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

The Legacy of Grief

This chapter explores grief, and within it a character wrestles with some quite dark thoughts. It touches on chronic illness (sublty) and mental illness (not so subtly). Please read with care.

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.