A Beleriand Treasury of Childish Tales by Clodia

A Thousand Suns

"A Thousand Suns"

taken from

A Beleriand Treasury of Childish Tales

as told to

Erestor and Melinna of Ered Luin

(the guilt is Gogol's, both for the inspiration and the beta-work)

Maglor stands beneath a thousand suns and sings the blood away.

It traps him in a net of ragged words, his oath and curse. Pitiless, the stars shine down like the jewels enchained in iron chests at Formenos. But the brilliance of his memory is cooling now to absent-minded ashes, slipping through the maimed harpist's fingers of his mind like sand beneath the tide that breaks in scarlet shards and froth upon the sunset shore and flees his naked feet, which once walked the shores at Alqualondë. Alqualondë and Doriath's woods and all around the cliffs above the mouths of Sirion.

He washes his guilt away with salt. It tastes of blades and bitter edges.

(Or else, the truth. He knew he shouldn't do it, any of it. He did it anyway.)

Once, wielding his voice like a weapon, he cut a path through all the angry ghosts to silence, so that he could confine the whiteness of their words and their mocking faces into the labyrinthine depths of sleep – when he slept, snatching at splinters of respite between the recollected deaths and battle-fever. But his voice is blunted now, pitted and rusting from the rough sea-breeze, and their accusations ring through his head even in daylight. These days there is no silence. And then sometimes he sees them, too, the ghosts, sprawled out in their unnatural broken poses on the blood-damp dunes.

Sing to us, they say. Sing of your quest, Fëanor's son. Sing how you fell.

"No," he says and finds his voice is gone, cracked into the two salt-crusted halves of a broken dream. No. I will not.

Sing to us, Fëanorion. Why would you make a lay if not to sing it?

He does not recall the reasoning of a time when his hands still stretched over harp strings, the tendons in his wrists standing out sharp and whole beneath thin skin. He shakes his head. The water paints him etched in acid shadows, pale-faced, a ghost himself of all that he had been before the fall. Before the brave descent from crafting jewels and music into those glorious warrior's days of blood and fire. A bruise is darkening plum-purple around his eye, blooming into a bright nosegay of hyacinth shades and jonquil edges. He brought his mother flowers once with clean unbroken hands.

Let it be lost. Let his fall be so forgotten, the bloodshed and the glory. Let his lay and all the horror of his sung deeds pass unremembered into the dusty, lustful dark.

(If no one remembers, will it matter? Where will the truth be then?)

We will sing it for you, say his ghosts, the murdered Elves who drift like smoke and rumours through the childish disorder of his inchoate mind. We will sing of the Swan-Haven and Elwing's plight and those who died in Doriath. We will sing of Dior's sons. We will remember.

No, he says, in his head. Don't. You should forget.

We will remember.

Their eyes are pitiless. He slew and devoured their mercy long ago.

He hears them fading as the thousandth sun sinks low beneath the bloody sky.

Chapter End Notes

This was written a year ago for Gogollescent's birthday.  And let this be counted as a recommendation for anyone interested in Discworld or New Star Trek stories. I drew in particular on And The Mourners Will Laugh (a New Trek fic about the villain, possibly-thrice[.]livejournal[.]#cutid1) and The Eyes of the World (a rare LOTR snippet about Denethor and the palantír, www[.]fanfiction[.]net/s/4355483/1/The_Eyes_Of_The_World).