A New Day in Valinor by Lferion

Ever On

Written for the Fan Flashworks challenge The Last Word, and the SWG challenge Turgon's Rock Opera, with the prompt of Patti Smith's Because the Night.

Posted here on Fan Flashworks as a fixed length ficlet of 250 words. Revised to a triple drabble, expanding on the SWG prompt, and posted here on SWG, and here on AO3.

Many thanks to Runa for encouragement and sanity-checking.

Maedhros shut the book, contemplating the last words: The End in a flourish of red ink. Simple, clear, unambiguous. There were no more words on the page to read. The story was finished.

But stories were never finished, except in books, and occasionally bed-times. One's own part might end, in death or because things moved on without one, but the story went on — other people doing things and the consequences of those actions, people reacting and thinking, planning and doing and failing to do, over and over and on. And on and on and on, sometimes. How else was he sitting here, a book in his hands, more books on the shelf, with Fingon beside him, writing something, and his father across the room, being interrogated in the most persistently polite manner Maedhros ever had the pleasure to witness, by Bilbo Baggins, Hobbit once of the Shire, now of Aman for as long as he cared to stay, Ringbearer, poet, historian, whose own deeds were a matter of song and story. Whose own story was certainly not done.

The sun was setting, painting a golden road on the lake below the house, glinting on the nib of Fingon's pen, the simple hammered band on his finger, match to the one on his own hand. Soon Gil-Estel would rise, the moon after, and someone would light the lamps, call them in to supper, and evening would become night, (and oh, nights were something to look forward to now, that story turned from peril and nightmare to comfort and delight; loneliness and cold to warmth and love and arms around him,) and then morning again, watching the sun rise. A new page.

Stones and stars, rings and roads, going on, looping back, notes in the song, a river of words without end.