~*~

Dressed in simple clothes, Elrond departed Mithlond without observation, knowing not if his path might ever bring him back there. The High King he had not met, nor Cirdan or any other Lord of the young realms in Middle-earth. At Eonwe's promised return he would be absent, and likewise omitted from any reward granted the Faithful thereafter. Yet Elrond was faithful to more than the Valar.

At the Grey Havens he crossed the Lhun by ferryboat, and bearing west followed the gulf to the sea, with the Ered Luin ever shrinking in the distance. Through Harlindon he trekked, finding that fertile land uninhabited if full of promise, and he marveled to know that this was Ossiriand of old, where in his youth he had dwelt in fear and hardship under the Shadow, an orphan among exiles. None of that evil now remained; the land was at peace, striving only to heal.

Soon the coastline veered east, and from the southern foot of the Ered Luin, woodlands and wide plains and rolling hills streaked by silver streams stretched far as the eye could see. Looking out upon this land, Elrond was awestruck by its beauty and newness. Everywhere there was lushness and life; nowhere were razed forests or mass graves or sinking marshes, as Beleriand had been reduced to during the Great Battle.

At once he was smitten by a sensation he did not know to name love. "Verily it will be Ages ere I leave this land," he said, certain as a memory, and as unchangeable.

Yet his path was to be one of sand, thus ever he marched southeast, the sea within sight. Few speaking people were met along that way, none of them the one he sought. Days became weeks, then months – soon he ceased to keep tally. At a time now and again he would sit dispirited from long journeying, and wonder at his purpose. Then either by seeing Earendil's star in the West Elrond would be uplifted, remembering his father's faith that had brought salvation to all; or else he would think to hear singing from afar, and be reminded of his promise and the certainty in which it had been made.

'I will return,' he had said as a lad, ere riding off to war. 'Though the years passed be many and all roads since grown dark to me, I will return.'

Gravely Maglor had replied, 'Let him not vow to walk in the dark, who has not seen the nightfall.'

'Then I vow to see the nightfall, and to find you there.'

But Maglor Feanorion was never to be found, though it would be centuries until Elrond accepted that, and millennia before he admitted it. No amount of determination or endurance could change another's fate, or one's own; a lesson learned at a high price, the first of many in doom's design.

Upon a sandy bluff that faced the sea, in some uncharted place past a land bordering another called Harad, Elrond stood unmoving as night fell. None were present to see that he gazed downwards, at shallow footprints leading nowhere, which he had followed for... he knew not how long. To no avail he tried to count the days since this had happened last. Be it two decades or two lifespans since Maedhros' trail had ended amidst breaking Beleriand, Elrond did not weep for lost time. Faced with another set of faded footprints in another Age, standing nowhere despite coming so far, Elrond wept for lost purpose, misplaced since the first league.

"So be it!" he cried aloud. "I bid farewell to an echo, an endless path of false hope; if there is naught else, my promise stands unbroken." His voice came back to him, sincere as it had left, the hush of the sea beneath every word. He would not be soothed. "So be it."

In the West one Silmaril shone above, its light reflected upon the watery horizon below. Now northwest Elrond found his own path through unmapped lands, the sea ever beyond sight, and never more unloved.

~*~

He remembered constant walking, dragging numb feet like stones below the ankles, knees wobbling as though the joins were made of the water his canteen was empty of, burning thighs like the lava and fire he fled from. But he shivered with fever, nausea from more than lack of food and drink. Arda was breaking; violently the ground shook, unpredictable, unnerving. For days he had not slept, too frightened, so tired.

Every time the smoke cleared enough to see, another mountain was missing from that jagged line of rock and heaven which surrounded him some days like sentries on watch, and tumbled down on others like felled clouds from a falling sky. Fumes from saltwater fighting molten earth were poisonous, the wind bruising and incessant, memories of that time hazy behind a shroud of illness and fatigue.

After too many wrong turns and dead ends he was fatally delayed, saw with his sharp eyes the safelands beyond from a high and breaking cliff on the sinking ground beneath. Being too weary to weep he went a little mad, knowing long striving despite fading hope was for naught. He would have been killed by falling stone or boiling magma if not for the flooding sea that had none of his love and never would. Fey laughter filled his heart as the massive wave came crashing down, but continued in his ears even as he drowned.

Forgotten be the judgment and mercy dealt therein that place twixt death and depth, while a soothing voice of one spouse spoke to another words without meaning. The wrath of Osse curtailed by the bidding of Uinen in a matter of song, awash in a tide of unconsciousness and doom's decree. Remembered be waking upon a bed of niphredil as a stranger in a strange land.

Elrond sat upright, finding himself amid a coppice of reeds, and thought he had only dreamt. Along the beach he walked as one revived after long rest, two voices echoing behind him in a foreign tongue. In the seaward distance remained the high hill of Himring, now an island and sole remainder of the sunken realms of Beleriand.

~*~