Sirion by Grundy

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This Is The Way The World Ends

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Elrond was woken by an increasingly insistent repetition of his name.

“Elrond?”

Poke.

“Elrond.”

Poke.

He tried to delay answering as long as possible, because he was fairly sure he knew what was coming, and he had no good answer.

“Elrond!”

He reluctantly opened his eyes to find he was facing the cave wall and no more comfortable than when he’d fallen asleep in the first place, largely out of sheer boredom. The back of the cave was already dark, and even at the entrance, the shadows were lengthening.

“I know you’re ignoring me, El. But it’s getting dark. And I’m hungry.”

His twin had always been the impatient one. His impulsiveness often led to trouble - and (inexplicably in Elrond’s mind) to those who did not know them well concluding that Elros must be the younger of the pair. It was vital that Elrond keep him from doing anything rash just now.

“Elves can go much longer than this without food before suffering ill-effects,” he replied after a moment’s thought. He hoped the uncertainty in his mind wasn’t apparent to his brother.

“That’s grown elves,” Elros pointed out testily. “We’re elflings. And we might not even be proper elves anyway.”

Elrond didn’t bother asking where his brother had gotten that notion. In the last year or so, as their mother’s time was given more and more to ‘matters of state’ and the worry on her face had kept pace with the hours she spent away from them, the pair of them had gotten very good at slipping about unnoticed. They’ve heard quite a few things not intended for their ears.

The adults’ worry that they might not be ‘proper elves’ is a topic they’ve heard quite a few variations on. Both their parents are only part-elven. Earendil is half-elven- adan father, elven mother. Elwing is more than half-elven, but with strains of both edain and maia. No one is quite sure what that makes their children.

Opinions vary. Some like to point out the reassuring ways they are clearly like elves – occasionally more elf-like than either of their parents, even. Others fret about the ways they aren’t, like the way they grow too fast. No one has quite decided whether their apparently unelvish talent for mischief is mannish or an inheritance from Melian. If Luthien was ever less than perfect as an elfling, none of the Sindar care to remember it now.

All the concern puzzled Elrond whenever he thought about it. Surely an adan grandfather and an adan great-grandfather couldn’t outweigh their greater number of elven ancestors. If they did, by the same logic, shouldn’t Melian outweigh them all, making them maiar instead of elves? It didn’t make sense.

Either way, Elrond often comforted himself with his mother’s assurance that not everything they overheard was necessarily accurate. He wondered if he should repeat it for his brother’s benefit now, but decided to address the more immediate problem.

“We have to wait,” Elrond said firmly, putting into his words all his trust and conviction that the grownups in their lives will be back, even if it’s later than expected. No one abandoned elflings, after all.

Nellas and Lalwen had both told them to stay in the cave. It was important.

They’d been still in their beds, just rising to get ready for breakfast when Lalwen came rushing in, peremptorily signaling the young elleth who normally helped them dress that she was dismissed. Lalwen had a large rucksack in her hands, the sort the twins had seen grown elves going on journeys carry. Flinging the doors of the clothes press wide open with a carelessness neither twin had ever before seen, she began throwing their things into the bag.

Nellas had entered the room not a step behind. She too carried a pack, and to their shock, she was armed. No one in Sirion carried weapons openly in the queen’s house.

“Dress at once, and mind you pick warm things,” Nellas told them as she stripped the bedding from first one bed, then the other, and crammed it into her pack.

Too alarmed to question this extraordinary behavior, Elrond pulled the outfits they usually wore for playing on the beach from the clothes press before Lalwen could add them to her bag. Nana had had those made specially so that they could still build their cities in the sand even with winter coming on.

“Boots, boys, not the shoes you wear for inside,” Lalwen called.

He could not ever remember dressing faster in his life – and to his surprise, by the time he finished, Elros was dressed as well, even getting his boots laced properly without help. He had never managed that before.

Lalwen and Nellas had finished cramming their packs to the point that they could hold no more, with Nellas dumping two books from Elrond’s beside table into hers almost as an afterthought.

At Lalwen’s sharp look, Nellas shrugged.

“They will need something to occupy them,” she said brusquely. Grabbing Elrond’s hand, she added, “come!”

Lalwen took Elros’ hand – his half-hearted complaint that he could walk on his own was hushed instantly by her expression.

Their mother met them in the hall, looking frightened. The fright did not leave her face when she saw them with Nellas and Lalwen, but she did look somewhat relieved.

“My big boys,” she said, sounding as though she might cry as she hugged first Elrond, then Elros. “You must go with Nellas and Aunt Lalwen now. Behave yourselves and do exactly as they tell you!”

“My queen,” Nellas began, but naneth had cut her off.

“No. You know why I cannot. The time for argument has passed. Get them safely away. If I can join you later, I will.”

Naneth kissed them each twice and hugged them fiercely.

Then Nellas and Lalwen had hurried them away. They rushed down a little-used outer corridor that the twins sometimes played in on rainy days, until Nellas reached the dead end. To their surprise, a small door opened beneath one window, small enough that Lalwen and Nellas had to crawl to go through.

The astonished twins had been helped out that little door by Nellas, and down a ladder-like set of hand and footholds that they could not have managed on their own. It was not a long way down before they found themselves standing on a ledge cut into the cliff, one that could not be seen from any window. Lalwen followed them down, closing the little door from the outside.

“Come,” she said again.

The stairs down the cliff had no railing, and were just wide enough that an elfling could walk side by side with a grown elleth or ellon. Lalwen and Nellas took the outside, and set a pace so quick that Elrond and Elros both stumbled more than once, always to be caught at once by firm but urgent hands.

Neither twin made a sound as they were rushed down the secret stairs, and then what felt like miles of beach to the caves they were normally forbidden to enter – not only were the caves much further away by the way they normally reached the shore, but Elwing always worried that Elros would injure himself out of sight and not be found.

“Inside,” Lalwen instructed.

A glance at her face was all Elrond needed to understand that naneth’s normal rules did not apply today and forgo any protest he might have liked to make. Elros, of course, needed no further encouragement to explore the previously out of bounds area.

Nellas followed them inside, but stayed long enough only to drop her pack and nod at Lalwen before disappearing. Elrond made to follow her, to see what she would do next on this very odd morning, but was restrained gently but firmly by his aunt.

“Now listen you two,” Lalwen said, her voice tense in a way that unsettled Elrond – and evidently Elros as well, judging by the way his suddenly still brother’s hand crept into his. “You are to stay in this cave no matter what. Keep quiet and don’t go out where you can be seen. Nellas is outside and will look out for you. Don’t go out unless your mother comes for you herself or one of us tells you it’s all right.”

Elrond blinked.

“What if it’s someone other than you or Nellas or nana?” Elros asked uncertainly. “What if it’s Tirniel or Glinwen?”

“No!” Lalwen replied sharply. “Naneth, Nellas, or me.”

“Not even Uncle Celeborn or Aunt Galadriel?” Elrond said, alarmed at the prospect of being in the position of having to disobey one of his kin on at the order of another. Uncle Celeborn probably wouldn’t mind too much, but both twins had a healthy respect for his wife and Elrond had no wish to have her cross with him. Not only could she be a bit frightening, he didn’t have enough aunts to go upsetting them willy-nilly.

To his surprise, Lalwen frowned as if this might be a valid concern. She paused for a moment before replying. Elrond wished he was old enough or at least wise enough to decipher what the series of expressions that flitted across her face as she thought meant.

“I do not think your uncle will return in time,” Lalwen said at last. “But yes, if one of them come to get you, that will be fine. But no one else, do you understand? Stay quiet, stay together, and above all, stay in the cave.”

“Where are you going, auntie?” Elros asked nervously.

Elrond judged his twin to be close to tears. Everything about this morning was wrong.

“Back to gather a few more things,” she replied, with another of those looks he did not undertand. “It may be quite a while before we can go home again.”

It had been very quiet in the cave after Lalwen left.

That had been hours ago. After their initial unease wore off, it had been a fun game for a while, exploring the cave and pretending they were creating a new hidden kingdom. Theirs would surpass Nargothrond, perhaps even rival Menegroth. It would be the grandest hall the elves of Ennor had ever seen.

Eventually, they had gotten bored, and Elros had taken to building what he could with the stones he found on the floor of the cave and gathered into a large pile in the middle while Elrond read.

It didn’t take him long to read both his books. Not because they were short- in fact, the one was a rather weighty tome that he had picked from nana’s library solely because he liked the picture on the cover- but because he didn’t know his letters very well yet. Lalwen often tutted that the education of young elves in Sirion was not what it should be, which had for a time given Elrond the impression that he was somehow disappointing her by not being able to read well or write much more than his name yet.

That had lasted until Lalwen and Nellas had a truly spectacular row on the subject, during which Elrond’s presence had been quite forgotten as they traded verbal blows and vented grievances he would not begin to understand until years later. But by listening, he had learned that the elflings of Sirion were not as well taught as they should be because the Sindar refused to have their children learning Noldor words from Noldor books – and while he did not see why that should matter, it seemed most of the books in Sirion were Noldorin.

That included the two Nellas had packed for him. He had tried very hard to sound out the words, not wanting to waste this rare concession on her part, but it was not easy, and made no easier by the lack of adult help.

He wasn’t sure at what point he had fallen asleep. But it seemed he had been sleeping for some time, for it had been bright outside when last he looked. He did not feel any better for having slept. He could not remember what he had dreamed beyond an uneasy impression of freezing wetness and having lost something important. He didn’t feel well, and if he hadn’t felt a need to be brave for his brother’s sake, he would have admitted to wanting nana.

What was worse, no matter how he turned it over in his mind, Elrond inevitably returned to the conclusion that Elros had a point. Lalwen had been gone all day, and they hadn’t seen anything of Nellas, either. He hadn’t felt the reassuring brush of his naneth’s mind against his in some time. And it was getting dark. While Elrond knew it got dark sooner now it was nearly winter than it had in the summer, he still felt like they had been here much longer than they should have been left on their own.

But no one abandoned elflings…

“I’m going to look outside,” Elros announced.

Elrond could hear the fear under the bravado, and that stoked his own. More than that, he wasn’t sure what he would do if something happened to his brother. Elros was too impulsive, prone to react first and think later. He needed to stay in the cave.

“No,” he retorted. “You’re always getting told off for not thinking. If Aunt Lalwen or Nellas see you, you’ll be in big trouble.”

He paused, reviewing the events of this unsettling day.

“Huge trouble,” he amended. “I haven’t been in trouble for a while, it should be me that goes to look.”

“Fine,” Elros huffed, rolling his eyes. “You. But go look. Something must be wrong. It’s not like Aunt Lalwen to have not brought anything to eat.”

“She said she was going back to get more things,” Elrond pointed out. “Probably she realized she forgot.”

“She’s the one always telling me haste makes waste,” Elros grumbled. “She should have remembered something that important. Nana brings snacks even when we’re just going to play by the sea for a few hours.”

Elrond stopped short when he reached the mouth of the cave. Because of the grownups’ not so secret worry that he and Elros might not be proper elves, he had heard that the sight of Men was not as sharp as that of elves. But he doubted it needed elvish sight to see the town of Sirion burning, lighting the sky with a glow that scared him more than everything else that day put together.

“Can you see Aunt Lal?” his twin asked urgently from within.

“No,” he said quietly, not sure how to explain what it was he was seeing, or if he even should. Elros was already frightened enough without being told that their home was being destroyed. It wasn’t on fire yet, set apart from the rest of the town as it was, but it was surely only a matter of time.

“What about Nellas?”

As Elrond’s eyes grew accustomed to the rapidly deepening darkness away from the fearsome glow of the flames consuming the only home he had ever known, he realized he could see Nellas. She was far up the beach, nearly all the way to where he judged the stairs they had come down must be.

Elrond had never seen death before, but he was not a baby. He did not need to be told that someone lying so still with arrows sticking out of them was no longer alive.

He swallowed hard, and somehow made himself answer.

“She won’t be coming,” he said quietly, retreating back into the cave.

The tears slipping down his face felt like they were on fire, too.

Elros started toward the mouth of the cave in alarm at the sight and feel of his twin, but Elrond grabbed his arm.

“They told us to stay in the cave,” he snapped. “We stay in the cave!”

He turned away before Elros could see him crying, hoping he’d done enough to keep his twin in here, where it was safe. If it was safe. He could only hope that Aunt Galadriel or Uncle Celeborn knew about this place. He suddenly had no great confidence that Aunt Lalwen would be coming back for them.

“El,” Elros said, sounding suddenly very small and afraid. “What about Nana?”

I don’t think she’s coming, either.

He couldn’t say it out loud.