The Missing by Elleth

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Chapter 1

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Eärwen opened her eyes against the mounting feeling of distress.

There was nothing to the landscape she found herself in but featureless, shifting swathes of mist, lit into dim grey from some unseen source. If it was the sun, she could not pinpoint where it shone, and had she not been standing on her feet would not have known what direction would be up, and which down.

One arm's length in front of her, and Eärwen's hand was vanishing into the dry, grey mist. Her feet were bare, and only barely visible through the fog, standing on what felt like a flat expanse of crumbling, barren rock and strange fragments that splintered under her feet; she was strangely wary of bending down to examine closer, certain she was happier not seeing what she stood on.

She took a careful step, shuffling her feet over the debris, until her toes met empty air, and she drew back swiftly from the edge, too afraid to feel forward, too afraid to make a sound. She bit down hard on her lips.

Nothing else changed. She wondered briefly if these were the gardens of Lórien, or the hills surrounding them - a region famous for its mists - but there was a familiar salt smell on the air - the sea must be nearby, then, but what awaited below was almost certainly not the sea near Alqualondë, or any place her people had charted. There was no comfort to it, and she heard nothing, neither the sound of waves, or seabirds, no life at all.

Then, a shove against her shoulders by something unseen out of the mist. She tumbled forward, arms outstretched to break her fall, and fell, and fell, and fell, finding only nothingness while the sensation persisted. Up away behind her, she heard a voice, almost-forgotten, deep and melodious out of the Bliss of Aman, cry her name, crying to seek it, find them for me, I cast out my thought farther than I can go, but she could not will herself onto the cliff again, and kept falling - down and down and down.

At last, nothingness.

* * *

"I am telling you, it was…" Eärwen shook her head and shuddered. Anairë gave her a helpless look across the breakfast table between them, and drank down her tea. "... an unusual dream at best, a nightmare at worst."

If she was honest with herself, she had yet to shake the sensation of incessant falling, and her own breakfast sat before her still untouched. She sighed and reached for a piece of Anairë's fruit. Anairë squeezed her hand tightly.

"Dear heart, it was a dream. It has been a long time since I have seen you so unquiet."

"Perhaps," Eärwen replied, finally no longer able to hide the worry in her voice, "because I cannot shake the idea - now that I have had time to think - that it has something to do with Nerwen."

"Nerwen?" Anairë echoed. Eärwen sighed again; she had expected skepticism - she was not certain by far that she had heard her daughter's voice, and Anairë distrusted visions and dreams after too many had brought her tidings she had not asked to know, and not all had yet come true, nor was she certain they ever would. "She still is exiled - we would have known if the ban on her had been lifted. Are you certain she was calling to you, and it was not merely a nightmare?"

Eärwen shook her head. "I wish I were, so I could forget or take action. Perhaps I ought to speak with Arafinwë. It is not from me that Nerwen received her gifts, and he may understand how to read this better than I do. If not that, I must call upon Lórien."

"I do not think that Lórien will be inclined to help - her banishment is upon her still, and.... Arafinwë. Well." A soft note of alarm crept into Anairë's voice. Eärwen knew it all too well.

She rose and made her way around the table. Standing behind Anairë's chair, she rested her chin on Anairë's head and reached forward to lace their right hands together. "Do you see this?" she asked. The morning sun was shining into the open balcony in the cliffside, setting their matching rings of gold and pearls gleaming. "Our troth given shape."

"I remember. A little too well," Anairë says, tilting her head back so her loose black hair, sun-warmed and smooth, tickled the top of Eärwen's breasts above the neckline of her nightgown, and made her murmur low in her throat before leaning down to kiss her wife. Anairë gently returned it. "You must not worry that I shall go back on my choice."

"I am not, not truly, dear heart," Anairë said. "Not since the Laws were changed."

"Then what is the matter?" Eärwen drew back and crossed her arms, leaning against a pillar for support.

"I hate to see you unhappy - and I hate to see the past returning to haunt us. Since Moringotto's defeat I had been hoping that we were free of it at last, and more so since the world was made round. And two-thousand years past even that… another dream, and from the only one who is, through her own choice, still exiled."

Against her will, and feeling strange with the residue of the dream still clinging to her mind, Eärwen felt a smile coming. "Nerwen grew powerful in the Outer Lands, they say, and she will come when it is time, whenever the chances of the world make it so. Do not be so concerned for me. I am not of glass, and not likely to shatter, no matter how terrible those dreams may yet become. There have been too many gruesome ones - the dungeon - that were not dreams at all, and for all that Nerwen may have called to me, I do not think she is the one in danger. Rather, it was… a missive of sorts. Perhaps we… ought to wait until she sends me another, before we act in over-haste and consult anyone else. But we must act sooner or later."

Something kindled in Anairë's eyes then, suddenly, reminiscent of the light of her dark eyes in their youth - Anairë restless, with dance-motions interwoven into her every step, brimming with an energy that grown quieter across the years, a slow-burning, warm fire rather than the flashing, darting flames of before. Eärwen loved her no less for it, and she had often had warmth enough for both of them - but seeing her eyes light up as they did kindled a familiar spark in her, and reaching for Anairë's hand again, she grinned. "As soon as we know more of this - shall we seek what she wants us to find?"

It was not a question at all.

* * *

The crown was pressing down onto the space between her brows, and after a day of dividing and redistributing fishing claims between recent arrivals out of the East and those of her people who were already settled on the southern shore of the Bay of Eldamar, Eärwen was glad to lock it in its casket. She let herself fall onto the bed, kicking the shoes off her feet in the process, and shrugging her cloak of office from her shoulders.

Anairë was nowhere to be seen - she had been arranging for equipment and supplies, and Eärwen made a mental note to share details on the current situation at court with her brother for the time she was gone, if she left at all. Alpaher would act as her substitute when it was needed. As the crown prince of Alqualondë, it was a pale shadow of the office he should have held before his life had been cut short in defense of the ships, but he was content enough, he claimed, to swear fealty to his sister and spend a quiet life with his family instead after his return, rebuilding what they had lost, and be at her side when she needed him.

That had not been all she took away from the day. The new arrivals were restless. Many of them had been arriving in recent years, ancient kin with the Lindar who had turned aside from the westward march before the crossing of the mountains, settling along a river-valley all the way to the sea, if they settled at all. Many were now fleeing from a terror that had been stirred in the mountain-mines near their domain and threatened, they said, to cast its shadow over their land. If it ever came forth, they feared it would engulf the forest of Lindórinand, their home, in flames.

Eärwen's dream itched at the edges of her mind - for there had also been news of Nerwen - Galadriel now - although Eärwen doubted she would ever get used to the name in that form, or make it fit with the image of her daughter vanishing into the dark as the host of the Noldor reassembled and marched north, there was no doubting it was her.

She, the newcomers claimed, had taken up the rule of the land not long prior, and was trying her utmost to keep it guarded - not merely against the threat in the mountains, but also against other forces of dark growing in the world outside that she had long been striving against. Eärwen heard the words with a surge of pride, but it was not long before worry set in. If Nerwen had been concerned about her people's safe arrival in Aman, that might be the reason for the dream.

After court had concluded, she took aside the leader of the newcomers to speak with her, hoping that the Sindarin she had learned from other arrivals in years past would be enough to make herself understood without a translator by her side.

"Are there," Eärwen asked the woman - stocky, bright-haired and perhaps kin of old with her through some forgotten link - "any missing of your people - was anyone lost on the journey into Aman?"

Haldis took a moment to answer, but from the shadow that came onto her face Eärwen guessed at what the reply would be before she had said it.

"There are some. It is a strange tale," she said, failing to hide the distrust in every word. "My sons told me what I know about it. They are marchwardens of our land. They know more than I do about the world outside our borders, and I can only guess; I have no scrying mirror as the Lady does, although she told me the land itself worried - for here no one knows the names of Nimrodel and Mithrellas. They took ship from the south, from Edhellond, not Mithlond in the north whence I and my people sailed. Their company was lost once before, but they found each other again, it is said, and sailed away then, not long before I myself went. But now they are gone, and they never reached this harbour."

Eärwen thanked and dismissed Haldis, and before returning to her rooms made her way to the harbourmaster's office to find the records of arrival of all that had come into Aman as part of Lindórinand's wave of incomers. None by the names Haldis had given her were listed at all, and only one ship in recent years had come from the harbour she had claimed.

Were these, then, the ones her daughter had asked her to look for? How would she know that their ship had never reached a harbour, and if they had foundered, how could she know they were not dead?

And if they were not dead, how would they find them?

* * *

The water stretched flat and featureless before her, broken nowhere by ripples as far as she could see. It was beautiful, glassy and dark under the dome of mist, but the eerie lifelessness of it made her wary of stepping closer, and before she had made up her mind, a shadow was coming through the mist toward the shore she stood on, growing larger and larger until a swan-shaped prow emerged.

The ship beached with a terrible sound, wood screeching and splintering over the gravel littering the watermark. It was the first sound Eärwen had heard in this place at all, and she clapped her hands over her ears, wishing desperately for quiet to settle again.

It did at last, when the ship was out of water and halfway up the beach. Swathes of mist formed about it, trailing like distended fingers, hands that tried to grasp the wood, and if flaked apart where they touched.

No one disembarked. No lights flickered on the ship, and where someone should have come ashore to check for damages, there was no movement at all above the deck - only the wooden hull like the husk of a gigantic swan-headed insect, discarded and abandoned, breaking down before her eyes.

Out of her detached curiosity, a shudder ran across her back, and even knowing that at some point on the isle the bottomless cliff awaited her fall again, she walked - away from the beach, away from the hands, away from the two pinpoints of light like eyes that blinked to life suddenly before her, until she reached level ground and began to run.

She could not hear her daughter's voice this time, but she could tell, somehow, that Nerwen was seeing what she saw, and it comforted her.

Waking came with a start as she fell, and Eärwen found herself snug against the skin of Anairë's warm body behind her; only her heart was still thundering.

* * *

The ship rocked over a final wave before calm settled, and the very wood seemed to let out a breath of relief. Anairë, whom the swell had turned pale and grasping for composure, leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes. "Is it over now?" she asked in a low voice.

"I hope so," Eärwen replied, turning from her wife to the large windows of their cabin. "I have never sailed so far outside our bounds, but the borders where the Straight Road meets the Sea are said to be a little tumultuous. But I daresay," she said and smiled over her breath catching, "that the view is worth it. Love, come and see!"

Anairë came to her side carefully, walking as though she did not quite trust the planks to remain steady under her feet, but she, too, gasped at the sight before her, and slid an arm around Eärwen's hips to draw her closer.

"Is not this alone worth the journey?"

"Mmm." Anairë's smile was audible in her voice, and Eärwen could find no fault in it. The vista before them was an expanse of smooth, dark water, flat as a mirror for the stars, immense, measureless and clear, shining in the black sky above, below, and around them. Here and there, misty islets of rock protruded from the water, the remnants of the Twilit Isles that had once protected Aman and were now lining the border region. Mists were also gathering at the edge of their sight where the Straight Road dipped toward the blue globe below, the bent world, the shimmer of bent skies in a sunrise of gold and pink, and shimmering clouds swirling above the seas and lands.

"I can barely believe…" Anairë breathed with an incredulous laugh, and tears in her eyes. "I had never given much thought to being in the Unseen Realm after nothing much seemed to change for us. I had not expected… this. It is almost as though the laws of our nature do not apply here."

Eärwen said nothing, feeling that more words or any attempt to explain what they were seeing any further would spoil the moment. They stood in silence, looking out on the world below, until a knock at the door sounded and Elcánë entered, and the look on her face turned from mesmerized to apologetic seeing the scene she had walked into.

"I am sorry to have to interrupt," she said to Eärwen, sketching a bow. "But the lookout spotted something that fits your dream, aunt."

"Good. Thank you. Tell the steersman to take us there - carefully. We do not want to beach here as they did." Eärwen felt her heartbeat pick up. "And tell the crew to ready our gear. We should not waste time."

Elcánë withdrew, and Anairë turned to her again. "Are you certain this is wise? It is beautiful - but so different here, and I know you are now certain that what you saw in your dreams were these Isles, but… I do not like it. If the ship you are seeking is here, there is no saying what we will be finding."

"Them and their crew, I hope."

Anairë's face cracked into a brief smile, but she grew serious again too swiftly for Eärwen's taste. "And what of the apparitions you spoke of, dear heart? Hands like those of ghosts that pulled the ship apart…"

"You do not have to believe me if that will make you feel better. You helped me find out that I had seen this place - if I had gone around speaking with the fishers and travellers about my dreams, they would have thought their Queen going mad, and perhaps with reason, rather than indulging your... creative excuses. But what I mean to say - you have done your due, and more than that in coming with me, you do not need to do more than that and worry over me as well."

"I -" Anairë sighed. "That is not much of an answer, and I will not stop worrying until we are home again, and these people we are seeking in safety, so you can dream in peace. I do not want you to come to harm."

Anairë leant in close and kissed her, long and sweet and gentle, until Eärwen sighed and pulled away before the rising warmth in her became too much to resist. "Soon," she murmured against Anairë's lips. "Soon, all of it, and not merely the dreaming in peace. Remember this while we go."

* * *

Anairë crouched at the boat's prow while Eärwen and Elcánë rowed ashore. The sea should be rippling under the boat, but even so the oars, dipping into what felt and seemed like water, made no sound, gave no wave or splash, so that she was surprised to find them crossing the distance at all. She had wondered whether to take anyone else, but even so it seemed that her niece, being a healer, was the best choice. She could think of nothing that any of the remaining crew might help them with, and not even Anairë's consummate sword-fighting skills would be of aid against creatures of mist - but even so, she felt safer with her wife with her, and Anairë's sword strapped to her hip, however little good it might do. If they came to harm, at least they would remain together.

As they approached the beach, the looming shape that the lookout had seen and prompted them to examine, solidified into a ship with more and more features swimming out of the mist - and at last the swan-prow out of Eärwen's dream. Eärwen watched the colour drain from Anairë's face, nodding. "It is as I saw - only… look." She pointed to a large hole in the boat's hull where the wood had withered away, and tugged at the rope hanging from the harness she wore. "It seems we will not have to climb aboard, at least; it will be easier to enter through that breach."

They lit torches, and once ashore, on the same screeching gravel that Eärwen remembered from her dream, she bent down to examine it more closely. In between the rocks lay all manner of debris: Flakes of wood, pieces of metal, twists of ropes that were withering away, fragments of bones - and the beach stretched beyond the edge of her sight in the mist, enough for ships and their crews, hundreds of them perhaps. She swallowed around her fear, casting around for the rowboat, fearing suddenly that it hard been broken apart already, that Elcánë herself would be gone, but it lay with Elcánë holding her own torch aloft, cedar wood bound with sage and asëa aranion that smoked and sputtered and threw a wide circle of light around her, casting her terrified face into stark light and shadow.

Around the edges of the ring of light crowded the mist, with its specks of light like myriad eyes, hands stretching toward her grasping at empy air like supplicants, and with cold dread settling like a stone in her stomach, she prayed they would be swift enough before the torches burned out. Eärwen stared at her feet as she walked, to try and not see the ones that must be around her and Anairë. Her wife's fingers clawed around her hand tightly, and the thought of her brave Anairë being so terrified quickened Eärwen's steps toward the ship.

Inside, they found darkness and dank, damp air. She and Anairë had entered the ship's hold, littered with cargo that lay strewn apart as though the ship had been shaken by a great wave. Perhaps it had, perhaps they had passed through a storm on the bent seas that had cast them onto the Straight Road off a safe course and onto this shore, perhaps into a lingering shred of the twilight of sleep that had given the isles their name when they still fenced Aman from the outside world.

And it was quiet.

The mist - and the ghosts in it that had Eärwen wondering if they might be the unlucky mortal sailors who had sought a way into the Blessed Realm against better wisdom, trapped ages ago - seemed not to be entering the ship after them. Caught in between when the world shifted they must have grown wrathful and resentful of the living, and she was relieved they were not, for the moment, following, desirous of the life of the Eldar, but afraid to claim it. The flickering of their torches painted movement into every corner, and they both hurried onward.

As they moved up the stairs into the upper deck, Anairë's fingers opened on the torch that she held, and it rolled, sputtering, back down, while Anairë herself only barely caught her balance on the wall, her face drowsy in ways that Eärwen knew from early mornings when she was unwilling to rise - then endearing, even comical, but now terrible.

Eärwen picked up the torch, grabbed Anairë's arm, and pulled her along. "Please, stay awake. Anairë..."

She pulled her through a door and stopped short. They had found the cabin, a row of beds along the wall - and in them, sleepers - a skeleton crew and a few passengers. She could not tell which of them were the two she had been sent to find, but she had no intention of leaving behind any of them. The ghosts had let them sleep in peace so far, and perhaps their sleep - the magic of it that kept them living, such a semblance of life that sleep might be - had deceived the dead, dissuaded them from taking what they longed for.

Her sight narrowed when Eärwen yawned, swaying on her feet.

"No," she murmured. "No." It was a token resistance at best, she knew she would soon be joining them, but even so she grasped the hand of the woman closest to her and pulled her from the bed. She fell to the ground with a hollow sound upon the wood, and Eärwen found herself glad that the dark-haired woman was lithe and slender, her freckled face quiet and untroubled, and gave no resistance, unsettling as her doll-like lack of resistance was. Over Anairë's sleepy protest they lifted her together and moved outside the way they had come, until she was safely in the rowboat. Out on the beach, the air was clearer and colder than in the ship - not by much, but enough to bring her to awareness, enough to press Anairë down onto one of the benches and tell her to wait and hold her torch aloft.

"Guard her. And do not sleep. Do not sleep, my love." Eärwen took her face in both hands and kissed her briefly, a dry touch of lips before, followed by Elcánë, she went hurrying inside the ship again to bring out the next of the missing, and the next, until Eärwen stumbled over her own feet and Anairë, then more awake, sat her down in turn to go with Elcánë.

The smoke from her torch rose to tickle her nose. Already the torch itself was burning low, she noticed, more than halfway down, and they had not finished bringing the crew outside. What should happen if they failed - what should happen if the torch guttered out she did not want to think, shaking her head and willing deep breaths toward wakefulness until it was time to let Elcánë rest, herself with eyes nearly drooping closed while Eärwen sped into the ship with Anairë at her heels for the final few times.

"We have them!" she heard Anairë cry breathlessly after they had brought two more people outside. Elcánë's torch was nearly down to its wooden stave, a ring of glowing embers, and the first of the wraiths were growing bolder, coming far closer, reaching even as Eärwen and Anairë pushed the boat offshore, once more screeching over the gravel. It looked almost comical, the rowboat scattered with the sleeping crew, and it sat heavy and low in the water, making it difficult to move forward. Anairë slept sitting up, and her hand had dipped into the water, and strangely the torch kept burning through it, casting its light into the bottomless depth until her fingers opened and it fell away, a pinpoint of light growing smaller and smaller until it was gone, much as Eärwen had felt in her first dream.

Then they reached the ship, a rope ladder was cast down for them, and hands pulled them aboard. Sleep claimed her at last.

* * *

The mist cleared, and she heard familiar laughter before a tall, white-robed figure stepped into view, glowing with the same soft, golden light that suffused the trees all about. Hidden birds were singing in the boughs, and veiled but nearby was the bright burble of a swift river.

"Mother." There was an undeniable smile in that word, and Eärwen was pulled into an embrace, her daughter's strong arms around her. "It is good to see you."

"And you, Nerwen." Eärwen felt a smile in return coming on, tilting her head back until she could look her in the face. "Have you grown taller yet?"

More laughter. "I do not think so - but it has been long, and who can say for certain? I meant to welcome you to my land - or, at least, what semblance of it I have made to show you through my mirror for some restful sleep, while you are close enough that we may talk, although I expect this to fade once you return to Aman. It is fenced against me still, there is some test for me still to pass before I may come home, and I do not know when that test shall come… but I could no longer sense Nimrodel and Mithrellas long before their due arrival, nor knew of their safety, and they are both dear to me, as they are to the land itself, part of it as they were. It took the most out of the crafts that I know to find them and reach you at all."

"You grew powerful indeed," Eärwen said, sitting in the grass under one of the silver-barked trees, and gathered up a golden leaf. "But I can see that you miss home still - even growing malinorni here. The one in our gardens also still stands; it is waiting for you.

"Perhaps I shall return soon," Nerwen answered, joining her in the grass. "As I told you, there are fights yet to be fought, and a test to be passed, and who says that I alone out of the House of Finwë who has seen Aman with her own eyes and still dwells here shall live through them?"

"I say it, although I have no foresight," Eärwen answered. "One of my children at least shall live. Perhaps this deed with the Missing shall soften the hearts of the Valar toward you."

"Perhaps. And they must surely listen when you speak to them about the Straight Road, and the Mortal Men that stray onto it by accident, trapping themselves in the calm unto their deaths - and that the same ill fate befalls elven ships at times, with no deeds to blame them for that earned them the fate of sleeping until the world's end, and for them not even dead to release them in such a place between places. But you have done enough - the release of others is not your task; I will not ask you to do it again now that there is proof that something must be done, and the people you rescued can plead their own case once they awake."

Eärwen smiled. "Not powerful only - cunning, also, but you never had one reason only for your deeds."

"Indeed not, but I think it is best for you to wake now. My hold on this dream is already fading. Farewell, Mother, and do not forget me."

The mist thickened slowly, and the colours bled away into pure white. Her daughter squeezed her hand before the last of her, the starlike gold of her hair, faded from view as well, and Eärwen blinked her eyes open to meet Anairë's relieved, beloved face.

"We are about to reach Alqualondë, dear heart," she said, smiling softly. "Good morning."