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Twilight had set upon the forest, casting shadows upon the flowers growing there and the waters that flowed in the creek skirting the edges of the tall trees looming over them. Maglor shook his head to clear his thoughts, which had returned once more to his youth and to Irmo.
Or perhaps not to his youth, except for how that was the last time Maglor had gazed upon Irmo in his gardens and how promised with all the foolish hope of youth to find a way so they need not be separated.
This glade was similar to the one he had been in then, with nightingales singing in the shadows and poppies dotting the ground. Maglor did not join the nightingales in their singing this time.
Sleep called to him, as it so rarely did these days.
“I thought sleep had forsaken me for my crimes,” Maglor said as he woke in the dream. There was no need to avoid the subject.
Irmo blinked at him, his eyes reflecting the same trick filled depths as the pools of water in the gardens. “Sleep and I are the same, and I would not forsake you.”
“Perhaps not by choice, but our pleas are still not to be heard,” Maglor said.
They lapsed into silence with those words. The nightingales sang here too, happier songs than the ones they had sung in Beleriand or sang now in the lands Maglor slept in. Eventually Maglor began to sing with them, short little notes as he felt Irmo’s fingers weaving flowers into his hair.
“How did I come to find you again?” Maglor asked when the song came to an end. He was not sure he wanted to know, but he also did not want to leave the dream without knowing if it was to be the last time he saw his old lover.
“Oromë was not the only Vala to once wander the lands outside Valinor,” Irmo said. “Though his journeys are the most well-known, I think you would find signs of several of us upon them. I hope you will, at least. I should like to speak to you again as we once did, and it would be easiest if you stumble across a glade filled with poppies. But for now I shall leave you with only a kiss, for time has passed faster there than here, and it would not do for you to pass into an unending sleep. I do not wish to meet in my brother’s hold.”
Maglor woke the next morning with a memory of lips pressing against his, in a glade no longer filled with nightingales or poppies. He pulled his satchel to the side, only to find a single poppy floating in a glass phial within it, water filled with the images of stars surrounding it.
It could only be a gift from Irmo, and that meant it had not been a dream without promise.
There would be another glade and another meeting in a dream.