Santa Claus (or whatever happened to Maglor...) by ford_of_bruinen

Santa Claus

He could remember a time when he would have hated this cold, the frosty winds sweeping over the small island even in summer before the winter snow and ice buried it and moulded it to the sea come autumn. In fact, he still hated this cold, but at least up here it was peaceful and he was at the centre of the world, all roads from here leading south and, he could pretend to himself, west.

Stretching, he walked down in one of the many tunnels that wound its way deep underground. The darkness in which his subjects worked had long since confirmed his suspicions. Why anyone would call the vicious looking stunted creatures for Elves he had never been able to figure out, more like they were descendants of Orcs and goblins, smaller and weaker than their ancestors but still vicious; put a hand too close to those pointy little teeth and you all but asked to lose it.

The vast underground chamber smelled of woodcuts and paints; they made old fashioned, hand-crafted toys here. What other playthings ended up wrapped and packed for delivery was acquired by... other means, he had never bothered to closely to find out how. Each year he simply handed a list of things needed, computer games, branded toys and other modern toys, to one or two of his more reliable creatures, never exactly enquiring exactly as to how they fulfilled their mission. Once they returned, they brought the things that he had asked for. It was a comfortable arrangement.

Walking through the chamber, he looked over the work done in the past year, the great mountains of presents, many whom would be opened by ungrateful little bastards who had been whining for the latest video game. He admitted it amused him to think of it. Human children were almost as vicious as his workers- almost... At least, as far as he was aware, the human children would not normally consider eating his workers.”

He had built this place many years ago, after centuries of wandering, of searching for something he would never find. No, not the Silmaril - he had found that, embedded in one of the never-melting icebergs that grew to the north of his island. He could see it in certain lights, at sunset and sunrise, under the full moon, gleaming and spreading its eerie light through the ice. It was the way home he had searched for, century after century, hoping to find some kin. Instead the other Elven realms had faded and died, leaving him alone and friendless among mortals who saw his immortality increasingly as a sign of evil. He was inclined to agree with them. When the new religions had grown and overtaken the older cultures he had started hearing rumours of a legend, a gift-bringer in the middle of winter. Something in the idea had appealed to him, perhaps the idea of doing something good and winning redemption. That was how it had started.

Throughout the years it had grown, as much the myth itself as he had within the myth, and he had rediscovered something he thought he had lost: the magic of his voice. It would not work if he used it for long, but for one night a year, sometimes two, he could weave magic such as this mundane and grey world had long forgotten about. He could travel around the world, leaving his gifts, searching for a hole in reality that would show him the way home. He suspected his newly regained powers were connected to the jewel in the ice; at times he played with the idea of carving the ice, splinter by splinter, until he could once again touch the pure light, but every time the thought came to him his fist closed in pain, the scars on his burned and wrecked hand contracting to remind him of the last time. And so the Silmaril remained where it was, and so did he.

He had searched a way to travel in those first years: wolves, which had worked well until people had started seeing them as evil, horses for a while until he grew bored of the plain breeds that now existed. After that he had played with the idea of polar bears, the thick white coats gleaming after a good brushing, but he had lost almost a hundred workers to the hungry animals before he had given up on the idea. Now he used reindeers. They were slow and dull, herd animals at the best of times, but they ate none of his workers, although he could not say the same about the workers eating them, and he could breed a large herd to cover his losses. He had taken an odd liking to using an albino at the front, the strange red eyes and nose appealed to him in a twisted way, reminding him a little of blood and white sands. He was, in his own way, sentimental.

Running his hand through his long hair, he opened the door to his own chambers, set underground of course, where the freezing winds could not blow through the walls. He remembered how his grandfather had proudly worn his beard, short and well tended of course, as a mark of honour and age that few in that time could have achieved. It had been a long time since his own beard had started growing and he sometimes wondered with amusement how long it had taken before his grandfather's ruddy hair had turned as white as his own was these days. Of course he doubted that his grandfather had gained the rather respectable weight that he himself had in the years since he had settled here. It was not that bad a life, workers that mostly kept to themselves, a wife who cooked, although he would rather not ask what, and a warm home. He had had less at times, much less.

She was waiting for him, stretched out lazily across the bed, her whiter-than-milk skin almost luminescent in its own right and the blacker-than-coal curls spreading across the mattress. He smiled at the sight; he knew what she was, of course, if not what name she had originally held, but it did not matter. These days she wore the name of her ancestor, Thuringwethil, and it suited her. She was beautiful and her company was far better than that of his workers. Blood-red lips spread in a slow smile as she gazed up at him and he sat down beside her, as always unable to resist her allure.

Tonight he would drown himself in her, in her cooking, in wine, and tomorrow he would work his magic. Tomorrow he would be Santa Claus.