For the First Time in Forever by quillingmesoftly

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Fading Summer

In which Maglor is supportive, and Neniel has a crisis of confidence, confides a secret, and finds a way. 

Maglor swallowed the last piece of flatbread. Nurwë’s voice was bright and interested as he spoke to Regen, but his eyes continued to flick to the screen and the kitchen door of the longhouse. Dînen was asking Tauren and Helado about the progress with their projects. And Neniel’s absence was a near palpable thing beside him, the space where she should have been speaking with her siblings and teasing them, enjoying the time with her family. At last, they rose to clear the plates, and Maglor passed the bowls to Nurwë. 

“Where do you think she’s gone?” Maglor asked. 

Nurwë frowned. “There’s a stream that runs into the river by a willow grove. She’s likely there. I think she was startled by how many people decided to follow her lead last night.” He poured water into the skillets. “I should go to her.” 

Maglor frowned, and chose his words very carefully before he spoke. “I…am not sure that Neniel would tell you, if she was worried. You’re her father, after all.” 

Nurwë’s expression was pure confusion. “What do you mean?” 

Maglor looked at him for a long moment, and then comprehension dawned like the sunrise. He’s Unbegotten. And Dînen is a Maia! Neither of them know. No wonder there had been so much relief in her gaze, when she looked at him by the sea shore. How can two beings without parents understand how much… 

“She wants you to be proud of her,” Maglor said. “She wants to do a good job. For you to value her.” Nurwë’s eyebrows crashed together in a thunderous frown, and Maglor held out his hands, palm out, speaking quickly to forestall the explosion. “And of course you value her, and you are proud of her. That much is obvious. But…there is almost certainly a little voice in her head that is saying that she is going to do terribly at this, and that you are going to be disappointed.” Nurwë’s expression was softening, a little. “Let me try first. You’re the person she’s looked up to from her earliest moments. I’m just a friend.” My opinion matters much, much less. Even though he apparently had enough Fëanorion pride left that it felt like running nails down the blackboard of his fëa to admit that.  

Nurwë was silent for a while, before at last, a wry smile hovered at the corners of his mouth. “Twisty reasoning. But I think I understand it. Alright. Walk north-west beyond the last longhouse, and you should come to the stream; follow it west until you come to the willow grove.”

It must have been very lonely before her cousins were born, Maglor thought, and he left the longhouse. Atar had not been perfect, no, but he had keenly known the fear of having been a disappointment, and he had worked very hard to make sure his sons did not know the same fear. Even so, the insecurity had never entirely vanished, and Maglor had not been fully able to see the way it had lingered in himself until Elrond and Elros wriggled their way irreversibly under his skin and into his heart. It had to have been difficult, growing up with parents could never have understood that.

The summer sun was already streaming onto the river, and into the forest. Up ahead, he could smell the distinctive scent of molten metal, and on the river, canoes had already been pushed into the river; the fisher-Elves were singing a merry rhapsody, and Maglor listened with interest. It was a laughing tune, with the quick, pattering rhythm that many of the Kindi songs had. The harmony was wordless, but the melody was not, and the lyrics had been composed from the perspective of the river otter. The otter sang of his prowess in the river, of how nimbly and quickly he could dive through the waters, and of the different kinds of fish. An instructional rhyme, sung by children to learn the different kinds of prey, and by adults for the joy of passing it on. 

When the song had almost passed out of earshot, he came to a stream, and he glanced behind him, and ahead. No more longhouses. This must be the one, then. He turned west, searching with thought for the distinctive sense of lapping waters, and found her. 

She was sitting with her legs dangling in the stream, her back against a willow tree. She was not singing or kicking her legs back and forth, but she wasn’t listening to the currents, either. There was none of the trancelike stillness that marked her when she meditated. Instead, she had a water lily in her hands, and was shredding the petals off of it, one by one.  

He sat down beside her, and nudged her. “We missed you at breakfast.” 

“Mmm.” 

“What are you thinking about?” 

She swallowed, and picked another petal off the water lily. “They said they’d follow me.” 

Maglor nodded. “Yes…” 

She shook her head, something helpless in the movement, and worry flickered through him at the sight of it. Neniel was irrepressible, her spirit as light-filled and joyful as the sunlight playing on her hair. Maglor folded his hands together and set them in his lap. It reduced the chances of his doing something stupid.

“I – I just…” She snorted, and shook her head. “Stars, I feel like such a child now.” 

“Why?” 

She shrugged. “I was never going to be the heir. Never supposed to be the heir. Inheritance passes through the mother’s line, and my inheritance is…” she gestured at the world around her. “The stars, the waters, the otters, the fact that the world recognises me as a part of it, not just one who inhabits it. It bothered me when I was growing up, but I’d made my peace with it. And then I let Ráca hand the task of leading them over to me.” She shook her head. Blonde waves were tangled and knotted. “I’m wondering if it wasn’t a terrible mistake.”

In other words, she was frightened. 

Maglor shook his head, smiling. “You’ll be fine.” 

She glared. “Maglor.” Implicit was the reprimand at dismissing her so casually. Maglor shook his head again. He understood, he did, but…

“Neniel,” he returned, smiling at her. “Really. You’ll be fine.”

“You don’t know that!”

“No,” he admitted. “But they’ve chosen to follow you, Neniel. They all know you, you’ve grown up with them, and they’ve chosen you.  Don’t underestimate the power of that. And considering how much of leading is just talking people into things, or persuading them, I have every faith in you.” Her glance was questioning, and his smile widened. “Do I really need to mention your record of talking people into things?” 

She rolled her eyes, but she was smiling now. “You think so?” 

“I’m certain,” Maglor said. He picked the petals up out of her hand and tossed them back into the water, before he pulled her up. “Come on, take me through it. What’s your plan for getting them to Mithlond?” 

“I thought I’d start by talking to my Uncle,” she said, falling into step with him. “If it’s by the coast, then Ossë will know where it is. And he told me once, when I was little, about teaching some of the Elves who left about how to make water craft.” 

“The Teleri,” Maglor said, with a nod and his heart twisting with an old, weary guilt as he remembered the swan-ships of Alqualondë. Neniel’s glance at him was uncomfortably perceptive – why was he even surprised by that anymore? How had he ever thought her naïve? – and she smiled, a touch sardonically. 

“Are you likely to do a repeat of Losgar?” 

“No! But…” Maglor hesitated, glancing down at his scarred palm. But I can never be as I was, either. Never be Makalaurë, the proud, talented fool of a prince who had sung with the Teleri on their ships in the pale light of Laurelin. Neniel caught the glance, and her gaze softened, mouth twisting apologetically, as her hand landed on his shoulder. Her fingers squeezed gently.

“Maglor?” 

He swallowed. “What was it you said last night? Through the darkness to the starlight?” 

She nodded, and Maglor let his hand come up to land on top of hers, his thumb moving over her knuckles. They stood like that for a while, the sunlight streaming down onto the river banks, the larks trilling in the trees, the cool touch of her hand on his shoulder a silent comfort. 

“It sounds like a good place to start,” he told her, finding his voice at last. The words came out much huskier than he had intended. 

She smiled at him. Apparently, she hadn’t noticed. “Come on, then.”

 The sight of Ossë, Dînen and Neniel all sitting cross-legged on the floor of the longhouse was…well, a little startling, frankly. But nonetheless, there they were, the two Maiar and the half-Elf, as Ossë’s webbed hands made sketches in the dirt of the coast-line, indicating the route that Neniel would have to take, if she wanted to sail to Mithlond. The map was very detailed as far as the coastline was concerned. It was just that after that, it got remarkably hazy. 

“So you’re saying there’s no way I’d be there before winter,” she said, frowning in thought.  

Ossë shook his head. “Not a chance. Even if Uinen and I tugged the currents to help, there’s still time building the boats, and it’s not a short distance.” 

Neniel sighed. “Just over a season, you say?” 

Ossë nodded. “At least. Possibly two seasons, if you set sail in the autumn.” 

Neniel’s frown deepened. “I don’t think it’ll be an easy winter this year. Will it?” she glanced at her mother questioningly, and Dînen shook her head. 

“No. I’ll probably be asleep for a third of it, at least.” 

Neniel nodded, and Maglor tried not to stare. Asleep. For a third of winter. How? Why? “So, sailing this year is not an option,” Neniel said. “We could wait until the spring, I suppose, but…” she turned to him with a frown. “You went came down from the north coast of Lindon by land. There has to be a land route, doesn’t there?” 

“I’m certain there is,” Maglor agreed. “I simply have no idea where.” 

Neniel sighed, staring at the dirt sketch gloomily. Then a thought occurred to her, and she blinked at her mother. “Are Galadriel’s people still up around the Lake?” 

Dînen’s eyes went hazy and unfocussed for a moment, before she nodded. “On the south shore.” 

Neniel nodded. “Alright. Time I paid them a visit, then. I’ll wait till next year if I have to, but not if there’s a better choice.” She rose, and kissed Ossë on the cheek. “Thank you for coming up-river, Uncle.” 

Ossë smiled, and scooped her up in a hug, before walking out the door of the longhouse. Seaweed robes fluttered as he moved, and webbed fingers moved in a graceful wave. “Valar favour you, nettá.” 

He walked into the river, and a moment later, the only sign of his having been there at all was bits of seaweed floating down the river. Neniel rubbed at her forehead, and Maglor rested a hand on her shoulder. Her hand left off rubbing at her forehead to land on his. Her skin was cool to the touch. 

“Go ahead,” she said, eyes half-closing, her face falling. She looked almost like she was steeling herself for a blow. “Ask.” 

Suddenly, the thought of answers was much less appealing. Still, he must have been his father’s son in some respects, because he asked. “Why are you so adamant that you must be in Mithlond before winter?” It wasn’t that it was a foolish decision. But Neniel’s grid for what was and was not a foolish decision usually looked quite different from a normal Elf’s. For it to match on this point, of all things…

Silence. Then, eventually: “I’m not well in winter.” The words were quiet, and not bitter, but only because they lacked bite or venom. It was resignation. “Some winters are better than others. Nearly all, I can push through. Sometimes, though…” She swallowed and shook her head again, braid swinging with the movement. “It’s one of the reasons why Ráca’s coming.” She held her mind open, and allowed him to see a familiar sense of numb hopelessness, of pain that would never stopped, of spiralling patterns of thought that only ever went downward. Only in her case it was intertwined with memories of freezing cold, and being nestled into her sleeping mother’s side, who would not, could not wake, no matter how much her daughter cried. 

Wisdom be damned, Maglor thought, a stone in his throat as he pulled her into a tight hug. Neniel didn’t seem to mind, judging by the way that she leaned into the touch. 

 “Either we get settled in Mithlond by the first frost, or I don’t leave till the spring,” she said. “That’s the way it will be this year.”  

Maglor hummed. “Even if you get your people settled by the first frost, it will be hard for them. It’s not easy coming to live among a new people, and they’ll be looking to you.” He rubbed a circle into her back. “Will you take my advice, if I give it?” 

“Maybe.” There was a spark of teasing in her eyes as she stepped back out of the hug. Not as merry or mirthful as it normally was, but he’d take it. “You swim with your clothes on. I’m not sure I should take your advice.” 

He snorted. “Stay here until the spring. Start teaching Thindarin to the people coming with you, rest, use the autumn to prepare what you’ll need for the journey. It will be easier because you won’t be improvising at every turn, and it will make it easier on your people, too. You might not come back for a long while. Let them have the winter with their families.” Take the time with yours. Dance with your cousins, cuddle with your sisters. 

She thought about it for a minute, and nodded. “I can see the logic in that. I’ll tell them soon. First, I should go and visit Galadriel. It’ll go over better if I can tell them we know where we’re going.” 

Maglor snorted. “There is that,” he admitted. 

“Do you want to come?” 

Did he want to come and see his cousin? It would have been tempting, if it weren’t for the fact that after Doriath and the Havens, the outcome would likely be a fifth Kinslaying. 

Maglor shook his head, managing a smile for her. “No, you go on ahead. Just tell me the news when you get back.” 

 She came back a little over a week later through the kitchen door, with two salmon dangling from her hands, kingfisher feathers in her hair,  and a luminous smile on her face. She set the salmon on the bench, and then sat down beside him, jostling the pelts as he stitched the bearskin to the nettle cloth that Helado had provided. Maglor set down the needles, as she opened up the otter-skin pack and unrolled a piece of paper. Maglor ran a hand over it, smoothing it out and weighting it down with the bottom of an empty bowl. The key of the map was written in a fair, unfamiliar hand in tengwar and in Sindarin, and below it, in a bottom-left corner was an unfamiliar woman’s sigil, a ring of silver flowers bordering a four-pointed golden star, set within a golden lozenge. It stretched from Lake Nenuial to the Kindi settlement, from the Baranduin to the coastline forming the east and west borders, the Lhûn running along the top edge of the sheet of paper before it dipped down into the Gulf.  

“Who gave you the map?” 

“Galadriel’s daughter, Celebrían.”  

Shock sluiced down his spine like ice. “Artanis has a child now?” 

She nodded. “Born about a century ago, I think. She’s lovely. She comes downriver and visits sometimes. But she spends a lot of time working on these.” Neniel frowned as her finger ran over the Lhûn. “So, this is the Lhûn. We’d have to go by Lake Nenuial, though, if we were going that way. It might be smarter to just take the dogs and the travois for provisions and cut across the downs, and go up to Mithlond that way. The hills and downs should make for good landmarks, and if we just walk until we hit the Lhûn, we shouldn’t get lost.” 

Maglor shook his head, pulling himself back into the present, and studied the map again. “A month to six weeks to travel over-land, if you stop to sleep regularly. And if you leave in the spring, that still leaves you all of summer and autumn there to get settled and get familiar with the city. You’ll need it.” 

Neniel’s glance was questioning, and Maglor smiled at her wryly. “You’ve never lived as a foreigner in someone else’s land, have you? There’s a kind of…” Stars. What was the appropriate metaphor to explain? 

He thought back to Aman, and elfling days, and the dizzy feeling that had once taken him as Maitimo and Finno once yanked a rug out from under him. He reached out and tapped with the memory. Her eyebrows rose. 

“You’re saying that we’re going to feel like we’ve fallen down when we go to Mithlond?” 

“Finrod and I agreed on a term for it, at Mereth Aderthad,” Maglor said. “We called it culture shock.” He shook his head. “The more time you can give your people, the better. Go in the spring, and cut across the downs. If you really want to build ships, I’m certain there’ll be plenty of time to do that. Círdan will probably be happy to help. ”

“Will you come?” 

That was the question, wasn’t it? 

Gil-galad would not have forgiven attacking the Host of the Valar, even if he had obeyed Ëonwë’s command to let Maedhros and Maglor go free. Even if he had, Mithlond held Sindar, and Noldor who had owed their allegiance to the House of Fingolfin and decided to stay in Middle-Earth, and Falathrim. They would, presumably, not be rejoicing for the last member of the Kinslaying Fëanorions to come forward and live among them, even if Gil-galad wished it.  

But eventually, Maglor shook his head. 

“I think if you and the other Kindi don’t talk about me much, then Gil-galad will probably not drag me in to be executed,” he said. Neniel swallowed abruptly, and Maglor winced, giving her hand an apologetic squeeze. “Sorry. But I won’t come with you to Mithlond. I might go into the caves of the Ered Luin, for the winter. It might be more comfortable than the beach near Himling.” 

She nodded. “A good plan. I’ll talk to everybody about it. It should be alright.” She paused. “Although, now that I think of it, I really should have given you a different name, when I was introducing you to the hall. Iarwain Ben-adar, maybe.” 

Maglor snorted. “Iarwain would rightly go to your father, and Salyë, and Círdan. And Lenwë, I suppose, if he’s still alive.” 

“You’re the eldest of the House of Finwë still in Middle-Earth,” she said. Maglor ignored this point. 

“And ben-adar is hardly how most would describe me.” Not when his entire fate had been decided by his grandfather, father, and the works of Fëanor’s hands…

“Correct me if I’m wrong,” she said, a sweet note in her voice that Maglor recognised from the final argument they’d had before he gave in and the pelts. “But – unless I misunderstood that entire section of Leithian – a false name is for avoiding recognition, is it not? For being inaccurate, in order to mislead others?” 

So this was how a rabbit felt when a trap sprang around his legs. “And so you argue me into a corner once again. Poor Gil-galad.” 

Her eyebrows rose, her head tilted to the side in birdlike curiosity. “Why poor Gil-galad?”

“Because he is going to have many more headaches next year,” Maglor said, and he yelped as Neniel’s fingers pinched at his ribs in swift retribution. “Ai! That was a compliment, I swear!” 

“Really,” Neniel drawled, unconvinced, and Maglor caught her wrists, laughing. 

“A compliment to your skills in an argument,” he said, and she did smile at that, wry and amused and perhaps a little pleased. 

“May the Valar save me from silver-tongued princes,” she said, and Maglor shook his head. Regardless of who his grandfather had been, he barely counted anymore. Although it was nice to know that he still had some skill at soothing ruffled feathers. 

“Oh, no. You’re definitely going to the wrong place if you want to avoid those.” Snorting with laughter again, he caught Neniel’s wrist once more as she went to flick him in the forehead, and she laughed as well, her eyes sparkling. 

“Alright. The overland route in the spring,” she said, eventually. 

Maglor nodded. “I think that’d be best.” 

Maglor had not felt this irritated for a long time, he thought, when Neniel said: “I’m thinking of calling him Iarwain ben-adar. It might cause a few less problems in Mithlond than Nerdanelion, and you know the Sindar don’t do as we do, they go by the father’s line. What do you think, Ataro?” 

She was sitting cross-legged on the kitchen floor, deliberately staying out of his and Nurwë’s way, even as she carefully applied kingfisher feathers to another arrow. Maglor retrieved the jar of pickled vegetables, set it on the bench, and then turned and glared at her, folding his arms across his chest. Nurwë’s brow had wrinkled as he put the pieces together, before he glanced at Maglor, amusement in his eyes. 

“As another name? I approve,” Nurwë said, his eyes gleaming. “Eldest, indeed. Anyone would assume you were referring to one of my peers, and yet every word of it is accurate.”

“I do not approve,” Maglor put in, feeling more than a bit testy, as he grabbed the jar of pickled vegetables.

“I like it as well,” Dînen said, from beside Neniel, leaving off her conversation with the kingfisher on her arm. The kingfisher dropped the dead lizard it was holding to give a long, trilling call, as if also in agreeement. Maglor glared at it, too. 

“I’m already known among you as Maglor Nerdanelion.” Eru, it still felt strange for that to be the thing that he said. He’d never been ashamed of his mother, of course, but it had never seemed to define him in quite the same way that being a son of Fëanor had, even before Morgoth’s release. It was not Nerdanel, after all, who was the heir to Finwë Noldóran. The histories would have been unfathomably different, had she been. “Do you really think you can persuade seventy-five people to keep a secret?” 

…Well. The Kinslaying had been concealed for a time, now that he thought about it. Perhaps with the Enemy gone beyond the Void, a Kinslayer could also be concealed. 

“Possibly I could,” Neniel said, a distinctly mischievous smile lighting up her face as she applied the fish glue to another arrow. “If I’m as persuasive as you say I am. But I can definitely persuade enough people to tease you. Especially if you get that tetchy every time we call you it, O Iarwain. And soon enough, it’ll catch on, and they’ll forget they ever heard you called anything else. It’s not like you’ve spent a lot of time with anyone outside of the family.”

He shot her an icy glare, and then, with a slowly dawning feeling of horror, realised that he was helping prove her point. 

“You’re insane,” he told her.

“And yet-” she said, with a grin, as she applied the feathers to the shaft. “You followed me home anyway.” 

“You practically dragged me,” Maglor said, but it was a weak protest.  

“Oh, yes. Kicking and screaming. How could I forget?” 

Teaching her Sindarin had been a terrible idea. He’d have to figure out exactly where it ranked in the slew of terrible ideas he’d pursued throughout his life later. “How will you explain the joke? Its usefulness as a false name evaporates the moment you say ‘eldest of the House of Finwë.’” 

Her smile widened. “Oh, that’s easy. You kept calling me young, so I decided to tease you about your ancient, creaky bones, Iarwain.” 

“Creaky!” His outraged voice echoed off the walls of the longhouse. 

Neniel laughed, replaced the lid of the glue jar, and disappeared out the door of the longhouse. Before dawn the next day, it must have spread through the settlement, because Maglor found himself hailed by a cry of Iarwain in the early morning, followed by a playful invitation to join the fishermen on their canoes. He went with them. He had, after all, been advised to make himself useful, and they were pleasant enough company.

Ben-adar still grated on every last nerve he had, even if it had been technically true since before the Moon rose. But Maglor found himself answering to Iarwain without even a grimace by the time the leaves had carpeted the forest floor in red and gold. 

 

Chapter End Notes

Nettá: Kindi, little one.

Neniel's seasonal depression is something that greatly intrigues me, mostly because I was always startled by the fact that such a lively character as Goldberry seemed to just spend a great deal of time sitting in her chair in the winter, in the text. But whenever you have a hybrid, there's often a case of great strengths, but also particular quirks. In this case, I think Neniel inherited some of how her mother, as a Maia of a river, is bound to embody the seasons in a way. So just as rivers can freeze over in particularly cold winters, Dînen can hibernate. 

The sigil that Celebrían's map is marked with is based off the wonderful work by heget_squirrelwrangler. 

Iarwain Ben-Adar: the name that Elrond knows Tom Bombadil by. Translates to 'Eldest and Fatherless.' 

 

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