and the waters prevailed by StormsBreadth  

Celebrimbor is in the forges, when Ereinion finds him.

With the war finally over, there’s a hum of activity in the air. The High King had declared that the rough settlement on the north of the Gulf of Lhûn is to be made permanent, and people had jumped to respond, making plans and breaking soil. Eager to put their mark on the land, to finally build something new after the decades of destruction.

Since then, there’s has been no end to the building works, and thus no end to the broken tools and the need for new ones. The makeshift forges are full with the clang of hammer on metal, a ringing counterpart to the cries of the gulls that bob on the nearby waves.

Ereinion watches silently as Celebrimbor hammers out a dent in a spade. 

Once he’s satisfied that the spade is fit for use again, Celebrimbor adds it to the pile of fixed tools and turns to his king. 

‘My lord,’ he says with a slight bow. Etiquette is still one of the things the infant kingdom needs to settle. In his personal life, Celebrimbor knew, Ereinion preferred informality, but a protracted military campaign had required a rigid hierarchy. Add to that the cultural differences between Sindar and Noldor, and where the new city will fall remains to be seen. 

‘Cousin,’ Ereinion replies, a small smile on his lips, indicating his own approach. Celebrimbor feels his own lips twist in return, though with a heavier irony.

‘After everything, you would claim kinship with the House of Fëanor?’

‘I would claim kinship with you, Celebrimbor, ever a friend to my own house.’ Ereinion’s voice is warm, but it rings with an authority that leaves no room for argument. Celebrimbor bows his head in acknowledgement, and Ereinion moves on, looking around the forges. ‘You’re working as a blacksmith?’ he asks. 

Celebrimbor shrugs. ‘I’m doing some blacksmithing,’ he says, which isn’t quite the same thing. 

Ereinion nods, thoughtful. ‘Not your preference?’

Celebrimbor has been at Ereinion’s service for the better part of a century now, and his king knows him well enough to know that blacksmithing was never Celebrimbor’s particular interest. While he could make a sword better than just about anyone yet living on Middle-earth, his passion had always been for smaller works of artistry, silver- and goldsmithing. Gemcraft, when he had the time and capacity. 

But that sort of delicate craft requires a level of creative energy that Celebrimbor hasn’t felt for several decades, and besides. There’s little enough demand for jewellery these days, and lots of demand for tools. Spades and hammers and chisels don’t need great artistry to do the job, and he can make them serviceable enough. 

‘It’s what’s useful right now.’

‘Your commitment to the new city is admirable.’ 

Celebrimbor makes a face. He’s not sure that he is committed to the new city. He had just been in the area when it started springing up, and since it had been doing so under Gil-galad’s command, he had felt he better contribute. 

If nothing else, it’s something to do. Proof that the world hasn’t ended and Celebrimbor’s own two hands still work.  

‘What do you want?’ Celebrimbor asks, rather than attempting to explain any of this.

Ereinion takes it in good humour. ‘I’m sending a group back into Beleriand. We know that the land was torn up by the fighting, but we don’t know when, or if, it will be safe for people to return, and our planning for the next few years hinges on what land we have available. We need more information.’

Celebrimbor nods, already thinking. ‘Do you want me to make equipment for them?’ he asks. Last he saw of Beleriand, it was a mess. They’ll likely need some sort of climbing gear. Lamps, maybe – he probably has the materials stashed away somewhere.

‘I want you to lead the group.’ 

That was not what Celebrimbor was expecting to hear. ‘Me?’ he asks. ‘Surely there’s someone more suited.’ Someone not so closely associated with a disgraced band of murderers, perhaps. 

‘I can think of none better. You know the lands of Beleriand well, are skilled at solving problems and have a cockroach’s knack for survival. My people hold you in high regard, and I consider you one of my most trusted advisers.’ He pauses, glancing around the forge. ‘And I think you will get bored of fixing tools before too long.’ 

Celebrimbor looks around, at the grime of the forge and the pile of tools he’s fixed. Beyond the make-shift shelter they’ve made for the smithy and out into the dust and bustle of the new city. As he watches, a swallow lands, scratching at the ground. She carefully picks up a glob of mud in her beak and flits away, back to build her nest.

Even the birds are creating their own little homes. Settling in, finding where they belong. Ereinion is right. Celebrimbor sighs. 

‘When do we leave?’

They leave three days later, which was enough time for Celebrimbor to make a couple of lamps and say goodbye to those few people who might miss him, or at least mark his absence. His fellow smiths clap him on the arm and wish him luck. Galadriel tells him she hopes he finds what he’s looking for, and refuses to listen when he tells her he’s not looking for anything. Elrond seems distracted, while Elros is brimming with vitality, but they both embrace him. 

‘If you see anything of Maglor…’ Elrond starts.

 Celebrimbor grimaces. He thinks the most likely course is that Maglor followed his brother to the depths of the earth, or turned and threw himself into the sea. Can’t promise that if he did find him, he wouldn’t send him to the grave himself. But he cares for Elrond enough not to say that. 

‘I’ll let you know.’

The group Ereinion has gathered is small, for ease of travel and because not all that many can be spared. Ereinion has appointed Celebrimbor as their leader, and while Celebrimbor suspects that the group will be fairly egalitarian, he’s mindful of the responsibility as he travels to their meeting place. Mindful, too, of his heritage, and whether some may object to following him on those grounds. 

He knows it won’t be a worry with the first person he spots, at least. Losselloth came over with his family on the stolen ships, and followed Maedhros to Himring when the Noldor parted ways. Kept following him, even as the Sons of Fëanor turned to worse and worse deeds: he knows she remained in their camp after Sirion, and likely would have followed them to the bitter, fiery end if she’d been allowed. 

She offers Celebrimbor a nervous smile when she spots him, and he makes himself offer one back. He knows that the twins were always fond of her, and t hat she has a sensible head on her shoulders and a good knowledge of eastern Beleriand, both of which will be useful on their quest.

The elf standing next to her is someone Celebrimbor is much more straightforwardly pleased to see. Ribinvir was a stonecarver in Nargothrond, working alongside King Felagund on some of the city’s most ambitious projects. When the city fell, he was one of the few who fled alongside Celebrimbor and made their arduous way through the wilderness to the Isle of Balan. Their paths have not crossed much these past decades, but Celebrimbor remembers him as cheerful and steadfast and capable of swearing extensively in Khuzdul. Now they’re walking into the wilds again, Celebrimbor is glad to have him at his side, and Ribinvir’s friendly grin suggests the feeling is mutual. 

‘Celebrimbor,’ he says, grasping Celebrimbor’s arm. ‘Good to see you again, old friend.’

Celebrimbor smiles and says something in agreement, before turning to greet the other two elves he vaguely recognises. Heledholf, he knows, is a former scout of Gondolin, one of the refugees who arrived at the Havens of Sirion. His impression of her is brusque and practical. Taerfinios is one of Círdan’s administrators – Celebrimbor actually knows his wife better than him, as she had done a lot of work coordinating relief efforts whenever there was a crisis, which there often was. Taerfinios acknowledges Celebrimbor with a nod, and passes on her regards.

The final two Celebrimbor doesn’t think he knows at all. They introduce themselves as Eluduinen and Damlann, both Sindar, though judging by the pearls threaded through Eluduinen’s tousled blonde hair she hails from Falas, and Damlann’s soft woodland accent suggests Doriath. He has wide eyes and long fingers that can’t keep still, and introduces himself as a crafter without naming a specialism. 

And that’s it. Seven elves, of varying backgrounds, scooped up by Ereinion to venture back to the wastes of Beleriand.

It’s raining when they set out, a light drizzle that gets heavier as they begin their climb up through the western foothills of the Ered Luin. The tsunamis that crashed over Beleriand when the sea broke through may have ended, but the land is still marshy and unstable. They judge it best to stick to the higher ground. 

Their initial plan is to travel up along the mountains, keeping their feet clear of the marsh where possible and using the height to see a wider sweep of the land, before descending further north. The rain makes it hard to see much of what’s ahead of them, however. For the first morning, they mostly stay tucked inside their rain cloaks, focussing on their ascent. For all he’s been working in the forge, Celebrimbor’s body isn’t used to this kind of exercise, and he finds himself breathing heavily, sweating in spite of the rain and the chill.

There’s a break in the rain around early afternoon, and they gratefully take the opportunity to sit in a clearing and eat. The group makes the careful small talk of people who do not know each other, but know they are going to have to work in each other’s company for a long time: polite, earnest, carefully not touching on anything too sensitive. 

Celebrimbor finds himself sharing a rock with Eluduinen, who cheerfully explains the knack to finding good oysters as they eat their lunches. 

‘Not that there’ll be any colonies established there yet,’ she says, gesturing back to where the Gulf of Lhûn cuts a gleaming swathe through the landscape. ‘The waterscape is still too new. And it might not be the right type of water, once it settles, or the right temperature. We don’t know, really.’

That’s the crux of the matter, isn’t it? They don’t know. What the land will look like, what its people will look like. What they’ll find as they cross Beleriand, this land they all knew so well, now shattered and changed.

Celebrimbor looks back. The Havens are still visible from here, a cluster of buildings and tents dipping their toes in the bay. It crawls with activity, people hurrying to and fro, working on the building projects or carrying messages or going about their own unknown errands. They’re too far for even elf eyes to identify individuals: all Celebrimbor sees are the movements. But put together they show a city alive, a city growing. 

‘We’ll find out,’ he says. 

The rain continues on and off for the rest of the day. They push further than they might otherwise, hoping that the rain will stop in time for them to set up their tents, but the light starts to fade with no end in sight, so they end up making camp in the rain. Celebrimbor offers to go and hunt, leaving the others to wrangle the wet canvas of their tents or root around in the trees for dry firewood. 

He slips away into the scrubby brushes, listening to the sounds of nature. He's not been on this hill specifically, but he once spent a few weeks in these foothills on a hunting trip, and the broad lay of the land is familiar. 

It was in the early days at Himlad, once the east had settled and their fortress at the Pass of Aglon newly built. Celebrimbor was feeling restless, an adult and yet still part of his father’s household, isolated in a lonely castle, watching an unstable border. Desperate for his father’s approval, resenting the fact that he brought him here. Meanwhile Curufin was by turns restless and distant, and nothing Celebrimbor could do was good enough. He and his father were too similar, and yet not quite similar enough, and the tension grew over the long summer until Maedhros came to visit. 

Then it exploded. 

There were screaming matches between all four of them, but Curufin and Maedhros especially. The sting of exile was festering within him, and he resented Maedhros giving up the crown. Celebrimbor, meanwhile, resented the fact that for all their arguments, it had never actually been about him. Eventually, and with unusual tact, Celegorm announced that he was taking Tyelpë hunting. 

And he did.

Hunting with Celegorm alone was not the genteel, horseback experience that Celebrimbor had come to expect from the rare occasions that his family got together or entertained guests. Celegorm ran with Oromë's hunt back in Aman, and for them, hunting was something you did on your own two feet, over the course of many weeks, with only a bow, a knife and a bedroll. They slept out under the stars, Celegorm making sure that Celebrimbor knew how to navigate and Huan providing warmth when the nights took a chill. The hound’s fur was soft under Celebrimbor’s hands.

Celegorm could could never be called gentle. But he could be patient, when he had a mind for it. Patient when lying in wait for prey. Patient when teaching, his firm hands guiding Celebrimbor to skin a rabbit or set a trap. 

Patient when planning an assault, or scheming to take over a city. Celebrimbor knows well that the hands which taught him to hunt were bloody in more than one way.

It was late spring, when he and Celegorm went hunting, and the woods were alive with the sound of skittering things and creatures. It was difficult even to move without startling a fat pigeon or a family of mice. Now, it’s eerily quiet. Most of the old growth trees are gone, leaving behind stumps covered in moss and ivy. Young beeches and pines have started to grow between them, reaching skyward while shrubs colonise the underlayer, but if the woodland has animal inhabitants, they’re quiet, and Celebrimbor can see no sign of deer or foxes. 

He tells himself it’s just the rain, that creatures are hunkering down out of the downpour. He would gladly do the same: hunting in the rain is miserable work. He wanders further and later than he expected through the quiet of the woods, before he eventually finds a couple of pheasants hiding in the gorse beyond the woodland. He scales back up the hill with them as the rain eases off to a trickle and the last of Arien’s light gleams through the thinning clouds. 

The land below him is devastated. 

When Celebrimbor was here last, he remembers the rolling hills beneath them, the carefully tended and orderly vineyards and farms of Thargelion, the silver rivers that crossed the landscape to converge on the Gelion as she made her stately way down to the sea. 

Now, the Gelion rushes like a sea herself. She burst her banks long ago and shows no sign of subsiding, pulling the landscape with her in a rush down to the sea. The rest of the landscape is just as devastated, farms and vineyards swallowed up in a churn of mud, chunks of land thrown up and on their side, earth torn asunder. Celebrimbor has to stop for a moment just to stare. He had seen some of the devastation during the war, but from the ground, it was hard to see the full scale of it. Seeing it in full, Celebrimbor feels like the landscape itself: torn open, churned up. Lit by an impassive grey light. 

He stays there for longer than he should. When he turns to go back to camp, his bones jolt as if from sleep.

He's the last one back. Taerfinios and Heledholf have already set up the tents, Eluduinen has brought in water from a stream, and there’s a thin little fire going under a pot. Ribinvir, sitting by the fire, wordlessly holds out a hand for one of the pheasants, and they sit down to pluck and gut them. 

Then, because they are elves, they sing. 

It’s Damlann who takes up the refrain first. It’s a Sindar song about walking through the woods to meet one’s beloved, but they all know it. Some of them spin harmonies, or argue over verses. Celebrimbor is reluctant to join at first, still shaken and strangely blank from the landscape. But he is an elf, and there is no sorrow too deep for song, and even if his heart is not in it he can mouth along with the words. 

Celebrimbor finishes preparing his bird and leaves it to Ribinvir, the superior cook, to deal with. The song comes to an end, and Damlann starts on another. When that one ends, Eluduinen starts a Teleri sailing song that Celebrimbor doesn’t know, but quickly picks up the call and response. 

By the time the pheasants are cooked and they’re ladling out stew to go with their waybread, they’ve sung a dozen songs and the last gleams of Arien’s light are fading from the sky. With the cloud cover, the night is incredibly dark, and it hides the view of the churned-up landscape. 

Celebrimbor crawls into his tent, and is grateful for it. 

Chapter End Notes

Title from Psalm 84:3

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They wake to more rain. Packing the tents away wet isn’t ideal, but the rain doesn’t look likely to stop any time soon and they have a long way to travel. They pack down rapidly and keep moving north, pausing whenever there’s a break in the rain to make observations and take notes. Losselloth and Ribinvir discuss the stability of the land while Heledholf carefully examines the plants and Eluduinen counts the birds that wheel overhead. 

Celebrimbor finds himself at something of a loose end when they do. He’s a smith, rather than a land surveyor: he doesn’t even know much about mining. On one of their longer breaks, he tries pulling out his sketchbook. It doesn’t contain much, just a few old technical drawings for weapons and notes about metals. He sits with a pencil looking out over the torn-up land, and feels awkward. 

‘Are you drawing?’ 

Celebrimbor looks up. It’s Damlann, holding a sketchbook of his own. Unlike Celebrimbor’s, this one looks well used, and he’s holding a travel set of watercolours to go with it. Celebrimbor laughs awkwardly. 

‘Not really. Artisan, rather than artist.’

‘I mean, that looks quite good to me.’ He gestures at the facing page, which has one of Celebrimbor’s sword designs. 

‘I’ve drawn a lot of swords. Not so many landscapes.’

‘May as well practice, right?’ Damlann smiles, nodding at the space beside him. ‘May I join you?’ 

Celebrimbor can’t think of a good reason to object, so he moves over instead, giving the Sinda space to perch next to him. Damlann sits close enough that Celebrimbor hears his earrings clink together. They’re delicately made, tiny silver vines that dangle from his earlobes and crawl up the shell. Lost wax casting, Celebrimbor thinks. 

Celebrimbor watches as Damlann opens his own sketchbook. Unlike Celebrimbor, he’s been busy, and the pages are full of scribbled landscapes and delicate drawings of flowers. Damlann shoots Celebrimbor a sidelong smile as he turns to a new page and starts sketching out the horizon line. Celebrimbor frowns, and turns back to his own page. He doesn’t have much flair for landscape, but he’s reasonably competent at replicating what’s in front of him, and by the time they move he has, at least, a diagram indicating the lay of the land. 

Once they’re moving again, he feels a little more useful. Heledholf is a competent scout, and most of the others have experience travelling in the wilderness, but Celebrimbor is the only one who’s spent any real time in these mountains save possibly Losselloth. And while Celebrimbor wouldn’t say he knows Thargelion particularly well, he remembers bits and pieces from his hunting trip with Celegorm, from family visits to Caranthir. Enough that his eyes are trained to see where the patterns of mud and broken earth indicate a former settlement, or a smudge in the plain a former road. 

At least the stars are still in their places. With one obvious exception, but Eärendil’s path across the sky with the Silmaril is predictable, and Celebrimbor knows how to keep them heading north. 

After three days’ travel, the land below starts looking a little less waterlogged, a little more stable. Celebrimbor consults with Heledholf and Losselloth, and between them they think it’s likely safe enough to descend. 

This land bore the first brunt of Morgoth’s ravages, burning in the Dagor Bragollach and being overrun and ransacked by orcs immediately after. But that was a hundred years ago now, and the course of the War of Wrath ranged mostly westwards, giving the land here time to recover. The ground is still broken and jagged, but new growth is emerging over the rents in the ground, gradually smoothing them over. As they descend, it becomes clear that some of the old growth managed to cling to life. The group stand a little straighter as they step under the dense canopy of the ancient beeches, where the leaves keep the worst of the rain off and create a tranquil hall of green. 

Even as they leave the old growth forest and step onto land devastated by the war, there are signs of recovery. The newer woodlands are are strong and healthy, saplings of beech fighting with elm and oak to establish themselves, low shrubs taking advantage of the gaps in the canopy the creep across the ground. It’s spring, and the birds are starting to return from their winters in the south, swallows and nightingales and other birds that Celebrimbor doesn’t recognise but Eluduinen names for them: tree pipit and redstart and spotted flycatcher. The land here is firm too, and when Losselloth tests the soil, she comes up smiling. 

‘Not perfect, but it’s alive. A few more seasons and… I think it will be fine.’

Over the next few days, they make their way through Thargelion. During the war, it had seemed like everything was doomed to destruction, but travelling across the land now they see the new plants growing up and the land slowly settling, growing steadily more solid in spite of the ongoing rain, and calm down slightly. 

They skirt around the edge of Caranthir’s old domain. Celebrimbor knows the roads that would lead them to the keep, still just about visible beneath the years of neglect. One night, he climbs to the top of the dilapidated farmhouse they’re camping in, disturbing a cloud of outraged house martins roosting under the remains of the roof, and looks east. 

He hasn’t seen the keep since the long peace. In his mind’s eye, the keep is whole and hearty, warm yellow stone lit by the setting sun as Celebrimbor and his father arrived from Himlad. He knows it must be ruins now. Part of him wants to travel there, to see the proof for himself, but what would be the point? They’ve already determined that this section has stabilised. No reason to go out of their way. 

But he stays awake anyway, looking east, watching the stars shift and the dawn light start to drift over the mountains, thinking about nothing.

They continue their survey. 

The main problem, it seems, is the Gelion. The river had always been wide and deep, only growing more so as each of the rivers of Ossiriand came to join her. But now, she is hungry, roaring and impassable, pulling debris down in a roaring torrent and sucking in chunks of her banks. 

Once they've finished their business in Thargelion, the original plan was simply to head West, through the green lands that had once been controlled by Ambarussa. It’s looking increasingly unlikely that they’ll manage to get across the river.

They try the old dwarf bridge, just in case. It's broken, of course. Most of the old stone has been swept away or buried under the swirling brown current, but one pier still remains, broken-off arches still flung out as if for balance, standing strong against the tide. Celebrimbor can still make out the carvings on the sides, the careful patterns that some dwarven stoneworker must have cut into the rock some hundreds of years ago. 

‘We should head north,’ Heledholf says, frowning. ‘It might be easier to pass the Little Gelion and the Great Gelion separately. And we wanted to visit Himring and Anfauglith at some point anyway.’

Celebrimbor nods. Heledholf’s words make sense, and yet… 

How long will the pier remain, Celebrimbor wonders. How long before it joins the rest of the bridge, swallowed up by the current? There’s a tightness in Celebrimbor’s throat at the thought of it disappearing forgotten, beneath the waters. An urge to do something to mark its passing, to recognise that it had once stood here. 

‘One moment,’ he says, and starts moving towards the bridge. 

While the pier is the only part still standing, a chunk of the bridge base has fallen off into the water. The corner of it still pokes out, a stepping stone between the shore and the bridge. Celebrimbor eyes it, judging distance, height. Risk of falling into the quick, murky water, never to be seen again. It’s a bad idea, but something unnamed compels him. 

He jumps. 

There’s a thin hiss of breath behind him, a horrified gasp. But he makes the jump. The stone is slippery with rain and river spray, but he accounted for that too, landing low and grabbing the point with a hand. He stands slowly, feeling with his feet until he finds a foothold. The rock underneath him is solid still, stable against the current. 

He hears movement from the shore, and turns around just in time to throw out an arm and help stabilise Ribinvir, who has made the leap after him. Ribinvir gives him a nod once they’re stable, and turns his gaze to the fragment of bridge that’s up in front of them. 

‘You first,’ he says. Celebrimbor nods, eyeing the lip of the bridge. There’s no room to get a running start, but he takes a single step back, pushes forward with the momentum, and leaps.

For a moment, he’s suspended in the air, the sheer rock of the bridge rising up ahead of him, and he doesn’t think he’s going to make it. But he reaches out anyway, and manages to grab the ledge he was aiming for. He hauls himself up over the lip of the ledge, onto the platform of the bridge proper. He turns back to Ribinvir, keeping his centre of gravity low, and holds his arms out, ready to catch him.

From here, Celebrimbor can see the rest of their party. Heledholf and Losselloth are both watching them with concern, Damlann with something like fascination. Eluduinen has gotten distracted by something on the river back, and is in the process of calling Taerfinios over to join her. No-one else is coming after them, so Celebrimbor turns his focus back to Ribinvir. 

His friend jumps. Celebrimbor catches, letting the momentum carry them both backwards, slowing the force and using it to pull Ribinvir directly up onto the platform. They lie there for a second, one on top of the other, panting as the water roars around them. 

Slowly, Ribinvir gets up, and Celebrimbor follows. On some instinct, both of them walk to the other side of the bridge, where it breaks off into nothingness, and watch the churning swell beneath. Celebrimbor lays his hand on the rail at the side of the bridge. It’s still smooth, cool to the touch, finished in a granite that glitters when the sun breaks through the clouds above.

Aulë’s name is not often on his lips these days, but Celebrimbor still knows the prayers of thanksgiving for a completed work of craft. They’re not the same prayers the dwarves say to Mahal, but Celebrimbor hopes…

‘Father of invention, you delight in all the works of our hands…’

Ribinvir joins him after the first couple of words, laying a hand of his own on the cool stone. 

There’s no change when they finish. No sign of acknowledgement. Only the rushing of water. But Celebrimbor’s breath feels easier, the tightness in his throat lighter. The last remnants of the bridge have been acknowledged. He turns back to Ribinvir. 

‘Back to the others?’ 

‘I’m sure they’ll have plenty to tell us,’ he replies. 

Getting back across is easier. The stepping stone is lower than the pier, and from there it’s only a short leap to the banks, which they scramble up without issue.

‘That was foolish,’ Heledholf says, reproachfully. Celebrimbor nods. He’s aware.

Ribinvir gives her a charming grin. ‘We made it, though. Some foolish things are worth doing.’ 

Heledholf sniffs, but Taerfinios returns before she can reply. ‘It gave Eluduinen a chance to look at the water,’ he says, nodding over to where Eluduinen is crawling back up the bank herself. 

‘The water is brackish,’ she announces. At everyone’s blank expressions, she shakes her head and elaborates. ‘It’s saltier than river water should be. Like an estuary.’ She looks out at where the water is distinctly heading towards the sea. ‘I don’t know what to make of it.’ 

‘Maybe the war opened up a mountain with salt deposits?’ Losselloth suggests. ‘We had a salt mine in the mountains to the north.’

‘Maybe.’ Eluduinen doesn’t look convinced. 

‘Could there be two currents?’ Celebrimbor asks. The river here is wide enough that they can barely see the opposite bank, let alone all the movements of the water.

‘Like a tidal bore? We’re a long way from the coast, but it’s not impossible I suppose. Keep an eye out for whirlpools.’

‘Regardless,’ Heledholf says. ‘We clearly can’t cross here. If you’re done with your risky escapades, we should head north.’ 

And north they go.

They follow the Gelion north, bowed down by the near-constant rain. Their tents and socks never get completely dry, and the land is squelchy underfoot. It’s hard going: the water has become wild and unstable, the banks more of a suggestion in some places. The earth under their feet sometimes moves, great tremors shaking the ground and throwing the water up in crashing, dirty waves. They find themselves taking long diversions around wide pools of muddy water, or scrambling for high ground in the face of flash floods. Eluduinen frowns at the water, checking it regularly.

‘It’s less salty here, but there’s other contaminants. Metals and dirt and the like.’ She looks out across the water, brow furrowed in concern. ‘It’s not good for the river creatures.’

Above her, a gull cries. They look up as it wheels in to land on what used to be a tree, protruding from the water, and regards them with beady eyes. Eluduinen sighs. 

‘At least the seagulls are doing well.’ 

They keep going, to the point where the Great Gelion and Little Gelion flow together into one. Here, the water is still thick and fast, but as they travel up into the mountains again, its course grows narrower. They find a point where it’s narrow enough to throw a rope across and catch it on a scraggly tree, determinedly clinging to life among the rocky crags. 

Heledholf goes across first, balancing on the precarious single rope. She ties more ropes across so the rest of them have a handhold, and they ferry their equipment over cautiously. After pulling their ropes free again, they carry on.

This far north, and in the mountains, they catch occasional glimpses of Anfauglith. 

Celebrimbor had mostly not been on the front lines, during the war. The commanders of the Host of Valinor were not going to let anyone descended from Fëanor within eyesight of Morgoth – for all the good that did in the end – and besides. Celebrimbor was a better smith than fighter. So he had seen little enough of the very north, where the fighting had been the worst.

The land here bears the scars of it. The ground here is torn up, great rents in the earth that are slowly filling with slag and stinking water. Elsewhere the earth is piled up, ordinary land thrown upside down to reveal a motley of red and black and brown, broken only by lurid streaks of churned up yellow or grey where strange minerals have been uncovered or dumped. There’s not a hint of green across the whole land. In the distance, smoke rises from the levelled mountains of Angband, the bitumen and coal buried beneath still burning.

The whole landscape is an open wound, bleeding and festering. Celebrimbor can’t look at it, keeps his gaze fixed firmly on the ground ahead of him as they pass through the remains of Maglor’s gap. 

The low ground here is marshy. They don’t have the single great river of the Gelion to deal with, the instead the land has opened up into the chaos of Anfauglith, a hundred little streams that get in the way and saturate the ground around them, rendering it boggy. They make camp on a hillock, and attempt to dry their boots out from the dozen slips they’ve all made, when land that looked solid turned out to be wet, or mud slid them down into a stream – or where they simply had no choice but to ford the streams they came to.

The next night is a little better. By now, they’ve started the approach up to Himring. The mountains here were torn up towards the end of the War, twisted and reshaped by the Host of Valinor in their push to the North. Celebrimbor finds it unnerving, the peaks he once knew now broken and jagged, the land around them littered with enormous chunks of rock.

They should reach Himring on the morn. 

The knowledge feels like a stone on Celebrimbor’s stomach. He struggles to find sleep, and leaves his tent after a few fitful hours to sit on one of the rocks flung their way. The whole landscape is familiar and yet wrong, strangely quiet in the way that Celebrimbor would usually only expect in the dead of winter, when snow mutes all sound. 

All of the strongholds of his uncles had resembled them in various ways, from the glorified hunting lodge of Ambarussa to Caranthir's tidy counting rooms and Maglor's elegant, sprawling complex, designed for acoustics and filled with his beloved horses. Himlad keep had been a balance of his father and Celegorm: dark, tucked away in a tangled forest, yet richly furnished within. The forges ran day and night, and Curufin had done some clever feat of engineering such that the excess heat filled the rest of the home and kept it warm even in the dead of winter, when snows covered the outside. 

But none of them had fit their lord more than Himring. Himring was Maedhros, to a greater or lesser extent. Tall, forbidding, ever vigilant to the north. The first Fëanorian keep as he had been the first Fëanorian son. The Maedhros Celebrimbor remembers was grim, but he was present, lit from within, unmovable as a mountain.

There's a sound behind him. Celebrimbor looks around. 

Losselloth. Like Celebrimbor, she's dressed for sleep, cloak wrapped hastily around her shoulders. She starts toward Celebrimbor when he looks at her, then hesitates until Celebrimbor shifts over, making room for her beside him on the rock. 

She sits next to him, not quite touching, but close enough that he feels the weight of her presence. 

‘I thought it was you,’ she says. ‘When I saw someone else was up. It wouldn't be anyone else. I think he's just a villain, for the rest of them.’

She's probably right. Celebrimbor knows that she followed Maedhros to Sirion, remained in his camp during the War of Wrath. Only at the very last violation did she turn aside. Even then, Celebrimbor doesn't think it's by choice: he doesn't think either Maedhros or Maglor told anyone they were planning to steal the Silmarils. His family have a habit of inspiring fanatical loyalty.

‘I know he was, by the end. But that wasn’t all that he was.’ 

Celebrimbor knows. Despite his best attempts to deny it, he knows. He disavowed his family, refused their oath, stepped away from his line and pledged allegiance to another, but they were still his family. The monsters who ransacked Doriath were the uncles who read to him as a child, who charged around with him on their shoulders. The traitor who send Finrod to his death was the father who had carried him, taught him, sent him away from Alqualondë so he wouldn't be a kinslayer before he was an adult. Even the madman whose Oath drove his seven sons to their seven deaths was the grandfather who crafted miniature marvels for Celebrimbor’s begetting days, who first taught him to tease metal into fantastic shapes and trap light in crystal structures.

If anyone yet living knows the people behind the stories, it’s Celebrimbor. 

But he still remembers the burning ruins of Sirion, first seen from a boat that came as fast as it could, but too late to stop the violence. Maedhros had been a monster by then. He had been a monster during the War as well, savage and brilliant, taking a harsh pleasure in violence – and, as far as Celebrimbor could tell, only in violence, by the end. But by then they were at war, and Arafinwë was more than happy to point his mad, borderline-suicidal nephew at their enemies. 

He cannot mourn the person Maedhros became. Can’t mourn the people any of them became, knowing the death and violence that followed. He baulks at the very thought, mind numb and stomach tight. 

But Losselloth sounds lost, and small, so in the end he doesn’t say any of this to her. He puts an arm around her shoulders and draws her in. She leans against him, sighing. Eventually, he thinks she drifts into the alert half-sleep of their people, still resting her warmth against him. Celebrimbor follows her, letting ghosts drift across the surface of his mind until morning comes and chases them away. 

Chapter End Notes

Title from Isaiah 5:5

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Himring itself is surprisingly intact. 

They see the keep from a distance, looming from the top of the hill, still recognisable despite the upheaval all around. As they approach, it becomes clearer that the keep isn’t entirely unscathed. The roof is cracked open, and the walls to one side have become tumbledown. Wind, water and time have all taken their toll on the once-proud structures, grinding down the stones that once stood firm against the north. Sparrows nest in the broken crannies and crows caw out an unfriendly welcome. 

Still, the land is firm and high, and while rocks have been cast down and the land reshaped around it, Ribinvir declares that it could likely be rebuilt. Celebrimbor tries to imagine it. Falathrim stylings on top of Maedhros’s Noldor utilitarianism, the starry banners of Gil-Galad hanging from the walls. The vision makes his stomach clench.

The keep has been thoroughly plundered already, but they comb it over again just in case. Any textiles or papers left behind have become exposed to the elements and rotted away, and any valuables have been carted off. They find dented tin cups and broken tools and weapons. Losselloth finds a few scattered pewter beads trodden into the mud. She wipes them off on the hem of the tunic and wordlessly hands a couple over to Celebrimbor. 

They’re round, made by casting, decorated with bold lines in a style that suggests they’re Mannish, rather than Noldorin in origin. Celebrimbor takes them anyway, rolling them against his palm. There’s still some grit on them that Losselloth didn’t catch, but the shape is pleasant. Celebrimbor eventually tucks them in a pocket, intending to tie them to a cord later.

They sleep in a corner of the keep where the roof still provides some shelter from the rain. Celebrimbor is tired enough that he actually sleeps through the night, back huddled against the stone walls. He’s directly below the place where he used to sleep when he came to visit. The bed is long gone, as is the floor. As are most of the people he used to come to see. 

Across the courtyard, Losselloth’s open eyes gleam, reflecting starlight and the memory of the trees. 

In the morning  they descend, heading west. Towards Himlad by the Pass of Aglon, though no-one has said this out loud. Celebrimbor, for his part, is mostly trying not to think about it. The land here is soggy, getting wetter as they go down, and the broken mountains make it difficult to traverse. The ground itself has opened up in places, leaving deep chasms. Most are filled with streams. Some run deep and fast, while others are nothing more than a trickle. Eluduinen checks the water in all of them, and her frown deepens as the day wears on.

Celebrimbor expected to feel something as he travels closer to the Pass of Aglon, to the keep where he spent the first 400 or so years of his adulthood. Instead, it’s as if his feelings slowly fade away with every step they take, resembling nothing so much as the flat grey of the endless cloudy skies. 

Ribinvir keeps giving him worried looks. Celebrimbor offers him what he hopes is a reassuring smile. It only makes him frown harder. 

They reach the old keep the evening after leaving Himring. The two keeps aren’t actually all that far apart – it was less than a day’s ride, when Celebrimbor lived here. But the ways were maintained then, and there was a direct path. Now, on foot, they have to ford the streams and climb over the ridges where the mountains have fallen down, every step rendered more difficult by the relentless wind and rain. 

The pass itself has been split in two, a river opened up where the road used to run. The fortifications have crumbled on either side, which does at least provide a crossing-place where the stones are piled in the water.

The keep is in worse state than Himring. The fortifications were built on a ledge above the pass itself, from which the scouts could keep an eye on the great gates, and beyond into Ard-Halen. Now, a landslide has cracked the building in half, and chunks of wall mingle with fallen rocks in a tumble that falls all the way to the river’s edge. 

‘Is it safe?’ Losselloth asks, looking at the pile. 

Heledholf tests some of the rocks. They’re large, heavy, and move very little in response. She nods. ‘Safe enough to climb, if we’re careful.’

Eluduinen elects to stay by the river, and Damlann remains with her. The rest of them climb. Celebrimbor focusses on the movement of his limbs: hand over hand, foot over foot. 

His last memory of this place is the view from horseback as they fled. The castle was lit up orange, both from the blaze of the setting sun, and from the conflagration of the forest beneath. Curufin had doused the trees with pitch and set them alight to buy the fleeing defenders time, delayed the orcs who smashed down the gates and swarmed over the hills. 

They had to leave the better part of their wealth behind, the tapestries and tools, fine furnishings and casks of wine. They salvaged most of their jewels, a good store of weapons, their horses. Curufin had begun preparing the moment that he caught wind of movement from the north. They kept their jewellery in their ears and their swords on their belts. Celebrimbor fled wearing earrings made by Fëanor himself. 

Curufin, he knew, had been wearing Celebrimbor’s first necklace around his neck, a child’s wonky first attempt alongside the finest craft of the Noldor. 

Both have been lost since, of course. Celebrimbor didn’t know whether Curufin was still wearing it when he died: he didn’t claim his father’s body. His own earrings were left in Nargothrond, when Celebrimbor fled that place as well. He stopped wearing his old jewellery after Finrod’s death. 

Their less portable wealth has long since been destroyed or plundered. The group looks around the keep anyway, making their notes. There are no signs of its original inhabitants. They find some old, charred bones and broken cooking implements in a rubbish heap, traces of the orcs who took the place over after the Sons of Fëanor were forced to abandon the north. 

Celebrimbor wanders around as the rest of the group take their observations. He expects to feel something as he walks around. Some sort of sadness, or connection, or a sense of history. But there are no ghosts here. Celebrimbor’s father has been dead for nigh on a century, and the keep is just a place. An old, abandoned place, ransacked and empty. 

He still finds himself in the smithy. 

They were in an outbuilding, attached to the outer walls of the keep, and they’re still relatively intact. The forges, the benches, even the tool racks are still in the same place, just hanging askew. Celebrimbor runs his hands over them, feeling the stone under his hands. When he lived here, there was an annoying gap at the back of one of the benches down which tools had an annoying tendency to fall. Because the benches couldn’t be moved, the only way to retrieve anything was to lie on the bench and wriggle your arm down the gap. He wonders… 

It’s not hard for Celebrimbor to reach down behind the bench now. He stretches his fingers, and they brush something smooth. With a lot of careful finagling, he’s able to pull the object out. 

A pair of pliers. Fine ones, for detail work, like jewellery-making or filigree embellishments. He reaches down again, still hunting, pulling up everything his fingers will reach between the bench and the wall. He scrabbles at the shapes buried in dust and grime. He finds a file, another pair of pliers, a few bent pieces of metal that might have been the start of a ring, or a buckle, or some other small object. 

The file was definitely his father’s. The handle is marked with his emblem, the cupped hand beneath the star of Fëanor. The pliers he is less sure about, but he pockets them anyway, along with the pieces of metal. 

The ground shakes, and Celebrimbor is out of the forge and in the courtyard before any conscious thought tells him to move his legs. His heart is racing in his chest, every nerve activated and screaming danger. He looks around wildly, searching for a way out, out, as far away as possible. Buildings aren’t safe, but neither is open country – but there, he spots woodland. They can take shelter there. 

‘Celebrimbor?’ someone is saying.

‘It’s not safe, we have to get out,’ he says. The tremors haven’t stopped, and no-one is responding with nearly enough urgency.

The elf in front of him looks around her. 

‘Did you find something? Or is it the tremors, because Heledholf thinks –‘

Her words are passing through Celebrimbor like water. He knows that the name Heledholf is familiar, but in the moment he can’t process what it means. 

‘Doesn’t matter, if we stay here we will be killed. Don’t grab anything, just go.’

Celebrimbor turns to follow his own advice, but there’s an arm around his waist and he would simply hit them and get free but he recognises the face, and it gives him a moment’s pause. 

‘Tyelpë,’ the familiar voice says. ‘Tyelpë, we’re not under attack.’ 

Celebrimbor feels sick and on edge, all of his muscles tight with tension and screaming that he needs to move. But the arm around him is firm and his mind is slowly catching up with his body, regaining the ability to process the world beyond the immediate haze of terror. 

The person holding him keeps speaking: ‘We’re in the ruins of the Keep at the Pass of Aglon, it’s the second year of the Second Age of Arda. This isn’t Nargothrond, the dragons are all slain.’ 

Celebrimbor draws a shuddering breath, than another. Ribinvir is the person holding him, he knows. Ribinvir, who experienced the crumbling stones and shaking corridors of Nargothrond, the screams of the noncombatants as they were kidnapped or put to the sword. Ribinvir, who would surely recognise the signs if they were under attack again. 

He takes another breath, and another, trying to focus on the world around them. Another elf approaches, and Celebrimbor dimly registers that it’s Heledholf, another friend on their journey. Not from Nargothrond, but she was at Gondolin. She will have known horrors of her own. 

‘Celebrimbor, can you hear me?’ she asks, surprisingly gentle. ‘Can you follow what I’m saying?’

He nods, suddenly unsure of his capacity to speak. His limbs are tense, taut with the need to run, but he knows that he trusts these people and they’re telling him to stay. The conflicting needs are tearing him apart, making his breathing short and sharp. His face feels hot, tingling. 

Heledholf is still speaking. ‘Good, alright, I need you to tell me about this object.’ 

Something is shoved into his hands. It’s leather, wrapped around metal, perhaps eight inches long and rounded. The leather under his fingers feels well cared-for, with a stamped design of some kind. Celebrimbor looks down to see Heledholf’s water canteen. It feels reassuringly solid in his hands.

‘Celebrimbor?’ she prompts again. 

‘It’s made of tinplate,’ he says automatically. ‘To protect it from corrosion, and the leather case is to protect it from dents. The metal plate was hammered into two rounded shells and joined with tin solder.’ It’s poorly done, actually: there’s slightly too much solder and it creates a visible bump. Celebrimbor frowns at it. 

‘And the leather?’

Celebrimbor takes a slow breath. Some part of him registers that Heledholf is trying to calm him down, and he resents being treated like a panicking child – but it is working. The feel of the leather under his hands is pulling him out of that wild and frightened place, and describing the craft gives him something to focus on. 

The leather is less satisfying to him than the metalwork: it isn’t Celebrimbor’s craft, and he knows only a little about the process of tanning and conditioning a hide. He turns it over, feeling the water inside it slosh around. ‘The design was made with brass stamps,’ he says eventually. ‘It’s dark leather, made to protect the canteen from dents and make it easy to carry. The stitches are neat. There’s a point where one of the straps has been repaired, but it’s only noticeable if you’re inspecting it.’

‘Good. Thank you.’ 

Celebrimbor bristles at her thanks. It feels patronising. But then, he did just shout at them all to flee from nothing scarier than a tremor in the earth. He keeps his head down and tries to concentrate on breathing. There’s still a leftover urge to run, and he tightens his grip on the canteen, willing it to go away. A minute later, he hands the canteen back to Heledholf.

‘How are you?’ she asks. 

‘Better,’ Celebrimbor says. Now that he’s back in the present, his limbs feel strangely loose, and there’s a hot flush of embarrassment rising in his throat, his cheeks, the back of his head. He takes a breath and swallows his pride, sitting inelegantly down on the ground. ‘I’m sorry.

‘None of that,’ Heledholf says briskly. Then, after a moment, her gaze softens. ‘I have nightmares about the Gates of Summer.’

‘I couldn’t sleep under stone for a long time after we made it to Balar,’ Ribinvir adds. ‘It hits us differently.’ 

Celebrimbor nods. Objectively, he knows this is true. But it still feels like a failing, to be so caught out – and with thoughts of Nargothrond, too, rather than the equally ravaged keep they’re currently sitting in. He focusses on the feel of the stone beneath his hands and trying to keep his breathing at a normal speed. His face feels strangely tingly, his limbs simultaneously charged and unable to bear their own weight. 

Ribinvir sits next to him, close enough to touch. The warmth of his body is grounding, and after a moment Celebrimbor leans against him. The tremors seem to have stopped, and the rain is starting up again, but for now it’s light enough that it just feels cool on Celebrimbor’s face. 

‘Are you all alright?’ 

The question comes from the broken entrance to the keep, as Eluduinen’s head pops into view. 

‘We’re fine,’ Heldholf replies. ‘Just taking a moment after the tremors. I think we’re basically done here?’ She looks around at the group, who are nodding and making sounds of agreement. ‘Celebrimbor?’ 

‘Yes,’ he manages to say, and gets up. It’s only once he’s started moving that he realises he left the file in the smithy.

Objectively, he should probably leave it behind. It’s heavy, and he has no need for a file at the moment. No need for a file when he gets back, either: he has plenty already. But it’s a long time since he’s seen his father’s maker’s mark. 

He makes a split second decision, one he himself doesn’t fully understand, and turns back. ‘One second,’ he says, and takes off running. 

It’s only once he’s in the smithy again, picking up the file, that he realises he’s been followed. Ribinvir stands at the doorway, looking around the room. 

‘I don’t need supervision,’ Celebrimbor snaps. Ribinvir folds his arms. 

‘This isn’t supervision. I thought you might want company. You grew up here, didn’t you?’ 

Celebrimbor sighs, putting the file in his bag. ‘I think you’d say I grew up by Lake Mithrim. I was an adolescent when we landed at Losgar and an adult by the time we came to Himlad. Not that you’d know it from the way my father acted.’

Ribinvir nods thoughtfully. Celebrimbor belatedly remembers that Ribinvir had been in Nargothrond when Curufin and Celegorm stole it from under Finrod’s feet. Celebrimbor had never asked him, or anyone, what they made of the whole affair. Not while Celegorm and Curufin were ruling behind Orodreth’s nominal throne. Not after, when Orodreth bid them leave. He hadn’t wanted to know. Still doesn’t. 

‘It sounds like a challenging place to live,’ Ribinvir says, mildly.

‘Yes,’ Celebrimbor agrees. He takes one last look around the forge. ‘But wasn’t everywhere, in the end?’

Chapter End Notes

Celebrimbor is triggered and experiences a state of confusion relating to his trauma over the sack of Nargothrond. We experience this from his PoV. He experiences some shame over this, but other characters are supportive. 

Chapter title from Psalm 46:3

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Their initial plan is to go from the Pass of Aglon into Lothlann, or what remains of it. From there they will travel north and west, to see what has become of Ladros and Taur-nu-Fuin. Eventually, they hope to make it to Tumladen and the ruins of Gondolin, then eventually to Hithlum and the mountains. Angband itself is condemned, the still-smouldering ruins given up for good, or at least the next few centuries. But there is a lot of land between the Mountains and Angband, and there may yet be some place worth recovering. 

The journey north is slow. Celebrimbor remembers when this land was an open plain filled with waist-high grass and sweet-smelling meadow flowers. Before the War, Celebrimbor had thought that the grasslands might return in time, and the sound of crickets fill the air once again. 

Now, though, the landscape has been turned upside-down. The cracks and displaced stones that made their journey from Himring difficult are only more extreme here, where the highlands of Ladros seem to have been flattened in some places, crumpled up into more extreme peaks in others. Jagged spires of rock surround them as they head northwest, gloomy and oppressive with their presence.

As discomfiting as they are, the craggy spikes of rock are only the start of their problems. Where the rocks haven’t been raised, the land has cracked open, huge rifts that they have to find ways round or descend. The banks of the gullies are treacherous, made slippery by the endless rain and full of shifting stones that tumble and crumble beneath their feet, causing them to lose their balance. Losselloth twists her ankle badly their first day out of Himlad, and they have to stop for a couple of hours while Taerfinios and Heledholf painstakingly Sing it to a point where she can walk on it again.

When they reach the bottom of the gullies, there’s almost always water. If they’re lucky, the water is fairly clean, though heavy with salt and minerals. If they’re unlucky, it’s stagnant and oozing, filled with stinking slime. Worst is when it’s run through some of the wastes of war, when rather than water it’s a brightly coloured sludge full of the poisonous compounds turned up from the earth or used by Morgoth in his fight. Sometimes it looks like water at first, until the light hits it right and they recognise the sick opalescent sheen of Angband’s buried fuels. 

Sometimes they see animals. Thin, straggly birds and small mammals with ribs showing under their fur. In the gullies themselves, the creatures are mostly dead, poisoned by the toxic streams or starved by the barren landscape. Even the vultures leave those bodies well alone, regarding the carrion with beady-eyed suspicion. 

Eluduinen speaks to the birds sometimes, floating whistles that Celebrimbor has no hope of understanding. He remembers Celegorm trying to teach him the odd phrase, but while Celebrimbor is reasonable at languages, he’s never quite mastered the knack of communicating with the small creatures. 

Even he, though, can pick out one phrase that Eluduinen seems to be using again and again, a short series of low and lilting notes. 

‘What does that mean? That little phrase?’ he asks Damlann while they’re taking a break, as Eluduinen attempts to convince a flock of ragged gulls of something. 

Damlann looks at Celebrimbor with tired eyes. ‘Go south,’ he says. ‘She’s trying to convince them to go south.’ 

‘Will that work? We don’t know what they will find.’

He shrugs. ‘It’s surely better than here.’

Celebrimbor can’t disagree. While they are, at least, not being harried by orcs or other foul creations of Morgoth, the land itself bears the scars of war so starkly it’s painful to behold, let alone travel through. 

Eluduinen finishes her conversation with the birds, and the group reluctantly shoulder their packs to get moving again. They had taken a break at the edge of a stream to eat some of their dwindling rations and Sing some of the water clean enough to drink. It’s a task Celebrimbor has been helping with: purifying materials is a part of smithcraft. The principles that work for metals are also true for water, though Celebrimbor vastly prefers metal. Water makes his insides feel sloshy. 

It’s only been three days since they left the Pass of Aglon, but it feels like it’s been weeks. They’ve travelled maybe ten leagues in that time, a distance that would normally only take a day of walking. It’s colder here, but the sun is relentlessly bright and the air, even away from the worst of the pools, smells of sulphur and burning. There’s scarcely anything to hunt, and little enough drinkable water even with the rain. 

Another tremor hits as they start climbing the bank. Celebrimbor is used to them by now, but he still feels his heart beat a little faster as they throw themselves to the ground. He slips in the process, skidding back down a dozen feet towards the stream again. The gulls take flight, crying their outrage to the sky. Small rocks and debris rain down from further up the slope, but with no immediate shelter Celebrimbor can only cover his head with his arms. There’s nothing big, at least, though one fist-sized rock hits him hard enough that he knows there will be a nasty bruise. 

When the shaking stops, the river is wider. A bloom of something yellow rises up from the middle of it, spreading like turmeric in a stew. Celebrimbor watches, fascinated, as the current catches it, constraining it to a ribbon of yellow down the middle that wends its way downstream, rather than spreading out to colour the whole river. 

‘Celebrimbor!’ Losselloth calls from above. Celebrimbor looks up: while he’s been watching the river, the others have all made it to the top of the embankment. 

‘I’m coming,’ he replies, scrambling up behind them. 

He clambers to the top of the ridge, where the others have sat on a couple of rocks. Immediately to the north is an impassable wall of rock, shiny and warped in such a way that suggests it has been melted. Dragonfire, Celebrimbor supposes, with a slight churn of his gut.

To the south and west another gully opens up. Despite the ones they’ve just emerged from being a shallow trickle, the water here flows high and fast and reeks with a foul smell that suggests swimming would go poorly. They might be able to get a rope across – though anchor points look scarce – but most likely they’ll have to find some way to traverse the melted ridge and go north.

Celebrimbor stares at it. His companions have let their packs down again, despite it only being half an hour since their last rest, and seem equally reluctant to move. 

They can’t even see the Echoriad from here. Even if they had enough elevation, the haze and the rain would block it out. Celebrimbor estimates it’s perhaps a hundred leagues from here to Tumladen. At their current rate of progress, that’s a month of scrambling down gullies and across broken rocks, eking out a subsistence on vultures and carefully clarified water. Eldar cannot die of starvation, Celebrimbor knows. But it hurts, and it changes you. There had always been a certain quality in those who crossed the Ice, a hunger that never quite left.

They’re being careful with their waybread, and haven’t felt real hunger yet. But the spectre of it looms, another pressure when they’re already fractious and tired, weighed down by the misery of the landscape. 

Celebrimbor doesn’t want another month of this. 

‘Eluduinen,’ he says. She looks up, in the middle of retying a scarf around her hair. ‘Damlann says you’ve been telling the birds to go south.’

She hesitates a second, then nods. ‘There’s nothing for them here. The water is tainted, and there’s nothing growing. Not even weeds.’ She casts a troubled eye north. ‘It will be centuries for this place to be habitable again. If… if it ever is.’

Celebrimbor takes a breath. Looks around, at the exhausted faces of his companions. ‘I think we should do the same. There’s nothing for us here now. If the grass covers it again in a hundred years, the High King can send another team then. For now, I say we turn south.’

There’s a moment’s silence, then:

‘You don’t have to tell me twice,’ Ribinvir says. ‘If I never have to cross one of those rivers again I’ll be glad of it.’

‘I fear we may be crossing rivers wherever we go,’ Taerfinios says. ‘But I agree with heading south.’

Losselloth nods thoughtfully. ‘If we try to find the Esgalduin and follow it south, it should take us through the former lands of Doriath and down to the far side of the Gulf. We were planning to visit those lands anyway, before the Gelion cut us off.’ 

‘I’d like to try and spread the word on the wing as we go,’ Eluduinen says. But… yes. South would be better.’

Damlann is nodding, but Heledholf hesitates, looking to the west. Celebrimbor follows her gaze, then sits down next to her.

‘Gondolin?’ he asks.

She purses her lips. ‘It’s irrational. There will be little enough left of it now, the valley was flooded in the Dagor-im-Ered.’ 

She’s right. Celebrimbor was on the other side of the continent during the Dagor-im-Ered, but he heard about the stroke of Tulkas’s fist that split the Sirion wide open, the tidal wave that Ulmo sent over the ruins of the city he had once tried to protect. There’s likely nothing left. 

But he has seen the ruins of his own former home. Even if he would say he felt nothing, the weight of his father’s file sits heavy in the bottom of his bag, alongside a string of pewter beads and twisted metal.

‘It was your city,’ he says quietly. ‘And we will make it to Gondolin. Just by the longer route.’

Heledholf is silent for a long time before she nods. ‘The south, then.’

The lands that were once Doriath are easier going than the shattered wastes of the Anfauglith and Tar-nu-Fuin, but they are still strange, changed by the long courses of the war. Here, too, the shape of the land has changed, earth thrown up or hollowed out into channels and hillocks. 

The rain eases off as they travel south, but the ground is still soggy. Water congregates in great gleaming pools wherever there’s a dip, and even the higher ground is boggy underfoot. Reeds and marsh grass are slowly overtaking the ferns and shrubs that once made up the forest understorey. Most of the trees have fallen, but a few old willows remain, thriving in the flood. They creak as the elves pick their way past, and more than once one of their group trips on a root that they could swear wasn’t there a second ago. 

In the mornings, the mists are thick enough that they have to tie themselves together to avoid wandering away. Even the birdsong here is eerie, the haunting, warbling cries of divers piercing the air. Eluduinen’s reassurances that they’re just looking for a mate does little to offset the growing feeling of unease as they draw closer to the ruins of Menegroth. 

The entrance to the Thousand Caves is similar, in some respects, to Nargothrond. Both built into the side of a mountain, high above a river. But where Nargothrond had, at least initially, been built for secrecy, the Iathrim had the security of Melian’s Girdle, and so their outer doors were majestic, surrounded by great pillars in sinuous organic shapes. 

Or they had been, once, before they were ransacked by kinslayers and abandoned to the forces of nature and the Valar. Now, the doors are covered in moss and ivy, the columns cracked and fallen.

They send Damlann, the only Iathedhel among them, into the caves first, and follow his lead. The afternoon sun has burnt away the mists and slips in through cracks where the caves have been broken open, golden light illuminating the thick layer of moss that blankets the floor. 

It’s only when he looks a second time that Celebrimbor notices the bodies. 

There’s few enough of them, time and scavengers having worn away most of the remains. But here and there among the ruins he sees the edge of a sword, the curve of armour, a bleached bit of bone. Fëanorian remains as well as Doriathrin. He draws in a shaky breath and looks around. The others seem to have noticed as well, looking around with expressions ranging from sorrow to concern. Damlann crouches by one of the bodies, hand resting on its skull, eyes closed. 

Celebrimbor waits for him to stand before speaking. ‘Do you want us to bury them?’

Damlann shakes his head. ‘We’ve already held our funerals. I would rather let the dead rest where they are than disturb them again. What better funeral monument, after all.’

‘I understand.’

It changes the way they pass through the halls, now, knowing that they walk through a grave. They walk with reverent care among the dead. On the edge of his hearing, Celebrimbor thinks he hears someone muttering prayers to Mandos. He says nothing himself, but pauses when he sees a body that still wears Fëanorian armour, or bears a Noldorin weapon. 

He knows they must be lying here somewhere, but he doesn’t spot his family. No sign of Celegorm’s distinctive black plate, or Caranthir’s jewellery, or his father’s sword. Some part of him is glad. Let them lie, anonymous, buried under the green moss, laid in their magnificent crumbling tomb.

Celebrimbor leaves the ruins first and sits beside the river. He undoes his hair and rebraids it, simple, unthinking motions. Something in his chest feels strange, like something tight is finally coming loose, or a blockage finally running free as he watches the flow of the current. 

The feeling grows over the next few days as they follow the Esgalduin down to where it joins the Sirion. A haze disappears as the mist thins and they pass through the changing landscape. The banks of the Sirion are swollen, just as the Gelion had been, but where the Gelion had been greedy, the Sirion travels along at a leisurely pace, meandering, as the newly formed marshland becomes streams that feed her. The land is only getting damper and marshier as they travel south, until they find they are having to wade through waist-high water to get anywhere at all. Eventually, it becomes clear that walking is no longer practical. They retreat to higher ground, to where a stand of trees still remains.

Taerfinios has a good knowledge of boat-building, and Celebrimbor and Damlann are both quick to pick up any craft. They spend a few days fashioning three light boats that will carry them downstream. 

They float along at a leisurely pace, using long sticks to stop themselves getting entangled in the roots and rushes that line the water. The landscape has changed dramatically, but it’s still alive. The water beneath their boats is full of fish, and the waterbirds flock to feast on them. They see long-legged herons waiting in the shadows, poised to strike at an unsuspecting fish. A cormorant wrestles with a still—wriggling eel, and swarms of marsh insects fill the air. 

They retreat to the banks in the evening to sleep and explore the patches of dry land that remain. All around, the woodland is turning into marshland, more more extreme as they head south towards the delta where the Sirion reaches the sea. At some point, Eluduinen announces that the water has turned brackish again. The marsh plants change, cattails and rushes giving way to the cheery purple blooms of sea lavender. The landscape loses its trees, becoming flatter and more open. 

Under the wide open skies, in a landscape with little to break it or draw the eye, Celebrimbor suddenly finds he can breathe again. He hadn’t realised that he had stopped. He tilts his head back and watches the endless open landscape, drawing in deep lungfuls of air lightly scented by brine.

They spot the high ground and buildings that mark the Havens of Sirion when they are still a couple of days out. Here, there’s very little high ground left, and the flats have become tidal, such that any island they spot at low tide is likely to be covered by water several hours later. They end up sleeping in their boats one night, taking shifts to sleep and guide the boats where the water slowly pulls them ever southwards, towards their goal. 

It's only when they are a few leagues out, close enough that the patched walls of the havens rise up, white and gleaming, that they spot movement, tiny figures travelling along the moves. 

The Havens are still inhabited. 

Chapter End Notes

The characters travel through an extremely degraded landscape, including dying birds. They come to the ruins of Nargothrond where they come across the corpses of kinslayers and kinslain alike. Celebrimbor does not find the corpses of his family. 

Title from Micah 1:4

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They reach the settlement around sundown. They were spotted in the late afternoon, a collection of figures slowly congregating on the wall around the edge of the settlement. They waved, trying to communicate friendly intent, and, after a long few seconds, the group on top waved back. As they approach, a few figures peel off to come and meet them. 

The delegation is a mixed group, mostly Sindar, a few Noldor and Edain. A couple look slightly familiar to Celebrimbor, but not enough that he would remember their names. 

‘Hail, friends,’ Taerfinios says, their nominated spokesperson for this encounter. ‘We did not realise any yet lingered in these lands.’ 

‘This was our home for many years,’ says one of the group, a tall elf who speaks Sindarin with the woodland accent of the Iathrim. ‘And it remains our home now. Who are you, to come here now?’

‘Taerfinios, once of Falas, now a follower of High King Ereinion Gil-galad. We come at his behest, to see how the land lies in Beleriand now that the War is over, and discern what might be done to make it habitable and fair again. Have we leave to enter?’

The delegation in front of them fall quiet. Celebrimbor feels the slight pressure at the edge of his awareness that suggests some of them are communicating silently, mind-to-mind. He tries not to fidget. To his knowledge, Gil-galad’s name is well-respected among most of the elves of Beleriand. His Noldor blood comes through the line of Finarfin, the least objectionable of the three Finwëan factions, and his upbringing on the Isle of Balar with Círdan has given him ease when talking with the Sindar. His conduct in the War, too, has earnt him respect beyond what would usually be accorded to one of his tender age. 

But for whatever reason, this group did not follow him to the Lhûn, and have chosen instead to slip away to the abandoned coast. Although they don’t seem hostile, there’s still a tension as they wait for the other group to make their decision. 

Eventually, their spokesperson speaks again. ‘I am Leicheg of the New Havens. Be welcome as guests. Our hospitality is meagre, but we offer it freely.’

The Havens at Sirion are not like Celebrimbor remembers them. 

Then again. Even though he visited them many times in his years living with Círdan and Ereinion on the Isle of Balar, his overwhelming memory is not the summer market that ran under clear blue skies, or the songs they used to sing while gutting fish, or any of the many joyful memories from at time. 

It’s roiling skies and broken doors, people scattered and streets bathed in blood. The sick feeling of being too late, of knowing that the damage was already done. Knowing that the perpetrators were Celebrimbor’s own kin. 

There’s no blood on the streets now, partly because the streets at the edge of town are covered in a thin layer of water. Back when Celebrimbor first knew this place, the Havens had risen from the edges of the various streams that spilled out of the Sirion, up to the cliffs above. Now, the lowest-lying houses are partially submerged, partially crumbled away, their remains boarded over and serving as jetties. The waiting elves tie up their boats and lead them through the streets. 

They've done a good job of adapting to the new situation. Clear water and sand flow between the buildings, but the people who live here have hauled rocks into the road to act as stepping stones, and sent boards between balconies and windows to enable crossing higher up. Small boats bob cheerfully around the outskirts and at the doors. As the settlement rises to the cliffs, Celebrimbor sees more green peeking out between buildings, where the inhabitants have planted gardens.

Their group don't seem to merit the privilege of fully dry accommodation yet. Their guide, a young Sinda who introduces herself as Alwedhen, takes them to a building towards the edge of the settlement, where the water laps low enough that it mostly doesn't get over the tops of their boots.

It looks abandoned, but mostly still intact. The walls are sturdy and the rush thatching on the roof is in good repair. Alwedhen pulls out a ladder and sets it against a window, then shimmies up to unlatch the frames and lash the ladder securely in place. They tie their boats to a post at the bottom and climb up to join her. 

'No-one's claimed this building yet,' she says, as she helps them bring their supplies in, and then gives them a hand hauling themselves. 'So it's a bit dusty, but we've checked and the insides are solid enough, at least up here, and we rethatched the roof a few months ago. Dwell here as welcome guests, and share our table this evening.’ She pauses for a moment after the formal words of welcome, then adds: ‘We normally meet up at the top of the hill. When it isn’t raining, at least.’

They thank her, and she leaves. Celebrimbor suspects that the invitation to dinner is as much about their hosts wanting to take their measure as fulfil their obligations towards guests, but that feeling is entirely mutual.

The house they’ve been given is as solid as Alwedhen said. There's a layer of dust and a briny smell, but the room itself seems solid, unaffected by rot  - at least on the first floor. Looking down the hole where the stairs must once have been reveals that the ground floor is covered in a thin layer of water, seaweed clinging to the walls up to about knee height. There's a dark mark against the wall where the staircase must have been rotting, before someone cut it away. 

The upstairs is abandoned, but not derelict or ransacked. There’s still furniture in place, though the mattresses that once topped the bedframes have long since mouldered away. Any personal touches are gone as well, suggesting that the last resident of this building was not a hapless refugee, slaughtered by the Sons of Fëanor, but a Valinorian solider or several, landed at the Mouths of Sirion to begin their campaign. 

Celebrimbor and his friends spend a while clearing the rubbish from the rooms, and dusting them with a broom Eluduinen improvises from a bundle of plants from the salt marshes nearby. 

By the time they’re satisfied - bedrolls laid out in a row, tents neatly stacked in a corner - the sun is starting to wester, and it’s time for them to make their way up to the cliffs. 

By now, the tide has gone out again, and their feet stay dry as they start the ascent. There's a fire lit up ahead, near the top of the cliff, that guides their ascent, set in the shadow of some ruins... 

It's only as they turn the corner, passing the walls that surround the courtyard, that Celebrimbor's mental map snaps into place. The landscape has changed so much, the cliffs eroded and buildings shifted, that it's not until he sees the full courtyard that he realises they stand by Elwing's tower. Or what's left of it, at least: the tower itself was close enough to the edge of the cliff that it has long since fallen into the sea. But Celebrimbor knows this garden well, and has to put his hand on the wall to brace against the surge of memories. 

Not the Third Kinslaying, fortunately. Celebrimbor hadn't made it this far up, in the search for survivors. Didn't see the desolation that his remaining uncles had wrought in their desperate quest to snatch a necklace from the hands of a young mother. From Elwing. 

But this means that Celebrimbor's memories of this place are untainted by blood and ruin. With the last light of sunset painting the sky, and scent of night-blooming flowers filling the air, all he can think of is the night of Elwing and Eärendil's wedding. 

Idril made Celebrimbor join the wedding party as a member of Eärendil’s kin. Celebrimbor had resisted at first, their relationship being very distant – second cousins once removed – and complicated by time and war. He’d thought it was only Idril’s lingering childhood affection for him, until Eärendil had placed a hand on his arm and looked at him with Tuor’s sea-blue eyes and said ‘Uncle. I want you there.’

To Eärendil, Celebrimbor supposed, it mattered less that Celebrimbor was the son of a man who slaughtered his wife’s family, and more that he was the cousin Idril had wept tears of joy to see when she arrived at the mouths of Sirion. Mattered more that Celebrimbor had picked him up – small, yet sturdy in the way human children often were – and shown him the biggest boats he’d ever seen.

He accepted on the condition that Elwing didn’t object, but Elwing had been bright and bold and quick to laugh and forgive, and she not only didn't object, but insisted. 

So Celebrimbor stood with Tuor and Idril and the remaining lords of Gondolin, waiting at the gates to Elwing's courtyard, listening as Tuor asked the ritual questions seeking admittance and favour of the bride. 

‘Elwing grants your request. Enter, friends.’

The gates were flung open, revealing the young bride bedecked in seabird feathers and spring blooms and there, at her throat, glowing with the holy light that Celebrimbor had not seen in hundreds of years, the Silmaril her parents had died for. Celebrimbor’s parents had died for. Celebrimbor had to grip Idril's hand very tightly, and she gave him a worried look. 

But it hadn't been the Oath, passed down somehow without Celebrimbor's consent. Nor had it been the jewel madness that seemed to overtake some when they saw the light of the trees again. It was only – some emotion, reaching up to grip him, such that he could shake his head gently and assure Idril that he was fine, and not about to cause a kinslaying at a wedding. 

The wedding itself was beautiful. For a royal wedding, between a prince of Gondolin and a princess of Doriath, it wasn’t an ostentatious affair. Celebrimbor was just about old enough to remember Turgon and Elenwë’s wedding, which had all the pomp and ceremony you would expect of Turgon. TBy contrast, his grandson’s wedding was vows under a bower of sea lavender, freshly caught fish grilled over an open fire, and dancing under the stars. Most of all, it was the love of two young peredhil, shining through the entire ceremony. 

Towards the end of the night, as the east was just starting to glimmer the brighter blue of morning, Celebrimbor found Idril sat on a bench, her face set not towards the dance floor where her son was still swaying in the arms of his new wife, but to the sea. She sat barefoot, shoes and silver foot braces both discarded. 

‘Are they giving you trouble?’ Celebrimbor asked, nodding towards the braces. He’d spent a lot of time improving on them, since Idril’s arrival. 

Idril looked up, startled out of whatever thought she was having. ‘What? Oh, no. No they’re brilliant, really. But I can only dance for so long before my feet get tired, and I wanted to feel the grass.’ She pressed her feet down into the grass as she spoke, stretching out the twists in the muscle that they tended to fall into unsupported.

‘Is it time?’ Celebrimbor asked quietly. Idril sighed.

‘I fear it comes closer. Now Eärendil is grown, and wed. My Tuor grows restless with longing for the sea. And he… he aches. His bones grow old in ways I do not understand, but it makes things harder for him. He fears that if he waits much longer, he will not rightly be able to make the journey. And he must make the journey.’ 

‘I understand,’ Celebrimbor said, and he did. Perhaps not the call of the sea, whose waves had ever discomfited him after that single journey from Valinor to here. But he was intimately familiar with the call of a project, the fascination with an idea that could quickly lead to obsession. The need to follow an idea wherever it took you, because the only choices were turning away and wholehearted commitment, and turning away would destroy you. 

Idril turned to him, sudden, breaking his train of thought. She grabbed his hands and stared at him with wide eyes, the same Finwëan grey as his own. 

‘Look after them, Tyelpe,’ she said. 'There’s a darkness looming… something on the horizon.’ Her voice broke slightly and for a second she wasn’t the wise leader she’d grown into, but just a scared mother. ‘Look after my baby.’ 

Celebrimbor blinked, shocked by her sudden intensity. He held onto her hands, nodding. 

‘Of course, Rillë, of course. I’ll do whatever I can.’ 

It hadn’t been enough. 

Now, the courtyard is cracked and changed, but still recognisable. The promontory where Celebrimbor once sat with Idril has long since fallen into the sea, but the night-blooming flowers still cling to the walls, and people still gather around the fire in the middle. Like when Celebrimbor had been here last, it’s a mixture - mostly elves, some humans. 

The meal is baked fish and sea vegetables, not much different to what they’ve been eating on the road, but eating in a settled place, with more folks for company than their own selves, makes it a more joyful occasion than their recent repasts. 

Celebrimbor sits a little apart from the rest once he has been given his plate. Close to where he had sat with Idril, staring out at the sea. Eärendil’s star has risen overhead. 

‘Celebrimbor?’ 

The voice isn’t one he recognises. He looks over and sees an elven woman. She has dark hair, but her features are hard to place, not clearly Noldor nor Sindar. There’s something slightly familiar about her, but he can’t place it, and he frowns slightly. ‘You – you are Celebrimbor, aren’t you?’ 

‘I am.’

‘You won’t remember me but – I grew up here. And after… they came… you were the one who found us.’

The picture snaps, suddenly, the face of the woman in front of him matching the face of a scared girl, hiding in the dunes. He draws a shaky breath. The skies above him are wide open, the setting sun paints the world in brilliant golds and pinks, and the woman in front of him is alive, alive, alive. 

‘I remember,’ Celebrimbor says, voice thick with feeling. ‘Though I don’t – you’ll have to tell me your name again.’

‘Serniel. I’m Serniel.’ 

Celebrimbor pats the space next to him. ‘Sit with me?’ he asks, and she does.

Chapter End Notes

Title from Song of Solomon 8:7 

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They spend a few weeks in the New Havens, as spring slips into a balmy summer. The people here are from a variety of backgrounds, and here for a variety of reasons. Some came from here and wanted to return home. For others, rebuilding the ruins is a show of defiance. Still others seem disaffected by the war and sceptical of traditional governance, and are seeking an alternative way to organise society. A few simply followed their friends. 

Many of them had some connection to the Havens before they were destroyed the first time. Over their first few days, Celebrimbor realises he recognises some of them. A woman who still wears the pearl earrings her partner commissioned from him as a betrothal gift. A father whose son used to play with Eärendil. A potter, with whom he once traded jewels for plates. He had thought, after the Third Kinslaying, that the people here would look at him and see only his father’s face, but it isn’t true. They see a smith, Idril’s cousin, friend and aide of the young High King. 

Not so young now. But if the people here don’t want to follow Gil-galad’s banner, nor, it seems, do they have a particular quarrel with him. They have simply chosen to make their camp here, on the flooded delta of the Sirion, among the shifting landscapes and the tides. Celebrimbor can respect that. 

The waters, it seems, cannot. 

Spending more than a few nights in one place gives them a chance to take more measurements and do a deeper analysis of the land surrounding the settlement and the ways that it’s changing over time. Being able to speak with people who’ve been living on the land for some time already is helpful, as they’re able to get a sense of change over time. Eluduinen works with a woman called Tatharen, who has been watching the sands since she arrived almost a year ago. She walks them around the settlement at low tide, when the water only laps at their toes in the lowest parts, and shows them an array of high tide marks. 

They’re getting higher. 

Tatharwen takes them out around the river delta, showing them islands and describing how they’ve changed over time. In an attempt to be useful, Celebrimbor sketches the islands they see, rough diagrams that show their shape and elevation. The soil is slowly getting washed into the water, leaving behind only sand or, in some cases, nothing, the dips and waves of the landscape slowly smoothing out into a flat landscape that the water can rush over. 

One evening, while Celebrimbor is sitting on a rooftop and watching the sun start to fade towards the horizon, Eluduinen comes and sits beside him. 

'Can you check these figures for me?' she asks. ‘I need to know if… I need to know if you see what I’m seeing.’

Celebrimbor takes the piece of paper she offers, and looks it over. They're calculations, tracking Tilion's course across the sky and the strange pull it exerts over the waters of Middle-earth, the high and low tides over time, Tatharen’s observations supplemented by Eluduinen’s own. Celebrimbor follows her numbers in his own head with a growing feeling of dread, then pulls out a pencil to scrawl out his own equations. 

Her maths is correct, its conclusion stark. Unavoidable.

'I had worries, all the way back in Thargelion. That far inland, the water shouldn't have any salt in it, and the currents – it only makes sense if the water’s flowing in from somewhere.’ 

Celebrimbor nods again. To the west, the waves slosh against the base of the building. In his mind's eye, Celebrimbor sees them rising higher, higher, until the buildings here are completely swallowed up, sunk beneath the waves, taking all the memories with them. The riverbank where Celebrimbor embraced Idril for the first time in hundreds of years has already fallen into the river, as has the quayside where he watched Gil-galad and Eärendil run through the streets together. Soon the buildings will be gone too, the waves creeping higher until they swallow the courtyard where Elwing and Earendil were married, where he has been welcomed these past weeks by the people who live here.

Did the Valar know this would happen, he wonders, when they took the land itself for their weapon. Was it part of their plan all along? 

Thinking about it makes Celebrimbor feel slightly sick. This small community have built so much from so little. The houses are decorated with paintings of flowers and the gardens and vegetable patches burst with life from the love of their caretakers. In his mind’s eye he sees it, underwater, drowned and lifeless as it had been after the Third Kinslaying. 

He looks down at Eluduinen's figures again. ‘At the current rate of sinking, it should be a few years before this place is fully underwater.’ 

‘I think so. But they’ll be going higher and higher up, and that’s assuming that nothing dramatic happens between now and then. If there's another earthquake, or the cliffs fall in again, it could be less time.'

‘And further north?’ 

She shakes her head. ‘I don’t know. I would guess that the mountainous regions and highlands have more time, but it’s difficult to say. The banks of the Sirion are nonexistent down here, and there are low-lying regions to the north that might be flooded already. But… I think most of it will be drowned within the next decade.’

Celebrimbor nods. He’s not a geographer, but he’s come to trust Eluduinen’s intuition. And her sums. 

‘We need to tell them.’

They don’t summon the whole settlement at once. There are only a hundred or so people here, but that’s still more than can comfortably fit in the upper room they’ve been occupying. Celebrimbor invites Leicheg, as the settlement’s spokesperson, along with Tatharen and a few others. They all listen in stony silence as Eluduinen explains her observations. 

Although they haven’t spoken about it explicitly, from the expressions on their faces, Celebrimbor doesn’t think her conclusions come as a surprise. When she finishes, there’s a long pause, before Leicheg lets out a long breath. 

‘It seems you were right, Tatharen,’ he says. ‘But ai, I hoped you weren’t.’

‘It’s hard to lose your home,’ Eluduinen says. ‘Harder still to lose it twice over.’ 

Leicheg holds a hand to his eyes from a moment, shoulders bent in grief even as he hides his face. When he straightens again, there’s a spark in his eyes as he looks, not at Eluduinen, but directly at Celebrimbor.

‘What would you have us do, then, Noldo?’ he asks. ‘Are we to come to Gil-galad’s heels as a well trained flock of sheep?’

‘Leicheg!’ Tatharen explains, grimacing apologetically at Celebrimbor, who shakes his head. Anger, Celebrimbor knows, is a common response to grief. He resists the urge to match it, and speaks with a measured tone. 

‘You can do whatever you want. We were sent to survey the lands of Beleriand, and we’re sharing our findings. The information is yours to do with as you wish. But you might want to think about leaving.’

‘Not all the elves of Beleriand who went east have joined Gil-galad’s cause,’ Eluduinen adds. ‘Some of our people have gone further east, to join the elves of Eriador and beyond. Some went south, to form a new city. Edhellond, they called it. I imagine they could use some help from those who know how to build a safe haven.’

Celebrimbor thinks it’s a nice touch, specifying ‘our people’. Leicheg doesn’t apologise, but the anger fades from his eyes, replaced again with that heavy sorrow. 

‘I need to speak with my people,’ he says, readying himself to leave. ‘We have much to consider.’ He sweeps out of the room, swiftly followed by the others, though Tatharen hesitates on the threshold. 

‘I’m sorry. It’s… As you know, it’s not like there weren’t signs. But most people have been looking away from them.’ 

Celebrimbor nods. ‘Go and make your decisions.’ 

She nods, and hurries after Leicheg, leaving the group sent by Gil-galad alone in the room once again. 

'So what of us?' Ribinvir asks. 'Do we turn around, call it a loss, go back to the High King?' 

'I don't think it's all a loss,' Eluduinen says, pointing at Thargelion on her rough sketched map. 'If the Gelion continues to flow the way it is, I think there's a good chance the rest of Thargelion will survive – the waters will drain into the river. The sea, eventually. But yes, most of it... I don't think that it will be here in a few years time. These lands will be Ulmo's, soon enough.' 

‘We should all return,’ Taerfinios says, as though this were the obvious conclusion. ‘There’s nothing in the West.’ 

‘We don’t know that,’ Heledholf replies, obstinate. 

‘We’ve completed the task the King set us, we’ve discovered that Beleriand is a loss. We need to help these people get to safety and go home. There’s no point to continuing West when we know that it’s all going to be underwater soon!’ 

All of Beleriand, underwater. All the places that Celebrimbor has lived, and fought, and loved since he arrived. The places where his loved ones fell. He thinks, briefly, of Nargothrond, her shining halls, wrecked and broken by Glaurung’s assault. In his mind’s eye, he sees them sinking, filling slowly with water. 

A sense of deep wrongness fills him, at the thought of simply letting those places and people slip by, unremarked. 

‘That’s exactly why we should continue west,’ he says. The group startle, and look round at him. In truth, he’s surprised himself with how strongly he feels about it. It’s that old pull, the one he hasn’t felt in a long time, to embark on a project and see where it leads him. ‘I would want to see these lands once more. To mark their passing.’

‘It would mean much for me to see Nargothrond once again,’ Ribinvir says, his voice a steady rumble. 

‘And I Gondolin!’ Heledholf jumps in. 

Taerfinios is going red in the face. Celebrimbor holds a hand up. ‘We don’t all have to continue. I think it would be best if some of us returned, or remained for a time with the people here. But for those of us who would press on… I think we should.’ 

In the end, it’s Celebrimbor, Ribinvir and Heledholf who decide to press on. Leicheg comes to speak with them again a few days later, to tell them that the people of the New Havens will be making their way to Edhellond gradually, over the next few years. Eluduinen and Damlann decide to stay with them, while Taerfinios and Losselloth return directly to Gil-galad. A few elves will be leaving the New Havens with them, an advance guard ahead of the main exodus.

They have a party, the night before they depart. Celebrimbor hadn’t realised that they were that popular, but the hosts have prepared a feast and people line up to give them parting gifts. The richest of these is a proper boat that they can ride up to Nargothrond, replacing their rudimentary coracles, but individuals come up to give them sea buckthorn wine, pots of jam, sea grass bracelets. Eluduinen gravely presents Celebrimbor with her notebook. When he flips through, he finds not just her water observations, but a hundred sketches of birds, with notes on their habitats and calls. 

They gather in the warm night, back in the courtyard of Elwing’s home. They eat roast fish and birds loaded up with sweet sauce and summer fruits, and the musicians among them pull out their instruments as soon as they’ve done eating. Celebrimbor takes turns spinning around the courtyard with whoever asks him: Eluduinen and Losselloth, Serniel and Alwedhen. As one song ends, and before another begins, he glances over to the musicians, and catches the gleam of Damlann’s eye in the firelight. He smiles, friendly, and gives him a nod. 

To his surprise, Damlann doesn’t just nod back, but puts his drum down and comes over. Like many Sindar, he wears his hair loose by preference, and he pushes a strand of it out of his face before he speaks.

‘Do you have a partner for the next dance? They can do without me for this one.’ 

‘I do now, I think,’ Celebrimbor replies, holding out his hands. Damlann smiles, and takes them.

He’s a good dancer. Not ostentatious, but graceful, with the sense of rhythm often found in musicians. When the music builds to the climax that could result in a lift, he catches Celebrimbor’s eye again and raises an eyebrow, challenging. 

Celebrimbor is not, himself, much of a dancer. But he is strong, and if the battlefield has taught him anything it is how to anticipate the moves of another. He narrows his eyes, and gives a tiny nod – and that’s all Damlann needs to launch himself at Celebrimbor, trusting that Celebrimbor will catch him. 

He does. He catches Damlann effortlessly, lifting him up almost above his head, his hands on Damlann’s sides the only line of contact to the ground. For a second, they hang together, suspended in a moment of trust, before the next beat in the music plays and Celebrimbor brings him back down to the ground. 

Afterwards, when the musicians have called an end to the dancing and only a couple of instrumentalists remain idly playing, Celebrimbor finds Damlann again. He’s sitting near the edge of the gathering, long fingers holding a half-full cup of their sea buckthorn wine. He shuffles over as Celebrimbor approaches, making room for him on the bench, which Celebrimbor takes. Their legs touch. 

They sit in silence for a moment. Night has properly fallen now, a warm summer night full of stars and the scent of flowers. A nightjar lands in a nearby tree with a commotion of branches and feathers, sounding its strange vibrato cry into the night.

‘Why did you come on this mission?’ Celebrimbor asks, eventually. 

Damlann smiles wryly into his cup. ‘Why did you?’ 

‘The High King asked me,’ Celebrimbor replies without hesitating. 

‘He asked me too.’

The words could be telling Celebrimbor to mind his own business. But Damlann is looking at him over the rim of his wine glass, his ears are attentive, and Celebrimbor thinks it might just be an invitation. Tell me your secrets, if you want to know mine. 

Not that Celebrimbor’s secrets are worth much. 

‘I grew up here, even if I was born on the other side of the sea. I know the land fairly well.’ He hesitates a second, then: ‘I think I needed to see it again.’ 

Damlann nods. ‘I would have liked to see Nargothrond.’

‘Didn’t you?’ There had been trade between Doriath and Nargothrond once.

‘No. Never had a good enough reason. My family… even though King Felagund was kin to King Thingol, my family did not trust the Noldor, they did not want me to go.’ He smiles, lets out a breath. ‘Especially after they realised I wanted to learn smithing.’

Over their journey, Celebrimbor has seen Damlann draw, paint, weave willow into the shell of a boat and stitch patterns into the tunic he was mending. And a singer and a dancer as well. He’s like a magpie, collecting bits of as many crafts as possible rather than specialising in one.

‘What of now?’ Celebrimbor asks. ‘You’re travelling with a lot of Noldor.’ 

The smile twists again into something more like a grimace. ‘My mother died in the Second Kinslaying, proving her point, I suppose. My father in the War of Wrath. Almost a decade ago, now.’ 

‘I’m sorry.’ 

‘It’s not your fault.’

Celebrimbor opens his mouth to say something, the automatic dismissal of what Damlann is saying. But he closes it again after a moment. Damlann’s comment might equally have been an automatic dismissal, but with the weight of both their families between them, Celebrimbor thinks it might have been more. So he takes it, lets it pass. 

‘What of you, then?’ he asks, rather than delve deeper into that line of thought. 

‘I learnt silversmithing the lathrim way. We use lost wax techniques, mostly. They’re good for creating organic shapes.’ 

‘Your earrings!’ Celebrimbor exclaims. ‘Did you make them yourself?’ 

Damlann seems startled, distracted from his train of thought, but he smiles under Celebrimbor’s enthusiasm, tucking his hair behind his ear to better show the delicate leaves. ‘Yes. I didn’t stick at it all that long, only enough to master the basics and make some pieces I wanted. I’m good with my hands, though, and I’ve tried a lot of crafts in my time. The High King thought I might be of use.’

‘I’ve been glad to have you. You certainly have many skills,’ Celebrimbor replies, and it’s the truth. Damlann smiles, meeting his eyes again. 

‘I’m easily distracted by new and exciting things,’ he says, holding Celebrimbor’s gaze for a second longer than he has to. ‘Speaking of which –‘ he pulls something out of his pocket, holding it out to Celebrimbor, who takes it. ‘I’m of more use here than going to Nargothrond. But will you draw it for me?’ 

Celebrimbor looks down at the package he’s been handed, and recognises Damlann’s watercolour set. He swallows. 

‘I’ll do my best.’

Chapter End Notes

Title from Ecclesiastes 1:7

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Before the war, and before the destruction of both places, the route from the Havens of Sirion to Nargothrod would have been easy. Simply follow the Sirion up until the point where the Narog flows into it, then take the Narog right to Nargothrond's gates. The difficulty at the point would have been in finding the entrances, rather than in the journey itself. 

Now the Sirion has burst its banks and the delta has become a marsh, leaving the course less clear. 

Still, they floated past the joining of the Narog on their way down, and it was still more or less identifiable. Their gifted boat is sturdier and easier to navigate than the ones they crafted and equipped with proper oars besides. The river currents are not aggressive as they paddle upstream. If anything, the rising waters have filled the Sirion with a confused languor: she no longer rushes to the ocean, but meanders, slow and expansive, as the ocean seems to make its way towards her.

It takes them a few days to reach the Narog. Only two people need to row at once, so they take it in turns rowing and resting. They sing, intermittently, and talk, but mostly, they are quiet, watching the shifting landscape. Drinking it in. Even in the few weeks they stayed at the Havens, the landscape seems to have changed slightly. Perhaps it’s the first signs of autumn, but the landscape seems more languid. Quieter, fewer signs of wildlife. 

Celebrimbor thinks that the Narog has changed too, when they reach the joining point. Travelling down from the mountains, the Narog is wilder than the Sirion, the waters crashing together in foam. Celebrimbor remembers the first time he took this route, following the river on foot with the small, small group of survivors from Nargothrond. They travelled in the brightest parts of the day but stuck to the undergrowth where they could, poorly armed and terrified that they were being followed, that the roving orcs or worse might come upon them unawares.

Now even these waters have calmed somewhat. Or perhaps their force has just spread. Like most of the rivers they've seen on this trip, the Narog has swelled, forcing her banks apart or overrunning them, and now she flows wide and chaotic. 

They manage to push the boat past the initial joining. The current is faster here, but they're still plenty able to push against it. 

Slowly, the flat marshland they’ve been travelling through starts rising into hills, rising up out of the water that surrounds them. The valleys, too, become more extreme as the gentle hills turn into the crags out of which Finrod built his city. Where most of the space between the hills had once been fertile farmland, now every valley is a river that twists and turns and joins the central stream. Rowing becomes more perilous and they are forced to slow down, but they don't abandon the boat: here, there is no way to walk between the peaks, and if they lost the boat they would be forced to swim. 

Celebrimbor thought that he knew the landscape around Nargothrond fairly well, but it's evidently changed over the war, and in response to the monumental forces that now shift the shape of the landscape around them. It takes him by surprise when they round the corner and see, suddenly, the jut of the ruined bridge that leads out of the hidden city. 

Celebrimbor's heart seems to stop, and then it starts again, fast now, desperate. He sucks in a breath of air. 

The river is much higher, now, than it was when Celebrimbor saw this place last. There's less fire, too, and fewer orcs swarming about. No great, monstrous lizard overseeing it in reptile satisfaction. But Celebrimbor's heart still beats wildly in his chest and adrenaline floods his veins, some animal part of him screaming that he needs to run. 

It’s not lost on him that this is the second place he remembers last viewed from over his shoulder, as he fled it. So many places they’ve abandoned, as the Enemy pushed them ever back, into smaller and weaker positions. 

‘Watch out! Heledholf shouts, forcing Celebrimbor out of his memory and into the present. In his distraction, he had stopped rowing so assiduously, and now the current has caught them, pushing them back downstream and towards the sides of the valley – and the attendant rocky walls. Celebrimbor grabs his oars properly, leaning on them to slow and redirect the spin of the boat before starting to push again, until they are safely in the middle of the stream and not being carried back down and away. 

‘Apologies,’ he says. ‘It brought back some memories.’ 

‘I guessed. Are you alright?’

He nods. ‘Not about to start running across the river again.’ He glances over at Ribinvir. He’s staring at the bridge, a grim expression on his face. Celebrimbor remembers, suddenly, that Ribinvir had been one of the stonemasons to work on the project. He puts a hand on the other elf’s arm, and Ribinvir startles, then shakes his head and clears his throat.

‘Yes. Memories. Not good ones.’ He puts a hand on the rudder. ‘They’re past, though. Let’s see if we can bring this boat up to bear.’ 

They draw up close again to the remains of the great bridge. The legs break the flow of the water, providing a safe harbour against the current where they are able to safely secure their boat and make their way up. Celebrimbor remembers when these slopes were fair and covered with shrubs and grasses. Now it's just bare rock, and slime. 

Closer, the halls look worse. The bridge juts out across the water like a broken arm. The entryways are gaping maws framed by the broken teeth of their shattered doors. Beyond them lies only darkness and the faint smell of damp. 

Celebrimbor finds himself hesitating on the threshold. It's a far cry from the glory days of King Finrod Felagund, when the doors were thrown open and the hallways glittered. 

‘We’re going to need the lamps,’ Heledholf comments. Celebrimbor nods, and roots around in his bag for them. They don’t have many: the clear, steady light of Fëanorian lamps make them extremely valuable, but there are very few who can make them these days, and it would generally be considered an obscene luxury to take on what's essentially a glorified camping trip. But Celebrimbor is a master of gemcraft. His grandfather’s lamps were one of the first tests of his skills as a smith, back when he was a child and welcome in Aulë’s halls. Even in the short time between Ereinion recruiting him and their leaving, he was able to make a couple. 

These ones catch the light of the sun at noon in the hills on the banks of the Lhun. It's a pure, bright light, illuming the space around them as if through a window. Celebrimbor passes them to his companions. 

The three of them step cautiously into the hall, past the jagged remains of the doors and into the stone halls beyond. Celebrimbor pauses once he’s inside, breathing slowly, seeing if he feels the raw edge of panic on his tongue. But the halls are quiet, and his heartbeat remains steady. There are no dragons here.

It's quiet, inside the doors. The rush of the river outside feels muted, the darkness of the halls seeming to bear a thick weight. The walls here are cracked, parts of the wall collapsed, though how much of that is Glaurung's invasion and how much the movement of the land since the War of Wrath, Celebrimbor can't say. As they move through the halls, their lights fall on piles of dust and rubble, cracked stone mixed with rubbish left by the people who came to use this space after its abandonment. Human, Celebrimbor thinks, by the scale of the tools left behind, though even these later inhabitants left so long ago that anything they left is decayed and worn.

Above them, great cobwebs festoon the ceilings where festal banners once hung, and as they descend deeper their movement startles a cloud of bats. The small creatures fly into their faces with a series of outraged squeaks, forcing them to stumble back, hands raised for protection.

And yet, even in the destruction, there are hints of old Nargothrond. A fragment of bas relief remains, crooked, on the wall, showing an elda playing the harp. Patterned stones remain inset in the broken floor. The great carved pillars that herald the way to the central hall still stand tall, soaring into the darkness above their heads. 

They descend down past the pillars, towards the central, open hall. With every step, the smell of wet stone grows stronger, and the damp in their air lays thicker upon them, until they can hear the lapping of the water itself, close below. 

The staircase comes to an end before them, the corridor opening out into the first and greatest of Nargothrond's mighty halls. Their lights reflect off a great, dark, flat expanse. 

Flooded. 

The water spreads across the whole of the hall, still and mirror-like. The underground streams that carried water to Nargothrond and the tunnels that brought in clean air have also let in the rising waters, slowly drowning the ruined city. Celebrimbor guesses that they're approximately on a level with the waters outside. 

The three of them stop, looking out across that lake that was once the central hall and hub of the great city. Two hundred years ago, it would have been full of people talking, singing, doing business heading from one part of the city to another. The doors led to dwelling places, crafting rooms, kitchens and treasuries. Great staircases spiralled down the central opening, leading to the depths of the city. The arch at the end, barely visible in the lights of their lamps, held the way to the central throne room, where Finrod had once cast his crown at the feet of Celegorm and Curufin. 

Empty now, and quiet, the only sounds the breathing of the three elves and the soft movement of the water. This deep underground, and lacking the lamps that once filled it with light, not even algae is eking out a life. 

'The water isn't deep,' Ribinvir says. 'At least where the walkways once were. We could wade, if we were careful.’

Celebrimbor crouches down, puts a hand in the water. It's shockingly cold, but the current isn't too strong, at least here. He nods. 

'Let's see if we can get to the throne room, at least.'

They leave their shoes on the steps, at the top in case there’s another shift in the earth that sends a wave their way. Celebrimbor hisses as his feet are enveloped by the water. He acclimatises slowly, but it's the kind of cold that doesn't just stay on the surface, but seeps through skin and flesh to chill your very bones. He curls his toes against the rock, careful with his steps for fear of slipping. 

Gingerly, they make their way along the edge of the hall, hands on the walls for stability, peering through the openings up into long-abandoned corridors. Some are collapsed, but others remain open. Beside them, down the centre of the room, the water gleams deep and mysterious, the drowned depths of the city hidden from view.

The throne room is a couple of steps down again, and the water rises above their knees and up to their thighs. But it's still here, at least. The throne itself is broken and crumbled, only the stumps of the legs remaining, and the coloured stones and bright metals that once decorated the walls have been picked away, leaving only the indentations where they once were set. 

But the central dais still rises up out of the water and they wade gratefully towards it, helping each other up the steps. There’s a huge crack down the middle now, as though some great weight had landed inelegantly upon it. There’s an obvious guess as to what that weight might have been, and Celebrimbor carefully doesn’t make it. He focusses on his legs instead, which are numb and starting to shake. He sits on his feet to attempt to warm them. Ribinvir and Heledholf, who both crossed the grinding ice, stand stoically beside him.

‘The lower levels must all be underwater,’ Ribinvir says. ‘All the workrooms and storehouses, the halls for leisure and training…’

‘The ways out, too.’ Celebrimbor’s memories of their escape are fuzzy in parts, but he remembers running down, down, holding the hand of the person behind him, trying not to trip on the rough-hewn staircases. If someone trapped them in now, they would drown before escaping. 

Celebrimbor takes a slow breath. Not a helpful thought right now. The dragons are slain, and the land is at peace. 

‘The water seems to be a consistent level in the places we’ve been so far, so I would guess that the living spaces are mostly still dry. The stairs to the royal apartments...' he points towards the staircase behind the remains of the throne, that had once led up to Finrod's rooms, to Orodreth's and Finduilas's. To Celebrimbor's own, when he has dwelt here, first with his father as Finrod's guests and then as Orodreth's kinsman and friend. He doesn't mention this, though Ribinvir surely knows it. 

‘It's worth looking,’ Ribinvir agrees. ‘We can see if... if they haven't been entirely ransacked, there might be something worth bringing back, before it all sinks.’

Celebrimbor nods as Ribinvir speaks. Even if there isn’t anything worth retrieving, Celebrimbor wants to see that for himself. ‘Let’s look, at least.’ 

'I'd be glad to search somewhere a little drier,' Heledholf says. 

They plunge into the icy water once again, but only for the time it takes to descend from the dais and across the room to the next set of stairs. Their feet leave wet prints on the stone, grit and dust gathering between their toes as they ascend. As Celebrimbor feared, the rooms have indeed been thoroughly raided, the doors broken and the furniture turned upside down. Looking into Orodreth's room, it seems that anything that might possibly have been of value has already been taken or destroyed, deliberate, petty damage that makes Celebrimbor’s throat tight. His desk lies split down the middle, drawers thrown across the room. 

Celebrimbor leaves Ribinvir and Heledholf to conduct a thorough search of Orodreth's apartments, and drifts off in search of the chambers he himself had once kept. Like all the other rooms on this corridor, Celebrimbor's apartments have been ransacked, the furniture torn apart and all of Celebrimbor's books, jewellery, clothing and tools long gone. But unlike the other places they've visited where Celebrimbor once lived, this place is at least still a room. The furniture may be broken and scattered, but the bed in the corner is still distinctly his bed, the rotted covers still askew on the mattress are his covers. 

He stands in the doorway for a moment, and breathes. Doesn’t think about the screams, or the flight. The room is just a room, no enemies are approaching. He waits until his breathing comes normally again, and then steps in. He is not only here to bear witness: he wants something specific. 

One of the many wonders of Nargothrond had been its heating, the system of hot air blown from a central furnace, up through pipes in all the walls to heat the floor beneath people's feet. This had the side effect of leaving a lot of convenient cavities in the rooms where it was in operation, and one only needed to find a loose flagstone to take advantage of it. There had been a loose flagstone under Celebrimbor's bed, once...

It takes some effort to move the collapsed bed out of the way, but once he does, the flagstone is perfectly accessible, and still wobbly. It comes away without too much trouble, revealing the small space beneath. This hidey-hole appears to have remained hidden, its contents undisturbed. Celebrimbor carefully pulls the box up and out to the floor beside him, removing the lid with slightly shaky hands. 

The contents are still in place. It's an odd collection, things that Celebrimbor hadn't wanted to throw away but hadn't wanted to think too hard about either. A ring of Finrod's given before he left on his doomed quest with Beren. A couple of glass beads strung together, presented to him by a child from one of the villages of Himlad. A furious letter from his father, preserved in the dry dust. Two delicate star-shaped earrings, set with glittering stones.

Celebrimbor pulls them out, holding them up to the light. The earrings are not anything particularly special, all told. A simple enough shape, and jewels that, although finely made and cut, are not beyond the capacity of any competent Noldorin jewelsmith. They’re notable only because of the hands that made them, that put them in Celebrimbor’s ears on the occasion of his twentieth begetting day, celebrated at Formenos. 

He folds them in the letter and tucks them into his bag. He fishes out the pewter beads from Himring, and ties them together with the glass beads and Finrod’s ring, then puts them away too. 

Ribinvir and Heledholf are back in the corridor by the time Celebrimbor leaves. They've evidently been through some of the neighbouring ones as well as Orodreth’s: the dust in the doorways lies disturbed, the doors themselves moved on their hinges. There's a small pile of things on the floor between them: a few buttons; an inkpot; some leftover paper detritus. A meagre hoard, for a king. 

Ribinvir spots him looking and smiles ruefully. 'The Enemy was thorough, it seems.'

Celebrimbor nods, peering at the paper. He recognises Orodreth's handwriting, though it's been a long time since he last saw it. The paper is nothing all that interesting. Notes from a meeting, Celebrimbor thinks. He picks it up for a closer look, then pauses, thinking. 

'Do you remember...' he starts, then stops, because he isn't sure that Ribinvir would have known in the first place. 'There was an auxiliary treasure house,' he says. 'Or – not so much a treasure house as a storeroom. Somewhere to keep documents and things. I know the main treasury was plundered long ago, but this one was out of the way. It didn't look like much, unless you knew to look. It might have escaped.'

Ribinvir looks surprised, then nods slowly. 'The one on the corridor to the armouries?' 

'That's it. It might... It might be worth looking.'

'It will be underwater now.' 

'I can hold my breath a long time.'

Ribinvir is still nodding, clearly thinking through the logistics. Heledholf, however, looks shocked. 

'What?' she asks. 'You're planning to swim down there?'

'If that's the way, then yes. At least to see if anything can be retrieved.' 

‘That’s insane!’

To Celebrimbor’s surprise, she seems both genuinely surprised, and to mean it. 

‘There will be other treasure. You can make other treasures, or do they lie when they call you the heir of Fëanor?’

Celebrimbor flinches a little at the term. He’s heard it bandied about, and mostly ignored it. Celebrimbor is a talented smith, it’s true. Possibly even the best, at least here on Middle-earth, despite his relative youth. But the term is used for more than simply his skill in the forge.

Ribinvir saves him from having to answer. ‘Those treasures won’t have belonged to the High King’s father,’ he says softly. ‘For all that Círdan has done a magnificent job of raising him…’

‘And Orodreth was my cousin,’ Celebrimbor says. Second cousin, technically, the both of them Finwë's great-grandchildren. But they were close in age. Before Celebrimbor's grandfather had led his wing of the family into exile, he and Orodreth had often been pushed together at events, the fourth generation, babies of the family. The quiet youth Orodreth had been had changed and grown as Celebrimbor had, into a quiet adult, never quite with Finrod's sparkle, but with a seriousness to him, a willingness to take action when he thought it mattered. 

Celebrimbor still remembers catching a glimpse of him, that evening on the shores of Valinor that set all their fates in motion. Celebrimbor's father had been holding Celebrimbor close within the Fëanorian faction, the most committed group, those whose hearts were already set on going. Celebrimbor had stayed there willingly, sticking close to his family, unwilling to speak, having little enough to say in the chaos of it all. 

Orodreth had spoken, though, taking his grandfather's part. Celebrimbor can still see him in his mind's eye, lit by lightning, standing on a rock with his blonde hair plastered to his head, begging the assembled Noldor to see sense and seek peace.

It had only been a flash, a moment in an evening full of chaotic moments, before Curufin had dragged Celebrimbor away, but it stuck with him. He wondered more than once why Orodreth had come with them at all, rather than return with Finarfin to Valinor. Had it been Angrod's doing? Or had he hoped to do something good by being there with them? Had he regretted it?

Celebrimbor never managed to ask him. And now, of course, it was too late. 

‘Oh,’ Heledholf says, breaking into Celebrimbor's thoughts. She pauses for a while, clearly thinking, then: ‘Where do you think the room is, then?’

Chapter End Notes

Title from Lamentations 1:1

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They decide that Heledholf will remain behind on the dais of the throne room, staying dry and keeping watch in case they run into trouble. They return to the boat to retrieve as much rope as possible, tying their lines together for maximum length, fashioning a clip they can use to anchor themselves to it and still swim with both arms. They grab blankets, too, ferrying them carefully back and piling them on the dais, and Celebrimbor fashions a harness for their lamps to fix them on his and Ribinvir's heads. He stows his retrieved treasures back on the boat. 

They go back in. 

The route they think they can take isn't that complicated. They're able to wade to the edge of the throne room, and down the stairs, fixing their ropes along the way. The main difficulty is the cold. Even having waded down, it still shocks him as he goes deeper, up past his legs and to his core. He moves around slowly, trying to convince himself that he's not about to die from it.

They swim carefully down the quiet, empty corridors, leaving the glow of Heledholf's lamp far behind them. Their lamps, rigged to their foreheads, cast a steady glow where they cast their gaze. 

The difficulty comes later. The storeroom, Celebrimbor knows, is down another level, tucked away, on the way to the lower training grounds. The corridor that leads down to it is fully submerged, the door at the end barely visible in the gloom. 

'Are you sure about this?' Ribinvir asks, as they hover at the entrance to the stairway, the last bit of friendly air. He's managed to find a steady perch, at least, a niche carved in the walls next to a wall bracket they've used to secure the ropes. Celebrimbor looks down the stairway and nods. 'I'll give the rope a tug every minute so you know I'm still alive,' he says. 'If I tug three times, or I haven't tugged in a few minutes, will you pull me back?'

'I will.'

Celebrimbor dives. 

The cold shocks him all over again as it closes over his head. Celebrimbor can immediately feel an ache in his cheeks, and his ears from it. But he's experienced worse, and he pushes through, down into the depths. 

The water is relatively clear here, Celebrimbor's light illuminating the walls and floors, the silt gathered at the bottom. It's kicked up by Celebrimbor's passing, creating a whirling cloud behind him. It's oddly peaceful under the water, the ordinary corridors transformed into an otherworldly landscape by the way the light passes through water, rather than air. Celebrimbor's angle adds to the strangeness. He's swimming horizontally, suspended above the ground as if in flight.

He presses forward, down to the door he can just make out at the end of the corridor. The water resists him: his body is lighter than the water and he has to fight against the upwards pressure as he goes. His ears are starting to ache, and he can’t tell if it’s from the cold or the pressure – but he forces himself to ignore it, because there, up ahead of him, is the door, still stood fast against the outside. Celebrimbor kicks down to get close to it. 

The locks have long rusted, as have the hinges. Celebrimbor thinks that a good blow could take them off. He takes his knife and attempts to hit at the edge, but the cold and the pressure of the water make him clumsy, and it’s hard to aim while he’s also fighting against his own buoyancy. He misses, fumbles, almost drops his knife. Manoeuvres into position to try again. 

His lungs are starting to complain, but he ignores them for now. There’s a handle on the door, and a little bit of slack in his rope, so he winds it around the handle to keep him down here. This time, he tries wedging the knife in between the plate and the door itself. It manages to find a crack, and he hits the hilt of the knife instead. This is easier, and his blow lands. The lock shifts slightly, the knife driving down deeper into the crack. 

One more go. He grabs at the handle with both hands, and kicks off the wall. The movement dislodges the silt and it blooms up around him – but it works. The lock bends, comes loose - not fully out, but enough that Celebrimbor knows he can force it. But now his lungs are screaming air, air! and the edges of Celebrimbor's vision are turning shaded and dark, so he tugs on the rope three times and starts kicking wildly for the surface.

Coming up is less pleasant than going down. Celebrimbor is at the very edge of his body's limit for air, and the disturbed sediment has made the water a grimy, murky mess that gets in Celebrimbor's eyes, reducing his visibility to almost nothing. 

But Ribinvir is at the other end of the rope, pulling and guiding him, and after a few long seconds Celebrimbor suddenly breaks the surface, desperately sucking in great lungfuls of air. His head is pounding and he flails, disorientated – but there's suddenly an arm around his chest as Ribinvir catches him and pulls him back against his own body, sharing his stability and meagre warmth as Celebrimbor struggles to get his breath back. 

'Easy,' Ribinvir says. 'Easy.' 

It takes a couple of minutes before Celebrimbor can breathe steadily enough to talk properly. 

'The door was still locked. But I think I broke it. It's – I'm going to go down again.' 

'Are you sure?' Ribinvir asks, concern tinging his voice. 'We don't – the High King has no expectations for us to retrieve anything here. You don't need to.'

Celebrimbor laughs, shaky. 'He'd call us both idiots for sure. But I'm going to anyway. Just... give me a minute.'

They stay where they are for more than a minute. Heledholf pulls the rope at some point and Ribinvir pulls it back, the wordless communication letting her know they're both still alive. The water around them slowly settles, still murky but clearer than when Celebrimbor had just swum through. Eventually, he nods again. 

'I'm going back.'

'Valar protect you.' 

It's reflexive, Celebrimbor is sure. But in the moment, it feels ironic. Were it not for the Valar, these halls would not have flooded in the first place.

But then, were it not for the Valar, would they have ever existed? Can not most of the world be attributed to them, in the end? 

The water is no gentler the second time around. The silt has settled a little, but the water is still cloudy. Celebrimbor thanks his earlier self for his foresight in securing the rope: it makes going down the second time much easier.

His past self also did a better job than Celebrimbor realised on the lock. Now, the mechanism comes away with just a bit of manoeuvring from the knife. The water starts to shift around his hands, and a bubble of air floats up through the opening.

It's dry inside. 

Celebrimbor tugs at the door. It doesn't budge, of course: it's not only the locks keeping them shut, but the weight of the water itself. But maybe there's a way to make the pressure work for them. If he can get the door loose enough that the pressure could push them in, rather than having to tug them out. The hinges are as rusted as the lock. But he’s running low on air…

Another bubble of air rises to the surface... perhaps...

Giving the rope a swift tug so Ribinvir knows he's still alive, Celebrimbor puts his face to the gap where the lock had been, forming a seal with his hands. This is either a brilliant idea, or one that may literally kill him if he lets his air go with no replenishment – but no! Now that he's blocking the water from coming in, he feel air on his face and takes a shaky, grateful breath. 

The air is stale. But it is air. Celebrimbor breathes deeply for a few seconds, then retreats. Even with this new source of air, the weight of the water is immense, and the breathing hole is thin. He's bought time, is all. 

He swims down to one of the hinges, picking away at the screws, working his knife in at the edge. It takes less time than the locks did: the hinge is both less securely anchored, and he has the technique for opening them now. He manages to prise it off in the space of one breath, and the door bends slightly, letting more water in at the side. Better, but not the rush Celebrimbor was hoping for. He starts work on the next hinge, chipping away. 

He picks away at the second hinge, hitting the gap with his knife – and the door folds, buckling in the sudden weak point. The rush of water shoves Celebrimbor against the door, which breaks fully away from the hinges and into the room. At the same time, a rush of air bursts out of the room, throwing Celebrimbor in the opposite direction, such that his body feels like it’s being smashed apart. He flails wildly, desperately grabbing for the rope, but in the rush it seems to have come loose, leaving him unmoored and at the mercy of the tremendous force of water.

The flood catches him and smashes him against the back wall of the storeroom. He tucks his head in at the last second and avoids hitting it, but the force of it jars his bones, and it’s been too long since he managed to get any air. Running purely on adrenaline, he somehow manages to feel his way up the wall, until he feels air among the sloshing of the water and pulls himself up to take a desperate breath. 

Around him, the water seems to be calming, now that the initial flood is over. Sheets of paper float around him, the long-preserved ink growing blurry from the water. But the shelves were not only full of papers: Celebrimbor is sure he can see other shapes in the water, if he can only get a visual through the water…

‘Tyelpe!’ 

The word startles him out of his focus. He looks around wildly, and sees Ribinvir’s head in the waters near the door. His hair is flat against his head and his eyes are wild and worried. 

‘I’m here!’ Celebrimbor says, or tries to: his teeth are chattering too badly to actually make sense. 

‘I thought you were dead!’ 

He manages to shake his head. ‘No. No. It was – the door. Threw me.’ Words are harder than he’d realised, with how violently he’s shaking. 

‘We should go back to Heledholf to reassess! Come over here, I’ll help.’ 

‘I’m fine,’ Celebrimbor says. The water is settling again, and he thinks he sees a gleam of metal under the water. ‘Look, there’s –‘

Rather than try to make his words work to explain, Celebrimbor dives instead. But his limbs aren’t cooperating properly, he can’t get much depth, and he gets turned around. In the open room, it’s hard to tell which way is up. 

A hand grabs him by the arm, and Celebrimbor is hauled up to the surface by Ribinvir’s strong arms. 

‘Don’t do that,’ he says. ‘Tyelpe, fuck – what is wrong with you? We need to get back to Heledholf, we need – you’re bleeding.’ 

‘Just scrapes,’ Celebrimbor manages. ‘From the wall. I’m fine, there’s was something in the water. We should see what we can gather.’

‘We can do that later. If you were thrown against the wall, we need to make sure you’re not concussed.’ 

Celebrimbor opens his mouth to explain that he wasn’t concussed, when another wave of shivering overtakes him. ‘Fine.’ 

There’s a palpable expression of relief from Ribinvir, who tows Celebrimbor over to the doorway. ‘Wait here,’ he says, guiding Celebrimbor’s hands to the frame to hang onto. Celebrimbor considers complaining that he could do it himself, but he’s low on energy, so he just clings instead as Ribinvir finds the end of the rope for them to navigate by. 

‘Alright. Let’s go. You ahead of me.’ 

Celebrimbor does as he’s told. Truthfully, once they’re moving he can see the wisdom of it. He barely has the coordination to keep pulling himself hand over hand, even once he’s out of the fully underwater tunnel and back to the partially flooded corridors. Even once they’re back to the great hall, where the water is only thigh-deep, he can’t stand, and has to pull himself up onto the dais like a wet fish.

Heledholf, Valar bless her, has built a fire. 

'I think he’s concussed,’ Ribinvir says, as Celebrimbor attempts to strip his sodden tunic over his head, shivering violently. ‘You can do a diagnostic Song, can’t you?’

‘Yes, and the standard healing checks as well,’ she says, then hisses. Celebrimbor turns to look at her, and sees that she was looking at his back. He glances down: the tunic in his hands is torn and tinged with blood. His back must look a sight, and it will be worse once the bruises start to emerge. 

‘I’m fine,’ Celebrimbor says. ‘It looks worse than it is.’

‘Who is the current High King?’ Heledholf asks. Celebrimbor huffs in annoyance. 

‘Ereinion Gil-galad, son of Orodreth Noldoran. I can trace the line back to Finwë if you like.’ 

He drops his tunic and picks up a blanket, wrapping it around himself. The dry wool, warmed by the meagre fire, settles comfortably around him and he immediately feels significantly better. 

‘Do you remember how you got the injury?’

She’s running through all the questions then. At least his teeth have stopped chattering quite so badly. ‘I was in a submerged tunnel trying to get a door open. The room behind was sealed, so it was air, and when I managed to open it the force of the water filling the space behind threw me against the wall.’ Now that he’s wrapped in a blanket and slowly warming up, he can admit that this was not, perhaps, his wisest scheme. He blames the lack of air. 

‘And you say you didn’t hit your head?’

‘I managed to tuck it into my body.’

‘Let me check.’

It’s not phrased as optional. 

Celebrimbor bows his head, letting her feel around his skull. She Sings something that seems to cut a line right down the middle of Celebrimbor’s brain. His ears ring with the echoes of it. 

Eventually, she seems satisfied. ‘He’s not concussed. Just an idiot.’ 

Celebrimbor grimaces, but doesn’t argue with her assessment.

‘I’m going back down,’ he says, to joint expressions of horror from Heledholf and Ribinvir. ‘No, listen, the water will have calmed again, and I know there were things worth diving for down there. Come with me, or don’t, be I am going to retrieve what I can.’ 

‘I don’t think the High King would want you to risk your life for trinkets.’ 

‘I’m not. But I am going.’ He stares them down, implacable. One thing Celebrimbor knows, has learnt from experience, is that there are few people he can’t out-stubborn if he puts his mind to it. Not his father. Not the High King. Certainly not Ribinvir or Heledholf. And he needs to get back down there. 

It’s a pull he can’t quite explain, but it’s always been there. The need to see something to its full conclusion, once it’s started, the unerring fix on a target. Perhaps he inherited it. But he won’t be dissuaded. 

‘Fine,’ Ribinvir says. ‘But the ropes aren’t long enough to reach into that room properly, and I’m not letting you go in unsecured again.’ He looks around at Heledholf. ‘I’m afraid you’ll need to get wet.’ 

She grimaces, but nods. ‘Alright. When you’re ready.’ 

It takes longer than Celebrimbor would like for his body to stop shivering, but he eventually warms up, curled up with a blanket between his body and the cold floor as well as between himself and the air. His plait drips onto the ground, the water running to the central crack in little rivulets. 

Eventually, he thinks he’s ready to go back in. He stands, stretches, turns to Ribinvir. ‘Are you ready?’ he asks. 

Ribinvir, who had been doing much the same thing but slightly more stoically, gets up as well. ‘I still think you mad. But yes. Heledholf?’

She doesn’t say anything but nods, lips pressed tightly together. 

Now that the doors are open and there’s a sure supply of air, it’s less stressful to go down the corridor. They leave Heledholf where Ribinvir had been, her end of the rope secured to an old wall bracket, as Celebrimbor and Ribinvir follow it down to the storeroom. 

Celebrimbor is tired, but it’s faded to the kind of tired he can work through, motivated by the imminent end to their quest. 

The contents of the storeroom are a mess. As Celebrimbor suspected, it’s mostly paper items, many of which have risen up and now float on the surface, gently bleeding ink into the water. Celebrimbor bundles a bunch of them up to bring back to Heledholf to dry, putting them on a high shelf above the water line. Other items rest under the waves, and he and Ribinvir take turns diving. 

Much of what they dredge up is meaningless, the detritus of state put somewhere out of the way. But they do manage to dredge up some pieces of meaning. Bits of Orodreth’s armour, jewellery worn for various affairs of state. A votive statue of the Lord of Waters. Celebrimbor wonders how Ereinion will respond to that. A belt buckle, a knife – part of a matched pair given by Celebrimbor. They can’t find its mate but, well. Celebrimbor can forge another.

It’s not much, but it’s something tangible. Proof that Nargothrond once existed, that it was once ruled over by King Finrod, King Orodreth. So few escaped the destruction, Celebrimbor thinks he could name them all individually. Celebrimbor wishes we could lift the whole city, place it safely on dry land as a monument forever. 

But he can’t. So he clings to the scraps they pull out of one old storeroom and ferries them all, slowly, painstakingly, over the course of many trips, up to the throne room again. There, they pause for a while to warm up again before carrying everything from the throne room to the surface. 

They emerge into the thin light of the moon and the distant glow of the stars, tired and hungry, treading the thin line between exhaustion and euphoria. They drop their hoard in the boat and collapse, dead eyed and blank – until suddenly Celebrimbor is laughing. It’s infectious: Ribinvir starts a moment later. Heledholf frowns for a second, disapproving, before a smile cracks her stern expression and she’s laughing too. 

They laugh until tears roll down their cheeks, and they’re not so much sitting together as slumped in a heap. Celebrimbor wraps his arms around both of them. 

‘Thank you,’ he says softly. ‘Thank you.’

Chapter End Notes

Title from Psalm 130:1

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Heledholf insists they spend a day recovering from the cold water before attempting to move on. Celebrimbor spends it with Damlann’s watercolour set, venturing as far as the flooded great hall to sit on the steps and attempt to capture the eerie environment within. His drawings still feel flat, capturing the image alone and not the atmosphere, but since neither Heledholf or Ribinvir seem inclined to draw he supposes it will have to do. 

He tries to make a record of the land around them as well. Even though it’s only early autumn, the trees of the Taur-en-Faroth are already starting to turn a sickly yellow colour, their leaves wilting on the branch. Celebrimbor takes the time to mix a watercolour the exact same shade, holding his careful sketch of a leaf up against its original. 

The weather holds out as they set off again the next day, fine autumn sunlight lending the drowning landscape a queer beauty. With Nargothrond behind them, Celebrimbor feels odd, restless yet blank, always aware of the tiny store of treasures carefully stashed in the bottom of their boat. Of the mementos he has at the bottom of his bag. 

When he isn’t rowing, Celebrimbor draws, mostly to keep his hands busy. Partly because there is nothing else he can take from this landscape. He scribbles landscape after landscape. He’s getting better. Or, at least, more proficient, better able to capture the views in front of him even if he knows in his heart that this isn’t his true craft. 

It’s been a long time since Celebrimbor made jewellery. 

Slowly, they pass out of the Taur-en-Fauroth and into the plains of the Talath Durnen. The land here is higher than towards the coast, not yet flooded as Arvernien. The land near the swollen river is squelchy underfoot, but there are still wood-topped hills where the earth is firm underfoot. They mostly camp on the hills, at the edge of the trees. Here, life still flourishes, and Celebrimbor lies awake listening to the night creatures, trying to identify birdsong from their descriptions in Eluduinen’s book. The only one he manages is a nightingale. It’s late in the year – they would normally have fled south by now – but his song is still bright and clear. 

Ten years, they thought this land might last. According to Eluduinen’s book, nightingales live between two and five years. The bird singing now may be able to return to these woods for the rest of his lifetime, and his sons and grandsons too. But there will come a time when the nightingales returning north in spring will pass over, and find nothing but waves.

The thought of that loss is too much to bear. Celebrimbor stays awake as long as the nightingale sings. The next day, he hears Heledholf whistling the little creature’s cry. She stops when she notices him looking, and smiles blearily at him. 

‘I heard him in the night. I thought… someone should remember his song.’ 

‘I heard him too. Thank you.’ 

Autumn draws in as they head north. The birds that were just arriving as they began their journey have turned around again, heading for milder weather to the south. One day a great cloud of cranes passes overhead, filling the air with the low trills and the sound of rushing wings. There are so many that for a moment they seem to blot out the sun itself, and Celebrimbor and his companions pause their rowing just to watch.

When they’re not watching the birds, they pass the time singing. They’re all Noldor, so when they run out of Lathrim ballads and Falathrim sailing songs, they find themselves going back to the songs of Valinor, songs for hunting and working and soothing children to sleep. When they pass a stand of silver willows, their colour like in tone to the willows of Lórien, Heledholf starts to sing Who Lies There Beneath the Silver Willow Boughs. She gets a few lines in, before seeming to remember that it’s about Celebrimbor’s great-grandmother, and trailing off awkwardly. 

Celebrimbor clears his throat, and takes up the refrain. The death of Míriel Þerindë was the first tragedy that shook Celebrimbor’s family, but there have been many since then, and the song of unaccountable loss feels fit for the slowly drowning land. Singing becomes hard as tears well up in Celebrimbor’s throat and spill out over his lashes, but he keeps singing until the song is finished and the willows are far behind them. 

Then they aren’t singing, they talk. Heledholf tells stories about life in Gondolin, and Ribinvir talks about the building projects he had worked on. Slowly, Celebrimbor finds himself talking too. He usually avoids talking about his family, too aware of the pain they have caused. But surrounded by the wide skies and open river, something opens up and he finds himself offering small stories. At first he sticks to the safe stories of his childhood, but as the peaks of the Ered Wethrin begin to loom on the horizon, he starts talking about his life in Beleriand. 

The weather turns colder as they travel north, frost touching the grass in the mornings and a chill wind blowing through their clothes. They shiver, and pull out cloaks that they haven’t worn since the very start of their journey. By the time they reach the source of the Narog at the Pools of Ivrin, it’s late autumn, and they find the pools covered in a thin layer of ice. 

The pools are wider than when Celebrimbor first saw them. He managed to convince his father to let him accompany Ambarussa on a mapping expedition. The journey was miserable, as everything was in those days, low on supplies and hiding from orcs. 

But the pools were beautiful. Still, clear and full of starlight. Surrounded by vegetation, despite the hostility of the years-long night. They bathed in the pools, and felt clean again. It was the first time since Losgar that Celebrimbor couldn’t smell smoke in his hair. 

Now, Celebrimbor breaks through the ice and washes his face in the sharp, cold water. It’s colder than the water in Nargothrond, he thinks, but fresher. The cold cuts through the haze of his grief and all of a sudden Celebrimbor can see the path ahead of him in a way he hasn’t for years, even decades. 

Behind him, a little ways up the bank, he hears Heledholf speaking. 

'It's not that far to the river Teiglin,' she says. From there, we can get closer to Gondolin. I know – the way might be flooded now, but I still know the hidden valleys.'

'If anything, the valleys are probably less hidden by this point,' Ribinvir reflects. 

Celebrimbor remains quiet as they debate their next steps, still reeling from his sudden revelation. Ribinvir and Heledholf are poring over a map, tracing waterways and valleys in search of a way from the Narog to the Sirion, and all Celebrimbor knows is he isn’t coming with them. 

Eventually he finds his voice. 

‘I’m going to Losgar,’ he says. The words hadn’t even formed in his mind before they were out in the open, but now that he has spoken them Celebrimbor knows that they are true, that this was where he was heading all along. 

Heledholf looks upset. 'But Gondolin–' she starts. Celebrimbor cuts her off. 

'The two of you should go on to Gondolin. I can make this journey by myself. And with winter approaching, I don’t know if we’d be able to get to both before the snows arrive.’ 

Ribinvir nods slowly. 'Travel with us as far as Tol-in-Gaurhoth,' he says. 'And we'll meet there again, once we've both found what we're looking for.' When Celebrimbor starts to object, he holds up a hand. 'We only have one boat. And I don't know if the remains of Beleriand will be traversable by foot by the time we return.'

Celebrimbor starts to say he doesn't care, he'll find a way – but realises that this is probably not a promise he can keep. And even if there's a part of Celebrimbor that feels like the only thing that matters now is completing his quest to the end of the world, another part of him is aware that there must be something that will come after. 

A meeting at Tol-in-Gaurhoth it will have to be, then. 

‘Very well.’

They actually part a little before they reach Orodreth’s old keep, at a point where the cuts through the Ered Wethrin and up to the Mountains of Mithrim. There’s a high pass here, one that Celebrimbor and his uncles first discovered all those years ago, which should be safely above the water level. 

It’s emotional, saying goodbye. After years of not crying at all, now Celebrimbor can’t seem to stop, and he weeps as they embrace in farewell. When they draw apart, Heledholf is openly crying, and Ribinvir’s lips are pursed in a way that suggests he’s trying not too. 

‘I’ll see you at Tol Sirion,’ Celebrimbor says, the old name falling from his lips without thinking. 

‘Six weeks from now,’ Heledholf says. ‘Don’t even think of doing something stupid, or we’ll come into Hithlum to find you.’

It’s a nonsensical threat, but he appreciates it, much as he appreciates Ribinvir’s tight hug and final check that he doesn’t want them to follow. 

‘No,’ Celebrimbor says to him. ‘Thank you. But I need to do this by myself.’ 

Ribinvir nods. With a final farewell, Celebrimbor turns, and starts to climb up through the mountains. 

They’ve moved around, over the course of the war. The pass isn’t quite as Celebrimbor remembers, and the mountains around him slope to one side as though their foundations are sinking. Perhaps they are. It makes navigating slightly more difficult, and at times Celebrimbor has to stop walking and scramble over rocks and scree. It’s tiring, but oddly peaceful, with only the wind and the birds for company. This ascent is easier than the first, Celebrimbor’s muscles adjusted now to this sort of walking. 

He follows the half-missing trail up and up, until suddenly he’s over the crest of the path and Mithrim lies spread out before him. 

He wanted to see Lake Mithrim again. It was his first home in Beleriand, for those thirty long, terrifying years while Maedhros was captive and Maglor struggled to rule them as Regent. Thirty years, through which Celebrimbor very suddenly stopped being a boy in the eyes of others, and became a man, even before his family left for their self-imposed exile in the east. 

He sees it now. The lake has expanded, swallowing up all the land in the cradle of the mountains. In the distance, Celebrimbor can see ruins jutting out from the water, the remains of the settlement on what used to be the south bank of the lake. 

He considers swimming out to them. But he is alone now, back to having only the things he can carry on his own back. Small tent, rolled up blankets, knife and bow. The file and trinkets that still rattle around the bottom of his pack. He’s mindful of Heledholf’s words, mindful that she must be half way to Tol Sirion now, rather than waiting for him with a fire. So he sits and sketches instead. 

Great reed beds have grown up around the edges of the lake. The reeds are brown now it’s autumn, but they still dip and sway with the wind, great eddies and whorls that make the reed bed seem alive. Celebrimbor tries to capture it with his borrowed watercolours, but it doesn’t quite work. The reeds are just a brown blob, the line where he tried to capture a dip just a smear. He turns over to another page and picks up his paintbrush again, frowning at the shifting landscape in front of him. A more talented painter than Celebrimbor would be able to catch the movement, make an image of a moment that still feels alive. But Celebrimbor is not that artist. Unless…

He puts the paintbrush down and picks up the pencil instead. Sharpens it with his knife until the point is fine and sharp, and starts scribbling. No longer trying to catch the landscape, just the shapes of the reed bed, the idea of movement. Because Celebrimbor can’t capture the vision in front of him in paint, but perhaps he will be able to do something with metal. 

Celebrimbor sketches until the sun starts to set behind him, refining his idea slowly. A bracelet, he thinks, formed of interconnected little rods that will shift when the wearer moves their arm. It still needs work, and Celebrimbor won’t be able to do anything until he has access to a forge and some silver, but for the first time in a long time his mind is ablaze with possibility. 

He sets up his tent in the high mountains and curls up under his blankets. He wakes shivering: this high in the mountains, the frosts come sooner and thicker. Nothing for it but to get moving, then. 

The walk to Losgar takes him several days, and is mostly unpleasant. Dor-Lomin is as flooded as Mithrim, the reeds as tall as Celebrimbor. They fly in his face, small leaves surprisingly sharp and seeds dusty in his eyes. But the reeds are better than the open water: at least here he can fight them down, and make something of a usable path, as opposed to having through the murky water that’s sometimes calf deep, sometimes waist deep, slippery at the bottom and filled with moving creatures. 

If there’s one thing Celebrimbor is glad of, it is this: that where the landscape has changed, it has not been left dead. Around him, he hears the calls of wading birds, the susurrus of the reeds, the hum of insects. They know, now, that this place will be underwater soon. The plants will drown, the animals will move, or die themselves. But for now, at least, there is life. 

He makes it to the Firth of Dengrist one morning in early winter. It’s barely recognisable: the Ered Lomin has been shattered and brought low, no more than a wonky line of hills stretching off to either side. But the whole place still tastes of Doom, to Celebrimbor. If he focusses, he can still smell the acrid tang of smoke on the air. 

Losgar.

He’s left the reedbeds behind him, and now walks, mostly, through the grass of a saltmarsh. He leaves his shoes and bag on a hillock and, after a moment, takes his father’s file, his grandfather’s earrings, the string of beads. The pieces of ephemera that are the scraps left of his family, and takes them to the water’s edge. His hair is falling loose from its plait, so he pulls it loose, lets the wind catch it and blow it around his face. 

Feeling has slowly been returning as Celebrimbor made his way across Beleriand, but now it rushes over him like an oncoming tide, the force of it enough to bring him to his knees. He screams with it, loud and sudden enough that it startles the birds around him and they rise into the sky, screaming their own displeasure along with him. 

Celebrimbor keeps screaming. He screams for the evils his family has done. Screams for the blood on his own hands, his complicity, the war. Screams for loss of them, for his anger. Screams for Finrod and Orodreth and Elwing. For his mother. Screams until they turn into great heaving sobs that bear him down to the ground, until he is curled up on the sand and mud weeping into the salty earth. 

He weeps for the men who raised him. For Maedhros’s inner fire and Maglor’s restless hands and wondrous voice. For the temper that hid Caranthir’s steady heart, for Ambarussa’s good cheer. For Celegorm, fiery and cold by turns, ruthlessly ambitious, and yet who raised him like his own son, who put him on Huan and taught him to hunt. 

For his awful, fractious, complicit father, who covered Celebrimbor’s mouth before he could swear the Oath, who sent him away before any blood was shed at Alqualondë. Who walked away from Celebrimbor, when the Oath began to pull his hands into action. Who taught him how to turn metal into art and Sing crystals into gems. 

He weeps until his tears run dry for his awful, beloved, complicated family, until the sea starts to trickle in around his body and the waves lap at his face, hiding his tear tracks in the spray. For a minute, he considers staying there, seeing how high the sea will rise. Whether it will carry him away. 

But his bags are on the hill behind him, and he has a king to get back to. Friends who will be waiting for him at Tol Sirion. So he sits up, disgustingly damp and muddy, feeling like he’s been rubbed raw inside and out. He still holds his father’s file clenched in one hand, the string that held the beads and the earrings wound around his fingers. As the waves start to crash around his knees, he opens his hand. Watches as the waves suck them away, out to sea. Here, where they first landed, where the land is slowly being reclaimed. Celebrimbor feels free. 

He stands. The smell of smoke is gone from the air now, replaced with the tang of salt. Around him, the marsh hums with life. The birds wheel and dive overhead as Celebrimbor turns and starts making his long way home. 

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