#celedrielweek

There is no mallorn left in Middle-earth now. The golden canopies of Lothlórien are long fallen away, and what remains there is no longer Lothlórien. But whatever forests grow in Valinor will not be Lothlórien either and Celeborn knows this truth the way the Maiar can’t and the Noldor won’t: what is lost, is lost.

Ossë places the golden leaf down in the space between them. “Your son has passed through the halls of Mandos and walks again in the forests of Valinor. Your daughter is healed from the wounds to her spirit and now she sings and laughs once again. Your wife is no longer weighed down by exile and grief; she has been welcomed home. But you linger here in a land of fading trees. Do you not wish to leave?”

“None of the elves wished to leave,” Celeborn says. “Not until the Valar pleaded and demanded and herded us across Middle-earth to the sea. Did you come to gather me up like a lost stray?”

“I would not say it precisely that way, but yes. I came to take you across the sea.”

“No,” Celeborn says. 

“Middle-earth will fade further for its fate is beyond our power and beyond our sight - it is for mortals now. Already there are farmers cutting down your trees and new roads laid through your forests and soon mortal eyes will not even see you as you pass. The elves will be a children’s tale, a faint song in the leaves. In Aman you will have forests as great as the ones you once knew here and your family again at your side. Do you fear them changed? They are still the ones you love.”

“But I would not be,” Celeborn says. Little use in explaining it to one of the Maiar; they would never understand, not when even Melian who had loved Middle-earth as much as any of them ever could had left it behind as easily as passing from one room into another. Celeborn has known - first when Doriath fell, and then when Beleriand drowned - what it is to lose the land he is tied to, and how it would hollow him out, leave him nothing but a shell of sorrow and silence. 

“You do not know,” Ossë says. “I will not bring you to Aman against your will but I will not leave you here without pressing my case.”

“Your case? Did you come here by the Valar’s command or your own?”

Ossë opens his other hand to reveal a scrap of white fur that Celeborn takes from him without thinking. There is no mark on it but he knows this, all the same - he knows it has been cut from the edge of a stole made long years ago on the ice. 

“Who are you to stir such pain in me, Maia of the sea,” he whispers without lifting his eyes from the scrap of fur. “Who are you to have me believe Galadriel is permitted to send out the Maiar to do her bidding?”

“A long and turbulent story. She is… determined. And I? Because Ulmo will allow the Maiar who serve him to go where we will, even here. Because I always cared deeply for the Sindar. And perhaps because once my wife brought me to Aman although there seemed no future in it I could bear.”

Celeborn knows this story. As Melian told it, Uinen had bound Ossë hand and foot and fin and claw in seaweed stronger than steel, and pulled him through the waters back to Ulmo. He would laugh, in other circumstances.

“Galadriel says there is future and hope and love awaiting you in Aman,” Ossë says. “You will not become what you fear becoming. She bids me tell you that she knows you better than I or any of my own kind could and she is sure of this.”

An hour of silence passes; and then a second, and then a third. The sun dips low beneath the birch trees.