Unhappy Into Woe by StarSpray

Six

The shift was abrupt. Maglor jerked out of a troubling dream in which he was searching a dark forest for something, or someone—he could not remember upon waking. The stones around him trembled, and he heard them crying out in—joy? Relief? Then he felt the presence of Sauron pressing down upon him, sudden and weighty, pressing on his ribs and constricting his lungs, closing like a fist around his throat. He tried to gasp for air, but couldn’t breathe. The brand upon his chest burned with sudden intensity, but he had no strength for anything except a weak, muffled whimper. Sauron’s voice was in his mind like a shout: The great singer of the Noldor will sing no more.

There were other wills striving against that of Sauron, and he almost fancied that he could hear the Music of them, a Power speaking into the stones that was somehow familiar, but mingled with others that were not, slipping through cracks in the defenses that Sauron had not known were there—or perhaps he had not cared, thinking himself unassailable until it was too late.

As suddenly as he had begun, Sauron released Maglor and withdrew. Maglor did not know or care if he had fled Dol Guldur entirely, or merely released his hold upon him to focus on the battle happening above. He lay struggling to breathe, drifting in and out of wakefulness. Chaos erupted in the corridor outside, but that was not unusual. The orcs fought with one another, or with the Men who served in the tower, as often as they came to torment the prisoners. The sound of tramping feet had long ago ceased to inspire anxiety. 

The sounds of the orcs died away after a time, and were replaced by other, stranger sounds. Fair voices calling out in the Woodelven tongue—and in Sindarin, and in the Common Speech. Calling for prisoners, any who might be alive. Maglor did not move. He could not have answered even if he wished to. It was a new trick, surely, this bringing of false hope. He tried not to listen, but the voices only grew louder.

But then something rattled at his door. He heard the lock break apart, and the rusted hinges scream as the door was pushed open. The wood had warped, and now dragged reluctantly over the uneven stones until it stuck—but it was enough to let in a beam of light. It was a lantern, a bright yellow light that shone far steadier than the red torches that the orcs used. Maglor flinched and turned his head away from it, raising his arms with a great effort to try to hide his face. The light hurt. The chains dragged over the floor, and fell heavily on his chest and stomach. “Leave it,” he heard someone say. “There can’t be anyone in there, if the door won’t even—”

“There is someone! I saw—here, help me—” There was a heavy thud, and then another, a few muffled curses before a third, and then the sound of splintering wood. Maglor felt dizzy. Those voices—surely this was another new trick, a new form of torment, or he had finally gone utterly mad, to be imagining those voices here, where they did not belong, where they had never been and could not be. He kept his eyes closed, although the light changed and dimmed. 

“Ai, Elbereth,” one of his apparent rescuers murmured as they came to kneel by him. “Look at his chest.”

“Look at his mouth,” said the other, in a tone of horror. Maglor cringed away from the hands that reached for him, though they were gentle. He jerked back and his head hit the wall. “Easy. It’s all right. We’re here to help you, not hurt you. Elladan, we’ll need a stretcher.” 

One of them left. The one that remained ran his hands over Maglor’s body, gentle but efficient, checking for fresh wounds or broken bones. When he finished he carefully took Maglor’s face in his hands, turning him toward the light. “Can you hear me? Can you open your eyes?” Maglor did not want to, but he found himself opening them anyway, blinking against the light, still painful even dimmed. 

It was Elrond’s face that looked back down at him. Or Elros’. Maglor tried to shrink back, but he couldn’t move, except to tremble. “It’s all right,” said Elrond, or Elros, or the phantom sent to torment him. “We are going to take you away from this place.” 

He had thought himself past tears, but found that he had been wrong. The phantom wiped them away with gentle hands, and then the other returned, identical in face and voice—and not alone. Another was with him, whose spirit shone so brightly that it was as though the sun had stepped into the room. Maglor flinched and closed his eyes again. His head ached, and he struggled to take a breath. Their voices passed above him, speaking quickly and quietly, and he understood little of what they said past the sound of his heartbeat in his ears and the dull throbbing of his head. The chains fell away from him, and soft cloth was wrapped around the raw skin instead. Someone caught his hand, fingers running over the ancient scars there, but nothing was said of it. 

Then one of the twins began to sing. If he’d been able to move Maglor would have covered his ears. The soft words were that of a lullaby—a lullaby that he had written and sung to them long ago and far away, that he hadn’t thought of in so long, that should not be coming back into his mind now. A hand smoothed over his hair, and there was a quiet, subtle power in the song that caught him up like a child in a blanket, bringing sleep of a different kind than he had known in that place. 

His next waking was sudden, and filled with pain. Someone held his head still, and someone else was pulling the cords from his lips, long-since healed over. It was slow and it felt like his mouth was being torn apart. He wanted to scream with the pain, but somehow his throat would not produce a sound. Voices rose around him, and other hands came to hold his shoulders and arms and legs, though he didn’t have it in him to do more than twitch. Whoever was pulling at the cords worked methodically and slowly, and every second of it was agony. Even after the last of it was gone, his entire face hurt. He couldn’t breathe, and his mouth was filled with blood that flowed down into his throat and choked him. “Lift him up,” someone said, and he was raised to sitting, leaning back against the one who had been holding his head still. They kept their hands there, holding his hair out of his face as someone else pressed a warm wet cloth to his bloody lips. It had a fresh smell to it that eased his mind, and a little of the pain. 

He did not open his eyes; the room seemed too bright around him. Someone put a cup to his lips, helping him open his mouth for the first time since he could not recall when, so he could drink cool water that washed away the taste of blood and soothed his aching throat. Someone used another cloth, also damp and fresh-smelling, to wipe away the tears from his cheeks, before he was laid back down on something soft. “Rest, now, Maglor,” said a woman’s voice, deep and unaccountably familiar. A soft warm hand rested on his forehead. “You are safe. Sleep.” It was a command as much as a reassurance, and he was powerless to disobey. 

His mouth still hurt when he woke again, but it was an ache of swollen, slowly-healing flesh rather than the pain of fresh wounding. The light in the room did not seem so overwhelming, either, and he dared to open his eyes. He saw first the ceiling, made of pale wood and with living vines twined about the beams. He lay in a bed, a proper bed with blankets and pillows so soft it made him want to weep. It sat beside a window that opened out into tree branches, with leaves of brilliant gold. Maglor stared at them. He had forgotten that there were such colors in the world, such beauty. The wind passed through the boughs and the sound of the leaves did make him weep, silent tears escaping as the music of birds joined with the sound. Somewhere distant an Elven voice rose up in song, a merry tune in the tongue of the Woodelves. 

The sound of a door made him turn, reluctantly tearing his gaze from the trees outside. The room was light and airy, with soft rugs on the floor and colorful hangings on the walls. A stand near the bed held a basin and ewer, and another small table sported a vase holding some dark green leafy plant, and a few bottles of silver and colored glass. But it was the ones who had entered the room that caught and held Maglor’s attention. For a moment he had dared to believe that the rescue had been real, and he was truly away from Sauron and his cruel torments, but the twins had returned, still looking as like Elrond and Elros as they had in the darkness of Maglor’s cell—more so, now, with sunlight to brighten their soft grey eyes. They wore robes of green and gold, and smiled to see him awake. Those smiles faded when he flinched—though he found himself powerless to turn away, drinking in the sight of them although he knew they could not be real. 

One of them sighed, “It is as Arwen said.” He crossed the room to sit on the edge of the bed, taking Maglor’s hand in both of his. “We are no trick of the Enemy, Maglor,” he said, so very gently. “This is no dream—you are safe in Caras Galadhon. I am Elladan, and my brother is Elrohir. We are Elrond’s sons, not Elrond and Elros.”

Elrond’s sons. Maglor had not even known that Elrond had wed. He looked at them again, and up close and in bright sunshine he could see that the resemblance, though very strong, was not absolute. They had freckles where their father had none, and Elrohir sported a scar through one of his eyebrows. 

They tended to the wounds on his mouth with gentle efficiency, washing them with warm water into which a few leaves from the vase had been crushed and dropped. He was gently ordered not to try to speak with his mouth still so swollen, but Maglor slowly came to realize, with growing horror, that he could not speak anyway. His voice was gone, as it had not been before—he could have whimpered or moaned, back in the dungeons of Dol Guldur, but here even when such sounds should have escaped—even when he tried—there was only silence.

The twins left him alone to rest after a time; they had filled the room with cheerful chatter as they had tended to him, talking of the city and of the forest surrounding it, words that he heard but did not really listen to as he tried and failed to make even the smallest of sounds. In their absence it was quiet—but not silent. The wind still made the leaves rustle, and a nightingale had alighted just outside of the window to sing for a while. Maglor leaned back against the pillows and watched it until it flew away, and then he watched the leaves, and tried to swallow down the tightness in his throat. He was safe, or so they said. The Enemy was gone, fled from Dol Guldur in the face of whatever power had assailed it—and that same power was there in Caras Galadhon. He could feel it in the air. Who wielded it, and what they intended to do with him, Maglor could not guess. He was weary, though it felt as though he had been asleep for years, decades, perhaps centuries, caught in an unending nightmare. Time held no meaning in the dark. Now he was back in the sunlight as autumn was waxing, and found precious little comfort in it. The Enemy had had the final victory over him, in the end.

Who was he, if not a singer? What was he, without his voice?