Galadriel walked through the dimming light of Lothlórien, her footsteps slow and ponderous. The twilight fell in dappled shadows, and she stopped in a patch of sunlight, the evening beams catching the gold in her hair and sending it out into the deepening shadows. She could sense Celeborn's worry, but pushed him aside. In the morning, she and Elrond, Lord of Imladris, would depart for the Havens, and across the Sea. After all her years of longing, she would finally set foot in Valinor.

Celeborn, her husband, the man who had ruled beside her as an equal, the only elf to ever see and appreciate her intellectual qualities as well as her beauty, would not. He claimed he would follow, but part of her doubted that. He was a Sinda, he was bound to this world by blood and birth and love, bound in a way she could never be. He was destined to live and die in this land, but she was not.

She looked down at the scrap of parchment in her palm, and felt herself a fool. This was a child's game, this note-following, but when she had risen from her waking dreams, her maiden had entered with the vellum, saying only that it had been found in the council room. On it was written, in an entirely nondescript hand, the words: "Meet me, Artanis, by the Mirror." Had it been any other time, she would have cast it away, but this was to be her final day in her kingdom, and none ever called her by her birth-name anymore. For the sake of the old days, when she had been a warrior, she wanted to solve this mystery.

Still, she shuddered at the thought of looking into her Mirror. She had sworn to abandon it to rot and weeds and time, had sworn never to see it again. It had served her well, back when her Ring possessed power, back when she was more than just an aged elf-witch without any abilities. In the old days (not more than four years ago) all water would bend to her will, now, she scarcely dared to swim in the swift-flowing Anduin. How things changed.

The mirror she had rescued from the ravaging of Doriath by her cousins, the sons of her half-uncle, Fëanor. They had swept down unprotected on Thingol's kingdom, and none of Melian's enchantments could protect the Sinda who dwelt there. Celeborn had almost perished from an ill-fated arrow, and she had been forced to drag him through the burning halls, bleeding profusely herself. She could still taste the ash and hear the screams of elves who had been her friends.

The mirror had been in Melian's gardens, and without a second thought she had taken the mithril plate etched in the strange runes that she had never quite learned to read. It was an insane thing to rescue, but she had, and in it she still saw her dying kinsmen, her grandfather's severed head, all her sorrows focused into a tiny drop of blood that fell from her brother's broken neck.

She could not think about it.

Once more she turned to her note, written not in Sindarin Cirth, but in Noldorin Tengwar. The strokes were even, perfect, the kind of mastery that no one save a native speaker could ever hope to achieve. Her visitor would be a Noldo, then.

She wondered vaguely if she should have brought a weapon. In days gone by, she would never have bothered with as petty a thing as a sword. With a lilt to her voice or a flick of her wrist, she could render any adversary incapacitated. Now, she had no power save her own. The note did not seem threatening, and the strokes were smooth and round enough for her to believe their author's intent was harmless, but there was something vaguely ominous in the way the words were phrased. Meet me

She climbed down the stone-carved stairs to the bowl of the valley, and saw no visitor nor any sign there had ever been one. She looked at her mirror, and at the pitcher filled with starlit water. Without her Ring, she could not control the mirror. It would show her whatever it wanted her to see. Above her, the trees waved and whispered, in a form as close to apprehension as they came. There was no sound save the waterfall and her own breath.

"Artanis," a voice said, and she turned, not quite believing it. Her cousin stood behind her, her cousin Maglor, her cousin whom had burned her home and slain her kin, her cousin she had loved most dearly.

"Kanafinwë," she said, the word a gasp torn from the depths of her soul, where she kept all her hidden sorrows. "Makalaurë," she said again, as if by repeating his name she could dispel this impossibility. He could not be here, he was supposed to be dead, and yet he stood before her, his eyes shadowed and grim, his red hair brushed but lusterless, his clothes a ragged patching of animal pelts. "You died," she said, and he laughed. In Valinor, his laugh had been more musical than aught save his voice, but now it was rough and coarse, devoid of joy.

"Would I could die," he said. "Would I could leave this world."

"I am going to," she said. She noticed it was not Sindarin they spoke, but Quenya, and not the bastardized form that was now prevalent amongst the Noldorin cities, but the pure and perfect version first heard at the gates of Tirion, and in the court of Finwë, High King of the Noldor. She had not spoken such in centuries, and yet it came with ease to her tongue.

"And your Sinda?" he asked, as if Celeborn were a pet she kept around for her amusement.

"My husband will remain here," she said, and he laughed again.

"Is that what you get for your troubles? You forsake us, your kin, for a husband who chooses this barren, rotting land over you?"

"Don't speak so!" she said, because those had been her thoughts. She had scarcely dared to think them, and now they hung in the damp evening air. They could not now be unsaid. "Why are you here?"

"I wanted to say farewell to my favorite cousin," he said, and she shuddered at his words. All of her brothers had perished, and the hands of the Kinslayers were red with their blood.

"I am your only cousin," she said. He reached out to her and she stepped backwards, almost tripping on a root in her haste to escape him. "Don't touch me!"

"Artanis," Maglor said. "I have been so alone-"

"You deserve to be!" she snapped, and he flinched visibly at her words. "My brothers are dead because of you, my friends are dead because of you, the cities of Doriath, and Sirion, and Alqualondë are gone because of you!"

"Do you think I haven't paid for my sins?" he asked. "I have spent every agonizing minute of my life in this world looking for something I have no business possessing. My days and nights are consumed by my father's lust for the Silmaril, and my hands kill instead of heal, my voice screams instead of sings! I left my wife in Valinor, and I will never see her again! I am doomed to wander the shores of the sea, doomed to live alone, doomed to never die! I've tried to kill myself, I've tried to starve, to hang, to drown, to stab, but the Oath I took prevents me from that. Fëanor's shibboleth is my bane, and I cannot escape it!" She looked at Maglor, and felt a tear rend her heart. He had the stooped shoulders of the long-defeated, and the hunted gaze of a weary animal.

"Makalaurë," she murmured, and she remembered how she would run to him when she was younger, when her brother had beaten her at swords, or one of the princes laughed at her for wanting to fight because she was a girl. He had said her name so soothingly, he had set her on his knee and taught her to play the harp, to sing as sweetly as an Ainur. What had he told her, so long ago? They're jealous, Artanis, because all they can do is fight, and there's nothing you can't do.

She brushed her hand against his cheek, and up into his hair. As a babe, she remembered she had loved to pull at it, to yank as hard as she was able and see the faces he made at the pain. He stiffened beneath her touch, and she pulled away. It was a crime worthy of death to touch another's hair unasked for in Valinor, not that death was an understood concept back then. When Fëanor had grabbed a handful of her hair, High King Finwë had done nothing.

"Why are you here, truly?" she asked, and he looked into her eyes, though all she could see in his was her own reflection.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I wanted to apologize, I needed to, and I know nothing I can say or do will bring your brothers or Doriath back, but for what it's worth, I am sorry, Artanis, for everything."

"Maglor," she said. "I'm sorry too, for your father, and your brothers, and your wife, and all your sorrows." He embraced her, the last two elves born in Valinor in all the world, and she rested her head on his shoulder, imagining a time far back in the past, when death was a joke, where the worst crime imaginable was forgetting to bow to the king, where she had been a princess, and he had been her favorite cousin, where all her kin were still living.

"Send my love to my wife," he said, and she felt a sob rising in her chest.

"Send mine to my husband," she said, her voice breaking. How was it that, after all her years of wanting to leave, she could not now bear to go? "Oh, Kanafinwë-"

"Were you ever happy?" he asked her, and her thoughts turned towards the shining silver child she had borne.

"Yes," she said. "I was so happy."

"I'm glad," he said. He said no more, but only looked at her, as if in her golden hair he might catch some glimpse of Valinor.

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