Through Shadow, to Morning by Idrils Scribe

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Through Shadow, to Morning

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These last days of the long wait smell like new-fired brick and oak shavings.

Even here, enclosed in Erestor’s study, the scent is thick in Elladan’s nose. The loremasters have downed their quills over the din of hammer strikes and work-songs that shatters the scriptorium’s solemn silence. 

His mother is right, he supposes. Forty-eight is too old to be sleeping in a nursery off one’s parents’ bedroom.

The very day Erestor brought word that Elrohir had been found, Celebrían commissioned the architect for an expansion off the main building along the riverbank. She had plans drawn for a bright and airy solar with carvings of ivory stone; two suites of study, bedchamber and washroom; balconies overlooking the Bruinen; and a small but well-laid private garden. All of it to be built within the year.

The first spade was in the ground before Glorfindel rode from the valley, and the Last Homely House has been bedlam ever since.  

Fine particles of stone dust are caught in the wax tablet before him, an archipelago of pale islets dotting the sea of wax into which are carved the differential equations Erestor set for today’s calculus lesson. He worries at one with his stylus.

Where is Elrohir now?

Somewhere on the high seas, Lindon’s navy carries him closer to home with every windswept league. Perhaps he is already near enough.

Elladan glances aside. Over at his work table, Erestor is calligraphing some piece of official correspondence. He does not look up from his quill dancing over gold-lined vellum.

Elladan is unwatched, and free to search for a while.

After Elrohir disappeared he would lose himself for days, his mind wholly turned inward as he groped again and again for his brother, seeking out Elrohir's absence like a fresh amputee worries at his stump. He forgot to eat, did not sleep, until he drove his parents so mad with worry they forbade it. Breaking him of the habit took years.

Of late, Elladan has relapsed. He has taken to secretly pushing the boundaries of his reach, searching Imladris and the land beyond for Elrohir’s presence, hoping against hope to find him drawing near.

“Are you well?”

Erestor is at his elbow. Elladan startles so badly his stylus cuts a jagged rift through the wax, marring the equations.

“Eldatan?” Erestor’s tone is gentle. They speak the ancient Quenya of Tírion together, but only here in the privacy of Erestor’s study. Erestor tutoring Elrond’s heir is controversial enough without Elladan sounding like a kinslayer in public.

“Apologies, Erestáro.”

Erestor knows. He always does. He pulls up a stool and sits down beside Elladan, his face soft. “You will not bring him home any sooner by losing yourself in osanwë.”

“When can we leave?” Elladan demands yet again. Ever since the gull, he and Celebrían have had bitter words.

Elladan was the one to catch the grey seabird as it flapped down into Imladris’ great courtyard. Somehow he knew . Driven outside by an inexplicable unease, he cradled the small, warm body between his palms, the little heart hammering against heaving ribs beneath silk-smooth feathers. To Elladan the gull first spoke, its orange beak wide and panting between the words.

Galdor’s message was brief, but clear. Found. Headed to Mithlond aboard the Nemir. Fading.

The words haunt Elladan ever since, tormenting him like a wound. 

“Tomorrow, at dawn,” Erestor repeats once more, withstanding Elladan’s gaze without flinching. He took Celebrían’s side again just now, when Elladan thundered into his lesson under a dark cloud of frustrated rage.

“I should have gone with Father.” Another hard-fought battle, sadly lost.

“You would slow them down,” Erestor says with the tone of a healer bringing bad news. “We can risk no delay.”

“I ride as swiftly as any of his escorts.”

Erestor shakes his head. “On a journey so harsh, a willing heart does not suffice. Your father’s company will take no rest nor sleep until Lindon.”

Elladan scoffs. “If Mother and I had left when the gull came, we would be halfway there by now!”

Erestor raises both hands in a warding gesture. “The House of Eärendil are no travelling tinkers, free to roam wherever they will. King Valandil is our friend, but the Dúnedain are a proud people. For a foreign head of state to cross Arnor’s borders, permission must be sought.”

“Father did no such thing.”

“Ah.” Erestor has that clever look that means he is setting up some devious trap at chess. “But your father did not enter Arnor. Neither did his guard. Merely a company of anonymous couriers under the diplomatic banner.”

He draws a small roll of paper from his wide sleeve, the device of the Elendilmir woven into the black silk wrapping. “The pigeon from Fornost arrived this morning. Valandil does, of course, graciously welcome the Lady of Imladris to cross his realm on her journey to Lindon.”

Elladan leaps to his feet, his chair clattering against the tiles. “Then why are we sitting here doing calculus! ? We could have been on the road for hours already!”

“I was hoping to take your mind off the wait.” Erestor says. His tone is soft, but his eyes remain sad. “The baggage train is almost assembled. The tents are loaded onto the wagons as we speak.”

“To the Void with the damned tents!” Elladan snarls.

His voice echoes through the study. Startled at his own outburst, he falls silent. Erestor is a kind teacher, but a strict one. Never before has Elladan raised his voice at him.

Erestor gives no rebuke, nor sets Elladan to copying inventories or pestling ink-galls. He rights the fallen chair with unhurried motions, then sits and lets the silence deepen as he waits for Elladan to master himself. Outside, the stonecutters chant a hymn to Aulë as they heave something heavy into place.

Elladan rubs a hand over his face, lost for words.

“Your brother is ill,” Erestor says in his explanatory tone, as calmly as if they are analysing Rúmil’s Annals. “Should we receive him with half a pack of waybread and a damp bedroll?”

Elladan’s heart goes cold with terror. Elrohir must not die.

Erestor lays a hand on his shoulder. “Your father will be with Elrohir soon, if he is not already. He is the greatest healer I ever met. And I have seen many.”

Erestor deftly relieves him of stylus and tablet. “Leave the equations,” he says, and takes Elladan’s hand between his own for a moment. “They will keep.”

“I…” Elladan fumbles, all his well-learned rhetoric forgotten. If there exists some irrefutable argument he could deliver now, one that would get him to Elrohir’s side faster, he cannot think of it. “He must not die.”

“He will not.” Erestor says, conviction shining bright in his face. “Your father will not let him.” He fixes Elladan with that bright, treelit gaze. “You must be strong for your brother. Even when patience is the hardest.”

Elladan finds he has spent it all. “At sunrise, without delay, or I ride off alone.”

Erestor nods, solemn as if speaking to Elrond himself. “At sunrise.” A rare smile brightens his usual sternness. “Go pack.”

Elladan heads for the door, but before leaving the study he turns.

“Will you come with us?” He knows better, but still he asks.

Erestor’s face takes on that hidden sorrow Elladan knows from many such childish invitations, sadly declined. “Better not. The journey will be more peaceful without me. Besides, someone must govern Imladris in the lord and lady’s stead.” Erestor smiles once more, and adds, “you have never visited Arnor. Keep your eyes open. When you return we shall discuss your observations of the Dúnedain.”

Indeed Elladan has never crossed the border. His parents cannot bear to let him from the guarded safety of the Hidden Valley. Elladan is mindful of their wishes–they have sorrows enough already. Still, he is looking forward to seeing what lies beyond the Ford of Bruinen.

“I will. Until later, Erestáro.”

Beyond the study’s relative quiet, the house grates on his nerves. Everywhere, the hallways are loud and busy with craftspeople and porters running back and forth. The family wing is the worst of it.

Only the nursery is, as ever, unchanged.

Elladan never felt any desire to move out of the room he used to share with Elrohir. He always kept Elrohir’s bed undisturbed beside his own where it belongs.

Elrohir’s sheets are crisply folded. Elladan does not like them to be changed, and he only allows it when the dust grows thick enough to be seen. The staff indulges him in this, ever since that terrible day twenty years ago when the housekeeper lifted the long-unaired tick and found it disintegrating into flakes of moth-eaten wool. Elladan became too angry, perhaps, but they should not have replaced Elrohir’s mattress. 

Elrohir’s remaining belongings are protected by Songs of Keeping. Wooden horses. An intricate spinning top, Mírdain-made. The bow Glorfindel gave him on his seventh begetting day. Elladan lifts it carefully, the loosened string trailing behind.

The toy is so small in his hands. The belt for the quiver with six soft-tipped arrows could not fit halfway around Elladan’s waist. The fletchings are bright red, blue and yellow feathers from the flock of imported parrots that flap through Glorfindel’s greenhouse.

Elrohir is a soldier now, according to the Dúnadan Ruhiren, who met him in Harad. A stern, veiled desert warrior who led other such men into battle.

He could have died . Maybe he still will, even now. 

His throat closes with panic at the thought. He must leave this room, this shrine to a brother who may never return.

The new rooms are an organised chaos of masons, fresh-sanded timber and frantic chiselling. His mother is at the heart of it, debating one of the glaziers about some barely visible flaw in a diamond-shaped panel. She has a scarf wrapped around her hair against the plaster dust. 

“Mother…”

Her face goes soft at once, and she leads him out to what is to become the garden. The trees have already been planted, and the saplings Sung to sturdiness. A fragrant mass of lavender sets clouds of bees abuzz. The flagstone path down to the river runs between riots of white and purple hollyhocks.

“What if–” Elladan’s voice is strangely unwilling to speak the words, and he struggles to make himself heard over the carpenters’ hammer strikes. “What if he does not come?”

He cannot meet her eyes, keeping his gaze on the scar the stonemasons tore in the main house’s wall to make a passage to the new addition.

At once, her hands close over his.

“Did you feel his death?” she breathes, barely a whisper. For a moment she fails to hide her terror, her eyes sharp on his face.

“He is alive.” Elladan would know it if Elrohir was dead. Somehow, he does believe he would.

She straightens at that. “Then he will come. The matter is simple. Glorfindel has found him, and he will bring him home. Elrohir will come. Do not let yourself think otherwise.”

Something wild lies in her gaze.

Elladan looks over this flowering garden with its young trees crowned with summer leaves, each one chosen with care–white birch and rowan and silver willows to trail their branches into the river. The new wing’s soaring arches, the balconies angled for the finest views of both the Bruinen and the valley’s waterfalls. Such beauty, all of it brought into being with singular determination.

It might seem like a different thing, Celebrían hiring every mason and carpenter in Imladris to build mad hope into solid stone–very different from the sorrow that reduced Elladan to a red-faced shouting match over a calculus tablet–but underneath lurks the same hue and shade of sorrow.

As long as Celebrían can go to the builders every day, sketch additions onto the drawings with charcoal and confer with the architect about tiles, water pipes, and hypocaust floors, that same snarling terror that haunts Elladan, too, is kept at bay.

He can give her that, at least.

“You are right,” he says, and smiles for her.

“Come, sweetling.” She, too, finds a smile for him, and steers him back inside.

In the shell of Elrohir’s future study she allows them to be roped in by a mosaicist in search of instructions.

“Oromë hunting I think, for the south-facing wall,” she says to the waiting artist. “Green and lapis blue in the Iathrim style. Unless you have another suggestion, Elladan?”

He does not, at first, and is already shaking his head when he remembers. Whatever Elrohir has become, some things cannot have changed.

“Add Nahar rearing–in white, of course.”

----

Celebrían wakes to Elrohir moving in her bedroom. It is nothing out of the ordinary.

The shadow of her missing son haunts Imladris. A ghostly Elrohir flits between the pillars of the white stone cloisters, roams amidst the pines in the valley’s forests; he moves in the shadowed corners of the Hall of Fire, a formless shade shifting between man and boy. 

He only ever watches, grey-eyed and mute. She wishes she could speak to him, touch him across the many miles of distance that must separate them still. She has tried so often, over the years, but whenever she turns to him he melts away like morning mist at sunrise, intangible.

Elrohir is everywhere, save in the newly built rooms. His silent shadow does not come to those stark, half-finished spaces where his real self never set foot.

To escape him she slides from her bed, wraps herself in a mantle, and heads to the night-dark husk of what will become the twins’ solar.

The wind no longer whistles through the casements. A crew of Mírdain glaziers have already set the windows with diamond-paned perfection. Soon lamplight will dance over many-coloured tapestries where now is nothing but darkness and fresh-set plaster.

The doorway to Elrohir’s rooms is a gaping rectangle of deeper blackness. Its door remains on trestles in the carver’s workshop, soon to be hung in the decorative hinges the smiths have assured her will be ready tomorrow.

She passes through, coarse grains of cement cracking beneath her soles. The patterned tiles are still being fired.

Her footsteps echo in the emptiness of what will be Elrohir’s study.

The mosaic is taking shape on the wall, across from the casements that will pour daylight over Elrohir’s work table. Oromë does not have a face yet, and Nahar rearing is a half-formed blotch of white. Another dark doorway awaiting its door leads to the bedroom beyond.

A man’s apartments, not a boy’s. Whatever else Elrohir may be, he is no longer a child. And yet, it is all she can see him as.

Tomorrow they leave on this strange pilgrimage of hope. Elladan and she will ride west along the King’s Road for she knows not how long until by some bend, or bridge, or roadside inn, anywhere between the Ford of Bruinen and the Tower Hills, they will meet Elrond’s company.

She tries to imagine the moment–Elrohir leaping from his horse to greet her. Will he recognize her? Will she know him ? All she can picture is the little boy who was lost. How tall will he be? The mortal Ruhiren could not tell her. Secondborn memories are fickle.

Footsteps echo in the solar behind her. Soft, but not enough so to escape her huntress’ ears. A click of metal.

She spins and blinks against the sudden glare of blue light spearing into the study.

“My Lady.” Erestor half-shutters the Fëanorian lamp in his hand.

“Master Erestor.”

He draws back a little, taken aback. Celebrían rarely has dealings with Erestor; she prefers Elrond as a go-between. Matters have never been easy between Celeborn’s daughter and Maedhros’ chief counsellor, the thrice-blooded kinslayer.

At first she suffered Erestor’s presence in her house for Elrond’s sake. Of late for Elrohir’s, too. Without the old spymaster’s tricks her son would never have been found–even she cannot deny that.

“My apologies, Lady. I did not know you were here. I only meant to inspect the day’s progress.”

Erestor is still in his formal robes and likely has no intention of going to bed at all. What ghosts haunt this house for him? None of those he slew have ever set foot in Imladris. Perhaps they do not hound him here, all those dead men, women and children. Did little Eluréd and Elurín remain in Beleriand, roaming drowned Doriath beneath the waves? Likely not. Judging by Erestor’s wan look, they did find their way into the Last Homely House.

He looks pale even for a scribe. His double burden must be getting to him. He is in charge of both rushing the Lady of Imladris and her eldest onto the road with all proper arrangements, and keeping the building underway as fast as Elvish hands can work.

He sees her look and tenses, awaiting her reaction.

Elladan cares greatly for Erestor. Only to spare her son more sorrow does she keep herself from rebuking the Fëanorian for trespassing on her grief.

“The glazing is all in,” she says conversationally. “The tiles are not, and without them the doors cannot be hung.”

The tense line of Erestor’s shoulders lowers just a little at her civil tone.

“I will see to it,” he says in that perfectly accentless Sindarin. “When you return–when Elrohir returns–he will be comfortable here.”

Maybe he thinks she does not know he teaches Elladan to speak Quenya like a kinslayer. Maybe he does not care.

Whatever else he may be, Erestor is a supremely capable organiser, whether of bloodshed or building. She has no doubt Elrohir will find these rooms finished and furnished with all he could possibly need.

“Lady…” Erestor never addresses her by name the way he does Elrond–only ever her title. He is wise enough not to try. “The grooms will have the horses saddled by sunrise. Perhaps you should rest.”

He presumes much, this Fëanorian, to order her back to the silence of her bedroom, to Elrohir’s ghost haunting the shadows. For a moment, she resists the mad impulse to snarl. The next hot tears prick her eyes, and she frantically blinks them away.

Nienna, have mercy! 

She has wept so much already, tears enough to fill the great wide Sea. No more. Not here, not before this man.  

Erestor only waits in silence. He knows.

“They will need you at your best,” he says when she has mastered herself once more. “All three of them.”

Whatever the house of Eärendil needs, Erestor will obtain for them. It is the least he can do.

“I will rest.” She makes herself grant him a polite little nod. “Evening, Master Erestor.”

-----

Night still lingers over the valley when she makes her way through the house to the stable courtyard. Elrohir trails her even now. His shadowy, ever-shifting form weaves between scattered pools of lantern-light.

She sets her shoulders beneath the well-worn burden of grief, when the thought comes to her.

This is the last time .

The last time she has risen from her bed with her lost son’s shadow haunting both dreams and waking. Tomorrow she will be on the road, riding to meet him. When next she sets foot in the bedroom where she so often wept in Elrond’s arms, Elrohir will be under their roof.

She leaves the family wing and passes the Hall of fire. Elrohir’s shadow, both small and grown and all things in between, silently follows in her wake. She pays it no heed. In the courtyard he dissolves into the clamour and the bright lamplight.

Dawn comes early in summer. Already the snow on the eastern peaks is shifting to pale pink, and the last stars are winking out. Her company is assembling: a caravan of guards and grooms, carters and cooks, bustling about wagons loaded with tents and folding beds and all else needed to encamp an ailing child in comfort.

Erestor is everywhere at once, handing out instructions, reminders, and admonitions where needed. He bows politely when she passes, and she, too, gives a civil greeting. Both their gazes come to rest on Elladan. He was among the first to mount, and he now sits on his grey mare with eyes wide as he takes in the milling bustle of horses and Elves. Never before has he seen such a great riding.

Another thing about to change for the better. 

Smiling, she mounts and takes her place at the column’s head behind the standard-bearers holding the banners of Imladris and Lórien.

As if to guide their steps, Eärendil rises in the West as they ride from the courtyard. Behind them the dawn pours gold into the valley, lighting up the morning mists. The air is clear and bright with promise, and Celebrían can breathe freely for the first time in forty years.

It is time. 

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Chapter End Notes

Dear readers,

I wish you all a very merry Christmas and a happy 2025!

I hope you enjoyed this little tale. For plot-related reasons it had to be set in summer, but there still is a hint of a Christmassy theme.
Of course I'd love to hear your thoughts about it. What do you think about Celebrían's and Elladan's respective coping strategies? Is Erestor handling them well?
What do you imagine the upcoming reunion will be like? Similar to the original 'verse, or very different?

See you soon for the next installment of Northern Stars,

IS