A Handful of Seawater and a Cheekful of Salt by Isilme_among_the_stars  

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To the sea, and...

Maedhros returns. Maglor seeks out Círdan, is confronted with a painful truth, and copes with it poorly.

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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.