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The girl is lovely but spiteful. She is not the friend she pretends to be.
In the diaphanous greenery, she shimmers like a ghost, covered in a fine mist of rainfall. Between the trunks of the trees, the child follows her, her dress catching on the fine claws of brambles as the girl leads her deeper and deeper into the wood. Bracken tickles her ankles, and the child reaches down to adjust her slipper so it doesn’t fall from her foot. She doesn’t notice the slow reduction in birdsong until it is completely gone. The girl turns around and beckons her onwards. The uneasy hush makes the child hesitate, and she bites her lip. She is not allowed so far into the forest. Her throat is dry, and she can hear her own heart beating in her ears.
The girl is impatient, and she makes a noise with her mouth like the snapping of a beast’s jaw. The child plucks at the fine lawn of her skirts, twisting the fabric around her finger. She prefers the wolf-cub, trotting along at her side, pink tongue lolling out of the side of its mouth, the peculiar way it feels when she tries to touch it. Like water, although its fur is not wet.
The girl does not speak. She is terrifyingly silent, but too beautiful to ignore. Her skin is the colour of whey, her hair very dark except when the light penetrates the canopy of branches, and it shines deep red in the glow. The child tries not to look directly into her eyes, but she is aware of their power, their indescribable depth. Always, she thinks she knows the girl, feels the familiarity in the marrow of her sternum. A little pressure on her chest, a sly insistence.
When the child falls, as she inevitably does, when the journey becomes more difficult, the girl laughs. And when she becomes too tired to go on the girl disappears, and the child must find her way home alone, a bunch of wood anemones clutched in her hand.
So it goes, season after season.
///
She touches his face whilst he sleeps. He slept so little before; like all of their kind, he had no need for an excess of somnolence. To be incarnate once more engenders untold strain on even the most noble spirit, and so Galadriel lets her husband rest. Sometimes, in these quiet moments when she is tracing the arc of his cheekbone, or the line of his brow, she thinks of violence, and she steels herself not to withdraw her hand, to keep her fingers gentle and soothing when she really wants to scratch.
You left me, she would tell him, her nails scoring lines down his face.
Celeborn stirs, but he does not know her mind.
Catching her wrist, he tugs her hand down and kisses her pale open palm. He takes her other hand, entwining their fingers, and Galadriel meets his eyes, the same bottomless blue she remembers, a darker ring around the edge like where the ocean drops from a sandbank. He came back to her unharmed, not a mark upon him, as smoothly perfect as he ever was. She never saw his body, but imagines he was reduced to nothing in the fires of the abyss, the Balrog bellowing its victory over him.
‘I am sorry,’ he says, kissing each of her fingertips.
Galadriel shakes her head, dismissing him. She is aware of the thundering of her thoughts against the barricade she has erected to curtail her resentment, and lets a gentle smile play on her lips instead.
Celeborn kisses her, and it is transportive. The light in her room seems to grow, warming the tapestries on the wall and the bed beneath them, the open vista of Rivendell beyond the window glowing honey gold. If it is a false image, she does not care. Celeborn tumbles her onto her back, pulling the sheet over them both so for a moment it billows like a sail upon the sea. He nudges between her legs and she lets her thighs fall apart. To welcome him again in this way fills her with something that crystallises even as it multiplies, making hard the parts of her she had let grow soft and unused. Galadriel tilts her hips up toward his and she closes her eyes as he drives inside her, filling her with his bright light.
He dips his head, and his hair brushes the scar over her heart. Galadriel flinches, and he kisses the side of her neck, soothing her there as he rocks against her. She presses her heels into the small of his back, clutches the hard muscles above his shoulder blades, and remembers the first time. A meadow before war had touched them, where she was as unmarked as he appears to be now. He was gentle then, too.
‘Melmenya,’ he whispers, coaxing her forwards, into a promising pool of light that is blinding. ‘Come with me.’
A prickling across her skin, an itch on the back of her neck, a tweak of the skin there as if from a hand, and then the pulsing, the sickening throbbing over her heart, into the locus of that black wound. It looks like any other scar, but it feels as if it is glowing red, burning through her skin, opening into a necrotic flower, flesh peeling back to reveal her traitorous heart. Galadriel’s throat rolls. She kisses Celeborn’s jaw, and he takes this as permission to come inside her.
///
He would dearly love to face her on the battlefield. Is tired of this insipid dance they are conducting, feels certain they are keeping her from him. They do not trust her still, he thinks with satisfaction.
He leaves Barud-dur, his black stallion thundering across the burnt land, despoiled with the desiccated remains of trees and Orcs who have not met with his mercy. When he arrives at the latest front line, he cannot stand the simpering of the Orc General, cannot even be bothered to strike fear into the pathetic creature’s belly. He is interested in one thing only. Who is in the company pushing forwards? Not the Dwarves, he cares not for Dwarves. Durin himself could stride onto the battlefield, and he would not turn a hair. Who is in the Elven company?
She is there. They have seen her atop a white stallion, bow and arrow sheathed to her back, a terrible looking sword at her side. She does not lead the charges, though. It is the herald, the so-called Lord of Rivendell, and Sauron huffs in irritation. Unless they are waiting for him, unless she is waiting for him.
‘The herald… and another,’ the General says, keen dark eyes flicking back to his comrades.
‘Who?’
‘An elf.’
He snorts. ‘Yes, very good. Who is it?’
‘They call him Celeborn.’ The General adjusts his girdle, holding onto the belt containing his mace, perhaps with the idea of defending himself from the Dark Lord’s anger.
That is not possible. He dismisses the orc with a grunt.
It isn’t possible, but it is true.
///
She is not how he remembers.
The ethereal beauty who he danced with in a glade, sunlight falling through the leaves around them like rain. Pliant and warm in his arms. Laying her in the long grass, her hands pulling him down between her legs, the easy claim he made on her and the way she gave so freely.
She is still beautiful, razing his body like an unrelenting sun, the break when you shatter the surface of a still pool. Heart-stoppingly beautiful. His body responds the way it always did, but when his féa reached for hers, he met first resistance, and then an outright denial. She did not push him away, but she might as well have done, and although he came inside her, he felt no answering reply, no easy acceptance, no reciprocation.
Celeborn is not a proud man. Decimation by a Balrog will strip even the most conceited being of pretension. He is stronger than he’s ever been, imbued by something that wasn’t accessible to him when he was a mere Sindarian prince. She is more powerful, too, he can sense that much, she allowed him to see that. She has spoken little about what has happened in all the years they have been apart. He knows the state of Middle Earth, has watched from afar, but cannot discern what occurred in her heart during that time.
He looks at the scar over her heart and wonders at what lies beneath the deep stitches of repaired skin. The prickle of his ego disturbs him, the knowledge that she has lain with another man whilst he has been away. He tried to deny himself the realisation, but he knew, a bolt of information he would rather not possess, driving into his stomach. He has dismissed Elrond and the handsome Silvan elf, Arondir; it is neither of them, but somebody has touched her where he can no longer reach.
Elrond, too, is changed. Older, of course. Circumspect. He is cautious around Celeborn, speaks to him little unless they are discussing plans of assault. There is a reticence about him, and Celeborn is sure Galadriel is the cause. Elrond will not allow her to do anything but man the rear guard, and Celeborn wonders at this. He had never known her as a warrior, but he can see that is what she has become, the potential for it always there in the ready slash of her tongue, the single-minded intention of her resolve. And yet, Elrond denies her, and she does not quarrel with him about it. She swallows her frustration.
The night they hear that Sauron has joined the orcs, a streak of lightning hits the muddy ground several feet away from their encampment, and Celeborn refuses to see it as a sign. It is raining torrentially, and the ground has reduced to a sludgy morass. A wind is building, whipping through the trees and slapping tent flaps to and fro. Galadriel is cleaning her sword in their tent, her eyes narrowed, her hair falling from the crown of braids around her head. There is mud on her cheeks, and her lip is bleeding. Celeborn licks his thumb and wipes the blood away. She does not look up.
‘Melmenya. We will not launch any further offensive tonight. Come, sit with me.’
She finishes cleaning the sword, then polishes it until it shines, a mirrored blade reflecting the glint in her eyes. She resheathes it and comes to sit beside him on the cot. Her armour is already spotless, lying on the bench by the entrance to the tent.
‘I thought you were with Elrond,’ she says.
‘I was,’ Celeborn replies, kissing her softly, tasting salt, ‘but now I am here. With you.’ He reaches up and pushes the shoulder of her shift down, kissing her collarbone.
She holds his bicep as he kisses up her neck to the underside of her jaw. With his arm around her waist, he lifts her onto his lap and buries his face against her chest, tugging at the strings so he can lick the side of her breast and then her nipple. Galadriel’s fingers tangle in his hair, her nails scratching his scalp gently. She wants to come back to him; he feels sure of that, but something is preventing her. The wind howls, the sound like an echo issuing from a cavern, and Celeborn closes his eyes against it as she kisses him, her tongue inside his mouth like a whip.
Deliverance, the twilight of that last day, a smile playing on her lips, her gentle teasing. The armour that did not fit, ill-made.
He knew nothing of war.
He knew the green light of mornings in the forest, the cool refuge of moss and lichen, the velvet touch of her skin. He knew the way she tasted, the images of all they intended for their future. A bloodless horizon, the music of children’s laughter, and nothing to fear. She hid things well, even then. Her life had not been easy, but there was no evidence of that the first time he saw her in his uncle’s court. A collective intake of breath ricocheted around the hall. It was true what they said. She was lit from within by the light of the Two Trees. She was beautiful enough to drive a man to pursue something that could only encapsulate a thread of her glory. Celeborn thought her finer than any Silmaril.
He still does.
He casts a line into her mind, a silver spool to follow, but she does not catch it; instead, she roughly pulls at the waistband of his breeches and sinks her teeth delicately into his bottom lip. Celeborn complies, shifting onto one side and then the other to pull down his breeches without removing her from his lap. She removes her undergarments, too, and his eyes roll as he makes contact with the heat at her core, his finger sliding inside her.
He asks something of her, he casts it into her mind, lets it ring in her blood like a song, but she does not reply. She takes greedily, holding onto his wrist, her fingers digging into the pressure point below his thumb. Her breath is hot against his neck, a low groan comes from her parted lips, but he sees nothing of what is inside her mind.
She plunges over the edge, and he coaxes her through it, kissing her throat, the curve of her neck, her shoulder. Her breathing slows, and Celeborn strokes her hair, unwinding a braid and curling it around his wrist like a bracelet, silver and gold. Isn’t that what they are together? The ideal alchemy, entwined together, as the wind pelts the canvas walls, trembles along the guide ropes, a shiver over the ground that cannot reach them. It cannot reach him at least, but there is something disturbing the surface of Galadriel’s mind, a shimmering peak he is not privy to. No sooner has he thought to confront her than she is on her knees over him, pushing him back onto the cot. He aches with anticipation. Aches down to the very oldest wounds, into the dark marrow.
Light explodes behind Celeborn’s eyes as she sinks down onto him, and the muscles of his stomach contract as he fights for control. She is casting a mist, a shimmering disturbance on his vision, halting his ability to perceive anything but her over him, her hair falling over her shoulder and cascading onto his chest. He murmurs her name, the name he gave her, each perfect syllable a star.
///
All night, she lets him please her until the muscles of her thighs ache, until euphoria runs out of her, until the tent smells so strongly of sex they can only hope nobody comes to summon either of them. It helps. But it is not a cure. There is no cure for what ails you, a treacherous voice reminds Galadriel.
It is a long night, but not the longest she has known. There were nights when dawn never came. This morning it does, weak and diluted as it is, a brief haze of light illuminating the deep puddles that have formed beneath the rugs on the floor, saturating the fibres, darkening the threads. Celeborn is asleep on his front, the sheet around his bare waist, the cleft at the base of his spine still slick with perspiration. She runs her hand over his powerful back, feels the muscles respond with a minute spasm to her touch. He wants her back so very badly.
He will continue to call for her across the abyss.
Some mornings her chest aches. Each breath is an effort, as if she has spent a night breathing in malodorous smoke, a thick acidic fog coating her lungs and stifling each inhalation. She imagines it black as tar, sticky, adhering to the viscera inside her chest, limiting the life running through her body so she can barely stay conscious. The scar burns at these times, but it also pulses, with a beat that is not her own heart, nor her conscience. A beat that is something other, a persistent tattoo that repeats itself in her head until it begins to feel like music, or the howl of an animal.
Her husband shifts beneath her hand, and she jerks her fingers away from his skin, afraid suddenly of what she may have left there on his smooth, muscular back. The fingerprints of her true desires.
It moves through her heart, like the beat of a wing. The softest blade. She has not been able to admit, even to herself, that it was both agony and ecstasy to have that foul spike, the crowning glory of his wretched headpiece, driven into her chest, penetrating the soft flesh as if she were more animal than anything else. The look in his dark eyes, his pupils massive and bottomless, of such victory, of such pleasure, and then the faintest flicker of fear.
He knew not what he did.
Did he fear he would kill her? Or was he afraid he had unleashed something between them that he had not intended? Standing on the cliff edge and sinking to her knees as he withdrew the spike from her chest with a sickening hot sound, Galadriel felt relief flutter at the very edge of her mind, a kind of fulfilment that she had come so close to reaching when he wore the false mantle of Halbrand. How cruelly he had toyed with her as they fought above the ruins of Ost-in-Edhil, showing him the fair face that had so tempted her.
She had wanted Halbrand, wanted him beneath her to crack open.
You want him still.
He does not exist. He never did.
He could, but for you.
She had placed the sword in his hand, and then she had trembled with anticipation when his true face had threatened to run her through.
It is annihilation she craves, whether his or her own, Galadriel does not know. She wants completeness. An ouroboros, but not the one her husband offers her. She wants the join to happen in the gaping maw of her wound reopened, threaded with black veins, and him inside it. The power in the silty darkness, salt pouring from her mouth, and the waves crashing again and again over her head.
She does not want the promise of something old made new, a magnolia bloom coaxed into life opening to the sky, her hands filled with the future Celeborn envisions. It is easy for him to do so, he who has been cleansed in the light of Aman and then sent back to her. She can see his mind, the smoothness of it, the hollows and dents knocked out into a green valley. She envies it, the erasure of pain; she would not have wished to see him suffer, or roam the Hall of Mandos in perpetuity, dragging his broken body.
You were promised relief, and you refused it. You dove into the dark waves because it is what you crave. The light would only illuminate all that you have lost, the empty caverns in your soul, and your desire to fill them with a legacy to eclipse your pain.
///
Sometimes, he sees a child.
She is on the edge of the battlefield, and her form solidifies the longer he looks. In her hand, she holds a dagger forged in Valinor, an alloy of the finest gold spun with silver. When he looks into her face, she does not cower but stares insolently back at him, and he is reminded of Luthien and her foul hound. His lip curls.
She has the amber-green eyes of a wolf, a flash of red in the silver light of the moon as it shifts into the twilight sky. Fear coaxes a flame into his chest at this apparition. But why should he be afraid of a mere child? Her hair is black as pitch, wound into elven braids around her head, revealing the tips of her pointed ears. An elf, then. She is so beautiful it makes his teeth ache, finer even than Luthien.
She remains unseen by anyone else, those lupine eyes fixed only on him, until he wants to bark at her to desist, to leave. Of course, she cannot, because she is not there.
Who are you?
Wait, and see, she replies. Her voice is a symphony, the finest collection of notes he has heard since the first music flooded his senses. When she disappears, he can feel a hand clasping his inside his gauntlet, and he shakes it away, waits for the peculiar burn in his chest to subside.
He wonders if Galadriel has seen her. If she has suspected what he is beginning to.
When he removes his armour after seeing the girl, when he unclasps his pauldrons, unhooks the gorget from around his neck, he finds he is bleeding. It is not the viscous dark substance that he usually emits from wounds, but the true scarlet of any other being, and it occurs all over his body in seeping incisions. It leaks from every place the crown pierced, from each stab wound inflicted by those he counted as his subjects.
The darkness closes in again, a reduction in his field of vision until it is barely a pinprick, as around him they plunder his body. Why relive what is passed? He sees a flash of the Moriondor’s pocked face, the brief transition into something else thanks to her, because she brought the best in everyone, did she not? The worst in herself.
He had waited, hadn’t he? He can be patient; he can bide his time. He had had the Uruk beneath his foot, his spear positioned at his throat, and he had allowed her to think she had stayed his hand.
He can wait for the child, too, for her to reveal herself.
Your destruction. Your damnation. Your punishment.
The bleeding does not last, and it has vanished without a trace when he replaces his armour.
Perhaps the child is a distraction. As dawn shivers across the battlefield, lighting what is left of the trampled vegetation with a grainy glow, Sauron sees him: Celeborn, the silver prince, the scorch marks of the Balrog long fled from his handsome form. He feels the veil around the elf and detects Galadriel’s handiwork in its fabric. Foolish of her to think she could protect her husband.
She loves this inconsequential elf, and Sauron chafes irritably at the realisation as he watches Celeborn mount his grey stallion. He can discern Galadriel all over him, on the smooth skin beneath his armour, inside the pink of his mouth. She is everywhere, and the rage Sauron feels at this pricks at something ancient in his core, and something newer below where his heart beats.
She preferred Halbrand.
The rough-hewn texture of his skin, the bumps and scars, the hair that ran down below the waistband of his breeches. She liked him best as she found him, aboard that raft in rags, and by the time he had donned her elven finery, she was turning away from him, suspicion poisoning her mind. He enjoyed her in every guise, took full advantage of the baser feelings available when clothed in the facade of a man. The shape of her body beneath the wet shift, the flare of her hips in fine gowns, and the muscles of her thighs in armour. Yes, he had wanted to taste her.
You still do.
Her stance weakened when he evoked Halbrand, looked up at her through those long lashes, and she hesitated. She had wanted him, too. He had smelt it on her, felt it in the air when they faced each other across the map in Queen Miriel’s war room, when her lips twitched as he teased her through the bars of his jail cell, when they clasped arms on the deck as they sailed for Middle Earth. Whilst he feigned sleep in his hammock amongst snoring Numenoreans, he thought of how many ways he would take her. Against the wall of her cabin, on the floor, the ship rolling beneath them, or in a bunk, her hair falling in a wave onto his chest.
A fallacy to pretend that he is a being beyond such pleasures. Melkor had made sure of that. Piercing her breast with Melkor’s crown is the closest he has come to completion in a millenia.
///
Galadriel takes her place at the head of the rearguard. Tension sings through her, a sharp appetite hollowing her stomach. When they begin the charge, she immediately abandons her post, veering away into the treeline. Her company hesitates and then surges forward as planned, relying on Arondir to lead them true. She knew this would be the case, that the Silvan elf allows for her caprice. It is rare for her to feel trusted.
Weak sunlight filters through the clouds, but beneath the canopy of trees, it is dank and grey. The ache in her chest tells her she is not the only one barrelling through the trees, branches whipping across her face, body braced for the horse to stumble over an errant root. The horse sidesteps a bog, and Galadriel whispers into the beast’s ear, soothing the sweat standing out on its powerful neck, calming its rampaging heart. They break out into a clearing, and the horse rears onto its hind legs.
Sitting on a log at the other side of the pine needle-strewn ground is a child, her braided head bent as she cleans the blade of a dagger, wiping the cloth from crossguard to tip.
‘You there!’ Galadriel dismounts, throwing the reins back over the horse’s neck. ‘What are you doing here?’
Her stomach turns liquid as the child looks up and fixes her with wide, rapacious eyes. She is so beautiful that Galadriel gasps, holding the breath inside her mouth and tasting metal as if she has licked the blade the girl is polishing. She has the pointed ears of an elf, and yet that is not possible; there are no elven children here.
‘Answer me,’ she demands, taking a step towards the girl.
The girl looks back down and rubs a shine into the ornate pommel of her dagger. It must be a trick, something of his doing, some peculiar prank. Galadriel watches the child unblinking, waiting for her limbs to lengthen and her face to darken as she reconfigures into a more recognisable form. Halbrand, Annatar, the Dark Lord in his black chainmail and plate. She dare not step too close, knows that this is a trap of some sort. A theory shimmers on the edges of Galadriel’s mind, but she does not allow it to germinate, dismisses it before it can grow wild and unreasoning.
A thunder of hooves resounds to her right, and Galadriel draws her sword, turning to face what she knows is coming.
He leaves his horse at the edge of the glade, and her body wilts as he strides towards her, in Halbrand’s armour, with Halbrand’s face, a sneer tweaking the corner of his mouth, a flash of humour in his green eyes. He looks at the girl, too, who shows no surprise or alarm at his entrance into the glade. The air grows wet and thick around them, and Galadriel can no longer see a path back through the wood.
It is lovely. Dark and deep.
‘I see you brought your friend,’ Halbrand says, with a smirk, nodding at the child.
‘I don’t know who she is,’ Galadriel says, setting her jaw.
Halbrand scoffs, but then his face stills. He crouches down mere feet from the child, and she looks up from what she is doing, setting the dagger calmly on her lap. He reaches out, and an instinct inside Galadriel nearly makes her knock his hand away from the girl, but she waits and watches as he touches the child’s cheek with the tips of his fingers. She is corporeal, not a spectre, a wraith, or phantom. A flesh and blood child, or else the darkest of magic.
A change occurs on his face, and Galadriel watches with interest as he drops his fingers and takes the girl's hand, turning it palm up to visualise her wrist and the network of black veins thrumming beneath the pale skin.
‘What is she?’ Galadriel’s own blood slows inside her, thick and turgid, a nauseating slowness as she realises she couldn’t flee even if she wanted to, much less defend herself with the sword.
‘A warning,’ Halbrand says, he smoothes the girl’s cheek with his rough thumb, and she smiles, her teeth are sharp like an animal. A wolf, made for tearing and consuming ribbons of flesh.
‘She’s beautiful,’ Galadriel says, her voice barely a whisper, all her energy concentrated on remaining standing.
Halbrand nods, sadly. It is sorrow on his face, written on his mask, and it is almost believable.
Galadriel’s doublet is wet, and when she reaches up to touch the damp spot, her hand comes away black. Without looking, she knows the wound is open, bleeding through the fabric. Halbrand stands and comes to her, close enough to touch, and everything inside her urges her to back away.
In the end, she steps forward into his waiting arms and allows him to tuck her head beneath his chin. They stand there in the glade, transported to another time when they were side by side and their bond seemed impenetrable, bound together with a past and a future that mattered not when held in the present.
Halbrand leans back and cups her cheek in his hand. When he kisses her, Galadriel feels bound in place by no earthly bonds, but by her own need, her own desire as it gallops ahead of her heart, her mind, and finds its place in his mouth, in the lies branded on his tongue. It is all a lie, and so where is the harm in indulging it? It is not real. None of this can be real.
On another battlefield they are fighting each other, he is circling her with a sword raised, no hesitation when it pierces an unguarded vulnerability at her waist, and she is aiming an arrow directly into his blown pupil. They are ripping each other apart, but here, in this haven, they are reaching into the gaps in each other’s armour, undoing clasps, unlacing ties, seeking the soft flesh they know lies beneath.
He howls her name down her throat so it echoes into the deepest parts of her. Hadn’t she imagined this? Time and again, she had dreamt of what would have happened if they hadn’t been interrupted that day, if she had taken him on that log, ridden him to victory. How much deeper the shame would have been, and yet, could it be any worse? Had she not already joined with him in the most destructive manner possible, laying waste to an entire land by the machinations of her actions, in pursuit of what he assured her, even afterwards, was a mutual enemy. It was a false flag. She was the enemy all along. She is the destruction of Middle Earth.
They fall to the ground, grappling with each other's armour, layers of clothing, everything an obstacle to this consuming need. Galadriel is stripped down to her shift, and it is saturated with dark blood, adhering the soft gauze to her skin over the open wound, a red flush travelling up the side of her neck closest to it. It is a fever. Her ears ring, her vision gauze-filmed and red. She is bold with the pretence that this is a dream.
Halbrand roughly tugs aside her shift and laps at her wound, the open heart of it, clamouring like a separate pulse. He licks the ragged edges, presses his tongue into its necrotic centre. Galadriel lays her hands against his stomach, wants to reach inside him, hold on to what she knows is true in him. He is lean and muscular, but there is a softness that Celeborn does not possess, a flawed beauty that was made especially for her.
Her need for him is intractable. He takes her breast in his mouth, teasing her nipple, rolling his tongue across it until she is straining her hips up towards him. He growls into her mouth and the sound trembles in the quivering muscles of her thighs. With one hand, he pulls open the front of his breeches and presses where he is hard to her needy centre, whilst the wound bleeds and bleeds.
///
Halbrand does not know where he ends, and she begins. He runs his first and middle fingers over her tingling nexus until she jerks beneath him, and her wetness runs onto the palm of his hand. He slips his middle finger inside her, crooking it and finding the point that will send her over the edge. She is moaning his name in short, broken sobs. The name he could have spent a lifetime being called by her if he had chosen differently, if he had not stumbled and misread.
This moment is not what he had imagined it would be. He takes away his hand, and she groans pitifully. He sinks inside her, and she clamps down around him, her fingernails digging into the small of his back. The most excruciating pain, lancing him from his skull down to the ligament at the back of his ankle. It is immaculate, the most complete feeling he has ever experienced in his long life.
The border between pleasure and pain is so close as to be indistinguishable. Melkor’s hand at his throat, pressing into him from behind as the world turned black, his skin sensitive to the point of being raw. Soft words in his ear and then the inevitable snarl, the bite, the infiltration. Galadriel does not infiltrate him; she subsumes him, with a power he had not predicted she possessed. She takes his pain, and she makes it larger, before white-hot light streams behind his eyes, and it is all drawn away and replaced with something else. He drives into her, and she meets him thrust for thrust. It is nothing so simple as an explosion. The ground does not shake, but his being fractures.
He comes inside her and she holds him there, one hand clamped onto his back and the other clasping the back of his head against her breast, the blood from her wound staining his cheek. When they have finished they spring apart. Galadriel scrabbles back on the forest floor, pulling her scant garments back around her, her cheeks red, and her eyes fever-bright. The wound has begun to clot, no further fresh blood trickling from its depths, but when her blush dies, she is pale and spent. Sick.
They both look to the log, but the child is gone. Galadriel colours again at the idea that the child, figment of their mutual imagination or not, might have witnessed their debauched display.
‘We neither of us know how to heed a warning,’ Halbrand says, getting up and roughly pulling his clothes back on.
‘What do you mean?’
He does not answer.
///
There are many dead. On both sides. Celeborn is sure she is not one of them because he has turned over each fallen body, both orc and elf. Where she is, he dare not guess. Elrond does not appear surprised that she has disappeared, and Arondir is polite but evasive when he questions him, claiming she moved to strengthen their flank as they passed the forest, but that he has not seen her since.
Sullied with the stench of orc blood and mud, Celeborn remounts his stallion and heads away from the healer's tent where the injured are being treated, soothing his animal’s nervous whickering as they clear the border of the encampment.
Darkness is draining the desolate landscape of any remaining colour, and the quality of light inside the trees is grey and subdued. He sees clearly between the densely packed trees, the horse picking its way carefully, the pine needles crunching underfoot. The bracken is dead, saturated with the deluge that has slowed their progress day after day, and kept the line held, neither side gaining any ground, and casualties mounting. A dessicated acorn cup falls from an oak pinioned between the pines, and it lands on Celeborn’s saddle. He picks it up, runs his thumb over the circumference of its empty cup. Remembers playing with the little husks as a child, filling them with water from the river, offering them to tiny creatures who crossed his path.
A soft cry filters through the undergrowth. He dismounts and leaves his horse, picking his way through the soaked earth, the ground holding onto his foot for a moment each time he takes a step. He knows there are things in the forest that can lure you into a trap, a will o’ the wisp drawing you onwards into a cradle of darkness from which you will not escape. He is getting nearer to the source of the sound. The hairs on the back of his neck prickle, and he reaches to his hip to rest his hand on the pommel of his sword.
There is a stagnant pool amidst a break in the trees, its edges gummed with mulch and rotting leaves, a faint mist hanging above the water. There are no lights to entice a passerby, no twinkling eyes to liven a curious mind.
Celeborn is not curious.
A small figure is crouched beside the water. A girl, her chin resting on her knees, her arms hugging her shins. He knows better than to immediately approach. A child’s form is easy prey for black magic. She is floating a leaf on the black mirrored surface of the pool, a twig poked through it like a mast, and she occasionally reaches out and prods it with one small white finger. She has heard him, he is sure, but she doesn’t turn around immediately, giving him a chance to observe her - the bumps of her spine visible through the fabric of her thin tunic, her dark hair woven into elaborate braids - by a loving hand? And her pointed ears.
A mean drizzle of rain begins to fall, but it hardly reaches them, only thickens the damp fog hanging in the air.
‘Are you alright?’ he asks, finally.
The girl wipes her nose with the back of her hand and turns to look at him. Celeborn braces himself, but she is just a child.
She nods.
‘The woods are not safe,’ he says, sternly.
She presses the little leaf boat beneath the surface of the water and stands up. No elven child would be this far from home, certainly not in a time of war.
‘Will you take me home?’ she asks, and he winces, a discordance in her voice twanging inside him like a badly struck chord.
‘Where are your parents?’
‘Gone.’
She walks over to him and slips her small hand into his.
///
When Galadriel arrives back at camp, Celeborn is not there. She does not know where she has spent the intervening hours, but her horse stamps its foot when she approaches its stall and offers it a handful of hay. It made its way back without her. Her chest and upper back on the side of her wound ache, and she wonders if she has been passed out on the forest floor all this time. She has no fever.
In their tent she unsheaths her sword, calls for an attendant to remove her armour and bring a bowl of water for her to wash. The young attendant flinches at the sight of the wound, and summons one of the healers. Galadriel is reluctant to comply, but allows a poultice to be applied, releasing a fresh stream of something black from beneath her skin.
When the healer leaves, she washes between her legs. His spend is still leaking out of her. She changes into a fresh tunic and breeches and drinks the tonic the healer has left her. It tastes of the earth, of flowers ground beneath a pestle, a tang of ginger and turmeric root. She sits in silence, the reverberations of what she has done ringing through her body.
When the tent flap is pushed aside, Galadriel makes to snap at the intruder to leave her be, but Celeborn steps inside, his silver-gold hair swept away from his face, his lips colourless, and his gaze barely able to meet hers. Behind him is the child from the woods. Galadriel jumps up and reaches for her sword. The girl retreats behind Celeborn, and he extends a hand into the space between them, warding Galadriel off.
‘Get that unnatural thing away from me,’ she spits.
Celeborn keeps the girl behind him. He shakes his head and Galadriel slowly lowers the sword, the poultice strapped to her chest slipping. Her heart races, crawling up into the back of her throat, pounding behind her eyes, in her head. She can see only the child’s arm and shoulder, one ear and cheek, as she is concealed behind Celeborn. She watches the small pale hand, the little circle made with a thumb and forefinger.
‘Put it back in the woods,’ she manages, a strangled breath heaving from her chest.
‘Galadriel.’
He steps towards her, and the child comes with him. An eldritch sprite, dirt beneath her fingernails, her elven slippers stained with mud.
‘Get rid of it,’ she hisses, the fine hairs on the back of her neck tingling, the skin on her chest burning.
It lurks, the escalating theory that has been forming in her mind since she first saw the girl on the log, since she rutted with Halbrand in the dirt like an animal. The thought threatens to metastasise, and Galadriel cannot stand it, feels her whole body tremble under the strain of rejecting it. There is no shelter from it, battering against her ribcage, terrible wings beating, fiery whip extending up into her mouth and scalding her tongue. Celeborn waits for an explanation, although she can tell by his pallor that he has divined enough.
‘I told you to take her away.’ She pushes his chest, and he takes a step back, the child clinging to the edge of his chainmail.
The girl is shivering, at first only a little, and then shaking so violently her teeth chatter in her mouth. Celeborn takes her to the cot, and Galadriel steps in a wide arc to avoid her. He wraps her in a blanket, tucking it beneath her pointed chin. She looks up at Galadriel through her long dark lashes, the peculiar amber of her gaze holding her fast, and Galadriel’s body reacts, a painful stitch opening in the dark folds inside her, revealing what has yet to be written, where the ink has only just dropped. The child regards her sadly, but Galadriel will not give in to pity.
‘If you send me away, he will come for me,’ the girl says. Celeborn cringes, but her voice is like a soft feather on the side of Galadriel’s cheek, an impossible delicacy, the closest thing to perfection.
‘Who?’ Celeborn asks, crouching down in front of the child.
The girl’s eyes flicker over his shoulder to Galadriel. ‘She knows.’
A dark tower, the monstrous silence of a dream, an unseen realm and a hideous throne. The child, years from now, at his feet, a spiked gauntlet resting on her shoulder.
You will keep her at first, but she will go; in the end, she will not be able to stay. They will know what she is.
It isn’t real, she isn’t real.
Celeborn catches the tears of a ghost.
She will be.
Galadriel’s mouth tastes of iron, the blackened metal of a forge, radiating heat from an immense anvil. But the weapon will not be made of iron, or steel, not silver or gold, but flesh and blood. Celeborn looks back at her, and whilst his face is turned away, the child exposes those sharp incisors. It is not a snarl, but it isn't a smile either. Galadriel’s skin tingles, and she isn’t sure if she wants to take the child into her arms or drag her from the tent.
‘I’m going to fetch some tea,’ Celeborn says, straightening and looking at Galadriel meaningfully. She stares back at him, her hand tightening around the grip of her sword.
‘You can’t leave me with her.’
‘She is just a child.’
He is not so wise, afterall.
Galadriel stands with her back to the tent entrance, the girl opposite her on the cot. Celeborn touches her arm as he passes, bows his head towards her, but says nothing.
‘Go,’ Galadriel says, indicating the exit with the tip of her sword once Celeborn has disappeared from view towards the fires.
The child pulls the blanket more closely around her narrow shoulders. ‘It doesn’t work like that, emel.’
Galadriel’s hand loosens around the sword, whatever warmth had imbued her body drains from her, rendering her skin as cold as marble as she sinks onto the ground. She needs to be lower, in contact with the earth, the damp rug beneath her hand as she crouches with her head bent as if kneeling in front of the girl. As if to kiss her ring. Tears run silently down her cheeks, and her hands tremble as she lays the sword on the ground.
She had known the first time she saw the girl, but had thought it some trickery of his, a manipulation swiftly forgotten when he got what he wanted. When they got what they both wanted. She is a figment, not entirely corporeal, but she is built of a truth, of potential. She is here for a reason.
‘You must choose,’ the girl says, getting up from the cot and stepping softly over to Galadriel, the blanket trailing on the ground. She crouches down beside her and tilts up Galadriel's chin with the tips of her cool fingers. The tears run onto the palm of her hand.
‘This is dark magic,’ Galadriel manages, her voice hoarse.
‘Yes.’
‘You do not exist.’
‘I do.’ She reaches and touches the increasing stain on the breast of Galadriel’s shift. ‘And I do not.’ Her skin is so white, almost translucent, her lips the red of blood in the snow.
‘What is your name?’
But the child just smiles.
‘What do you want me to do?’ Galadriel asks, and the girl lifts her hand and kisses the centre of her palm before placing it over the wound.
The pain goes quiet, it laps at the very edge, barely a disturbance of the still waters suddenly conjured inside her mind. She is in a meadow, at the edge of another great forest, quite unlike any she has seen before. There is a stirring in the golden leaves, and Galadriel can smell the light of Valinor. It isn’t Valinor, but it comes close to the peace she remembers from her youth. Somewhere out of sight, a stream trickles over rocks, and then from a small valley the girl emerges, running over to where she is sitting and dropping a bouquet of picked flowers from her skirts into Galadriel’s lap.
Galadriel frowns. ‘Melethel, you must not pick the flowers.’
The girl grins, tangling a fistful into her dark hair where they stand out like flakes of snow. ‘I shall do what I like,’ she replies, and Galadriel pulls her into her lap amongst the already wilting petals. She kisses the top of her warm head. She smells like smoke, like burning, like an ore from the centre of the earth.
The scene dissolves around them, and although she knows he has no hand in this, it feels horribly familiar. The sky is a sulphurous flame, and the girl is running ahead of her over a wasteland, stepping without care on fallen elves, her cloak flying behind her. Galadriel calls her name, but she doesn’t turn around. She keeps running to where he is waiting at the treeline, an impression of darkness just out of sight.
Galadriel opens her eyes. The tent is unchanged around her, and the girl remains crouched, her elbows tucked in, her luminous eyes intent on Galadriel’s face.
‘You would come with me,’ the girl says.
Galadriel shakes her head. Does not need to close her eyes to see herself sitting at his right hand in a grisly throne room. ‘No.’
The girl’s bottom lip turns down. She goes back over to the cot and sits down, almost as if she is sulking. When Celeborn returns, she accepts the mug of broth and sips it delicately. The quantity in the mug does not reduce.
///
He does not go after the girl. She will come to him sooner or later.
In the sky, the stars multiply before his eyes, and he allows himself a moment to marvel at this land that came from a single note and became a discordant melody that can still engender moments of great beauty. He is the architect of much of what will bring this Middle Earth back from the brink of inconsequence, reverse the disorder that has spread across the land. He does not wish to do it alone. For all things there is a counterpoint, a remedying balance. He is not so blind that he cannot see that some of his plans could be viewed as ugly.
They will not be able to see that when they are blinded by her light, brought to their knees by her grace and power.
///
When Celeborn takes the still full mug from the child’s hand, a bolt of electricity flies up his wrist at the contact and he drops the cup, the broth spilling onto the ground. The tent seems smaller, the fabric brushing him on either side, a darkness spreading like tar from the periphery of his vision.
He is inside a cave, and his lip curls at the idea of being in a dwarven realm. Somewhere, a baby is crying. Not the burbling sobs of the child in the woods, but a throaty, strident scream. When he rounds a dark corner, an outcrop of rock brushing low against the top of his head, he finds the girl, and in her arms a baby. The girl says something to him, but her voice cuts through him like the repeated strike of a hammer on an anvil.
Celeborn steps forward. The girl raises the infant above her head, its arms and legs kicking out in alarm and dislodging its shawl. It isn’t real, the echo of this knowledge tickles the back of his scalp, drives into the bones of his skull, and yet the desperation in his chest is not manufactured. He grabs hold of the baby, and in doing so, the girl stumbles backwards. Behind her is a ledge he hadn’t seen, and Celeborn reaches out in vain with his free hand as she slips and disappears from view.
He holds the infant against his chest and looks over the lip of the crevasse into a darkness deeper than any he has ever seen before, the breath of a fell beast burning the inside of his nose.
///
In the end, the girl leaves of her own accord.
Galadriel cannot look at her husband. When he touches her, she shrugs him away. Grief washes over her, a loss hollowed out below her breastbone.
The next morning, the rain is torrential. Wargs are sighted near the camp, and Celeborn takes his bow to join a company tracking them. Galadriel stays in the tent, her heart beating an unfamiliar rhythm in her chest, and nausea surging and roiling in her stomach. A film of perspiration clings to her forehead. She pulls aside her shift. The wound is the smallest it has ever been, closing in on itself like a thread through the eye of a needle, the ragged edges pinched together. Instead of blackness just beneath her skin, the web of dark veins extending out in a starburst, there is just pink, slightly puckered skin. A scar is forming.
Celeborn returns. She hears him outside the tent, the uneven pitch of his breath. He shoulders his way through the tent flap. There is something in his arms. Galadriel closes her eyes, but when she opens them, he is still holding it. He lays the bundle down on the bed and pulls back the blanket wrapped around it. It is a wolf, a cub, with fur the colour of treacle, an arrow piercing its side.
It is dead.
Galadriel groans, pulling the creature into her lap. In the dense fur at its neck, there is a solitary wood anemone, a snowy white flower in the black.
///
When Celebrian is born a year later, far from the frontline, a cluster of wood anemones is found tied with a string on the steps leading over the first bridge into Rivendell.
As she grows, she looks to every treeline she encounters, as if someone is waiting for her there.