The stone was still scarred, scratches pale against the grey where gems had been prised from their settings and disappeared into some looter’s pocket long ago. Master Elrond had apologised and Glorfindel had shrugged and said no one could come unchanged from Valinor to Imladris by way of Gondolin’s ruins. Why should a doorstop be any different? Let it bear the wounds of dangerous ages.

All the same, he remembered it pristine, his father etching the golden flowers now touched up with mithril by Elrond’s jewelsmith. And finding, once, those stolen jewels glittering white and red on Alqualondë’s gem-strewn beaches.

Aredhel’s hair had been dark, of course. She had been very fair, though, and the grey of her eyes had been almost blue in the clear, cool light of a mountain morning. Amid the dawn-silvered towers and snow-white streets, the echoes of Aredhel Ar-Feiniel’s laughter had trailed in ribbons of unfurling sound, her feet light on the blossoms shed by lantern-hung trees.

She had given her lightness to her cousin’s blue-eyed daughter. Glorfindel had never heard Galadriel laugh.

But:

“Did you ever meet my father, before?” said Celebrían merrily. “My mother still says she fell in love with his smile.”

He was quiet, their guest, and solitary, and otherworldliness clung to him like a spider’s web of shadows, his past drifting dark behind the brilliance of his blazing eyes. Sometimes he flamed with all the light and youth of the Exile new-come from Valinor he had once been. But Celebrían saw him more often caught in reverie, or from afar heard archaic melodies drawn wistfully from Erestor’s nightingale harp.

She found him watching her, sometimes. What was he thinking?

“Crossing the Helcaraxë with Galadriel,” he said. “And Elrond’s father, as a child. Odd, to see the two of you now...”

He avoided talking about Gondolin, when he could. They asked him about it, sometimes, and sometimes he answered them; but mostly they realised he did so reluctantly. After a while, the questions ceased.

Night after night, he flew back to Gondolin on silver wings. The nightingale harp sang sweetest by starlight, carrying him home to the white towers and the brilliance of the city he had made.

“Sometimes I think the Queen left it to hearten us,” Erestor had said, “though it was Daeron’s gift. All of us, I mean, who stayed in Middle-earth. She was –” a hesitation “– very wise...”

Candlelight swam in the brandy, a glimmer of gold in gold. Glorfindel’s past was refracted through the prism of the glass. He was saying, “You should have seen it,” and seeing it again as he spoke. “The towers – white towers and fountains – and singing under starlight – when the city was done, when we’d built our bright future, when we were safe –”

Memory blazed about him. He sprawled amid nightingale cushions, enrapt. Brandy: it loosened the heart as well as the tongue. Glorfindel liked it better than miruvor.

Erestor’s hands were light on the harpstrings.

“We saw it,” he said, “afterwards.”