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The first time Idril boards a ship is not, as her parents had hoped, at the ports of Alqualondë. Her first memories of the sea aren’t the gentle coves of the bay of Valmar or the calm of a quiescent ocean, but a treacherous blue plain, deadlier than even the perilous ice, lying beneath her feet. Though the light of the Trees shine in her eyes, she first remembers brightness as the luminescent shadows slinking beneath frozen plains and the cracked sheen of starlight over miles and miles of ice. To this day, when she looks at the stars she remembers her mother teaching her their ancient names as they shiver against the cold, and to Idril it seems that starlight is the coldest fire, colder than golden Arien or wayward Tirion, constant and distant and sad.
That’s the last memory Idril has of her mother: the perspective of a child, looking up from where she’s tucked beneath Elenwë’s chin, seeing her mother’s breath mist the air as they look up at stars.
Then the sea plundered them. Idril will never forget how her world upended when the sparkling glare of endless sheets of ice cracked open to the sea’s dark flood, without foothold or handhold, her mother’s arms a cage around their sinking bodies until suddenly she was hoisted into the air, screaming as the cold air swept over her, screaming for her mother, screaming like she was newborn, and the stars wheeled bright and furious overhead as the sea moved cold and silent below and her mother’s hand, stiff with desperation, held her up until her father took her, shouting, into his own arms. But the sea closed over Elenwë’s head, and she was lost.
Ice she knew the ways of, knew how to skate over its smooth surface, avoid its rough ridges, how to fall without hurting herself and right herself if she fell. But there was nothing Idril could do against the sea.
It’s to the sea that they repair, however, when she rides with her father and aunt to Nevrast. The kingdom Turgon builds there sees gulls wheeling white-winged around sandstone houses, salt brining in pools, fish brining in salt. Aredhel swaps her bow for a harpoon and learns anew the ways of a different hunt as she sets out with the dawn behind their Sindarin neighbours to return trailing her own catch, a net of shimmering cod. Idril, fed for the first years of her life on seal blubber and other unnameable meats, gets used to the taste of salt and kelp, the soft white flesh of fish. She learns to pick seaweed strewn by the tide and to boil salt in pans, learns to ferment and pickle against the threat of rot, learns what it means when the swans fly past, their white wings flapping in the air. She does not, however, set foot on a ship.
It becomes known that the princess fishes for crabs excellently in the tide pools, though even Idril makes acquiescence to practicality when a particularly large crustacean pincers her big toe: close-toed footwear for Noldorin royalty when facing the arms of lobsters. At night, she sleeps with the sea pounding in her ears and in her dreams imagines its blue fingers eating away at the cliffside, eroding the foundations, another more dangerous world making war against the roots of the earth. Even as she applauds at the yearly whaleboating races, welcomes the carved leviathans home at the cove, she waits to confer the prizes when the eager crews have clambered, flush-faced and proud, out onto the sand. Idril Silverfoot prefers her legs to be on land.
---
They leave the sea at last in Gondolin, where everything is airy heights and low green plains. It is a land that does homage to Manwë over Ulmo: fittingly so, the favour of the Lord of the Breath of Arda has always rested heavy on the house of Fingolfin. Eagles make their nests in the grim, sheer peaks, while hawks strike at unsuspecting mountain goats. The sky is a blue rim cupped by the circle of mountains, and the sea is far, far away.
Water springs from the earth, murky-white and hot in some places, cool and fit to drink in others. The tinkle of fountains against stone is barely an echo of the roar of the tide as it floods the shore, and for the first time in centuries – as far back as she can remember, really – Idril sleeps free of care.
The golden hours of her joy are disturbed only by the cognizance of Ulmo’s hand on her father’s shoulder. Where it does not break on the walls of the city, the ocean breaks in Turgon’s heart. Idril sees the currents of the deep that thread through her father’s gait and the sea’s sorrows spill in her father’s eyes. Ulmo clings to him like a dream. When the king speaks, at odd moments the resonance of his voice gains the deepness of the Lord of Waters. The fountains burble in strange voices that hearken of distant shores when Turgon sits by their marble rims.
Idril has lost her mother to the sea. She stands, staunch and rooted in stone, holding her father’s hand. She stares down the sea’s invincible might as her father builds, higher and higher, the city founded on Ulmo’s dream. As the years pass, the tide recedes from Turgon. Gondolin’s roots sink deep into the earth even as its stone spires climb high into the sky.
The sea returns with thunder when Tuor son of Huor comes to Gondolin, bearing the arms of Vinyamar and stained with the salt-breath of the shores. Idril hears Ulmo’s voice threading beneath his thin human tones and feels her hands shake. Unease wakes in her, never to be fully quelled again. She feels the city of stone shake around her as it comes unmoored in the hands of the deep, ripped out from its roots to wither in the sun. For the first time since she stepped foot on the green plains of Tumladen, she feels like a boat adrift in a storm.
The sea never leaves Tuor, not completely. Not when she clasps him to her, not when she threads her hands through the honey-gold of his hair, not when she marries him. She feels it spliced into his eyes, woven into his skin. Ulmo competes with her for love. She wraps her arms around her husband, her short-lived husband that death will take from her, or the sea will take from her, and prays to keep him from all others. She feels his mortal body shifting in the deep sleep of his kind, presses her ear up to hear the more frantic beating of his short-lived heart. The hiss of his blood in his veins seems, for a moment, like the hiss of waves at low tide. Idril bites down gently on his chest, resisting the urge to draw blood. The frantic terror of everything that she has lost, all that could be taken from her rises, drawing up like foam on a crashing wave. She closes her eyes and feels the stone around her swaying like the boards of a ship: the ships she never took.
When her son is born, she knows with a mother’s foresight that he, too, is Ulmo’s.
---
Gondolin falls. Down the river Sirion she leads her people and recognises the smell long before she sees it: the salt winds of the coast. As they crest the last sandy hill they see the shimmering blue surface extending ever-west to meet the blue sky. On the beach, before the huts of Doriath’s people stands their princess, a pair of pearls studded in her ears and the Silmaril blazing at her throat. As Idril stares into the last light of the Trees she hears the sea in her ears, and her feet sink into the wet sand as she makes her way down to the shore.
In its own way, it’s like being at Nevrast all over again. They dredge the delta of Sirion for the grey salt it produces and hunt equally the catfish that burrow in the mud and the shimmering anchovies clouding silver in the bay. Idril learns to recognise crabs in their holes all over again, weaves sails, makes bait, sees the fishing fleets out at morning and greets them with the sun setting red in the west. Her son, far from the fountains she had hoped for him, grows up with the sea in his ears, holding hands with Doriath’s little princess.
But Idril rode into Nevrast with all the comforts and all the riches a Noldor lord could provide his only daughter. Even in their first days at Hithlum, she remembers her father furnishing her with what meagre opulence he could provide, trading with the Grey-Elves of the lake for children’s toys, boots and shirts and stockings to replace the patched, stretched rags she had outgrown, seating her closest to the fire, heaping her heather bed high and soft, then piling it higher with the furs and pelts her aunt brought from the surrounding forest.
She left Nevrast a princess, crowned in garnets at her father’s right hand. In Gondolin, she dwelt as the highest lady, the queen if not in name, Idril Celebrindal, the shining jewel of the city. She had never feared to go barefoot down its paved paths and its smooth stones in the city of stone – in Gondolin, she had almost forgotten fear. But the day she left she wore boots of mail, the same boots she wears to Sirion. And she departs Gondolin the leader of vagabonds starved of everything but their lives, barely a tithe of the city’s people stumbling at her heels away from the only home that many of them had ever known. Her son, when they had arrived at the mouths of Sirion, had outgrown all his clothes.
Despair hems them in. There is no more escape from the ruin that is Beleriand. The black hand of Morgoth lies over all, withering the trees, polluting the waters, sending wolves howling in the night among the dim forest. Círdan’s people are a shadow of what they were when Idril first met them, the proud folk of the Falas. Their shipyards are torched, the large part of their people killed or dragged to Angband. Círdan, long in years, is bent with sorrow. Gil-galad has the same anxious shadows graven into his face as does the princess of Doriath. As does Idril’s own young son.
And she hears the sea, murmuring to the west. The sea that did not admit her father’s messengers. The sea that took her mother. The sea that has murmured to her husband half his life and calls even stronger to her son. And Idril looks across it, at the pitiless horizon, the invisible high seat of the Valar. And she thinks of the misty valley of Hithlum, a cage for slavers and slaves alike; the cold peaks of Himring overrun with orcs; Nargothrond a nest for dragons; Doriath torn down by the hands of kin turned unto kin. And she thinks of Gondolin, the red rise of Morgoth’s army blotting out the sun, the flames licking up the King’s Tower and Eagles falling, pierced with black arrows, from the ash-choked sky. And she thinks of Sirion, fragile as Gondolin was not, as Doriath was not, where the survivors of wrack thrown together by the tide eke out their lives. And she thinks of Gil-galad slender like a young birch, and the child’s fat clinging to the cheeks of Doriath’s princess, and the milk scent of her son’s skin. And she wonders: she made a way of escape from the fall of Gondolin. But what escape is there from the ruin of Beleriand?
And she wonders: the sea did not admit Turgon’s messengers. But will they admit his daughter?
---
Sea-longing has engraved Tuor’s face with a dreamy cast in his old age. His wrinkles are deep now, and his hair has dulled from honey-gold to steel-grey. His hands, corded with muscle, are spotted with the blemishes of age and he walks slower and heavier than the years of his youth. It breaks Idril’s heart, the signs of his departure inexorably advancing. She holds him close, her jewel and her love, in fruitless defiance of death.
It is not death that takes him first, however, but the sea. Old as he is, the strength has not left Tuor’s arms completely. Voronwë aids him, his staunch friend from the journey of his youth: they fell trees and log the wood, saw them to long planks, build in the shipyards of Círdan a ship fit for a long voyage. It is a hard labour, and one that Idril, in her secret, most selfish darknesses, does not know if she wishes to succeed or fail. They are hopeless in a hopeless land, but the years of Tuor’s life are not yet ended, and so, neither is Idril’s happiness. If death or the sea must have him, she wishes for the one that would come later rather than sooner: to have him in old age than lose him to Ulmo.
But at long last when Eärendil is a man grown and the wedded to Doriath’s princess Eärramé, Sea-flower, is ready. It is Idril who weaves the sails. Following on the heels of Eärendil’s wedding clothes, Idril unravels the thick white canvas that will bring them, if all goes well, to the shores of her birth.
Centuries later from when Fingolfin first saw the red glow rising from Losgar and knew himself betrayed, his granddaughter steps foot on a ship. It is not the ship that will bear her to Beleriand – they are far, far past that. It is not a swan-ship, nor strictly a Telerin ship, though much of the craft Tuor learnt from Círdan their kinsman. In one aspect, however, it is the same: they go with few blessings but their own.
Their son weeps to see them go. Entreats them to stay. He is barely twenty. He is newly married. He has lost the home of his childhood and now the last piece of that home means to floats away on the tide. It pains Idril to see the tears well in his eyes. She longs for the days when smiles came easily to his lips, when he danced without care through the streets of Gondolin, accompanied by the flute of Ecthelion or the harp of Salgant. The dream that Eärendil would be spared, long lost, makes a spectre of its absence. But even to her son’s sorrow she will not yield.
She is Idril of the secret way. Idril of the escape. Idril wife of Tuor, who is Ulmo’s beloved. She places her hand on her son’s cheek, swallows the details of his face.
When they board it is Idril who supports her husband by the elbow, Idril who hauls the supplies aboard, Idril who pulls up the sails that the winds blow full. Though they stand together at the railing to wave their son goodbye, it is Tuor who needs to sit first, and Idril who guides him to a nailed-down chair.
Beleriand fades into the distance.
---
All goes well at first. The salt air picks back up Tuor’s spirits, and after the first day he is hale as he was ten years ago. Puttering around the deck, cooing back at screeching gulls, wiping the spray from his face, Idril’s husband is in his element. It makes her smile, though sometimes it also makes her sad.
And the sea is kind to them, at first. They have a week of calm, where the waters glow like the facets of a vast jewel and the coral of the shallows bloom red and white beneath the passage of their ship. By night, Idril recognises once more with a sudden shock the glowing lights in the water she had known from her early youth and pressing her hands to the railing to watch those sea-drenched stars pass by. The wind is favourable, a swift wind to the west that fills the belly of their sail. The sunrises come golden and bright, the sunsets burnished auburn on the bellies of trailing clouds.
On the seventh day, the gulls have disappeared and the bottom has dropped out of the sea. Idril wakes to a red sunrise that drips down the horizon carried on clouds that thicken throughout the day. By noon, it is as dark as dusk and the wind has started to pick up. The waters grow choppy and violent and the ship starts to shudder as the gloom draws close.
Then the sea shows its wrath. They ride on waves that move like raging horses, that sway and shudder and snap and throw them high into the air to land once more on the beast’s back. Rain, falling in sheets, comes almost horizontal in the grips of wind that lashes like whips. Lightning is their only light, its cold, pitiless flash showing Idril’s husband in snatches: white-faced, white-haired, hard and enduring hands gripping the wild-turning rudder. The wind howls in her ears. She sees the white sail strained to breaking one way, then as thunder passes and another flash cracks the sky the ship lurches and there it is, tugging them the opposite.
Caught in the grip of the storm, Idril is helpless. She does not know the sea, cannot, as Tuor attempts to, go the way of its moods and slide like a hand down a shark’s side over the cruel edges of its teeth. She clings to the railing as rain and spray soak her to the bone.
There is nothing in all directions but the sea’s rage. No shore that they can make for, no certain course they can chart. Before the spears and tridents of Ulmo there is only enduring. She closes her eyes, feels the heaving blue mass of the sea, the rootless sea beneath her feet, and waits.
By the dawn of the third day, the storm has passed. They glide, ashen-faced but alive, in perfect stillness through shadowy, mist-filled waters. Idril can barely see Tuor though he’s only two arm-widths away. She huddles close to him, brings her arms around his mortal body. He lives, thank Eru. They both live.
They have been thrown into a strange, sinister place. The fog never lifts and the wind never comes. The sun does not seem to rise or set in the stillness of the grey days and the grey nights. They see no stars, no moon through the ever-thick fog and mark the goings of the days through only the shadows that deepen around them. The water is shallow, treacherous with sandbars and jutting rocks. There are no fish. Nothing moves apart from their ship. Around them, islands appear and disappear in the stagnant mist, shadowy sketches on the surface of the still, glass-like sea.
Without wind, only oars keep their ship moving. Idril becomes a dab hand in the galleys though Tuor sighs to see her there. Time after time, he makes to join her, and each time she turns him back. Though her arms ache after each day with the weariness of strain, Tuor aches too, she knows, with the weariness of age. And while her aches will lessen with healing and time, his will not. He is grown old even over the time of their voyage: his hair is white now, like snow. His eyes are faded from the brightness of their youth, discoloured with the mists of age. But he is still Tuor. And he loves her. And even in the discomforts and indignities of their pitiful state, they make each other happy.
They row, making slow pace, for what feels like an eternity. The islands never end. The fog never lifts. The sea does not clear, does not deepen, does not change. Idril stops eating, but even so the food runs out. And then the water.
At last, they make for shore. They beach their ship, the hull grinding against grey pebbles. Even if the lands are uninhabited, they are both apt scavengers from the trials of their lives. Seaweed, crabs in their holes, what greenery the island has to offer, even tree bark – Idril is famished as she had been only on the Grinding Ice. They need to eat, need to drink.
It is Tuor who supports his starved wife down the planks, this time, as they make their bent slow way down the alley of defeat. It is Tuor who sets foot on the stones of the island first – but Idril follows only a heartbeat after.
She knows as soon as the ground settles that they’ve made a mistake. Sleep overruns her, the fog that folds the sea folding her under. The spells of the Valar encircle her in their trap. She swoons, fainting beneath the magic of the isle. She feels, with the last terror her heart can muster, her husband’s warmth leave her as he, too, succumbs.
“Tuor, Tuor!” Idril cries out. But she is swept away.
---
The hand of Ulmo rests heavy in Idril’s dreams. She finds herself breathing through the water like one of the Maia as the shadowy shapes of her childhood nightmares make themselves clear: sleek, black porpoises swim by in schools while rotund penguins flap their black wings and kick their little yellow feet. Sea lions tickle her with their quivering whiskers, while dark-eyed sharks silently circle. Water, thick and heavy and black, eddies around her as she sinks and sinks, until she lands on the barnacle-clad back of a great beast: the king of the deep, the plumber of depths, the singer of songs.
The Lord of Waters does not reveal himself to her clad in the shape of a man. Idril feels incomprehensibly small resting on that vast back, feeling the undulations of the whale’s slow passage. They pass by coral beds where fish dart among the shipwrecks. The mark of Gondolin is carved into some of those wooden hulls, but others, older wrecks have swan-prows, are surpassing beautiful even in their ruin, and Idril knows she is seeing the Telerin ships that the Noldor killed for, whom Uinen drowned in turn. As she watches, an eel with fins like a butterfly passes through the open window of a ship’s cabin, circles a dead man’s skull, and swims calmly away.
Idril wonders where her mother’s bones have sunk.
Ulmo’s voice does not come from any one direction, but seems rather threaded into the sea itself. It is low, lower than any sound Idril has ever heard, and deep as to be fathomless. She feels it vibrate in her bones, as if it comes from the foundation of the world. If she were not already carried, she would have fallen on her face.
“Be not afraid,” the voice booms, “Idril, daughter of kings! Thy work is done, and well thou hast done it. From thy line shall spring a light that shineth even past the Pélori, yea I say, even unto the heights of Taniquetil shall it be set. Rejoice, master of the secret way! From thee shall the plight of the Children reach the ears of the highest, and from thee come the last hope that endureth beyond the spears and arms of Melkor and keepeth through the falls and dooms of Fate. Now the secret voice gaineth depth and the rift wideneth in the armour of Fate and the breach groweth in the walls of Doom and lo, I gainsay as is my part, spring up the light against the everlasting darkness. Close at hand is the third music, the theme that playeth itself from sorrow to joy, and all thy tears shall be but water on the flower of hope. Sleep now in thy exile, daughter of the Noldor, and know that thou hast laboured not in vain.”
And even as he speaks, she hears a mighty horn blowing a great note that resounds in the deep and beyond it. And it seems to Idril that the eyes of Ulmo, dark and wide and unencumbered by the shadows of the sea are lent to her for a moment. She sees the world as it appears to the ocean, a leaf adrift on a pond. And she sees Beleriand not as it has always appeared to her, in its mountains and its rivers and its deep-rooted trees, the high grassy plains and the low-lying valleys where the mists gather and sink, but as a thing malleable, a work moved and shaped by hands larger than her own in the time when her mother’s mother slept by Cuiviénen.
Then the hand of Ulmo plucks at the harp of time and behold! Then comes the theme that only the waters know though Vairë spins their threads. Alike to a stream over a dry gully does Ulmo’s purpose run over the span of years past and in its wake Idril sees her own line hallowed, and the doom upon them high and sheer and dreadful. And she sees in the chain that will break every chain: herself, escaped from the grinding ice as her mother lifts her high, and the Gondolindrim, escaped from the eye of Morgoth as her father throws up his walls, and the Lothlim, the remnants, ‘scapt from the fall down her own secret tunnel, and then a ship, white and beautiful, scraping silent against the white shores of Eldamar, and a lone star rising in the night sky. And she sees between the hammer of Fate and the anvil of Morgoth the way of escape threading blue and secret, and the whisper of hope passed silent from hand to hand. And in the eyes of Ulmo it is a great deed that her house has done and will do, and down the iron bands of Eä Idril espies the last pardon of the Noldor and the succour of sorrows, and the downfall of the shadow at last.
Then the music of Ulmo is revealed, and Idril sees her part, one small link in the larger whole.
But Idril turns her head in the sea, and shuts her eyes, and weeps.
In her weeping she pours out the sea as seen from the shore, terrible, nameless, a thing that buffets the small lives of the Children of Eru as surely as fate has chained them and the shadow struck them down. And counterpoint to Ulmo she plays her own note. And the note of Idril is this: a hand, white with cold, stiff with desperation, holding hope aloft as it sinks down into the depths.
So her mother had lifted her up, and her father had held Gondolin aloft, and she had raised the Exiles; but the work, unfinished, passes on. A series of hands stretching out from the sea, each one lifting the next closer to the stars. Each faltering halfway beneath the burden as the strain and the loneliness and the grief goes from one hand to the next and hope, silent and sad, rises buried under all. And there is no sparing the child from the burden of what is passed on. Idril sees Eärendil’s sad face as she went away, and from her own hands with the eyes of Ainu and Eldar she sees her son, rising, the last link, the only hope, the lone star in the cold sky. And with him rises the whole world.
And she sees herself sleeping as the years wheel and the slavering danger draws near Sirion and ruin stalks the home of her only child. And she cannot help him. And she cannot spare him. And her last plea has failed, for it was not hers to make.
Elenwë had struggled and swum and kicked, gasping for air with the feeling dying from her limbs as she reached out to the stars. She had clasped Idril to her in the cold water as they made their futile way through the path that would admit one alone. Only at the last had she thrust Idril up with a scream as Idril’s rabbit-heart pounded in the death-cage of her mother’s last striving for the life she would be denied. Turgon had raised Gondolin’s white walls against the treachery and horror of Morgoth, and there he had clung, her proud father, to the hope that one work would be enough against the rising tide. And when the city had withered in the flame, he had withered with it in a great fall. Idril had led her people, diminished and exiled, down the paths of the Sirion all the way west back to the shore. And there she had essayed more, to bring the message of both the Firstborn and the Secondborn to the uttermost west.
But it was not for Elenwë to walk Beleriand, as it was not for Turgon to hold his city, as it is not for Idril to speak that message. Ever they have overstepped, those of her line. Ever they have had no recourse but to overstep.
All this Idril reveals to the Lord of Waters. And she says why, and she means that her mother died floundering in the icy sea, and her father died burning in the falling tower, and she now sleeps on the enchanted shore. And each fall has been greater than the rise, and each loss heavier than the gain. She has seen the work of hope reap despair on her line and feels its shadow in her own weariness, in her father’s head bent low beneath his crown, in her mother’s slip as she fell. Much has been demanded of them. And the work of Ulmo hastens to its fulfillment as his hand falls heavy on the slim, young shoulders of her son.
Then Ulmo no more with words does speak but comforts her with the songs of the sea. But to Idril no joy comes.
---
Slowly, the whale begins to rise. They leave the sea’s deeps where light sparkles and fires plume, into the cold belly of the ocean where all is black and night. Idril does not know if they are moving through the vastness of Eä or a single, boxed-in room. She feels no walls, and yet the darkness seems itself a wall. The only sign of another living being is the slow movement of the whale’s barnacled skin as it creaks and shifts beneath her. Breath comes easily to her in this dream, but hard to her mind, even in dreaming. She is so unbelievably weary.
Is death like this, she wonders? Does Mandos, too, bring such heavy force down upon the souls in his care? And she thinks vaguely of death, which Tuor had also called sleep. But sleep, if it is like this, is no rest for her. This grey ocean where her soul drifts unanchored, where thought and sorrow and even joy can still pursue her. Escape, Ulmo had said. But there is no escape for Idril.
They swim in darkness for a long time.
At last, a light appears over their heads. It’s dim, at first, like the marshlights in the meres of Ivrin. Indistinct and flickering, Idril thinks it a trick of the eye before it grows in strength and frame as the waters go from black to blue. Then Idril wonders if it is not what the sun looks like from very far below: a little candle set upon the surface of the world. And though the light is not very bright nor very warm, she is glad that it exists. More than any of Ulmo’s sad songs, it gives her comfort in their slow passage upwards to fix her eyes upon it. Her heart is soothed to know that something other exists than herself and the sea.
Up and up they go. The sun appears, then the moon, then the faint light of the stars as they wheel their lonely fires in the firmament of Arda. Still, the light remains. It is not sunlight or moonlight or starlight. It glows with neither the last gasp of the Two Trees nor the telltale brightness of Varda’s work: it is golden, like honey, and wavering, like dawn.
They are close now to the surface. The waters are barely cold anymore. Idril sees the grey back of the one who carries her, the smooth dynamism of form and the power of its armoured tail.
Before such a being, she is dwarfed. But she is not nothing.
She draws her last breath beneath the waves, and then the whale breaches.
Water throws her up as the sea erupts in towers of foam. She gasps at her first breath of air. It slices, a cold shock, down her throat. Her sea-change has not yet left her; she feels the sea breaking over the shore of her soul. Even now, the music of Ulmo rings in her ears and she fixes her eyes up, to the light.
Tuor, gay and golden and young, looks back at her.
All the air rushes out of Idril’s lungs.
Tuor’s hair is thick now and as honey-gold as the day Idril first laid eyes on him in the halls of her father. But the corners of his eyes crinkle as he smiles and the thin lines stay even when that smile slips away. Idril saw those marks appear on his face, little by little, over the course of their lives. She remembers their shadows when Tuor first laid eyes on their child. She remembers tracing their imprint in the nights they passed in their wedding bed and kissing the traces of his age.
He is no longer old, no longer bent. He is dressed in the simple mariner’s clothing, practical for travel that he wore on their ill-fated journey. He walks to her very tall, with a spring in his step. Borne on the waves, he looks like one of the Maia of Ulmo, and indeed the sea swirls around him. But the waves pass through him, and the water does not touch him. He is no Maia, but a mortal. Why, her heart breaking, why is he mortal?
Drenched, heavy with the sea, Idril reaches out to him. His hand is light as air in her own, and his grasp as weak as water.
“Now I must leave thee, Celebrindal,” Tuor says, “for our fates are sundered. I await thee with the world’s ending, when all our hurts are healed. Fare thee well! Tuor son of Huor has loved thee, and shall.”
“Tuor!” Idril cries out, and tries to hold him. But he is carried up on a buffet from the outer airs of Eä. His hand slips away, formless in the wind of death. Through the crack in the wall where Eru peeks in, beyond even the ocean where the stars make lonely port, the soul of Tuor departs – to where, Idril does not know.
She calls his name once more. Her voice falls, thin and small, on the still, grey waves. And she hears, as if in a dream, the cry of swans on the shores of Nevrast.
Even the Powers shall envy, Ulmo sighs, the gift of Eru.
And the sea carries Idril to shore.
---
Idril wakes up.
Beside her, the waves caress Tuor’s face. She lays a hand on his cold, wet cheek.
And the Morning Star rises, hung with hope, on its first voyage into the night sky.