5. He is sailing

There is always the highest point in any endeavor after which everything is bound to go down; perhaps, not forevermore, but for a period, certainly.

That was precisely my thought when I regained full awareness. I was still in the cockpit of my vessel, and before I registered anything else of significance, a red error message on the navigation module's screen attracted my attention. Still blinking to drive away the flashes mottling my vision, I looked at the display and snorted, even as my heart jumped unbidden in my chest.

"Figures..."

The computer was panicking as the connection to any external data source was very evidently gone. No GPS or GLONASS (or even Beidou, anyway) signal whatsoever, no INMARSAT downlink, nothing.

"They probably would not mind having a constellation in orbit, though", I muttered out loud with uncharacteristic glee, feeling elation wash over me uncontrollably, like a tidal wave. The lack of modern electronic connection (my smartphone parked on the dashboard also showed a complete lack of any networks or satnav, though that, in isolation, could have been chalked up to more mundane circumstances like being too far from the shore) meant that I had really made the transit. I had to proceed on to Tol Eressëa - and further, if allowed - but I could not refuse myself a moment of affirmation and contemplation.

The melody inside me was now trickling along, resembling something like the gentle murmur of a forest stream melding seamlessly into the kind, gentle laughter of a child - and then back again, while never really changing. I knew that voice. It was my own, when I was a little elfling without a worry in the world. While I knew I would never again be as happy and innocent - no one who had lived a life would, and myself less than anyone - at least the burden of my exile was dissipating.

Eru only knew that I was starting to buckle under it. I would not admit that before - not consciously - but I could do it now.

I poked out to ascertain the surroundings. The wind had died down completely; the sea itself has not changed much, but there was now a peculiar kind of fog surrounding my boat distantly on all sides, while the vessel itself and the water around it were still awash in sunlight - I would estimate this bubble as being a couple cables across, not that it really mattered. I started debating internally whether to start the motor again, but no sooner than I put my hand on the engine key that I felt the yacht shudder, as a gust of air hit the sail, and the wind started picking up again. I snorted, thinking momentarily that the Valar must be amused at watching me dodder back and forth. The promptness with which the atmospheric conditions were changing to accommodate my transit made me certain that they were observing me closely. Maybe even reading my thoughts from afar. Possibly even laughing on their thrones high.

Ah, but even the Valar must have changed. Once they were ready to smite Eärendil - Eärendil, for Eru's sake! - for impinging on the nefarious ban, and then, a couple Ages later, they were not objecting to the halflings and Gimli, a dwarf of all people, coming to settle. They must've reconsidered a few things since Númenor. I could only hope that a (former) Kinslayer, but a Ñoldor nevertheless, would be welcomed with at least half as much heart as one of Durin's folk.

The boat picked up speed under this wind, and I had no choice but to go with it, being completely adrift with regards to geography, what with no landmarks around, no map, no depth charts and no satnav to guide me. I wondered if the others who had made this journey before me were seeing the same thing, although the incongruity of travelling to Aman not in a sacramental swan-headed boat but in a modern yacht built of fiberglass, chock full of advanced (and now patently useless) technology and loaded with hallmarks of my modern earthly life, was not lost on me.

"She sure would look silly in the harbor at Avallónë", I muttered under my breath to break the silence.

Outside, the fog banks were parting before me, and even before I spun around to see it with my own eyes, I was certain that they were similarly coming together behind the stern. At the very least, the bubble of good illumination was maintained, and that made me feel safer, even though inside I was fairly certain that I would not have been in danger of hitting a sandbar or a floating log either way. I closed my eyes for a spell, and lingering before my mental sight now was a glowing golden thread extending into the fog, taut as a guitar string, and I realized that it was leading me like a child would be pulling a toy car - or a toy boat, anyway. In that instant, I understood the reason for the Straight Road's name.

I did not see the Shrouded Isles because of the same unnatural mist surrounding me - I guessed that was why that archipelago was called thus. Yes, you must really be the Captain Obvious today, Macalaurë, I chastised myself, and what curiosity I had about these rocks would best be left for later. The wind was steady and the motion swift; only a few hours had passed before I felt any kind of change, and in the interim I was even able to sit down with a pen and a notepad to write down some of the melodies that had been haunting me. One tune was still unfolding in my mind as a steady beat fitting for a road song, but a flighty guitar solo, punctuated by indescribable, airy ostinati, was soaring over the rhythm, giving it such majestic feel that on Earth... back on Earth... it could have become a metal anthem.

The thought of never - in all likelihood - being able to see Earth again was a novel one, but somehow much less painful already than I would have believed.

Yet eventually, slow down the boat did; with nothing in this whole deed being a work of chance, I realized that I was about to arrive. My heart fluttered again at the thought.

I raced to the prow again, and no sooner than I got there, as if on cue, the veil parted resolutely. Far ahead, I beheld the land that could have been nothing except Tol Eressëa, glinting like an emerald in the light.

Odd as it might have sounded, I've never seen it like that. I was born in Aman so I've never travelled from Middle-Earth by boat, let alone under the eyes of the Sun or Moon. When my father's thrice-damned expedition left the shores of Aman - in looted boats whose proprietors we had, to my eternal shame and pain, just killed - we were hurrying to get away from the hecatomb, still high on blood and adrenaline, so we passed the Lonely Isle in a haze, not paying it any heed at all. Besides, it was shrouded in the darkness that those who were born in Valinor - that is, most everyone in the host - found unnatural and constricting our vision anyway.

It was an absurd thought, but at the sight of Eressëa I wondered how it came to be that my father, whom I held in as much regard as I would a god back then, has never even really seen the light of the Sun or the Moon. I had no concrete inkling of his fate over the ensuing millenia, but if the stance of the divine emissaries at my - and Maitimo's - court martial after our ridiculous attempt at stealing back the Silmarils was any indication, I would not expect him to be ever released from Mandos. My brothers, probably, too, except maybe the juniors, and even that was a stretch.

At Nuremberg, we all would've been hanged, incinerated and our ashes flushed down the Isar. As it was - by Eru's whim in creating us immortal - we were all still around (and there was little that could be done to change that, for good or ill), both victims and perpetrators, so the contempt and animosity, as I realized with a start, could very well have still been there. The realization - not that I never thought of the possibility, but it had only then become a real consideration rather than an abstract notion - was like a chill of arctic wind down my spine, and the sight of the swiftly approaching island became ominous rather than welcome.

Has the passage of centuries and aeons dulled the edge of hate's blade? I realized that not only I had no answer to that question, but I had very little idea of how the elven society (or societies, if the divisions into the three peoples of the Eldar had persisted, or even deepened) might have changed over the ages. On one hand, eleven thousand years (give or take) is a lot of time; nary a thing is known about what the human race was doing back then... but the Elvendom is another matter altogether. Not only we are long-lived - thus less prone to forgetting (and likely forgiving, too) as is inevitable with the humans' generational changes: we are - or at least were - awfully conservative, as well. Have the denizens of Aman really changed in that regard? My gut was telling me that no, they have not; the view of Tol Eressëa in the distance looked to me like a pretty good indication of that. One would have thought that over the millenia, it would have evolved into something akin to Hong Kong, or at least Saint Petersburg, with its obsession about architectural preservation still belaying through-and-through modernity... instead, it still appeared medieval, in Earth's terms. Well, maybe more like Renaissance or (very) early industrial age - it would've taken closer examination to pronounce the final verdict - but not much farther than that. For one thing, I was seeing sails galore, rather than steamboats, let alone hydrofoils, in the harbour.

The more I was eyeing the shoreline, the more I was becoming sure that my homecoming would not be a simple and straightforwardly pleasant affair. Well - that comes with the territory of being an Exiled, a Kinslayer, a Fëanorion... and overall a pretty complicated fellow.

Well, only one way to find out, I thought as I saw not one, but two sleek vessels that could have only been patrol boats veer towards my yacht.

Note: the chapter name is from a song by Jon and Vangelis (from Private Collection album, 1982)