Hearken Still Unsated by polutropos

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A Return

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"In the changes of the world the shapes of lands and of seas have been broken and remade; rivers have not kept their courses, neither have mountains remained steadfast; and to Cuiviénen there is no returning."
- Of the Coming of the Elves

The World folded in on itself. Mountain ranges burst from the Sea and extended their spines, belching fire, over the land. At first Maglor could do nothing but laugh. Then his song turned, as it often had in the passing years of that age, to a plea for forgiveness and release as the One poured rains upon the earth for days unreckonable.

So it was that after an age wandering the long strands and soaring cliffs along the fringes of Endórë, he was found on the shores of the changed World by Children of Men with shining eyes as dark as night and skin the colour of the soil they tilled, here where a river spills into the Sea. They welcomed him and for many lives of their people he repaid their love with songs. Songs for their children, songs for their departed, songs to remember their histories, and songs of hope for their futures. Maglor’s own Song rested for a while, a murmur far out to Sea beyond the mouths of the river.

But as the round World settles into its shape and seasons, the great river is changing its course and the rich brown earth is turning to dust. The Men are dwindling and moving on. With each who leaves, Maglor’s Song swells louder in his dreams. The endless push and pull of waves against the shore.

A young man comes to Maglor as he tends to a fire on the wind-lashed beach, a pack strapped to his back. He is the last of them to leave.

Standing in the dancing light of the flames he asks, “Where will you go, Wave Singer?”

Meeting his sensitive black eyes, Maglor’s mind traces a path through the wilderness of his memory to another face and another question: “Where would you go, if your oath did not constrain you?”

Now, as then, Maglor does not know. But he has spent many years singing the mired waters of his doubt into tales and he no longer offers impatient and uncertain answers, so he smiles and invites the man to sit with him. The answer will come. He takes up a rustic harp. He carved it himself of the wood native to this country and strung it with the guts of the sheep pastured here.

He sings a last song for the man.

The lush green hills, hína
Call you to go, hína
To find there another home
A place your own, hína.

 

That night, Maglor hears another voice out on the Sea. The ocean fills the expanse of his dreaming, but it is as still and quiet as a bay nestled between protective shores — save for a silver melody. The smooth plane of water is pulled back like a curtain over the land to reveal a bowl of caked and cracking silt. The melody drops and stretches on into lamentation, strained and weak.

Maglor’s own story tentatively unfolds between the strands of that music. He longs to make himself known to the other Song but it shifts and strays as if blind and deaf to him.

Somewhere between the desert of his dreaming and the wells of his memory, a voice says, “I would go back. Where our ancestors came from.” It is the voice of someone whose spirit Maglor believed long ago released and summoned West, far from where it longed to go. Maglor has heard that Helcar has drained into the Sea, and to the Waters of Awakening there is no returning. But it can be no other Song that is now carried on some trickle of moisture in the soil. Unconscious of its own need, it reaches out for relief.

As the Sun casts her heat over the sparse brushland, Maglor rises and follows the narrow course of the river inland, deep into the East.

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Even when Daeron arrived, centuries ago, there was little left. As the Belain had drowned Beleriand, so they had drained the great inland sea in the East, leaving no more than a shrunken lake beneath the shadow of the mountains. Then the World bent, dragging the last of Nen Echui¹ over its curve and into the Sea. The Elves who refused the summons and for many ages roamed these shores have all but gone. They have followed the changing courses of the rivers, taking their ancient songs and stories with them.

Daeron sinks his fingernails into the emptied and drying lake bottom and shuts his eyes against the brightness of Anor. He curses the relentlessness of change. A vision presses in from the corners of his mind: glassy-blue ripples spreading out in perfect waves.

Jaw clamped, he spits between his teeth, “No!” The protest is enough to leave his weakened body gasping. He must be a sorry sight: torn and filthy linens over dull skin and matted hair, flattened and frail against the grey earth.

'You look like a painting,' says a voice, and Daeron laughs despite the burning tightness in his lungs.

The lake is gone, those stars are dimmed, that voice has fled its vessel and passed as far West as one can go. Why does the Music taunt him yet with visions of the World Unmarred?

“Let me go.” He pushes against his thought, straining to unbind himself from his body. The colours of his soul, green and silver, flicker against the backs of his eyelids.

There is a firm pressure against his back, pulling him away from the earth. The weight of his body gives way to the arm circling his waist and the hand cupping his head. A golden melody slips between the cracks of his wavering awareness. He senses shadows stretching above him as he is carried away from the heat and the light.

*

The branching yew extends over them like a blanket against the scorching Sun. Maglor sets Daeron down beside its trunk and murmurs a prayer to the tree to protect him. He follows the sound of a creek to its source. Returning with a filled skin, he pours the water between Daeron’s parched lips. He stirs but does not wake.

The Sun rolls over the curved firmament and Maglor lies on his back, hands folded over his stomach. Between the tiny gaps in the tree’s canopy, the sky turns a deeper blue. The air is still warm and humid here under the protection of the forest, but Maglor has used his cloak to cocoon Daeron’s sleeping form, curled up on his side with his back to Maglor.

 

In the comforting haze of dusk, the back of hand brushes against Maglor’s arm. The mud-caked pads of fingertips graze his skin and broken breaths punctuate the continuous flow of the evening’s music.

“You are there.” An affirmation that is yet trembling with disbelief. Daeron’s faint voice is nearly swallowed by the breeze but a quiet Song rises and twists around him.

“I am here,” Maglor says, tears brimming and trailing down the sides of his face in salty streaks. He lowers his hand into the narrow space between them and laces their fingers together.

Daeron’s breath hitches in his throat. “I have been taunted for so long by a vision like this. But there was water, and beauty...” He pauses and inhales deeply. “How did you know I was here? Did you see it also?”

Maglor wishes he could say he had, but until the last desperate strains had found their way towards the coastline, there had been nothing. He had not even thought to listen. He had nearly come too late.

“No,” he answers. “I thought you were gone until I heard you reaching. It was not long ago.”

“I am sorry.” Daeron tightens the grip on his hand. “I heard you. I should have followed. But how could I believe it when everything else had passed away, again and again? Even now…” He shifts against the ground. “Even now, if I turn, I fear you will not be there.”

“Do not look, then. I will still be here when you are ready.” Maglor unlaces their hands and rolls to one side, holding Daeron’s shrunken form close against him where he can feel the rise and fall of his breathing. He presses his lips to the tarnished silver of Daeron’s hair that even now smells of still, clean water.

 

They lie folded together into the depths of the night, not sleeping but exchanging strands of the stories that they have walked through alone. Maglor feels the pulse of a dark lake at the heart of an ancient forest and he pulls Daeron closer as a phrase of lamentation slips between them. From his own mind tales are drawn that Maglor long ago thought resolved. Loss upon loss that he had neatly folded into sequences of sound now unfurl before being stitched back together with fine silk threads of green and silver. A suture of forgiveness.

The shadows of other souls appear in their shared memories: the faces of Men and Elves, even the voices of trees and beasts and rivers, each offering consolation and succour. But all of them are strange, never quite able to reach across the gap in understanding, to pull back the protective shell of solitude. At last they envision the other’s face, soft and star-lit and dappled bright and dark with the reflection of an unseen pool below. The stream of thoughts slows to a gentle trickle.

“Would you sing?” With Daeron’s question, they are back under the branches of a yew on the banks of a lake that is no more, that was before that the eastern reach of a great inland sea now turned to desert.

“Of course.” Even with Daeron’s Song spread across his mind, it has been so long since Maglor has heard the Music of the Firstborn that it takes a moment before the words come to him.

Hína, Eruhína
The singing waves, hína
Call you to wake, hína
To walk upon paths unknown
Go not alone, hína.

The final notes drift up into the indigo and Daeron at last turns towards him, resting his head on one hand and using the other to brush, feather-light, over Maglor’s cheekbone. Their eyes retrace the lines of faces that for so long have existed only in memory.

The faint curve of a smile touches Daeron’s expression. “You make it sound beautiful. The unknown.” His sigh warms the exposed skin on Maglor’s neck. “But to live it, endlessly? To be woven into the Music of a Marred World? In that there is only despair.”

The smile falls and Daeron lifts himself to lean against the tree's trunk. He picks up the waterskin and stares contemplatively into its open mouth before taking a sip.

Maglor pulls himself back to sit beside him. “I do not think there is despair in not knowing.” He leans on his hands, eyes piercing the night as he looks out over the parched basin. It is strewn with dark patches where strange weeds have taken root. The spirit of the place washes over him and suddenly he is seeing the world through a sheet of water as clear and smooth as glass. A vision surfaces of Daeron seated on the banks of this lake playing upon his wooden flute.

“For how many years," he asks, "have we two listened for the echoes of the Music of Creation in the oceans and lakes and rivers? And yet we will never be sated. Like the water in which they say it lives, the Song does not rest but ever moves and changes. It cannot be known. It is the same for all who call Arda home, whether Elf or Man or any other creature that lives. Even, I think, for the Ainur. It may pool in a great lake for an age and then pour down into the Sea in another. It fills whatever spaces it can and flows by whatever paths most easily open before it.”

Moonlight paints a white line down Daeron’s neck as it turns towards him. “You do not believe then that all was sung to completion before Time?”

“Perhaps. I don’t know. I have given up on the desire to know.”

Daeron’s brows gather, deepening the shadows around his eyes. There is fear wrapping dark tendrils around him, a discordant Song rising. “How can you say that when you fixed your doom to the name of Eru himself? To the everlasting darkness.”

Maglor draws his knees to his chest. He yearns to reach past the fear, to touch and be touched by the person behind the discord, but he finds patience in that glassy flow of water.

“If our deed faileth.” Snatches of words that once held his soul thrall now feel light and ineffectual on his tongue. “Did I not fail?”

Above them, a pair of nightingales chatter and trill to one another and they both listen awhile.

Daeron takes another sip from the waterskin and passes it to Maglor. Only the tips of their fingers touch as he takes it.

“Do you believe you have been released, then," Daeron whispers, as if afraid of the answer, "from the oath you swore? That your doom has been lifted?”

“Released, lifted,” Maglor says, “or never truly laid down.”

He does not know, perhaps will never know; but as his lamentation has turned to acceptance and finally to faint hope over the years, he has allowed himself to wonder. He has asked again the questions that he had let drown in his weariness, when it was still two against the world, in those desperate, final years of a desperate age before he was left utterly alone. He has wondered and doubted and hoped, in the confusion of his loneliness, but not until now has he found courage to again share those thoughts with another.

A tautness that Maglor had not perceived before, like a string seldom plucked but out of tune, snaps in the space between them. What follows is not the gaping, empty silence that Maglor knows so well. It is a potent and comforting quiet, like silence after rains when all things that grow, their roots spread out beneath the earth, drink deeply of their sustenance.

“It is I who failed.” Daeron has barely finished the words before he folds over with a slow and heavy inhalation. He catches his face in his palms, muttering, “I failed to trust. I failed to hope.”

No hesitation remains as Maglor wraps him in his arms. Daeron sinks further into his touch as each wave of truth washes over him and spills forth as tears. There is no soaring crescendo of Song when they melt together now, as there had been long ago at the feet of another mountain range beside a rushing spring. But there is love, expansive and open.

At last Daeron lifts his head. The edges of his profile seem to have sharpened, white against the night and beautiful.

He says, “I have fought against the changes of the World all my life,” and turns to search Maglor’s eyes for confirmation. The tears shine on his face, even here in the shadow of the tree, as if with their own light. Maglor leans forward, brushing their cheeks against each other.

Daeron’s fingers are pressing into Maglor’s back and he continues to speak softly beside his ear. “I hear Music and I am guided by it to the point of falling deaf to its subtle shifts and changes. Then I break against a sudden cacophony of disorder and there is nothing to keep me afloat in that desert of silence.”

“I know,” is all Maglor can say, holding Daeron together as his spirit shivers, feverish with the ache of thousands of years of conviction unravelling.

The puffs of Daeron’s breathing become steady and cool against Maglor’s neck. “Will you sail West then?" he asks, his grip loosening almost imperceptibly. "To your home?”

Maglor draws back, gently moulding his hands to the contours of Daeron’s face as he says, “I find that is the one place that I have no desire to go.”

There is a weight to their joined breaths that pulls Maglor forward to close the space between their lips. The kiss is lingering and warm, like a palm cupped around the slow flame of a candle to shield it from the wind. He knows then that he will never again cross the Sundering Seas.

When they pull apart, there are bright rivulets of tears clinging to the rims of Daeron’s eyes. “Where will you go then, if not West? There is no place left for us in Ennor.”

“No.” The long vowel passes through Maglor’s mouth like a song from somewhere else. “We are the World and we are bound to it. There will always be a place for us wherever we go within it. All of Arda is home to us.” The words are his and yet not his: a certainty that has lain dormant since the day his particular spark of life was ignited from nothing.

Slowly, his arms fall away. He sits back to let the fullness of his heart swell with a longing to see and experience everything. He hears countless Songs unfolding at once: the songs of every stone, every tree, every shore, every river. A surge of joy pulls at the corners of his mouth and he turns to Daeron with a grin so wide it hurts. He laughs, imagining the strangeness of the sight, but there is bright starlight deep in the wells of Daeron’s eyes and though he does not laugh he is smiling, too.

Maglor’s laughter settles inside him like a warm, sweet tonic. “Now,” he says, “will you wander the World with me? Or will I have to carry you still?”

Daeron does laugh then. It is quiet but clear and fearless. Maglor thinks it is the most beautiful sound he has ever heard.

“Yes,” Daeron says. “You will never again walk alone, meleth-nín.² ”

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Chapter End Notes

¹Waters of Awakening (Cuiviénen in Sindarin).

²‘My love,’ Sindarin.

Album inspiration: Places I May Have Visited, People I May Have Met, Pt. 3, Remy van Kesteren (EP, 2022).