50 Prompts: AU Silmarillion by Urloth

---

Prompt: Loss

Warnings: Character death

Summary: She is dead. Three words. Nothing changes. Two words.

---

“She is dead.”

Three words and his world came apart at the seams, and remade itself into a garment both uncomfortable and ugly.

She is dead.

The very woods mourned for the spirit as wild and free as they.

She is dead.

Her smile, her laughter, even her voice raised in fine anger would no longer be heard.

“She is dead My Lord,” the healer murmured, the gold fibula of his rank shining. He wondered if he had asked; shelled out a fortune just to get a mithril badged Healer here, that she would still be alive. But there had been something about the way she had grown pale and tired in her last days.

No.

No amount of money, bribery, or even calling on old favours would have brought to him a healer of the skills required to save his wife.

“The child?” he asked hoarsely, staring blindly at the healer’s fibula. It was good work, for something mass produced in a mould and then personalised with the Healer’s name and number.

“He lives, we are just seeing to him now.”

In time the healer returned with a wrapped bundle. “We had to clear his airways My Lord. It was touch and go for a moment, but he shall live provided you find a wetnurse.”

“My seneschal is already looking for one,” he replied, lips feeling heavy and numb. He took the bundle and peered into his son’s face. It was already fine boned, showing stronger signs of her than of him.

“I am sorry,” said the healer, “for your loss.”

In the silence of the hallway, the child turned against his chest, seeking warmth, and he held him closer.

-

His child grew, because that was what children did, and they were close for he had to be both a father and a mother to him.

It was strange; he might not have paid quite so close attention to his son with a mother there to take care of the necessities. Oh he would have spent time with the lad, and taught him as he did now, but he would not have been quite so close, he imagined.

“Was she strong?” his child asked.

“Yes, strong enough to fire a bow and put her arrow straight through the skull of an orc,” he replied.

“Was she smart?” his child asked.

“Most definitely. I have never met someone able to debate the way she did, or as quick to learn a language as she did,” he replied.

“Was she beautiful?” his child asked.

“Yes,” he closed his eyes and saw her in the darkness behind them, glowing like a candle flame, “oh yes.”

-

“I found a cloak the other day,” his child came to him with the material draped around that small body as it had once around her, and his heart caught in his throat to see the reinforced white silk. “There is a map on the side.”

And there was, drawn by fingers dipped in ink. He imagined she must have drawn it when the fevers and delusions had been bad; when she had gone stumbling through the fortress, crying out in a foreign language and not knowing any of the familiar faces who came to help her, even her own husbands.

She had been trying to remember her way home.

In a way, the lethargy and her silence had been a relief from that behaviour, but in the end, it had been so much worse.

-

He called his child ‘his little asp’ but in the ways of his people did not give his son a formal name until he was twelve years under the sun.

“Maeglin,” he decided, “you have a sharp glance and sharper eyes,” he grinned thinking of the old Dame of the Broadbeams, and how delighted she had been, when his son had pointed out to her that a group of diamonds she had not yet paid for were filled with tiny, hard to perceive flaws that had escaped her watchful eyes.

Eöl looked out into the darkness of Nan Elmoth around them.

“And Uialchen, I think,” he added, dragging his fingers gently through the silken mass of his son’s thick black hair as the newly named Maeglin smiled in happiness up at him, “for I think your mother would have named you something like that.”

-

And so lived Maeglin Uialchen of Nan Elmoth, for many long and happy years in the darkness of the trees. At times he would look at his mother’s cloak, and its finger painted map, and dream of a city of white stone where a king ruled, and knew his sister dead, but did not know why or how.

Sometimes he wondered if he should leave and find the city, bring them news of his mother but he never did. He did not wish to leave his father, who was all the family he had, and he knew nothing of the white city save what he dreamed, and he did not dream much.

Long the years were, and plentiful. But at last the doom of Noldor found even one who knew not their Noldor heritage, and Morgoth broke the protection of Nan Elmoth. Lord Maeglin Uialchen, three days a ruler of his father’s fiefdom, was taken.

To the rack he was put, and heinous torture was visited upon him until at last he was coerced the draw the map of his mother’s making upon hide taken from his father's back, fingers dipped in his own blood to complete the deed.

And there he died, Lord Maeglin Uialchen, having doomed the city of Gondolin whose walls he had never seen. For this he was sentenced to the void.

So it is written and so it must be.

---

Chapter End Notes

Uialchen - Sindarin: Uial (twilight) + hen (child) = Child of twilight Lit.Twilight Child.

Maeglin's canon mother's name is Lómion which signifies in Quenya "child of the twilight."

It's not a perfect match but I tried.