Chapter Text
There came a lady clad in grey
beneath the moon a-shining.
One moment did she stand and stay
her hair with flowers entwining.
He woke, as had he sprung of stone,
beneath the moon in shadow,
And clasped her fast, both flesh and bone;
and they were clad in shadow.
And never more she walked in light,
or over moonlit mountain,
But dwelt within the hill, where night
is lit but with a fountain -
Save once a year when caverns yawn,
and hills are clad in shadow,
They dance together then till dawn
and cast a single shadow.
(From an early version of J. R. R. Tolkien's poem 'Shadow-Bride', 1936)
He says: “they’ll tell stories about us one day. When these people’s distant grandchildren walk the realm, when everyone’s forgotten when we came, when all of our history is so faint we’re stitched into the land like legend, they’ll still tell stories about us.”
Turning to her, cradling her, his forehead pressed to hers: “maybe we’ll be here to hear it, Galadriel. Maybe we’ll be telling the stories ourselves. Some curly-haired child on your knee, Theo’s forty-times-great grandson.”
“Maybe we’ll be far away,” she says in return. “Maybe we’ll be gone. Some distant empty land. Forodwaith - your fortress must still stand under the ice. We could rule the snow and the grey seals.”
(Neither of them mentions Valinor.)
He stares up at the rafters, dreaming awake, and tells her: “They’ll begin like this. Once upon a time there was a soldier, a great warrior of the elves. The youngest child and only daughter of a mighty family. And there was… what am I in this story? The monster, the king?”
“The smith,” she says.
He smiles at that. “Yes. A blacksmith king, who paid a bride-price for the warrior elf with mithril and magic and the work of his hands. And they lived in happiness from that day forth in a land -“
“Mairon.”
“Ah, now. It’s a poorer story the way you’d tell it. But if you insist: they lived in happiness eventually in a land of apple trees. Better?”
Perhaps, better. But that’s not where it begins.
It begins with an oath.
Númenor, centuries before
Although the smith was a master of his craft, trained by Aulë himself, the people of the island kingdom doubted him. Here, even with the guild crest on his shoulder, he had to begin as barely more than the apprentices that scuttered around the workshop. Here he had to prove his work.
Fortunately for the smith, the forges were all in great demand making materials for the great warrior’s war. Somehow she had managed to convince the island queen to grant her an army. She had her ships, her soldiers, all the swords they could make her; and yet she would not be content without bringing the smith, too.
“That is hardly -"
“Shhhh. It’s a legend, a fairytale. They’re true in a different way.”
The first time she asked him, he said no. The smith had left behind war and anger and everything on Middle-earth. He told her that he wanted to find peace on the island kingdom and never return there; he told her to find another head to crown. And still she was not deterred.
She came a second time, found him in the forge and begged him to go with her, and a second time he told her no. He told her that he was not the hero she sought. He told her that he had done evil; he told her that when the island people learned of it, they would cast him out; he told her that she, too, would cast him out. Still, she was not deterred.
There was something in the warrior that compelled the smith. She seemed like a being sent from the Valar to bring him back to greatness. He had seen her only once before, at the head of a company of warriors hunting across the tundra; and he had watched, curious, noting her beautiful hair, her speed, her determination as she struck down an ambush party of orcs. He thought then that she might prove a worthy adversary. He never expected she would seek him as an ally.
And so he was thinking about her, as he stayed behind to finish sweeping the forge. He was thinking what it would be like to fight her, and what it would be like to fight alongside her. He was thinking what it would be like to kiss her with the sparks of the forge fires dancing in her eyes. He was thinking that in some other reality, he had chosen to fight at her side already; and in another reality still, he had captured her in that frozen tundra and held her hostage, hands and feet bound, glaring up at him on his throne. He was thinking of what it would be like to run his fingers through her hair, to hold her face close to his. He was wondering in which possible realities she would struggle and bite at his lip as he kissed her, and in which of those she would find herself thrilled at the taste of his blood.
The smith was a little of a monster, after all. A little of a monster, and a little of a king.
A third time, the warrior came, and this time she brought him a gift. The gift of an oath - her own oath - to forgive him anything from his past and stay loyal at his side, no matter what she learned of this evil he had done, so long as he would name himself king and follow her into battle. And she took his hand, and pressed it against the anvil; and swore to Aulë that if this smith would be loyal to her, and do as she asked him, then she would forgive him his past and stand by him even if all others cast him out. She would stand by him.
And so, he agreed.
And then he told her his name.
She shifts beside him in their bed, all these long years later. “Perhaps you hoped I wouldn’t recognise ‘Mairon’.”
“I knew full well you’d recognise it. I gave you the name I wanted. Do you think I wanted to be Sauron then?”
“Didn’t you?” she says. “Not even a little?”
“Galadriel,” he says. “My warrior wife, my queen. Let me tell my story and you tell yours.”
(Which isn’t the same as ‘no’. But he never lies to her.)
At first, what Galadriel did was - nothing. Too keenly aware that all the actions available to her could turn against her in some way she could not foresee, too overcome by the weight of her own words pressing her down like anchor chains, she sank to the floor by the anvil and could not even weep.
Halbrand who was not Halbrand, who had never been Halbrand, said some things to her she did not hear. Then he ignored her, and at the edges of her vision she saw him continue to work, clearing and tidying, sweeping the floors. Then he squatted down before her. “Coming with me to see the Queen Regent?”
Somehow she was still breathing. Somehow, she still existed. But speech, movement, pleading for him to stop this, all were beyond her. And eventually he was no longer there and she realised he must have gone to the Queen, sealing his fate and hers.
Twilight had turned into night, turned into the grey pale shadows of early morning. Then from nowhere he was there again, his hand on her face, fingers dug in under her jawbone as he pulled her head up, some sort of bottle pressed to her lips. She tasted rich, heady spices and spat, pushing it away. “What is that?”
“Wine. We’re celebrating.” He was smiling at her, smiling as if the world had not just broken into pieces and left her forever tumbling through the gaps. “Good to hear you talking again, elf, I was getting worried.”
She could indeed talk, it seemed, although turning her head to look at him or doing anything more with her hands than drag them into her lap was beyond her. “What do you intend to do to these people,” she said quietly to the ground.
“Have them follow you. Hunt orcs, save the Southlands.”
“Hunt orcs.” Nothing made sense any more. “Your orcs.”
He rocked back on his heels, and she could feel his eyes on her, looking at her, long and awful and unrelenting. “Let’s go for a walk,” he said. And eventually, when she didn’t respond, “People need room to work here. Besides, don’t you want to hear what evil things I’ve got planned?”
“No.”
“How are you going to stop me, then?” And faster than she could react, one hand on her elbow and the other arm around her shoulders, he hauled her to her feet. “Come on. Walk.”
Outside, it seemed that the sun still rose. People still hurried through the town squares exchanging quiet early morning conversations, shutters were still thumped open, boots were still laced up by yawning workers sat on doorsteps.
He steered her through parts of the city she hadn’t seen before, through courtyards and narrow alleys between tight-crowded houses, up steps that clung tight to sheer cliff faces of pale stone. Throughout, he said nothing, and seemed content enough with her silence. In time, they reached a quiet terrace tucked away before two empty buildings, an old, half-dead fruit tree of some sort growing from a crumbling pot.
He sat down, and gestured for her to sit across from him. For lack of anything better she conceded.
“When you told me your company turned against you. What did they do?”
“What does it matter, now?”
“What did they do,” he said, and when she didn’t answer reached out with his foot to nudge hers, the edge of his boot pressing uncomfortably into the sole of her own.
“Laid down their swords and refused to fight. We returned home.”
“Hmm.” He leans back into the low wall, thoughtful. “And they took you with them, did they?”
“Of course.”
“Bound in chains and beaten, or -”
“Why do you ask me this?”
He was smiling, the same Halbrand smile that had teased her and played with her since the raft, and it seemed almost a greater cruelty than anything else he had done. “You know what my company did, when they turned against me? They split me in two on my own anvil. My own most trusted lieutenant burned what was left of me and then they trod my ashes into mud on their way back south. I think there were songs. I didn’t have much of a form by then to tell but I think there were songs. They fucking cheered when they killed me, Galadriel. That was the last sound I heard, my own army cheering as they watched me die.”
She considered this, picturing him being broken to pieces, torn apart and burned, his spirit drifting away in smoke as those he had trusted laughed and celebrated. “Good,” she said.
His eyebrows came up, his head cocked to one side. “Are you going to ask me why they did all that?”
“It doesn’t matter why. You are evil, those who served you are evil. What difference if that evil turns on itself? Like a snake poisoned by its own bite.”
She still had Finrod’s dagger. It was in her hand before she had to think, her mind operating on some level more primitive than oaths or allegiances or any future beyond this moment. She lunged straight for his throat -
His hand closed on her wrist like iron, seemingly already there before she’d even moved. Deadpan: “Won’t you please spare me, kind elf.”
“There is no need for you to mock me.” Her voice seemed so quiet, now, as if nothing she could say would make any difference any more. “Why did you not kill me when you could? You had enough chances.”
“Which should be evidence enough that I don’t want you dead. Unless you think I’m careless. And I am not careless.” He nods to her dagger. “I got this back for you, remember?”
She hadn’t forgotten. “Why? What purpose of yours did that serve?”
He shrugs.
“Sauron.” She’d said the name a hundred times, a thousand; sobbed it and howled it, snarled it and whispered it, yelled it across empty frozen wastes. She had never once said it to him.
A slight, untroubled nod of acknowledgement. “One of my names.”
“I know all of your names.”
“You do not, Galadriel of the Noldor.”
“Skip this part. It’s boring.”
“You don’t want to hear again what you told me. How you convinced me.”
He rolls onto his stomach, the better to shake his head at her chidingly. “Go on then,” he says. “And the smith said to the warrior…”
He told her that they had a common enemy. A plan - Morgoth’s plan - they both, surely, wanted to oppose.
He told her that he had turned against Morgoth and his legacy legacy, and that his aim was to heal Middle-earth and mend the damage that had been wrought.
He told her that he had never, never once, lied to her.
And he reminded her that she had, after all, sworn an oath to stand by him. She had sworn, of her own free will, not to turn him away for his past. Not to cast him aside. She had sworn to Aulë. She had sworn an oath, Galadriel, this said with a dangerous and ancient look in his eyes.
And just as her hand tightened again on the handle of her dagger, he added: “But only for my past. Not my present. Not my future. If I’m deceiving you, if I really am planning to carry out some great evil, you’ll be able to turn on me as soon as you learn of it without breaking that oath. And won’t it be easier for you to do that when you’ll be there at my side?”
Perhaps part of her believed him. Perhaps she was only so desperate for a way out of this that she seized on his words anyway, denying what he was.
At any rate, she had no choice.
“Do you want to know why I really got your dagger back for you?” He leant in too close, some awful caricature of intimacy, and whispered: “Because I saw you wanted it. You woke up on the ship and it was the first thing you looked for. I knew I could get it for you, so I did. That’s it.”
“And the smith deceived her -"
“No. No I didn’t.”
“The smith deceived her.”
“I wish you wouldn’t say that, Galadriel.”
The journey went much as she imagined. She felt sick at the thought of what she was doing, bringing this evil back to Middle-Earth, granting it a crown and an army.
(“I’d have the army anyway, Galadriel,” he whispered to her as they stood at the railings watching the seabirds swoop low over the waves. “At least you’re here to watch me.”)
He joked with the soldiers, the young ones she’d taught to fight, and over days they began to follow him about coaxing stories and battle advice from him. On the third occasion that she found him sitting below decks with an admiring circle surrounding him, when she resolved to finally confront him and stop whatever poison he was dripping into their ears, she approached only to find he was describing the beautiful mountains of Middle-Earth to these children of Númenor who had never seen them.
“Commander Galadriel!” A tone of pleasant surprise, as if he hadn’t known she was there, as if he was nothing but pleased to see her. “Can you tell them what the elf kingdoms are like? I barely know more than stories, myself.”
(“If you harm them,” she told him later, “if your intention is to bring them to death and ruin, I will devote the rest of my life to hunting you down in any form you take until the end of Arda itself.” He only laughed.)
When they rode out across the Southland plains, she wondered whether they were galloping towards some betrayal at last. An ambush, an army coming to hail him their dark lord. But instead, it was all as he said: scattered hamlets, empty farmhouses, dead crops, then a band of orcs and a smaller band of terrified, outnumbered villagers, who stared at the approaching Númenor cavalry as though the Valar themselves had sent it.
She couldn’t spare the attention to keep close watch on him in battle. She was commanding, she was battling orcs, and it felt glorious and right. And somehow he was always there anyway, at her side, battling with her, so quick to anticipate her moves it felt that they had been fighting like this for years.
She still wouldn’t believe him, though, not even when they captured the moriondor enemy commander. She wouldn’t believe Adar’s failure to recognise him; wouldn’t believe Halbrand’s anger, “remember me?”, a weapon raised and a snarl. Wouldn’t believe any of it, not even when they had him tied for questioning in an empty barn. Not when he told her he killed Sauron, not when he claimed Sauron had been trying to undo the damage he had caused, not even when she threatened to drag Adar’s orcs into the sunlight so he could watch them die one by one unless he would admit -
“Galadriel.” Halbrand’s voice (no, not Halbrand, not Halbrand), his hand on her shoulder, keeping her back. Then: “Did I tell you how I killed your brother?”
She went for him without a second thought.
“Ah - no.” This time he knocked her dagger to the ground, held her wrist fast to stop her going to retrieve it. “I thought he was their leader,” he said, his face inches from hers. “Obviously he had to be their leader. An elf, one of the Noldor! But he wouldn’t admit it. And he wouldn’t tell me who they were or what they were doing in my tower, or anything. He wouldn’t even give away Beren to spare himself, your brother - so very loyal. And so I sent one of my wolves out to kill all the prisoners, one by one, in front of him until he gave me what I wanted. I was just - like - you.”
He let go of her, and turned to Adar as she sagged to her knees and the world seemed to fold and crumple around her. “Remember me now, you treacherous little worm?” she heard him say.
“I would like to interject to remind you that the smith does not harm the villain, very much. The smith is kind and forgiving despite what he’s been through.”
“You threatened to ram your fist down his throat.”
“But I didn’t, did I? I couldn’t, not with you there. My guiding star, my lady of light. Let me tell this part. I’m better at stories.”
The bracelets on her arm clink softly as she moves. Once they were coloured cloth, woven tight, one for the birth of each of her children in the Pelargir tradition. But Pelargir’s traditions are for mortals; for them, the colours faded and the cloth wore thin to fraying almost before the children were all the way grown. The original bracelets are long ago gone. Now they are metal forged to look like woven ribbons, made by the blacksmith king who had first tied the cloth around her arm.
He makes things; he mimics things, and echoes them, and changes in the guise of improving, and improves in the guise of mending. Like the bracelets she wears, like and yet unlike the cloth they represent. Like the stories he tells, and their story when he tells it - so much more beautiful than the way it really began.
“You tell it to me, then,” she says.
The warrior and the smith knew they were battling a cunning foe, akin to the dragons of old, one that lied and tricked and deceived with its tongue. They knew better than to trust the golden poisoned honey of its speech.
And because their foe was clever, it knew better than to lie to them directly. Instead, it spoke in half-truths, trying to weaken the smith and turn the warrior against him.
“You’ve returned with your own pet elf, I see. Does it please you to have elves do your bidding again? Is this one a replacement for me?”
The smith kicked him, a foot hard to the monstrous creature’s chest.
“So bright and pure. Yet so cruel and cold. Is this what you do with elves now, Lord Sauron?”
But the foe was mistaken; for the warrior could not have been so cruel, nor so cold, as she permitted him to live.
The warrior walked away without a word, and the smith thought for a time that he had lost her. He walked through crowds of cheering soldiers, beer splashing from their mugs, searching for her, and she was not there. He asked the villagers she saved, who grouped together in huddles as they mourned and celebrated together, and none had seen her. He began to think she had left him, his warrior; he began to wonder if she was some gift given to him and then pulled away, some prize shown to mock him. Then the island queen told him to search in the trees, and there he found the warrior waiting for him.
“Shhh.” His hand between her shoulder-blades, stroking her back down to quiet before she’d even objected. “I know, I know, you've told me enough times, but let me tell it now. Let me tell this part.”
The smith wanted to tell the warrior what he had felt, fighting alongside her. He wanted to show her how clear he was now of the path ahead and of her place at his side. Or he wanted to bring her the head of her enemy, lay all the orc weapons before her in a great, clattering pile. Or he wanted to build her some vast palace, the sort he had once been able to design, but not out of smoke and black stone any more; something light, marble, limestone. A gift, a home. Enough to remind her of the elves, should she ever miss them.
Or he would bring her a crown; a sword; a ship. Whatever she liked. Truly, in that moment there was nothing in Arda he wouldn’t have brought her or hunted for her, forged for her, built for her. She could have had anything.
But she seemed to fear what he might say, and he in turn feared what she might do, and so they sat there in silence together on a fallen log, until the mountain of fire woke and all was ruined.
“You forgot -”
“I didn’t. It doesn’t matter.”
“The part where you claimed to be their king doesn’t matter?”
“And what’s a king, Galadriel? Rule by descent, rule by conquest, it’s much the same to farmers. They needed a king, they had none other.”
The volcano felt both like a terrible shock and a terrible inevitability. Galadriel woke buried in ash in smoking ruins, and her first thought was to call for him, using the name she first knew him by at sea. Then her second thought, that this must be his work, this must have been what he led them towards the whole time. Then her third, when she couldn’t find him or any other alive, that maybe this was some form of justice, the world burned in fire just as Beleriand had sunk beneath the waves; that his evil had been so great that his punishment was to burn up in the ruins of his would-be kingdom, and that her punishment was to wander the ashes alone.
But she found Theo, in the end. She found the survivors from Númenor, at their camp, with their blinded queen (her fault, surely her fault), with sorrowing Elendil whose son (her fault, again) was not there.
And then: “What about our king?”
The creature who claimed to be their king was lying under sweat-drenched sheets, shirt stained with darkening blood, healers fussing around him. If he were truly a mortal man she would have been deeply concerned for his life.
She sent away all of them, the healers, the Silvan elf Arondir who had stayed with these people after the elves withdrew. Stayed calm and quiet until they were out of hearing. “You monster,” she spat at him then, “you have never been anything but evil, this was your plan the entire time -”
“This wasn’t me.” Simmering fury in his voice. “I didn’t do this, this was that fucking orc, this is what I was trying to stop. Look!” He pulled at his bloody shirt.
“How convenient for you.”
“Come on, Galadriel, how’s it convenient for me to have them kill me again?”
“Oh, I think it would take more than this to kill something like you.”
There was a very slight smile at the corner of his mouth, that part of him that she was learning to recognise was pleased when she acknowledged what he was, how powerful he was. “Maybe I’ll live, but the injury is real. I can’t exactly hunt him now. You’ll have to go without me.”
“I’ll have to?”
“You swore an oath,” he says. “You swore an oath to stand by me, Galadriel.”
“And because you could not keep from doing evil -”
“Don’t you even think about turning your back on me now. Don’t you dare.” He pushed himself up on his elbows, wincing at the pain in his side. “You swore an oath to Aulë.”
“For your past. I am not bound to stay at your side for anything you have done since. I am released.”
“No. No you are not.” His face became something different, something worse, his eyes yellowed and cat-like, his fury blasting from him like the heat of the volcano. “I have not lied to you and I have done no evil since we set foot on this land. You swore yourself to me and you can’t go. You will not go. I command you stay, Galadriel, Galadriel -"
“Goodbye, Halbrand,” she said, the last time she would ever call him by that name. And she did not turn back, even at his wordless scream.
One final thing, before she left. She gathered several of the people of the Southlands, Arondir, Bronwyn who seemed to be the closest to a leader they had. “The creature in there is not what you believe,” she said. “He is not a mortal man. He is not your rightful king. He is a servant of Morgoth from long ago. I am sworn not to kill him for what he has done, but none of you are bound by what binds me. He is weak now. Do what you must.” And she rode away, back to the elves and the High King, who had been wrong about Sauron but perhaps, all along, right about her.
“It did hurt. I was in agony.”
“Yes, you poor, injured -"
“Now, now.” His weight on top of her, his lips silencing her jibes, suddenly hungry and urgent. “I should have had you in that bed right there, injured or no. I could have convinced you. I know how to convince you.”
“You didn’t, then.”
“I had some ideas.” He traces a line down her side, shoulder to hip. “Anyway, you didn’t kill me so I knew all wasn’t lost.”
“I couldn’t. It would have been for the past whatever I claimed, I’d have broken my oath.”
“You couldn’t.” A soft kiss at the base of her throat. “You couldn’t. And you came back.” His knee nudged her thighs apart.
“You said you wanted to tell the story.”
“I'm bored with the story. Now I want my wife.”
“What you want is a distraction from what you did.”
He slumped down beside her. “No, Galadriel. From what you did.”
There will be stories about them: legends, myths, fairy tales.
And fairy tales are cruel.