The Shape of a Child by Isilme_among_the_stars  

When Maglor approaches the cave, it is eerily quiet. It was not he who discovered the boys hiding in the shadows at its mouth, yet it falls to him to retrieve them. His servants have failed to do so.

“They are children — infants still — and yet I am to believe full-grown soldiers cannot subdue them?” The captain to whom Maglor speaks wears armour unstained by battle and bloodshed, for he, and the score of warriors scouring the landscape for survivors under his command, stood aside. It is a hesitant kind of loyalty he now offers, flint-eyed and heavy with unspoken, careful appraisal. That same face once grinned, fierce and proud and speckled with the blood of orcs, from the back of a destrier cantering through the lush open woodland between Gelion’s arms, heady with victory. Maglor could account him neither weak nor fickle then. Nor is he now, but steadfastness and valour have become contested notions in these troubled days, and Maglor, in the secrecy of his heart, might grudgingly concede that the captain has the right of them more than he. Perhaps unwilling is more pertinent than unable.

There is an affront in the captain’s expression, effortfully veiled. “You will see, my Lord,” he says simply, and steps aside.

Before the entrance of the cave runs a stream, wide and shallow, fed by waters that come racing, helter skelter, down the slope above. Flashes of white, foaming liquid wend around dark, mossy rocks, and cascade like a veil over half of the opening. An overhang looming above casts the visible portion in shadow. There, softened by mist and spray that hangs ghost-like in the air, is the shape of a child, bent low as if cradling something large and precious. Maglor cannot yet make out what the object is, only that the bearing of the child is one of distress. 

A handful of soldiers form a sparse ring around, but none set foot over the water. “Have none of you ventured to succour the boy?” Maglor asks the nearest, with barely disguised disdain.

“He will not have it, my Lord.” There is apprehension in the soldier’s eyes. Not fear, exactly, but a lack of surety uncommon among the battle-hardened, who have seen and known nigh all the strange and dark things there are to know in this defeated land, increasingly wracked by violence and poisoned by dark sorcery. It gives Maglor pause, but he cannot be seen to waver.

“He is a child,” he hisses at the hesitant elf as he steps decisively into the water’s flow. “The choice is not his.”

At his approach, the child snarls like a feral cat faced with a larger predator. His eyes, lit lurid green from within, fix sharply upon Maglor. Maglor does not recoil, nor turn back; he continues his approach, steady and sure, though the skin on his back prickles. As he creeps steadily forward, the uncanny child begins to growl. Beneath Maglor’s feet, the rocks are set to shivering, sending a lace of fine ripples along the surface of the water.

Mist swirls between them, pushed about by slow eddies in the air, born of the force of water striking rock and a feeble, intermittent summer breeze. At last Maglor sees what the boy holds: another child, like to himself as a still midnight lake mirroring the starry sky. Brothers, he deems them; twins, likely. A strong suspicion settles in Maglor’s mind, for rumour of only one pair that remain children has reached his ear, so rare are twins among the Eldar. The second boy is unmoving; his limbs spill limp and pale over the damp ground as the first clutches him close, one small chest pulled tight to the other.

“I can help you.” Holding forth his hands, open and peaceable, Maglor steps forward cautiously until but a few feet separate them. Only at this close distance does the desperation of the situation become clear. Blood glistens in the unmoving child’s dark hair; his stillness surpasses that of startlement, or sleep. Blood clings, as well, to his brother’s hands and smears the ground about them. 

“No,” the boy cries. There is such tension in his small body, and his hair sprays about his shoulders, tossed by the fingers of an un-felt wind that troubles not the air of the physical plane. Maglor senses a spirit in him greater than his form suggests. It was the same with Lúthien, word would have it. “No!” he shrieks, and the waters about Maglor’s feet leap and thrash.

“I’ll come no closer.” Slowly and deliberately Maglor kneels upon the bank and folds his hands calmly in his lap, though he is restless to be done and move on. The toes of his boots and the length of his scabbard are lapped by the stream. Little patience has he left for gentling the child, yet he brings what can be scavenged to bear. “Your brother is injured,” he observes. Unto death, likely. No breath seems to stir in that quiescent chest. What does the boy know of mortality? Does he realise?

Shadows gather around the children, flocking seemingly at the boy’s behest, and darken their forms; shadows that hide and comfort, like a great cloak. “We were frightened,” the boy says, and turns his gaze fearfully toward the closest soldier. “He slipped on the rocks.”

“…and struck his head,” Maglor surmises.

Down comes that small, uncanny face, burying itself in the crumpled tunic that covers his brother’s unmoving chest, and both children look, for a moment, unbearably small and exposed. “He will not wake,” the boy whispers. The words, so quiet they are little more than breath, reach Maglor’s ears as if carried by the wind, yet the air remains still, save for fretful eddies in the mist. It is a pitiable sound.

“Elven souls sit ill in broken bodies.”

All stills, save the water. The birds in the long reeds cease their squawking cries. Even the mist stops its fretful dance.

There is a spark that comes into the boy’s eyes as he lifts his head once more; their light, before so unnaturally bright, turns earthy, like something dredged from the depths of time. The air in the marshy woodland grows heavy and close. All around them, inexorable and pressing, a primal energy thrums: the very compulsion that causes roots to burrow and split rock, leaf buds to unfurl, and sap to flow. Reeds at the edge of the water downstream rustle and gain suddenly in height. Birds take flight. Vines writhe and the branches of the trees groan. The earthy force bears no malice, but neither has it goodwill. It simply is. And that is worse, Maglor thinks, for with such undirected dispassion anything might be brought about. Sluggishly, as honey poured into a jar, it coalesces around the child. He is sure now, steady of hand and still of mind as his soft, infantile fingers seek the seam cloven into his brother’s scalp by rock. He breathes a steadying sigh and then shifts the stuff of the world, that which gives form to creatures filled with the secret fire, until the breach is gone. Maglor cannot see the child’s skin and bone and sinew knit together; nonetheless he knows it achieved. But what can a child so small understand of the intricacies of an elven body? Of blood which carries life, of bone that gives shape to their form, and of the wrinkled, slippery organ beneath the skull which governs thought? How can he mend that which he does not comprehend?

“Will my brother waken, now he is whole?” The words are meek and desperate, and in them Maglor reads his pressing fear. He thinks himself alone. This boy, bold enough to snarl at soldiers twice his height, uncowed amid such hostility, cannot bear to stand solitary and forlorn. It is a cruel world which forces a child to face it thus.

“I know not.” Who can guess the will of Mandos? Who can know Eru’s mind? Others of the boy’s lineage have returned from the dead. He has been fed on the milk of such tales, perhaps. But of the uncounted souls that have passed to Mandos, only two have Beleriand seen returned. Honesty may bring little comfort, but to invite false hope — hope that must surely be dashed —  is a great deal crueller, he deems. Soberly, Maglor adds, “Likely, he will not.”

The boy’s face twists into a snarl. Shadows fly from him, sharp and dark, thrusting outward like the points of spears. “Tell me he will wake!” Beneath them, the ground trembles. In the sky above a sudden squall fulminates. Sparks flash and thunder through the air, upsetting the flight of dragonflies and small birds which fall, lifeless, to the ground. A storm is in the boy’s eyes to rival that which whips up around them, harrying the land.

“I shall not offer falsehoods. You will bear it, should he not, son of Eärendil.” Maglor has fed three brothers to the pyre, and two more shall follow them ere long. Grief bruises the soul, causing pangs greater than any wound of the body. Let the child have his fury; far better is it than despair. The storm grows. But even now the clear waters of the stream rise against the wind, and the harmonies of the second theme echo in their babbling rush, growing loud. Doom has seldom remained quiescent among the Houses of the Men, whether for good or ill. Túrin could not outrun, nor outfight his curse, nor would Tuor’s destiny allow him to lag too long, caught in the wonder of a widening world. There is a Doom about these children, even as there was for their forebears, and its tendrils wrap them tight. A cool, shallow wave rushes forth, soaking Maglor to the thigh. Onward it drives, a-foam and a-ripple, to play at the grieving boy’s knees and worry at the fingers of his unmoving twin. The still child stirs and moans.

Such is the will of Eru, then, and so be it. “Hand him to me,” Maglor demands of the boy who again cleaves to his brother in stunned silence as the winds about him slow to a stuffy Summer stillness. His wide eyes, devoid of the queer, lurid light, are a clear, common grey. Ordinary, he now seems, an innocent thing surrounded by a morbid mess of feathered bodies and iridescent wings, as if it were not he that brought about that devastation.

“No…” the boy protests as Maglor wrests his brother from his arms and hefts him up. Some small measure of vigour returns to him, though he does little but mewl and pull reflexively away as Maglor takes his belt knife and slashes a shallow cut where blood still sticks, suspiciously, in the child’s hair over unmarked skin.

“You hurt him!” Small, yet strong, hands pull at the injured child’s tunic, as the boy makes a steadfast attempt to gain him back, though to do so he must reach above his head.

Maglor catches a struggling wrist and holds it fast. “I have done him no harm!” he whispers insistently. “None must know. Do you understand? None must hear of the events that passed in the mouth of this cave. Your brother caught a glancing blow with an errant blade, no more.” And the boy comes along without much fuss. He has little choice. 

On the far side of the stream Maglor thrusts him into the arms of a waiting soldier. “A child only, as is plain,” he says in bland tones laced with scorn. “Tell me, what do you believe you saw ‘neath that overhang?”

“Only mist, my Lord,” the soldier replies with tight jaw and guarded expression. “Only children amid the mist and shadow.” He holds the boy slightly apart as if unsettled still, though the boy remains grey-eyed and mundane, only a child, small and vulnerable, in the grasp of a warrior, fully armed and strong. He will hold his tongue for a goodly length of time; shame is a powerful suppressant.

Maglor cannot shake the feeling, as he strides away from that cave, that it is a dead thing he brings out of the shadows, even if it breathes. Only time will tell.

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