But Maybe That Was The Light Of The Trees by Nekomitsu

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

It was the best of times.  Makalaurë woke up with a song thrumming all the way through his veins.  He hummed it in rhythm with the passing heartbeats of valinorean life. Sometimes, during the mingling of the lights, he sang it out loud, and if his brothers joined him for an impromptu concert and Nelyo took the harp and Curvo the wooden flute while Moryo watched silently, well, then, that was good, that was perfect.  Still, the thing about concepts such as 'the best' is that by their own definition what follows must necessarily be worse.  Makalaurë should have been wise enough to realize as much, but 'the best' tends to blind to any and all traces of darkness – or maybe that was the light of the Trees.

It was the best of times.  Makalaurë's parents stumbled together for breakfast, smiling and bright-eyed, and Ambarussa groaned a worn-out "Oh, for Eru's sake, not again – mother, you're old!" in embarrassed twin voices.  Come night best took a turn for worse, and Nerdanel retired with a frown while her husband hammered away in his forge.

Makalaurë's wife was the best, but the growing unrest amongst the Noldor had driven her back to her parents, and that was the worst, as was seeing his brothers in the same situation.  Nelyo smiled, and Findékano smiled back, and that was the best, but then Findékano's father plotted against Nelyo's, and that, Makalaurë reflected as the malicious rumour reached him, was the worst.  Cousin Irissë rarely visited anymore, and while it left Turko free to his best pursuits through wild forests, that, too, was the worst.

It was the best of times, and Makalaurë was happy.  It was the worst of times, and happiness was but a dimming illusion.

Or maybe it was simply the light of the Trees.

In Makalaurë's family, loyalty meant following Fëanáro's will from the smallest details to the last consequences.  Makalaurë accepted it as the natural order, and he saw very little to criticize in it.  After all, even the Noldóran bowed to Fëanáro's wishes before his own.

Makalaurë's wife thought very little of the fëanorians' concept of loyalty, and she said as much in her one and only visit to the exiles in northern Formenos.

"Blind obeisance isn't loyalty," she sighed wearily, "but the very thralldom Fëanáro seeks delivery from."

Makalaurë frowned.  "Deference towards one's own father can hardly be compared to slavery at Taniquetil's feet," he said, but he said it softly, slowly, because she had never truly been one of them and wouldn't understand.

"Oh, Lauron," she answered in a sad, sad voice, "you wouldn't understand," and he didn't.  There was no alternative choice to family loyalty.

Obeisance or thralldom, Makalaurë still jumped in Nelyo's footsteps the moment he stepped into the ring of burning torches and claimed Fëanáro's accursed Oath as his own.

Makalaurë's keen ears could hear a distant prayer to the Powers in the West beyond the frenzied beats of the drums and the cries of legion upon legion of orcspawn.  He detachedly hoped the High Kind led the prayer, as Findékano's pleas from the Ered Wethrin would surely earn the Union unexpected allies.  "The eagles," he fancied the elven host cried.  "The eagles have come!"

But the eagles never came, and neither did Doriath nor Nargothrond.  Halfway between battling and turning around in flight Makalaurë cried.  Unbeknownst to him, fat tears left grooves down the mix of grime and blood on his face.

It was fine, it was all right.  There was a reason they called it the Unnumbered Tears.

In the years that followed Nelyafinwë was accused of Findékano's death in a myriad of reproaches.  You lost him the Tears, they said, and he was killed.  Your battle orders weren't tactically sound, and they killed him.  You trusted wrong allies and wronged trustful allies, and it killed him.

Nelyafinwë's reply was an icy stare and a cold silence, and his captains and brothers rose in his defense.  Hasty Tyelkormo spoke of cowardly settlements hidden amongst rock and mountain while crafty Curufinwë expounded upon the treacherous nature of the Aftercomers.  Even silent Carnistir raised his voice in the heat of the debate, and restrained his brothers' attack on the young captain who had thought to mention that Findékano's bane had been Fëanáro's own.

"I killed him," was what Nelyafinwë didn't say out loud.  "I killed him when I passed the cursed crown of our doom unto his father."

"No," was what Makalaurë didn't answer.  "Yes," was what he didn't voice.

Makalaurë had somehow become Maglor over the long years since Valinor.

The change had been swift outside his circle, but it had taken three Kinslayings and a much diminished host to reach him.  Makalaurë had held with Noldor pride while his people became the last true bastion for their old mothertongue.  They were proud of their mastery of quenya in a land of sibilant consonants and wheezing sounds, and its banishment didn't affect their daily life but granted them a grim satisfaction at contradicting a long-death King's edict.  "Lord Makalaurë," called the captains during patrols, and "My Lord Makalaurë," called the remaining lords amongst the fëanorians, and "Brother," called Nelyafinwë and Nelyafinwë alone.

Somewhen along the way, as Makalaurë became Maglor, Nelyafinwë of the many names had turned into Maedhros of the one hand.

While their pride held Makalaurë had remained thus.  After Sirion, however, pride had all but forsaken the remainders of their folk; they only remembered when their dispossessed king walked by with his burning eyes and his changed name.  Poor and harried, they became a displaced community with more women than men, a handful of warriors, and two half-bred children to gloss over the lack of elflings.  Survival forced them to forget their once-beloved tongue, and sindarin words crept into their minds until their names turned irrevocably from their original forms into those used by outsiders for centuries.

"Maglor," Elros Half-bred said, grasping Makalaurë's hand in his smaller one and tugging at it.  "Maglor.  Maglor!"

"Father," Elrond Half-bred said as he took his other hand, and Makalaurë – no; Maglor, Maglor, Maglor, Father – sighed, and smiled sadly and slowly.

"Yes," he said.

Chapter End Notes

A/N: While I realise Maglor and Maedhros answered to those names for most part of the First Age, I get the feeling that inside their tight pro-fëanorian community everybody would have held to their noldorin roots no matter what.  Hence... this.

The burning pain in his right hand was Maglor's only companion as he wandered the seashore for long and lonely years.  His feet took him North until the sea blocked his path back into the lands he had once known, where he mourned his loss to the standing water, and then South until the stars above his head became new and outlandish.

For a while he carried his small harp in his left hand, even though he could hardly pluck its strings with his damaged fingers.  Its wood decayed.  One morning, Maglor stood from his grieving vigil for all that had been lost and left it behind.

He remembered standing at Maedhros' dreaded tower at Himring and asking for his brother's harp for one reason or another.  "Sorry, brother," Maedhros had said.  "You'll have to ask cousin Findékano.  I gave it to him."

Maglor had frowned.  "Why would you do that?  It was a good instrument."

Maedhros had laughed, and increasingly rare sign by that time.  He had tossed his head in mirth, and his coppery hair had caught the vivid light of the fëanorian lamps on the walls.  "I could hardly expect to be able to play it these days, could I?" he had said, raising the stump of his right hand with grim amusement.  "Besides, his fell from the blasted eagle as he broke me free from my chains.  It was the least I could do."

Maglor wondered what had become of the instrument, and mourned it, and his brother, and his brother's missing laughter.

He ate what little the trees and the ground afforded him along the winding way.  At times he starved, and that was fine too.

No other ever recognised him by who he was.  Elves he saw but a few, and less as time passed by.  Men he encountered no matter where he went, proud sailors with grey eyes and dark-skinned southrons with blinding white smiles.  Every now and then he crossed a party of orcs, and those he slaughtered without hesitation, even though his blade burned in his damaged right hand with every thrust and parry.  He met stranger creatures, short beings with hairy feet and majestic oliphaunts with enraged eyes.  He killed spiders.

Lost in mourning, he didn't care.  The world passed him by.

One afternoon an earthquake shook the lands.  Maglor thought little of it, but a short yen afterwards he found a group of wandering elves and observed them from afar, unseen and unnoticed.  They sat around a merry fire, and they sang about the Enemy's defeat, and about the last High King of the Noldor in Exile, and they toasted to Elrond Half-elven's marriage.  Maglor smiled.

Then one of the elves took to the opening thrills to the Noldolantë, and Maglor fled away in shame.

The steady increase of the number of orcs in his wandering path forced Maglor to starve more often than not.  Travellers became less common and showed unsavoury characters.  It heralded an Age reaching its climax, Maglor thought, before going back to procuring food for himself and singing his sorrow to the everchanging waves and silent trees.

One afternoon across the wilderness he trapped a wild hare, as pitiful and scrawny as most beings in the area had become.  Still, it was nourishement of a kind and Maglor was gratefully preparing it over a small campfire when a Man entered the circle of light, treading softly but announcing his arrival with a soft voice speaking greeting words in the mixed jumble elventongue had become through time.

The man was young in years and easily as skinny as the roasting hare, but there was strength in his arms and pride in his face.  His eyes were gray and shone with an inner light.  They reminded Maglor of Elros' eyes.

He invited the Man to share his food, meager as it was, and the Man accepted and passed his own wineskin.  Maglor drank.

"What is your name, stranger?" the Man asked.

Maglor smiled softly.  "Some called me Bard," he said, "back when there was reason to be known as such."

"Bard," the Man repeated, accepting the obvious concealment.  "I have known of a Bard up in the North, but he was a Man and not one of the fair folk."

Maglor shrugged.  He took another sip of wine and didn't ask for the stranger's name.

"They call me Strider," the stranger offered anyways.  The fire brought sparks of steel to his eyes and Maglor almost called him Elros nonetheless.

"The eagles!" cried the hosts of the martial tribe Maglor had taken residence with while war blocked his path down the winding coast of what had once been known as Middle Earth.  "The eagles have come!"

They had, Maglor, reflected wryly, even if several ages too late and on the wrong side of the fight as far as he was concerned.  The eagles of the IX Hispana and the XX Valeria Victrix gleamed dully as the enemy stepped into neat battle formations that would have made even the strictest Noldorin tactician proud.

There is a man at Maglor's right.  His face is painted and his hair is long and loose after the fashion of his people.  He shouts.  Maglor looks at him, and the man smiles, wide and bloodthirsty.

"For war!" the man screams.  "For war!  Those eagles have it coming!"

The men at Maglor's right echo his cry.  Maglor shrugs.  He raises his shield, and grips the sword tighter in his aching right heart.

'The eagles have it coming!' makes as much sense to his mind as any other battle cry in his life, and is easier to shout than his family's 'For a bunch of shining rocks!'