Quietus by UnnamedElement

---

Chapter 3

---

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.