Quietus by UnnamedElement

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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.