The forest should not have known my name, and yet it whispered it.

The wind carried it, low and mournful, as though the leaves themselves remembered the songs I once sang beneath Valinor’s unmarred stars. Maglor Fëanorion. Prince. Kinslayer. Oath-breaker. Father of none, yet guardian of two I did not deserve.

Elrond slept in my arms, his small brow pressed against my shoulder, his breath warm despite the winter air. Elros walked beside me, quiet, no longer asking when we would find safety — he had stopped believing in such things days ago.

The trees parted like a held breath.

And there it was — Taur Im Duinath. Her realm.

Moonlight spilled across pale stone and silvered birch. Lanterns glimmered like stars caught in glass. The air smelled of riverwater and night-blooming flowers — the same scent that clung to her hair the last night I held her in Valinor, before my father’s oath dragged me away.

I thought I had forgotten how to tremble. I was wrong.

I stopped at the foot of the steps that led toward her moonlit hall — the Moonwell, they called it now. She had built a kingdom from grief.

She stood above me.

Not the girl in white satin who once pressed her forehead to mine at Alqualondë — but a queen crowned in pale branches and quiet danger. The Black Swan of the Swanhaven, now clothed in shadow and silver waterlight. The woman whose people my hands had not protected. The woman whose kin my brother’s sword had cut down.

Her eyes — Eru, her eyes — widened the barest fraction when she saw me. And then… stillness. Like the sea just before the tide turns red.

My throat burned. The Silmaril at my hip pulsed beneath its wrapping, searing my skin with every heartbeat. A constant reminder — you are unclean.

I forced the words out.

“I have no right to stand before you.”

My voice sounded like broken glass.

“But they have done no wrong. If you would cast me out, or kill me here, I will not fight you.”

I shifted Elrond gently in my arms, the child murmuring in his sleep.

“Only… take them in.”

Silence.

Even the nightingales stopped singing.

I braced for her to turn away. Or to order her guards to cut me down where I stood. In truth — I prayed for it.

Instead, she whispered — barely audible over the river.

“Why come to me?”

I raised my head.

And for the first time in centuries, I spoke the truth without armor.

“Because before the ships burned… you loved me.” “And because I —” My voice broke. “I still do not know how to stop loving you.”

The words left me raw. Exposed. As helpless as any mortal kneeling before judgment.

She did not speak.

She descended the white steps one by one, her pale hair like moonlight over water, until she stood before me.

Close enough for me to see the small scar on her palm — a memory of a night long before the bloodshed, when she tugged me laughing through the coral gardens beneath the lamp-light of Tirion.

Her hands trembled.

So did mine.