AUTHOR: shoneaugen
EMAIL: cparkerho@hotmail.com
DISTRIBUTION: Ask and recieve.
FEEDBACK: Pretty please?
DISCLAIMER: Galadriel and Celeborn belong to Tolkien. I just bring them out to play.
SUMMARY: Celeborn reflects, after Galadriel's departure.
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Arda seems emptier without her by my side.
Or perhaps it was I who lingered at her side and now founder, lost, a mallorn leaf stripped from its golden branch and cast away into the rushing grey of the Celebrant. Naught in all this land can assauge the pain with which I watched my Lady board her ship to the Undying Lands; with which I stood, trifling beside the roaring sea and the dwindling, illusory vision of the vessel that bore away my wife, leaving me with only my failure. My loss.
Perhaps I should not bereave so, my mind tells me - Galadriel is, after all, sure to come upon more joy on the western shores than in the fading lands of Men, and I would grudge her no little pleasure that once she rejoiced in here, with me. And it was not as if she had simply departed that one day; she had drifted, deliberately as she had done all, with her own leave-taking in mind at the end. I know not if she did it out of her love for me, or the waning thereof. Sometimes, though, the fact that she had sunk - or risen, perhaps - out of my reach so slowly, so inexorably, wreaks the most grief on my heart. That my love for her had once been enough to keep her with me through the ages, and so soon became inadequate.
I cannot forget my own sorrow now, wandering among the senescent lands of once-bountiful Imladris among what remains of my kin. Lorien was as in a stasis, unchanged over the years that passed, and mayhap in that lies some of my sorrow. I was the lord of Lorien, the soul of the mellyrn, and I did not, could not change as the Ring of Water wrought its own changes on Galadriel. So often would she tell me: "To bear a Ring of Power is to be alone."
I would say in kind, "Let another bear it, and be alone no longer. Be with me."
But she would not, and it wearied her soul and her mind to no purpose, no end. And in the end, still she bore her Ring, and cut me adrift in its stead.
In her place, I put this land - my home - where I will stay, and defend it until all has come to pass and the world come to an end. And until then, I will linger with my hope, mingled with the sorrow that is ever clearer without her presence, and wait for a time when I will meet her again, if that time should come.