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What plummet, seas, to sound you—
All the long reaches spun out silver-white—
Turn you, and cast drowned riches?
Or how again, O velvet night,
“I am going to live by the seashore,” Maglor says, meaning it. “I shall have the waves for my bed. I’ll tuck their foamy edges under my chin.”
“And then the whales will come,” Celegorm interrupts rudely, poking his head in, “And ho, ho! They shall eat you.”
“Go away, wretch,” Maglor snaps.
Maedhros shoos Celegorm out for once. “Go on,” he urges. “You were speaking a poem.”
When the sky, stooping with its glittering load
About the elf-locks of the curious grass,
Scatters its sparklings, will you part almost
Upon the quintessential host?
“You should eat.” Curufin, white-cheeked, mocking, always coming out of the dark.
Maglor’s eyes hurt, despite the dark. He has begun to catch light sideways, with careful, seeking glances, so that he can shut it out and hide.
“I’ve eaten.” (He hears—he hears that old voice. That old argument.)
“We have to be strong.” Curufin all but forces the bread into his hand. “Who knows when they shall grow tired of waiting, and attack?”
He means their family. He means Finrod, tanner and thinner than Maglor remembers, but still himself; still fierce and blue-eyed, still too knowing to be really kind.
(What would kindness even be, to Maglor?)
He means Fingolfin, and Fingon—
Somehow, Fingon knew.
Or how, the figment spirit sleeping,
Can it render body ghost,
In its dream unseat the heavy monarch,
Conjure to the bleak wild coast
Daylight reigns outside. A cruel monarch, in a country where there is no king.
Maybe the one in the mountain, bloody Ulfang suggests, in the flat voice with which he used to speak, not the hideous croak of his dying. Maybe there is a king, Maglor Kanafinwe, and you offered him your brother as payment for the use of his lands.
Maglor would drink, if the taste and scent of liquor did not bathe him in memory. He would sleep, if he could.
But Curufin is nagging at his elbow, and Celegorm is burning a fever that will not break but for blood, and the young ones are…
He does not even know how to protect them, whether they need it or not.
Still, the men and women of Fort Mithrim look to him as a leader. That is the greatest mockery of all.
I shall have the waves for my bed.
He has not burned the shards of his clairséach, even though he has sworn to, in the long nights. He wants a different price, by Heaven or Hell, but there is no one to pay it to.
He hears the shreds of old songs, because that is the blood that he was given, unbreaking.
Its sunk, its deep delight,
Its night of mists divide, recall how, flitting
Above the pallid thing,
Joy has an azure wing?
He wonders, should it come to that, if the lake would do.