Thank you! I still haven't got quite caught up with archiving my B2MeM stuff, partly because I chose to make things difficult for myself (no swamping the site all at once, no posting unrelated pieces as chapters of a single work, no back-dating).

Because I was considering writing a companion piece from Maglor's POV, I know more about what exactly is going on in his head than I did when I originally wrote this--more than you probably want to read in an Author's Response! But let's just say that some emotional states can produce zen-like effects without being at all zen in themselves. And, if asked, he would be hard put to say what he's got left to lose, although there is always something!