Beneath the Ever-Bending Sky by Isilme_among_the_stars  

---

I Hear the Rising of the Sea

---

The shore was quiet.

No gulls cried. No creak of rigging, crack of billowing sails, nor bellow of crewmen cut the air, for no ship had visited this stony beach in years. Neither did forlorn melody echo in the secluded cove, for the old elf was sleeping. And he dreamed.

Ossë looked upon the bedraggled figure with mild curiosity and wondered what his mind’s eye saw. What was it like to lose yourself in a place between waking and death? To forget the world and time, to fall through the cracks in your mind? Was it escape, or imprisonment? Perhaps both.

The old elf, with face still fresh as the first daisies of spring, creased his brow, whimpering low and forlorn. Ossë’s sea-silken hand brushed one unblemished cheek. He did not withdraw it when eyes like moon-fire shocked open, piercing and deep, pinning him as Falathrim spears did coral trout thrashing their last defiance. The maia was not daunted. Was he not also as perilous as the murky depths?

“It is time, old friend,” Ossë’s sibilant voice washed over the elf like foam over sea pebbles, deceptively soft.

“No,” Maglor replied, just as quiet, just as firm.

Ossë pressed a promise into the elf’s hand, nacre-sheened and sharp, then returned to the waves to call on another ancient friendship. He would not allow these shores to become the moribund elf’s last haunt. Maglor hurled the mollusc shell into the foamy surf with a loud splash.

..<|>..

A skiff hugged the rugged coast, its oars raking the clear, still waters. Círdan pulled deeply against the glassy surface and breathed deeper yet of the still, cool air. He adored mornings like this, when all the coast seemed to sigh with contentment. The rising sun came blushing into a sky kissed only by the lightest breeze. It was merry hell to be caught in such weather on the open seas, of course, but here in the havens such days were bliss. There was a certain quality to the empty firth’s peach-gilded grey not to be found in any other place in this world. Círdan would ache for its serenity long after he departed, just as he ached still for the slate-dark depths of his long-lost Falas. Stowing the oars with a sigh, he turned his gaze to the hazy shore. Once these docks had been a forest of masts, alive with the bustle and hum of a cheerful, sea-faring people. But few of the tall ships remained now, silent witnesses of a bygone age holding forlorn vigil, their duty near its end. The time for departure drew near.

Ripples and a splash broke the mirror-calm surface, rocking the skiff as a dripping figure clambered over the gunwale.

“Well met,” Círdan greeted, accustomed to such intrusions.

“You mourn it already,” Ossë remarked, eyeing the elf with uncomfortable intensity.

Círdan spread his arms wide. "How could I not? Behold its beauty.”

"I did not say you were wrong to." The maia sniffed, passing eyes over distant cliffs.

"You too mourn," Círdan observed.

"How could I not?" Ossë echoed with startlingly accurate mimicry. "These shores spill over with uncounted grief, like a gutted fish."

Círdan wrinkled his nose. "Eloquent, as always, Ossë."

The boat rocked with a strange sound that passed for laughter. "If you wish for pretty words look not to me. I shall guide you to the one who spills them, careless and heedless, thinking none wish to hear. One of his own is needed to retrieve him I deem."

"You have found Maglor?"

Ossë peered at him strangely. "How could I find what I had never lost?"

Círdan’s heart quickened. "Where is he?"

"You will need a bigger boat." And with that, the maia slipped over the side to glide gracefully away.

..<|>..

"It is time," Ossë repeated on another day, at another shore, to the old elf with the fathom-deep eyes, while skates played in the shallows around their ankles.

"No.” He turned his proud head away so that wind-snarled curls danced briefly in the sun. When this answer earned him a thorough splashing, the elf glared. "I have chosen."

"You have chosen wrongly,” declared Ossë, who knew a thing or two about wrong choices.

Maglor would not be moved. "It is still my choice."

There were worse places to spend an eternity as a lyrical phantom than this sun-blessed beach. Its crystal waters deepened to ultramarine under a clear, bright sky; a little warm for Ossë's taste, but the elf seemed well acclimatised. The maia surveyed him. Bronzed forearms hugged tight around his companion’s middle, cinching the gauze tunic he wore. It was a posture better suited to the cold northern climes, for the old elf nursed a chill buried deep in his bones. Healthily glowing skin could not hide the rime clinging beneath.

"Others may also make choices,” Ossë retorted. “I choose to haunt you until you acquiesce."

"I have never tired of your company so quickly as you tire of mine," the elf reminded him gently.

"No matter. I can learn patience."

Maglor scoffed, for he knew the maia to be endlessly mercurial. But the patience of lapping waves carves deep caves at the ocean’s edge, and Ossë was well acquainted with waves. Maglor, staring studiously at the glittering horizon, lifted one tanned foot and with a perfectly straight face, splashed Ossë back.

..<|>..

Ossë’s kelp-strewn figure sat astride the nose of the ketch. Círdan, busy stashing oilskin wrapped gear below deck, chose not to question the maia's seabed-torn adornment, likely the result of some under-wave storm he did not wish to hear of. "What is my bearing, Ossë?"

The bedraggled head cocked to one side. "South, once you clear the firth."

"And how far am I to go?"

Ossë shrugged. "What is distance to a drop in the ocean? Your artificial markers are strange to me. How should salt know how many leagues it has rolled dissolved in the waves?"

"Tell me of the coast there then, and the patterns of nature in that place."

"In the warmer waters life teems and races, not sluggish and cautious as it is here. Turtles nest in the balmy sands, there where summers are hot and winters bring no frost. When there chances an easterly wind, the scent of rosemary blows over the waves."

Círdan paused, thoughtful. "It is farther south than I have travelled in years, I think, my friend."

"Mayhap. Do you bring companions?"

"This journey is mine alone. Unless you should like to bunk below deck with me?"

A sour look passed over Ossë's leathery face, and he leaned backward to brush webbed fingers through the rippling surface lovingly.

"I thought not," Círdan concluded, untying the mooring line and pushing bodily against the piling. The ketch’s nose swung about, pointed toward the open sea. "Lead the way."

..<|>..

In the still evening air, Maglor floated upon a calm ocean, watching as the first stars began to blink into the dusky sky. Cool water soothed away the heat of the day, not yet gone from the heavy air. And as Ossë swam beneath, the elf's buoyant body rocked with the wake of his passing.

"Do you not find this climate stifling?"

Maglor was not so easily capsized. Disgruntled, he turned an eye briefly toward the maia before returning his gaze to the heavens. "You forget that I grew in the dewy heat of Aman, roaming within steamy valleys cradled by the Pelori."

Beside the elf, Ossë’s body hung languidly like kelp beneath the surf. "It was never so dry in that place."

"That I will grant you," Maglor agreed, "but neither did such glorious fruit as the olive grow there, and cherries, you can forget entirely."

Unimpressed by produce of the dry earth that to him held little appeal, the maia huffed. "Why will you not return?"

"To a place unmarred by darkness? How can I take there the ruin packaged within my heart? I am a poison, Ossë. No good will come of it." And with a few broad sweeps of still-vital limbs, Maglor propelled himself along the wave line.

Ossë, dolphin-like, dived, snaking his way through the water to surface again beside the elf. "Do you think my heart less dangerous than yours? I have swum in the inky depths of the midnight zone. I turned toward the impenetrable dark and felt it slip fingers deep into my heart. Yet when I surfaced, Uinen and Ulmo took me back still."

"This is different," the elf asserted, exposing his belly to the seabed in a desire for speed; his arms pulling determinedly through the water.

"How?" he asked, but the elf would not answer, for unlike the maia, he could not speak under water. Ossë narrowed his eyes. "One of your own comes hither. Do not run from him."

With a series of strong kicks, Maglor pulled ahead, and Ossë let him go.

..<|>..

A ketch skirted the headland, skipping through quiet waters as it rode the coat-tails of a summer storm. In the distance, white glimmers adorned the mountains over Andrast, where the last tall peaks of Ered Nimrais caught the sun. Círdan leaned over the port side, peering out with a hand raised against glare. He saw not one hint of another vessel for miles. In times not long passed, these waters had been thick with corsairs. That obdurate scourge had not been easily quashed, but Elessar had managed it. These waters were the sole domain of Dol Amroth’s mariners now. Where were their ships?

Before the bow of the boat, a raft of sea lions broached. Their playful fins caressed the air in a graceful display of seemingly effortless synchronicity as they rolled and dived. Among them a familiar form cavorted, webbed toes kicking through the surf with delight and abandon. Ah, that explained matters.

“Have you scared away the sailors, Ossë?” Círdan called.

“They are fearful of the high, tossing waves. All fled to their harbours when the winds rose. Tiresome creatures.”

It must have been an impressive tempest. He tipped his head toward the darkling southern sky. “Your storm?”

Ossë looked affronted. “Manwë is lord of the airs, not I! Mine is only the accompaniment: towering breakers, seaweed adorning the shore, rotting crab carcasses tangled in the midst. You know how it is.”

“Indeed I do.” Círdan was no stranger to the gifts Ossë bestowed in his wilder moods. How could one forget that memorable winter storm late in the second age, when the sea surges had been ferocious enough to unearth creatures of the deep? He had gone to the beach to survey the damage and found it littered with fang-toothed snake eels. The sight of hundreds of dead-eyed and open mouthed carcasses staring back at you was not one easily forgotten. “The air grows warmer. I judge we approach the climes you described. Have I far to journey yet?”

“Less far to go than you have already come. A ten-day’s sailing perhaps, though I can swim it faster.”

“You have known how long it would take me all along, haven’t you?”

Fetching up on the deck the maia fairly chortled.

Suddenly, the mainsail found a new attitude with a particularly sharp flick under his hands. “You could have just told me!”

“Would that have been entertaining?” Ossë stretched out his long limbs, bathing in the sun as he watched the storm ahead with smug affection. Just then, a barrage of particularly ferocious waves beat upon a distant shore, sending showers of foam into the air.

“Show off,” Círdan muttered.

The maia gave him a self-satisfied look that softened after a moment. Was that endearment? The emotion looked strange on his face. “You bore the jest well, as you ever do.”

“How is our Noldorin friend faring?”

Ossë shrugged.

“Not well, but he hides it with a convincing performance?” Círdan guessed.

“Not so convincing, but he tries.”

..<|>..

On a warm southern shore, footprints in the sand wore slowly away, eaten by the rising tide. They tramped up the beach, disappearing as the sand turned to shelves of chalky rock. There, a cool blue light shone in the window of a dilapidated house, nestled comfortably into the hill. Tiles were missing from its roof and patches of stucco from its walls, but this did not seem to bother its inhabitant, for whom the building was more a squat than a home.

The grief-eroded elf sat cross-legged atop a thin mattress in the only corner where the roof was mostly intact. Before him lay a leather wallet, open and spilling its contents to be pored over: letters mostly, some brittle and faded. Ossë had never seen much point in written correspondence. Of greater interest to him was a little shell, half covered in parchment. The shell itself was nothing special, a cockle only, and quite a plain one at that, with nothing remarkable about it save a perfectly round moon snail hole near its wider edge. But through the hole there was threaded a twist of hair, soft and dark. And Maglor’s fingers ever seemed to find it as he read and re-read long redundant words, brushing the loose ends absently.

In the beam of soft, clean light that at that moment began to shine through the broken roof, it was apparent that the hair, which at first appeared to have come from one small head, in fact belonged to two. Ossë followed Maglor’s gaze as he looked sharply up toward Eärendil, where his ship rested beside the moon.

“Why should you care?” Maglor asked of the star. “I would have thought you preferred me far away.”

Eärendil, of course, did not hear. The light continued to shine resolutely down. After a moment, Maglor stowed the sheaves of parchment inside their protective bounds and turned away. Curled as he was, a spray of dark hair covering his face, one might miss the fine trembling of his shoulders and think he found sleep, but Ossë was not fooled. The favour he bestowed was as much memory as promise; a pebble of sea glass slid onto the window ledge in a shade of turquoise never matched outside of Aman.

..<|>..

Círdan had barely set foot upon dry land when a ragged figure strode toward him with all the ominous purpose of a storm cloud.

“If you think I am coming with you, you are sadly mistaken,” Maglor declared with a hard edge to his voice. This was not the welcome Círdan had hoped for, frayed and slightly forlorn as he felt after weeks on the cramped ketch. It was, however, more or less what he had expected.

“I am glad to see you too, Maglor,” he shot back, as the other appraised him with a long, hard stare. Stretching sore arms, and curling toes into the crystal sand, he savoured the feel of steady earth beneath his feet. “Would you be so kind as to direct me to the nearest fresh water?”

“Filling your casks and then turning homeward again, are you?” Maglor asked pointedly.

“Oh no.” The smile Círdan wielded was angelic. “I plan to stay a while yet. The balmy air here is rather pleasant, is it not? I wish to make the most of it.”

By the narrowing of his eyes, it seemed Maglor considered the merits of becoming a thorn in his side. At length, a bare rudiment of civility won. “A short walk north of here you will find a runnel still flush with water, despite the dry weather. You need not travel far upstream before it is no longer brackish.”

“My thanks,” he called after Maglor’s retreating form as the other strode determinedly away.