Oh, this is cold, clever and dark!

I love the different variations on Maglor there are in fandom. I can believe the sympathetic one, the foster father of Elrond and Elros, who threw his Simaril away and repented....and I can believe ones like this, where he is essentially mad, and being a poet, is mad in a creative fashion!

Your story also underlines ones of the more terrifying aspects of the Silmarillion end game. If Maedhros and Maglor had done the right thing, by *not* attacking the Havens and Elwing, it seems that the result would still have been "and the Morgoth kills everyone."

curse you, i dont like AU stuff cos it confuses my shaky grasp of canon, but this was so good that i'm afraid you will succeed in confusing me. *shakes fist*.  and i dont want to talk about how eagerly i read on to find out what happened... gah ! 

poor Elrond... i mean, one good true dream is not gonna console him for all the bad ones he must have had...

Wow! AU at its best!

I love this kind of story that asks more questions than it answers: what triggers the Valar intervention since Earendil can't go with the Silmaril? What happens to Elrond and Elros? Did Gil-galad get killed in the attack on Balar? Celebrimbor? Will Maglor eventually recover the Silmarils before Eonwe grabs them? Will this fulfill the Oath and free everybody? And it goes on...;)

Wonderful!

There's little I can say that I haven't told you already, but who cares! There were so many amazing things about this sad and dark, but satisfying AU. I loved that you made Maglor the more detached, enigmatic, devil-may-care of the two, analysing the situation so mercilessly and gambling on the faintest of hopes. I loved the pragmaticism of your Elwing. Loved curious and courageous Elrond, and his prophetic dreams. Loved Morgoth's sense of interior design, using Balrogs as part of his lighting concept. This is an utterly compelling AU. As Angelica observes, it's so intruiguing to speculate how the Valar come around without Eärendil pleading, and whether Maglor survives, maybe even manages to fulfill the Oath. At the least, he has fulfilled his mission of buying the necessary time for the survivors, and I can tell myself that he'll see some kind of reward for that (beyond his triumphant grin in the end).
In conclusion, excellent!

Wow! That is stunning. I liked everything about it. Maglor and Maedhros were terrific characters.

I loved Elwing and Earendil both a lot.(I've never been particularly drawn to Earendil--I can't get deadbeat dad out of my head! I know inappropriate response to the heroic mode of the canon story, but I was a modern-day single mom, so I have my prejudices.) Other fanfic has forced me to feel pity for Elwing and even a little empathy from time to time, but never love. This one gave her guts and intelligence. Again, my own personal morals kicking in--once one has kids and is stuck with them, one's possibility for taking heroic suicidal chances is trumped by one's duty to stay with them and safeguard them unless one has another parent-option lined up.

Anyway, I like Elwing in this fic as both mother and responsible leader in this story. And I like that Earendil shows up! And she somehow knew he was coming--in other words, he was not totally gone and out of reach. She clearly had some means of reaching him--even if she was not aware of how it worked. Perhaps Maiarin magic of some sort.

Elrond! He was a little star! I hope he survived. Fantastic.

Maglor was stunning, absolutely acceptable and thrilling to me in his mythic heroic mode--so human and appealing! Wow! However this story would have ended if you had written an ending, for me he had already won! He got to see Morgoth get his!

I think this is an amazing story. Even if I got all of your intentions for it wrong! It was perfect for me!

So effective, from the way it starts right up to that ending!

Among other things, your AU demonstrates, more clearly even than I would have expected, that just avoiding the Third Kinslaying as such doesn't necessarily make that final period in Beleriand less bleak.

Very good characterization throughout! In that meeting between Elrond and Maglor I felt rather painfully what will never happen between them now, as well what happens. Of course this Elrond hopefully might keep both his parents, although one doesn't really know whether Elwing and Earendil have managed to deal with their problem of few survivors and fewer ships until Eonwe arrives...

Thank you very much for sharing this with us!

Being a Navy brat, I've always seen Eärendil as pretty much the exact opposite: someone actively working to protect his family and get them to safety in the only way he can.

Fascinating. I was born while my father was in the Navy (and not present at my birth). But I always loved his stories and considered him a hero. I guess I read Eärendil, instead of one pursuing a straight and necessary course, as being a bit of a gallavanting risk taker. Not that world does not need dreamers of impossible dreams.

Well, you indeed succeeded in making him more accessible to me, enabling me to read him in a more favorable light.

Indy, I just loved this. I thought the premise of the AU was interesting and thought-provoking, set up so that it really got at some intriguing characterization and politics from the time period. I really liked your Elwing, who came across as strong in a sturdy, unflinching way, like a tree that has grown up lashed by the winds off the sea.

The decision of the brothers, of course, was wrenching: at once heroic and hopeless. When Maglor looks back and sees Maedhros's body lying on the ground, my heart twisted. And the ending was darkly upbeat. The story really just succeeded on a lot of levels for me.

I don't read much AU, but I really enjoyed this one.

The ending was maybe a little rushed, compared to the previous sections, but it works as a "glimmers of a fragmenting mind" type thing, I think; telling the tale from captivity. To me, it reads as though Maglor would prefer to think about the least horrible of all the horribleness ;)

Morgoth's punishment is very in-character, too; at this point he has no need to make a visible statement to forces that care about his captive, and so indulging whimsy takes priority, hehe.