Work Text:
Tread lightly, she is near
Under the snow,
Speak gently, she can hear
The daisies grow.
All her bright golden hair
Tarnished with rust,
She that was young and fair
Fallen to dust.
Oscar Wilde, Requiescat
1. Who was it that gave Elwing of Doriath the ability to assume the form of a bird?
“I chose mortality because my mother is a bird,” Elros tells his daughter Tindomiel, in his very best I-am-making-sense voice that his children refer to amongst themselves as his I-was-raised-by-elves voice because nothing he said in that voice ever made a scrap of sense. She hands him in turn her best long-suffering sigh.
“Explain. And for Manwë’s sake and mine, don’t take two hours for the preamble this time.”
“First, she was born to the potential of eternal life, and chose to jump off a cliff instead,” he grins. “Which is, well. Understandable in such horrifying circumstances, and so forgiven. Few wouldn’t jump when half-kissed by swords. So, they fish her out and turn her into a bird. As if she asked. Then, she gets to Valinor and they expect her to be some sort of penitent, begging for mercy for her great and terrible sin of trying to cut short her own song. Does she do that?”
“No, she doesn’t,” Tindomiel cannot help but smile. “She hops on to the beach and… what was it again? Trots across to the Teleri?”
“Yes, but the Teleri tour is not the funniest part, beloved,” Elros starts to laugh, his braying, Maedhros-inherited cackle. “So the woman turns up while everyone is sitting around discussing the, well, Peredhel-problem, and chirpily declares that she would, in fact, prefer to be one of the Eldar. Immortality and all. Eternal life. The very thing she so casually tossed away before their noses not ten minutes prior. Blinking and bemused, they grant it to her, and my father follows suit because what else is he meant to do? And then… and here is where it peaks, my starriest of skies. Here is the funniest part.”
“Atya, I wish you wouldn’t announce the punchline like this every time. It ruins the joke!”
“I built the city you swan about in, I’m allowed to ruin a joke or two,” retorts Elros, precociously crotchety though he was not yet past middle age. “Now, then they offer Eärendil his heavenly duty. Take his ship, give it a good old diamond-dust and send it on to the sky to serve as a great big finger to Morgoth and a little finger to kinslayers around the realm. Of course he says yes. I can picture it, his look of delight and gratefulness: Eärendil the Man, offered a place in the Sky. And what does Elwing say, even though nobody asked her because surely, surely she wouldn’t… but she does.”
“Gods no, I can just picture her saying to them. Eternity in that unbearable cold, eating hard-tack and stardust and shitting off the side? Fuck that. I want a nice little tower where I don’t have to interact with Fëanor or Finarfin or Thingol or even my own parents. I’ve had a lifetime strung up to the bloody Nauglamir, and just look how that went. I don’t want to hear the word Silmaril ever again, let alone look at the thing every day of my life, and if that means you have to put me on an island then go ahead and put me on an island. With a few conjugal visits here and there. Hell, even Melkor would have felt sorry for Manwë in that moment. Forget a swan, I’d have turned her into a chicken myself, just for her sheer nerve! And there it is, Tindomiel-dearest! A three-act comedy if there ever was one!”
“So… it was a punishment?”
“Oh, no, nobody knows what it is. But I like to think she asked for it. An odd little lady, our mother. Had a pet snail for a while. A bird? I swear to you, I wager she chose it, and did it for a laugh to boot, didn’t think he’d actually do it!”
Elros cannot speak any more, and careens into a great roar of laughter, leaving his daughter blinking in confusion. “But I don’t get it! Yes, yes, very funny, but what does any of this have to do with you choosing mortality?”
“At least he tried to give you an explanation,” says Elrond dryly from the corner of the room, having been an amused witness to the entire story but staying silent because Elros tended to think formally ‘banishing’ his brother from Númenor every time he irritated him was the height of comedy. “Your esteemed father invoked the same mythos to me as well, except it involved telling me that he chose mortality because if Naneth truly was a swan or seagull or what not, I want to avoid running into her, because no red-blooded man wants to run into his mother bare-arsed on the beaches of Aman with feathers on her tits. I’d rather remember her as our lovely, kind, playful little mother. Frankly, Elrond, it’s you who made the more worrisome choice. Signs of a warped psyche, one might say. And all this he tells me to my face, on the second most traumatic day of my life.”
Elros, who still hasn’t stopped laughing, sputters out a single, spitty word: “perspective!”
Perspective indeed. For the three-act comedy was all a matter of perspective: another Elwing-story told for comfort. And in the story, an acknowledgement of perspective. That the six-year-old twins looking back on the tragedy of Sirion and wresting it into comedy required that they were loved past the age of six. Happenstance, yes, mercy from the boot on the neck, but mercy regardless. For love to have grown from the ruins, and for songs to not have been so simple.
2. If Elwing of Doriath is a bird, what kind of bird is she?
She pecks out the eyes of lost elves and unworthy men, says one story. She eats them. She sings sad songs by the seashore, says another. A swan, say the politest, and a vulture, say the rudest. The cruelest, of course, say that she is neither woman or bird but something between. And so do the kindest.
The bards sing of her so: there once was a woman who wore a star on her throat, and when fiends of fire came to steal it, she chose transcendence over surrender. She leapt from the cliffs and as she fell the Valar took pity, changed her shape, gave her another form and the freedom of the skies. Sometimes, on certain nights, you can see her flying in the moonlight, neither woman nor animal but something holy between.
Elwing is born immaculate in all the songs. She is a mother with tender eyes and soft hips and stretchmarks across her slim abdomen. She is clad in white in most, and neither truly survives nor truly drowns. She has a thing holy between her legs. A mother’s womb. Can you have a mother’s womb if you are no longer a mother?
She is the holy between.
Wholly between.
Peredhel.
Think now of the myth of the harpy. The harpy exists in the space between forms, which is to say: in the space of the not-quite-human. Woman's face on bird's body, or bird's wings grafted to woman's frame, flesh meeting feather in seams that shouldn't exist. And when she jumped, when the water wouldn't take her and the air wouldn't hold her, what emerged was simply the truth of what she'd always been: a body that couldn't resolve itself. There are no words to spare for what she is, only words for what she fails to be. Half-human, inhuman.
3. Why is it so difficult to write the story of Elwing of Doriath?
The problem is this: the tale of Elwing of Doriath had been so hollowed by the thing around her neck that when at last the soldiers came with torches and swords, there was very little left of her to write about but the weight of the stone. This suits both Sindar and Noldor, Valar and Melkor, because the story of young Elwing augments the story of the Silmaril. The Silmaril had consumed her from the inside, say the Noldor, because she was unworthy of bearing it. The Sindar claim it consumed her not because she was weak or unworthy but because that's what holy objects do: eat away the people tasked with protecting them.
Like Lúthien before her. Like Elrond after.
All this preamble is to say that when the swords entered her home and her children’s voices faded in the smoke, the story of Elwing boiled down to a single choice. They screamed at her and screamed at her, and told her she must make this choice. As if she didn’t know. As if she wasn’t born into this. Handed a jewel that kings and kingdoms had bled for, told to guard it with her life. Her husband had already left, chasing his own inherited doom across the ocean. Her sons were lost the moment those men breached the walls. She was left standing on a precipice holding the one thing she'd been told mattered a thousand times more than her own existence, and there was simply nowhere left to go.
Elwing is a swan in the stories. But if she hadn’t been a swan then she would have been a selkie or a siren or a sea serpent because the Eldar have millennia ahead of them before the breaking of the world, and they cannot spend it all confronting what they failed to prevent.
It is easier to ask why the Valar never intervened than to ask why didn’t I? To claim the thirty year old alone made the hard-headed choice to withhold the stone in the face of a strongly worded letter, than to pretend she wasn’t surrounded by two-thousand-year-old advisers with treelight in their eyes. Easier to name her breakneck flight a vocation than to admit we live in a world where mothers are made to calculate their children's weight against the world’s and blamed for the infants’ lightness, easier still to view her as having failed than to think that this was what it took to —
No one decides to lie. The Eldar do not lie. They just stop correcting each other, stop insisting on details that serve no purpose, stop remembering the parts that make the moment difficult to recall. And so Elwing of Doriath turns into seafoam.
Did she really ever look that young?
Was her silence truly despair or just a veneer of arrogance?
Was she saved because of her innate goodness?
Or the jewel?
Was it the jewel that saved her or was it she who saved it?
They have to do this, you see. Because they are still here, building and governing and trying to make sense of a war that will outlast them all.
4. Where is she?
Elwing is underwater.
Elwing is underwater, but the water is not cold. Cold would imply sensation, a body that still responded to the world with feeling. Instead there is pressure. Everywhere, always, the squeeze of depth against her ribs, her skull, the soft, liquid places behind her eyes. Her lungs burn, but she gets used to it very swiftly. Her lungs have been burning since she hit the surface, a very long time ago. Since before that. Since the moment she understood what she would have to do.
Sometimes she experiences the jump again.
Not as memory (memory would be bearable, memory can be set aside) but as reoccurrence. She is standing on the cliffside window with fire behind her and screaming somewhere in the smoke that might be her children or might be the house itself, wood shrieking as it splits. The Silmaril is hot against her chest. She jumps. The air rushes past. The moment elongates, pulls thin.
She falls.
She sees the other drowned stories sometimes. They drift past like thoughts you're trying not to have. One of them has long dark hair that moves in the current like ink dispersing. Another is small, child-sized, and Elwing turns away from that one because she cannot bear to understand what that means. A third woman floats face-down, arms spread, and she recognises the posture: the moment of surrender, the body's final argument with the mind's decision.
How long has she been down here?
5. But what if, standing in the ruins of Sirion, she chose her sons?
Let us think about one of the worlds in which Elwing of Doriath gives the Silmaril to the Fëanorian forces at the end of the Third and Worst Kinslaying, in exchange for her sons. In this world, she reclaims the crown of motherhood, and victoriously steps back into a mother’s womb, one leg first, then the other. And then what?
What of the city razed around her?
What of the men who razed it so?
What of her sons?
Two little boys, they are, and only six. Much like in the true world, nobody knows that one will be a king of men, and the other the greatest healer in the realm. Here they are six years old, and little boys who might one day grow to tall, strong men, blades hot with furious retribution. Would they be spared? Yes. Maglor would have taken pity on them regardless, and Maedhros would have allowed it. The sons of Fëanor do not dirty their blades with child-blood, for their hearts are too tender. But Maglor and Maedhros did not sack Sirion alone.
And so, we turn to history again, as we always must when answering to the future. We turn to Doriath, which provides us two lessons. The first: that little Elured and Elurin were left in the woods to starve. The second: that it was not Celegorm himself who spoke the order.
But what if they were spared? What then?
In this world where Elwing chooses motherhood as she hurtles off the cliff, Elrond and Elros grow tall in the ruins of their birthplace. They have no cause to speak Quenya at the dinner table, nor to find father-figures in kinslayers. They hear Sirion-stories instead. In these stories, the knee-high twins are told it is their heirloom that led to the city’s sacking. Their mother, held at knifepoint. Their little friends, the collateral damage to this great and terrible war. And their survival, yes, yes, mercy dispensed by the boot on their necks.
What must a child see before it takes up arms?
Elrond is not a healer. Elros is not a king. They are as wrathful as winter. They speak in oaths and absolutes, swear be he foe or friend. They love their mother and become what she surrendered to. They spend their lives trying to reclaim what can never be returned, razing cities of their own in the trying. The wheel turns. The sons of the woman who gave up the jewel become men who would burn the world to take it back. Earëndil is lost at sea, and stays lost. The hosts of Aman never arrive. Beleriand dissolves into the darkness.
Angband alone remains.
So tell me. Would you exchange the lives of your own children for that of every other child in the world? You would? You would, you swear it? Because you are no Elwing? Good for you. Yes, good, you have done the right thing. You have done the right thing, and your children will call you mother. Hand in hand you walk beside them, brushing their hair and buttoning their cloaks against the chill. Hand in hand across a continent of ashes: the greatest mother, and the last two children in the world.
6. Did she know she would turn into a bird?
The horses arrive in spring, which feels like a violence all its own. Spring turns Sirion almost as green as Tirion, and the brooks are bubbling merrily as men with swords and torches break through the gate. And so for the survivors of the third and worst kinslaying, spring is Elwing holding Elros while Elrond clings to her skirts, and the sound of wood splintering as they broke down the doors.
She'd known it was coming, of course. Had known since Eärendil left, taking with him all the hope the two of them had borrowed. Had known since before that, probably. Since the jewels were first made, since her grandfather's mortal hand closed around the stone, since the oath that would eventually consume everyone it touched was first spoken. She’s known this for so long she doesn't know what shape she'd take without the weight around her neck.
Flight is unthinkable.
A servant who survived (her name was Linneth, and later she would wake screaming every night for months) remembered the Lady Elwing as terrifyingly calm. She'd handed Elros to Linneth. "Take him. Take both of them. Go through the kitchen, out the back." Her voice was flat, factual. "Don't stop. Don't come back. Take them and run.”
"My lady—"
"Go."
Linneth went. But Elrond had twisted free, wailing in terror, and he had run back toward his mother, and by the time Linneth caught him again the hall was full of smoke and the Lady was gone. She'd taken the Silmaril and vanished up the stairs, toward the cliffs, toward the only exit left.
Later, much later, Linneth would tell people that she saw wings. That mid-fall, the Lady had transformed, had become something white and bird-shaped, had flown away. She believed this. She needed to believe it. The alternative, that she'd watched a woman choose death over surrender, over capture, over eternity, over whatever the soldiers would have done to make her give up the jewel, was not something she could carry. That Elwing had chosen death over Doriath. That she chose the possibility of death for her sons than see them turn them into another Elwing of Doriath, another Maedhros Fëanorian.
Linneth does not stay to watch the jump. Whom among us wouldn’t run from the sound a body might make, hitting water from such a height?
7. Why a damned bird? Why not a boat? Why not, well, literally anything else?
Because the songs and legends are less about what the Eldar remember and more about what they would rather forget. Because the old songs about women who became seals and birds, or about young brides claimed by the tides, are simply a recognition of a phenomenon too dangerous to name plainly.
Because the songs needed Elwing to want something, you see. Want the Silmaril, her husband, Aman, anything and everything. That she was called, summoned, claimed by something larger than herself. They needed some proof that her departure was mystical rather than methodical. A creature that longs for the sea, is pulled by ancient blood, some essential nature she cannot deny. There's desire in that, a narratively convenient yearning, proof that myth serves the mythmaker, not the mythologised. Better to believe Elwing was welcomed by the distant sea than admit she was thrice exiled from her very own land.
For the past makes no pledges of comprehension, and that for people like Celebrían and Morwen and Finduilas and Elwing and oh so many more, trying to locate oneself in its narratives feels like grasping at reflections in disturbed water. I cannot tell you whether the Eldar truly believe such tales of transformation, whether turning into a bird as you hurtle off a cliff is something they can easily comprehend. But I can tell you this: across centuries, in countless rooms, people have vanished into explanations more bearable than the truth.
The swan songs are as much about the singer than they are about the sung-of. The great Eldar preoccupation with longing, the breathtaking tragedy of a woman caught between two worlds, about transformation as the ultimate proof that the heart’s desire transcends flesh. Her jump is romantic, shimmering with inevitability and magic, proof that the darkness cannot contain. The songs savor every detail—the leap, the salt spray, the moment between woman and bird—lingering over the beauty of sacrifice, the bittersweetness of duty, a performance so profound it requires metamorphosis. There is a strange pleasure in the aesthetic rendering of such despair, proof that loss is lessened by repetition in song. It is resignation painted as romance, exhaustion rewritten as destiny. Some deaths are forgotten. Others are sung.
8. But will Elrond ever understand?
This is the longest answer. The only answer.
The two meet by accident, which is to say: inevitably. Aman is vast but shared grief has a way of drawing its bearers together, and Elrond has been walking the same stretch of shoreline for weeks, trying to remember how the Bruinen bubbled in spring. She is standing in the shallows when he sees her, water to her knees, looking out at the unchanging horizon. He knows her immediately, of course. Something in the set of her shoulders, or perhaps just the way she holds herself by the elbows like someone who has learned she can only comfort herself. He should leave. He has spent seven thousand years deliberately not seeking this very conversation.
"Elwing?" he calls her by her name, because mother no longer fits in his mouth. How can you call a woman who looks half your age mother. Half your daughter’s age — your dead daughter’s former age.
"Elrond,” in recognition.
"I didn't mean to intrude."
"You're not." She looks back at the water. "There's plenty of shore."
He comes to stand beside her. They are silent for a long time, two people who jumped from different cliffs into different waters and somehow ended up on the same beach.
"Do you swim?" he asks, and immediately regrets it: too close to the myth, to the songs that made her something she wasn't and to the sound of a body hitting the water from such great heights.
But she answers without flinching. "No. I just stand here sometimes and remember that the water wouldn't take me. That even drowning can be denied if the Valar decide you're not finished. It’s rather fun. You should try it sometime.”
He doesn’t say anything, because what the hell are you to say to that? So they stand in silence, and it's easier than speaking, and when he comes back the next day she's there again, and the day after that, until it becomes a pattern: dawn at the shoreline, and a comforting silence.
They talk, eventually. Small things at first—the quality of light here versus there, the way memory grows unreliable across centuries, whether the apple trees in Valinor taste like the ones in Imladris.
(They don't. Nothing here tastes like anything from there, which is unfortunately the point.)
She tells him about Sirion, about the months before the attack when she couldn't sleep, when she'd walk the halls at night with the Silmaril burning against her chest and her sons asleep in their room and the knowledge sitting heavy in her gut that eventually the horses would come.
He tells her about Arwen, about the moment he understood she would choose mortality, how he knew she would regret it when the moment came at last, how he'd tried to talk her out of it and heard his own arguments fall flat because they were the same arguments someone might have made to him once, about duty and continuance and the weight of being what your people need you to be.
"Did it work?" she asks.
"No."
"Good,” Elwing winks at him. “I’m always a believer in someone being able to choose a death they might come to regret.”
"The songs," she asks him one day, "are you in them? The songs about me? Or is it only Elwing and Eärendil? Or Elwing and the Silmaril. Do I leave you behind even in song?"
"Sometimes. As a footnote. The lost sons, later found, raised by the kinslayers who killed for the jewel their mother died protecting. And then, of course, the love which grew between them, as little might be thought. That makes it neat. Redemptive, even."
"And was it? Redemptive?"
He thinks of Maedhros's hand, careful with his fever. Maglor singing him to sleep. The way they'd taught him and Elros to fight, to read, to survive in a world that had already tried to kill them once. They, of course, were experts in the matter. "I don't know. They loved us, Elwing. And we loved them. I still love them. But redemptive? I don’t know. They wanted it to be so, I think. That was what it was, before it turned to love. But soon all four of us understood that any chance of redemption was–"
"Dissolved long years ago," she finishes. "Sunk into the cobblestones of the Alqualondë pier. There’s a song about that, you know."
She grins roguishly at him, and oh Valar, Arwen—
She draws patterns in the wet sand, watches them dissolve as the water moves. "I'm glad you loved them, at the end of the day. I hate it, of course. But I’m glad they loved you too. Yes, that you loved them, and so survived them."
"I'm sorry you didn't survive me."
“So am I.”
Weeks pass. Then months. They fall into a rhythm that mimics friendship, though neither of them names it that. Sometimes they talk. Sometimes they just stand in the water and remember what it felt like to live in a world that can in fact surprise you with its machinations. One day he tells her about the morning he realized Arwen was really leaving, really choosing Aragorn and mortality and a life that would end. How he'd stood in his study in Rivendell and wept before her as he felt the future collapse before his eyes.
"I tried to stop her," he says. "I made her wait. Years. Decades. I made him wait. Thinking if I delayed long enough she'd change her mind, or Aragorn would die, or something would shift and I wouldn't have to watch her choose to leave me."
"But she didn't change her mind."
"No." He picks up a smooth stone, turns it over in his palm. "She looked at me the day she left Imladris for the last time and said, a love like yours and mine, Ada, cannot be sundered by sea. And I wanted to tell her she was wrong, that she didn't know what she was talking about, that love is sundered by sea over and over and over in our world."
“That you may love her here, and she may love you there,” Elwing nods. “That you may still be Elrond, and she may still be Arwen, that she will continue to be Arwen when she passes beyond our world. But you are no longer father and daughter. Not like you were when you shared a future.”
The gulf between them shrinks. Only a little, but enough to allow a monumental question to pass between them like an old, dead hull-ship between eroding cliffs.
"Would you do it again?" he dares, and his voice breaks on the question. "If you could go back, knowing everything—would you still jump?"
Elwing is quiet for a long moment.
Then she turns to him, face carefully blank, her voice near-inaudible: "What was her bride-price, Elrond?"
The question catches him off guard. "What?"
"Arwen. And Aragorn. What did you demand of him before you'd give your blessing?"
"That he—" Elrond stops. Remembers. "That he reunite the kingdoms. That he bring peace to Middle-earth. That he prove himself worthy of her by becoming the king the world needed."
"The saving of the world," she says softly. "That was your bride-price, for the dearest thing to your heart."
"It's not the same."
"Isn't it?"
He wants to argue, wants to explain the difference between a daughter choosing her own fate and a mother choosing a jewel over her sons' safety, but the words stick in his throat.
"She was an adult," he says finally. "She made her choice freely. She may have regretted her choice, but it was hers. You—your sons were children. They might have needed you. It’s different. It’s not the same."
“I never said it was,” she raises her eyebrows at him. “Don’t put words in my mouth. You’re not too old for a twisted ear. Would Arwen have obeyed you, had you forbid it.”
“I’m no bloody Thingol!” he snaps, eyes glinting. “How dare you—“
“Oh, these days everyone says they’re not a graduate of the Thingol school of parenting,” Elwing waves an airy hand. This is the problem with having a mother so young, Elrond thinks childishly. They say childish things, like Thingol school of parenting. He half expects her to stick out her tongue. “Especially Thingol himself. It’s quite fashionable, you see. Now, let us please stop evoking Thingol every five minutes, I had enough of that even as I lived. Would your daughter have obeyed you?”
“Yes, but she would have lived an eternity in utter misery,” he exclaims. “Of course I wouldn’t do that to her! Of course I wouldn’t! I’m not that sort of parent.”
“Congratulations,” she says dryly. “But you’ve told me everything, Elrond. The truth, not the songs. You told me when you gave your assent, and it was not when she made her choice, not when you first learned of their love. You set her betrothed a trial, knowing the boy, your foster-son, would never defy you. That even if Arwen might disobey you, Aragorn never would. You set him a trial, like Thingol.”
“It was no trial. I merely wished for him to earn his birthright, for her line—“
Elwing laughs. “You, brought up as you were, amongst war camps and fortresses, Elrond? You, who raised the line of Elros in your own home? Am I to believe you are suddenly beholden so to creed and lineage?”
"That's different too. Aragorn agreed. He chose—"
"To pay the price you set. Yes. Tell me, if Aragorn had failed, if he'd died in the attempt, would you have considered it worth it? Your daughter's grief, in exchange for the attempt at peace? But you’re right. You’re not Thingol. For what you chose was no jewel nor death-march, but the vanquishing of the foe and the saving of the world. You chose so, knowing the boy until then cared not for heroism nor his birthright, knowing that this, that Arwen, would propel him to this cause more than any bloodline ever could. Knowing the cost of the sunrise, and paying the blood price. Knowing the bitter cost of the end, of her deathbed regret. And still you chose the world. You chose to try and end the need to make such choices. You chose to end the burden of Peredhel.”
“But oh, Elrond,” she continues, voice catching on a sudden sob. “My Elrond. Does such a choice make you a cruel man? Does it mean you bear no love for your Arwen? Does the act of naming a bride-price mean your heart did not break in the naming?”
He opens his mouth, and finds he cannot answer. For it had, Valar, it had destroyed him.
“So, Elrond, let me ask you your own question. Would you choose again now, what you chose before?”
Righteous dissent sticks in his throat, so he takes a moment, and the moment stretches to an hour and at the end of the hour, Elrond realises that he is weeping. And the tears in his eyes are not for Arwen, as they often are these days. Not now. Not at first. At first, Elrond is not thinking of Arwen at all.
He is thinking of the sunrise dripping down cliffs of lime and shimmering across the Bruinen like a film of oil and crab-apple tarts in autumn. He is thinking of swallows diving at dusk, making swooping shapes on the walls of old Lindon. The first stars blinking in confusion over Imladris on the night he first named the city. He is thinking of dawn in Edoras, standing on some narrow path with the world dropping away on either side and the sun breaking over distant peaks, turning the air itself pale pink, then amber, the plains below still pooled with blue shadow. Of Arwen's face the day she left Rivendell for the last time, the way she'd looked back just once, and he'd seen in her eyes that she knew what this sundering was asking of him, that she was asking him to let her go so the world could continue, could heal, could become something worth her joy and his sorrow. Of the undeniably mortal understanding that the best parts of a life might be the parts that lead directly to its ending. And there is something so unbearable in the understanding, in knowing she is living, truly living, in soil that changes and seasons that wound and beauty that doesn't last, as he exists. As he exists, and exists, and exists.
Elrond then thinks of his daughter waking in Minas Tirith to a summer that brings life and scorches and disappoints, that floods the lower fields and leaves farmers delighted and devastated in turns. He pictures her walking through gardens where roses grow leggy and odd, where weeds insist on life, where the wind brings dust and pollen and the threat of wildfire. And he feels himself suspended between two versions of the world: this one perfect and static, where the trees his foster-fathers knew as saplings have become ancient beyond measure, and that other one mortal and variable, where Arwen is learning what it means to tend shoots that might fail, to plant knowing the drought might come, to love a garden that will outlive her by ages. He thinks of her in afternoon heat with sweat on her temples, in morning frost with her breath clouding, in the slant of autumn sun that tells you winter is coming. Of Elrond’s first and only grandson, sticky fingers and rosy cheeks, gossamer-hair curling around his shoulders.
The death of your child, or the salting of the earth?
"Yes," Elrond says at last. "Yes, I would. In every world.”
The true cost of an impossible choice is too heavy to be borne by song and story. It is the moment you understand the world only continues because of something you have done, and that it will continue without you in it, and so you must decide whether that world is better for your absence. Elwing flew from the cliff the moment she grew wings, knowing her sons would grow without her, would either die in fire or learn to braid their hair and button their cloaks and call someone else father. Elrond watched his daughter choose a mortality she would one day come to regret and named peace in the world as her bride-price, knowing she would live and love and then sorrow and die in a future he would not inhabit, that he will never see the gardens of Minas Tirith bloom. It is not the same choice, though they are both made by the same secret knowledge.
There are days Elwing herself believes the heroic and cruel songs sung about her, and is convinced that through some brutal act of contrition, she might yet split herself open and extract the mother she might have been, could have been, or, like the cruelest of songs say, should have been. What would that surgery look like—what knife could separate bird from the body that was thrust into it? What is the velocity of a woman falling from a cliff? Fast enough to blur the lines between the human and the inhuman. She wonders.
She pictures often, this other woman she might have been, clawing her way out from inside the bird like she were breaking through a shell, blood-slicked and wet from the womb, a little-girl-lost who did not sell her own motherhood in exchange for the life of every other child of Beleriand, who let herself choose the crying of her children over the wailing of the world. Perhaps that-Elwing would have loved those boys better than this-Elwing ever could, would have turned in mid-air and flew to them. But all that could be salvaged from burning Doriath were the daughters who knew how to flee, who saw survival only through wings, not roots. Which is to say: Elrond is his mother's son. And Elwing is her mother's slaughter.
Would you choose once more, what you have chosen before?
It is a knowledge both clean and devastating: that you can love a child so completely and still recognise that doing everything to ensure and establish your continued presence in their life might be the cruelest option available. That sometimes, the most profound act of devotion is to flee. His foster fathers leave for Eönwe’s camp in the pitch black night, to spare them the horror of a final farewell. The trees keep growing. The children keep living. Elrond sunders himself evermore from his daughter upon a high hill on Edoras. The sun sets on his sons from the deck of a white ship. The children keep living. Nerdanel waves a tearful goodbye from a high window. The children keep living. Elwing shoves her twins into a nursemaid’s arms, and carries a jewel across the sea. The children keep living. Eärendil turns his ship to the brighter shore, tears lining his cheeks and the jewel strapped on his brow. The children keep living. The host of Valinor arrives, and Arda is saved. The children become people you will never meet, carry joys and sorrows you will never witness, and you must make peace with that. You are already gone.
What would you choose if given the choice again? The crying of your children, or the wailing of the world?
"I know, Elrond. I know you would," Elwing turns to her son, and her eyes are full of tears and it is the happiest he has ever seen her. As if knowing that Elrond would make such a choice, that he too would choose the world, made her own choice worth the choosing. They sit in silence again. He'd made his choice. She'd made hers. Now, they make another. She takes his hand, and he clasps it tight. Somewhere oversea in Endor, someone is singing about the swan who chose the sea, and Elrond understands that the song is beautiful, the song is a symbol, the song is a lie, and the song is neverending.
Yes, Elrond understands.