One In the Fires of the Heart of the World by Isilme_among_the_stars

Maedhros had not expected the searing pain. The jewel branded him none-the-less.

Unclean. Evil.

Though weary and deeply regretful, he had never considered himself thus. Stained, perhaps. Broken, certainly. But not evil. There had been no comprehension of having sunk so low. Even after all that had come to pass, Maedhros still considered that at his core he was fundamentally good, even if it were buried under a multitude of sins. But the jewel burned, and the anguish of being unworthy of it was too much to bear. With no more illusions, no more purpose to fill, all that was left to him was despair.

The despair wasn’t new. He had lived with its shadow for an age. But now, stripped bare of all else that he had clung to, its black maw opened before him, drawing him inexorably in. He chose instead to be swallowed by flame.

What was a little more heat when he already burned? He hadn’t reckoned on its exponential curve of intensity. He had not known it possible for pain to so far surpass even that of hanging from Thangorodrim. Even his bones felt incandescent. He would have screamed had there been air in his lungs. They instead expanded with pure, molten heat. This unbearable brightness was far beyond agony.

Then suddenly, all stopped.

Awareness remained, softened but somehow unfathomably deep, now that the flow of sensation had ceased. And his awareness, awash in an encompassing sea of relief, resounded with one thought.

I am free of it.

The relief did not last long.

He no longer had eyes to see with, nor skin to feel, and yet he could perceive. What he perceived first, of course, was Maglor. His brother’s fëa was now jagged with pain and anger, rising in peaks above the dark waters of sorrow with an undercurrent of fear that ever had their home in his soul these past centuries. Once, it had been like a clear, melodious stream.

Images came to him, of his brother’s face cast in umber by the light that spilled from the crack in the earth. How at the last moment Maglor had thrown himself forward, arms out, too late. The wildness in his eyes, his hair tossed about by the rising heat in the air, was seared onto Maedhros’s soul.

Then came guilt and regret. For then he remembered Maglor had no one left to him in the world. Instinctively he reached out, just as he had done many times before. Without thinking, Maglor welcomed him.

His thoughts were not words precisely. But the shape of them was this: You are dear to me still. I do not wish to leave you alone in the world. I am sorry.

The tides of Maglor’s sorrow boiled and crashed, inflamed by fury. Yet tossed to the surface like seafoam there was still pity, and the shape of it was this: Go. I grieve the suffering you may find in Mandos. Yet do not linger, for perhaps by small chance, hope still there remains.

Mandos indeed already called him, a light yet insistent tug within.

To Maglor he conveyed assent, even as he anchored himself to his brother still a while longer with a firm yet warm thread of care. He tried to be stillness, the unmoving foundation of rock that he had been in earlier days. Maglor accepted this. He smoothed around him, as disturbed waters whose want is to return to stillness. The great burgundy towers of his anger sunk slowly below them, though Maglor was still shot through with bright, white, streaks of pain. When at last the waters becalmed, Maedhros realised they had travelled to the shores of the sea. His brother tasted salt and heard crashing waves.

The call of Mandos grew stronger.

From Maglor came the shape of a sad smile and his long, skillful fingers regretfully untying knots to release the thread of care that bound them. Then came a singular wave pushing him gently but firmly to the shore. Thus, Maedhros finally left, and allowed the summons to drag him down into the dark. 

Leave a Comment

The whisper came into the back of Maedhros’s mind whenever someone mentioned the Halls of the Dead…

Míriel.

As he hovered uncertainly on their threshold the name reverberated through his thoughts. Míriel Therinde, his grandmother, the first fëa to grace Námo’s halls.

Everyone in Aman knew the story. But he, the eldest son of her own son, was intimately familiar with it in a way no other could be. He had not merely heard the tale but grown up in the aftershocks of it and walked in the spaces hidden between its words.

Awareness had come one stifling summer night when, awoken from restless sleep by his father’s raised voice, he’d seen his tears. Peering around the doorway at Fëanor’s face, twisted not in anger but sadness, Maedhros suddenly understood that the stinging criticism on linguistic shifts that he vented once again to an ever-patient Nerdanel, only papered over the fear that Míriel’s memory was being forgotten. Neither father, nor mother saw him. Small and frightened by such raw emotion, Maedhros crept back to his room with knotted stomach. He lay curled and sweating with the covers over his head until shouting dissolved into sobs, and sobs faded to silence. There were many other such scenes, kept secret in the privacy of their home, never spoken of in daylight. To be part of his family was to be intimately acquainted with grief. A poor exchange for the grandmother that should have been there to give her their love. Mandos for him would forever be associated with the vast space that a person could take up in their absence.

In his youth Maedhros wondered if the stories of Míriel’s death, claiming the child possessed of such singularly fiery spirit had carved it from his mother’s very soul, had any truth to them. Was Fëanor truly so exceptional only because of her sacrifice? No. Maedhros decided that had only come to be believed because grief sharpened his father’s fire, made it brighter, drove him on.

Father’s grief is what truly sets us apart, he had often thought, in the days when it had not been so ubiquitous, a bitter spring from which all must drink. Grief was the reason they could never remain long in one place, the unspoken barrier that prevented them from finding the belonging he and his brothers so craved among their cousins, uncles and aunts. Fëanor had never been content to rest in one place, physically or intellectually. Always striking out in new directions, frustrated with the confines of existing only in one place at a time, and the limitations of possessing only one set of hands. Fëanor’s endless search for mastery was a frantic thing, a way to keep running always away from that gaping darkness, toward some new source of light. An already brilliant mind polished blinding bright through constant movement, so to never have to touch the sadness. Because if he did? Well, they’d all seen what had happened when he could run from that wellspring of grief no longer, beginning the night that Finwë had died. When the darkness caught him, all was madness and devastation. Father was a wildfire roaring up the slopes of the Pelori, he and his brothers were flames crackling in its heat, and they had all watched the world burn.

What had driven Míriel to Mandos? Perhaps no one would ever know. Perhaps the sickness came with her on the long march to Valinor. Newly emancipated and shivering, his strengthless body languishing under thinning bedclothes that did little to shield against the chill winds blowing from lake Mithrim, Maedhros had nothing to do but think. He imagined his grandmother, her vitality drained by illness to its lowest ebb, and pictured its birth on the shores of Cuivienen, fulminating from the fear that moved in the shadows there. He was no stranger to shadows, had been almost all shadow himself then. He knew what they could do. He’d felt close to her in that sickbed, as if she lay alongside him, beckoning and warning by turns. Whispers gifted to him of surrendering to the dark by a woman he thought, perhaps, he now understood. Maedhros had been so weary, but he would not follow to Mandos the invitation that she proffered. There was too much of Finwë in him to take Míriel’s path.

Finwë’s people, his people, dallied on either side of the lake in those days, complacent prey animals ignorant of the unseen threat gathering beneath Angband’s reeking smokestacks. That threat he saw only too clearly, and so it must be him to corral them, no matter how exhausted he was. Neither could he disappoint his father, forswear the last promise made to him and consign his younger brothers to the everlasting dark. Even on desperate nights, Míriel’s morbid whispers the loudest in his ears, he would not have chosen to fade away. Like Fëanor, grief, that most efficient fuel, he allowed to sharpen him. The diffuse candle-light warmth of his own spirit had become a single point of deadly flame, so bright as to be almost colourless, hot enough to cut steel. Intended as a rallying call, to bring devastation on their enemies, it had consumed him in the end.

Can you forgive me, Maglor? he wondered, For following grandmother? I tried for so long not to, to shut my ears to the beckoning call. Can you forgive me for deserting you in the end?

Mandos opened to him. Maedhros accepted its cold embrace.

“Death found you at last,” Námo said simply, in a voice far gentler than Maedhros had any right to expect, making no mention of the manner in which it had done so. He was not kind, but neither did Námo condemn with words that dropped like stones, as they had when he prophesied the Exiles’ Doom.

Yes.

He longed for rest. No doubt Námo sensed this.

“You will not enjoy being houseless.”

I did not imagine it would be so. It is still preferrable to torment.

“We shall see. It will be harder on you than others I suspect.”

I have endured much before. At least in houselessness I may find peace.

“Of a kind. Go then and take your rest.”

The halls were vast and strange. An endless twilight landscape, they stretched out before Maedhros like Thingol or Finrod’s caves, though lacking the majesty and warmth of either. But beauty was not absent. He had expected it to be severe, but a cold sort of elegance graced the place, like Varda’s stars shining in a cloudless Midwinter sky. But it wasn’t this that surprised Maedhros the most.

He should have expected it. When the prophecy was spoken, he had been there to hear it along with everyone else. He’d turned those words over in his mind, holding them up to a candle as if through examination he could somehow find the flaw that would cause them to unravel. Maedhros knew the prophecy spoke of yearning and entreating, so it perhaps should not have come as a shock. The Halls of Mandos were not quiet.

So many souls. So many fëar around him, and all were thinking thoughts, connecting, colliding in a cacophony of colour, meaning and the remembrance of sound. It was all so loud.

Maedhros shut it all out. 

Leave a Comment