Chapter One: A Parting
He stepped out into the cold. He felt it more than the others did, because his blood was mixed and his heritage stained with those whose days were not eternal. The shallow gnaw of wind against his face proved discomforting, a reminder of his mortality even amongst those who never aged. The ground beneath his feet lay slick with ice, and his steel-toed boots burst the thin covering that others had slid over with ease. An image came to his mind of a pig raised with cats, like the old song he'd once known as a child. The Kinslayers, they who had ravaged his city and destroyed his House, had taught them things of innocence like that. They'd been more father than his own distant sire. He put thoughts of pigs and slaughter from his mind and stepped in front of the Lord General of his army. Glorfindel stood gleaming like a beacon in the feeble dawn light of winter, his armor shone with polish and the embossed celadine, the golden flowers of his house, caught the light and cast it on the ground. His silver cape, the color their city, was swept against his shoulder and tumbled by the wind. He looked a king.
Elrond swallowed the slight fear that crept up into his mouth and shut his eyes against the waves of vision that made him faint as fever. He saw his General in combat with the Demon of Morgoth, he saw the black Balrog's shadow and shattered helm crumple against the strength of the elf's blow. He saw the being falter, stumble, and bring with him his adversary, down into the depths of the earth.
He stepped forward, his eyes open once more, and looked out.
An army stood before him, ten thousand souls stood still as stone. The wind bit through their ranks and separated the banners from the bannerpoles. Above, the grey clouds promised snow. His mouth was dry as bone, and his throat ached with the stench of smoke and ash and ice. The prepared words tumbled around his head and rearranged themselves into senseless sentences. None of this made sense, not really.
"Kinsmen," he began, and the silence was absolute. "My lords and guardians, my defenders and counselors, my friends, your presence gladdens me. My heart is ice within my chest but your warm hearts will serve to thaw my own. Your courage I will tax for mine, your strength I will encompass as my own, and in you I will place my hope for a life without war, but war we must have to gain this peace. I am asking no easy thing of you: in this winter I have ordered a march south, through territory hostile and unfamiliar to most of you, to a land were neither rain falls nor sun shines. I ask you to leave your wives and your children, your lovers and your parents, your home and your country for a place that could not be more alien were it the Void itself. My kinsmen, I know what it is I have asked of you, and I know that if I asked you to march to the black forest of Beleriand and fight the Morgoth once again, you would just as willingly raise arms and follow. My honor lies in yours, and I have no fear of shame. So then, we march south and west to the shadowland of Mordor, where the long arm of the Enemy falls outstretched on the kingdoms of this world. We will check his reach and stay his search for power, or our war will usher in that final war between the Mights beyond our own. It is not an easy thing we are attempting, and I am aware that when we return, if we return, our numbers will be diminished beyond the point of mourning. We do not rush to battle for the heaths of youth or the certainty of glory, but for those whom we leave behind. Your women and children, your lovers and parents, your kinfolk too weak or young to defend themselves, have their defense in you. We are the armor that keeps sword from body, we are the shield that keeps blade from bone. When you fight you do not do so for me, or for the King, or for your ancestors. You fight for your children, that they may live without fighting, and dwell in peace. Your lives are not offered up on an alter ro my glory, but on the alter of your House, that all your descendants may live. So then, as we leave this place of peace for one of war, as we bid farewell to a life of friends for a land of foes, as we prepare the exchange of body for soul and this world for the World Beyond, I bid you take courage. This foe will not destroy our people. This foe cannot take away your bonds of kinship. Your deaths will lead you to life, your sorrows to joy. I ask you fight with me that all may live."
He found sweat had plastered his hair to his neck, and his ears suddenly rang with noise. He wondered if he would collapse in a fit, but he looked down and realized his men were shouting at once, their voices echoing off the steep walls of his valley. Glorfindel touched his arm with his gloved hand. Elrond felt the warmth of his touch as though from a brand, and he realized his whole body was shaking.
"You can't have a vision now," Glorfindel said, softly. "Your soldiers will think you're afraid of addressing them."
"Just afraid of what will become of them."
"Didn't you hear your own speech?" Glorfindel asked. "The dead will not die when they perish for their kin."
"Someone still has to bury the bodies," he said, but already he felt stronger. "My lord the King awaits us outside the city gates. We must make haste."
Still, as he passed underneath the arch engraved with a quote from Pengolodh, he could not help but glance backwards. His gaze met that of the girl's (she was a woman grown now, she had been for centuries), and he remembered reading a philosophy as a child that speculated the eyes made their own light and directed it towards whatever they looked upon. He imagined a melding of two lights in their eyes, a kind of union whose innocence was rivaled by impossibility. She lifted her hand, a benediction. He raised his own, a farewell. He did not know what he wished to say to her, as she watched from one of the great gabled windows. He did not know what she would say.
"Do you ever take your own advice?" Glorfindel asked.
"When it matters," he murmured. The girl turned from the window and went in. He mounted his destrier and rode out.
Elrond and the King reclined at table, their feet freed from iron shoes and their bodies released of their armor. The King had a flagon of wine at his lips, and when Elrond said something witty, he sprayed forth a red mist that might have been blood. Across from them, the Lord of the Atari, Oropher, sat, with the commander of the Sindar forces, Amdír. The leader of the Longbeards, the children of Dúrin the Deathless, sat couched in his cups, and his brother's heirs, Isildur and Anárion, sat at his side. Outside the forest moved with the Tree-Lords, and the cry of birds and beasts filled the air.
"It seems a very unnatural war to be fought with all the world, not just against the Enemy," the Dwarf muttered, and Elrond remembered the War of the Jewels many thousands of years ago, when dragons and Mights had fought, not just nature.
"It's a war that all have a stake in," he said. "I did not think I would see the day when the Lords of the Sindar and Atari break bread with one of Aulë's folk, even those who had naught to do with the Fall of Doriath."
"Those events happened so long outside my ken that my father's father's father's grandsires scarcely breathed."
"Amdír and Oropher watched their homeland burn," he said.
"Let's ask the Smith to keep us from that fate," the Dwarf grumbled, and turned to one of his advisors to confer in their sacred tongue. The King poured Elrond wine from his own goblet, and Elrond saw the eyes of all watch this sign of favor.
"Drink, my son," the King insisted. "We've precious time before we must put aside all pleasures and get down to the business of war, and I'd rather do it with my wineskins empty." Elrond knew they had all heard the king's use of my son, he knew exactly what game the king was playing. He was not sure it was wise to bring politics into the company of allies, nor was he sure it was foolish.
"I can't best you in drinking, Ereinion," he said. "It would be a fool's task to try. You hold your liquor, mine holds me." The tent roared with laughter and the King inclined his head and drank from his cup. Isildur and Anárion were not too wrapped up in their discussion to notice the currents of the conversation. Maedhros once told him and his brother that politics was an ocean. No matter how choppy the waves appeared, it was important to avoid the pull of offense and treason that always lurked beneath the surface. Elros, more fool than brave, asked if one must steal boats to cross it correctly, and their captor had drawn his lips into a snarl and turned away. It was not an apt metaphor, Elrond reflected. One needed to speak beneath the surface, not be wary of duplicitous meanings. Then again, the Kinslayers had never truly succeeded in diplomacy.
"Elrond is my closest kinsman," the King was saying. "Even in defeat he manages to find victory. Do you know how he founded Imladris? He lost Eregion to the hordes of monsters our Enemy unleashed, but he led a retreat back through the mountains and came to his valley quite suddenly. It had no record on any maps before he first trod the ground. As the wolves and the wargs howled outside, trying to find passage through, he set up roads and passages and governors, and when he finally managed to fend off the enemy that caused the downfall of the Northlands, he asked if he could rule his little refuge, he, who had and has the pick of any kingdoms in my domain."
"The point of this story," Isildur whispered to Anárion, "is to show that our lord uncle is not ambitious. Listen how the king makes his weaknesses his strengths, listen how he primes him for succession. He'd make him King of the Noldor, and it is in our interest to foster that succession as well as we can."
Elrond listened to the King and to his kinsmen and to the dwarves and the elf lords and the servers and the birds and the trees, and he could not breathe. His valley was removed, his chambers isolated. He could read books without reading others, he could disappear for days at a time, if he chose, and see only those he wished to see. He waited for a gap in the conversation, and when one came, he excused himself. The King's tent scattered candlelight on the ground, and in the distance he could see the pale peaks of the Misty Mountains. Did the dwarf know that the Morgoth had raised those glimmering peaks to prevent the elves from finding a homeland in the West? Did he know that beneath his mines and hammers and gold-rivers, the bands of shadow lay thick upon the foundations of the earth?
He turned towards the West, where his city, enfolded in the arms of the foothills, lay sheltered. The Kinslayers always talked about ruling as a marriage between the kingdom and the king.
What of a real marriage? He had not considered a wife in his early years, when the fires of his blood burned hot and his sword thirsted for blood. The pretty, shallow ladies of Lindon, or before that, the scattered tribes of the dispossessed, had little appeal to him. Now he was old, not quite so old as Oropher or Amdír or the King, but certainly among the elder of his race. He had no sons to succeed him, he had no children on which to rest the future of his House. He knew the prophecy given Lúthien - the line of her blood would never be sundered - but one could not have children without a wife, and one could not have a wife if one lived in the field. His city was more respite than home; he knew far more intimately the smoke of campfires and the taste of hard tack. His hands were calloused with warwork, not administration. What woman would want a man absent for more years than he was present, when a stray bolt might fell him or an ill moment of fortune cast him down? What woman could he give a portion of his soul to, he who had seen the Changing of the World and the end of the First Age?
He thought of her, the girl who had turned away from war to the confines of his city, whose hair shone like the silver of his banners and whose eyes were bluer than the sea. He was grey and dark and old, she silver and bright and young, and her heritage matched his in grandeur. They were cousins, of course, he was related to all the nobles elves by blood. He was the great-grandson of her mother's brother. There would be a kind of symmetry if they wed.
"What are you doing?" Glorfindel asked. He too could understand the thoughts he heard.
"Am I not allowed to dream?" he asked. "Must I live for duty, and duty alone?"
"You know what happens to the women of your line," he said. "Why not leave a pretty thing where it is?"
"I have," he said. "I have bitten my tongue for centuries, in accordance with my judgement of what is right. But when the Shadow is purged-"
"I do not have as much hope as you do," Glorfindel said. "The Might of the Enemy is beyond what we have raised, beyond what any army could raise. Unless the Valar send their soldiers, as they did in the Great War, we will be overcome."
"I have seen things beyond what is now," he said.
"It was luck that you found the valley when you did. The defile was so narrow the horses could not walk two abreast, but we slid into a land of peace from a place of war. It is not the way of the world for things to always work out well."
"My life has not been one of pleasure." He almost snapped the words, because he hated the worry that emanated from his General. He was an elf-lord, a Might in his own manner, he had the blood of the Maia in his veins, he had elf-witches in his line, who sung being from nothingness.
"You've mortal blood too," Glorfindel said. "You're less elf than you think."
"Leave me, my lord Glorfindel," he ordered. "I would be alone." His General bowed beneath the weight of his command, and Elrond felt a touch of guilt at his tone. Glorfindel was his truest friend, and he loved him for his clearsight and insight as well as his courage. "Things have changed since I was young," he commented. "Once I fought against dragons, now it's orcs and goblins and wolves and wargs."
"Once I slew and was slain by a monster more dreadful than any dragon," Glorfindel said. "The world is less kind than it once was to Creatures of Mystery."
"The Kinslayers talked about our kin as a fire. A fire may be swallowed up at once, or it might burn itself out little by little until only the ashes remain. The vanishing of those things is a boon, but we are Mysteries ourselves."
"This world is not our world, not truly. The World Beyond must be the place we venture to, and one way or another, we will. Surely you know better than to fear death?"
"Perhaps it improves with practice," he said, and Glorfindel smiled grimly. From inside the King's tent, laughter roared.
"It's cold, my lord," Glorfindel said. "You'll not do yourself a favor if you freeze to death." He stepped obediently from his contemplations, back into the swirling colors of the King's lodging. The warmth of the fire burned his face.