Work Text:
Tonight as it gets cold
tell yourself
what you know which is nothing
but the tune your bones play
as you keep going.
- From "Lines for Winter" by Mark Strand
The trouble with being hailed as a master of lore was that people tended to forget history happened to you right along with everyone else.
Elrond would not fully come to appreciate this until Imladris, where he learned what it truly meant to steward a place, to be its lord, to tend and nurture it root and stem. Long and hard work, that, and impossible on any but the Eldar’s timeline, in which one might spend a decade’s afternoon weaving protective enchantments or singing the Bruinen onto course, and come back to oneself in a different season, a different century, and then go in to dinner. One could forgive a traveler, weary from toil and trial, for overlooking the valley's master in the woodwork, recognizing him instead in a tapestry or by the name on an ancient scroll.
But in what Elrond later understood to be the last gasp of his long youth, he had not been so patient. Time behaved differently then, and Elrond would never quite be able to put his finger on why. Perhaps it was a trick of circumstance, a consequence of Beleriand itself; after his and Elros’ earliest days there had never again been time to lose oneself, and even Maglor’s best efforts could not dispel the shadow of a rapidly gathering doom, which in the end had come and gone like the crack of a hammer.
In Lindon they seemed to dwell interminably among the shards left behind, here at the edge of the continent, in the fading of another year. Elrond wondered aloud when the days would either cease to ratchet forward at speed or begin to yield some measurable progress as they did. He and Gil-galad were working late, sitting up in Elrond’s office, which had been assembled temporarily years ago and now seemed rather permanent.
Gil-galad laughed at him, though not unkindly. “I fear you seek the impossible,” he said. “Would it distress you to learn that I felt much the same as you when I first came into the kingship?”
“Came into. That’s a rather passive way to put it, don’t you think? I thought the kingship tumbled out of a collapsing tunnel and be-filmed you in the moondust of Gondolin.”
“This is how I know you’re overtired. You have stooped to poetry.”
“I am not tired,” said Elrond, dipping his quill into an inkwell.
“You are more robust than I, then.” Gil-galad made a final notation in the ledger open before him and set his own pen down. “Come, let us be finished. Have a drink with me.”
Elrond fought the urge to say that it seemed they would never be finished; half of Forlond was still a sprawl of tents, though they’d grown sturdier and more elaborate over the years, and Elrond knew he would actually be sorry the day he disassembled his own quarters at long last. Gil-galad had been among the first to move into more permanent housing, as befitted his station, but he had not gone without protest and still maintained his former accommodations adjacent to Elrond’s as a kind of auxiliary outpost, claiming convenience. It was here he led Elrond now, though only to pour them each a cup of elderberry wine. Then they went out of the tent into the night.
The demise of Beleriand had been quick and violent, less a death of one continent than the bloody birth of another. Yet it seemed to Elrond its final throes echoed still: for one thing, the weather was strange, less clement than he recalled from the lost coastlines of his childhood, as though the skies no longer knew which lands lay beneath them. Winters in Lindon were cold. Snow fell upon the beaches past the havens at Mithlond and drifted straight into the sea, and there were storms that rimed the land with gleaming ice and made the ground impassable.
No snow had fallen yet this season, but the air was clear as crystal and the stars overhead seemed harder, their brightness more penetrative. Elrond could feel the starlight sear his skin, though perhaps that was only the chill.
“I remember when I first saw Eärendil’s star come into the West,” Gil-galad said, gaze upturned to the sky. “After Sirion, when things still felt ruined. We had come too late, and I thought—“ He shook his head. “I thought it my first true act as king and my first failure also.”
“None blamed you.”
“Oh, but they did. Sirion was full of those who had done nothing for years but flee. They were tired, and they were used to seeing the rot of everything the kings of the Noldor touched. They expected nothing from me but more of the same, and I saw it in their eyes when they looked at me. The bar was in the mud already. Sirion only confirmed their suspicion I would not even reach it there.”
“That’s hardly fair,” Elrond said, the force of his loyalty chasing some of the cold from his face. For he did feel loyal to Gil-galad, intensely so, and more than he had once expected.
“I cannot fault them. I could not fault you, if you felt the same. You foremost, perhaps.”
When Gil-galad turned to face him, ruddy from the cold and the wine, Elrond saw in his eyes an unexpected hint of trepidation, as though Gil-galad thought it possible that all along Elrond had been nurturing some grudge.
“My lord, if I have in any way implied—“
Gil-galad held up a hand. “No, no. Though I admit when you first came to me I held my breath for some time.” He sighed as though releasing that ancient breath, a gout of pale steam billowing around his head.
“The blame for Sirion falls on the backs of four elves, one of whom went on to raise my brother and me. Even had I apportioned some of it to you I am well used to making a home of contradiction.”
“Did you forgive Maglor? I have never asked you.”
The frankness of the question was disarming. Elrond looked away. They were standing in what had become a kind of makeshift festival square in what would become the center of the city. A few days before there had been a feast, ostensibly to herald the advent of winter, though in truth for no other reason than that the king wished it. Between the two of them Elrond was the healer, but Ereinion Gil-galad was the best at taking Forlond’s temperature, and he had deemed the people in need of festivity. So they had drunk spiced wine, sung and played music long into the night, lit a great bonfire against the cold. Even Elrond had been compelled to set his work aside, and after some cajoling and still more wine, to dance.
Elrond could not hear a harp string plucked or a voice raised in song without an accompanying echo. Sometimes it came loudly, a ringing in his ears, sometimes less sound than an ache that dwelled in his chest but which might seize his whole body at any moment, cast him back into the last days of the old world, when he himself had looked up and lighted on a westward gleam and known an end was hastening to hand.
“You spoke of the star,” Elrond said. “Gil-Estel. Why did it make you think of Sirion?”
“It was a change. A sign that something had happened, that something would happen. That we were not simply waiting for Morgoth to grind us to pieces by the sea. I was not so audacious as to think I put the star there, but perhaps it meant my failure had not been quite so abject as I believed.”
Elrond nodded. “I cannot now think of another way things might have happened. But that is all of history, I suppose. Time’s threads unspool, and weave their own surety behind them.”
This was all Elrond felt equipped to say on the matter of forgiveness, but Gil-galad seemed to understand him. As one they looked back up at the sky, which had begun to cloud to the east with the promise of snow. The Mariner was not visible, and Elrond hoped to be abed by dawn, when next he crossed the horizon.
“Things will change here too,” said Gil-galad. “One day we will scarcely recognize this place.”
Elrond searched his face for some premonitory melancholy. Later he would wonder, but if Gil-galad felt such that night he had not betrayed it, and Elrond himself had had no particular foresight.
There had been only time, with its guarantee of ceaselessness. There had been only hope, that in the ensuing centuries Elrond might look back and say: at Lindon, under Gil-galad, things could only have been good.