Whispers on the Wind by Elrond's Library  

“I thought I’d find you up here,” Rog called, his voice carried farther by the whipping wind. He spoke Sindar, a shared tongue, their mother tongue, a last vestige of a shared and common heritage.

Maeglin just shrugged, looking over the green valley of Tumladen, eyes firmly on the Encircling Mountains. Certainly not down at the jagged rocks below. His father’s sword lay bare on his thighs. 

Maeglin did not want to talk, not to Rog, not to anybody. He rarely did, but especially not today. 

But there he sat, the smith-Lord of the House of the Hammer of Wrath, his body a living furnace despite the comfortable distance between them. Maeglin’s gaze flashed to Rog’s hands, and back to the mountains. He was fiddling with a ring-puzzle, the type meant to be nearly impossible to solve. The metal rings clinked quietly as he worked. 

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Maeglin said flatly, or tried to. It came out too sharp. It always did.

Rog responded with blandness, a Lord’s careful neutrality. “I did not say anything. What do you not want to talk about?”

Maeglin groaned, slapping the flat of his palm against Anguirel’s blade. “You know what!” 

Rog shrugged, shooting him a small smile before turning back to his puzzle. “Ambiguity leads to misconceptions, Eölion.” 

To be called so, to have his father acknowledged when everyone else called him Aredhelion, and on this day … On this day in particular it stung so. So much. 

The wind whipped away the tears as they fell. But Maeglin refused to tuck his face away, to hide, for the potential of looking down, down Caragdûr’s rocky face, was too much to bear. He did not want to see what was left of his father.

Rog continued to manipulate the rings, a solid presence, a quiet companion to Maeglin’s grief.

“Do you think me a coward?” Maeglin finally asks.

“Why would I think such a thing?” Rog turns, facing Maeglin more directly. 

“For being afraid of a pile of bones.”

Eöl’s final words rang heavily in the space between them. So you forsake your father and his kin, ill-gotten son! Here shall you fail of all your hopes, and here may you yet die the same death as I.

“His words are just words,” Rog said, shrugging again. “Whispers on the wind, there one second, gone the next. You have nothing to fear from them.”

Maeglin shook his head, fingers idly tracing the fuller of the black sword in his lap. “He’s been gone for two years to the day.”

“I know.”

“Does it get easier?”

“Grief?”

“Yes.”

“You grow around it, but it never really leaves. Changes. Grows softer with time and distance.”

Maeglin stared out, past the Encircling Mountains, at the wide blue sky and the buttery-soft clouds. The wind had died, which let Rog hear Maeglin’s whispered confession.

“I don’t think I can. I think I’m too angry.”

If only someone could tell him, that Turgon had buried Eöl himself, that there were no bones to see. 

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