A Handful of Seawater and a Cheekful of Salt by Isilme_among_the_stars  

The sea shouts and groans.

Maglor stands on a pebbled beach, barefoot, as elven ships go sailing by. The water is cold but he doesn’t feel it. His feet have not been his own for some time. The ships skip and dance over slate-grey waves with their silver sails full. Maglor watches. He watches and he watches and he watches. Gradually the ships grow small against the backdrop of the sea. Fenced thoroughly by the Gulf, they skate toward a distant glimmer of freedom. The doorway to the open ocean is small, but so are the ships. The sun chases and races across the sky, too fast, until it has won, and still the ships sail, heedless, into the blood-red night.

There are more away in the Grey Havens, rocking against their piers, waiting.

Maglor turns his back to the sea and begins to walk.

He walks through the cold night and does not feel its chill. He walks over the stony earth and does not feel its bite. He walks for weeks and weeks. Eastwards, always eastwards. He knows not why, just as he does not understand why he stood on that beach. Most decisions do not feel like his own. He simply follows his feet, and his feet have not been his own for some time.

The land is green and flush with rain and sometimes the hills roll endlessly on, and sometimes plains are choked with twisted, dark woods, and sometimes mists pool about dreary lowlands refusing to dissipate, and sometimes the mists and vapours cover insect-filled marshlands replete with mud that sucks at his feet. All pass by in their turn without note or remark. East, he goes — east, toward the mountains — until the country is windswept and the road passes to the south of hills raked clean by its cruel reach. Nothing grows tall and proud upon them, only gnarled, hunched things. Maglor trudges down the middle of the road as driving rain blinds his eyes.

“Where are you going?” a tall, elven Lord asks, stopping as their paths meet. The road turns to churning mud beneath the hooves of his steed. Behind, a sea of cloaked figures bend over the necks of pale horses, cringing from the downpour.

“Eastwards,” Maglor says, and the word scratches roughly from his throat.

“That is plain. The last of our people are bound for the West. Why do you strike against the grain?”

An answer comes from his lips as a surprise. “One who I loved abides in Rivendell, beneath the mountains.” Perhaps his feet always knew their destination, but they are poor conversationalists.

“I come from Rivendell. It is emptied. How long has it been since you walked among the Eldar?”

The years have worn on uncounted. How long has it been since he stood beside the sea with an unwanted prize that burned like hellfire? How long since he threw it away? Maglor does not know.

The Lord dismounts and comes close. Silver hair gleams under his hood. His eyes roam from Maglor’s torn clothing to his scarred hand to his tangled, dripping hair and come to rest on his face. “One should not remain alone and weather-worn. Come with us. You shall be warm and fed.” What abstract things, satiety and comfort. When was the last time he longed for their like?

“Where is it you go?” Maglor asks.

“West,” the silver-haired Lord says with a small, amused smile as his graceful hand points in the direction from which Maglor has come.

That night, beside a crackling fire under the shelter of those stark, windswept hills, the tall elf bathes and binds Maglor’s bleeding feet. He feeds him and bids him sleep. When the sun rises he changes the dressings and bids him eat again. He is not cruel, but he is cold.

“Have I caused offence?” Maglor asks.

“You have done nothing impolite,” the elf says. He looks away. He turns over the earth and buries the fire’s ashes. “I am Celeborn,” he says. “What may I call you?”

“Randir,” answers Maglor, for he has been a wanderer for long ages. He knows not what else to be.

“That is not your name,” Celeborn says, like he knows something yet unsaid.

“No.”

What right has Maglor to the names he once held?

The road stretches before them. In silence they journey on.

✦

Maglor roams the corridors of a great house in the Grey Havens under the light of the gibbous moon. Miles and miles of tapestries peer down from their high mounts. Stars and devices and family crests leap and dance on seas of sable and royal blue. They mock and they jeer.

“What are you looking for?” Celeborn asks. Maglor is looking for a dark-haired youth with intelligent, grey eyes, or rather, the Lord that youth became. It has been long since he saw him.

“He is not here,” Maglor whispers and falls to his knees.

“Who is not here?”

Maglor remembers how the children slept. Pale light reflected in curved flourishes upon their dark, unruly hair. They were still, in sleep. Maglor whispered promises of safety into ears with broad, soft points. The children did not stir.

One twin sailed, and one remained. Both are lost. “Oh, starlight,” Maglor weeps. “The ships are sailing and I cannot see you safely home.”

“Perhaps he has already gone.” Celeborn kneels before him. “Many have.” Celeborn’s face is not cold in the pale light, but neither is it warm.

Maglor turns away. Eärendil’s star is picked out in silver drawn to a fine thread and twined with silk. It shimmers. His fingers brush the threads of its lowest point. “That boy’s heart ached for even the lowliest of creatures. He would not leave while his people remained, however few.” Maglor’s voice is too flat. It crumbles and breaks.

“Unless, perhaps, he knew they would follow, and trusted beyond doubt that his people would be well cared for.” Celeborn speaks to him in the way people touch something both delicate and dangerous. He speaks to him as if Maglor were a spider he coaxed from the corner of its web. 

“In whom would he place such trust?”

“In me.” Celeborn’s words are made of steel. He looks Maglor in the eye. His chin is firm and his brow set. Maglor was a leader once. He recognises marks of authority.

Celeborn surveys Eärendil’s silken star. His mouth curls into a grimace. He straightens his lips. He holds his hand, palm up, to Maglor like an offering. “Come with me when I go, Maglor. Rumour has it you almost made that choice, once.”

“That was a long time ago.” And it was another elf who decided so, one who had a right to that name. The elf that exists now only wears his skin.

✦

The sea hisses and it spits.

The hull of the ship sways and pulls tight the ropes that hold it to the pier.

Quietly, a grey-bearded, barefooted elf comes and leans casually against the bollard by which Maglor stands. He folds his arms over his chest. “So you have come at last.”

The sea foams and breaks against the cut stone below. It makes shapes as beautiful as they are violent.

“I watched you,” the elf says. “All those long years. You did not look as if you wished to be found. I wondered when Maglor, the prince of old, would remember himself and return to us.” The elf’s face is known to Maglor. He was neither bearded nor grey when they first caught each other’s eye over a song and a goblet of wine in the first age. Maglor is much changed, too.

“I am not he.”

“No,” Círdan agrees. He looks at Maglor slant-ways with sharp, piercing eyes. “You could be yet.”

Maglor stares at the grey, fretful sea.

Círdan sighs. He pushes himself upright without unfolding his arms. “Elrond took ship at the very beginning of this age. He, and your cousin. That was over a century ago now. They are not missing, as perhaps you feared.”

Starlight over the seas. Maglor remembers how it looked. He remembers how Elrond stood on the brink of the world where old lands sunk, birthing the new, watching starlight pulse and shrink and fly back home to the sky. He remembers how Elrond scooped a handful of dirty sea and watched it sparkle over his fingers.

“Well then, are you getting on my boat?” Círdan asks.

The timbers moan and they groan.

Maglor sits astride the bowsprit as the elven ship goes sailing. The wailing wind is cold. He does not feel it. His skin has not felt like his own for some time. The ship skips and it dances over the slate-grey waves with its sails full. Over his shoulder the Havens shrink, growing impossibly small as he watches. Maglor watches and he watches and he watches. Before him is the open sea. It does not seem like freedom. The ship skates forward and yet the vast body of water draws no nearer. It seems like an endless oblivion. The sun chases and races across the sky, too fast, until it has won and still the ship sails on, inevitably, into the carmine night.

Leave a Comment

The floor lurches and it leans.

The ship has come to rest. Phantoms of storms with waves like great walls of water crashing violently over the deck haunt Maglor still. He huddles against wooden planks curving bow-like against their supporting ribs, like the thoracic cavity of a great beast. He has been swallowed whole by a dragon, consumed by a whale.

“I do not think he should be alone,” Celeborn tells a woman with well-muscled arms and eyes like green jewels.

She had rushed across the floor and knelt before him. Her curled brown hair had caught the light that streamed through the hatch, turning frizzy fly-away strands to copper. She had run a trembling hand softly along his cheek and whispered, “Makalaurë.” And he had told her that was not his name.

“Have I no say?” Maglor objects.

The woman looks at him, her green eyes sad. She is Nerdanel. She is his mother. She is a lie. His mother belongs to a time long ago and a land far away. “I am afraid you have not,” she says. She swipes the back of her hand hurriedly across the crest of one cheek and looks away. She has done this several times.

When she asked him, “What, then, should I call you?” he had shrugged. He did not like to hear the voice of his mother on her lips.

Círdan lowers himself to lean against the hull beside Maglor. “What would you choose, if you could?” he asks.

“I know not,” Maglor says. He has not known his mind in a long while and it is hard to follow one’s feet in the belly of a ship.

“Go with her, then,” Círdan says.

Maglor doesn’t reply. The deck beneath his folded legs stretches on for miles and miles and the bulkheads either side crowd close. It is distracting, and unsettling.

“Randir is the name he prefers,” Celeborn is telling the woman, but it is not a name. It is a description. He knows not what else to be. And there is no longer any name he has a right to.

The woman comes close again. Maglor searches her as if they were at a masquerade and he sought a chink in a mask through which it could be discovered who lay hid beneath. She is his mother and nothing is real.

She bids him stand, to walk out of this stuffy hold, and accompany her home. How can he stand when the deck and walls keep shifting? How can he walk out into a land beyond this lurching beast when such a place may not exist at all? The ship has sailed him right out of the world and into a tale, outlandish and strange.

Maglor is pulled to his feet — she is as strong as ever his mother was — and he can traverse the treacherous planks, swaying like a drunkard, if he is careful. He goes with her. She might not be true, nor really his mother (she is both, he knows, and isn’t that mad? To know a thing, and still think it untrue?). Still, he goes.

The woman turns a tight, careful smile upon Celeborn. “You have my thanks,” she says.

Celeborn, tall and silver, surveys her with a level gaze. “We are kin, of a kind, Lady Nerdanel,” he says. “I merely act as familial obligation requires.” He is not warm, but his eyes, as they flick over Maglor, drench with pity. It is a terrible thing. Maglor could drown in it. He could fall into its disquieting depths and never surface again. What a wretch Celeborn must behold.

“You trivialise your restraint and magnanimity, my Lord. They have not gone unmarked,” the woman says. She guides Maglor inexorably forward.

“Farewell, Maglor,” Círdan says with the kind of sincerity that suggests he means it.

That is not his name. He has no name.

✦

The woman pushes a solid, ornate door open. It creaks. Behind is a room rich and elegant. “Your brothers are not home, I am afraid,” she says. “They will be glad of your return.”

“I have no brothers,” Maglor tells her.

“You have six,” she corrects.

“They died.”

She purses her lips and makes no dispute.

Maglor’s eyes devour whitewashed walls hung with oil paintings. They roam over thick, dark beams that span the ceiling and falter over a thousand not-quite-familiar homely touches. Fine, intricately patterned carpets adorn the floor and he bends to feel their thick pile. He runs fingers over the walnut grain of an ornate set of drawers scattered with half-worked gemcraft. His breath clouds upon the marble of an abstract sculpture. Its style is unmistakable. Maglor has seen its like in all states of completion, from rough blocks to polished perfection, from his earliest days. He turns sharply to the woman who stands in the doorway regarding him with curious eyes.

“Always you have had an eye for fine things Makalaurë, my magpie,” she says.

“I will not call you mother,” he accuses.

“It bothers me little what word you use. I care only that you stand here before me, living and breathing. Name me anything at all.”

Maglor laughs bitterly.

He breathes. He follows unfeeling feet. Is this living?

“What would you choose?” he asks.

She tilts her head and watches. Her eyes are as deep as the ocean and as unfathomable. She knows. Oh, she knows so much. “What would I choose? As you are Ranyamo, then I am Istarnië.”

Istarnië, the woman names herself. She who knows.

On the long walk from Avallónë they spoke seldom. Sometimes the land was planted with sighing fields of wheat, and sometimes their path wended its way along waters that chattered and rushed, and sometimes the way was stony and steep, and sometimes it wended under the cool shade of ancient forests. All passed by without note or remark. Day after silent day and night after silent night Maglor walked and Istarnië watched. She watches in the way that he has wandered: habitually, incessantly, perpetually.

Maglor turns away. He does not like her eyes on him. She watches and watches, and she knows enough to fill oceans. He can see the depths in her eyes.

“Stop,” Maglor says.

She doesn’t look away. “You shall have to be more specific, my darling.”

Maglor does not like to be watched. “I am tired,” he says.

Istarnië leads him to a large bed with tall posts, swaddled in thick, velvet curtains. She says, “I know you have not slept for some time.”

The curtains are soft and so is the bed. He doesn’t know how to sleep on a bed so soft. He might sink through feather pillows and comforters. He might drown. He might disappear.

She tells him the room is his. It has been since it was built. The room recalls to him something of Himring and of the bed there in which this body slept, when it belonged to an elf that deserved his name. The room is a lie.

Maglor lays on the bed and counts the whorls in the beams on the ceiling. He does not sleep.

✦

The night is riddled with the unquenchable light of the stars hanging like drops of lurid silver, like beads of mercury amid the unbreakable dark. Maglor glides down stairs. He ghosts through unoccupied rooms. He drifts.

The house is made of memory. It is new, and it is old. Incongruous ephemera of well-worn, left behind lives nestle amid alien comforts, new-wrought and strange. Each bring a stab of heart-twisting recognition, like a blow to the gut, sending Maglor spinning, spinning, turning, drifting out of place. He could float away. He could drift like a feather on the breeze. Or sail like a mote of dust amid the firmament of stars and celestial bodies, the only real thing in a vast world of make believe.

Maglor is blown, incorporeal and weightless, into the night. His toes scrape cobblestones and trip over dewy grass. No longer does he follow his feet, but is dragged, stumbling, behind them. The grounds are sculpted into familiar, alien shapes and Maglor drifts and he turns and he falls to his knees and keens at the lurid, argent lights.

Even the stars are strange.

“Ranyamo?” Istarnië stands framed in the doorway with the warm glow of candlelight at her back. She holds forth a shawl. “It is cold, love,” she says.

Her feet leave impressions upon the grass for she walks solidly through the world. Maybe she is true and Maglor is not. Maybe he is only a dream imagining himself real.

They gaze at the stars, soaked in dew from the grass on which their bodies lay. And Maglor could reach out and pick them like berries if he tried. He could squeeze and burst their silver skins between finger and thumb until they leaked pure light, starlight staining his fingers.

Maglor remembers a small hand held high, weaving through the night air. It made paintings of the stars as they shone through soft fingers. A young voice sang half-remembered snatches of sweet, melancholy song.

“I had a son. He was not mine, and yet, he was.” Maglor’s voice drifts, weightless, up to the stars.

“I know,” Istarnië answers. “We have met.”

Above, the pinpoint bright lights begin to fade as the unbreakable dark fritters away, melting to blue as beautiful as sapphire.

“He had a brother. A twin. They were not mine to love, yet I loved them.”

“I know,” she says.

Maglor turns to Istarnië. Her dew-damp hair is a rich red-brown. There is sapphire reflected in her ocean-deep eyes. “There was good,” he beseeches. His mind is full of swords and blood and futile pursuit. “Amid the sordid and terrible, this, at least, was good.”

“I know,” she says, and her eyes trained upon his are round and sincere and not to be borne. It is better to look at the sky.

“How did you know?” he asks.

“Of you and Elrond?” Istarnië asks. She shifts her shoulder until it touches his.

Maglor shifts away. “To find me,” he says.

“Word came after your ship docked.”

A tremor had thundered through the ship before it stilled. Círdan clattered down the ladder speaking of disembarkation. Maglor held fast to a bulkhead like a pleura clinging to the hold's wooden ribs. “Not yet,” he pled.

Light tracked across the scuffed planks of the deck and crept up the thoracic curves of the hull. Light dimmed and died and sparked to life again where it had begun. Celeborn knelt before him. “It is time to go.”

Maglor’s voice stuck in his throat. He swallowed it down like a lump of dry bread. The light travelled and faded and came and went and came and went. Maglor’s legs cramped. Then Istarnië came. It felt like little time at all.

“How long was it?” he whispers.

“Too long,” she answers.

Time unspools like twisted wool springing from a spilled bobbin bouncing across the weaving room floor. Time coils tight like a thread spun and wound by the wheel. Time means nothing at all.

Leave a Comment

There are chickens in a poultry run. They must be fed. This task falls to a servant, not a Lady, but Istarnië does it and she brings Maglor with her. She throws back the velvet curtains surrounding his bed. “It does you no good to lay staring at the ceiling,” she says.

The sky is brighter than gemlights held too close to the eye. Every colour in the world is as loud as that of coral in the warm southern oceans. Grey is banished and nothing is real.

Maglor holds eggs. Their shells are warm and round in his hands. They bake custard tarts and the eggs crack with a satisfying crunch and the tarts taste like Tirion and childhood and still nothing is real.

Maglor paces from the window to the wall, from the wall to the window, again and again.

Istarnië watches. “What troubles you?”

His feet do not know where to go so they stutter in endless loops.

“Come, walk with me,” she says.

The estate is large, but after some time it ends and there is summer-green forest bursting with branches of lemon-lime leaves. It goes on for miles unending. They walk and walk and walk.

“Alalvinórë?” Maglor asks.

He travelled through the land of Elms on Tol Eressëa as a child. Buoyed on his father’s shoulders he stretched arms high above his head. He wondered if he would grow as tall as the trees. In Lindon he carried a twin on each hip under the elms. Neither stretched tall. They clung and whimpered.

Istarnië tilts her face to the dancing canopy. She smiles as if remembering something sweet. “Yes. Its western reaches, toward the mountains.”

“The forest endures,” Maglor observes. He does not know of which he speaks.

“The land has changed and it has not. A great city of the returned rests at the heart of Alalvinórë now.”

They built cities under those other elms too. Lindon shrank like a half-devoured carcass. Bare ribs of land, starved and salted, jutted into the murky blue sea. Its heart was drowned. But the forest lived on, diminished. Like a miracle. Like an abomination. And so did he.

Beneath Maglor’s feet the ground compresses like a sponge, so thick is the forest floor with leaves. He sinks. And he could drown. Oh, he could drown in musty, decomposing leaves. He could suffocate, trapped in a dream. Perhaps he already has.

“I want for home,” Maglor says. He is thinking of a land that is gone and of a family that was broken and of gap-toothed grins and elms very different to these. That is the last home he knew. He is thinking of how Elrond giggled when the rain, filtering down through leafy trees, touched his face and how Elros climbed like a squirrel and how Maedhros wouldn’t hold them but he would smile softly and smooth hair away from their foreheads as they slept. Those things were real. They were real.

Istarnië has turned on her heel. “Very well, then,” she says.

She leads him back to a house with white-washed walls and chickens and door handles that can be worked with the press of an elbow.

It is not home. Maglor has not had a home for some time.

✦ 

Istarnië traces the fresh, pink scars on the soles of Maglor’s feet. Her touch tickles. He wishes she wouldn’t. He does not wish to feel it.

“How came you by these?” she asks.

Maglor cannot recall. He wandered through the landscape, unfeeling. Now, when he walks, the carpet is soft and springy, the grass itches and the cobblestones prickle and scratch. He wishes they wouldn’t.

He does not wish to feel.

Let this day remain a story. Let his life remain a dream.

Istarnië scoops goose fat from a jar and massages his scars with her thumbs. Maglor taught Elrond to do the same. To keep them soft, so they would not tug at the flesh and bind it. So Elrond could always move freely. So restriction would not endanger him. Even small impediments are easy to exploit.

“By wandering unshod?” Istarnië asks.

It is hot, where the fat coats his skin. He does not wish to feel it.

Scars are insensate and cannot feel. Maglor has many. On his feet. On his body. Over his heart. Numb, numb, safely numb. It is better this way.

Istarnië picks at his scars. She peels them away with her watching and her knowing and her unrelenting kindness. Maglor is raw beneath.

“Stop,” he pleads.

She lets his feet drop to the ground and wipes her greasy hands on a linen cloth. Maglor curls them beneath him and wraps his arms around his middle.

Istarnië watches and she sighs softly. She does this a lot. She sighs and she watches and she looks at him as if there is a puzzle to be solved behind his eyes. As if she is looking for all the layers that are yet to be peeled away. “You need not wander any longer,” she says.

“This is not my home,” he tells her.

“No,” she agrees. “Yet it could be.”

He does not tell her it was he that abandoned his last home.

Starlight over the seas. Elrond searched and he did not find what he looked for. He watched a star devour his father, sundering them in every meaningful way. He scooped salt water in his palm and let it fall. Light bled through his fingers and he could not hold it, though he tried. Every little scintilla of Eärendil unable to be kept. He wept. He called out another name. He screamed it in fury. He wailed it in desperation. And Maglor did not comfort him.

It was then Maglor understood. He no longer had a right to that name.

What kind of father does not come when his child calls?

Some scars grow beyond their purpose. Or strain to amend a wound too extensive. They tug and they pull, grotesque and web-like, bonding two living surfaces that were never meant to touch until wrists are drawn down and hands claw, fingers seize and heads cannot be held high. A clever surgeon can release these contractures with an expedient cut.

A man who takes another man’s children and plays at being a father becomes such a scar. He cleaves when he should not and pulls the children out of shape.

Maglor was no healer, but he was a practised hand with a blade. He let Elrond weep and stumble, empty-handed, into the night.

✦ 

“Hold this,” Istarnië bids.

She constructs an artifice of metal and wood. Maglor does not know what it is, nor its purpose. Perhaps it is but an abstract contrivance of her mind.

It matters not. Maglor holds.

It is a familiar shape he bends himself to. He played this role many times as a child. He would hold the pieces for his mother (for Istarnië) and she would tell him small truths: how wood was joined, how some metals could be welded, the secret workings of minds, and of hearts.

With deadened fingers Maglor holds.

“You are quiet today,” she says.

Maglor is always quiet. He seldom finds much use for speech. And his mind spins. It stretches out fingers, trying to feel out the edges of the dream he is caught in.

“I have not heard you sing,” she says.

“I do not sing,” he answers.

What use is song? Every lament he ever composed fell on deaf ears. Oh, they heard… the Eldar, the sea, the stones. But it changed nothing. All came to ruin in despite.

“You used to,” she reminisces with a sad, sweet smile. “And the sound was like nothing else in the world.”

“I am far from myself,” he whispers, and it is true. He is living a step removed in a world that is strange and uncanny.

“Oh, darling,” she says. She takes the wood from his hands and folds him in her arms. “I am so sorry,” she says, though she has nothing to be sorry for.

“Nothing is quite right,” he whispers into her neck. A confession. “The world is off key.”

“It will not always be.” She says it sincerely as if she believes it to be true, as if she can feel it like ants feel the shifts in the air before it rains. She kisses him on the crown of his head and it is nice.

Could he still this moment if he tried? Could he refuse to move on, like a single refrain repeated over and over until it is worn into the muscles, its motions perfected, its memory etched into the soul?

Maglor wants to keep it, but he has no right.

Leave a Comment

Alone in the honey-glow of late afternoon Maglor walks the hallways. His feet are bare. Walls stretch on with an impossible endlessness and the carpet rises with each step. Before him there is a door. It has been left ajar after a flurry of activity that began when the sun was high. To walk through it is to fall back in time.

Maglor drifts. He floats about the chamber like air, touching lightly each surface.

Light oozes through the open window and pools like syrup upon the writing desk, the carpets, the bed. Light spills and pours and flashes coppery bright.

Maglor kneels and runs fingers along the brass corner braces of a familiar, alien coffer. There is no dent where Elros fumbled a heavy candlestick and nothing is real. Nothing is real! (It is, and isn’t that mad? That the world feels a dream when he knows it is not?) Maglor can feel the chill of the metal beneath his fingers. He doesn’t want to. Because if he can feel the metal he can feel his skin and it belongs to him and he to it, and it hurts and hurts and hurts. So he drifts away.

He floats past the bed, which is long because his brother was tall (is tall). He goes to the window. The sill is warm and rough beneath his palms. Outside the world spins on. Outside a bustle of activity continues and elves go this way and that, preparing for their Lord’s return. Maglor was a Lord once. He knows the shape of these motions.

The bed pulls at Maglor like a lodestone does iron. It tangles him in threads of inexorable force and draws him in. He kneels and clenches his fists in its soft furs. He breathes deeply and tries not to feel. Pillowed beneath his cheek there are furs, thick and soft. Outside, the sky is vermillion.

Time skitters away.

When once more time slows its coltish feet the night is dark, for the stars are veiled. There is no moon. Shadows, deep and grey drape the room. Maglor could keep the shadows if he tried. He could fold and stow them like blankets in a chest. He could wear them as consoling shrouds when skies prove too fulgent and colours too bright. A large hand rests on Maglor’s back and a deep, familiar voice says, “I know you are awake.”

“Let me dream, Nelyo,” Maglor answers. “I am tired, and it is a kind dream.”

“This is no dream,” Maedhros answers. He is there in the mutinous dark. His hair is pulled back against the wind and dishevelled from it none-the-less and he smells of travel. His grey eyes are soft.

Nothing is real (it is). His brother died (he lives). He died screaming in the bowels of the earth. Nothing can purge that memory.

Maedhros wraps Maglor in his arms and they are warm. Maglor does not wish to feel the warmth, for if he can feel it then it is real. And if the warmth is real then so is everything that came before. Tears flow like seawater over his cheeks.

Maedhros holds Maglor tighter.

✦

“Where are you going?” Istarnië calls.

Maglor’s feet are restless.

He walks and there is purpose behind the action. He has calves and they ache. There are lungs in his chest, and they burn. The world is over-saturated and so is he, as if two days, or perhaps a dozen, have been pressed into one. Like he is bigger than his skin.

There is somewhere Maglor must go and he can almost touch the reason why. There is a dropped refrain he must continue to sound.

Elros used to declare, “I don’t know!” His small face contorted with frustration. The boy did know but had not the words. It is like that, but not quite. Maglor knows, in a vaulted part of his mind, but it is so long severed from the self which moves through the world that they may as well speak different languages. Randir. Maglor. One and the same and not that at all.

The door is cool beneath his fingers and Maedhros’s grasp is firm on his shoulder.

“Unhand me,” he snarls.

“There you are.” Maedhros grins. He says it as if Maglor had been hiding, like a child playing a game, and has now been found.

“I must go,” Maglor insists. If he stops now he will burst. If he stops now he will erupt and fly, streaking, into the firmament, and there is no telling where he might come down.

Maedhros steps aside. “Am I stopping you?” he asks.

Where is Maglor going? He is going to the sea. There are answers there — answers that he needs —  though he cannot quite recall the question.

Starlight over the seas. Starlight over the seas. A handful of seawater and a cheek full of salt. What became of that big-hearted boy?

“—with you if you wish.” Maedhros is looking at him like he expects an answer.

“No. Alone.” The words are more forceful than Maglor intends.

Maedhros nods like he accepts this without question. Like he expected it. “A moment. Allow us to provision you, at the least.”

Maglor waits. He sits and he stares as the sky rolls over with cloud, gloomy and grey. He does not wait long but it feels as if whole days pass.

“Come back to us,” Istarnië says. She presses a parcel into his hands that smells of long ago, of wanderings in the wide lands of Aman. There is a fearful hope in her sea-deep eyes. She swallows and looks away.

Maglor walks and he does not stop. Time moves in a steady, frustratingly orderly fashion. And every step beneath the ancient forests, down the stony slopes, past the rushing waters and through the sighing fields of wheat, Maglor feels. He does not want to. His feet do not hurt but his heart does and it aches and stabs and burns.

One elven ship in the dock is tilted, its careened, algae-ridden skeleton exposed stark against the sky. A breastbone of a keel bobs short, shallow breaths at the waterline. Down there sailors tend it. Down there they scrape slimy, fetid clumps from the planks and toss them like offerings to the calm waters. Does the sea, to the ship, seem wrong? Does it know it slews off-kilter, viewing the world through wrong-seeing eyes?

“Ah,” Círdan says. He wipes the back of a filthy hand across his sweaty brow. “You have returned.”

“No,” Maglor corrects, “I have come back.” When the Calaquendi returned to Middle Earth they came with proud heads high and trumpets blaring. This is not like that. This is no return at all.

Círdan looks at him with keen eyes. “Just so,” he says. He beckons Maglor down to the floating platform. A scraper is thrust into his hand.

Maglor scrapes and sweats and is glad of the burn in his arms which lessens the burn in his heart almost enough to bear. “Do you hate me?” he asks.

“No,” Círdan says with the kind of sincerity that suggests he means it.

“Why not?”

“What good would come of it?”

Maglor hates himself. Self-loathing nested in his breast long ago. It never left.

Starlight over the seas. A handful of seawater and a cheek full of salt and no comfort for Elrond from Maglor’s hand. Maglor hadn’t wept. He had no tears to cry. He set off along the ruined, newborn coast and came not back.

“Tell me of Elrond.” Maglor’s voice crumbles and breaks. “Is it better for him this way?”

Círdan’s hand stills. He places his scraper carefully on the platform beneath their feet and straightens. “I have not seen him,” he says, “in over one hundred years.”

“I know,” Maglor says. His cheeks are wet.

“I cannot tell you how he has recently fared. Nor is it my place to do so.”

“I know.” Maglor is thinking of a bleak, lightless night long in the past — six millennia, he has been told. He can still hear his name sobbed in desperation. Oh, how that boy keened.

“Then what,” Asks Círdan, “do you want to know?”

“Was I right to unshackle him? It was better, was it not? It was better. He was better without me. They both were.” He is pleading. He is on his knees with his slimy hands leaving ugly green streaks on the hem of Círdan’s shirt.

“Is it ever right to take someone’s choice from them?” Círdan asks in return. He is not cold. He speaks, in truth, quite gently. Kindness can be cruel.

✦

Maglor sets the heels of his hands to his eyes and presses.

His feet do not remember the land they passed over, desperate and numb. Before him is the ornate door that creaked under Istarnië’s hand. Here is the handle that works with but a press of an elbow. Inside the carpets and the whitewashed walls with their paintings and the thick, dark beams are all the same and nothing is real.

Maglor sets his palms against his temples and squeezes. It changes nothing.

He goes outside and walks great circles around the grounds. His toes dig into the earth. He cannot feel them. Nothing is real. Nothing helps.

Voices call out in tones of enquiry, polite and solicitous, but he does not reply. Maglor drifts. He drifts under the bright sun and the blue sky. He floats over the jade grass. (He is dreaming, he must be.) Back to the house. To the chamber Istarnië named as his with the velvet swaddled bed and the whorls in the beams on the ceiling. The whorls are closer for he is standing, and yet they are farther away. (This is a dream. It is real. Why does everything refuse to seem true?)

Maglor rests his brow against one tall post. He takes a quick, sharp breath and beats the dream from his head.

There are arms around him and someone is saying, “Enough. Enough! Stop!” as he clutches the post.

He does not want their confinement so he pulls away and he says, “I have to get it out!” and the words sound desperate and strange.

The arms grow tighter and they are warm and familiar. “This does not help. You know it will not help, Makalaurë,” Maedhros says. He says it firmly, in a voice quiet and close, just as Maglor used to for him. And because the floor has begun to lurch and sway, Maglor lets himself soften until he is entirely limp. What use is fighting?

Istarnië says, “Maitimo, why is there blood?” as if she is scared but does not wish it known.

An explanation is offered regarding the post and its edge but Maglor loses track of the words. Maedhros’s voice is calm. He knows what to do, and it doesn’t matter that the air has turned thick and opaque, or that it feels as if nails have been driven through Maglor’s skull, or that his body is impossibly heavy. He could lose himself in that voice. He could float upon it like a boat on a calm sea, lulled by the rocking of gentle waves.

“I know not if they were safe or well,” Maglor mutters. And then he remembers that only one remains, so he corrects himself. “…if he is well. I asked Círdan…”

Soft curses tickle Maglor’s ear. Maedhros shifts his weight. “…Elrond,” he says to someone else.

Maglor’s head is hot. It is suddenly very cold and they are on the floor and Maglor isn’t sure when that happened. He shivers in Maedhros’s arms.

Istarnië kneels before him and presses something to his brow. Her eyes are wide and serious and sad. “Why did you not ask us?”

Maglor does not know.

“Because,” Maedhros says, “Círdan seems real and we do not. Do I strike near the mark?”

It hurts like the truth. He closes his eyes and nods.

Maglor remembers Maedhros on the floor in a half-built fortress before the hill it rested on had been named Himring. It was frigid. Maedhros did not feel it. He crouched awkwardly — protectively — in only a shirt with his skin turning purple-mottled and pallid. He looked up at Maglor and said, “You are not real. This room is wrong.” But Maglor was and the room was not. By then they knew Maedhros’s mind dwelt one step removed and retreated further at times.

“We are here,” Istarnië tells Maglor. She says it fervently, as his mother did when he was small and there was an important truth to impart.  “You and I are here together with the ground beneath our feet and the sky above our heads. Nothing could be more real, no matter how it may seem.”

“Elrond is well enough,” Maedhros adds as Istarnië presses her hands together before her face and turns her glistening eyes away. “He fares better than you, at least.”

It is enough for now. It has to be.

Leave a Comment

Istarnië dips a cloth into a basin of water. Curlicues of thready crimson spread at the contact. She squeezes. Water falls, a thin pink stream, to ripple the surface. Istarnië dabs the cloth against Maglor’s brow again.

“You are truly her?” he asks. The question is mad (and that he spoke it aloud is worse).

She purses her lips. “Your mother? I always have been.”

The cloth is cold against his skin. It stings and drags, despite her tender hand.

“I am sorry,” Maglor says.

Nerdanel raises an eyebrow. “For what?”

His regret is too vast, too vague. It squeezes his lungs. It slips fingers around his gut and clenches. Maglor cannot answer.

Nerdanel thumbs carefully at his hairline. She surveys his brow with a critical eye. “This appears cleaner at the least,” she says and sighs. “It is quite bruised.” She dabs an earthy-smelling ointment that prickles painfully onto his smarting skin.

Starlight and regret. They were all that remained when Elrond had stumbled away. When the last of his wailing had droned into silence and the last of his tears had fallen, there was still starlight, pulsing and shrinking, flying back home to the sky. Had Eärendil heard? Was he as desolate? He, at least, had never wronged his sons. His desertion was forced by the hands of others.

“I was foolish,” Maglor says.

“You were,” Nerdanel agrees. “People often are when they are hurting.”

“A poor excuse.”

“No excuse at all.” Nerdanel wipes greasy hands on a clean linen cloth. She looks him in the eye and says, “You are my son. You are capable of better.”

Muffled weeping carried in the air as Maglor lay unsleeping on a soft bed swathed in velvet. The sound threatened to smother him. He counted wooden imperfections in the ceiling beams above and they numbered fewer than the sobs. Despondent sounds stifled in the hand. Implacable tears. Maglor knew them for what they were. Nerdanel’s eyes were red-rimmed when they lay together in the grass below stars that hung like silver berries in the night. And Maglor uttered not a word.

“I have been cruel to you,” he says now. He does not flinch nor look away.

“Must I repeat myself?” Nerdanel asks.

“I marked your words.”

Words. They fail to slip easily from his tongue in this moment, as words have been wont to do all his life. It is aggravating. Maglor worries fabric between his fingers. He exhales heavily through his nose.

Nerdanel has eyes like the sea. She is as patient and unyielding as ocean currents. She folds her hands and waits.

“I have wounded you,” he says. “…and I have done far worse to others. I apologise.”

Nerdanel has eyes like the sea. The sea towered and broke over Círdan’s ship. It tossed Maglor about the hold. It delivered him. “You are not absolved. Perhaps I will find forgiveness within me for the transgressions that are mine to forgive, in time. Until such a day, the care I have comes stained with wrath and anguish, and with that you must make do. But nothing,” she says, fierce as a tempest, “nothing, could dislodge you from my heart, Makalaurë.”

Maglor would ache less if that were not true… if each motion of his mother’s hands, each measured word, were not suffused with tenderness as equally as anger and sorrow… if he cared not for her in return.

“I know,” he says. And he does know, for is there not an estranged child refusing to quit his heart also? Starlight rippling over the crests of waves haunts the backs of his eyelids. That last shard of fatherhood buried itself deep and cannot be ripped out. He could nurture it, if he tried. He could let it grow outward, into something kind. Or he could continue fashioning it into a bitter blade with which to injure himself, folding inward upon its sharp length until nought but misery remains.

Nerdanel is silent for a long moment, considering him with fathom-deep eyes. She watches and she knows. “I believe you do,” she says. She thumbs away the tears that wet his cheeks and leaves him in terrible silence.

✦

There is a lyre in the corner of the room. A small thing. Entirely new. Maglor traces the curves of its pale wood with his eyes as Maedhros sets out quill and ink.

“The message must be brief,” Maedhros says.

“I have not forgotten,” he replies. The morning is aflutter with memory and unreality. Messenger birds take flight on whirring wings but there is not a feather in sight. Sunlight creeps, predatory, through the window to steal the shadows. It seeks to spear him with its lucent beams. It could burn through the darkness, exposing and exposing until there is nought left of him at all. Maglor presses the heel of his hand to the bruise on his brow until it hurts.

Maedhros tuts. He pulls Maglor’s hand away. “What do you wish to say?”

Starlight over the water, a cheekful of salt and his name screamed in desperation. Choice denied. “That the decision is his. I will not steal it away.”

“What decision?”

Sunlight ripples over the paper. The room floats and blurs.

Maedhros sighs. “Your wits are scrambled,” he says. He caps the ink. “We will write later.” He drags a thumb gently over the crests of Maglor’s cheeks.

“No,” Maglor protests. His thoughts are less tangled than they have been in years. But Maedhros could not know. He wasn’t there. He had burned by then.

Maedhros is a bulwark that will not budge. “Later,” he promises. 

“Very well,” Maglor concedes.

Regret is a beast that eats Maglor whole. Regret is a chasm he could trip into and fall and fall and fall. “How do you bear it?” he asks.

Maedhros looks up. Sunlight turns his red-brown hair to copper and his grey eyes silver. “Bear what?”

“To act as Lord and make decision after decision after all that came before. I cannot even sing.” From the corner of the room silver strings wink at him.

Maedhros deposits the lyre in Maglor’s lap. “Play the damned thing. That is what it is for.”

“How?” Maglor pleads.

“With your fingers, as you always have. Sometimes there is nothing for it but to move forward in defiance of regret and despair. And to stop thinking so much of yourself.”

Maglor plucks a string hesitantly. It sings.

“There is much I must attend to,” Maedhros says softly, regretfully. He kisses Maglor gently on the brow and departs. Quill, ink and paper he leaves on the desk.

The lyre sings. It sings beautifully and it says what Maglor cannot with words. The sound pulls at all that is strange and makes of it a song, haunting and otherworldly and melancholy.

There comes a gasp from the doorway. Maglor’s fingers falter.

“Do not stop,” Nerdanel urges. Her sea-deep eyes shine.

Maglor plays until the shadows grow. When he sets down the lyre, he picks up the quill.

✦

Maglor is real and he has a name. He has hands and they shake. He has a heart and it aches. He inhabits his skin cautiously, as if at the first sign of danger he might throw it off and bolt, a decoy left behind to bear the hurt he cannot.

His feet touch the earth but lightly. It is enough, for now.

“What do you have?” Nerdanel asks.

In his fingers Maglor grasps a small piece of paper rolled into a tight tube. He slips it into a tiny canister and holds it up. Sunlight glints, liquid and bright over its metal.

“What did you write?”

“Elrond will understand,” he says.

Nerdanel watches him. She nods. She asks no more questions.

Elrond had not seen him on that night six millennia ago. He never knew how close he came to finding what he sought. What choice would he have made? What choice will he make now? Maglor doesn’t know. Uncertainty eats him. It swallows him whole.

“He is kind, Elwing’s son,” Nerdanel tells him. “I should not think he will seek to wound you grievously.”

“Have I done so to you?” Maglor asks.

Nerdanel bows her head. “No Makalaurë, you have not.” She says it with the kind of sincerity that suggests she wishes it were true. It sounds as if she tries to swallow the sea.

Maglor watches and watches (he is akin to her in this, if he tries) and knows she bleeds more than she wishes known. “I do not believe you,” he says. 

“No,” she agrees. “You would not. We are too alike for that.”

“Not alike enough,” he tells her.

Maglor raised another man’s children and he learned how to stitch wounds inflicted by his own hand. Perhaps they healed badly, but they healed. A wound, no matter how well tended, no matter how faded with time, is still crueller than no wound at all. But it is better to bind it, once inflicted, even if it is inexpertly done. In his arms Nerdanel is warm and real. In hers he feels solid. The ground is firm beneath their feet and the sky above is grey and that is well enough. “I have missed you,” he says.

She sighs, and the sound is like a bowstring releasing its tension, its arrow unfired. “And I you.”

They can keep this moment if they wish, deserving or not. They can keep it and repeat it like a familiar refrain played over and over until it is etched into the memory of their sinews, worn into their souls.

“Come then,” Nerdanel says. She takes his hand. The winding stairs leading to the dovecote creak beneath their feet.

The birds are grey and the sky is grey and so is the cannister weighing heavily in Maglor’s hand. He ties it securely with shaking fingers while Nerdanel holds the carrier bird firmly between hers.

“Ready?” she asks.

“No,” he says. “Release it all the same.”

And she does. Her hands fly up, up into the cloudy sky. Her fingers spray open like a fountain. Wings flutter. The bird is gone. A choice is winging its way to Elrond. A chance that was once stolen away. Perhaps it will right nothing. Perhaps the ink that flowed has been for nought, just as the blood spilled that once brought them together was. But Maglor is here beneath the sky and above the earth and he breathes and he hopes. That is enough for now. It has to be. Time has never stood still for a melancholy elf.

Elrond will reply, or he will not.

“Watching it fly away will not speed its wings,” Nerdanel says. She comes to stand by his side. He does not move away. Between them span a myriad of shimmering, ephemeral threads. And Maglor could reach out and grasp them if he tried. He could weave them into a tapestry vast and long, and the cloth would be beautiful and terrible and full of care and sorrow. 

“I know,” Maglor says. “Walk with me?”

Maedhros’s estate is large and the grounds are well ordered, but after a time they will pass into a summer-green forest of ancient trees, wild and vast. The forest goes on for miles and miles. It has changed, and it has not. So too Maglor. So too Nerdanel. Maglor’s feet are still prone to wandering. Nerdanel still watches and knows more than most.The trees will be gnarled and the shadows will be grey and the stars, when they come out, will seem altogether ordinary.

They will walk and walk and walk.

And then Nerdanel will lead him back to a house with whitewashed walls, a creaky door, and a collection of familiar, alien comforts. 

It will not feel like home. 

It might, one day.

✦✦✦

Leave a Comment