Beneath the Ever-Bending Sky by Isilme_among_the_stars  

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Journey Long Before Me Lies

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Wind thrashed the shoreline, waves beat mercilessly against cliffs and two Quendi sheltered nestled betwixt rocks, dwarfed by the magnificent display.

“Ossë is in a mood today,” Maglor remarked casually.

“I heard the winds teasing earlier,” put in Círdan.

“They whipped him into a frenzy, no doubt.”

No sooner had Maglor finished speaking than a particularly ferocious wave sent a shower of spray in their direction. The maia was listening, it seemed.

“Nōwē,” Maglor chided, his eyes fixed on a shape among the waves. “Did you learn your lessons from Ulmo so poorly? Surely that tub lacks a dropped anchor.”

The undercurrent of darkness beneath his companion’s teasing tone quickly captured Círdan’s attention. Following Maglor’s gaze he found his ketch tossed roughly about the bay, drawn surely by the swelling tide toward the treacherous shore.

“She will be dashed against the rocks,” Maglor observed.

She would, too; the ketch bobbed inexorably toward a jagged outcrop of basalt with unforgiving edges. Círdan had never once failed to secure any of his vessels. Perhaps some thread of fate stitched its designs this stormy day. He sighed regretfully. “There is nothing for it.”

“To the void with that!” Maglor rose, and with determination stamped into the set of his long limbs, strode purposefully toward the waterline.

“Are you mad?” Círdan called after. “You will be dashed against the rocks.” But before he had finished speaking, Maglor had leapt into the waves. It was a clean dive, executed with skill, into waters wild with stormy commotion. Círdan could scarcely draw breath until a dark head broke their surface, and he had muttered a desperate appeal to Uinen that the whelming waves not conquer the foolish creature. Perhaps Maglor had finally let go the last twists of his threadbare sanity. No right-minded Elda would dare challenge Ossë on such a day.

When a forlorn figure half-scrambled, half-washed onto the ketch’s deck, Círdan could almost hear the Noldo’s terse imprecations.

Where do you keep your damned spare, Nōwē? Maglor would no doubt be muttering as he searched, mast to keel, for the second anchor. You are not fool enough to neglect stowing one.

As the boat drew closer and closer to the outcrop, Círdan’s apprehension grew, like mounds of spume gathering on wet sand. At last, a dark object sailed over the portside railing and sank rapidly to the depths. The anchor took, and happily, when the vessel ceased her determined drift, she still bobbed far enough out from shore to avoid disaster. The small figure aboard paused not, however, and made ready to dive back into that roiling water.

“Stay there, you fool!” Círdan called, but his words were snatched by Manwë’s sprites, and lost to the howl of the wind.

Maglor was strong, and showed no sign of flagging as steady strokes propelled him toward the shelf of rock on which Círdan stood, despite wind-whipped mountains of surf threatening to overthrow him. Strength, however, could not save him from the swell that hit just as he neared the promontory; and as Círdan had feared, he was indeed dashed against the rocks.

Fiercely, Maglor clung, refusing to be pulled back as an arrow drawn for a second firing; and true to nature, no sooner than Círdan had dragged him from the water by the shoulders, did Maglor shake him off impatiently.

“I am well. Do not fret!” he insisted.

Well, in Círdan’s opinion, should not include a disoriented sway plaguing one’s movements, nor a cut blooming above one’s brow. He eyed Maglor with concern as one side of the Noldo’s face glazed red where seawater pouring from his hair mingled with blood. Realisation came, in that moment, of how deeply he cared for the surly elf as grieved imaginings seized him. The thought of his companion dragged, insensible, to the sea bed, turned him cold.

“Would you cease being a prideful ass for a moment?” he quipped, ignoring Maglor’s rebuffing hands that he might hold him steady as the two made for higher ground, and spray, cast off from the booming crash of storm-front waves, lashed their backs. Later, when both were dry and Maglor’s hurt was tended, he asked, “why did you do it?”

And Maglor answered ruefully, “I may be content to linger here indefinitely, but you, most certainly, are not.”

“Boats can be built, given time and resources.”

“Perhaps,” Maglor asserted, “I do not wish to put up with you for as long as that would take.” But both knew the suggestion for the falsehood it was.

..<|>..

Sutures bristled, prickling his skin as Ossë ran a careful finger over the lump burgeoning from Maglor’s forehead. A great purple bruise spread there, like squid ink dispersed in water.

The old elf stirred. “Admiring your handiwork?” he muttered with eyes still closed.

Ossë withdrew his hand, regret as slick and heavy within him as algae covered boulders festering on the edge of a fetid pool.

“You should not have been in the waves,” he accused.

“Spare me,” the elf grumbled, “I have suffered one upbraiding, and have no use for another, nor for your guilt.”

“Do you hurt badly?” Ossë inquired, quite politely he deemed.

Perhaps Maglor thought otherwise, as glazed eyes opened to spear him with an incredulous look, darkly intense. “What do you think?”

Elves were complex creatures. The sensate experiences of incarnates, as a whole, were such widely varied things, and in the specifics of the mammalian nervous system, Ossë now found himself sorely lacking, just when the knowledge had become pertinent. He turned a plaintive expression upon Círdan.

Yes, greatly, the elf mouthed, taking pity as he was wont to do.

“It pounds like an un-moored vessel beating against stone pilings,” Maglor moaned.

An awfully unpleasant thought that was. Imagining the thumping, Ossë wondered if it applied only to Maglor’s forehead, or also to his ears. He slunk away.

..<|>..

When Ossë crept back to slap a gob of slimy goo across Maglor’s brow, the disgusted look on the Noldo’s face had Círdan chuckling heartily.

“Leave it,” he advised, catching his breath as he wiped tears of mirth from his eyes, “it will help.”

“It has the feel of mucus, or worse,” Maglor complained.

The concoction may well have included the secretions of some unfortunate sea creature, for all Círdan knew. Ossë’s remedies never came without a touch of revulsion, and yet were strangely effective. Surely enough, the tension in Maglor’s shoulders soon began to disperse, and he rose to sit.

“I will calm the waters when you sail,” promised Ossë, as near an apology as ever there came from the maia. Círdan tipped his head in acknowledgement.

Such surety was there in the word when. Ossë, clearly, had no doubts as to Maglor’s eventual concession. Though Círdan remained unsure of its inevitability, he thought, perhaps, the other had softened to the idea, and judged the time ripe to apply leverage.

“When we sail, we shall first ensure you are in a good mood,” he told Ossë.

Neither the emphasis nor the feint were lost on Maglor, who answered with a sharp look. “That is, if we sail. I am minded rather to walk. I shall not care that it increases the time required tenfold or more.”

Ossë might have looked suitably chastised, had the expression ever passed his strange face before. As it was, he managed only a rather amusing mild bewilderment, and Maglor’s answering laugh was quite fond, even if it was cut short by a painful wince.

“You are forgiven,” he offered, softly.

“What use do the tides and currents have of forgiveness, Fëanorion?” sniffed Ossë, much offended, and took his leave with as much dignity as he could muster.

“You are minded to sail, after all?” Círdan asked, as the pointedly harsh crunch of Ossë’s retreating footsteps faded (the maia had no trouble moving silently, even upon land, when it was his wont).

“I did not say as much,” retorted Maglor, but the evasive answer was rather ruined by the melancholic expression he wore as he spoke it.

“Neither did you refute me.”

“It only occurs to me,” said Maglor after a good stretch of time, each word spoken with the same gravity and affected carelessness as stones plunked into a shallow pool, “that I shall miss your company when you leave. Perhaps I should not have saved your boat.”

The affection lately stirred in his breast, Círdan began to realise, was grudgingly reciprocated. Maglor, it seemed, had come to care for him too, in his own way.

“If you wished me stranded here,” he answered, “perhaps not.”

..<|>..

The elf of ships and rigging bent at the very edge of the sea, removing quill and viscera from a squid and tossing them to the waves. Around Ossë the pleased flitterings of a thousand tiny creatures vibrated through the undercurrent as they came to feast.

“Uinen give me patience…” Círdan muttered, and turning, called loudly behind him, “sit down, for pity’s sake, before you fall over!”

There stood the old elf, swaying with the motion of the sea as he drew a crab net from a sheltered pool, nested amid a tumble of weed-adorned boulders; and Ossë found himself momentarily transfixed, before recalling with a jolt that Quendi were never meant to move so.

“I will take care of this. Rest now,” Círdan told him with a voice as deceptively gentle as the silty ocean floor, that none-the-less holds firm under the vast weight of oceans, and pushed the other’s shoulders downward until Maglor was forced to sit. He made no protest. The attentions of his own kind did him much good.

“Why are you doing this?” Maglor asked, as the other squatted before him, radiating concern.

“We have had this conversation before. Do you not remember?”

“Ulmo insulted your ship. I have not forgotten.” There Maglor blew out a frustrated sigh. “That is not what I meant…”

“Then by Aulë,” Círdan implored, “say what you mean! Or have the words deserted you?” He took the other’s face in his hands and turned it this way and that, seeking for sign of infirmity therein.

Seemingly more from habit than annoyance, Maglor batted his hands away. Far more tolerant was he toward Círdan, than he had ever been for Ossë. “You could simply have waited me out, or, had you grown frustrated, lashed me to your mast and had done with it. But this? It seems very much like care, Nōwē. Yet I have done nought to deserve it.”

“Should I not care? You are a being that breathes, just as I, are you not? Is kindness not yours by right?”

It struck Ossë melancholy to see Maglor scoff at that, as if he believed his very personhood in doubt. The feeling was much the same as one had gliding over the broken peaks of drowned Thangorodrim. Life had returned, teeming, to Beleriand-under-the-waves shortly into the second age. Crustaceans had crawled in, seeding coral as they went, beaten in their racing only by microscopic creatures too small to be seen by incarnate eyes. Etched into the stones of Brithombar’s walls now stood thriving reefs, brimming with the industry of survival. In some places, however, life would not take hold. No weeds grew, not even the hardiest, over Morgoth’s slag heaps of old, where still lay the great wyrm’s decaying bones. The old elf was not of their ilk, though he seemed to think it. So dulled had his countenance become that it were as if Ossë beheld him lying in the sandy shallows from above, as water bent and tempered the sun’s light to render him a blue-grey.

“You suffer from faintness again?” Círdan asked as Maglor pressed the heel of one hand to his forehead.

Tangled curls bobbed like a buoy rocked by the waves as he nodded.

“Come, then. Inside with you, and should you refuse to lay I shall sit on you such that you are forced to do so.”

A strange feeling lapped at Ossë, wistful as the retreating tide, as the two elves withdrew, one laughing weakly at the other’s jesting threat. Ossë was as the birds that wheeled over cliffs, high above the waves, distant and watchful. He was as an anchor pulled from the seabed’s firm embrace, a security and connection no longer craved as it came time to sail. The elves made their hobbling way along the beach, and as Ossë slipped quietly into the waves and away, he could not help but think they left him behind.

..<|>..

Maglor had quietly fussed over his pack for an hour now, strewing its contents across his mattress that he might pack and repack the items contained within. Círdan watched as he stowed them in a variety of haphazard ways, to little avail. A worn leather wallet seemed ever at the forefront of his efforts, and invariably received the most care. Though he had improved much, the knock taken to his head still made of him a poor logistician, much to Maglor’s frustration.

“What are you trying to achieve? Perhaps I can help.”

“Likely I will be fit to travel soon,” Maglor declared, which was no answer at all, though the Noldo clearly believed it was. His wits, Círdan knew, had not been dulled. Rather, infuriatingly obtuse was for him merely an usual mode of communication.

“Do all Finwëans believe their intent carved as legibly on their faces as cirth in stone? Or is that your particular talent?”

Maglor looked up sharply. “It is past time you returned to Mithlond, is it not? I assume you do not intend to depart without me.”

Had he resolved to sail at last?

“You mean to come?” Círdan asked tentatively, still fearing were he too heavy-handed the other would shy away, like a flighty ray.

A small, concessionary smile twitched across Maglor’s features. “You have a second bunk on that ketch of yours, do you not?”

“Well,” Círdan jested, “I had planned to tie you to the mast…”

And Maglor laughed as he pulled out the leather wallet yet again and eyed it ponderously. “I hope you brought a strong rope.”

Círdan came to sit beside him. “Is it fragile?” he asked.

“Somewhat. Though susceptibility to water damage troubles me more. It is long since I have journeyed over sea, and I am afraid I am unprepared.”

“That is no object. I have oilskin that can be spared.”

“It would be much appreciated,” Maglor accepted, touching his hand briefly in a curiously intimate gesture of thanks.

Quietly, and with little fuss, the contents of the old stucco house were gathered and put in order. Little discussion was required, as they had fallen some time ago into an easy working relationship, dividing labour as easily as they drew breath.

“Are you certain?” Círdan asked as the last items were stowed into a wooden crate.

“No,” Maglor admitted. He paced restlessly about the floor now there remained no tasks with which to busy himself. Doubt was evident, certainly, but Círdan thought it only fear disguised, for Maglor’s determination seemed sound. The Noldo’s feet took him, seemingly without conscious intent, to the window, and with palms flat against the sill he leaned into the gloaming, where the first stars began to shine. When Círdan laid a steady hand between shoulder blades that faintly trembled, Eärendil shone warmly upon them both.

..<|>..

The easy skill with which Círdan handled his ketch was no less a marvel to Maglor now that their journey neared its end as it had been at the beginning. He watched with appreciation as a series of practised manoeuvres brought them cleanly into the Gulf of Lune. The journey had been a pleasant one, as, true to his word, Ossë had gentled the waters as they hugged the coastline, following it north. Now, as their vessel skipped over the protected waters of the firth, Círdan breathed deeply of the rain-washed air, still heavy with moisture from a passing shower. “We will reach harbour before the day is through,” he judged, “if this wind holds.”

The Teler came to life on these familiar waters in a way Maglor had not seen in all their time in the south. He became more himself the closer they came to the havens, as if shrugging off a confining cloak, or stepping into a pair of well-worn boots. Maglor, by contrast, felt increasingly ill at ease, and wrong. As a surge of biliousness came causing him to cling to the mizzen mast, Círdan seemed to take his unsteadiness for renewed doubt. Perhaps doubt was indeed responsible, at least in part, for though a touch of light-headedness still lingered, it had not affected him so in weeks.

“What convinced you to come, in the end?” the other inquired, displaying in its full glory his tendency to treat conversation like rigging and rudder. The connections he drew were not always obvious at first, and subtle tugs frequently begat greater swings, the effect of which were slow to realise, yet weighty. Thinking long-ingrained apprehensions failed to lift, the Teler aimed to point Maglor’s prow toward something stronger.

“That,” Maglor admitted, not without a touch of bitterness, “I do not rightly know.” He did not much like being steered, no matter how well-intentioned the steer-er.

They docked as sunset flamed across the heavens, casting rippling waters in gold; and disembarked at a lamp-lit quay lonelier, despite its marks of lived-in society, than the patched, stucco building in an abandoned bay had ever felt. A small party waited to shepherd them toward a laden table set beside a welcoming hearth.

“We have met, have we not?” Maglor asked the elf with tree-lit eyes who pressed a hearty bowl of stew into his grateful hands, surprised to find another child of Tirion still on these shores.

“We fought alongside one another, a long time ago,” she agreed, settling in the chair opposite. “I ran messages between our companies.”

“You are one of Turgon’s folk, if I remember correctly? Yet you linger.”

Now that recognition had come, he knew that they had seen one another once more. Her dark eyes had met his across another battlefield, when the field had been more ramshackle refugee village and opposing was more accurate than alongside.

“I have my reasons, just as you,” she spoke mildly, betraying neither a hint of this later meeting, nor of resentment. “One day, perhaps soon, we shall give up our clinging and turn toward home.”

..<|>..

“What am I doing here, Nōwē?”

Maglor lay curled atop the bed he’d had the use of since their coming to Mithlond. Such doubtful questioning and self-isolation were common occurrences of late. Bereft of the habits of survival that had, if not driven, then at least kept him from freezing over entirely during their sojourn in the wild south, Maglor began to stagnate. It was evident too, that he slept poorly, if indeed he did so at all.

“On that mattress? Clearly not what it was intended for,” Círdan made light, knowing humour to be the most reliable balm between them, though his heart ached to see the Noldo thus.

Maglor scowled, unmoved. “You are aware, I presume, that in this house there lives a survivor of Sirion’s havens? What right have I to walk the same halls as she?”

“She is not the only among my remaining people,” Círdan conceded, coming to sit in a chair beside the bed. “Have you been condemned?”

“No. The matter has not been raised, even once.” That silent lack of rancour, nor even acknowledgement, seemed to grieve Maglor, perhaps belying his very understanding of how the world functioned. “You could all sail,” he insisted. “Leave without me. You need not provoke their pain with my presence.”

“There is not a single Elda here who believes that the best course of action, I promise you.”

Anger was evident now in the harsh lines of the other’s brow. “Why? You think me ill? That my mind is not my own?”

“No,” Círdan refuted softly, “I believe you grieved. We who remain are not in the habit of turning our backs on the hurting.”

“Not even those soaked in the blood of their kin?” he provoked, clenching his scarred palm into a fist.

Círdan did not rise to the bait. “Not even they.”

But Maglor, hungrier for confrontation than a mantis shrimp faced with an offending crab, changed tact. “If I am forced to sail, Nōwē, I will be made to face spectres that haunt my worst dreams. Even if your band of forgiving Sindar manage not to spill their anger, I promise you, most others will lack their restraint.”

“None here wish to coerce you. We will wait to sail until you wish it.”

“And what,” Maglor asked pointedly, “if I am never ready?”

“I have waited three ages. What is another? You are afraid, I think,” Círdan posited, “not of the ire you may face, but of the business of going on living in its despite or lack; that there will be no marked moment of a curse lifted, forgiveness granted, or weregild paid to shift the weight of the past from your shoulders, only a banal normality that sits poorly with the blood-soaked past you cannot forget. But the past must be contended with, whether you do so here or in the blessed realm. Perhaps, you are scared to find, in the end, that it was only you keeping those you love at a distance, with no reason for it beyond poorly used guilt.”

“What do you know?” It was no longer anger that marked Maglor’s words, much as he aimed to make it so, but grief, and the agony of a bared soul. Kindness, sometimes, needs must be cruel.

“Could you truthfully say you wished wholeheartedly never to leave these shores, I would gladly part and sail in a heartbeat, but I do not believe that the case,” Círdan dared go on. “You came willingly to Mithlond, Maglor, but run still. You must ask yourself, is the escape you fashion truly an escape? Or merely a prison built from the bricks of solitude and empty skies?”

..<|>..

The woman with tree-lit eyes stood in Maglor’s doorway.

“He missed you,” she said, leaning in to better see the scrap of parchment on which Elros’s faint handwriting could just be made out. The comment, scrawled in the margins of an early treatise on the divergence of Sindarin dialects, largely inaccurate, and later scraped hurriedly for re-use, read what a load of rot, under which Maglor had written prove it, Elros!

“You knew Elros?” he asked.

“I helped man the fleets to Númenor.”

“What small chance I might have had for reconciliation, before the sea and its promise led him away, I squandered,” Maglor admitted ruefully.

The woman’s expression twisted in sympathy. “Turgon sent my son to the sea, and Ossë sent him to the depths. Many still thought the Valar would find pity for our plight in those days, but hope had already left my heart. I begged him not to go. We did not part well.”

Fraught partings were all too familiar to Maglor. “May it be he lives again in Eldamar, and you shall have your chance to mend that rift.”

“Perhaps we will meet again, on the other side of the sea, perhaps not. It may be he lingers in Mandos yet. Who can say?” The woman cocked her head curiously. “Sometimes it is not what one expects to find, but what one fears not to, that terrifies us more. Is that not so? But come, the evening is fair, and we would have you join us, if you will.”

This midwinter the winds and waters stilled in a rare reprieve from the near-constant rain and blustering wind the season usually brought. On the wharf there were set hundreds of lamps, some simply oil and wick set in shells, and others elaborately wrought lanterns, catching puffs of misty breath in their warm glow. Among the winking stars above, Eärendil shone bright and clear, and as Círdan passed him a mug of spiced miruvor, his light was mirrored in its honeyed depths.

“We have all lost much to the darkness,” Círdan lamented. His normally cheerful friend was unusually sombre this eve. Sorrow rounded his shoulders and soaked ebullient limbs, weighing more heavily on him than Maglor had yet seen. “It lengthens, the year comes to its nadir, and we remember. Let us kindle for ourselves a little light.”

“In hope or defiance?” Maglor asked.

“Why not both?” With a piercing look as salient as his words, Círdan took up a small candle for himself and held another out for Maglor to take. “You may light one if you wish, in memory of the lost.”

“Who will yours burn for?” Maglor asked, curious.

“For Gil-Galad, Elwë, and Olwë, among others.”

The last was unexpected.“Olwë is not lost,” he said with some surprise.

“And yet,” answered the other, “he has been to me for many ages. You have your own living ghosts, do you not?”

And Maglor thought of Elrond then, and of Nerdanel, of kin who turned back at Araman, and all those departed over the great sea. “I think, Nōwē, the time draws nigh for us to face them.”

“I believe you are right, my friend.”