When All Other Lights Go Out by sallysavestheday

Death is dim, and warm, and quiet, Fëanor thinks. He can almost understand its appeal.

He is hidden in the linen closet, stretched out on a chest in a careful imitation of his mother’s pose in Lórien, cocooned in a tapestry of her making, imagining her end.

The walls are thick and the door well-fitted, admitting only a sliver of light and minimizing sound. After the uproar of Míriel’s departure, the absence of stimulation is soothing. The burning ache in his chest retreats, some, and his heartbeat finally slows. Fëanor slides into a fitful sleep, dreaming, as always, of fire.

He wakes to find the dark has cooled around him, clotting and settling. He strains his eyes to find the door, but there is no light from the hall. The chest rattles under him as he tries to rise, and Míriel’s weaving grips him like a shroud.

Finwë finds him by his screams: the desperate fire of his voice seeps under the door and nearly sets the air ablaze.

Fëanor hurls himself at his father, gasping and sobbing. The light of the candle Finwë carries wavers as he kneels to hold his son. Fëanor flails, keening. The flame goes out.

Curled against his father’s chest, Fëanor weeps for his absent mother, lost to the dark.

Ever after, he chases light.

Gemcraft is the core of it: singing to the hearts of the stones until they shine with their own radiance, pooling colors in the palm of the hand like water or sap or wine. The jewels echo his own Song, layering and building the light in a fugue that taps his heart. He is twined with their music, burning into them as the tune builds and builds and builds.

Lamps grow from that intimate knowledge of the light at the center of things. Fëanor’s lamps are bright and steady, with a perpetual glow that banishes shadows and makes edges clear and bright. Not for him the taper’s shimmer, the oil’s smoky flame. His lights burn with indifferent constancy in mist and rain and sleet, their endurance a comfort, a guard. A warning, perhaps.

He hangs chains of them in the great ballroom of his father’s palace when Finwë weds again: living gems singing in cases of brilliantly-faceted, unbreakable glass. The light catches on the jewels in the king’s crown, the glow of the great rubies set there breaking into shards of red on the smooth skin of his brow. Indis reaches up to wipe at the spots of fractured light, laughing as her pale hand comes away clean.

Fëanor leaves them there, dancing under his gift of captured stars. He rides out from Tirion, beyond the range of Treelight, into the empty bowl of the night. He hunches under his cloak on a lonely mountainside until long after the feasting is over, wiping angry tears from his cheeks and tossing the clearest and brightest of his gems from hand to hand.

Ill at ease in the face of his father’s joy, he retreats to the wild lands, the deep mountains, all the starlit corners of Aman where minerals seam the earth and hidden jewels sing. Hauling the rarest of metals and fistfuls of gems, he presents himself to Mahtan, prideful and bold. The great smith takes his measure – the bruised heart, the bright eyes, the hopeful eagerness under the brash exterior – and welcomes him home.

Fëanor grows stronger in Mahtan’s forge, keener of mind and of hand, drawing the light from stones with a twist of his wrist and a swift pulse of Song. The fairest of them he crafts into a bracelet for Nerdanel, holding his breath when he gifts it to her, laughing with relief and the unexpected possibility of happiness as she kisses him and fastens it on.

Marriage and fatherhood soften his pursuit of light but make it more potent. He drapes his unorthodox wife in jewels that radiate his fierce devotion, glowing at her throat, on her wrists and fingers, tangling in her hair. Each room of their home is full of warmth and power, lit within by lamps that spring alight with a touch and hold a steady glow. The nursery is never dark, never cold, never entirely still – the soft lights Fëanor rings it with hum tenderly as their babies sleep. His children grow tall in that light, in the luster of their parents’ adoration.

It is not until Maglor moves into rooms of his own that the trouble begins.

Half-grown and eager to be away, he still misses the warm lights of the nursery. He sings to comfort himself, but the tunes send his mind shivering into dark corners and fearful dreams. The tales of Grandmother Míriel leave him shuddering, sleepless, through night after night, afraid to close his eyes lest he never wake again. Maglor has seen Fëanor’s face when that lost mother is mentioned, and he quakes at the thought of telling him his troubles. He swallows his terrors, tries to outrun his dreams.

Maedhros hears him weeping through the walls. He coaxes out the secret of Maglor’s fears – that dread of death and darkness – and tries to comfort him. Darkness is never absolute, he argues; even behind the clouds there are stars. But Maglor is inconsolable, his mind churning with Míriel’s imagined loneliness, her unending suspension in solitude, in silence, in the dark. His nights remain battlefields, every breath a lament.

Maedhros finds Fëanor in his workshop, frowning over plans for some magnificent engine, and asks him to share the secret of the lights. The fierce heat of his father’s attention can be painful, but it softens with pleasure when Maedhros makes his purpose clear. Fëanor glows with pride: his sons love each other in a way that he and Indis’ boys do not. He has raised them to this bond, this tender entanglement. All their lives they will have each other: they will never be lonely, never weep silently outside the circle of their family’s care.

Fëanor abandons the task of the moment and turns his bright energy and focus to Maedhros. Together, they draft a design for a lamp to keep Maglor company: the family device worked in jeweled glass with the purest of gems at the center, sung through with strength and comfort and love. No toy, this; it will be both beautiful and practical, designed to soothe and inspire.

Maedhros loves glass-work: the magic of the transformation, the heat and the flow, the subtle dangers in the dance between liquid and solid, between fine grains and cascading light. He plans his coloring carefully: cadmium and selenium for the red; cerium, sulfur, and carbon for the yellow. A black copper oxide that spills into blue with the touch of the heat. A bare pinch of coloring in each batch of silica, ground carefully, painstakingly fine.

As the sand melts and the colors flow, Fëanor wraps an arm around Maedhros’ shoulders and kisses his temple. How fortunate he is, to have a son who crafts with such purpose and love. Maedhros leans tenderly into his father’s hold. The furnace light catches on his forehead; it trembles and glows in his fiery hair.

Fëanor leaves the shaping to Maedhros, watching as his long fingers coax the forms he can see in his mind’s eye from the brilliant glass. The star takes shape, each ray drawn finer than fine, glittering in the palm of his hand. When it is cooled and assembled and leaded into its frame, Fëanor opens his strongbox and offers Maedhros the choice of his private store of gems. They spark and shimmer against the cushioning velvet, potent, waiting to be called into light.

Maedhros hums, considering, then touches one with a careful finger. It vibrates under his touch, welcoming the attention, and he laughs and tosses it to his father with a grin.

Fëanor fits the gem into its setting, then teaches Maedhros the tune to awaken it: his own heart’s deep music, an echo of the enduring Song. He cups his son’s hands around the lamp, smiling.

“Now, Nelyo. Sing.”

Maedhros sings his love into the gem as Fëanor hums softly in harmony beneath him: strengthening, buttressing, ensuring that the glass will not break or the song dim, even with the roughest of handling.

The lamp trembles to life between Maedhros’ palms, then steadies. The colors shine clearly, with a gentleness that consoles and cheers. Maedhros is beautiful in the soft light: serious, tender, his young face sweet and open, imagining an end to another’s fears.

Maedhros and Fingon play a dangerous game in Tirion, sneaking into each other’s rooms to cling and grapple and love with a desperation that leaves them giddy after long nights without sleep. Wiser hearts would secret themselves away, but they tempt fate and their fathers, climbing balconies and sliding down drainpipes to tumble into one another’s waiting arms. Drunk on delight, they make mistakes that nearly expose them, again and again.

Fingon plunges over the windowsill only seconds after Fëanor has left Maedhros’ sitting room. Maedhros comes home in last night’s crumpled robes, smelling of Fingon, and risks passing Fëanor in the hall, trusting his father’s distraction to secure him from harm. They huddle in alcoves at formal gatherings, teasing each other to frustration, giggling breathlessly as their hidden hands touch and stroke and clasp, until a passing guest salutes them and draws them into conversation. The risks raise the stakes: they make the burning hotter, and the quenching even more sweet.

Maglor’s rooms are next to Maedhros’, and he is no fool. Rustling ivy on the balcony and the muffled noises of delight speak volumes; he glimpses Fingon’s golden ornaments shimmering in the softened light as he slips away afterwards, a shadow weaving through the garden’s trees.

Maglor knows his father’s opinions. His own friendship with Finrod has been tested and found safe, if unbecoming, as Fëanor holds Finarfin’s sons in careless contempt. But Fingolfin’s heir is another matter entirely, wound up in the barbed and bitter wires of succession and precedence and pain. Were it any other of his own children, Fëanor would scoff and lecture against the constraints of laws and customs, defying faith and public sentiment for pride and the pleasure of debate. But Nelyafinwë must be third, and sire a fourth. Fingon is as far from an appropriate match as it is possible to be, for the eldest son of the House of Fëanor.

Maglor loves his father, in the absolute yet distant way one loves a star, the sea, the flames. Fëanor was at his best when his sons were very young, bathing them in affection and attention that knit their hearts to his, inseparably. Once they grew old enough to have their own opinions and their own pastimes, the fierce heat of his interest in them cooled. He remains paternal, supportive, encouraging where their ways parallel his own, and they are still bound to him like moons to a planet as it turns. But it is Maedhros who has his finger on the pulse of the brothers’ lives – their small frustrations, their secrets, their private insecurities and pains. It is Maedhros who watches, who listens. Maedhros, who cares.

Maglor places the lamp Maedhros made for him long ago in his window. On nights when his father is away he sings it alight, watching the glow spring up and steady under his welcoming hands. He waits for Fingon in the garden on one such night, startling his cousin into a wary crouch, ready for a fight. Maglor only laughs and points out the beacon; he whispers its use, grinning in fond complicity. Fingon’s eyes shine with gratitude and he tugs Maglor into an exuberant embrace, then disappears up the trellis into Maedhros’ room.

Thanking Maglor awkwardly, afterwards, Maedhros offers to set the light in his own window, but Maglor just shrugs and laughs. It is his lamp; he may do with it as he likes. Better it sits in his rooms than in his brother’s, for appearances’ sake. Tirion is not the bright, fair city it was when they were children. Shadows cling and creep and words have edges; loyalties are settling into ruts; tempers steam with barely contained heat.

Maglor reads in the lamp’s tender glow, listening to the rustle as Fingon climbs to his brother’s balcony. Let them love while they may, he thinks, shivering. Soon enough, the opportunities will cease.

The cabin on the swan ship is small but richly appointed. There are no stains, no scars from the recent struggle, and the fittings are graceful and elegant. Telerin-made and well-loved, clearly, by the care that has been taken in their craft and preservation. The vessel is not the flagship, but of nearly the same size. “Fit for the Crown Prince to captain,” Feanor had laughed, in his pride, as he ushered Maedhros aboard. Maglor sails with him; Caranthir and Celegorm and Curufin on the other ship of this same class; Ambarussa with their father on the largest – seasick and heartsick and kept close under his watchful eye. The remainder of their host is divided among these vessels and the lesser ones, silent as they creep away from shore under the cover of the fog.

There are no lights in the cabin. Whatever lamps or tapers the sconces held are gone, hastily snatched as the fighting began and now lost to the sea or the stroke of some Fëanorian sword.

Their torches smoke, too large for the room. They will stain the walls and ceiling and must be put out. Maedhros crushes his into the sand bucket by the door and drops to the bed with his arm flung over his face, weary beyond words, sick with grief and guilt and longing for Fingon, returned to him beyond hope after so long apart. He replays the struggle in his mind: the terrified grappling in the dark, stumbling as his feet slid in the gore, the arm of a Telerin fisherman drawn back to spear him as he flailed and staggered. Then Fingon, bright and furious and beloved, his blade flashing, his arm warm around Maedhros’ waist as he steadied him and kicked the Teler’s body overboard. The slipperiness of the bloody deck. The mingled rage and devotion in Fingon’s eyes.

And now they sneak away, running dark and silent with what little skill they have, aiming the ships’ prows across the Belegaer with anxious hope while Fingolfin’s host sleeps on the beaches behind them. Maedhros cannot keep the tears from leaking out under his lashes as he lies sprawled on the bed. It is the promised treachery, already brewing among them. But his father will hear no word, brook no delay. He trusts his brother not at all. Fëanor must be first to cross; they will up anchor and away.

Maglor watches Maedhros as he weeps in the captain’s bunk, the red fan of his hair across the pillow like blood, shocking in the whiteness of the room. He fumbles in his luggage, then douses his own torch. Singing softly, he calls his lamp to life between his hands. The jeweled glass sends the light dancing around the cabin, and Maedhros uncovers his face in startlement. He stares: remembering, yearning.

Maglor sets the lamp in a bracket in the small, round window, where the light can shine out behind them, dipping and rising with the waves. A watcher on the shore will see it, if he looks with love.

Maedhros is still weeping – almost silently, in a slow, damp drag. Maglor kisses his forehead and curls next to him in the bunk. The ship bucks and yaws in the shuddering seas.

Maglor startles awake, disturbed from his dreaming by silence and a change in the light. A loon wails from the lake, and moonlight – it is still so strange, that silvery cascade – pours in through the shutters.

Maedhros is gone.

Maglor hurries into his clothes and slips out the door into the night, but he has no idea where to begin his search. Maedhros has been unwilling to be out of sight since his rescue from the mountain – he has craved company, needed the touch and speech of others to keep him grounded and composed. To have crept out alone is so out of keeping with his desperate sociability that Maglor dreads the worst: he has been taken, or lost. Ever at the edge of his clinging there has been a chasm of pain that Maglor has not known how to bridge. If Maedhros has fallen into it, he may truly be gone. Maglor’s heart clenches as the loon cries again.

Something glimmers on the lakeshore: a gentle light, half-hidden. Maglor knows its soft shine, and his heart eases as he creeps closer, quiet in the night.

Maedhros is curled on his side with his head in Fingon’s lap, sound asleep as his cousin draws gentle fingers through his hair. The light from Maglor’s lamp softens their features, smooths the lines of grief and care. They might be young again, stolen away to keep company far from the acid tangles of their families. They are all tenderness, in the lamp’s warm glow.

Maglor backs away, silently. He has stumbled on their farewell, he realizes: with the morning, the first train of goods heads East, to the border lands that Maedhros has claimed in his renunciation of the crown. Maglor and Maedhros will ride with it, prospecting.

Maglor smiles wryly to himself. Their father’s fierce capacity for love burns yet in all of them, for good or ill. The lamp’s remembered light will beam across the leagues, unbreakable as Fëanor intended, but not, certainly, used as he would have hoped.

**********

Flames at their heels, the last defenders of the Gap break for Himring, gasping in the oily clouds, their horses’ haunches straining, hooves thundering. Maglor’s throat is raw with smoke and exertion: he has held the fires off for days with songs of rivers and rain, forcing the flames back and down, hurtling back and forth along the lines at the tail of their retreat like a barrier wave, echoing his memories of the Sea.

Now he leads the rag-tag, desperate rearguard through the smoke, hoping against hope to reach refuge in Maedhros’ stronghold. He has only the most general sense of direction in the sundering dark, plunging headlong away from the hordes of Orcs that spill through the fires behind them. He leans and fumbles in his saddlebag, digging among the few remaining treasures he has salvaged as his mount staggers and recovers, staggers and recovers. The lamp slides into his palm like a blessing and he lifts it in his battered hand, already singing.

The light blazes: a beacon, a flare. Maglor keeps singing as the sortie Maedhros has readied charges out of the night and sweeps past them, fresh swords on fresh horses, deadly and keen. The remnants of the Gap’s companies stagger the last few furlongs to Himring and plunge through its gates. Maedhros is waiting, arms open to catch Maglor as he slides from the saddle, still clutching the lamp. He waves it at Maedhros, breathlessly grateful. Maedhros’ sharp teeth gleam as he grins.

**********

The snow falls like a curtain as soon as they leave the protective overhang of Menegroth’s gates. The searching of the caverns took too long, and they are far behind their quarry: any tracks that Celegorm’s men might have left have long been filled.

Maedhros is quietly frantic, his hunched strides a tell. He beats the bushes in a widening circle, pausing periodically to listen and to scent the air. There is no sign of the children, and night is falling fast. The great flakes brush their faces like a denunciation: cold and bitter in the looming dark.

Maglor unfastens the lamp from where he has clipped it to his belt and crouches, shivering. The glass is cold and inert in his hands. His mind is still; no kindling song stirs in his mouth. Maedhros hovers over him, eager for the light, but even with his heated urgency there is no spark.

Maglor stares blankly at the silent lamp. There is blood on his hands. Blood on the glass.

He drops the accusing thing, shuddering.

His father’s star glints red amid the piling snow.

**********

Maglor will not use it, after Doriath.

He tries, once, on a night when Maedhros cannot rest for circling thoughts of failure, and their father, and Fingon, but the glow no longer warms or sustains. The light only makes clearer what they have tried to hide.

He buries it in his cache of their dead brothers’ belongings: furs and cloth and weapons piled high, out of sight but never out of mind.

Shivering in the dark with the old terrors will be his penance.

For a while, the fog bred by that wakefulness feels kind.

Elros and Elrond both dream of death.

For Elros, it is a soft and welcoming warmth, a lightness felt pulling at his wrists, his chest, his throat. He is drawn forward like iron to a magnet: rising, singing, sighing. There is no fear.

For Elrond, it is a nightmare of Sirion: blood and flames and the cries of terror that rang through the city as they fled to the tower in their nightclothes, barefoot and gasping in the dark. Over and over he climbs the stairs, turns to face the dim, armed menace behind them, and falls, over the balustrade, into the burning air.

He wakes with his mouth full of his pillow or his face tangled in the sheets, having flailed himself into strange contortions in his sleep. He knows he screams, or sobs, when the dream catches him: Elros has hushed him, furiously, desperate not to draw attention in Amon Ereb’s gloomy nights. Their captors’ bright eyes well out of the darkness when they wander the halls after sundown, gleaming with some hunger that neither Elros nor Elrond can name. Better to stay behind the solid door of their room, small and still and unobtrusive, until the sun rises and they can breathe again.

But they cannot always remain unseen. The circles under Elrond’s eyes catch Maglor’s attention at breakfast. Frowning, he asks after their health, their diet, their patterns of exercise, with an air of exasperation that tries to mask a guilty fear. Elrond yawns before answering and Maglor pounces: Is he not sleeping? Is he afraid?

Maedhros scoffs into his tankard with sarcastic verve and Maglor rounds on him without thinking, fists clenched in impotent rage. Their eyes meet and something bleak and bitter heats the air between them as the twins watch with trepidation. Maglor’s eyes fill with tears; the moment drags out until Maedhros, abruptly, relents. He finishes his ale with deliberate care, then scrapes his chair back to rise, leaning in to kiss Maglor’s cheek as he does so.

“You took them, Kano. You manage them. Call me only if they fall in the river or get stuck in the armory gate.”

He thumps Elros gently on the shoulder with the stump of his arm as he passes, grinning when he startles. Tossing a wink to Elrond, he vanishes into the hall, whistling so perfectly out of tune it can only be deliberate.

Maglor winces. He tries again, more gently.

“Elrond, if you are having trouble sleeping, I have something that may help.”

He draws the twins to his own room, then digs through crates and chests and the piled belongings of what seems to be a small host, muttering under his breath. Elros and Elrond take in the chaos from the corners of their eyes, careful not to appear to be looking. Maglor’s room is heaped with detritus: a pile of rich velvet robes, long out of style; antlers mounted on a silver crown, twined with chains and gems that flash dully in the firelight. Rolled, moth-eaten weaving. Dusty account books. A pair of matching bows.

These remnants of other lives have taken over the space; Maglor’s own neat bed and worktable are crowded under the window in the small pocket of order that remains. But he seems comfortable with the clutter, caressing the piled flotsam as he sorts and searches with focused determination. He huffs in satisfaction as he unearths a traveling pack of antique make, then unfolds a bundle of cloth that has been stored inside.

The lamp gleams in the sunlight that slants through the window. The ancient glass shines as richly as when it was made, imbued with Fëanor’s power and Maedhros’ Song. Maglor bends a canny glance in Elrond’s direction, then holds the lamp out to him, smiling.

“This will help you to keep those dreams at bay. But you will have to let me teach you its song.”

That was the beginning of it, Elros always says, when they are older, and perhaps wiser, and better guarded against the kinds of tricks of feeling that snared them into Maglor and Maedhros’ hearts. Elrond could not resist – neither the promise of peaceful sleep nor the invitation to music – and with that concession, half the barrier was gone.

The rest of it fell when Elros caught Maedhros turning the lamp in his trembling hands and weeping. All the tall terrifying keenness of him had shrunk into a grieving heap, and Elros could never stand by and watch sadness. His small hands touched the metal fingers, then the flesh. Maedhros’ great scarred hand caught his and tightened, wonderingly, as the lamp steadied and shone.

Elrond will not permit Maglor to be lost.

Whenever he can, he makes his way into the dunes and watches for the glow and dance of color in the dark: the light of Maglor’s lamp, shining. It is almost a game, the patient waiting. The days or weeks of solitude as he searches are cleansing and steadying. Eventually he will stumble on the camp: tidy or disheveled as Maglor’s current mood directs; more or less equipped to face the day.

Elrond brings rope and knives and candied fruit, a warm cloak and whatever songs he thinks Maglor may not have heard. They grill fish over the humming fire, exchange news, dissect the politics of Lindon, or Eregion, or Imladris, as the centuries turn.

Galadriel’s doings always spark Maglor’s particular mirth and admiration: he takes a crooked pride in that tiniest cousin grown so grand. When Elrond’s news is that he has wed Celebrían, Maglor laughs and laughs and laughs. “Were you not already entangled enough with the Finwëans?” he asks, breathless with delight, as Elrond blushes and scowls.

Somehow Maglor knows when Elrond’s children are born. He finds him waiting each time with some strange yet perfect toy carved out of driftwood and embellished with the gifts of the sands: shells, bone, seeds, fragments of softly weathered glass. For Elrohir, a horse with a mane and tail like water-weed; for Elladan, ancient branches twisted into clasping hands. For Arwen, in sea-bleached wood, a small, white tree. Elrond turns the gifts in the lamplight, watches the colors shift and burn.

Over the long years, they slowly untangle the pain of the Silmarils, of Sirion, and of Maedhros’ fiery end. Elrond’s visits are Maglor’s penance: a love both longed for and endured. Eärendil arcs overhead as they sit in the dark and sing, with only Maglor’s lamp to see by. Maglor tips the star-lord a grin, or a wince, as the mood of the moment demands. Elrond leans closer; he smiles at the sky, smiles at Maglor, unconcerned and unbiased in his loving.

The years of war keep them apart, but Maglor waits, knowing that Elrond will eventually bring his grieving and his rage to temper at the seashore. He sings the lamp alight each night and holds it cupped in his hands, imagining that the glow soothes the cracked flesh of his branded palm. It is such a long time since he was a child afraid of the dark; a boy whose brother loved him, both of them basking in their father’s warmth.

Maglor’s heart grows slowly lighter with every visit. The tug Westward strengthens as his spirit cools, but still he waits. He waits.

The last time, Elrond stumbles through the dunes, weeping. Celebrían is Sailing: his heart is broken, his craft has failed. It takes a great deal of garbled pleading before Maglor realizes what he is being asked. He trembles with it, even after all the time that has passed. But this is Elrond begging; Maglor will wrestle the sea itself on Elrond’s behalf.

Celebrian’s wounded heart calls to his own: they know each other instantly, deeply – two battered souls uncertain of their welcome in the West. Maglor takes her hand; he leads her up the gangway, singing.

Elrond watches from the quay as the sails grow smaller and smaller in the distance. The lamp burns, steady and bright, in his lonely hands.

Arwen walks the corridors of the palace with comfortable familiarity, rocking Eldarion’s daughter in her arms as the baby frets and yawns. It is an honorable task, this soothing of a frightened child, and she has learned well the craft of it, with all her own little ones so wary of the dark. And after all, it is from her blood that the terror comes – hers, and her father’s, his one great fear – so she might as well do the calming, if she can.

She laughs to herself, remembering Aragorn’s surprise at her reluctance to sleep with shutters drawn or curtains pulled. He had thought it shameless, until she admitted the creeping dread of dreaming where she could not see the stars.

There was a lamp, once, when she was young: an ancient thing that held a soft and stubborn light. Elrond would sometimes wake it for her with a song, when her mother’s absence overwhelmed her and the darkness curled too close to bear. She remembers the gentleness in his face, the regret that sometimes seemed to strike him, and the sweetness of the tune that called the light.

She mentions it to Aragorn as they pass their fussy grandchild back and forth, and he grins in recognition. It had soothed his dark nights, too: red and orange and yellow and blue, timeworn but unbreakable. Elrond would sing it into life for him with a tune in Quenya so old as to be almost unrecognizable, his long hands cupping the glass, his palms filling with color, pure and bright.

It should be no surprise when, the next time her brothers visit, Elladan pulls the lamp from his saddlebag, wrapped carefully in silks for padding against the journey. These moments of synchronicity grow more common as she ages, as the edges of her two lives grow thinner and overlap. She lives more and more in the borderlands, now. When she walks the halls with a grizzling baby her footsteps echo in this world and the next.

It is smaller than she remembers, this dream-chaser, this friend in the dark. The colored glass has lost none of its luster; it is unchipped, unscarred. The gem that sits within it is radiant, still. It fits her hand with absolute familiarity, humming.

Aragorn leans over her shoulder and touches it with a reverent finger.

“It sings of love,” he says, softly, “Can you hear it? Someone sang this into being with fullness of heart.”

It is one reason she adores him, Arwen thinks: this listening, this awareness of the feelings of others, this abundance of care. She turns to kiss his weathered cheek, strokes the soft steel of his hair away from his face. When did they both grow so grey? she wonders. Then Aragorn winks at her, with that crooked smile of his, and, as always, he is everything she needs.

He remembers the tune, mostly, and she, if she focuses, knows most of the words. Between them they manage it, with the baby propped wide-eyed across their laps.

The lamp winks awake.

The child reaches for the light, wondering.