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Spring - Y.T. 1497 - Alqualondë
The blood is still drying on the deck of the ship.
It’s sticky beneath Makalaurë’s feet, a half-solid squelch-peel at the heels of his boots as he steps over the worst of it. Splashes of seawater have washed much of it away, in Ossë’s rage of the past few hours, but some of it remains: half-crumbled as it dries into the wood, softened like tar by the damp.
It is dark enough, even in the eerie blue glow cast by the lantern in his hand, that Makalaurë can pretend not to recognize the stains.
His brothers are gathered by the bow of the ship. Makalaurë joins them in silence. They’re all gazing forward into the darkness—out of the darkness, as they slip gradually out of the unnatural shadow that cloaks the coast of Valinor, and into the starlit expanse of the open sea. (All except Tyelperinquar, young and solemn, his head just up to the bottom of his father’s ribcage; he nestles in against him, asleep. Curufinwë has wrapped his scarlet-bright cloak around him, tucking him in close.)
It’s Maitimo who speaks first, his low voice hoarse with salt and shouting. A few wisps of fiery-red hair have come loose from his bun, half-up against the smooth waves of his locks, and drift over the copper circlet that rests upon his head.
“How are we doing?” he says, softly.
Carnistir—working his jaw, looking away—speaks for the rest of them: “We will be fine.”
His face is hard, but his eyes are hollow, as if he can’t bring himself to truly look at anything. The splotch of birthmark-red over his cheeks, lit by starlight, has never looked more like blood. He has wiped himself clean, sometime since the battle; his hands and stern-scowling face, at least. If his clothes remain stained, Makalaurë does not notice. A privilege of the colors of their father’s house: cloaked as Carnistir is in his varying shades of crimson, Makalaurë cannot tell which splotches of darkness are born of water, and which are born of blood.
The same cannot be said of Tyelkormo or the Ambarussar, who are all three clothed in green beneath the red of their cloaks, and in the blacks and browns of their half-removed armor. A deep scrape cuts across Tyelkormo’s cheek, half scabbed over, the same color as the stains on his spring-green tunic; his equally-green eyes are still a little wide, a little wild, his shock of pale hair matted with gore. It makes Makalaurë’s eyes stray downward once more: ship-wood, still darkened, sticky beneath his feet.
(Blood in the water. Blood on the ship. Blood on his face, on his sword, on his hands—)
He clears his throat. “Someone,” he says, and swallows, makes his wavering voice even by practiced force. “Someone still needs to clean the deck.”
Ambarussa—Ambarto, he thinks, by the shade of his hair, shadowed as it is in the veil-thin starlight—twists his fingers together, staring down. “So loud,” he murmurs, as if to himself.
His twin takes his hand, but says nothing; it’s Maitimo who tells him, “It’s over now.”
“So loud,” Ambarto repeats, shaking his head. “So soon . . .”
“We did say so, didn’t we?” says Ambarussa, a little louder than his twin: loud enough to echo across the ship, to startle Makalaurë into an unnerved twitch, when his voice slips into something greater than itself: “Elda or Maia or Aftercomer . . .”
(He doesn’t sound like their father—not quite—but something ripples beneath his voice, like the scent of smoke on the wind, and Makalaurë shivers.)
“Cowards,” Tyelkormo spits out, with a glance over his shoulder, back toward Alqualondë. “Traitors.”
“It’s over now,” Maitimo repeats, with a hint of sharpness this time, and Tyelkormo falls silent. “Let’s not dwell. Curvo, put down the sword.”
Curufinwë shows no sign of having heard. With one arm, he gathers his sleeping son to his chest. With the other, he holds up a blade to the light, tilting it, testing it:
“If the guard were larger,” he mutters to himself, and runs his newly-injured thumb over the hilt, “to better protect the fingers. Provided that does not upset the balance . . .”
His eyes, silver-sharp and mirror-bright, are so much like their father’s. In the pervasive darkness, he is even more their father’s double than usual; it is only the relative dimness of his spirit, the fire that burns quiet and steely-blue within him instead of leaping-blazing scarlet, that distinguishes him. The lack of a crown upon his head. Atar’s face has grown sharper, its lines more severe; Curufinwë, as ever, is his steadfast echo, even in this change. He shines with the same fervor, lit from within.
Although—now that Makalaurë thinks of it—he hasn’t seen their father glowing with the passion of invention for . . . quite a long time now.
Not so with Curufinwë; like their father, he has honed his revenge into single-minded intensity, but he directs it to other places. Stares at his sword like it holds all the mysteries of the world in its steel. He has, Makalaurë notes, cleaned and polished it perfectly, so his reflection shines bright and unmarred—even though Makalaurë recalls it dripping red. Curufinwë’s face snarling, standing in front of his trembling son. A body hitting the deck.
(Blood in the water. Blood on the ship. Blood on his heart-pulsing, harp-calloused hands.)
He does not know what his brother is thinking, whether his mind dwells on anything other than the weak points he has noticed in the blade, the racing potential of future improvements. But Makalaurë is not a craftsman, and when his hand drifts to the hilt of own sword, he vows to himself, silently, that it will never again taste the blood of any but the Enemy and his servants.
It is not an Oath, but he believes it.
(Perhaps he is a fool to do so.)
“We’ve weathered through the worst of the storm,” said Carnistir. “I imagine we’ll make it.”
Tyelkormo scoffs. “Of course we’ll make it,” he says, tossing his head: a sharp ripple of silver-white in the starlight. “We didn’t come this far just to drown, and none of us have so far.”
Some of us have, Makalaurë thinks—but what Tyelkormo means is none of them, so he keeps his mouth shut.
“What do you suppose it’s like, over there?” says Ambarussa.
He swallows, to rid himself of the dryness in his mouth, the sticky-sickly taste of salt and blood. Imagines the taste of clean water in its stead, clear and pure, and the scent of flowers on the breeze. “Beautiful, I imagine,” he says.
“More beautiful once we rid Moringotto of his head,” says Tyelkormo, with a snarling grin on his face.
Maitimo tilts his head. “Quite so.”
“How long will we be there,” says Ambarto softly, “do you think?”
Carnistir says, “However long it takes.”
“Quite so,” Maitimo repeats.
They all share a glance, and a bolt of determination shoots through Makalaurë’s chest, reflected in his brother’s shining eyes. The stars glimmer above, with darkness at their backs. Hope swells, cleansing and true, the brightest of new beginnings.
“To vengeance,” says Tyelkormo, lifting an imaginary drink.
Maitimo copies him, a smile flitting to rest on his fair face: “To vengeance,” he says, “and to new horizons.”
“To the High King,” Curufinwë adds, raising his own imagined glass toward the cabins of the ship, where their father now rests (or, more likely, where their father now paces back and forth, hands running feverishly through his hair, poring over maps and sharpening his blades).
“To the High King,” they all echo, and pretend, caught up in sudden levity, to drink.
(And of the seven of them, gazing out at the horizon, only two—Maitimo and Ambarto—look back, however briefly, toward the way they came.)
A fresh spray of seawater soaks over him, into him, loosens the blood dried still over his skin. Washing it away. Makalaurë tilts his head up, and lets the scent of salt drown out his doubts. The scent of hope, of renewal. Of rebirth.
Spring is on the wind, blowing in from the east, and with it comes a life all anew. He looks at his brothers, dark-spattered, fierce-eyed: touched with saltwater, their hands and weapons cleansed. Made anew in the wash of the battle, and made anew once more in the wash of the storm. Emerging now, as if crowning through birth all over again—all seven at once—into the shadow of this dark new world, ready to set it alight.
(The breeze grows a little colder.)
~ ✷✷✷✷✷✷ ~
Summer - F.A. 7 - Himring
The world is changed.
Everything is changed. Or then again, perhaps only they are.
Summer in Himring is thin and mild in the daytime, cool and crisp at night. But to Makalaurë, it is nothing short of blazing hot. This grim-lipped, whip-scarred version of Maitimo burns like the new sun, and his fortress crackles with invisible flame. Makalaurë would call it passion, but the word falls short; fervor is what his brother carries within him, white-hot and inextinguishable, smoldering through the stone corridors and in the reflections of their people’s eyes.
Sometimes, he can almost smell the smoke.
It isn’t just Maitimo, either. These days, they are all burning. Atar and Ambarto, both dead in fire, scorched themselves out in ash; the six of them are left, and the six of them carry the flame of the Oath, shared between them. Leaping, reaching higher. Farther. Bringing true summer to Himring, and vengeance to their hearts.
They will all depart soon, to the scattered lands in the East they’ve promised to take; Curufinwë calls it their third exile, but Maitimo calls it opportunity. Yes, they are consigned to hold the front lines—but that makes them strategically invaluable to the crown.
And of course, there is the matter of the Oath—how it curls, pleased, in the depths of their chests, to see Angamando on the horizon. Its quarry nearly in view.
Tomorrow, most of them are leaving. Carnistir and Tyelkormo and Curufinwë, going off to build their own fortresses, while Ambarussa lingers for just a little while more; where he will go afterward, Makalaurë does not know. He himself has the Gap to hold, while Maitimo will remain here, in his fortress of stone and solitude, built up from the ravaged rocks of the ground as if to mirror the re-forging of his own inner soul. But for one night more, they are all together, all seven of them—
Well. Old habits. Makalaurë swallows, and corrects his thought: all six.
They are standing at the ramparts, all lined up in a row. There is one-half of Ambarussa, and these days, Makalaurë can stand to look at him without gasping aloud in grief. He is silent as ever, but there he stands: gazing out at the gray-whipped sky, one hand clenched tightly behind his back. His other hand is hidden from Makalaurë, as is most of his body, still clad in the leather of his scouting armor—cast in shadow, the bodies of their brothers concealing him like thick-grown trees. Certainly Makalaurë cannot see his face. Perhaps that is for the better.
There is Curufinwë, who at last looks different enough from their father that Makalaurë can stand to look upon him, too: his dark hair is drawn back in that same businesslike tail, but the severe angles of his face are gaunter now, thinned as they all are by scarcity and grief. The fingerprint-scars burnt into his jaw, clasping at his cheek, set him apart further: their father’s last farewell. His eyes are the same as ever, if more shadowed; that piercing, glittering silver-gray, just as sharp as Atar’s, but more . . . distant. Calculating. He is a shadow of their father, a broken mirror, paled and still. Atar was never still: always moving, always dashing ahead. Curufinwë is statue-perfect in the night. Where is Tyelperinquar? He must be inside, alone, in bed. He does not feel their pull, the calling of the Oath; Makalaurë wonders if Curufinwë is glad of that.
There is Carnistir, a leather book gripped even now beneath his arm. He’s dressed down, by his standards: no cloak, minimal jewelry, the thin silky flare of his black half-cloak baring his arms to the mild night. Once he would have stood in their precise center: three brothers on each side, and he an island, standing stiff and haughty and alone, and preferring nothing else. Now their numbers are crooked, their balance disturbed; he stares off into the distance, a slight frown on his stern dark mouth, hands clasped behind his back. He does not open the book beneath his arm; he does not lean into either side; he does not speak.
There is Tyelkormo, his usual bow and wolf-pelt cast aside for the night, hands gloved but tucked into his pockets nonetheless. Every time Makalaurë sees his face, it has collected more scars and scrapes; he is not gone so often as Ambarussa, but Curufinwë says he often takes charge of patrols and hunting trips himself. It is well they will share their lands, the two of them, or Curufinwë might shatter like a cracking mirror, and Tyelkormo might ride out into the wilds one day and simply never return. Huan is not here; he must be with Tyelperinquar. Bits of white-gray fur drift from Tyelkormo’s clothing. He leans in to say something to Carnistir, but Makalaurë does not catch it.
Then there is Makalaurë himself, who stands between Maitimo and their younger brothers. And then, of course, there is Maitimo—
Well.
Hmm.
Perhaps that isn’t so accurate, anymore.
There is Maedhros, who looms like his fortress, the pennants of his hair catching in the wind. Even out of the corner of his eye, Makalaurë glimpses his scars: pulling his face out of proportion, gruesome and warped and wrecked. That his new name keeps the meaning of the old is something of an irony; even Makalaurë—who loves his brother dearly still, he does—cannot bring himself to see him as anything close to beautiful.
For most of the Noldor, using their Quenya names is a stubborn, steadfast act of rebellion: a way of saying these are our names, this is our tongue, and you cannot outlaw them. You cannot take them from us.
For Maitimo—for Maedhros, the opposite is true. To insist upon his Sindarin name is to say, you cannot change the fact that I am changed. You cannot take away the fact that I am not who I once was, though the roots remain the same. When people are forced to use it, a glaring spot of Sindarin in a sea of smooth forbidden Quenya, it trips up the conversation for a discomforting heartbeat; when heralds stumble over it as they announce him—Lord Maedhros—it is a stark reminder of where they are, of what they are here to do.
Despite what their brothers might say, Makalaurë knows he is not giving up. He is not giving in. His shedding of his old name is as calculated a move as his surrender of the crown; it is not what he needs to be anymore. It is not where he serves best.
But he is a mosaic of names, just as his skin is a mosaic of colors and scars. Findekáno calls him Russo; Makalaurë and his other brothers call him Nelyo yet. Curufinwë insists upon calling him Nelyafinwë—a transparent dig at their half-uncle. Maedhros permits it. The blame may be placed upon them, as he confides in Makalaurë once—his proud, fire-hearted brothers; he can only be expected to restrain them so far. He can bend the knee, shed one less-meaningful name, and still keep his head held up high.
No, Maitimo Maedhros is not giving in. He refuses, after all, when they are not in court, to call their uncle Fingolfin.
That is who Maedhros is, these days: solid and unmovable, stubborn as their father and determined to burn just as bright. War in his eyes, and in his heart. Fixed upon the plumes of smoke on the horizon, the black fortress in the distance, as if he can taste their victory—his vengeance—on the wind.
Even now, he is watching the horizon—even now, the night before their brothers depart, in what may be the very last gathering of all six brothers for centuries.
When Makalaurë glances left and looks to him, Maitimo does not look back—and Maedhros doesn’t, either.
(Has he not taken enough from you? Tyelkormo snapped, when Maitimo—Russandol, he was calling himself then—put his foot down on the matter. Will you let him take your name, too?
He did not take it from me, Russandol had replied—steely, in that eerie, gravelly new way of his. I gave it up, to survive. I let that part of myself die so that I could live. I understand if you cannot love what remains, but it is who I am.
Of course we still love you, Makalaurë said.
Fool, Carnistir scoffed, tossing his head in agreement. You are still our brother. We are bound in more than blood.
But Curufinwë had fixed his gaze upon his eldest brother, and nodded slowly, and said, Name yourself as you will, Nelyafinwë. If you are to be Lord Maedhros of Himring, then long may he reign.
Long may he reign, they all echoed; and because they were not in public, Russandol had not pointed out that officially speaking, he does not reign over anything.)
Now, none of them say anything. Where once Maitimo’s voice would have filled the silence, clear and deep and full of concern, Maedhros does not even part his lips; as ever, it is Makalaurë who must fill his role.
But he is not Maitimo; he never could be. So instead of speaking, Makalaurë begins to hum.
It’s a lovely song, haunting and low. Only Makalaurë knows that it is an elegy.
He has written many mourning songs for their father. Songs for the dead of Alqualondë, for those lost upon the Grinding Ice; these are more political than personal, almost cold in the manner of their crafting. But some songs he composes alone, and does not share their lyrics. He doesn’t want to turn the moment into a reminder, doesn’t want to do anything than soften the tense quiet—so he keeps it to himself, the fact that he wrote this song for Ambarto.
Of course, the song does not remain uninterrupted.
“Eru’s sake, Káno,” Carnistir snaps with a glare, lifting a hand to massage his temple. His voice is sharp and grating, as always—although perhaps, in the last handful of years, it has grown sharper. “Can we not have a moment of silence?”
“Why, Moryo, don’t be ridiculous,” drawls Curufinwë, before Makalaurë can draw breath to retort. “In silence, one is obliged to think.”
He wields the words with surgical precision. Curufinwë wields everything with surgical precision, from words to hammers, jewel-loupes to blades; in emulation of their father, at first, and now with something more driven, more focused. He has taken to politics in a different way than Maedhros or Carnistir: less military tactics and financial plans, more whispered words in courtesans’ ears and letters slipped beneath doors in the dead of night.
“Some of us could benefit from the practice,” says Tyelkormo.
“Self-awareness is the first step to progress,” Carnistir fires back neatly, and Tyelkormo bares his teeth:
“Grabbing your wrist is the first step to tearing your arm out of its socket,” he says.
Carnistir sneers at him, arms folded, and Tyelkormo grins back, more a snarl than any kind of smile at all. And if it’s a little more vicious than it ought to be, the barbs more pointed, the snarl too deep—
“Boys,” Makalaurë intervenes, when Maedhros says nothing.
Tyelkormo barks a laugh at his tone, and his teeth flash white in the moonlight, like fangs. “Sure, whatever you say, Ammë,” he mocks.
Carnistir winces a little. “Don’t,” he warns.
“What?” says Tyelkormo, eyes narrowed, voice rising. “I can’t even say the word Ammë without you throwing a tantrum?” He spits out, “Ammë, Ammë, Ammë—”
“Shut the f*ck up, Tyelko—”
“Or what, runt, you’ll kick me off the ramparts?” Tyelkormo hisses, his eyes alight with a feral glow. “Try it.”
“I’d help,” says Curufinwë, who stands behind Carnistir like a shadow, examining his fingernails in apparent calm.
Tyelkormo’s glare swings to him. “Traitor.”
Curufinwë opens his mouth, smirking a little—
“Enough.”
A deep, rasping voice cuts through the night. Maedhros. They all cease, as if heeding a command in the midst of battle; Makalaurë shivers, just once, before the prickling unease of his brothers’ strange tension settles away beneath his skin.
Once more, they are silent.
Sometimes, he cannot help but feel that the rest of them have all become truer versions of themselves, the deepest cores of them intensified, made brighter and stronger and real. Curufinwë, who spends hours upon hours in his workshop, and whose blades grow cleverer and stronger every year. Tyelkormo, ruthless hunter of their many dark foes. Carnistir, with ink staining his fingers and strategy sharp on his tongue. And Maedhros, who has always been the bravest and brightest of them all, this iron-hearted leader, this beacon in the night; he is more a lord than ever, now, has shed his name and the ashes of his innocence to rise up from the flames once more.
And then there are the other two. Ambarussa, cleaved in two. A shadow of himself, bitter and silent. Makalaurë cannot remember the last time he heard him speak aloud. How can he hope to be like the rest of them, to be melted down and re-forged into the barest and truest essentials of his soul, when half his soul is gone?
And then there is Makalaurë, who is . . . a minstrel. At the core of him, he is a minstrel—no matter the armor he wears, or the cavalry he commands—no matter that his voice must be raised in command, rather than in joy and song—he, unlike the rest of them, must force himself into utility, must become something entirely new. His deft musician’s hands, marked by the callouses of sword and bow, rather than those of the harp; his mother’s gentle heart, twisted up in his chest, struggling with each beat to match the rhythm of the drums of war.
He and Ambarussa are the outliers, those who trail behind: unable to metamorphosize with such natural and direct grace, forced to commit to converting themselves into different animals entirely.
. . . But perhaps that thought is overly self-absorbed, he thinks, as he tries to catch Ambarussa’s eye (he cannot). Perhaps he is not so different than the rest of them.
Makalaurë breathes out, and begins to hum again. Not an elegy, this time, but the chorus of a war-march, words set to a simple tune to which another verse could easily scan: neither foe nor friend, neither foul nor clean . . .
They stand among the towers of Himring, the silence now broken by his unwavering melody, and the whispers of his younger brothers as they begin to mutter between themselves again.
The spring of Arda has passed them by. They are standing in the fires of summer now, heat in their hearts and ash on the wind.
. . . brood of Morgoth or bright Vala . . .
None of them speak the Oath aloud, tonight. He is certain they can all hear it, anyway.
It shivers between them all like a chain: two links missing. Drawn tighter, tauter, in their absences. They huddle together in the crisp-biting wind, pulled into the pooling warmth of their bodies, like a fire set against the dark. The wind is cold, the horizons grim; but Makalaurë is humming, and Tyelkormo is snickering, and the determined twitch of Maedhros’s scar-split lip is very nearly a smile; and the Oath thrums between them, grounding and galvanizing, close enough to the deep timbre of their father’s voice that they could all close their eyes and pretend.
(He shivers.)
~ ✷✷✷ ~
Autumn - F.A. 506 - The Eastern Marches
Himring, fallen, looms in the distance.
Dead leaves flutter past hollow faces. Brittle brown, bloodied red. As fragile as Makalaurë feels, standing here as if on a teetering precipice, as if the crisp wind might catch his bones and shatter him away over the parapets’ edge.
In their border fortress, at the top of the outer wall, they stand: Maedhros and Makalaurë, clustered together, so close their shadows mingle into one. Maedhros’s stump rests on Makalaurë’s shoulder. His hair is shorn to his chin. He did it after the Nirnaeth, a jagged mess of a cut that left the ends uneven, just like in the years at Mithrim as it regrew; Makalaurë had found him with the knife in his hand, a careless graze seeping red at the hinge of his jaw, his cast-off braids spilling like autumn leaves across the cold stone floor. It had grown back slowly, inch by inch, till it reached to beneath his shoulders—and then.
And then, and then, and then.
And then Doriath.
He’s cut his hair short again, sometime since, and now goosebumps raise in delicate patches over the bared nape of his neck. It’s even shorter than Ambarussa’s now. Ambarussa, who—he glances to make sure—is standing up here with them still, a good ten feet away, staring out at the frozen plains with no expression on his stony face.
Between them, there is nothing but empty space where their brothers ought to have stood.
None of them speak.
There are no words—no words for this, no words urgent enough to press up and break through the heaviness lodged in his throat, the teeming blackness that crawls into his mouth and stings his tongue with the bitter taste of decay. As if a wide chasm has yawned open between them, a gaping maw of black silence. Makalaurë hates silence; he can feel it buzz between his teeth, and yet—what can he sing?
They do not speak.
He does not sing.
His brother’s arm is heavy on the back of his neck.
They didn’t bring the bodies back. The armor and the weapons, yes—Carnistir’s simple but finely-crafted messer, Curufinwë’s longsword, Tyelkormo’s infamous spear—they’ve just lost their best swordsmith, after all. But the bodies they dragged out from the caverns, and set alight upon a great makeshift pyre, to burn like their father and brother did.
To join their ashes on the wind.
Makalaurë closes his eyes, and feels the dust and the dead leaves slipping through his hair, sliding like silt against his face. They are far away now, but the wind here is strong and always smells of burning, and he can almost pretend he is breathing in his brothers’ smoke again.
Before they burned the bodies, as Maedhros stripped them of their arms and armor with grim pragmatism in his hard gray eyes, Makalaurë had taken something, too. A ring from Curufinwë—not his wedding ring, which he hasn’t worn since before Alqualondë, but a thin silver ring set with a trilliant-cut red tourmaline, a collaboration between their father and a young Tyelperinquar. A pocket-knife from Tyelkormo with a deer-antler handle, scavenged from the pocket on the side of his left boot. Carnistir had not entered the battle with many personal effects, so Makalaurë had taken one of his hairpieces, a plain braid-pin wrought of shining metal.
They burn in Makalaurë’s pocket now: three tiny, accusing memories. He took a harp from Doriath, too, a slender little wooden thing that can fit in one hand, to replace the one he lost in the Nirnaeth. Doriath has taken his brothers from him, and as he has not taken the Silmaril in return, he contents himself with this—pretends to content himself with this. Pretends its silver notes do not ripple, a sour reverberation in his tight-clenched teeth, whenever he plucks its strings.
He wonders who it belongs to.
He looks at Ambarussa. Ambarussa does not look at him, and does not step any closer; he is staring out at the horizon still, with a hungry, familiar gleam in his eyes.
Selfish, stripped of his voice and his reason and of everything that matters, he slips closer to Maedhros, huddles beneath the shelter of his cloak. Burning in the silence, he soaks up his older brother’s warmth, scarce as it is in their stillness. The eye of a raging storm.
He imagines that from afar, he and his brothers must resemble falling leaves: two shocks of red-russet hair, shorn short in their grief, curled up against the cold in the swathes of their father’s crimson. Not quite brown yet, not quite decayed. Tethered to life still, but plucked, torn from their branches by the unforgiving wind. Still floating in the air, the three of them. Still falling, side by side.
Still chained.
He wonders how much farther they have to fall.
(A speck of snow floats across his vision.)
~ ✷✷ ~
Winter - F.A. 539 - Amon Ereb
Makalaurë Maglor is colder than death.
He has put Elwing’s twins to bed. They are wary of him still, especially the younger one—Elros; Maglor has had too much practice telling twins apart to fail at it now—gazing up at him with their wide black eyes, glimmering like the stars for which they are named, suspicion written across their little faces. But at least they have stopped trying to attack him whenever he opens the door, and permit him to take them on walks around the fortress without wresting away to escape.
(The older one—Elrond—had even wished him good night.)
Now, he’s emerging from the turret steps, cloak clutched around his trembling shoulders as the snow falls thick around him, cursing his brother for all he’s worth. He knows before he even looks up what he’s about to find—Maedhros, framed by the falling snow, staring out at the broken ravages of the lands surrounded Amon Ereb. There’s a bottle of whiskey hanging from his hand.
He knows better than to approach in silence, or to touch his brother’s shoulder without warning. Thud, thud, thud, go his boots against the weathered stone; hiss goes his breath as it puffs from his lips in plumes of skeleton-white mist. His brother’s breath is much the same—slower, perhaps. Softer.
Himring was colder than this, Maglor knows, and Thangorodrim colder still—but then again, having known the cold well does not stop one from feeling it.
Even so, Maedhros is not shivering.
In fact, he’s barely moving at all. Hair of fire, face of ice: like a statue left out in winter, its carved face ravaged by wind and time, frost gleaming harsh on the planes of its features and snow seeping dark into its marble cracks.
Maglor steps forward.
“Nelyo,” he says, softly.
No response.
“Nelyo,” he says again, “come out of the cold.” A little louder, a little sharper: “Nelyo.”
Maedhros does not turn his head. As if to himself: “So little left,” he murmurs. “So little left, these days.”
“Yes,” Maglor agrees. “Let’s go inside.”
Hoarsely, dazedly: “Can you feel it still?”
There is only one it to which he might be referring. The Oath thrums, twists in his chest like a blade, and Maglor grits his teeth: “You are looking the wrong way,” he says.
Because Maedhros is gazing north, toward Himring, rather than west across the sea—west, where Elwing and the Silmaril flew, beyond the horizon and beyond their reach.
Maedhros’s eyes remain fixed on the north. “And yet the other two are with Him,” he points out, and Maglor realizes grimly that he is not looking toward Himring at all. “If we gathered all our remaining forces, it would not be enough to retake Thargelion, much less the rest of our lands. If we still had—”
A pause. Their brothers’ names Names burn, too scalding to speak aloud, in the frozen air between them.
“Estolad, perhaps,” Maedhros finishes instead, turning the bottle of whiskey around in his hands. He takes a slow, idle swig, and does not make a face at the burn.
Maglor blinks. “You are planning to retake Estolad?”
“And north from there.”
He crosses his arms—slipping them between his sleeves, to best conserve his warmth—and selects his words with delicacy. “You cannot hope to march on Angamando again,” he says, while another name—Findekáno—sizzles in the air, unspoken. “That would be suicide.”
Maedhros huffs, a faint slip of air through his nostrils: the closest sound he makes to a laugh, most of the time. “We have already lost everything.”
“Not everything.”
“Yes,” says Maedhros, suddenly sharp, “you have those children of yours, don’t you?”
He tamps down on his reaction, bites his tongue at the vigilant scrape of eyes raking over his face. “They aren’t mine,” he says.
“No, indeed!” Maedhros barks out a true laugh—grating, harsh like rust. “No, indeed,” he says again, musingly, and turns away from him, lifting the bottle to his lips. “You would do well to remember that, Káno,” he says, through a mouthful of drink. “We will ransom them to Elwing sooner or later.”
The dismissal pricks at his nerves like a taunt. “Do you truly still believe that?” he snaps against his better judgment, and presses on, even when Maedhros’s eyes snap dangerously to his: “Even the children themselves have begun to accept that she will not come for them. And still, you insist upon—”
“West or north, Makalaurë!” Maedhros interrupts, and his countenance flares with a fierce white light—rare enough, these days, that Maglor falls silent in the face of it. “West or north. I can either look to the west for Elwing the White, or north to the Iron Crown.” He leans in, and hisses: “Do not tell me how hopeless my plans might be,” he growls, “and what ruin would surely come of them. I am well aware. Which path would you rather I dwell upon?”
You can only ever look in one direction, Maglor thinks, spiteful, and bites back the words from his lips—
“How much longer,” he begins instead, and hesitates.
How much longer can they hold Amon Ereb, he does not say. How much longer will this war drag on. How much longer will Elrond and Elros remain with them. How much longer will you stand out here and drink to bitter memory, while inside the fire sputters and threatens to die, and I am obliged to follow you out into the cold.
“The Oath will not let us die,” Maedhros says, “and we cannot forsake it. We can only pursue it, to its end or to ours.”
And if there is no end? Maglor wants to demand, but Maedhros is already speaking again:
“We’ll lose them, too,” he says, gruffly, as he turns away once more. “Your children. One way or another. So many mouths to feed.”
Maglor bristles. “Don’t say that.”
“So many mouths,” he repeats. “Do you tell the children I am mad,” he says, “or do you tell them this is simply how monsters act? Or are they too frightened to ask?”
He says nothing, and Maedhros sighs. Takes a swig of whiskey, and doesn’t bother to wipe his mouth on his sleeve. Turns. As if only just noticing him: “Makalaurë,” he says, blinking.
Mirthless, Maglor snorts. “How much of that have you had?”
“Not enough,” Maedhros grouses, glaring down at the bottle in his hand. “Never enough . . .”
Abruptly, he grips the bottle by its neck, and hurls it over the ramparts. It sails into the snow, vanishing into white. The winter wind is harsh enough that the sound of it shattering to the ground never reaches their ears, leaving them waiting in silence for a crash that never comes.
Maglor does not flinch.
There are a thousand things he could say, a thousand bitter truths on the tip of his tongue; he swallows them all. “Come inside,” he says, instead. “We can hardly do anything if you freeze to death.”
“I have been far colder than this.”
The corner of Maglor’s mouth quirks up. “Come inside,” he says again, gesturing, but Maedhros turns away one last time, his eyes hooked somewhere in the wintry storm:
“Not yet.”
The wind whistles in the parapets; snow gathers on their shoulders, in the ripples of their hair. After a moment, Maedhros raises his arm and drapes it around Maglor’s shoulder, sheltering him from the wind: the only way he can say I am sorry. And Maglor nestles beneath his cloak: the only way he can say I forgive you.
He tucks his head into his brother’s shoulder, and listens desperately for his heartbeat. Thu-thump. Thu-thump. Thu-thump. It carries on, unyielding, uncaring. Devouring.
Keep going, says that heartbeat, says the Oath. Binding them where they stand, unable to shift away, unable to shift closer, and yet murmuring still with each thump in their blood: keep going.
And—
—and—
(—and—)
~ ✷ ~
Winter - ??? - Tol Himling
—and his brother’s form wavers and dissolves into white, blurred into the snow of a storm-whipped sky, and Makalaurë—
—and Maglor—
—and the singer is alone.
His voice trembles on his lips, and fades.
Spring and summer, autumn leaves, the warmth of a caress in the winter’s cold—they are nothing but music, fragile Song spun on his cracking lips, poured into the air out of his desperate throat.
He is standing by the parapets, ice beneath his feet, his tattered cloak dusted with snow. Around him stretch not the lands of East Beleriand, but the icy waters of the northern sea, where his brother’s fortress juts darkly above the waves.
Six shadows loom beside him, deepened by the sudden hanging silence.
His illusory embellishments fade away, and Tol Himling stands as it is: creaking and crumbled, like an ancient, rotting skeleton, the phantasmal flesh and muscle peeled back to reveal its age. Like a tree in winter, wind-bent and bare.
Andthe singer is small and cold and slight, a tiny smear of blue-black against the gray: a leaf trembling on one of the tree-branches, clinging. Lingering. Or, perhaps, unfurling, emerging anew—the very first bud of spring.
