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Donna Noble is a woman with an echo in her soul. She knows that she is missing something, something that feels like it must be the most important thing in her life, but pretends that she hasn’t noticed. She yearns for… something. She has no idea what it is. She does not quite belong anymore, and she doesn’t know why that is either.
And
Maglor Feanorion has wandered upon this earth for thousands of years. He is alone and last and longingly lost. His song is on the wind, weaved through the sand sung among the waves. He is ancient with earth’s ancientry, and strange with the strangeness of our world, and he is achingly, eternally sad.
And
Donna Noble is a soul unmoored. She was meant for the wild, the strange, the ancient; things beyond the minds of mortal men. She looks to the stars and they call to her, but she does not belong to them. She is a creature of earth, her place is here, a strand of the tapestry of time and space, not its weaver, her mind’s home is the sphere of this world, she is no lord of Time.
So
Donna Noble walks upon a beach alone and she hears music carried on the wind. It is like nothing she has ever heard, sung in a strangely unstrange language, painting what might have been pictures in her mind if it had been just a slightly different shape. It resonates with her very soul, with the wind and the waves and the invisible stars, it does not remind her, like the echo of an echo of something forgotten, and it is so, so very sad. So she walks towards it.
And
Maglor is older than the mountains and older than the moon, and his lonely mourning is older than the shape of this world. He has lost hope and lost urgency and lost any sense of the importance of anything long ago. In this twenty first of centuries as Men of this age count it, he is not not hiding, but he is not exactly hiding either. Maglor Feanorion is awful and awesome and awe-inspiring in the sense wherein all three are the same. He holds about him the grief and horror and guilt of incomprehensible ages and weaves it into heart wrenching song which hangs heavy on the air. Mostly, he trusts people walk away from the sounds of crippling despair, and mostly, people are sensible enough to do so.
But
Donna Noble is not stopped, she is not turned aside. She is mesmerized by this song that half-reminds her of something she’s forgotten, while rooting her so strongly to herself, to wind and sea and a sorrow which belongs here. A sorrow which tugs at her, familiar in its foreignness, but completely unique in itself. And for all her brusqueness she is horribly empathetic once she gets going.
So she finds this strange, hobo-looking man on a beach and he looks up at her in surprise and she says,
“You’re beautiful.”
It’s not like her, to say something like that, but it sort of comes out of her, after that song, and it’s true.
And
This is Maglor, who has lived for such a terribly long time, a ghost on the wind with only his sorrow to remember himself by. This is Maglor, encountering Donna Noble, a force of nature who cannot be daunted or distracted, who stands for no nonsense, one of the realest and most living people in the world.
There is no escaping this, whatever this is, whatever happens next. Donna will not allow misery in innaction. Their souls are mirrors of light and dark, one holds too much, the other echoes emptiness. Donna has always walked towards strangeness, even when she has had no truck with it, and it has never left her alone for long. Maglor is ancient and strange, but he is the pure opposite of other-worldly. Donna has seen stars until she was overcome by them, it is time she falls in love within the circles of this world. They look into each other’s eyes with the echoes of the music of the greatest singer who ever was hanging about them, and each see the other to their very hearts, and both are in awe. There is no turning back from this.