I loathe sea travel — I have only rarely willingly set foot on a ship since I stepped from our ill-gotten fleet and passed into Beleriand with my brethren many long ages ago. Every time I must, I hope never to do so again until a ship comes that will willingly bear me to Valinor.
My wife, Ainurél, was heavily pregnant with our second child when she expressed to me that she wished to travel to Harlindon with her best friend, to pay a visit to their cousins—and she wished to see the gulf of Lhûn, the dramatic coastline. She was after all from the deep forest of Doriath—but as a Teler the sea ever enchanted her.
I worried for her condition, but even were it my place to forbid her, I could never find it in my heart to deny my wife anything she desired. It would not be a long journey, or a hard one—on clear days you can see the sliver of land that is Harlindon from the terrace here. I could not allow my own fear of the ocean to diminish her love of it, and so I said while that I wished she would stay, that her joy would bring joy to me.
As she prepared to leave, she asked me what I would like as a memento. As always, I replied that I need nothing but her safe return. She pressed me, as she always did. I asked that she bring interesting stones, sea polished by the dangerous surf. She chided me for being predictable.
“Dearest Silwë,” she said, touching my face briefly before she embarked. “Worry not.”
“I do not worry, my love.”
And she, laughing, joined her friend at the ship’s railing. I remember the sun in her hair, and the way her friend threw her arm about her shoulders like they were sisters. I walked home, and resumed my jewel-work. I tried not to worry, for she bade me do no such thing.
I was filled with a sense of doom, all the same.
The days grew longer than I had expected, and the weather soured, and then a messenger of Círdan knocked at my door. There had been a shipwreck. My wife, and my unborn child, had been taken from me, lost the depths of the cold sea.
I do not remember much past this. Durandis came to me in my agony somehow, and restrained me that I would not throw myself into the ocean, reminding me that I had a daughter, that I could not make her an orphan as a sacrifice on the altar of my grief. And so I sank to the beach in the driving rain and screamed into the waves in Quenya, begging Ulmo to take me instead.
The Valar are infamously deaf to the pleas of the Noldor.
“Dearest Silwë. Worry not.”
I should have been able to protect you.
I am so sorry, my beloved, that I failed you.
