Chapter Text
If paradise was to be found in Middle Earth, Lindon was the grandest contender. Once a remnant of Ossiriand, west of the Blue Mountains in Eastern Beleriand, the birds curve and wheel between the witchery of morning light and the tuft of the westernmost sea. The Gulf of Lune broke into Lindon gently, cleaving the two into the realms of Forlindon and Harlindon.
Over these rivers run from inland to shore, misty spray kissing dew drops and cliff tops. At the edge of the High Elves Capital was the horizon, as far as the eye could see. A royal blue vault of velvety sky leaping off the silver lipped seafoam waves until everything shone and everything glistened and everything was good.
There was something a little bit more than magical about this land. A bridge between Middle Earth and Valinor where the Grey Havens port ferries Elves from this life into their respite. Back to their true home. A place where eons could move and feel as a day. Where time seemed to run syrupy thick, as steadfast and slow-going as the Elves who lived there.
And then, one day, a girl washes ashore face first down in the grit of the sand.
She’s mistaken for limber then. A knitted-up tangle of flotsam. It is by chance she is tripped over by a morning stroller on the shoreline, coincidence a hand is revealed, luck some would say that the elf who stumbles and slips and spies pale fingers calls for aid and a half-dead Elfling is flipped onto her back.
She is taken to the Healers after that.
She stays peacefully asleep in the beginning, under the gentle but watchful care of her attendants. She is young, the Healers eventually tell Gil-galad once he inquires after her, once he is standing outside her sequestered chambers, word having spread to his own ears because she was so very young.
An Elf had not been born in centuries, and yet here one was, unmistakable by her ears though there was something a little… human about her face, washed up on Lindon’s shore, in a sorrowful, pitiful state. Severely malnourished one Healer warns, riddled with scars another laments, and a complete and utter stranger many more whisper amongst themselves when the story, as stories tend to do, catches fire and spreads to eager, pointed ears.
No Elfling had been born in centuries, and even, by the slimmest of chances, one had, there had been no reports of a missing elf child from Lindon to Near Harad.
So who was she, where were her parents, her family, and how did she end up nearly dying in the waters of Gray Haven?
The stranger stays blissfully asleep despite all the attempts the Healers endeavour to awaken the slip of a girl, and answers do not come until three days after her appearance where, from the very same stretch of seaboard she was discovered that fateful morning, a satchel is found caught by a rockpool.
The oddest of things are inside. A cloak. A rock. A long, bobbled stick.
Strangest yet is a little scrap of parchment, nearly destroyed by its waterlogged festival in the rockpool. It’s edges have come away frayed, ink has run to unsure beads in places, but the words written in chicken-scratched scrawl are intelligible enough for Gil-galad to read.
Names.
Two.
He fists the paper until it nearly crumples in a tight grip. Turns to a guard and barks “Find me Galadriel.”