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Maeglin could laugh for how the impact of flesh on stone– once, twice, thrice– is such a dull, sleepy sound compared to the crash of rockfall or the crumple of crushed armor. From a distance, perhaps it sounds gentle. Even to his own ears, the crack of bone and the snap of flesh like the silken sound of biting into soft fruit is strangely hushed, as a cloudbank mutes moonlight.
Oh. It is the rush of air whipping past him that drowns out the cacophony of his breaking body. Funny, in its way. Such a mercy need not have bothered with him.
He does not scream. That would frighten Eärendil.
Maeglin looks down at his remains for what must be some time. The sheer walls of Caragdûr only part to reveal a jagged slash of sky above him, with the sun and moon nowhere to be seen.
He has the belated thought that blood must be seeping into his shoes and stumbles back from the pool of it around his body.
His form feels solid enough to his probing fingertips, but it is out of sync, somehow, with the world around him. He cannot feel the wind on his face, nor does it lift his hair. He can pick up a handful of stones, but the dust does not adhere to his skin or collect in the lines on his palm. If he concentrates hard, he can perceive the weight of them, but it is like recalling a dim memory.
The pain he anticipated does not come. He remembers the guilty swoop of elation that accompanied the sense of getting away with something (dribbling molten metal on a mold-pour without Eöl noticing) (the conclusion of Assembly without anyone raising a counterpoint he’d realized too late in his argument). It is not the same as feeling it.
It is deathly quiet around him and within him.
When he scours his heart for the aches he is well-accustomed to, he uncovers only an insensate, acute, tinnitus-tone that cuts through the silence and drowns out his thoughts, blooms black at the edges of his vision. Perhaps the silence was preferable.
He wrenches his focus away and counts the clasts in a broken boulder for what feels like a very long time. It does not diminish, but he draws further away from it.
Who knows how long it has been; the shadows behind the rocks have not changed. Arien and Tilion’s endless chase are as voices in another room; the illumination comes from elsewhere. Cast against the rocks and his blood and the shatter of his body, the light is as soft and misted as the aurora. It ribbons around his unwalled stone tomb and then off through the maze of rock in a shimmering path before it turns out of sight.
What is there to do but follow it?
The light-trail leads him far, through blurred landscape, across unknowable cycles of sky and season. It is at once an age and only a moment. He is less real out here, he thinks; his thoughts are slow and heavy as molten glass. The pull of time is like a phantom touch from a distant memory: too feeble to moor him.
But it is brighter where willows fringe two joined rivers. He should not be surprised to see Idril and Tuor by the water’s edge. Of course it could only have been their radiance he was compelled to follow. Hasn’t it always?
But they are alone. Where–
He remembers the caustic burn of animal panic (unwittingly catching them strolling in the gardens and meeting Tuor’s eye) (jolting from uneasy sleep in Angband's dungeons at the slightest sound) (news of his father at Gondolin’s Gates). It is not the same as feeling it, but with the glare of their light in his eyes, it is a near thing.
Where is the boy?
His frantic gaze lands on the lantern at Tuor’s side and all in a rush he remembers relief (Turgon’s eyes wet and his arms open in welcome) (the numb embrace of unconsciousness come to steal him from torment for a time, as no rescuer would). It must be nighttime, Eärendil must be asleep. Safe, surely.
Surely.
Maeglin moves closer, ever drawn by their terrible gravity, though he should know better by now. Tuor is turning to Idril, encircling her in his arms, and she presses her face to his neck. Maeglin cannot quite hear what they have been saying, but they have quieted now.
Idril’s shoulders tremble almost imperceptibly.
This is wrong, Maeglin should not be here. This is not for him to see. He remembers, acutely, the gnaw of longing, the sick anger, the bitter, profane, giddy secret of his desire– and this close, he can feel the ghost of it, too.
Yes, of course. He haunts them vividly, no doubt; they contain a piece of him, perhaps more so than anyone left alive.
Maeglin sees Idril still suddenly like a startled doe, but does not anticipate that she will whip around and pin him with her eyes. They are unbearably bright, molten silver and gold.
“You,” she says.
He is made so utterly real in her gaze. Warmth bleeds along the length of his veins and a reedy breath shudders through him for the first time since Caragdûr’s depths. Maeglin feels himself solidify, feels his body’s weight return abruptly. He is clumsy, slower than he would have been in life as he turns to run, but–
“Stop!” Tuor shouts, already on his feet.
Maeglin does, and does not know why.
Idril advances on him slowly, like a stalking cat, but he is utterly frozen.
“I saw you fall,” she says, low and dangerous. “I saw Maeglin Lómion dashed upon the rocks like his father before him. What is it that stands before me now?”
What, indeed. He opens his mouth to speak, but finds he cannot sustain his breath, can’t seem to find any traction in his throat. He isn’t sure what he would have said if he could.
Tuor’s hand closes around Maeglin’s arm and Maeglin does not need to concentrate to feel the warmth of his broad palm. His form has not been more sublunary than where Tuor touches him since before he fell, he is certain.
Tuor pulls him with inexorable, but oddly gentle strength toward the river.
“I should hope they never told you such frightening stories in fair Gondolin,” Tuor says, not to him.
Idril’s face is smooth as glass. “Specters followed us from their graves on the Ice,” she replies. “Sometimes for great distances before they faded. But they were not so solid.”
“Only those who die in hate are bound like this,” Tuor murmurs.
The dark river stirs a deep, nameless dread in Maeglin as Tuor steers him back, walks him down the shallow bank and–
“No, please!” Maeglin cries at last, when one foot sinks into the water, stirring up the fine, silken river silt like smoke. The current tugs at him like a thousand hands– not to drag him to oblivion, he is certain, but to unhouse whatever is left of him from this haphazard form. Whatever fate awaits him, that is worse. If the deft fingers of Ulmo will pluck away this husk, then he will never…
Never what?
Tuor does not push him out further, but he does not relent either, and holds him fast. Unbidden, Maeglin’s hands rise to claw at Tuor’s grip on him, but he is shaky and weak, as though beset by fever. He cannot make his bitten-down nails scratch Tuor’s skin.
“Please,” he says again, voice raspy as a struck match. He hardly recognizes it.
“Speak true,” Tuor says gravely, heedless of Maeglin’s struggling. “Or I’ll let go.”
The dark water snaps at his heels as it whips past and Maeglin stills. His hands shift abruptly from clawing to clutching, but the desperation is the same.
Tuor barely has to voice the question before Maeglin gasps out his answer:
“I am– as you say, I– I was called Lómion first. My mother named me in secret–”
What?
He has never in all his life uttered this wretched truth to another soul, but it writhes in his throat like a living thing when he tries to stem the flow of words. The air drags at his breath and his stomach heaves like he might vomit the words, bile-bitter, into the river.
Maeglin shudders hard, but it bursts past his clenched teeth in a hiss. Yes, he had been nameless, except in secret, until Eöl found him competent enough to be worth claiming. He thought he'd locked that humiliation away long ago.
“Enough, wretch,” Idril says coldly, her ashen countenance unblemished as marble, but for the twin fractures of tear tracks on her face. “This is no shade sent by the Enemy. You would evoke our pity after what you have done? Who else could you be but my conniving cousin, despicable in death as you were in life.”
Speak true, Tuor had said, and Maeglin could do nothing but. If only the truth of him was better than this. He sags in Tuor’s hold, listless; wants to fall to his knees in the water at her feet, though it would make no difference.
“Why have you come here?” Tuor asks him, low and dark as the roiling river.
“I don’t know,” Maeglin says dully, though promptly. Then: “I had to find you.”
This is news to him, but it feels true– truer than any of it, perhaps.
“To finish what you began on Caragdûr?” Idril suggests, vicious for all her composure.
“No!” Maeglin says, breaking from his reverie. He’s hardly aware of pushing against Tuor’s hold again, but Tuor squeezes his arms like iron manacles and holds him in place.
“Haven’t you had your fill yet?”
What is there to say? That there had been little point in resisting? That if Morgoth's monstrosities had come far enough to find his delving spot, all of Gondolin would follow soon enough?
That Morgoth offered Maeglin’s contemptible reward only after he'd broken? That Maeglin had dared, in his despair, believe that there was one life he could save?
(That a swift death had been the best he thought he could do for Eärendil?)
“I never wanted any of this,” Maeglin cries.
“Bite your tongue,” Idril snaps, alight with a lurid, shining rage. “I know well what you wanted! And when I refused you, you pleaded with Morgoth to wrest it from me! Were you shocked, cousin, when the Enemy broke Gondolin to rubble rather than deliver it to your waiting arms?”
Pleaded?
She takes a shuddering breath, beautiful and terrible, and her words take on an awful precision: “You know, I have lain awake wondering what happened to your reason. To believe that colluding with Angband would bring anything but your certain demise– you are many things, but you were never stupid. What hate, I thought, or madness, or even sheer evil held deep in your heart could compel you thus? I’m sure it was no easy task. I could never imagine any explanation that made sense, and not for lack of trying; it has troubled me, cousin! If only I could ask you, I thought.”
Oh, Maeglin thinks, realization dawning slow as syrup through the rising plume of pain. Of course. They never even knew he was taken. Yes, they must be perplexed if they think he went willingly.
Little point in telling them now.
“Now that I am presented with the chance,” Idril says. “I find that I no longer care to know.”
Maeglin says nothing. Blood wells on his lip and trickles down his chin.
“Idril,” Tuor says softly, when it begins to drip steadily onto Maeglin’s shirt, darker than the river.
Bite your tongue, Idril had said, and Maeglin could do nothing but.
They need not bind him or threaten him with the water to keep him subdued, they find. In whatever twilight form he inhabits now, Maeglin is compelled to obey their every command.
“Sit down,” Tuor says cautiously. “In the river.”
Maeglin does, though Tuor pulls him up a moment later, drenched and shivering bodily from cold he didn’t know he could still feel.
“Sing Felaiheg and the Jellyfish Queen,” Idril says, ruthless.
Maeglin does, his face burning. He’d resisted only a moment before a needle of sudden pain startled him out of concentrating. The lilting children's tune is eerie, sung in Maeglin’s halting, wrecked voice into the solemn night, and Idril stops him after half a verse.
It might have been funny, in another life, working out the limits of Maeglin’s condition and jerking him about like a puppet, but it feels like walking on a knife’s edge. He does not have to wait long for the commands to grow dark.
“Apologize to my husband,” Idril says, voice gone chillingly soft.
“Idril,” Tuor interjects, looking alarmed. “Wait, Maeglin, don’t–”
Maeglin’s stomach rolls, caught between them.
“Speak, and you must mean it,” Idril persists, her voice steady, her eyes locked on Maeglin’s, though dark sparks begin to drift across his vision.
“No, Maeglin, do not,” Tuor says again, and reaches to Idril beseechingly. “My lady, please, to tell him what to feel is too far–”
His head pounds as though being squeezed, the nausea bobs heavy and slick in the back of his throat. For a moment, he imagines absurdly, vividly, that he is a doll tearing at the seams between the pull of two squabbling playmates. Maeglin could laugh, but for the unbearable, diametric pull, his entire body a straining side-stitch.
“I don’t care,” he gasps, reeling. “I don’t, I don’t mind. Just– please.”
He hardly knows what he is asking for. It’s not an unfamiliar feeling for any thrall out of Angband.
Idril has never been cruel, only ever infuriatingly uncompromising, but Gondolin's fall has whetted that tenacity to a bleeding edge. Her gaze brims silver with tears, but does not waver.
“Stars!” Tuor cries. “Maeglin, do as she says!”
The tension coiled painfully tight in Maeglin’s chest snaps soundlessly, unfurls like a spool of ribbon.
He drops to his knees.
Hard to know if it is a mercy or a humiliation that they leave him like that for a time, with his forehead resting against the cool dirt. His tears have flowed up toward his brow, making mud, doubtless. Impressively lifelike, how it leaves stinging tracks of salt when they dry. Maeglin hadn’t known he could still weep.
He hadn’t taken Tuor for such a soft-touch. Do all Men have such weak stomachs? Tuor endured only a few words before he turned and walked off into the night. Idril, at least, had lasted a while longer.
“I would make you sorry for everything,” she'd said. “But you will say only what is true.”
So Maeglin had.
He did not apologize for treating Tuor as poorly as he dared. He did not apologize for pettily opposing Tuor politically at every turn. He is not sorry for having spread malicious gossip, or for his attempts to sabotage their wedding, though he is more than a little embarrassed in hindsight.
He had not apologized for hating Tuor on sight, and never would.
He had not apologized for hypocritically, desperately, pathetically desiring Tuor, though… now he is not sure. It has always been difficult to separate wanting Idril and wanting what she has; wanting to be her, even now.
All the rest, he had spilled onto the riverbank. With his face in the dirt he could not see Idril's disgust or cold dispassion, but he could feel her looming until–
“Don't you dare,” she had breathed. “Keep my son's name out of your mouth. Don't you dare even think it.”
And Maeglin obeyed. She’d gone soon after, unwilling or unable to abide his choking and crying as he stumbled around the boy’s name, battered in the jagged waves of sorrow’s tide. He went on for some time without her.
It is agony to navigate the thorny bracken of his thoughts without evoking the child's face in his memory. He wonders if they could make him forget.
Maeglin lets himself imagine it for only a moment. They've shown they are far too principled to manipulate his mind like that, and he does not deserve the solace of oblivion, besides.
But, he thinks wretchedly, no chance at redemption has ever felt so close or so real.
They might order him to forget every evil thought in his head– or, indeed, forget all his past, good and bad– and he would obey, and would be new again. They might order him to be docile and humble and good and content, and he would have no choice. No hesitation, no weakness.
He could never hurt anyone again.
More probably, they will scatter him in the river. But perhaps he could persuade them to keep him, undeserving as he is. Put him to whatever use they see fit. Hasn’t he been revived and compelled to do just that; obey their every command unequivocally? He certainly can’t imagine any other reason why he might deserve a second chance.
Maeglin does not know what power he has to protect them or divert their enemies. Perhaps he could be used to a tactical advantage as a spy or envoy? Surely, surely they could find some purpose for a despicable but devoted, obedient ghost? They must know he is harmless, or they would not leave him alone. Surely he need only convince them of his usefulness.
To his profound shame, a pallid shade of an all-too familiar desire colors his imagining: kneeling at their feet, swearing himself to their service in all things, offering his body to their direction. Worthless, wretched, dead, he still burns for them.
Whatever he has become does not remember hope, but even now he has not forgotten how to ache.
It's hard to know what time passes without them. Perhaps it is dawn, or even the next night. He feels their light before he sees them, lets it warm his back a moment before he turns. Idril carries a basket; Tuor, a jug and a rag knotted around a knob of soap.
Heat creeps up the back of Maeglin’s neck, but he has little time to dwell on it. Idril gestures in his direction without looking at him: follow. He scrambles to his feet.
They traverse the shore upstream a little ways, where the river is wide and calm and the willows are enormous, twisting, ancient. A dense throng of them lean over over the water’s edge, trailing heavy fronds in the gentle current. Their curtained bath, Maeglin supposes, as Tuor pulls aside the branches and they duck under the leafy bower. A far cry from the luxurious royal thermae of Gondolin, set deep into sunlit caverns where steam billowed golden in the towering limestone vaults. There, Idril would have had a dozen attendants or more, but here under the willows, there is only Tuor to wind her hair into a knot on top of her head.
Had Maeglin a heartbeat, he thinks it would be thundering.
“Close your eyes,” Idril says, voice unreadable, and Maeglin is nearly grateful to sever the sight of her shapely neck from his vision. He sinks slowly to the ground and burns there, listening to the swish of clothing, the soft plash and silken purl of their wading in the river, the rasp of the soap-cloth against skin. It drowns out their low murmuring to each other, in spite of how Maeglin strains his ears. He thinks he might hear the word why escape the soft susurrus of their conversation like an errant drop of water.
He bows his head and tries to blank his mind. He cannot let himself imagine a world where he is permitted to hear their quiet, incidental conversations. Of course, he could not have previously imagined that they would let him trail after them to the bath either, but that does not bear thinking about. He especially cannot think about them both in their smallclothes.
“Then I will retire the issue for today,” Tuor says abruptly, not to him, resuming his usual volume. He never could keep quiet for long.
“But knowing might make all the difference.”
Maeglin has little time to parse this before he realizes with a start that the encroaching splosh is Tuor emerging from the water. It patters like rain onto the bank with each stride. The creak of the basket, the rustle of cloth, and Tuor is made decent again with a clean shirt, Maeglin surmises. He tries hard not to imagine any more.
When Tuor sits, the crunch of the pebbled shore beneath him is far closer than Maeglin anticipates. He smells soap and wet hair, and wonders if his face can still color.
“Eärendil has been dreaming about you,” Tuor says after a while, and Maeglin’s heart sinks into his stomach. If he notices Maeglin wince at the name, Tuor does not mention it. His voice is terribly soft as he adds: “I wonder what I should tell my son of your fate.”
Maeglin hangs his head, but cannot stop from asking, treacherously: “What does he dream?”
“What do you think?” Idril says, the tremor in her voice very nearly concealed by the rippling current. “He dreams of your knife, Maeglin. Of your fall. Over and over.”
(Over and over: the jangle of Eärendil’s little mail shirt against his blade, the boy’s cry of no no no– not defiance, but denial; entreating not Maeglin, but Fate. It feels for all the world like he is falling, still.)
“He will not sleep alone,” Tuor says. “This morning, he woke just enough between nightmares to ask me if you would be waiting at the Havens.”
A shard of memory tears at Maeglin’s brain like a carrion bird. Before Angband, before everything–
“When I see the ocean someday,” Eärendil told him gravely. “I want to see it together with you.”
This had been a tactic, of course, to evade his naptime by delaying Maeglin in the garden.
“I get seasick,” Maeglin had replied, lifting the latch on the gate with a definitive clack.
“Me too,” Eärendil declared absurdly, having only heard of the ocean in his father's stories. “But let’s be brave, okay? Promise you'll go with me?”
You will never see the outside of these walls, Maeglin had thought, but he’d said “Of course I would never let you go to sea alone, my dear.”
It is a monumental effort to raise himself to his knees with the leaden weight dragging in his chest. He bows low.
“Please,” Maeglin implores in a cracked whisper. “You know I must obey you. Tell me what I should do.”
Much as he feared, only the sound of the water laps against his ears for a long moment.
Finally, Idril’s voice: “Bathe here in the river after we have gone.”
“There are clothes for you in the basket,” Tuor adds.
“What?” Maeglin says, raising his head from its deferential place on the ground in his confusion. “Why?”
Another silence, nearly as long as the last.
“Maeglin,” Tuor says, voice thick. “You are covered in blood.”
He waits in darkness a while longer after the sound of their footsteps dies away. Time passes as uncountably as water in the stream before he opens his eyes again.
Maeglin looks down at himself, and yes: his mail glistens red, his clothes are soaked with it. It is ground into the lines on his hands and beneath his nails. A crimson bead drips from his hair.
Shouldn't it be long dry by now? Shouldn't Tuor’s order to sit in the river have at least rinsed his mail clean?
(Shouldn't he be lying dead in the shadow of Caragdûr?)
He leaves what remains of his armor in a heavy pile on the bank, but keeps all his bloody clothes on, wading into the water. The current is not strong enough here to unseat him from his form. It is warmer than before, too. Perhaps it is daytime, late in the afternoon.
Maeglin lathers the soap-cloth and scrubs until the water runs clear. The clothes they have left for him are grey and blue and smell like sunlight when he buries his face in his arms.
He waits there on the pebbled shore until they come for him again, but it is a far more dreaded voice that floats through the willow fronds.
Small, piping, wren-sweet.
“Onóryo?”
No no no!
Eärendil endures all of Maeglin’s terrified protestations– you shouldn't be here, what are you doing, leave me, go back at once – with a quiet stillness that Maeglin does not recognize. The boy has never been one to suffer in silence, wailing for his scraped knees and bruised feelings with the thoughtless self-assurance of one whose cries are always answered. He did not throw tantrums, he was just noisy, boisterous– like every child should be, Turgon had effused– not to mention exuberant like his father and opinionated like his mother.
(Maeglin said nothing of his own quiet and anxious childhood, but, to his genuine surprise, had never managed to resent Eärendil for being so cherished. Without even trying, he'd loved him too dearly.)
But the boy's crying is muted; refined, Maeglin supposes, by loss.
Or perhaps his tears have weathered away a facade and something uncanny, something uncharted peeks through now.
(Peredhel.)
“No one will tell me why,” Eärendil says at last, as though he hasn't heard Maeglin's increasingly feeble rebukes. He fixes Maeglin with his mismatched eyes, at once wary, alien, and utterly lost.
One for sea and one for sky, Tuor had declared to anyone who would listen. They are a torrid storm and fathomless midnight, now.
Before Angband, Maeglin had never flinched at the brush of Eärendil’s mind. Like many elf children, ever-eager to chatter, but lacking in vocabulary, the boy stretched out often to impart impression, emotion, memory, as though dropping a pebble in Maeglin’s pocket, or hooking one finger onto his.
Flung like midden from Morgoth's cruel and careless hand on Gondolin once more, Maeglin had lived in terror of the child reaching to him and catching even a flicker of Angband’s dungeons like a snake bite, like a lash. He’d avoided Eärendil as best he could, enduring Tuor’s quiet dismay and Idril’s less-quiet confusion. He dodged the both of them, too, taking meals in the workshop, skipping Assembly as much as he could get away with– better to stoke resentment and sow malcontent among his allies in private, anyway.
“You do not simply disappear to those who love you,” Turgon had reproached him. “You leave behind a hole in their hearts.”
His uncle had been so difficult to shake, but Maeglin managed it eventually, sick and sweating and faint with fear, screaming so loud it made his own ears ring:
“You love a shadow, and I will not pretend that shape any longer! You are neither of my parents, and I am not your sister!”
Maeglin had decided that night that he could take no chances with Eärendil’s life. He would rather see him dead than haunted with a Gondolin-sized chasm in his little heart.
But here he stands, open like a wound.
“I want to know,” Eärendil says, quavering.
“There is no reason,” Maeglin says dully. He squeezes his eyes shut, all but curls into a ball to escape the child’s gaze.
(Cinereal. Ultramarine.)
“Yes there is!” the boy cries. “Yes there is– you were gone and then everything changed, you were angry with everyone when you came back–”
Surely, Maeglin thinks, leaden, they have told him what he needs to know. That Maeglin was weak, that he was a coward and a curse and a stain. What is there to understand? His greed dragged them all into ruin. He could not have Gondolin, so he smashed it to pieces and threw it to the Enemy. Surely even a child– especially a child!-- could recognize puerile, selfish, senseless evil.
“You were so angry that you tried to kill us,” Eãrendil is saying. “And Morgoth’s army came and– everyone– Grandfather– my friends and– Níte, and Ecthelion, and Gellindo, and–”
A sob jags through his already-asperous voice, and Maeglin would crush his hands to his ears to block out the sound, except that they are preoccupied clawing away his own tears.
“Everyone says it’s your fault, onóryo, and I don’t understand–”
Maeglin means to scream, but can scarcely make any sound through the painful clench of his throat: “They are right, child! It is my fault!”
“Why?” Eärendil demands, his small voice splintering into a shriek. “Why why why! Tell me the reason!”
It opens Maeglin’s mouth like a key in a lock and air rushes into his lungs. The ugly, awful, shameful story rolls inside him, twists a cramp in his stomach. He is not certain how long he has been kneeling, but his legs feel like dead weight beneath him, fused to the rocky bank.
A deathly quiet pools somewhere in the base of his skull, still as the shadow of Caragdûr, deep as the vaults of Angband.
He looks up at Eärendil through tears and dark strings of his hair and marvels, not for the first time, at what a beautiful child he is. The product of a pure and untroubled love, the union of two souls Maeglin has ached and ached for, with his mother’s chin, his grandfather’s long hands, his father’s laugh– and yet, so utterly new and utterly his own.
If Maeglin hears the encroaching chime of Idril’s prosthetics sprinting to the river’s edge, he does not register them. Through the roiling, painful haze rising in him, he says to Eärendil: “Please. I can’t.”
He does not feel the sting of Idril’s slap, only watches the world move as his head turns with the impact. He catches a dizzy glimpse of Tuor snatching Eärendil off his feet and holding him tight, of Eärendil squirming in his hold.
“How dare you,” Idril is saying. “How dare you!”
“No!” Eärendil cries. “No, wait! I want to know!”
Maeglin’s head pounds, his chest heaves. It burns like holding his breath for far too long, or like the occasions when Sauron pulled every muscle in his body taut and left him arched in agony for hours.
“I have lain awake wondering,” Idril had said. How like her to demand that it all make sense.
How unlike her to settle for ignorance…
Her gaze moves restlessly between him and her son, expression wavering like water. Rage and love. Fear and hope.
But what does it matter why, really? What good would it do to tell them now; isn’t it all finished?
(Isn’t he here before them all again, after a ten thousand-foot fall?)
“Onóryo, tell me!” Eärendil shouts, like the crack of bone.
“Knowing might make all the difference,” Tuor had said.
“Tell the truth!” Eärendil sobs, like a gull at the shore.
So Maeglin does.