Tattered and Split by StarSpray

One

I go down to the edge of the sea.
How everything shines in the morning light!
The cusp of the whelk,
the broken cupboard of the clam,
the opened, blue mussels,
moon snails, pale pink and barnacle scarred—
and nothing at all whole or shut, but tattered, split,
dropped by the gulls onto the gray rocks and all the moisture gone.
- "Breakage" by Mary Oliver

- -

The sea is huge, and grey, and loud, and Elwing hates it. She hates it and she fears it, and so once she is old enough to slip away from her nurses and her guardians, she goes down to the beach.

They say that Lúthien was never afraid, and that Thingol was fearless, and that Dior was bold as Beren his father and that Nimloth had a hunter's heart, and that Emeldir led her people out of Dorthonion through fire and smoke and danger and she never faltered, and Barahir saved the life of Felagund. None of them would fear the sea, Elwing thinks. And so she steels spine and clenches her fists as she stands just beyond the reach of the foam as it washes up over the stones and sand and broken shells. Her feet are bare, and the stones are cold beneath her feet.

There are always strange things littering the beaches. Broken shells, whole shells—sometimes with things still inside, with spindly legs like spiders, or squishy lumps of muscle that pulse and pull back when she lifts them up. Elwing is as happy as they are to drop them back into the surf and hurry away. Other bits of shell she keeps, like the perfect scallop with mother-of-pearl coating one side that shines like a tiny moonbeam in her palm beneath the noonday sun. And there are stones that the sea has worn down into smooth and pleasing shapes, and bits of wood that have also been worn by the waves into something unlike the boughs of trees that they once were.

Or not boughs, perhaps, Elwing thinks as she picks up one piece that was definitely once straight and smooth and rectangular, and she thinks of the stories she has heard of the sailors Turgon of Gondolin sent off into the West, the ones that never came back and never, if the whispers are to be believed, reached their destination. She shudders, and drops the wood. It splashes into the surf, which washes up and over her ankles—the tide is coming in, and the water is very cold, and Elwing flees.

.

She does not return to the beach until the refugees from Gondolin come down Sirion—until Eärendil comes. He is not afraid of anything, it seems, and because they are of age they are thrown together as playmates, and so she is dragged down to the shore with him. He collects seashells and stones and bits of sea glass, which he keeps in a box under his bed, and is more fascinated than horrified by the pieces of wood that were once parts of ships.

"I am going to build my own ship someday," he tells Elwing as she stands well back from the water while he splashes about, up to his knees in the surf and wet up to his nose. It is a cloudy day, and beyond the shore the sea is flat and colorless as the sky. A few fishing boats drift lazily about between the Havens and Balar, and gulls wheel about, calling plaintively to one another. Elwing wonders, sometimes, what it is they are saying.

"Where will you sail?" she asks Eärendil, as he bends down to pick up a shell.

"I don't know," he replies cheerfully. The shell has a crab inside it, and instead of dropping it he pokes at the spindly legs, and only narrowly avoids getting his finger pinched. "North, south, west—south and then east, maybe. I want to see the world—all of it, wherever the winds will take me."

It's an impossible dream and they both know it. But he says it with such confidence that for a moment, while the sun breaks through the dreary cloud cover to shine on his golden hair, Elwing almost believes that he'll do it.

But then the clouds close again, and the world is grey and dull again and a chill wind blows down the coast from the north, making even Eärendil shiver and abandon the water in favor of going home to dry clothes and mugs of hot tea.

.

Eärendil never loses that habit of collecting bits and pieces from the beach. He keeps them in small boxes and then in a chest that he makes himself from pieces of collected driftwood. It is a patchwork, crooked thing—like most things are, in Sirion, even the people.

When he is gone, Elwing will sometimes go into their room to find the chest open and its contents strewn about the floor, and Elrond and Elros sitting in the middle of it all, examining each piece like it has a story to tell if they can only find the secret.

Their faces light up brighter than the Nauglamír when Elwing gives them each a box of their own, to fill up with their own treasures discovered on their long walks along the beach. The boys have inherited their father's fascination rather than their mother's fear, and Elwing is glad of it. She stands on dry sand and watches them splash in the shallows, and thinks of her brothers splashing about on the banks of the starlit Esgalduin beneath the beaches of Neldoreth. It is a hazy memory—only a glimpse of shimmering water and dark heads and the sound of children's laughter—and it makes her wonder what Eluréd and Elurín would have thought of the sea.

Elros runs out of the waves to show her a shell he has found, a silvery translucent jingle, shimmering with water where it sits nestled in his small cupped hands.

A month later, her sons are lost in the smoke like her brothers were lost in the snow, and Elwing throws herself into the sea because even drowning is better than burning.