Clear Pebbles of the Rain by StarSpray

Seven

The falling of the mallorn leaves was a gradual thing, a steady rain of them from above until the branches overhead were bare and pale in the spring sunshine, and the ground beneath was a carpet of gold through which patches of green grass only peeped here and there. The coming of the spring flowers happened overnight, a burst of gold and a sweet fragrance carried into Maglor’s bedroom on the breeze—warm now, as winter truly faded away. He sat on his bed and leaned out of the window, catching a branch and bringing it to his face so he could inhale more deeply the scent, and feel the silky petals against his skin. They smelled like no other flower he could remember, and he wanted to commit the scent to memory before he departed.

It was evening when he ventured out, needing to stretch his legs and escape the kind but constant gaze of Elrond’s children. He felt more solid these days, less like he would fade away into mist and misery at the slightest nudge, but he had dreamed the night before again of his brothers, all six of them falling, one by one, to blade and to flame, and had woken with his father’s voice echoing in his mind, though he could not recall the words. The spring flowers had chased away most of the dark thoughts that the dream had brought, but not all. As he walked Maglor found himself brooding on Fëanor, and what he would say if he could see him there now, silent and scarred and reliant upon his youngest cousin’s grace. Nothing good, certainly. Last and least, Sauron had called him, and it was all too easy to hear those same words in Fëanor’s own voice.

As he walked he heard a soft voice call his name. Galadriel. Maglor stopped and hesitated before turning. He did not wish to see her, to have her know the direction of his thoughts. But he did turn, finding her standing near a high green hedge, clad in soft grey, her hair tumbling loose about her shoulders and down her back. She seemed to shimmer in the gloaming, like a last bit of sunlight had caught and clung to her hair before the evening set in. She beckoned to him, and then disappeared through an opening in the hedge that he had not seen before. With a sigh, Maglor followed.

Beyond the hedge lay a garden where no trees grew, so that the stars shone down bright and silver from a patch of clear sky. As Maglor entered it he looked up, and saw the bright gleam of Gil-Estel almost directly overhead. He looked away. Once he had taken heart and hope from the sight of it, but he did not want to look upon his father’s works that night. Before him lay a deep hollow, shadowy, down into which Galadriel was passing. Maglor followed down the long steps, but he paused by the stream that fell down the hillside, glimmering silver in the starlight. He could almost hear music in it, but it remained out of his reach. He thought of his first encounter with Sauron in Dol Guldur, when he had been able to call upon all the knowledge he had gleaned from the waters of the world—and he had very nearly succeeded in his resistance. But years of dark and cold and silence had crowded it all out and now he felt almost as deaf as he was mute. He knelt and dipped his fingers into the water, and found it icy cold.

As he withdrew his fingers he looked down into the hollow, where Galadriel was filling a silver ewer from the stream. She glanced up at him and smiled, briefly, before turning to a shallow silver basin that was set upon a pedestal carved into the seeming of branches twined about one another. Maglor remained on the stairs, and watched her pour the water in, and breathe over it. The air thrummed with power, and he shivered. The water stilled, and Galadriel remained standing over it for some minutes, gazing into the basin. What she saw there, Maglor could not guess. He slowly descended the last of the stairs, stepping onto the soft grass at the bottom as Galadriel raised her head.

“It will not be long before the Enemy returns to his stronghold in Mordor and declares himself,” she said without looking at him. Maglor couldn’t stop himself flinching. He stepped back, and his legs hit the edge of the steps. “He gains power by the day.” She touched the edges of the basin, her gaze distant as her thoughts drifted. “The Seven he has, and the Nine,” she murmured, “but not the One. Still he seeks for it, but it remains out of reach—of him, and of us all.” Maglor did not know if she was speaking to him or only to herself. He knew of those rings only by chance, and he did not know why they had been made, or for what purpose Sauron so desired them. And he knew nothing at all of the One—whose it was, or made by whom, or what had happened to it.

Finally, she looked to him. “Yet time remains to us,” she said. “It will be long before he has strength and armies enough to wage war—and Gondor yet stands strong. Dale is being rebuilt in the north, and Erebor restored. Thranduil holds the north of Mirkwood, and we Lórien. There is yet hope.”

Maglor was aware, still, of the evening star hanging above them. It seemed to shine even brighter with her words, just for a moment, as though Eärendil himself had heard them.

Galadriel gestured to the basin, and the still water it held. “My mirror shows many things,” she said. “Some things I can command, others it shows as it will. Will you look?”

He took a few steps forward, but did not step up to the pedestal’s edge, and so all he saw in the water were the reflected stars. Maglor looked from it to Galadriel, and caught sight of a gleam upon her finger. He reached out before he could think better of it, catching her hand and lifting it to reveal the ring upon her finger, silver and diamond, glittering like the stars above them.

One of the Three. He could see Celebrimbor’s work in it, and feel the way that it amplified Galadriel’s power. He did not doubt that she could do what she had done here without it, but with it upon her finger, her reach was longer, stronger. So this was what Sauron so desired.

“That is Nenya,” Galadriel said softly, not withdrawing her hand. “The Three are hidden, and not spoken of, but they are not idle. Air, water, fire—these things Celebrimbor put forth into his greatest work, alongside the will to preserve and to heal, and to hold the darkness at bay.”

Maglor dropped her hand, feelings his lips twist into something rueful and unhappy. Air, fire, water—the long homes of the Silmarils, and the powers of Celebrimbor’s Rings. It was no accident, and he wondered at it, and at the change that seemed to have taken place in his nephew at the start of the Second Age. Celebrimbor had disowned his father in Nargothrond and turned away from their House—and Maglor had not blamed him, not then or after, while Curufin had raged to mask his grief. Now he was learning that Celebrimbor had in a way modeled his greatest work after Fëanor’s, and that he had kept a place in his grand city for Maglor himself, and that he had used Fëanor’s star as his own maker’s mark. Perhaps it would have been better if he had not.

“Maglor.” Galadriel caught his face in her hands. They were of a height, and when he met her gaze he was unable to look away. She searched his eyes for a long moment, and when she at last released him he stepped back, tilting his head back so he could see nothing but the stars overhead. They were cold and uncaring, and there was some strange comfort in that. It was some time before Galadriel spoke again. “I bore your father no love, that is no secret,” she said finally. “But he was not always what he became in the end. I saw the darkness growing in him, but failed to see that it was the same that grew in all of us in those days. I do not know all of Celebrimbor’s thoughts before he began to use the star of your house again in his work, but he did not want death and darkness to be the only legacy of his family.” She sighed, and it was heavy with grief and regret. “He did not, could not, fully succeed. But there are those for whom the Star of Fëanor is a symbol of friendship and of peace, when holly covered the land of Eregion and bells rung in Ost-in-Edhil.”

Maglor looked back down when Galadriel took his hand. She turned it over, revealing the scars from the Silmaril. “Does this pain you?” she asked. Maglor shook his head. It had seemed wrong to him when his hand had begun to heal, though he’d been pitifully grateful all the same. There was no pain like the burn of the Silmaril. Not even Sauron had been able to replicate it. He was surprised to see her smile. “It is said that they burned Morgoth, and he was never rid of the pain of it.” She released him, and went to pick up the basin, tipping it back into the stream that flowed along unceasingly. Maglor rubbed his own fingers over the scars, watching the starlight glimmer on the water.

It must have meant something, that he had healed and others had not. But he did not know what.

He left Galadriel’s garden and walked the rest of the night. He passed by deep tree shadows in which the ghosts of his past watched him. There was no sea to drown their voices here, and not enough light on moonless nights under the trees to chase them away. They had followed him from Dol Guldur, keeping to the edges of his dreams and the corners of his waking eyes, but he thought that maybe they had been with him all along and he had only learned, before, to ignore them. Or sing them away.

As dawn came, making the flowers glow far overhead, Elladan came to find him. Maglor had stopped to rest his aching legs beside one of the many fountains, and was watching the water glow faintly golden in the owning light when Elladan joined him. “Have you been out here all night?” he asked. Maglor shrugged. “Elrohir and I have heard from the wardens on the northeastern march; the road over Caradhras is clear, and we may leave at any time. Arwen and Eleryn have packed for you. Arwen says you would not take anything at all if it were left up to you.”

Arwen was not wrong. Nothing here was really his . It was only things given or lent to him. Well, there was the bowl that he had made, but Maglor had already given that to Eleryn, who had accepted it with a warm smile and thanks that had seemed genuine, although he was sure that it would not do anything but collect dust in a cupboard somewhere. Still, he owed her a great deal, and that was all that he had to show it.

“Are you willing to leave today?” Elladan asked. Maglor swallowed a sigh and nodded. Elrond’s sons were eager to be home, and who was he to delay them unnecessarily? Elladan smiled and rose, holding out his hand. “Then we will take our leave of the Lord and Lady. Arwen will ride with us as far as the Nimrodel.” He pulled Maglor to his feet and then along the path to Celeborn and Galadriel’s talan, where traveling clothes had been set out for Maglor. They were both familiar and not, for he had worn similar styles as Lord of the Gap, but of course these were not of Noldorin make…although he saw Arwen’s hand in some of the stitching, and in the embroidery along the collar—more musical notations that he did not recognize, and dotted with tiny silver stars.

Elladan and Elrohir both retrieved him to say farewell to Galadriel and Celeborn. They met in a small but airy room, sunlight and bright with woven rugs on the floor, and bright-colored murals on the walls. Galadriel was there, clad now in soft white with her hair unbound, and Celeborn in green with his silver hair in simple braids, and Arwen joined them too, clad for riding like her brothers. Maglor hung back as the twins bid their grandparents farewell, receiving blessings for the journey alongside the kisses and embraces.

Then Galadriel turned to him. “One last gift I have for you, Cousin,” she said, and brought out a cloak, alike to the ones Elladan and Elrohir and Arwen wore, that shifted shade and hue subtly as the fabric moved in the sunlight. She set it around Maglor’s shoulders, and secured it with a brooch in the shape of a sprig of mallorn flowers, delicately wrought of pale gold. “May the stars light all your ways, Maglor,” she said softly, “and may you come again to joy in the house of Elrond. I hope our next meeting is a happier one.” Maglor bowed his head.

Horses awaited them below, light-footed and eager to be on their way. Maglor could not recall when he had last mounted a horse, though he remembered that once he would have leaped into the saddle as lightly as Elrond’s children did. His own horse was a mare with soft brown eyes, who nuzzled her nose into his hands when he held them out. When he finally swung himself up it felt strange indeed to be back in a saddle, like he was pretending to be someone he had once been but no longer was. They left the city through the gates and turned north again, taking the same path that led toward Cerin Amroth.

Spring was a busy time in any wood, and in Lórien there was a constant chorus of birdsong, and nonstop rustlings and noises in the underbrush as animals awoke and went about the business of the waking year. Arwen sang as they rode, a song of springtime and blooming flowers. They passed by Cerin Amroth, and Maglor paused only a moment to look up the hill, covered now with flowers of all colors and kinds in addition to the golden elanor and pale niphredil. The white-barked trees were no longer naked, instead sporting pale green leaves that fluttered gently in the breeze.

Farther on they jumped across a swift-flowing river, and turned northward until the woods began to thin, and at last they came to another river. It flowed before them with an echo of a woman’s voice singing, as though she were somewhere just upstream and out of sight. “This is the Nimrodel, named for the maiden who lived here long ago,” Arwen told him. “It welcomes weary travelers to the wood and washes away the cares of the road. And it is where I leave you. I will come soon back to my father’s house, but not yet!” She embraced her brothers, and last of all Maglor. “I hope I will find you in Imladris when I come there again,” she said, smiling at him before pressing a kiss to his cheek. “Farewell!” Maglor caught her hand and kissed her fingers—a clumsy gesture, for he had long ago forgotten how to be gallant. She smiled at him again, though, ever forgiving, and remained on the banks of the Nimrodel as he and her brothers splashed across it, and until they passed away out of sight through the trees.

As the wood fell away behind them, Elladan tipped his head back, smiling in the sunlight. “There is our road,” he said, pointing to the mountains ahead. One gleamed redly in the bright sun. “Over Caradhras, with hope that he is sleeping! And then on to the Gwathló, following it to where the Mitheithel joins the Bruinen.”

“And then following the Bruinen the rest of the way to home!” Elrohir added.

They rode on, and Maglor looked back only once to see the Golden Wood retreating behind them, a glowing beacon in the shadow of the Misty Mountains. He did not lift his gaze beyond it, where the horizon was dark, and storm clouds gathered.