Chapter Text
Minas Tirith, 120 Fo.A.
Banners in the white city. Bells ring, seven peals for the stars on the crown, seven again. But what she’s wearing is all wrong—grey’s no color for a bride. Where is her gown, where are her combs? She’ll have to go back upstairs.
“Ammë, dear—this way.”
The queen squints at the hand that steers her shoulder. Here a woman’s face resolves—amber eyes, dark hair touched with grey—and a name sifts up, the name that Arwen gave her long ago, capitulating to sentimental and political import. Silmariën. Firstborn, mother of the faithful, her daughter who guides her to the banister, taking her by the arm as they descend.
“The King is with Prince Barahir in the stateroom—we’re to make our hellos before the ceremony. Tindë is off reassuring the rest of court, and Tyelpë, well.” Silmariën sighs conspiratorially. “She did ask to be put in charge of the flowers…”
There is some joke here. Arwen must be in on it.
“Your husband is dead,” declares the boy at the bottom of the stairway.
Ah, yes. Arwen glowers. “I know that.”
Memory returns to her. Two mornings ago she had woken beside the body in the tomb, in the bed prepared for them at the end of the procession down Rath Dínen. The girls strewing petals, the grave Gondorian peerage all assembled. How like a wedding-night it all was. She might be forgiven her confusion.
The strange boy slips into step beside her. “It happened the same for me, you know. Time was running out, and so I started taking fistfuls at random, spiraled backward. Just couldn’t let it go.”
He shrugs at her, self-admonishing, an obnoxious twinkle in his eye. Arwen doesn’t like the look of him, not at all, turns to her daughter for reassurance. But now Silmariën is nodding at the ladies-in-waiting who line the corridor, with their murmurs of Princess, of Queen Mother.
Arwen tugs her child’s sleeve, as her own garments had once been tugged. “Who’s he?”
Silmariën tilts back to her, questioning. “Who’s who, Ammë?”
But the boy Arwen saw is gone, not a trace of him, only the shrouded women watching as they pass.
###
Aragorn had really felt like a trick. The first man to make sense, the person in whose eyes she scried her future, and course he was Elrond’s fosterling, her distant and symbolic cousin, in many practical senses her sibling, although she never set eyes on him until that day beside the Bruinen, in the birch grove.
Arwen was abroad often in those years. She had been dwelling in the south, writing her book on the people of Caranthir, descendants of peredhil who had never been given a choice. When she’d learned that Elrond had another young heir of Isildur in his charge she was glad of it—playing foster-father always kept her mother’s spirits up.
It was that name that made her nervous. Estel.
Foresight is a curious organ, like a feather on the spine, an unnamable taste on the tongue. Arwen supposed that for long-years she had been restless, sensing the rhythm of elvish life would not hold her half-elven nature indefinitely.
And then: Tinúviel!
When he called her that she’d laughed at him, for who would say such a thing in Imladris, save a drunkard, a guest soon to outstay his welcome? That afternoon she had known two thousand seven hundred and ten years, he just twenty, gangly, guileless, popping out ridiculously from behind a tree.
Still something struck Arwen between her ribs.
Her name is not mine, though maybe my doom will be not unlike hers.
What had gotten into her? It had always been the promise of his name—the child’s name he answered to, not the names he’d learned the day before, first of many more to come. It would be a long time before he grew into any of them. And yet seeing his face for the first time, there in the river-light, and his expression so sweet and reckless, belied by the height and breadth of him, the queer and tender thing he was beneath the warrior he would become—from that moment, Arwen had known.
She’d joked that night to Elrond, I think he wants to marry me. And yet it was not a joke, it was her first true admission, a way of finally telling him what had felt impossible to utter.
That there was hope for the fate of Middle-earth, that it was entwined with her mortality. Yes. Her choice.
Her mother wept then, and Arwen with him. What else was new? How he loved her, and how she loved him, and how entangling was their love. Elrond’s mind was the place she knew best in the world, for centuries her sanctuary, font of the knowledge she craved endlessly. Why, Emig? And he would always answer, show her the book or diagram or pickled specimen, the spell or the formula, and when it wasn’t so demonstrable he would tell her the theorem, the story, the speculation. The child’s version, at first, and as she grew older the telling grew longer, until it seemed he told her everything.
It had been a long time before Arwen saw clearly how Elrond treated her like a twin, for lack of his own. For envy, she thought in more fractious moments, of the twain who were his firstborn children.
It was only after her father sailed that things turned truly bitter between them. When Celebhîr had been gone a century a crack had come in Arwen’s long forbearance; she’d fled from Imladris in sudden rage, so steeped in Elrond’s grief she’d lost sight of her own. It was a different thing. Elrond mourned for fear he would never see his husband again, that his duty to Middle-earth would bind him to this side of the Sea through unnumbered years of chaos—to his own corruption or else a death he could not comprehend. Would Mandos truly honor immortality granted by Manwë?
And yet what Arwen mourned was certainty. She knew now that when she’d parted from her father at Mithlond, it had been for the last time.
So she came to admit to herself, collecting her wits in Lothlórien: that Celebhîr had known it too.
For she would have sailed with him—she wanted to. Her father had refused her. He had pressed the green stone into her hand, and in a terrible flash Arwen had looked into its depths and seen him healed, and the world along with him. Healed imperfectly, at perilous cost, and yet healed nonetheless.
And so it was, three centuries later, that Arwen sensed the name she would bestow upon this latest heir of Isildur. From that moment in the woods when he’d met her eyes with such reckless hope, she remembered the Elessar.
But the time was not ripe. Arwen put Aragorn out of her mind. She knew she was not yet truly a woman to him, but only an idea. She would let Arwen Undómiel become the distant star he strove toward.
For how else would it be seemly? When the boy Estel first came upon her he was just that—on the cusp of childhood. How many debates had there been with Elladan and Elrohir regarding rules of engagement when it came to the Secondborn? Citations of Beleg Strongbow, and then of course their own great-great-grandmother—Lúthien had certainly appreciated a furred chest, a body that earned its strength and shapeliness through toil.
Yet it was a matter of timing, of the man coming into his own in this perilous age, for the times were growing strange indeed. As the shadow lengthened Elrond tightened the glamours that webbed Imladris, and when they slipped back through the borders Elrohir and Elladan plied their sister with anecdotes, first or secondhand, of the young chieftain of the Dúnedain, the quiet valor of his watch over Eriador and his deeds in the service of Rohan and of Gondor.
In the end it was her grandmother who drew the strands together—Galadriel, who loves a setup, who had done the very same for Arwen’s parents, adjusted more or less to Celebhîr having been a son and not a daughter. (Elrond, as it happened, had been equally fitting as husband and wife.)
Perhaps Arwen’s siblings were in on the scheme, for they had insisted on escorting her to Lórien that season. And yet it was the Lady of the Golden Wood who had prettied up the wild ranger, all but posing him in the glades of Caras Galadhon for her granddaughter to stumble upon as if he were some newly commissioned piece of statuary. A hale and noble warrior now, Aragorn had seemed more abashed that night than he did as a youth of twenty, clean-shaven and bewildered in his gems and silks.
Somehow, over that summer, Arwen had gotten him to loosen up. She told him she liked the beard, never mind the ban on facial hair her grandmother imposed upon her people (most notably her husband). Aragorn stopped gawking at her and began asking thoughtful questions about her scholarship. They went fishing on the Anduin, got drunk in a talan and kissed laughingly like Arwen once had with not a few of Galadriel’s handmaidens, girlfriends of a younger age.
She began to feel relief that her heart’s grave portent was being fulfilled in such ordinary things. Still there was a gravity to the season, weight to their words and glances, and it drew them at last on the eve of midsummer to Cerin Amroth, a hill named for a king doomed by love.
“Did you know him?” Aragorn asked, with his head held in her lap.
Arwen did not wish to elaborate on the siege of Imladris by Angmar, those fearful years when Amroth of Lórien and his forces had come to the valley’s aid. She remembered the Silvan king as a fierce commander, and yet his tragic end had always seemed a bit ignominious, waiting and waiting for his Nimrodel until the waters took him.
“A little,” said Arwen. “Though when I was young, I thought Amroth was a name of my father’s.”
At this Aragorn looked puzzled. Arwen bent to kiss his brow.
“It was one of Atya’s peculiar epessi for him. ‘Lord Amroth.’”
“How morbid.”
“I suppose he used it somewhat less after the real Amroth was dead. But it was because Ada used to call himself that in Ost-in-Edhil. That’s who Elrond thought he was, the night they first kissed. Which was eleven hundred years before their second kiss, mind you.”
“Went badly?”
Arwen laid down to nestle against his shoulder. “Oh, that’s a long, impossibly tedious story.”
Beside her Aragorn went still. “What’s he like?” he asked. “Your father. Your mother rarely speaks of him.”
He was so careful with his words. To talk of Elrond as mother, when he was also Atya—still a new concept to him, and yet a helpful one, for it evaded the awkward fact of Aragorn’s foster-father, made them somehow seem two distinct parents; to use the present tense in reference to Celebhîr, who dwelt in in the west, and yet as much in the past as his own father Arathorn, long dead. There was an intimacy to Aragorn’s understanding of Arwen’s world that brought her solace and unease at once, her not-quite-brother, the male and mortal part of her that had been missing. And yet there were so many things that he could never know.
“My father.” Arwen found she was faltering, perhaps as much as Elrond did. “Well, he’s…big and tall and very funny—and exceedingly contrary when he wants to be, a bit mean, even, except never to me—and he’s sort of quietly brilliant about all manner of things, an artist, and a keen tactician, probably the best cook in the world…”
Now she was babbling, trying to conjure a time before the Redhorn, jutting up against the memories of the last days; what had remained that was still recognizably Celebhîr.
“He’s incredibly strong.” She laughed at herself, how little-girlish she sounded, as tears broke down her cheeks. “And patient, Gods, beyond patient—he had to be, marrying my mother—”
Elrond was patient too, in his own way. From Sirion onward he had watched the world end and change and end again. This was his strength, the endurance that he amplified in Vilya to safeguard their valley and the lands beyond. And yet Celebhîr had endured it all with him, welcomed change, won it for himself. Believed in what he could become, and what his children might.
“Is he waiting for you?” asked Aragorn. “In Aman.”
When Arwen looked at him she remembered the stone in her father’s hand: the gift she was given, the price she had paid already.
“No.” She shook her head. “He isn’t.”
She embraced Aragorn then, and though far from their first this was the kiss of troth-plighting, doomed and sweet. Arwen had never asked for permission; she had been granted it nonetheless. Her beloved was kissing her back.
###
At the funeral people come to her with solemn words and sprigs of athelas before they pass on to her children. Seating arrangements are by birth order, at the king’s insistence. Stately Silmariën is at Arwen’s left hand, the first daughter of the realm and still best-beloved by her people, as her brother well knows. Beside her, dark-browed Tindómerillë and silver-braided Tyelperína—with their sister presiding ten years above them they have been oil-and-water adversaries from the womb. And yet they are practiced enough at performing civility, the unidentical twins.
(Indeed for all that they represent a reunited kindred, no particular likeness prevails strongly among the four scions of House Telcontar. How grateful the queen has always been, that her children’s faces are their own—that their minds are unbound by that fey and shimmering thread that danced once under the leaves of Doriath. They are ordinary—they are spared.)
Last on the dais, by his own design, is Eldarion. Arwen watches as her son looms tall and fretful, hesitant to settle in his throne, springing up from it to greet each functionary and guildsman. He returns every consolation they ply him with, the new ruler mourning with his nation. A sensitive child, Eldarion, the baby attuned to the vicissitudes of older sisters—a gentle man, relieved, not resentful, to have come of age long after his father’s wars had ended.
“A king for a time of peace.” The ghost-boy is back, squatting strangely beside the throne of the queen, as if watching on the sidelines of an archery tournament. “Like my Nólimon, though this one’ll actually have the chance to rule.”
“Well, my husband picked a decent age to die.” Arwen speaks under her breath. “Unlike you.”
The boy raises a delighted brow. “Oh, you are far crueler than my brother!” He swats at her hand, mock-wounded; he has acquired a silk fan, a mourner’s memento, with which to cool his spectral body. “You must have tortured him.”
At this Arwen chuckles in the face of the treasury official bowing before her. The woman looks startled, and turns with evident relief to Silmariën.
(What had been truly cruel was convincing the people of Gondor they were obtaining a benevolent, Elvish queen, and then letting them watch helplessly as she transmogrified into a mad, mortal crone.)
“It was him I stayed alive for, you know.” Hanging off the arm of her throne, the boy beats the fan in a slow drumbeat. “I thought I knew what it meant, mortality. But at the end I wasn’t sure how he’d manage when I was gone.”
The form in which he appears to her is eighteen or nineteen years of the sun, Arwen guesses, the end of quick-passing peredhil adolescence. Patchily bearded, hair greasy and chopped to just below the ears by an inartful hand. The age they were when they were everything to one another—for Elwing was lost to the sky, and Maglor to the oath—and yet so soon to be sundered, by war and by choice.
“So you lied to him,” she says, though Elrond never put it that way. “The last time he came to see you, you said you’d live another hundred years. You let him sail home to Lindon, and then you died.”
The boy rises and takes Arwen’s hand. “I assure you,” he says, with a kiss to her fingertips. “I was lying to myself just as much.”
He flicks his fan shut, and slips away again, but not before he gives a leading glance across the throne chamber, towards two hooded travelers standing at the threshold.
###
Gwennig.
Elladan and Elrohir circling her like hawks. When has it ever not been so?
Even once Arwen grew old enough to wander widely in Middle-earth, in the service of research or caprice, they had their sources, men and dwarves and elves alike who would gladly track the movements of the Lady of Imladris.
It was not the twins’ fault they were like this; the mandate came from their mother and father, Elrond who had taken centuries to concede Arwen was no longer an infant holding to the hem of his skirts, Celebhîr who had been on bedrest for a year after her birth, and joked, in his good-natured but disconcerting manner, of the great cost his daughter had come at. Strong-spirited, they had called her even as a small girl, and it was not long before Arwen learned her history, what had become of Míriel Serindë and of Fëanáro. As a child you could be at once gift and burden, and even if you strove only for the former, the latter was inherent.
You could not be good all the time.
You were the Evenstar of your people with gems and pearls laced in your hair at the feast of midsummer, and the next day the derelict who ran off into the woods on your brother’s horse, furious your father and Glorfindel would not yet let you train with the border guard. You sought to prove you could survive on your own—and you could. You were on the run like Lúthien swinging from her braid-rope, eating snails and sleeping on a tree-bough like your grandfather when he was a boy. You were twenty years old, fearless, a vaster, stranger entity than the body that contained you—the bounds of which might shimmer and dissolve, the deeper you went into the wild. Until for an exquisite moment it seemed you were high up in the trees, singing with the birds who betrayed you, flying off to tell your mother—who sent your siblings to drag you back home, diminished, by the points of your ears.
Always the little sister.
And yet that vigilance had been misplaced. When evil came it was not Arwen who was taken.
Elrohir and Elladan do not wish to draw attention to themselves, and are equally practiced at evading it in the wild as in the halls of court. She does not find them until after the reception has ended, when her younger daughters guide her back to her chambers, misty-eyed and gossiping, sniping at one another over Arwen’s stooped head.
When had she shrunken thus? She can remember carrying one girl on each hip.
Yet the women they have grown into are silenced by the sight of the older twins, who rise when the queen and her daughters enter, tall and shadowed, eclipsing the midday light through the window-slats.
“Uncles!” cries Tyelperína, at once happy and a little frightened. So it has been since she was a small child, confronted with the knowledge of such twainship, holding it up to her own. “We did not suppose—oh, how good it is to see you, it has been too many seasons—”
“My lords.” Tindómerillë cuts her sister off, and comes forth more formally, lifting the veil from her face. “We sent word at the hour of Rath Dínen.”
Elladan nods. “We rode swiftly.”
“And the winds were speaking of it,” Elrohir follows, “carrying the bells and dirges, and the birds too wove the sorrowful tidings in their song. Much sorrow we bear, sister, for the passing of our brother Estel, Elessar Telcontar.”
These are eloquent condolences, and yet spoken like a stranger’s, stiff as any of the mourners who had come forth in the throne room.
Arwen looks between the four of them, two sets of two. She lifts her own veil.
“Gwanûn.”
A greeting, a dismissal. The word sends Tindë and Tyelpë into brief and murmuring embrace with their kinsmen. Her daughters recede from the room, and Arwen shuffles toward the daybed, where her lady’s maid has set a jug of watered wine upon the little table.
“Surely you are thirsty after your travels.”
In an instant Elladan’s hand is at her back, steadying her as she sits, and Elrohir is filling her cup. Begrudgingly, Arwen permits the cosseting. She lets herself feel at last the import of her siblings’ distant bearing, their awkward silence.
A man they loved has passed beyond the world. Soon he will pull their sister with him. They are perfectly terrified.
Arwen takes the cup, cuts her eyes from twin to twin, as mind to mind she tells them: stop looking at me like I’m already dead.
Elladan brushes the thought aside, settling beside her to speak very gravely: “We bear grief from Daerada as well.”
Her brother unfolds his palm, revealing a figure of a nightingale whittled from white pine.
Arwen takes the token, feeling the fine detail of the feathers. She has not expected Celeborn in Minas Tirith for many decades. Last she saw him was at Nenuial, the summer-palace some fifty years ago, where everywhere the old Sinda glanced he looked like he’d seen a ghost. Her grandfather had been understanding of her choice; he bore great respect for Aragorn, and had been kindly to his great-grandchildren when they were young. Yet Arwen knows all of this was more for love of her and Middle-earth than for the age of Men.
“He would see you.” Elrohir squeezes in on the other side. “If you wish it, we will take you to him—home to Imladris, where you might rest.”
This last word is spoken carefully, a fine euphemism. Yet Elladan’s gaze sharpens.
“Then you would tear the Queen from her family?”
Arwen scries the memory, fresh and festering in her siblings’ thought, tedious as her girl-twins’ spats. For hours as they rode southward they have been arguing—ever of two minds, like a dog chasing its tail, one taking up the other’s position as soon as they set it down.
Finally Elrohir bows their head. “No,” they concede. “Of course not. We’ll stay here in Minas Tirith, gwennig—we’ll be with you.”
They say no more than this. Once more it goes unspoken, the inevitable fact of her death, as Elrohir brushes a braid back from Arwen’s face, and Elladan strokes her shoulder. If they let go, they fear she will shrivel up into a corpse, collapse to dust beneath their withdrawn fingertips.
In this rather crowded silence Arwen looks across the room. She is not surprised to see the boy who has been trailing her all afternoon. Now he lingers in the doorway—he has been watching them, a pitying expression on his pimpled face.
She scowls into the middle distance: “Oh, leave me in peace!”
The message is not meant for her siblings. They heed it nonetheless, rising with murmurs that they ought perhaps to go and see the king, and a tender kiss each to the crags of their sister’s cheeks.
###
The queen sleeps then, alone in her marriage bed. She does not bother to remove her grey shrouds nor unweave her crown of braids. The linens have all been changed; still she breathes Aragorn’s scent, avoids the great divot he left in the mattress.
(It had been here her husband had turned to her, two sunrises past: here he told her he’d slept his last night among the living.)
At last Arwen drifts off and dreams of nothing, and perhaps this is the end, the great silence that comes of slipping from the world.
Cruelly, it seems, she wakes again. The light is low, the candles lit, and Silmariën stands at her mother’s bedside, scolding.
“You’ll be all tangled.”
She coaxes Arwen from the blankets and her overclothes, finds her nightgown, sits her down at the vanity, and begins the task of pulling out her hairpins. The set was a wedding gift from Galadriel, adorned with sprays of diamonds in the shape of niphredil-blossoms. Reverently, Silmariën places each pin back in the jewel-box, then combs out the plait it tethered.
It is through such objects that Arwen’s children know their kin over the sea, remnants and fragments. Silmariën hums as she works, and the tune is one that Arwen surely taught her, passed along absent-minded in an hour such as this, when her daughter was small and their places were reversed.
“What song is that?” asks Arwen, though she has known it all her life.
A strange laugh comes forth, not her daughter’s. “You know, I’ve never been quite certain.”
Something too is strange about Silmariën’s reflection.
From a child, the princess’s look has favored her father’s side, Dúnedain-dark with Gilraen’s golden eyes. Yet the queen has always perceived another haunting in her daughter’s face, her worried brow or pursing lip. The specter now comes forth in full, her daughter’s features de-aged and distilled.
In the mirror Arwen beholds the fairest elf-maid she has ever known, save he is neither elf nor maiden: Elrond, with his hands laced in her hair.
“I think we came to Amon Ereb with it. We sang to one another when we were frightened.”
Her mother smiles, saying this terribly sad thing. He is finger-combing her curls, oil-damp, shiny and dark, untouched by silver. It is Arwen’s wedding day again. Of course it will be Elrohir who weaves the final braids, by far the family’s best stylist—and yet it is Elrond who awoke earlier than anyone that morning, knowing Arwen had scarcely slept, Elrond who set out her garments and gems. The dizzy weeks after the Ring’s destruction he had slipped even more easily than usual from joy to sorrow, but in those hours his joy prevailed, as he bustled about, singing with lightless Vilya plain upon his finger, reduced to mere adornment.
“A song of Sirion, then,” says Arwen, one hundred and twenty-one years ago.
Elrond takes up a whalebone brush. “It must have been. If there were words in my mother’s tongue, they are lost to me.”
This, she knows, is the first grief of his life, perhaps still the greatest. Still in this moment he is so happy, humming on as he brushes her hair.
Though the mirror preserves Elrond’s image perfectly Arwen has only the memory of his mind, an impression fading and failing with each year since they parted. And yet she knows what mother meant to him was absence—and yet also a desire, a self-taught discipline, a blessing unlooked-for.
If some cruel and childish part of him hated Elwing, then far more of him honored her. He had worn her marriage-braids on his wedding day, and now Arwen would wear them on hers.
Had worn them. Her mother drifts away, her hair goes grey again. Silmariën smooths back the wiry strands from Arwen’s brow.
“Better, isn’t that.”
Arwen turns from the mirror. Now she lets Silmariën cup her cheek, as she held her daughter before she was even named, the frenzied minutes after birth when the midwives were rejoicing. For they proclaimed the prince of the realm, a firstborn son—until the queen had cried silence, knowing the whirling little mind so lately contained within her own was growing every moment, shifting and branching, too hungry for the world to yet hold any definition.
This was not the hunger of Melian, which sought to bind and replicate. It was a human thing, more kindred to the will of the Maia-queen’s daughter that first broke the bonds of immortality.
Children will tell you who they are, if you only pay attention.
Arwen wants to put it all to words, how she had tried her best, and given freely the understanding that she herself had not always been granted. Yet she too has stumbled. She had known Silmariën was a girl-child, and made sure she had the songs she needed to survive. And she had given her daughter a queenly name, in recompense to the first Silmariën, Lady of Andúnie, the queen dispossessed. Now her namesake would take the throne.
Amid the symbolism Arwen failed to see that her daughter found a different import in her naming. She did not wish to be her father’s heir. At age sixteen she’d abdicated, in relief, to her infant brother.
I am not like you in all things, you know. A teasing smile, a kiss to the baby’s forehead. I have little desire for power.
How that had pierced Arwen’s heart, with truth and unbidden cruelty.
So long ago; so many failings since. The time the twins went climbing in the flower-boxes and fell straight out the window. Gods!
Aragorn made her better, balanced her shortcomings with his own. But they had so little time, in the end.
She wants to tell this to her daughter mind-to-mind, far easier than speech, to ask forgiveness. If Silmariën sees her effort, she can only dimly perceive its import; ósanwë is not the realm of mortals.
“I am tired,” Arwen says, for it is all she has the strength for.
“I know that, Ammë.” Silmariën holds her, stroking her back like a babe’s. “I know.”
###
Weeks pass; winter comes. Arwen does not die.
A watch is set, it seems, to catch her in the act. In Imladris, once, she knew places she could go where she would not see another for days on end. Now she has rarely been alone in twelve decades—always there have been handmaids, nurses, seneschals, guards, tutors, advisors, children, then grandchildren.
Arwen did not always mind it, for long-years of her life have been given over to loneliness. Yet to endure this constant vigil in her dayroom or at her bedside—it grieves her, irks her, to be made into a spectacle.
Perhaps it is that far too few faces are familiar. She has known so many in Minas Tirith, and most of them are dead. Arwen longs for lost friends, for Elanor Gardner creased and grey, still laughing by the waterside at Nenuial, for Éowyn of Rohan and Ithilien riding with her in Emyn Arnen. Women she had grown up with, for grown though she was when she became the queen of Gondor it had been the slow half-conscious growth of centuries. She’d had to learn, and quickly, what was meant by mortal growth, the flame burning brief and bright.
And there are elves Arwen thinks of too, long passed westward—or else into the woods, and the starry nights, reclaiming what they can of Cuiviénen. Or else long dead; perhaps reimbodied, perhaps disembodied, wandering spirits refusing the summons.
“What is your choice?” she asks Elrohir and Elladan.
They will not answer her. It is their silence that drives her mad, their equivocation; even in their minds there is no answer.
Cowards, Arwen thinks.
And then regrets the thought, for her siblings know her heart, and heed it. Too noble they are, too understanding of her cruelty.
“Give them time,” says the boy at the foot of her bed, sitting in a sliver of moonlight.
“Were you so patient?” asks Arwen of the dark.
There is a deep silence, filled by the cold wind that wails outside the tower window.
Arwen shakes her head against the pillow. “I am leaving soon,” she says to him, or to herself as silence stretches on. “I will go where I can be alone.”
###
She is saying it now to everyone, that she will soon take her leave.
“That is the gift that is granted you.” Eldarion braids his hand to hers, emerald-eyed snakes newly glinting on his thumb. “You will walk beyond the circles of the world and be with Atya.”
How sentimental is her son the king, how pious! And yet it was Arwen who taught him thus, by the choice she made to become his mother.
“We shall walk with you, when it is our time.” Tyelperína follows her brother, bends to kiss her mother’s brow with tears shimmering in her grey-green eyes. “We will be together again, by the grace of the One.”
Tindómerillë is the skeptic of the family, tends toward less figurative imaginings of the afterlife. Yet she holds her tongue for once, putting aside her pince-nez to whisper her own belief in Arwen’s ear.
“You will be free, Ammë.”
Silmariën says little, eyes set on her needlework. The steadiest of them, and yet she mourns most deeply—is ballasted by mourning. And Arwen knows that ballast for her own, for she too was once a daughter taught to bear it, that mingled strength and sorrow drawn deeply from the well of Arda marred.
###
Should this not be the end for Arwen Undómiel, held in the arms of her family?
It is not so. Death she chose, and yet in dying it seems that immortality returns with vengeance.
Nigh three thousand years she lived encased in amber. The light of Imladris, elvish time’s unyielding languor; too much of it all. And then had come an end to endless afternoon—a man walks into the birch-grove, and suddenly her days are numbered.
She has felt them falling ever since, bittersweetly, like leaves from her boughs.
Until these creeping hours. Life clings to Arwen’s bones, a fëa in revolt against its fate. Is she yet an elf? Or something closer to a wraith?
Repent, croaked Aragorn, holding to her in the tomb. Go to the havens.
Her beloved knew as well as her that this was folly. Aragorn had been at Arwen’s side when she told Frodo Baggins that her place on the ship was now his. To the Ring-bearer she’d wished to convey her awe, her gratitude that the improbable future she’d only glimpsed had been fulfilled by this hobbit’s hand. And yet that gem she’d given him was only a token.
Arwen wakes one midnight and knows at last the true gift: that she will make her final journey eastward when Frodo’s had been to the west.
She rises from bed, and seems to meet her full height, a strange vigor animating her. She’ll pack light, she thinks: only her riding-cloak over the nightgown. Only the boots that Elladan reshod for her last week.
There is hardly any moon, and yet she knows the boy is there by the door. Arwen strides past him to the wardrobe.
“I don’t need your reprimands.”
“You’ll have none.”
“Then why are you here?”
His eyes are barely perceptible to failing elvish sight, the dimmest of lanterns.
“I would guide you. The path you tread is seldom walked, Arwen Evenstar.”
“Mortal men are dying every hour, lost to the world. Such is the way of Arda.”
“Very few have chosen mortal death so willingly.”
A roar builds up in Arwen, all her spiteful mutters gathered.
“I told you. I want to be alone!”
Silence again. She fastens her cloak, and then she starts to sing.
Her voice is not what it once was. Still there is some glamour left to her, lulling the minds of the guards outside her bedchamber, the sentinels in the halls.
She’s always made an art of it, running away from home. Arwen has questioned the sentiment that she is Lúthien returned, for her deeds have been far lesser. And yet in this aspect she remembers their great semblance, as she makes herself a cloud of gloom, dark within the dark, gathering itself along the streets of Minas Tirith. Down through the gardens, the markets, the belly of the city half-asleep.
As the queen makes her silent and unseen descent her subjects pass by sparsely. Here a courtesan, a grocer and a lamplighter, the last soldiers traipsing from the taverns, young lovers parting furtively on stairways. Their breath hangs in the air, white streaks on winter’s cold—life, brief and warm and beautiful.
Seeing their faces, Arwen wonders if she might not rather haunt this place forever. She could slip between the stones, linger among her people as this newborn age of Men wears on and comes to truly know itself.
Yet that knowledge will not be the domain of elves, even an elf disavowed. Arwen’s feet carry her forth, on bootheels shaped by her brother’s careful hands—no, she cannot turn her thought to Elladan, nor Elrohir at rest beside him, her siblings who out of care for their dear sister’s dignity have left her out of their sights, trusting the palace guard.
When she was very young her father taught her how to shield her mind, for the world, he said, is a dangerous place. And yet it was not long before Arwen came to know what Celebhîr had truly meant, at least in part: the craft was most practically deployed against one’s family.
She cannot think of the twins, for they will follow her, and stay her, and Arwen will remain undying, trapped with them in indecision. Her son and daughters will be forever at their deathbed vigil.
She must spare them all; she must go.
Gloom gathers to the stables, a lulling haze. The half-asleep groom sitting watch does not perceive any disturbance.
Arwen’s mare flicks an ear, and huffs, but does not startle. Good girl.
It is a lucky thing no one is there to watch her floundering attempts to mount the horse. And yet the queen is persistent; in time her curses fade to chuckling. Imagine that, an old woman riding bareback upon the frozen field of Pelennor as day breaks upon the Ephel Dúath, the hem of fallen Mordor diminishing behind her as Arwen rides north.
###
After Aragorn left Lórien at summer’s end her grandmother came to her. Galadriel was pleased with the outcome of her ruse, had spent the season simpering whenever the betrothed couple crossed her sights, happy as a cat in the cream. Yet as the leaves turned their autumn gold her look was graver, and she posed Arwen a question.
“What is it that you see?”
Galadriel had coached and cajoled her granddaughter’s sight from childhood. She tutored Arwen in water-scrying, taught her how to see the future’s weft and guess which warp would shape its kinder outcomes. In the end the greatest lesson was the imprecision of the art, even for those most adept.
Now Arwen was tempted to answer very literally. This hour, through the talan’s open side, she saw only the dark maze of rhododendrons, above them the young mallorns Celebhîr had planted during his last residency in his mother’s lands.
She sighed into her wineglass. “A man,” she said. “A man I love.”
Galadriel slipped into the seat beside her. “And a kingdom you will rule.”
“Haruni!”
“What?” An undisturbed smile, serving herself. “You’ll be good at it.”
Arwen had been in a dark mood. It was true what she’d told Aragorn, ere they parted: when she looked at him her heart rejoiced, and she knew that valor had made him evil’s great enemy. She could see the great gladness that would someday extend beyond their two hearts to encompass all Middle-earth.
Yet now that her beloved was gone, so too was this clarity. She shook her head.
“There is no kingdom, and no king but he who rules in Mordor.”
Galadriel drank. “Do not let him circumscribe your ambition.”
Her grandmother had been at war with Sauron for thousands of years. Her brother fell before him; her son had left these shores when the wounds dealt by Mordor’s servants grew too much to bear. And yet a great weapon remained in Galadriel’s arsenal: that she could speak of the Dark Lord with the same condescension she used in tales of certain kinsmen, those bright-burning kings and princes who she had now so long outlasted.
The ambition she named was not one Arwen admitted easily to herself, nor quite understood. She fell silent a while, thinking of this. No, she was not Lúthien, who had broken from the fetters of royalty to claim her wild future; nor Idril Celebrindal who with love and wisdom had been wed to one whose time with her would be so brief, and with him led her people out of ruin. She was not Lady Galadriel, her grandmother beside her, who had burned for a realm to rule and found several of them, though never quite as queen; and she was not Elrond Peredhel, who would have been High King of the Noldor after Gil-galad’s fall had it at all been in his nature. She carried threads of all of them, and she was her father’s daughter, Celebhîr who in a flicker of his own foresight had given her the name she loved the most.
Not Undómiel, those lovely lilting syllables tethered to a twilit world, but Arwen, royal maiden.
“What did you see,” Arwen asked, “when you named my father?”
She did not mean to goad her grandmother. Galadriel was so rarely caught off guard. Yet for a moment her eyes widened, and Arwen wondered if she was tempted to speak it aloud: silver queen. That name had been a gift, a weapon, finally a relic—and yet in the end it had not been disavowed utterly. It was the part of himself that Celebhîr had given to his daughter.
At last Galadriel looked down, with a smile both arch and sad. “I suppose I saw his father,” she said. “And myself, my hope, my pride. Perhaps an ambition I once had for queendom—if you want to ask him about it.”
It comforted Arwen to hear her speak this present-tense, and with a tinge of muttered affront, as if Celebhîr might overhear her from the next room. As if he was not across the Sea.
“But unwittingly, I deem—though I will not take my Telpë’s credit for the name he gave you—perhaps I saw the turn toward you his life would take. Though not without pain, for him and for me. It is not a perfect art, the naming of a child.”
Galadriel, too, had been strangely named. Celebhîr had always relished the irony of Nerwen, the man-maiden who for so long had denied her maiden-child his manliness. Arwen knew his good humor had come at great cost. She was glad to know her grandmother in an age of milder temperament, more secure in herself, if also more sorrowful. If all came to pass as they hoped, Galadriel would be reunited with her son in Aman. She would never again think of him as someone she had lost.
Only Arwen would be lost to them, and they to her. Even in the best of fates her choice would be a bitter one. In any case the shadow still obscured it.
Now she dared to speak against that great uncertainty, with the hope she bore when she’d brought back the Elessar to Galadriel. Someday the green stone would be a bridegroom-gift; they both foresaw that much.
“Then I will be prepared when I have children.”
Her grandmother shook her head. “You too will falter,” she said, “although you are very wise. Yet I knew many who came before you, Arwen Undómiel.” Galadriel looked into her eyes, and Arwen felt the lurch of all it seemed she saw, those faces under starlight and Treelight and sunlight. “And I deem you are the better part of all of them.”
###
Such an inheritance she carries, a vaster import than can truly be borne by blood or bone. Gondor’s aged queen has suffered from vanity as much as anyone. Yet in some ways it has been such a relief to break down, to grow old. To release herself from history.
Although it now seems she risks repeating it, a woman walking in the woods.
The trees of Lórien were never this sparse in winter. Galadriel’s glamours, Nenya’s fluidity, had kept the leaves flush and golden even on the darkest days. Now a stark white sky through black branches glares over Arwen as she makes for Cerin Amroth. At the border she’d sung off her horse, bidding her back to Rohan where she was sired.
Arwen is alone now, as much as she can ever be.
What did Melian, in her longing, make her raiment of, when as a spirit she came rustling through the glades of Nan Elmoth? Did she shape herself from earth? Did she shoot up like a flower, night-blooming?
Perhaps, when she revealed herself to Elu, her allure was the forbidden fungi, skin supple as a mushroom-cap and hair dark as its gills.
Such beauty, springing out of death, the forest’s endless dying. And rebirth—a dance that began well ere the coming of the Children and will endure long after we are gone.
The hill is barren, bereft of elanor or niphredhil. Yet as Arwen lays her body down she is thinking of what will grow here. For the earth will dismantle her; it is her heart that makes this choice, to have its vessels rewoven in the Song’s great substance. So too with the love she bears, and that has tied her to the world—it will dissipate, perhaps to reach the hearts of those it knows yet living, perhaps to haunt this place where love became a chosen thing.
“Not a haunting.”
That voice again. In a bolt of irritation Arwen sits up, as she might have once when her siblings teased her, and feels her soul sigh forth into the air.
Elros is holding out his hand.
“You’re here,” says Arwen, though she looks back at her body on the hillside, eyes open as if in elvish sleep. “I thought I’d scared you off.”
“Ah.” He laughs, and seems far older than he was in Minas Tirith, a closer agemate. “Well, I too once had a daughter.”
Elrond was not with his brother when he died. And yet he had made sure to be with his niece Tindómiel in her final hours, on the terrace of her house in Andúnië. The last words the great lady spoke were in delighted wonder at a flock of gulls that skimmed the waves.
Arwen knows the memory well, for it had been among her mother’s happiest.
She wants, at last, to wail, to ask how she has done this to herself, to all who love her.
Then again, it will be easier for her children.
It is Elros who tells her so, from experience, a promise transcribed when Arwen reaches for him—in the half-familiar contours of his thought, the warm roughness of his palm.
Yet even in this moment of contact, mind and body both are losing meaning. What once was Arwen now passes through the sky’s swallowing brightness, traveling towards void’s embrace.
The music stops. The gift unfolds.
###
“It’s hard to imagine
How nothing at all
Could be so exciting
Could be this much fun”
—Talking Heads, “Heaven”