Chapter 2: Bathing in Broken Light
The peace of the hidden pool was a physical thing, a blanket of sound and mist that pressed against the skin. Elenya had discovered it a week prior, a cleft in the rock behind the main falls that required a slippery, careful climb. The reward was utter solitude. Here, the roar of the main cascade muted to a deep, thrumming whisper, and the water settled into a broad, still basin the color of old bottle glass.
She came here to think. To feel the sun, dappled and fractured through the ceaseless spray, warm her face. To let the water hold her, weightless, and for a few moments, silence the constant, low-grade hum of dislocation.
Today, she floated on her back, her hair fanned out around her like pale seaweed, her green gown a damp weight on the bank. The world was reduced to the cool embrace of the water, the vault of green canopy above, the endless white noise. She closed her golden-green eyes.
The disruption was not a sound at first. It was a change in the water’s rhythm, a shift in the pressure against her body. A sudden, powerful displacement.
Her eyes snapped open.
He was there, wading through the waist-deep water towards the opposite bank as if he owned the very air molecules. Water sluiced in sheets from broad shoulders and a back mapped with old, pale scars that spoke of violence on a scale she could barely imagine. Golden hair, usually a radiant mane, was darkened to deep honey, plastered to his neck and the strong line of his jaw. He moved with a predatory grace that made the tranquil pool feel suddenly, acutely small.
Glorfindel.
She knew him by reputation, by fleeting glimpses in the halls. The legendary hero returned from death. A figure of song and fear. He was never in the library, rarely in the healing wings. He was a creature of the borders, of patrols and distant shadows.
And now he was here, shirtless and steaming slightly in the cool air, having entered from behind the curtain of the main falls itself.
Elenya gasped, a short, sharp intake that made her bob in the water. She scrambled to find her feet, the smooth stones slick under her bare soles. She stood, the water falling to her hips, the thin shift she wore beneath her gown for modesty now transparent and clinging.
He turned at the sound.
His eyes were not joyful in that moment. They were chips of summer sky, bright and utterly cold. They swept over her—the dripping hair, the revealing cloth, the obvious, vulnerable shock on her face—with a dismissive speed that was more insulting than a prolonged stare.
“You trespass.”
His voice was not the melodious instrument of Elrond or Lindir. It was flat, honed by wind and command, and it cut through the mist like a blade.
Elenya’s mind, usually a nimble tool, blanked. Every courteous Sindarin phrase Lindir had taught her evaporated. Instinct took over. She lifted her chin, wrapping her arms around herself. “I didn’t see a sign.”
It was the wrong thing to say. A modern, flippant retort that sounded absurd even to her ears in this place.
A muscle twitched in his jaw. He took a step closer, the water rippling out from him. “This is not a common bathing pool. It is a place of reflection. For those who have earned quiet.” His gaze flickered to the bank, to her simple gown. “Not for curious visitors to gawk and paddle.”
The unfairness of it, the sheer arrogance, ignited a spark in her chest. The fear burned away, replaced by a hot, familiar indignation. She’d faced condescending academics before. Men who thought her looks precluded her intellect. This was just a taller, older, deadlier version.
“I wasn’t gawking,” she said, her own voice gaining strength. “I was swimming. And reflecting. Unless the privilege of reflection is reserved only for those with specific historical trauma?”
She saw it then. A real reaction. Not anger, but a profound, startled recognition, as if she’d reached out and slapped him. The coldness in his eyes fractured, replaced by something wary and intensely focused. He looked at her properly now, not as an inconvenient object, but as a person. The gaze was unnerving, a physical weight.
“You speak… boldly,” he said, the flat tone now tinged with something else. Caution.
“I speak honestly. I meant no trespass. I found a quiet place. If it’s yours, you could just say so. Like a person.”
For a long moment, the only sound was the eternal sigh of the waterfall. The mist coiled between them. His eyes did not linger on her body again; they were locked on her face, searching for something. The confidence she’d mustered began to curdle under that scrutiny.
Then, without another word, he turned. He waded back towards the thunderous curtain of the main falls, his movements clean and powerful. At the edge of the roaring veil, he paused and looked back. The mist and scattered light caught him, and for a second, he seemed to glow from within, a figure of water and shattered sunlight.
“Do not come here at dusk,” he said, and it wasn’t a request. It was a warning. “The pools are not safe when the light fails.”
Then he was gone, vanishing behind the wall of water as if he had never been.
Elenya stood shivering, not from cold. The encounter had lasted less than two minutes. It left her feeling scraped raw. She stumbled to the bank, fumbled her still-damp gown over her head, and climbed back to the main path with clumsy, hurried movements.
The serenity of the valley felt false now, a painted backdrop. His words echoed. Earned quiet.
She avoided the pools. She threw herself into her tasks with a brittle energy.
In the library, Lindir noticed her distraction. “The consonant shift from ‘lam’ to ‘lamb’ is not typically accompanied by a grimace, Elenya,” he said gently, pointing at her transcription.
She smoothed her face. “Sorry. Mind elsewhere.”
“The Lord Glorfindel returned from the northern patrol this morning,” Lindir offered casually, tidying a pile of vellum. “His presence often… unsettles the air. It is the weight of a spirit that has seen both sides of the veil. Do not take his manner personally. He has little patience for anything he perceives as fragility.”
She thought of the scars, the cold eyes. The way he’d looked when she’d mentioned trauma. “He made an assumption,” she said, more to herself than to Lindir.
The Elf-loremaster gave a slight, wise smile. “He is very old, and assumptions are the bricks of which his world is built. It takes something… unprecedented… to shake them.”
Lindir’s words followed her out into the colonnade. Unprecedented. The word felt like a stone in her shoe, a constant, irritating reminder of her own impossible situation. She wasn't just a visitor; she was an anomaly. A glitch in the deep code of this world. And Glorfindel, with his ancient, assessing eyes, seemed to sense the wrongness of her before she even spoke.
She avoided the main halls for the rest of the day, retreating to a lesser-used courtyard where a young, dark-haired human boy was trying to coax a finch from a low branch. Estel. Aragorn. The future king, currently a child with grubby knees. He saw her and grinned, his earlier shyness around the strange woman melting away. He asked her about birdsong.
Without thinking, she began to hum, then sing. It was a lullaby, the melody pulled from a fractured memory of her mother’s voice, the words a nonsense mix of Serbian and something else, something flowing and ancient she had never consciously learned. The child stilled, his eyes wide. The finch hopped closer.
From the shadow of a marble arch, Elrond watched, his face unreadable. Beside him, Glorfindel stood, having just delivered his patrol report. The song, familiar and utterly foreign, wrapped around the courtyard. Glorfindel’s hand, resting lightly on his sword hilt, tightened. His gaze was fixed on Elenya’s profile, on the unconscious tenderness in her expression as she sang to the child. He said nothing. He simply turned and walked away, his golden hair a flash in the dim corridor, leaving Elrond with a contemplative frown.
The official meeting was orchestrated by Elrond two evenings later, a small gathering in the Hall of Fire before the minstrels began. It was politics, plain and simple. A way to present the mysterious guest to his most trusted, and to gauge their reactions. Elenya wore a simple gown of deep blue, her hair braided back. She felt like a specimen.
Elladan and Elrohir were already there, leaning against a carved pillar with identical, easy smiles. They were a buffer of normalcy. “You look less like you’re marching to your doom now,” Elladan said, offering her a cup of spiced wine.
“Only slightly,” she muttered, taking it. The warmth of the fire didn’t reach her.
Then he entered. Glorfindel was clad in a deep green tunic, not armor, but he wore it like a uniform. He acknowledged Elrond with a slight bow, his eyes sweeping the room in a tactical assessment that landed on her for a millisecond before moving on. He took a position by the hearth, apart from the others, a statue of perfect, poised isolation.
Elrohir nudged his brother, his voice a low, casual murmur meant to carry. “She is beautiful, isn’t she?”
Elladan grinned, playing along. “Striking. Even for the Eldar, she is something. Don’t you think, Glorfindel?”
Glorfindel did not look at her. He examined the contents of his own goblet as if studying a map of distant lands. His voice was clear, dispassionate, devoid of any inflection that could be construed as interest. “I could not tell. I haven’t paid it any attention.”
The words hung in the air, crisp and deliberate. They were not an oversight; they were a dismissal. A wall erected in plain sight. Elenya felt the heat rise in her cheeks, a mix of humiliation and sharp anger. She took a deliberate sip of her wine, the spices suddenly bitter on her tongue.
He was, objectively, the most beautiful man—being—she had ever seen. The firelight loved him, tracing the line of his jaw, the broad set of his shoulders beneath the fine fabric, turning his hair into a cascade of molten gold. His light eyes, now fixed on the flames, were the color of a winter sky over a glacier. Perfect. And he was also, without a doubt, an asshole. A cold, egotistical asshole who wore his trauma and his superiority like a second cloak.
Elrond smoothly interjected, discussing boundary reports from the Misty Mountains. The conversation moved on, a river flowing around the immovable rock of Glorfindel’s silence and Elenya’s simmering resentment. She answered questions about her health, her studies, in polite, clipped Sindarin. She could feel Glorfindel’s presence like a low-frequency hum, a disturbance in the atmosphere.
Finally, as a bard began to tune a harp, she excused herself. The twins offered to walk with her. As they left the hall, the warmth of the fire giving way to the cool night air of the colonnade, Elladan sighed. “Do not take it to heart. He is like that with everyone new. Especially now.”
“Especially now?” Elenya asked, her voice tight.
Elrohir exchanged a glance with his brother. “Since your arrival,” he said simply. “Since you came… unsettled him. He does not like mysteries he cannot solve with a sword.”
They left her at the doorway to her chamber. Inside, the silence was absolute. She leaned against the carved door, the stone cool against her back. She thought of his perfect, remote face in the firelight. He hadn’t paid any attention. Good, she decided. Let him ignore her. She would build a life here, in the libraries, with the twins, with the child in the garden. She would carve out a space that had nothing to do with ancient heroes and their cold, beautiful scorn.
But in the dark, the memory of his eyes in the waterfall cave—that moment of fractured coldness, of startling recognition—would not leave her. It was the only crack in his armor she had seen, and it haunted her more than his outright dismissal.
It was the only crack in his armor she had seen, and it haunted her more than his outright dismissal. Sleep was a restless, thin blanket that night. She rose before dawn, her mind churning, and found her feet carrying her not to the library, but downstairs. The kitchens of Imladris were vast, warm, and humming with a pre-dawn quiet, the only sounds the crackle of banked hearth fires and the distant rush of the Bruinen. The air smelled of yeast, dried herbs, and last night’s roasted roots.
She just wanted tea. Something simple and normal to ground her. She moved quietly past long wooden tables, searching for the ceramic canisters where the herbs were stored.
A shadow detached itself from a deeper alcove near the cold pantry. He was simply there, leaning against the stone wall as if he’d been waiting for centuries. Glorfindel. He wore a simple grey tunic and trousers, his hair loose, and he held a sharpening stone in one hand, a long, wicked-looking dagger in the other. The shhh-shink of steel on stone stopped.
Elenya froze, a jar of mint leaves in her hand. Her heart hammered against her ribs. “What are you doing here anyway?” The words spilled out, too loud in the quiet. “An Elven Lord, skulking in kitchens before sunrise? Don’t you have a dawn to herald somewhere more majestic?”
He didn’t move. His eyes tracked her, cool and assessing. “I go where I please within these walls. The question is your own presence. The household staff will attend to you if you ring.”
The condescension was a spark to tinder. All the frustration of the last week—the displacement, the fear, his beautiful, infuriating contempt—ignited. She set the jar down with a sharp clack. “And what are you, then? A guest or a housemaid? You seem to enjoy polishing your own steel. Or is touching anything without a hilt beneath you?”
A dangerous stillness settled over him. He placed the stone and dagger on the table with deliberate slowness. “You have a clever tongue for one so profoundly lost.”
“I’m not lost.” The lie tasted bitter. “I’m here. You’re just pissed because you can’t figure out how or why. Because I’m a question your shiny sword can’t answer.”
He moved then. Not with the blinding speed she knew he possessed, but with a deliberate, closed-in stride that brought him across the flagstones until he was mere feet away, crowding her space. His presence was immense, a pressure in the air. “You presume to know my thoughts? You, who sings lullabies in tongues you should not know to children who are not your own? You, who hides in waterfalls and libraries, playing at belonging?”
The reference to her song for Estel felt like a violation. It was a private moment he had witnessed and now weaponized. Rage, hot and blinding, swept through her. The careful control she’d maintained snapped.
Her hand moved before her mind could catch it.
The slap echoed off the stone walls, a sharp, startling report. Her palm stung fiercely. His head had turned a fraction with the impact.
He did not raise a hand. He did not flinch. He simply, slowly, turned his face back to hers. The place where she’d struck him bloomed faintly red. His expression was unreadable, a mask of fair, perfect features. But his eyes—they were no longer cold. They were live things, simmering with something ancient and volatile.
“Jebem ti!” she spat, the Serbian curse ripping from her throat, guttural and full of all her fury, her fear, her desperate homesickness for a world that no longer existed.
Glorfindel went perfectly rigid. The volatile heat in his eyes flash-froze into pure, unadulterated shock. “What did you just say?”
The intensity of his reaction doused her anger for a second, leaving confusion. “I said, ‘fuck,’” she shot back, switching to the Common Tongue. “In my native language. Is profanity also forbidden to curious visitors?”
“Your native language.” The words were flat, disbelieving. He took a half-step closer, his gaze drilling into her as if seeing her for the very first time, peeling back skin and bone. “You claim that… that tongue is your native language?”
“Yes,” she said, defiance warring with a creeping unease. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
The shock on his face crystallized into a hard, urgent certainty. The brief, haunting crack she’d seen before was now a yawning chasm in his composure. “We are going to see Lord Elrond. Right now.”
“What? No, we’re not—”
His hand shot out, fingers closing around her upper arm. His grip was like iron, unbreakable but carefully measured not to bruise. He began pulling her toward the kitchen entrance.
“Let go of me! Idi u kurac! Šta je ovo? Pusti me!”
With every snarled Serbian phrase, his stride faltered a fraction, his head twitching as if struck by small, invisible blows. Each word she meant as a vulgar insult, he heard in a different key altogether. The ancient, melodic resonance of them, the sacred vocabulary of the High-Elves of the West, used for poetry and lore, was now a stream of brutal, colloquial fury.
He was stunned. He was livid. And beneath it, buried under millennia of grief and duty, a long-dormant part of him, a spark that remembered irony and absurdity, flickered with raw, unwilling amusement. The contradiction was staggering. He dragged her, this furious, messy, impossible woman, through the silent, pearly halls of Imladris as she cursed the Valar in the language of the Valar, and he did not know whether to shake her or laugh.
He chose to tighten his grip, his face a storm, and marched them both toward Elrond’s study.