and one man, in his time, plays many parts by Duilwen

i.

"Hell is empty, and all the devils are here."

- The Tempest

Read i.

It was raining.

 It had been raining for ten days. 

The passage of time was announced by a bell in the townsquare, such as it was, which Maglor sent Celegorm to ring twice every day when the stars were in the same place.

The stars hadn’t been visible, because it was raining, and he’d sent Celegorm when he felt like it, when he woke and when he tired, and he was thinking that perhaps it would be good for morale to make the days a little longer, so the storm didn’t seem to drag on.

This was not an urgent question, and should not have occupied more than a second of thought. But the urgent questions were too urgent, screaming for his attention and clawing at his spine and hurting to think about, so he occupied himself with the trivial ones. If he just got it right, rang the bells at the right time and built something beautiful, the urgent questions might slink away defeated. Or someone else might deal with them. Maglor did not particularly care. 

He had a conference room. It had been his father’s, and Fëánaro had immediately unpacked his notes on Sindarin and his treasured books on metals and light and optics and shelved them in neat piles, fabric wrapped between them to protect the bindings. It wouldn’t have occurred to him to wonder whether he’d created a room suitable for a King of the Ñoldor in exile, a room aesthetically and symbolically appropriate to their mission here. But he had. Unthinkingly.

Fëánaro had once told Maglor that he thought they had this in common, an artistry as natural as breathing, and ever since then Maglor had been terrified that his father would realize one day that his son had to work for it. He’d lied and written songs that toyed with that image, the effortless artist. The songs had taken weeks of careful revision and he’d claimed that they’d come to him in a dream. The lying, at least really was as natural as breathing. 

A conference room fit for a King. The key was in the subtle touches, in the way the fabrics his father had chosen – bright, silvered, intricate - contrasted with the books they shielded – dense, solemn, illustrated and bound in muted earth colors during the brief period when that had been a fad in Tirion. It was careless and careful. With the tables folded into the floor – as they did, elegantly – it was a throne room suitable for receiving delegates. With the tables up it was a opulent meeting space that looked to have been carved out of a library. 

The ceiling was the first of its type they’d attempted with the suspect lumber from the stunted trees of this land. Arched, with an intense geometric precision that would compensate for any flaws in the material. “In Tirion we could afford to be careless,” his father had said, when the roof went up, positively gleeful, as if he’d felt alive for the first time in this world where one could not afford to be careless. 

He’d been dead two days later.

 Maitimo had not changed anything about the conference room. Maitimo was prepared to tell him not to – though he couldn’t have explained why, if you didn’t see it – but Maitimo had been constantly in motion, in those last days of his life, no time for projects, healing here, building there. He’d been in this room only when he’d called all of them here to tell them of Morgoth’s offer of parley.  “We have to be smarter than he is,” Maitimo had said.

It was raining. Maglor sat in the conference room and mused on the paradox by which a person’s last words became the ones that defined them, the ones exalted in song. The words that told you the most about a person were the ones spoken carelessly, in their last days, the ones that spoke to dreams that had died with them, the ones that spoke to dreams that were already dead – though little did we know it! – when they were first spoken aloud.

The bells rang.

“I didn’t tell you to ring them,” Maglor said a minute later, when he heard the energetic huff of a dog’s breath at the door.

“Figured you were moping,” Celegorm said, “or overslept, or dead –” that last phrase said casually, as he slammed the door with one hand and dragged back an overeager Huan with the other. So Maglor could pretend not to have heard it, or maybe so Turko could pretend not to have said it.

“Choked on supper?” Maglor asked flatly.

“Well,” Celegorm said, pulling out a chair, setting Huan’s front paws on his lap as he sat down – all these noises to cover the words, that was Celegorm – “we’re overdue, no?”

Finwë. Telvo. Father. Nelyo. Scarcely a few months between blows that, in Valinor, they would have taken fifty years to begin recovering from.

“I thought about it,” said Maglor, “but that’d leave you in charge.”

“I could handle it,” his brother answered. “All you do is wear that crown and mope around and ring the bells.”

Those, Maglor knew with a sudden surge of insight, would be Celegorm’s words, when the time came to sum him up, much later.

There was a malicious edge to the words but there was none in his eyes, or his hair, wet and muddy. For a second Maglor wanted to warn him about those words and whatever dream they spoke to, warn that the dream was already futile and the words, in the end, would be deeply amusing to some audience sufficiently removed. Then he violently shook his head clear of that thought – you couldn’t change songs by warning their subjects, Eru witness he’d tried with Father – and glared at Celegorm until calm enough to answer contemptuously.  “If I recall it’s you who rings the bells, brother. I’d ask someone else to do it - one of the suddenly-unnecessary court attendants I have camped miserably around would be deeply honored – but then you’d be entirely useless.” 

Turko flinched. Well, Maglor thought with annoyance, you started it. “I’d be happy to-”

“Curufin and Caranthir are working continuously to reforge all the swords built before we knew what we were doing, Pityo’s – handling logistics –” he wasn’t, not well, and Maglor was covering for him, but that was something else entirely – “I am developing a functional regional map and songs that transition between Sindarin and Quenya so as to make the former learnable. You’d be happy to help? With what? No, you wouldn’t.”

“I’m better at killing things than building them,” he said agreeably, twining his fingers in Huan’s long fur. “So I am entirely useless, I suppose, for as long as killing the Enemy isn’t an interest of yours. Your Grace.”

“It’s gone so well so far,” Maglor murmured.

“Actually, I think every mistake has been failing to kill the enemy, in one form or another. Solves the food situation too. Unless you object to eating orcs? Some folks have been doing that anyway – young kids, mouths to feed – and no one is dead yet, so their meat probably isn’t poison. It’s no worse a bet than anything else in this place.”

Maglor felt his throat closing with disgust. Orcs – they spoke, they had language. A few of them, captured, had begged to die quickly. Or so Curufin had interpreted their words, on one particularly memorable occasion when he’d looked terrifying enough that captives might quite reasonably hope for a swift death.

Orcs had been Elves once, as best as anyone understood it.

The rain drummed down on the carefully-arched roof and Huan whined piteously.

“Sure, all right, go out hunting,” Maglor said. “Blow your horn, see if you meet any new friends. Offer them shelter, protection –”

“I know how to meet people, I’ve fought alongside them, if anyone is out there I’ll represent us well. Meddling Manwë. I’m not stupid.” He rose even as he spoke, and left quickly. As if he’d feared being challenged on that last point.

Maglor watched him go. It was easy, he thought, to be continually surprised by how graceful Turko was. The room felt even more achingly empty in his absence. 

He went to the forge.

Being the King of the Ñoldor was really a matter of keeping them all at work. All of the work here was urgent and necessary, which was good for morale; most of it was needlessly difficult and frequently delayed and often needed redoing, which was terrible for morale. Corrosive, Maglor thought wearily as he pushed open the door, ugly and destructive everwhere but most damaging where he needed a sharp edge. 

Curufin was working. Curufin was always working, these days, he did not eat and he did not sleep and he burned himself nearly daily in the forge despite the fact that his work was otherwise not at all reckless. Almost unnaturally good, really, even by the high standards to which he’d always held himself. Fast and efficient and perfect work, done by hands caked with blisters.

“Last one for today,” Maglor said. “I’ll wait.”

If not prompted to stop Curufin would probably work himself to death. Celegorm, who was probably more perceptive than he even realized himself, had done the prompting for the first few cruel weeks after their father’s death. Maglor had taken over, eventually, because if there was a way to care for his brother and simultaneously exercise his authority in some sense that actually mattered –

- it helped, too, that he had a use for Curufin that was less physically demanding.  They were more than twice as productive when they worked together on the language.

Maglor let the door swing shut behind him. You could scarcely hear the rain, here. The air was hot and humid and had the dense, musty smell that screamed that they’d been burning wet wood. Maglor seated himself neatly and gracefully on a workbench – a King deigning to observe his subjects, not a mislaid minstrel with too much time on his hands, certainly not a brother pretending he could keep his family alive by keeping them all in his sights.

“Naïve” was not a role he could afford to play; Beleriand seemed to delight in setting out the ways that it could teach him better.

“Do you have nothing better to do?” Curufin said, turning at last to look at him, iron cooling on the table before him.

“If I did,” Maglor answered distantly, “I suppose I would be doing it.”

“If you thought of it,” his brother said, pulling off his gloves, running one hand through his sweaty, forge-frayed hair. In Valinor it had been a subconscious vanity; it made his resemblance to their father even more striking. Here, Maglor didn’t know. Habit, maybe.

“I take it you can’t think of anything yourself.”

“Clipping your toenails would be more productive,” Curufin said, “as just one example from the very large class of things ‘anything at all that doesn’t involve interrupting me’. Drawing pictures. Dancing in the rain.”

“I did that on the way here,” Maglor assured him, just for the split-seconds’ horror and anger that worked their way across Curufin’s face before he realized he was joking. Curufin did not process things in terms of aesthetically correct kingship, really, but he knew what would happen if the cracks began to show.

(Maglor was the only one with an instinct for aesthetically correct kingship and, as such, the best king. If Father and Nelyo were still alive this would be an irony he’d amuse himself with while patiently trying to nudge them into acting rightly, and spinning the songs as if they had. With them dead, it felt like a profoundly hollow qualification. He could rearrange the books in the conference room; he could schedule the teams of builders and scavengers to pass each other in neat formation; he could arrange for the new language of these lands to be sung in every household. People looked at him and saw a king, looked at his subjects and saw a kingdom. But there were no words that could summon a smile to Curvo’s lips, or Pityo’s, and so in some sense it was all shadows and mirrors, a theater-king on a world that had proved itself far bigger than the stage.) 

Curufin was dawdling. Maglor put a hand on his back to guide him out of the forge and got a glare in return. Curufin did not like being touched. All right if it was for an audience – a public display of carefully-performed affection, that was allowed – but for its own sake certainly not. We are our own audience, Maglor thought, and didn’t move his hand. They went outside. 

It was still raining. 

 “Either we have inconsistent accounts of the imperfect tense in Sindarin,” Maglor said, “or someone recorded it wrongly.”

“Or different groups use it differently. Inconsistent how?”

“The shoreline communities we’ve spoken to would be using it interchangeably with the past progressive – ”

“Oh,” Curufin said, “I saw that. No, they wouldn’t. The forms for the imperfect in the Mithrim dialect are almost like the forms for the past progressive in the samples from Losgar, so you were probably confusing those. Mithrim Sindarin doesn’t have a past progressive – or, rather, the aspect of verbs is continuous by default, with the preterite the marked case.”

“Why isn’t that in the notes?”

“It should have been an obvious inference from what was in the notes.”

“We don’t all live in your head.”

Curufin didn’t answer. It took a little more pressure on his shoulder to keep him walking forward.

“Would this be right, then?” said Maglor, and launched into one of the songs. It was meant to be catchy and memorable, something you would hum under your breath until you tired of it. It felt desperately inappropriate to the situation. 

 Curufin relaxed anyway, and had four grammatical corrections by the time they reached the central building. “I won’t comment on the artistic merits,” he said.

 “Any account of artistic merit that doesn’t take into account whether a song has the intended effect on its audience is rather limited,” Maglor said mildly. “They wouldn’t sing this in Valinor – but that’s a point to its credit, maybe.”

“But how will you know if you’re any good, without a hundred highly qualified poets of note to sing the praises of your latest masterpiece?”

“The Þindar have poets of note,” he said. “Even hundreds.”

“Without writing?”

“Specifically because they lack writing.”

 ”Do they praise you?”

"That’s not really important to me," said Maglor - a bald-faced lie, but Curufin let it pass. Maglor picked up a sheaf of papers and started flipping through them. The only way to talk Curufin into resting was to convince him that he’d thought of it himself. He pushed three pages of grammatical notes across the table and asked his brother to copy them, “making corrections as you go, obviously.”

Curufin managed, while barely tilting his head, to look simultaneously exhausted and contemptuous. “Anyone can do that.” 

“Either they won’t catch my errors,” Maglor said pleasantly, “in which case we’ll have documentation that is mistaken, or they will, and think less of me.”

“And I won’t think less of you?”

 “You know how many errors are inevitable in a research work of any length.”

Contempt melted away, leaving only exhaustion. “Tomorrow, maybe. Right now I’m going to sleep. You shouldn’t call me away for work that is not genuinely urgent.”

 “Dismissed,” Maglor said without looking up. 

And that was how one coaxed Curufin to take care of himself.

It did not stop raining for another eight days. Turko returned on the seventh one, uninjured and substantially more lively. They’d travelled south, as far as the sea. Though they’d shied up twenty miles from the shore, as soon as they were close enough to hear the waves. “Figured there was nothing to see,” said Celegorm, running his fingers through his hair so that muddy water dripped onto the floor.

Islands, maybe, that they wouldn’t able to reach without boats. More Elves, maybe kin of Círdan’s people, who they’d have to lie to as they’d lied to Círdan’s people about the fate of their sundered kin. Waterfowl, which made bad prey. Ulmo and Ossë and Uinen. 

“No,” said Maglor, “I figure there’s not.” He had imitated Celegorm’s voice, but not mockingly. Celegorm paused in his muddying of the entrance, startled by the sound.

“I mean-”

“I know what you mean.”

 If the waves were red when they crashed against the shore, that would be survivable; it would feel like atonement; it would make its demands apparent and painful and obvious. But the waves were black against the shore; the world was lightless. The blood had all been swallowed. Dying people didn’t, really, bleed very much in the first place. Not at all if they died by fire.

“The land by the shore is very nice,” Celegorm said. “Substantial local population, mostly living in the mountains and venturing toward the coast for food or trade. No one had any desire to travel to Mithrim, but they wish us no ill, and maybe well. I gave them presents.” He looked up at Maglor. “I said we wouldn’t be back.”

 “And we won’t,” said Maglor. “There’s a whole world out there. What’s dinner?” 

“Steak,” said Celegorm, “I suppose.” He sat down noisily and began unpacking his bags. “From, ah, anyone unfortunate enough to get in our way – and to our misfortune, none of them run on four legs. Maglor, have you ever thought about the fact I cannot speak to orcs?”

“…no? You could probably ask Curvo to learn and then teach you, if it’s important.”

“I speak the tongues of every being in the world,” Celegorm said.  “The deer, the fish, the insects, even, though they don’t have much to say. But of course when we met the Moriquendi –”

“They prefer to be called the Þindar –”

“Some of them prefer to be called the Þindar, and some object that only Elwë’s people are Þindar, and some are Avari, probably, though disinclined to admit it to me, and some prefer Moriquendi – it’s fine for you to go around pretending they all agree on these things and there’s one language we can teach our people and it’s called Þindarin, from where you’re sitting it probably seems like it’s mostly true –” 

“Your point is taken,” Maglor said. He was tempted to accuse Celegorm of channeling Curufin, but Curufin, if he’d become interested in that argument, would have made it for different reasons and from an entirely different angle. And yet it was unlike Celegorm to have discovered, unprompted, a passion for language.

“The point is, I can’t communicate with any of them,” Celegorm said, “I have to learn their language the slow way, song and thought and gesture, because my gift is for animals. Oromë thought so and now it’s clearly true.”

“And?”

“I cannot speak to orcs.”

“I think you are overthinking this.”

“I think I’m not.” 

“We both know –”

 “Do we? Say it.”

“People say,” Maglor said, “that orcs were tortured into being from Moringotto’s experimentation on Elves. The ones he captured at Cuivienen. That the reason Mandos never returned our dead to life is because their souls are beyond his reach – and not dead at all, maybe.”

“The ones we are eating are definitely dead,” Celegorm said. “I am good at killing things painlessly.” He hesitated. “Killing people painlessly. Maybe. If they are people.”

“If they are,” said Maglor, “you are doing them a great mercy.”

“Sort of figured you’d come up with something like that,” Celegorm said, but not unhappily. 

A drop of water splashed his nose as he spoke. For a second he thought he’d imagined it, but then another one landed on the table. 

Celegorm hadn’t noticed. “No one down by the southern shore knew of sources for metal, either. They were impressed by it, but they didn’t recognize any of the ores, and they hadn’t heard of anyone who used it-”

 “The roof is leaking,” said Maglor. 

“Oh. Shit, really? I’ll go climb outside, see if there’s a flaw-”

“There’s not a flaw,” Maglor said, maybe a little too heatedly. “It was built perfectly.”

“Obviously not, though.”

“You were there when we built it.”

“Cáno, it’s leaking.”

“I’m the one who told you that,” Maglor growled at him. Unreasonably angry, maybe, but - they’d have to move all of the books. They had chests, rainproofed, waxed, he could get everything moved in the next few hours if he interrupted Curvo and Moryo right now, damage to the books would be irreparable in the truest sense. And if this conference room, built by their father’s hand with his characteristic precision, was falling apart –

Not unreasonably angry, really.

Turko came back three minutes later, wetter and muddier. Maglor thought sullenly that he seemed to glory in it. “Thank Eru for the rain,” he panted.

“That was something of the last thing on my mind,” said Maglor.

“Without the rain it’d have happened anyway and been uglier. The beams are rotting. Some of them are nearly rotted through. I may think I can do your job, but it’d have been rough on morale for the fourth Finwean king to be brained by a collapsing ceiling –”

“We coated the wood when we put it up,” Maglor objected. “it should have lasted a hundred years.” 

“Well, it’s rotted. In several places, too, there are a few other leaks we must not have seen.”

“I wasn’t challenging you. It just – shouldn’t be -”

Celegorm shrugged. “I guess things don’t last as long, around here.”

“If wood rots within a year how on earth are we going to build any cities worth living in?” 

“Stone?” 

“Probably crumbles to dust within a century,” Maglor muttered. He was being deliberately absurd. Even here, where food rotted within weeks if not kept dry and wood, apparently, decayed in less than two years even when coated, stone should last forever. “Perhaps the Þindar had the right of it and we should all be nomads.” Celegorm, damn him, looked tempted. And not at all distressed. “Go get your brothers.”

He should have spent the time before Celegorm came back starting to pack up the books and tapestries; instead, he spent it sitting quite still and trying different ways to come to terms with this. Endorë; land of impermanence. Like sand castles on the shore, all of their homes and fortresses and kingdoms would be. He’d tried, they’d all tried, in Alqualondë as children, saving sand castles from the waves. You could build walls of sand to forestall the tide, but they bought you, what a few minutes? You couldn’t hold on to anything, no matter how tremendous the force you were willing to throw at the problem. Not lastingly. Wood rotting in two years. Had their father understood –

- but he had, he’d created the Silmarils. 

The door opened and his brothers burst in. All of them were wet; none were dripping or muddy except Celegorm, who had a gift for it. Even Huan had managed to stay drier than he had.

“The roof has rotted through; help me save the books,” Maglor said. The rest could wait.

It took four hours. Eight hundred books, nearly half the wealth they’d taken from Valinor (and their father would have called it far more than half). Two of the tapestries had suffered water damage. One of them had been Míriel Þerindë’s, a fantastically opulent rendering of the market in Tirion. Children darting around the vendors’ feet, sewn gemstones glittering defiantly from the stalls, Laurelin glazing everyone with the lazy urgency of summer. The left half of the tapestry had been soaked, and swelled, and now sat bleak and disfigured and colorless.

They stood around it for a moment as if it were a dying person. 

 “What we should do,” said Curufin, “is coat wood with tar, sap, wax-based paints, combinations thereof, leave it outside, see what lasts the longest.” 

None of those were available in the quantities necessary to house everyone. “Well,” said Maglor, “at least the study won’t take long to run. Think! An exploration of decay that gets results in scarcely a few months. We’d be the envy of Aman.” They’d set buckets to catch the rain; it made an irregular, rhythmic, almost musical backdrop. “I’m going to have to advise everyone to rebuild their homes, and we still don’t have any materials that we can state with confidence will last two years.”

“Tell them that’s the point,” Caranthir said. “Fast iteration. No one’s best attempt at anything is their first, but as long as the first endures there’s little incentive to change anything. Maybe in Endorë houses cannot be built to withstand the centuries, so instead we’ll have silly periodic status-competitions in which everyone tears their house down and builds a better one.” 

“It’s a distraction and a waste of resources that are needed to win the war,” Maglor said.

“Yes, because you’re doing so well on that right now.”

 “Acting before we knew what we were doing got Father killed, got Nelyo killed, I’d question why you’re trying to goad me into it, but –” 

“Oh,” Caranthir retorted, “so you haven’t forgotten who killed them. In which case I question why you need goading into it.”

“We can’t win,” said Celegorm. They both whirled to face him. “Trust me,” he continued, “if we could, and I thought Cáno was sitting on his hands, I’d have taken an army and left a week ago. But we don’t know how to kill the Valaraukar. We don’t even have some good guesses. And if we can’t take them, what are we going to do to Moringotto?”

“Father planned -”

“Father didn’t have a plan,” Amrod said, so quietly it was nearly buried in his brothers’ shouting but so clearly and precisely that it was not. He stood up from the chest he’d been sitting on and half-smiled at the ways their eyes all followed him. “Father didn’t have a plan, all of you know it. Of course – of course everything is rotting through, it was a delusion to start with. Run off a cliff and you won’t start falling until you look down.” He kicked over a bucket on the floor. It had been porcelain; it shattered. “By your leave –”

 “Go,” Maglor said.

The door opened, then slammed closed.

Curufin’s head hadn’t turned to watch him depart; he was glaring instead at Maglor “The problem here,” he said, “isn’t that you lack the courage of your convictions, it is that you have no convictions in the first place. We can all say whatever we wish, no matter how destructive, and you’ll sit there wide-eyed like a barn owl. That was a lie, and a lie you should not tolerate hearing spoken.  Father had a plan. Every person in this room has repeatedly failed him in it.”

They’d started being cruel to each other after losing Maitimo. The point, Maglor thought, had been to make each other feel something. Now it no longer did even that. The rain dripped. Caranthir leaned over to fold the ruined tapestry.

“Huan, no,” said Celegorm; he was trying to lap up the water off the floor. “You’ll cut your tongue.”

He already had. Drops of blood were blossoming in the puddle. Maglor thought of white docks and angry waves and vicious, twisted, ugly orcs. In the dark all blood looks black, he thought. Maybe it was only by light that there was ever any difference. 

ii.

Read ii.

They’d rebuilt the conference room a little larger, with a roof of baked clay tiles. That had required a repurposing of the forges that horrified every metalworker in the settlement and would take far, far too long to do for every one of Maglor’s subjects. The water-damaged tapestries had been tucked carefully away in a chest; they were currently irrecoverable, but the future might bring better news. Some of the undamaged tapestries had grown mold and mildew while tucked in their chests, and were similarly irrecoverable. Decay, Maglor thought, was Moringotto’s cruelest invention.

The new room had space for shelves, and Celegorm had carved some elegant bookends, and the library was back on opulent display. Maglor’s seat was now backed with the sturdy, grey fabrics popular among the Þindar. 

Celegorm and Caranthir had ridden out to slaughter some horde of orcs that their scouts had reported were venturing daringly close to the settlement by the lake. It should be a trivial operation, but until they returned some part of Maglor’s mind would doubtless be composing their eulogies. They’d lost twenty people since the rainy season had ended, to accidents or well-aimed orcish arrows. Death, here, was swift and senseless.

Everything here was swift and senseless.

It was a clear, cold day; the stars were glittering. He was walking back from having rung the bells for evening when he heard their horses approaching. He turned around to meet them at the gates. The horses were approaching at a cruel pace, which was so unlike Celegorm that Maglor pulled up, surprised. If it was bad news – 

They came into view a second later, riding shoulder-to-shoulder at a full gallop, holding something between them. No, someone. Holding an orc between them, one hand bound to each of theirs, shrieking in agony each time one horse got half-a-stride out in front of the other.

“You idiots,” said Maglor once they were close enough to hear him, “he could drag you off your saddles.”

“His arms would come off first,” said Celegorm with a grim and startling satisfaction. “Your Grace-”

- and that really was something, because Celegorm never had bothered with that, even for Father, even for Finwë -

“Moringotto,” Caranthir finished the sentence grimly, “has an emissary for you.”

 The orc had pale, splotchy skin against which the bulging of its black veins was rather disconcerting. It was trembling violently, it kept opening and closing a mouth full of rotting teeth. The smell was overpowering. 

Several dozen people had crowded around to watch; others were pressing in behind them. Well, Maglor could play a king best in front of an audience anyway. 

 “Moringotto,” he said, “lacks the strength to face us in his own right, and lacks the honor to surrender, and lacks the wherewithal to flee. So he tries to do us harm by trickery. We acknowledge no emissary of his; we confess ourselves startled he is desperate or foolish enough to try the same trick twice.”  None of that had been addressed to the orc, but now he leaned down to face it. “Does he offer me a Silmaril?”

“No,” it snarled. “He offers your brother.”

 Celegorm and Caranthir tensed, but barely. They’d heard these words already, then. Maglor composed a silent reprimand for not giving him a little more warning. “All of my brothers are here,” he said.

“Wrong,” it growled. The rest had been in Sindarin but now it curled its lips to try at Quenya. “Nelyafinwë Maitimo – ”

“Is dead,” Maglor said. 

 “No,” said Morgoth’s emissary. “Though I imagine he wishes he were.”

Maglor straightened and took two steps back. Not enough, a thousand wouldn’t be enough, but – “Celegorm,” he said, “kill it.”

The creature cried out in dismay. It was talking – quite coherently, really, quite quickly, judging by the movement of the lips – but something was roaring in Maglor’s ears and he could not hear it. They’d never found a body. They’d thought it likely, even, that the Enemy had tortured him before his death. But that had been Years ago, and of course they’d drawn the only conclusion that could keep them sane.

 He’d meant for Celegorm to draw his sword, but instead he’d loosed the creature’s arm, reached for its head, and snapped its neck. It crumpled at Maglor’s feet. Maglor could feel his own lips moving, but his orders, too, he could not hear over the terrible pounding in his head. Caranthir let go of the carcass’s hand.

In death the orc looked less inhuman. Its muscles, slack, had softened. It could have been sleeping. Maglor turned and left and left a dozen guards clustered around it.

The conference room was dark. Maglor did not light a lamp.

“It could be a lie.” Curufin had chosen the seat farthest from his brothers, across the table, and was tapping out patterns on it with his fingernails.

“It could be the truth,” said Celegorm.

“Probably true, I think,” Caranthir said. “We know how Moringotto operates, taking Elves captive is the first thing he did, of course he would –” 

“We have yet to successfully predict Moringotto’s actions, even once,” Maglor said. “It’s a bit far to say that we know how he operates.”

“It costs him nothing to keep Maitimo alive, it’s consistent with his history-”

“He could rather trivially have proved it,” Curufin countered, “and he didn’t.”

“In fairness,” said Celegorm, “it’s possible the orc had more to say.” He was glaring at Maglor somewhat accusingly.

“If Moringotto wanted us to hear it, then we don’t want to hear it,” Maglor said flatly. “That’s simple. We can’t outsmart him at his game, yet, but we can refuse to play it-”

“And meanwhile Nelyo’s being tortured,” said Celegorm.

“Might be being tortured,” Curufin said.

“It doesn’t actually matter,” Maglor cut them off. “If we’d had reason to believe we could triumph against Moringotto, we’d already have attacked him. We have no new reason to believe we’d stand a chance. So we can’t attack him. And we can’t trust anything he’d offer in negotiations –”

“I thought you’d say that,” Celegorm said.

“Don’t interrupt me.”

 Celegorm looked as if he intended to, but Huan put his face in his lap and he thought better of it.

 “So it doesn’t matter if it’s a lie,” Maglor said. “Anything we do because of it would be exactly what Moringotto wants.”

“Well,” said Caranthir, “except, in one version Maitimo’s dead and in the other he’s possibly still alive, and whether or not we can do anything about that I’d say it matters.”

“Alive and being tortured,” Celegorm said, “if there’s something we could do to goad Moringotto into killing him –”

“That’s sick –”

Huan yelped sharply. “That would be right,” Celegorm said. “That would be the right thing to do.”

“Since when has anyone in this room cared about that?” Amrod asked mildly. 

“I think-” Maglor began, but Curufin cut him off.

“No. No. If you, my King, are going to keep letting that slide I am going to say something. Every member of this family is, and consistently has been, motivated by the desire to protect our subjects from danger, defeat Moringotto, and build a safe and healthy independent kingdom. With -” and he turned to look directly at Amrod – “one exception, who valued feeling like a good person over seeing those goods realized, and if off the back of his idiocy you are going to lord it over the rest of us that you, too, value feeling like a good person –”

 Celegorm lifted him off his feet. He’d moved quickly, while no one had been looking, with the startling grace that Maglor had made a mental note of earlier. He was holding him by the collar of his jacket. Curufin fell silent. 

“That was too far,” Celegorm said, breathing hard.

The jacket ripped; Curufin collapsed back into his chair. He’d only fallen a few inches. It had seemed, Maglor thought distantly, far more dramatic that that.

 Amrod’s hands, on the table, were bloodless and trembling violently.

 “Yes,” Maglor said, “yes, it was. I think –” 

This time Amrod interrupted him. “Did you know?”

Curufin raised one eyebrow. 

“Did you know he was on a ship?”

 The leaks in the roof had long since been patched, but Maglor thought that he could still hear water dripping.

“No,” Curufin said, “of course not.”

 “Would you have stopped-”

“Father would have.”

“If Father didn’t?”

 Curufin leaned back. “You don’t understand our father at all, do you?” 

“Better than you, I think. You’re too close.”

“And you recklessly and constantly undermine everything he worked for because it makes you feel temporarily less guilty.”

Amrod stood up too, then. “While you don’t feel guilty at all.”

“Well,” said Curufin, “no. Tell me, what good has it done you? Why exactly would I aspire to it?”

“Because,” Amrod said, “as long as we craft all these pretty little stories about why they died they will keep on dying. You can tell us all that I’m to blame for everything, and god knows I’m not going to rip away whatever helps you sleep at night-”

“Don’t you dare-” 

But Amrod had pivoted to look at Celegorm. “You can tell yourself that it just happened, that death is a random senseless great equalizer lunging out of the dark, but let’s not notice how, for something random and senseless, it sure strikes the same tree twice, doesn’t it? You –” facing Maglor - “You can tell yourself and our people that it’s some fucking tragipoetic dark night of the soul, that hope is about to dawn, that we’ve taken our lashes and learned our lesson and emerged from this stronger, but as long as you tell yourself they died to teach us a lesson, you won’t be able to face the real reason -”

 “Pityo,” Maglor said, quietly, lending his voice enough resonance to fill the room anyway, “you know I don’t believe that, don’t you? Obviously we are not stronger for our losses. Obviously they did not occur in order to strengthen us. I know the real reason. I sing a story that will inspire our subjects to get up when we tell them it’s day and permit to sleep when we tell them it’s night.” 

“All right,” Caranthir said, “what’s the real reason?”

Amrod looked, Maglor thought distantly, more alive than he had in two years. In any event there was more blood in his face. He was staring at Maglor as if seeing him for the first time, and from a great distance. “You say it,” he said.

“The real reason,” Maglor said, “is because we’re doomed. We are all inevitably going to die, no matter what choices we make. We have already failed.”

“Mandos doesn’t have that kind of power,” Curufin snapped automatically. “They were trying to scare us.” 

“There are always ways around words,” Celegorm said. 

“I,” said Caranthir, “am curious if you had any objective in saying that, Pityo, beyond destroying morale.” 

“And,” Amrod said, “you are the only person in the room who even wondered. Have motives? Me? Yes, of course.”

There was a long silence. 

 “Turko,” said Maglor, “sit back down.”

He did.

"Pityo, sit back down."

He did.

“If we’re lying to ourselves,” Amrod said, “and each other, to protect each other, if we’re figuring out which stories we’ll tell before we know which ones we believe, if we forget there’s a difference – well. We’re all going to die. That’s fine. But I want to die at the enemy’s hands.” He was looking at Curufin again. “And so, if my brother’s death at Losgar was really an accident –”

“It was an accident,” said Maglor, forceful and quelling. 

“They we’ve got to figure out what we’re going to do differently. I vote for no games, no lying. Not here. To our people? Sure. But –”

“We’re not all going to die,” Celegorm said. And then, reluctantly, when everyone at the table glared at him. “I’m not playing games. Never was, actually. I just don’t think we’re going to die. Cáno, with all due respect – and that might be the first time in my life that I’ve meant those words to convey a lot of respect – you like tragic endings, of course you’ve decided we have one.”

No, thought Maglor, that’s not the reason. The reason is that I already know your words. The words I’ll sing for you. “I think,” he said, “that maybe we’re all healing in our own way, now. I think ‘strong enough not to lie to ourselves’ is – something to aspire to.” 

“And,” Caranthir said bitterly, “on that topic, we’re pretending Maitimo is dead.”

"We’re agreeing Maitimo is dead,” said Curufin. 

Huan barked sharply. “Maitimo is dead,” Celegorm agreed slowly, “but if we happen to get an occasion to barricade the entrances to Angband and light the place on fire and kill everyone inside, we definitelytake it, even though it won’t do a thing to Moringotto or the Valaraukar. You know. Just because.”

 “And if a reasonable chance of rescue arises,” Amrod said, “same thing.”

“No,” Maglor said. “No. Even if a chance arises – we’d be too tempted, we’ll spend too much time looking for one, and it would be just like Moringotto to design something that looks like a possibility. If a reasonable chance for a rescue arises we ignore it, because Maitimo is dead.”

“We wouldn’t have to bear the risk ourselves,” Curufin said, “we could send someone.”

“Sure,” Maglor said. “If someone expendable shows up I will set them right on it. None of my subjects are.” It was silent again. Maglor wondered how close one would need to get to Angband to hear someone screaming inside. “Moringotto has no reason to actually keep him alive,” he said aloud, “and plenty of reason to lie to us and claim-”

“Careful,” said Amrod. “I think you’re convincing yourself of comforting things again.” 

“If I were trying to comfort myself,” Maglor murmured, “I should hope I could do better than this. Perhaps I would convince myself Maitimo has flattered Melkor’s servants into freeing him and is now starting an orcish civil war, and will return to us any day now, riding a warg and surrounded by legions faithful to our cause.” 

“With the Silmarils in his hair,” said Curufin.

They sat there in silence. “Well,” Celegorm said, “I am glad you can live with yourself. By your leave –” 

“No,” Maglor said, “we still have to figure out what we’re going to tell everyone.”

“You can do that without me.” 

“You have to know it,” Maglor said wearily. “Sit back down.” 

He didn’t. He crossed his arms and stood next to his chair. He looked, Maglor thought, like a pouting toddler. Startlingly young, for someone who’d snapped an orc’s neck with his bare hands less than an hour ago. 

What to tell his people? So that they’d have the strength to get up in the morning, he’d said, and the comfort to fall asleep at night, but night and morning were both illusions of their own, now that there were no trees to mark the days. An artifice of comforting lies, built on comforting lies.

“We could tell them the truth for once,” said Amrod wearily.

“I usually do,” said Maglor. “It’s all about how.” Their father’s body, turning to ash and blowing away on the wind - true, or a story? He wasn’t sure. He wasn’t sure there was a difference. The Oath they’d spoken together with him, the Oath he’d claimed, in terrible pain, as his final words - true, or a story? Both, of course. All the best tales were.

Maitimo, a prisoner in Angband, suffering unimaginably - true, or a story? Did it matter? Not in how he had to tell it. Not at all, really.

"If we see any orcs with red hair-" said Celegorm bitterly.

"I changed my mind," said the King. "You can leave."

They all did, after that. One by one, and in silence.

iii.

Read iii.

Huan woke him.

Huan was howling.Howling like he had for the Trees, and for two brothers and three successive Kings, howling like Oromë’d given him oversized lungs specifically so in this moment he could rouse the whole of western Endorë.

Long ago, when still a child, Maglor had perfected the art of rolling over onto his nose to squeeze out a few more precious moments of sleep, while braiding his hair so he could legitimately claim he was getting started on the day.

Those memories hurt to even touch; they were sharp in unexpected places.

He dressed in seconds. His hands were shaking. He tapped out a rhythm on the dresser, and that calmed them. It didn’t make any sense to think ‘who is it going to be’, none of them were out, none of them were in any danger – 

- and then he stepped outside, and everything made sense.

Telperion lived. 

Or – something of Telperion lived, something the right color but far, far too weak, floating, defiantly, as if the only means the Valar could imagine that would suffice to protect their creations from Melkor was to keep them off the ground.

It was the first time he had really seen these lands. The stars sufficed to avoid walking into a building right in front of you, and to catch the outlines of hills on the horizon. But now the world had been painted for him, in the silver that colored all of his good memories, and it was breathtaking. The mountains, haggard and rocky and snow-capped despite being substantially shorter than the Pelori, clung to the horizon in three directions. Trees studded the hillsides and poured into the valleys and stood defiantly tall atop the riverbanks. Everything was vast and dizzying. Maglor had forgotten what it was like to feel small. 

Their people were gathering. The camp was arranged in a half-circle around the lake’s shore, the best compromise between using space well and minimizing the area that they needed to fortify. The official buildings – Maglor had refused to have them called a palace, he’d build a palace when he had stone – were in the center. It would have made a natural gathering place in any event, and especially because it gave a clear view of, well, whatever it was. A hole in the sky, shining like Telperion. A star, grown with outrage and daring to a thousand times its natural size. Not an illusion, Maglor was sure of that, because the disk itself could have been deceptive but the silvery light it cast across the lands could not have been done by manipulation.

Maglor watched its reflection on the water. Telperion had been dead, and this was unmistakably Telperion and he was not sure if he was reassured or frightened. Just when they’d resigned themselves to the permanency of death in these lands, to the everlasting darkness in which they’d build anew and the Everlasting Darkness to which they were damned if they failed.

Maybe, he almost said aloud, this is my power; the lies I sing come true.

“Behold,” he said instead, letting his voice carry, even though everyone was already looking. “We do not know whose will this serves, but not Moringotto’s – by light he is weak, and cowardly, and did us damage only by virtue of allies who were neither, and who have now turned against him. Such is the fate of evil, to be friendless, to wait always for a knife in your back.” They were all listening. He chuckled. Loud, clear, removed, dangerous – that was what they needed to hear right now. “We do not pity him. But this is a danger to him, then, and so a boon to us. By the light we can scout farther. By the light our enemies are weaker. Go, get supplies and weapons for a trip. It moves too slowly, I think, to fall from the sky and leave us trapped here; but we’ll travel in numbers that in any event do not chance that. We will map the whole of the lands between here and the Enemy before we rest.” It was difficult to tear his eyes off the orb. He did it anyway, to look back at his assembled people. “We will have orders for you when you return supplied and armed.”

They didn’t return to their homes right away; they grabbed for each other’s arms and started whispering. Huan was still howling.

“Get him to stop,” Maglor told Celegorm. Talking to Huan directly never worked; he seemed to acknowledge them all as family, but as lesser family, worth protecting but not worth listening to. He listened to Celebrimbor sometimes.

“I’d be worried it was a trick of the Enemy, if he weren’t so pleased.”

“That’s pleased? It sounds like when Father –”

“No it doesn’t,” said Celegorm, looking mildly disappointed in him, “Not at all.” 

“The sounds are identical,” Maglor hissed. It probably wasn’t worth pursuing but no one usually contested him on questions of music, and they were the same pitch, the same undertones, the same volume. It really was absurd to imagine that Celegorm’s capacity to interpret animals didn’t require any actual distinguishing features in their communication.

“But of course it doesn’t,” he said, apparently catching that thought. “It’s a gift, it makes sense it’s closer to osanwë than to spoken language. Otherwise anyone could learn.” 

Their father had tried, once, for three years, more for the sake of the time it meant spending with his third son than out of a genuine desire to carry on conversations with the dogs and horses. Their father didn’t even like talking to most people. He hadn’t been able to learn, which likely meant that no one could. Maglor bit his lip and shelved that memory. He should not be distractible like this. He’d set aside the time to compose his grief.

Celegorm was stroking Huan encouragingly. “Do you think osanwë could be used to communicate with orcs?” he asked when he saw Maglor looking.

“What is it with you and orcs? No.” 

“I could use it to mislead them, to feed them false sounds and memories, make it look like a larger army is facing them than is truly-” 

“Macalaurë,” said Curufin, and Maglor turned gratefully, “with light sources we could start creating more of the lampstones Moringotto destroyed in Formenos –” 

“Yes,” Maglor said, “good, do that.”

 “It’s not bright enough, too distant.”

“Well, then why-” 

“I need lenses,” Curufin said, “which is to say glass, and better equipment –” 

“We have sand, we have high-precision tools…” Maglor did not know very much about what exactly crowded his brothers’ worktables. He knew that when their father had returned to Formenos, after burying Finwë, he’d walked through the shattered workroom from which a lifetime’s creative work had been stolen and said “the Enemy, fool that he is, did not take the tools.”

“Yes,” said Curufin, “if the light source remains we can produce a strong enough lens in the next few days.” 

“I’m not going to forbid you the sand,” said Maglor impatiently. 

Curufin did not move. “No.”

“So what do you need from me?”

“Nothing, Tyelperinquar can help me.” He spun and walked off.

“Compliments,” said Celegorm from next to Huan, who was still howling. “that’s what he needs from you. Curufinwë Atarinkë that is brilliant and necessary and I am grateful you thought of it, I wouldn’t have, and of course the resources you need are at your disposal, you have my trust and admiration –”

“You don’t talk to him like that,” Maglor objected.

 “It wouldn’t mean anything coming from me. Wouldn’t mean anything coming from you, either, if Father were alive, but-”

“I see. Thank you. All right.”

Celegorm nodded and looked away.

“I am going to leave now,” Maglor said, “because otherwise in a moment I will lose my temper and punch your dog.” 

Huan swiveled his head to look at him, with a glint in his eyes that seemed to say ‘bring it on’. Maglor almost smiled. It was hard not to feel exultant, seeing the faces of his loved ones clearly for the first time since Losgar. Seeing them by Telperion’s tame and gentle light for the first time since – 

- it was not very hard not to feel exultant, actually. He drew up his robes so they wouldn’t get dirtier and walked back inside to prepare the scouting orders.

He hesitated for a moment to close the door. They had not bothered to build the houses here with windows, since it was constantly dark outside and the lights within, when lit, could only serve to attract enemies. But now it was hard to let the light go, even for a second.  He let the door swing close and lit two oil lamps – wasteful, but when poorly lit the space felt like a trap.

Strong enough to withstand the enemy, small enough to move quickly so they weren’t trapped if the light started to fade. Competent people in charge of each, but some to leave back as well, just in case this was a diversion of Morgoth’s. He was unreasonably sure that it was not. 

The door opened. Amrod, his hair tied carefully, the silver light showing that his skin was far too pale. “It’s not for us,” he said.

“If it’s a blessing of the Valar, then assuredly not,” said Maglor. 

“If it’s for the Þindar one wonders why they did not do it a long time ago.” 

“Did you look around? Outside? Did you see these lands?” 

Amrod pulled a chair out with a shriek of wood against wood. “I didn’t keep my eyes closed.” 

“If Grandfather had seen this, if the first peoples had seen this, I don’t think they’d ever have gone to Aman. The light – it was the only promise they made us.”

Amrod was picking at the finish on the tabletop. “No decay.”

 “True.” 

“The dead can heal and eventually return.”

“A lie, in the only sense that mattered,” Maglor returned. 

“Still.”

“Go outside and look around,” Maglor said, “and tell me that you would have walked a thousand miles more to get somewhere where the light was too bright to see the stars.”

“Of course not.” He leaned forward. “What are you working on?” 

“Scouting crews.” 

“My job.”

Maglor set the pen down and folded his hands on the table. “I don’t want to ask too much-”

“You have never so much as asked me to open a door.”

 “True.” 

“You tell people I am in charge of logistics and then you do it all.”

“At first you weren’t up to it. If you are now –”

“At first none of us were up to it. You made stupid mistakes, got people killed –” They’d taken a long time learning how to scout in the dark. And they still had no idea how to treat the sort of injuries that didn’t heal with time but instead worsened.

“Yes,” Maglor said, “I did.”

“So when were you going to ask me to do something? When were you going to ask me if I neededanything? I don’t think you were concerned about me, I think you like feeling useful.”

“I’m so starved for that, here,” Maglor murmured. “No, I thought when you were well enough to work you’d also be well enough to take some initiative on it.”

“Well.”

“I want ten people in each group, I want three who speak Þindarin competently – because some people are assuredly claiming to be more fluent than they are, and I really need at least one who is fluent. Five who are competent with bow and arrow - you can check against these lists for that. I don’t want married couples in the same group –”

“No one is going to be distracted,” Amrod said, his hand fluttering to form an orb like the one in the sky.

“Not that,” Maglor said, “it’s that if some groups don’t make it back I’d rather have widows than orphans to deal with. If they don’t have children, or if their children are already dead, then fine –”

“How many?” said Amrod.

“Ten. I told you –”

“No, how many couples do we have with all of their children already dead?” 

“Not so many. People don’t tend to survive that. They – they grieve to death, they burn through their bodies or shake them apart or just let them go –”

“I know.”

“I really was worried about you, I just didn’t know what to say –” 

“I know.”

The oil lamps cast their faces in orange like dancing flames. Amrod sat with his back very stiff and his posture impeccable.

His tengwar, Maglor noted, was shaky.

He cleared his throat. “That’s the dominant consideration in assigning people to scouting and project groups. Carnistir did the math for me, a while back. People who were uninjured who wasted away from grief. He was trying to sort out why some people made it when some didn’t. Ninety percent survive the death of one immediate family member, if they have others. Forty percent survive the death of two. Losing all of them – no one.”

Amrod pulled more papers across the table. “You shouldn’t release those numbers,” he said. 

“No?”

“I rather preferred believing it was a choice.”

“It is,” Maglor said, “if not a conscious one. I, for instance, would never grieve by dying.” Their eyes met. Maglor could add a ring to his voice, sometimes, when he was certain of things. He had done it there. 

“Do we want to send people all the way back to the water?”

“No.”

“You,” murmured Amrod after a moment, “do grieve by dying, sort of. You haven’t sung since Maitimo –” 

“Died,” said Maglor tersely.

“Since then,” Amrod said. “It feels like losing someone, being around you when you’re quiet. I was unsure if it was appropriate to grieve.”

 “I’ve written all the Þindarin songs –”

“It’s different when you’re writing for people –”

“You should be more precise with your language, then,” Maglor snapped. “And I always write for people.”

“Sometimes not the people you’re singing to.”

“No, always the people I’m singing to. It’s a performance art, Pityo, there isn’t anything else.”

“That –” Amrod said, “that’s the thing I am talking about. Everything you have written since Losgar has been purposeful and manipulative and, of course, stunningly well executed, but none of it has made me afraid of you, none of it has been overwhelming, none of it has felt like you were writing from the heart any more than the minimum necessary – you’ve written songs, but you haven’t written music. ‘It’s a performance, there isn’t anything else’ – well, there used to be.”

It took an unusual amount of effort to keep breathing evenly. “Making people afraid of me wouldn’t really serve any of my goals,” Maglor said, “would it?”

“Are you afraid? Of making us feel anything? People aren’t as fragile as you’re treating them, Cáno, I keep telling you that.”

“You should work, if you came here to be helpful.”

 “Can we put out the oil lamps and prop the door open?”

“No,” Maglor snapped. 

 Amrod rolled his eyes – orange by the light of burning oil – and dropped his head back to his work. 

“Did I hurt you?” 

“Of course not,” Maglor said smoothly.

“No one else will have noticed. If that’s what worries you. Even if they knew music very, very well, they would have to know you better than anyone does.” 

“Except you?” 

“Including me. I only noticed because I was leaning on you a little too hard, maybe. Shall we exchange groups and check each other’s assignments for any errors?”

Maglor led a group himself. It was symbolically and aesthetically appropriate. His group headed north and curved in a wide semicircle along the plains, which got flatter, colder and unfriendlier as you went. You could see someone coming three hundred miles away. As close as one could come, in these lands, to completely safe, but he’d made up for that by setting them a rigorous pace with difficult ground, and by demanding that they sketch from horseback rather than stopping.

The ecology here was the same as closer to Lake Mithrim. Plants of a type that they recognized vaguely from Valinor, tightly curled in buds, or shriveled into the ground, fast asleep. You could sing them awake – Maglor had tried it once – but with no light they’d swiftly die for good, once wakened. He wondered if this dimmer Telperion was enough light for any plant to live by. They could test that later.

And, with stubborn determination, new plants had grown around and over the ones that were ill-suited for this world and sleeping. Lichens, ugly fungi and sponges, sticky bioluminescent mosses. All of them grew scarcer toward the north. The temperature grew colder and the rocks grew sharper. 

After a while riding, the light started dipping in the sky. 

“All right,” Maglor said, “turn back.”

“Your Grace,” someone murmured, “what happens when it hits the ground?”

“We’ve prepared for every conceivable outcome,” Maglor said, which was false, because he was conceiving of new ones on the spot. “The incompetence of the Valar is surpassed only by their vanity, as a general principle, and assuming that this is their work I doubt they will permit it to smash apart on the ground.”

That earned an appreciative murmur. There was still a thrill of sacrilege in criticizing the gods, even after they’d damned them and doomed them and drowned them. Maglor’s father would have been annoyed that anyone still cared enough to bother loathing them.

They pressed the horses hard for the ride home. 

A few hours later, with all but one of the groups returned back, the circle dipped beneath the sky. It did not crash; it vanished gracefully. Maglor stood by the lake watching for the last group to return – it would be slightly undignified to stand there staring awestruck at the orb for too much longer – watching the land once again go dark. The stars, which had been hard to pick out against the brightness, were still there.

“If that was a temporary blessing,” Maglor said, “it was welcome and well-used. If it returns again we’ll find the means to put to effect the advantage it grants us over the enemy, who hates light and fears it. In any event, he thought he had destroyed the Trees; he was wrong at least in part, and is weaker than he imagined himself. That knowledge merits celebration, even if the ambiguous blessings of Moringotto’s brethren merit none. We will hold this day in memory as a new festival for a new land. All tasks are suspended.”

They cheered, just as they’d been intended to, just like new apprentices granted their first day off. Maglor waded through them back to the conference room and ordered some people to set up the instruments for a proper dance, the stylized Cuivienen-inspired ones of Tirion. People caught on as soon as he started the drums.

“Exiles pretending to be in Tirion pretending to be in Cuivienen,” Curufin said, sitting next to him. “Delightful. I take it they are supposed to realize we are closer to our ancestors here, and to remember that in Valinor we were singing of stars we couldn’t see?” 

“Perhaps I just like these songs.”

“The last scouting group returned. They met no orcs. It seems that the Enemy’s servants don’t like the light.”

“So much the worse for them, then. Curufinwë – if it doesn’t come back – given enough time, is there any way that you could –” 

“No,” he said. “I’m sorry. If I had the Silmarils, maybe-”

“There is no conceivable avenue to getting the Silmarils back before winning the war entirely.”

“I’ve thought of a few,” he said. “If you happened to change your mind about a rescue –” 

“I haven’t and won’t. But go on.” 

“Tyelcormo says there are poisons that can be concocted from the plants here, toxins that are airborne like pollen,” he said. “There are also – this I have verified myself –high-density fuel sources among the sleeping plants, including some seeds that are explosive when burned. We find the means to dump several hundred thousand explosive seeds coated in poison over the walls of Angamando and light them on fire-”

“It would not kill Moringotto.”

 “No,” he said. “But if all we needed was disarray it might permit someone to slip in and take the crown. And once we have the Silmarils back we can grow food, our homes will not decay, wounds will heal faster-” his perpetually burned hands were fluttering with excitement. Maglor remembered what Celegorm had said earlier.

“That’s brilliant, Curvo. It’s a sort of reckless inventiveness that I don’t think the Enemy would expect us capable of. Find people, do research. Even if this idea doesn’t amount to anything, if we learn something from it, or if it fails interestingly-”

Curufin was glowing. “I expect that at the very least it will fail very interestingly.” 

 We did not need the light, Maglor thought, we needed the optimism. Can I give them the optimism, when I know we are all damned? But there was no reason the two had to be in tension, really. They could take Morgoth down with them, in a poisonous explosive fire if they pleased. They could die triumphant and damned.

He sang. 

From across the plaza Amrod caught his eye and looked startled, then pleased, then vaguely terrified.

The drums roared and his subjects moved with quick Ñoldorin grace through a difficult chain of steps at twice the speed and it was no longer Exiles pretending to be in Tirion pretending to be in Cuivienen. We are the heirs of both, rather, Maglor sang, and we abandoned the first for safety and the second for danger and we triumph and we thrive wherever we go. We are damned, oh yes, and against the backdrop of the Everlasting Darkness look how bright we shine.

iv.

Read iv.

The light came back.

Despite themselves his people cheered it. There was another dance, this one impromptu and occurring without Maglor’s approval or participation, because he was busy with Curufin and Caranthir planning a year-long series of agricultural experiments that could determine what could grow under the new light, what could grow in well-designed greenhouses if mirrors were used. They had a plan sketched out by the third time the light rose in the sky.

Then they built focusing lenses several meters across and set them carefully atop buildings with improvised retractable roofs and began work on creating the glowing Ñoldorin lampstones that his father had developed so many centuries ago. They were ornamental pieces in every home and office and workshop in Aman, but their original creator and his family had none; Morgoth had taken them. 

The city was singing. Its songs were shaped nothing like Tirion; the roads were uneven and imperfectly planned, the walls were not ceremonial and were densely guarded, and nothing glittered. To realize that it was a Ñoldorin city, Maglor thought, you had to listen carefully, you had to look close enough to see how defiantly inventive the crumbling, incompetent buildings were, and how they improved with each year’s new understanding. The city was poorly-planned and clumsily-built and falling apart, but there was more to sing of it, in a way, than of Tirion.

When the light rose in the sky for the seventh time a woman approached Maglor in the newly-laid cobblestone street. He didn’t go about accompanied – no people to spare – but by convention everyone usually stood respectfully out of the way. She, though, cheerily crossed the street to end up in his face. “Your Grace!” she said, “It needs a name, and we have seven for your consideration.”

“We?” he said, amused. “And I suppose it does. Are those your proposals?”

She instinctively pulled the scroll back from his hand, and then, realizing what she’d done, awkwardly held it out again. “Well, yes, but I was hoping to explain the context and considerations. And ‘we’ being the Lambengolmor for Endorë, or that’s what we’ve been styling ourselves, though if you think it’s too impudent we could probably –”

“I think,” said Maglor, “styling yourself a new Lambengolmor is not inexcusably impudent but interrupting me in the street rather is. You may bring your proposal to me tonight, when the light rises.”

“Of course,” she said, not at all abashed. 

 “Who should I tell my seneschal to expect?” He didn’t have one. Perhaps the appointment was overdue, really, but he couldn’t think who would suit. Everyone his father had trusted had died with his father, everyone Maitimo had trusted had died with Maitimo-

“Celirhíl,” she said.

“That’s Sindarin.”

 “A translation!” she explained with a  bright smile. “They appreciated it tremendously. They’ve already learned some and been rounding the names off to the nearest appropriate phonemes – you’re Maglor – but everyone a little less important has a little time to choose how we want to be known.” She faltered at the expression on his face. “It’s the ultimate triumph, really, of your and the Lord Curufinwë’s efforts to encourage rapid adoption of the language.”

“My father’s,” Maglor said. “That was a priority of my father’s. Celerhíl. I will see you after the light rises.” He arrived at the workshops quite thoroughly distracted and having forgotten the questions he’d intended to ask when he got there. Luckily everyone was eager to regale him with information and left him no brief silence in which to ask questions anyway.

“Everything is in place,” Caranthir said, “we can start making lampstones this evening. I’ve told Curufin his time is probably more highly valued somewhere else – this procedure is trivial. Well. Not trivial. But there are ten or fifteen people who can do it, and in comparison to some of the skills and arts that are all but lost here –”

“We have an observation deck there, if you want to watch,” he said. “The idea is that we can train some more people, have six lenses in each of four buildings of this type, each of which can produce one lampstone a week –”

“Do we need that many?”

“To trade with the Moriquendi,” Caranthir said. “From what the peoples around Mistaringë have said, it’s possible that even if we bring Elwë all the riches of Valinorë he’ll refuse to let us in to talk. But, from some other things they have said – it would much improve our odds.” 

“Bribery.” 

“Diplomacy.” 

“As you like it. Moryo, do you have complete personal records for everyone in the settlement?

“Not all of the new arrivals from the lakeshore tribes.” There were several thousand of those. They’d settled within the Fëanorian perimeter for protection and kept their distance, at first. Now they came to the dances, sometimes, and traded Maglor’s people dangerously intoxicating wine in exchange for the last of the lembas out of Valinor. Maglor had half-heartedly tried to forbid this, but when Caranthir had instead suggested taxing it he’d been happy enough to foist the whole mess off onto his shoulders. 

“But all of our people?”

“Yes, of course. Gray book, my rooms. Or rather – I should probably go with you, you’re not going to be able to decipher it. There’s not much to do here until the light rises…”

“I have a meeting then,” said Maglor, “so this won’t take that long.” 

Caranthir’s rooms were the largest. Maglor had never noticed that and wasn’t sure how to challenge him on it. He’d in any event made good use of the space. The gray book was actually eight separate volumes, designed so pages could be detached and reordered, covered on both sides with dense, tiny writing. “Pityo’s been helping me,” said Caranthir, at Maglor’s raised eyebrows.

 “He has? That – raises more questions than it answers.”

“I promised him that if people decided, of sound mind and in their own right, to leave, then you wouldn’t stop them from going by force.”

“Of course not.” He was thinking more about the impracticalities of stopping them than any grand principle of just leadership, but Caranthir looked oddly pleased. 

 “He promised to help me collect information.” 

“What sort?”

“You’ll see. Who did you want to know about?”

“She gave her name as Celirhíl. Which isn’t just a Sindarin pronunciation, it’s a proper translation, if I’m to understand it-” 

“Yes, lots of people are doing that,” Caranthir said absently. “It’s a fad. Here. Ah. She’s Túretulco’s younger sister.” One of their father’s apprentices of forty years. Maglor didn’t know him except vaguely, but Caranthir was smiling fondly. “Their mother was in the workshop this afternoon,” he said, “she’s one of the people who can do lampstones. Their father is dead, as is Túretulco’s wife. Alqualondë.”

“Add to the book,” Maglor said, “that she’s styled herself a representative of the Lambengolmor for Endorë and wants to meet with me to name the light.” 

“Oh,” said Caranthir, “that’s a good idea. She has a lot of ties in the local tribes – the ones living within our protection and without it – so we could ensure that it has a consistent name in Quenya and Þindarin, even. And naming things improves everyone’s spirits. It feels like a properly Ñoldorin thing to concern ourselves with.” There was sarcasm there but Maglor was not sure who it was aimed at.

“We named ourselves the Quendi,” Maglor said. “By Cuivienen, I mean. Those who speak. It was the Valar who decided to name us children of their Light. It is not merely a properly Ñoldorin thing to concern ourselves with; it is a properly Quendi thing to concern ourselves with. Strange, maybe, to celebrate our small rebellions, even after the great and terrible ones – but necessary, perhaps, if we are to define ourselves by anything other than what they took from us.”

“Rehearsing your speech already?”

“Always,” Maglor said absently. Caranthir had finished adding his notes to the book. “Túretulco has children, right?”

“Three.”

“And her? Is she married?”

“She has a girlfriend in the Þinda settlements,” Caranthir said. “Why?” 

“No – no reason – how do you know things like that?” 

“People like talking about things like that,” Caranthir muttered. “Finding out whether they’re actually fluent? That takes effort. Finding out who they’re sleeping with-”

“Moryo-”

“Oh, are you going to enforce the laws of the Valar here?” 

“Of course not. I am just realizing that I’m obviously not keeping you or Pityo busy enough.”

Caranthir smiled bitterly. “This was from before the light. There was time to burn, then.”

“Well.” Maglor said. “Now there isn’t, so I order you both to stop tracking our subjects’ sexual indiscretions with the locals. And if I’m not mistaken, the light’s rising, so –” 

“I’ll go make you a lamp,” he said agreeably. 

Maglor had still neglected to appoint a seneschal, so he met the woman herself at the door to the conference room. “The main considerations,” she said without preamble, “were memorability, aesthetic appeal, and maintaining the possibility of using the same word in Þindarin and Quenya by obeying the phonemic principles of both languages. That last one proved to be the greatest constraint.”

“If you give me the list,” Maglor said, “I’ll look it over and make an announcement  later.” 

Her face fell. “But I wanted to explain all of the relevant considerations –”

“I think I have a good grasp of them,” he said gently.

“The Þindar are already using Ithil. Another relevant question is how easily the word modifies –”

“Celirhíl,” Maglor said, “I learned Telerin for the sake of making poetry with puns that only half my audience would understand. I tried learning Valarin for music, and gave up only when I realized nothing would ever rhyme. I’m currently managing the vast expansion of our capabilities made possible by the new light source, and I do not have time to have the new Lambengolmor teach me about language. You are dismissed. Go tell your Þinda friends that we’ll host a naming ceremony for the light, tonight, when it is at its height.”

She at last looked a little disconcerted. “It’s all in the notes,” she said, and left. 

It occurred to Maglor, as he drew the paper closer to read it, that perhaps in the shock of Maitimo’s death he had drawn his inner circle too small, and it was worth finding some quiet, responsible, discrete people to add to it.

He spoke the seven possible names of the Moon aloud, and knew at once which one was right. He gave the speech at the Moon’s peak in the sky, and sang, afterwards, a silly children’s ballad in which Ungoliant was explained to have inadvertently vomited the light back into the sky, where it circled now to mock her. The lyrics worked in Sindarin and Quenya and most of his people obediently alternated, at least until they got too drunk.

Ithil. The Moon.

“Maglor,” he said, testing it out, the name the Sindar called the Noldo king. Curufin raised an eyebrow.

The next day a different light rose in the sky. Laurelin, people said at once, though it wasn’t, just as Ithil was not Telperion; but it had in common with Laurelin her color and her scorching heat, and within an hour of its first surfacing on the horizon everything in Middle-earth was dying.

“Damn,” Curufin said. “The experiments are all a little useless. The plants that were asleep are awakening, they’ll do fine; the plants from Valinor need a lot of water, but if we irrigate the fields they should also do fine. The native flora are all going to die.”

 “Something of a crisis for the people accustomed to living off them,” said Maglor, scowling at the orb in the sky. Just like the Valar, to try to surpass something they’d done perfectly well and end up completely misunderstanding the people they intended to benefit. Assuming the Elves even were the people they intended to benefit.

“As long as it hurts Moringotto more than us, it’s worth it,” Celegorm said fervently. “And by this light, if I climb the mountains, I could see all the way back to Aman, probably.” 

“Go for it,” Maglor said, “but the other mountain range. Try to catch a glimpse of Angamando. Tyelco-” because he had already starting running off – “no matter what you see, come straight back. Swear.”

 “I swear,” he said solemnly, and then wheeled gracefully around and raced away. 

“He’s right,” Curufin said, “that it hurts the orcs more than us – and, more importantly, that there’s a general principle at work here that advantages us. We’re adaptive. We were taking advantage of Ithil within an hour of its appearance. If you give the order to start irrigating an experimental field off the lake –”

 “Yes, of course.” 

“- then we’ll be exploiting this advantage within an hour too. Moringotto is slow to react to surprises. He’s stronger than us, but he’s clumsy and we’re inventive. Speaking of which, if you liked the idea of poisoned exploding seed pods, I need to go collect samples now before they all bake to death in the light of this hairbrained –” he waved at the sky.

“I’ll track down our arrogant pack of young linguists and ask them for a list of recommended names for it,” Maglor said. 

It was hardly the first priority, though. Concentrated by the lenses in the workshops, the golden light reached a dangerous, searing intensity; it was, Maglor thought as he squinted at it, brighter than Laurelin, and looking directly at Laurelin could fry your eyes. He aided them in pulling the retractible roofs over the lenses, listened to an excitable young engineer with plans to turn the concentrated light into a water heater and possibly a generator, approved efforts to irrigate the western section of the lake, and, as the golden light rose higher in the sky, returned to his room to put on clothes he had not worn since he’d left Tirion. 

I should have known, he thought, when he heard the unmistakable sound of Celegorm on horseback racing toward the camp at top speed, that the good things don’t last even long enough for the beginning of healing. 

Celegorm was dusty and sweaty, his robes sewn for Formenos and for Araman and lately used for lightless Endorë. The horse was overheating, and he waved Maglor toward him as he walked with it toward the lake. “They’re here,” he panted when Maglor reached him.

“Moringotto’s – what are the numbers –”

“Not Moringotto,” he said. “Irissë’s here. They’re all here. Nolofinwë’s people – thousands of them, maybe tens of thousands of them. All of them, possibly. I didn’t stay to count. They’re marching toward Angamando.”

“No,” Maglor whispered.

“Yes,” he said. “I’ve seen them. We need to –”

 “I’ll call a meeting,” Maglor said, and closed his eyes for a second. It didn’t shut out the light. Instead it pulsated, reddish, within his eyelids, until he felt sick and had to bury his face in his hands.

Amrod had taken to sitting on Maglor’s left and leaning in to read whatever he was looking at. He did it today even though there was nothing to look at.

Celegorm and Huan took up the entire right side of the table between them. They both, Maglor thought dimly, looked profoundly unhappy.

“They hiked across the Helcaraxë.”

“Yeah.” 

Celegorm shifted restlessly. “We don’t know that.” 

“It’s a fairly reasonable inference,” Caranthir spat. “I don’t think the Teleri built them boats.”

“Could have built their own-”

Curufin shook his head. “If there were ways of getting here from Aman other than the Helcaraxë, Father would have thought of them. It’s utterly implausible that Nolofinwë found something he didn’t-”

“He wasn’t exactly in his right mind.”

“Our people weren’t disciplined enough to get the ships out of Alqualondë and Olwë’s were willing to kill over mere property,” Curufin snapped. “Anyone who claims we could reasonably have anticipated that is a liar, because you didn’t.” He looked around the table. “None of you did.”

“I rather doubt Olwë did,” Celegorm offered. “And in fairness, they mightn’t have been trying to kill us, at first, throwing people into the water. They weren’t familiar with armor, they might not have known that an armored man can’t swim –” 

“That debacle,” said Maglor flatly, “is not worth rehashing at any length. It’s done, and we did it, and we carry it with us –”

“How courageous of you,” murmured Amrod.

“Ah, but Cáno,” Curufin said, “you’ve missed the essential trait distinguishing this argument from our previous ones. In this case we are using our differing assessments of Father’s capabilities and sanity to arrive at different conclusions. I contend that Nolofinwë and his host must have crossed the Helcaraxë. Because I am confident in our father’s judgment that there was no conceivable way to leave Aman save by the theft of the boats or by the Helcaraxë. Anyone who does not share my confidence in him can predict, instead, that they found another means of passage, and we’ll see the issue settled shortly. I will grant you that every previous discussion on this topic has been an abhorrent waste of time and energy. But this one is not.”

“If they did,” Caranthir said, “they will have suffered staggering losses. It’s not a safe – hell, I’m stunned it’s even possible – they must be starving.”

“It’s not any more feasible to eat off the land here,” Curufin said. “Or, rather, it wasn’t until recently. He gestured outside, even though the room was windowless. “They can’t be any hungrier than we are.”

Caranthir shook his head. “They’ve been walking the whole time. That’s double the food needed.”

“They can’t have been walking the whole time,” Curufin said. “It’s less than half the distance from Tirion to Formenos, and we travelled that, in the dark, in less than half a Year’s time. It has been four Years.” 

“And yet,” said Maglor, “we can anticipate that they’re hungry, low on or out of supplies of food and in poor physical condition. And that they’ve suffered substantial losses, probably of children in particular. We can verify all that with some scouts – yes,” he added to Celegorm, who was standing to leave, “but not right now – and that will settle the question far more effectively than speculating.”

Celegorm sat back down, heavily. “They’re going to hate us.” 

“Going to?” Amrod said. “Already do, presumably. We killed them –” 

“No, we didn’t.” Curufin said impatiently.

“Yes,” Amrod retorted, “we did, and you are the one who persuaded me of it, so for a few minutes, god damn you, you will listen. You explained to me, a while ago – on a boat, and I was seasick, so it’s possible a few details have escaped me, but –”

 “Pityo, you can make your point without the hostility,” Maglor said.

 “Curufinwë Atarinke presented me with the following dilemma. I live alone; a person comes to my house, injured and in need of aid. I refuse it, and they die. Am I accountable?”

“Yes,” Caranthir said impatiently.

 “The person comes to my house, injured but not fatally. But they intend to go straight back out, and if they don’t rest they assuredly will die. They intend to do this because a child of theirs is alone outside, half a day’s walk away. They are determined to return to the child, and cannot be dissuaded, nor can you stop them from leaving. You could however offer to go yourself, or offer to lend them a horse, or tell them of a shorter path to the valley where the child is. If you make either offer, they live. Instead you don’t, and they die. Are you accountable?”

“Yes.”   

“General principle. A person in desperate need is set upon their course. They cannot be dissuaded from it, and indeed turning from it would impose a terrible cost on them. You have the means to help them – by taking the trip with them, or by lending something you hold dear, or by teaching them how to make the journey more safely. You withhold such aid. They die, are you guilty?”

“We thought Nolofinwë’s people would return to Aman,” said Curufin. 

“Then we obviously did not think very hard.”

“We thought that,” said Curufin, “because our own people contained many among them scared and whining they wished to return to Aman – and if there were such cowards even among our own family, then how on earth could we expect steadfast hearts among Indis’ kin?” 

Celegorm had stirred at that, but Amrod waved him down. “Oh,” he said, “now you’re just being lazy with the insults. I knew him better than you did, and he was not a coward. Shortsighted? Yes. Reckless? Yes. I suppose he got both traits from our father. Principled to a fault? Time, I suppose, will answer that, but I’ll grant you it in the meantime. But he knew. Telufinwe knew that he had sworn the Oath, and that he was damned forever unless he fulfilled it. He knew he faced the wrath of the Valar, and of Eru, if he returned and he knew the fate he had bound himself to after that. And still. He thought it was the right thing to do, and so he did it. You don’t have that courage. You cannot imagine it. You never will. Give me an army of ten such cowards, and I’ll burn Moringotto on his throne.”

“They’d decide they were so impure as to be undeserving of the plaudits for destroying him,” Curufin said, “and so let him live.”

“Both of you,” said Maglor coldly, “are being vicious, cruel, unfair and unkind. Every person in this room has chosen to bear terrible risk to see terrible evils brought to heel. Every person has made the compromises and sacrifices necessary to place us in the best position for that war, or best uphold their duty to their people, or best uphold their conscience, when those differed. And we’ve all got it wrong a couple times. We are doomed, even, to get it wrong. To be presented with those choices again and again and have the world twist itself into knots to make our choices wrong, no matter how good our intentions.” He turned to Curufin. “Your extended meditation on the duties of aid owed a desperate, injured friend would have been useful to present to Olwë, back when that mattered. After that you should have dropped it. No one cares if he was in the wrong to refuse to teach us to build boats. Though it’s not a fraction as fucking useless as relentlessly derailing conversations to insinuate that the dead deserved it, so if you’re determined to devote your energy to one of the two –”

“You’re not well-suited to the role of mediator, Cáno,” Curufin said. “It’s too obvious you just want everyone to shut up and leave you alone.”

“Tyelcormo,” Maglor said, “if he speaks again without permission throw him out of this room.”

“No,” Celegorm said. “He’s being cruel but you’re pretending to be wise and neutral and that’s even worse, I think.” He stood. “I’m leaving.”

“I have work to do,” said Curufin, standing as well. “If they come here, and they’re angry, we’re going to need to defend ourselves.” 

“I’m not killing anybody who marched across the Helcaraxë to come give Moringotto a fight,” said Celegorm. “And why would they come here? There’s a whole continent out here. They can go somewhere else.”

“Mountains,” said Caranthir carelessly. “Strong defensive strategic position, water for agriculture, good line of retreat to the sea – we wouldn’t think of it like that, but they would.”

“Father,” Curufin said. “They’ll come for Father. They think he’s here, so they’ll come. By your leave–” 

“Go,” Maglor said, and shuddered at the screech of chairs being pushed back from the table, and blinked at the sudden, harsh bright golden light that spilled into the conference room, and marvelled, in the sudden silence, at how quickly optimism could turn into despair.

To evil ends shall turn all things that begin well, he thought, and even though the room was superheated by the strange new lights, he shivered.