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The night under Mindolluin was rolled back into twilight, and Arwen found herself sitting on a heathery ledge upon a high moor that looked out over a deep green valley to a strange mountainous country. That way lay the light: darkness abode behind her.
Across the valley the land rose in wave after wave, from dim grassy foothills through steep forests of pine to bare ramparts and towers of rock and ice, and so up beyond reckoning or guess until they could not be told from the fire-painted cloud-castles of that glowering overcast evening. Silver threads of streams came down by many waterfalls into the dusky depths of the valley, and paths brown and wayward as mountain-goats leapt up into alp and glen, and ever on up into the mists. Arwen knew then that she dreamed, and her heart hungered for that country, but she lacked the wings to fly there and no true road ran down from her moor.
To her right, her ledge crumbled away into the mouth of a rotten rubbish-choked gully. For life, and more than life, she dared not look that way. She turned hastily away to her left, where she felt a companionable presence sat beside her on the next heathy hummock.
There she saw a young-old woman of mortal race: pale, long-limbed, and slender, with sharp regular features framed by a cascade of unbound hair that was dusty-black as an old raven’s feathers. Arwen’s heart skipped two beats then as she recognized that face; but she said evenly:
“Do I look so, now? Are you my fetch, come to show me that my life’s grace is worn out and I must go down into darkness? I will not come, nor can you make me. My love and I have not drained our parting-cup, and he is not ready!”
“Don’t fish, dear!” said the other. Her sparkling grey eyes and dangerous quick smile were nothing of Arwen’s at all, and a current bubbled beneath her light voice that laughed all doom to scorn. “You know very well what you look like; but that isn’t me any more, just an old slipper that stopped fitting. Still, after an Age of having every Elf-fool hold my image up at you, don’t tell me you don’t know me yet?”
“A Lúthien Tinúviel!” Arwen whispered. “O greatest-grandmother, how are you here?” Then a dread that seemed to seep up from that rotten gully behind her chilled her to the bone. “And where is Beren?”
Lúthien waved a vague untroubled hand at the purple heights of the far mountains. “Up there somewhere, working inwards and upwards, finding the best trouble and getting into it… We don’t live in each others’ pockets, my darling: that’s for people who think they could lose each other still. There’ll be a long hello when I catch up with him again, and then we’ll make the mountains sing with it! But you might want my help here, so I thought I’d drop by, this one time.”
“Father and all the Wise taught me,” said Arwen with some effort, “that where Men go and you went, there is no return before all the world’s ending. Were we deceived, then, or – what have you done?”
“Yes, well, that!” Lúthien stretched and looked sidewise at her, with all the sly innocence of a fox. “It was a special grace and difficult to get; only you may have heard, I can make a serious nuisance of myself when I really want something. So we only have tonight, and then I’ve an interesting walk ahead of me before I meet you all on the other side. But if the One had wanted me to sit on the side-benches sighing to the Music, he ought to have made me otherwise!”
A shadow moved in the twilight, and the mantle of Lúthien’s regard settled warm and protective about Arwen’s shoulder. “Arwen, my dear – O Arwen, our dearest and best of us all! – you have my hard road ahead of you soon, and I know it is bitter and black, and there are dry gulfs and forgetful hills on either side of it. I came to show you that there is more than empty Night and cold eternities to look forward to at its ending. Hold that in your heart when your time comes, sweet greatchild, and win through. Come home to us, and to him!”
Arwen’s dreaming eyes misted, and her hand found her foremother’s through her blindness. “I never meant to turn aside,” she said, “but the fear has grown on me that I shall not see my way, or dare not. My roots are in the Earth, and my heart has been sent no call beyond it; but I will come without roots or heart or anything, if only I can. This will help me greatly, I think; but – waking, shall I remember?”
“Not in the mind,” Lúthien confessed, squeezing back with what reassurance she owned. “Even I couldn’t dance my way around that. There is some ineffable reason it wouldn’t turn to good, and the Powers I could reach wouldn’t eff it to me. But you won’t forget in your bones, unless you want to, and that should be some help along the way… I’d have led you through the bad passage myself when your hour came; only the paths are different for everybody, you see, and there’s no walking them twice!”
“Thank you!” said Arwen simply; and they sat looking into the sourceless dusk and the glory of the high mountains for a spell. Then Lúthien said shyly,
“We have this one night till your sunrise, and I see we’ve some time while the world turns. Eternity and the Fire are no waste of life to look on, but – even here, we don’t get the same hour twice, and the Morning and the Evening don’t get to meet often. Shall we share tales of Middle-Earth and the Mountains a while, and catch up about ourselves and our family?”
Then Arwen threw back her head and laughed; and the two women eased their hearts with long speech broken by companionable silences, there upon that high moor, while the mountains burned in the West and the wide world spun on towards morning.