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They are thirty-five and they can no longer return to the lands that raised them.
Eärendil sails by night, high and bright and so far away, high in the Void whose vastness she cannot stand for long even for his sake, and she is left alone in a pale tower to wait. It's not so unfamiliar a thing, but here she lacks even the business of the Havens with which to occupy herself.
She thought she might find family here. There are indeed many who introduce themselves and call her kin, but they are strangers, still, and remain so for a long, long time. They are not those she thought to find when she first wandered the undying shores with half a memory of long, grey halls and the vaguest of explanations of rebirth.
She has, by virtue of not dying, arrived long before any of them.
She had grown used to the weight of the necklace, of the jewel, of rule, once she took it up, and now with neither charge nor people her time is strangely empty. She never loved the Sea the way Eärendil did, but she would sail with him gladly for company alone were it not for the emptiness of the tractless abyss. She was born a forest thing, and even the flatness of the open sea is enough to discomfit her, all wide and wide and wide with no tree or hedge or mountain wall to hem it in. She doesn’t understand how Eärendil crosses it every night unceasingly.
It's not so bad as all that, really, and she reminds herself of this often. She has made friends in the cities- in Alqualondë, in the smaller settlements sprung up nearby, even in Tirion, where Eärendil’s kin- distant as hers in the Swanhaven- are most hungry for news, however out of date it must have become by now. She sees people regularly; has learned much of the shared history of the kindreds of the Teleri and begun lessons in the working of clay into fine and useful things.
Even so, the days come when the tower that was built for her is tall and lonely, and she can only watch from the windows or the open roof and wait and wait for the ones who might, one day, return.
(He was thirty-six, and he died.)
(He came to grey halls he knew from his parents’ stories, where the walls are smooth like mirror-glass and the ceiling is lost to vaulting shadow and all the tapestries are woven light. He arrived among the others slain in the ruin of Doriath, both his people and not, and then the servants of the Halls came among them, and answered the questions of those who could ask, and they drifted into the silence of the Doomsman’s halls.)
He finds Nimloth in a corridor as wide as the great passage through the heart of Menegroth, the one that wound from the king’s hall to the grand gates. She is less swift to remember than he, but she takes his hand in time.
He finds his most loyal captain in a round room like a receiving chamber, entranced by a light-tapestry that covers the entire wall. He thinks it tells the story of a great journey.
He finds Eluréd and Elurín in a small chamber near the central halls, peering through the crack of a narrow door and whispering to each other. Eluréd pushes just an inch too far and they both tumble in and Dior leaps after them.
The elf woman within is tall and fair and ember-eyed- embers like a fire nearly dark, but eyes like he has seen ablaze before on the other side of crossed swords, pale hair stained with others’ blood. Baskets bleeding light and color surround her, luminous in the twilight of the halls.
“Who- you are not the living nor servants of the masters of this place. How did you find this door?”
He is brought before the Doomsman and asked where his soul ought to rest, and he answers.
Rest is not a thing he much knows, though, and it's clear too fast that he remembers more than most. These things take time, the keepers tell him, to heal and to recall and to face the world again. He need not rush.
But he has always done things swiftly and this is no exception. While Eluréd and Elurín roam the grey halls the way they had the forest paths, curious and unwary, Dior paces.
The halls are all the same and yet each one is different, all smooth walls and lost ceilings and endless light-weave things. They stretch on and on and on, straightways and shallow curves and sharp turns before wide chambers, endless and yet endlessly confining.
“Go,” Nimloth says, when their paths cross again before a tapestry of some shining silver city. “I am not yet ready, but you need not bind yourself to these sunless halls on my account. Eluréd and Elurín will tire of this place eventually, and then we will join you.”
“A day the keepers here must eagerly await.”
And Nimloth laughs, and that is a rare sound among the dead and their keepers and the patient healers. She doesn't miss the woodlands as keenly as he, nor the blue skies, and often still she wanders deep in memory and far from him. The twins range farther afield, vanishing into the depths of the halls until they are returned by the Doomsman’s befuddled people to the oldest chambers frequented by those most ready to depart.
He is not eager to leave them, even half-remembered as he is, his family or his kin or his people, but with each not-day that passes he grows more restless, until even the keepers take notice and bring him to the ones that open the doors. They ask him a great many questions- about his memory, about his desires, about the shape in which he might wish to be reborn. Then they send a runner to consult with someone mightier than they- what about he is not told.
Even much later he never is told, but the messenger returns with an answer and the door-wards of the halls of the dead open the way for him.
The gates of the Halls of Mandos are ten yards tall and silver-grey, as grim and imposing as their master. They open slow and silent, only grudgingly admitting light into the twilit halls.
“Go,” the doorwards tell him. “May these halls leave you with enough peace to live again in the world without.”
Stepping over the threshold is like stepping through a curtain of mist, like breaking through the surface of a still pool to feel the chill of spring on your face again. Dior steps out of the shadow of the great gates and returns to the land of the living after a span of years whose measure he does not know, his limbs heavy and solid and real in a way they could never be within Mandos, in the place apart where so many souls reside.
There is a wide court outside the gates, all white paving stone and broad-leafed trees that shade the road that leads to the cities. It beckons him, and he follows.
She is fifty-something and she stops keeping track so carefully.
Rumor has run through the cities as it always does when the gates that guard the dead swing open. She hasn’t heard who it is who has emerged- hasn’t cared to investigate any further. However little those who haven’t died truly know of those mysterious halls, everyone she has spoken with has agreed on this, at least: she should not expect those she knew to return so soon- not even within the century.
She does not ask who they think has come back. She goes down to the markets in Alqualondë and looks for pears and flour and the little sweetrolls that Eärendil likes so much, and wonders when he will return. The docks are empty compared to the day they first arrived, so many ships put out to sea to bear the West’s long-awaited answer to the few remaining souls in Beleriand and Eärendil along with them, bearing hope upon his brow.
The road back to her tower is long and lonely and blissfully quiet, passing through forest and meadow and fields of sweet flowers. She stops in the early afternoon beside a cool stream, humming with the song of the water as she unpacks a simple lunch in the shade of a willow grove.
Alone as she may be when she makes the long trek from her tower to the cities, this is solitude like she never had at the Havens, and some days it’s still a novel thing, the silence and the empty space. Even the Silmaril is gone, its song lighting the Void where Vingilot sails. It’s a quiet so complete she can hear herself and only herself, and dwell in memory all her own.
The whispers of the grove around her change, a difference so slight she would not know it were she not alone. Someone approaches, the trailing willow branches sigh, and the stream on its stones calls out in greeting. Unhurried, she packs away her meal and shoulders her bags, turns to face the newcomer and-
Oh.
It- surely it can’t be him, can it? They all insisted no one she lived with would return so soon, but there he stands.
Elwing has never known her eyes to deceive her, even when they played out memory not her own when the Silmaril sang. She would know her father’s face in any light, though, and he hasn’t changed since he kissed her brow and sent her fleeing into the caves with Eluréd. He stands there in the sunlight, surprise writ large across his face, and she realizes with some sharp prick that’s almost pain that he doesn’t look a day older than she herself does. They would have lived the same span of years in Middle-earth, wouldn’t they?
There is surprise on his face… but no recognition.
She could laugh. Part of her wants to. Of course- she was a child the last he saw her. Even if he came here looking for her, why would he think the woman before him was his daughter. Oh, she should have expected this, shouldn’t she? They had said her people would be rebodied, but what assurance had she had that they would be the same? A silly thing, expecting that those who passed through death to live again would be as she remembered them. She surely would not be the same to them. She gathers herself to greet him, cordial and perfectly welcoming.
“Good afterno-”
“Elwing?”
She draws a sharp breath, nearly choking on the heavy scent of flowers in the air. Dior takes half a step forward, a hand half raised, but stops himself short.
“Father- I-” Oh, stars above, what can she say? She grasps for something, anything, and comes up with wisps of the face she wore before her people when they finally came to her for answers. “You have returned,” she says, straightening her shoulders and drawing herself up to her full height in some distant imitation of the posture she had copied from the Lady Idril.
“I have,” he says, and there’s an echo of some distant sadness in his voice. “Just today, in fact. I heard some few stories, but-” He fumbles for words, more lost than she can ever remember him. “Are you well?”
“Of course,” she says by force of old habit. “The weather is beautiful and the road is clear.” She hesitates. “Are you?”
“The Halls of Waiting are made to heal the spirit,” he says, and before she can protest that that’s no answer he adds: “Everything is strange here, but yes, I am well.” A smile touches his lips, small but no less true, and it strikes a chord of memory in her like a great and echoing bell. “It is good to hear running water again,” he says, “and to feel the touch of the sun.”
“It’s not the same as it is across the Sea,” she says, memory thickening her voice.
“No,” he agrees, “but I welcome it nonetheless.”
“Where are you bound?” she asks then, because surely it should be easier to think about the future than the past, or the long and static present where she lingers, locked in waiting.
But Dior falters, then, and the shrug of his shoulders is too casual, she knows, because she does the same when people ask her questions she does not want to answer. “Nowhere in particular,” is all he says. “There is enough direction given to those who leave the Halls, but I’ve found myself with little purpose here.”
Yes, that she knows well enough. No people, no duties, no kin save, now, each other and Eärendil who’s too often away- or those who are kin only distantly, and who too often speak to them only out of fascination with the scions of Lúthien Tinúviel.
“Would you care to come home with me?” she asks then, and wishes she knew how to speak with him. She used to tell her father everything, when she was small, perched in his lap to watch the stars and listen to his stories, when she still believed her parents had all the answers in the world and darkness could not touch her, but she knows better, now, and sees against her will all the cracks in his mask that show someone just as breakable as her.
“Home?” he asks, curious and bright, and she smiles at last.
“They built a tower for me at the edge of the Sea,” she says. “It’s some ways away yet, but you are always welcome there.” And he agrees, and they continue north together, and the sun shines warm upon their faces.
Time is strange. The years pass oddly here. They have dinner.
Dior is around sixty- sort of, he supposes, if he doesn’t count the grey years, which he doesn’t- and he has dinner with his daughter who looks no older herself- who is, she tells him, approaching eighty. His daughter, who did not die, but who has come to the lands where none can come save through death or birth, whose shoulders are inked with silver wings as her mother’s had been with curling vines when they were wed.
He thinks he ought to have grown used to the idea by now, but the woman frowning over a scribbled recipe and an array of unlabeled spices is at once a stranger and the child he sent fleeing into the depths of Doriath.
“Can I help with anything?” he asks. Elwing hands him the paper with a defeated huff.
“Can you read this?”
Dior squints. Then turns the paper side to side. Then holds it up to the light. “Where did you come by a recipe with such… unique handwriting?”
“Fallion- a friend of mine who lives near Alqualondë,” she says, leaning her head on a fist. “He said he learned it from one of the old Sindar almost three centuries ago and thought it might remind me of home.”
Dior wonders if it does. He wonders what she considers home. He wonders if it would do the same for him.
“What is it?”
“He never said,” Elwing says with dry amusement. “I have deduced that it’s something involving fish. Probably.”
“Fish…” He never did learn to love it, not the strongest tasting ones that left the kitchens reeking for a full day afterwards, but who is he to complain about dinner with family. “Ah! If this is ‘fish’, then- I think I have the rest of this.”
“With just that?” she says, almost startled.
“Your friend’s writing isn’t that much worse than my mother’s. Would you like me to transcribe it for you?”
Elwing’s surprised laughter is the same as it was when she was a child. Her eyes shine the same. This is new, though, this sort of life, cooking together and dining together and cleaning when they’re done. It reminds him the most of when he was young, tucked away in a quiet corner of the world before reality came for them.
They say such things won’t happen here, in lands removed from the evils of the world, but they tell also the history of Aman and it’s already happened once before, and the armies of the West have gone and marched to war. It would be careless indeed to assume dark deeds won’t happen here again.
He hasn’t voiced such thoughts to Elwing- not when she must have learned such lessons even better than he, not when she stares out to sea so longingly, not when these visits are meant to bring them peace. Not when they still aren’t quite sure how to speak to each other.
Is he more her father, he wonders, when they have lived nearly the same span of years, when she was only three when he was killed. When she has grown into a woman and a queen all her own, with him nowhere to be found. All his memories of her are of a child, eager and forthright, but the Elwing that stands before him and hands him clean dishes has seen much more of life. It might be one thing if he had seen her grow, but cruel blades and fate had denied them that. He should be grateful for even this much, when his own fate has been so uncertain since the moment his mother chose hers. He is grateful. He feels it keenly, though, the lost years, the empty space between the girl and the lady.
Lady of the Havens. A lady left now with no charge and no purpose and no people to guide or be guided by. That, at least, he understands with painful clarity.
“Do you still remember how to fly?” she asks suddenly, standing at the open window. “I remember… you would change into a nightingale and sing with Grandmother, wouldn’t you?” She pauses. “And sometimes you would chase Mother as a falcon or the like and steal the pins from her hair. We weren’t supposed to repeat anything she said when you did that.”
A breath of laughter escapes him. “I’m surprised you remember so much. You were quite young.”
Something strange crosses Elwing’s face, harsh and fond and wistful all at once. “My memory has always been quite good.” Dior studies her, but she shakes herself before he can muster a reply. “Eärendil will be returning soon, and I said I would meet him today. I thought perhaps you might join me, if you wished.” Her voice tilts up as in question. She hasn’t turned from the window. “We never had the chance to fly together.”
She hasn’t turned from the window, and so can’t see his face. He isn’t sure what crosses it; he’s far too out of practice, this long away from court. “It would be wonderful,” he says, trying to will the heaviness from his voice, “but I fear… I fear my memory is not so sharp as yours.” She does turn, then, her eyes bright and piercing- bright like his mother’s, bright like his, bright with ancient power and the light of a burning gem.
“You… don’t remember how to change?” she asks tentatively.
“I-” It’s not so simple as forgetting. It’s not the sort of thing one just forgets. He hasn’t changed his shape once since leaving the Halls behind- hasn’t found a reason to. Hasn’t watched the birds of lands undying or felt the breeze in his hair and thought of flying like he once had.
“You need not wait on me,” he says quietly, and watches something in Elwing deflate with a pang. “You have promises to keep and the sky to see- don’t worry about this.”
She is not easily persuaded- not by him, at least, though the press of time has greater weight- but she embraces him and whispers a goodbye, and a promise to meet again next week, and takes to the skies. Dior watches her go, brilliant white against the red of dusk, until the sky swallows her whole.
They have seen each other almost weekly since Dior’s return, in the streets of Alqualondë or the quiet woods or at the tower.
Her father keeps a home of his own at the edge of the city, small and cozy and set apart. It was a common gift, he said, for those new-emerged from the Doomsman’s halls, and the more so for those who had no plan to join another’s household. She had offered, early, a place in the tower, but he had gracefully declined and she couldn’t help but feel relieved when he said he preferred, for now, a place alone.
“Are you sure of this?” Eärendil asks for the third time, worrying at the edge of the damp towel laid over the rising dough. “It feels as if he’s been avoiding me, or I him, since he returned. Is this-”
“Eärendil,” she says, taking his hand firmly in hers. “Calm yourself.”
“I am perfectly calm,” he insists, taking his hands back to hold both of hers between his. “I am simply wondering if this will go as smoothly as you believe.”
“What, precisely, do you think will go wrong?” she asks, amusement coloring her voice. Eärendil makes a small, disgruntled sound.
“Nothing, precisely,” he admits, “I just… I don’t wish to strain things between you and your father. Not when there are already so few people either of you might call family here.” Elwing frowns.
“And what of you?”
“...What about me?”
“Your close kin are just as sparse as mine- more so, even.”
Eärendil shrugs, dropping their hands and looking aside. “I spend more than half my time aboard Vingilot or preparing to return to her. You must spend all that time here alone. I couldn’t make that any more difficult for you.”
“Eärendil…” She sighs then, and draws him in to a firm embrace. “I would not see you so miserable any more than you would wish it on me. They will return to us one day. All of them.” His arms tighten around her and she presses a kiss to his forehead. “And,” she adds, lightening her voice, “I expect the two of you will get along with worrying ease.” He laughs into her shoulder.
“You think?”
“Oh, yes,” she says. “You are both most insistent on what should grow in the garden, and have terrible taste in jewelry.”
“Now that’s not fair,” he objects, pulling back. “Just because you have no appreciation for the significance of-”
“-of the number of rubies in a cluster doesn’t mean they’re not important,” she finishes with a most unconvincingly straight face. Eärendil rolls his eyes, but he laughs, and she can ask for little else.
They’re rolling balls of dough flat when the knocking starts and she leaves floury handprints on the door when she answers it. Her father takes her appearance in stride, mostly, and gracefully accepts his new duty of dicing vegetables.
“Elwing tells me you have taken an interest in gardening,” Dior says amiably, his knife knocking rhythmically against the cutting board. You wouldn’t know to look at him- at any of the three of them, these days- that cooking was an art they came into only recently, but one-time lords who now live alone have little choice but to learn.
“I have, yes,” Eärendil says, not taking his attention off the dough he is so studiously flattening. “Many of these vegetables came from ours, just outside.”
“I passed it on my way in,” Dior says. “The tomatoes were doing quite well.”
Stars, they’re both being so polite. Better than impolite, perhaps, but if she wanted everyone around her to be so stilted in their conversation, she could simply go back to the cities, where even still they’ve not quite grown used to her.
(“You were hardly nervous to meet my parents,” Eärendil had groused the night before, restless and uneasy in their chamber.
“I was seven when I met your parents,” Elwing had pointed out. Eärendil had only groaned and buried his head beneath the pillows.)
She shouldn’t fault them for it. Valar know she still has her share of awkward moments with her father, but she dreamt of home last night- her first home, on the isle in the Adurant, where her grandparents led her and her brothers on ‘hunts’ through the brush in search of berries and her parents danced at dawn- and aches for something half so joyful. She’s been chasing such dreams all her life, and if it can happen only rarely that she has family around her then she will make the most of it.
She leaves them to the chopping and the rolling to take the meat from the fire and shave long strips from it for their meal. She returns to the almost-charred smell of the fast-cooking flatbread and a most detailed discussion on whether or not mint really will keep small animals from the leafy greens- and if it’s worth the cost of planting mint in the ground.
“There are easier ways to repel the rabbits,” she comments, clearing space on the table for all the assembled dishes.
“Not everyone can just tell them to leave and have that be the end of it- or set the birds on them,” Eärendil says, gesturing widely with the latest flatbread hanging from the tongs in his hand. “Nor can we be here to guard the garden at all hours, and so- mint.”
“Alas,” Elwing says to her father, not quite under her breath, “birds and beasts I can reason with, but not so the clutches of mint, or my husband in the garden.”
“I can hear you,” Eärendil says without heat.
“I know, dear.”
“Hmph.”
“Dear?”
“What?”
“Your bread is burning.”
Eärendil turns back to the stove, unhurried and unconcerned. “They are done just enough,” he says, holding up one that bears more blackened spots than not. “Yours are in the basket on the table.”
Dior watches them with open amusement, but when Elwing holds his gaze too long she sees something heavier behind it.
Easy enough to hazard a guess as to why.
He has spoken relatively little of the Halls, save to mention those he met there. She knows her mother lingers, and she knows her brothers remain. She knows her sons were not among them, and dearly wishes to believe the rumors Eärendil brings home that it’s because they still walk in Beleriand. Her father had returned alone partly at her mother’s urging, by his account, and partly to calm the ceaseless pacing of his soul, and that’s a thing she can imagine far too well, the relentless need to find something to do with yourself even when all the world demands you rest.
Even Elwing hardly notes the change, gradual as it is, but by the time the night grows dark they are deep in stories of their childhoods and the honey-baked pastries Dior had brought. The second is far sweeter than the first but just as fleeting, and soon the silences stretch longer as they fall deep into contemplation of the stories of their lives.
“It was hardly all dark things,” Eärendil protests when Dior speaks mournfully of how young he and Elwing both were when fire came to their homes. “Before or after the attack.”
“Fault me not for wishing there were no dark things at all,” Dior says, smiling sadly. “The two of you have children yourself- surely you know the feeling.”
It’s late when Dior at last departs, taking no light but the stars to guide him but as certain as Eärendil at the helm that he would find his way. Elwing stands outside the door of the tower and watches until the night steals him away, and tries to believe that they will find this ever easier.
It’s late in the Age- the First, they’ll call it- and he watches Elwing sail away.
“They said only that we may not walk among elves or men again,” she says, binding her hair for war. “They said nothing about sailing- and even if they might judge me harshly, their commanders in the field will be less displeased.”
“I am not one to dissuade you from arguing with the Powers,” he says, and is, even in his worry, amused. She blinks, her hands pausing in their work, and he tucks an escaping pin back into place. “We argued long enough over your brothers’ fate.”
“You did?”
Dior sighs through his nose. “They should be given the chance to Choose for themselves,” he says softly, “and to know the full weight of what it is they are deciding. Even if they know no uncertainty, it’s a thing that should still be theirs to declare.” They would have been counted among elves without contest once he had Chosen himself had he not asked and then insisted when he came before the Judge.
“It’s not a thing another should decide for you,” she agrees, just as soft. “It’s hard enough to Choose for yourself.”
Silence falls, stifling and thick, as Elwing shrugs on thick robes woven for the high, cold reaches of the sky. She goes unarmed, but takes the brilliant Silmaril from its place near the door of the tower to join Eärendil below on the deck of Vingilot. Dior can hear her sing even from here, and it shines with blinding light that scatters off the timbers of the ship like they’re fields of gemstone dust, and they sail to battle armored in the glitter of a thousand diamonds.
He remains in the tower much of the time they are away, tending to their garden and watching the skies for their return.
It seems cruel, to him, to send them back to what remains of their home just to fight, and more so to be forbidden to return in any true way- but they are as the dead returned there, and to walk among the living again is a thing of these shores alone.
Elwing thought herself the one best suited to call the Silmaril’s song in battle- against winged dragons, it’s been said, fire-breathing and big enough to block the stars. She did not want Eärendil to go alone. Dior cannot fault her for that any more than he could Nimloth for drawing her blade beside him in Menegroth, but he would have his daughter see no more of fire and death, if he had any say at all.
The day Vingilot returns, the sky is overcast and the sunlight pale, her white timbers scarred by claws and scorched black in great swathes. Even the Silmaril is dark, dim and quiet when Elwing bears it ashore. She and Eärendil look little better, and they go at once to sleep with hardly a word to anyone.
Elwing is the first to wake, joining Dior pale and drawn beneath the tree that overlooks the sea. She sits beside him wearily, resting her head on his shoulder and closing her eyes.
“Did you sleep well?” he asks after a long quiet, gentle and hushed. Elwing only shrugs one shoulder, hunching deeper in the heavy cloak she’s wrapped around herself. Her feet are bare, toes poking out from beneath the cloak, and her hair blows about unbound and tangled from sleep.
“I saw Elrond and Elros,” she says at length. “I spoke with them a little. They-” Her words tremble, just a little, just enough for him to hear. “They’ve lived there longer than I ever did, and all of it in ruins. They seemed older than me.”
“Oh,” Dior says softly, and tries to gather her close, as he did when she was small and woke from unkind dreams. He hasn’t tried since he’s returned- hasn’t dared, hasn’t asked if she would want it, when she hasn’t once acted as a child seeking her father- but she lets him now, curling into his side and hiding her face in his shoulder. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Elwing.”
“It was like speaking to strangers,” she whispers into his clothes. “I shouldn’t have expected anything else. They must barely remember me. Why would I think they should know me? They tried, I think, for my sake, but we will never know each other.” She shudders and gently, Dior rubs her back.
“Is this what it was like for you to see me again?” she asks at long last. “Valar, I didn’t think it would be this hard.”
“Not the same, I think,” Dior says softly, “but yes. They are at once the same child you left behind and a stranger grown.” What a strange kind of grief, that of lost time, of things that can never be made up. He never would have wished this on his daughter, but perhaps she is doomed to follow after him in far too many ways.
He, at least, has been granted grace enough to have this second chance, to live with his kin again, to come to know her joys and sorrows both, but unless the Valar’s forbiddance is loosened or a second desperate voyage made, her sons will not set foot upon the western shores, and should they come to acquaint themselves with death, there is yet no guarantee they will walk from the Grey Halls. There had been none for him, nor for any of his children, nor for Eärendil. Elwing may well have looked her last upon Elrond and Elros amid the ruins of Beleriand.
Perhaps it’s crass of him, to hold his daughter so gladly while she mourns that she can’t do the same with her own sons, but he can’t bring himself to care. He settles himself against the tree and lets Elwing retreat again to sleep, gently detangling her hair as best he can while the twilight shadows lengthen.
They meet, now and again, wandering in the woods between the tower and Alqualondë. Smaller towns have begun to grow in lands that once stood empty of anything but roaming beasts as more and more emerge from the Halls. There are few yet who knew either Elwing or her father as their lords, but some have gravitated towards them all the same. None of them, she thinks, know that she walks alone in wooded glades, nor that her father walks beside her. She doesn’t think she cares if they do.
They meet most often in a clearing they’ve come to call their own, where the sun looks down between broad leaves that shade them near as well as the canopy of Doriath. There’s a blackberry thicket not a half mile distant and a cool stream nearer than that, and there none find them while they sit and talk and talk until the starlight sends them home.
She watches her father as he watches the birds, trilling back and forth with them with an ease that she can’t match even in their form. She watches him watch them fly away, lost beyond the roof of leaves and leaving him, wistful, behind.
“Like this,” she says gently, letting transformation take her slowly, feathers flowing from below her hair until she rests in the clearing in the shape of a gull, watching him expectantly.
“It is not a matter of the shape,” he says, the faintest of edges in his voice. “Nor, I think, forgetting the process.”
Elwing returns to her own form, settling beside him in the soft grass. “You always told me not to overthink the change,” she says after a moment’s thought. “To trust the part of you that wants to change.” Dior makes a nearly amused sound.
“You must remember my advice better than I do.”
“How did you learn to do it?”
“I never rightly did,” he says, staring towards the distant sky. “My mother changed like it was second nature; I only ever copied her.”
Elwing ponders her own transformations, the warmth in her chest that pulls towards the next shape in a way that’s much like falling, but like her father it’s a thing she barely learned, and certainly not a thing she ever thought to teach. Neither Elrond nor Elros had been so quick to feel it as she or her brothers had been- though she also changed before them far less often in the busy days of the Lady of the Havens.
She changes shape before her father again, and he tries again and again, but she has not the first idea what holds him back. She circles the clearing once more, this time in the shape of a nightingale as she recalls, distantly, her grandmother favored. She can feel the thing that changes building as he reaches up towards her, feathers poking from the waves of his long hair- but something catches, and the change-thing fizzles out, and his arm drops at last, defeated.
“It was close,” she says, landing beside him. “I could feel it.” Dior closes his eyes and rubs at his temples.
“Close,” he repeats lowly. “It used to be such an easy thing. What has changed?”
What hasn’t? Elwing thinks, but she only rests her head against her father’s shoulder as a cool breeze whispers through the grass.
News comes to them in the Second Age by way of the Lonely Isle and those in the outer lands with whom they trade on the sea, filtered through many mouths and months of travel. More pressing to Dior this day is that which comes from the doors to the Halls of Mandos and the rumors of who has emerged.
It is not the first time it’s been said that the sons of Fëanor have returned, but it may well be the first time it’s been true. He has not yet gone to see for himself who it is, exactly, who walks beneath the sun again. He distrusts what he might do if he finds it is one of their commanders who came against him in the hall of the King.
He has listened to the stories of the days before the sun and moon on these shores, but the more who return to Aman from ages in the outer lands the less the prevailing attitude looks down upon the carrying of arms. He trades tales to a historian from Tirion for the forging of a blade and brings it into the forest, to the clearing where he and Elwing often meet, and there teaches himself again the deadly dances he first learned beneath the watchful cover of the trees of his mother’s home.
The sword is a work of art as much as it is a weapon- a finer thing, perhaps, than nothing but stories merited, but he learned early to be gracious about gifts- and though it’s not quite the same as his own that was surely lost in the sack of Doriath, he learns it as he learns himself again and beats memory back into muscles that have half-forgotten the life they lived before. It’s meditative, and if it reassures him to have a weapon near at hand as he’s forced to see that foe will return as sure as friend, none yet have dared to challenge him on it.
“What are you doing, Father?”
Elwing creeps into the clearing, worrying the golden bracelet she often wears, eyes downcast.
“I was only practicing,” he says, sheathing the sword with a restrained flourish.
“Do you expect to need it here?” she asks, and the question is laced with thorns, wary and apprehensive and all too ready for the answer to be yes.
“I imagine it would be frowned upon to draw a blade for aught but performance,” he says by way of answer and she hums in thought.
“I don’t know by what means they think to keep the peace,” she says at length, settling on a patch of soft moss in the shade. “There are no great foes now to force cooperation.”
“That’s far from the only way to stall a fight,” he says, frowning. Her eyes follow the scuttling clouds above the spring-leafed branches.
“It’s the swiftest.” His brow bends only further at her clinical reply, compelled to argue for all his heart agrees with her.
“Those who return will not be so eager to die a second time,” he says, “and there is space enough for anyone to keep their distance from those they don’t wish to see. It will not come so quickly to bloodshed.” Her eyes slide down to him.
“And is that why you’ve found yourself a blade after all this time?”
Dior stiffens. Some part of him rebels, tries to cry that she should not be so cynical, even after all she’s seen- that this is the pragmatism won with age, that she should not know it yet. The dissonance rattles him more forcefully than it has since their first meetings here and he grips the hilt of his sword.
“I heard a Fëanorion returned,” he says at last. Elwing watches him.
“I heard one died.” She gives the bracelet on her wrist a violent twist, the golden mesh of it glittering in a stray lance of sunlight.
“I heard a rumor to that effect,” he says, drawing his blade again and returning to the first form of the shade-step dance. “But I thought they were all lost already?”
“One was unaccounted for, Eärendil told me,” she says, and an odd softness comes into her voice. “And another had a son.”
“And now he has died?” Dior prods, carefully neutral. He has heard, now that he thinks on it, of the jewel-smith. Elwing looks at him sharply.
“He was my friend,” she says.
“And your fathers killed each other.”
Her mouth twists, her hand still worrying at the bracelet. “He made this for me when Eärendil and I were wed.” A beat. “He helped me learn a little of the gem.”
“Did he?” He knows he does not keep the dryness from his tone.
“He only ever looked at me, unless I asked,” she says, snapping at last. “He cared far less than anyone else about it.”
“He didn’t care about the work of his grandfather’s hands- the work the rest of his kin gladly killed us for.” They obsessed over it, to the point he might have been moved to pity were it not for all the rest of it.
“You wore it yourself, for a time,” she says. “You know how it draws the eye. Even if it was all an act, he had far more restraint than anyone else who looked on it, and for that alone I would be grateful.” Dior inhales deeply and releases a long, slow breath.
“I am sorry,” he says, “for the loss of your friend. I never met Celebrimbor. If he was kind to you, I am glad.” Elwing draws a breath herself, and releases it in a manner most eerily similar to his.
“I have little love for his kin,” she admits, “but for him I have no ill will.”
He must wonder at the timing, though. Rumor said that it was Celebrimbor’s father who had emerged this time. If it’s true, he is curious if the jewel-smith came to the Halls before or after that departure.
Dior shakes himself from his musings, though, and turns to his daughter, flipping his fine sword and catching it by the flat of the blade. “Did anyone ever teach you these dances?” Elwing shakes her head, watching him curiously.
“Not so clearly,” she says, “but I remember… something.” And she takes the hilt and holds it the same way he does, and steps into the right form like she knew it, once, but her body lacks the memory. “The Silmaril remembers much,” she says at the tilt of his head. “Some memories are not quite my own, but I recall them all the same.”
Such an explanation raises only more questions in his mind, but he adjusts her stance as his teachers in the guarded wood once had for him and walks her through the blade-dance step by step to the music of birdsong in the trees.
Word comes to them specifically as the summer of Aman dips towards fall while she clears the garden of withered vines gnawed by beetles.
“Your presence was requested by three who are ready to return,” the messenger of the Halls says formally, handing her a thin paper that bears the same strange scent she has come to associate with those who have just come from the halls of the dead, all stone dust and spice. “It is a request only,” he says. “No matter who the returners may be, it is no command from them or from Lord Námo.”
“You don’t know who it is you are delivering such requests for?” she asks, mild but surprised, and the messenger shakes his head.
“It is a matter between those returning and those requested only,” he says. “I am only to inform you of the time and place they intend to depart the Halls. The rest is your decision.”
“You have quite the system to this now,” she observes.
“We have had quite some practice by now,” he says with a polite smile, and takes his leave.
The paper does indeed note a time and a place, and below that three names- three whose return she has awaited with great anticipation since the day she found her father clothed in flesh again. Far too late, she thinks to ask the messenger if there is anything those new-returning might need, or if gifts have become customary without her knowledge, but he is long gone, the grey of his robes lost to the yellowed grass and trunks of young trees that the squirrels plant ever nearer the tower every year.
“It’s been some time since I left,” her father shrugs when she asks him. “I emerged barefoot and robed in grey, with no one there to meet me.” He laughs, short and amused. “I surely wasn’t asked if I wanted to notify someone.”
They bring lunch, packed carefully into a large basket Dior had woven himself after a string of lessons in the harbor, and sit in a white stone courtyard to await the return of their family.
The court is wide and empty, though it must surely be able to hold at least a hundred with ease, and they are alone with the cool breeze and the massive, slate-grey doors decorated with the image of two great trees in sharp relief undulled by the passing of years. Slowly, slowly, the doors swing open, silent as a yawning grave, the interior nothing but shadow. Beside her, Dior stands.
It’s been so very long since she’s seen her mother, but she knows her at once.
Nimloth’s hair is blindingly silver in the white court beneath a pale sun, the same shade as the two young boys who rush past her to see the living world for the first time in two millennia. They find Elwing and Dior easily across the yard and run, barefoot and bright with laughter, to greet them.
“Father! Father!”
“You’ll never believe who we met-
“Did you know there are secret tunnels in the Halls?”
“They said there weren’t supposed to be, but we found them anyway.”
Dior kneels, laughing, and opens his arms, and they cling to him, chattering about things Elwing will never know. She steps aside, and her brothers do not notice, though Dior does, opening his mouth to interrupt Eluréd’s urgent debrief on all the secrets of the Halls of Mandos. Elwing waves him off and turns to her mother instead- finds Nimloth watching her with a hand over her mouth and eyes wide with realization.
“I knew-” Nimloth begins, her voice trembling. “I knew you would be grown, but I never thought…”
“It’s good to see you, Mother,” Elwing says, and finds her eyes are stinging and her cheeks hurt from the width of her smile. “Welcome back.” And Nimloth embraces her, hugging her close with all the strength of one who trained with the marchwardens and too many years apart.
“I am so happy you survived,” Nimloth whispers, one hand tight in the fabric of Elwing’s light cloak. Eluréd and Elurín gasp at something Dior says and Elwing looks at them over her mother’s shoulder, and tries not to dwell on what it means that they’re still children. “I know that what came after wasn’t easy either, but I’m glad you got to see it.”
“So am I,” Elwing whispers back, and thinks that it is true.
They both stagger as twin weights crash into their legs.
“Elwing??” Eluréd demands, staring up at her. “They said you were all grown up, but-!”
“How did you do it?” Elurín says from her other side. “I know you’re good at changing, but I didn’t think you could use it to grow like that.”
Something harsh and mourning rises in her throat, but she swallows it down. “You can’t. After you-” she casts about for something, some way to soften it, but there isn’t any, really, and Dior and Nimloth both look at her like they know it, too.
“After we died,” Elurín supplies helpfully. “It’s okay. We know where we were. We remember it.”
“Oh,” is all she can manage, choking down the grieving thing and thinking that whatever happened to her sons, at least they survived. Their childhood may not have been a kindness, but they made the most of it, in the end. She hopes she did as well herself.
“I still think you cheated somehow,” Eluréd says, squinting up at her suspiciously. “You’re too tall now.”
“I didn’t cheat,” she says around a watery laugh. “I just… kept growing. I lived by the Sea for many years before coming here.” Eluréd frowns.
“...we can’t carry you around anymore, can we? We could barely do that before, anyway, but…” Elwing’s breath catches, reminded unwillingly of her last sight of either of them, of Eluréd shoving her through the secret door before returning to the tunnels to find Elurín. He had tried to carry her there, but it had been faster just to run, hand in hand.
Elurín elbows Eluréd sharply. “We said none of the sad things today,” he hisses and Eluréd shakes his head.
“Sorry,” he mutters, then plasters on a smile. Elwing hadn’t thought they ever learned how to do that. “We haven’t seen the sky in ages,” he declares, pulling away and catching Elwing’s hand while Elurín takes her other. “We haven’t gotten to go flying since your begetting day celebration- come on!”
“You want-” Elwing starts, but they haul her forward together until she stumbles into a run as they sprint ahead of her, leaping into the air and shifting into swift-winged swallows, soaring up and around the courtyard until she follows, laughter flowing into birdsong as the wind catches her beneath her wings and throws her heavensward. “We’ll meet you in the forest,” she sings to her father, knowing he will understand, and pursues her brothers into the clouds.
Nimloth laughs as Elwing and the twins vanish into the autumn sky, watching Dior as if she expects him to follow.
“What?” he asks, grinning at the sharpness in her gaze, the focus of a hunter ready for pursuit.
“It has been far too long since I could run like this,” she says, and he laughs, and she goes running barefoot from the courtyard like the hunting cats of the deep woods, towards the trees beyond, and if she shoots him an odd look when he runs beside her rather than taking another shape, she does not pause to question it. The lunch he and Elwing packed remains, forgotten, in the stone yard.
“That’s enough,” Elwing laughs, half-falling into her own form in the clearing, hair stuck to her sweaty forehead and her arms aching with the echo of their exertion in flight. “Mother and Father won’t be as fast as us, and they’ll be most disappointed if we can’t have dinner together.”
Elurín makes a face. “You sound like mother. You never used to worry about missing dinner.”
“Unless Father promised you those candied fruits,” Eluréd cuts in. Elwing blows hair out of her face.
“I am a mother,” she says, half under her breath, but there’s no other noise here to hide the words and Eluréd gasps.
“You’re what?”
“I grew up!” she says defensively. “And then I married-”
“You what?!” Elurín’s voice climbs even higher than Eluréd’s.
Elwing frowns in consternation. “Is that… really so strange to hear?”
“You’re our little sister,” Eluréd protests. “We should have- we don’t even know them!” He rubs at his face, tucking himself against the fallen log that’s been a bench for three decades now.
“I’m sorry,” Elwing says quietly. “I’m sorry.” It seems woefully inadequate against the magnitude of loss contained in so many years away, against the realization that you have remained on an island, unmoving, while time went on but did not touch you and you’ve been left behind.
“Does that make us… uncles?” Elurín asks, more subdued than she can ever remember seeing him, even in borrowed memory. “Will we get to meet them?”
Elwing releases a heavy breath and sits down beside Eluréd. “Not Elros,” she says quietly. “He… he is like Grandmother. He has gone where we can’t follow. As for Elrond… I can’t say what he will do with his life, or if he will ever make the journey to these shores.”
“We’re supposed to Choose some day,” Eluréd says, leaning against her. “They said we could grow old enough here to understand it, but… I don’t think I know what they mean.” Elwing draws a long breath.
“You have time,” she says. “You need not worry about it yet.”
“Tell us about the sea?” Elurín asks after a long moment, settling on her other side- and she does.
They come at last to the clearing- their clearing, Dior and Elwing’s, exhausted and breathless, hearts thundering in their chests in time, and there they find their children, Elwing stretched out against a log, returned to her own shape, head cradled by a pillow of moss, her brothers curled up against her side, all three of them fast asleep as if they never had a care in this life or the last.
The summer is young, and Elwing and Eärendil gather their family to the tower.
Eluréd and Elurín have grown, though slowly, following their mother in patience as much as appearance, far slower than Dior had grown, and far slower than Elwing must have. They race up and down the tower stairs, chasing each other and their sister when they goad her into joining them on the wing.
Those who have returned and accepted the invitation make all the more noticeable those who did not- those who cannot, and who will not until the world is remade. Dior and Nimloth have come, of course, but they are frequent visitors here. Nimloth’s father has come, though her mother has not yet returned. Even Elu Thingol has come, who carries himself with all the gravity Dior recalls from his earliest visits to the Thousand Caves when his parents yet lived- his parents who will not return, his mother who Chose to pass beyond and leave all chance at reunion like this behind. It’s been an Age since Dior could last say he felt bitterness over such a decision, but he still does not understand.
His grandfather’s habitual regality is rather ruined when the twins swoop a little too low, knocking loose the wire circlet that binds his hair and leaving stray feathers in their wake- and all over the table.
Dior wonders when last such a gathering was graced with so much laughter.
This is a first meeting for many- most of Eärendil’s kin and Elwing’s never had the chance on the far side of the sea, if indeed they crossed it at all.
“You are quiet today,” Dior says, joining Eärendil in the shade of the tower.
“Only thinking,” Eärendil says, watching the long table wistfully. “I’m happy that so much of your family can be here, but…”
“Still no word?” Dior asks softly. Eärendil shakes his head.
“Even the Ulmondili have found no sign. There are more obvious reasons they may not have made it here, but…” he trails off with a heavy sigh and Dior can only lay a comforting hand on his shoulder.
“You will see them again one day,” he says gently, and Eärendil glances at him, appraising.
“You believe so?”
“I do.” I must. Else he could not bear to think his mother chose such deep separation purposefully.
They stand together in the tower’s shadow while two more guests approach, hand in hand. Eärendil straightens, shading his eyes. “That’s my grandfather,” he says, voice shivering with disbelief. “Turgon. And with him, that…” he hesitates, squinting. “My grandmother?”
“Go,” Dior laughs when a minute passes and Eärendil still has not moved. “This is your event, after all.” Eärendil offers a strained smile, but he goes, and soon bright voices high with joy fill the air.
They pass the afternoon most pleasantly, sharp memories left behind (only once or twice enforced by a pointed look from their hosts) in favor of long and meandering discussions of food and hobby-crafts picked up since leaving the Halls and the latest gossip from the cities. The greatest stir comes when a shadow passes from the trees to the table and then there sits Melian herself, as if she were there all along, coaxed from the gardens for an evening but still quiet in a way Dior had not known her to be at all when he was young.
Evening comes, and still they are all gathered here, and Eärendil must still depart, Vingilot docked below the tower and iridescent in the twilight. The sail comes down and catches an otherworldly wind, lifting her into the air with a gentle touch. Elwing stands at the edge of the cliffs and sings, one long and carrying note that follows after the shining ship, and in its setting in the prow the Silmaril flares with silver brilliance.
Eluréd and Elurín run past Dior, feathers already trailing in their wake. They’ve changed their forms already as they pass Elwing, whose song cuts off with startled laughter, and in a heartbeat she has followed after them. Dior is ready to follow, too, floaty on company and drink and the promise of the open sky.
It seems so easy, watching her, like it should be as simple as wishing to make it so. He closes his eyes and envisions the shape he wishes to take- a nightingale like his mother, the first he ever became- and pushes at it, pushes in all the same ways he did in his earliest memories, pushes at where he knows one shape should give way to another, pushes until he opens his eyes again and finds… nothing. Elwing and her brothers are already well into the air, circling the tower as Vingilot rises, but he remains unchanged, static and stuck in place.
A hand takes his, cool and unfamiliar like this, but he looks into his grandmother’s eyes and finds there a spark that has long been missing. “Like this,” she whispers, and it’s like a hand guiding him along the threads of Power that grant them all this gift, pushing past the part of him that’s been ruthless control and deep-buried fear and stone anchored in a stream. Time moves on, but he rejoined it long ago, and it’s long past time he let all of him go on.
At long last, the wind lifts him from below, and he flies with Melian to greet his children and see the Star of High Hope on his way.
