Quietus by UnnamedElement

Prologue

Quietus (n.): 

1. A severe blow (nautical). 

2. A finishing stroke; anything that effectually ends or settles: as in an argument.

3. Final discharge or acquittance, as from debt or obligation; that which silences claims.

4. Death, or something that causes death, regarded as a release from life (literary).

5. Something that has a calming or soothing effect (archaic).

.o.

“Now Maeglin and his mother were free for a while to go where they wished, and they rode often to the eaves of the wood, seeking the sunlight; and desire grew hot in Maeglin's heart to leave Nan Elmoth for ever.” --Of Maeglin (The Silmarillion)

.o.

“[Tuor] seized Meglin by that hand that held the knife [that had struck at his son] and broke the arm with the wrench, and then taking him by the middle leapt with him upon the walls, and flung him far out. Great was the fall of his body, and it smote Amon Gwareth three times ere it pitched in the midmost of the flames; and the name of Meglin has gone out in shame from among Eldar and Noldoli.” --The Original Tale (The Fall of Gondolin)

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Prologue

It had been days since Aredhel was separated from her companions, and the trees were tall and dark about her. The birds sang loud in a constant, if changing and raucous, hum, but her own steps were soft, muted by the slick, pine leaf-fall underfoot. She could not hear the wind above the trees and could barely see the sun through their interlocking boughs, and at every turn she feared to walk straight into an enemy’s arms, or to fall into some secret crevice from which she would never return, where cold water from the heart of Arda would suck her far away beneath the ground, entomb her in this foreign land apart from kith and kin… 

But she did not cross a single living creature besides the birds, and every tree and every turn looked to her the same. She was not familiar with these woods. She was not called by them at all—here, she was alone.

Alone .

She could not tell whether it was day or night, but her ankles were cut with the catch of thorn and pine, and she was tired. The chorus of birds elevated, building like a mountain into a cacophony of sound to subsume her.

Aredhel let herself fall in regret to the forest floor, and the woods fell with her into silence, like some recognition of prayer. 

She laid her head against the rough bark of the tree and stared into the boughs above— If she were to die here, she would think on those she left behind, of how kind they were to her, of how much they had, together, survived: her brothers, her father; her cousins, her mother (so far away, and long)—

The woods awoke with movement, then, and something stirred at the edge of her mind. There was the scent of moss crushed underfoot, and she tried to turn but she had turned, instead, to stone.

Alone .

Her heart beat like a wardrum in her ears; her skin burned with the cold of lonely crossings; but the trees were tall and dark, and she was small and silver— 

Her vision faded into grey until she could not see.

A closer stirring, then, a burst of the scent of loam kicked up after the longest winter, and the night crept down to drown her. 

She could not breathe, and she could not flee. (She could not even cry: Hark! For I am Írissë, daughter of Nolofinwë! Behold my core of steel, the fire of this heart so bold! ) 

The night was heavy on her mind until the pine underfoot cut the silver of her dress and set her aflame.

The birds screamed in the canopy as the crushed moss built like a zephyr around her, as the forest crept over her body to claim her—their cries and their wings a whirlwind that dried the tears stiffening her face:

Tears like salt on the longest crossing—

Wind like rain, the scent of shore (birds greeting them as saviors to tell her they were close!)—

But this was a forest that pinned her; this was moss and it was vines that filled her gaps and grew in crevices deep, crept with perversion down her throat to pierce her heart behind her ribs— 

(A core of steel and a heart so bold!)

Alone .

She was drowned in the earth of this faraway place.

Alone.

She was crushed and she was pressed …

Moss cupped her cheeks, edged her nose—spider silk across her mouth, an art she could not breathe, and then:

A final sleep so strange.

An unbearably heavy night. 

The trees were dark and tall, but she was small and silver. She was folded into the woods like a natural thing forgotten—it grew over her as if she were stone, some memorial to an ancient land: moss and fern, lichen and vine... Trees opened their roots to cradle her cairn until her veins were theirs; their sap pumped through her until the respiration of leaves under the birds’ undulation became her only breath—

The scent of moss crushed underfoot…

(She swam from the depths of the drowning cold to shoot the watery sun.)

The sun rose gold in her faraway mind, but in the darkness of the wood she was taken.

.o.

Aredhel awoke in warmth. There was a quilt across her chest, and the sound of a fire gentle in her ears. She opened her eyes and blinked: a cottage, but grand—grand like someone had lived here for hundreds of years, old and beautiful, austere and…rustic. 

She could not keep her eyes open, for she was weak from the woods.

The woods! She opened her eyes again and looked around, then let lids fall heavy like morning mist—it did not smell like the woods here.

She breathed, raised a shaky hand to touch her own face.

There, there was no moss, no silk—she was dry and she was clean. Her face was her own.

Tired .

Her lungs breathed air and her heart pumped blood.

Alone?

But no, there had been more than moss, had there not?

No…

“Sleep.”

She breathed, and then her hand was grasped and pressed gently to her side.

(She sunk into the depths of a sleep so strange as the moon cast wide overhead.)

In the hearth, the fire popped loud, and Aredhel slept like death.

.o.

The trees were tall and dark about her, but far above (as if leagues away) she could see the palest dappling of sun, and it warmed her—a dusting of gold on moon-white skin. She blinked as if wakening but she must have already been so, for she stood alone among resinous pines, the soles of her shoes thick with autumn’s late refuse. 

She spun around and stared, but there was neither movement nor sound.

How long had it been since she left Himlad? It could not really have been so long that the trees should have shed, limbs silver and reaching, naked arms cut cross pines darker than night to clasp at one another’s— 

How had the seasons turned like this?

What was happening?

She spun round again and peered into the depths of the forest, but nowhere was there light. She did not know which way to go—she could not even tell in which direction the sun would set within the thickness of the forest.

How had she come to this place? Had she not been abroad before and then lost in the woods? And then there was a death and a sleep; and next a warm bed and hot fire, a gentle hand and a sleep again like death, but now— Now.

She was here ?

A twig snapped somewhere far away, and Aredhel’s breath caught in her throat, for she had seen no creatures, had neither felt nor heard even a susurration of wind. No thing she wanted to meet in the dark cold of this wood would give warning by sound…

At least no elf, and she did not wish to encounter wandering men or journeying dwarves when she was disoriented and forgetful, when she had lost all sense of time and place or where she was—

She had been travelling south from Celegorm’s, and yet she could not remember coming upon these woods, and then—somehow—there had been a house…

The trees creaked around her, and then there was stirring at the edge of her vision and the scent of moss crushed underfoot—loam kicked up after the longest winter—and, suddenly, he was there:

Tall and dark and fair, hair nearly as midnight as her own: face cold and pale as snow yet, somehow, warmer than hers—as if lit from within by muted sunlight—though he did not look as if he had walked beneath anything but bough or star for centuries upon centuries upon years. 

It was not the glow of Valinor she saw in him but, she thought, one of vitality , and it was familiar, if not wholly welcome…

He took a step toward her and she took a step immediately back—or, rather, she tried to. She found immediately that she could not, could not move nor breathe; and as he walked closer and closer to her, the woods became a spinning funnel from ground to sky, as if she stood in the middle of a waterspout of woods.

She could not stand and fell to her knees and was sick.

He was in front of her then. Steadying her, long cold hands pressed against her ill cheeks. Aredhel looked up to see the face of this unknown elf, the only still thing in the yet spinning woods. She closed her eyes against the spinning and swallowed hard, felt the pinch of pine needles at her knees.

“You have the light of the Trees in you,” the elf said underbreath, and there was something cuttingly bitter beneath the blithe observation; she would have shivered if she could but, as it was, only her neck and her head would move. “Your name?”

“Írissë,” she said, and her throat stung.

“Do not be rude,” he said softly, and he lifted her chin so she was forced to look into his eyes, and they were dark and deep as those waters beneath ice at the Crossing. Never had she seen eyes so dark.

The arboreal waterspout fell utterly away into stillness as he gripped her harder, and she could have cried in relief, though she did not, for she would show him she was strong.

He pinched her chin. “Your other name,” he insisted. The fingers bruised her. “Not that one; that is dead.”

“I am Aredhel,” she said quietly. “I am Aredhel, daughter of Fingolfin—”

(A core of steel! the fire of a heart so bold!) 

“—Ar-Feiniel of Tirion, and Gondolin. I come from my cousins in Himlad.”

“Ah,” the elf said, but he offered no name in return.

She was still under his hands once more.

“You are beautiful,” he finally said. “It is a pity you must leave me.”

What was happening?

He dropped his hands from her cheek and chin and suddenly she was limp and limbless, and she fell to the ground, helpless as an eel out of water. She rolled just far enough to see him pointing into the far-off forest:

“That is the way out, Aredhel. I wish you luck. You will not see me again, I think, for a while.”

And then the elf was gone—the backwards scent of spring burst through winter loam spiraling in his wake—and she was alone again, the trees tall and dark around her. Before she could steady herself, she was spinning again, pinned by the vertigo of it all to the needle-sharp floor, and her mind was chased to the edges of the world.

.o.

Days or weeks passed. She could not tell waking from sleep, dream from reality: she knew only the woods around her and the images that flashed before her eyes and inside her mind like the moving panoramas she and her cousins had loved as children in Valinor, long ago, except—

Except these were ghastly . And she did not know if they were real or part of sleep so strange.

Her horse she saw, at one point, laid on its side and swollen as if it were many days gone. She blinked and then it was ripped open from chest, down underline, to groin; and—as she watched—viscera spilled from the newly-gaping chasm to the rich and rotting detritus like a hot red wave. When next she blinked, there were maggots all about it, and her own lost sword lay on the ground beside the beast, as if she had defiled the body herself: Aredhel lunged for the blade but it was just as suddenly gone, evaporating between her fingers, and—by the time she looked up from pounding the ground in anger—she was but a hand’s width away from her horse (a dessicated thing now) and it writhed lifelike with maggots-cocooned; the forest wound its way about the long-gone body the way it had done her on her first day in this place: it crawled across the bones and jellied sinews, spun vines like coils—like the gold in her distant brother’s hair—around empty ribs, and the moss grew faster than the centuries as it padded the spaces where the flesh once had been… She had tried to scramble away at that (for fear of being caught again herself), but she was swept up in a sudden explosion of black: the flies burst from their cocoons to swarm her until the world was colored deeper than deep-forest night—dark as the eyes she had seen somewhere, but could no longer recall—and they chased her like yellowjackets until she could run no more, until she collapsed to her knees gasping and exhausted, until the woods exploded about her…

Another time, Aredhel had approached the promised edge of the woods and could see dawn lightening the world at its horizons—she could see it between the distant trees like toothpicks, a child’s twigs in play—and the sun… She could almost feel it on her face. She ran then, faster than she had ever run before: She leapt over logs as would a doe, picked her way through deadfall with a speed to rival the nimblest children of those laiquendi she had once sighted from afar—squinting—in her travels.

Breaths heaved past the point of pain, she was fit to burst through that coveted border (that cursed barrier between light and dark) when she was forcefully struck by some thing— invisible , unseeable, unfeelable—and the world spun away again. 

When she woke from her daze, everything was as it had been, except that when she raised a hand to her face to clear her sight… She bled.

She had stood at the edge of the woods, then, and she had watched the sun burn away the night. As far as she could see, it lit the broomgrass from the edge of the forest to the edge of the world a brilliant, burning, roughspun forbidden gold… The grass waved to her and beckoned in the early morning light. 

She spat blood from her mouth onto the ground.

She gazed abroad, ran hands down her cheeks, and cried.

Since then, she had walked the edges of the forest every waking minute—grass melted into rocks melted into distant mountains into darkness and then empty lands of grey mist that urged her faster forward. She shouted into the emptiness of each place, called for her cousins, called for elves, called for men and dwarves, for anyone who would come: even Melkor’s foes would be preferable to this wood-quiet silence and the cacophony of her lonely mind, for she could not tell sleep from waking from walking from rest. But the heart of the forest had begun to work its will on her, and by her second time round the borders she was not only hungry and thirsty but dragged—unbidden (light shoes now ground through; the soles of her feet protected by layers upon layers of pine sap and duff)— toward the heart of the dark woods.  

The trees were tall and dark as they pulled her in from the borders in an ever-shrinking spiral.

Sometimes, she thought she could hear her kin calling for her; sometimes she thought she saw a child flit through the trees, dark as night and fair as dusk both; and she cried, then, for the sieve her once fine mind had become, for there was no child here, there was no one here —she was alone.

Alone?

Alone.

The trees were tall and dark, and she was small and silver; and the closer she got to the heart of the forest the more wildly beat her own heart, a wardrum, except she was marching forward in an uncontrollable advance while her mind tried to run, to retreat.

Days or weeks passed, she could not tell.

She saw her fallen horse; her fallen cousins; her lost brothers, her lost folk; children she did not know; mirages of those things she wanted most; memories that no one should know but her; and sometimes at night the woods were the sea, were the ice, were the yawning maw that had swallowed her aunt, that her father had pulled her and Itarillë from, thrown them into Turukáno’s arms (her brother, her erstwhile protector: behind in Gondolin: Why had she left? What had she done?) ; and there was a child, a child —

A child? Of twilight. A child. 

(Moss cupped her cheeks, edged her nose—spider silk across her mouth, an art she could not breathe, and then:

A final sleep so strange.

An unbearably heavy night. )

Her child? 

And then she awoke—like a drowning woman cresting the water, like a too-long-dived pelican bursting forth for air—at the doorstep of a cottage (but grand, as if someone had lived there for centuries) , and she fell to her knees and bowed her head. She beat on the door, prepared to beg, to barter, to give anything at all for a way out of this cursed place…

The door opened with a silent gasp:

“Aredhel.”

She looked up and pushed long hair from her face with scratched and swollen fingers, and she squinted into the face of this man who seemed to know her.

“Do I know you?” she tried to ask, but she could barely make a sound, so great was her thirst and so raw her throat.

“I am Eöl,” the elf said, and he helped her up. “And you are Aredhel, daughter of Fingolfin, Ar-Feiniel of Tiron, and Gondolin.”

She could not speak but he took her into his house, and the door shut heavy behind them.

“I will give you clothing and food, and a place to recover,” he was saying, and she stared at the decorations on the walls, foreign and exotic to her—dark and green. Had she been here? The door was locked with a key behind her. “How long have you been in this place, my forest of Nan Elmoth, Aredhel Fingolfiniel?”

She did not answer him. She did not know. 

He took her to a large stone room attached to the main cottage—slightly below ground, she thought vaguely, from the temperature—and helped her to a bench. Before her was a steaming basin of water in a deep-carven bowl in the rock. Warmed for a bath, as if he had been expecting her.

She blinked and fought through the fog of her mind to look at him better.

What was happening?

But she was tired and she was lost, and as his hands came to her, as his body came close, she let him unwrap her shredded clothes from body and limbs, let him lift her and place her in the basin, let him wash her as she shook.

The scent of moss crushed underfoot…

“Your life will not be so hateful here, Aredhel,” said he.

The sun rose gold in her faraway mind, 

but in the darkness of the wood 

she was taken.

 

_________________________________________________________________________

Eöl was not wrong, precisely. Over the months, Aredhel became used to the place and to the silence that those who lived in the austere and somehow-grand cottage wove about it, like memory. She had found the things Eöl loved and she gave them to him; she had discovered the things that made him smile, and she ran with him under the eaves of the dark forest. He taught her to climb trees as surely as she had once run upon the walls of the City of Seven Names, balanced light as a bird—she and Eöl would watch the stars rise all around them when they settled together in the canopy. 

After a time, she stopped trying to get away, for every time she ventured to the wood edge she could only stand at the border and watch the broomgrass burn in the light until it was replaced, over time—days upon days, upon moons—with muted winter grey. She would return then, each time, as if inexplicably pulled, like wool pulled through and wrapped thin round a spindle, until she was back at the door, into the cottage, back to her small works.

Over time, she stopped thinking of herself as Írissë, as daughter of Fingolfin, as Ar-Feiniel… She became only Aredhel of Gondolin, sister of Turgon-the-Hidden, cousin to the Feanorians, so close yet so far away. She never stopped peering from the treetops toward those places she knew they would be, her surviving kin: the only ones remaining who would know to look for her, though she was beginning to think there was something unnatural here, something that would keep others out just as skillfully as it kept her in.

And yet… Life became bearable—less hateful, indeed—when she accepted she could not leave, and that is when she opened her heart to the Valar: She asked for a child to fill her days and distract her mind; to turn Eöl’s thoughts from her to the wider world of possible progeny; to tempt him, perhaps, to open the borders of this place so that their child might grow as any child ought: under stars and under sun, with love freely given by both kith and kin... 

Aredhel did not know if the Valar cried for her as she had once done for herself—she did not any longer—but, with the new moon, she quickened with child, and she was glad. Even Eöl wept to be a father.

She found herself often, then, smiling alone in the gloaming light.

Sometimes, memories of her desperate and neverending race through these trees when first she came flashed across her mind, but she would grab them fast and lock them tight inside her heart so she could not dwell.

But there was one she could not stop reliving: the sight of that child, fair and dark, slender and fast, eyes sharp as ravens as he ran between the trees like some lesser Valinorean spirit… She had always seen him—flitting out of the corner of her eye—at dawn and at dusk— at twilight —and she had thought he was not real.

And he had not been. Then . (Perhaps.)

But that night the next Autumn when she was laid out upon a well-stuffed pallaise, in the center of  a clearing in the trees (the sky was black with the absent moon, pinpricked with the cold light of small and silver stars) , curled on her side with one leg held open by one of the ladies of the house… As she pushed and rested and cried and bled, the stars blended into glorious streaks as she watched the night sky shift above her…

As—on her back with the hands of near-strangers supporting her, the elf who had brought her here, to this place and this state—nowhere to be found… As—with one final push and another final tear there was a moment of clarity—

Then, she knew.

The sun had begun to purple the sky at the farthest edge of the clearing when a lady placed the child in her arms. As another stuffed rags into her to stop the bleeding, Aredhel looked upon her glorious child, her salvation, and she knew . 

That child of the twilight she had seen, was here in her arms. The only thing, perhaps, that had not been an illusion.

Lómion, she thought. Lómion. 

And then Eöl was there, taking the child gently for himself.

She would not say the name aloud, for already that name was dead.

She watched Eöl’s face carefully.

“What shall we call him?” she finally asked, dry lips almost sticking to her teeth as she tried to speak.

“You may call him whatever you want, but I do not have a father-name for him yet.”

The child had hair like Eöl’s.

“I shall call him child ,” he said. “My child.”

 Aredhel swallowed and took a sip of water offered her by the birthing lady.

“Eölchín, I will call him,” he continued. “For now.”

Eölchín for you, Aredhel thought. Lómion for me.

Aloud she said: “Let me take Eölchín, beloved. We shall see if he will latch.”

He handed him to her and she cradled the boy close to a naked breast.

Above them, the sun crested the treetops, and she and the child were burned an autumn gold. Lómion latched and began to suck.

 Eöl and the others of the house dissolved around her so it was just she and the child, just she and this gift from the gods, and she closed her eyes and let the sun warm her, let herself awaken to the Wide and Wild World about her.

Eöl walked away, then, instructing—over his shoulder—those of his house to do away with the bloody palliase and to see Aredhel cleansed.

The child mewed as he ate, and Aredhel was small and silver in a woods tall and dark, but she swam from the depths of the drowning cold to shoot a watery sun that rose a burning, brilliant— beckoning— gold.

Chapter 1

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Four Years Old

Sun spattered the ground like lace caught in the wind, and Lómion tumbled in it. The child sought to do the impossible, and Aredhel laughed as he leapt again and missed the patch of gold he had been targeting, catching himself on one foot to the left of the dancing light. He had been trying to catch the sun in one of the shaded, brush-cleared areas about the cottage for an hour now, and his cool, fawn-tone cheeks were finally darkening with frustration—berry-red patches bloomed along his cheekbones.

Aredhel put down the shirt she had been darning, tucking the needle so it was flat against the fabric she weaved, and then called:

“Child! You cannot catch the wind and sun!”

Lómion looked up from where he had sunk to the ground in defeat. He held his hands out in front of him and showed her how the dancing light lit him so gold his palms were white as cold stars.

“Yes, it can touch you—can you feel its warmth?”

The child nodded silently.

“But you cannot hold it back, nor pin it beneath your feet. It is more tricksome than even the water in your creek.”

He closed his hands around it until they were tightened fists lit blindingly between them. 

“Come,” she said.

But he shook his head and stayed where he sat:

“I want it.”

Aredhel brushed her hands over her skirt and tightened the laces of her leather boots before answering. When she looked up, his fists were clenched on his knees and he watched her so intently—with eyes the color of the darkest, deepest woods—that her chest was flooded with a gripping, distant cold.

But she stood and took him up beneath the arms and hefted him onto her hip, where she balanced him and uncurled his fists: one by one, finger by finger.

“I know,” she finally said.

He stared up at her.

“I want it, too, Lómion.”

He pressed his small hands flat onto her chest and she took him and stepped into the darker woods, routing them toward the trees and the edges of the forest. They walked for a long long time—until her feet burned with reopened blisters—and then she sat him down and knelt beside him.

The world opened wide before them, and it was high-noon in early spring in that world outside the Woods.

The child held out his hands and felt the breeze catch at him, felt the sun soak into him all the way up to the elbows.

The broomgrass was the first thing to return in the spring, and its pale green waved in the wind, rippling like the sea. Closer to them—nearly within reach from the forest—the thistle was just shin-height, and it would be long months before it burst into towering, and vibrantly purple, royal life. For now it was short and sharp—stiff and unsightly—and her son reached for it in wonder:

“No! It will prick you, child.”

He jumped and withdrew his hand into the dark.

“We must be careful when we linger at the edge of the woods. Father cannot know we have been here, yes?”

Lómion nodded.

“So that means no scratches from things we are not supposed to have seen.”

He nodded again.

“Here,” she said, and she lifted him into her arms and scooted on her knees as close to the edge of the treeline as she could, until there was thin grass in addition to the winter refuse beginning to pad her legs. 

She lifted him and rearranged him until his feet stood one on each of her thighs, and she grabbed him round the middle and bid him lean out.

“Put out your arms as if you could fly,” she whispered.

But he stretched them wide before bringing them in above his head as if he could—instead— dive , and he leant so far forward that the sun kissed his shade-pale face, and he sighed.

She held him there for hours, and he leaned like a sapling too crowded by its older brethren; as the sun crossed the sky, his young face followed it like a flower.

Finally, she pulled him back from his journey and settled him into the woods. She stood and massaged her sore arms, brushed any evidence of the forest-edge from her knees, and took the child up again.

They turned back toward the darkest center of the woods, and she glanced at his sun-kissed face and asked as they went:

“And what do we tell Father if he asks why you glow with the warmth of a new-born fawn?”

“That we spent the morning soaking in the treetops.”

“Good boy,” she said, and she pressed a kiss to his temple. 

She sang to him as the wide world became distant behind them, as they came closer and closer to the heart of the place as if drawn by a magnet; she sang to him until the light was a pinprick far behind, lodged deep and firm and burning like a dart in the center of her chest.

She opened the door to the cottage and they stepped into darkness.

 

.0.

Seven Years Old

Rain pounded on the high-set windows while Lómion lay on the carpet near the fire, organizing tumble-smooth gems by color. He was alone in the room with his father, who sat  in a stuffed chair nearby, bent double over a writing box and making notes on things Lómion knew from previous experience he had no interest in yet, but assumed he would one day.

There was a burst of thunder so loud it rattled the high panes, and when Lómion jumped he sent his white and yellow stones skittering across the floor to clink at the hearth.

His father looked up and Lómion froze, hand extended.

“You have spilt your stones, child.”

Lómion swept them back and reorganized them.

“Which are your favorite?” his father asked. “I did not know when I was at Nogrod, so I brought many.”

There was a moment of silence, filled with the subtle scraping of stones on the carpet, pushed back into place with small fingers.

“The yellow and the white,” he finally said. “Like the sun and the moon.”

“Ah,” said Eöl, and he put aside his desk and pens and dropped to the floor in front of him.  He reached out a hand to select a perfect white stone and laid it flat in the palm of his hand. “This is the color your mother was wearing the day I met her.”

Lómion’s hands froze once more and he looked up at his father suddenly. In the moment their eyes met, Lómion felt a zing as powerful as the lightning in the storm chase him from head to toe, and the image of his mother dressed in white and stumbling—feet red and sore, hair dark about her dirty face—flashed across his mind.

It disappeared with the next crack of thunder and he frowned as his father still stared. 

“White and silver like the moon,” he continued.

Lómion tucked his hands into his lap but did not look away from Eöl’s gaze. 

“Not like you and I,” he said, and he rocked back onto his heels and continued to watch him. He picked up a handful of stones casually: darkest obsidian, deep garnet, and cold pyrite. Lómion tucked his hands deeper between his knees and watched as his father’s hand bloomed open around them, the gems on full display.

“When you grow older,” he said firmly, and he closed his hand over the stones again with a flourish, “your mother will tell you stories that are not true, about me and my kin.”

He opened his hand without looking away from the child, and the gems fell like bodies into heavy water—one, two, three—in their pillowed clatter onto the carpeted stone.

Whatever spell of silence had been cast over Lómion as his father spoke broke with the tension of the fall:

“Father, who are your folk? You will not say, but I hear whispers in the forest, and yet when I walk close to listen—”

But his father held up a hand and did not let him finish:

“My folk— yours , Eölchín—are Teleri. We are not golodhrim like your mother. She will speak to turn you from me, as you grow, as even she does now, in her small ways.”

Eöl suddenly lifted a hand and gently tipped his chin. 

“But,” he said,  “you are the son of Eöl , not Lómion, nor whatever else it is she calls you when you slink together in the dark, when I go abroad.”

Lómion watched his father from below, and he tried hard to push away the images of gold-kissed broomgrass that suddenly overwhelmed his mind: he and his mother’s view from the edge of the woods. 

“Do you understand this?” Eöl insisted, and his hand was heavy at the child’s jaw.

Lómion blinked hard and the endless waving grass was gone. It was just the dark sitting room now, lit with lamps like the memory of muted sunlight that would stream on cloudless days through the narrow windows set parallel to the ceiling. The light that made it through would  be shivering and weak, like the stream-bed where he sunk his toes in winter cold on those brightest days of spring... As he thought, his eyes flicked toward the yellow gems for just a moment, and his father’s hand tightened on his chin infinitesimally in response—Lómion reprimanded himself for showing his thoughts and, yet, he said with conviction:

“Yes, Father.”

(Yet Lómion did not understand, for he was but seven. Still, with need, seven years is time enough to learn how to guess hearts and minds—to catalog events, to record the look on the face and all the precursors to avoid them—even if one does not understand the conclusion one is coming to that allows them to survive...)

“I understand, Father,” the child repeated again, more emphatically this time. “Of course .”

Eöl dropped his hand from his chin and grasped Lómion firmly at the shoulder, instead—he pressed a kiss to his brow. Lómion brushed all the gems into a pile and scooped them up hurriedly in grasping hands, dropping them as quietly as he could into their waiting box.

“May I go outside, until nightfall?” he asked finally, with a glance up at his father that chilled them both.

“Go, Eölchín,” his father said, and he took the box from him and tucked it away beneath the chair. “Go!” He swatted at the child gently. “Run the woods like your folk are intended, but listen for the evening call to return.”

And then Lómion was off, fast as an arrow and more true. He was out of the house and into the trees before his father had finished his request.

Aredhel stood around the corner from the sitting room, and she watched her child go. Eöl turned his attention to her, then, and she emerged from the shadows to attend him.

.0.

Ten Years Old

Lómion sat against the door to his room and listened. His father had told him that if he began to listen to him and better follow instruction, he would take him on his journeys outside the woods, a place Lómion had never been, though he knew the feel of the sun’s soft fire and the way it wrapped his skin in a golden armor that sheltered his heart for weeks and weeks. And his father had told him stories of men and dwarves, too, of elves that were not he or his mother or those few he knew who lived about their homestead; and, while they would not see elves, his father said, the dwarves he could meet, and maybe the men, and they would like him. 

How he wanted it, and craved. 

He hungered for it: the light of the sun and the light of lives that were not he or his mother (his mother the moon, his mother a reflection of the dimming light around her).

And tonight, too, how he hungered, but he was meant to be good; he was meant to sit quiet and still if he wanted to leave these woods, his father had told him so and yet—

It was hard to sit still when the second crock in as many minutes hit the ground and shattered. A shard thudded into his door like a javelin; it shook the frame and chased down his spine from his head to his toes.

Tonight, it seemed, was a silent battle, but for the destruction of things . 

His father wanted answers to questions he did not even have to ask aloud for his mother to decide she would not answer them. It had started that night with a whisper he had caught on the wind, Eöl said, of tales of towers long forgotten, and a maiden lost and saved, ungrateful. 

But it had started that night, in truth—Lómion rather thought—with the discovery of a frond that grew only at the edge of the woods trailing the hem of his mother’s dress.

He had been sent to his room then, ushered by his mother with a whisper and a prayer, and he had looked up into the night of his father’s towering form, of his mother’s calm face as she circled away from him like a distraction and pulled his father by the hand, who only paused long enough to slip the latch into its place on his door to lock him in.

The sound of a vase exploding in the fire came next, and Lómion leaned his head against the door and began to count the silence that followed.

One, two, three, four—

A door opened and closed somewhere. Perhaps one of his father’s folk leaving out the back.

Nine, ten, eleven, twelve—

He breathed, and there was the sound of soft, barely there footsteps on the flagstone, and then the carpet.

Nineteen, twenty, twenty-one—

And then the sound of shifting linen, of a soft brush of fabric and skin, as if someone ran a hand from the shoulder of a tunic to the elbow and, then—at twenty-nine —his mother:

“Let us go into the woods together, love,” said she. “Let us walk beneath the light of the stars, the way you like it, in the treetops. Let me gather the light and shine for you.”

There was a gasp from his mother, then, and a minute of long silence broken by—

“Fetch your cloak.”

Next, the door to the cottage opened and closed like a breath on the wind, and Lómion was alone.

He opened his door just enough to knock the latch on the outside free with a thin book, and he pushed it open as little as possible so as not to disturb the glass and give himself away. Picking his way around the shards, he stretched his hearing and crept to the lauder. He returned to his room with two shrunken apples tucked beneath an armpit and several hearty strips of deer jerky in his hands, a dark thin shape in the quickly falling night.

It was not until he had shut his door behind him; re-latched it with a switch he had fashioned for that very purpose; settled back onto the floor and chewed halfway through one of his pieces of jerky, that he noticed his foot bled.

He had stepped on a shard of crock and not noticed, perhaps, and now he would be caught, but there was no use going back out now.

The sun set, and he sat in the dark alone for a long time (feeling the aching pulse of his foot, watching the shadows of the tree in the waxing moon play at the far corners of his room) until, finally, he fell into dreams.

Chapter 2

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He did not know how long he had wandered the dark circuitous paths of the wood, paths as complicated as the veins he knew lay beneath his very own skin; paths as deep and complex as the twisted tunnels he had learned to run, the lapping, returning and crisscrossing paths of his father’s heart and mind: always one step ahead, a sharp turn to the left, a scramble up the tree to survey from above.

But he was older than he should be, he realized, and his mind moved faster than a child’s; and, suddenly, he was running .

His heart burned and drove him like fire though he did not know why.

He was running faster than he had ever run before, yet he breathed as easily as if he lounged with his feet in the creek, head tilted back to watch the sky through a sliver of trees, breeze catching the heavy air of the woods and beating it into a zephyr—

But, no ...

It was dark here, and he ran.

The sky was black and the trees were tall and looming, and he was Maeglin— Maeglin? —and he was young and small (but older, taller than he should be); and the night was never-ending: he could not see the sky. He looked down at his feet as they beat the paths that bloomed dark and endless before him, and the world seemed to spin beneath his feet—he ran harder and faster to catch it. 

The woods streaked black and dark like his father’s hair and his own eyes, and vines whipped occasionally from the sides to grab at him; there was a cacophony of birds overhead. He ran and ran and ran until he could finally hear his own breath in his ears, his own heart beating like a drum, a drum, a drum of war , like the kind in which he would one day fight, somewhere far away from here, far away—

One, two, three—

His feet beat the ground and kicked up duff around him—

Nine, ten, eleven, twelve—

(A burst of loam after the longest winter.)

So fast, so fast, his feet did not even touch the ground; it smelled like moss crushed under foot—

Forty-one, forty-two, forty-th—

His ankles were cut with thorn and pine and they burned, they burned, they burned —

Ninety-seven, ninety-eight, ninety-nine—

His chest was flooded with a cold that took his breath away, a cold of deepest seas and tallest mountains and ice and ice and ice and—

The longest crossing, a chorus of birds building like a mountain into a cacophony of sound and then:

Fire, tall as the trees, tall as the darkness, deep as his—

One hundred.

His feet stopped of their own accord.

He was rooted to the ground and swaying as the world caught up to him and tried to drag him along faster than his body, but he steadied himself and pretended his feet were the roots of trees (roots so deep they wrapped themselves round the core of the world) , and they were tall and dark.

He was still and the world was, for a moment, utterly silent, so silent he could feel the pressure of it pushing against his ears, like an odd inverse bloom…

And then the noise exploded.

And came rushing back in, crackling , a low roar. He was suddenly standing at the edge of a wide, wide clearing, with a fire twisted tall and spiraled, nearly at its center. Red and orange, red like sun like blood—like the stone his father had dropped before him, sent plummeting to the carpet with obsidian and pyrite…

It smelled smoky and hot and organic, like the forges his father would take him to— would take him to?— and it curled about him like acrid vines, spiraling down his throat and up his nose until his face was painted with tears that burned his skin when they evaporated in the heat.

He was alone and could not move.

(Alone?)

Then, as if from far away, he saw his father drag his mother from the dark nothingness, and they were two lithe figures between the trees that edged the clearing like painted matchsticks. He shoved her forward onto her hands and knees, and Lómion could not move:

His feet were anchors, his voice so silent it was as if he had never learned to speak...

There was a glint of a more intense dark at his father’s side as a hand reached toward his belt, but the fire roared then—incandescent—and there was not even time to blink before it exploded and expanded, consuming his mother and himself, the world…

The last thing he saw was his father’s eyes—dark as night, sharp as obsidian, just like his own—burning away in the enveloping night.

.o.

Lómion woke to a room kissed with cool and lit a morning grey. Outside the high windows of his room it was twilight, and the house was cloaked in silence. None of his father’s folk stirred. He could not hear his mother in the sitting room or the kitchen. His father did not shuffle papers or hum to himself as he started his day.

It was as quiet as that moment before the fire in his dream (he hoped it was a dream) , but still—even awake—he burned...

He scrambled to his feet where he had fallen asleep on the floor and limped to his bed, for his foot was hot and tender and his body was lit from head to toe as if he were encased in ice. He shivered and quaked and crawled under his duvet, where he waited for his mother to come.

.o.

The next few days were summer-hot dreams. 

The bit of glass he had stepped on, his father told him—between blindingly painful baths in tubs of winter-melt from the stream—had been the one that had exploded in the fire; and the one that had exploded in the fire had been from his workshop, he said, and was, thus, probably contaminated with refuse, which had made him sick. 

But Lómion did not care about the why: he had never felt like this before, and he did not want to feel it again.

His parents’ faces flitted in and out of his vision intermittently until—after a time—it was just his mother repeatedly returning. He would wake, and she was there; he would turn into his pillow and cry, and her hand would fall reassuringly heavy but light as a breeze on his back, tracing the ridges of his spine and whispering soothing words to him in that language he was not allowed to know. 

Days passed.

Finally, one morning, he opened his eyes to find his room no longer shrouded in endless grey. His mind was in his body fully instead of wandering paths weaved beneath trees and edging unnamed mountains. He did not hurt, and his mother sat beside him, working on white-threaded embroidery. He watched the needle repeatedly pierce the green linen, watched her hands shift to pull it through with delicate intention, in contrast to the ferocity with which the needle dove and surfaced and dove again

After a moment she looked at him, and he pushed himself up and watched her without moving.

“Your father has gone to see the dwarves,” she said quietly.

Lómion nodded but did not speak, and she abandoned her work on the bed and handed him a glass of water. He watched her through it—her face was distorted and strange. She took the water from him when he was done, and her eyes lit a subtle sparkling in the dark room, the color of the fog-edged woods on a frozen winter day. Lómion stared and asked directly:

“Was it an accident, the glass from the workshop?” 

His mother blinked, and pulled her embroidery back into her lap. “What do you think, child?”

“I do not know.”

“And neither do I,” she said, and her hands were busy again as the thread betrayed her thoughts. “I think he makes things in that workshop that would make the Valar weep, but I do not think he intended it to hurt you . You are his seed, yes?”

Lómion’s chest was cold and he did not know why. His mother’s hands sped across the linen and pricked like a bobbing heron at water’s edge, precise and fast, but controlled…

“I have been having dreams, Mother.”

She looked up at him and he felt himself melt, and he moved to her as she said simply:

“I know.”

The field of green on her lap had transformed into a white tower that pierced the sky. He could not look away.

“Does father know?”

His mother shook her head and soothed him. “And it behooves us to keep it that way, my dawning child.”

He was quiet as his mother readjusted and tugged him against her so they sat against the wall, and he turned his face up to watch hers intently, to memorize it. 

“Shall I tell you a story to pass the time?” she asked.

He nodded and then took the embroidery hoop in his hands and looked down at it. He ran fingers along the floss and followed the stitches all the way from the towers to the gates, and then his mother began.

.o.

Two days later, Lómion found a ledger containing sketches of knives and bows and other such things beneath his pillow. A day after that, a copy of his father’s notes (in his mother’s hand) peeked from beneath his pallaise, detailing the various questionable uses of a few plants and minerals Eöl had discovered that Aredhel thought Lómion should know. Next, there was a simple story in simple words—also penned by her—tucked in a stack of clean tunics: 

A great, cold journey;

It said.

a never-ending siege;

It explained.

a hidden city replete with glorious homes, dug deep with fountains:

It detailed.

A place well-loved, well-stocked and so fair—so bright! —it nearly shone past its defenses into the encroaching night…

They did not discuss these gifts, but Lómion devoured them nonetheless.

When his father returned a week later, Eöl did not acknowledge the child’s mysterious illness or recovery but, after breakfast the following day, he invited him out as a companion—for the very first time!—on his lonesome wandering about the woods. 

Lómion’s mother stood at the edge of the clearing, then, where they had used to play, as father and son began their journey. She waved and smiled and bid her son farewell. 

Lómion looked back for half a moment (maybe more), but he did not raise a hand in return… He caught her eye instead, glanced downward and away, and then turned—resolute—to follow his father.

And, just like that, his childhood was over. 

His chest burned with shame as he disappeared into the dark. 

_____________________________________________________________________________________

 

They left early and returned late, if even they returned at all before nightfall. 

Over time, Lómion saw his mother less and less (though his heart still yearned for her). The dreams had not stopped, and always were they dark and wrathful and tiresome, but Lómion followed his father where'er he went, for he did as he was bade. His father had become wary of he and his mother’s time alone— still slinking in the darkness, he said of them—so days turned to months turned to years until Lómion was twelve and his mother had spent the better part of eight seasons alone, or under the watchful eye of her husband...

One day, father and son returned just as the sun dipped behind the trees, and his mother met them in the clearing. It was late spring and Lómion had grown so tall he was only two heads shorter than his parents, and his arms were bare and lanky but building fast. His father looked him over appraisingly.

“Maeglin,” said Eöl then, and his eyes as he looked upon him were piercing and—in their darkness— bright . “I shall call you Maeglin , and that shall be your name.”

Lómion directed every ounce of will to avoid glancing toward his mother, then, for he could feel her—from the heightening energy that swirled around them—tensing behind him.

He did not watch her and yet he knew : 

As his father dropped a hand onto his shoulder and blessed him, his mother turned away, pressed a hand to her mouth, and cried. 

“ Maeglin ,” his father repeated. “Sharp of sight, sharp of mind: guesser of intent and reader of the heart beyond mists of words.”

Lómion held his father’s gaze without quavering or looking away, but Eöl glanced harshly to the place his mother had retreated and sighed.

“You are lucky to have more than just she to guide you in your skills. Though I have none so like yours, there are ways to persuade a person, that one such as you might nurture as you grow... With the gifts of my family—and hers—you have the potential to capture the moon.”

Lómion tensed under his father’s hand and said nothing at first. He watched the lines at the corners of Eöl’s eyes and lips, watched the slight tilt of the head as he looked down upon him before speaking.

“Father,” he finally said, “I am grateful.”

And then his father was steering him toward the cottage—through the woods, away from that place he had come bursting into life twelve autumns before—and his mother’s anger swelled like a cresting wave as she followed.

.o.

Later that night, Aredhel came upon him at the basin out of doors where he was crouched, cleaning his hunting knife. He turned swiftly as she neared, eyes wide and sorrowful in a way she had never seen before. He dropped the knife and raised his hands in supplication and whispered, pleading:

“Mother, I am so sorry.”

She bent low to pick up the knife and leant in close as she returned it. “We all do what we must.”

He nodded and took the knife, and his small hands shook as she continued. “He knows , Lómion.”

“What?” he hissed.

“Maeglin , child. The name he has given you. Maeglin. ”

She stared at him hard, and he breathed in so suddenly the air quivered around them.

“He knows what you...” But she trailed off, waved a hand vaguely at the space between their heads.

The night deepened as Lómion stood—frozen—and Aredhel clutched her heart and went inside to fetch crocks and pots to rinse, an excuse to work with her son. The night deepened further as they worked at the basin, until the trees stretched tall and blindingly dark about them, until Eöl brought them a lamp before disappearing back into the house, leaving them entirely alone for the first time in many moons. The night rose and the chorus of crickets and tree-frogs sang, and it was cacophonous and loud but they worked together in silence even as Lómion’s anxiety built to match the peaking swells... 

What do we do?

In the last light before the oil burned out completely, he piled the cleaned kitchenware into his arms and met his mother’s eye. 

We wait until you are older.

She tucked his knife into his belt.

Stronger.

Lómion opened the door for her and crossed to the cupboard where his father kept the dwarvish liquor he favored. He poured his father a glass, and then himself, but he did not drink it. Brushing past his mother, he placed both to the right of his father’s hand. Hunched over his designs, Eöl did not glance up, and Lómion hurried away.

Less afraid.

Outside with his mother, Lómion ran far enough from the cottage to allow himself a moment to breathe. 

We will both—

They did not speak. 

Do whatever we must— 

He palmed the handle of his knife.

To survive.

 

They stood shoulder to shoulder and squinted through the trees toward the stars.

Chapter 3

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Fifteen Years Old

Maeglin stood at the counter beside his mother, chopping root vegetables. His fathers’ folk were engaged elsewhere, and Eöl himself had gone to Nogrod alone. He did not allow Maeglin to accompany him there yet.

His mother reached for another rutabaga and spoke casually as she began to slice: “You know the stories I have told you since you were small, of the land across the great ice, and those lords and ladies who once hunted with the gods? Of the cities so tall and white that their towers disappear when they pierce the clouds?”

“Of course,” Maeglin replied immediately, looking up from his work.

“They are real, child,” she said, and she moved onto the parsnips and sliced them thin for mashing. “The stories. They are about our folk, of whom I am descended and from whence I came before I abode here, with your father.”

Maeglin laid down his knife, folded his hands on the counter, and stared.

“You are descended from Finwë ?”

Aredhel tilted her head to the side slightly and acknowledged, “And thus are you.”

“Know you where they live?” Maeglin asked quickly.

“Who?” She had looked back to her work.

 Maeglin glanced toward the door and back to her. “He who would be your father, the king;” he said, “and your brother, the king ; and your cousins , princes of the Noldor.”

Aredhel cleared the cutting board and sat down her knife, dropped hands to her hips, and looked at him directly.

“I shall tell you when you are older.”

Maeglin shook his head and, smiling, brushed his mother’s work into a bowl.

______________________________________________________________________

 

While travelling with his father, Maeglin woke often in the night, for his body was growing so fast it felt, sometimes, that he was stretched by an invisible force, so his bones and muscles could only thin and then—in his sleep—race to catch up. He would wake often with a pang, only to find himself laid beneath a blanket on the forest floor, curled with his back against his father’s side, who always lay breathing evenly—deep in rest—every single night.

But he preferred waking to a burning ache in his legs than he did to gasping awake, choking on memories of fire and smoke, a horror he could not quite see through the mists of his mind, though it felt so real when he slept that sometimes when he woke he expected to find his father far away and towering, bent over his mother’s sprawling body: sword raised and eyes lit from within and shadowed from without with a fire that burned.

Even though his father had never hurt him , it was a jarring thing, waking so close after these dreams that his mother thought were more than that, and that his father knew he had, through means of his own. 

That particular morning, they woke in a glowing crepuscular mist at the edge of the woods and they moved about the camp in silence. Maeglin finished packing their bedrolls and was just rubbing at the pain shooting up his thigh when his father ducked low to peer into his face. He pressed a piece of waybread and smoked meat into his distracted hands and asked:

“Did you sleep well?”

Maeglin took the food and straightened, looked up at him. He did not frown but forced his face to assume neutrality as he shook his head and met the darkling eyes.

“You have not slept well, for years.”

“I have not,” Maeglin confirmed, and he stuffed the meat into a pocket and hefted on his pack, adjusting his cloak beneath the straps.

“I think you are caged in these woods.”

Maeglin’s heart jumped at the words and his eyes were drawn from his fumbling hands to his father’s piercing eyes.

“I—”

“And if you are to leave them, I would rather you be guided by one who knows you and the world about this place.”

He did not move at all, but he let his mind focus on the light at the edge of the woods, growing and refracting in slowly dissipating mist.

 “I am not naive to the fact that children will sneak about on their own—grown on stories of faraway lands and greener times—and place their House in danger.”

Maeglin turned his head and stared hard at the ground, and heat burned up his neck and disappeared, hot, at his hairline.

Eöl began to walk then, and Maeglin did not immediately follow, but he heard the crunch of frost underfoot as his father crossed that invisible border behind which he and his mother would often stand, peering through their distant window into the far-off world.

“Come, Maeglin,” his father said loudly, and he gestured sharply, pointing into the Wide World, on vibrant display as the mist rolled back like a rising curtain. 

His heart beat hard in his chest and he managed not to glance back toward mother or home.

“I will take you now to see the dwarves at Nogrod, and teach you their ways. You are old enough.”

He stepped back into the dark for a moment and crossed to take up Maeglin’s hands. He pulled him gently over that divide between night and light, until he was surrounded on all sides by gentle, morning sun, grey and warm to look at—if not to feel—on that crisp winter morn…

Eöl dropped his hands and shoved him gently, so he took a step forward—

His heart beat wildly in his chest and he felt his arms rising from his sides almost against his will, stretched out— just as his mother had told him to do —as if he could fly… He tilted his head back so his face drank the watery sun and his breath hitched cold in his chest as he thought, for a single moment, that he might cry. 

Maeglin did not know how long he stood there, but he opened his eyes only when his father’s hand came down firm and warm on his shoulder and—under the reassurance of that fresh, encircling sun—he did not even flinch at the touch.

Maeglin smiled before he could stop himself and when he turned to his father he was smiling, too.

“Good things come to those that heed their master, child.”

It seemed the mist came down on him, then, like sleet or frozen rain, but he acquiesced nonetheless and focused hard on the sun instead, ever-brightening, climbing the horizon. They walked and they walked and—in his mind—he was soaring, and his heart was alight with song even as his ears took in and filtered out his father’s words as they progressed. 

By the time they crossed the River Gelion on their second day of travel, he moved as if caught on warming updrafts, thousands of leagues above the heavy pall cast about him by his father. Even when he fell on an algae-slick rock as they forded the river—even as he looked up at the slow-moving surface from below, slow and blinking before his lungs began to beat against his heart against his chest and he struggled to his feet—even then he soared, and he burst from the surface like a child drowned, and he shot the watery sun…

They spent an extra night at the river so he could recover from the cold, and he edged close to the raging fire Eöl had built for him as he shook, but, even so—that night—he did not dream.

__________________________________________________________________

 

Twenty-Eight Years Old

Aredhel returned from a walk with Eöl one morning picking moss from her hair, and Maeglin watched from the corner of his eye as he poured her tea.

She returned another day hanging from his father’s arm, bent over in laughter, and Eöl smiled upon her as if she were a cool, clement night after sun-scorched heat, the edges of his obsidian-sharp gaze softer and more polished than Maeglin had ever seen.

Another time, they stumbled in together through the cottage door, long after all the folk had gone to sleep. Maeglin stood in the doorway of his room—clutching a book to his chest—as his father twisted a hand into the hair at the nape of his mother’s neck. As the steel of her melted like fire to ice, Maeglin looked away.

The morning after that , he watched them from the back door where he hunched low, rubbing leather oil into the armguards his mother had gifted him for archery practice. His mother and father leaned close in an exchange so quiet he could not hear them, but—over minutes—the hissing sounds of his father’s anger began to intermittently rise like an overflowing pot, and it became difficult to focus on the task beneath his hands…

Finally, Maeglin looked up to see his mother tall and strong ( hair black as midnight, she glowed bright as the moon ), and her clothes seemed to lift around her as her own ire grew to match his father’s, and then their voices were boiled over and spreading out, absorbed and muted by the heavy darkness of the forest all around them.

Maeglin rose to walk away from it—to avoid becoming an unintentional casualty of the debate—when he was stopped in his tracks by a sound like a tree cracking under lightning at the height of a storm—

He whipped about to see his father, tall and dark, above his mother, small and silver, yet straight as unyielding steel, even as her cheek prickled with stripes of vibrant cerise. 

Eöl flexed his hand at his side.

Maeglin opened his mouth to say something but his mother turned to him immediately and held up a hand.

“It is no concern,” she said coldly. “This is not the first time your father has disgraced himself by raising a hand against the one he ‘worships as the moon;’ the one, he says, who puts ‘Tilion and his charge to shame’.”

Maeglin looked from one to the other, took a step, and faltered.

“Insecure enough that—” his mother continued as he froze, eyes flicking toward Eöl momentarily, “when I ask for more time with you—he fears what a mother and son might do while he is gone, as if he is not enough to control us.”

Her voice was rising and it quivered as she spoke.

“Because you, child, dare show interest in something that is not him!”

She spat blood on the ground at his father’s feet and pinned Eöl with eyes that shone bright as pure iron. 

“Go, Lómion,” she said firmly, without looking at him. “Your father is no concern of yours. He is mine .”

And, so, Maeglin dropped his things and ran.

 

He started planning that very night and, though he said of it not a word, he could not look his parents in the eyes for weeks.

Chapter 4

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Eöl granted his mother’s request so that—over the years—he and she were gifted more time together. However, as Maeglin continued to grow and mature, so too did his sharpness of heart and—while a child still (and one who did not have peers with whom to compare observations)—he nevertheless noticed things he could not stop and that, therefore, burned him. The more time he spent alone with his mother, for example, the more often would she return from her reunion walks with Eöl (for Maeglin still traveled with him often) with tears salting her face and, sometimes, with her tunic tucked in at the waist as if to hide some mess. But there was always something that betrayed her: most recently, blood she had missed with the wetted tail of her tunic creased the corner of her mouth.  

Aredhel thought she hid her suffering from him, though Eöl knew he knew, and used it to control him. But the two of them had their own confidences that Eöl’s pride would never allow him to imagine.

.o.

In a slit in the underside of his pallaise, Maeglin hid the notes on his father’s poisons his mother had gifted him after he had fallen ill, when he was small. Over the years, he would pull them out by candlelight and read them, and add his own notes on the back. He did this year after year after year, until he was stealing bits and pieces from Eöl’s workshop; slipping things he had made or acquired in Nogrod into pockets sewn inside his sleeves; until he had organized and cataloged and created so much that one night—when his father was far away without him—he built a box into the floor beneath his trunk and stashed it all away.
 

.o.

His father’s folk that lived about their cottage were strange and distant, and Maeglin did not like them. 

He did not like that they listened to his father and ignored him, that they looked at his mother as if she were a slip, a waif, a suggestion of a moonbeam, memory. 

He did not like that they would help her when his father was home, but leave her the hardest work when he was not. 

He did not like that they spoke a language he could not quite understand, and he did not like the way they looked at him—decades upon decades—as if he were some strange thing they were glimpsing in the forest for the first time, when he had never lived anywhere else.

Once, he had tried to make a list, of people who might help. He had been young then, young enough to still believe there was help that might come from inside the borders of the Wood.

But the list shrunk over time, as name by name was crossed and discarded, until one day he built his own fire and burnt the whole thing.

“Why will they not aid us, when they know how you suffer?” he had asked her once.

“Because your father is not always so hateful.”

“But he is,” Maeglin had insisted, and she tilted her head to the side in gentle acknowledgment.

“What see they in him?”

“The same as I, I imagine,” she answered and glanced away. “He is enchanting.”

Maeglin had not spoken but stared, and then set his face hard and blank and looked at her again, but she continued before he could so much as wet his lips—

“And they are dark elves, child, and are bound to his will.”

“Father is a dark elf, too, is he not? By the figuring of your kin.”

She nodded.

“And thus,” Maeglin had countered, “so am I.”

“It is not the same,” said she. “You are not the same.”

“Then what am I?” 

But his mother had not answered, and he looked away and frowned.

 

It had been days since Maeglin had been separated from his father, and the trees were tall and dark about him. From far away, he could hear his father’s step through the muted sigh of slick pine fall, and could feel his mind wrapped tight and close around his, but he could not see him and had not been able to for days. Every time he closed his eyes the images flashed before him, and when he opened them, his mother would dash before his sight, cut through with a blade of black, gasping. 

White and silver, black and red: The world was a painting. 

He wandered and wandered and the birds spiraled in a cyclone until they crossed in cycling streams of flight, straight and then curved. They followed him as he ran, and—when he looked up—they were the bars of a cage endlessly circling him.

He woke one morning in the clearing in which he used to play with his mother, and he was no longer lost or alone. His father bent over him, and he felt twenty years older than he had when last he had held his own thoughts and, he realized—looking down at his hands, which were wider and more defined than the last time he had seen them—perhaps he had aged…

“Where have you been?” Eöl simply asked.

 Maeglin only stared at him, face unmoving as his father hauled him to his feet, and then cupped his cheek and spoke loudly inside him:

“You are strong enough in arm, but are you strong enough to master your sightful mind and, in need, defend it?”

A pang shot through his heart and his breath stuttered, pattering along his chest like a leather-rib drum.

“The things you have seen, child, yet not bothered to raise a hand against: Does Maeglin only run? The house of Eöl does not—we hold our ground and fight.”

He burned and burned and pulled from his father’s grip violently: an image of Eöl damned by the gods and suspended against a backdrop of pure white and swirling grey flooded his mind: 

It burst outward like a song called upon and released—

“Stop!”

 A hand cracked against his face and he was taken at the shoulder and shaken. Fingers spiraled round his neck and the scent of moss suffused the winter, throwing his senses forward until the woods were startlingly sharp and vibrant around him. 

“I have given you your skills,” Eöl hissed into his ear, and Maeglin’s tongue caught on the ridge behind his teeth as the fingers grasped him and choked; he shook. “I have given you your life , and with one moment—one mood , child—I can take them away.”

(Until you are older, stronger, less afraid.)

Maeglin straightened his back so he was a tall core of steel and he looked his father in the eye as his heart yet beat like a bird against the cage of his chest, as his lungs worked double-time round the vines that mined his throat. Tears streamed down his face but he jerked away, reeling, and the vines burst into flame before him. He fell to the ground, stuttering and worn.

When he looked up, his father stood stiff in silence, but he clutched a hand that blistered, and Maeglin blinked and stared.

“Whatever your mother thinks, Eölchín?”  his father said with words that flayed the soul. “There is no such thing as an accident.”

.o.

Maeglin watched him go, and then he prepared his pack for their trip to the caves. He stayed up until the sun filtered through the high window of his room, where it fell on his tired brow like a cold benediction.

He checked and double-checked his notes—his father’s, in his mothers hand; and his, in his own—and he measured the contents of one of the vials he had prepared one more time before tucking them into a roll in the bottom of his pack. He slipped out the door of his room to the lauder.

The latch on his childhood door swung with a clatter behind him—useless and weak—and Maeglin routed through the cupboard for meat and for cheese. He sliced a bowl of preserved apples so quickly the blade was a blur, and he tossed the knife toward its spot in the block so it turned head over head over— thwack.

He retreated to his room where he waited for his father, and he ate.

He waited and he hungered.  

That image of his mother impaled and burned looped like the moving panoramas she had told him about when he was a babe, so that—in his heart and in his mind—he watched her die again and again and again.

___________________________________________________________________________

 

Maeglin came of age without fanfare. He spent the day deep in the bosom of the world where he could feel the earth’s heart beat around him. He did not have the night-sight of his father but he had come to appreciate the ground, how it circled round him like a dark embrace, reassuring and true: If you learned from its moods and sured up its faults with vigilant care, it bestowed upon you gifts unimaginable and—when it fell upon you in a rage—it was only punishment well-deserved.

Chapter 5

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“Good things come to those that heed their master,” his father had told him as a child. And, over the years—as he stumbled and weaved into a quiet, early adulthood—it proved again and again to be true: good things lay on the path of least resistance, and good things came on days wrapped in easy acquiescence.

Every moment, though, when Maeglin thought he was ready to release his father from the bounds of the physical world, he would be pulled back into place with a jerk and a hook, air rushing past his lips like a blow to the gut. Other times, he would be pulled back with a gentle hand at his chin, an unspoken, non-threatening promise. Worst of all was the turning of the eyes upon him, the suggestions in his mind—the tilt of the head and a glance to the side where his mother would often be, darning socks, or humming.

He seldom resisted for he knew it was folly and yet…

The dreams had worsened over the decades and he had crept closer and closer to that circle of trees like painted matchsticks, so close he could almost see what would happen in the end, what would happen after his mother died, to him.

And so, once—at the mouth of a mine in Nogrod, with the dwarves disappearing into the dark before them—he had confronted Eöl. He had asked for release, or release—at least—for his mother, whom he had come to believe was held against her will, far away from those kith and kin who missed her, who must think her long dead and gone. He nearly fell to his knees to plead, for his own will and his mother’s were waning, but his father would not have it, and Maeglin’s pride would not allow it, either. He fingered the small blade he kept at his wrist, dipped each morning in a mixture he had composed from his father’s very own figuring (just in case).

But it was dark around him and he felt small as his father loomed, and the only light in the place was far away and disappearing, fading into a pinprick as the dwarves descended into the mine and he was alone with nothing to cling to.

His father took him at the back of the neck and spun him round so his cheek was cold against the harsh, cave-wet wall: “The Teleri do not abandon their lands ,” he said. “ Or their fathers.”

And then his mind was taken. Maeglin could not move as the scene played out behind his eyes:

 

This time, the fire was small but the blade was big.

His father was tall and he was small.

His mother cast himself before him on an endless loop as the blade plunged and stopped and plunged and stopped and plunged until—

He was taken up by the heart and thrown upon the ground. He looked up into the endless dark as his father moved within it—hair dark, eyes dark, skin aglow with blade as black as night—and then he watched (frozen and still— dead? ) as his mother stopped her fight and laid back like an offering to the emptiness of the sky, her clothes fresh and silver and white, like a moonbeam through winter-bare shadows. The blade came down then and pierced her—proud and straight as a spear, tall and dark—and she was—

(You cannot pin the moon! It is more tricksome than even the water in your creek.)

She was taken by the woods as his father stood over them. He had grown vines from his fingers and moss from his feet. Waves of duff and clinging lichen bubbled like the edge of a fast-progressing flood, over his body and his mother’s until they were dead-alive; until they were folded into the woods like natural things forgotten, grown over as if they were stone, memorials to ancient lands, a cairn for the living:

A sleep so strange inside his father’s house (this land of Nan Elmoth, where wife and progeny amount to nothing).

Whether in his mind or in the mines, his father walked away, but Maeglin stood pressed against the wall and heaving—trapped in moss and bound by web—at the heart of a mountain (in the heart of the woods)— alone.

 

 

Hours passed so that he was numb by the time his father returned—alone—from his long day of discovery with the dwarves. He peeled him from the wall like lichen from a branch, and Maeglin swayed on legs that bent like twigs as his father spoke:

“They spend the night to venture further in the morning, but I have told them I have need to deal with you. They also find disobedient sons distasteful.”

Eöl did not touch him but still Maeglin felt as if he was held tight, his breaths thin as fog on the glass of a pond at daybreak. Eöl guided him with the barest hint of a suggestion at the edge of his mind and, try as he might, he could not buck him.

“I command you,” Eöl said, when he opened the door to their grand guest rooms and shoved him forward. “Pack.”

And Maeglin did, but he burned, and his skin itched with a rage that simmered just beneath the surface, edging his crisscrossing veins as he worked.

“In all this you shall obey me, or I shall set you in bonds,” his father called from the washroom.

Once, Maeglin would not have believed it but, this time, he did not dare to laugh. 

.0.

He returned to his mother that time in pieces, for he had not quit the arguing with his father the entire ride home, and he had not quit the arguing with him for the weeks in between. Not from the day they rode in and Maeglin fell from his horse bound and exhausted, sound of body but hollow of mind; not until the day his father left at the invitation of the dwarves in summer. From winter to summer he and his father simmered and argued, while he and his mother fought to think for the power wrapped round them by Eöl’s invisible chains.

(But when Eöl left for that summer feast, he left them both behind, and over great distance his power over them was lessened.)

That particular day, it was wildfire-hot and they were miserable and impatient. Eöl’s folk tracked them like wolves in the wood who watched the sickened deer graze—wandering farther and farther afield—at an unprotected dawn...

“Do you know what the husbands of men do when their wives try to leave them, Mother?” he asked, when all the folk had departed for their chores and they bent together over a basin, scrubbing stains out of Maeglin and Eöl’s work clothes.

“Do you know what they do to wives who choose to stay ?” his mother countered dryly.

Maeglin tilted his head, and his mother continued:

“Besides, how would you know, Maeglin?  Your father is no Man.”

“I do not have to see it to know,” he spoke underbreath, and he scratched at a burr embedded in the linen. “I have heard it said; and I have heard the things Eöl says to the dwarves at Nogrod.”

His mother did not answer, only rubbed more lye into the clothes with cracking hands.

“And I have seen them in my dreams,” he said with ill-hid urgency, gaze focused intently on his work, “and they have been cast before my eyes like ghosts—real enough to touch—in the mist.”

They finished their work in silence, wrung out the water over the basin, and then hauled the clothes outside to cast them on the line, as if each day would be the same, as if they would need these things in this place, forever and anon, until they died…

“Well then, Lómion,” his mother finally said as she pinned, and her loose hair was caught by the wind. Dark, it whipped his face like a switch. “We shall just have to not get caught.”

He glanced at her and away, and the pressure of the woods was heavy on his heart.

“I am no babe in the woods,” she continued. “I have hunted with the greatest hunters in this world and the Other. I have ridden alongside Oromë himself.”

“Mother…”

“With your mind, child… Together we will make it out, and we will see my kin.”

His heart burned to imagine it, and her pride in him warmed him and gave him hope.

They fled the laundry and packed their things. They damned the folk, gathered their horses, and left. 

.0.

Aredhel and Maeglin made the edge of the forest and began to grope for that border that, every day, bound them. 

They grasped and they pulled and they cursed and they fought, until Maeglin thought his mind would flee from the intensity of the work as he pounded and he pushed. 

Time passed, hands bled, and Lómion spat carmine onto the moss and heard his mother do the same. The sky was a misty, watery gold through a far-off window, and he had long since begun to careen toward resigned despair— 

But then miraculously (perhaps by strength of will alone) that invisible, unseeable, insistent thing —that had for years and years kept them—shattered like lightning across a pitch black sky: they were thrown forward (birthed, heaving, dripping) into the endless broomgrass sea.

Their horses followed calmly, but they lay on their backs and breathed...

The light burned, the waves beckoned, clouds moved across the sun: the world was quiet and steady and whole, until a cacophony of birds startled into the sky around them, haphazard and harmless—

Free.

.o.

The ride was golden and rushed, but it was one of the happiest of his life. On the horse next to him his mother careened wildly across the plains, leant her head back as she slowed, and sang. He joined her, and as the sun worked its way down the horizon and they were leagues from those cousins he had met for the first time and whom he found he loved and adored —craved and hungered to emulate, to possess their freedom, their strength— they caught one another’s eye and whooped. His mother’s whoop turned into a yell—long and high, sustained and wrenching—until she was screaming as they beat their way across the plains, through the mountains, up the river, into the night.

Neither could speak through that rawness til morning and—even then—they said nothing at all, but instead bowed their heads and gave thanks for the sunlight, for the warmth of the world, for the ability to think and be without looking over their shoulder, without a haunting of their minds, without without with :

Birdsong on the wind.

Grass about the ankles.

Frogs on the bank and a heron skirting the breeze.

The Wide World stretched out before them, and they pointed north (more true than an arrow) across the beckoning gold in that rising morning: the yellow and the white, like the moon and the son.

(With the gifts of my family—and hers—you have the potential to capture the moon.)

But they fled and they rose and cut themselves free, and they burst through the mist into the brightening morning. They ran, they ran, they ran.

Epilogue

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It was a beautiful city, and it was glorious and strange.  There was a woman there who shone brighter than his mother, so that she was just a reflection of this lady’s greater beauty, and yet… To see his mother and her brother—his uncle !—come together for the first time in a century? It nearly shattered his mind, and while once he might have wept, he instead wrung his hands:

For a moment, he understood love.

Turukáno, she had cried.

Írissë! he had called, and then, his mother:

This is Lómion! Brother, look—

He had glowed, then, from the inside out.

This is my Lómion, your sister-son, my morning star.

But then came the night, and his life—tiny once and meaningless, but expanded, now, and sprawling—collapsed around him.

And he could not have predicted it.

And he did not know.

He was cast into eternal twilight when she slipped through his fingers; and he felt nothing (nothing at all, except for the sensation of air as he dove into the depths of some secret crevice, as he fashioned his own tomb of cold and dark in this foreign land, far away from kith and kin)—  

He felt nothing at all as he watched him go.

And he stood silent and listened, and when his father cursed him he spoke not a word in return but—in his mind—he cursed him worse: to the eternal darkness, past the edges of the world and beyond.

The sun set.

His world crumbled.

His heart was mists of grey.

“Lómion,” she had said, as she brought his hand to her lips. “How lucky I have been to have you.”

The sun set every day, such that sometimes he could not tell whether he waked or dreamed.

Lómion.

He dug deep into the earth, and—for the rest of his life—there was a hunger and a longing that could not be sated. 

He was free of command and yet...

For the rest of his life, he groped in the dark, and grieved.

__________________________________________________________________________

 

He opened his hand without looking away from the child, and the gems fell like bodies into heavy water—one, two, three—in their pillowed clatter onto the carpeted stone.

His chest was flooded with a cold that took his breath away, a cold of deepest seas and tallest mountains and ice and ice and ice and—

The longest crossing, a chorus of birds building like a mountain into a cacophony of sound and then:

Fire, tall as towers, tall as the darkness, deep as—

His hand burned and blistered and throbbed, and the child spat his blood—hateful blood, cursed—onto the ground. 

He was caught and flung, then— flying, suspended:

(“Put out your arms as if you could fly.”)

One.

The sun rose gold in his faraway mind —

Two.

His father’s eyes—dark as night, sharp as obsidian—burning away the encircling night —

Three.

His chest burned with shame as he —

 

Fin.