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

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i.

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

- The Tempest

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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.