To Alqualondë

Mina stared up at the mountain towering above them and tried to catch her breath. The Taniquetil was no longer the Mount Everwhite she had read about in "The Silmarillion" and "The History of Middle-earth". The summit of the mountain had been blasted off in what must have been the equivalent of a gigantic nuclear explosion. The sides of the peak still gleamed in the sunlight. But no longer in the pure white of freshly fallen snow, but in the glassy black of molten stone.

She forced herself to tear her gaze away from the mountain. Bending over slightly, she felt her pounding heart calm down and the stabbing pain of exertion in her sides recede a little. Each breath of the cold mountain air burned her lungs. Mina stared at the path in front of her feet. The mixture of mud and ashes was black and dangerously slick. Clearly she recalled Lothíriel's descriptions of how miserable her first days of walking with the Fellowship had been. But Lothíriel had been nearly twenty years younger than she was. And she hadn't been pregnant. Although the pregnancy was still barely visible, just a gentle swell of her stomach and a general softness to her features, Mina tired easily, and she felt continuously off-balance. She hadn't tried reclaiming her pack from Celebrían. Even so, she was painfully aware that her slow pace endangered all of them. But she simply couldn't walk faster! And all that adrenaline that kept her stomach cramping with fear and rushed in shivery thrills through her veins couldn't be good for her baby!

Calm, she thought. Mina, you must calm down. Or you will never survive this!

That was entirely the wrong thought to entertain, because it triggered a whole avalanche of feelings that threatened to overwhelm her and leave her a crying, shivering wreck in the black sludge. How could she ever hope to survive this? How could they ever hope to even reach Alqualondë?

Slow breaths, she thought. Concentrate on breathing out. You can't risk hyperventilating and succumbing to a panic attack. This is neither the time nor the place for panic. But everything inside her screamed with fear.

"Mina?" Elentar put his arm around her and drew her against the warmth of his body. She shivered violently and had to clench her teeth or she would have started sobbing.

He did not ask her if everything was okay. He did not offer any false reassurance. He simply held her. Held her close until she stopped shaking. Until she could exhale her tension in a sigh and close her eyes, allowing her consciousness to retreat inwards to the new life that was taking form within her womb. Again she felt sure that she would hold her daughter in her arms the moment she was born. That she would delight in the delicate beauty of her baby's Elvish ears. And more, that she would know her daughter as a woman. A woman with children of her own. But how much of this was simply mortal wishful thinking, and how much the foresight of the Eldar that her daughter's presence in her body sent coursing through her veins?

"Better?" Elentar asked at last.

Mina nodded. "Yes. Thank you." She straightened up and dared to inhale deeply. Now, with the panic attack kept at bay, the crisp, cold mountain air felt refreshing and invigorating. Fëanor was nowhere to be seen. But Celebrían was standing a few feet away before the black ruin of a tall tree, her face an expressionless mask. Without the cold, mad gleam sparking in her eyes, she could have been a statue carved from white marble. The only brightness in the desolation of the blackened mountain. The distress of her grandson's wife didn't seem to bother her at all.

Indeed.

"She is too slow, and the exertion is not good for the babe," Celebrían told Elentar, her voice icy and disaffected. "We should not tarry in this darkness."

Elentar stiffened beside Mina. A rush of heat flowing over his skin, she could almost feel the fury flaring up inside of him. She curled cold fingers around his hand. She's right, Mina thought at him.

"What do you suggest?" Elentar asked. How he kept his voice cold and smooth enough to match his grandmother's in spite of the red-hot anger he felt was a mystery to her.

"The ghost can carry her," Celebrían said.

"No."

"A strategy with the added advantage of keeping him in our line of vision," Celebrían added sourly, casting a glance up ahead where the path wound its way around a jagged boulder. Squinting in the twilight between the blackened earth and the darkening sky, it seemed to Mina that a shadowy figure waited for them next to the rock.

"Or so he could carry her off to his Master?" Elentar did not even try to hide the fact that he did not trust his half-crazed grandmother.

"I don't think he would do that," Mina interrupted. At least not now, while there's still a chance that we might find his wife and help her flee from the Shadow …

"Can he carry her at all?" Elentar clearly hoped that the answer would be no.

In a gust of darkness and silvery glittering eyes, Fëanor reached the group. "Can he carry her at all? If he cannot carry her, I shall endeavour to bear that burden," he mocked Elentar.

But when he approached Mina, he moved slowly, forcing the shifting shadows of his fëa into a form that was almost … well, not human. But less ghostly.

"Lady," Fëanor whispered, "wouldst thee trust me with thy weight as thee trusteth me with thy life?"

Instinctively, Mina splayed her fingers over her abdomen. She thought of Fëanor's story, what she knew of it. Of Nerdanel. Their unhappy parting. His end in black ashes near Eithel Sirion. A wind or a sigh stirred the ashes at her feet.

"A tendency to treason and treachery was never your problem, sire," she said at last. "But can you really carry me? You must realise that you appear rather … insubstantial. No offence."

Instead of an answer, Fëanor came to her and surrounded her with his darkness, wrapping her into his spirit-form as if he were a diaphanous blanket. She bit back a yelp and a gasp of surprise at the same time: lifted up into the air by shadowy arms, she felt as if she were floating. And he wasn't cold! After millennia in the cold of the Halls of Mandos, his spirit was still burning.

When she heard his voice in his mind, it was much softer and more modulated than when he had invaded her thoughts the first time: Even mighty Fëanaro needs time to relearn the physical world after time unending suspended houseless in the darkness. What arms are for …

She floated weightless, cradled in the warm, dark embrace of invisible arms.

The look on Elentar's face was priceless.

oooOooo

The rest of the journey across the Pelóri seemed like a dark dream to Mina. Now that the ghost carried her, Celebrían and Elentar could run like only the Firstborn can. Swift and fast, silent and surefooted. Even Aman's Fenced Heights barely slowed them down, for despair and fear drove them, with madness not far behind.

But they were lucky, and running day and night, no unnatural shadow descended upon them but the darkness of dusk and the bleakness of starless and moonless nights. Indeed, they did not only escape their foes, they saw no living thing at all. No bird, no bee, no deer, no rabbit, not the smallest flower nor the tallest tree had survived the return of the Shadow to Aman. And only when they descended from the height of the pass to the eastern shores of the Blessed Realm, the zone of destruction that surrounded the Taniquetil gave way again to the deadened perfection of a summer forest frozen on the cusp of summer.

They stopped at what Fëanor and Celebrían thought a safe distance from Alqualondë. Mina thought she could see flecks of white far away between the deceptively fresh green of the trees and the grey expanse of the sea. Perhaps the city had not been blackened like the White Mountain?

"Will they guard the city?" Elentar asked.

Celebrían narrowed her eyes, gazing toward the distant harbour city. Apart from that she was completely motionless, unnaturally so. Once again she reminded Mina of a marble statue. Or of a volcano – the grief and horror and rage inside her ready to explode any moment. No, Mina thought. Not a volcano. There was no heat to that elf-woman. Only cold. Fëanor seemed more alive to her now, after having been carried by the ghost for three days and three nights. And his spirit was definitely still fiery. Mina smiled. His intangible embrace had kept her comfortably warm even on the pass, when the winds made even Elentar shiver. No, Celebrían wouldn't burn to ashes when her hröa released her fëa; she would turn into an ice-storm, a deadly, icy blizzard. And what was left of her would melt away into cold rivulets of clearest water.

"No," she said at last. "I do not believe the harbour is watched. It seems to me they do not know yet that the Straight Way has been opened. Or that there are Elves again in Middle-earth."

Again? What about the Elves in the Far East? Mina thought. They had always been there, presumably. If Elladan and the kindred of his wife had ever crossed the Eastern Seas successfully, that was. But maybe Celebrían didn't count the Lands of the Sun as a part of Middle-earth. Or she didn't know …

Don't, Elentar thought at her, do not mention my uncle.

Mina felt her cheeks flush with heat and hoped that Celebrían wouldn't notice. Clearly, Elentar didn't trust his grandmother completely. Mina suppressed a sigh and looked away. Elentar was right. While Celebrían seemed to have rallied during the last days and appeared much saner than she had been when they met her, she was certainly not sound of mind. And if she stayed in Aman, trying to reach the fugitives in the caves, she could easily be captured by the enemy …

No, it was wiser if no one knew that there might be many more Elves left in the East than Elrond and his new mortal wife and their scattered allies. She drew a shivery breath.

"But they are not far," Celebrían added.

"They never are," Fëanor said dismissively.

Alqualondë was even more beautiful than Mina had imagined it, her inspiration Tolkien's words, Peter Jackson's movies, and her own love for art noveau. But the streets – paved with a stone that glistened like mother of pearl and felt like velvet to the touch – echoed with silence. The windows gazed upon them dark and empty, and many doors stood open as if calling for their inhabitants, or crying for help …

But there was no one left to come.

In passing, Mina plucked a blossom from a man-high stone vase planted with passiflora. The flower crumpled in her fingers liked aged silk paper. This time, she couldn't blink away the tears. Without a word, Elentar took her hand and wrapped his fingers tightly around hers.

"At least there are no corpses," he said tersely.

Mina didn't even try to imagine what experiences from his past made him say that and caused that pinched look on his face. She shuddered violently and swallowed hard, fighting sudden nausea. Not the best conditions for embarking upon a sea voyage.

Celebrían didn't seem to notice the echoing emptiness that surrounded her. Now and again her lips moved as if she were talking to herself, and her eyes crossed slightly, glittering with an intensity that scared Mina. Celebrían might be many things; "sane" was not one of them.

"They are closer than they were," Fëanor hissed suddenly. "Where is that ship you spoke of, woman?"

Celebrían spun around, her lips baring her teeth in a silent snarl. Clearly, she didn't appreciate his manners.

"We don't have time for this, if they are coming!" Elentar growled. "Where the hell is that ship, grandmother?"

"Can you blame me for not looking forward to standing before a reminder of my husband's unfaithfulness?"

"Ex-husband," muttered Mina, who still couldn't quite believe the story as Celebrían had related it. Of course the Greek gods of earth had produced even worse soap operas. Still. It was not what she had expected to be confronted with upon her arrival in Arda … Mina sighed. If only that was all she had to come to terms with here! Shivering, she drew up her shoulders. There was an air of watchfulness to the empty houses. As if invisible eyes watched her every breath.

"Can we get a move on, please?" she asked and uncomfortably rotated her shoulders. Suddenly she was afraid the ship wouldn't be there. That they'd end up caught between the sea and the Shadow.

But no. It couldn't be. It must not be. She concentrated on her knowledge of her baby daughter's weight on her chest after birth. The sunlight on translucent, pointy ears.

We'll make it, she thought to the little life that lay nestled deep inside her womb. We'll make it. You'll make it.

They rounded a fishermen's shed to the last quay.

And there it was.

A small, white Elvish sailing ship, fashioned in the lines of a bird, maybe a swan. Graceful. Serene. As if she were waiting for them.

Next to her, Elentar sighed with relief. "An alph! A swanship of the olden days! Praise be! I'll be able to sail her just fine."

As if on cue, Fëanor hissed, whispering a garbled stream of Quenya to Celebrían that Mina didn't understand and that made Elentar blanch.

And then he didn't have to explain, because Mina could feel it.

Heat. And Evil.

Death.

There were no drums in the deep. But Mina's heart supplied a frantic rhythm that pounded every syllable of dread deep into her brain.

Balrog. A Balrog of Morgoth. A foe from the old world.

And then he was upon them, spreading his wings and blacking out the sun, and raining fire and acid down on them, and there were no more thoughts, just action. Jumping off the quay while Fëanor produced two shadowy swords out of thin air, handing one to Celebrían. Blindly following Elentar's orders to pull this rope and jump that way. Groaning wood. Snapping sails. Fire lashing at them from the darkness. Bright arcs of swords dancing, cutting, forwards, backwards –

Until suddenly: wind filled the sails, billowed the canvas and pushed in hard gusts against the ship, as if it wanted to lift it up and throw it out of the harbour and onto the sea. Mina had to kneel and cling to ropes and railing, she couldn't possibly have stayed on her feet. Elentar seemed to be everywhere at once, rigging sail, adjusting the steering wheel, securing the lines.

Behind them the battle raged on. The Balrog, clothed in a thunderstorm of Evil and dread, reached for them, his black power, deathly tendrils of unlight snaking over the waves. But Fëanor's spirit and Celebrían had turned into flashes of lightning. White and bright they split the darkness, striking deep and cold, recklessly, without fear … or hope.

oooOooo

A/N: This chapter was written for the first ever "Create for Life" event. Many thanks to my sponsors donating to various cancer-related charities for this chapter, and to my cheerleaders who kept me writing. Thank you so much.

As promised, this story is not abandoned. And while I cannot promise when I'll write the next chapter, I do hope it won't take me another three years. Thank you for reading, and for your patience and understanding.