Chapter Text
They had sailed into the sunset, into the green forever beyond the World. It seemed like they were sailing towards the horizon, into endless blue, with no shore in sight. The Straight Way was a gift, and a promise, and never quite certain. It offered itself, unexpectedly; so Círdan’s sailors had said. It was never quite in the same place twice, that border of mist that was also a threshold, a veil between the sacred and the world.
Elrond wasn’t worried that they wouldn’t find Valinor. His heart had begun to turn West, long ago. He only followed. The mist would part for him, and for Galadriel, and Mithrandir, and the last of his household; for the Ringbearers, tethered to the world as they were. He was going somewhere he had never travelled, but where he had known that he would, one day, go; ever since the day he had stood exhausted in a sword-torn tent before Eönwë and been asked to choose.
-
They found the Straight Way on the third day. The gulls flying overhead had disappeared by the end of the first day, reluctant to stray too far from dry land. Elrond had watched the last bird wheel back to Middle-earth with a feeling of loss he couldn’t name, its thin cry in the air a sound that took him back all the way to childhood.
Gandalf had looked at him sideways, under his bushy eyebrows.
“It is goodbye,” he said. “But there is a welcome ahead of you.”
-
The white ship entered the white arms of the mists, and silence fell. Everyone on board stopped talking, singing, moving about; breathing. The falling rain stopped. Even the sound of the water, the slapping of the waves against the hull, seemed to soften. There were no birds.
There was no longer any sky, no longer any horizon: only white. It had fallen like cloud around them, but Elrond could still see the other passengers on the boat as clearly as at noon.
“Oh,” Bilbo said from his blankets. “It seems to me that we’ve sailed into a star.”
“Not quite,” said Galadriel. She was standing at the prow, a slim figure tense with expectation. “Not yet.”
Then the mists lifted and the clouds parted, and they sailed into night. It was suddenly twilight, as though in Valinor time had altered irremediably, fallen out of rhythm with the round world. The sky above them wasn’t blue any longer, but velvety dark; the stars were out. The sea was black and silver.
Ahead of them, on the horizon, was a distant corona of brightness, a column of unbearably piercing light that lit up the distance like a torch and ran like fire across the edge of the sky.
Something loomed almost immediately ahead of them, a massy blackness that came up out of the dark like it had shouldered itself in front of them.
An island, quite lightless.
“I don’t understand,” Galadriel whispered. There was both wonder and horror in it.
“Nor I,” said Gandalf.
“Is something wrong?” A small quiet voice.
“Not quite, Frodo,” Gandalf said. “Not wrong, precisely.”
“What is that place?”
“It is the island of Tol Eressëa. The other half of Balar, preserved here above the waves.”
“It’s empty,” Elrond said. “I had heard –”
“So had I.”
The light was growing stronger the further they sailed. The twilight was brightening, their white sails beginning to glow.
“Should we try to land?” asked one of the Mithlond Elves who had sailed with them. “I don’t see any piers.”
“No,” said Gandalf. “Failing Avallónë, we will sail on for Tirion. It is ahead of us, on the left. Sail towards the light.”
-
The light was directly ahead of them now, once they tacked past the silent, empty island. They were sailing not into a star but into the Sun, it seemed to Elrond. The brilliance on the horizon was difficult to look at directly: it was radiant beyond radiance, it was brighter than the heart of a flame, it shone through and behind his eyelids when he closed them. Their white sails turned egg-yolk yellow. Gandalf’s beard and robes were staining saffron.
Then they were closer yet, and they were no longer observing the light as it streamed over the black mountains and through the gap between them; they were inside it.
Erestor gasped, very quietly.
The light fell on them like a blanket. It was warmth, it was goodness, it was virtue, it was life itself; it was mirúvor that had transcended its state. It was pure laughter. It was a thousand times stronger than sunshine. Elrond felt like a plant which had been dying of thirst, and been watered at last; like he could feel his skin opening, breathing, straining to take as much as it could.
“How can this be?” asked Galadriel quietly. “They could never craft them again. They said so.”
The distant shapes were clearer now. White and gold, silver and yellow. Two masses of brilliance side by side, the yellow currently the brighter and the white dimmer.
“They could not,” said Gandalf.
“It is the Trees?” asked Lindir cautiously. “Somehow?”
“It should not be,” Galadriel said. “It cannot be.”
“And yet,” said Gandalf, “it is! We have business to inquire into, it seems! Our work is not yet done.”
“Is it likely to be dangerous?” Frodo asked.
“I think not. I cannot say what it is, or why it is, or how it is; but I have no sense of anything dark here, and if there was evil intent at work, I believe I could tell. Does it feel wrong to you, Lord Elrond? You are very quiet.”
“It feels strange,” said Elrond, since he had no words to say that he had never seen such light before, and yet he had known it once, because his mother had worn light like this around her throat in his earliest days — very, very long ago.
-
On their distant right, there was a smudge of lesser brightness. It was difficult to make out, but it was a city, with its own lamplit towers, a pale shining place in the darker margin of the bay, screened from the full power of the Treelight by the mountains.
“Alqualondë,” said Galadriel. She sounded like she was weeping, but she kept her face turned away to the shore.
Whenever Elrond had heard the word, it had never really been in the sense of the Telerin city itself; the name had come to stand instead for massacre, for murder, for the first blood-red jewel in a beaded chain of horror. Alqualondë, Maglor would say to Maedhros, or Maedhros to him; Menegroth, Sirion. They never meant the cities themselves, but what they had done in them, using the names against each other like weapons, as ways to flay each other.
Alqualondë, said Galadriel, and he heard home throbbing in her voice: what it had been to her mixed up with what had happened there, and longing, long centuries of it, suddenly naked and desperate.
“Shall we alter our course?”
“No,” said his mother-in-law. She stood a little straighter. “Mithrandir is right. Whatever’s happened, the answer will be in Tirion, not among the Teleri.” Then, wearily, “That’s where the trouble always is.”
-
They came ashore as near the gap in the Pelóri as they could manage. There was a harbour, but no boats, and it was rudimentary, nothing like Lindon had been. This was not somewhere many boats came very often, Elrond could tell; and yet that made no sense, even if relations between Tirion and Alqualondë had never recovered. There was Tol Eressëa not far away in the bay; there had been two long Ages of Elves sailing home from Middle-earth; Tirion must have been where some of them wished to land at once, where they wanted their feet to first fall once more on this side of the Sea.
“Steady, Lord Elrond,” said Gandalf, as some of Círdan’s people prepared to dock and Elrond leapt to his feet. He took his arm less to balance him, Elrond suspected, but to brace him. “You have faced many disappointments in your long years. You should prepare, I think, to suffer yet one more.”
“My wife.”
It wasn’t a question.
“I don’t believe you will find her here,” Gandalf said. “Not because she has faded, or chosen to lie down in Lorien! Do not fear that. I am certain that the Lady Celebrían is well. But I do not think she is here.”
Nor his parents, Elrond supposed. Nor his lord. Sailing had always meant loss to him, and sorrow, and those things indeed he had endured in departing: it had also meant Celebrían, long longed-for reunion, and Gil-galad, dearly loved. And his parents, near strangers to him because of the vagaries of fate and chance, choice, and the binding laws of the Valar. The first two he had looked towards eagerly, and the last he had wished for but somehow feared. And now, Gandalf was telling him, he should expect none of them, not yet.
-
His parents had sailed through the mist like he had, the first since the Exile to pierce its mystery and to find their way to the white shores. They had docked nearer to Alqualondë. His mother had stayed there, and his father had walked up the long beaches to the gap in the mountains. Eönwë had told Elrond and his brother that, at the end of the War. Their father had walked this road too, towards this white city, and his feet and the hem of his robes had glittered with diamond-dust. He had walked through the streets of Tirion, climbing higher and higher as the city rose on its great green hill, and found them empty, as though Morgoth had flown ahead of him.
And Eönwë had met him at the top, robed in radiance, and greeted him –
“Aiya Eärendil elenion ancalima,” said Frodo. He had been quiet since they sailed, and quieter still since they landed. Bilbo had not been. Bilbo had grumbled about the change of plans, and wondered out loud if he would be buried under a sand-dune for the temerity of setting foot on Aman proper, and, when Gandalf had given him his bond that it would not be so, grumbled more about the walk. He’d waved off an offer from one of the Rivendell Elves to carry him — ‘A gentlehobbit has his dignity, Master Teidon!’ — and then announced that he might, perhaps, condescend to be carried on someone’s back, if it meant someone would do the same for Frodo, who looked peaky and needed looking after.
Gandalf’s eyes had twinkled, and Elrond had found his heart lifting despite itself. Everything was strange and unexpected, but Hobbits, it seemed, were immutable. He hadn’t heard Bilbo sound so much himself, nor look so clear-eyed, since shortly after he’d arrived at Imladris after giving up the Ring.
Frodo had been thinking just the same as he. Hail Eärendil, the looked for that cometh at unawares, the longed for that cometh beyond hope…
They were coming upon a Tirion unaware of their impending arrival. It was a point in favour of Gandalf’s presentiment that Elrond would not find his wife here, nor his lord, nor his parents. He could not disagree with it. Otherwise it was impossible that he had somehow sailed past an Avallónë which was black and silent, at which his wife hadn’t been waiting for him with her heart in her throat.
-
He more than half-expected Tirion to be ominously empty, too: as empty as it had been when the father he knew so little of had walked this very path alone, half-mortal, greatly daring, clutching only a thin rag of hope.
It wasn’t.
They had seen no one travelling from Eldamar through the Calacirya, though there were imprints of feet and hooves and carts in the dust they trod, and Elrond had wondered —
And then they had cleared the last hill and Tirion-upon-Túna, the fabled city of the Deep-elves in Elvenesse, had lain clear before and above them. Túna was not, itself, a hill. It was a mountain, a gentle one, a sleeping green giant, and on its head and shoulders and all about itself it bore a crown and cloak of white stone, tall towers and glassy expanses. It was gilded with Tree-light and with gold and bronze; it was girt with trees, green cypresses that seemed to go hand-in-hand with the towers and the glitter. It could be accounted a hill only in comparison to distant Taniquetil in the distance, sere and white and unimaginably high.
Galadriel was weeping again, and this time not hiding it. Her hair, worn simply down her back, seemed to have taken on an extra quality in the Tree-light, awakened somehow in it.
“Tirion looks like this in my dreams. I have seen it like this in my mirror. I never thought to see it as it was again; it was changed forever even before I left. The Trees were dead. The peace was broken. Everything was black and ruined. How can this be?”
“It seems a very cunning trick,” said Erestor, a line between his brows.
“I do not think so,” said Gandalf.
“You should go to the Valar at once, Gandalf,” said Bilbo from the sailor’s back, peremptory. “They dwell on the real Mountain? Up there? Well, that’s where you should be. Don’t give me that look! I’m not proposing that you climb the Mountain; Frodo’s told me a little about your trouble with the Redhorn, and I don’t wonder at you disliking the prospect! I like mountains myself, but no one seems to have packed my walking-stick or my old Dwarf-hood for this journey — no offense to your household, Lord Elrond. Can’t you summon up an eagle, or grow wings and fly yourself?”
Lindir looked like he rather expected Manwë to blow Bilbo and his sailor-steed off the hill for his presumption.
“Such feats you expect of an old man, Bilbo Baggins!” Gandalf said sadly, shaking his head.
“By which you mean, I take it, that you would rather sort things out yourself, Mithrandir?” Elrond asked. He wasn’t quite as tolerant as he might otherwise have been, thinking of his wife, waiting somewhere with her eyes on the horizon. “Is it wise to tarry?”
“You wrong me, Lord Elrond! I have no intention of untangling this myself. I think the knot likely to be quite beyond my power. What I wish to do, and what I mean to do, is to discover precisely how matters lie; it seems to me that we have the luxury of satisfying our curiosity before we need call on greater powers to remedy the problem. There is no darkness in this, I feel, and if time itself is undone, no need to hurry. And I must confess that I have long harboured a great many curiosities about Tirion in the time of the Trees that it would please me to lay to rest at last.”
“Did we not promise Frodo rest?”
“Frodo’s well enough,” put in Bilbo. Indeed Frodo was looking in better health than he had when he had arrived in Mithlond. Like Bilbo, he seemed suddenly less weary, the pinched lines in his white face smoothed out, his eyes brighter. Was it simply an illusion of the Tree-light, or something which the light itself was doing, mending mortal hurts that Elrond himself had been unable to alter? “Besides, you promised me one last adventure.”
“And an adventure you will have,” Gandalf told him. “However, I will not enjoin it upon our whole host. Those who would rather not are quite welcome to make camp here.”
There was something rather terrible about those two old friends coming together again in order to wreak havoc, as though their last joint venture —in which Dale had burned, and a fire-drake from the First Age fallen, and five armies and four peoples joined in battle — had not been quite enough.
Elrond looked at his mother-in-law. There were still tears on her cheeks, but her mouth had curved.
-
Tirion was full of people: of Elves, singing, dancing, working, walking. Great bells rang out, and smaller ones, heavy solemn peals crossing with light and silvery ones. The streets were full of people, each of them bent upon their own ends, and each of them, so far as Elrond could see, beautiful. They shone. Their clothes, their jewels, their faces, their eyes; they were a riot of colour, a loud clashing frieze of antique figures no longer frozen in story or song, tapestry or painting, but hustling, bustling, singing, frantic as an anthill.
Tirion in the time of the Trees, Gandalf had said, like they had in fact sailed into the past instead of taking the Straight Path east of the Moon and west of the Sun. They had gone slantwise through time as well as space, back before Darkness.
“It’s as busy as a dwarf-mine,” Elrond said in wonder.
“You have never been down a dwarf-mine,” said his mother-in-law.
“No; but now I know why you have!”
“Can they see us?” wondered one of the Lothlórien Elves. “If we reach out, will we touch them, or will our hands pass through them?”
“You mean, I think,” said Gandalf, “are they real, or merely a living memory? Are we real, or as mere wraiths walking through a past we cannot alter? Good questions, both; but as for your first one, I think you will find it answered, if you look to your left — and to your right. They seem to have noticed us now.”
They were being stared at. Or rather, Gandalf, in his aged body and with his long white beard, was being stared at; and the Hobbits, on second and third glance, were drawing attention for their not quite childlike proportions and adult faces. The strange thing was how little fear there was in the looking. The Deep-elves from the time before the Flight were curious, but not fearful of strangers.
“—Ainu,” Elrond heard one exclaim, “the strangest fánas sometimes —!”
It was only then that he realised why he’d been on edge since they entered the city. The Tirion-Noldor were speaking Quenya, all of them: cut-glass and precise, harder-edged than Sindarin, luxuriously polysyllabic. He hadn’t been surrounded by Quenya speakers since his youth.
Galadriel closed her eyes, like she was bathing in the sound of it. Then she opened them. "We must go to the King’s House.”
“You shall lead us,” said Gandalf.
“I cannot tell you what we will find there,” she warned them, but her whole being altered subtly, as though she had fixed on a firm point in the distance, somewhere on the hill above them, through the coiling white streets dappled with cypress-shadows and thronged with people. “But let us seek the house of my grandfather.”
-
“Do you fear seeing him?” Elrond asked as they walked. They had never spoken much of Valinor together; they had spoken of Celebrían and her possible life across the Sea, but not of Galadriel’s life before the Flight, before the Doom. There were questions which weren’t fair to ask, and answers which were unlikely to be offered.
He had never spoken at length to her of his childhood, and even Gil-galad in Lindon had only ventured a few awkward stabs into those conversational waters before giving up the effort when Elrond would not be drawn.
“Not he,” she said. “I fear meeting myself. And I fear not meeting myself; I fear that my father has yet to be born; and I fear that he has, but that he has yet no reason to know me. I wonder whether my mother is still a girl in Alqualondë, there over the water, and I regret not stopping to find out. I fear seeing my cousins again, the living and the dead: the ones surely unmurdered still in Swanhaven, and their murderers. I fear that we have come too early, and I fear that we have come too late.”
“Mithrandir does not seem worried. I think he believes that all can be made right later, without loss of time, and that we are merely seeing something we should not have had the chance to see; but that this is a gift.”
“A gift!” she said. “An opportunity, rather. If he is not hoping to see the unimaginable mind and hand of Fëanor at work at last, I will be greatly mistaken.”
“You wrong me, Lady Galadriel,” Gandalf called sorrowfully up to them. “Do you think I would treat such a momentous event as a mere sight-seeing opportunity? Do you think I mean to go picnicking in the past?”
“It sounds like a fine idea to me,” Bilbo said. Elrond wasn’t imagining it; he did look better. Stouter. “A picnic basket would be just the thing right now. Bread-and-butter, and some potted meat, and a few apples; and I wouldn’t say no to a slice of seed-cake or some nice damson jam.”
“Damson jam!” said Frodo, and laughed, sweetly and unexpectedly.
-
There was more noise the higher they climbed. He had been wrong to call Tirion an anthill; it was a hornet’s nest, the sound cacophonous, the energy quite wrong. It didn’t match the broad streets, or the dappling cypress-shadows, or even the busy productivity of the lower quarters.
“— fighting,” someone said, their Quenya exaggeratedly languid to his ear. “—stormed in, clearly meaning to make trouble –”
“This is the Great Square,” said Galadriel. They had come to the crown of Túna, and above them, tall and fair, was a great white tower with fluted sides and a gilded roof. It seemed impossibly slender for its height and its lack of buttresses, as though gravity had not been consulted in its making. Across from it – “The house of the King,” she added.
It was where everyone’s attention was focused. On the great front steps, someone appeared: a faraway figure in blue, his jaw clenched and his fists curled. He made it only two steps away from the great doors before someone else caught him up, a shorter, more dynamic figure. He was shouting. The one in blue shouted back. Then the one who had hastened after him put his hand to his sword hilt —
“Oh, I have not come so far, nor fought so long, only to witness this stupidity again,” said Elrond’s mother-in-law. Nenya blazed on her hand with silver fire, and she was as a white flame suddenly kindled in the busy and colourful crowd, cold and furious.
The shouting stopped. The Deep-elves stopped, stared, and then made a path for her as she stepped forward.
The figures on the steps outside the house of the King stilled, like they belonged to the history-painting or history-play Elrond could not help feeling that he was watching; not real.
“We do not require the intervention of the Ainur in our family affairs,” said the one with the sword harshly, though his hand had slipped away from its hilt.
“Yet there is no surer way to invite it than to do as you meant to,” said Galadriel. “-- Uncle Fëanáro. Uncle Nolofinwë.”