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Sharper than a Serpent's Tooth by EmberOfTheSea
Fandoms: The Lord of the Rings - All Media Types, J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth Legendarium & Related Fandoms
11 May 2026
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Summary
When Elrond learned the choice of his daughter, he was silent, though his heart was grieved and found the doom long feared none the easier to endure.
– Return of the King, Appendix A, The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen, J. R. R. Tolkien
Or, Arwen tells Elrond of her betrothal to Aragorn. He – doesn’t take it well.
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Her father! Her dear, dear world of a father. As ineluctable as the seasons and as unknowable. She was made in his likeness. They were a mirror and its reflection, spiralling on for eternity. A virus self-replicating, an aberration; their riverine bloodline nothing but a glitch in the great fabric of the universe, perpetuating itself over and over in the hopes of resolving its own paradox once and for all. The line of the peredhel – Arwen and Elrond and Elrond and Elwing and Elwing and Dior, all the way back to Lúthien herself – a poem of fixed meter and rhyming pairs, each generation following the same pattern time after time after time. No hope for escape.
Arwen had to get out; she had to break the mirror. That was the only way any of it would end. Could he not see that? He had to. He had to.