Chapter Text
“But as for Arwen the Fair, Lady of Imladris and of Lórien, Evenstar
of her people, she is of lineage greater than yours, and she has lived in the
world already so long that to her you are but as a yearling shoot beside a
voung birch of many summers. She is too far above you. And so, I think, it
mav well seem to her, but even lut were notso, and her heart turned towards
you, I should still be grieved because of the doom that is laid on us.”
"What is that doom?"' said Aragorn.
“That so long as I abide here, she shall live with the youth of the Eldar,'
answered Elrond, “and when I depart, she shall go with me, if she so
chooses.”
—Appendix A
When Elrond learned the choice of his daughter, he was silent, though his
heart was grieved and found the doom long feared none the easier to endure.
But when Aragorn came again to Rivendell he called him to him, and he said:
“My son, years come when hope will fade, and beyond them little is
clear to me. And now a shadow lies between us. Maybe, it has been appointed
so, that by my loss the kingship of Men may be restored. Therefore, though
I love you, I say to you: Arwen Undómiel shall not diminish her life's grace
for less cause. She shall not be the bride of any Man less than the King of
both Gondor and Arnor. To me then even our victory can bring only sorrow
and parting - but to you hope of joy for a while. Alas, my son! I fear that
to Arwen the Doom of Men may seem hard at the ending."
So it stood afterwards between Elrond and Aragorn, and they spoke no
more of this matter[.]
—Appendix A
Flowers Will Come Again
Fourth Age 181
Archives of Minas Tirith, Gondor
Laelas shifted a lamp to her right as she pulled another stack of damaged papers toward her. She and her childhood best friend Cirion had been locked in the parts of the archives that were still not open to the public, tasked with the unenviable task of sorting through several dozen crates of documents from the end of the Third Age that had either never been organized and cataloged, or had been damaged during their relocation. There was discontent in the lower levels, and their parents had decided the archives were the safest place for an adventurous girl and an overly confident boy to entertain themselves in the interim.
Cirion–said overly confident boy–was the youngest son of Taurmiriel and Folcwine and, thus, the grandchild of the first leaders of Gondor and Arnor in the Afterworld: Aragorn and Arwen, and Faramir and Eowyn. Laelas, meanwhile, had moved with her mother Glasduil (daughter of Bergil, eldest son of Beregond) into the Citadel some years before, for her father Brethil (son of Farasben, eldest son of Mablung of Ithilien, who had been a dear friend of Faramir) had been killed in a trading accident in Harad. The two had then grown up together, and Cirion’s inclination toward logic and staid and steady action often balanced Laelas’ tendency to ask for forgiveness instead of permission.
She squinted at the newest sheet of parchment and readjusted her seat, glancing at Cirion as she reached over the tea for a biscuit, for he had begun to hum to himself as he stitched a tear in one of the older pages of vellum.
She bumped the tea as she sat back down, and Cirion dropped his tools onto the table and exclaimed dramatically, “Do not spill your tea on that, Laelas! Findegil will have your skin.”
“He will not,” she scoffed, rolling her eyes and reaching for a slate-grey, felt folder (having already discarded the most recent sheet into the for someone else to review pile for, to her, it looked as if a scribe’s list for market day had somehow ended up in the King’s Writers records). “Findegil has enough calfskin to wrap the entire city three times over, Cirion. He does not need me .”
They sat in silence for a time, except for the sound of Cirion’s needle schwunking through the leather, the smooth slip of floss against floss until it knotted and pulled and he popped the needle back through, over and over and over again.
“How are you repairing it this time?” she asked after a long minute.
“Flowers,” Cirion said shortly. “The kind grandmother embroidered on all of mother’s kerchiefs.”
“Pretty.”
She finished her biscuit, straightened the sheet within the dark folder, and leaned forward to read, the elegant, slanted script cranking out like a winding road before her, until she was running along them so fast they left her completely breathless.
.o.
The story of Aragorn and Arwen is told elsewhere and in greater detail, but nowhere are other tales of the House of Elrond in the Third Age so written. This is a strange thing for—even as the time of the elves began to mist into story—a line as marked by mortality and grief as Elwing’s came to its peak in a handful of small moments and a smattering of great deeds, cast throughout the centuries like the birth of stars flicked from an artist’s hand, scattered far and wide in that darkening canvas of the Third Age on Arda.
Unnamed constellations and untold tales fade, inevitably, with the evening, or so say the men of Gondor, where I have sent this story to rest. But I am neither a man of Gondor nor a Man at all, and I am not of the night but the morn, and have carried stars on my back since the First Age of this world—I fell in flame and when I rose I found the stars had changed. I am of the house of Elrond and, yet, I am not, for my allegiance is older than he. It is as old as my first lord and lady; it is golden and it is bright: it remembers a time when we did not speak of the diminishment of lines but the strength of a well-braided future, before the gift became a choice, became a curse that would haunt my Lord Elrond until his last day on these shores, for he loved his children dearly, and his children loved him back.
This is the story of Elrond and the hurt done his heart that touched upon his children’s. It is the story of Elladan and his love that would never be, for Elrond chased the artists’ brushes with dropcloths in a bid to change their fate. For all my care I could not steer him, even under the steady bow of his father’s distant, watery eye.
.o.
“This is about your great-grandfather!” Laelas exclaimed, pushing the page across the table to Cirion, who looked up from his repair work.
Cirion took the paper and skimmed it, before snorting and pushing it back toward her. “And it is inaccurate! This is dated Fourth Age 3–” He stopped and pointed to the corner. “But cousin Barahir did not write the tale of Aragorn and Arwen until recently, not as this one says, ‘that it is told elsewhere and in greater detail’.”
Laelas rose from her seat and peered over his shoulder as he skimmed.
“It is probably balderdash, cousin,” Cirion concluded, and he slipped it back into its folder and tossed it back onto her side of the table. “Some story written for young ladies to lose their wits in.”
Laelas hmm ed, picked up his teacup as if she were about to refill it, and then served it for herself.
“Well, I do not think that is true. You have failed to dig into the clues in this text and, furthermore–” She ducked beneath the table and returned with the crate from which she had first found the near-empty folder. “There is more where that came from.”