and the waters prevailed by StormsBreadth  

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I will remove its hedge, and it shall be devoured

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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. 

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Chapter End Notes

Title from Isaiah 5:5