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We met again upon the battlements of Helm's Deep. Later, I likened us to swallows reunited at the very first breath of spring. You did not like those words. Perhaps because by then you could already see the claw-marks of the dark sickness upon me.
We stood together upon the battlements. Two women at the head of two armies.
I was the fairest daughter ever born among all the Children of the World. Nobody said "Only the descendant of Lúthien Tinúviel could unite the armies of Men and Elves."
In Helm’s Deep I touched the light of my heart against the flesh of your heart. "You keep me safe," I said and you replied "You are my heart." And so it was. We walked across the sea of parting. We kept one another safe.
We parted beneath the moonlight, as simply as we always had beneath the swelling buds of spring, or in the white stillness of snow, before the summers and autumns that came and passed in solitude among the branches outside my chamber. The summers of my patience. The winters heavy with scent.
But the seasons had ended around us. The times were changing. They lay within their shell, which had begun to crack, like the egg of a sparrow. Darkness would come, of course. It had already hatched in the heart of the South, born of iron, fire, and black earth, with broad, powerful wings and sharpened talons. It had already touched me. But I was not afraid.
Our own egg had to break. We would have to crack it open ourselves, with our own claw.
The wanderings were over. All scents would become part of the past. The sweetness of your sweat behind your ear, and the smell of oak. The dark earth caught in the cracks of your palms. The scent of the forest you carried with you. The hours I spent upon the veranda, waiting for the cries of birds bursting suddenly from the trees like living banners. The warm hours. You never spoke much, but when you wished to, you could tell a good story.
At Helm's Deep you pressed your nose against my neck. You listened to the story of my heart. You breathed in the forests of Lórien upon me, and the waters of my grandmother, Galadriel. Then you held my hand while the remnants of battle dissolved into the earth like withered leaves. I told you we had reached the end of wandering. After this, other things would have to come. I dreamed of buds opening in the hands of the tree, in some city very far away.
I had seen you looking at me through the water as though I were gazing into a mirror. My black hair and your black hair. Our blue eyes. The white tree burned within the rippling water, dissolving into the flames until it became one with the black earth and the blackened, smoke-filled sky. You were not there. I stepped aboard a white ship of carved beech that drifted peacefully across the Sundering Seas. I wore white. Bright shadows danced across my gown and through the silk of my hair. I do not know where you were.
Then the sickness caught up with me. It tore my arms with its talons. It lifted me from the ground and laid me upon your bed.
That happened after Helm's Deep. There, before the mouth of the rock, we stood side by side and fought bravely. I liked that. Nothing like it had ever been written about me. In the midst of battle, my evenstar heart beat against your armor in steady rhythm, like the feet of soldiers upon the earth, marching backwards and forwards into destiny.
You would bid me farewell one last time before setting out toward the white tree of my dreams, sitting beside the bed of my illness. And I would take your head into my hands one final time and say goodbye to you as one bids farewell to the sun sinking beneath the green horizon. The dark days had come, and they would pass.
Our swift-footed hearts would carry us through them.