Long Time Passing by Grundy

Chapter 1

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Eärwen has walked this way a thousand times before.

But this time is different.

Not because she walks it in the sun – after five hundred forty three years of the Sun, seeing Alqualondë by its light has lost its novelty, even if it had been a shock the first time to find the soothing twilight of her youth banished by the brightness of Laurelin’s last flower.

The waters sparkle in the sunshine, every wave a fresh play of light and water. Though she misses the twilight, there is still an echo of it at nightfall. By day the sea is no less beautiful, its music no less compelling.

Not because the harbor has been rebuilt, the damage wrought by Fëanaro and his sons and their followers erased by new docks untarnished by blood, and the swan-ships that had been a presence since her earliest days replaced by craft built since the rising of the sun.

These ships are sleeker – faster, more maneuverable, and above all defensible. They will not be taken by force as the swans were, nor will they burn on unfamiliar shores. Their numbers will increase with the years, for when the dead return, they will surely wish to build ships with their own hands, to reclaim their place among their people as once they had been part of the making of the stolen swans.

Not because she treads the path in worry, even in fear – she had made such walks before, the first time to find blood and death awaiting her, the second time to find life and shame as her husband led the repentant Noldor back to beg forgiveness and make what amends they could.

Fear and worry have become familiar to her over the years. These new sun years may be shorter, but they feel so much longer when they are spent in fear – and grief. She may have seen the blood and death in the Darkness, but that somehow loomed less terrible in her mind than the blood and death she had not been able to see – her sons’ deaths, two in flames and one in darkness; her grandson’s death, betrayed and beaten; his daughter’s death at the hands of the hated orcs.  

No, this time it is because she will have answers. That her father did not wish to sail to the aid of the Exiles she might be able to swallow, if they had any confidence that more than a tenth of those who had marched from Tirion yet lived.

But there was no such assurance. It is fellow Lindar young Elwing has spoken of, and the children of Exiles like her husband Eärendil. None of them have ever known Tirion as anything more than nostalgia tinged stories. (Eärendil recognized the city of his forefathers more for its resemblance to Turukano’s lost Gondolin than anything else, which was equal parts comfort and distress to Anairë.)

She will have answers because they left kin on the eastern shores, and she cannot believe her father has forgotten them, even if they know his brothers have fallen. Young Elwing is his great-niece. Nerwen’s Celeborn is his grandnephew.

She will have answers, because her daughter is not yet dead, and she will not give up on her without a fight.

She will have answers because she is a grandparent too now, and her grandson and great-grandson still live. She will not abandon them to darkness and death while there is breath in her body, and it does not matter to her if all the hordes of Morgoth stand between them.

If the Ciriáran will not sail, whether for the kin he left behind or for the kin begotten by his grandchildren, he has a daughter who knows her way around a ship nearly as well as he does. And he rules a people who chafe to aid their sundered kin as much as she does.

She will have answers – and ‘no’ will not be acceptable.