When All Other Lights Go Out by sallysavestheday

Constant and Inconstant Beams

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.