A Handful of Seawater and a Cheekful of Salt by Isilme_among_the_stars  

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Come, walk with me

Under Nerdanel’s care Maglor begins to return to himself slowly and finds the experience distressing.

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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.