Work Text:
⸻ ✦ ⸻
The Shore That Remembers
Being an Account of Maglor Fëanorion's Coming to Aman, and What Passed There
⸻ ✦ ⸻
I. The Thing the Sea Gave Back
There are shores in the Undying Lands where the sea does not behave as other seas do. They are patient shores, deep in their listening, and they receive whatever the waters carry with a kind of solemn, unhurried attention — as one might expect from a coastline that has, over the long ages, grown accustomed to the extraordinary. Ships come in from the Grey Havens carrying the last of the Eldar from Middle-earth. Great swans pass. The tide deposits, now and then, things that have no name in any catalogue of the expected.
On one particular morning in what the Teleri reckoned a comfortable and unremarkable season of their comfortable and unremarkable age — a morning whose only distinction had thus far been a fine light on the water and the pleasant smell of salt and flowering sedge — a young elf of that people came down to the shore to tend his nets, and found one such nameless thing.
He was young, as has been said. Young enough that the War of the Ring was to him what the drowning of Númenor was to the elves of the Third Age: a tremendous story from a world he had never touched. He had been born after Sauron's last shadow passed out of history, and he knew Middle-earth only as one knows a country from very old maps: the distances all wrong, the names half-familiar, the people who lived there belonging to a time impossibly remote. He was a good-natured lad, attentive to his nets and respectful to his elders, and he had been told — as all Teleri children are told — to watch the tideline with care, for the sea is older than any name given to it and keeps its own counsels about what it will or will not return.
What he found, then, lying where the foam retreated and the dark sand was still wet, was an elf.
Or rather: a shape that had once been an elf and was still, technically, one, though the word seemed a poor fit for what lay before him. Tall, even crumpled as he was, with the long limbs and the high bone-structure of the Noldor — but the clothes! The clothes were almost entirely gone, dissolved by water and years and the careless indifference of many weathers into something closer to suggestion than fabric. The skin beneath was pale as birchwood in winter, and the face — the young elf looked at the face for some time before he could persuade himself he was not looking at a dead thing — the face was the face of someone who had been away a very great while indeed. Not dead. But not entirely present either. The grey eyes were open and staring at the sky with an expression that lay somewhere beyond exhaustion, past the far country of grief, in some unmapped territory for which no cheerful Teleri word existed.
The young elf crouched down and said, very gently: "Are you drowned?"
The grey eyes moved, very slowly, to look at him. They were the eyes of someone who had forgotten, for so long, that the world contained other people in it that the sight of a face required a moment's quiet adjustment.
No answer came. But the chest rose and fell.
The young Teleri, whose name was Círiel, was not a complicated thinker, but he was a kind one. He had a donkey-cart. He had three woollen blankets. He knew that the most celebrated healer in that part of Aman kept a house not four miles inland — a lord from the old world, they said, who had built his hall in the hills and whose door was always open to those who needed it. Everyone said so. Everyone had always said so.
He bundled the stranger into the cart with the efficient tenderness of someone who has, before, helped fishermen pulled from the sea. He tucked the blankets around the long cold limbs. He gave the donkey the instruction it had come to expect in such moments — a particular clicking sound and the words "gently, now" — and turned inland.
The stranger said nothing. He lay still and watched the sky pass overhead with that same vast, unfocussed gaze. Círiel talked, because silence made him nervous and because he believed, in the way that kind people often do, that sound was a form of company even when the recipient could not respond. He explained where they were going. He explained that the healer was very skilled. He explained that the storm earlier in the week had been a fierce one and that it was no dishonour to have been caught in it — he'd heard of ships far sturdier than any man could build being battered past recognition by that particular gale.
He did not know that there had been no ship. He did not know that no storm had driven this elf from his course; that the sea had not received him accidentally but had, in some sense difficult to articulate, been waited upon for a very long time, until at last something in a ruined mind had stopped resisting what the water had always been willing to offer. He could not know these things. He was young, and the world he had been born into was a gentler one than the world that had made the stranger, and for this particular morning at least, that was perhaps just as well.
✦ ✦ ✦
II. What Elrond Saw in the Doorway
Elrond Half-elven had, in the long span of his life, become very practiced at the quieting of his own heart. This was not coldness; anyone who mistook it for coldness had not looked carefully enough at his eyes. It was rather the discipline of a person who has outlived many certainties and learned that the heart, if permitted to race too freely at every astonishment, will eventually break under the weight of all the world's impermanence. He had held this discipline through the breaking of Beleriand, through the fall of kingdoms, through the departure of his wife and his twin sons' diverging fates and the long silver grief of watching Arwen choose a door he could not follow her through.
He was in his stillroom when Círiel came to the door with the cart. He came out at the sound of wheels, wiping his hands on a cloth, and looked.
He looked for a long time.
He was grateful, afterward, that Círiel was a tactful young person who had busied himself with the donkey's bridle and found it suddenly very interesting, because the expression that crossed Elrond's face in that doorway was not one he would have wished many people to witness. Something cracked open behind the composed grey eyes. Something that had been filed under lost, under do not revisit, under the long and patient grief of all the years of searching — shores walked and cried upon, rumours followed and found to be only rumours — came undone in a moment with the force of a dammed river finding at last a break in the stone.
He had searched. How he had searched. In the latter ages of Middle-earth, between the duties that claimed him, he had walked the coasts. He had asked anyone who might have seen. He had followed every echo of a song half-heard by a fisherman at dusk. He had, in his private heart, gradually and with great reluctance translated that searching into a grief he carried quietly, the way one carries a stone that has been in the pocket so long it no longer seems heavy until the day you set it down.
He crossed the yard in six strides and stood at the side of the cart and looked down at the face he had not seen in an age of the world.
"Oh," said Elrond. It was not, perhaps, the most eloquent thing he had ever said. He had spoken words of power at the ford of the Bruinen. He had counselled kings and comforted the dying. "Oh," he said again, very quietly, and then he took the long cold hand that lay atop the blanket and held it in both of his, and his discipline came back to him in the way that discipline does when there is work to be done, and he looked up at Círiel and said, very steadily: "Thank you. Will you help me get him inside?"
✦ ✦ ✦
III. The Breakfast Tray and the Weight of Kindness
Maglor did not know, precisely, when he had stopped dreaming and when the dreaming had been replaced by this.
This was: a bed with clean linen, in a room with a window through which morning light fell at a precise and gentle angle. The light was different from Middle-earth's light, though he could not have said how, except that it had a quality of permanence to it, as if it had decided to be morning and saw no particular reason to revise that decision. The walls were stone but hung with woven cloth. There was a hearth. On a low table beside the bed there sat a tray, and on the tray —
Maglor looked at the tray for some time.
He looked at it the way he had looked at the young Teleri's face in the cart: requiring the adjustment. Requiring a moment of very careful translation from the language of disbelief into the language of the present tense.
On the tray: spiced wine, warm, in a cup he recognized because he had drunk from a cup very like it when cups like it were made in a land that no longer existed. Honey-cake, the kind with dried berries folded into the dough, which was a Midwinter thing, a festival thing, not a thing for ordinary mornings — someone had made it for this morning specifically. Preserved figs, which he had loved since before the Sun was lit. A little dish of something fragrant and herbed that the Noldor used to eat at midsummer feasts.
Ordinary hospitality does not go to this trouble. Ordinary hospitality does not remember, across an age of the world, that dried berry cake is a comfort and not merely a food. Ordinary hospitality does not root through its stores for the preserved figs that someone brought specifically from the gardens below, though the season is all wrong for them.
Maglor sat with the tray on his lap and the morning light on the wall and felt something he did not yet have a word for — something in the register of shame, but deeper, and stranger, and tangled together with a gratitude so acute it was nearly indistinguishable from pain.
Elrond was speaking. He was sitting in the low chair beside the bed in the manner of someone who has claimed a chair beside a sickbed and means to stay in it, and he was speaking in the calm and slightly rapid way of a person who has had something large and important bubbling in him for several days and is now at last permitted to release it in organised sentences. Maglor had been listening, he thought. He had been listening in the way that one listens to music while also thinking of other things — present to the sound, not entirely to the meaning.
He caught the end of it. He dragged his attention back from the fig dish.
"— and I do not say it merely to console you, I say it because I believe it to be true as I believe anything: you will see them again. All of them. It is coming — I feel it in the slow turning of what remains. Morgoth spends the last of himself in his prison beyond the Door. The day approaches when the discord that unmade so much will be unmade in its turn, and those held in the Halls of Waiting will be released at last — your brothers, your father — even those we had believed gone beyond the reach of hope."
He paused. He looked at Maglor with an expression of such deliberate, practical warmth that Maglor felt the shame climb higher.
"A hundred years is nothing to us. A thousand years is a passing season. What is eternity's patience against eternity's promise? What you have lost, you have lost only for the meanwhile — and meanwhile, however long, has always an end to it. You have time. We both of us have nothing but time, and that," said Elrond, with the slight smile of someone making the best argument available to him, "turns out to be rather a great deal."
Maglor heard him. He heard all of it, this time. He understood that Elrond had mistaken the quality of his silence — had looked at his averted face and the untouched spiced wine and read there a grief for his brothers, a longing for his father, and was responding to that, precisely and generously, with everything a healer and a lord and a foster-son could offer by way of remedy.
He had not been thinking of his brothers. He had been thinking of the fig dish.
The shame of it — the specific, detailed shame of sitting here in clean linen eating festival cake while Elrond arranged, with great care and evident love, all the words that he imagined would be most needed — that shame was very nearly unbearable. Not because it was Elrond's mistake, but because it was his. Because a better elf — a less comprehensively broken one — would have been thinking of his brothers. Because a father, even a foster-father, a flawed one, an absent one, deserves better than to be the man from whom one receives comfort while distracted by preserved fruit.
He set down the fig dish. He looked at Elrond — at this patient, serious face that had once been a child's face in the ruin of Sirion, a child he had not deserved and had not adequately cherished and had left to the long mercy of a world that, as it turned out, had found him worth keeping after all — and he opened his mouth.
He had meant to say: I am sorry. I am sorry for every age I was absent. I am sorry for the oath and for what the oath made of me. I am sorry for the songs I sang on empty shores when I should have been here.
What came out instead, because grief does not always observe the path one lays for it, was:
"Elrond — your daughter — "
He saw the change move across Elrond's face. It was not a slow change. It was quick — the way a door closes is quick, though the room behind it may be vast and full of light. Not anger, precisely. Or not only anger. Something more complicated than anger, something that had been arrived at over a very long time and at very great cost, and which was therefore defended with the particular firmness of a conclusion hard-won.
"No," said Elrond.
The single word fell into the room with the weight of long consideration.
"No," he said again, more quietly, and pressed two fingers briefly to the bridge of his nose in a gesture so unguarded and so familiar — Maglor had seen that exact gesture from this exact person when he was eleven years old and working through a difficult problem — that it stopped his breath for a moment. "That is not — forgive me. What I mean to say — what I have been trying to understand how to say for longer than you have been in this house — is that I will not have them pitied. Not Elros, not Arwen. Not in my presence."
He stood. He moved to the window and looked out at the permanent morning for a moment before continuing, and when he continued his voice was steady, though it had the steadiness of something that has been made steady by deliberate effort rather than by nature.
"They chose. Both of them — they chose freely, with full knowledge and full hearts, and they chose well. Elros built something that lasted three thousand years. Arwen — " A pause that lasted three quiet seconds and contained, Maglor understood, a great deal more than three quiet seconds could comfortably hold. "Arwen lived every day of her mortal life as she had always lived: entirely herself. As if the gift of days mattered, each one, without condition. I did not always understand it. I am still, perhaps, learning to understand it. But I will not call it loss in her hearing, or in yours, or in anyone's — because she would not call it that. And I think she was wiser than I am."
He turned from the window. Some of the steadiness had shifted into something softer — not quite a smile, but adjacent to one, the way a distant lamp is adjacent to warmth.
"We made different choices — the three of us. Elros and Arwen chose the Gift, and I chose to remain, and none of those choices was wrong. Different is not lesser. I ask only that you believe me when I say so."
Maglor said nothing. He was looking at his foster-son — at this remarkable, unreasonable, grief-tempered, love-durable person — and thinking that he had managed, across the whole endless ruin of the years, to be not as entirely useless as he had believed, if something this unbroken could have been, in any small part, his.
He reached out and picked up the spiced wine. It was still warm. He drank.
"Sit down," he said, at last, because thank you and I am sorry and I do not deserve the figs were all true and none of them were what needed saying. "Sit down, and eat something. You have been talking for a very long time and I don't think you've had breakfast."
Elrond looked at him. Something crossed his face that was, against all probability, fond — the way the sea, having battered a shore for an age, will sometimes lay a smooth shell at its feet instead.
He sat.
✦ ✦ ✦
They sat together as the morning light moved slowly across the wall, saying little — which was, both of them knew, the oldest and most necessary kind of talking.
Here ends the first account of the Coming of the Last Son of Fëanor to the Undying Lands,
as it was remembered in the house of Elrond upon the hills of Aman,
in the time before the Remaking.