Hearken Still Unsated by polutropos

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A Meeting

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"The joy of that feast was long remembered in later days of sorrow; and it was called Mereth Aderthad, the Feast of Reuniting. Thither came many of the chieftains and people of Fingolfin and Finrod; and of the sons of Fëanor Maedhros and Maglor, with warriors of the eastern March; and there came also great numbers of the Grey-elves, wanderers of the woods of Beleriand and folk of the Havens, with Círdan their lord. There came even Green-elves from Ossiriand, the Land of Seven Rivers, far off under the walls of the Blue Mountains; but out of Doriath there came but two messengers, Mablung and Daeron, bearing greetings from the King."
- Of the Noldor in Beleriand

The wood-beamed feasting hall reminds Maglor of the one they hastily erected on the shores of Mithrim. There, for dark years unreckonable, the Noldor grimly took their meals and held their councils. At his command, they abandoned it. At his word, they retreated before his uncle’s host, delaying the march towards their foretold Doom. Now, but twenty years on, Fingolfin welcomes them as honoured guests. He speaks of reuniting and peace, of kinship and common purpose. He says nothing of the past but speaks only of future hope.

Both much and little has changed since those grey years by the lake. His name has changed. But there was no sudden fullness of life that came to Macalaurë’s hollowed spirit when he called himself Maglor. The language of his new name has roots in this land; he does not. In the same way, the scaffolding of half-built fortresses rises up from the hills like the tall masts of ships adrift on this ancient landscape.

Certainly, there have been moments. When he wept under the branches of a tree as a storm rolled over Mithrim; when they crossed over the blooming plains of Ard-galen in spring; when he first washed himself in the swift, bracing waters of the Gelion. He has found ways to squeeze hope out of those moments — to find the strength to command, to inspire, to comfort.

He has still found no way to turn those moments into songs.

“It is good to see you smiling, cousin.”

Two glasses of honey-wine appear below his field of vision, one extended towards him. Finrod’s fingers are ringed with emeralds set in silver, his arms draped in white silk embroidered with gold.

“Was I smiling?” Maglor takes the offered drink and swirls his cup, watching the eddy of amber liquid rise and settle. “That is good.”

“You have been since you arrived this morning,” Finrod says. “But your answer tells me that perhaps there is an element of performance to your joy.”

“Aren’t we all performing?” Maglor sips the wine and his smile falls. “It is too soon.”

“Perhaps. Or perhaps waiting too long would only have let old wounds fester. Look there, the Falathrin lords with Turgon's. And your brother laughs with the Laegel¹ – your neighbours, are they not?”

“Ambarussa’s neighbours, yes. But I assure you that every word is spoken from behind a veil. Maitimo has mastered the craft of diplomacy, despite everything. Or perhaps because of everything. He is more resilient than any of us. But do you see him laughing with our uncle in that same light manner? No. Unless it has been scripted for their audience, they exchange words behind closed doors only, each syllable scarcely containing the tension vibrating behind it, despite the mutual respect there between them.”

“My.” Finrod shrugs his brows and sips the wine. “Is that how you perceive our converse now?”

Maglor laughs and places a hand on his cousin’s shoulder. “If only we were all as forgiving as you. Or as well-liked. What of the Fenced Land? Has Elwë sent no one?”

Finrod hums in an evident tone of resignation. “King Thingol refused at first, when my brother presented the invitation. But two have come.” He tilts his chin towards the strong, dark-haired elf speaking to Angrod. “Mablung, his Captain, and Daeron –” he gestures to the one beside them, who wears a crown of ferns around loose silver hair, “ –his minstrel.”

“Good of him to send us some entertainment.” Maglor finishes his drink and sets the glass down.

Finrod scowls disapprovingly.

“Oh, do not worry.” Laughing, Maglor casts a glance towards the ceiling. “I am sincerely relieved it won’t fall to me to provide it all. I find I have little desire to entertain.”

His cousin’s grey-green eyes, set in soft rings of gold lashes, are sinking into him. There’s a sting at Maglor’s temples and he squints away the sensation.

“Gods, I forgot how you can do that. If you must know – I cannot find it. Music. Not since…” He waves a hand. It is difficult to know when he lost what he cannot remember ever having at all. “I have learned to pretend, of course. But the unclouded stars, the wide lands, the freedom of which my father spoke — I do not feel it. I cannot hear it.” He turns to Finrod and whispers, “Is it the same for you?”

Finrod only sighs and smiles sadly.

“Of course it’s not. Well, please do not give me away. I am sure the Sindar would love to know that Valariandë² rejects me.” He squeezes his cousin's forearm. “What is one more secret to harbour?”

A roar of laughter from a nearby table swallows the answer on Finrod’s lips. They settle into a comfortable silence and for a moment Maglor allows himself to imagine they are still young and irresponsible, standing under the mosaiced lintels of Tirion’s palace.

At the urging of half his family, Maglor does play that evening. His harp, the one crafted by Curufin, is shoved into his hands. The instrument still gleams as brightly as the day it was made.

Shouts for a song of Valinor, a legend of gods, one of his own compositions. He chooses instead a fast and vibrant dance song. Quickly, their disappointed groans turn to cheers and excited steps as partners are passed and glasses raised. It is so simple to play a room into jubilation. So simple that his mind need not even be present for it.

Maglor laughs as he slips away from the music. Though his ears mangle the melody, he knows how to force his fingers into perfect form. To him, the sound of his own voice is distant, but the revellers whirl, their mouths split wide with merriment. It is no different from any other choreography he has picked up since that day Finwë lay bleeding and broken on the marble floor. His hands have orchestrated the deaths of kin with as much skill as they now play through the memories, springing up and falling down one after another like enemies in the way of his progress.

His lips move and his voice sings without him, while his mind concentrates on the scents of wine and spices, of fresh-cut wood and burning oil; on the shapes of bodies as they move through space; the texture of jewelled chains against velvet and silk and linen.

A grey shape wreathed in green stays seated, alone. Daeron looks through him, expressionless. The melody gallops fiercely and stumbles, but Maglor raises his voice to cover the dropped notes. Daeron’s eyes dart over him.

Maglor hastens his song to its end, sending the dancers spinning, raising their laughter to a fever pitch. His hands are numb when he rests them on either side of the strings; he does not feel their last vibrations under the applause. His jaw aches from smiling. He stands, bows, and finds the swiftest way out of the hall.

*

The round Moon rises above the mountains of the east. The last time Daeron visited Eithel Ivrin, there were no long white beams painted between the shadows of trees. Ithil is too bright behind the pines that have climbed too quickly towards the sky. Yet the land is still familiar beneath Daeron's feet and he follows a steep hill down to a pool in the river.

He breathes deeply of the spray rising around a small fall of water. The enchantment here feels less potent than where the Esgalduin flows beneath the bridge of Menegroth, but it is more profound and more ancient. They say the springs of the Narog are protected by the Lord of Waters himself, and Daeron has come to listen to his Song. He sets aside his wreath of ferns, slips off his soft leather shoes, and shucks off his robe. His ankles and arms are bared to the cool night air. Seating himself on a round stone at the pool’s edge, he lets his feet fall into the water. Starlight shifts and twinkles as he moves them through it.

He asks the Lord of Waters for clarity. He and Mablung were sent to this feast with the Golodhrim to bring back messages from the lands and peoples beyond the Girdle. Even Thingol in his pride knows that Beleriand’s heart cannot forever be cut off from its limbs.

Daeron is here especially to observe the unfolding of history and learn the minds of its actors. But there is one mind now among them whose Song drowns out all others. While all danced and laughed about him, Daeron felt an empty space, one that has lain quietly within him for many years, opening again.

“I should have expected to find you here.”

The new presence does not unsettle him, although Daeron had not heard his approach. He finds it is as comforting as the water lapping around his feet.

Daeron greets the minstrel of the Golodhrim by his titles. Maglor’s smile is gracious but tired as he returns the courtesy. He sits on a rock at the opposite end of the pool with his legs folded in front of him, hands clasped around his knees. Somewhere on his way from the hall he has unburdened himself of the jewels that hung from his wrists and around his neck and released his hair of its silver twine. It falls over his shoulders in dark waves.

Although the words he wants to say are, ‘Why have you come here?’ and, ‘For what do you grieve?’, Daeron instead reaches across the gap between them with a compliment: “You played well tonight.”

Maglor grins and his eyes rove over the hillside. “You listened intently.”

There is suspicion written in the way Maglor rolls a thumb over the finger of his opposite hand. Daeron considers him: bright-eyed and as finely-formed as a statue, as they all are, but softer somehow, and more transparent. Perhaps that is why he limns his expressions with such hard lines and moves with such deliberate grace. Before he knew of him as their minstrel, Daeron had heard reports of him only as their king. One whose soul is so open should never have had to bear the burden of leading a people.

His round and curious eyes are looking into Daeron now, expectantly.

Daeron smiles. He could elaborate, expound upon his virtuosity and safely let the tiny spark of their conversation die out as if he had flicked it into the water below. But that yawning space inside him begs to be filled. So he says, “May I ask you something?”

Maglor raises his brows slightly and thin lines curl around his mouth. “Certainly.” He lifts the fingers of one hand in invitation.

“What troubles you?”

The warm expression fades. Maglor chews on his lip thoughtfully. “First you must tell me,” he shifts his gaze to Daeron, “do you ask me as an emissary or as a peer?”

“Neither,” Daeron replies. “Or rather, I do not ask as one who wants information. I ask out of concern. As one who wants to help.”

“You are awfully quick to offer your assistance.” Maglor’s laughter is an empty sound.

“And that surprises you. Because the king who sent me was not?”

Maglor frowns and sets his jaw. “That is not what I meant.”

“You were not here for the first wars of Beleriand.” Daeron meets the colourless light of Maglor’s eyes. “We were victorious, but it was dearly-bought. I understand why Thingol no longer shows the same warmth and compassion he showed us when Bauglir was yet confined in Balannor.”

A muscle ripples over Maglor’s cheek. “And yet we have a common enemy. What do you know of the woes that he brought upon us?”

“I know something of them.” A sense of duty tells Daeron it is not wise to confide in this prince of the Golodhrim. His instructions have always been to listen closely, remember clearly, and speak little. He rehearses and accompanies and improves upon others. It is a role that aligns well with his nature.

But tonight the Music of the Narog urges him to sing, so he says, “Though I serve him, my heart does not agree with my King in this.”

It never has. Not since he felt a wash of tears over his face, years ago, when he suddenly felt the pain of the Golodhrim as keenly as if it were his own. He has kept that pain to himself. Though he knows not whence it comes, his heart tells him that its exposure would be akin to tearing the dressing from raw wounds before the approach of the enemy.

Maglor studies him from across the pool. Webs of light reflected from the surface of the water dance over his throat. “Why do you not share the feelings of your king?” he asks with sincerity.

“I pity you.” A dissident compassion.

A sharp burst of laughter and a proud tilt of the chin and Maglor says, “I am sorry,” and draws himself back inside, “but your answer surprised me. What reason could you have to pity us? Look at us,” he sweeps an arm through the air before him, “we have fine clothes and adornments, wide realms and mighty towers, we are surrounded by friends and kin—”

“Yet you are troubled.”

Maglor’s gesticulating hand comes to rest slowly on his knee. “Yes,” he admits. “And is there not much to trouble us all?” He squints into the distance as if searching for something. “Though we may take delight in reuniting with long-sundered friends and drink deeply of the healing power of this place,” he mimics the words of King Fingolfin, “our hearts high and full of hope—” then stops himself short with a sharp breath in, swallowing the rest.

Daeron exhales. There is a long silence in which they simply watch one another, eyes roaming, tracing, and returning to the other’s face. Maglor looks down and tilts forward to drag a hand through the water. Daeron’s feet grow warm and a gentle tinkling like waves lapping over broken shells enters his mind – and Maglor’s, too, for he pulls his hand away with a short gasp, his gaze apprehensive when he lifts his head. He runs the hand through his hair, pulling it forward to obscure his face, and folds the arm around his knees again.

“Why do you pity us?” he asks at last.

Daeron said pity, but he should perhaps have called it love. He sighs and looks to the stars, trying to weave this feeling into words. “We are all Edhil and we can all hear one another’s Songs at times. But I can feel beats between Songs, the connections in the silences. I can feel the grief in your people's memory, and the longing.” Impressions of emotions that he has held in himself for so long. Now one sits before him who understands.

Daeron’s soul is spilling over. “I have never felt the connection between the Eruchîn so intensely as when your people arrived here.” But it was not his people, he realises. It was him.

Maglor looks away and kneads his palms and Daeron knows it means he should stop, but there is a racing rhapsody of sounds sliding over one another — plucked strings and vocal harmonies and frothing waves tearing at cliff sides — and the confessions tumble from his throat in the same moment as they are thought. “I can hear you, now.” His own voice is faint under the swell of Music when Maglor turns his eyes back to him. “But you cannot hear me. You cannot even hear yourself.”

The Music subsides, its last notes dropping into the water below them. Daeron brushes away the tears that cling to his lashes. He is relieved to see compassion among the emotions that flit across Maglor’s conflicted expression.

Maglor’s movements are cautious but deliberate as he unlaces his boots and pulls them off, setting them on the rock beside him. He lets his feet hang in the water and leans forward on his wrists, head bowed. For an instant, the whole place holds its breath.

“How did you know?” Wells of grey light peer up from under dark brows.

“The way you played tonight.” Daeron’s words are heavy on his tongue and he feels as if they might drag him down into the pool as they leave his mouth. “It seemed you were not there.”

Maglor blinks away a sheen of tears. “And you, minstrel of Doriath, want to help me hear it again?” He swallows. “Why?”

Words roll through Daeron’s mind in all the tongues he knows. Connection, learning, understanding, freedom, love. Language fails. “Because I want to know you. Because I was meant to.”

Harsh laughter is swallowed by the hillside. “Fate,” Maglor scoffs. “Do not talk to me of fate.” He pulls one foot from the pool and tucks it beneath the leg that still dangles over the rock. “Besides, I do not think you want to know me.”

“I already do,” Daeron confesses.

Folds of skin twitch beneath Maglor’s eyes; his pupils are wide and black.

Without asking for permission, Daeron begins to unthread the notes of Maglor’s Song as best he can, humming each as it comes free. It is nothing like the music in his mind, only a simple sequence of tiny vibrations sent through the air between them. Then one catches on an echo of some melody, and the breath in Daeron’s lungs shapes itself into words as it travels to his tongue. They are rich with the rolling vowels of the language of the Golodhrim. A lullaby.

Close your eyes, hína
Draw the covers, hína
Dreams collect in light wells deep
It’s time for sleep, hína.

Ripples reach across the pool in widening curves and break softly against the rock on which Maglor sits. He abruptly pulls his other foot from the water.

“How do you know that song?” he snaps. “That is a song of Valinor.”

The sharpness of Maglor’s voice melts by the time it reaches Daeron’s ears. “I suppose it is a song of Beleriand now.”

Maglor’s fear is concentrated in the tips of his fingers as he laces his boots with practised dexterity. He stands and pierces the mist rising from the pool with his gaze, the only movement the slight quiver of his mouth as he considers what to say. The mask of faultless beauty slips and well-worn creases appear on his face, criss-crossing his expression like the bars of a cage. There is nonetheless a startling symmetry to this bare beauty — art where before there was only artifice. His lips straighten and settle and Daeron knows he will say nothing. He turns his back and walks away with precise and rhythmic steps.

Daeron waits for the warmth brimming in his heart to drain and leave him empty once again, but the feeling of fullness remains constant. If anything, it only swells, spilling out through his pores and settling like dew on the verdant life that grows and breathes all around him.

*

Maglor has spent the night following the river up to the highest pools, deep in the shadows of Ered Wethrin. He discarded his boots some time ago so his feet could feel and grasp the ground beneath him. His robes he shed soon after, leaving them in a pile where he stopped to bathe. Now he wears only his loose tunic and trousers, rolled above the knees.

Here the river spills languidly from the side of the mountain and he can follow it no further. So he pauses and sets his hands, rimed with grime, on his hips. He tilts his gaze towards the sky. It is not from exertion that his heart hammers against his ribs as if trying to escape. Fear, then?

What does he have to fear?

A silvery, lilting voice fills his thoughts. ‘What troubles you?’

Such a simple question, and spoken with such sincerity. And there is no way in which he can answer truthfully. No way that can be put in words, at least. Perhaps if he could put it in music. In touch. It has been so long since he has touched another.

Maglor laughs aloud to himself and shakes his head. He recalls the ever-bright, ever-elegant features of the one he called his spouse contorted in anger and hatred; the memory of his³ lips as they shaped themselves around the words ‘betrayal’ and ‘murder’. Then Maglor’s lids pinch shut and he sees instead sensitive black eyes and the delicate curl of a pale mouth. ‘I pity you,’ it says. He allows his eyes to stay closed a moment longer. Those words should shame him, but their memory melts over him as warmly as if they had been an expression of love.

There is a rustle of leaves in the knotted oak behind him. Maglor starts and snaps his neck back. (What does he have to fear?) Gathering his breath, he lets his gaze drift through the layered branches set against the grey hues of morning. The blackbirds trill, the first to perceive the coming dawn even as Arien brushes against the eastern edges of the world.

Another sound floats down and washes over his face like a mist of warm rain: a flute, warbling in pure and unobtrusive harmony with the chorus of morning. Maglor tips his chin back down and dares not look for the player among the branches — as if on seeing him the song might end. He stands awhile, listening. Has he fallen into dreaming? He closes his eyes and smiles at the notion that comes to him then: to join his voice to Daeron’s music. If only reconciliation were as simple as two breaths joined. There would be no need for feasts such as these, for promises. For oaths.

Perhaps it is that simple. He looks up and almost at once lights upon the figure seated deep in the tangle of thick branches. Daeron leans against the tree’s trunk, one bare foot hanging down and the other bent and steepled on the branch. Long, elegant fingers move over his flute. Even so must the Firstborn have conversed with the forest as they made music guided only by the sounds of wind passing between leaves and water over stone.

How long has Daeron been there? How had he climbed to this place so quickly, and unseen? Maglor finds he does not care, for he is brimming with something pure and light and full. Perhaps it is the power of these waters, perhaps it is some ancient impulse, but a rush of syllables comes to him then, in the old language of the Quendi, and he raises his voice in song.

The flute skips a beat, the birds stop singing. But then they resume, clearer than before. The three songs braid themselves together. Like flower buds, sticky with life, the notes quiver before unfurling into fullness. Each new petal rests upon the last until heavy blossoms release bursts of colour and fragrance; even so does sound caress sound in the joining of their music. The dawn chorus has fallen silent and it is only them. As their Song closes, Arien is already pouring her fiery light over the western hills.

In years to come, neither will be able to say how they came together, but they awake in each other’s arms, damp with dew upon a bed of clover.

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Chapter End Notes

¹Green-elves, plural.

²Beleriand (Quenya). Maglor’s use of Quenya names and Finrod’s use of Sindarin throughout this dialogue is quite intentional.

³The gender of Maglor's canonical spouse is never given. He is male in my headcanons. See this Tumblr post by arofili if you're curious.