Title: Twilight, or Of Elves and Men
Rating: K+
Characters: Arwen, Elrond, Celeborn, and a shameless Lothíriel cameo
Summary: There will be no more twilight. Elrond sails from Middle-Earth and Arwen remains as a Queen caught between Elves and Men
"I will cleave to you, Dúnadan, and turn from the Twilight. Yet there lies the land of my people and the long home of my kin."
- The Tale of Arwen and Aragorn
She was sewing.
Nice, simple stitches that could have been perfect if she had tried, but sometimes Arwen did not want to be perfect.
Elves were accustomed to perfection; all her life she had striven to be perfect.
Her ladies were seated about her and they watched her with careful, polite eyes; she knew they reported to their fathers and brothers and sisters and fiancés if she so much as frowned or sighed, if she had a headache or dropped a glass of wine, if she decided to retreat into her bedroom for just a moment's peace, and then began the gossip.
The Elf Queen.
Beautiful she might be, but she was a foreigner and for all that her nights with her husband were blessed, she was not with child.
Estel did not see, though he too was a foreigner, for he was so very loved by all who saw him; he had won their hearts, taken them for his own. In their faces she saw no question; the servants bowed, the children ran to him in the streets to bring him flowers, the people reached to brush their fingers along his cloak as if he was a god. It was, Arwen knew, an exhausting role. They expected nothing less than perfection, nothing less than a legend, and though Estel might be just that, brave and beautiful and strong and good, he was a man. He cried, he bled, he loved.
Still, he was beloved.
But Arwen? She might be beautiful, she might be gentle, she might be clever and kind and she might love the world that spread beneath her feet, but she was strange and alien and unfathomable, high and unreachable.
They could not love her.
The conversation flowed past her.
"His Majesty is…"
"The king of Rohan is coming, they say, but when-,"
"My father says-,"
She struggled to make perfect reply and instead sipped her wine.
It was summer; the air was hot and heavy and she tasted the coming storm, saw the thickening clouds to the south. She let her eyes drift to the open window where far below a white shirt fluttered in the wind of a clothesline. It transfixed her.
And then, suddenly, it was as though she had been sundered, as though she had been stabbed through the heart; gasping, she felt her wineglass slip through her fingers.
Crash.
Splintered glass and dark crimson wine on the white marble floors.
"Your Majesty?" Like frightened doves they fluttered about her and the lady Malheril called hysterically for a page.
It was the Princess of Dol Amroth who took her arm: "Your Majesty, please, sit down," and she realized that she must have risen, but she wandered about in a strange, dazed world and she could not breathe, could not see, and then hands helped her to sit and then she tasted cool, clean water.
"Adar," she rasped. "Oh, Adar."
.
He was gone.
.
It was not really summer, she remembered.
It was autumn.
"I've sent a messenger to His Majesty," the Princess told her, "but it will be some weeks- this storm is too heavy."
She nodded. She did not want to lie abed, but she had no choice; the leech had come to examine her, an old woman called Ioreth, her eyes beady like a crow's, and she had tilted her head to one side and said that mayhap Her Majesty was with child.
No, Arwen had said. No.
My father has gone.
She was so frighteningly alone.
.
Horses' hooves.
Perhaps it was Estel, but no, there was that storm in the South, and Estel might have come for her, but the king could not, and she was so sad, so splintered, so lonely, like a little child- she was just a child, so young, she should have gone to him, should have sailed with him, Mother, and-
Your Majesty, someone was saying, Your Majesty, and then, "Arwen-," a voice with the strength of centuries, an iron will forged by loss and pain and strife, a voice with the singing silence of the forests and the beauty of the sun through the leaves on a summer day, a voice that made her a child once more.
"Oh," she said, helplessly, "Daeradar!"
And he was there and they walked outside beneath the fading trees, together and she clung to him and wept, tears soaking his tunic, as the afternoon dipped into twilight.
"I am too young," she whispered, "oh, what I fool I was!"
"It is a terrible price," her grandfather said, and his touch was gentle on her cheek, "one that we have long foreseen for you. But there is life, too-,"
And she laid a hand on her flat stomach. "Not yet."
"Before she left," he said, "she saw it. She looked into her mirror and she saw that you would bring life to this world."
What else her grandmother had seen, Celeborn did not say, but she did not question his words and drew close to her that fragment of comfort.
"I will stay," he said to her, and she saw the sudden sharp pain in his face and thought of her grandmother.
But for now, she could not think through her own grief, sharp and blinding and splintering.
Shards of glass and crimson wine.
She drew in a deep, shuddering breath. "Yes," she said. "With me."
.
And she remembered.
.
"A new age," her father had said to her, the day they had bade each other farewell. "The age of Men. The time of the Elves has gone. But you, Daughter, you are somewhere in between-,"
The choice of Eärendil and Elwing, of Elrond and Elros, of Lúthien- it lay bare before her.
"And so we go," he said, "but you will remain, and you will bring them life, and dignity, and beauty as they have never know before."
Tears sparkled like diamonds beneath his eyes.
.
He was called Eldarion, Son of the Eldar, but he would be a king of men, and his days would be bright and blessed, the nights coming swiftly and surely.
There would be no twilight.
A/N: Meh. I dunno what to think. Please review!
-claire
3 September 2011