Quietus by UnnamedElement

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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.

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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.