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Why was Elrond even here?
Well. For his daughter's wedding, Faramir supposed.
Elrond came to Minas Tirith for Arwen's marriage, clearly because not coming was unthinkable for men who cared so deeply and publicly for their daughters, but Faramir could already see the half-elf had arrived only partially. The rest of him seemed still suspended in some middle distance between being orphaned and doing the orphaning, what had been and what now was, unable to fully inhabit either.
Now. One thing needs to be made clear here: Faramir was not being deliberately rude about a lord he’d never actually spoken more than a handful of polite words to, by assuming his intentions and pretending he knew what Elrond’s orphaning had to do with Elrond’s presence in Minas Tirith at the present moment. The problem was that Elrond was a consistent, if inoffensive, presence in almost every history lesson Faramir had sat through, from the kinslayings to Gil-galad’s spontaneous combustion to the breaking of the Watchful Peace. The most benign tumour Arda could boast of. And spending six years of one’s life getting soundly drilled about the worst days of a fellow’s life had the unfortunate side-effect of genuinely assuming one had the right to make conjectures about the fellow in question.
So Faramir observed how Elrond moved through the celebrations with almost admirable mechanical grace, performing the gestures that were clearly expected of him: the paternal blessing, the noble smile, the careful attention. All with a miasma of postponement hanging about him like vapour over ice, as though he were waiting for some internal thaw that had not yet come. And writ clear across his countenance, unashamed of itself, an immovable sorrow exposed to the elements, a raw nerve flicking from one amputated limb to the next, which appeared to turn certain smiles into winces, grins into grimaces.
Unfortunately, due to certain recent events in his own life, Faramir recognised this sense of being trapped in a posture one could neither maintain nor abandon. Elrond had arrived in Minas Tirith carrying an intention. He would retrieve his brother (though this, Faramir did not yet know), he would complete this one specific thing, but the doing of it seemed to have stalled somewhere inside him, and this Faramir could see even then, even before the whole demented plan was made clear to him.
Elrond Peredhel, Lord of Imladris. A promise of action without yet being an action itself. A figure frozen at the moment of beginning, unable to proceed and unable to turn back. In this age of iron and ash, when even the best of Men had learned to keep their griefs carefully curtained, this creature, who wore his sorrow and his stubborn, unquenchable life like visible raiment. Faramir thought: he has chosen not to hide. And then, with a pang of recognition: he is here because he thinks there are still things worth bearing such grief for. It seemed impossible to Faramir that such openness could survive the long cruelties of the world. He carried his strangeness like a refuge, Elrond did. As though he'd discovered long ago that being perpetually outside the circle meant you were also outside its obligations.
To nobody’s surprise least of all his own, Faramir was watching Éowyn when Elrond first approached him on the terrace overlooking the lower, duller circles of the city. She was dancing with one of Éomer's thanes, her face bright with wine and the relief of having survived long enough to claim joy, however provisional she was assured it would be. He felt the old displacement of the second son, the sense of being adjacent to life rather than a participant in it.
The wedding had gone on for hours, which was also very unsurprising (Faramir considered not thinking this, because it was rather unkind, but he did find it rather funny and allowed himself to think it) because Iluvatar forbid Arda did not unerringly prolong every great tragedy of Elrond Peredhel’s life. Still, it was passably fun, and he enjoyed other people’s weddings because of the opportunity it offered him, to blend into a crowd and hang about banisters with people he would never have to speak to again. Musicians cycled through their repertoires and began again. Someone started up the Noldolante because, once again, unerring prolongation, Elrond’s tragedies, et cetera. Torches were lit and burned down and were replaced. The feast tables had long since been cleared, the formal toasts concluded, but still people lingered, afraid that dispersing would break whatever spell had allowed them to forget, for these few hours, what they'd survived to reach this moment.
Faramir had performed his own duties as adequately as ever: the speech as representative of Gondor's new steward-class, having been thankfully demoted from any kingly duties, the ceremonial presentation of gifts, the careful navigation of political pleasantries with dignitaries (read: Legolas and his fierce, frightening little friend) who were already calculating how to leverage this new alliance. But now, released from obligation, he found himself at the margins again, his natural habitat of tree-cover. Watching Aragorn and Arwen move through their guests with grace. Watching Éowyn laugh with an ease he was still learning to trust-without-question. Watching Elrond not really watching any of it, his attention sliding off surfaces like light off a mirror, unable and unwilling to land.
Then Elrond's voice from behind him, low and oddly hesitant for one so ancient.
"Lord Faramir. Might I impose upon you for a favor?"
The request, when it came, was delivered with an oblique delicacy that suggested Elrond had been rehearsing it for some time. The thought made Faramir shudder slightly. Perhaps he had been rehearsing it for some time. Since before his birth. Perhaps centuries. Did Elrond know when Faramir was born, that he would ask him such a favour? Immortality had never truly sat right with Faramir, and he didn’t glorify it in the way Éowyn (who, swiftly into their courtship, admitted without shame that she had a set of paper dolls of Elrond when she was a child, and would ‘dress him up’ in tunics and dresses she would draw and paint onto parchment) did. Absolutely not. Faramir was fundamentally opposed to the idea of immortality, and that was that.
Elrond did not get to the point quickly.
He spoke at length of Númenórean customs, of preservation practices that seemed barbaric to modern sensibilities but had once been considered pious, and for a while after, taken as at least somewhat normal. And then, he gave an extended lecture about the voyage of Elendil and all that was able to be recovered from the Númenórean palaces, that could not be taken into exile alongside by the line of kings because they were, unlike the Ring of Barahir, somewhat unwieldy. He did this because he had, quite literally, all the time in the world, Faramir knew, though it didn’t stop him from thinking Elrond was doing all this to personally offend him and take away from the time he could spend not talking to people like Elrond.
And so it remained that the royal vaults beneath Minas Tirith, Elrond explained at last, contained certain relics. Certain relics that happened to, technically speaking, be human remains. Remains which he wanted. As in he, Elrond Peredhel, wanted, right then and right there and, apparently, wanted Faramir of all people to go with him to retrieve them. Specifically: the skull and femur of Elros Tar-Minyatur, first King of Númenor, Elrond's twin brother, dead these past six thousand years and a man about whom Faramir knew far too much about, including all the concubines he got through in four hundred years of rule.
In a situation like this, gaping like a trout was the only reasonable response, so Faramir did just that.
"You're wondering why I didn't ask the King, whom I love as a son, and turn instead to you, whom I am not yet sure I even like very much," Elrond said wryly. It wasn't a question, and frankly, even though it wasn’t his first thought (that having to do with skulls and clear signs of derangement and whether elves could be forced to go to Valinor for the betterment not of themselves but of those who had to deal with them) Faramir had in fact been wondering exactly that.
"Aragorn would insist on doing it properly. Permissions, protocols, a formal procession with witnesses and documentation." A pause, as Elrond sighed fondly, before winking unkindly. "He has become, unfortunately mostly thanks to myself and the ministrations of my daughter's inherited micromanagerial tendencies, rather good at legitimacy," The corner of Elrond's mouth lifted, though his eyes remained serious. "He'd feel obligated to make an event of it. Valar. Perhaps even a parade. Could you imagine?”
Faramir sighed, thinking about how the former ranger’s eyes had gleamed at the thought of a salt tax. “Sadly, yes.”
“Whereas you and I. Hm. Shall I say… we've had practice at being… the other one. Having lost better and brighter brothers than ourselves."
He met Faramir's gaze then, and the lightness drained away.
"And so, you understand, though I am certain you will claim not to, the desire one might have to sit in a darkened room, hissing at the sun and howling at the moon, clutching some cracked, dusty skull. You won't try to comfort me by suggesting Elros chose the better part. That his mortality was a gift, that brevity makes things beautiful." His voice was very level, his face impassive and grave, far too stable for the things he was saying. "You know the brother who remains cares not whether the one who left may have made the wiser choice."
Faramir felt a bone shift and jerk in his chest, a recognition so immediate it was painful. Yes. He knew that. He knew it because he had spent an unforgivably long time constructing elaborate justifications for why Boromir had been the worthier son, the true heir, yes, yes, the brighter brother, as though Boromir's evident superiority in life somehow absolved Faramir of the crime of surviving him in death.
"Why do you want your brother's skull?" he asked, half-exasperated and hoping beyond hope to be rescued. He’d even take rescue-by-woman. He wouldn’t mind a jot if he had to lose face and have Éowyn come whisk him off the terrace and elsewhere, like a warm feathered bed with no elf lords to speak of. "Why? What on earth could you possibly do with— My lord, of all the depraved things—"
"Depraved? You make it sound as if I were planning to engage in coitus with the thing!" Elrond exclaimed, genuinely affronted, before furtively looking around him and lowering his voice. "I swear on both my good name and yours, that I am about to do no such thing. I will not be making any such mischief, you have my word. Only these fingers, and this heart, will come into contact with the bone truth of my brother’s death. Nothing else. I may have some Noldor in me, but thankfully not as much as such acts would require. I have loved Maedhros Fëanorian but not enough to be him.”
"Then what do you plan to do with it?”
"Hold it, I suppose," Elrond shrugged. "Perhaps weep a little over it from time to time. The story of Elrond and his brother's skull has not yet been written. Such songs will be for the future. The poetry will be mine to pen."
Faramir tried to apply perspective and propriety. This was, he supposed, someone whose losses had never scarred over properly. The wound was old, yes, Ages old, but it had been kept deliberately open, tended like a flame that was not allowed to go out. The beacons of Gondor, burning for eternity. The horn of Gondor, blaring all his life. And there was something animalistic in that refusal, in that lifelong death knell. It said: I will not let this diminish. I will not grow the necessary calluses. Far from being rightly apprehensive of such beings and such damaging sentiment, for Faramir, this knowledge made Elrond legible in a way that pierced through the strangeness of the half-elf, the impossible span of his years.
Here stood an ache.
Here stood an ache so meticulously preserved that even someone like Faramir, who had carefully learned to live around his own inadequacies, who had built the scaffolding required to remain functional, could recognise it immediately and intimately. Could feel the shape of it, pressed uncomfortably tight-hot against his own losses. Some people survived by forgetting how to feel the old wounds. Elrond had survived by keeping them open. And yet somehow that made him more present, not less. More reachable, more real, a brother lost and forever sought, across the gulf of everything that separated them.
They met again the following afternoon to discuss logistics. Elrond had done his research with characteristic thoroughness. He knew which levels of the vault were accessible, which guards worked which shifts, when the changing of the watch created opportunities for unobserved movement. Faramir found himself oddly charmed by this display of practical conspiracy, so at odds with the ethereal reputation of the lord, and asked him why on earth he was playing at soldiers-and-bread-thieves as if he’d suffer a beheading were he to be caught, instead of having Aragorn mildly pity him and (Faramir agreed this aspect was probably worse than beheading) make his daughter undergo a slight degree of secondhand embarrassment.
"When your memory spans epochs," Elrond said doggedly, as if Faramir hadn’t mostly been jesting and displaying once and for all the elven inability to take a damned joke for once in their eternal lives, "you learn to tread lightly. The world keeps shifting its nature beneath you: what was once simply what happened to me becomes story, then myth, then an utter lie. It makes you wonder, always, what you're standing on now. Who will tell this story? How will they tell it? And what are you losing in the telling of the story?"
"Does it matter?" asked Faramir. "To the bearing of the now? When your brother died, my Lord Elrond, did you calmly tell yourself that this would all be a story one day? That you would pop around to Minas Tirith one day, this one, that is, and recruit some poor jobsworth—being myself—to assist you in getting his skull back? Does his skull even belong to you? Legally speaking, that is.”
"Oh, of course I did no such thing. I lost my ever-loving mind, my young friend. To this day I remain confused as to why Gil-galad did not leash me to a tree or take some such precaution," Elrond waved an easy hand, and there was something rueful in how he said it, "Well. He may well have done. I remember not. Later on, he told me that we are all of us caught in a narrative whose author began speaking without knowing the ending. That the Ainur themselves sang the world into being before understanding what shape the song would finally take. Which is to say, I don't think they expected it, when Melkor began squawking, and yet they endured in the hopes that he may, well. Shut his damnable mouth."
"I'm starting to see why Éowyn likes you," Faramir sighed glumly. "You truly are odder than it's possible to romanticise, even for our kin."
And then he narrowed his eyes, smelling a rat. "And what shape would this story take, Lord Elrond? Later, that is. When you pen this poem, I mean.”
"Oh, potentially pear-shaped," Elrond said airily, leaning back on the verandah and crossing his legs, actually patting Faramir gently on the back. "The story of Lord Elrond Half-Elven and Lord Faramir probably-prince of Ithilien breaking into the vaults of Minas Tirith to requisition the skull and femur of Elros Tar-Minyatur. A pear-shaped poem, ripe for the interpretation.”
Faramir had not thought much about what Men were losing until Elrond framed it as loss. But once named, it became obvious, undeniable. The Fourth Age had brought peace, yes, and the restoration of the line of kings, but it had also brought a compulsory forgetfulness. Elrond had noticed it even before he left, the way Men had begun to misplace things. Not through carelessness exactly, but through a sort of preemptive letting-go, as though they were practicing for a larger abandonment they could already sense coming. Heirlooms went missing. Traditions were performed once, twice, then allowed to lapse. Knowledge that should have been passed down, eroding at the edges already. Lesser characters being written out of grander stories.
Faramir thought: We're shedding. Like trees dropping leaves before winter, except there was no spring promised on the other side. They were lightening themselves because something fundamental was already gone, and holding on to the small things, the songs, the stories, the ways of doing things that connected them to what had previously been, only made the absence of the past more obvious. Maybe that was it. Maybe Men kept losing things now because they had already lost the one thing that made keeping anything else seem worthwhile. The Elves had been the continuity, the proof that memory could outlast forgetting. Without them, what was the point of preservation? Everything would be forgotten eventually anyway.
Better to let it go now. Get used to the lightness.
But clearly, Lord Elrond wasn't letting go. He was burrowing deeper into his grief like a headlouse, insisting on its specificity, refusing to allow it to dissolve into the general sadness that came with living long enough to see the end of all things. A somewhat pedagogical refusal, as though he were not performing sorrrow but demonstrating an alternative relationship to loss, a deliberate, meticulous surgeon’s attention to a healing wound.
Faramir understood this. Or thought he did. In the weeks after Boromir's death, when people had tried to comfort him with platitudes about honour and sacrifice, about how his brother had died well, he had wanted to scream. As though dying well made up for being dead, as though the manner of leaving mattered more than the fact of absence. As though their separation overrode their similarity.
They had been clinging to different parts of the same impossible thing, he and Boromir. And when his brother's grip had begun to fail, when Faramir could feel the brittleness of his letters, the weary chicken-scratch of someone whose hands were cramping and listless by turns, what had he done? He had told himself Boromir was strong enough by virtue of being Boromir. That his brother would find his own way back from whatever edge he was approaching.
But perhaps that had been the moment it all went wrong. Not the arrow-struck knight but the faltering brother. Perhaps Boromir had needed him to say: I see you, brother. I see you losing purchase. Let me come to you. Stay where you are, and let me come to you. Instead Faramir had stayed where he was. Safe in his own footing, his small certainties, his comforting inadequacies and the cushion of being second best. And Boromir had—
He couldn't finish the thought because he couldn’t bear the shape of it: that his brother might have been waiting for him, holding on just a little longer, listening ever so hard for the sound of someone coming back. Now, watching Elrond plan their movements through the vault with that terrible precision, Faramir understood they were both halves who had failed to reach the whole in time. Who would spend the rest of their lives wondering if there had been a moment, only one, for more missed moments would be too much to bear, when turning around and making a single different choice might have changed everything.
Minas Tirith bore the sediment of its own history unevenly. The upper circles still held their severity, a white austerity that spoke of older ambitions and grander certitudes. But descend far enough and you would soon find the compromises: additions built in haste during the siege years, repairs that prioritised function over beauty, whole sections where necessity had overwritten intention.
Faramir had watched emergency measures curdle into permanence, seen stopgaps become the only solutions anyone remembered. The lower levels especially had acquired a kind of practical ugliness, a gnashing set of toothlike structures that did their work without bothering to justify themselves aesthetically. Soon enough, he thought, the upper city would follow. The old disciplined stonework would seem merely impractical, too labor-intensive to maintain. Efficiency would win, as it always did. And Minas Tirith would forget it had ever aspired to be more than simply present and functioning.
The vaults were a different matter. They occupied a stratum beneath intention entirely, operated entirely through a logic of gain and accumulation that had long ago exceeded any organising principle. What had begun as a deliberate archive, a place to preserve the material evidence of kingship, the objects that connected present legitimacy to past authority, had become simply a place where things were put when no one knew what else to do with them. Just because they were ours. No. Not so. Not so with the room after room of Haradrim relics: horned helmets and cooking ladles and painted wooden horses meant for children’s floors. Not ours by right but ours by might.
Faramir had been down here twice before, both times on official business that had required locating some specific artifact for some specific ceremony. Each time he'd been struck by the sheer density of forgetting the space represented. Not the absence of memory but its opposite: so much preserved that nothing could be truly remembered. The older artifacts had been claimed by time in the way of all things left too long in the stewardage of Gondor: stone gone soft at the edges, metal blooming with corrosion so thick and green it looked less like decay than an enthusiastic resurrection.
They went down after midnight, when the city had settled into its deepest sleep. Faramir led, his knowledge of the guard rotations proving accurate. Elrond followed with a silence less learned than essential, the absence of sound appearing to simply be his natural state. Elves looked good in anything they wore. They descended through layers of the city's history, each level a different era's attempt to solve the problem of how to live in a way that paid tribute to the past and promised the future a fighting chance.
The upper stairways were well-maintained, the stone still holding its polish from regular use. But as they moved deeper, the architecture changed, became rougher, more desperate. You could read Minas Tirith's various sieges in the stonework if you knew how to look for hasty repairs, sections shored up with whatever materials had been available, entire passages that dead-ended where some crisis had interrupted construction and it had never been resumed.
The air grew colder, denser. Faramir felt it pressing against his face, thick with the exhalations of stone and the particular mustiness of spaces that existed primarily to hold what the living world had finished with. His torch threw their shadows huge against the walls, elongating them into giants and then collapsing them back to human scale as the passageway narrowed and widened, narrowed and widened, following a logic that had been lost centuries ago.
Elrond moved behind him with his usual ungodly grace, his footsteps irritatingly lighter than they should have been for someone his height. Occasionally Faramir would glance back and find the elf-lord's face caught in the torchlight at an angle that made him look downright terrifying, too beautiful, too other, a thing that should not be walking through human architecture at all. Then Elrond would shift and become merely a man again, or at least man-adjacent, and Faramir's pulse would settle. Was this how it was for Elrond too? Would he look at creatures made so similar to his image and find himself thinking of their vicious lifespans?
They passed through three separate gates, each manned by guards Faramir knew by name, who'd learned not to ask questions when the odd son moved through the city at odd hours. One of them, a young man from the Fourth Circle who'd lost his father in the siege, looked at Elrond with naked wonder before Faramir's sharp gesture reminded him to attend to his post.
The vault entrance was unmarked, easily missed if you didn't know it was there. Just a door set flush with the wall, the wood swollen with damp, the hinges protesting when Faramir put his shoulder to it. And then they were through, and the temperature dropped another degree, and Faramir's torch revealed the sediment of Gondor's long memory stretching away into darkness. As he moved through it, he avoided shards of pottery and scraps of bone that dragged his eye towards them. A singular oliphant tusk. He looked away.
In the vaults now, they began operating on that mirage of intention. The plan hadn't acquired weight yet and still remained but an idea, still the clean incision, driven by purpose: retrieve the remains, perform the private rite, restore what can be restored. Elrond was running on necessity, this must be done, therefore I will do it, and Faramir on the pretense of usefulness, the old hunger to be needed. Two halves, yes, unequal and uneven and all there was left of their brighter brothers. Neither had yet felt the bone truth of what they were moving toward. The vault was still just a low, underground room. The relics were still just dusty, fragile objects requiring careful transportation.
It was only later, Elrond's hands on the hidden casket, Faramir watching the way he didn’t let himself hesitate, that rhetoric drained out. That the thing stopped being a half-cocked mission and became simply what it was: two half-men in a stone room, in the middle of the night, trying to carry the remains of brightness out into a diminished world.
The casket was smaller than expected, marked with Adunaic script that Faramir, though he had always been better at his lessons, couldn’t fully parse anymore. The language had drifted, evolved, transcended through contact with other tongues. What remained was fragmentary: a word that might mean "king" or might mean "first," another that suggested either "sea" or "star" or “spray”. You too, then, he thought. You too. The inscriptions meant to preserve had been touched by time too, made as uncertain as the men who gazed at them.
Elrond opened it with his steady surgical hands. Inside, wrapped in cloth that disintegrated at the touch, were the promised relics: a skull, a femur, bone gone the color of old parchment. For a moment neither of them moved. Then Elrond reached in and lifted the skull with an indecent tenderness that made Faramir look away.
There was something in Elrond's face just then, a viciously unavoidable beauty, a ludicrous, luminous, lamentable confusion, a man who'd arrived somewhere he'd been hurtling towards for centuries and found it both exactly and nothing at all like he'd imagined. A grief that met its object and found not the desired, left-behind stranger but a shard of bone from within you, within yourself. All his sorrow, suddenly condensed into a shape and a name that he could fit his hands around, that he could press his lips to. All his sorrow, made in his own image. Faramir understood then that he would never see this again. Not a moment like this, not a man like this. That whatever else his life held, it would not hold another evening like this, where he stood witness to someone else's roaring loss in which was foretold the exact trajectory of his own.
They did not speak on the way back up. The casket felt heavier than its contents could account for, as though it had absorbed the weight of all those abandoned objects and their abandoned meanings. Elrond carried it against his chest like a firstborn child. His mother’s firstborn child, who might break if held any other way.
There was one near-miss with a guard making rounds ahead of schedule. Faramir, falling back on old reflexes, lied with a smooth efficiency, having spent his youth navigating his father's fears. Yes, Lord Elrond had requested a tour of the historical holdings. No, it couldn't wait until morning, for the elf-lord was departing soon. Yes, I know it is the middle of the night. Have you met a normal elf? The guard, faced with Faramir's title and newfound bullishness as well as Elrond's otherworldly and not frightening general presence, chose not to inquire further.
The casket went unnoticed.
Nobody in living memory had ever set eyes upon Elros Tar-Minyatur’s skull.
They reached Elrond's temporary quarters as the city was beginning the pre-dawn stirrings that preceded true waking. Inside, Elrond set the casket on a table and stood looking at it for a long moment before carefully removing the skull again, cradling it alone in his fingers. And as if he’d forgotten Faramir was there, he pressed his lips again to the fragile pate, the gaping nasal cavity, each loosened tooth, breathing in old ash and dust. Like a mother. Like a brother in the womb, close enough to touch.
Faramir tried to imagine it: near seven thousand years of watching people fail and fall and vanish. How many partings at docks became final without forewarning? How many faces last seen turning an unremarkable corner never turned back? At what point did memory cease to preserve and become instead a kind of obliteration, each loss laid over the last until the detail blurred, until what remained was not the image of any single grief but only an overwhelming brightness, the way a candle held too close to the eye becomes not illumination but a burning blindness? Perhaps that was why Elrond moved so carefully now, why his attention to this one specific relic looked painful in its focus. He was trying to hold a single image clear against the accumulated glare. Trying to keep this one loss, his worst loss, from dissolving into the unbearable light of all else that was gone.
Elrond sat in the terrace chair, the skull cradled in his lap. His long fingers continued tracing it with a strange mixture of reverence and scientific curiosity, slitting across the sutures, the eye sockets, the solid curve of the temporal bone. There was something almost erotic in the attention, though Faramir rather prudishly hoped that wasn't quite the right word. Intimate, perhaps. The intimacy of someone relearning a landscape they'd thought lost forever. Was this what the Eldar of old Beleriand had become? Strange creatures cradling skulls in their arms, kissing empty spaces where dozens of lifespans were once played out?
"I've forgotten his face," Elrond said quietly, after almost an hour of reverent silence. "Isn't that extraordinary? We were identical, until we were not. And I have forgotten his face. I can remember the weather of our childhood with such absolute clarity. I can tell you exactly, exactly, Faramir, the temperature range of Sirion during the autumn months, though I was barely six when Sirion was attacked. But his face..." He shook his head. "I've constructed it from pieces. From Estel’s face, my sons’ faces, from Arwen's even, yes, from half-remembered dreams and forgotten songs and whatever Maglor remembers when he bothers to turn up for solstice. But the actual thing, the particular arrangement of features, the wicked grin and overbright eyes, that face which was uniquely his, that is gone. All that is left of the face of Elros Tar-Minyatur is this skull. This skull and I.”
The skies above the First Age had offered no constancy to the Peredhel twins.
Late-written memory held them changeable as cloud-cover: cold clarity giving way by noon to a tasteable thickness, a light drizzle of salt and coming rain, then breaking apart again by evening into those long amber rifts where the light seemed to arrive from the older, crueller world his foster-fathers spoke of. He and Elros had learned early not to trust what the dawn promised. The coast taught them that dawn's promises tended to be of the fingers-crossed-behind-your-back sort. Wind off the water could remake the day's entire temperament between breakfast and supper, cycling through every mood the air possessed: cutting cold, suffocating stillness, wailing gales, spent, sucked-dry calm. They had been children in an Age that refused to hold still.
Perhaps that was why stasis, later, had seemed such an impossible ambition for his Elros.
"He chose it," Elrond continued, his voice flattening for the first time. "Mortality. As though it were simply a matter of preference, like choosing between two equally valid paths. But it wasn't equal. How could it be? He chose to leave and deliberately become something I could never follow, never fully understand. And I'm still here, still trying to..."
He trailed off, his hands still moving over the bone.
Faramir felt himself retreating into familiar patterns. As Elrond worked, Faramir found himself retreating into the stillness he had learned young, when his father's attention was a blade and speech only made you bleed faster: you could withdraw into a privacy so complete it was almost like ceasing to exist, a kind of purposeful thinning, making yourself permeable to circumstance so that it passed through you rather than shattering against you, and shattering you with it.
He felt it happen now, the walls of the vault losing their solidity, his own pulse quieting and distancing itself from him. There was a freedom in becoming purely observational, present and alive without the weight of consequence, unloosed from the noose of the past. The fear was still there, but it was happening to someone else, some unfortunate soul he was watching from a great and generous distance. One day, he would not remember what he had been afraid of, there and then. Only that for those few minutes he had achieved the thing he'd spent his childhood perfecting: the ability to be entirely there and entirely absent at once, untouchable in the space between.
But then Elrond spoke again, and the spell broke.
"The ones who did it are still out there, you know,” he looked somewhat vicious as he turned back to Faramir. “The ones who burned Sirion.”
Faramir raised his eyebrows. “Your… foster fathers?”
“No, not them,” Elrond winked rather sheepishly. “As you know, there are certain… complexities there. My feelings towards both Maglor and Maedhros can never be untouched by both adoration and resentment. And, well, Maglor is still hopping around. He’ll probably turn up tomorrow, having smelt the free wine at the festivities, not to mention that awful rendition of the Noldolante is likely to draw him like a moth to a rubble-fire. No, Faramir. I mean the others. For Maglor and Maedhros may have given the order, but they did not raze Sirion alone. There were footsoldiers, generals, captains, whom we never knew because it was not them who raised us. Some died, and some of those will have been released. Some of them sailed West. They're walking around in Valinor right now, probably admiring the fucking trees."
The profanity was so unexpected, so at odds with Elrond's usual measured speech, that Faramir laughed, and Elrond laughed as well, clearing his throat awkwardly.
“I am afraid, I think,” he continued. “Of having to co-exist at all costs. That such a life is what awaits me in Valinor. The unbearable part is knowing they are, in all likelihood, out there. The ones who had put the torch to Sirion, who had decided which children lived and which didn't, some of them were still walking around on the brighter shore. Still eating, sleeping, presumably finding small pleasures in sunlight or wine and learning to live again. They had unmade the world for Elrond Peredhel and then simply continued living. And now, Elrond Peredhel must sup with such unmakers of worlds.”
“Do you not do so now?” Faramir found himself asking, thinking of the rows of straw dolls in the vault, that Elrond had ignored in his pursuit of his brother’s bones.
"Ah," Elrond nodded faintly, a strange, intense expression on his face. "Yes. I suppose I do."
Faramir let the words arrange themselves before he spoke them. "We will make our own names for it here, as you know. Pacification. Unification. We will bring peace to those who lack it." He kept his voice light, conversational. "Soon, Gondor will march south with flags and treaties and the knowledge that we are improving things at all costs. For our governance is a gift, and resistance is barbarism requiring correction."
Faramir knew this because he had seen it himself. Had been this himself. Men who had burned Haradrim villages, who had done things in Ithilien to captured soldiers that had no clean words. And afterwards they had gone home. Planted crops and took on princely duties. Married. Or at least got engaged. They told themselves they'd had no choice, because war made everyone into something they weren't. Because they weren’t that.
But that was the lie, wasn't it? They were that. They were that now. War had happened, and now they were that, those people who kept bones in vaults that belonged not to them. They had discovered they could be that and survive it. And maybe that was the thing Elrond couldn't forgive: not the acts themselves, but the fact that Arda had allowed them to go unpunished. That it had simply absorbed the horror and kept renewing, day by day, crawling towards those brightest of futures. Maybe that's why he kept his wounds so open.
He thought at last of the Haradrim dead in the vaults, their bones labeled like specimens. Tribe the first, conquered to last. Tribe the second, forcibly united. Tribe the third, fallen to the unstoppable march of progress.
"The men who will do this, who will burn villages for the sake of unity, for the sake of never having the forsaken in the corner of their eye, who will decide which children are salvageable and which are too corrupted by their innate viciousness and backwards ways, they will come home to honours. To marriages and sons and the pleasant plumpness of a legacy well-earned."
Faramir met Elrond's eyes, feeling far braver now than all his years in Ithilien had made him. "And I will share tables with them. I will govern alongside them. Because that is what it means to be part of a race that is still expanding, still convinced of its own righteousness. The Age of Men has arrived in Gondor, and by Iluvatar it will arrive in the desert one day. Spring will touch the wasteland and unmake it. These unmakers of worlds sit in my halls, Lord Elrond, and the man who will lead the charge was nursed in yours."
The candle between them had burned low enough that the flame sat in its own pooled wax, flickering with each breath they took. Outside, the rattle of carts on stone, voices calling across courtyards, the resumption of ordinary life. Elrond's hands rested on either side of the skull, not touching it, just framing the space where his brother had been reduced to portable remnants. Faramir thought about all the other caskets in the vaults below them, each containing its own little justification, its own careful arrangement of what could be said and what must remain unspoken. The stone walls held their indifferent silence, equally willing to preserve monuments and graves.
"I do not like it. I do not like what Gondor does with memory," Faramir asked abruptly. The question had been forming itself for hours, maybe longer. "This… this hoarding, this accumulation, telling ourselves that preservation is the same as remembrance. But it's not, I think. I think it's a way of not having to think about what any of it means."
Elrond tilted his head, considering. "And what should Gondor do instead?"
"I don't know. Let it go, perhaps. Stop pretending that keeping objects is the same as keeping faith with the past." Faramir gestured at the invisible vault beneath them, the weight of all those forgotten things. "Or give them back. Or throw them away. Make them mean something in the present instead of just... storing them. Waiting for some future generation to figure out what they're for."
Elrond was quiet for a moment, his hands still moving over the skull's surface, as though reading some text written in the bone itself. "My people have a different problem," he said finally. "We remember everything. Every slight, every sorrow, every moment of beauty or pain. We cannot help it. The past doesn't fade for us the way it does for Men. It accumulates, layer upon layer, until the present is almost invisible beneath the weight of what's gone before."
"And yet, you forgot his face."
"Yes." The word came out soft, almost wondering. "Yes, I did. Isn't that extraordinary? Six thousand years of perfect recall, and the one thing I most wanted to keep, the shape of my brother's face, that disappeared and I don't even know when. There was no single moment where I thought, this is the last time I'll be able to see him clearly."
"Maybe that's what time does," Faramir offered. "Even to those who are supposed to be exempt from it. Maybe memory isn't meant to be perfect and forgetting is part of how we survive."
"Or maybe," Elrond said, his voice taking on a harder edge, "maybe it's just another loss. Another way the world takes things without asking. And one is supposed to accept it gracefully, call it wisdom or growth or the natural order. But I do not wish to accept it. I want to hold onto this—" he lifted the skull slightly "—and say, this was real. This person was real. And his loss is real, and I will not pretend otherwise.'"
The vigil stretched on. At some point Elrond began speaking again, not quite to Faramir, not quite to the skull, but to some point between them. He talked about Elros's choice, about what it had meant to watch his brother deliberately step toward an ending. About the impossibility of even considering it at first: one twin choosing finitude, the other infinity, and neither path allowing them to remain together. Elured and Elurin, he said, had died together. Elladan and Elrohir would choose together. It was only one set of twins, the middle set, who had been irreversibly sundered. Faramir listened, and found himself speaking too, though he hadn't intended to. He found himself speaking of Boromir, about the failure of not seeing, not reaching out when it might have mattered. About the fantasy he returned to again and again: going back to that moment, saying the thing that might have changed everything.
"But you can't," Elrond said. "That's the cruelty of it, how the moment passes and you only recognise it as the moment afterward, when it is already too late."
"Yes."
They sat with that for a while. And then the sun rose truly, and changed everything. What had been numinous in candlelight: the skull's hollows holding significance in its shadows, the bone that glowed blue with some interior luminosity, became, under the flat, honest dawn, merely skeletal. A thing. The yellow-grey of old bone, porous where it shouldn't be, a crack running through the left parietal that signified a careless scribe’s accident rather than any momentous fall in Tar-Minyatur’s life. The sunrise drained away the sacred as they sat staring at the thing, returning it to its categorical truth. Faramir watched Elrond's face as he watched this happen, the tightening around his eyes as his brother became, again, just evidence of a man who once lived and was now dead.
Elros Tar-Minyatur, whom the sun could never touch again.
"I—He had this idea," Elrond said, not quite looking at Faramir anymore as his voice began to crack. "When we were young—very young, before the choice was real. Playing hide and seek, see, in the courtyards of Himring. I would cry when I couldn’t find him, not because I lost the game but because I couldn’t find Elros. And if I couldn’t find Elros, then what was the point?”
“And Elros was Elros. He would find me, wailing like he had already died, and turn it into a game. A storyteller he was, Faramir, rivalled Maglor, rivalled all of our race in his capacity to turn every damned thing into a story. And this too was one. He said that no separation was permanent. That both our lives were happening at once, layered over each other like pages in a book someone was holding closed. He developed the idea further, when he got older, took it from a childhood comfort to a philosophy. The stories got more elaborate. He said, mortality and immortality weren't actually different trajectories but the same existence viewed from different angles. Like how a river feels unbearably still for the thrashing fish but the fisherman on the bank thinks it's moving too fast. That somewhere we were still children in Sirion, and somewhere we were having this exact conversation, and somewhere he was already old, already dying, and I was still—"
He stopped, needing a moment.
"He said that's what the dead were: the dead we had witnessed die, and the dead who lived evermore oversea. Not gone, just living in a part of our life we couldn't access anymore. That the separation was just a problem of perspective, like standing on different sides of a door."
"I think he was trying to make the choice easier for me. To suggest it wouldn't really be an ending. But all I heard was that he'd already decided. That in his mind he was already on the other side of that door, and I was the one who'd be left standing in the hall, listening. All I heard was that if I hadn’t clung to him so, if I hadn’t cried each time I lost him, cried so tempestuously he had to write this story to stave off my sorrow—write this great and terrible loss as a momentary separation—“
Faramir watched Elrond's face change too, drifting into a collapse not meant for him to witness. The tears came without sound, buildup or resistance. The light had shifted the sky, gasped and dissipated, and what had been held suspended in starlight could no longer remain so. It was like watching someone step off solid ground into a bottomless sea. Elrond seemed to recede even as he stood there, pulled into some dimension where ordinary coordinates no longer applied. Where time moved strangely. Where a brother dead six thousand years could be as present as the white stone beneath their feet.
Faramir had the sudden certainty that this was what grief actually was when you stopped managing it, that it breathed so deep and bent everything around it. That made proximity and distance, then and now, lose their usual meanings. You didn't experience it so much as fall into it, helpless as a star cut loose from its tether, turning slowly in a brightness that had no up or down. A most glorious indulgence, erotic in its intimacies, wondrous in its vastness. He didn’t know why he thought of Lúthien then, the most beautiful woman to walk the earth. But he did. And when he did, Elrond stood before him with his skull, inhuman, monstrous, divine in his grief.
Later, trying to articulate it to Éowyn, he would fail. It was the thing the old words gestured at, spirit, ghost, apparition, without ever quite capturing. The sense that you were not merely yourself, bound by skin and history, but part of some older current affected not by just your own dead but the dead of those you loved, the dead all over the world. And that for once, briefly, you had stopped doing the work of holding yourself separate from it. Faramir would never have guessed, watching Elrond move through the wedding feast, that their acquaintance would revolve around a singular skull and measure itself in hours rather than years. But that was the nature of all significant meetings: you never knew you were inside the short span of knowing someone so deeply until it had already passed into memory, of thing-that-happened, irretrievable through fallible machinery and buried relic.
It had always been Boromir’s favourite lesson: the neat circles in which their world turned. A body became earth. Earth became grain. Grain became bread. Bread became body. The world was a closed system of transformations. Faramir had found this thinking far too mystical and had easily dismissed it as Boromir being Boromir with his high fancies. But one night, he had sat beside an immortal elf lord, watching dawn reduce the five centuries on his lap to a mere scrap of bone, leaching away the luminous charge the night had given it, and wondered if Boromir had been gesturing toward something he hadn’t caught at the time. That he wasn’t romanticising the persistence of matter but finding hope in the indelibility of having-been. That existence, once achieved, created a kind of scar even Arda couldn't smooth over.
Watching Elrond with the skull, Faramir had realised that there had been a version of himself that only existed in Boromir's presence, called into being by his brother's regard, answering only to brother, and when Boromir was gone that version had ceased to be and would never exist again. Elrond had spent six thousand years calculating the sum of himself minus the absence of Elros, and the equation had never been resolved.
And so, Faramir knew then, that he would learn to operate within this reduction not by avoiding its existence but sinking into its blinding abyss. That there, he might even, perversely, find a kind of freedom in it: when you are already partially erased, further losses register at a different level. Already acquainted with absence as a permanent condition rather than a temporary state, you are set for life in a world that insists on forgetting. And in that light, it almost seemed as if subtraction was the point. Not wounds to close over but loadbearing absences entire lives were built around, the way a city is shaped as much by its hollow vaults as its ivory stone.