What's Real, What's Stranger by Elleth

Chapter 1

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The house that Alina and Eric inhabited was a small but rambling building full of unexpected shapes, nooks and crannies that Maglor had been given unconditional leave to explore. He happened upon pockets of past that hung suspended outside present time - a stack of paper filled with elegant, curling tengwar in a mode he could not read, a sealed glass jar of earth, pottery with the geometric patterns of half-remembered Kukkutarma, a tiny shard of damascened metal on black and silver silk in a glass case, perhaps part of an erstwhile sword-blade, a winged scarab made from blue faience. There were more artifacts whose origin Maglor could not place, set seemingly at random inside the house, and better-cared-for than any such old works of art had any right to be. 

The house itself had a part in their collection of oddities as well. The living room was a semi-circle; the back wall had been fashioned of the kind of rough limestone that dominated the landscape, still recalling the shape of the round huts found there long ago. A nook next to the tv set held a yellowed ivory carving of what had to be an immense age; a woman with netted hair and upturned, catlike eyes. 

“Is that…” Maglor asked, setting the small idol down again carefully and turning to his hosts with a quizzical look, and Alina laughed, her own eyes crinkling in some remembered mirth. She laughed easily and often, and Maglor could not help feeling comfortable around her in a way he had not felt around people for many years. 

“Yes,” she said. “She was quite talented at capturing likenesses, don’t you think? Of course we tried to convince her and her clan that there was no reason to depict me so, that we were in no way unusual, but people then had a long memory and they remembered us coming among them every now and then, every few lifetimes of their kind.” 

“Did you ever do that?” Eric asked. “Fall in love with a place and the people in it?”

Maglor shook his head mutely. It was not entirely a lie; after he had begun wandering he had always preferred to keep moving, but there had been places that felt more like home than others, perhaps remnants of Old Beleriand ravaged in rising waters when the great ice shelves withdrew, a flood some 8,000 years ago. No, that was not right. It had been destroyed when the Powers marched upon Morgoth and the North foundered in war and ruin, far longer ago...

He passed a hand over his face and shook his head. 

“Maglor, are you alright?” he heard Alina ask as she lightly swatted her husband’s arm. “We agreed not to bother him, remember?” 

Maglor took a deep breath. Agreeing to leave the beach with Eric against his initial misgivings began to seem like a sudden mistake, even for all the kindnesses and amenities they had offered him over the past few days: an opportunity for more hot showers than he had had in over a decade, a bed that he only gradually grew used to again, the use of their instruments and books and their telescope at night, Eric’s cooking and Alina making sense of his tangled curls. They meant him no harm, he was certain now, but - 

“Max?” Alina tried again, and he again shook his head, hearing only the rustle of her jeans against the sofa as she sat down again. “You can go and rest if you’d like. I have a stack of papers to grade, and Eric could go fetch us takeaway from town. I feel like Chinese.” He would have laughed at her intonation, and Eric’s huff in response - half banter but with a serious note plainly audible - but managed only to murmur a ‘yes, thank-you’ instead, and fled the room. 

Half an hour later, rest continued to be elusive. Maglor found himself pacing up and down his room, from one window looking out to sea to the other one, both thrown open to admit the freezing air. Although it was barely past four in the afternoon, It was already growing dark, a gradient from deep blue overhead to a strip of clouds in gold and pink low in the west across the water. The wind had faded to a gentle breeze, just barely loud enough to still carry the sound of waves and the gnashing of the ice in the surf. The sound was familiar - necessary, even, for him to concentrate, and so was the cold - but his mind stubbornly refused to acknowledge more than the notion that filled him with dread, and brought him no closer to resolving it: 

He was forgetting. At the very least he was misremembering. 

Across the room, the digital clock shone bright red letters at him, and he stared back without quite making sense of it, and just as he was about to turn it off, Alina’s knock on the door made him jump. 

“Please - come in,” he called. She entered, and Maglor saw her eyes turn briefly toward the open windows, but she said nothing about them, just giving Maglor the flicker of an understanding smile as she sat on the bed and patted the space beside her. 

“I heard you walk to and fro - you’re above my office, and if nothing else this house has got thin walls and ceilings.” 

Maglor rumbled a vaguely apologetic noise. 

“No, it is fine,” she continued. “I understand you are feeling restless. It must be quite disorienting to settle again, after such a long time wandering. Eric shouldn’t have asked that, at least not without you coming forth with it on your own.” 

Maglor held up a hand, then reflexively curled his fingers when he remembered the scars on his palm. 

“His question was not the problem,” he explained. “Or not… in itself. I hold him no grudge.” 

Maglor fell silent again; there was no way to phrase what troubled him in a way that did not border on the ludicrous, and with Alina so much younger than him - she, like her husband, had only been born in the Third Age - she could not even attest to his memories personally.

“But you are clearly unwell,” Alina countered, and brushed a strand of hair behind her ear. “Let me help.” 

“I do not know if that is possible,” he said, and, hoping to steer the conversation into another course, continued, “What kind of papers - are you a teacher?” 

“I read Ancient History and Archaeology in town. It seemed to make sense at the time we decided for a livelihood here. When there are men encroaching upon your way of life, do the same, settle as one of them. My students like me, at least,” she laughed. “And I like them.”

Maglor could not share her high spirits, not when he had come no step closer to the solution of his problem, but instead another path at avoiding it had closed to him. 

“I will keep wandering,” Maglor said. “I think - I used to be a teacher in Aman, but… “

“You were, yes, I remember reading about it,” Alina said, and an animated spark sprang into her eyes. “Elrond had some of the compositions you wrote at the school - on Taniquetil with the Vanyar, was it, under Elemmírë? They were favourites in the Hall of Fire,” she said. 

“I… yes,” he said. “I think I did.” 

“You think you did?” Alina asked. “You don’t know?” Then her expression sobered. “This is what has been haunting you, is it not? Eric mentioned that you brought up Númenor when he came to get you, and you seemed to barely… even fill the word with life. I thought you might just have been tired, but… that is not what it was, was it?” 

“Leave, please,” Maglor said. He rose, and nearly stumbled in his haste to get to the door and throw it open. “Leave. Get out,” he repeated, putting some of the Command behind his voice that he knew he still could muster. 

Alina went, but not without turning and giving him a look that spelled out no fear, only reluctant compliance. Apparently her resolve that Maglor ought to be left alone had vanished now that she had scratched at the surface of his problem. 

“We’ll talk about this at dinner,” she said. “Eric should be back soon with the food, and it’ll go down easier with something in your stomach.” She closed the door behind herself, allowing no continuation of the argument. 

Maglor had less than half an hour to prepare himself for the inevitable, and during that time what grew in him most of all was shame - not merely that he was no longer sure whether to grieve Thera or Númenor, but that he had sent Alina away so roughly when she had only sought to help him. He briefly contemplated packing his few belongings, but even the clothes he was wearing were Eric’s, and even though he had not always been above theft, he was reluctant to repay their hospitality with it.

Nor, he realized, would running solve his problem now that it had come to the forefront of his mind. Eric and Alina might.

He still jumped when Eric pulled into the driveway and Alina called for him to come downstairs, idling for a moment by the open window and staring out at the distant sea. It was fully dark now and when he joined the two of them in the kitchen Maglor squinted against the light, but found to his surprise that the mix of unfamiliar but pleasant scents from the cartons Eric had set on the table made his stomach growl. 

Alina’s face was dark with anger when she said the westward grace - something that she insisted be observed, although she made neither her Avarin husband nor Maglor join her - and it was not until Eric picked up on the unusual silence as they ate that she said anything at all. 

“I was wondering whether we ought to contact the others. Melanie and Miriam already know he’s here; I emailed Mel and you know she can’t keep secrets. Alan might help, or Vanessa. She’s the oldest, isn’t she?” 

“Doriath, yes, but probably… not so much.” Eric chewed and swallowed. 

“Crap. Point taken. Gil, then?” 

“Perhaps, if you tell me what in particular you want them to do with him.” 

“I would also like to know that,” Maglor said. Until that moment, he had never been so aware that he was among strangers, and it was bewildering to hear them rattle off a list of names - he could only assume they were the group of other Elves who existed to keep watch on the shores of the world. It made him wonder whether Alina intended to subject him to some punishment or humiliation that would demand witnesses. 

She took her time answering, preferring to pick at her rice dish in silence. 

“Maglor needs help,” she said eventually, and reluctantly, when her carton was half-empty. “He is forgetting.” 

Eric nodded just briefly, as though he were all-too-familiar with the phenomenon, but he seemed unwilling to discuss it, and Alina squeezed his hand, before turning back to Maglor.

“Maglor,” she said, and her face finally relaxed into something less pinched and angry. He was not sure he preferred it. “Are you aware that you are not alone in this?” 

His previous hunger had evaporated, even though he had eaten barely a mouthful of whatever it was that Eric had brought for him. He was not very familiar with takeaway. 

“No. How would I be?” he asked. “I have only been here a few days, and apart from that time one of yours picked me from that road…” He rolled his shoulders. “My exile did not often permit me to come among my own kind.” 

“But you have been here a few days,” Alina said, speaking gently. “And you saw our collection. Why do you think I chose my profession, why do you think we have such keepsakes, if not for the sake of memory? It is easier to remember if you have constant reminders, as well as something tangible. They are not merely ornaments… we have been in all these places, lived there for times and mingled with the people. Even so, I do not remember the mammoth hunters’ names, not even the girl’s who carved my likeness.” A timbre of sorrow slipped into her voice. “Not even our minds are limitless, and we have been here for so long now… perhaps the Valar retain all that they have seen, but it is said that even they will grow weary of it at last. We need to let some things go.” 

Maglor sighed, touching the ring that Eric had returned to him on the first day of his visit, and he had yet to come to terms with wearing it again - his wife was one of the few memories he would never relinquish, and never doubt, along with those times he turned against his kin, but others… 

“My songs are not very tangible; I do not have much left of my old life, and if I cannot trust even my mind, then my music falls short as well. I sang my stories to a Man once, in the Great War, but whatever he made of it…” He closed his eyes briefly. “When I sang for him, one night I saw Venus through the clouds, and it blazed like… Eärendil’s Silmaril would have. Did. And yet, it is only a planet in your telescope. How do I know which the true memory is?” 

“You could be surprised about this Man,” Alina said. “But more importantly… why should not both be true? After Valinor was removed from the world, or perhaps when Elrond and Galadriel sought the Havens… so much of ours was lost and slipped into the Unseen Realm. But of what has been there may be echoes, chords of the Music repeated… there is the moon outside the window, and I do not think Lunik or Apollo 11 touched onto Telperion’s flower, but who is to say it was not indeed so, outside their knowledge and understanding?” 

Despite himself, Maglor felt a smile coming on when he gazed outside the kitchen window Alina had indicated, up at the new year’s first full moon hanging low and bright in the sky. 

“Perhaps,” he agreed. “Thank you, Aelinn.” 

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Chapter End Notes

Many, many thanks to Polly and Bungo for their beta magic on short notice! The title was loosely inspired by Rachel Jamison Webster's poem Kauai.

Kukkutarma is (one of) the ancient names of Mohenjo-daro, one of the largest sites of the Indus Valley civilization, noted for its advanced urban development in the Bronze Age.

a woman with netted hair and upturned, catlike eyes: I’d imagined it to resemble the so-called Venus of Brassempouy. 

ravaged in rising waters when the great ice shelves withdrew, a flood some 8,000 years ago: References the flooding of Doggerland, a landmass in the contemporary North Sea that was flooded when the ice shelves melted at the end of the last Ice Age. 

whether to grieve Thera or Númenor: The Thera Eruption, which is widely believed to be the origin of the Atlantis descriptions in Plato’s Timaios and Critias, and so probably also Númenor's real-world precursor.