Transmutation by sallysavestheday

Transmutation

Tucked away on Elladan’s shelves, among dog-eared books and healing instruments and feathers and beads and bones, is a kaleidoscope, made for him centuries ago by a frequent traveler from the Ered Luin – a Dwarf with wise old eyes and a rollicking laugh and a beard dyed a brilliant green. Elrohir has one, too: they were fine gifts, for the children they were then.

The bright tubes are filled with bits of colored glass in scarlet and blue and gold, cut and shaped into pastilles and stars and diamonds and faceted spheres, rolling from corner to corner as the barrel of the toy is turned. Each shifting movement arranges the small, bright pieces differently. Held up to the light and viewed through the tube, they move through an intricate dance: the same elements, constantly recombining. Patterning through change after change.

Once, feeling tipsy and forlorn, Elladan had held his to his eye and watched the light break on the scattered glass. “It’s us, Ro. Look: every bloodline in Arda, almost, spinning into who knows what, or why.” Elrohir’s puzzled frown only made his yearning worse. “We’re just bits of everything that used to matter, Ro. Nothing meaningful. Nothing whole.”

Elrohir had taken the toy from him, then, and his glass of wine, as well, and held him as he wept for their smallness among the great, their uncertain endings, their choices yet unmade. Elladan was sheepish in the morning, but that sense of whirling fragmentation has never entirely passed.

He envies his sister, sometimes. Her Choice is behind her, no matter how much their father wishes to change it. Arwen’s eyes already look beyond the circles of the world. Her legacy will be empire, or nothing at all.

Elladan and Elrohir are still searching.

It helps, for Elladan, to ride out with his twin and clear the Orc-nests in the surrounding mountains. To cut straight and swift to the heart of his own emptiness: that place where his mother’s cries of torment still echo and resound. Had he been other, he thinks to himself – one, purposeful thing: the true heir of the Noldor; the true heir of the Sindar; a muscled son of Men, howling and circling his axe; the scion of Melian, binding – those cold claws would never have dared to reach for her. But he is only his own splintered self, hunter and healer and scholar and smith, shimmering into and out of position as the world’s barrel turns.

It is worst at times like these: when the Great House fills with visitors, layering languages and cultures and beliefs, simmering with history’s tensions and strains. The unfinished business of legends strikes sparks against the ancient stone of the walls. Old friends of Elrond’s from distant lands encounter unfriends passing, and the diplomatic dance begins. Elves and Men, Dwarves and Hobbits; all moving through the patterns, turning and turning.

The House is waiting for something, poised on the edge of a change. Elladan is well-aware of his father’s foresight, his uncanny ability to pull people and promises out of the air. He has watched Elrond frowning his way through the cool halls over the last year, and wondered. Chips and shards of potentiality move in the shadows, tumbling toward some reckoning that none of them can name. This gathering of Free Peoples has the taste of a funeral, or a coronation in wartime: some bitter transition in the face of doom.

He cannot flee Imladris for the hunt at such a moment, but his palms itch and his breath catches. He needs something to smash.

He finds Elrohir ahead of him in the smithy, stripped to the waist and grimy, whistling through his teeth as he hammers, imagined orc faces and quirks of politics flattening under his well-timed blows. No horse will be able to wear the shoes he beats into thin metal leaves, but that is not the point of the battering.

“Come to pound steel, Dan?” Elrohir’s teeth are white in his sooty face as he grins.

They have been schooled carefully, as suits their mingled heritage: in scouting and herblore and husbandry and strategy and politics and the singing of all the great tales. On dark nights their father walks them through the forest, humming, as the thing within them that is neither Elda nor Adan dances and wails. But they both gravitate to the forge, to the thunder of metal on metal and the hair-thin blaze of drawn wire. You have Noldorin hands, their mother used to tease, with truth on her tongue: they have been burned, uncountably often, by both black blood and fire.

The heat of the forge soothes Elladan’s rough edges as he sinks into the rhythm of the hammer’s blows. He scans the day’s work of mending needing to be done: broken blades and a split ploughshare, a bottomless bucket of twisted nails. His hands can redeem these damaged things, at least. The sweat will be its own reward.

Working makes waiting easier. Elladan thinks of Aragorn, long away and now haunting the gardens and the Hall of Fire again with a grim jaw and a trembling, tenuous hope. The invisible line between his grey eyes and Arwen’s is taut, tense, telling. They have been wishing for so long, the bright shards of their lives and their lineage tumbling and turning.

Now the pattern is settling. What light will make of it is yet to be seen.

Elladan’s shoulders ache with the work of repair. He catches Elrohir’s eye, sees the sweet soreness mirrored in his brother’s face, and starts up a song. It is a tune that springs from none of their origins: a new thing, fierce and bright with their rhythm as they remake their small space in the world.

The tunnel of his own mind narrows, lit with the forge's sparks and echoing with his blows. The foresight claims him and he sees it, suddenly: all their twin lives’ shattering and mending, winding the way to Narsil on their anvil; sun and moon caught in the blade, the bright steel under their hammers, folding and tempering.

Elladan and Elrohir will not attend tomorrow’s council. They will be heating the furnace, cleaning the oil baths, clearing space for the shards to rest in honor before they are reshaped, reborn.

Those splinters will catch, and hold, and shine as the world’s turning barrel pauses and the light leaks in.

The blade will split the sky by nightfall, warded and weighted, passing from their hands to Aragorn’s, all the broken pieces of history coming together again at last in this one bright thing, blazing.

They were born for this Great Work; their hands the hands of the Eldar and Edain and Maiar, mingling. Their hearts shaped from fragments of many colors, falling into white.

Into the great sword, the light of all their hopes.

Andúril. The Flame of the West.