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If this were another story, it would be about loss. But this is a story of an Elf, and Elves do not grieve for Men. What is Man compared to a creature of infinity?
If you put the newborn child of a Man and the newborn of an Elf side by side in the same crib, the only way to tell them apart would be by the ears. Their paths in life branch only because, at the moment of first breath, the Human-to-be begins its unraveling towards death and the elf begins her unraveling towards oneness with the universe.
Arwen would be considered an exceedingly normal child by the standards of a Man. Her Ada reads her bedtime stories from ancient tomes of lore and tells her of the great wars that once wrenched Middle Earth in two. She learns the sword from battle-hardened men with porcelain faces who do not smile. When she falls and skins her knee she cries, like any girl of six, although she is a child of sixty.
She likes to watch the Human Men who visit her Ada’s court. They’re always moving; quick jerks of limbs and weapons that seem faster the older she grows. There is something fascinatingly alive about them, even as she sees the age lines etch themselves upon their faces and pull them a step closer to death.
“Why are the Men so quick? They’re like the horse fleas that jump about the stables,” she asks Ada at dinner one evening, watching the creatures finish plates of food in the space between his breaths.
“They follow the changing of days and we the shifting of the seasons,” he says, voice deep as the deepest Silvan river. “Their lives pass like clouds over the sun.”
“Then why must I study the wars of Men? It ought not matter.”
“When summer daylight is threatened by the great snows of winter, even the most eternal of creatures must wake and fight with the sun.” He takes another bite of thick bread and chews thoughtfully.
“I understand,” Arwen says, not understanding at all. Her Ada often speaks in riddles. She looks over at the Men. They gather around the fire now, smoking their pipes and humming their strange songs. A breeze blows through the great Hall. Shall we? the wind whispers to her, but she is a child, as much as an elf ever is a child, and she has not yet learned to listen to all that is in the world. She turns from the Men back to her Ada and feels her time slow further to match his own.
Days—months, years, years, years—later she has become nothing but Evenstar, the light of her people, the one who dreams the future in the falling of tree leaves. If this were another story, the moment when Arwen grows from child to symbol would be a moment of pure joy. But that’s not what happens.The moment Arwen is fully-grown she steps out of time and feels her joy shrivel in her chest, replaced by a need to cup existence in her hands and shuffle it forward. She would grieve the loss of joy, but there is no time to grieve because Elves are not beings of time.
Adulthood for Arwen becomes marked by constant glimpses of the future and a high pitched whine as the mortal things move around her at hyper speed until she cannot distinguish one sound from the next. It hurts her ears at first and then fades. Soon she cannot hear most sound at all. The voices of other High Elves sometimes filter through, but otherwise her silence is broken only by the slow turn of Creation and the occasional glimpse of the future as time shifts and ebbs. If you asked her what a chipmunk sounded like she wouldn’t be able to tell you. She’s not even sure what she ate for breakfast.
She quickly loses track of the time between her snippets of prophecy. Once, she loses a century afternoon while playing with the Elven children who run about along the branches of the courtyard trees. She pauses to kneel on a wider branch, and is taken by visions of steel and fire on Mordor lands. When she comes back to herself the children are grown. Soon there are no more children. She supposes that she should feel sad about it, but the more the seasons spin by, the harder it is to reach something like sad. Sad is the smallest bead of dew pitted against the waterfall that is Creation.
Prophecy sends her to the Halls of Mirkwood to hand a bow to an Elfling with golden hair. It sends her to the broken sword of the fallen King of Gondor and so she has it mended. It sends her to her Naneth’s bedside after the yrch have torn into her Elven flesh and left nothing of the soul behind. It whispers Valinor and so the ships are built to send her Naneth away to the promised land of rest and healing and Arwen tries to feel grief, can almost touch the hollow ache of missing.
She lets a tear fall to her cheek and Ada slaps her with a marble-cold hand, for to grieve fully would be to call time back to herself and Evenstars are meant for a higher purpose than longing. The tear cools against her cheek before Ada’s hands wipe it away and cup her face. A decade passes before they move away from each other and by then she has hardened to stone.
She stands in the gardens at the highest point of summer a day—a year, a century—after Naneth has sailed and feels prophecy thrum again through her veins almost like a song. She walks along the branches of trees and along hidden paths to the water that borders her land from the Land of Men. She stands at the river of Rivendell and feels the summer’s hot air against her skin cool to autumn. The horses of Men thunder over the plains to her, their hooves striking the ground as if they were beating a tempo against her skin, a second heartbeat to match her own.
A Man drops a bloodied Man-child in a too-large tunic at her feet. The blades of grass whisper to her destiny, prophecy and she Sees that it is the child who is prophecy. She looks deep into its boy-blue eyes and thinks to herself that he could almost be an Elven child if it weren’t for the roundness of his ears.
She blinks and the child is replaced by a youth with the same boy-blue eyes, who is still growing his way into a body proportional to his long limbs. His love for her is writ upon his rapturous expression and she laughs in his face although she feels no mirth. What is love to a statue that marks the seconds in the passing of millennia?
Shall we? asks the air, desperately. But she listens to the future alone, the ways of the wind muted to her still, and turns away from the Man-boy-child. He’s gone in the next blink. Snow frosts along her bare arms.
In another story they end here. The Man with blue eyes dies within the space of her next breath and she continues on. This is not that story.
On a hill leagues away, an old hobbit smokes a fistful of pipe weed and hums along with the whistle of the air. Now, the air sings to him. He slips a ring—the Ring—onto his finger. An eye opens in Mordor. Creation freezes for a moment, before it all begins again at the speed of a Human child. Arwen falls asleep in silence and wakes to the sound of birds in her window.
She goes straight to the library on the uppermost floor of the palace as soon as she’s dressed. She knows that her Ada is there as easily as she knows that the Ranger Men will come to Rivendell by morning of the next day. When she enters the library she sees Ada sitting at a window, head propped in his hand. He looks almost like flesh for the first time she can remember. He looks old.
“There will be a war,” he says, his voice quiet and not so deep. “We must fight or sail, but there is no place left on Middle Earth for creatures beyond time.”
“I understand,” she says, and this time she does. Time has taken the riddles from him, laid him bare and set lines into his hands.
“You will sail,” he says, a command.
She thinks about seeing her Naneth again, and her stomach falls upwards into her throat. She thinks of Ada’s cold hand hitting her cheek because Evenstars are symbols and not meant to grieve. She wonders if Valinor has a need for prophecies.
“I will sail,” she says, because it's what she ought to say.
By the time the Rangers enter Rivendell, Arwen is close to pulling her hair out of her head. Even the sound of her feet slapping vulgarly along the wooden floors of the palace is almost too much to bear and she finds herself wishing again for silence. The loudness of Men tips the scale into agony. She can’t decide if she should muffle her ears with fabric or stick her entire head under water so she does both, wrapping her head in a shawl before dunking it in a stream behind the palace. The water is cold.
“Are you trying to swim Elf?” comes a voice behind her. She jerks upwards, tearing the cloth away from her face and feeling her hair slap wetly onto her back. Man-blue eyes catch her gaze.
“Prophecy,” she says.
Prophecy the wind whispers between them.
“Actually, my name is Aragorn,” he says, lips curving upwards like the wooden bow he holds loosely in his hands.
In another story, this is the moment she falls in love. In this one, she laughs in his face a second time, and marvels at the feeling of feeling.
“Is this what it feels like to be mortal,” she wonders aloud, “this loudness, this lightness?”
“No, Lady,” Man-Aragorn says. “This is what living is like. Mortality has its own weight to it. Like a stone dragging you to rest at the bottom of the lake.”
She wonders if the stone of mortals is lighter than the one Creation has leveled on Evenstar.
Shall we? Asks the wind and she smiles.
“Accompany me?” she asks him, and he pulls her from the water with calloused hands that catch on her skin.
She doesn’t fall in love with him at first. She falls for the sounds of birds in the morning, with the trickle of rain dripping from the leaves, with the sound of horses in the stable. She’s not used to having days that begin and end. She’s not used to ends in general really. Aragorn takes her riding and laughs at the way she whoops at the rush of wind across her face. He plays her songs, encourages the lower Elves to sing during dinners, and belts out bawdy tunes with his Ranger companions while she covers her face to hide a blush. She’d forgotten how much she once loved music.
When she is with Aragorn it feels like she has all the time in the world. Each day is like a century and she cannot get enough. But, forever doesn’t exist in a world with time and she wakes only a month after his arrival to find the Ring housed on Silvan land and Aragorn standing at her door.
“I must go,” he says, destiny accompanying his words. She looks at him and tries to see him as a stranger. He is a Man and Men are insects on the land that burn and blight and die within an Elven sigh. This Man smells like rank sweat—he doesn’t bathe as much as she would like—and he sings off-key on occasion. His jokes remind her of the terrible ones her brothers would snicker about when the three of them were children and remembered how to laugh.
She reaches out on an impulse and grasps his hand. When she touches him she feels. It is not love she feels; she has not fallen in love in the space of a month. It is something more like friendship, like possibility. She imagines that once he’s gone she will be forced to sail and step out of time again.
She tightens her grip and pulls him away from her rooms, out of the house of her Ada and out to the mound of Cerin Amroth. She commands him with all the authority of a High Elf of Silvan.
“Ask me,” she says.
He doesn’t pretend to be confused; he merely tightens his fingers around her own.
“Will you?”
“Yes.”
If this were another story it would detail the rages of her father when she refuses to sail. Arwen would have a moment of crisis, of decision, that makes her fling herself upon a settee and weep bitterly into her hands before throwing away her life for love. She would walk to her Ada’s library and touch his face and say I choose a mortal life, and so the Silvan King would crumple into his grief and the Evenstar would be no more.
But Elves do not grieve so he merely touches his forehead to hers, the world continuing as it does around them. By the time they separate her betrothed is a King of Men and the Ring is gone and her Ada must sail away with all the Elves of her land.
Her life with Men is a good life. She rests somewhere in the middle of time and not-time. She learns to love. She learns to listen to the voices of Men and hear the sound of the animals and feel joy again. When her husband is finally old he tells her not to grieve for him when he is gone.
“Elves do not grieve,” she says and he dies a week later. The Men of Gondor entomb him in glass.
She sits with him once the crowd of mourners is gone, and lets a single tear fall to her cheek.
In this story the wind whispers to her shall we? and she hears it as she rests her head upon the coffin, her face young still but her soul grasping for her grief as it rots through her meat body.
Shall we? the wind whispers and she closes her eyes and reaches her tattered spirit down through glass to his bones beneath.
In another story, in every story, she says in her grief,
“I choose a mortal life,”
and falls into time until it stops her heart.