Chapter 428: Arriving in Aman
When Elríen's figure finally disappeared from sight, the composure Arwen had maintained throughout the farewell gave way. The tears came quietly, without any attempt to hold them back.
This parting carried no promise of a return. It might, in truth, be the last. For a mother, there was no way to bear that lightly.
Kael was not untouched by it either. He drew her close and spoke softly.
"Don't grieve, my love. This is only a temporary parting. Trust me—we will see her again."
Arwen looked up at him, her eyes still bright with tears. "Do you truly believe that?"
"I do." His voice was steady. "Trust me."
By the common understanding of things, those who sailed from Middle-earth to Valinor did not return. That was simply how it had always been. But Kael did not consider that an absolute constraint. If he grew strong enough—if he reached the level of a Vala—the question of returning to Middle-earth would cease to be a question at all.
That was part of what drew him westward now: not only to see the land where the Valar dwelled, but to seek them out and find whatever path might lead beyond the level of the Maiar.
In Middle-earth, the level of the Maiar was the ceiling. He had remained there for five hundred years, walking ancient ruins, calling forth the souls of the long dead with the Resurrection Stone, and looking back through history with the Palantíri. With the power he now possessed, he had even been able to draw from a Palantír the events of the War of Wrath in the First Age, watching, in some fashion, as the world had been broken and remade, mountains destroyed, and continents driven beneath the sea.
The scale of what the Valar could accomplish when they moved in full force was beyond anything he could currently imagine matching.
Every path he had pursued in Middle-earth had led him to the same conclusion: if there was a way forward, it lay in Valinor.
There was something else, too. The system that had been with him since the beginning—which had never quite made sense to him, even now—was still there, still beyond his full understanding. He had searched for it within his own soul and found nothing, as though it occupied no place he could perceive.
His best guess was that it belonged to a level of existence beyond his current one, and that only by reaching the power of the Valar, or something beyond, would he be able to understand what it truly was.
And every place in Middle-earth where the system had allowed him to check in had already been visited. If he wanted to continue, Valinor was the only direction left.
——
The great silver-white ship moved westward at speed, the smokestack sending up a continuous trail of steam across the water behind it.
The sea was rough. Great waves came in succession, and the ship — enormous as it was — seemed small against them, liable at any moment to be swallowed up. Círdan at the helm showed no concern at all, guiding the vessel through each wave with the ease of long practice, holding the course.
Arwen and Elthir felt nothing unusual — only the forward motion of the ship, the wind from the west. But Kael could sense what was happening beneath that ordinary surface: the ship was passing through something, moving in a way that had no ordinary physical explanation, crossing between layers of the world and entering a different order of space entirely.
Then the rain came. It descended all at once, a complete curtain of it, covering the entire sea, reducing visibility to nothing. Direction became meaningless. Only the faint pull of the western summons — that persistent sense of location that had sat quietly in the back of Kael's awareness since Gandalf had first pointed it out — gave them any orientation at all.
The rough water subsided. Around the ship, everything became still. No waves, no wind-sound, only the quiet of the ship's movement through calm water and the faint smell of salt air. They might have been on an entirely different sea.
The rain continued for a full month. Kael, Arwen, and Elthir remained inside the cabin, out of the downpour.
Then something changed in the air. A fragrance drifted in—cool and warm at the same time, sweet without being cloying, carrying the scent of flower nectar, fresh greenery, and morning dew. Breathing it in felt like setting down a weight that had been there for so long it had ceased to be noticed. The weariness of a very long life eased, if only slightly.
From the water around the ship came singing—clear and fluid, rising and falling, as though it drifted from somewhere beneath the surface, as though the sea itself had found a voice.
Then the rain dissolved. Not gradually—it broke apart and vanished, like a curtain drawn aside, leaving the sun to fall across the ship's silver hull and cast back a cold, bright, moonlike radiance.
Kael, Arwen, and Elthir stepped out onto the forward deck.
What they saw was this:
The sea was a deep, transparent blue, like an enormous sapphire, clear all the way through, reflecting a sky lit with many-coloured light.
Mermaids swam through the water, countless in number, their faces as beautiful as any Elf's, their hair pale and luminous as flowers in full bloom. They held their arms along the surface as they swam and sang, their voices carrying something that made you want to lean over the rail and go to them. Their upper forms were breathtaking; their lower halves were fish tails, scaled in every colour that glass or water can catch, appearing and disappearing beneath the waves.
They circled the ship as they sang, leading it onward.
The sky above was not the blue of Middle-earth's sky but something softer and more golden — a pale, clear gold that covered everything. The sun hung lower than it ought to, and larger, and yet its light had no heat in it to speak of. It fell like fine cloth, warm and diffuse, turning the surface of the water into something like broken diamonds.
Ahead of them lay land.
A coastline stretched in both directions as far as the eye could reach. The beach was white, flawlessly so, the sand as fine as ground pearl. Behind it, the land rose in gentle slopes, covered with flowers and plants that none of them had names for. Higher up, tall, straight mallorn trees stood with silver bark and golden leaves—far larger and more numerous than those of Lothlórien—covering the hillsides in a continuous sweep that caught the sunlight and scattered it in fragments of gold across the mountains beyond.
Beyond the trees rose the mountains themselves. Higher and greater than the Misty Mountains of Middle-earth, they were not the dark grey of ordinary stone but a pale, milky white, their summits crowned with snow that glowed softly in the light. The highest peaks disappeared into cloud and radiance, and from somewhere among them—or perhaps from the air itself—came something that might have been music.
This was the end of the Straight Road: the continent of Aman, where Valinor lay.
The ship moved forward across the shining water toward the approaching coast.
It came to a bay on the eastern shore of Aman—a natural harbour formed by stone arches that the sea had carved over ages uncountable, where the light of many stars shone clear and bright even by day. This was the Swanhaven, the Telerin harbour, the ship's destination.
The beach was white and strewn with pearls—opals, diamonds, pale crystals scattered like ordinary sand, and pearls lying everywhere underfoot. The buildings and palaces were built of pale white stone, adorned with the finest pearls and gemstones, making the harbour seem almost unreal in its beauty.
Ships shaped like swans lay at anchor in the harbour—white hulls, golden beaks, eyes of gold and jet. From a distance, each looked like a great living swan resting upon the water.
Countless Telerin Elves moved along the harbour front. Their hair shone with silver-white or rainbow-gold light. Their faces were calm and lovely, and they walked with the effortless lightness of those who had never carried the weight of Middle-earth's long wars.
Círdan brought the ship through the great stone arch at the harbour entrance and drew it alongside the white-stone quay. The Elven crew moved quickly and without fuss to lower the gangplank.
Kael offered his arm to Arwen. Elthir fell into step behind them, and together they walked down to the quay.
A group was waiting for them on the dock.