TA 138
~IMLADRIS ~
Elrohir was screaming. The eight-year-old elfling fought his mother's restraining arms in the center of the hall. Her usually so gentle hands clutching his smoke-stained night clothes with the firelight reflected in his streaming eyes. Elrohir's terror would not allow him a moment to catch his breath between sobs and hacking coughs. Elves were shouting and rushing all around them, urging them to follow into the safety of the wide lawn.
Elrohir had appeared in the foyer alone and confused and refused to go further when Elrond and Celebrian had found him, standing there paralyzed with the discovery that Elladan had not followed him downstairs in their rush to escape their burning bedrooms.
Imladris had awoken in the dead of night to the scent of smoke and flames already engulfing the large storage area behind the house and the lower story of the Peredhel family's apartments, just under the rooms where the boys were sleeping.
"Where is your brother?" Celebrian failed to keep the fear out of her voice. She was kneeling on the ground in front of her son, trying to get a coherent answer out of him as he tried to wriggle out of her arms. "Ro, where is Elladan?"
"He was behind me!" Elrohir wailed, reaching over his mother's shoulder to where the stairway up to their rooms was engulfed in black smoke. "He was behind me! He was behind me!" he screamed until his voice became raw, and all meaning was lost to the torrent of his panic.
"Get him outside!" Elrond urged. The familiar look of numb shock and terror on his son's face as Celebrian tried to hold him back from running into the flames was all it took for him to turn around mid-stride. He grabbed the hot brass railing up to the twins' rooms, wincing and covering his eyes with one arm. He coughed uncontrollably as he bent his head below the eye-watering smoke and heat. Drifting motes of burning embers landed on his shoulders and his exposed skin; they had, minutes ago, been his refuge against the outer darkness. The flames rose up like a living thing before him. The curtains, the furniture, and the beams of dark wood across the ceiling all seemed to ripple and distort in the all-consuming heat.
"I will find him!" Glorfindel promised, overtaking his lord as he pushed past him and up the stairs into the twins' suite. His bright hair was braided into a protective silken headwrap, and he took the stairs two at a time, pulling his tunic over his face and wincing as he stumbled blindly into the wall of heat.
"ELLADAN!" Glorfindel's powerful voice fought for dominance over the roar of flames.
Tearfully, Celebrian wrapped strong arms around Elrohir's waist and lifted him, coughing and struggling and screaming for his brother as they made it the last few steps out into the night. His voice sounded shredded and raw, and he was red in the face as he clawed and bit at his mother's restraining arms.
"He was behind me! He was behind me!" was all he could manage to say as Celebrian fell back into the soft grass, moist with the dew of the early morning, watching the life she had made amongst the horrors of Arda being consumed by the flames. The lawn was already populated with most of the members of their household who stood with their swiftly gathered belongings and family members to watch the Last Homely House burn. The fires had yet to reach the Halls of Healing, which were attached to the main houses by an open cloister, and the healers who had been in the middle of a quiet night watch were now running through the crowd tending to those who had been burned or inhaled too much smoke. The lower floors had guest rooms and apartments for the valley's many visitors, sprawling architecture blended the ancient cltures of its lord and lady. Delicate wooden tracery in patterns like mallorn branches was balanced with the elegant handiwork of Noldorin masons. All was aflame beneath the bone-dry heavens.
Erestor's teams of engineers were climbing the cliff face beside the waterfall. The pressurized copper pipes that wound down the cliff face were already green with the spray of the river. The elves who had installed them decades earlier were, even now, fighting to open the great turning valves, which would shut off the pipes and let water spray out across the engulfed rooftops. The roar of the Bruinen fought with the roar of flames.
"Come back," Celebrian prayed, her eyes burning with the heat that poured from the open door, a tumbling pillar of coal dark smoke roiling across the lintel and flames blackening the stucco above the windows. The inner space of the house seemed to ripple and distort with heat. The carefully sculpted railings and corbels cracked and were swiftly consumed in hungry walls of flame. She could feel her husband's rising panic through their marriage bond as he searched the boys' bedroom fruitlessly, fear gripping him as neither he nor Glorfindel saw any sign of his son. A gout of sparks flew up into the clear night to mingle with Varda's stars, as suddenly as if a door had been blown shut by a gust of wind, Elrond's presence in her mind vanished.
Celebrian could not contain the scream that was wrenched from her body as she watched the roof above Elladan's bedroom collapse. She held her son close to her, turning Elrohir's face away from the fire to tuck it into her shoulder. Elrohir had gone limp in her arms, shaking and gasping for air with wide eyes as he clutched at her dressing gown. He was going into shock, fading from her even as she held him close. He would not survive the loss of his twin.
There were hands on her shoulders, blocking her view of the house. Celebrian suddenly felt that she was cast adrift, a boat sliding inexorably from the harbor of safety. One of the healers was trying to speak to her, but Raniel's mouth seemed to move silently. She was trying to calm her down as Celebrian's face distorted into wails of grief, and she rocked Elrohir's body in her arms.
The water hissed as the engineers finally got the valve open, and a great plume of pressurized water sprayed across the flaming rooftops. Celebrian was damp in seconds, and the water adhered her long curls to the bare skin of her arms and her nightgown to her legs and body. How long had it been? Time seemed to dilate horrifically as if it had not been only minutes before that she had been curled contentedly against Elrond's warm, gently snoring body.
"Someone's there!" a voice was yelling. She watched, numb as if it was an act upon a play, as a stumbling figure struggled the last few steps from the door. He was carrying a body over one shoulder like a sack of corn. The smoke was being replaced, bit by bit, with thick white steam that obscured the inside of the house. She recognized Glorfindel's broad-shouldered silhouette a moment later, and, lips parted in numb shock, she watched him pass her husband's unconscious body to two healers before sliding to the ground, choking for another breath.
"Where's Elladan?" She asked, and the roar of fire and water drowned out the smallness of her voice as she clutched her son close to her.
Ataxo looped his arms behind his lord's shoulders, and Raniel took his legs. His head dropped back as they laid him in the damp grass beyond the heat of the fire. His dressing gown was singed in many places; there was blood on his face and a terrible stillness in his body. Vilya pulsed naked and unmasked upon his hand, struggling to maintain the fleeting rhythm of his heart.
"He's not breathing," Ataxo observed, ever tight-lipped and efficient. The old Noldo wasted no time in positioning his Lord's pliant body and beginning brutal chest compressions that sent his long braids dancing while Raniel chanted a healing hymn to Este, one delicate hand upon Elrond's crisped and bloodied hair. The misty fall of water soothed the angry burns on his hands and face.
"Where is Elladan?" Celebrian cried out again in despair, tearing her eyes from her husband's still body. Glorfindel needed only a moment to regain his breath before he stumbled to his feet and made as if he would go back into the house, pushing aside the healer who tried to give him a wet cloth sprinkled with athelas oil. But he had only taken two steps before, with a terrible groan and a mighty splintering of wood and crumbling of plaster, the front façade of the house buckled outward and collapsed. There were screams from those who stood close by and shouts of dismay. A moment later, the upper floors, including what remained of the boys' bedrooms, followed, water-logged charcoal falling inward in a plume of steam and dust. For a moment, the stillness was only broken by Raniel's shaky healing hymn.
"Muk!" Ataxo cursed, slapping his Lord across the face, trying to block out the ruin behind him from his mind as he focused all the power of his long life into his command, "Breathe!" he shouted and to his immense delight and relief he saw a shudder run through Elrond's body. He threw back his head, mouth open with weak, hacking coughs and blistering, bare feet kicking in the damp grass. Ataxo rolled him onto his side, gently supporting him as he choked and gasped through burned lungs, eyes fluttering at the edge of consciousness as his body fought for air. "Breathe, my Lord," he coached in Quenya as if he were speaking to a child, rubbing his back in gentle circles. Ataxo nodded for Raniel to go tend to the lady of the house.
"Where's Elladan?" Celebrian asked numbly as the elleth knelt before her with tears in her eyes, embracing her around her shoulders, "Where is my son?" She did not resist when she felt Elrohir struggle between them in an effort to get to his father. Elrond lay a few feet away under the care of his master surgeon, who was delicately lifting his eyelids and feeling his pulse. But Elrohir only took one step before he yelped in pain and crumpled to the ground with a cry and a sob, wincing and grabbing his thigh.
"Are you hurt, my little lord?" Raniel asked, turning dutifully towards the boy who was struggling to suppress his tears of discomfort.
"It's Dan." He looked wildly from the healer to his mother, his soot-streaked face pinched with pain and relief as his mother caught his arm, "Nan, he fell, he can't move, he's awake!" a murmur of desperate hope went out from the crowd. A dozen elves immediately went in the direction that Elrohir's finger was pointing. He strained against his mother, who was wise enough not to run into the smoldering house on her own.
"Go!" She commanded the elves standing nearby, "Under their window!" She watched as Erestor's engineers ran around to the far side of the house, where the falling water had turned the ruin of wood and stone into smoldering sludge. With the way that the house had collapsed, she could not see whether the space below Elladan's window was bare or buried in rubble. The old oak tree, which stood guard above their balcony, littering it with acorns in the fall, still stood with wilting leaves above the ruined house.
"ELLADAN!" Erestor was shouting as he carefully avoided the still-smoldering debris. "Elladan, can you hear me?" The librarian was enormously satisfied with the effectiveness of his fire suppression system, but he could not express any relief until the last family member had been accounted for.
"I hear something!" one of the searchers lifted a wooden beam from where it had fallen against a low branch of the oak tree. "I found him!" they announced, "He's alive."
"They found him! They found him!" Elrohir sounded breathless as he hopped up and down, trying to get to his brother and weakly fighting his mother's hold on his tunic. There was the sound of an elfling's shriek of agony, and Elrohir stilled, watching as, a moment later, Erestor emerged from behind the house with Elladan in his arms and a broad smile on his face.
"Celebrian." The world seemed to fade; she looked to where Elrond had been lying unconscious a moment before; he had rolled over to look at her, one hand reaching out to touch her shoulder. "Celebrian, wake up, my love." His voice was firm and kind, and the darkness of the night in Imladris from so many Yeni before dissolved into their cozy bedroom in the yellow house in Tirion. The looming shadows of devouring flame faded into soft star shadows and the distant sound of tinkling water, and still, her heart would not stop hammering.
"I'm sorry." She pulled herself upright in a swirl of sheets, breathing deeply of the sweet air.
"Tell me what visions haunt your rest," he sat up, too, holding both his hands in her own and studying her closely. "You cry out for the children." His face was serious beneath a pattern of obscuring shadows.
Celebrian opened her mouth as if to speak. The silence of the city after midnight was profound.
"Will we know?" she finally asked him in the darkness of their bedchamber, "when they pass?" she paused to sniff, and he held her wrist, her pulse racing under his fingers, "it's a cruel fate to miss so short a life."