Sirion by Grundy

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One Acquainted With The Night

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She does not know how long she has been waiting here. It could have been any span between a heartbeat and forever. Time had no meaning for her, not when it was only a way to measure how long she has been sundered from those she loves.

Namo’s halls are barred to her, for they were intended for the Children, and entrance for others is restricted to those who serve the Doomsman. That place is not for her – the wayward one who alone of all her kindred had given her heart and bound her fëa to one of the Children.

The maiar and even the Valar know what love is, and have bonds that the children would understand as marriage and kinship, though they beget no offspring, for they are born of their Father’s thought alone. She is the only one of them who knows what it is to give form and spirit to a child of one’s own – a Child.

So it is that she is the only one of them to know the pain of loss as the Children do.

For her kind, once bound to one another, can no more conceive of not knowing that their mate exists, of holding a piece of their spirit as their own always, their souls resonating with one another in the Song, than the Children can conceive of existing with such an assurance. Even were their mate to be cast out beyond Arda and prevented from return, an ainu would still Be, and some part of them would always know their mate, no matter the distance between them. They cannot be kept from each other any more than their thoughts and actions can be kept from their Father.

Those that had sung the world into being do not know what it is to feel a part of themselves suddenly vanish, to feel their spirit wither and to seek for that which is missing beyond their touch or reach; they have never known what it is for that resonance to suddenly fall silent, stopped as though it had fallen out of the Song. They do not understand the crushing, overpowering burden of Not or Never.

They cannot understand grief as she does, the sensation of suddenly being so much less and alone that even now there are times that she cannot breathe for it and needs to focus all that she is on simply continuing to Be. For the first time, she can realize, however dimly, how Miriel Þerindë felt before her fëa sought Mandos.

She forces herself to carry on, in her darkest, most painful moments, for her beloved Elu. For the day will come when he will walk from the Halls again, alive. He will not be as he was before – before Luthien’s choice, before the steel entered his heart and emptied his eyes, before his spirit fled his broken hroä, leaving her alone and bereft, powerless for all her power. But he will return to the living world someday, and he will need her there when he does lest this emptiness that threatens to consume her become his burden as well.

And she forces herself to do it as a lesson, that she may speak of this to her kind. For if they had truly understood loss as the Children experienced it, perhaps all might have been different.

How could they possibly have known how torn Finwë must have felt when they made him choose, much less the soul-deep sensation of wrongness, the tangible disquiet of missing something vital, that Fëanaro had carried within his fiery spirit from his youngest days? Having never known such a state of being, how could they have hoped to diagnose the malaise before Melkor nursed it to its terrible crisis?

It was no doubt some time before she noticed that someone was calling her name. They may even have called her by her original name, the one her kindred had known her by before she had bound herself to Elu. But she had not heard, mired as she was in her grief.

“Melian.”

That name she still responded to.

“Melian, my dear one.”

But when she looked up, it was not her Elu, nor even Namo, who stood before her and called.

There was a ripple through Yavanna’s being that the Children might have called a sigh.

“Dearest, I do not understand why you do this,” she said softly. “Surely it cannot help to keep watch here, knowing he is just beyond your reach. It has not diminished your grief that I have seen, only made it worse.”

“I will wait as long as I have to,” Melian replied firmly, certain she had expressed this before sometime in the eternity between her arrival here after Elu’s death and whenever now was.

“Namo has told you it will not return him to life any faster,” Yavanna said patiently. “His spirit cannot reach you here, and must heal in its own time. Vana has begged you often to go rather to those gardens you once walked in days gone by, that Estë might do what she can for you.”

They may have had this conversation before, or perhaps they have been having it the entire time. It did not much matter. Though it was also a lesson of a sort for the ainur – for the Valar are not accustomed to having to repeat themselves, nor to such baffling stubbornness or incomprehensible singlemindedness in one of their kindred.

“Has she? If so, then I have surely answered that for some hurts there can be no healing. My husband is dead, and even though he may return, our daughter never will.”

“Yes,” Yavanna agreed. “You have said this. And we have sought to understand, my dear. Yet in observing the Children, it is rare to see one bereaved forsake all company of kin and kind. Surely if they do not behave thus, it is not right for you to do so.”

“I will do as seems best to me,” Melian answered, wishing only that her kinswoman would leave her to her grief.

“Will you not even go to your granddaughter?” Yavanna asked sadly. “She has no closer kin here to greet her, nor will she find any in this land who understand life on the far shores as she has known it. Olwë’s people do what they can for her, but you of all of us know best how hard it is for one of the Children to be so alone.”

Granddaughter.

“What granddaughter?”

They are the first words she has spoken unrelated to her vigil, indeed, the first that show any continued awareness of the rest of Eä beyond the Halls that hold her husband’s fëa and the Walls that separate her from her daughter forever.

“The daughter of your daughter’s son,” Yavanna explained, in a voice more suited to charming flowers from the barren earth than convincing a grieving maia to abandon her long wait.

Melian needed a long moment to call even her daughter’s son to her mind, for fair though he had been to the eyes of the Children, she had known from the moment she beheld him that he too would follow his parents – a mortal, born of mortals, who would walk in Arda for a brief season only.

She had already known her daughter’s time ran short, and had not been able to give of her heart freely to her grandson. She had seen him but seldom, for Luthien and her husband had retreated to Tol Galen for the days allotted to them.

But if his daughter had been permitted Valinor…

It had been some time since she moved, or wanted to, but she found to her own surprise that she did remember how. Her body was no longer a solid thing of flesh and bone as it had been on the Hither Shores, and not anchored to the mortal plane, she can come and go as she likes. It is just that until now, she had not wished even to try.

The journey from outside the Halls to the harbor of the Lindar is but the span of a thought, and once there she needs no guide to tell her where to find her daughter’s grandchild.

The little one sat in the hall of Elu’s brother Olwë, smaller than Melian would have believed any scion of Thingol could possibly be, fragile as a bird. But this little bird behaved as one caught in a cage, seeking for that beyond its reach. For every time her eyes strayed to the sea, looking back to the mortal lands, following that faintest of threads Melian could see binding her yet to those shores, the next moment she would look inland, toward Tirion and Valimar, following the connection – stronger by far – to her own mate.

Elwing’s mate might be beyond her own sight, but not that of an ainu. He would have been easy enough to see even without the light of the Silmaril illuminating him. A stranger was he, and yet one of the Noldor returning home. Though not only Noldo – Melian, having given birth to a Child, could read that at a glance.

And now Melian understood why it was that Yavanna so urgently wished her to stir herself. For both young Elwing and her husband were half-elven – half mortal, half eldar, poised between two worlds – and Manwë was inclined to judge them as those who have entered lands barred to them, rather than as elves who have come where they have every right to be. Neither of them had even been born when the Doom was pronounced, and if Elu’s people had been banned for lingering rather than abandon their king…

Melian needed to be able to speak for them if no other would, both her granddaughter and her husband’s people. If her kin think she has been difficult up until now, just try to declare her great-granddaughter a mortal and her life forfeit, or one of the Eglath subject to the Doom of the Noldor.

And they had something in common, Melian saw, now that she Looked, herself and this fragile granddaughter she was about to meet for the first time- a long wait stretched before them both, laced with grief that might break a stronger Child than even one of Thingol’s line. No one understood the pain a child’s choice could bring as Melian did, and she foresaw that soon enough, Elwing Dioriel would know that pain as well.

If she could wrap her arms around her daughter’s granddaughter and protect her from that, she would. But knowing what the Song portends does not allow her to avoid it. Sometimes, it does not even let her cushion the blow.

She did not even realize the change that sudden foresight had wrought until she noticed the Lindar were bowing to her – bowing, as none had since she forsook Menegroth. She had, out of habit, assumed the form the Iathrim were used to seeing her in, and nightingales followed her as ever they had.

“My lady, you honor us with your presence,” Olwë murmured. “Though you are not familiar to our eyes, I bid you welcome. Is there some reason you have come among us?”

He recognized her not, but how could he? They have never met before now, for Olwë had departed long before she and her beloved emerged from the forest. Even once her husband had died, she had never stood in his presence, never until now ventured forth into the lands of Aman where the Children walked. That her husband had a brother here had not pierced the haze of her loss.

“Surely she has come to see your newly arrived kinswoman, husband,” Queen Súyelírë murmured softly, recognizing Melian no more than her husband had. “Word of her tale has spread quickly among our people and beyond. Were the Noldor and Vanyar not occupied with the festival of the stars at Valimar, your halls would be filled to bursting with the curious.”

“I have come to see my granddaughter,” Melian announced, her voice ringing through the respectful silence in the hall. “And to be a comfort to her if I may.”

Elwing’s eyes, when they turned to her, held all the awe and hope of the rising sun. And in the warmth of that regard, Melian felt some frozen region of her own spirit begin to thaw, though she had never noticed the frost.