Fathoms Below by Raiyana

1

Read 1

The hands were everywhere, grabbing, bruising, lifting, hurting.

Hurling.

 

“A gift for you, my love.”

“So I see. And what a … special gift indeed.”

The sound of water rushing in his ears, masking but not quite muffling voices, one soft and dark, one light and wry as it offers… him?... to the other.

Maglor blinks, surprised he can.

And then his lungs heave with fire, but salt splatters his skin as he retches, seawater pulsing from his body in exhausting shudders of agony that flare across his skin.

He gasps for breath, surprised to find it, tinged by a peal of laughter that isn’t his own.

Trembling, he pushes himself up – tries and fails twice – swiping at tangled dark hair until his face is clear.

He sees darkness.

Panicked, he falters, falling falling, until his back hits the ground that should be nowhere near him and he can see nothing above him except a murky blue, the hue lighter near the middle of the room.

He blinks.

The walls are strange, moving almost, as though he’s seeing them through a thin sheet of water – Finrod had a doorway like that, Curufin told him in a letter once, a continuing stream of water stretched into a sheet by clever hands and a cleverer mind.

Oh, little brother.

The grief has lessened over the years, and still for a moment he thinks he can see Curvo, hair cut short to his ears after tiny Ambarussa accidentally burnt half of it when they wanted to explore his forge, so much softer than he became in Beleriand, still the ner who’d spend days working on a bauble to make his wife smile.

I miss you.

His heart aches for them, hoping – and not hoping, always – that perhaps Curvo found his love once more in the Halls of Mandos, found himself once more…

Perhaps that is all the hope they can wish for, a glimmer of mercy beyond death.

And he daren’t hope for even that.

“She was pretty, that one – and so sweet.” The dark voice remarks.

He startles, eyes darting in the direction of the speaker.

She smiles – and it is a she, despite the strange blue skin that reminds him of a group of whales he once saw, and the body that has little to distinguish it as a female, and still to name her anything else would be impossible.

For a moment, he can’t breathe, tortured lungs gripped in frozen fear of that smile.

And Uinen moves, fluid as water, sinuous as a snake, her limbs – green-webbed fingers longer than fingers ought to be, skin decorated with the lumps of pale barnacles clinging to her, a body that is thick and feels strangely nurturing in a sense he does not quite understand, ending in a mass of squid-like tentacles each thicker than his legs – flowing like she is following her own current.

“Beautiful, is she not?” The words, the light wry voice turned sweetly loving, right next to his ear are even more startling than the knowledge that when the sailors who heaved him overboard to calm the storm cried out a sacrificial prayer to Uinen, she actually listened.

He nods, dumbly.

She is, the savage beauty of power leashed if barely, the roar of the seas hers to command or calm, and he knows who is beside him, foam-white hair floating in a current that doesn’t exist in this strange bubble of air beneath the waves.

“Ossë,” he breathes, fear-tinged.

Ossë laughs, high and bright, and an elf-shaped hand darts into view, gripping his shoulder. The bruise beneath flares to life, hot and painful, and the best reminder than this is no drowning-dream.

He is fathoms below, dropped into the depths of the sea.

And he is alive.

For now.

 

Uinen moves, too fluid for true bones and flesh, and Ossë’s hand moves to the centre of his back; Maglor does not need the push to kneel, fear taking his knees out from under him. Not fear of death, which has long since been reconciled – for a while, he even thought it would come by the hand of either of these powers, would wash him away from the shoreline he had wandered for so long he couldn’t even remember the years.

That’s a lie.

He remembers every tear-stained, rage-filled, lamentating day.

Every single one.

No, the fear is not for death, but for vengeance; he remembers, alongside those lonely days when the gulls were his only potential audience and his voice wind-ripped and raw as he sang out all that had been in a lament for what should be, the rage that had tossed the swanships upon the waves. He remembers staring into a glass wall of water not unlike those that now surround them, seeing elves he had known and sung with in taverns mere nights before suspended, floating in the breathless void of water and death, claimed by the hands of the two who study him as though he is the strangest being they have seen.

“Because you are,” Uinen laughs, her teeth sharp and jagged in her mouth, snatching the thought from his mind. “The Children are strange, born from the thoughts of Eru as we are, and yet they are not as us, an endlessly strange mystery, at once entertaining and – what was that word, the new one?” she adds, glancing over his shoulder as though Maglor’s mind isn’t whirling, breaking beneath the sheer pressure of theirs surrounding him.

“Baffling,” Ossë supplies, sounding bored.

Maglor whimpers.

And Uinen pulls away, her power drawn back once more until Maglor’s mind can escape the riptide, gasping for breath he can’t find at her feet.

“What… will you do with me?” he asks, not foolish enough to dare look up into her eyes, aglow with the fell power of the Deep she commands.

Uinen laughs, round and amused, a laugh that somehow reminds him of Nerdanel and brings to mind a long-forgotten (never forgotten) memory of her, round with the child that would be Curvo, laughing at something Atar had said.

“That is the question,” she muses. Ossë has slunk away, moving to stand at her side, and Maglor’s spares a half-hysterical thought to the way Ossë looks small next to Uinen, despite being taller even than Elu Thingol. Ossë’s lips split in a smile that says he snatched it from the water, shifting his gaze until he is looking up at her, adoration clear in his face. “What to do with my new singer, dropped into my hair…” Uinen pauses, a tentacle snaking its way up and around Ossë’s finned leg. “What were you trying to do?” she asks, ignoring the way MAglor can’t stop staring at the tentacle caressing its way up Ossë’s limb. “You have not, to my knowledge, left the beaches where you were granted leave to roam many turns of the Sun before now, as you count time.”

“You…”

“Think you aught occur in our domains beyond our knowledge?” Ossë asks, grinning sharply.

“But…”

Uinen moves again, her sudden closeness startling, one webbed hand cupping his chin until he is forced to look at her.

And suddenly he is not so scared, seeing a different aspect of the Deep in her gentle smile, the nurturing mother of all life.

“You were never ours to slay,” she murmurs. “And I do enjoy the singing.”

Maglor gapes at her, aware of his own resemblance to a landed fish.

Uinen’s smile widens.

“So, tell us,” she adds, “what is your purpose for stowing away onboard a ship that was destined to sink?”

“It still could,” Ossë says, too gleeful for comfort.

Uinen shakes her head. “Not today, my love,” she murmurs. “The singer paid for their passage.”

“Elros!” Maglor blurts out, feeling again the echo of pain that had brought him to the bustling port, had made him so reckless as to sneak onto the first vessel bound for Númenor he could find. “I wanted… to see Elros.” I fear my son is dying.

“The King’s time is ending,” Uinen nods, and something almost sad passes across both their faces. “And a new King is to ascend the throne, carrying his father’s sceptre. It is the way of Men to pass beyond the circles of the world when it is their time to do so.”

“Still, I…” Maglor tries, his heart aching; he has not laid eyes on Elros since the day the twins were sent away, and yet the thought that he will never again see him smile that crooked grin of mischief, hear his shout of triumph at the winning of a good sparring match…

Uinen hums something thoughtful that isn’t truly words as he knows them and a ream of images flash through his mind, all Elros – on a ship, standing with Círdan bent over a drafting table, laughing on a quay, his arm around a little boy who looks like him, playing with a small girl and a young man in the surf, their bodies bare and their laughter free and joyous, standing solemn and silent as he lifts a longbow, firing a flaming arrow across the water – as seen from the Sea.

Maglor does not know he is weeping until her fingers snatch the salt from his cheeks.

“You loved them well,” Uinen tells him, letting him break apart and sob into her comforting bosom, until Maglor’s mind floats away on a sea of soft deep humming to a space outside time.

 

“What… what will you do with me?” he asks again, much later and not at all, curious and apprehensive in turn.

“By rights you should have died,” Uinen says. “Only my curiosity feeds you breath beneath the waves.”

Maglor nods. It is to be death, then, and drowning. He touches his throat, wincing. Not the way he would have chosen to die if he could.

There is a strange poetic justice in it that appeals, at least; Maedhros leapt to a fiery death, it seems fitting his own end should be a watery grave, the last of the dread Feanorians.

“Would you give yourself over to me?” Uinen wonders, and somehow he trusts her, nods without needing to think it over.

“I have been in your keeping since the last days of the War of Wrath,” he muses, feeling the rightness of it settle upon him like a well-loved cloak, warm and strangely comforting. “I would.”

The next thing he knows is her lips, pressed tight to his own, not a soft kiss, yet not forceful either, her hands cupping his face with a strange gentleness as she pries his lips apart.

And breathes into his mouth.

And Maglor is lost to the power of the Deep Sea surging around him.

 

“Not bad,” someone says, so close and so far away, and Maglor tries to blink, tries to see. His eyes burn, just for a moment, and then clear.

He blinks.

The gentle pull of the current around him lifts his hair, long and dark still but not tangling in the water like he thinks it should have.

He blinks.

The movement of hair in water is almost hypnotic, the swish going back and forth with a current he feels in the depths of his soul, somehow knowing its run from beginning to end, playful in turns and still playful in other places, only this time it has teeth.

He scrabbles to sit, fingers skittering across the pebbly sand that he’s lying on. Light glitters across his arms, caught in a hundred tiny scales as it filters down from above.

“Wha…” he tries, surprised enough to open his mouth, and more surprised when the rush of water down his throat brings life rather than choking death, feeling it splash itself through him, washing away the stale fear that clings to him, still. “...What,” he tries again, twisting wildly as he tries to get up, only to realise that his legs don’t work right.

“Pitiful,” the same voice opines, a cross between amused and bored. “You have to swim, you know.”

Ossë, Maglor thinks, panicked for a moment as his arms whirl slowly through the water, failing to help much with moving him forward though he manages not to fall over.

Until he looks down.

And finds that where he once had legs, he is now looking at a long tail, the wide fin at the end a soft silver colour that darkens to a greyish green as it travels up his body, deepening into emerald around his hips. The scales end somewhere around his navel except for where he can see lines travel along muscles, so light they could be mistaken for his normal pale skin if not for the way they catch the light, running along his chest and arms in an intricate pattern he can’t quite discern.

“The mark of the Lady,” Ossë tells him, just a hint of jealousy in his voice, confusing even as it explains, making the shape of his scales coalesce into a sudden whole.

“I…”

“You gave yourself to her, remember?” Ossë chides, watching impassionately as Maglor’s hands – fingers webbed in slightly green skin – roam across his body, seeking out the meeting of scales and skin that is so seamless he can’t feel the end of one and the beginning of the other.

“I remember.” I did not know what it meant.

Maglor is surprised at his own lack of panic, finding himself suddenly in a body so strange as to be unrecognisable even to himself. And yet not.

There is a scar he got in Alqualondë, that callous is from centuries of harp-play, that was the spot Nerdanel used to tickle, making him giggle as a small child.

“I… have a tail.”

“And gills,” Ossë helpfully supplies.

Maglor claps his hands to his neck, gasping as he feels the fluttering lines of flesh there, water moving through him with every ‘breath’. He moans in disbelief, sinking down until he is back on the ocean floor, his tail curled up beneath him as he hugs himself.

“She made me a monster,” he whispers, shuddering. Pushing his hands into his hair, he pulls hard at the strands, wishing the pain would wake him from this nightmare. “Why?”

“You have a strange definition of monsters,” Ossë huffs, crossing his arms across his chest in affront as he swims into view, his own body shaped like a mirror of Maglor’s new one even though he moves in it with much greater ease and familiarity. “I would say you were already a monster. The Lady gave you her blessing, changed you into a being that would survive in the water as you wished, and this is how you show your gratitude?!”

“But…” Maglor weeps into his hands, surprised to feel Ossë’s hands, gentle now, resting on his shoulders.

“You are bound to the Sea, Maglor, freely offered and accepted,” he says, squeezing lightly. “And so you must return to the Sea, always.” He squeezes again, making Maglor look up at him, seeing the shells braided into his white hair, strands of Uinen’s green wrapped loving around a few plaits.

The same green that wraps around his hips now.

Maglor faints.

 

When he wakes once more, it is to Ossë’s sardonic smile and a shoal of small silvery fish surrounding them in a world of sunlit glitter that is so beautiful he wants to weep at the sight.

For a moment, neither speak, enjoying the dance of the fish.

And then Maglor asks the question that came into his mind once he managed to regain himself enough to remember Ossë’s words.

“What did you mean ‘return’?”