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Elros slept, awaking to a dream he knew well. It was not the nightmares of burning Sirion nor of the horrors of Angband: when he dreamt of a wave rising it was not a memory of what he had known but a memory of what would yet be.
This time he did not find himself walking through a city nor standing on a fair green field; instead when his dream-eyes opened he lay atop a bier in a dark room of cold stone, and knew it to be his own tomb. Elros closed his eyes, wishing to awaken, wishing for the dream to have passed, and opened them again to find himself still atop the coffin. He surrendered to the inevitable.
Elros stood up and walked out of the tomb. He blinked in the bright light; a sweet smell suffused the air and the sun was hot on his face and bare arms: yet he was chilled, his bones as ice. In front of him was a balcony garden with soft green moss, at its center a tree with white bark and white fragrant flowers. As Elros moved past it, the branches clutched at his arms and it seemed to him that the tree wailed. Below the balcony lay a city made of sparkling marble towers and bright metal domes. It was beautiful. It was silent. No noises came from the city below, though he saw people in its streets and markets and gardens. If he walked among them, he knew they would not speak. He stayed where he stood and looked.
A wild laughter sounded from behind him, like the howls of rabid wolves, and when Elros turned to look he saw a figure robed in white, in its hand a fiery wheel; but the figure stopped laughing when Elros stared in his deep-seeing eyes. There was malice in them, and no pity, but confusion and thwarted desire too.
“This is not how it is supposed to happen,” said the man in white. About him was the tree and it burned, an acrid smell like to that which Elros had smelled during the War, when elves and men had been engulfed in dragonfire. But louder than the fire was the roaring in the distance, and Elros knew the waters were rising. Above them clouds gathered and the heavens bent.
“But it will,” said Elros with the certainty of dreams, the surety found only in sleep. “Whether you will it or not, the waters shall cover the land and you with it.”
He turned around but now he did not see the city but an inexorable sea coming ever closer. He watched it rise with no fear, that killing tide, watched it with calm equanimity, but when he felt water against his toes he awoke suddenly, his terrified heart pounding, his body shaking and covered in cold sweat. But the mattress was soft underneath him and the blankets warm, and beside him Zimrahin was sleeping; he breathed and made himself calm. The curtains in the bedroom were half-pulled and moonlight limned them in silver-white. The osmanthus in its pot smelled sweet and nothing like the white tree as it burned. He could not feel water. He would not sleep again this night.
Elros stood up and wrapped himself in a robe; he turned to look at his spouse. Zimrahin hadn’t moved, the rise and fall of her chest slow and steady, a sign of life and sleep both. He breathed out in relief; when he walked out of the room he took care to shut the door as quietly as possible.
His private study was close by and before he sat down by the round table haphazardly covered in letters he lit a lamp, but for a long moment stared blankly at the blue tiled floor before turning to his work with a sigh.
After some time, Elros heard footsteps and started; his daughter Tindómiel entered, clad in a shift and dressing gown. It was the waning hours of the moon.
“I saw you were awake,” she said, nodding to the oil lamp, its light magnified by clever mirrors and lenses.
“I woke and did not wish to go back to sleep,” said Elros, “so I decided to at least work a little.” He waved his hand, the one holding a letter accusing a merchant of selling adulterated copper. “You know how the king’s attention is needed for disputes over the ownership of sheep.”
She did not laugh, as was her wont. Her strangely somber eyes were piercing, his grey-eyed daughter. His sons had their mother’s coloring, the yellow hair and blue eyes of the House of Hador, but Tindómiel looked like Elros; she looked like Elros’s mother, from what he remembered of her. She likely looked like her namesake Tinúviel.
“You had a dream,” she said. “I know, for I have seen it too. A great wave that covers the green lands.”
“I have seen it,” Elros agreed. “Does it trouble you, dearest?”
“To see such an end? Of course it troubles me. To see the waves arise, to have them…”
He leaned forward, suddenly greatly troubled himself. He had never been covered by the waters in the wave-dream, had never himself drowned, but now wondered with horror if Tindómiel had.
Her eyes caught his. “I’ve never drowned in those floods, if that is what you fear. But I cannot run from the wave, and it engulfs all but my head, and then I awake.”
Elros closed his eyes, a pain in his chest that she should experience such a thing, and he wished that the crueler wave dream was his and not hers.
He opened them again when he heard her settle into the chair across from him. “I don’t drown,” said she, “nor do I feel terror in that moment, just…” She frowned, perhaps searching for the words. “A terrible certainty. And sometimes a fierce, grim pleasure, as if an enemy is being defeated.”
That figure robed in white, thought Elros, their enemy.
“But sometimes I see ships,” Tindómiel said, “ships upright on a surging sea and their sails like silver wings. The abyss does not claim them.”
He leaned back in his chair, glad that if Tindómiel came near to drowning then she also saw others surviving.
Yet she continued, “But one day the abyss will claim those sailors too, as it shall claim us all.”
“The abyss?” mused Elros, struck by the brightness of his daughter's eyes, bright as those of the Eldar, bright as burning Arien. “Perhaps. Perhaps just the setting of a sun.”
"A sun?" Tindómiel laughed, fey as Tilion's glow. "But when my sun faileth and the abyss of death taketh me, what then? The world is fair, and Númenor fair, but it will not be forever, and neither will you nor me. Father… the Valar gave us this island, this gift, but it will drown. What does Ilúvatar have for you and me? Will he give us nothing?”
“Then he give us nothing,” said Elros, sure in himself. “And still I would say I chose rightly, though I wish my choice had not bound you too; for that I am sorry. Still I Chose rightly.”
“I bear you no ill will for binding me to the fate of Men, Father. I am glad I have no Choice to make; it seems a most heavy burden.”
Elros had never before spoken to his children of his Choice. “It was and was not,” he told her, “in some ways the easiest thing I have ever done. For my brother too, I think, for all that he chose the fate of the Eldar, eternity and fading. Me, I am not that patient.”
“You chose an end, then.”
“I chose many ends. We have both seen one of those, Tindómiel; we share that sleeping Sight, that dream. The wave rising and the island falling. But you and I will not see it with our own eyes, nor shall our children for many generations, but instead see…” He waved his hand at the open window, where beyond the thin curtains were fields and buildings and a tall mountain, stark in the moonlight. One day the waves would cover them, but tomorrow the sun would rise and the fields would be green and the roofs of the buildings red and the mountain grey and the snow atop it would shine like a diamond. One day a white tree would flower in a garden.
Again Tindómiel said: “The world is fair.”
“So it is. Tindómiel, next time you dream, look at the land. It will be yet fair, and our descendants will build fair things upon it.”
She stared at him a long while, her eyes like a cloudless night. He wondered if he would live to see her raven-dark hair frost into silver.
“And day turns to night again.” She sighed. “And then to day. I suppose you chose a beginning as well, when you chose mortality, the brief day and the unknown. Well, I suppose your eternal brother will remember you at least, as the Eldar who visit us now have set the land into their memories, even if with time the island of the gift will become forever forgotten to Men.”
“He will, my brother.” He reached out to take his dear child’s hand and resolved to hug her for a long while before they left the room for breakfast. “But ours will be the world. And I would have you take joy in it, and not be overtroubled by dreams of the far future, dreams that may not come to pass.”
“We both know it will come to pass. But not in our lifetime, nor for many many lifetimes to come. The downfall is far away and I am not overtroubled by it. Not most of the time, anyways, only the occasional night.” She cast a dubious glance at the stack of papers. “Well, we’re both up. Do you want help with the disposition of sheep?”
Elros smiled, shoving some of the papers her way, and thought of how it seemed such a short time ago that Vardamir had taught her to read, she then a toddler too young for a tutor, and now she and Vardamir were both grown, both adults and both still so young to him. Tindómiel took one of the letters but did not look at it, nor did Elros turn his eyes towards the one he had set down on the table. Instead they looked at the window. It was still night, but on the horizon was the morning star.
“The day lies ahead for us, oh daughter of the dawn,” said Elros.