A Poet's Curse by Elisif

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A Poet's Curse

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He could not see gold.

Gold was dead, just like all the others.

Maglor ran, fled far into the shadowed depths of the forest, his voice inside screaming that it could not be so, for there had been golden leaves spinning in the autumn wind when the twins had departed, left the floor unswept and the beds unmade to bid him farewell with upturned palms, there had been gold still in his eyes when he had collapsed into grief. He ran, not daring to open his eyes, not to find this autumn forest that he knew should have glowed in that brazen hue of cloven sunlight for which he himself had been named turned to nightmarish black.

It was a poet’s blessing to yet be capable of melding rapturous descriptions of forest, meadow and sky while cursed to no longer see their hues.

A poet’s curse to remember life in the manner he did.

Life. Had it been only a dream, a song on a distant wind twisted to tormented thought in heavy-lidded sleep?

No; even he could not deny that he had lived, once, long ago. That he had rode and hunted in quiet meadows and thunderous gorges alike, felt the breathless rush of wind against his face and treasured the feeling of the years lifting from his shoulders ere he even knew they could be deemed precious. Had performed, played to the very stars in a hall of marble so bright it had all-but-blinded him and left him no choice but to play on the memory of his hands alone; had sung with no less pride in halls where newly hewn walls still dripped sap in the centuries after, every bit as proud though it was not marble but smoke of birch and charcoal that had blinded him then; had caressed and kissed the pearls that draped an Elleth’s neck and much that lay below in the hot-blooded passions and blissful, intoxicating summer of his far-distant youth, had lived, had loved, had been, in that world now wrought only of lingering memory where there had yet been blues and greens.

They had died first, in the dust-choked memories of an Anfauglith drowned in blood; others had followed in the century since. Silver, shine of cherished memory, light of Telperion’s all-sheltering boughs, had fought valiantly, lingered to battle’s end and at long last admitted defeat. With the departure from his eyes of that mellow, autumn-bright shade for which he had been named only grey and black remained. Grey and black... and white.

White.

How had he ever forgotten?

Star of light, the dark adorning,

All through the night...

Lead us onwards, towards the morning,

All through the night...

Eärendil’s star, paid for in his brothers’ blood, planted among stars yet valiant and unmarred in a mockery of all that never could be bought in blood nor to any other earthly price, a final radiance of the old world shining onwards among the black...

Dark the silence round us spreading,

All through the night....

Dark the path that we are treading...

All through the night....

 “No, please stop!”

The hollow scream was real, echoed as he fell to his knees and flung his hands over his eyes, bade welcome to dark where it belonged and as it should have been, screamed in vain to still the remorseless melody in his head. Stop.

Had he ever, in the bliss of Valinor, known what it was to fear the stars?

What did it matter? He had become one who did.

Though our hearts be wrapped in sorrow,

From the hope of dawn we borrow,

Promise of a glad tomorrow...

The song halted; the calm of the forest was sliced through by the silvered trills of a nightingale, melody lifted to the clear expanses of the darkening morning sky.

Come comfort of the night, sweet nightingale!

Let all you love to shadows pale, amid the echoes of your song...

“Stop, stop, for the love of Aman, stop!”

The nightingale sang onwards.

Your praise unto the heavens bring...

Maglor leapt to his feet, wrenched his bow from his back, raised an arrow, yanked back the drawstring and fires into the twisted knots of spindling, over-reaching boughs above.

The Nightingale sang onwards in mockery.

The nightingale sang onwards in the stillness of a night that was nothing but black and grey and Maglor wept, not because he had failed, not because he had not reaped so much as a single drop of blood from the nightingale’s tremulous, ever-pulsing breast, but because he had realised with the release of that single, impulsive arrow to the stars, that day would never again be otherwise.

Black. 

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Chapter End Notes

The first of the two songs repeated in this chapter is of one of the many variant English translations of the Welsh lullaby “Ar Hyd y Nos”. The song is commonly called “All Through the Night” in English. The second is my own loose translation of  the seventeenth century German poem "Komm Trost der Nacht, O Nachtigall" by Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen.