and the waters prevailed by StormsBreadth  

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but the cormorant and the bittern shall possess it

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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.