On the Nature of Time by Elrond's Library  

Time meant very little before they descended into physicality. The Void was a place of messy contradictions: full and empty, silent and deafening, pure black and rainbows of color. The recession of Music into empty silence, the passing of insubstantial into substantial – being awake and suddenly individual was infinitely strange.

They gathered at the edges of the world Eru had created for them to inhabit. Fear struck unsung chords and liminal melodies. They ordered themselves in choral groups, each according to their nature, and waited. Waiting had never been something they could do, a new sensation with all the rest.

The First among them organized the choral groups, found themselves partners and encouraged those who waited to find those other individuals who harmonized within their own beings. Understanding sparked between them, still wordless, nameless – a yearning for intimate binding and companionship for some, an equal contributor in creation for others.

Eventually, the Firsts raised their voices in Song, and raised the land, contained the echoing waters, separated the air from the firmament. The Firsts bade them to spread, to inhabit the spaces that sang to them, to greet each other with tidings of joy and cooperation in this new home.

They named themselves collectively Maiar, the Beautiful, and they found purposes that fit their melodies. Some spread into the land, raising mountains and digging vales, while some aligned with the First of the Waters and burbled happily in streams and brooks. The transmutation of physicality was their task, happily undertaken.

Others found themselves closer to the First Singers, who named themselves Valar, the Powers. It was under their teachings, their ingenuity, their interpretations of the great Themes Eru had Sung that the Maiar began honing themselves into craftspeople. They Sang as they worked, exploring the physical world with unmitigated eagerness.

Varda’s Maiar crafted infinite stars, setting them high in the firmament. They embraced the heat, the radiation, the light with eager arms. Twisting and dancing in the dark, time passed swiftly for them – all their focus on the task in front of them, and so the world changed without them.

By contrast, the Maiar of Aulë felt every moment at a pace akin to magma seeping out of the land, or the erosion of stone against the relentless tides. Their experimentation was a deluge of delight and discovery. They chattered away their time, sharing every new invention with their fellows.

The world took shape around them, and they were content. The First among them celebrated their achievements with them, they laughed and sang and danced around bonfires in the lamp-lit dark. Few recognized the undercurrents of discontent, of deception, that ran around them as they feasted on their own satisfaction.

Change in the order of things came quickly, when it came. The plot to destroy the Lamps in the north and south was executed with surprising efficiency. They had no reason to think that chaos might come with darkness, for so long they had lived without light. But change came. 

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For ostensibly immortal beings, the experience of time passing was highly variable. Maedhros had spent his time on Thangorodrim trying to bridge his understanding of how, despite time passing at the same rate, it could feel so slow, compared to his life in Tirion, now long since gone from him.

Every day – or what might have been days, weeks, months, years – was an agony of waiting. Waiting for something to change. The stars wheeled overhead. Birds called in the distance, retreating and returning with a seeming seasonal migration. How boring, to be in such a position, in such lonely agony!

When Fingon came for him, time picked up again. Maedhros recovered, discarding his heritage with blasé ease, his names and his position and his identity fell apart as he reforged himself into a singular knife, edge honed to the singular purpose of standing firm against the Shadow in the north.

He displaced his people again, splitting the Noldor into smaller and smaller factions. He took his brothers and their people east. He taunted the Dark Vala with his position, high on Himring Hill, building tall and boldly and without deception. He displaced them yet again, sending his brother’s people south.

And so time slowed again, the siege slowly turning elves and men and dwarves into meat on the field, but never quickly enough to be unsustainable. Their shared endeavor was punctuated by little crises, skirmishes that barely made an appreciable dent in their enemy’s lines, but made for good sport.

When it came down to it, the Union made in his name was never really going to make a difference. To evil end shall all things turn that they begin well. He listened to the cries of his people, that the High King was dead, and so turned and ran.

Maedhros was haunted by memory and pain in the years following, which crept like garden snails, punctuated by two moments of rash decisions and loss. Even the addition of a new set of twins could not soften him, for he felt his losses too keenly to accept care of more.

Time kept sweeping on, though, and the little twins grew, and left. Horns were heard from the west, the horizons red with blood and black with acrid smoke. The Valar had come, and with them victory, and an opportunity to regain that which had been lost. So they crept closer.

They killed again, a necessary thing to win their prize. As it burned his soul, Maedhros wished desperately for more time, or else to turn it all back, for becoming a knife aimed solely at Morgoth’s heart was no way to live. He strode forward and tumbled over the precipice.

And so as it began, so it ended, time slowing to a crawl as the heat of the caldera rose to meet him as he fell. The only way to finish this story is  to destroy it all, and so he met his inevitable end, and passed out of time. 

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