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Cool brushes of green life turned into cold wet grey grains and a hard stab in the sole followed by a sickening crunch. Sand molds of hasty feet oozed full of brine nearly as soon as the stamp of flesh departed from them, and what little of a dent remained was blanketed seconds later in a frigid sheen that erased any trace of presence. The footprints of the Song had shifted away long before, and only distance notes on the fëa left any semblance of a trail.
Fiercely protective of their watery charge, the monsters’ crashing weapons sprayed chilled black blood from frozen blades, shrieking their blasting strength and wrenching every thought from Elrond’s mind except alone alone alone.
Even the seafoam hissed and fled from him.
So much for Elros.
The starless dome above was cloaked by the last breaths of the dead.
So much for himself.
Innumerable dead. All for a couple of jewels. Jewels won. Taken. Grasped. Was it worth it?
Yes, the Fire would answer, jaw set like glass that would shatter if pressed. (He lied, too prideful to admit the folly of himself and his family and his father. Perhaps it would chain him for eternity.)
No, the Song would answer, unraveling, its notes wild and uncertain, fleeting as the violent wind and volatile waves, terrifying in its frantic despair and warbling harmony that searched for the melody that had launched itself into boiling, bubbling depths.
But the Fire had snuffed himself and the Song stumbled in shadowed grief, and above the pounding of Elrond’s feet and the waves and the wind, his vile peredhel ears could not hear the wailing notes.
His heart could feel, though, its cursed reach beyond the burning grave and clattering camp and freezing shore and into those few precious fëar that screamed and paced and sobbed.
(In some hidden cavern of his mind, he knew one day he would bless his cursed heart and see its beauty, though he would always hate his ears. His barely crested ears that mocked Eldar with their curve and Edain with their point and matched not even those of Elros, for Elros’ ears curved like a summer nut, and though he was hated by Elf he was at least loved by Man, and that was more than Elrond could say for himself.)
He pulled at the loose cord tying his fëa to that of the singing sobs, desperate to make it taut again, like the wire hooked to Elros’ pacing heart. His brother’s wire strained and stretched but did not plead, for Elros was never one for pleading, in his self-proclaimed maturation circumstances either were or they weren’t, there was no in between, and if Elrond did not return soon enough Elros might just leave him too—who could blame him, Elrond had left first—so there had to be a limit on the search for the Song.
Four days the waves whispered, their only mercy so far that night. This night. The next day. The next night. The next day. Then he would turn around. Two days out. Two days back. Surely Elros would not have left him by then?
(He had waited for Elros for a week once, when he disappeared into the thicket weeks after their forced adoption, for by that time though their new life was for Elrond, it was not for Elros, and some foolish part of his twin believed he could live in the woods like Eluréd and Elurín—our real uncles, Elros had whispered. Never again had more tears poured from Elrond’s burning eyes than in those seven days of terror and fury, in which the Song could neither sooth nor reassure, yet even when Fire dragged Elros back kicking and screaming, Elrond still raced forward on legs that trembled from forgetting to eat and sleep and drink and breathe, and his little fists beat the Fire and wailed forth the anger that had roiled to a breaking point, and even before Elros’ torn and bloody feet touched the ground, Elrond had nearly strangled him in a choking embrace and begged him to never, never leave him again. Elros had promised, and on hearing that promise night crashed over his eyes. In it, though his eyes and heart failed him, for once his cursed ears allowed him to hear the Song’s soothing and Elros’ murmuring love and worry and apology, and after that they never left the other’s side, not even in battle.)
The fear of a broken promise drove him out of his panting walk and back into a gasping run, onward, onward, onward, through the freezing night, and he barely registered the waves that wet his knees and flying tunic.
A sun of fire broke through the breath of the dead uncountable hours later and reminded him of his already flaming chest and wheezing lungs. Maedhros had endured worse when he leapt to his fiery death, still endured worse, Elrond winced as his fëa stroked the burning ribbon and whispered a prayer to Mandos that he would heal the scars of the eldest son of Fëanor in haste.
He would not listen, even to the eldest son of Gil-Estel and a descendant of Lúthien. He had no reason to.
Edging away from the ribbon of fire, Elrond clutched the strained wire and felt rather than heard the clash of metal on metal. His heart leapt into his throat and nearly dragged him back to his brother, his constant, desperate to save him from the war already won—so why does he wield his weapon again?!
And then the truth of the acrid tang of fear and worry registered and he breathed, for Elros feared only for him, not for his own life, and battle did not rage round his twin’s hröa but only his fëa, and that Elrond could sooth with murmurs of love tapped into the strained wire.
He ran again. Out of the cool of the morning and into what should have been the heat of the day, but clouds hid the sun’s cruelest rays, and Elrond imagined his mother’s wings had coaxed them into the sky for his sake. He blessed the goodwill—for though it did not dampen his parched tongue, it at least stayed the pain of heat—and ran on, and as the sky’s myriad shifted from blue to gold, he begged the Valar to send the Song home.
The waves quieted that night as clouds gathered on the horizon. The calm before the storm, his fëa whispered. But he’s close now, Elrond whispered back. He dared not waste water on argumentative words, for he would not give up, no matter how foolish his stance. I can hear him.
Notes lilted through the windless night—ones even cursed peredhel ears could hear—from no song Maglor had ever sung for them. Even his most heartbreaking music had not filled Elrond’s fëa with the despair this did. With a defiant twist of fate, he turned his despair into hope and tipped his face to up the ebony sky, tears rolling down his cheeks at the thought of Maglor seeing the same stardome.
He ran harder, pausing at intervals to walk and hear the song of estel. He had one more day to reach Maglor. Valar, let it be your will, he cried, his cry both more and less desperate now than before.
The dawn brought no sun, only a storm that drowned out the song and drove him from the edge of the water. He could not halt to fill his hands with water from the sky lest Maglor escape, and the rain that pooled in rocky crevasses tasted of disheartened brine and left him both thirstier and more hungry.
Without the comfort of Song, unbidden tears flowed down his cheeks, mingling with the rain and mocking him as they added more salt to the already salted air and rocks and beach and sea. His trembling legs begged him to stop, and he bit through his lip with an irony curse, for elven legs never tired, but his legs, like his ears, could do him no good.
The cold of the rain seeped into his bones, and his chest—angered by much heat and little rest and meager water and no food and sudden cold—stuttered as his head buzzed, and he feared that even if the rain stopped, he would not hear Maglor’s song.
The downpour halted at sunset, its clouds still darkening the horizon. Cotton filled Elrond’s ears, and tears sprung into his eyes, for he should have heard the song, it tugged as his fëa enough to tell him that, but cursed peredhel weakness drowned it out.
(Though he could not blame even peredhel for his weakness, for it was not all peredhil, not even only himself and Elros, it was only him and his cursed runtish weakness that spawned in a fluke from the marriage of elves and men and reminded him winter after winter that he should not have lived through his first and the punishment for daring to defy the laws of Eru Illúvatar would last for Ages to come.)
The clouds fled in time for the stars to break through, and in the same moment the song finally reached his ears, familiar notes of the stardome, and hope leapt in his aching chest.
Maglor had called him.
He should have turned back. The time allotted for his search had ended. But I’m so close, he implored as he broke his vow and quaked at the thought of the consequences. He would not stop, he resolved, not when Maglor was nearly within his grasp, nearly visible. Come what may. Instead he ran through the night as long as his halting lungs and numb legs would allow. The moon broke through the clouds and more stars slipped into view, and with every star and every step the call grew louder, more familiar, more precious.
And then he saw him. It could be no one else, for though the silhouetted figure could be any elf or man, Elrond had not seen a single soul for two and a half days, and, unless the Valar hated him with a vengeance, the figure far ahead but so close could only be Maglor.
Maglor! he shrieked, and the word was lost to a sudden gust of wind, thrusting his cry out to sea.
Maglor! he screamed in defiance of another icy blast that swept his pleading inland.
Maglor! he begged even as the wind threw his call and Maglor’s into his face.
Nelyo! he cried in pleading desperation, and as if it was the missing word to the spell that unlocked his father’s shuddering, grief-filled heart, the syllables soared forth and the song paused.
The cord trailing to his fëa trembled, notes he had not plucked traveling to him. Elrond fell to his knees at the sound of the lullaby of years past, his chest warming like the fire that crackled in the hearth even as it threatened to choke him.
Come back home, he whispered along the cord, his throat too raw from salt and sand and sickness and screaming to even croak.
Maglor’s fëa flickered with the guilt of resistance.
Please, he begged. Please, I need you. Elros needs you. We’re alone without you. He left the words and you’re alone without us unsaid, for those were words of cruelty that he would never utter, not even in his deepest anger.
(Elros would have.)
(Later, Elrond would wish he had had the malice of man to do the same.)
Still, Maglor said nothing as if weighing guilt and duty on the scales of his fëa.
We love you, he whispered. I love you. Come back to us. Please.
The song began again, still of the stardome though not the lullaby, and for a moment, Elrond raised his eyes to the heavens and tears of relief gathered in them and blurred the stars. But anger froze the liquid crystals.
The song was growing distant. The silhouetted figure moved away.
Fury shook him, and his fist seized the salted cloth above his wheezing chest. It was the sort of wheezing that would have driven fear into Maglor’s eyes, and with a desperate fling of childishness, Elrond hurled it along the cord and heard the song falter and draw nearer, just as it did every fall and winter, plucked on a lyre and accompanied by words that chased the fevered nightmare delirium into the distance as the fire danced and soothed his head and his chest.
And then, as if snapped, the cord recoiled, and with a cry he found his hröa trembling in the frigid sand as his fëa shuddered, teetering as two taut threads held it in place instead of three, and one of those threads frayed and threatened to burn at any moment.
A wave crashed over his head without warning, and as he sputtered, clawing away from the sea’s reach, he gasped through the brine that filled his lungs in his panic.
Maglor was gone. He had felt Elrond’s desperate, sickening cry, and he considered, measured, rejected. There was no future along the seaside. Nothing left to run toward. Only something to run away from.
But if I can only get to him he’ll understand, he begged.
But he’s gone, an echo of Elros reasoned. He doesn’t care anymore. He doesn’t want you. He doesn’t love you. Get back to the one who does before he leaves too.
Elros won.
He did not know how much time had passed since he had staggered up from the sand where he collapsed the night before and began the impossible trek back the way he had come, but he knew when he first woke, his hröa and fëa screamed in unison and gave him two options: stay and die or stand and try.
He tried for Elros. Not himself. Elros was the only reason he staggered through the midday heat, beyond thirsty and too sick for food if he had managed to find any.
Two days’ run away from Elros. Lungs soon-to-be full of fluid. Burning fever. Throbbing skull. Aching body. The only sensible part of him that still clung to reality had been wise to emphasize standing did not guarantee survival.
He hated himself. For the folly of his mission. For the folly of his hope. For the folly of his pride. Some fragment of his mannish heart believed Maglor loved him enough to listen. He might not listen to Elros, but he’ll listen to you, his heart had whispered.
The sea wrapped around his ankles, shocking him with its frigid grasp, and he fell to his knees, his hands dragging in the dregs of the wave and the dry sand, the mixture cementing to his body with a grainy burn. He drew a crackling breath and covered his face, his shoulders shaking in shame and grief. He had abandoned the one who loved him for the one who did not, one who had loved naught but his eldest brother and his father’s jewels.
He cursed the waywardness of man and begged for the steadfastness of an elf, and when the only answer was a taunting whistle of wind, he dragged himself to his feet and staggered onward through the blinding sand, ignoring the call of the sea and the urge of the forest on either side, for one he would choose only if he longed for death and the other he could not navigate.
Only by walking on and clinging to the crutch of his brother’s fëa could he prove to the Valar that the elven blood running through his veins had worth next to the mannish dross.
The sun chose mercilessness that day, and not a cloud scuttled by to shield him from the vicious rays. When the sand scorched his bare feet, he veered to the water’s edge, ice preferable to fire. Why did I leave my boots? his fevered mind wondered dimly for the first time since he set out. Leaving was perhaps the only spontaneous action he had ever committed, slipping from the tent in the middle of the night and leaving Elros to wake in a panic and find little comfort in the hastily scribbled note left on his made bed.
Never again, he breathed as his eyes shuttered in a desperate attempt to block the glaring light from the sea and sun and sand. In that brief moment, he tottered and stumbled into the shallows before he could regain his balance.
He rested in a pool of misery for a while as the waves lapped against his burning body. His head lolled first against his knees, then his chest when his body faltered and the glowing red behind his eyelids faded to black.
The crash of his burning, freezing body into the waves woke him, and as he spat out and coughed up brine that again invaded his lungs, Elrond stumbled up to the now grey shore and barely remembered to thank the Valar for the cover of night. Something dimly resembling an overhanging rockface rose to meet him, shifting in size and shape and position before his bleary eyes. He dragged himself beneath it and collapsed into a panting heap that coughed and wheezed, pain racking his burning frame with every frail breath. His hröa begged for sleep but his fëa would not give in and instead counted every grain of sand sticking to every inch of his hateful flesh.
(If he slept he would die, he knew blearily, and for some reason he could not find a decent reason why he should not give in.)
(Elros of course.)
Darkness came anyway.
Her eyes closed, the sea air filled her lungs again and again and again, but Galadriel's mind would not cease its clamoring. Gritting her teeth, her eyes snapped open as she walked into the onslaught of the piercing ocean sun and wind. The taut cord of her fëa was coiled so tight her officers had nearly banished her from the business of the camp, likely afraid she would turn on them as if they were her enemy.
A foolish fear. Perhaps. The corner of her mouth quirked up in an almost-smile at such a thought. Her Silver Clam would laugh to hear it. He would return soon, leading his triumphant elves, his eyes anxiously searching for her, and she would remain aloof until he took her arm and wrenched her away from her post and into the forest where her guard would drop and the sunrise of joy would spring onto her face and they would dance and laugh like giddy elflings and shed their armor and swords and knives and fall into a mossy bed and simply be for the first time in what felt like an age. And once fully reunited they would set out for their little one tucked safely away from the heat of battle and hatred, and love and peace would fill their fëar.
The grass parted to make way for the sand of the shore, and with a careful glance, she dropped into it and discarded stockings and boots and waterskin in a neat, hasty pile, and threatened to commit acts of violence against the Valar if they had allowed any of her company to follow her.
The sand warmed her aching soles but did not burn, and as she sank into the sand with a satisfied sigh just a little of the tension released from her shoulders.
It was a tension she would never admit to any elf in the camp, would rarely admit to herself. Only Celeborn would ever hear of it, that he would hear of it only because he noticed and analyzed and pried until her breaking point. He was the only one she had ever opened her heart to and there would be no other. No other was worth it.
Her mind slipped away from him and focused on the rhythmic crashing of the waves, in and out, in and out. Her breathing matched it, in and out, in and out, and she slipped her fingers into the warm sand with a smile, pushing further and further until it covered her wrist and half her forearm, until she reached the cool sand below its sun-baked coverlet.
A cry disturbed her, and she glanced upward, searching for the intrusive gull. Even shielding her eyes from the glaring sun, none showed itself. She glared silently and shrugged, resting her head against her knees, the dark skirt covering them glowing with the heat of the sun.
Another cry sounded, this one stranger.
Her body shot up, the relief of the seaside snapped away in an instant as every fiber of her being tightened. It was not the cry of a gull but of someone. Nearby. Someone who in her childish eagerness for a rest she had not registered.
Skirts and sand flew as she spun around, eyes piercing every rocky crevasse where the grass and sand met. If the watcher was hostile, she would capture and fight if necessary. If friendly, she would still bring them to camp, momentarily a prisoner of war and likely deserving the axe.
The cry came again, fainter. Her eyes settled on a rocky alcove just above where she had left her things.
“Foolish,” she muttered bitterly, stalking toward it. She always said leisure was for the weak minded. Bless the Valar her company had not seen her.
“I am Galadriel, Commander of the Northern Armies. Show yourself unarmed and approach slowly, and I will leave you unharmed.”
Not so much as a grain of sand stirred. A furrow creased her brow. “I said show yourself,” she hissed, stepping closer, ready to spring.
Nothing again. Then a whimper.
She edged nearer. “I command you, reveal yourself to me now and I will let you live.” In truth, she would not kill them, not if they were of elvenkind. The Valar forbid she make her camp with the sons of Fëanor.
A bloodcurdling scream jerked her from thoughts of mercy and pride, and in instinct she lunged first for her blade and then for her quarry. Her knife had pressed into the pale skin of his throat and drawn blood before it jerked back in horror.
Eyes of silver met hers, burning silver being refined in a furnace. Bright. Too bright. Fevered and seeing not reality but whatever horror the youth’s delirium trapped him in. (Barely a youth but small and far too slender for age.) His lips had long ago cracked but still bled sluggishly, the ooze closer to orc blood than cherry life. Her heart stopped for a moment and her grip on the dagger tightened. He might be one of those twisted and tormented until his mind was torn by the mixed blood that flowed in his veins. Her gaze tripped over the rest of his body and her mental hackles lowered. Any exposed skin was strawberry, burned by the sun’s ferocity. The body of an orc would have long succumbed to monstrous boils, bringing a death of great pain upon him. Her face twisted at the memory of such a company of the enemy.
A soothing murmur left her lips, the sort she had not used since she last saw Celebrían, and she crouched, placing a gentle hand upon his jerking shoulder. Eyes closed, she reached out, her fëa brushing his.
She nearly recoiled.
His fëa sobbed, not the sob of one whose body and mind were tortured by masters so cruel the Valar should have wiped them from the face of Arda, but the sob of one whose heart had been broken again and again by those he loved, whose heart feared the wrath and abandonment of the few he still clung to, and of those few—Galadriel took a bracing breath and edged closer—one was dead, one had left him, and one had given up hope.
His body jerked again, and a violent cough rattled in his chest and turned into a desperate sob.
In alarm she sprang up, reaching blindly for her waterskin and nearly falling to her knees at the side of the one before her, drawing him up close to her chest. Warnings that he might be hostile, that he might attack, that he might hurt her never came to her. And if they did, they flitted in as no more than a murmur.
“Be still,” she whispered into his crested ear. No, she realized after a pause. It both was and was not. Crested and rounded. Of Eldar and of Edain. One of the peredhil twins. Melian’s kin. Nostalgia tickled her fëa, and with affection for that which many scorned, she shifted so he lay against her arm and uncorked her waterskin, placing it before his lips. She eased a few drops in. Then just a few more.
“Easy,” she murmured as his breathing hitched and his eyes widened in pain. “Go slow.” She brushed his fëa again, and the creases left his brow.
By the time his darting eyes slowed, he had swallowed far too little for her liking.
You are safe, she willed him to understand. Be at peace. I will care for you.
He drooped in her arms with a sigh and fisted the spare cloth of her sleeve in a childlike hand. If he had broken the constructs of reality and reached through her flesh and seized her fëa, he could not have affected her more.
Galadriel did not even register the shocked stares from her company when she flew into camp, weaponless and barefoot and carrying cargo more precious than any jewel the sons of Fëanor had fought over in the war.
Voices flickered through—fevered—freezing—strangling—darkness. Most chided in disappointment or hissed in doubt or bargained in mercy. One spoke louder, softer, fiercer than them all, though, it fought him, soothed him, urged him.
You will not give in, her fëa insisted. There is more in your future than death. You daren’t pass now.
And for some reason he trusted her.
As sense returned to him in a waking state, he understood why.
It was because in her touch and tone he felt that for which his hröa and fëa had ached for nearly a century, the gentle but mighty, soft but calloused voice and hand of the mother who had long since left him for the sky and a jewel. It seemed everyone had left him for a jewel, everyone except the one who caressed him with a mother’s touch now, who said in quiet nighttime murmurs that he was worth more than any jewel even the Valar could craft.
(Even Elros convinced him to fight for the jewels and family ties. He allowed Maedhros to ensnare his heart, and was thereafter puzzled beyond belief when Elrond revealed he did not share the same sentiments. It was the first wedge, and he had known the moment it sprung into being: the first dig at their love and their oneness, the first pronunciation of death and doom.)
Perhaps that fact also allowed him to trust her, for she did not deny the death he expected would follow, no, she affirmed and acknowledged and pushed past it, tying it up in a neat bow and reminding him of the beauty that would always hide the gnarled knot.
Her curt words with her company and flares of her nostrils and snaps of her eyes quaked the hröa of every elf, yet in them Elrond saw the vicious love she held for them, for her people, for her task. She would never cease, her every action vowed to herself with anger, to them with urgency, to him with tenderness.
Almost without his knowledge the wire Song had snapped restrung itself, and her fëa rested at the end of it, and for the first time in a century, he knew he was safe, for as much as it warmed him when he woke to Elros fast asleep and tangled in the bedcovers with him, sleeping just as they had when they were still true elflings—newly adopted and not newly orphaned as they now were—tremors shook the wire of their fëar, and though he denied it because the truth cut him like a knife, one of them would sever their love soon.
(For his foolhardy run across the sand and waves, Elrond would curse himself for centuries as his brother aged and he did not, as his brothers’ descendants turned him away, as they fell to their doom, and even the water that crushed Númenor crashed over his shoulders.)
But the cord of the fëa of Galadriel held fierce and strong with the steadfastness of pure elvenkind, of one who had basked in the true light of Valinor. She, he knew, would never waver.
Queen.
Warrior.
Mother.
He would always remember that by the seaside, when he was first orphaned, she gave him water. Though in the coming centuries their paths often wove separately, she remained a constant when he flailed blindly for purchase or reassurance or simple companionship, for she responded to his tugs on her fëa without fail, and with every response he grew more certain that he was orphaned no longer.