and the waters prevailed by StormsBreadth  

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the valleys shall be cleft, as wax before the fire

Environmental degradation and grief-related warnings in endnotes.

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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. 

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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