On the Nature of Time by Elrond's Library  

Maedhros

Using the second set of 10 one word prompts: Bridge, everyday/every day, Heritage, Displaced, Endeavor, Listen, Memory, Horizons, Tumbled, Caldera

each paragraph is 50 words exactly, according to gdocs.

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.