How I Leave You

Where Do You Belong?

No.

No, it cannot be.

He cannot be speaking the truth. They cannot still be alive, for that would mean...

That would mean they left me. Without as much as a word, they left me. Left me here, chained to centuries of imagined solitude, while they were, what, fleeing? Hiding? Certainly not wanting to be found, and least of all by me.

"You are sure?"

The three words strain their way from my throat. They hurt all the way out.

"Yes," Gandalf says gravely. "Beyond a doubt, I'm afraid."

"How long?" I ask, scared by the anger in my voice. "How long have you known?"

"I had my suspicions for a while. But I did not want to tell you, my child, unless I could tell you for sure."

"How long?" I repeat.

"A month," he says.

A month.

At first glance, four weeks seems like an eternity to have kept this from me. But what is a month to a decade? To two centuries of loneliness?

"Did it even happen?"

I sound so brittle. Like the little girl who, all those years ago, lost her parents. Her people.

Or, at least, who thought that she did.

"Azog's attack? Yes," the wizard says, looking awfully ancient in the warm light of the torches. "News of the ambush was no lie. The orcs found the parts of your kingdom in the shallowest parts of Rhûn, and thought it abandoned, nothing more than an old castle that was swallowed by the sea long ago."

I scoff at this, imagining the surprise the orcs must have felt when they realized their mistake.

"How many died?" I ask, my eyes unfocused on the hands of the wizard.

"Enough," is all he says. "But Azog's battalion retreated when they realized they could not win a war fought in water. They proceeded with their original purpose, reaching their final destination only a few weeks later."

He does not have to finish that sentence for me to know what happened afterwards.

"I cannot believe..." I start, not sure where to start at all. "I cannot believe that I never questioned the story. That— that I so naïvely believed my people would be slaughtered like that."

Thorin.

Thorin had been the first to question it. That day in Bard's house, when I told Thorin the story for the first time. My story. What I believed it to be, anyways.

I had been upset by his reaction. By his stubborn distrust of what I believed to be true. Impossible, he had said. And I had hit him for it.

"I cannot believe word of this never reached me until now."

The tears well into my eyes without my permission. But it is too late to stop them.

"Oh, my dear Ilwien," Gandalf says, his voice heavy with compassion. "Do not be upset by this, my child. Rejoice in it."

"Rejoice?" I would laugh if my throat wasn't twisted with sobs. "I beg your pardon, Gandalf, if rejoicing might be somewhat difficult for me to do."

"Yes," the wizard says, slightly drawing out the word as he so often does. "But think of it this way. If anyone were to have gotten word of the naiads' existence, it would have been you."

"Clearly not," I mutter, wiping my eyes.

"Why do you think they fled without notice, Ilwien?" He waits for me to answer, I think, but I will do no such thing. "Having an army of orcs stumble upon Rhûn was a terrible shock to your people. For so long, you had lived in peace. So long that anything but it seemed a tale from long ago. But the issue, my dear, is that your people had not lived in peace with the rest of Middle Earth. You had been living in hiding."