Chapter Text
Elrond Peredhel’s first memory was light.
Beautiful, glowing, multicolored light. His and Elros’s minds connected as they gazed at it together, suckling at their Nana’s breasts.
If someone were to enter their little house at the center of the camp, opening the door to let in the music of the river, they would have seen their princess bearing three great lights: a silmaril on the carcanet around her throat, and two sleepy infant boys held tight against her chest. If that someone used just a touch of imagination, they might have thought the three great silmarils were reunited again before Princess Elwing. Then that person would blink, see that two of the jewels were not jewels but princes, and, upon reflection, be thankful that the camp was blessed with the boys instead of all three silmarils.
Elrond squirmed drowsily, picking up the impulse from Elros. He made clumsy grabby hands at the light. For a moment it shone red under his little fingers. His Nana exhaled a soft sound that was half sigh and half chuckle.
She gently pried his fingers off her grandmother’s silmaril and hummed a lullaby, a familiar tune to the twins. It was a song of Doriath, one her own Nana had sung to her and her brothers long ago, under the glittering jeweled domes of Menegroth. The Sindarin flowed gently from her lips, and the twins quieted, hearkening. Half-formed images of silver trees and night-loving nightingales floated through Elrond’s mind, his Nana’s indemmar telling a tale of a place he would never go.
As one, he and Elros drifted into Irmo’s misty realm, where, for a while at least, they could remain sheltered children.
He was asleep. He dreamed of multicolored light flowing down a waterfall, his half-closed eyes still settled on his Nana’s silmaril.
He did not see his Ada come in, his blond curls that the twins loved to tug on matted with salt. He did not see his eyes, normally crinkled in laughter, bearing a somberness that made his Elwing draw in an anxious breath.
Elrond did not hear their hushed voices, talking long into the night about food scarcity, and orc patrols in neighboring lands, and another handful of their joined subjects fading from grief for their lost homes. He did not hear Ëarendil telling his beloved about his mentor Cirdan’s worries about his own people, or the difficulty in sourcing wood for his ship project, or the odd, malice-coated beasts that had succeeded in spreading from the land to the coastal seas, and the war wild-tempered Ossë was making on them.
Elrond did not hear any of it, did not feel the thick air of unease that suffused his home that night.
In Irmo’s land, with Elros by his side, held close by his Nana, bathed in the light of a holy jewel soaked in bloody history, he felt perfectly safe.