One of the nurses, whose name Arwen had not yet learned, was measuring Aragorn's pulse with two fingers. She marked something on a wax tablet, then went to check under the bandages around his head, which she also noted thoughtfully with the stylus. When the woman, a matronly veteran of the healing halls, went to check on the responsiveness of his pupils, Arwen had to force down a wave of irrational possessiveness. The nurse laid a kindly hand on the king's chest. How dare she touch his flesh so casually? The rational part of Arwen's mind knew that she was only doing her job, that they had to maintain careful records of his vital signs in case anything changed. The rational part of her knew that throwing the woman out would wake the baby if not her husband. The shortbread in its leaf wrapping crumbled in her clenched fist. She had cried so many tears that her eyelids felt like used washing cloths. All she had left was anger. Was this the will of the Valar?

"Has he shown any signs of awareness?" the healer asked, and her motherly tone made Arwen's train of thought seem petty and foolish.

"No," Arwen answered, "he seems to sleep ever more deeply." The nurse looked at her for a moment in sympathy before writing something on the tablet and hanging it back on the peg by the foot of the bed.

"Be sure to eat, my lady," she glanced pointedly at the broken pastry on the upper swell of her belly.

Arwen took a reluctant bite with a weak smile; the nurse squeezed her shoulder as she passed, and the tender familiarity of it brought a fresh wave of tears to her eyes. No one in this city of mortal men would dare to touch her other than her husband and her children. She was like a porcelain Numenorian urn to be admired from a distance. She placed her hand over the woman's where it rested on her shoulder, but when she turned to look up at her, she was gone, the doors of the sick room swinging shut behind her.

Faramir's shortbread tasted like sawdust in Arwen's mouth and mingled with the scent of antiseptic and healing herbs. She knew that eating was important for the child inside of her, and for a moment, she felt a surge of shameful resentment to the unborn infant, for whom she would stay alive even after her spirit had faded. Elven children would not survive the passing of a parent, but perhaps those of mixed descent would be more resilient. She would lose her children forever, as was the way with mortals, as she had chosen was right.

"I can't do this," Arwen confessed to the quiet room, "I can't do this alone." The trembling in her husband's hands had stopped. She didn't know if this was a good or a bad thing. He had sunken into a deep, healing sleep; his eyes did not move in their bruised sockets, and his breath was slow.

Frustrated and scared by his stillness, Arwen crushed the leaf wrapper in her hand – she stood clumsily. Cursing under her breath, she brought a hand to steady her lower back. She went to the window and opened it, two guards stood on the balcony. She looked across the Western part of Minas Anor; the piling mountains were to her left, and the slate roofs of the city cascaded down to the fields below. The wind, hot with Midsummer, swept in to play in her hair. She stood there, brooding, for a long time until the tears finally came, a string of crystal pearls across her cheek. The life that she had forsaken paradise for, the man whom she had waited for for centuries, was slipping through her fingers, and she was alone.

Celiriel made a happy baby noise, and it pulled Arwen from her dark thoughts. Walking to the bassinet, she saw that the infant was still asleep but seemed to be dreaming vividly. Celiriel laughed and kicked, eyes squeezed shut, producing a long, speech-like babble that dissolved into open-mouthed giggles.

Arwen smiled fondly at her daughter. Celiriel cooed and reached for something over her head. She let out a shrieking peal of delighted laughter and grabbed at the air with tiny fists. Arwen did not touch her, not wanting to interrupt the dream. She watched the child for a long moment, it was like someone was playing with her. The wind stilled, and a strange feeling of familiar presence crept upon her.

Arwen looked over her shoulder, but the room was empty of all but the ghosts of memory. Only the grim-faced guard watched them with quiet empathy.

There was a gentle knock at the door.

"Enter!" Arwen looked at the guard. Who opened it to allow the same sable-tunicked official who had tried to get her attention the night before.

"My lady," he bowed deeply, his eyes lingering on the king's pale face.

"Yes, Beril?" she spoke softly, to not wake the baby who had settled into uninterrupted sleep.

"I apologize, but the envoy from Eriador is still waiting. I'm not sure what to tell them."

"Where are they now?" she asked with a sigh. How did life have the audacity to move forward after all that had befallen them?

"They were put up for the night at the Smoldering Star," Arwen cringed. Letting officials and diplomats stay in a common inn was not ideal. Usually, these sorts of things were Damrod's jurisdiction, it was his passion to treat royal guests to all that the White City had to offer. Her chest clenched. "There is a halfling party among them, Sir Took and a girl. She looks to be only a child. She bears a letter directing her to seek you out directly."

Arwen's eyes became round as she remembered the letter that had arrived that winter from the Shire, informing them that Samwise Gardener's own daughter would be turning sixteen in the spring, and the eager response, written in her own hand, inviting the child to come and stay in the palace as one of her handmaidens. In all the chaos, her arrival had completely slipped her mind.

"Elanor?" she gasped. The sound of an explosion and crashing masonry brought her head whipping around towards the window, "what was that?"

"Another attack?" Beril looked to the window, cowering behind his clipboard.

"Has Holleg returned with Eldarion?" she snapped, turning to the guard who was rushing to pull her away from the open window. The guards who had been on the balcony with crossbows aimed at every suspicious bird came inside with pale faces, bolting the warm summer day outside behind a flimsy pane of glass. The sound woke Celiriel, and she wailed in fear. Arwen dodged the guard and went to scoop up her daughter. She held the child close to her body and stepped backward until she sat heavily on Aragorn's bed. If doom was to find them, it would find them together.

.

The explosion echoed through the palace, down to the holding cells behind the throne room, where two inept graverobbers, a grumpy dwarf, the Blue Wizard Allatar of the East, and the Peredhil twins had been wrongfully detained by a skin-changing terrorist whose hatred for the Numenorian race burned behind a veil of political bravado and was motivated by a deep jealousy from before the rising of the sun or moon.

Allatar had been in the middle of explaining how Pallando had been infatuated with the Nightengale of Lorien herself and had considered it a personal slight when Melian had fled to Endor before the first age, still worse, she had spurned his love for that of a lowly Quendi.

Gimli barked in laughter, which he quickly swallowed when the ground shook.

Elladan grabbed his brother's shoulder when the mortar in the ceiling above them hissed to the ground, and the whole building echoed with a BOOM. The pin, which Elrohir was valiantly attempting to fit into the lock mechanism, fell to the ground and rolled beyond his reach.

"Muk!" Elrohir swore, reaching fruitlessly for the silver wire, "what was that?" he interrupted the old man's story, his heart hammering as he imagined the whole tower coming down on top of them. It would only be a moment of pain before the end. The end, the end, the end. He found Elladan's hand and clutched onto it as he seemed to feel the breath stolen from his lungs for a moment. He felt his brother fall against the door beside him, clutching his temple as the wave of psychic energy washed over them.

Allatar looked up helplessly, falling to his knees with his fairies swirling around his head in a flashing rainbow frenzy. There was a moment where he gazed upwards through the ceiling. His eyes reflected a purple light that they could not see.

"What is it, father?" the dwarf asked. Allatar looked at Gimli, and his blue eyes were full of tears.

"He was here." He looked around, everyone had felt the subtle change in vibration in the air, "and now he is gone. He took my brother to meet his doom."

"He's gone?" Elladan asked, meeting his eye. He clutched at his brother's arm with a bit more fear than he would have admitted.

"Someone's coming." Elrohir interrupted him, pushing his face as far between the bars as he could and looking down the curving hall. He heard feet coming around the bend of the corridor. "Eowyn!" he yelled, rattling the bars.

The Lady of Ithillien stopped herself at a skid on the marble floor.

"Lord Elrohir!" she exclaimed, looking over his shoulder at the others in the room, "Lord Elladan! What happened?" she gazed at the Peredhil twins in awe and utter confusion before scrambling for the keys at her belt.

"Where did you get those?" they asked in unison. Both stood and watched as she fumbled for a key that would fit the oddly shaped lock.

"What Trick is this?" Gimli growled and looked at her suspiciously.

"Your Friend Tulk got a solid blow on our intruder in the courtyard. I grabbed them," she explained to the dwarf, pushing her hair back as she tried the third key on the ring. "These keys belong to Faramir," she shrugged as she finally found one that worked, "I figured he would be in the holding cells." She looked around at them in disappointment.

The fairy lights, sensing that their master was liberated, immediately returned to their urgent burning red color.

"Take me to your king!" Allatar stepped forward. He looked at Elrohir and Gimli, "You," he ordered, "follow the lights. They will lead you to where my brother has left his bomb."

.

They were still half a turn up the spiraling stairs that dropped down to the inlaid floor of the archives. The massive rotunda was bordered with pillars as large as ancient trees. The vast, circular space occupied the bottom floor of the White Tower. It was divided by ornate shelving into sections in such a way that you might not see the center of the circle if you were standing at the edge of the room. Some of them had been upended, and books lay haphazardly around the floor. The space was illuminated by arching windows set high on the walls. No flame was permitted to burn in this sanctuary. These were the texts that were considered too rare and special for the public, originals and ancient manuscripts of illuminated Tengwar bound in calfskin with mithril leafing on their pages. Every pillar had been fitted with a device the size of a roast ham made of what looked like pale, waxy clay. There was a mechanism fixed to each one of them, as clever and delicate as a stopwatch. Each one was clicking as they counted down to some unknown time.

They found the librarian, a kindly scholar from Dol Amroth, lying dead in a pile of scattered books with his throat slashed. His clear, blue eyes gazed up into the rotunda unseeing, and blood painted the pages of the books that he had fallen upon.

Faramir stopped when he recognized his old friend. "Go!" he ordered the other two.

"Is that Narbeth?" Commander Holleg asked, making a sound between a sob and a laugh. He clutched his arm to his stomach by the elbow and leaned heavily against the archive wall. He looked as if he was making a concerted effort not to pass out or throw up from the pain.

"Get him to the infirmary," Faramir ordered the prince, who nodded, looking at the old scholar with rage in his young eyes, "I'll deal with this." His eyes made a circle of the many-pillared room, and he passed one hand across his hair. "Go!" Reluctantly, Eldarion pulled his eyes from the body, his hand closed around the space where his magical stone had been a moment before. Narberth would remain dead, and there was nothing he could do.

"Lord Faramir, is that you?" a scared voice came from under one of the fallen shelves.

"Findegil?" The prince called out to his friend.

"Eldarion!" The apprentice emerged from the shadows cautiously, setting a centuries-old manuscript carefully aside from where it was blocking the view of his hiding place. The prince embraced him as he stood.

"He killed master Narbeth!" Findegil was a plump boy with more fondness for history books than training. He was a year younger than Eldarion and a favorite of the Steward. He used both hands to stuff a pair of round, dwarvish spectacles onto his face as he stood and looked around at the explosives ringing the archive, "I tried to take them apart," he looked guiltily at Faramir, "but I couldn't figure out how it worked, then I heard fighting so I hid."

"As you should have. Both of you go!" Faramir steered the boys towards the doors.

"Where is the skin changer?" Findegil asked, following obediently.

"He's gone," Eldarion answered with a tone of certainty.

"How do you know?" Findegil asked, "He could be anyone. He could be me!"

"He was taken." Eldarion knelt where Holleg had slid to lie against the doorframe. He had his arm pinned to his side and was breathing quickly with his eyes squeezed shut.

"Commander?" Eldarion asked gently. Holleg looked up at him with tears in his eyes. "Can I help you stand?"

Holleg only nodded. Eldarion put out a hand to support him, but the Commander was determined to stand on his own and did not want to let his injured limb hang. "I can walk." He ground through gritted teeth.

The three of them raced through the palace, Findegil struggling to keep up with his friend's long legs. "What do you mean, taken?" he said when he caught up.

"I don't know."

"You aren't making sense, my lord."

"Does anything make sense Fin!" Eldarion spun on him, and his eyes seemed to shine a soft purple-grey. Findegil put up his hands in a gesture of acquiescence. "I saw." Eldarion softened. He looked around the empty hallway, abstract banners in patterns of silver and black hung between the windows. "there was, like a hole torn in the sky. I saw…" he looked around, but the world seemed to be like a thin shell woven in intricate perfection to the music of starlight and the breath of time. Findegil put one hand on his friend's elbow.

"Who took him, Eldarion?" Findegil asked. Eldarion was struggling to catch a full breath as his mind reeled. "Who did you see?"

"I saw my grandfather." He admitted, as if he was just understanding it for the first time himself.

"You saw lord Elrond?" Findegil's mouth made a circle as he gasped in amazement.

"No." Eldarion grabbed his wrist, "Fin, I saw Arathorn."