all you know gets older when the sun goes down (silm | celebrian/goldberry, celebrian/elrond)

[fiachairecht]

all you know gets older when the sun goes down. the silmarillion & other histories of middle-earth - j. r. r. tolkien, celebrían/goldberry + celebrían/elrond. celebrían journeys west after the orcs attack and does not, precisely, leave. 1.3k words, rated t. for legendariumladiesapril 2016.

The world doesn't end.

Celebrían's world ends.

*

It's unexpected and inevitable and her immediate instinct is to blame herself: she had grown complacent, after leaving Lothlórien. Silver and shadows seem very far away when Imladris is bursting with reds and greens and blues, covered not by her mother's shifting blue sea-magic but by her husband's steady golden warmth. The shadows are cast by trees and light, there; they do not move on their own in her new home. The years spent in a realm newly made rather than eternally grown have changed her, years spent fighting mortal foes have weakened her.

So her world ends: on the path between Lothlórien and Imladris, in the liminal spaces of the mountain pass, without her mother or her husband or her children, without her long-ago fey lover and without even shadows.

It's not even as bad as it could be, though: bleeding out stops hurting, after a while. She moves her focus from the drops of blood sliding across the jagged edges of her wounds to the rivers of it curling around her and how the stars dance reflected in them.

Celebrían thinks of her mother, waiting for a daughter who will never arrive. She thinks of what awaits her in the Halls of Mandos, and wonders how long she will have to wait before she can return to Middle Earth and fulfill the promises she's leaving as broken as her body is. It's a distraction from the orcs debating how best to kill her, from the way she can feel her skin growing brittle with poison.

It doesn't, in the end, matter.

*

Her sons rescue her and her husband heals her.

Her world doesn't come back.

*

Celebrían tries to make a new one. She forces her fingertips away from her now invisible scars, stays up nights so she doesn't have to see her blood spreading across skin and stone behind her eyelids every time she closes them. She holds tight to her husband and children and remembers what it feels like to have elven skin under her hands, rather than orcish armour and wooden restraints. She knits, she draws, she does everything the healers suggest. Tries to slot this new world into just one more series of before-and-afters: before Eregion, during Lothlórien, after Goldberry, after the orcs.

Imladris is not a place of battle, Elrond reminds her every night. The orcs will not come here. You're safe. He whispers the words into her hair and her lips and her skin as she wraps herself impossibly tight around him and he means them to be a comfort but she knows they are lies.

Orcs, after all, weren't supposed to attack travellers on fortified roads, either.

Nothing is as it is supposed to be anymore, and now she has no mother to protect her with a silver ring, no Goldberry to make her find humour in the absurdities of wrong. In Imladris the shadows now shade into deep reds and golds and have faces and swords and they scare her more than the formless nameless things that remained caught on the branches of mellyrn trees in Lothlórien. Things that skitter out of view before you've managed to pin your eyes on them, after all, do not want to cut you open and watch you bleed.

*

She leaves Imladris, sets off West and even manages to half-convince herself that she's telling the truth when she means to set sail.

The world still isn't her own.

*

The road to the sea is long and the journey, when Celebrían pays attention to it at all, is just as taxing as her failed recovery in the silence of Imladris' fields. Mostly, though, she leans forward and buries her face in her horse's mane and watches the world pass by with glassy eyes. It's better this way. No one to scold her for dwelling in her memories, no one to remind her that she's supposed to be healing. Just the faint songs in the wind mingling with her own voice as she hums to herself.

She eats, sometimes. Sleeps, when her vigilance has worn so far down that she knows replenishing it is more important than not letting it go. Doesn't notice the seasons turning around her until the first snow catches in her hair at the edge of the Old Forest.

There Celebrían stops, because she more than most knows what it means to cross into a forest. Moreso than crossing the borders of any realms it means change it means giving up control it means a change in the way the world will hold you. Reality that she hasn't felt in a year presses back against her mind as she flattens her hand against the tree trunks that call her forward with everything but words.

She could turn back. Could go around the forest and continue to the sea, to the waters that would take her home to heal in ways she can't in this world. But there is music caught in the trees that is so unlike the sea's and it, too calls to her; it, too, carries promises. So she dismounts, and steps forward once and then again, picks out the sound of running water and walks straight for it and she doesn't hope for things she might once have found by a river, she doesn't.

Goldberry appears by the river anyway, when the sun has ceded the sky to the moon, and she's silver-blue against desaturated greens and blacks and Celebrían thinks she's a delusion shaped by exhaustion and want until she says, you found me after all.

*

Before the end of the world, Celebrían had promised her once as they stood waist-deep in a river that ran with Nenya's magic more than water.

She hadn't meant to lie.

Had she lied?

*

Celebrían doesn't remember sleeping but she must, because she wakes screaming in Goldberry's arms, blinking as rapidly as she can in hopes of erasing the image of Goldberry dripping with blood instead of river-water. She lies stiff and cold for the rest of the night, unmoving except for her eyes that track the moon's progress towards the horizon. Goldberry doesn't ask questions but she sings in a language not unlike that of the forest.

In the morning Goldberry still doesn't bring questions, just mushrooms and sweet violets. It's not unlike many of the meals Celebrían has found for herself along the way, but from Goldberry's hands she feels like she's tasting the food for the first time in years. The sunlight is still gold in this forest but it's colder, different from the gold in Imladris. The shadows are more familiar. She tugs Goldberry into the river with her.

When they were younger Celebrían used to float face-down in the water, testing how long she could hold her breath and wondering what would happen if she refused to surface no matter how her lungs burned. She was never curious enough to truly test that, and Goldberry was always there to pull her up, laughing through the concern that furrowed her brows. She has reasons to test that now, she thinks. It's one of the few thoughts that's always managed to pierce the fog that's blanketed her since she was carried down the mountain.

But she also has reasons not to, reasons that unfold with the forest and its songs, with Goldberry and her touches that respect the thin fragility that Celebrían has faded into but that don't dictate how breakable she's allowed to be.

I have a cottage here, Goldberry says that night on the riverbank when Celebrían wakes from her nightmares. The world you weary of need not touch you there, if you do not wish it.

The forest air is thick and empty around them and Celebrían can breath again. She surges forward with the river, laces her hands in Goldberry's hair, kisses her again and again and again reveling in the first true warmth she's felt in longer than she can remember and with each kiss she says yes.

*

The Old Forest isn't quite a part of this world.

The Old Forest, Celebrían thinks, could become her world, if Goldberry agrees.