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He could hear the singing again.
It wasn’t unusual, these days. Once, the night sky he’d sailed had been silent save for whatever noise he made to disturb it, but that had been before the endless Void beyond the circles of their world had begun to bleed through into the empty spaces between the stars.
Earendil always knew when he was sailing through a point where the veil between them was thin. It was only then that he heard … things.
Music, sometimes. Wordless, wonderful music that filled him with such bliss that he lost all track of what was around him and would wake up hours later, lost amongst the stars.
Pounding, other times. Pounding and a roaring rage, like something was trying to break through.
It was getting closer. Earendil didn’t think it would be long now.
But the singing was different. Wild and beautiful, yes, but less alien than the wordless music that came from beyond the stars. It seemed closer, somehow.
He always left it at ‘somehow,’ though he knew better than that.
It came from the same place the whispers had come from, long ago. Before the whispers turned to screams and the screams to singing.
It came from the light that he flew through the sky.
It came from the Silmaril, and any thought beyond that, he carefully locked away.
The stars went dark around him, and he gritted his teeth and flew on. They would come back if he flew straight on, back through the thinness in the world.
Or he hoped they would. It had always worked before, but he didn’t like to think about how long it sometimes took.
The singing was much closer now.
And the boat had dipped with the sudden addition of weight.
The only light should have been that of the Silmaril, but there was a warmer light behind him, flickering across the deck of the boat like flames.
“Feanaro,” he said, mouth dry, but as bad as that possibility would be, he hoped it was true, because all the others would be worse.
The song turned to high laughter, as musical as the song, and Earendil spun, hand on his sword, little good though it would do him.
Most things here were not nearly corporeal enough to stab.
It was almost elvish in form, which was more than some fëar of their fading people could still claim. But all the ragged edges had turned to flame, and there was some great shadow within it that twisted and grasped, reaching out with greedy fingers for the burning light at Earendil’s back.
It cocked its head, as much as it had one, and the grasping tendrils changed direction and instead brushed against Earendil’s face.
Earendil froze.
“Your face,” it said, words still half-song. “I know your face, or almost do. Your face is just a little wrong. And when did you grow to be so tall?”
Not quite Quenya, not quite Sindarin, not quite anything, but the words still fit neatly into his mind like arrows into chinks in armor.
Not Feanaro, as he had realized after the first laughter.
No.
“Maglor,” he said, and the name echoed oddly.
Maglor, to his knowledge, had never seen Earendil’s face.
But Maglor had seen his sons’, and he had seen for himself in Elrond’s face that the resemblance was close.
The laughter this time was delighted. “Yes! Yes, yes, yes. That was the name. I’ll need it soon. It’s almost time. We’re coming through.”
Earendil didn’t move. He wasn’t sure he could.
“You first, you first, just right through there.” The words were almost soothing, a gentle lullaby. “Just one per door, but that’s alright; there’s others coming, by and by.”
The whole boat shifted just a little to the side, and he shivered as he felt the world shift around him once again.
The stars shone faintly, just half real, above him, while the flaming fëa flickered in and out.
Then the stars shone bright as the world strained to knit itself back together again for at least a little bit longer.
The fëa was gone.
Just one per door, but that’s alright, he remembered, and he shivered again.
He wondered, just briefly, what would have happened if he had looked a bit less like his sons.
But it did not pay to think about things glimpsed in the Void.
Earendil sailed on and told himself he couldn’t hear the singing coming from the light.