Awakening by MourningGlory

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Awakening

wake up.

fall in love again,

wage war on gravity.

there’s so much

worth fighting for.

you’ll see.

­-- “Nine,” Sleeping at Last

It was the silence that first wakened Maglor. Millennia spent with waves roaring in his ears had rendered their absence deafening. His listless spirit stirred. In this diminished state, he was not exactly thinking about the silence, nor even about the “noise” of that familiar roaring’s lack. Rather, he felt an emptiness, as if it were a certain solid thing, pressing down on him like a great weight. This weight did not pain him. It was simply something there – a presence, like a person walking in through a doorway to which one’s back is turned. But the last breathing son of Fëanor could never have named that something. He could no longer retrieve the names or even the words he once knew, so long had it been since he’d used them.

Warmth. The speechless, worn-out spirit of Maglor felt this, too. And dry. A stark contrast from the cool, damp beaches to which he had grown accustomed. He felt encircled, even protected, by this dry warmth that was also soft, as if the world itself had become warm and dry and soft, as if he were ensconced in firm clouds – unable to move and grateful not to need to. A pleasant smell had wrapped itself around him, too. Its scent was of green and gold goodness, fresh and unspoiled, like morning sunlight through young spring leaves. He breathed it in, deeply, lungs expanding, as though they remembered how to sing, as though they had not spent the past many years taking in only enough air to survive – sipping it shallow and slow.

After a time, Maglor heard the clack of a doorknob, the barely audible creak of a well-oiled hinge, then soft footsteps and murmuring and the clunk of a shutting wooden door. The footsteps and murmurs continued. Even if Maglor had not been too tired to listen, he could not have understood the words these trespassers whispered. The Sindarin tongue. He had learned it in adulthood and used it for only a short time – or so those few hundred years would have seemed to him now. And even the mother tongue of this lost poet had long since become a memory inaccessible. He perceived the strangers’ speech as so much rustling of leaves, as wind through trees, as the too-quiet voice of a shy flute.

Then, a hand. It touched him. And another, and another. Gentle, yet firm. Confident, but light. Deft and skillful like a harpist’s fingers over strings. Maglor felt no alarm. He cared not what they might do to him. He cared not for himself at all. Perhaps there was not even a himself to be cared for anymore. Yet it seemed not quite gone. Maglor’s spirit exuded the tiniest glow at the kind and gentle touch of all these practiced hands, these healers’ hands. Those hands did very little. Merely arranged and rearranged the soft, warm world where Maglor lay – raising up the valleys and sweeping away the mountains. And they turned his body so that he felt a slight firmness on his back, not his side where that firmness had pressed him, near-imperceptibly, before. After a faint sloshing sounded, the scent of green-gold goodness grew stronger, and Maglor breathed deeply again. His visitors left as quickly and quietly as they had come, with the softest click, creak, and clunk and a shimmer of suppressed fluting. When the silence returned, he welcomed it as a friend, and he let it sing him to sleep.

The next sound he heard was the same click of the door. The whisperers had returned – and more of them. They shuffle-stepped ever closer to where Maglor lay and gingerly removed the blanket that covered him. He felt this new, slight chill as a sudden shock, as if his flute-voiced companions had betrayed him, exposed him to a cruel new coldness. But soon he felt their warm, gentle hands again, sliding in under his shoulders, head, back, legs, and feet and then lifting him – so many, holding him – and placing him on another soft surface. They were carrying him, on a strip of cloth, down and down and down some corridor. Maglor felt his body swaying slightly as his carriers stepped. First this way, then that, back this way, then that again, as though rocking him to sleep. But before he could drift off completely, they stopped and removed his loose-fitting clothing, lifted him with their hands again, then lowered him slowly, slowly into a large basin of water.

It was nothing like the water of Ossë’s waves, those cold, relentless batterers of the shore. This small, Maglor-sized pool was a warm embrace – not quite hot – still and clear and smooth as honey, not grainy with salt and sand. Where the seas threatened to drag down, forcing a swimmer or a drowner to fight for the surface, the kindly puddle that enveloped Maglor lifted his tired limbs upward, making them lighter and even more at rest. This sort of water was new to him, or so old that it seemed a novelty, and he hardly noticed the distant family resemblance between his welcoming bath and the forbidding ocean. The scent of green and gold, of new sunlight through new leaves, had followed him into the water. Or perhaps that scent pervaded the water – perhaps the water itself was made of that new sunlight, and the young leaves floated lazily upon it. Another deep breath.

After settling their charge safely into the basin, Maglor’s Sindarin companions began to bathe him. Their expert hands flowed over his arms and legs like gentle streams. When they tipped back his head to wash his hair, he nearly fell asleep, so comforting were the warm water and the firm fingers kneading his scalp. Maglor became aware, to his surprise and wonder, that he had shoulders, arms, hands, and long, thin fingers. He had legs, feet, and toes, too. Skin and bone and muscle. Mostly skin and bone, but enough muscle that he felt some strength return as the healers’ fingers rubbed against his limbs and pressed them gently. Again, his spirit grew ever so slightly warmer, tentatively spreading itself thinly through his body, like the first weak rays that grace the sky before sunrise.

His spirit recoiled when they lifted him from the water and a wave of cold air crashed upon him. But almost instantaneously, he was wrapped with warm, soft towels, rubbed dry, and clothed. His caretakers rocked him back and forth with their steps all the way back down the corridor before lying him down and covering him around with soft, dry warmth once more.

Then one of the shy flutes found its tongue: a whisperer spoke aloud. “All finished, my lords,” sang his voice. Maglor still could not comprehend the sense of the words, but he took in their smooth, sing-song Sindarin sound.

“Thank you,” answered one of the “lords.”

This voice. It was different. It spoke Sindarin, but where the healers’ whispers had been like whistling wind, misty and delicate, this voice heralded solidity. To even make a sound in wispy Sindarin, it had melted itself down like the steel of a sword in the forge. Its strength remained, though it flowed in liquid form. This liquid-metal voice sparkled with a certain hope that peaked almost playfully around the edges of one’s ears. Yet it sighed, too, with the weariness of an armored warrior not quite at the end of a battle. And though Maglor could not understand the speaker’s simple words, he knew he had heard that voice before. His weak spirit leapt despite itself, as if trying to reach that voice – to share its hope and to comfort its weariness. But this leap proved too much. The next instant, a wave of weariness passed over Maglor himself, and his spirit quieted.

Maglor’s flute-tongued friends shuffled out, and the lords strode in. Two of them. The steps of the first were soft and graceful but decisive and strong. Those of the second seemed to send tremors through the very ground. Maglor felt a warm hand on his forehead. Its touch hummed with gentle power, and a bright, mighty spirit grazed his tired and wilted one. The stronger spirit retreated almost immediately, as if afraid to incinerate the weak life it had touched, but the warm hand remained.

“Mithrandir, he is improving!” Maglor could feel the heat of the speaker’s spirit as it danced for joy but inches away. This was the familiar, liquid-metal voice that had sounded before. “He is weak, but his fëa has finally woken. He may recover, yet.”

“Good,” the other lord answered. His voice crackled like lightning and rolled like thunder. It whistled like a hurricane’s wind. And yet its crackling was also like that of a fire in the hearth, joyous and even teasing, as kindly and lifegiving as it was dangerous. Maglor knew this voice, too, but it was more distant from his mind. The echo of an echo of a memory of a half-thought.

Mithrandir… Mithrandir. Maglor replayed the strange series of sounds over and over in his mind, as he once would have played and replayed the most challenging measures of a piece he was learning. But unlike the Maglor of old, who never failed to practice to perfection, this Maglor tired easily. After a breath or two, he let “Mithrandir” drift away, a weak puff of smoke.

“But do not forget,” the hearth-fire voice sparked, jolting Maglor back out of his half-sleep. “The road is long. And this bard has many leagues to go before he sings again. I would not have you lose hope for lack of patience.”

Though the hearth-voice was warm and friendly, the liquid-metal voice demurred to answer. Instead, the lord whose warm hand rested on Maglor’s forehead breathed in deeply, audibly like a gust of wind, then spoke with a very different voice. Quenya. The once-liquid metal of the speaker’s speech had taken solid shape. It had become a mighty broadsword, glistening gold as if swung beneath the noonday sun, whooshing as it went. Its wielder fought no Orcs: he simply savored his own strength and skill in the brightness of the day. This voice that was a sword at play cried out like a trumpet. Bright and joyous, it sang. Noble and generous, like the call of a benevolent king.

“Macalaurë, son of Fëanáro,” intoned the kingly horn in Maglor’s mother tongue. “I call your fëa to awaken, to burn bright once more with the fire of your father’s house. I call you to the land of those who are alive. Arise! Breathe! Move! Speak! Live again!”

The shining words warmed Maglor like sunlight, and he basked in them like a sleeping cat as their speaker repeated them. But like the Sindarin speech that had tickled his ears before, these words were mere senseless sounds to him. A familiar, comforting sound, but sound, nonetheless. Even the name of his fearsome father. Even the name his own mother had given him on the day of his birth. It was no more than a beautiful noise.

Five times, the noble voice called to Maglor. Five times, Maglor failed to understand. Silence fell, and the speaker’s strong, hot spirit seemed to cool slightly. He sighed and removed his hand from Maglor’s forehead.

“As I said, many miles to go,” smiled the hearth-fire voice. This time, that speaker spoke in Quenya, too. The hearth-fire had grown larger, hotter, more fit for a palace than a cottage. It resounded like a bigger, deeper horn of brass, one whose warm strength embraces a frail listener in the way a wise grandfather comforts his tiny grandson. “Do not lose hope. Try again in a few days. Perhaps he will hear you when his fëa has grown a bit stronger.”

“Of course,” answered the voice nearer to Maglor. Sindarin again. Melted steel and weariness. The discouraged speaker rose, and the two lords left Maglor alone.

Time passed for Maglor much as it had since the silence first woke him. His quiet companions, his whisperers of Sindarin, visited him often. They would turn him where he lay, this way or that, and arrange the pillows and blankets around him to keep his body in place. Then, they would replenish or merely stir the cauldron of athelas and restore the strength of its healing scent. Less frequently, they would visit in greater numbers and carry Maglor away to bathe him. Always, the bath would be followed by a visit from Mithrandir and the other lord. The two would speak to one another briefly, and the lord whose Quenya sang like a trumpet would call to Maglor’s spirit five times. Five times, he would go unanswered. The two would depart, and each time the unnamed lord’s spirit would grow colder and damper and wearier, despite Mithrandir’s efforts to enliven it.

For Maglor, these happenings flowed on like an endless song, verses and refrains in which he played a small part, one strange and silent instrument in the small ensemble of mostly woodwinds and two brass. He wafted along in his half-woken dream as he had drifted through the cooler, wetter millennia on the shores of Endor. Except now he was comfortable and comforted. No longer alone. He would have gladly subsisted in this stasis until the end of all things, had it not been for the quailing spirit of the unnamed lord. Maglor was too weary to recognize the sorrow and growing despair that encroached upon his sleepy peace, but it gnawed at his spirit and spoiled his otherwise snug existence. Again, he did not think about it, but he felt it. And it was enough to stop him from drifting off entirely, never to wake again.

At the end of one visit from the two lords, after the unnamed trumpeter had sounded five times and received no answer, the trumpeter cried out, still speaking in Quenya, “Olórin, help me! He is slipping beyond my grasp! Please, won’t you call to him? I fear there is nothing more I can do.” Olórin, Mithrandir, the lord with the hearth-fire voice, gave a grunt of surprise, as if this were the strangest request for his despairing companion to make.

“My lord Elrond,” he answered, “your skills as a healer are nearly as strong as mine. And your kinship with your charge, here, makes you a better healer for him than I could ever be.”

“If you will not help me, what am I to do?” whispered the one called Elrond. “My skill will take me no further. There are no others this side of the sea who can save him, and none on the other willing to try. It seems I have lost him, after all.” His voice grew softer as he spoke, until it was barely audible.

“If I may,” resounded the warm, hornlike voice of Olórin. Ever the hearth-fire, there was a sparkle of kindness, even humor, in his tone. “I said a moment ago that your kinship to your charge gives you an advantage over even me. And yet, you address him as a stranger. I know it is not easy… But perhaps he does not need the very grown-up lord of Imladris. Perhaps he needs only the Elrond he remembers.” With that, Olórin’s reverberating footsteps sounded his departure, and the thick wooden door shut behind him with a clunk. As soon as he had gone, Elrond began to weep. There was silence for quite some time, broken only by Elrond’s soft sobs.

“Atar,” he whispered through his tears. With a clammy palm, he shakingly clutched Maglor’s thin hand. “Atar, please.”

Elrond… Elrond… Maglor was replaying the sounds in his mind, as he had done for “Mithrandir.” Except this time, he did not give up. These sounds made some sense to him, he thought, if he could only remember that sense. He squinted, straining the eyes of his spirit, into the black abyss that had once been his memory. Elrond… Elrond… Ellllrond… Elllurond… Elllehrond… Elerond… Elerond-o… Elerondo? Yes, Elerondo. But what did it mean? Elerondo, Elerondo, Elerondo. Maglor repeated these sounds, too, still straining his spirit at the blackness.

There! Something appeared. But what was it? Maglor’s spirit squinted at the slight change in his darkened mind’s eye. He saw deepest blue waters, nearly black. White and yellow splashes of light shimmering weakly on the surface. But something was missing.

Elerondo. A night sky appeared, clear and cloudless over endless grasslands, not a hill, nor even a molehill in sight. Horizon in all directions. Moonless. The stars danced unhindered. As Maglor surveyed that starlit prairie in his memory, he felt stabbed through. And still, something was missing.

Elerondo. There. A wide-mouthed cave on a new moon at midnight. Varda blazed forth in her brightest raiment. Rays of white, silver, and moonstone shone into the shallow lake by the cave’s opening. So brightly that the water itself seemed to glow, even where it lay below the cave’s ceiling. Inside the cave, the lake’s sparkling surface shined upward and reflected the starlight’s echo on the stone within. Tiny points of shimmering light danced across the darkened rock. A dimmer replica of the night sky’s dome lived for a few hours in that cold, black cave.

Elerondo. Maglor remembered the scene. Remembered the weakness in his body, the trembling in his hands, the lightness of his head, the sickness in his gut. Garments caked with blood, his own and others’. Armor dented, stained, and heavy. Then that sight of beauty, the sort of sight that once would have provoked him to song. It knocked him to his knees. If only he could be just a pair of eyes to look on that starlit lake forever. But what else?

Elerondo. It was then that Maglor became aware of the sound of weeping, just inches from his ears. Here. Far from that old cave. Yet there was weeping in the starry cave, too. Different weeping, a child’s weeping. But not so different. The voice behind those cries in the cave was small, high in pitch, but even then, it shimmered like liquid steel. Each sob and hiccough squawked like a little silver trumpet, lightening the shining cave still further with its bright, warm tone.

Elerondo. The weeping child’s name. Elerondo of the cave. Elerondo of the sky-dome. But who? And why? Maglor’s sleepy spirit strained. Elerondo, Elerondo, Elerondo.

“El-er-on-do,” he murmured aloud through cracked lips, his voice little more than a wheeze. He said no more.

The weeping Elrond gave a wet gasp, “A-Atar?” A pause. “Atar, Atar!” And his weeping returned in greater force. Violent sobs. Shoulders heaving. Tears covering his face. Without a thought whether Olórin or a stray healer might hear or see him. “Wake up, Atar,” he begged. “Do not leave me. Not again. Please, Atar!”

Maglor pondered with half-understanding the pleas that washed over him. Atar? Who would call me Atar? As if in response, a voice sounded in Maglor’s mind, his own strong voice of old, in unison with one that danced like a blazing hearth-fire: Elerondo of the sky-dome. Elerondo, your foster son. Elerondo, your… my…son. My son!

With effort, Maglor opened his tired eyes. Afternoon sunlight shone kindly into the room. His bleary vision absorbed the creams and browns and grays around him, and then a trembling silver-and-black shape directly in front of him. He blinked, then blinked again. The silver-and-black shape became the head and shoulders of a seated Elf. The whites of his dark gray eyes were stained red from weeping, but still those eyes radiated the wisdom of years and a hardened, stubborn hope. There was a sadness in them, too, that ran deeper than the momentary tears that stained his face. He had the dark brown hair that Maglor remembered, thin and wispy, made to float by even the smallest breeze. Crying had mussed it some, leaving the lord of Imladris looking unguarded and unkempt. The tear tracks and redness of his cheeks added to this, as did the beginnings of dark circles under his eyes. But aside from his slight dishevelment, Elrond looked handsome, healthy, strong. Maglor’s spirit glowed softly with pride.

Not for long, though, as it was quickly drawn to the tears that still rolled from Elrond’s eyes, the redness of those eyes and of his face, and the weariness of his bearing. The spirit of Maglor lurched and ducked into his stomach, then strained against his chest as if trying to escape it. His heart burned with a heat he had not felt in many years. The warmth spread throughout his torso, shimmered through his legs, and tingled his toes. It rushed upward, too, making his throat feel thick and tight, and burning his cheeks. It blazed the hottest behind his eyes. Maglor felt that had his body had a drop of water to spare, it would have spilled boiling tears.

His cracked lips moved again, and he spoke with a stronger voice, “Elerondo, my son. How I have missed you.” The corners of his lips curved slightly upward, his first smile in many centuries.

Another wave of sobs crashed through Elrond’s body, and he leaned closer, now gripping Maglor’s hand with both of his own. “Atar, I knew someday I would find you! Atar, this place – I built it to welcome you home.” His voice was cut off by tears.

“My dear son,” Maglor whispered, his voice growing tired again. “Your Atar loves you.”

Chapter End Notes

As mentioned above, the lyric at the beginning is from the song "Nine" by the artist Sleeping at Last.

While writing this piece, I made a lot of use of the wiki TolkienGateway.net to ensure I spelled things correctly, put the right accents on the names, etc.

The name "Elerondo" is a Quenya version of the Sindarin "Elrond," isolated from the patronymic given to Arwen, "Elerondiel" ("daughter of Elrond"). I found this bit of information on the "Elrond" page of TolkienGateway.net under "Etymology."

Other clarifications on names: Olórin=Mithrandir=Gandalf, Macalaurë=Maglor, Fëanáro=Fëanor, Imladris=Rivendell.

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