What Once Was by Grundy

A Scrap of the Past

I beg indulgence on the formatting, which I intend to fix once I’m back from holiday - I’m currently writing and posting from a mobile device. 

“Ada?”

Elrond looked up to find Arwen in the doorway of his study, paper in hand.

“Yes, darling?”

She came into the room, a mix of curiosity and mild frustration on her face. He wondered what had prompted it. Arwen had progressed to a point in her studies where she now undertook projects with Erestor that were far more open-ended than the essays assigned in her younger years.

“Do you recognize this?” Arwen asked, laying the paper carefully on his desk. “Erestor agrees with me that the vocabulary suggests it is early First Age Noldorin, but aside from that, we cannot place it.”

“Where did you find it?” Elrond asked, examining the sheet.

It was a sketch of a trebuchet, with some accompanying notes. While the main sketch was well executed and the notes technical, something about the smaller sketches around them suggested either someone young or someone not yet very experienced in warfare.

Given Arwen and Erestor’s conclusion about the language, that could really be just about any Noldo in the early years in Beleriand.

“It was in the papers Erestor says are the last of what came with you to Balar – your original collection, he called it.”

Ah.

That and a vague familiarity to the handwriting led Elrond to suspect he knew who was ultimately responsible, but he would let Erestor and Arwen reach their own conclusions.

“In that case, darling, it is reasonable to assume this came from one of the Feanorian followers. It’s unlikely they would have had anyone else’s papers.”

Arwen was clearly disappointed.

“But you don’t know who?” she pressed. “Erestor thought you might recognize the hand.”

Sneaky of Erestor to send Arwen, rather than just asking himself, Elrond thought. Though it was possible Erestor had his own suspicions and was just hoping for confirmation – and letting Arwen ask removed any possibility that Elrond was picking up Erestor’s thought on the matter and being influenced by that.

“I’m afraid not, Arwen,” he replied gently. “The Feanorions had already lost a great many of their people by the time I came to Amon Ereb, to both death and desertion, so the odds that I met the author there are quite low.”

“Oh,” Arwen sighed, “Drat! We were so hoping,..”

“You should write up your joint conclusions about it and archive it properly all the same,” Elrond suggested. “Just because we cannot identify the author now does not mean we will never be able to do so.”

Arwen brightened at the reminder that there would come a day when they would join their kin across the Sea, and have access to so much more information and sources than they did in the three hundredth year of the Third Age in Eriador.

She dropped a happy kiss on his head and danced out with the paper, no doubt returning to the library workroom she and Erestor have appropriated for their project.

Elrond himself was rather eager for the day they could ask the suspected source of that paper directly what he had been thinking. He didn’t know, it was true, but if he had to lay odds, he’d say he had just glimpsed one of Celebrimbor’s early efforts.