The Last Exile by Grundy

Chapter 1

Terribly short, but despite starting at least five different things for this challenge, this is the only one I feel might decently be considered finished.

Celeborn was not sure that he had ever properly understood how strong his wife was until she had departed.

He had underestimated, over their long years together, just how heavy her burden was. He had foolishly assumed that their love was enough to buoy her, making up for all her losses. She was no Exile, not when she had him, and then eventually their daughter. They were her family. She was not alone.

He understood how hard it was for her to have lost her brothers. After all, he too had lost family.

It was only when he returned to a now fading Lothlorien that he learned that it was one thing to know your family dead, another to know them living and yet beyond your reach.

His heart was an ocean away from his body, and he felt empty without it.

And, much like his beloved, he had chosen this sundering of his own free will.

He knew many had wondered that he remained when she sailed. But he could not have allowed their grandchildren to stay on the mortal shores alone. What if they should need help? If nothing else, they would need kin to anchor them when Arwen laid down her life. He would not have them face that loss alone.

Yet now that he had chosen, he worried for the family he could not see or help. What if Galadriel’s kin had not forgiven her choice at the end of the First Age? What if the Powers of the West, nothing more than legends and hearsay to him, had not relented after all as she believed they had? What if Celebrian, despite the presence of her mother and husband, missed the lands where she had been born? Missed her children? Regretted leaving the daughter she would never see again?

This was exile. Being sundered from nearly all that was dear to him, with only the faintest thread to hold onto. Increasingly alone in a land that, though grown dear to him over the long years, was not his own. Going through the motions of being ok, of being a steward to the trees, and a leader to what remained of the Galadhrim, as they too dwindled, fading or departing West as they would.

His incredible Galadriel had done this for two Ages of the world and not crumbled under the weight of it. He could surely bear it for the few years that remained to Arwen.

It was not the first time he had understood his beloved only in retrospect.

It had been only with Celebrian’s childhood, as she began to learn the tongues of her mother’s kin, both the Teleri and the Noldor, that he had begun to understand Galadriel’s sense of loss at the Ban, and how very furious she had been to have something so vital taken from her.

“Ada, the languages reflect the way they thought!” she told him happily one day. “The Noldor were curious about how everything works. They have words for more varieties of question than we ever thought necessary! But the Teleri loved the ocean, so they speak in terms of water and song!”

His daughter’s excitement at learning how the kin she had never met thought and spoke illuminated for him how great a blow Thingol had levelled at the Exiles in taking their very language from them. Their culture had faded as much from that loss as from the deaths.

Here on the Hither Shores, at least. In Aman, the Ban had been not on their languages, but on their return. Galadriel was the last of the Exiles to go home – or so Celeborn had thought as he bid her farewell at the Havens.

It was only now, in the solitude and silence, that he realized it was not so.

He has become an exile, too.

He will be the last to go home, for home is wherever his family is.