Short Stories and Drabbles

Adrift

Description: A character study into what Galadriel might have been thinking during the last episode of Rings of Power. WARNING: this contains spoilers for the final episode (duh) so if you haven't seen it, you might want to avoid this one for a bit. SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS. You have been warned! :) :) I put a WHOLE lot of spaces so you don't immediately see anything when you click so if you want to keep reading just scroll down. :)

Galadriel's course had been charted from the moment she first tasted fear.

It was the first time she saw death. Watched the light fade from someone's eyes and the life drain from their body. Felt blood thick and warm, gushing over her hands as she frantically tried to stem its flow.

Witnessed the aftermath.

A once vibrant, living body reduced to an empty husk. So far removed from what it once was, it was hard to believe it had ever been alive, to begin with.

They look like they're sleeping.

She heard the phrase that day and every day after and scoffed each time because death looked nothing like sleep. Death was an emptiness, a void that turned warmth into cold, soft into stone, and a living being into a broken doll.

She had scoffed until the very moment her brother died, and then she'd understood.

The words weren't spoken from a position of blindness or ignorance.

They were spoken out of love and despair.

That person isn't dead. They aren't hurt, in pain, suffering, gone.

They aren't gone.

They'll wake up soon.

Just be patient.

They're only sleeping.

But they weren't, and Finrod wasn't, and the pain that bloomed from that knowledge was like nothing Galadriel had ever felt because it was intangible and it was permanent. It didn't fade with time the way a cut or broken bone did, and the edges did not dull but remained ever sharp and ready to cut at the most unexpected moment.

She did not know how to deal with such pain, and there was no one there to tell her, for Finrod was gone, and Celeborn had left so long ago that she often feared he'd been more a dream than a memory.

And so, she did what she could.

What she thought best to deal with a wound that she knew would never heal.

She buried it in the fire of her anger.

She took her pain, and she fed it to her rage, kindling for a bonfire that would carry her through centuries.

Once, time had meant nothing to her, but after her brother...her husband...it became a furious sea, swallowing those she loved and ever nipping at her heels as she fled before it.