Chapter Text
In Maglor’s defense, he had never meant for anyone to see him.
He had meant, initially, to be in and out—a passing shadow in the night. To carry on quietly, as he had for centuries by now, unnoticed: sticking to the shore, speaking to people only when necessary, and to Elves never at all. He had never meant to stay in Ost-in-Edhil for any more than a day or to; he had only wanted to see his nephew’s city, at least once. He had pulled his hood up around his sea-roughened curls, Sung himself into an unassuming whisper of a silhouette, and stolen out into the city under the cover of night, marveling at its beauty, its diversity, its innovative life.
Now, he huddled beneath at the side of the road, harp hidden securely beneath the folds of his cloak, and waited out the rain.
Rain was nothing to him; not now, when he had spent almost a thousand years wandering the shores, sea-battered, world-weary, his boots worn thin and his voice reduced to a ghostly melody on the edges of twilight.
But that did not mean he could not feel the cold.
Maglor cast a swift, longing glance at the tavern across the road—flickering firelight, snatches of song and laughter. The warm, well-spiced scent of food. Icy water dripped down his back, seeping into his threadbare, sun-grayed cloak. He shivered.
But he dared not stand up; he dared not enter. Not here in this city of Elves, where his father’s star mocked him with the knowledge of his nephew’s presence.
He could not afford to be recognized.
“Excuse me,” called a soft, sweet-toned voice.
Maglor turned his head—not enough for the moonlight to sneak past his hood and reveal his face, but enough to glimpse the speaker.
It was a woman—a Sinda, by the unbound silvery-gold hair peeking out from her hood—who wore a pale short cloak, clutched around her shoulders like a bird’s wings. She tilted her head at him, radiating kindness and concern that he did not deserve.
“Are you all right?” said the woman, in Sindarin, so gently that Maglor might have wept, had he not wept enough lately to rival the night’s rainy sky. “Do you have a place to stay?”
He nearly laughed. A place to stay—the ground and caves and the occasional Mannish inn had served him fine enough for the past eight centuries, but never would he stay long. He could not. Like the tide, he was pulled by the glimmer of the sky, staggering over the beach: up and down the coastline, trying his best to fade away out of Elven consciousness while still keeping the song of his family alive.
If this woman knew who he was, she would certainly not have asked, would certainly not have looked at him with such warm, thoughtful kindness. She would have spat on him, called for help, and had him ousted from the city, or dragged to Celebrimbor for judgment, or slain him on the spot.
And he would have had to open his mouth and use his Song to get away, because despite it all, Maglor Fëanorion did not want to die.
It was only that he did not deserve to live well.
“Don’t trouble yourself,” he said at last. His voice shivered, eerie to even his own tired ears, with an instinctive musicality: the notes, threaded with rhythm but no power, hung in the air between them. He had spent so long singing to the wind that in the rare event that he spoke without singing, it took a great effort to rein his voice in. “I’ll be fine.”
The woman did not flinch. From this, he knew she must not know him; had she been at Doriath, or Sirion, or fought alongside him in the more noble battles of the First Age, she would have recognized the haunting tones of his voice. Unmistakable. Once a blessing, now a curse.
“Are you sure you wouldn’t like to come out of the rain?” she said.
“No.” The word came out too harsh, too fast; Maglor turned his head, lacing his fingers together tight enough to bruise. “Thank you.”
“Let me buy you a meal and a drink, at least,” the woman persisted, undeterred. “It’s cold out here; you should dry off by a fire.”
“No, thank you,” he repeated.
“I truly insist.”
“I cannot repay you.”
She laughed, an almost-familiar sound, low-pitched and gentle-edged. “Why should you repay me?” she said, raising her brows. “I’m not offering as some kind of bargain. Think of it as a favor to me; you can’t let me leave you out in the cold.”
Maglor drew his cloak tighter around his arms. “I’ve been colder,” he said, softly.
And others had been colder than him—his cousins’ people, straggling across the ice; Maedhros, shivering the cruel winds that bellowed their rage against the peaks of Thangorodrim. This was nothing. He was nothing. His suffering was nothing, and never enough.
“So?”
“I don’t need to be in your debt,” Maglor said.
The woman said, “You could repay me with a song.”
Maglor stilled.
He turned, and realized her eyes had fallen upon his harp-case: the only item he owned, aside from the instrument within and the sword hidden across his back, that he cared for with any proper regularity. It had peeked out from beneath his cloak when he shifted, the shine of its oiled leather in the night nothing less than an accusation.
“You do not know what you ask of me,” said Maglor coldly, drawing his cloak over the harp again.
But the woman’s face was bright, and her eyes were agleam with a familiar silvery steel: “I think I do,” she said, quite steadily, and met his eyes—“Uncle Maglor.”
Terror bolted down his gut. Maglor’s eyes flickered over her, wild, taking in every feature anew: Sindarin hairstyle, Sindarin nose, but—
The shimmer of her hair, like silver touched with a faint golden light. The fine, proud lines of her freckled face. The stubborn set to her jaw, the glittering determination in her jade-greenish eyes—
“Artanis’s daughter,” he rasped, exhaling in dread. “You’re—Artanis’s daughter.”
“Guilty as charged, I’m afraid,” said the woman, smiling in a most un-Galadriel-ish way—or perhaps not, for though it was softer, kinder, lacking the edge of mockery he remembered, it held that same intense and brilliant edge. “Celebrían, daughter of Galadriel and Celeborn, at your service. And you’re Elrond’s father.”
This time, Maglor did laugh: a slight, broken wisp of a sound. He—Elrond’s father! When Eärendil shone above them for all to see, and Maglor had chosen the Silmarils, and he had only ever been Atya because Elrond and Elros had been too young to go without some sort of guiding figure to love, because they had nobody else, because of Maglor, because—
“I’m not worthy of that name,” he whispered.
“That’s not what he has to say about it,” said Celebrían, raising her brows. “He’s been looking for you, you know. Were you going to stop by and say hello?”
Maglor’s heart twisted sharply: “Elrond is here?”
“He’s visiting his cousin Celebrimbor,” Celebrían said, and his heart jolted anew at the ring of his nephew’s name. “Who I assume you also haven’t said hello to, because I can’t imagine he’d throw you out into the cold.”
“You’d be surprised,” said Maglor, darkly.
Celebrían only raised her brows again—evidently, she had gotten that gesture from her mother. “Yes, I would, actually,” she said briskly, and Maglor blinked. “Come on. I’m taking you to where we’re staying.”
She reached out a hand, and Maglor jerked away, eyes wide. “No.”
“Yes,” she snapped, crossing her arms and fixing him with a startling glare. “Do you have any idea how hard it is to come up with a proper courting gift for Elrond? I can’t think of any good ideas! If his long-lost foster-father isn’t good enough, then I don’t know what is.”
Maglor stared at her. Several things about those sentences made no sense to him, and he spent a valient, fruitless moment attempting to unravel them, before settling on the least confusing one:
“You and Elrond are courting?” he said.
“. . . Well,” said Celebrían, with a faint hint of blush. “Not yet.”
“But you’d like to be.”
“Absolutely,” said Celebrían, and her face lit up like the moon, with a smile so wide it made Maglor’s old, weary heart twinge softly. “He’s wonderful, isn’t he?” She clapped her hands: “Oh, this is perfect! It’ll be much easier to ask for your permission then to ask Eärendil’s. I’d been planning to make a really big banner and hope he’s got a telescope. But I’m getting ahead of myself. I haven’t asked Elrond yet. Do you think he’ll say yes?”
“. . . I wouldn’t know,” Maglor ventured to say. “But you seem like a delightful young lady. I’m sure he likes you well enough.”
Celebrían beamed at him: “Thank you,” she said. “I suppose if he wants to court me, he’ll have to ask my parents. Oh, dear. That’s going to be interesting.”
Despite himself, Maglor winced. “I don’t envy him.”
“Poor Elrond!” said Celebrían, laughing in agreement. “He’s a bit frightened of them, you see. Every time he speaks in Quenya with that cute little accent of his, my mother looks about ready to burst into flames.”
Maglor winced again—both at the image of how his father had died, and Maedhros too, in flames; and at the reminder of how he had seeped, like a poison, into every facet of the twins’ lives. When he and Maedhros taught them Quenya, they had, of course, taught them to speak properly, with the th sound firmly in place. He could imagine how people would have glared at them, for that: the twins, not Teleri of Aman, not Vanyar, and therefore evidently speaking like that because of the Fëanorians.
He had imagined, painful though the thought was, that Elrond and Elros might have brushed off the accent as soon as they could, rather than cling to what would make them look like enemies.
Evidently not.
Maglor shivered with a quiet, guilty sort of ecstasy, and a matching guilty hope. If Elrond still spoke as Maglor had taught him, if that reminder was not too painful on his lips—perhaps he would be amenable to seeing him again. Even if he should not have to be burdened with the memory Maglor’s face, even if any affection he bore him was not deserved—
“I’m sure your mother would appreciate the allusion to my father,” said Maglor instead, softly.
“I’m sure she really wouldn’t,” said Celebrían. Then, her eyes went keen: “Speaking of my mother—”
“Oh, no,” Maglor whispered.
“I’ll make a deal with you, Maglor Fëanorion,” said Celebrían, with cheerful, steely determination. It reminded Maglor of an avalanche: he couldn’t run from it, couldn’t dodge it, couldn’t stop it; it only kept coming. “Come with me—no one else has to see you; we can sneak in through the window—and I won’t tell my mother that you’re here.” With a dangerous quirk to her lips: “But if you leave this city without saying hello to your son who has missed you desperately for centuries, I will tell both my parents exactly where I saw you. And I daresay they’ll be less happy to see you then Elrond.”
Maglor gaped.
“. . . You,” he said at last, somewhat faintly, “are as bad as your mother.”
“Thank you,” she said, looking pleased.
“That wasn’t a compliment.”
“I know,” she said, and reached out a hand. Hesitantly, Maglor took it, and she yanked him to his feet with surprising strength. “Come on, let’s go. This rain is only getting worse, and I wanted to ask you a few questions about linguistics along the way. So, when you first arrived in Beleriand, you would have learned a dialect of Northern Sindarin, right? Did you find it to be . . .”
She dragged him by the hand through the rain, chattering away about linguistics with a canny passion that would have impressed Fëanor himself, and Maglor stumbled after her with wide eyes, helpless in the face of her determined, merciless kindness. At the end of her road was Elrond, and Maglor did not deserve him; but Maglor was ancient and tired and cold, and Celebrían’s hand was warm in his.
And so he followed.