You are two thousand, seven hundred and fifty years old when you lose your mother. You lose her three times. The first is sudden, the second is slow, and the third is a long time coming. 

Bruinen rages when you cross into Rivendell, the rapids foaming in furious white. No singing greets you; a lull overhangs the valley like a thick fog. You make your way into Father’s healing sanctum, your stomach sunk with dread.

You almost miss Elrohir where he stands like a stone outside the doorway. His skin is gaunt and sunken around his cheeks and eyes. He does not notice you, and as you step closer, you realize he is in a trance. You wonder if you should disturb him, but something about the way his right hand clenches tells you this is no healing trance. You pass your hand over his brow and whisper, “Brother.”

Already you are stepping back as his fist swings out wildly. His eyes are senseless, ablaze. 

“Brother,” you say again, and this time your voice reaches him. He sags forward, wrapping his arms around you. His head presses into your shoulder. Like the golden moths of Lothlorien, you think. When dusk fell they would alight on your shoulder, wings tremoring. But your brother is no moth. He is heavy—too heavy—he is giving you too much of his weight. You concentrate on the sensation of your heels against the floor.

“Arwen,” he gasps. “Mother is—”

“Dead?”

For an undying race, your people have many words for death. Some lend death the gentleness of the open sea: gone, left, here-no-more. But the word that falls from your lips carries the harsher sense: taken, slain, marred. 

But Elrohir shakes his head. His gaze shifts to the sanctum door, then back to your face. His eyes are full of pleading. For you to enter, or not to enter? 

“It’s worse. Sister, it’s worse.”

You leave him propped against the wall like a child’s doll, made from twig and grass. Breakable, you think, and then try to banish the thought. 

Inside the sanctum, the air is redolent with clove and willow bark. Father sits at the small table beneath the window, mashing pestle against mortar. The scrape of stone whines eerily through the room. Intent on his task, he does not notice your entrance. You study the signs of sleeplessness on his face, then the army of jars and ointments laid out on the table. At last, when there is no avoiding it, you look to the raised bed in the center of the room. 

Your first reaction is relief. Mother is sleeping, her breath whistling in and out. She is clothed in clean, white linen, though bandages peak out beneath the cloth. Her hair has been carefully brushed. 

You were expecting something more gruesome. More outwardly horrific. 

You are drawing closer to the bed, when Mother screams. It is like the noise made by an animal as it is cut open. Her lips are open, her mouth wide, yet you cannot accept that this sound is coming from her thin body—this terrible, senseless sound, from the mouth that sang you lullabies, that hummed on spring mornings with such sweetness that the birds ceased their own singing to listen.

It cannot be.

You do not see father move, but he is suddenly at her side. He has taken her hand in his, murmuring to her, spreading honey over her lips. You step forward and take her other hand. It shakes in your grip, tugs away. Mother’s eyes are open, but black horror shrouds them. The scream continues, even as she runs out of air. Somehow, that is worse. 

And then, with no warning, it is over. Her eyes roll up, and she slumps back onto the bed. You set down her limp hand, which no longer shakes. But your hand is shaking now, as if something has passed from Mother to you. You watch it shake like it is some separate creature, some frightened, crawling thing. For a short, shameful moment, you wish you had stayed in Lothlorien.

“Arwen.” Your father’s voice is hoarse. He opens his arms and you nestle against his chest, lulled by the steadiness of his breathing, but not comforted by it. 

“Will she get well?” you ask, marveling at the calmness of your question. 

Morning sun spills through the window, warming your back but reaching no further. A chill seems to have thoroughly penetrated you.

Father doesn’t answer. He doesn’t answer, and so you know.

*

Your brothers leave. 

Each time they leave, they come back, except that each time they come back, they seem to have gone further away. They eat without pleasure, soft-crusted tarts gnawed at like hunks of cram. When you ask about their travels, the answer is always the same. We killed orcs.

This has become their sole justification for existence, you think. If the Misty Mountains emptied of orcs, they would move on to Moria. Perhaps they would go somewhere entirely worse. 

They leave you alone with Father and Mother and the Room. The Room swims with herbal sweetness that floods your throat and sets your stomach spinning. Father speaks until he has no voice. Mother screams. He sings lays. Mother screams. He tells old stories. Mother screams. He tries to laugh, as if hoping the freshness of the sound will stir something in Mother, but he cannot manage it. Father is also leaving, even though he never leaves the Room.

You are not much use in any of this. You have never had any great skill with a blade or arrow and your hands are not healer’s hands. You do the only thing that stops them from shaking—you weave. Mostly you weave tapestries of your mother. In these she laughs and sings. She passes through a wood in early spring, that time when tight green leaves loosen and uncurl, and the sunlight gilds her hair. You hang these tapestries in the Room, but Father never seems to notice. 

You would like to go back to Lothlorien. You would like to leave this tomb of a valley and walk freely under the mallorn. But everyone else is leaving; you cannot. So you enter the Room each day. You comb Father’s hair while he combs Mother’s hair. You pass bread into his hand and watch until the bread has been chewed. 

Fall becomes Winter, becomes Spring. One mockingly fine morning, you take your father’s hand and pull him outside. He has lost the strength to resist you. Grief has hollowed him: his steps are weightless over the soft rugs, like the passage of a wight. He gasps when the fresh air touches his face and stares at the fine-veined maples as if he has never before seen beauty. You leave him in the grove, weeping. 

When you enter the Room, Mother is awake. She doesn't scream. She takes the hand you offer her, and in her eyes you see a terrific struggle towards clarity. Lays are sung about Glorfindel defeating his balrog, the way he drove into the fell shadow with a piercing light.

You think that the struggle behind your mother’s eyes is the graver one. 

“I need to leave.” The words are fainter than dead leaves stirred by the mildest breath of wind. “He needs to let me leave.” 

You wonder if you will ever love anyone the way your mother loves your father. Her love is strong enough to shape her broken mind into these words. And you know that every day Father has sat by her side, she has not heard the sweetness in his voice, only the weeping that never passed his lips. 

“I promise, Mother.” You squeeze her hand, hard enough to bruise. “I promise we will let you sail.”

If you have a talent, it is this: you have never flinched from the inevitable.

*

The century after your mother sails drags slowly. You leave Rivendell; your brothers are never home, and your father has thrown himself into his work. But Lorien is no longer a balm. The gold of the mallorns seems to have dulled in your absence. 

“This place has changed,” you complain to your grandmother, who studies you somberly. She has a way of looking that does not stop at the skin. 

“Perhaps it is you who has changed, granddaughter.” She lifts a fallen leaf from the ground, angling it so that the sunlight restores the brown to gold. “Our fea are inextricably interwoven with the fea of this world. It fades as we fade; we fade as it fades. There is no separation.”

“I wish—” The optative mood springs to your lips before the thought has gained substance in your mind. 

Galadriel turns. Perhaps it is only the way the afternoon shadows fall, but her face seems dark and drawn. “What do you wish, my evenstar?”

But you have no answer.

*

You tell no one when you join the party to the Havens, and during the journey you keep your veil drawn over your face. Galadriel must know you’ve gone. In the long dark evenings by the roadside, you fancy you feel her troubled gaze on the back of your mind. I am not leaving, you try to signal back. I am only—

But here you lose your thread. The impulse that draws you is not one for which you have yet found words.

The air turns salty. Your traveling companions turn hushed. And then, for the second time, you are standing on the shores of the sea. Here you combed your mother’s hair, mussed by the brisk breeze. Here you watched your father kneel inside the boat and press upon your mother a final kiss. 

Your companions perceive great poetry in the cry of the gull. They burst into spontaneous verse, their song bubbling forth like a stream set free by Spring. Their levity disturbs you. To your ears, the gull sings only lament. 

The longer you stare at the sea, the deeper your disquiet grows. The water rolls in and out. It is eternal, you think—and then, it is trapped. 

You do not sail. Cirdan does not ask for a reason, but he does ask if there is anything you need.

"A loom," you answer, turning from the shore. The itch is in your fingers, in your soul. 

*

Galadriel’s smile is wide when you return. Under her warmth, you catch the current of relief. Did she really think you so cruel, to leave without a goodbye? In recompense, you bow your head and present your tapestry. The weaving took you many months, and you are proud of what your labor has wrought. 

The sea ripples and shimmers, now blue, now green, now silver-gray, granted freedom by the illusion of the threads. A ship crests the waves, but not an elven ship. This one is headed for the shore, a man at its helm. A light shines on his brow, so bright that his face is obscured. You hadn’t meant to weave him, not him and not the ship. They slipped in while you labored, and once the image entered your mind, the sea did not seem complete without him. 

It is your finest work in centuries. So you are startled when Galadriel takes one look at your tapestry and without warning begins to weep. 

*

Bruinen is docile this evening. The rapids twist and whine like the welcome of a faithful old dog. Your father waits for you where the water turns to greening bank. You have long dreaded this reunion. In your mind, Father hunches with grief; his gaze is like silver long tarnished. But when he opens his arms to you, his smile is free from shadow. 

Baffled, but pleased, you ask, “What happened to you?”

“Estel,” he answers, and his eyes shine with the humor of a private jest. Before you can press him, he continues, “Your timing is impeccable, daughter.”

He leads you to the stables, where your brothers are tending to their horses. Their faces brighten at the sight of you and at once you are assailed by the scents of mud and sweaty horse. You examine them closely in the pinkening light of dusk. Where a flame once raged in their eyes, terrible to behold, you see only kindly light, hearth-fire.

“I missed you,” you say carefully, your hands twisting as if straining for a loom. 

Elrohir ducks his eyes, and Elladan musters a smile weak with guilt. “We missed us too, sister,” he says softly. It is not quite an apology, but from them, it is the closest you will get.

You do not join the main company that night. Instead, you and your brothers spread blankets under the stars, laughing and singing until you feel, almost, like you are a child again.

*

“Tinuviel!” 

You turn at the cry to find a man watching you. Hardly a man, you realize, as he steps out from the trees into the silver sweep of the moonlight. His face is soft with youth, his step fluid but with the lingering clumsiness of a calf. 

“Tinuviel,” he says again, this time in a wondering murmur. 

Luthien. You’ve been told you resemble her more times than you can count. It’s always intended as praise, but you’ve grown to resent the comparison. Luthien won her place in the lays not by her beauty, but by her courage. You have done no deeds worth singing of, and you do not wish for Luthien’s name to be diminished by association with your own.

“That is not my name,” you say. 

He flinches, blinking like a sleeper met with cold air. “Forgive me. I was singing, and I—”

Men are rare in Rivendell; boy-men rarer still. “Do you have a name?” you ask.

“Est—” He fumbles his words. “Aragorn,” he says after a long, troubled pause. “Aragorn.” On his lips, the syllables sound less like a name and more like a question. A surprising feeling of kinship seizes you. You have never known what your name is meant to mean either.

“I am Arwen.”

“Arwen. Arwen.” 

Twice he speaks your name: first an exultation, then an oath. 

*

When you wake the next morning it is noon, the sun is full, and the mood in the valley is dark. You wonder at the change. There was a quarrel, you hear, between your father and his adopted-mortal. He is brooding in his study when you find him, an open vial of ink drying out on the desk.

“Is estel so easily lost?” you ask him with half a smile.

But he flinches and pulls you into an embrace tight with desperation. “Daughter,” he whispers, “I cannot lose you too.”

“Lose me?” you echo. The anger flares in you quite suddenly, a spark set in a field parched by long summers and dry springs. “I am not the one who leaves.”

When he has no answer, you tug your hand away and stand stiffly. Your father, your brothers—they have not forgotten, but for them the wounds are grown over with new skin. Your wounds are bound with woven threads, and the binding was your own.

“I stayed,” he says at last. You think of the shore, the lapping waves. The way he knelt in the boat, motionless, so long that you began to wonder. So long that you began to doubt . . .

Three thousand years you had lived. And yet that was the moment you ceased to be a child.

Your father is still staring at you, his hand held out helplessly. 

And you speak to him the truth you realized on that pale, sea-stricken morning. “You didn’t stay for me.”

*

At first, you think you have entered a dream. 

A man is standing beneath the mallorn. You know him—the broadness of his shoulders, the curve of his neck, the strong chin and the stern brow. He haunts your tapestries. But never before has he had a face, so clearly defined, though half hidden by the dappling shadow. You draw near, hoping the dream will not fade before you catch a glimpse of his eyes. There is a restlessness in you these decades that nothing cures—not journeys, nor bird-song, nor poetry. Only weaving brings you any semblance of relief.

His eyes are closed. He breathes slowly, savoring the pure air. You are a foot apart when his eyes open. They are the clear, horizonless gray of the sea after a storm. Something shifts in them as he looks at you, but he does not speak.

“I know your face,” you say at last.

“We met once before. I—” His eyes crinkle with half-shamed amusement. “I hoped you wouldn’t remember.”

Only then does the memory rise—a silver-eyed boy in the moonlight, gawking and gangly. You stare at him, at the lines worn into his brow and around his lips, the weight in his gaze. It cannot be the same person. 

“That was but minutes ago.”

He winces and holds his words carefully in his mouth before he speaks. “For my race, time runs like a mountain stream giddy in Spring. I have made long journeys.”

“Where did you journey?”

“Rohan first. Then Gondor. I beheld the white city.” Age, it seems, has not lessened his capacity for awe. “I saw the harbors of Umbar. I passed the border of Mordor.” That name is like a cloud cast over the sun. He flinches after he speaks. “Forgive me. I should not utter such words here.”

“Where should you utter them?” you ask. “Or do you think this golden valley does not feel the shadow? I feel it.” As you say the words, you realize the truth of them, heavy upon you. It must show in your face. Surprise parts his lips. 

He tells you of Mordor. Then, once more, of Gondor, of the white citadel that is his home and his heritage. 

“It is beautiful, yes, but that beauty is not what has stayed with me. For many years I dreamed of coming to Gondor. In those dreams it was always a city of stone. Oh, guards proudly lined the great walls, and the streets bustled with folk of noble mien, but they were faceless. It is not so now. There is life in those stone walls. It is a trust so much more sacred than I could ever have understood when your father bestowed upon me ancient heirlooms and an ancient name. I do not know if I have it within myself—” 

You see the fear enter his face, the way his sentence teeters. He has not said this before, you realize. These words, dredged up from deep inside of him, belong to you. He finishes in a whisper. 

“I do not know if I shall prove worthy of it.”

You consider him for a long moment as he battles to compose his face. Then you take his hand and lead him through the woods until you come to Galadriel’s palaces. In a corner lit only by a small side window hangs the tapestry you gifted your grandmother so many years ago. 

“Look well,” you command him.

He obeys. For the next minute you listen to the steady rise and fall of his breath as he examines your work with the focus that your father reserves for surgery and your brothers for the slaughter of orcs.

“Eärendil, the king come from the sea,” he says at last. “It is most beautiful work.”

But you shake your head. “You are mistaken.”

“Surely not. I—”

You smile. “It is perilous to linger in the Golden Wood if you cannot recognize your own face in a mirror.”

Your gazes meet. In his gray eyes you see first incredulity, then fear, and then, like a pond settling from a thrown stone—

“You’re like me,” you say, startled. The protest rises on his lips, but you cut it off. You promise him, “You will not flinch from the inevitable.”

*

The hour has grown late, but still you are walking. You think you could walk until the sun rises. You think that you would not mind if the sun never rose at all. 

“When I first saw you, I was young, with my head trapped in songs. I saw Tinuviel in the moonlight and sang to her. I hoped to one day claim her hand through glorious kingship and bold deeds.” He speaks softly, almost to himself. “But now I have met Arwen.”

“And how do you find her, this shadow of Tinuviel?”

He shakes his head. “No shadow. She is the evenstar, and shines most brightly in the dark.”

“Am I to be your beacon, O Mariner? Shall my light guide you to shore?”

You are jesting, but his gaze holds no answering jest. “The stars are strange in the eastern lands. But I always knew the evenstar shone, though I could not see it.”

“And your meaning?” you say, stepping closer.

His mouth quirks into a smile. “I would have thought the granddaughter of the Golden Lady could recognize a mirror.”

*

You exchange no rings with him. Nor speak you any oaths. He leaves on a day no less bright than any other, though for you the woods grow dark with his departure.

Your grandmother is watching.

“So I am to share her beauty and her doom,” you say to her.

“You share her courage.”

But you shake your head. “None of that. But I will vow this one thing. I will not sail. I will not leave.”

“You share her courage,” Galadriel says again, mournfully, and on her lips it is both blessing and indictment.

*

In your tapestries, you weave a city, a tree, a tomb.

But you are Arwen, and this is your truth: you have never flinched from the inevitable.