Work Text:
Loss is a cold thing, desolate in its silence. Elrond had always imagined it was warmer, when he heard the tales, like fire all consuming, or at the very least like water, rushing and rushing and tearing you away with it. But instead it is empty and still, cold enough it feels as though it will freeze his flesh rigid to his bones.
It wasn’t really loss he imagined, he supposes. It was rage and vengeance and even hatred that seemed always to chase upon its heels. But looking at the drained-well stillness of Maglor’s words and the cold, dead burning of Maedhros’s eyes, Elrond thinks even hatred is not so warming as it pretends.
And he and Elros sit huddled together, and they have not enough warmth between them to keep out the loss.
So Elrond cannot seek out warmth in anger. He has no hatred in his heart, no rage, no hope of vengeance, not against Feanor’s sons.
He doesn’t know why he thinks of them so, whether it is because they are sons or because they are brothers or because they, like he and Elros, are two small remnants of a family that is lost. They are, all four of them, alone in the dark.
On a chill evening, when the leaves were just falling and their bellies were full but they saw hunger ahead, Elrond asked Maglor to make a song for him for Sirion.
Maglor went still and his face became white. “No,” he said, “I cannot.”
“But it is too cold,” Elrond said, “and it is too still, and it cannot be silent any longer.”
“Then,” Maglor said, “You must make the song yourself.”
“But it would be better if you made it.”
“No, it would not,” Maglor said, “If I made it then it would be mine.”
Elrond pondered this a little, until he saw he could not understand it, and simply accepted, as children do with so many things.
He asked, “If I made a song, will you sing it?”
Maglor was silent for a long moment, but at last he said, “Yes. I will sing for you.”
So Elrond mad his song of mourning, of the loss of his home and the slaying of his people. He took a precious scrap of paper and write it down clumsily in the tongues of three peoples, and he took it to Maglor to sing.
Maglor sang it on a bitter winter’s night, and all around listened, a camp of murderers and two small children who were left.
Maglor sang, and his singing was wonderful, the clumsy, child’s words more beautiful than any song sung before or since. And so Elrond wept warm tears down his cheeks, and though the cold could not be chased away, the aching loosened a little from his heart