Chapter 425: Five Hundred Years
Kael was in no hurry to go to Valinor. It would be there whenever he chose to sail, and there was no meaningful difference between going sooner or later.
What mattered more was the other side of it: once he arrived, returning would not be easy.
"Not yet, Legolas," Kael said, declining the invitation without making much of it. "Arwen and I want to stay in Middle-earth a while longer."
Legolas did not press the point. He understood well enough that Kael's situation was different from his own. He was leaving because there was little left to keep him. The Elves of the Woodland Realm had dwindled to almost nothing, and the forest he had sworn to protect no longer needed him as it once had.
But Kael had Cemya. Even without Valinor, he could maintain his corner of Middle-earth indefinitely, keeping it whole, alive, and beautiful for as long as he chose to remain.
Half a year later, at the harbour of the Grey Havens, Kael stood on the quay and watched Legolas and Gimli board their ship.
After that, there were very few people left in Middle-earth who were not family.
The friends of his earlier years were almost all gone. Beorn the skin-changer. The Dwarves who had made the journey to Erebor. The professors who had filled the corridors of Hogwarts in the early days. All of them had lived their lives and passed from the world.
Only three old companions remained. Radagast the Brown, somewhere in the depths of the Great Greenwood, keeping to his own company. And the two Blue Wizards, Morinehtar and Rómestámo, still at work in the far east, slowly undoing what Morgoth and Sauron had left behind.
Even Edward—the most loyal of them all—was gone. He had refused the Elixir of Life when Kael offered it, choosing to age naturally. One quiet morning, he simply never woke again, passing as peacefully as anyone could hope for.
His portrait remained in the castle—a young Edward, who had chosen to go on existing in the world of painted images, serving as steward to Kael's own portrait.
The professors of Hogwarts had turned over several times. The teaching staff was now drawn from later generations of graduates, and their relationship with Kael was one of reverence rather than familiarity. They knew him at a distance, the way one knows a figure from history.
Kael had long since handed over the Headmastership to Elthir. He and Arwen had settled primarily in Rivendell — which suited him well enough, since when Elrond and the others had departed, they had left behind a library of such scope that it would take more than a single lifetime to read through. Kael spent most of his days there, working through the vast Elven archives, drawing out whatever wisdom and knowledge they held.
Lothlórien, for its part, Arwen had given over to Elríen to manage.
Between periods of reading, Kael and Arwen travelled. Not by broomstick or Apparition or the Floo Network or Portkey. They disguised themselves as ordinary people through Transfiguration, climbed into a travelling coach with a castle's worth of space inside, and went wherever they pleased.
Over time, their journeys took them to every corner of Middle-earth. The far north of Forodwaith. The southern reaches of Harad. The western shores of Lindon. The far eastern coastline. They passed through the great cities—Minas Tirith, the capital of Gondor under Aragorn's heirs; Annúminas, the restored capital of Arnor. They travelled through Rohan, through Ando.
Ando in particular struck Kael. The land that had once been Mordor—dark, poisoned, and hostile—had, over the generations under Boromir's descendants, been transformed into something that could not have been more different. The volcanic soil, enriched by centuries of ash, had proven extraordinarily fertile. Ando had become one of the great breadbaskets of Middle-earth, its fields stretching in every direction, its grain exported to Gondor and Rohan alike.
By the time Kael had walked the last corner of Middle-earth, it was the five hundredth year of the Fourth Age.
The world had changed almost beyond recognition.
Men had spread across nearly the entire continent. Half-Orcs and Trolls had vanished from the world entirely. The Hobbits had become a wandering people — the Shire, their old homeland, was now human land, and no one thought much of it. Dwarves were rarely seen, glimpsed occasionally in the deep mountains but gone from the wider world. As for the Elves — they had become the stuff of minstrels' songs and old tales, creatures of legend that children heard about and half-believed in.
Hogwarts, too, had become something different—not a castle, but a name on a map. The whole region between the Last Bridge to the east and the Brandywine Bridge to the west, with the North Downs and South Downs marking its northern and southern boundaries—that entire stretch of land, enclosed within the Kingdom of Arnor, had been a free territory for as long as anyone could remember.
Within this land called Hogwarts, the town of Bree served as the free capital. There were no nobles, no slaves, no monarch, no lord. The only authority was a Mayor, elected every ten years by all free citizens of the territory. The absence of any power that could compel or oppress had made it a place people came to by choice, drawn by the freedom it offered, its openness, and the sense that here, at least, a person could simply be.
Over the centuries, it had become the most intellectually vibrant and artistically expressive corner of all Middle-earth.
Hogwarts Castle and Hogsmeade had been completely hidden from ordinary sight by magic, erased from the world of Men and surviving only as fragments in old books and ancient songs.
Hogsmeade had gradually become a city that belonged entirely to wizards. More than fifty thousand of them lived there now. The Ministry of Magic administered its affairs and oversaw wizards wherever they had settled, enforcing a strict prohibition against revealing the existence of magic to ordinary people.
The castle itself remained what it had always been to wizards—a sacred place, the school where every witch and wizard completed their training before going out into the world to make their lives.
Wizards had withdrawn from ordinary society, but they had not sealed themselves off from it entirely. Bree and Hogsmeade existed side by side within the Hogwarts region—outwardly with no connection, yet threaded together by countless invisible ties.
Every Mayor of Bree, upon taking office, was quietly informed of the existence of Hogsmeade and the Wizarding World, and maintained a line of communication with the Minister of Magic. The Ministry's role was not only to govern wizards, but also to watch quietly over the whole of the Hogwarts region, ensuring it remained independent and free from interference by outside powers.
The kings and ruling councils of Arnor, Gondor, Rohan, and Ando all knew, to varying degrees, that wizards existed. It was partly this knowledge that had allowed the Hogwarts territory to remain independent through a thousand years of shifting kingdoms, because no one who knew the truth was willing to be the one to provoke a confrontation. The Kingdom of Arnor in particular, which surrounded Hogwarts on all sides, would otherwise never have tolerated such a valuable stretch of land existing beyond its authority.
Beyond Hogsmeade, the next largest wizarding settlement lay in the Isengard region west of Rohan—a small wizarding town of several thousand, descended from the old Dunlending wizards. Their primary work was managing the nearby dragon grounds, ensuring the fire dragons kept there did not stray beyond the enclosure and appear before ordinary people. Isengard was hidden behind the same magical concealment as Hogsmeade and remained unknown to the outside world.
The Wizarding World had become its own sphere, expanding beyond just wizards to include Hobbits, Dwarves, Elves, skin-changers, and others who had nowhere else to go. In the Misty Mountains, a number of protected reserves had been established to house half-Orcs, Wargs, Trolls, and similar creatures, preserving them from extinction rather than allowing them to be hunted to extinction entirely.
Long ago, Hogwarts Castle had ceased to be anything other than a school. Kael and Arwen had left it behind many years earlier, settling between Rivendell and Lothlórien. The school and the Wizarding World had grown into self-sustaining institutions, needing less and less from him. He had not appeared before wizards in a very long time. Even the professors of Hogwarts barely knew who he was. Only the Headmaster had any real sense of him, through the portrait Kael had left in the castle, which could speak and answer questions in his place.
In the forest of Lothlórien, phoenixes and thunderbirds circled together through the upper canopy. Unicorns and winged horses moved between the trees below. On the banks of the Nimrodel, a Silvan Elven maiden sat singing an old song to no one in particular. It was the kind of scene that looked as though it could not possibly be real—too still, too lovely, too complete.
Kael and Arwen stood on the high flet of the tallest mallorn, looking out over the Golden Wood in the fading light. The warmth between them was the easy, unhurried kind that comes from a very long life shared together.
Arwen's face was turned towards the sunset. The light lay across her in a way that made her look as though she were glowing from within—something between a woman and something older, quieter, more than either.
After a long silence, she looked out at the forest she had gazed upon for a thousand years and sighed.
"I wonder if we'll ever see anything quite like this again," she said softly. "I don't think I could ever have my fill of it."