Middle-earth belongs to Tolkien. Thanks to Finlay for beta reading. MEFA 2009 First Place.

The Gift of Ilúvatar

She walked alone under the trees of Lorien and the leaves fell about her. Slender she was and graceful, but her air was one of sorrow and despair. She had not spoken in a long time, for there was no other talking creature left now in the Golden Wood. Pale winter light caressed Arwen Undomiel. While she walked, she let her eyes wander, greeting trees she had known from saplings, grieving for those that had succumbed to time.

To be older than the trees meant to see these slow and beautiful creatures grow and flourish and die. It meant to see rivers change their course and coastlines worn away by the sweeping tides. To be free from death was a sorrow mortals could not comprehend. The sadness of the Elves was the sadness of the futility of their lives, as ones forever sitting on the banks of a river, watching it flow by. To preserve what once was in story and song and to hold on to the memories of ages past became a heavier burden with each passing millennium. The eldest of her kind were weighed down indeed with the remnants of endless years.

Verily, they had their pleasures and their merriment; finer garments, choicer dishes and brighter songs than any other race. Still, the essence of their being was sadness. Their joy drifted away whenever the stars faded, but their grief clung to them as an everlasting gloom.

New things rarely captivated the Elves, and yet sameness made their days stretched thin like evening mist on the hillsides. Everything was fleeting, everything was in vain. To attach their hearts to anything meant to lose it, and they were destined forever to watch the slow decay of the things they loved. Their desire for beauty inspired them to great works of art and of craft, but once completed each creation brought with it the burden of having to defend it against the ravages of time. The Elven Rings had power to preserve some things for some time, but even those were destined to fade. Her father's home, her grandmother's realm, she had always known to be just episodes in the vast history of Middle-earth. Everything she knew carried its own doom from the beginning.

Men, on the other hand, seemed so much at home in their little islands of time. She had watched it with marvel. Their hearts seemed stronger, their passions fiercer. Sorrow had a weaker hold on them and their minds always turned to hope and renewal. Their lives were filled with purpose, driven to build what they could hope would outlive them: homes, cities and kingdoms. Mere trifles these things were to the Elves, who would see them crumble into dust, but to Men they gave both promise and pride. They wove garments that would be heirlooms. They planted trees to give grandchildren shade. They sat down at the end of a day, pleased with the changes they had wrought.

Men seemed to change and grow so much in mind and in skill in such short spaces of time. Elves were grieved by change, because they themselves changed so little. But changelessness speeds up the pace of life, when there is nothing to give weight to the years. Songworthy deeds are not done every day, so what was there left to remember? Arwen had seen her life slipping away like sand through her fingers. It never mattered what she did today, since she might as well do it tomorrow, and so Today and Tomorrow began to feel as if they were the same. Nigh on three thousand years she had lived without a lover or a child. Whole centuries had faded without trace, memories and songs melting into one as if it mattered not what was once real, until she felt that nothing, nothing would ever touch her at all.

How crisp and clear were, by comparison, her years with Estel. Short years, little more than a drop in the ocean of her vast life span, and yet a drop that changed the hue of everything. What had drawn her to him, that day on the mound of Cerin Amroth, was the sudden wave of knowledge washing over her that here was someone whose life truly mattered. And thus her heart had chosen him, to share in a life that had meaning and weight. He had been her anchor in time and her beacon in a sea of indifference.

When Estel had died, she had mourned him, but she had also envied him. His work was done and he had spent his time well. He had seen his world renewed and would not see it fail. The sapling he had planted was flourishing still. She longed for the peace that shone from his eyes when he closed them forever. Most of all, though, she was not yet weary of him, and the gift of the One to Men seemed to her more bitter even than she had expected. Indeed, she had never tired of him.

For there was another, a deeper sorrow, of which the Elves did not speak: That as the centuries passed, they grew weary of each other, however great the love between them. They did not welcome separation, but they bore it willingly. When her mother had departed into the West, her father had bowed his head to the inevitable and had not wavered in his choice to stay. It sufficed for him to know that they would meet again; he felt no urgency for that day to come. And thus it always was with her kind, content to linger and postpone. Few Elves had ever truly said farewell. Her father had at last encountered that final parting, when he sailed into the West and left her behind, and she knew that the bitterness of it was to him beyond any song in the Elven tongue.

Bitterness was on her mind now when she looked back on her life. Through long, languid years of yearning she had come, and one sudden day had found a love beyond all expectation. Anxious years had followed, years of fear under a deepening shadow, until her banner had been unfurled, the crown regained, the sapling revealed. A lover she had become, a mother and a queen. Now all, all was lost and nothing was left for her but to linger, without purpose or aim.

She had forsaken her mother and father, she had forsaken her kind. Her fate had become entwined with those for whom eternity is but a dream. There she walked, weighed down with the enormity of her grief and the sadness of too many years, and so she came to comprehend the choice of Elros. What a mercy to let go of one's sorrow. What a mercy to know an end. Thus she stood again on the mound of Cerin Amroth, with the golden leaves of Lorien scattered round her feet, ready at last to embrace Death. The Gift of Ilúvatar: She understood it now.