the dawn from on high by arriviste

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the dawn from on high

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“I have an errand to attend to, but I will join your party at the Havens in good time,” said Gandalf before the great convoy set out from Imladris.

Elrond gave him a sideways look. “Indeed? I had thought your business in Middle-Earth was at last at an end, Mithrandir.”

“There are always loose odds and ends to tidy up before one’s work is quite done.”

“I had thought, too, that all need for evasiveness had also come to an end.”

“My work it has been to kindle hope where it has gone out, or dwindled to a few smouldering embers,” said Gandalf. “I would not kindle it in vain even yet; and so I will thank you to keep your nose out of my business, Lord Elrond!”

Elrond’s winged eyebrows flew up. “I see,” he said, but Gandalf was quite sure that he did not.

It would do Elrond good to puzzle over his meaning in the days he meant to be away. He had been silent too long in these last days in the valley, with sorrow heavy on his brow and sadness in his eyes. He was leaving much that was precious to him in Middle-Earth, great and small. His sons would not ride out with him to Lindon, but would remain with their grandfather at the last. His daughter he had left on a green hill near the Meduseld, with tears in her eyes and a smile, nonetheless, trembling on her mouth; and in that golden hall her husband had stood beside her with all the glory of all the kings of his line back to Tar-Minyatur shining in his face, but silver already in his hair.

“We will not sail without you,” said Galadriel, who had also been silent too long lately. “But do not tarry too long! A hopeless errand swiftly becomes a fool’s one.”

“I have never sought to be called wise,” said Gandalf.

-

He found his loose end past the hills of Lune, on the shores of what had once been Harlindon, face turned to the west as the sun set. He seemed not to hear Shadowfax when he came cantering along the sand, nor did he turn when the hoofbeats slowed, and then stopped, and Gandalf slid from the broad white back.

“Kanafinwë Makalaurë,” Gandalf said, and the words rolled out with an echo of power behind them. They were words to summon with, and words to bind with: words to summon back into flame a fire which had long ago gone out, under different skies and on a different shore.

They were naming words, but their object did not turn, although he began to tremble.

His shoulders were very thin, and his long dark hair was matted with years of salt and sand, a tangle washed only in the sea. There was a shape to his face, even in profile, that spoke of a great and ruined beauty squandered as carelessly as every other gift given to his line; the high arch of his cheekbones shone through the thin and wasted skin.

Gandalf had seen many who had once been great and wise and beautiful brought to ruin, and this last remnant of the Elder Days was not the least of them. He did pity him, but that pity was not unmixed with sternness.

“Kanafinwë Makalaurë,” he said again, and Maglor turned his face from the far-away west at last.

His eyes were terrible. They were bright with the light of the Trees even yet, but clouded, because they had seen terrible things done.

Gandalf had seen death dealt out many times in many ways to the deserving and undeserving alike. That was in these eyes, but more than that. They had seen unjust death done because they had dealt it, with hands that were forever marked not by only murder but by the most holy and pure light left in all of Arda.

In one of those hands now there was a rude flute, carved clumsily out of driftwood, scarcely more than a whistle. The other was malignant with scarring: red and mountainous with proud flesh, and at the same time pitted and gaping over spaces where flesh had been and now was not. There was no sign of a weapon.

“Kanafinwë Makalaurë!” Gandalf cried, a third time, and Maglor fell to his knees before him in the sand. “Do you know who I am?”

It took him several tries to speak. Then, “Ainu,” Maglor said, and like his face, his voice was wasted and worn, but there was still great beauty in it. He swallowed. “Manwë?”

“I am here in the Elder King’s stead,” Gandalf said, “and I am called Mithrandir in this land.”

He looked down at Maglor for a long time, and some of the terrifying snow-white majesty left him as he did. Among the sea-wrack cast up by the wrath of a faraway storm onto the foamy shore-line, this last son of Feanor made sense, as the wreckage of a long-ago world, a tempest long past.

“I am not here to judge you,” Gandalf said finally, and this time he spoke without the sound of thunder or the roar of the winds. “I am here to ask of you again the same question that was put to you once before. Will you return to Valinor, and there abide the judgment of the Valar?”

He expected a proud refusal, as Eonwë had been refused, or perhaps a grateful yielding at long and longed-for last. Instead, Maglor began to laugh, or to cry; both together, painfully, in rasps and spurts that wracked his thin body, and the tears rolled unheeded down his face and to the sand.

“Oh, the Valar may judge me,” he said, more lucidly than before, through the spasms, “and they did, long ago, when Mandos spoke his Doom; they did again when I took my father’s jewel in my hand and felt Varda Elentári deny me. I know what the Valar will say, and I don’t fear it. But what of the judgment of Ilúvatar? He alone can unshackle me from what I have sworn, and he is beyond hearing me.”

“You might, perhaps, unshackle yourself.”

Maglor’s voice rose with the echo of a power which had once sang stone together and moved earth and water. “That, at least, I will not do!”

Gandalf’s brows drew together. “What is it that you think I ask? All I ask of you, Kanafinwë Makalaurë, is what has been asked of you twice now; I will ask a third time, and then it will not be asked again. Will you return to Valinor, and there abide the judgment of the Valar?”

“Have I a choice?”

“I say,” said Gandalf, “that there is always a choice, and when there are no choices left, how we make the choice left to us still matters. You might walk into the sea, or turn your knife upon yourself, and so go to Mandos to be judged; but that, you say, you will not do. You have always had that choice, and yet you have lingered instead on this shore; you may continue to do so until the Second Music, if you choose. I will not urge that path upon you. But I will say that there is a difference between surrender and stubbornness, between obduracy and obedience; and if I say now to you, come home, there is a difference between doing so on your own two feet, and lingering here until your choices narrow to nothing. There is a difference between owning your deeds, and running from them!”

More convulsions of sorrow and laughter, of long hopelessness; Gandalf waited, and like a child sobbing to itself, eventually they slowed, and wore down, and stopped.

“Oh, if I thought it would help,” Maglor said, at last, with great and unutterable weariness, “I would have long ago.”

-

His passenger was very light, and Shadowfax’s long legs ate up the distance as if he were no extra burden at all. Gandalf reached the Havens hours ahead of the winding caravan which had set out from Imladris, laden with the possessions that the Noldor left on Middle-Earth could not yet quite give up.

Elves!

Cirdan said only, when he rode in, “The dregs of the cup, Mithrandir?”

“Even now,” Gandalf said. “At last we have drained it all,” and he meant less a cup of wine bitter with sediment than lingering poison in an old wound, a last reservoir of despair lanced.

Galadriel, when she arrived as part of the great convoy, looked at the sand clinging to the hem of his white robe when she dismounted from her palfrey, but she said nothing. The long agony of denial was falling away from her like a cloak, and Nenya’s weary star on her hand was singing in harmony with the sea at last, with the tide and the scent of sea-salt blown in on the wind. There was little will left in her for discord now, like a diamond taken cloudy from the stone and slowly cut and polished until all that was left was radiant and free of flaw.

Elrond still looked sorrowful, but he was surrounded by hobbits on their diminutive ponies, which Gandalf accounted an excellent tonic. Sam and Frodo and Bilbo were clustered together, and although Sam looked tragic, Frodo’s face was already lightening the nearer he drew to promised release from his pain.

There was sorrow, too, in Merry and Pippin’s faces when they rode up to join the party for their leave-taking, but it grew less as they spoke to Frodo, and embraced him. That was another loose end tied up; they would see Sam home safe, and with company other than his grief.

Galadriel looked much, but she said nothing when her cousin, clad hastily in grey by some of Cirdan’s folk, joined the rest of the host filing past filling the ship as the hobbits took leave of Frodo. They were largely from Imladris but there were some from the Dreamflower, and from Greenwood that had been Great and would be again. Maglor’s was not a face that could be easily lost in a crowd, even among the many dark heads that had gathered in the Hall of Fire, and before that in Lindon and in Hollin, and before that in Beleriand: in Hithlum and Nargothrond, in Gondolin and Thargelion, in Sirion and on Balar.

Elrond too said nothing, but the look on his face at the sight of Maglor was very different from that on Galadriel’s. It brought Gandalf joy to balance out one of his many farewells with a meeting, ahead of those still to come. Still, when Elrond seemed like he meant to go at once to him, Gandalf shook his head. The white ship was still at the quay, and he would not have his bird in hand startled into flight too soon.

They were almost the last to board the ship. Galadriel, bearing Nenya, and Elrond, bearing Vilya, and finally Gandalf, with the red flame of Narya burning on his hand. He lingered a moment to give the last hope that he could on Middle-Earth to the small sad faces before him, and saw them smile before he left them.

Frodo was the very last to board, but there was no regret left on his face now. That was one of the things that Gandalf appreciated most in hobbit-kind; they could set things aside and move cleanly forward once they had seen the necessity, and they lived more in the present moment than they lingered in the past.

And then the ship left the faded and empty kingdom of Lindon behind, and there was nothing before it on the horizon but blue sky and blue sea until it slipped the net of Arda, and passed beyond it; and then Elrond, lord of Imladris, made his peace with he who had once been kidnapper and foster-father together as the sweet silver mist came down.

And when it had lifted, the light in the topmost tower of Tol Eressëa shone through the distance like a star.

-

“Two Ages of the world have passed since we first called you hence, Kanafinwë Makalaurë,” said the Elder King. “Have you come to ask for pardon?”

“No,” said Maglor Fëanorion, kneeling before his throne as he had in the sand before Gandalf. “I have come for judgment.”

A ripple went through the gathered Valar.

It was like the wind off a glacier, and the feeling of stepping off an unseen underwater cliff into deep water; it was the sound of hounds baying in the distance and the loud pulse of a rabbit’s heart, and it was the sound of a sword drawn from the sheath. It was the utter silence between the stars, and the long patience of seeds waiting in the earth.

“Do you know that you did wrong?” asked the Elder King, and looked at the last son of proud Fëanor with eyes as pale as glacier wind, and as sharp.

That was where they had dealt poorly with Fëanor, and with Melkor before him; they had left those proud hearts smarting, and sent them away bearing punishment rather than undertaking penance.

“He knows,” said Nienna, and wept, deep in her grey hood.

“He knew he did wrong when he wore his father’s oath? He knew he did wrong at Alqualondë? He knew he did wrong at Doriath, and again at Sirion? He knew he did wrong when Eonwë first called him to come here and account, and when instead he sought the jewels with his sword?”

“He knew,” said Nienna, still weeping. “That is his tragedy. He always knew.”

“He might have come when Eonwë called; even then he would have done less ill.”

“The crimes were severe,” said Estë the Gentle in her voice like feathers, “and yet it seems to me that so too has been the punishment.”

“The Dark Enemy of all the world served his sentence for but three Ages of Arda, and his crimes were black indeed,” said Vairë the Weaver; “by my measure, Kanafinwë Makalaurë has been punished for nearly as long.”

“Has he?” said the Great Rider, and snapped his fingers at one of the hounds by his knee. “It seems to me that his sentence has yet to be passed, and that any punishment can begin only after we have done so.”

“We are not here to punish,” said Mandos, Judge of the Dead, “but to render justice, and the two are not the same.”

Maglor remained bowed before the Elder King. His father had stood, but Fëanor had been full of wrath and pride, and his son seemed to hold only a great emptiness, like a sea-shell curled around only the echo of a sea-song.

“Long have you sung your sorrow to my shores,” Ulmo King of the Sea said to him, and his face was troubled. “I have heard your sorrow, Kanafinwë Makalaurë, but once you came with the sword to take from my Foam-Riders what they loved best, and you took their lives from them and burned the works of their hands. You came again with the sword to your own people come living out of Ondolindë, and you took their lives from them, and only by the doom in her blood and my aid did Elwing Star-Foam escape you. And yet long you have sung, and I have heard you.”

“A song sung only to the wind and to the waves,” said the Smith heavily; “a gift wasted,” and those who knew Aulë well knew what a damning verdict that was.

“A life wasted,” said Yavanna the Giver of Fruits; a lament, but also a judgment.

Varda Ever-White, Queen of Stars, said nothing, for her conclusion was already written in Maglor’s flesh.

“And yet,” said the Elder King, “he has come at last, at my bidding.”

“And mine,” said Nienna, and the tears on her cheeks were like pearls. “For Olorin called the White was once called the Grey, and he went forth into the round world not only in obedience to your will, but at my request; and I bade him to deal out mercy where he might, and to see home the last of those under the Doom.”

There was a long silence as the Valar considered that, and in that silence decisions were made, inexorable as an avalanche, as slow and sure as water wearing away stone, or vines pulling apart brick.

The Queen of Stars spoke at last. “Ask him,” she said, “what it is he would have of us, if he might,” and her voice was like the distant chime of crystal spheres.

The ruin that had once been the second son of proud Fëanor, and the lord of the Gap in Beleriand, and the owner of one of the purest voices ever heard lifted his face, and his eyes still spoke of death; death as an enemy, death as a nightmare, death as a companion, and death at last as a longed-for friend. “Rest,” he said, and his voice was only a thread of what it had once been. “Freedom from my Oath. After all this time, I want an ending; but I don’t know if you can give it to me.”

Irmo, Master of Dreams and Desires, shut his moonstone eyes and reached out with his will, and finally said, “He means it.”

“Three Ages of the World we bound the Dark Enemy,” said Oromë warningly.

“An Age yet we might hold Kanafinwë Makalaurë, and if the crimes were not equal, yet the punishment would be,” said Mandos. “In my Halls I would hold him, and give him respite; but he lives yet, and death is not ours to deal him.”

Vána Ever-Young said nothing, but she slipped from her throne and went to the side of Fëanor’s son, and put her white hand to his weathered cheek. He turned into her touch like one of her husband’s hounds, and a little of the long weariness in his face eased, and it could be seen for the first time that he had once been one of the great princes of the Noldor.

“Take your release, son of Fëanor, if you will,” said the Elder King, and with a long sigh Maglor Fëanorion sagged forward into Vána’s hold. There was a brightness like the brightness of snow in the sunshine as he yielded up his fëa freely, and with his choice the last claws of the Oath opened like a flower and let it go.

It hung in the air, a ragged and tattered thing, rent from grief and the Oath-binding and its own evil deeds, and the Valar on their thrones regarded it with sorrow.

Nienna said, “I will see it mended, though it take an Age.”

“Mended is not the same as being made whole,” said Varda Ever-White, “and my judgment will stay on him, even anew again in flesh, for his deeds will not and may not be undone.”

“That is just,” said Mandos, and the fëa he took into his halls, and the hroa Estë laid down in the long grass in the gardens of Lorien, his marked hands crossed over his breast.