On January 2nd, there was a discussion on Nilmandra's lj about the bitterness of mortality, in which Nilmandra put a draft of her scene of Arwen's death.  Reading it actually changed the tone of this chapter considerably in an attempt to present the same events in a different way.  However, the discussion was very interesting and all sorts of points came up which have probably influenced my view of events.  I have not deliberately incorporated anybody's thoughts, but still would like to thank Nilmandra, elliska, kln1671, meckinock, karenator, levade, meldewen04, lindelea, boz4pm, ramblin rosie, dot, dreamflower, perelleth and mumstheword04 for their insights.

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Endings and Beginnings

So little time, passed so swiftly, Arwen mourned, watching Elessar try to maintain his concentration as the Ambassador from Harad pontificated.  The king shifted slightly in his chair and moved the food round his plate.  Aragorn was finding it harder and harder to pretend satisfactorily that nothing was wrong. 

Elboron spoke, distracting the slight dark man and turning his attention away from Estel.   Even Faramir’s son was now showing signs of old age, Arwen sighed, while Faramir, of course, and Éowyn – and practically everyone else who had offered her support and love when she had come to Gondor – had long since passed beyond the confines of Arda.

‘This banquet seems to be lasting for ever,’ Aragorn murmured, leaning closer to her.  ‘How many more courses do we have to endure?’

She smiled at him.  His eyes were unchanged, she thought, even though his hair was now as white as Mithrandir’s had been and his bones ached when he had been riding in the cold and damp.  ‘Not many,’ she consoled him.  ‘I think the cooks have made some special pastry creation to impress us all – and then we can withdraw to permit the young ones to indulge in an evening of dancing.’  She slipped a hand in her sleeve and withdrew a twist of paper.  ‘Perhaps this would make the remainder of the meal less intolerable.’

Aragorn looked at her, his stillness enough to attract the attention of those who knew him.  Further down the table, Legolas lifted his head as if he scented the sudden tension.  ‘How long have you known?’ the king asked ruefully.

‘I do not know,’ his wife corrected him, ‘for you have not seen fit to tell me, my husband, but I am not Elrond’s daughter for nothing – I have seen enough over recent months that I suspect.’

‘I will tell you all.’ Estel palmed the twist and added its contents to his goblet surreptitiously.  ‘I simply wished to spare you the worry.’

‘My brothers have not been able to discover anything in the libraries of Imladris that is any more informative than you have found here, then?’

Aragorn smiled engagingly.  ‘I clearly do not need to tell you anything, my love, because you are always ahead of me in any case.’

‘Does Eldarion know?’ 

‘No, not yet.’  The king took a gulp of the wine.  ‘This is not something of which it is easy to speak.  I have been putting it off in the hope that some solution would turn up that would make it unnecessary.’

A burst of laughter from the group around Gimli turned eyes in his direction.

‘I do not believe,’ Arwen said, the pain in her voice not showing on her face, ‘that any solution that might come on us unawares would be any easier to endure than the truth.’

Aragorn reached out to touch her hand gently.  ‘I am sorry,’ he said.

‘It is not your fault.’  Arwen absorbed the pallor of his skin and the new lines that had appeared around his eyes.  ‘If I had been paying attention, I would have seen much earlier.’  She turned her hand to clasp his.  ‘But I see you always as the bold Dúnadan who stole my heart – and this shell of age and wisdom you have donned seems irrelevant to me.’

Their eyes met and held in one of those breathless moments when nothing mattered but their bond – and then the voice of the Ambassador broke their absorption and Elessar was forced to return his attention to the unwanted visitor.

***

Cúraniel set careful stitches in the frame.

‘Why did you not summon me?’ Legolas demanded.  ‘Why was it left for Gimli to tell me that I should come to the White City?’

Cúraniel continued to sew as he turned impatiently from the window.  Few came to this out-of-the-way room, and, at this time of year, still fewer chose to remain long.  There were advantages, the elleth thought, to her race’s indifference to cold.  Frost patterns curled in sparkling feathers on the glass, yet the fireplace remained empty and the air was deliciously crisp.   She had long since found the distant room a pleasant retreat from noise and the presence of too many people in the crowded citadel.

‘You were not – yourself,’ she replied carefully.  Reference to Legolas’s increasingly draining periods of sea-longing was likely to make the usually amiable prince snap.  ‘I heard that you were out of reach.’  She glanced up.  ‘Gimli was due here soon enough – and I knew that, if anybody would be able to find you, it would be him.’  Legolas was paler than the snow fields at the peak of Mindolluin, she thought, and his eyes were haunted by the memory of all those from whom he had been parted.

‘What could you have done had you been here sooner, lad?’ the dwarf asked.  ‘This is a time for releasing old ties and settling old grudges.  For handing on the torch.  Aragorn does not need us for that.’

She was frozen, Cúraniel realised.  Cold far beyond the capacity of winter weather to chill her.   She had not, at first, seen what had drawn Arwen to forsake her people for the rather self-deprecating king with the clear eyes, but he had become part of her extended family and she did not want to lose him.  But want, as she knew Legolas understood only too well, had nothing to do with what would happen.  Elessar would pass beyond them with the inevitability of Eärendil sailing across the night sky: he would pass and Arwen would accept her doom and Legolas would sail and she – she did not know what she would do.

‘Will you stay with Arwen until the end, lass?’ Gimli asked her softly.  ‘I would not have her left alone to endure the pain of this parting.’

‘I will stay as long as she will let me.  But she will not let me remain until the end – she will send me away,’ the elleth said with confidence.  ‘To Mithlond, with all she has gathered over the years to send to Lady Celebrían and Lord Elrond.’  She smiled sadly.  ‘I know her.  From the first she said that she will not let me suffer her death.  As if the reality of the event could be any worse than the anticipation.’

The dwarf shot a protective glare at his friend.  ‘Pig-headed elves,’ he grumbled. ‘Always sure that they know best.’

Legolas’s slight smile did not reach his eyes.  ‘If you discover differently,’ he observed, ‘I give you leave to come to me – in a millennium or two – to inform me of my error.  I will gladly apologise.’  He sighed.  ‘And do not tell me that I knew these days would come – it does not make them any easier to endure.’

‘Will you sail, lass?’ Gimli’s glare was unexpectedly warming.  It seemed heartening to have him concerned for her welfare – and the dwarf reminded her in some ways of the adar she had not seen in she knew not how long.  Not, she thought fleetingly, that he would have been flattered by the comparison.

‘In time,’ she said.  ‘When a ship is ready.  What else will there be left for me here?’

***

Aragorn thought he had never seen the twins look so sober.  Not even when they had exchanged that petrified stare over his wounded body after that first unexpected encounter with a party of orcs.

‘It had to come,’ he consoled them.  ‘And at least it is in my power to choose the day.’

‘Does Arwen know?’ Elladan asked.

‘She has known for longer than I realised,’ their foster brother admitted wearily.  ‘I should have known better than to try to hide it from her.  She hoped you might…’  He stopped.

‘I am afraid not,’ Elrohir said.  ‘Adar might have…   But there is nothing.’

‘We should have spent more time over the years discussing this end – but we always put it off.   I am not good,’ the king sighed, ‘at talking over matters of faith and hope.’  He leaned back in his chair.  ‘And I did not want to acknowledge, even to myself, that this parting would come.’ 

‘There is still time.’  Elladan rested a gentle hand on Estel’s shoulder.  ‘You have the opportunity to prepare.’

‘How can I leave her?’ Aragorn’s voice was anguished.  ‘How can I let her suffer this severance from her family?  Does she not deserve better?’

‘Are you not her family now, Estel?’  Elrohir met his eyes staunchly.  ‘Are not her children her family?   Even if it were possible for her to sail west, do you think she would want to abandon you all to dwell for ever in her past mourning you with every breath?’

‘I never wanted to hurt her,’ the king whispered.

‘I do not believe that is an undertaking that anyone can keep.’  Elladan’s grip tightened to a gentle shake.  ‘Arwen will find the next months hard enough – do not let her feel that you fear the outcome.’

‘I do not – not really.’  Aragorn put his hand over his brother’s.  ‘I long since came to terms with the Gift – and I think that I will welcome it when the time comes.  What I fear is leaving Arwen to do this by herself.’

‘She will not be on her own.’

Aragorn smiled.  ‘Not physically, perhaps – but this… this journey of the spirit can only be accomplished alone.   She could remain in the middle of the White City and be on her own.’

‘When Naneth sailed,’ Elrohir said, ‘for the longest time, everyone feared for Adar.  He was close to breaking – and we failed him.  We were too absorbed in our own grief and rage to be there for him.  We will not make that mistake again.’

‘She will need to accept the past,’ Aragorn told him, ‘before she can move on.’

‘We will do what we can.’  Elladan managed to keep his voice steady.

‘I know.’

***

Arwen watched from the shadows as they acclaimed her son king, and the voices rang from the city.  There would be no celebrations: not now, when Elessar the Renewer lay in his tomb, the spirit scarcely fled from his body.  That would wait until convention permitted again the wearing of colours.  But what colour was there now for her in a world turned grey?

She could not stay here, where every corner spoke of him. 

She needed to leave: go somewhere where once she had been one and whole and prepare herself for this leap in the dark.

‘Not yet,’ Cúraniel murmured, a solid presence at her shoulder.  ‘First you must mourn – and let your children see that you are not abandoning them in your first wild frenzy of grief for fear of being left behind.’

‘I will wait.’  Even to herself, her voice sounded remote, Arwen noted.  Try as she might, she was no longer entirely present in this rain-drenched city.  ‘After the coronation feasts.  When time begins to move again – for all save me.’  She drew another deliberate breath – one after the other, that was all she needed to do.  ‘I had not realised,’ she said, ‘how it would feel to be torn in two.’  A faint smile crossed her pale face.  ‘I am bleeding and no-one can heal the wound.’

The elleth took her hand and drew her back from the balcony into the privacy of her rooms.  ‘I have seen many who faded when their loved one was torn from them,’ she said, ‘many who could not endure the emptiness where once their fëar had been twined together.  But you are a naneth and a queen as well as Aragorn’s wife: a sister – a granddaughter – a friend.  You cannot simply give in to your desires.’

‘Yet none of it seems to matter.’

Cúraniel looked at the friend she had known since they had been young together.  It would not be long, she thought, before those who would treasure the Evenstar and keep her with them began to acknowledge that this wound was mortal.  Arwen had made her choice and bound up her life in the life of her grey-eyed Dúnadan – and, without him, her grasp on the world had loosened to the point that she could no longer understand the process of living.

‘How have you endured so many empty years trapped amidst this cold stone?’ Arwen asked distantly.  ‘This is no place for elves – here where the air is stale and the melody of Arda is dimmed to a distant murmur.  I had Aragorn’s love to warm me and my children to watch grow – but what made you stay?’

‘I have not dwelt here constantly,’ Cúraniel pointed out.  ‘I have spent many seasons among the forests of Ithilien – but friendship drew me back to the Stone City: friendship and an old promise.’

‘You will sail now.’  Arwen’s gaze sharpened.  ‘Like Legolas, you will seek a ship that will take you into the west, away from the wounds that come from opening your heart to the song of mortal lives.  There is no need for you to remain longer.’

‘When I am ready,’ Cúraniel agreed easily, ‘I will sail.’

The silence in the room weighed down on them: heavy with stone, muffled with tapestries, choked with velvet, cumbersome with memory.

‘I cannot stay here,’ Arwen said suddenly.  ‘I will suffocate.’

‘There is no need to stay, nor any hurry to leave,’ Cúraniel shrugged.  ‘Give yourself enough time to comfort those who will miss you.  You will all be ready soon enough.’

***

His naneth had become as vulnerable as an icicle in the spring thaw, Eldarion realised.  She was wearing away – her pale skin was translucent, and her eyes had lost all colour. A wave of pain tensed his stomach and stopped his breath.  He had tried to convince himself that the worst of her grief would pass – that she would be able to resume a life among them – but he was wrong.

She sat in the arbour beneath the first roses, where so often he had seen her.  He had run to her there for comfort when he had been a child, sat beside her as a young man to tell her of his triumphs and disasters, sought her wisdom when he had believed himself unworthy of the woman he wished to wed, brought her his children to hug – this had always been a place that was distinctly hers in this Stone City. But now, he realised, she was scarcely visible between the nodding blooms.

‘You must let her go,’ his great grandfather murmured.  It was not a command: Eldarion could have resisted a command.  Celeborn’s words were mild, no more than an observation of the scene before them.

‘She has left us anyway.’

His sisters had told him the same: told him that he was refusing to see what was in front of him: insisted that, if he was convinced she should remain among them, he should spend long days sitting with her and trying to stir her interest in the living world – but he had not wished to see what they saw. 

He could not deny it now.

He swallowed.  ‘Where will she go?’

‘She wishes to return to the Golden Wood – where she and your adar plighted their troth.’

‘I will arrange to leave the city and come with you.’  Eldarion set his jaw.  She was his naneth and he was not going to hand her over to her brothers and grandfather as if she was no longer important to him – a piece of the past to be discarded.

The silver-haired elf lord considered him impassively and decided that he would not be the one to tell Gondor’s king that he doubted Arwen would allow it.  He doubted she would consent to their presence either, but he and Glorfindel and the twins had the advantage of never having been subject to her authority – and if they chose to ignore her demands, they would.  And they could point out to her that Gondor would never let her leave alone and unguarded – better them, he would tell her, than a heavy-footed squad of the King’s Company requiring her orders.

Eldarion broke his gaze away from Arwen and swallowed.  ‘What will you do,’ he asked, ‘when Naneth passes beyond the world?’

Celeborn bowed his head and closed his eyes.  ‘I cannot tell,’ he said.  ‘I do not feel my time has come to sail – but I know not how your uncles will endure this blow.  It may be that it will be more than they can endure.’

‘It seems,’ Eldarion said, his voice desolate, ‘that all those who remained are abandoning us at once to live without hope in a world from which all wonder is missing.  It will be a bitter thing to be left to rule here in a world that has become so much less than it was.’

His great grandfather placed a comforting hand on his shoulder.  ‘There is always wonder,’ he said, ‘if you know where to look.’

***

She relaxed as the peace of the Wood soaked into her and the rustle of the leaves greeted her.  It was not as it had been – time had entered them both, she thought, and brought about a gentle waning.  Now all she needed was to be alone, to listen to the world around her and let it go.  And for that she had to persuade her fierce protectors to depart.  She sighed: that would be harder, no doubt, than convincing Eldarion and his sisters of her determination to do as their father had and persuade them that there was no need for them to witness her long decline.  At least, as the heirs of Númenor, they should understand the reason behind her choice.  It was more, she suspected, than her brothers would.  She must induce them to leave – and soon, while her certainty could withstand their distress.

‘I am sorry that we will be parted, but it is a passing thing.’  Her eyes glowed silver, luminous with something they could not see.  ‘We will meet again,’ she said with supreme confidence.  ‘And this division will be as nothing.   Tell Naneth that I love her, and Adar that I am sorry for the hurt I have given him.’

‘Little sister,’ Elladan protested, his voice choked.

‘I do not want you to be here,’ she insisted.  ‘Daeradar!   This is hard enough without watching you suffer.’

‘We cannot leave you to die alone, child,’ he said huskily.

‘I am not alone.’  She smiled brilliantly.  ‘I am never alone.  I had not understood before,’ she moved her thin hands to touch her fingers to her chest, ‘but all that I have been, all that I am, it is with me still.’

Her brothers held her between them and she stroked their dark heads gently.  ‘I had thought to fear it, here at the end,’ she said, ‘but it is nothing to dread.  It is merely that I, this time, am the one to leave in search of the unknown.’

‘Safe going, little sister,’ whispered Elrohir.

‘Look after Elladan,’ she responded with a smile.  ‘Elladan, keep Elrohir safe.  You are both my favourite brothers.’  She turned to Celeborn and invited him to join their embrace.  ‘Do not leave it too long before you join Daernaneth, Daeradar – or it will take you centuries to placate her.  Take my brothers home.’

Arwen looked at Glorfindel.

He shook his head even as he came to close the circle round her.  ‘Be satisfied with the success you have had so far,’ he said. ‘I gave Elrond my word that I would guard you – and guard you I will.

Celeborn straightened up.  ‘No, you will not,’ he said firmly.  ‘If my granddaughter needs a hermitage, a hermitage she will have.’

They withdrew reluctantly and Arwen knew that a simple word would have been enough to recall them, but she did not speak it.   They would be happy again, she sighed.  In time.  And time was something they had in plenty.  They would not forget Estel and her, or cease to miss them – but life went on.  It would simply be one in which she had no part.

She tested the thought.  It was not, she was sure, that she would not be, just that she would no longer be tied to Arda.  It was a strange concept, but peculiarly liberating.

Beyond her sight, at the marches of the Golden Wood, Glorfindel stopped.  ‘I am not leaving,’ he said mildly.

Elladan’s eyes were hard.  ‘Did you think we were?’ he asked.

‘I have known you since your first hours, Elrondion.  I have never yet known you to do willingly what would be best for you.’

‘Hardly fair, my friend,’ Lothlórien’s last lord told him. 

‘It would be better for you, too, not to be here, Celeborn,’

‘But I am no more likely to leave than you are.’

‘There is no point arguing,’ Elrohir said mildly.  ‘We will remain – silent and unseen – and watch over her, whether she will or no.’

***

She sang with the rapture of a nightingale on a starlit night.

Elrohir marvelled at the lightness of her spirit.  It was the last thing he had expected.  He and his twin had been convinced that this time waiting for their sister’s departure would be as dark as Moria’s endless deep as she resolved to take a path never meant for the Firstborn – but it was not so. 

At first she had been quiet – and so still that they had often thought to disregard her wish for solitude and approach her with the comfort of loving arms.  But, as the shortest days passed, she had uncurled and looked to the light as if it called her.

She drank from the cupped leaves of the willing trees and ate but little – a few berries, a nut or two, an occasional mushroom – and her body grew increasingly frail.  Pale she had been when they reached the Wood, but now she took on the look of fine glass, bending light, rather than reflecting it.   Yet she filled the Wood, that had been alone and silent since the last elves left it: filled it and made it ring.

For she was undeniably happy.  It confused those who watched her: who had expected these final months to be a time of intolerable pain: who had armoured themselves to endure this guard rather than abandon her to desolation.

As the days began to lengthen, she brightened and a feeling of anticipation stirred in the ancient trees.

Glorfindel looked knowing.  The Gift of Men was as alien to him as to the rest of them, but there was something in the music that echoed through the Wood that spoke to him not of an end, but of a beginning: a return to purity and innocence in a new form.  It was nothing he could explain – not to those who had not experienced it – but he began to see in Arwen’s final surrender an unexpected delight.

‘It makes me wonder,’ Celeborn said, as the returning birds greeted a glowing dawn, ‘about Melian in those last days before she abandoned us.’

‘I doubt she had any choice in the matter.’  Glorfindel presented him with a mug of hot tea.  ‘She was granted the grace to stay with Elu – but these concessions come with a demand for payment.’

Celeborn took a sip of the hot liquid.  ‘Yet she was Maiar,’ he said.  ‘How could we expect frailty from her – one who could raise and preserve the Girdle with a thought?’

‘Her presence was a loan,’ Glorfindel mused, ‘one that had to be given back.’  He watched Celeborn as he leant companionably against a tree, like two veterans of a wearing conflict.  ‘What of Lúthien?  Did she follow Beren without any hesitation?’

‘She had already died once before.  She had more idea what to expect.’

Glorfindel sighed.  ‘I know not what Arwen is waiting for now,’ he said.  ‘She is ready to depart.’ 

‘Perhaps,’ her daeradar said, ‘she is waiting for us to be prepared to wish her joy on her journey.’

‘Do you think she knows we are here?’ Glorfindel lifted an eyebrow.

‘I am sure of it.’

***

‘She was happy.’

Facing Lady Celebrían was the hardest part, Cúraniel decided.  The Lady Galadriel had known – she always did – and she had accepted Arwen’s fate long before the ship had left Mithlond.  Lord Elrond’s pain was doubtless great, yet he was far too controlled to let it show, but Lady Celebrían…

Cúraniel had still been in the White City when the four shattered elves had returned to tell Arwen’s children of her end.  She had promised to go to the Havens, she knew, and carry Arwen’s messages to her parents, but she had never agreed to go immediately.  And elves, after all, had a reputation for evasiveness.  She had waited while Legolas had built his ship and set sail with the dwarf in search of peace in the Blessed Realm.  She had waited as winter passed and spring stirred in this southern kingdom.  She had waited as those who had seemed broken by sorrow had picked up their lives and relearned the pleasure of laughter.  And they had come.

The Evenstar’s brothers were as taut as bowstrings.  Elrohir looked thoughtful, as if he had seen something unexpected, but Elladan had worked himself up into a cold rage at a fate that had taken his little sister from him and he paced incessantly, only physical exhaustion enough to give him short periods of rest.  Celeborn hid it better, spending hours with his great-grandchildren and telling them of Arwen’s willing surrender – but his eyes, Cúraniel thought, were more deeply shadowed than she had seen them since it became apparent that the Lady would no longer be able to endure in Arda.  Glorfindel, on the other hand, shone – as if he had seen a wonder beyond the ability of most men and elves to understand.

He had sought out Cúraniel, knowing that she would soon sail, and tried to explain to her the joy that had surrounded Arwen’s end.

‘Let Elrond know,’ he insisted, ‘that she understood before the end.  She embraced the Gift as she stepped willingly into the unknown.  She knew that she would be reunited with Estel and that this was only the first step in a greater adventure.’

‘Is that a good thing?’ Cúraniel asked.

He smiled brilliantly.  ‘It is a hard thing for an elf to understand,’ he admitted.  ‘But we felt her as she became free of the confines of the world – I can only look at it in terms of what I have experienced and say that in her end there was nothing to lament.’

She looked at him doubtfully.  ‘Can you not tell him yourself?’ she asked.

‘In time I will.’  He looked rueful.  ‘Elrond’s sons will not choose to take ship for some time – not as long as Elladan can find something on which to work out his resentment.  But tell Celebrían that I will bring them – if I have to bind them and carry them west in a sack.’

Cúraniel drew a deep breath.  It was not easy, talking to Celebrían of her daughter’s life in the White City and telling her of the grandchildren she would never see, but it was a story of love and deep contentment.  And, had she been Arwen’s naneth, she would have wanted to know every detail of her life – and of her final willing acceptance of a fate beyond the understanding of elves.

***

Elrohir was scarce visible in the deep green shadow of the ancient yew.  He caressed the deeply scored bark of a tree that had provided bows for the elves of the Greenwood over two ages.

His brother watched him in silence.

‘The song of Arda has become a dirge,’ Elrohir said at last.  ‘And, with every voice that is lost, we come closer to the end.’

‘What would you have us do?’  Elladan knew his brother’s answer.  For more than three centuries now his twin had been waiting for Elladan’s restless quest for peace of mind to be concluded and for him to concede finally to their Daeradar and Glorfindel that he was ready to sail.  But he had not been ready to abandon this land of his birth to accept the passing of long ages in a place that meant nothing to him.  Thranduil had understood him better – he, too, would fight as long as he may.

‘Sooner or later,’ his twin said softly, ‘we must make the choice – to accept that we are elves, bound to Arda until the end, and sail to join Naneth and Adar in the West – or choose mortality and let the Gift take us beyond the circles of the world.’  His lean figure disappeared against the gnarled trunk.  ‘We cannot hesitate for ever between the two.’

It was the closest, Elladan realised, that his brother had come to giving him an ultimatum.

‘I envy Adar the need that made him take ship,’ Elrohir’s murmur continued in a dreamy monotone.  ‘I envy Arwen the love than made her surrender herself.   We thought it cruel – we thought ourselves so much more fortunate to be able to ignore both Gifts and remain.’  He pushed himself away from the tree and came into the light.  ‘But we are cowards, my brother.  Not to choose – is not some kind of trick we are playing on the Valar.  It is not some way of having both.  We have neither.’  His sudden burst of energy dwindled.  ‘We have neither,’ he breathed.

Elladan contemplated him in some alarm.  When had his brother become so lost?  He had been selfish, pushing his twin into doing as he wished, confident that Elrohir would give him the time he needed to make up his mind.  ‘What does Glorfindel say?’ he asked.

‘That it is time.’  Elrohir shrugged.  ‘He has been saying that since Arwen…’  He stopped.  Just for a moment, as his sister’s fëa had flown the confines of the world, it had seemed to him a beautiful thing to accept the Gift and trust his spirit to seek freedom beyond the mundane.  Glorfindel had been shaken – he had realised that he had come close to losing all Elrond’s children in that moment.  But Elrohir knew, as his twin appeared to doubt, that he was an elf and that inner certainty had drawn him back to sob out his grief in the dying remnants of the Golden Wood.

‘I am coming round to his way of thinking,’ Elladan said carefully.

A spurt of weary laughter shook his brother’s shoulders.  ‘How much longer do you think it will take you to stop equivocating?  For I do not think you have the time to dither much longer.’

Elladan smiled wryly.  ‘I, too, am an elf, it would seem.  I might not relish the thought of sailing – but I have at least come to admit that I will not take Arwen’s route.’

‘That is something, I suppose.’

‘I am sorry in a way,’ his brother added.  ‘I have rarely turned down an opportunity to test the unknown.’

‘Or been prepared to let our little sister lead the way!’

Elladan rested his hand apologetically on his brother’s shoulder.  ‘I did not mean to take so long,’ he said.  ‘It can be hard to let go – I doubt I would have shown Arwen’s courage had her fate been mine.  I would still be haunting the fallen groves of mellyrn trying to make up my mind.’

‘We will meet again,’ Elrohir said with confidence.  ‘When we have finished our task and everything is remade.’

Elladan sighed.  ‘Then I shall hold that hope in my heart over the passage of the years to come.’  A slow smile began to spread across his face.  ‘We shall see Naneth,’ he said. ‘And Adar.’

‘You have become reconciled to the thought of taking ship?’ Elrohir said incredulously.  ‘Just like that?  I cannot credit it!’

‘Well,’ Elladan shrugged.  ‘I have always been impulsive.’  He grinned.  ‘And we cannot keep Daernaneth waiting indefinitely – Daeradar will be in enough trouble as it is.’  He looked thoughtfully at the grove of ancient trees.  ‘Arwen will be no further from us under the trees of the Blessed Realm than she is here.’

‘True enough.’  Elrohir drew his brother towards their horses.  ‘So you are agreed?  Is it time for us to seek our own adventure beyond these lands – where we will wait in hope of meeting Estel and Arwen again in that time outside time?’

Elladan gazed up at the patch of sky between the spreading leaves and drew a deep breath.  ‘We go, my brother,’ he said.  ‘Arwen told us to go home – and we will.’