Sirion by Grundy

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The Harsh Light Of Day

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The light was stabbing her eyes. The brightness hurt.

Everything buzzed. She couldn’t make sense of the noise in her ears. She screwed her eyes tight shut against both the harshness of the light as well as the noise and the confusion. She would have covered her ears if her arms didn’t feel like they were so terribly heavy.

It took a moment before she remembered anything.

She was Elwing of the Sindar, and she had sacrificed herself to keep her sons safe. Was she being reborn? The Noldor had claimed that such a thing happened, but the Exiles had only ever seen the dying part of the process, not the returning, so they were as ignorant as their moriquendi kin about what to expect.

Some of the noise finally resolved itself into words, and the words began to make sense again. It would have helped, she thought, had they been speaking Sindarin.

“She’s waking at last. Someone fetch Earendil!”

Her husband was here? Had he done it? Found the West at last? Why had he sent no message to tell them?

She opened her eyes, cautiously this time. After the painful brightness, she had expected sun and sky. Instead, all she saw was wood. She was inside a building?

“Elwing!”

Her husband’s voice was ragged, and worried, and exhausted. She turned her head toward the sound, and found that his face matched.

She was certain he would have clutched her close and kissed her, but someone else held him back.

“Gently, man, she is only just conscious!”

“Release me!” Eärendil snapped, sounding furious – for once the proud prince of the Noldor rather than the kind man she’d married.

He shook himself free roughly, for once not caring if he inflicted harm, but the hands that touched her face were beyond gentle.

Beloved, he whispered in her mind.

It has been years since she heard his voice, much less felt his touch. Her fëa latched onto the contact as one drowning would clutch at a raft.

“Elwing,” he whispered, his face close to hers, hugging her as though she were made of glass that might shatter at a careless touch.

She is not the only one relieved to be whole again after so long.

She could not say how long they stayed like that, unspeakably happy just to be in each other’s presence.
It was only when she finally felt able to sit up – Eärendil’s hands supporting her as she did, as anxious as though she were one of the boys about to take their first steps – that she spoke again.

“Where are we, my love?” she asked, fretting as she did at how gravelly and strained her voice sounded.

“Aboard Vingilótë,” he replied, sounding as though he might cry.

She has never seen her beloved cry. Not when he had recounted for her the fall of Gondolin or the death of his adored kinsman and tutor Glorfindel. Not when he told her of the road from the Hidden Valley to the Sea, every bit as long and harsh as that the survivors of Menegroth had faced. Not even when he had stood forlornly on the quay watching the light of his parents’ ship shrink to nothing on the horizon as Idril tried the last desperate thing she could think of to save her husband, leaving their son with the knowledge that he might never see his father again if the Ban of the Valar held.

Her arms may still feel heavy and wrong, but they wrap around him of their own accord.

“You are not well, my love,” she whispered.

He laughed, though the tears finally fell.

“You do not remember, do you?” he asked thickly.

Since she cannot tell what it is she does not remember, she concluded her husband was likely correct.

“The last thing I recall is water,” she said quietly.

It was no pleasant memory.

Pain. Cold. Knowing that she might not see her boys again for many years. The miserable thought that she had neglected to say the most important words of all when she bade them farewell that morning. What sort of mother did not tell her children how very much she loved them at such a moment? She could not say whether they heard her or not when she called out beneath the waves.

“How did you come to be in the water, my lady?”

It was not her husband who asked, but Galdor. It must have been he who had restrained Eärendil – she can think of no other who would dare. But the Lord of House of the Tree has known Idril’s son since the day he was born, and would not hesitate to stand in the place of an elder kinsman at need.

Elwing shuddered just thinking of it. She was not sure now where she had found the courage to be so calm as she did it, except that it had been necessary.

“I jumped,” she whispered.

She was not sure if Galdor had asked anything more. With her husband’s arms around her, with him so near, all she could take in was his reaction, because he knew the Havens well enough to have guessed at her full meaning. He held her tighter, as if he could erase whatever wrong had occurred by the strength of his love.

“Why?” Eärendil asked raggedly. “What happened, Elwing?”

“It was the Kinslayers,” she replied quietly. “They came for the Silmaril.”

“What of our sons?” her husband asked, his voice quiet, his fëa gone cold with fear.

“I sent them with Nellas and Lalwen,” she assured him. “They were to hide. I stayed. Maedhros and Maglor would not chase children when all they could see was the Silmaril, and I made sure they would see nothing else. I finally did it – I wore the Nauglamir for the world to see.”

“Name them not!” he snapped. “They deserve no names – their mother should have called them all Umbarto!”

She could feel his fury at his distant kin, those misbegotten wretches who should have been protectors of his wife and sons, but had become their hunters instead.

“No matter how I name them, their doom will find them all the same,” she replied, certain as she spoke the words that they were true. “In any case, they had neither my sons nor my Silmaril, for all they shed my people’s blood again.”

She could not keep the bitterness from her voice, for she knew that too many of her loyal followers had not done as she bid and fled when the Fëanorion assault overwhelmed the town. She did not ask what became of the jewel. She knew it was no longer around her neck, but found it mattered not, so long as it had not fall to the Fëanorions. She was free of its shadow at last.

“No,” Eärendil agreed, an odd tone in his voice, “they certainly do not have your Silmaril. Let us hope the same is true of our sons.”

She blinked in surprise, for he spoke as one who knew it as fact.

“We were on the point of turning back to the Havens, for we had no more success this voyage than the last,” he said slowly. “My heart was heavy, for it had come to me that if we did not find the way West now, any help would come too late. I stood on the deck late at night, considering whether it was worse folly to press on than to turn back, when I saw what seemed at first to be a white cloud exceeding swift beneath the moon. Then I thought it was a shooting star, for it resembled more a pale flame on wings of storm. And then I realized at last that it was a great white bird, with a shining light on its breast – and I recognized the Silmaril.”

Elwing said nothing, but she did not entirely like the conclusion that her mind leapt to even as he spoke.

“The bird dropped onto the deck at my feet,” he continued, “and I saw that it was nigh unto death. Well could I understand that, for we are weeks from land, and such a flight would have been exhausting even had the bird not flown with such great urgency of speed.”

“I called for help, and we carried the poor thing to my cabin, expecting it at any time to expire despite what aid we were able to render. I sat by its side, feeling I should not be elsewhere until I knew its fate. At some point I must have dozed off, for when I woke, I found the bird was gone – but you were laid now in my bed, the Silmaril shining at your throat.”

“At which point,” Galdor broke in sardonically, “it is a wonder his yelling did not wake you.”

“I did not yell,” Eärendil grumbled. “I was merely surprised to find my wife where I had expected a dead seabird!”

Elwing could not help but smile.

“It was then,” Galdor explained, “that he took the Nauglamir from your neck.”

“You seemed to breathe easier without it,” Eärendil explained earnestly. “And it looked to me as if a great weight had been removed, rather than a simple jewel.”

He reached into his sea chest and drew it out.

“Here,” he said, making to pass it to her. “I know how important it is to you.”

She snorted. If asked to choose, she would have taken her sons rather than the Silmaril, but she rather doubted they would have been spared had she leapt with a twin under each arm.

“It is far more important to the Valar than to me,” she said, choking down an unholy urge to laugh.

She knew if she laughed, all would be lost.

The Noldor have always thought the Sindar impious. Her husband’s mainly Noldorin crew will not welcome her thoughts on Ulmo – for it can only have been the Lord of the Waters doing – saving her for the sake of a bloodsoaked bauble.

If she can but keep her composure, they may finally hold the whip hand.

Elwing closed his hands firmly around the necklace, and looked up into his bewildered eyes.

“The Silmaril is little to me, I care only that the sons of its maker do not hold it, for they deserve it not after their deeds,” she told him. “But will the Lords of the West dare refuse you admittance to their sacred lands when you bear this?”

Eärendil’s face, beloved and so well known to her that she can read it like a book, was torn.

“But the boys-” he protested faintly.

“You told me when first you undertook these voyages that our best hope for their safety lay in convincing the Lords of the West to intervene, to use their might to defeat their wayward kinsman,” she replied steadily. “I may once have been uncertain, but I believe it now. The situation has only grown more perilous, not less, while you have been at sea. If we turn back, it is true we may see our sons grow to adulthood – but what will become of them then?”

Her sons look much as she remembered her brothers, dark hair, and grey eyes – the eyes of Luthien and Thingol. Their father is very much their opposite, with his golden locks and eyes that reflect the sea. Yet it struck her now as she watched Eärendil that in manner at least, Elrond was very much his father’s son. They both chewed at their lip in the same way when worried. Lalwen had long since given up remonstrating with Eärendil, but she hoped she might yet break Elrond of the habit.

“But if we leave them behind…” Eärendil whispered, and it grieved her to hear the pain in his voice at the idea. In his fëa, she could feel that it had been one thing for him to leave them with her – for not only did he love her dearly, he trusted her above all others with that which was most precious to him – but he cannot bring himself to leave them to an unknown fate, perhaps in the hands of strangers.

“We already have left them,” she said softly. “We may not have intended it so, but it is done. Now we must see this through- for their sakes if for no other! Lalwen and Nellas will let them come to no harm. Nor will your kinsman Gil-galad. And I am sure Celeborn and Galadriel will raise them well.”

In truth, she hurt no less than he did at the idea of leaving her babies to the care of any other. Not while she still lived. But she was as certain that the Valar will not turn away a ship bearing Fëanor’s jewel as she was that the sun rose in the east, or that the Enemy could not be defeated by the power of the Elves alone.

She has already proven that there is nothing, not even her own life, that she valued above her sons’ safety. If leaving them with what remained of their kin on the shores of Ennor for several years was what it took to ensure that safety, that was what she would do.

She could only hope that they would someday understand.