Nothing Beside Remains by StarSpray

Chapter 1

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The land of Eregion was very quiet. The armies, both defeated and victorious, had long since departed. The land was empty and blackened, burned and destroyed, and only a handful of animals had ventured back into it. Over the charred remains of once-lovely fields and once-mighty forests lay a faint sheen of green, as life carefully began to creep its way back.

But though the countryside was at last beginning to heal itself, the city of Ost-in-Edhil remained a blackened ruin. The walls were crumbled, the houses destroyed or left mere shells of themselves. The mighty work halls of the Gwaith-i-Mírdain had been reduced to rubble.

Maglor stood on their steps, imagining what they had once looked like, a wide swath of pale marble, with pillars holding up the roof and carved with many fair images. There was a fountain still in the square behind him, but it was choked with ash and dirt, its music silenced forever.

Even without stopping to listen he could hear the stones groaning and moaning all around him, mourning the loss of the folk who had delved and built and thrived in this place.

Slowly, carefully, he picked his way up the crumbling stairs and through what had once been wide hallways and airy workrooms. There were no bodies. Someone had come back to recover whoever they could, and there was a long row of stony mounds along the road outside of the city's walls. But whoever they had been, they had not attempted to recover anything else—not that Sauron had left much to recover, Maglor thought. All of the gold and jewels and mithril would have been plundered at the city's fall.

But there were other things left behind. Sketchbooks and rolls of parchment still mostly legible, and bits of carvings. Maglor unearthed an intact figurine of a little girl dancing, her skirt swirling around her legs and her tiny arms lifted above her head, an expression of joy delicately carved onto her face. The work seemed familiar, and sure enough, when he turned the carving over he found a tiny star of Fëanor on the bottom, and a C glyph, for Celebrimbor.

Nearby was a notebook, thick with notes and drawings, though water-damaged, and its cover splattered with old blood. Maglor picked it up, trying not to think of whose blood it was and how it had gotten there. He had heard tales of Celebrimbor's fate—and the fate of his body afterward. He didn't know why Sauron hated Celebrimbor in particular so much. Perhaps it was just that he was Fëanor's grandson. He opened the notebook to a random page, and found a torn but mostly-there plans for a tower. Maglor did not know how old it was, or if this tower had ever been built. But he recognized the style as his nephew's, even after all this time.

Long ago in Himring he remembered Curufin bringing Celebrimbor to visit. He had been so very young then (they all had been so very young, and foolish, and hopeful, in spite of the Oath), and he had spent hours telling Maglor about the cities and towers he planned to build someday, showing off his drawings and diagrams and explaining all of the things he was learning from the dwarves about different kinds of stone and what they were best used for.

Ost-in-Edhil had been the embodiment of those daydreams. Maglor picked up a piece of stone, a chip of granite the size of his palm that had once been part of a wall. This, too, he pocketed.

With that, he turned and left the city, and did not look back. Briefly, he looked north, where folk said that Elrond Peredhel had made an outpost during the war in a hidden valley nestled at the very feet of the Misty Mountains, and then when peace came turned it into a home. But it was to the south that his feet carried him, following the River Gwathló back toward the sea.