Shore Beyond the Shadowy Sea by Quente

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Waters wild no ship may tame

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On the very last night of his fostering at Minas Tirith, Elfwine stole quietly out of the city to find the sea.

One of the only complaints Elfwine had about the city of his fostering was that the great Anduin was several miles to the east at its closest point, and the port of Harlond was farther even than that to the south. Elfwine couldn’t very well build himself a boat to take down the Anduin in the middle of the flat farmland to the east (very few trees), so Harlond it had to be.

And there, he’d have to buy a vessel anyway, rather than make one.

It wouldn’t make for as poetic a tale of adventure as Tuor’s or Eärendil’s, but surely the Ese of the sea, Garsecgesfréa, would see in him a soul as much a blank page as Tuor’s ever was. “Write on me,” Elfwine muttered to himself, gathering his things into a bag. “I am blank enough!”

He set off quietly, feeling somber. His fæder Éomer and mother Lothíriel were still with the King and Queen, speaking long into the night. They’d held a feast for the two fosterlings, Elfwine and his cousin Elboron, upon the conclusion of their final duty rotation with the Dúnedain.

They’d spent the past year with Prince Eldarion, who was chief of the Rangers of the North, and a company of the elves of Thranduil, hunting the remnants of orcs that inhabited Greenwood the Great. Upon their return, they were deemed grown in skill and maturity enough to take up their responsibilities as young lords of their lands.

Which led to the other complaint that Elfwine had: he very much did not want to go back to Rohan. He loved it more than he loved any place in Middle-earth, which was just a little less than he loved the sea. And therefore, it was to the sea that he had to go, before duty bound him entirely to dry land and endless grass, encircled by mountains with no blue horizon in sight.

Elfwine left his horse Blacfínda in the stables at Minas Tirith; if he was going to sea, he would not have his fæder think he’d left his horse abandoned. And because of this, his going was slow and unremarked, for he pulled the grey cloak of Lórien gifted to him by his friend Legolas around his shoulders, and let his dark hair fall into his face.

Or at least Elfwine thought his departure had been unremarked.

Elladan found him before the moon had risen mid-sky. He came sauntering up on his own silver gelding, with Blacfínda in tow.

Elfwine halted and sighed, staring up at the bright moon that did nothing to obscure his face or his pack or his newly gifted bow of the Galadhrim, unstrung and bound to his back.

“I thought you might be coming out this way tonight,” Elladan said, by way of greeting.

Elfwine shrugged, and with a certain amount of resignation hoisted himself up onto Blacfínda’s back. His horse snorted at him reproachfully, and Elfwine patted his neck. When they returned home, everyone would be of that mood with him. “Then you know why I have gone this way, as well.”

Nodding, Elladan started forward, but to Elfwine’s surprise, he did not turn them back to the city of Elfwine’s fostering. Instead, he kept them on the road to the south.

“I do know,” Elladan said, in answer to Elfwine’s hesitation. “I spoke long with your father Éomer this night, and finally, I deem, he comprehends your mood.”

Elfwine bowed his head. “I do not wish to seem ungrateful or dishonorable, nor as one who shirks a hard duty,” he began, but Elladan held up his hand.

“He understood it because I told it plainly. Your speech with him is ever bound up with those words – duty, gratefulness, honor. Nay, lad, I know that you have no other words to use, for your life is –”

“-- But the span of a verse to one who will live to see the end of all songs, yes, I have heard,” Elfwine said. Growing up near Elves was at times a burden.

“Indeed,” Elladan continued, and then his smile faded into thoughtfulness. “Although, I believe I shall choose a different ending. But! This is about your little verse in the song. I let them know that the sea longing of the Elves comes regardless of one’s station – in fact, even the Lady Galadriel felt it, every moment of her life in the flets of Lothlórien.”

Elfwine had not know that. “I wish I had met her.”

Elladan reigned in his horse and stared at Elfwine steadily for a long moment. “You know, my heart forbodes that you will meet her – although what that means, I know not, nor do I wish it to be true.”

“That is odd indeed,” Elfwine said, but his heart was stirring toward something now – and it was much less abstract than simply “the sea.” “So, where do we go, now that you have explained my case so well to my fæder?”

“I go to hand you over to your next prenticeship,” Elladan said, his expression cheerful again. “We will have several days’ ride south to Pelargir, but from there, we shall take a ship to your grandfather’s city. Your lovely mother has already sent a hawk over with the details, and you shall have a berth prepared for you at a shipyard. Your father gives you three years before he bids you return home.”

The flood of emotion in Elfwine’s heart felt like a sudden dawn – something long desired was almost in his grip. “But fæder mislikes the sea,” Elfwine said, faintly, hardly believing it. Their conversations had always returned to your future is to be my heir, and you will be king of this beautiful land where grass waves in the wind like the very ocean.

“We fear that which we do not understand,” Elladan said. “And I do not like the sea either, although my brother…” he looked sad. “My brother does. Your lady mother also had some words: that you would be in as good hands with the Prince Imrahil as with any lord of this land – and that maybe you would choose to return, if given the freedom to explore this side of your lineage.”

They shared a smile, then. Lothíriel could be fierce when rectifying a perceived wrong.

“Do the folk of Dol Amroth have the sea-longing too?” Elfwine said, swaying a bit on the broad back of Blacfínda. “I yearn for it. It is in my dreams at night.” Strange dreams, of a voice full of wind and shifting sand speaking in pure and ancient Quenya to him, telling him something…something he always forgot upon awakening.

“We have long marked that you are the very image of your grandfather Imrahil,” Elladan said. “And like to him in mood as well. He is of the line of the elven lady Mithrellas of Nimrodel’s folk, and their sea-longing was stymied by many things. They were frustrated in their attempts to return to the uttermost west, so the longing still emerges in children of their blood.”

“And so, because a long-ago elf could not sail to Aman when she intended, I am forever cursed by this desire?” Elfwine asked, a little bitterly. His path would have been much plainer if he could have simply become the prince of the Riddermark that his father wanted.

Elladan nodded. “But if there is any grace left in me through my father’s blood...” Elladan’s voice trailed off thoughtfully, looking at Elfwine.

“I don’t understand,” Elfwine said, but Elladan spoke no more of it on their journey.

~

Two years later, near the end of his apprenticeship at the shipyard, Elfwine begged his father to let him go to sea.

Now he was finally at sea, and heartily he wished he was not.

I am sorry, fæder, Elfwine thought as he grimly tied himself to the mast. He was far beyond the path they’d set – and he knew that no ship should have fared this far west on a voyage with youths and a few seasoned mariners as sailors, not even a great ship of the design of Mithlond.

The ships of Dol Amroth were finely wrought, imbued with the elven craft of those who had taught their longfathers, but the wind had carried them far from shore, and the boat’s planks, carefully lathed, were about to turn into so much tinder upon the waves.

The sailors who were left aboard lashed themselves to anything that looked like it had a chance against the swelling of the sea. Above the roar of the storm, Elfwine could hear his father Éomer’s distrust ringing in his ears.

“My son, your blood is mingled with that of the sea-riders, and yet I forebode that no good shall come of heeding the call of your other nature. The sea is too chancy by far.”

Elfwine’s mother Lóthiriel had spoken words in return, with just the right amount of exasperated patience to make his father abashed. “Are there not orcs still in Middle-earth, my lord? Are there not dangers even here in our fair country? Else why would you so often heed the King Aragorn’s call to battle?”

And so after two years of apprenticeship with the shipwrights in his grandfather’s princedom, he had set forth on this voyage to vye for a journeyman’s spot. The boat was sound, and his own labor had gone into the building of it.

“I would not have my son take this chance,” he’d heard his father say again to his mother, softly, the night before his launch. “And yet, I would not unman him by keeping him from his path. I fear there is darkness to come.”

“It is full summer, my lord, and the seas have been still as the duck pond behind Meduseld. I would not set my son upon a sea in a squall, nor in a season of chancy weather.” Lothíriel replied. Éomer bowed his head in acknowledgement. Still, Elfwine remembered his father’s eyes, laden with a deep concern.

Elfwine and his mother owed his father a rather large apology, if he ever lived to see him again.

The storm had come upon them at dawn. It was as though their course northward angered some design of the Ese Sǽfréa, for there was no warning of it the night before – the waves were as quiet as ever they were in summer, and their path forward seemed certain.

The captain, a sailor of many seasons named Malondil, told the crew that they would arrive at port ahead of schedule, and Elfwine planned to send a swift rider back to his father with a message that he had landed safely.

But now, they’d been fighting for hours. For a while they’d battled to stay roughly on course, but as the sea worsened and the dank air thickened, they simply fought to stay afloat. They’d finally given up the battle at the moment when Malondil went overboard – he’d been struggling with the wheel, until a long lick of wind and wave tugged him into the sea, like the whip of the Balrog in Master Holdwine’s tales.

Ossë is angry, the crew cried. They knew not why. And now they simply held on for their lives.

Father, I beg forgiveness. I hope my brother Léofwine puts aside his inks and parchment and learns to be the heir you need. I always had too much of the sea in me. In a moment of black humor, Elfwine thought: And I am about to have more.

Even howling and bitter, the sea was beautiful to him. It was ever thus, haunting his dreaming and his waking, pulling him to the shore. Perhaps Elladan had seen this doom within him, unavoidable, Elfwine thought, fighting to keep his purchase on the rope.

The boat rocked perpendicular in the cradle of a wave so vast it could have swallowed all of the citadel of Minas Tirith. The mast stood sideways, and hanging low to stare down into the mouth of the sea, Elfwine clung desperately to the rope, hoping it would hold.

In his despair, he still found the sea beautiful – beautiful in its rage. Clearing his lungs from the water that fell against him, choking on the mingled rain and salt spray, Elfwine raised his voice in prayer to the Ese who might heed him.

Iethcwen whose feet faltering fled
The falls of the fielded country far from home
Hear your son, who heeding dreams abed
Prenticed to these flyers on your foam
And to the deepest ocean, wind-fed
Fared into firmament of fixéd doom
Heed to us, for we have angered thee
And spare us from thy rage upon this sea –

Shouting his words into the wind –

But a moment later, something strange happened. Thinking back, Elfwine could not coherently place the events. After his prayer, the ship splintered apart, the very mast he was lashed to toppling into the waves, and he with it.

The black waves took him, and Elfwine raised a farewell to the skies. At least, he thought, he was dying at sea. He spared a moment of sorrow for the rest of the crew, who were tugged into this doom with him … And after that, things got stranger.

First, there was the dolphin, who came to him and gripped his tunic in its many-toothed mouth. The dolphin swam upward with him to a sort of hole in the wave, and dropped him into it. Once there in the tunnel made of the sea, an Ese came to him.

They spoke with one another.

They spoke, and the Ese raised his hand, a thing of water and wind. “Thou shalt remember me not till the time comes that I shall call upon thee to speak my words,” he said, and it was as if his message was seared into Elfwine’s bones.

And then Elfwine stumbled, confused, to the other side of the tunnel, staggered to a large, flat stone, and lay on it in a swoon.

Some time later, he awoke, parched, to the sound of small, scrabbling feet.

~

Fëanor was an hour’s ride west of the portal when the pebble in his pocket warmed. At first, he disregarded it, not remembering why that rock out of all the assortment of things in his pockets should warm at all… Until, in the middle of raising his bow to help his son strike down their next meal, he paused.

“I’d best attend to this,” Fëanor said, and wheeled his horse around and into a gallop. He ignored the shouts behind him, and sent back a brief message through mind-speech: I don’t think I told you about the pathways I built to Middle-earth.

No, father. Maedhros’s mind-speech was full of exasperation. Tell me you did not build a pathway, expressly against the interests of the Valar, that connected our continents. Please.

I did, and someone has come through it.

Pushing the connection closed with a firm snap, Fëanor focused for a moment upon the journey. What was the swiftest way? Ah, through the forest. They’d recently cleared it of the latest hatchings of some ill-begotten spawn of darkness, so it was most likely safe. And with any luck, whoever or whatever fell through would be bewildered enough to stay put for a while.

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Chapter End Notes

• Once upon a time I wanted to write a story set in Bunn's Return to Aman verse. "Elfwine son of Éomer seems like a nice, innocuous little character, having no wife or kids," I thought, after zero research. "With a name like 'Elf-friend', I bet he's a good one for dropping into a fairyland."

  So I began writing. And then, I discovered that Tolkien already had him hying off to the elflands, in many versions and ways, and I realized that maybe there's a muse or poetic weltanshaung that steps in when people like us are trying to write in Tolkien's worlds -- and it just takes over.

• For instance I figured that Elfwine, being Rohirric, would probably have names for all the Valar/Maiar in his own (translated to Old English) language, and asked people what they would be. I received excellent responses, but in the middle of something else I stumbled across Elfwine's own translations. What are the chances?
• But yes. Many thanks to Jazthebard for the name Iethcwen (Uinen).