Clear Pebbles of the Rain by StarSpray

Six

Time passed strangely in Lórien. It passed but also seemed not to, somehow. The sun rose and set but beneath the trees it was impossible to watch its progress, and even less so the changing moon. Maglor wondered if it had been thus in Doriath long ago, and if this was something Galadriel had learned from Melian. It didn’t matter, really. He had nowhere to go, and nothing to wait for, and so he would not have been counting the days anyway. But still he could feel Galadriel’s power at work, and he wondered a little at it. There was something of Valinor in the feel of Lothlórien—and not only because of the mellyrn—and it made something ache deep inside of him.

No one seemed to care where Maglor went or what he did within the walls of Caras Galadhon. He took to wandering the city, glad to escape the treetops and walk on firm ground, learning the pathways and roads, and and learning something of the Galadhrim who lived there. Eleryn showed him the gardens and orchards where, come spring, the trees would blossom all pink and white. He stumbled upon rope-makers and found himself learning the makings of hithlain, which would hold any knot, no matter how clumsily tied, until whoever held the rope wished for it to come loose, and not a moment before. The day after that he was set upon on purpose by the potters, who set him down with a lump of clay and insisted he join them in their craft. They sang as they worked, and told him of the best places on the Anduin’s banks to find clay—in case he ever found himself wandering along the river and in sudden need of it, Maglor supposed. To please them, he worked the clay that he had been given, rolling out coils of it to stack into a clumsy bowl the way that his grandfather Mahtan had once taught him long ago. As then, his efforts were uneven and unlovely, but the Galadhrim were happy to show him how to fix it, and he left them that afternoon feeling odd, with clay underneath his fingernails. 

Another day he came upon a group of children at play on the grass. The games were unfamiliar, but the sound of their laughter pierced his heart; he could not remember when he had last seen so many elven children in one place. Surely it had been in Valinor, before the Darkening? There had been children in Beleriand—Eleryn was one—but very few had been born among his folk that dwelt in Lothlann, or at Himring. And they had never been so carefree as these children of Lothlórien, who ran barefoot through the winter flowers, fearless and full of joy. 

A few days later he found the bowl, painted a pale green, with yellow flowers around the uneven rim, in his room. Someone had etched a small M rune onto the bottom. He sat on the bed and turned the bowl over in his hands, marveling a little at it. He had made this thing, and if it was clumsy it was not unlovely. 

Music had always been his first love and his passion, but Maglor was also his parents’ son, and he had made many things with his hands in Valinor—metal and glass, clay and stone. Wood had been his preference; Finwë had been his teacher, and some of Maglor’s fondest memories of his youth were from his grandfather’s workshop, smelling of sawdust and fragrant finishing oils, sounding of Finwë’s gentle laughter. In his wanderings, when he had not been playing, he had been carving. There was never any shortage of driftwood. He’d made combs and flutes and sets of pipes—and knife handles, and bowls, and other useful things that he could trade to the fishermen he encountered sometimes for new clothes or a hot meal, or even just a few hours or days of company. He had never been as good a maker of things as his father or his grandfather, or even any of his brothers. But there had always been a quiet sort of satisfaction when he finished making a thing, sanding the wood to silky smoothness, and carving a small M intertwined with his father’s star somewhere unobtrusive (in the same way, he remembered with a pang, that Celebrimbor had marked the brooch that Arwen bore).

He did not feel that now. It was good, he supposed, to know that he could make something—but then he recalled why he still had the use of his hands, and could take no joy in it. He set the bowl down and flexed his fingers, and thought of his nephew, of the crushed and broken mess of his fingers that Sauron had left him with before the end—the assurance that even if he was permitted to live, he would never make again. Maglor had been kept whole—his hands and his voice, until the very end, because Sauron had desired his service. He still did, Maglor thought. When he returned to his full might, when he claimed victory over all the Free Peoples, he would come looking for Maglor again, with promises of comfort and finery and the restoration of his voice, if that voice would but be used for his pleasure. 

The very thought of it made Maglor feel ill, and to cast a shadow over the bright sunshine outside his window. The mallorn leaves were dulled and darkened, and he could feel again the iron grip of Sauron’s hand—almost solid flesh—around his throat, and the heat of his gaze upon him, crushing him until he could not breathe. He shuddered until he could no longer sit up, and then he could only press his face into the pillow until the tremors stopped. And then he just felt cold and weary and all too aware of the fact that, should Sauron find him and take him again, he would not be able to resist. His strength had been spent beneath Dol Guldur, and it would not return. 

When he turned his head away from the pillow, the sunlight had brightened again, and he could hear birds flitting about outside, cheeping at one another and fluttering their wings. The light caught on the bowl, on the bright sheen of its glazing, and he looked away, rolling onto his back to stare out of the window instead. The wind picked up, and a few leaves broke away to fall, gently spiraling, away to the ground. Spring was coming, and soon the flowers for which the mellyrn were famed would be blooming. It should have been something to look forward to, but spring meant also the melting of snows in the mountain passes, clearing them for travelers. 

Indeed, the opening of the passes came sooner than Maglor would have thought. A messenger came from Imladris on a sunny afternoon as golden leaves rained down upon the green lawns. Maglor watched them catch and swirl about in the fountain as he sat with Elrohir, who was mending some leather traveling gear and cursing with increasing creativity whenever he stabbed himself with the needle. “I could do that for you, you know,” Arwen said, coming to join them. She sat beside Maglor, leaning her shoulder into his as she spoke to Elrohir on his other side. “It would look prettier, too.”

“I don’t need it to be pretty,” Elrohir said. “I just need it to survive the journey home, where I intend to make a new one.”

“Oh, just give it here.” Arwen reached over to take the bag, which looked to be more patch than the original material. Even Maglor had never let his things get to that state—and he had gotten very good at sewing patches, over the years. Elrohir protested, but not very strongly. “You should have replaced this ages ago,” Arwen informed Elrohir as she re-threaded the needle. 

Elrohir shrugged. Then his gaze shifted away and he sat up. “Haldir is back!” He rose to his feet to greet a lone elf who had just entered the city, cloaked and hooded, though he pushed it back upon hearing his name called, revealing pale hair and a smiling face. 

“Haldir was sent to Imladris after the victory at Dol Guldur,” Arwen told Maglor as she sewed the patch more securely over the tear in Elrohir’s bag. “He took word of the Council’s success, though Elladan and Elrohir will tell Ada the full story. I was not expecting him to return so early. The winter must have been mild.”

Haldir parted from Elrohir after just a minute or so of speech. Elrohir returned to the fountain with a bundle of letters in his hands. “Letters for you from everyone, Arwen,” he said, separating most of them to hand to his sister. She laughed as she accepted them. “And one for me and Elladan from Adar, one from Lindir…and, Maglor, here is one for you.”

Maglor’s attention had been drifting as he watched more leaves fall, and he started, looking up as Elrohir held out a folded letter. It was thinner than the rest, a single sheet, and sealed with a bit of green wax—pressed down with a thumb print, rather than a seal. He took it uncertainly, and turned it over to see his name written in neat, flowing script that he recognized immediately even after so long, though when he had last seen it, the writer had not yet managed to consistently avoid smudging the ink when writing left-handed. Aware of Elrohir and Arwen watching him, though they were not looking at him, he broke the seal and unfolded the letter. 

There was no formal greeting at the top, only a strange-shaped ink blot that looked as though the writer had set his pen to the paper more than once, before taking it away again as though he had been unsure of what he wanted to say. Maglor imagined a pile of discarded paper under a desk, full of such blots and of lines scratched out or abandoned halfway through the writing. Under the ink blot on this sheet of paper was a single line, drawn like an arrow aimed directly at his heart. 

Please come home.