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There was a stained-glass window three times Elrond’s height on the west wall of Rivendell's library, depicting Elwing’s mythical leap into the sea: her naked body arcing to the sky as if in supplication, feathered arms outstretched behind her. At sundown, the clear crystal set in place of a Silmaril cast spears of coloured light through the room.
It had not been like that. Elrond would have remembered that.
All he remembers – truly remembers – is a hollowness.
There are scraps, of course, with which he has filled that hollowness over the years. On Amon Ereb, he and Elros sewed their blurry memories together to create a quilt in which they might swaddle themselves when the vastness of their loneliness became too much to bear. On Balar, others enriched those memories with their own. Círdan told them how her laughter rang like bells, and a memory that seemed his own (he could never be sure) threaded itself through Elrond’s mind. Later, he could not help but collect pieces of Lúthien passed down by Celeborn and Galadriel and, like precious gemstones, set them unartfully in the rough-hewn relief of his mother.
(It was Celeborn, not Elrond, who commissioned the stained-glass in the library. He had never known Elwing, and yet his love for her seemed greater than her own son’s.)
By the time Elrond steps aboard the ship that will take him West, Elwing is more an eclectic assortment of baubles and trinkets, most of them broken and without use, than the beautiful woman whose crystallised image Elrond left behind along with all the rest of his former life.
She is not there to greet him at the docks, nor did he expect she would be. Celebrían waits for a quiet moment alone to tell him she is waiting to see him, when he is ready. His beloved's presence lends him the strength he needs to make the journey to that far northern tower.
When a small woman with cropped black hair steps out onto the threshold, smoothing her plain skirts, Elrond’s breath leaps from his lungs.
“Celebrían said you like lemon cake,” she says. “I am afraid I am not much of a baker, but I grew the lemons myself in the solarium. If you’d like to come in, that is.”
“Mother.” Elrond barely stumbles through the word before fat tears fill his eyes. “Of course, I'd love to come in.”