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He wakes at the end of the world. There are dead hands beside him, lying in the mud like stranded fish after a storm. Blank eyes stare at him from faces ringed with battle-wreaths of ash and blood. They say: stay in Doriath, little prince.
In the distance he can see the Noldor in their white robes searching the dead. They have built vast hills of helmets like children playing with acorns. He hears Quenya shouts across the desolation and listens despite himself for Galadriel, and does not hear her.
He finds himself singing into the mud, reassuring his dead soldiers once again:
A Elbereth Gilthoniel,
o menel palan-diriel,
le nallon sí di'nguruthos!
A tiro nin, Fanuilos!
They say nothing, and the darkness takes him once more.
The second time he wakes the sky is growing dark and there is fighting once again, somewhere beyond his sight. Beside him, beneath a fallen horse and a pyre of broken shields, someone is groaning. He lifts himself up on his hands, mud oozing between his fingers, and then to his knees, and it seems he is able to crawl. There is a fire burning still over his side, from hip running down to knee; he swats at it pointlessly until he realises his broken armour is cold and the pain is beneath his skin, and there is little to do about that so he resumes moving in the direction of the noise.
It is a Silvan elf, an archer, her face pale grey as ashes. He helps free her and lift her to sit. She stares at her hands in her lap and says, “Are we dead?”
Between them they manage to make it to a copse of silver birch trees, or what is left of it. The archer puts her hand and then her forehead to blackened bark and sobs. He does not sob himself; this all seems like a daze to him, distant and strange. Vaguely amusing, if anything, that they rode out in such grandeur with their banners and shining shields and have all come to this. He remembers the chants of proud song and feels himself laughing as though some strange spasm has seized him.
He has one archer left of all his soldiers. One archer, and it seems his own body, although it too feels distant and strange to him now. He moves his fingers, touches each in turn to palm. Remembers running these hands through Galadriel’s hair and binding it up with flowers.
There had been a time when he had welcomed the Noldor even when others wanted them gone. There had been a time of peace, of beauty, of dancing in glades of bluebells. There had been a time when someone now dead warned him that Galadriel was not one of them, that the Noldor were dangerous, that he was blinded by beauty and sweet song.
He had ignored it. He had thought of the light in her hair that the Noldor said was like the Trees, and seemed to him like the Silmaril that Thingol kept. The most beautiful things of Valinor, the most perfect light. And then the Silmaril had turned Thingol to greed and anger, had brought the dwarves to tear him apart with hand and axe; and the Noldor’s quest for vengeance had led to battle and war, had broken through the safety of Doriath with beauty and sweet song of its own, had brought him to this.
There had been a time when he thought he could have both his peaceful forest kingdom and his Noldor princess. Now he understands that anything shining so brightly will always burn, whether it intends to or not.
“We must leave,” he says.
They cross the cold plain of Lothlann and gather others as they go, and by the time they reach the foothills of the Ered Luin there is a small band of them, broken and hushed. There is no safety here and so they must press on into the emptier lands in the east.
By this point they all look at him to command them. There is a discussion about asking the dwarves for safe passage through the mountains and his heart clenches like a fist and Thingol’s blood seeps into fountains on the cavern floor in Menegroth, and he says “no, no dwarves.” Instead they follow a winding thread of a route that takes them high into the snows where the dwarves will not see them pass.
He keeps them safe, all of them, through ice and cold and fear. He does not think of the day ahead or the day behind but sometimes when they keep watch by the night’s campfire he thinks of Galadriel crossing the Helcaraxë many years ago. She had rarely spoken of it; it was only from her brother that he learned she had led one of Fingolfin’s groups herself. He thinks of her brushing snow from her face, stamping warmth into her feet, looking out over endless plains of ice in the starlight.
He wonders whether she had not wanted him to know how afraid she had been, lying with him in the soft evening sunlight in Doriath with the ice long behind her. Or whether she had not wanted him to know she had never been afraid at all.
They settle in the woodlands high beyond the mountains, far from the Noldor and their anger, far from the dwarves and their greed. There are humans sometimes but they are few and scattered and mostly only hunting parties passing through in a crashing noise that is easy to avoid.
Mainly there are rabbits and deer and red squirrels, pine martens and lynx and wolves. Sometimes a great white-tailed eagle soars overhead on its way to the clear mountain lakes and something about the shadow it casts on the ground chills him like ice, makes his breath close in on him and shrinks the world down to the beating of his heart.
There are also Avari, dark elves who never began the journey to Valinor. To begin with they do not realise this for the Avari hide themselves well. Avari do not build grand halls and palaces; they shrink into shadows and climb trees fast as darting mice, and they are not seen until they wish to be. But once some years have passed they come to trade, furs and knives and information, sightings of vast herds of reindeer to the north and marching armies to the south.
He misses some things about things before although it all seems a haze, less real certainly than the sound and colour and blood that still come to his dreams. He misses the great halls of Menegroth and its vast libraries, he misses the young prince he was who would seek out history, language and lore, who would read in starlight rather than sleep. But there is much to learn here, too, and gradually he becomes a creature of forest and hill, of bracken and vast blue skies.
He is no longer Celeborn here. They take new names, leave behind ties to a home that may exist and may not. He keeps his name hidden, swallowed, a secret burning thing. He wonders if Galadriel would still name herself Galadriel.
He realises after a time that he assumes she is dead. She would have fought, he is sure of that much. He knows she can. He remembers her with a wooden sword in her hand practising games with the Sindar, an elaborate dance of light footwork under the beech canopies.
They hear that Doriath fell and he tries to mourn but it will not come. The wars rage on without him, just the same as they raged with him there.
When the Valar bring an army they feel the shake of it even in their far-away sanctuary: the ruin of land, the breaking of mountains, the flooding crash of oceans. He hears that all of Beleriand is gone under the waves.
More come after that, bands of Sindar, broken and weeping and gathered in safe in what would now seem a kingdom if he wished for such things. The Avari keep watch on their borders and teach them how to hide. He has safety, for his people. He has a different kind of peace than the one he once imagined but it is peace all the same.
The Avari report that there are armies, still, but there are few battles now. Sometimes there are orcs and wargs; sometimes a troll lumbers down from the mountains and must be beaten back, or ignored, to tramp past and leave them in peace. He hears the Noldor have established new realms, south of his forests. They do not look north, it seems, but he asks the Avari to keep watch all the same.
After a while peace seems to have settled like snow on cold ground, here at least for a season. He would relax; maybe; he would finally set aside his guard; but he cannot, not yet. The Avari bring him stories of armies that still patrol, here and to the north and east, and of a Commander Galadriel who leads them.
He has not heard her name for so long. It comes to him less like a breaking storm than he imagined it would, in the few and brief moments he allows himself to remember her. He has already lost the Galadriel who was whole to him in the realisation he had never had her. He waits and gathers the pieces of her that remain in this new world.
They say she is brave to the point of fearlessness, barely caring for her own life and never for her comfort. They say she is fierce, ruthless, as much a blade in her own right as the sword in her hand. They say she is too proud to ever cease fighting; too angry; too broken.
Once, and once only, he goes to seek her. He has heard of her company heading north and knows the route they must take to come back down through the snows at this time of year. He waits, quiet in the snow, invisible like a creature in its winter white fur; he breathes in the cold and the quiet, the distant sounds only of wind in snow-dressed trees and a distant calling bird. It is as if Doriath and Beleriand never were and he was never born but rather made here, fashioned from the rocks and pine needles of this place. It is as if he had never been Celeborn.
She comes down the ridge at the head of her company and her hair blazes like burning gold in the low winter sun. She is confident, sure-footed, at home in the ice as she must have always been. He thinks of a wolf-pack; of a flock of migrating birds; of a firebrand carried at the head of a hunting party. He no longer has any way to think of her that he can bear.
He remembers her beside him by the river, barefoot in long grasses, trying to finish some story of her brothers as children, laughing and laughing until he laughed too at the bubbling joy in her.
He remembers her lying soft and warm in his arms, the whisper of her lips against his neck.
He remembers her tipped head and smirk at his armour, her hands more practised than he had known adjusting its fit. You cannot go like this. You look like a silver clam.
His hands clench into fists, squeezing water from the snow. He does not know what he is fighting. He only knows that the war took his wife and the war took him, and scattered them both to the winds.
He watches the soldiers disappear down the long path into the distance, until her hair is the only thing still visible. Then that, too, is gone.