Work Text:
cenotaph: a cenotaph is an empty grave, tomb, or monument erected in honor of a person or group of people whose remains are elsewhere or have been lost.
Celeborn stands in the cowering forest and watches the dull glow of his simmering, sinking Doriath. To observe such a tragedy is a privilege, he knows. To look downwards is a blessing. The ground will be bare, he thinks vaguely, ashen after such devastation. The heather may grow again one day but the grasses are gone entirely, half-buildings standing in the dirt like the jutting teeth of a dried-out carcass. And what of the flowers? Would niphredil grow around Doriath if Doriath grew no more?
At his feet sits failure: thin air shaped like babes in the wood. He tries to hope. Convince himself that the lack of bodies might mean that they have in some way survived, even if captured, even if taken away and held for ransom. The soldiers, after all, are kin to his beloved. He knows of the frightening resilience of children, the way green branches and saplings bend and twist in winds that would shatter a towering oak. Somehow, this does not reassure Celeborn, who last saw them against the backdrop of a roaring blaze. Resilience does not guarantee immortality.
Could the little princes truly be living? Could he truly believe that every single child of Doriath has escaped as unscathed as the three year old princess heading the refugee column, smuggled out in a damned vase? Do earthquakes still at nursery doors? Are swords less sharp when the skulls are soft? Does floodwater withdraw when cradles float? Are saplings spared when the forest is set ablaze? Do little fingers thaw when the spring sky weeps? And what of the flowers?
How many? How many flowers lay limp?
How many died strangers to spring?
When the left-behind horses start to scream, thinly like torn linen in the wind, Celeborn wonders whether it is fear alone that makes them cry, or the anticipation of a world which no longer has the strength to bear a Doriath. Or perhaps it is the betrayal that unseats their sanity: the horrifying realisation that the men who set the city ablaze swung their swords from horseback. He stands silently among the trees, unable to move, and thinks, this world will not end in Dagor Dagorath. This world will fade as the Eldar fade and the horses scream, with the slow realisation that trust given to kin is trust misgiven. The horses are screaming. The horses are screaming and the children are dead.
The war ends, and the new age begins.
He makes a home in Lothlorien, though Lothlorien is no Doriath. Lothlorien is lush and green, and it is undeniably alive. Time begins a slow war of attrition against the fire and brimstone of the first age. His little Celebrían learns her histories from books, and in them, Doriath drifts listlessly in the past tense, unmoored from the present. One day when she is away from the house, he walks into her study and wrests the book from her shelf. He flings it out from the terrace, a brute, prey-animal fury twisting his face, the deranged fear of a noble steed before the thundering of enemy hooves.
Why throw out the book? Galadriel asks him. Shouldn’t she know her history?
The casualties, he tells her. It had the casualties wrong. The book stops counting the casualties once the city had been well and truly razed. As if the casualties of Doriath ended once Doriath counted its dead.
For no war ever ends. Children born tomorrow are shaped by arrows fired yesterday. Celeborn’s daughter was born over a thousand years after the sacking of her father’s homeland. And she will live to the breaking of the world, having only ever known a father who once watched his homeland burn and spent the rest of his life counting Doriath’s dead. Like all war-children born to a world that had already ended for their parents, Celebrían had to learn there were rooms within her father she could never enter, whole wings of his fëa razed to the ground.
Celebrían grew tall and lovely in Lothlórien, surrounded by golden trees and parents who adored her, and knew that no matter how brightly she shone, he could never fully occupy the spaces she illuminated with her life. As far as Celeborn was concerned, the birth of his daughter was not a new beginning but an epilogue, living, mocking proof that life continues after catastrophe. For what most haunts Celeborn is not the Doriath that died or even the fire that razed it, but the world which had the audacity to go on without it. And little Celebrían, denied a world which once bore Doriath.
Do earthquakes still at nursery doors?
When the Fourth Age closes like a tomb and Middle-earth becomes something to be remembered rather than inhabited, Celeborn finds himself in Tirion, among the white towers and the crystalline stasis of the blessed realm. He’s happiest when he’s with his Galadriel and his Cello-baby, but he tries to make do. He moves through his in-laws like a re-embodied ghost learning to mime the living: clasping hands with Finarfin, offering courtesies to distant cousins with borrowed names. The elves of Aman speak of the First Age as if it were a text they have all agreed to read the same way, a closed narrative with its tragedies neatly bound. Even the Teleri. Even Thingol.
But Celeborn sticks in Tirion’s throat. He is the remainder that troubles their arithmetic, an aporia in neat genealogies. Where they see the past, he sees only the eternal present. He smiles. He nods. He asks after their children, their craft, their songs. And all the while, he is walled off from them by something they cannot see. It is a strange wall, the one which built itself around him. There are some who view such a wall as an ornament, others as an obstacle, and still others who do not see it at all. It is a monstrous barbed wall around his heart, ever-growing. It sneaks its tendrils into every aspect of his life. It is a cenotaph.
It is Doriath. His Doriath. But there are very few who can truly understand what it is like for Celeborn. There are so few survivors left of Doriath, many having not yet been re-embodied and none left in Middle-Earth. Of the re-embodied elves he meets, most had only been children when the city fell. For saplings are not spared when the forest is set ablaze.
Then why, you ask, did he sail?
For love. Of course he sailed for love. Celeborn would do anything for love. A long time ago he became a refugee from his own history, for love. He created a version of himself that had never seen Doriath burn and spent years defending him from his own heart, for love. He will cross waters that claim every landmark of his former life, for love.
The adult survivors of old Doriath now cluster around the outskirts of Tirion in a mock kingdom. Celeborn is graciously welcomed, then held at arm’s length. He does not fault them, for he knows that a man who, in the immediate aftermath of Doriath, married not only a Noldorin woman but one of the house of Finwë no matter whose side she had fought beside, will never truly belong in such a place. Not like he belonged in Doriath. Fear, pride, time, trees. It is only Doriath.
He is Doriath. He is the cenotaph.
He does not see it as exile. He has no patience for those who navel-gaze over exile, wife or not. Hell, he wants to slap some of his own men for monologuing about it. Everyone is exiled from somewhere, he thinks irritably. The Valar from the Void, the trees from their seeds. Is it exile to be alive when you should be dead, to walk through markets nodding at merchants when your body knows it should be ash? Is it exile to walk through a snow-drift in a garden and think of niphredil scattered over blackened reeds?
He wonders how Elwing is, but knows he will never know, because even here, the Valar had situated her on a lonely, vacant island, with only longing and memory for company. Very few speak of her in the mainland. She had, after all, tried to kill herself.
Do you see now?
Have the casualties of Doriath ended after Doriath counted its dead?
Both Noldor and Sindar collect him at parties like a curiosity: the husband of Galadriel, the Sinda who survived. They are not so with Elrond, for the infant Elrond had no choice in the circumstances of his birth, nor did the elfling Elrond in the circumstances of his upbringing. But Celeborn had chosen the long defeat.
He had chosen to stay behind when his people moved on and lagged behind time ever since. Blooms only in the shadow of his wife, some snicker about him. Others want to bend their knee and touch the hem of his history in search of forgiveness. He authenticates their guilt, makes it real by being real, his presence at their feasts turning blood to wine. Celeborn is a quickfire route to redemption, because just look at the bastard. Look at Celeborn, his radiant wife and his dazzling daughter. Perhaps it wasn’t all bad. Just look at Celebrían dancing with her husband. Perhaps something wonderful survived in Beleriand, despite all our best efforts.
But what you don't understand, he wants to scream, what you will never understand because you came here on ships or through Halls and I came here in pieces, is that I am not proof of survival. I am a miscounted statistic.
Some casualties of war are not noted on cenotaphs. Some deaths go unacknowledged.
Celeborn is the remainder, the excess, the thing that cannot be domesticated by song. When some look at him, they see a survivor. Others see the bones of the place they had once known and loved, and others still see him as the calvary of all their own regrets. To survive the death of your homeland is to carry corpses within you, to become a walking cenotaph animated by absence.
Was Celeborn killed in Doriath?
Who wasn’t?
He stands in glittering ballrooms beside his radiant wife. There, Celeborn learns to choreograph normalcy. He lifts his cup when others lift theirs. He laughs at appropriate intervals, a learned behavior, an imitation of belonging. Politely, he listens to them all, as soft-spoken as ever.
The Noldor and Sindar both sing stories of their own sorrows: the Kinslayings, the grinding ice, the siege of Angband, the Battle of Unnumbered Tears. And he listens, genuinely, and attempts to understand, until he is told that some songs are not meant to be understood but forgiven. It is that which disturbs him most in Tirion. Not the grief but the forgiveness. The air is thick with it. Everywhere he turns there is reconciliation, that great Valinorean project of stitching the sundered world back together. Suffering and time transmuting violence into something almost noble, almost forgivable.
Celeborn does not begrudge his wife’s family their forgiveness. He has never deemed himself an arbitrator of anything, and, well… they were all nice enough once you got to know them, he supposes grudgingly. He cares little for who deserves what. What truly unnerves him is the mechanism itself, the way Aman has built an entire architecture around the idea that violence can be metabolised if you suffer enough afterwards, that the before can be neutralised by the now.
He watches penitents at festivals, the ease with which they move through crowds, how their laughter rings clear in the air and how hard they weep at memorials. They have been to the bottom of themselves and climbed back up.
They have done the work, Finarfin tells him. It kept them busy, and returned them to themselves.
But Celeborn has no work to do. He is not the perpetrator seeking absolution. He is the wound itself, and wounds do not seek forgiveness. They simply remain open, and then they close. Time has closed his own wound. It has calcified into bone, into a gap in his ribcage that lets the cold through.
The children of Tirion play in the streets, and sometimes he watches them from windows, these little ones who he hopes never know what it means to run from fire. Celebrían writes to him often, her letters full of news brought to her from mortal lands she left behind centuries ago, and he reads them like they are history books.
And he understands, one day, reading about a current Gondorian succession dispute, that this is what Doriath took from him: not his life nor his sanity, but his ability to metabolise time, to let one moment give way naturally to the next. The Eldar move from Cuivenen to kinslaying to exile to war to return to the breaking of the world, each age swallowing the previous, but Celeborn remains in a single aperture, a single burning city stretched across three ages like a painting left too long in the sun. He cannot move forward because moving forward would mean leaving Doriath behind, and leaving Doriath behind would mean admitting that the children are dead and have been dead and will remain dead and my god how many cradles, how many cradles, and the horses, the horses, and what of the niphredil and —
He calcifies instead.
He becomes monument rather than man. Celeborn is used to calcification. He has had eternity to discover that he is the one thing in all of Arda that cannot be fixed, because he was born in Doriath and so to heal would be to lose himself entirely.
But it is not all bad. There are days when the light in Valinor feels like a blessing, when he walks with Celebrían through gardens that have never known war and feels something peace settle in his chest like silt. There are mornings when he wakes and Galadriel is already awake beside him, reading, and the simple fact of her breathing tethers him to Arda.
And there are evenings like this one, when he sits on the edge of their bed and watches her at her mirror, drawing a comb through the long fall of her hair. It is such an ordinary thing, this ritual of hers, practiced and unhurried. The slow pull of the comb, the way she tilts her head slightly to work through a tangle, the cascade of spilled gold that catches the lamplight and holds it. He has watched her do this a thousand times, in Lothlórien, in Imladris, in war camps where mirrors were polished shields and privacy was a tattered sailcloth. The white flowers she threads into her braid. Her hand moving through the oiled strands like a ship parting the seas. He would choose her in every world.
And then the light shifts slightly and he realises how much fairer Galadriel’s hair looks in Valinor, how it has replenished itself with the radiance of her homeland, basked in the memory of the first light it had ever seen and transformed, brighter than it ever was under the dim lights of sunken Beleriand. It is the colour of summer wheat in the late afternoon sun, of gossamer under the moon. The same colour her cousin Celegorm's waist-length braid had shone in the firelight, a sword singing silver songs upon horseback.
Outside their window, evening settles over Tirion, towers fading into the amber and rose of dusk. A bird calls out somewhere in the garden, and the breeze through the curtains carries the scent of star-jasmine, of the sea, of flowers that will never know winter. Galadriel is braiding her silver hair, humming something soft and wordless. The horses are screaming, and the children are dead.