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“It has long been said amongst Men that whosoever might taste the heart of a dragon would know all tongues of Gods or Men, of birds or beasts, and his ears would catch whispers of the Valar or of Melko such as never had he heard before.”
- BoLT 2
Elros awoke to a hiss of wind and a distant clamor of seabirds. The sky above, divided by branches, looked bright and open even through its film of smoke. It seemed a fine morning.
Elros then became aware of a soreness invading his every joint, and the morning grew less fine. He could not ascertain, to any reliable degree, the position of his body in space. It took him only a bit of shifting and blinking to figure out why: he lay draped over a crook in the branches of a great dead tree, a white oak to be exact, its ancient limbs scraped bare. And though his brother’s cloak had been thrown across his body, he found himself scraped quite bare beneath as well. He was also a good seven yards above the ground.
Off to the left, a branch creaked as it shifted. There sat Elrond, hair neatly bound, swinging his legs and observing him.
“Well?” said Elros. “Care to explain?”
“Explain what, my dear brother?” Elrond asked with utmost solemnity.
Elros disentangled a hand and lifted it to indicate the current state of things.
“Ah,” Elrond said. “Mistake me not for any kind of expert in these matters, but we appear to be in a tree.”
Elros rather thought the man could do with a shove out of the tree and into some sort of pond. Sadly, the view offered only ragged bluffs rolling down toward the sea. “Why though,” he pressed. “Why are we perched in this snag like a pair of birds? A naked bird, even, in my case.”
“Runs in the family, I suppose.”
He was struggling fiercely to hold back his laughter, and Elros could tell. Gathering the cloak about his shoulders, he hauled himself half upright, the better to glare at his brother until he relented.
“Alright, alright. I assume you recall what became of Ancalagon the Black, scourge of the skies, mightiest of all the Enemy’s accursed host.”
“Yes.”
“And the tradition among Men of draining and drying a dragon’s heart for the slayer to sample.”
“Why, yes.”
“And the fact that the true slayer whisked himself away with the sunrise, leaving you as his heir in the eyes of the lore-keepers of the Men.”
“Not all of them,” Elros put in. “Not everyone favors the elder twin and not everyone counts us as Men, and they gnawed on all that in their council for a full day at least before extending the honor to me. But they told me it would send me into a swoon on the ground, unable to move! Nothing about - this.”
Elrond quirked a half-smile. “Ever the outliers, aren’t we?”
Sighing, Elros let his eyes drift back to the horizon. The sea was deep here, deep right up to the edge of the land. Spires and steeples of rock balanced blackly out in the water: orphaned headlands, chunks of the ground tossed afar. The birds called to each other. He was grateful for Elrond’s silence as he gathered his mind up, arranging the snatches of memory into order.
“First you grew restless and got to your feet,” supplied Elrond eventually.
“It felt important to me,” recalled Elros, nodding. “I knew I was beginning to see things, or see through things perhaps, and I had the sense that I should go look outside.”
Elrond leaned forward, tucking his knees up in front of him in a posture of such familiar curiosity that Elros couldn’t help but grin. The rest of his people would want to know the tale too, eventually, but for now he felt the glimmer of a secret between the two of them, precious and rare, a comfort to his heart.
He told him how the weave of the canvas roof began to swim with his fascination, how patterns multiplied upon themselves before his eyes. He had staggered out, dazzled by the play of light in the air, shrugging off the Hadorian sages who had tried in alarm to herd him back. He was ill and itchy and terribly thirsty, and clutched at Elrond, wailing that he feared himself poisoned - but then forgot all about that when a chatter of meaning materialized in the air. The crows of the camp, gathered to the commotion, were speaking to him. Of course, he realized, they could all speak; speak and sing, each frill of yellow grass and each creeping spider singing their life no different from himself. A world awash in voices, his own a part of it. He called to them, for he knew them. It seemed he had always known them - how could he have forgotten?
After that, his memory failed - he had only fraying flashes left now. Figures came to him out of the shadows of the hills and passed him by, some monstrous, some fair, some even recognizable. He lost all sense of direction. He felt the paths of the stars and the history of the land, falling into the water or rising out of it, felt where people had died and where they had been born. He had to shed all his clothing because it grew too heavy with things dying and being born, but looking down at his body he found the same in himself.
He lay flat on his face in the soil and wept for the enormity of it all.
And then, Elrond informed him, he had struggled to his feet and made a break for the bluffs.
“Why?” Elrond asked. “What terror gripped you so?”
Elros considered it. Only simple words came to his mind, words that seemed too small or too large to trouble a person. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “I think I began to feel that I could not contain that much… I began to feel myself falling to pieces.”
Falling. Yes, falling - crumbling like the land itself had crumbled and vanished. He had to hold on, hold on, hold it all, and he could not.
“And I ran to the feet of this great tree,” he said. “I remember that. It spoke to me too, not with the voice of a living plant, but that of a monument. I must have climbed it, and I must have looked a fool doing so, but I thought rather that the tree had taken me up into its arms and lifted me, to show me the sea. And in that moment I felt - I felt my spirit surrender. And then I was… I wasn’t…”
He had no way to describe what had happened then, except to make a motion with both hands like rain spilling into the water, like smoke disappearing into everything else.
Elrond mimicked the gesture, tilting his head in confusion, and Elros dropped his hands down helplessly. “I don’t know,” he said again.
“Were you still afraid, though?”
“No. Not at all.”
Elrond studied him, puzzling; he felt him try to touch softly at his mind. Whatever he sought, he did not find.
“What then?” he asked at last.
“Well, then I was asleep, and dreaming. I dreamed of great waves.”
Elrond nodded and asked him nothing more. They both glanced to the sea, which lay calm today, though out of sight something disturbed the seabirds' rookery and set them squalling. Elros no longer understood their voices. Perhaps, he thought, he might learn how with enough practice. He missed them already.
Then he heard his brother chuckle. “Great waves…”
“What?”
“You certainly look as though great waves have swept over you.”
Elros plucked a twig and tossed it at him, catching him on the shoulder. But Elrond, undeterred though unsteady, rose and maneuvered himself over to Elros’s branch, and pushed aside his indignant hand, raised more out of principle than anything else. He plucked the flecks of grass from Elros’s hair and set it to right, as he had since they were small together.
There was another memory, actually, somewhere in the middle of the waves, in the middle of the night. It might have been only a different dream. In it Elros opened his eyes to the night sky between the branches, where the darkness still flickered with hidden patterns, but now his mind had cleared as though scoured by a tide. He looked to his left and saw Elrond perched there, his half-asleep face at peace as the wind stirred through his clothing (for he wore no cloak).
Do not fear for me, Elros wanted to tell him. I love you and I know you will never forget. Do not fear.
But he knew not how to say it.
“Elros,” said Elrond now, into the quiet.
Elros hummed in acknowledgement.
“I was thinking,” Elrond began, “that Ancalagon was a rather large individual.”
“That he was,” Elros said.
“I don’t suppose you have any of him left over for me?”