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Maglor can feel the terrible weight of the words leave his mouth. The rushed scratching of the scribes, racing to record his every word, might as well be carved beneath his skin for how it makes his body crawl.
Yet the eve is mercifully still. The Song in his voice carries easily to the thousands gathered before him. He tells of his father’s death, tastes history forming on the tip of his tongue.
And not a word of it is true.
“Think you, in death, his eyes cast to Aman? To comfort? Retreat? Nay. They cast North.”
Self-disgust settles as a low ache. Ever the performer, Macalaurë. Your first act as King is to deceive your people. Spectacular. It is all too easy to speak those well-worn phrases and arguments—glorifying the Oath, throwing doubt over whichever Valar happens to spring to mind, doubling down on the virtues of creativity, liberty, ingenuity—words he’s regurgitated in speeches unnumbered, written for his father, for Nelyo.
Is he wrong to do this? Do his brothers, solemn and silent beside him on the dais, detest his words as much as he?
“…Says he, ‘I honour not the one who perseveres with hope, but the one who walks beyond hope’s horizon, and stops not there.’”
His father’s eyes had not cast North in those delicate final moments.
They had filled with tears, the bloated, lash-clumping kind that spill over freely on the other side of shame, clear pathways over ash-smeared cheeks. Maglor cannot let himself recall—not yet, not with how his throat tightens and the weight of his father's cloak sits heavy on his shoulders—his own hysterical grip closing around Fëanor’s fingers, only to find them horrifically loosened and already cooling from blood loss. No, no. You have strong fingers. Close them over mine. Grip me. Hold me.
More time I would have— Fëanor had spoken softly, his head nursed gently upon Maglor’s lap, lips soft with nostalgia and death but he eyes still deceptively bright even in those brief last moments. —But if not that, let me see you, let me look upon you.
Not North. Not West.
Fëanor’s eyes had cast upon his sons, flittering between all seven of them from one to the next, to the next, to the next, lingering longingly, indulgently, upon on each of them as if loath to move on, yet loath to linger lest he rob himself of one more look at his other darlings, before their final close.
"…Think you, the sun may rise and moon may dance while his feet were swift upon Beleriand? Nay! Think you, the soft underbelly of Arda could support three such creatures of light? Nay! One had to leave for two others to be born—say I!…”
They had found him flung over the unidentifiable remains of a corpse, his fëa unspooling from his flesh with disturbing momentum.
When Maglor had reached in with Ósanwe, his father had sent him reeling straight back into his own body but he'd glimpsed enough: a laceration can be stitched, a bone mended, but bludgeoning force delivers injuries to organs like ripened fruit dropped one too many times from a height. Fëanor was bleeding into places unreachable, seeping from vein into cavity to pool around organs.
Curvo had begged otherwise, shaking horrifically, mouth behind his ear and chest plastered to Maglor’s back as if it might somehow lend Maglor the strength that he knew he didn’t have, please, please, Cano, Cano, please, help him, please.
His voice cuts through the valley, missing not a single ear. Set in a wide circle around them, some twenty feet high and thirty wide, eight pyres are waiting to be lit by flaming arrow.
“Think you that Morgoth has been able to release his held breath since Fëanor drew his first upon this new soil? Let the craven breathe easy now. Let him recline at ease. Let him think us broke..."
There is poetry in it, Maglor thinks. A man who leads a people across a continent for jewels, and spares neither parties a thought in his dying breath. The ballads I could have composed, those beautifully faceted dimensions of ironic tragedy that translates so well into song and play. The tightness that threatens to clamp his throat bids him to speak it, that harrowing, beautiful truth. But it will remain in seven minds alone. Or six.
History need to be written tonight: hero-vengeance, not familial love. Spite, not softness.
Fëanor had time left only for loving his children, gazing at each in turn, whispering to bequeath upon them their new names: Sindarin names that they had yet confirmed. Let these be my last gift to you. They had sounded shocking, choked out through a ruined throat. He had heard Maglor, and embraced it whole.
As if Fëanor would ever allow another to form the letters and sounds that will shape his children’s names.
Celegorm, impatient, dips his arrow in the fire. Nocks.
“Tell me how death closes its fist around flame without catching alight. Tell me that Mandos does not nurse blackened fingers this very moment.”
They had little warning for that final moment. Fëanor had gripped them all at once, gathered the fraying edges of their spirits and wound them so tightly together that Maglor had glimpsed, briefly, images and ideas beyond his ken; the frightening rip-tide of Fëanor’s intellect; an ocean, the Ilmen. He had welded them together one last time as eight points held into one searingly familiar core, and pulled—
(Maglor had hoped then, for fleeting moment, that Fëanor had found a way to survive—some miracle of using the power of their fëar, all eight of them—and each of them would unquestioningly have given it—to re-open the crushed arterioles and mend the pulverised flesh. It hadn’t even been that he let himself hope, either—he simply had no ability to resist this one final emotional reprieve, not strong enough to reign it in when the light presented itself.)
—and cut. And mended the shockingly distended space left behind, stitching the gaping wound his fëa. And released.
When Maglor opened his eyes there had been fire and a numb beat of incomprehension. Then Maedhros was falling forward into the flames, face twisted with naked agony and unraveling like lost child, taking the rest of them with him. It was the first time they had ever experienced it: a world without the horizon of Fëanor in very corner of their mind. The feeling of being loosened from a steady grip, as seven distinct gems might be knocked clean from their their golden setting, scattered each into their own dark and sticky crevices.
The arrows fly, flame-lit.
Maglor Sings them each to their individual destinations and watches the pyres roar to life, light blotting out the stars above as one by one the fuses catch, and Curufin’s fireworks are sent two hundred feet into the sky, exploding not with the usual visual splendor of celebration, but with a single deafening boom that Maglor feels vibrate from the base of his gut to his throat.
Eight of them, the points of a star.
He doesn’t block his ears as others do, simply embraces the high-pitched tinnitus that consumes his mind in the ensuing silence and ignores the itch on his tongue.
Pitiable, he thinks, watching the smoke curl around the stars. Father falls upon them with sword, Maedhros faces directly with his tongue, and I tap a fiery rhythm into the sky from a safe distance.
Distance enough that it will not near shake the battlements of Thangorodrim. Maedhros will certainly not hear it, if he lives still. But Maglor needs only the slightest tremor of eight rhythmic, evenly spaced vibrations, to carry through earth and stong to reach deep into a dark mountain and caress a dark throne. No orc will feel it, nay.
A fallen Valar just might.