Who Shall Release Us? by polutropos

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Who Shall Release Us?

Warning for grief processing, references to canonical suicide. 

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No one waits at the doors of Mandos to greet the returned souls. An Elf is reborn completely alone. At least, it is this way for Maedhros when he finds himself lying on his back on a bed of soft grasses, staring up through a canopy of shivering leaves. Grey leaves against a white sky. He squints and lifts an arm over his eyes, shielding them from the flood of light.

He lies like this, in a colourless world, until the blanket of night brings with it dreams. Memories. Not all of them. Only enough to guide him from that place, pulled forward by a feeling of overflowing fullness, an exuberant imperative that he used to know as love.

*

“I did not ask to be reborn,” he tells Fingon as he watches the steam rise from a bowl of broth. It is all he has eaten since he returned. That, and a tea that Fingon tells him tastes like rose and mint. He does not remember these flavours, but Fingon says he will.

Fingon’s hand reaches halfway across the table and then stops short, withdraws back to clasp the edge of the wood. He is always reaching this way. It kindles some feeling Maedhros has not yet untangled. A tearing, straining feeling, of wanting to be both far away and near.

“I did not want to be reborn,” Maedhros says. One of the first memories was of how he died. In a womb of fire from which he was certain – had to be certain – he would never return.

“Findekáno.” Maedhros finds he likes the shape of that name, the way it fits around his tongue, so he says it more often than he needs to. He also likes the way it makes Fingon’s mouth curve into a smile that reaches the corners of his eyes. “Findekáno,” he says again, “I was not meant to be reborn.”

He doomed himself to death forever, he is – was – sure of this.

“Time changes many things,” Fingon says, reaching from his fingertips before he sighs and looks down at the tabletop. Maedhros always feels slightly colder when he loses sight of those eyes. He warms his palms on the bowl, but finds the heat on his right hand unsettling and pulls away.

“I am glad you are back.” Fingon lifts his gaze – so bright, so alive – and Maedhros is, for a passing moment, relieved.

*

The memories are a fever, a churning in his stomach, a weakness in his limbs. Maedhros spends most of his days sleeping and dreaming. A shining woman with a watery voice comes to him in those dreams. The shifting nacre hues of her skin and her herbs that sting his throat chase him from sleep.

“It is Estë,” Fingon says. “She means to help you heal.”

Maedhros does not tell him that he does not trust this god who enters his dreams uninvited, with her strange and distant gaze. He would not want his beloved to know that he may never heal.

(His beloved – that memory had returned like a surging wave with the touch of Fingon’s fingertips against his arm. Of course, it is obvious now. That is why Maedhros came to him first of all those he knew before.)

He settles into his arms and breathes deeply of that familiar scent. Grass, perhaps, and the hint of an oncoming storm. He has smelled these things through the open windows of this home that Fingon says is theirs, for as long as he wishes to remain here.

Maedhros also remembers his mother. She lives. She never stopped living. It is likely he will see her next, Fingon says, when they are both ready. (His father? His father is a formless thing, a terrifying thing. That cloud of memory might swallow him whole.)

He knows he has brothers, for he sees them dying and remembers how he was torn when each one passed away. He has counted the strips of his soul, billowing in his dreams like the bloodstained banners of defeated legions, their stakes slumping towards the earth. Five. Five brothers who died before him. Five brothers who returned before him.

He knows they have returned because he can feel inside himself the sutures that bind them back together. They will want to see him, Fingon says, but there is a hollowness in his voice when he tells him this.

Over time, he finds their names and smooths their edges back together: Amrod, Amras. Celegorm, Curufin. Caranthir.

Sometimes he dreams of a ragged edge, its unravelling threads whipped by angry winds.

*

Maglor.

Maedhros cannot remember how his sixth brother died.

“Where is Macalaurë?” He has saved this question for his mother. Fingon has given him enough bad news already.

Nerdanel sinks deeper into her chair and threads her fingers together around her cup. She doesn’t know.

Maedhros is angry. His skin stings around his eyes. Ask the Valar, he says. Does Manwë not know all that passes in Arda?

“Do you not think that I have?” Nerdanel’s voice trembles. She sucks her lip between her teeth. “They will not say. Nobody knows.”

His mother lets her head fall into her hands and Maedhros finds he is out of sympathy. It is difficult to have compassion when you understand so little.

“How did he die?” he presses. “Why is he not here?”

“I do not know!” Nerdanel strikes the table with her palm. “I have waited…” She inhales through her nose and stares at her first-born and last-returned son. Her grim face still shines with the Light that was long ago destroyed. “I – we thought you might be able to tell us.”

*

Maedhros cannot recall his twin brothers ever being apart, but now Amrod comes alone to visit him. This makes sense. Amras was the warrior, Amrod was the artist (a sculptor, though, like their mother – not a poet). Amrod loved Maglor best. And because Amrod – young, blameless Amrod – mourns Maglor most, he comes to Maedhros first. For answers.

“You all assumed Macalaurë would return before me.” Maedhros states this rather than asks. He knows it’s true. “Because he did less harm.”

Amrod squints into the sun for a long time. He does not deny it. The light reveals a thin line of salty crystals down the side of his face. Fine muscles twitch around his mouth.

“You do not remember, then? What happened to him?” Amrod turns his neck towards him slowly, the tear stain disappearing into shadow.

That was how Maglor looked towards the end. They have the same cheekbones, the same mouth. After the deaths of all the others, Maedhros hated his last remaining brother for feeling so much. He hated him because every time he threw his feelings against Maedhros’ cold determination it made him colder and harder. Maedhros has not told anyone how Maglor screamed and broke and crumpled. He has not told them how little he cared, then, for anything but his brother’s loyalty.

“No,” Maedhros tells a half-truth. “I do not.”

They have forgiven him for much more than he deserves. They might never forgive him for that.

“Do you think…” Amrod sucks a watery breath between his teeth. “Do you think he refused the summons?”

Amrod does not ask, ‘Do you think his spirit was enslaved?’ but they both think it.

An entire movement might have been played in the long silence in which Maedhros does not answer. Amrod catches his head in his hands, folds over himself, and begins to shake. The sounds he makes remind Maedhros of the time he witnessed his littlest brother choking on his own blood. He stands and leaves him there to pour out his grief in peace.

That night, Maedhros retreats to bed alone and bends all of his will on remembering how – when – Maglor died. This is his last thought before he falls prey to the exhaustion of so much blunted memory: ‘Did I kill him?’

*

A bee jumps between ostentatious blooms. Something is always flowering on this slab of paradise, cut off from the world. Cut off from knowing.

When he leapt into the fire, he left Maglor. Alive. Maedhros remembers that now, though he forgets how to breathe when he thinks of it.

And because it is impossible to stop thinking, and treasonous to those who claim to love him to stop breathing (though, that did not stop him before), he drags his listless limbs to Estë’s Garden at last. For Fingon’s sake, for his mother’s, for his brothers (all but one, who is not here).

Not for himself. He never asked for this.

“Nelyafinwë.” The Vala calls him by the name his father – his despised, condemned, at-best-forgotten father – gave him. (A reminder, also, that the first and second Finwë are gone forever.) He would hate her for this if he could remember how to hate.

“You will find healing in acceptance,” she says with a vaporous voice, muted and muddled like the steam rising from her lake.

Maedhros thinks, ‘Acceptance of what?’ and in silence endures the sting of her ambrosial distillations.

“Acceptance that we cannot know all,” she answers his thought. Always wheedling.

Steam settles on his cheeks like dew. He does not notice the moisture becoming salty until a drop slips between his pinched lips. It tastes like blood. No – thinner, milder. Like a child learning how to taste, his tongue reaches for another drop.

It tastes like the ocean.

For the first time in this, his second lifetime, he is forced to admit defeat – for he is powerless against the violent clenching of his lungs, the surging waves of grief, as he remembers how to breathe.

*

The vacant, mist-shrouded shoreline in his visions taunts Maedhros with an answer. If only he could hear, then he would know. But the sea and stones are soundless.

If only he had listened.

When he left Estë’s Gardens, he did not return to the home perched among the hills like a nest, high and safe and inescapable. There was no succour left for him there. He did not walk towards the towers of Eldamar, either, past the homes of those who died and those whose children died defending themselves against him. Following him.

There is another apology he must make before he can look into their eyes.

But who will listen?

He follows the coastline of Aman, retracing the journey of so many Ages ago. His gaze strays perpetually out over the mirage of an ocean as if the next time he looks he will see the hither shore. It is never there.

He does not stop until he reaches the furthest tip of that continent afloat in time and space. Where once was Ice, a spit of craggy rock juts out into the sea. (Maedhros cannot see where it fades out into nothing beyond the impenetrable mist.)

He strips himself bare and wades into the water. Neither warm nor cold, it takes him into itself. Once it is lapping against his waist, he plunges beneath the surface. He opens his eyes to an endless grey-blue womb. The only indication that he has not been absorbed completely, that he is whole and corporeal, is his own hair fanning out in the corners of his vision like blood. He floats up onto his back, blinks away the droplets clinging to his eyelashes, and spreads out his limbs.

How long would he have to drift before he is carried out to the edges of the sea? And beyond that? Beyond the Circles of the World?

Forever. He would drift forever.

The thrum of the sea pours into his ears, displacing thought. Like a sprinkling of rain, soft music begins to spatter down from the firmament. He has never had an ear for music (that was Maglor’s calling), but he knows their names: harps and lutes, pipes and trumpets, viols and organs. Choirs singing syllables in a language he does not know.

And one voice soars above them all.

Maedhros remembers his voice.

Listening is like drowning, but he lets the music fill his lungs all the same. He is not afraid of drowning. He listens and listens until the pressure against his ribs is so great that he cannot breathe. Then he listens still. The water that received him so kindly before is turning to ice around him, locking him in place.

Finally, the music filling his lungs bursts forth, a tumultuous column of sound reaching towards the voice in his memory. Only in his memory.

Maedhros once begged for death with a song. Now he begs for forgiveness. This time, there will be no answer. There will be no miracle to save him from this mistake, from the shame of this abandonment. But he sings all the same. He sings to the only thing he has left. The memory of his brother’s voice.

It is enough. It has to be enough.

*

A beam of sunlight refracts off of the gilded harp in Maedhros’ hands and cuts a white line across his vision.

“Where…?” It is the first time he finds the courage to meet the gentle grey eyes of Elrond Half-elven. “You saw him?”

The flicker of a smile tugs at the corners of Elrond’s mouth. He inhales deeply. “No. I never did. But I found that on the shore near the Haven, only days before we departed.”

Maedhros sinks down onto the portico wall. Shielded from the heat of the sun by Elrond’s shadow, he succumbs to silent sobs.

*

It is centuries before Maedhros does climb the steps of Tirion, but when he does, his right hand clasps a silver harp at his side. A small crowd gathers. Taking a seat on the edge of a fountain, he props the harp against his knee and begins to sing their story.

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Chapter End Notes

The image of Maedhros floating in the sea and hearing music is inspired by the image on the Judgement card in the Rider-Waite tarot deck. The line "...harps and lutes, pipes and trumpets, viols and organs. Choirs singing..." is a paraphrase from The Ainulindalë. 

The title is from the conversation between Maedhros and Maglor in The Silmarillion ('Of Eärendil and the War of Wrath') when Maglor is persuaded to attempt the theft of the Silmarils from Eönwë's camp.

Yet Maglor still held back, saying: ‘If Manwë and Varda themselves deny the fulfilment of an oath to which we named them in witness, is it not made void?’

And Maedhros answered: ‘But how shall our voices reach to Ilúvatar beyond the Circles of the World? And by Ilúvatar we swore in our madness, and called the Everlasting Darkness upon us, if we kept not our word. Who shall release us?’

‘If none can release us,’ said Maglor, ‘then indeed the Everlasting Darkness shall be our lot, whether we keep our oath or break it; but less evil shall we do in the breaking.’

 

Thank you for reading! I am always appreciative of comments. This is my first time writing Maedhros' POV and it was quite intimidating. Much, much more could have been written here, but hopefully these snapshots come together to illustrate a journey through grief to renewal.