Before the Fellowship of the Ring, for so it came to be called, could embark on its great journey, there were preparations that had to be made. Narsil, the blade that was broken on the plains of Dagorlad, the blade that cut the Ring from Sauron's very hand, had to be reforged. Our master smith, Curufin, was glad for the task, as his hands had long been idle. Though the Dark Lord had spent centuries in preparation for the coming war, the elves of Imladris had been largely idle. That was our inherent fault, one that was growing increasingly obvious to me. It was as if my people walked with our backs to the future, addressing the present only when we bumped into it.

Three elves, two humans, two hobbits, one dwarf, and one wizard; it was as diverse a group as I had ever heard of. All of them were readying in their own ways, but it was Aragorn who vexed me. We spoke little in the following days, and I was certain he was avoiding my company. Finally, I went to his chambers one night and, when he didn't answer my knock, let myself in.

The ranger had his own room in my father's palace, for he had sometimes resided with us over the years when he was in need of true rest from the pains of the world, and our halls were half empty to begin with. There was little there besides a bed and a chair and a few keepsakes from his labors as a defender of the West. A waterlogged journal, an eagle's feather, a few stones of no real value that he kept for the memory our time in Lothlorien; and the man himself slept in his clothes. As I approached the bed, he sprang up with a knife in his hand.

I reacted as lifetimes of training had prepared me to, turning my body and diverting the knife, then twisting it out of his hand. But Aragorn was not so easily thwarted, he dropped the knife and caught it with his free hand, its point left pricking my gown at my waist. His eyes were wild, but they calmed in a heartbeat, and the blade clattered on the floor.

"Arwen..." There was apology in his gaze, and also shame, but it was my fault. I knew about the night terrors, and the way he reacted to being woken, and I had disturbed him anyway. I put my arms around him.

"I'm sorry," I said, "I couldn't sleep." This was perfectly true, elves do not sleep as deeply or as often as humans.

"I attacked you," he said. "I could have sworn I was awake when you entered, but I saw someone else, a figure wreathed in shadows."

"Dreams are often closer to the surface than we think." We sat together on the bed, and a full, wavy lock of hair blocked my view of his face.

"We have to talk," I said.

"Plenty of time for that on the road."

"But little privacy. We need to have this out between us now."

"Have this out?"

"You didn't want me on this journey."

Aragorn shifted his torso so that he half faced me, his knee touching mine. "I do want you beside me, but I fear the secret you carry with you."

Heat rose in my cheeks. "I don't wear it, and it is not the One I carry. If Bilbo and Frodo could keep the One safely for decades, do you truly think I cannot be trusted with this?"

"I don't question your intentions, but I worry that you have not told Elrond. There may be a better way to protect the ring of Angmar than to carry it with us into darkness."

"All the same arguments that apply to the One apply to this ring as well," I said. "In any case, it may prove useful."

"That is my fear." Aragorn took my hand in his. "Your lore is more advanced than mine, surely you know this is not right."

"What I have learned," I said carefully, "is that Elves and Men both are wont to believe they see the world clearly when they are walking with one eye closed." I kissed him on his noble brow. "Do not fear for me," I sai8d rising. "Have hope for the world."

Aragorn could worry all he liked. I was not afraid of the ring of Angmar. As long as Sauron did not possess the One, he could not use it as a means of binding my mind to his. But for the nonce, I was concerned with a different artifact of nobler times.

Curufin was an unassuming figure of about my father's age. He was short for an Elf, under six feet, but his arms and shoulders were corded with adamantine bands of muscle. He wiped his hands on a leather apron when he saw me, and bowed. "My lady, to what do I owe the honor?"

"The honor is mine," I nodded to him, glancing over the charcoal drawings he had made of Narsil reforged. The process of remaking a sacred weapon was no simple matter of heating and hammering, it was a reflection of our highest art. "Those are beautiful," I said.

"Thinking with my hands," Curufin allowed. "What brings you to my workshop?"

I gestured at his designs. "The breaking of Narsil was a tragedy, but it was not the only weapon lost that day."

"Many both foul and fair," Curufin allowed.

"If one can be reforged, why not others?"

"Narsil was preserved because of its singular history," Curufin said. "Not much else remains from that dark day."

"Aeglos."

Curufin tilted his head back and made a trilling noise. "Snow-Point, the spear of Gil-Galad. What is it that you think can be done?"

"The same as you are doing." I touched the rough parchment. "Make the spear anew, and Aeglos will once again fight at the side of Narsil. What could be more fitting?"

"What does Lord Elrond say?"

"He has said nothing, I wanted to know from you that it could be done before I asked permission."

Curufin regarded his sketches for a time, wrapped as they were in Guenya lettering, as all our most important work was done in the tongue of the Eldar. "Aeglos was broken in two, the shaft snapped by Sauron's claw. The spear point itself cracked against his helm. Both present challenges to my art. Possible? Yes. But I cannot make you a promise, and Narsil is my priority at the moment." He looked thoughtful. "Who would wield it?"

I bristled at the suggestion that I would come to him about the weapon on someone else's behalf. "I would," I said, hiding my ire.

"Have you trained with the spear?"

"It was never my primary focus, but I am familiar."

The smith snorted. "Familiar? With the weapon of Gil-Galad? Speak with your father, then return to me, and we will talk."

Lord Elrond was not as difficult to persuade as I expected. In truth, it seemed he saw it as an excuse to delay the expedition, perhaps hoping I would reconsider when my brothers returned and tried to persuade me of their places in the Fellowship.There was a ceremony in the great hall announcing the project, and a great many elves forgot themselves in celebration and wine. Curufin was able to divide the prepatory labors among his journeymen, and both forgings were expected to come to fruition over the cycle of a moon. Aragorn softened again toward me, but I could sense his reticence on the subject of the ring. My annoyance grew, and the more I thought about our difference of opinion the more also I considered its object. I grew agitated, and when my brothers did return I was short with them, dismissing their claims and concerns. They might have been able to best me with swords, but had either of them slain a Ring Wraith?

Instead of developing my relationships with the other members of the Fellowship, I spent more and more of my hours alone and in meditation. My dreams had receded, but as the day of our leavetaking approached, they resurged, taking on new clarity.

Still I flew, though not always as an eagle. On occasion I found myself a passenger on the ship of my ancestor Earendil, who navigated the spaces between the stars. He did not speak to me but still wore a bright gem upon his brow, the Silmaril, and piloted by its light. But he sailed down paths I could not follow, so I drifted over Middle Earth as insubstantial as a ghost, drawn inexorably toward a point far in the South. The Dark Tower stood at the center of the universe, from the perspective of the sun and moon so much became clear. Middle Earth as we knew it was only one piece of a greater whole. On our maps, Mordor appears to be a square notch on the bottom right corner of a nibbled parchment. From the heavens, Sauron’s selection of a homeland makes more aesthetic sense. Taking the lands of the East and the South into account, for they were each as large or larger than Middle Earth, Mordor did not appear as a beleaguered outland at all. It was a linchpin, the central axis of a wheeling world. The Dark Tower was a nail driven into the heart of Arda.

Seeing this for the first time shocked me into waking, but on subsequent nights I grew accustomed enough to the vision and its revelation of Sauron's influence that I could progress farther into fancy. I was drawn to his stronghold, and there was no doubt in my mind now that it was his stronghold, Barad-Dur, but its glamor held. In the physical world, I knew it must have been terrible to behold, infested with orcs and other monsters, stained with blood and sorrow. In my dream it was a beautiful spire of brass. And though I visited it often, there was no sign of its master beyond a general sense of a presence like an open flame hid behind a mesh screen, the occasional echoing footstep. Apart from that, I was alone with his wonders.

Sauron, in ages before there was a sun and moon, before he was twisted to violence and terror by Morgoth, had been a smith, one of Aule's attendants. That was all the lore that remained of his existence from so distant a past, but his interest in the arts of the forge were evident in his works. If he had not been an artisan by nature, he would not have been able to teach Elves the craft of ring making, and our history would look very different.

It is often said of the Dark Lord and the one before him, that they could create nothing for themselves. They could only corrupt the creations of others. Hence, Morgoth had given rise to orcs out of Elves. But the evidence of my dreams, if it was evidence, suggested Sauron still busied himself with fire and steel, his natural elements.

I saw weapons of all shapes and kinds, and armor for beasts and trolls of a fearsome character, but none of that interested me. There were trinkets as well, blacksmith puzzles and music boxes, unsettling works of art, sculptures that resembled no living creature I could name. But the grandest example of his art took up an entire floor of the tower.

It was a clockwork masterpiece that at first I did not recognize as a depiction of our world. As I had seen from above, the Dark Tower was at the center of things, and once I recognized Barad-Dur the rest became clear. Mountains and forests of various metals, hard plating and fibrous copper canopies, stained glass rivers and oceans like a moment captured in time; and yet it moved

There were pieces like a chess set that I realized represented influential figures. My father was there, and Galadriel in Lothlorien. King Denethor in Gondor, and Theoden in Rohan, as well as others I could not guess at from their position. There were figures in the wider world as well, a man covered in bandages and bearing a curved sword dominated the East. To the South was a terror, a clockwork spider turning, turning in a kind of dance, bestrode the continent. It was red and black and radiated a palpable menace. Something in the rendering of the beast spoke of fear, the fear of the artisan for his creation, or for what it represented.

I heard footsteps from the stair, a light approaching, and I was jettisoned from this world of dreams. My heart was thrumming in my chest, and I knew I was not alone in my darkened room. There was a space of deeper shadow in one corner beside my bookcase, a form of nebulous malignancy.

I sat up. My shoulder burned.

"Princesssss."

"You're dead."

"I have alwayssss been dead."

"I destroyed you."

"I am on your finger."

I looked at my hand, and saw the ring of Angmar clearly in a stab of moonlight.

"No!"

I sat up, blinking and confused. There was nothing on my hands and no one in my room. The ring was still bound against my arm with the hilt, but my blood was in my ears and I was panting for air. I felt as if a weight had been on my chest as I slept, and only now could I breathe.

"Witch King," I whispered, "Lord of the Nazgul, are you here with me?" But the silence was unbroken, and the stillness gave no token of another presence in my room. Long minutes passed before I regained my equanimity and stood to pace and look out my window into the emptiness of night. Perhaps still influenced by nightmare, I saw the gray light of the fettered moon and stars as something deathly cold. The palace of high art and lush green plant life became something alien and strange. Was the ring speaking to me, or Sauron, or the Witch King, or some combination of the three? Was this only the echo of my wounds, or a new and active assault on my spirit? Not for the first time, I considered unburdening myself to my father.

No. He would take the ring from me, and it was mine. I had won it. He might also insist I stay behind from the Fellowship, and I did not want to have to follow Frodo and the others like a bandit in the wood. I would be a part of the Quest to bring an end to war with the Shadow, wherever it took. If I was going to fade, as my father seemed to accept all Elves would, then I would not sit patiently by as the world changed, but be a part of that change. In our discussions it was clear that Lord Elrond believed that the destruction of the One Ring would break the power of all the rings with which it was bound, including those that belonged to Elves, and that would spell the end of our time and influence on Middle Earth.

Why? Why did we have to fade? It was written that we would endure as long as the world endured, but that did not seem true any longer. When Elves die, we pass into the Halls of Mandos, which were once a part of the world but are now no longer. If a Mortal sails West, he will eventually reach lands on the other side of the world. When my kind sails, they do so to leave the world entirely. Had our connection to this earth somehow been lost? Had not the Noldor been pardoned for their rebellion against the Valar? In any case, I was not alive in those days, and should not be subject to their Doom.

The Rings of Power were going to be destroyed, even at great cost to ourselves. It was the only possible answer, as all the Wise agreed, These were not thoughts or questions for the dead of night, but matters better considered beneath the sun.

I lay down again. Long minutes passed unsleeping.

"Princesss."

Jolted up, I scanned the room for any sign of evil.

Darkness there, and nothing more.