Chapter Text
He stretches out to the edge of his strength, to rivers and lakes and streams, and listens to the first Elves awaken with a word for water on their lips. They will name his realm and forever hear its call deep in their souls. Sirion. Narog. Teiglin. Eventually, Belegaer, when they see the ocean bend around them as they slowly make their way West.
The Secondborn receive no greeting, no vassal of the Valar invites them to spend eternity in the Undying Lands, unmarred, unblemished. The Men are more than blemished – they are hurt and scarred, and fall ill, and die, their lifespans too brief to be worth consideration.
And Ulmo rises from the waves, untold by legends, trying to help them survive on Endórë while their Firstborn cousins feast and build and rule in Valinor.
He speaks to them of water and protection from rain, of canals and irrigation, of the Sea and ships to sail it, of nets and harpoons, of salt and fish and preserving it to last the winter. He does not know much else, but at least they have a chance at survival now. These Men, who are bearing the brunt of Eru’s whim to force mortality on their heads without being asked whether they would consider it a boon or a curse, and, Ulmo thinks, it is not fair, not fair at all.
Ulmo does not have to work alone. His Maiar are easily drawn to his cause, now they share streams and lakes, Ossë takes the surf and rapids, Uinen floats in marshlands and estuaries.
Until they are not the only ones talking to the discarded and the lost.
The most powerful and the most defiant of his siblings lands on Endórë in a shatter of light and begins building an army. Ulmo wonders whether he could serve in a kingdom of another, while Ossë pledges his allegiance with the certainty of tides and the rashness of a rip current, and Uinen is wavering, preferring quiet conversations with washer-women on both sides of the Sea to dams and locks and the power of a waterfall harnessed to run an empire; until swan-boats are burning and waves are flowing crimson, and the taste of blood and tears forces her to take sides.
The Valar are angry, betrayed, it is not long until his Maiar are dragged before their court, and Ulmo kneels on the cold dry marble, not a fountain, nor a puddle in sight, and tells his brother that, to prevent the Maiar from being sent into the Void, he will share the blame.
His name is erased from Valinor, his seat removed from their councils, the Sea – his home – turned prison when he is no longer allowed to speak to anyone from the waters. Ulmo sees a misfit empire rise in the North on steel and determination, and he is torn in two, for he once had taught both sides how to survive, and now he can only watch his children march to fleeting victories in an endless war.
He keeps waiting for a gap in his doom, for a loophole – and he is rewarded, he gets a chance to appear to an Elf, then a Man, sending him off to a hidden city, steering his ship through the treacherous currents, finally tearing a piece of his own life to give wings to one of the Firstborn who jumps off a wall into the waves wearing the same defiance he had seen at the gates of Utumno when the world was young. When she lands on the sand of pearls that still remembers the bloodshed from an Age ago, Ulmo feels joyful like a brook in the spring at having outwitted the rest of the Valar.
Their punishment comes down as his Sea is twisted from the inside, strangled and whipped into a giant wave that crashes on Beleriand – and Sirion and Teiglin and Narog are no more, no longer will he be able to listen to their streams, his only source of comfort when his speech had been cut off by the original punishment. His children, dead by the thousands under his own hand.
Now that the war is over, so is their sentence.
Ossë and Uinen, searching for an outlet to their guilt, apply themselves to helping the Men once again. Ulmo watches, lends a hand occasionally, and begins to feel hope creeping back, as tall towers rise on an island, and bright sails are leading their ships Westward, their spirits indomitable.
The doom repeats. Ulmo’s Maiar are forced to take the lives of those they have tried to lead and teach and protect. As the island drowns under a wave, they are only allowed to bear a few ships to the land in the East, and broken by guilt and loss, they will not venture out of the deep seas ever again.
We should have known, Ulmo thinks, remembering when the rest of the Valar stood and watched as Eru made Aulë destroy his creations, there is a pattern to the punishment, except that some of us receive no clemency.
He hides in the depths for a while, but slowly, with the patience of droplets turning into stalactites, the walls of ice he built around himself begin to crack, and Ulmo returns to now-unfamiliar shores.
He attempts to make a song of grief and guilt, and one evening, he hears another voice, raised as if in response, and the same darkness of sorrow in its notes.
Ulmo rides the rising tide to the shore and sees a lonely, dark-haired Elf on the shore playing a harp with fingers blackened and withered on his right hand.
They speak of a moment's rashness of taking an oath that destroys your life in its keeping and makes you watch as it crushes the ones you love, of what it feels like when your hands are twisted to murder against your will, of condemning yourself to an eternity outside, alone, for fear that you could bring only death to anyone you meet.
They speak, and then they sing together, a lament for the lost, a song of salt and wind and waves.
They find a kind of courage in each other’s stories.
They both go Eastwards, when they part.
The Elf has heard of a place of healing that does not turn anyone away. The Last Homely House, it is called. He fights shame and guilt and terror threatening to drag him back with every step, making himself remember what Ulmo had told him of the flight of Elwing to Valinor, her blame mingled with gratitude, of his second – son, he still does not dare to think the word - on the shores of Númenor, who never stopped telling stories of his childhood, and these tales did not portray him as the monster he thought himself to be.
Ulmo weaves his song into the waves, and suddenly Elves get a Sea-longing they cannot understand, and build the ships that the Vala then guides on the perilous straight road to the West. Once, he even makes Anduin flow backwards when Men are mired in yet another battle at a white city, but he has learned from Gondolin and would never again ask the rest of the Valar for aid.
The Elves sing a lament for the Noldor, and the Maiar sing a lament for Beleriand, their noble goals and bitter defeats preserved forever.
And sometimes an Elf and a Vala sing them together, alone on the shore late into the night, and a new dawn rises with a faint whiff of the wind from the Sea, whispering of hope and loss and remembrance.