An Endless Tide on Endless Shores by Rocky41_7

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An Endless Tide on Endless Shores

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            The tasks that kept Maglor alive had become so rote over the years that he often did not recall performing them; he simply looked over and noticed the water skins were full or there were skinned rabbits hanging from the rack. Elves were meant to be of Arda, but Maglor wandered far; the dark and distant places in which his mind dwelled were bleak and terrifying to him, but familiar, as the caress of a jailer. At such times as he found himself aware and observed the beauty of Middle-earth it was with the skittish guilt of one who might be caught stealing.

            What right had he to beauty anymore?

            He could not say what brought his mind back to earth as his hands and feet hunted through the underbrush of the small copse near the northern end of the stretch of beach on which he dwelled presently. Perhaps there was some animal part of his brain that responded still to threats, no matter how little Maglor’s conscious mind wished to be bothered with trivial matters like mortal danger.

            The part of Maglor’s mind that reflexively concerned itself with his physical safety (it did not bother itself overmuch about his mental or emotional safety) paid no attention to his annoyance at this insistence. It forced him to drop the armload of sticks he must have meant to use as kindling and snapped his attention over to a flowerless, scrubby bush squatting beside a narrow-trunked tree.

            The part of Maglor’s mind that spread its apathy out over the rest of him like a gelatinous mire remarked that this bush was no different than any of a hundred bushes, and if there had been a lingering Orc or goblin or warg, Maglor would have seen (or smelled) it already.

            But Maglor’s vigilance would not relent, so he was compelled to stand there studying this abominably dull bush, noting that there was a fat slug on one leaf, roughly the size of his thumb, and that the lower leaves were in disarray, possibly so deranged by a passing animal.

            The part of Maglor’s mind concerned with deadly threats may have been vigilant—but it was not especially observant. Perhaps its senses had been dulled by the gelatinous apathy, or perhaps this was why Maglor habitually came away from hunts with less even than Finrod (provided Finrod had actually participated in the hunt and not wandered off to collect caterpillars or discover some hitherto unknown sentient species of Middle-earth). Even Maglor’s apathetic forebrain was shocked at his own incompetence when, as he stood there staring flatly at the world’s most unremarkable bush, he realized he heard breathing.

            This jolted into action even Maglor’s most reticent senses, and he strode forward without much more thought, plunged a hand into the bush, and dragged out something heavy and thrashing.

            “Stop it!” the bundle wailed. “You savage! You brute!”

            Maglor let go, less at the beseeching, and more because he had the thing in the clear, where he could see it.

            “Oh, hell,” he sighed. The ghosts of his family were one thing—this was another entirely. If Maglor’s mind was going so poorly, didn’t it stand to reason he might die soon? Or would he merely be compelled to live on as a poor, insane wretch? Oh, I really cannot become any more wretched, he thought. One had to have standards.

            “This isn’t your wood,” said Daeron of Doriath, kneeling in the sandy dirt, rumpled from Maglor’s mishandling with a scratch on his cheek Maglor was mostly sure was not his fault.

            Maglor looked at him. It was possible it was Daeron. No one had seen or heard of him since he’d marched off out of Melian’s Girdle after Luthien—at least not to Maglor’s knowledge, which was admittedly abysmal at this point. He made a point of knowing nothing of current events.

            But knowing Maglor, wasn’t it just as likely there was nothing there at all?

            I touched him though, Maglor thought. Did that mean anything?

            “Go away.” Maglor stared down the Elf, waiting for him to disappear. Resentment at being made to speak and hear his own hoarse, unused voice festered in his breast.

            Daeron glared petulantly at him and said nothing, which made sense. If it was Daeron, he did not speak Quenya.

            “Oh,” said Maglor. Maybe it was Daeron. He had that same mulish look and tendency to picking fights he couldn’t win. His rich brown hair was curling around his ears, where it had been hastily and hideously cropped, and he looked twitchy, tense.

            “I knew not that any kinslayers survived,” said Daeron, and Maglor tilted his head, realizing with some faint curiosity he did not think he had ever seen Daeron genuinely angry before. Of course, what burned on his face now was only a shadow of a real feeling—Maglor knew enough to recognize that.

            Nevertheless—he did not want to talk to Daeron, and he certainly did not want to talk about that.

            “I do,” Maglor answered. He stepped closer. “Perhaps I’ll kill you too.” Daeron was not a warrior. It had been a great pride of Doriath that they had minstrels who knew nothing of blade or plow, and one of such phenomenal skill as Daeron had never been expected to busy himself with the dreary business of war. He was a rabbit, squealing at a wolf, and Maglor did not expect he would need to raise a paw to make him take flight.

            “Such mercy exists not in your heart,” Daeron replied, so bitter Maglor was surprised blood did not spurt from his lips. His chin thrust up defiantly, and the part of Maglor’s brain that processed consequences felt some unease to recognize too the look of an Elf for whom death was more promise than punishment. No, had he not had enough of those in his life?

            Weariness swept over him. Would Daeron really gall Maglor to part his jaws to frighten him away?

            “No, it does not,” he agreed. He gathered up his loose sticks and turned back towards the beach.

            “Hey!”

            Maglor did not have time for this, whether Daeron was a figment of his imagination or not. Frankly, he had less time for the flesh and blood Daeron than one that might be some construct of his mind trying to tell him something.

            Now that Daeron knew he was here, he would leave, and the beach would be quiet again.

***

            Maglor had no luck at all, anywhere in the world. He did not deserve it, but sometimes he wished for it all the same.

***

            Daeron was watching him. It took Maglor several days to realize this, which he blamed on Daeron’s damnable Wood-elf nature and their uncanny ability to conceal themselves in plain sight. He had not thought the trees large enough to bear much of an Elf’s weight, nor thick enough with foliage to conceal a grown Elf, yet he knew Daeron must have been there the past few days, even if Maglor had not noticed him.

            When he realized it, he was momentarily tempted to go fetch his axe, or for the sake of expending less effort, throw a nearby rock at the tree where he suspected Daeron was lingering. The feeling was quite sharp and sudden, and it startled Maglor that it did not instantly fade away. Irritated with this irritation that wanted him to do something rather than sit there in quiet resentment, Maglor rose and went over to the tree.

            “Did I not tell you to get yourself gone?” he said.

            “Did I not say these were not your lands?” There was a moment before Daeron answered, when Maglor thought he would feign he was not there.

            Maglor considered.

            “Come down,” he said. “Let us speak as civilized persons.” Another pause, and then the creaking of the small tree as Daeron slid down from the branch on which he had been acting the squirrel. Nearly the same moment his toes touched the uneven ground, the webbing between Maglor’s thumb and forefinger caught him at the throat and slammed his back against the slender tree trunk. “I said to get gone,” Maglor said quietly. He leaned in to speak, and then released Daeron and let him fall to his knees, choking for air down his abused windpipe.

            He looked at the one-time minstrel, gagging in the sandy dirt, with his raggedy short hair and patched up clothes. It would have been so easy to keep squeezing; Maglor could almost feel Daeron’s windpipe crushed beneath his hand, feel the thrashing of a body gasping for air, but he jerked away from the thought as though from an open flame.

            “How are you alive?” he wondered, shaking his head.

            “How are you alive?” Daeron wheezed, one hand still on his neck as he looked up at Maglor.

            “I was a general,” said Maglor. “You played party tricks for Thingol.” Daeron flinched, though whether at the insult or the name of his old patron Maglor could not say. It was a response, though. “It was assumed that you had died when you left the Girdle. Was that not your great gift to Luthien?” One skill of Maglor’s that remained untarnished then: the insults rose to his tongue with no more effort than turning a spit. It did not give him pride. “Iluvatar’s heart must be greatly moved to pity with you. Perhaps the Orcs as well, and so you have not yet been slain. Or perhaps you’re just a coward with fleet feet. It turns out you’re worth very little without Thingol at your back.”

            “Speak not to me of pity!” Daeron snarled. “You know nothing of it!” It was anger, but it was anger with tears bubbling below the surface, Maglor thought. No—he hadn’t ever seen Daeron angry, had he? “And speak not to me of Thingol, nor Luthien,” he whispered. He was trembling. “You know nothing of it.”

            “That’s easily done. Cease your eavesdropping and spying on my camp,” Maglor added over his shoulder as he turned back towards the beach. It was on the tip of his tongue to remind Daeron he could kill him still, but his stomach turned and he held back. Daeron knew. There was no need to remind him.

***

            Daeron ceased with the efforts to conceal himself, but when Maglor next noticed him, he was simply sitting at the edge of the trees, his back against a trunk, looking at the water.

            Now Maglor thought he had been quite patient enough.

            “Do you wish your death at my hands?” Maglor asked, standing in front of Daeron. “For it will not come.”

            “Then you have no means by which to force my departure.”

            Well—!

            Well…!

            Damn.

            “Is it not enough that you are unwanted?” It would have been enough for Maglor; he should have shriveled up and died before staying somewhere he was not welcome.

            “Far from it.” Daeron closed his eyes. And then: “You are blocking the sun.”

            Maglor stared at him. His mind was unaccustomed to dealing with others, and he found himself puzzled that violence and rejection had not been enough to do away with this refuse of the First Age. Once Daeron had been fawned on, beloved and adored for his skill, and ease with laughter and smiles, and there was no party he had ever passed without a great deal of company. Well, truthfully—Maglor had only seen him the one time at the Feast of Reuniting, but he remembered Daeron’s behavior. Presumably it was much the same behind Melian’s magic fence.

            “Why will he not leave?” he asked aloud, blinking in confusion.

            “I will go when it seems good to me, and not when you tell me,” Daeron answered, although Maglor had not been speaking to him. He did not open his eyes. “The beach is not yours alone.”

            “Perhaps it is my punishment,” Maglor murmured. “Perhaps it is my Doom.” It would be appropriate, wouldn’t it? To torment him forever with this Elf? A physical manifestation of Maglor’s guilt, and axe to the once-towering tree of Maglor’s pride, for the one Elf he could not truly convince himself he had surpassed in skill?

            (You could do away with him, came the susurrant voice in his head. It would be so easy; he would never see it coming.)

            “How you flatter yourself,” Daeron scoffed quietly. “The world’s inconveniences do not plot against you, Maglor Feanorion. You aren’t important enough.”

            “I wish that were true.” Maglor had long ago lost the energy to be ‘glum,’ but there was some faint whisper of it in his mien, as though there were a disintegrating, dried-up part of his brain that remembered what ‘glum’ felt like. When he found a place to settle, it was with his back to his uninvited company.

***

            There was blood on the bottom of Daeron’s left moccasin. He slept at the base of the tree where he had been sitting, and did not bother himself about protections. A red-black slash cut across the soft deerskin. Again, Maglor found himself stunned that Daeron had not been killed by roving Orcs, or a particularly aggressive badger.

            It was only a chore, when he crouched by the sleeping Elf and untied his moccasin. As he had suspected, the blood was Daeron’s—he had a nasty cut across diagonally across the arch of his foot. Fortunately for Maglor, Umanyar slept as heavily as their Calaquendi cousins, and Daeron did not wake when Maglor splashed water over the cut and wiped away the worst of the blood crusts.

            “Bandages, fool,” he said. Did he have any? He patted himself, as if he might find hidden on his person, unknown until that moment, some stash of bandages. Of course he had none—what would he make them out of? He was no weaver of cloth!

            (That had been Caranthir; though it was Curufin called ‘crafty,’ it was sharp-tongued Moryo who had taken after grandmother, who could sit in silence for hours at the loom, picking and weaving and feel not the passage of time, which made him, as far as Maglor had been concerned, an ideal sitting companion.)

            When Maglor blinked, the horizon was a bruised purple. He startled, feeling an unusual urgency, for Daeron might wake soon. He was not accustomed to having a schedule—what urgency could there be in Maglor’s life? At worst, he might fail to spare himself some inconvenience. At best, he might get himself killed.

            He had a shawl. It was worn through in some places, and he had stolen it anyway—perhaps he could make up for that by using it for the benefit of another. He went to the cave and fetched the use-thinned shawl, easily tearing it into strips. One he used to pad the wound; two others he used to tie it in place. He picked up the moccasin, thinking it could use a wash, and then by some grace of Eru, came back to himself before he wandered off into doing Daeron’s laundry without realizing it.

            Shaking his head, digging his fingers into his sleeves, he retreated to the cave, and stayed there until the zenith of the sun had passed.

***

“I don’t know what he wants from me.”

            “No, if he wished to kill me, would he not have done it already?”

            “He could be preparing himself, I suppose, you’re right. But it’s Daeron. I do, I do imagine he must have killed some things since he left Doriath but…another Elf? Daeron, a kinslayer?”

            “No, no, you make a fair point. If Turgon’s execution of Eöl counted not for kinslaying, I suppose neither would it count for Daeron to kill me.”

            “I wish he would take his leave and let me alone!” said Maglor, his back hitting the side of the cave. Slowly he slid down to the floor. “He torments me with his presence. He knows it. That’s it, Nelyo! He means not to kill me, only to drive me mad!” Maglor listened for the reply, and laughed. “Now! I suppose it is true, he wouldn’t have much work to do on that front.” But his expression lapsed back into discomfort and he rubbed at his shins with both hands. “He means to make me think of it every minute of the day…Oh Nelyo, I shall simply…I…

            “It’s only fair, I know,” he murmured quickly, quietly. “I have earned it, I know, but why now? And…and…does he not have other things to do? Nelyo, is he even real? Is it only a vision from Iluvatar, to remind me of my wrongs? As if I could ever forget them!” A high, unsteady laugh, and he wrenched a skin from his nest, balling it up in one fist. “As if! As if I could forget!” The still, blue-lipped faces of Elured and Elurin Diorion burned against the backs of his eyelids, torturing him with a sight he had never seen himself, shoving his imagination’s vision up under his fingernails like splinters of wood.

            Maglor gasped, and looked up.

            “Imladris! Elrond! Elrond is Doriathrim…in a manner of speaking. Well, his…you know. She was Doriathrim. Oh. Oh.” Maglor’s hands rubbed vigorously at his shins. “He should go there. To Imladris. Not here. Ah, but he’s punishing me, isn’t he? He can’t go to Imladris if he’s punishing me. He never met Elwing, I suppose, nor Dior either. I should tell him about Elrond, and the Last Homely House. Oh! But if he leaves he won’t be able to torment me. I suppose he will feel he must stay, then.”

            Maglor’s head tipped back against the rough stone.

            “He’s terribly distracting. I can’t think with him there. I know if I go out now he’ll be there. Or perhaps he’ll be gone. How did I ever live in such a crowded place as Himring? Oh, he’s driving me mad, Nelyo! Any moment he might say something to me. It makes me terribly jittery. I can’t live like this. I should leave. That’s it! I should go. If Daeron won’t go, I must go instead!

            “Ah, but then I shall have to pack everything. That is true. I could leave without it. But I should have to make it or steal it anew. Things have gotten into a nice rhythm here, haven’t they? Why, I barely feel the days go by!” Maglor felt it was somewhat permissible to lie to one’s dead brother, if that brother had so callously abandoned them as Maedhros had done to him. “Why should I leave? No, Daeron must go. He really ought to. It’s only polite. He was always terribly rude, wasn’t he? Oh, you never did speak to him, did you? Well, he was terribly rude. Do you know, when I spoke to him, he acted as though he had never heard of me! That he never knew I was a musician! Oh, I should give him a nasty bruise for that. He’s terribly rude.

            “Nelyo, do you think he’ll kill me first? Or shall I do him instead? I suppose either way I shan’t have to move my things to some new camp…”

***

            It had rained all morning, and Maglor had not seen Daeron. He expected the Sinda had finally crawled off to haunt someone else, but when the sky began to lighten to opalescent gray from the slate it had been since dawn, Daeron slunk out of the copse and huddled, hugging his knees to his chest, in front of the ashy firepit.

            Maglor did not like to have a fire in the cave unless it was very cold—the smell of smoke burned up the insides of his nostrils and got into everything.

            He spent several hours preparing to get up to go tell Daeron to get lost, or at least move back over to the trees, and away from Maglor’s firepit, and then relaxing again, deciding it wasn’t worth the effort. When he finally made it over, Daeron beat him to the punch.

            “You touched me.”

            Maglor stopped, blinking. Daeron had upended his script and was forcing him to converse naturally, an ability of his that had eroded to almost nothing by that point. He considered just walking away.

            “You took advantage of my rest,” Daeron said to his knees.

            Maglor went on staring stupidly at him. The cut, the cut, he told himself. The cut.

            “You were bleeding,” he said at last.

            “I did not invite you to touch me,” said Daeron. “For healing purposes or any other.” Maglor blinked at him. Daeron lifted his eyes, a deep gray that in the right light appeared flecked with brown. “Why did you touch me?”

            “You were bleeding,” Maglor repeated.

            “So?”

            “So…” Maglor frowned in frustration. Daeron made things needlessly difficult. Would he also ask Maglor to explain why one took shelter when it rained? “So when you bleed, you must patch the wound,” he said with concentration. “You must…you have to…you have to fix it.”

            “I could have done it myself,” Daeron muttered, looking back at the soggy remnants of Maglor’s last fire. “Why did you not let me do it myself?” He shuddered and Maglor cringed inwardly as though someone had struck him.

            Ah. Daeron did not wish to be touched by him. Who would? His right hand burned as though he clutched again his father’s gem against his palm and his throat swelled until he couldn’t speak; he turned away. He meant to apologize. He meant to say it would not happen again; or at least to scoff at Daeron’s fretting.

            But nothing would make it past the stone in his throat.

            He went back to the cave.

***

            “Why are you here?”

            There was no answer out of the dark, but Maglor knew Daeron was still there, even if he had not been able to see the outline of his shape in the starlight. It took Maglor a good long while to understand Daeron would not answer. Fortunately, he had grown much in the field of passing long silences, and so it did not trouble him to wait.

            “Why did you leave Doriath?”

            The silence cringed.

            “I was exiled,” said Daeron at last.

            Maglor did not think it possible for him to experience surprise anymore, but the capacity existed still, apparently.

            “Thingol exiled you?” he exclaimed.

            “No!” Daeron shifted fretfully on the sand, squeezing his knees and digging his feet into the shifting ground. “No. He would never.”

            “Melian?” asked Maglor. The queen of Doriath had generally taken a hands-off approach to ruling, preferring to let Thingol manage the day-to-day, but he supposed it wasn’t impossible Elves occasionally annoyed her. Daeron was a good candidate for being annoying.

            “No!”

            “Luthien?”

            “Stop it!” Daeron’s voice broke, pitiable in its loveliness, and he pressed his forehead to his knees, and then abruptly rose. “For what would it matter to you?” he asked, an icy tremble in his voice. “With the barest chance you would have slain them all.”

            Once, Maglor would have protested vigorously, insisted it wasn’t nearly so. Now he found he could muster only a dull disappointment in himself to think it might not be false and a shapeless nausea in his gut.

            “They would have all choked on your blade, on your song, if they had not lost their lives already,” Daeron went on. “You would have sung them to bloody ribbons as easily as you larked about for your uncle.”

            Hadn’t it been a time since Maglor had thought of Fingolfin!

            “So why are you here?” Maglor asked again.

            “I know not,” Daeron replied, and he left the beach.

***

            He did not come back.

***

            “He was my friend, you know,” Daeron said, when he had returned. Maglor, who had been laying on his back slowly feeling the sun scorch his face into tender raw patches, turned his head slightly to blink uncomprehendingly at a blurry Daeron. “Thingol,” the former minstrel clarified, his eyes still fixed on the softly rolling sea.

            Maglor said nothing.

            “I remember nothing of my mother and father,” he said. “No one knows what happened although—there are—there were…suspicions.” Daeron breathed deeply and sighed. “It bothered me little, as a child. The other adults took their practical role. I did not spend my youth yearning for some lost hand of parental guidance. But…”

            Maglor’s illuminated eyes were fixed on Daeron.

            “With them, it felt like…family.” Daeron pressed his forehead to his knees, quivering. “I should have been with them, I should have died too,” he whispered, not to Maglor. “I should have died too.”

            Maglor did not respond, because this was not the kind of thing to which one made a response. He knew that too.

            “Why won’t you kill me?” Daeron asked, turning to Maglor.

            “I don’t feel like it,” said Maglor.

            “Must one feel like killing?”

            “I must.” Maglor dug a shattered chunk of seashell from the sand and hurled it towards the water. “For all the trouble he gave us, I never met Thingol.”

            “I know.” In the shriveled up part of his brain that had once kept track of social niceties and proper manners, Maglor thought this was a rather rude response. “He was proud,” Daeron admitted. “Especially later. But kind, too. He and Melian…both took such delight in all things that lived. There was nothing in the forest too small to be important, to deserve respect. He would show me things sometimes and I…fear I was not appropriately appreciative.” Daeron shook his head. “Well, those things are lost now…”

            “So he took you in,” Maglor said, scraping into the hollow where the seashell had been. Daeron nodded wordlessly. “You have one up on my brothers, being as you never tried to depose him and stage a coup. What was it like, behind the Girdle?”

            Daeron stared at him.

            Maglor stared back.

            “Astounding,” Daeron remarked. “That you of all people should ask me such a thing.” Maglor blinked. Oh. Yes. Asking about that was probably—well he hadn’t meant—it was only that—

            “Well how should I know?” Maglor said to Maedhros. “He never said not to ask about Doriath! Were we not just speaking of it?”

            “I think you were always so careless,” said Daeron, rising to his feet. It was not unusual, Maglor had learned, for him to depart the beach for some hours when he found Maglor’s company objectionable. Each time, so far, he had returned.

            “And whither do you go now!” Maglor exclaimed.

            “To seek some peace,” Daeron answered. “I find it not here. Do not follow me.”

            “As if I would bother!” Maglor scowled at the sand. “Do you hear him? ‘Do not follow me.’ He thinks such a great deal of himself!” He picked at a hole in his tunic. “If he did not wish to speak with me, why does he persist in this agony? Does he mean to chastise me into silence?” Maglor frowned. “That isn’t kind, Nelyo. At least I know when to hold my tongue, which gives me a benefit over Moryo!” Frowning more deeply, he hunched his shoulders a little. “I know it isn’t much,” he murmured. “I have little to give. I know. Forgive me.”

            Maedhros was silent, and Maglor looked down the beach at Daeron’s vanishingly small figure. Perhaps this time he would not return.

            That night, Maglor slept outside, by the empty firepit.

***

            From in the pits of Daeron’s considerably-sized backpack, he had drawn a needle and thread, and was sat at the beachfront, sewing up a hole in some bits of fabric that Maglor could not identify while they lay limp and shapeless in Daeron’s lap. Occasionally his lips moved, as if he were mouthing words to himself, but he made no sound.

            “Are you going to sit there and watch me all morning?” Daeron asked without looking up, and when Maglor glanced at the sky, he was dimly startled to realize some time had gone by. Daeron had moved on to a new bit of fabric. There was a downturn to his mouth, a furrow between his brows, which might have been focus, or might have been something else.

            “You should not be here,” Maglor reminded him, because he didn’t know what else to say.

            “So I hear,” said Daeron.

            “What did you do to your hair?” Maglor asked at last, a question that had been gnawing at the back of his mind since their meeting in the small wood. Daeron looked up reproachfully, as though Maglor had asked something unforgivably rude. Had he? He couldn’t remember. It was dreadful­ though.

            “That’s no trouble of yours,” he replied primly, stabbing his needle with a little more aggression.

            “It seems a very great trouble when I have to look at it so often.”

            “If it troubles you so much, look elsewhere,” Daeron said, spearing his fabric, a tightness in his jaw that Maglor overlooked. He had grown unaccustomed to looking for signs of mood or reception in others. By fortunate coincidence, he gave up on the question, and lay back in the sand, watching a few gulls wheel overhead. Sometimes he wondered if Elwing was among them, but he supposed she’d have come down and pecked his eyes out by now if she were.

            “Why haven’t you killed me?” Daeron asked, and Maglor did not wish to dredge himself from his avian daydreams to have to respond to such a stupid question. He did, though.

            “For the same reason I don’t trouble myself to step on a mouse,” he said. Daeron frowned.

            “You aren’t funny,” he said. Maglor groaned.

            “If I kill you, will you shut up?”

            “I really think—”

            “Oh, stop!” Maglor snapped. “I haven’t roved about killing for no reason! I wouldn’t,” he added, frowning deeply, draping his arms over his eyes to shield them from the sun. “I wouldn’t do that,” he murmured. “I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t.”

            “But you could, if you—”

            “Go kill yourself, if you want to die so badly!” Maglor snarled, sitting up. “I will not be your escape from the mortal coil!” He hated that doe-eyed stare of Daeron’s, as if Maglor was the one being entirely unreasonable. “Is that why you linger? You hope still that I will take your life? I won’t do it! Leave me be!”

            “No,” Daeron said, tugging at his thread. He said nothing else, and Maglor sank back onto the sand, irritated at having been so stirred. “Only it…it wouldn’t be terribly unfair,” Daeron said softly after a long pause. “That’s all.”

            “‘Not unfair’?” Maglor echoed. “Are you still on about dying with the rest of Doriath?” Possibly not the best phrasing he could have put together, but was he not out of practice with conversation?

            “Am I ‘still on’ about it!” Daeron said heatedly, jerking on the thread. “Yes! Do you know—do you know what it is like, to linger on in such wretchedness when they are all gone?” Abruptly, Daeron’s eyes filled with tears and his hands trembled; he laid them down in his lap. “You were right before,” he said hoarsely. “I am a coward; a coward I have always been. I could not bear what I had done to Luthien and Beren, so I ran away, and in my cowardice, spared my own life! I never meant—I never meant for that—” He covered his eyes. “It is too cruel, that I live on because of my cowardice, and all the ones I have loved died in defense of our home,” he cried, hunching over. “I wish you had killed me also, then at least I might have redeemed myself!”

“Oh, stop being so damnably self-sacrificing,” Maglor snapped, sitting up again, his nails scraping at the sand. “Doriath would not have been saved by your miserable death. Why don’t you go bother someone else?”

            Daeron looked taken aback.

            “I would have thought that you of all people would—”

            “What?” Maglor asked. “Understand?” he sneered, feeling something hot and acidic and ugly boiling up in his gut, burning against his chest and throat. “Because you ran and tattled to Luthien’s daddy about her lover and she got in trouble? Tell me, Daeron of Doriath—have you ever killed anyone? Not a beast, but a person. Have you ever felt their blood hot and wet on your hands, and looked at the light dying in their eyes, watching their lips move, saying no, please stop. Don’t do this. Have you ever scraped the viscera of unarmed civilians out from under your nails? Have you ever looked at your own family and thought you had it in you to kill again, if they only said the wrong thing?

            “Don’t pretend as if you and I are kindred of any stripe,” Maglor said, his mouth twisted, that vile razor’s edge rising in his voice, the weapon he had taught himself and over which he had begun to lose his control. “Do not come here on your knees, with your ragged hair and your torn clothes, and try to tell me we understand each other.” He stumbled to his feet; there was a hot roaring in his chest, some wild, animal part of him that wanted to let that weapon loose. Daeron wanted to pretend they were alike? Daeron wanted to be at the Kinslayings? Let Maglor show him what he’d done! “Do not tell me we are the same,” he snarled, and he saw Daeron shudder at the force of his voice. He could do it. He could sing and scream and tear Daeron apart at the seams; split his skin and organs apart and watch the blood drip from his eyes and out his ears; howl until Daeron’s skull burst apart; he had done it before. He was shaking. “You know nothing of the darkness of my fae. You, who has never killed! You, whose greatest crime was a love game gone wrong. You are nothing like me, Daeron of Doriath, and you should fall to the ground and give thanks for it.

            “If you dare to suggest such a thing again, I will drag you out into those waves and I will squeeze the air from your lungs myself and I will hold you there until Ulmo bears your fae off to Mandos, you pathetic wretch.”

            Daeron looked at him, trembling, wide-eyed, and Maglor hated him, he hated him for looking at Maglor like he was the threat that he was. He would kill him to stop Daeron looking at him like that.

            “You don’t understand,” Daeron said, his voice just above a whisper. “If I…if I had done differently, if I had not gone to Thingol…perhaps the Silmaril…the Silmaril would never have come to us…” His eyes were too bright and Maglor was disgusted to see he was entirely genuine.

            “You’re a child,” said Maglor. “You still don’t understand the power of the Silmarils.” If Maedhros were there, Daeron would not have spewed this nonsense; Maedhros had always been better at silencing anyone with a look. Daeron would never have spoken to him at all if Maedhros were there. “I slew your king and your queen and your warriors and artisans alike in pursuit of that gem and you sit here and tell me it was your fault that it happened. The world does not weigh your decisions so heavily, Daeron of Doriath. You aren’t that important.” Daeron’s tongue flicked against his lips nervously.

“Do you think Thingol would blame your stupid choice for his death, for Doriath’s fall?” Maglor pressed. “Luthien? Even Beren? It was not you that gave them the command. It was not you that pressed into Tol-in-Gaurhoth. It was not you delivered the Silmaril, not you that slew Thingol, nor you who let fall the Girdle, nor you who destroyed Thingol’s progeny. Do you think your choices the only ones that affect the outcome of the world?”

            Maglor snorted derisively.

            “So you loved Luthien and she loved you not, not the way you wanted her to do. And you think that brought about the end of Doriath? I will tell you what brought about the end of Doriath, Daeron: I did.

            “So tell me again: why are you here?”

            Daeron’s overbright eyes had gone glassier still, and he was twisting his hands together.

            “Why are you so cruel?” he whispered.

            “That’s all that’s left,” said Maglor. If Daeron could not see, did not know, what a contemptible, noxious, loathsome thing that Maglor was, that was his own idiocy. Maglor had learned not to pretend otherwise.

            “Was it always?”

            “Does it matter?” Daeron did not respond; his hands moved unsteadily, aimlessly among the fabric on his lap. “What a child you are,” said Maglor. “I know not how Thingol tolerated you so much.” He turned away before he could see if Daeron flinched at his words, and went through the copse of trees to the fields beyond.

            To think he had the gall to sit there and tell Maglor their crimes were comparable! To act as if they were anything alike! As if Daeron could have ever done the things Maglor had done!

            “What a stupid little fool he is, Nelyo,” said Maglor. “To think he could ever be as awful as I am.”

***

            Maglor braced himself for Daeron’s departure, which seemed inevitable after he had lost his temper so sorely. He told himself that he did not regret it. He had said nothing that wasn’t true, and there were surely better things for Daeron to be doing than sitting around hoping Maglor might finally snap enough to kill him, not the least of which was dying in a more peaceful way than that.

            But Daeron did not disappear.

            He did fall silent, but he remained, drifting about the beach and the trees like an apparition lost and abandoned. Maglor hated the sight of him. He did not work on his sewing or gathering food or making little houses out of the kindling. Maglor did not speak to him. If he ignored him aggressively enough, perhaps Daeron would finally cease to return from whatever interludes of wandering he took.

            Yes, that would be best, Maglor thought to himself as he took his axe to the wood, for hacking apart firewood was good for soothing restless energy. It was time for Daeron to go, although Nelyo did not agree when Maglor told him so. Sometimes Maglor thought he was contrary just for the sake of it.

            There was something particularly irritating in watching Daeron of all people mope about the beach as if he and Maglor shared some similar fate. Daeron! One of the belles of Doriath! With that insouciant smile and ready rhymes and habit of losing himself in dreamy thoughts. It was just wrong and Maglor despised the wrongness of it. Daeron belonged in Maglor’s memories of the Feast of Reuniting and his whining to the Arafinweans about their overly-friendly relations with Doriath, not spat up like some unwelcome bit of flotsam on the beach, limp and colorless and moldering.

            It was terribly rude of him, but Daeron never did have any manners.

***

“You haven’t been eating,” Maglor said. He couldn’t tell if Daeron had lost weight, but he knew he had rarely seen him eat since he had started coming to the beach, and not at all since he had started his elevated sulking, and Maglor tended to doubt he was going off to eat when he left. So Maglor stood over him and made this remark, in the tone of one who was making a suggestion backed up with a threat, although it wasn’t.

“Neither have you,” Daeron replied unfairly.

“It’s not good for your health,” Maglor said. Just because he failed utterly at taking care of himself didn’t mean he was ignorant of what he was doing!

“Go away,” Daeron said, closing his eyes the way he did when he was finished engaging with Maglor. Maglor found the grace to refrain from kicking a load of sand into his face.

Maedhros and Celegorm had been the hunters among them, although Maglor had accompanied his brothers and cousins on hunts, and brought down a few animals himself. Mostly he felt he was brought along to be entertaining while they were skinning and gutting (they were particularly fond of any ditties he had on hand insulting their cousins and aunts and uncles). In any case, his present weapons were not quality hunting tools. He fished when he had to, and foraged other things. There were some wild vegetables beyond the copse of trees, which he had been cautiously cultivating for years. Sowing and growing them himself took more effort than he was willing to expend, but it cost less to nurture those already growing.

The intruder was right—Maglor had learned very intimately how long the Eldar could go without eating before it became a very serious problem. On a few occasions he had pressed it, thinking perhaps he could use this as a ticket out of Arda, but he had always given into his ravenous hunger before Mandos had come to claim his fëa.

Later, in the early evening, crusted with sea salt and with his hair a windblown mess, Maglor crouched beside the fire methodically pulling the bones out of four fish to lay them out on stones about the flames. Daeron peeled himself off the beach to amble over and squat across the fire from him.

“What are you doing?” he asked. Was that a trick question? Momentarily flummoxed, Maglor gestured soundlessly at the fish.

“Dinner,” he said at last.

“What a terrible waste of your time,” said Daeron ungratefully. The flames of the fire flickered in his eyes, gone dark in the low light, in the way of those who had never seen the Trees. Daeron, who had never seen Aman, and Maglor, who never would again. Perhaps they should have traded places, he thought. Daeron would have been a superstar in Tirion.

“I have quite a lot of it, I see nothing wrong with wasting a bit.” Having something even slightly novel on which to waste time was a blessing as far as Maglor was concerned.

“Planning to hold my feet to the fire now?” Daeron asked, with a bite in his tone that precluded it being entirely a jest. Maglor shifted uneasily and flicked a fishbone into the fire.

“No,” he said lowly. “I wouldn’t.” Daeron rolled his eyes and did not respond, and Maglor twitched. “I never tortured anyone,” he said loudly.

Daeron grunted some noise which Maglor could not determine indicated he believed Maglor or not. He said nothing else.

“I wouldn’t torture you,” Maglor insisted.

“Fine, you wouldn’t,” said Daeron.

“I wouldn’t,” Maglor said.

“You would only kill me without the torturing,” said Daeron. Maglor hesitated, frowning deeply. Somehow, there was a difference in his repeatedly threatening to murder Daeron and Daeron suggesting Maglor might murder him. He met Daeron’s steady gaze over the fire and his brow furrowed. Daeron said nothing.

“It was a joke,” he said at last, rolling his eyes again. “I heard a rumor you used to recognize those, although you were never much good at it.”

“Did Finrod say that?” Maglor demanded. Something twitched at Daeron’s mouth.

“Finrod Finarfinion,” he murmured. “It has been a time since I thought of him.” The thought did not seem to displease him, and Maglor realized he had never thought very much about what exactly the Arafinweans had gotten up to in Doriath, besides being annoyed and indignant that they were permitted to go somewhere he and his brothers were not. Another reminder of how little he’d thought of anything that did not directly affect him.

“You knew my cousins, didn’t you?” Maglor said, watching something ease up in Daeron’s lost gaze.

            “Finrod Felagund and Galadriel,” he said. “Aegnor the white flame, and Angrod, with Edhellos. Yes, I knew them. Luthien called them ‘cousin’ too. I do not know that I ever gained much favor with Galadriel.”

            “I believe most people have that feeling with Galadriel,” said Maglor. “I believe she cultivates it. Finrod, though, could have gotten along with—well, almost anyone.” Sauron was hardly fair game, and frankly he could be excused about Celegorm and Curufin. They were like hounds when they were out for blood—impossible to shake from the trail of their prey. And Curufin had never liked Finrod, not even back in Eldamar. Calling him ‘king’ and ‘deliverer’ was simply too much.

            “Yes, I liked Finrod,” said Daeron distantly, a more relaxed look about his mouth and the corners of his eyes. “He played a very jaunty tune. Not as well as me, though.” Maglor snorted at this addition.

            “And I’m sure he would have said so, but done it in a way to make you feel you had lost anyway.”

            “He was a great pleasure at parties,” Daeron reminisced. “The first time we went out—I had never known such a slight Elf to drink so much at once! You know he had metal…” Daeron touched his chest and Maglor’s cracked lips split into a grin.

            “No,” he said with the kind of horrified delight that would have once sent him running to Maedhros to share this latest family gossip. What habits Finrod had picked up from his Dwarven friends! “Finrod was pierced? Through the nipple?”

            “Through both,” said Daeron. “You never saw?”

            “Well I can swear on anything you like he did not have them when we left Valinor!” said Maglor. “And I didn’t see him much after. We went hunting, sometimes…maybe he took them out then.” He snorted softly. “Like as not he wished Maedhros not to see. Maedhros always thought he was such an innocent—” Maglor broke off, realizing with some horror that he had begun to speak of Maedhros, and he had said he would not speak of Maedhros again. 

            Daeron’s shoulders were hunched as he looked at the fire, but Maglor could not say if he was more hunched than he had been before, only that he was no longer looking in Maglor’s direction.

            “My apologies,” he murmured, falling silent.

            “I was sorry to hear what befell him,” Daeron said lowly, eventually, dragging a finger through the sand. “No one expected the king of Nargothrond to get wrapped up in the matter. What a mess it all was.” He sighed and sounded suddenly so inestimably weary, his shoulders slouching like the seams of a worn-out coat. “Play something, won’t you?” he asked.

“Why don’t you?” Maglor replied, unaccountably irritated by this request. He had played some since Daeron had begun haunting his beach, but it was not something they acknowledged. Once Maglor had played for the greatest and most appreciative crowds in Tirion-on-Tuna. Now he played for the seagulls, and the beat of their wings was his applause. If Daeron wanted a tune he could play it himself. “As though your boasting would allow me to forget I am not the only one among us who can pluck a string.”

There was a silence Maglor did not understand, given Daeron’s recent commentary. Daeron watched a small bug crawl off the sand up his finger and Maglor hastily turned the fish over, noticing that he had left them untouched for some time.

“I no longer…engage in such pursuits,” Daeron murmured at last, avoiding Maglor’s gaze.

“What pursuits?”

“Music,” said Daeron. Maglor stared at him. Daeron might as well have said he didn’t breathe anymore. The former minstrel shifted uneasily under Maglor’s gaze. “Oh, don’t, then!” he exclaimed in agitation, rocking as if to stand up.

“You play no more?” Maglor asked. Daeron dug his fingers into the sand.

“No. Not since I…no.”

“Why?” Daeron shrugged, not looking at Maglor, and wriggled his fingers under the sand. The bug, put out with this disruption, leaped back into the sand.

“I just don’t,” he said softly. “Ask me not, please.” He looked like a hermit crab pulled out of its shell, and Maglor thought he might wither away entirely if he pressed the issue.

Maglor had to bite his tongue to stop from asking the question again. Instead, he reached for the discarded lyre, and strummed his frigid fingers across the strings, and began plucking at them in an aimless melody. Daeron lay down by the fire, curling up on the sand, and closed his eyes. His cruelly shorn hair fell awkwardly over his cheek and across his forehead, baring the swoop of his ear.

“You wore ferns,” Maglor said as he twanged the lyre strings.

“Hm?” Daeron made some disinterested noise.

“At the Feast of Reuniting. You wore a crown of ferns,” Maglor recalled. “I thought it very strange and unappealing at the time.” Daeron peeked an eye open.

“Did I?” he asked. Maglor frowned.

“Don’t you recall?”

“What I wore to a single feast a thousand ages ago? Why should I?” Maglor’s shoulders twitched in a shrug and he looked down at the lyre instead. They were silent, and then Daeron glanced up. “But you remember.”

“Perhaps I have more of a memory for these things,” Maglor said, more stiffly than he would have in years long gone. He was better at lying then.

“Why Maglor,” Daeron sighed, closing his eyes again, “I never realized you thought so much about me.”

Somehow, Maglor didn’t break the lyre over Daeron’s stupid head, though he played only the one song, and then immediately retreated to the cave, leaving Daeron to peel the lightly smoking fish off the stone and serve himself.

***

When Maglor emerged from the cave at dawn, Daeron was dancing on the shore. There was no music but the playful crash of the small waves on the beach; he moved to some tune in his head, with all the fluid grace of the Eldar. He could almost imagine what it must have looked like, Daeron turning hand in hand with Luthien Tinuviel beneath the canopy of Doriath, under the watchful eye of Melian the Maia, when they all still knew more joy than sorrow.

Daeron had said he played no more, and Maglor believed him, but he realized, with a curious lightness, that even if Daeron thrust away his harp and flute, the music, the art, was in him still. There was a quiet vivacity in him as he danced, with the predawn light glowing around him, as though Eru Iluvatar had kissed him and breathed life back into his weary fëa, just for a few moments.

His delicate feet skipped and slid through the shallows, occasionally appearing to become unbalanced on the wet sand, but never quite losing it enough to fall. There was little enough pattern to it, which was how Maglor guessed it was not a real dance, but something Daeron had or was making up on the spot.

Had Maglor once been an artist of such surpassing obsession? An Elf whose fëa breathed in time with the Music of Arda, who could not help but create? He thought he must have been. A universe away, when he had lived a naïve and privileged princeling, had he not been that way? Before he had turned his mind to war, turned his gift to killing?

Maglor couldn’t remember anymore. He had lost track, he’d found, of the person he had been before the Oath. Anyway it hardly seemed to matter. Everyone who had known that Maglor was dead now—and what difference did it make to him, if he remembered or not? Better to forget, let a more golden time slip below the surface of the waves, forgotten, untouched. Let it die in a world that was gone to him. Better not to mourn the person he had been, or might have been, and just accept the gruesome, vulgar thing that he was.

As Aunt Anairë used to say: a tart can’t be unbaked.

Daeron had ceased his dance, and sat on the sand at the edge of the water, looking out. A realization struck him then about Daeron’s gaze and how it so often seemed drawn to the horizon. Maglor looked west for thence lay Valinor, and all that he had, in his callow impulsivity, thrown away. Daeron, he guessed, did not look quite so far—out there, under the waves, stormy, calm, gray, green, white-tipped or darkly eddying—untouched now for centuries by Elf or Man or Ainur—still and quiet and surely full of ghosts—lay the ruins of Doriath, and a life that had been snatched from Daeron.

Would he have ever gone back, Maglor wondered? If Doriath had remained, would he ever have ended his self-imposed exile, and returned to Melian and Thingol? He recalled the soft, quietly aching tone of Daeron’s voice:

With them, it was like…family.

Yes, Maglor decided. If it had been possible, Daeron would have returned to them someday.

Well. Another thing Maglor had taken from him.

He went back into the cave.

***

When Maglor was done filling the water skins, he went back to check on Daeron, who was sitting in the shallows with one of Maglor’s fish traps in his lap, fiddling with it in a way that made Maglor immediate want to whisk it out of his hands.

“Hey! What are you doing there?” he asked as he approached.

“This panel is coming loose,” said Daeron. “Have you more twine? I’m all out.” Maglor splashed over to where he was sitting and crouched.

“It’s fine,” he disagreed. “This little gap isn’t enough for the fish to get out.”

“They might break it,” Daeron argued. “Now that it’s damaged, it will break more easily.” Maglor sighed; fixing the trap was altogether too much effort. If the fish broke it, he supposed he simply wouldn’t eat. He tugged a bit at the panel Daeron was whining about, and caught Daeron’s twitch out of the corner of his eye.

“What is it?” he asked. Daeron’s eyes were on Maglor’s hand, and he drew it away from the trap, flexing his palm towards the sky. The raw-red, pitted scars made a warped, lumpy mess of his palm and his fingers, perpetually shiny in the way of a wound that had only just healed, and poorly. It taken a long time even to get this far; Maglor was grateful that most days it no longer oozed foul-smelling fluids. “It’s what you get for being a killer,” he said lowly, bearing the grotesquerie for Daeron to see.

“You deserve it,” said Daeron, angling himself slightly away.

“I know,” said Maglor. “I haven’t complained.” He rose to his feet. “There’s twine in the basket by the cave mouth. Do what you like with the trap; beat it against the rocks if you wish.” He moved back towards the cave.

“What happened to your brother?” Daeron called over the rush of the waves. Maglor halted in the sand. There was an emptiness so great in his chest it was a weight; an emptiness that, in its desperation to soothe itself, would suck in anything and everything around it, and never be sated. Was this how Ungoliant had felt, swallowing down the jewels that Morgoth threw to her? This ravenous emptiness, this fevered need to fill it?

“Which one?”

For a few moments, he thought he had spoken too quietly for Daeron to hear over the wsh of the waves, and he wasn’t sure he had meant for Daeron to hear, but then:

“The oldest one. Maedhros. It’s just you here. But were you not with him since the Gap burned? He’s gone, isn’t he?”

Was it payback, for his asking about Doriath? For needling Daeron about Thingol and Luthien?

Maglor flexed his scarred fingers, and felt Maedhros’ hand on his shoulder, and the smell of freshly oiled leathers was in his nose. Gone? he thought. No! Has he not been here with me ever since? He speaks only to me; but still—gone? Never!

“I killed him,” said Maglor. The consternated silence behind him was broken again by Daeron’s voice.

“No you didn’t,” he said. But he wasn’t sure. Maglor could hear it. He turned like a hound with a trail.

“I killed Maedhros,” he said, moving back towards Daeron. “Why shouldn’t I have?” He flexed his hand. “Am I not a killer? Am I not a kinslayer? Am I not remorseless, a terror, the bane of Doriath? I tell you, I killed my brother!” It would have been truly convincing, he thought, if his eyes had not welled with tears at the end.

Daeron sat still, holding the fish trap, the water rushing and receding around him.

“I killed him,” Maglor repeated. “Bear that in mind. Do not forget what I am capable of.” It would have been easy to kill Daeron then, he thought. Even now, he was stronger—he would bet on it. How many minutes did one have to hold an Elf’s face beneath the water before their hröa ceased its fight for life? Maglor could find out.

The thought made his stomach turn, and he twisted it into his mind like a knife in a wound, until he thought he would be sick imagining the feeling of Daeron thrashing underneath him, the last pride of Doriath smothered on a beach like a faceless wanderer.

No, sobbed some miniscule part of Maglor’s brain that remembered being something other than the wretch on the beach. No! No! I would never!

There was a savage, masochistic pleasure in shutting that voice up, in dredging out all the evidence of Maglor’s depravity and hurling it at his own feet, in counting through the tabs and the table of contents of his crimes, in wrenching that knife until he begged himself for mercy.

“You should leave,” he said. “Before I kill you too.”

He left Daeron sitting in the surf, and in part truly expected to find him gone when next he emerged from his cave.

***

            Daeron had been agitated all day. It had taken Maglor several hours to come to this conclusion, which was frankly shameful, but he did allow himself that he was out of practice in being around those who expressed feelings outside the phantoms of his own mind.

            Once he realized it it was impossible to unrealize, and Maglor lingered uneasily around the area of the firepit, watching him, waiting for…something. It came in the late afternoon, when Daeron threw himself down in the sand nearby and said:

            “Do you regret it?”

            Maglor sighed inwardly and slouched forward, elbow on his knee, chin resting discontentedly in his hand.

            “You’ll have to be more specific,” he murmured.

            “Any of it,” Daeron said unspecifically.

            “I should have told Fingon his parties were always terribly planned.” What kind of question was that? As if Maglor did not life his entire life in a mire of regret, and wake choking on it every morning? Did Daeron truly believe it was possible for him to have no regrets? I’m not that terrible, he thought miserably. Maybe it would be better if he was.

            “You make a jest of it!” Daeron turned to face him fully, and Maglor could see with dismay that he was spoiling for a fight. “So you do not. You think you were justified in your violence. That explains how you can bear to speak to me as you do.”

            “I did not ask for you to haunt my every step. You could be rid of me anytime you like.” Maglor’s expression darkened further. He did not owe Daeron of Doriath a conversation about his regrets.

            “Courtesy of you, I have nowhere to go,” Daeron said acerbically.

            “Go jump off a cliff, then, perhaps Ulmo will favor you too,” said Maglor. He did not remember having been such an unpleasant person before, but he also could not remember how to be otherwise, and this upset him and made him worse. Daeron’s shocked silence let him know how far gone he was. It was followed by a flurry of movement and Maglor’s brain shifted immediately to managing threats.

Daeron came at him and it was so laughably simple to stop him. Even in his fury his meager strength was impotent; Maglor shifted and used Daeron’s own weight to send him crashing into the sand, moving with half-remembered fluidity to sit astride Daeron’s back and bend his arm behind him, the other hand pushing Daeron’s face down into the sand. Daeron flailed against Maglor’s effort, but succeeded only in striking him once in the face, delicately splitting Maglor’s lower lip, which welled with a thin line of blood, before Maglor had him pinned down.

Daeron was making a choked noise against the sand and for a moment Maglor thought he was succeeding in suffocating him, but when Daeron managed to turn his head to the side and gasp for air, Maglor realized it was more plebian: Daeron was crying.

            “It isn’t fair!” he wept. “I should have died with them but I didn’t and then I found you and I should have killed you, I should have killed you for what you did to them; if ever there were a justified killing it would be my slaying you on Doriath’s behalf, on Dior and Nimloth and Elured and Elurin and Elwing’s behalf but I can’t. You took everything from us and still I cannot end you! Nor will you end my suffering! You have no grace in you!” Maglor got off him, falling into the sand nearby. Daeron gasped in ragged breaths of air before continuing:

            “I thought I could look on you and see you and understand how you could do it.” Daeron raised his head, tears endlessly welling in his gray-brown eyes and spilling over his dark lashes. “How anyone could do such things! I thought if I could understand then it would…then I would …!” He collapsed in the sand again, wailing. “There’s nothing left of you to hate! You aren’t even a person! A husk of a thing; some refuse Mandos has forgotten to collect! I understand nothing! And everything hurts!” He dissolved into incoherent sobbing, gagging and hacking up gobs of mucus and sand onto the ground.

            Maglor sat and watched. A husk? he thought. He didn’t like the sound of that at all.

            “You have time left to kill me, if you like,” he said.

            Daeron went on blubbering into the sand.

            “If it helps…I don’t understand either,” he offered.

            Daeron raised his head, and Maglor marveled: he had finally seen him angry. In fact, he was taken aback by the fire in Daeron’s puffy, red eyes; he had not know Thingol’s pet minstrel could look quite like that.

            “You don’t understand,” Daeron snarled, pushing himself up. “You sit there with—with—with the blood of my people on your hands…with children’s graves dug in your name…you sit there in the ruin of my home, of everything that we were, and all that we built before your feet ever knew these shores, and you tell me you don’t understand?”

            He was trembling, his knuckles white against the sand. The tears continued to fall down, dripping off his sandy chin.

            “You destroyed us, and you tell me you don’t understand?” Even in the low light, Maglor could see the muscles in Daeron’s jaw tightening and flexing. “How dare you?” Maglor had thought he was beyond being punished for what he had done; he thought that looking into Elrond and Elros’ eyes every day, knowing what he had done to them; he had thought that watching Maedhros slip through his grasp, a little bit at a time and then all at once; he had thought that his many centuries of solitude had scraped his soul bare of anything that might continue to be flogged for his crimes, but the way Daeron look at him then proved Maglor wrong. Maglor, lord of Maglor’s Gap, general of the Noldorin forces, prince of Tirion, kinslayer, bane of Doriath, cowered at the lowness and disdain with which Daeron of Doriath looked at him, and he would have slithered on his belly back to the cave, if he did not need to pass Daeron to get to it.

             “I only meant I…that I…” His mouth was moving, but there were no words coming; he could form no sounds to respond to Daeron’s condemnations. “I…”

            Daeron’s lip curled, and fresh tears swam in his eyes.

            “There’s nothing in you,” he whispered. “If there ever was. I thought I had at last grown too old to play the fool. I was wrong.” He grabbed at his tunic above his heart, clutching at the fabric, grimacing in a private pain from which Maglor averted his eyes. He meant to say something, anything, but he could not get Daeron’s name past his lips before Daeron rose to his feet.  

            “W-wait!” Maglor whirled in the sand as Daeron’s figure moved through the darkening beach towards the copse. “Wait!” He tried to get up and run after him at the same time, did not catch his balance, and crashed into the sand partway there. “Wait! Don’t go!” He spat sand off his lips; it stuck to the bloody split on his lower lip. “Daeron!”

            Daeron turned back to look at him and the relief that coursed through him at even this small, brief mercy nearly choked him with shame.

            “I-if you stayed, you could…do what you like with me,” Maglor babbled. “I won’t argue; the right is yours I suppose; I…just…don’t leave. Please don’t leave.” He hadn’t meant to say that; it wasn’t very convincing in light of what Daeron had just said. He was not particularly in a mood to be doing Maglor favors. “Please don’t leave,” he whispered. Don’t leave me alone he wanted to wail.

            Daeron was looking at Maglor in that way again, as if he were some foul worm crawled forth from Angband. Which, Maglor reflected, was quite possibly how Daeron saw him. Daeron said nothing, and disappeared into the trees.

            “Daeron!” Maglor fell onto his face in the sand, flagellating his mind for thinking of nothing to say that might have convinced Daeron to stay. It took several minutes for him to realize Daeron was still close by and he was busy lamenting on the beach again. He hauled himself to his feet and ran into the trees. “Daeron! Come back! You can kill me if you like! I deserve it! If you should rather…if you should rather take a hand you may! I should like to still be able to play the harp but I understand if it isn’t possible! Daeron!” Night had set firmly over the area and tears bubbled in Maglor’s throat as he recognized the impossibility of locating a Wood-elf in the trees in the dark. He spun about. “Daeron!”

            He’s gone, you dolt.

            Maglor sank to his knees, trembling like a bare branch in the wind, and with no warning, he was sobbing, the force of this sudden grief bending him forward until his forehead touched the dank earth. Maglor did not understand, how he could still weep all this time later, or how something so small could weigh so greatly on him, when he had so many bigger, more terrible things to cry about. Nevertheless, he sat there bawling until he was choking on his own spit and his throat was as raw as if he had run ten miles without a drink. He sucked in air like a drowning person and began again, until his body would simply produce no more liquid, and then he lay facedown in the leaf mold, shivering in the dark, until the first touches of light began to tinge the sky a navy blue.

            The ground was cold and damp against his cheek as he lay staring listlessly at the changing of the sky, watching dawn slowly brighten overhead. It had been like this before, hadn’t it? This stretch of sea strand, lightening at the dawn, darkening at the dusk, with the waves perpetually and ever lapping away at the shore. It had done so for years beyond counting before Maglor had arrived, and someday when he was dust, the sun would go on rising and setting over this lonely piece of Middle-earth, this lovely and achingly isolated bit of Arda, and neither the rocks nor the waves nor the wiry trees would remember him.

            Maglor was familiar with the sense of being hollowed out, like some great being had reached into you, and scooped out everything that mattered. It was not a feeling he relished; it was a feeling he had thought he was beyond at this point.

            He was not.

            When the sun is risen, I will get up, he thought. One had to remember some routines, after all.

            But the sunrise came and went, and Maglor did not move.

            When it is noon, I will get up, he thought. This position was not a comfortable one in which to lie.

            But noon came and went, and Maglor did not move.

            When the sun sets…

            In the end, Maglor dragged himself off the wet dirt only after dark had come again, because he felt stiff with cold and thought he might cry again, and if he was going to do that, he needed water. He gave the fire pit a wide berth, and slunk back to his cave.

            “I don’t want to talk about it, Nelyo,” he said, guzzling down half a waterskin in one go, and then falling down onto his nest of animal skins. “I don’t want to talk,” he murmured, turning to face the cave wall as he closed his eyes. “Just leave me alone.”

***

            For many days after—Maglor did not keep track, as he did not care to, and had ceased the keeping of time a great long while ago—Maglor did not leave the cave, save to relieve himself, which was infrequent, as he consumed nearly nothing. He did, after all, have a familiarity with deprivation’s effect on Elvenkind.

            There came a morning when he stuck his head out of the cave to see with jarring, leaping horror that Daeron had come back. He was sitting at the edge of the water, with his legs hugged loosely to his chest, looking out at the horizon as dawn stretched up above the water, casting her rose-gold light over his dark, wretchedly short hair.

            As Maglor watched, his wriggled his toes into the damp sand, and squeezed his legs a bit tighter, and rested his chin on his knees. The fingertips of the ocean just nearly came up to tickle his feet.

            Maglor had lamented his aloneness, and now Iluvatar was tormenting him with his sorrows, for Daeron turned his head, and Maglor flung himself back into the cave, but he knew that it was too late, and Daeron had seen him. He curled up on the animal skins, with his knees up to his chest, and his arms folded on either side of his head, clamped over his ears. He squeezed his eyes shut, and stayed this way until his muscles began to whine about being cramped into such a position. All he had heard was a quiet commotion by the cave mouth, which vanished and left behind nothing but the familiar whisper of the waves.

            Gradually, he unfurled himself and looked to the entrance. He did not see any traps, but then, he supposed they would be very poorly laid if he could see them so quickly. Crawling forward, he peeked at the surrounding rocks little by little, inching closer to the opening. What he saw when he knelt at the threshold of the cave was this: nothing.

            Specifically, the things he had left out by the cave mouth were gone.

            Daeron, the merciless fox, had taken things Maglor sorely needed—which he supposed Daeron would need too, if he meant to stay on the seaside. The tools with which Maglor had cleansed the water of its salt were gone, which meant his drinking supply now had a very sharp limit on it, and while Maglor was capable of going some time without water, he did not enjoy it (this lesson he had learned so keenly that even the deepest of fugs could not keep him from occasionally boiling a fresh pot of water for desalinization).

            With a quiet sigh, Maglor slumped against the lumpy cave wall, pitted with years of wear from the saltwater breeze. Robbed wasn’t the worst thing he could be.

            “I’m already the worst thing I could be,” Maglor said aloud. When Maglor thought too much of Valinor, it tended to depress his mood beyond his capacity to function, so he tried not to, unless he was trying to punish himself, in which case he would recount in order as many things as he could remember from his life in Eldamar. Presently, he was digging his fingers into a particular wound, whose exact bloody dimensions he knew better than the contours of his own face: What would Atar say?

            Maedhros and Maglor had not spoken of Fëanor in their last years together, but Maglor guessed they had both tortured themselves with similar thoughts. How could they not? Fëanor, inventor extraordinaire, groundbreaking linguist, prized crown prince of Tirion—what would he think of his half-wild, entirely savage, kinslaying, warmongering, child-thieving sons? They acted in fulfillment of his oath, and yet Maglor could not help but think Fëanor would be repulsed by them if he could see what they had become.

            At the time, the thought of Fëanor’s disgust and disappointment had filled him with shame so hot it felt it would burn a hole in him, as if he had knelt to gulp down wastewater of Angband. Now, he wasn’t sure he felt anything about it. He was too tired to feel more things. Perhaps a person could hold only so much shame before their cup overflowed and would take no more.

            When he emerged from the cave, there was a fire in the firepit. Daeron, barefoot, knelt beside it, and seemingly, he had determined how to use the various pieces he had pilfered. Occasionally, he adjusted the roofing, and checked the steady drip of clean water into the collection pots, and seemed entirely focused on this task.

            The whole system was something Maedhros and Curufin had devised. Its true purpose, besides soothing some of Nelyo’s paranoia, had been to stop him from driving everyone mad during his recovery. Sentenced to bedrest and with his nerves a jangling mess since he had returned from Thangorodrim, he could not keep himself from meddling in everything, and so Curufin had sat with him in one of the more extraordinary displays of patient generosity Maglor had ever seen out of Curvo, and together they had designed and built the little desalinization station.

            The Noldor had never used it, that Maglor was aware of, and by the time he had needed it himself, he’d had to try to reconstruct it from memory, with things he’d stolen or repurposed. He was sure it did not work as well as Maedhros and Curufin’s original, but he had something to drink, so he wouldn’t complain.

            But what was Daeron doing with it? Did he need water for his journey? Maglor may not have kept track of time, but unless he was truly losing his faculties, the sun had risen and set several times at least since Daeron had left him on the beach. What had he been doing since then?

            He stayed and watched until the collection pots were full. Daeron disengaged the system and picked the pots up one at a time, carrying them over to Maglor’s cave. As he drew near, Maglor straightened up, rigid, tensed for a fight, but Daeron went right by without a word. When he had put the pots back in their original location, the desalinization tools had cooled off, and he carried these back over to where he had found them also. He took one of the pots and filled his waterskin with it. Maglor wasn’t sure he would have stopped him if Daeron had gone into his cave and cleared it out of everything Maglor had in it.

            He must be gathering things for his trip, Maglor thought. One had to stock up before walking a long ways.

            Daeron left the beach, and Maglor supposed he was relieved that he had not stolen anything. When Daeron had been gone a good long while, Maglor went to sit by the dwindling fire. He watched it grow smaller, until the sea breeze threatened to extinguish it entirely.

            Nelyo was right, Maglor thought, stumbling into another well-worn track of thought. I should have done as Nelyo did. There is nothing for us here any longer. This is unbearable.

            He had destroyed or at least done away with the Silmaril, but its weight would hang around his neck forevermore; there was no freedom, not for Maglor Feanorion. He had built himself into a prison and there he would stay, until it collapsed on top of him and finally gave him the blessing of an end. How long would he keep rooting around in the dark for a key that did not exist?

            It could have been hours or days or months, but for the remains of the fire, that Maglor sat until a stirring at the edge of the copse caught his attention. There emerged Daeron, barefoot, his ragged pants cut off several inches above the ankle, holding the hem of his tunic to contain something he was carrying. He came and knelt by the dying fire and unloaded his cache into the sand. Maglor recognized some of the vegetables as ones that grew nearby—perhaps Daeron had found his plant patches?

            Daeron fed more wood into the feeble fire and took out a knife to begin skinning and cutting the vegetables.

            “What are you doing?” Maglor blurted out at last, his nerves unable to allow his tongue to stay quiet.

            “I tire of eating plain fish,” said Daeron. “It’s extraordinarily dull.” A miserable ball of nerves, Maglor could not bring himself to ask another question, instead choosing to worry fretfully at one of the holes in his tunic. At last, when he could bear Daeron’s silence no more, he whispered:

            “Why did you come back?” Daeron went on skinning and did not look at him and Maglor thought he would not answer.

            “Why don’t you go and get some fish?” Daeron said.

            “There aren’t any,” said Maglor. “I haven’t…there aren’t any.” He couldn’t remember the last time he’d set the traps out. Daeron sighed.

            “Well, go and set the traps, then. It may be we will get something before dinnertime.”

            “Why are you doing this to me?” Maglor demanded in a trembling voice. “Is this your punishment, for what I’ve done? It’s terribly cruel of you Daeron, I did not think of you as a cruel person but—”

            “Who said it was to do at all with you?” Daeron said. “Don’t be such a baby. Go and get some fish.”

            “I shall do nothing you ask until you answer me!” Maglor’s voice came out embarrassingly shrill. Daeron’s knife stilled and he looked down into the fire.

            “I told you: I have nowhere else to go.”

            “A lie!” Maglor cried. “You are no criminal, you might go anywhere! But you choose to stay here! I must conclude only that you mean to be a torment to me!” Daeron twisted the tip of his knife into the sand.

            “I have no wish to torment you,” he said. “It would bring me no pleasure, and it would restore nothing I have lost.”

            “Then why?”

            “I cannot explain it in a way you will understand,” Daeron said, lifting his eyes to Maglor’s. “Nor, perhaps, in a way that I understand. I will leave when it is time.”

            “That is no answer at all!” Maglor exclaimed in frustration.

            “It is my answer,” said Daeron. “Tell me to go, then, Maglor Feanorion, and I will go.” Sore with Daeron’s brutal unfairness, Maglor stared him down and then abruptly got to his feet to fetch the fishing traps.

            “He’s really the worst,” he said savagely to himself as he grabbed the traps from beside the cave. “Just the worst!”

***

            The part of Maglor’s brain that was responsible for the route tasks that kept Maglor alive on a day-to-day basis was functional only the most generous sense of the term and operated so consistently at near-failure that Maglor had quite forgotten what it was like to actually ensure his needs were met. It did not concern him anymore; his overall deterioration was only an outward sign of the damage within, and if he withered away entirely, he did not think he would be awfully troubled by it.

            There was a loophole.

            Maglor had not known that it existed, although when he thought back to his last years in the First Age, he supposed it made sense. The indications had been there, for he could not say that he had cared much then either for keeping himself in good health.

            That was this: for whatever inane, nonsensical, illogical reason, his mind was utterly untroubled with allowing him to go days or weeks without eating, and yet if he went more than a day or two without seeing Daeron eat, he become intolerably fussy. It was the worst kind of trick, it really was, that he should be troubled on Daeron’s behalf.

            Maybe Daeron had cast some Wood-elf spell on him, to make sure he was not the one having to wade out into the water to set and retrieve the fish traps or do the gutting or these other achingly dull and unpleasant tasks with which Maglor suddenly found himself replete, which he could have put off a great deal longer if they were being done only for his benefit. If he had, it was well-done thing, for Daeron did not even have to ask—and against his own will, Maglor’s mind began to plan ahead, so that he was not perpetually playing catch-up, but managing these things with a time cushion.

            Or maybe the spell was only this: the sight of Daeron sitting at his fire, his slowly-returning dark hair curling around his ears, weaving together a wreath of flowers and leaves which Maglor knew he would not wear, only set aside in the sand when he was done. He was determined to play the penitent, even when there was no one there to appreciate his effort.

            Daeron would not stay forever; it was folly to hope he might. But he was there now, so oughtn’t Maglor focus on that?

            He had left his lyre there when last he got up, and he watched with bated breath, holding back from making himself known, as Daeron reached for it. He watched Daeron’s slender fingers sweep over the wood, the strings, trace along the shape of it. Maglor had not taken good care of it over the years, and he could not get the sound of it right anymore, but that was a small matter compared to the thought of Daeron never playing an instrument again. Maglor ought not be so hopeful that Daeron would change his mind so easily, but…

            “Maglor!” Daeron called then, lifting his head. “Come and play something for me!”

            Naturally.

            Maglor looked up at the sky for patience, or something.

            “I’m coming!” he called back.

---

Chapter End Notes

On tumblr | On Pillowfort

I imagine Daeron has a lot of survivor's guilt about living through the destruction of Doriath just because he happened to not be there.

Here, they are not entirely honest or accurate in all their recollections, Maglor especially. Some of those things are obvious (we know Maglor did not literally kill Maedhros) but others are the result of Maglor's fucked up brain (such as his thoughts on Feanor's opinion of him, or some of the harsher commentary Maedhros is implied to give). Daeron also leaves out that he initially left Doriath to try to find Luthien and help her, and it was only when he was unable to locate her that he refused to come back.

Whatever your take on Daeron's backstory I am deeply committed to him and Thingol having had a close relationship. I also cannot BELIEVE there are no Daeron/Thingol fics on this website. We are SLEEPING as a fandom.

I'm terrible at this but I did try to work some symbolism into the story, where Maglor's cave represents his isolation/withdraw from society and the firepit is meant to symbolize community, or his effort/willingness to reach out to others.