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

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iii.

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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.