Maglor and Daeron's Not-So-Excellent-But-Kind-Of-Fun Adventure by Independence1776

“It’s a conflict of interest.”

Mace Windu sighed. “If you weren’t a Jedi, yes. But we trust you. It’s your siblings we don’t.”

For the same reason Maglor had never fully trusted Fëanáro. He’d expected his Jedi son to be his son and not a child of the Order. His brothers had grown up as Fëanáro’s children and thus believed, in general, that Maglor should have been more willing to be a part of their family than he was.

“But they refused to work with any other Jedi.”

“Indeed. Furthermore, the Sindar requested you as well.”

He took a deep breath and released it in a sigh. Of course they had. Far be it from the Quendi to not demand these thefts be investigated by the lone Quend Jedi. Well, it wasn’t the first time someone in some plantetary authority had thought they’d be able to manipulate supposed loyalty to homeworld based on nothing but birth and maybe a handful of memories. He didn’t know a single Jedi, not even one who maintained closer ties to home cultures like the Mirialan, who considered themselves Jedi second. The Order was home: family, culture, beliefs, philosophies, and folkways all in connected in ways that non-Sensitives could ever undersand. Most people just saw a bunch of monks with glowing swords and strange abilities. The Jedi and those who were friends with them knew otherwise.

“My briefing?”

Mace actually rubbed the bridge of his nose. “The Singer Daeron is talking with Master Nu for the rest of the afternoon. You’ll meet and travel over for supper at Senator Findis’s residence. I suspect you will leave from there.”

Three hours, then, given or take ten minutes. “I’ll be in one of the smaller dojos for the next two hours.”

Working out his frustration, he didn’t say. He didn’t need to. Mace and he had been friends and sparring partners for too long. Mace grinned. “May the Force be with you, Maglor.”

“I’m going to need it,” he muttered and left Mace’s small office.

Theirs had been an inauspicious meeting. Maglor glanced over at Daeron, who was openly staring at the Coruscant cityscape. Well, it was most certainly different from anything on Arda. “Is there anything you want to visit before we depart?”

Daeron said, “No. How can you live like this?”

Maglor turned the joystick and brought them in line to land in the residential building’s speeder hanger. “You’ve seen the Temple. There’s a lot more greenery on Coruscant than immediately apparent. Besides, life is life. It doesn’t matter whether it’s trillions of sapients on a city-planet or the tiny bugs that inhabit creekbeds on a planetary nature preserve. We’re all connected.”

“And dealing with so many people’s emotions?”

Maglor landed the speeder. He looked over at the Sinda. “That’s one of the reasons we grow up here. We learn to manage that young.”

“That’s not the only things you manage,” Daeron muttered. “Let’s get this supper over with.”

“Agreed.” If there was one thing he hated about being a Jedi, it was the amount of forced dinner conversations in the course of diplomatic work. And this wasn’t diplomatic work.

Supper went well. The informal briefing was more warning for Maglor than anything. Apparently, his brothers had taken him not attending Fëanáro’s funereal even worse than he’d assumed.

From his seat in the pilot’s chair, Daeron glanced at him without turning his head from the views of hyperspace. “I don’t know what they expected. If you’d been a Singer, you wouldn’t have been able to attend anyway. In fact, you’d have been forbidden from any personal relationship. Not even the strained one you have now.”

Maglor scowled down at the perfectly inoffensive instruments. “I firmly believe that Fëanáro thought I would renounce the Order and return to Arda after I learned more of my birth family. Nerdanel never did and still doesn’t expect that of me. Fëanáro never respected the boundaries I put in place. It’s only because Arda is not imporant in the grand scheme of the galaxy that no one major decided to make an issue of it.”

“Just look at Dooku and his Separatist movement.”

Maglor groaned. “Can we not? He’s a muckraker stirring up shit for the Order and the galaxy as a whole.”

“Ooh, language. I didn’t know you monks swore.”

That would have been insulting from anyone else but Daeron’s sense of humor matched Maglor’s own. He snorted in laughter. “We can have sex, too.” He paused. “Not that I want to.”

“Oh, good. I figured a Jedi would be more articulate in a proposition than that.”

Maglor leaned his head against the back of the co-pilot’s chair. “On that note, I should take a nap.”

Travel lag meant they would land on Arda at almost precisely the time Maglor was using going to bed at home. A nap would be essential if he was to be at all functional. And he needed to be. He was not heading into friendly territory.

He really shouldn’t have been surprised when Daeron landed at Doriath, not Eldamar. But it meant the only member of his birth family he had to deal with was Nelyafinwë, who was the most reasonable of his birth-brothers.

“Makalaurë.”

“Maglor.” After Fëanáro had made his expectations clear: a Jedi-trained Prince of the Noldor, Maglor had made his own point and changed his name to a non-Quenya name. That hadn’t made things any easier.

“Fine. Maglor, then.” Nelyafinwë leaned against the bulustrade. “What were you told?”

“That someone— neither the Singers nor the Noldor know who— broke into the Formenos stronghold, murdered Finwë and Fëanáro, and stole the Silmarilli. Around the same time, there was a theft here in Doriath as well, though no one died during it, so it took the Noldorin thefts for people to check. There is now a succession crisis in Noldorin Eldamar and you are likely hiding here so you don’t have to make the hard decisions while pretending that you are in fact doing something useful.”

“I don’t want to be king.”

Maglor shrugged a shoulder. “Then abdicate.”

“Easy for you to say.”

Maglor turned to look at his birth-brother. “Nelyafinwë, I’ve handled many peace treaties, succession crisis, and other diplomatic situations. You know you don’t want the duties that come with ruling. You’ll be miserable. And miserable people do not make good decisions or decisions made with the well-being of their people in mind. Given the crown to someone who will be good at it.”

“You sound like Mother.”

“Well, at least someone in your family has sense,” Maglor muttered.

Nelyafinwë laughed. “Two people.” He raised a hand. “I know you don’t see yourself as a member of our family. In truth, you aren’t. You’re Jedi and you have a different perspective on everything. You aren’t simply speaking from a desire to help me. You’re also looking at the broader political structure: what my rulership means for planetary stability, which could have effects across the sector, and maybe the galaxy as a whole.” He grimaced. “You’ve convinced me. I’m giving the crown to Nolofinwë.”

Well, at least his being dragged into this mess had one positive effect.

He clapped Nelyafinwë on the shoulder. “Glad to hear it. Let’s go join Melian and Thingol so we can get down to why the Singers dragged a Jedi into this.”

So, the full and formal briefing went exactly like this: the slow and steady build-up of evidence that the thefts had not been a local crime, that this was not a backdoor way to get Maglor involved in figuring out the succession crisis in Eldamar (though he’d already solved it accidently), and that it was now Maglor and Daeron’s job to figure out exactly who had stolen the gems and more importantly, why.

Maglor stared at the galatic map holo. Fine. Fine.

“I’m going to use a Force technique to narrow down exactly where the stolen goods are.” Everyone stared at him. “Yes, I can do that.”

“It’s a rather large galaxy.”

“It’s a database. And everything is connected.”

In theory he could. But he hadn’t done it on this scale before. He wouldn’t show the Quendi his uncertainty, not when so many of them thought him an oddity for being Jedi. Nor would he try. He would do.

Maglor closed his eyes and reached out with his hand and the Force. He blocked out the muttering and opened his eyes when his senses told him there.

It was a planet with only an astronomical catalog number, not even a name.

“Well, that was impressive,” Daeron said. “We’ll refuel the ship and head out in the morning.”

What was one more mission that completely destroyed his circadian rythms? “Sounds good.”

The unnamed world spun below them, green and blue and brown with white clouds. Otherwise known as a bog-standard habitable world without enough valuable resources to be worth expending the effort to extract them. There weren’t even any colonies or hermits trying to avoid living in the galaxy.

Daeron side-eyed. “Any Jedi magic now?”

Maglor rolled his eyes. He was indulging in some very bad habits on this trip. Quendi had that effect on him. He should work on that. Later. “No. Just the lifeform scanners onboard.”

It didn’t take much longer to find that there was some sort of something going on where there shouldn’t be. Daeron grinned at him. “Ready?”

Maglor grinned back. A Jedi shouldn’t crave excitement and danger, but this was  one of the fun parts of being Jedi. “Ready.”

They landed two kilometers from the outskirts of the base. It was dug into a cave at the base of a hill, but there were half a dozen or so ships landed out front. Five of them were starfighters and Maglor cast a happy eye over them. They weren’t in the best of shape. That would make this easier.

Daeron saluted him with two fingers touching his temple and Maglor scrambled on board one of the starfighters. Two minutes later, there were no spacecraft available and he used his lightsaber to destroy the engines on the starfighter he’d used to blow up the others. Yes, the base now knew they were there but it was worth it to leave no escape route for the criminals.

They split up once they were inside. Maglor needed no weapons apart from the Force and his lightsaber; Daeron had a blaster and his Songs. Maglor knew just enough about Singer traditions that he didn’t question it. The Singers simply had a different way of accessing the Force.

Maglor crept down hallways, sealing people into rooms if he could, injuring them if he couldn’t, and killing them only if he had to. Thankfully, that didn’t happen often. He ended outside of what looked to some sort of laboratory, but it was empty. Great. He used the Force to unlock the door controls and let himself in. He took a few minutes to slice into the terminal and download anything he found of relevance. And then it was time to go. He’d almost tuned out the wailing alarms so it was their sudden absense that caught his attention. So had the bad feeling in the pit of his stomach.

Nothing was ever simple.

He made his way out of the lab and deeper into the complex. More empty rooms, no people, and nothing of import. At least, until he reached a nice big airlock-type door that was sealed shut. Warning signs bracketed either side of it. “Oh, that’s not good.”

“It really isn’t,” Daeron said, skidding to stop behind him. “I don’t know if you noticed, but someone collapsed the cave entrance. The map of the facility I found said this way is the emergency exit.”

Maglor eyed the door. “Did you find what we were looking for?”

“Yup. The Silmarilli and all of the Sindarin items are in my bag. But the main guy shot himself before I could arrest him.”

“That’s unfortunate.” It was always better to take people alive, especially when they still didn’t know either the who or the why of the thefts.

“You?”

“I found a lab but I don’t know what its purpose was. Though I did download a bunch of information.”

“We might salvage this yet.”

“Indeed.” Maglor sighed and turned on his lightsaber to cut through the door.

Maglor telekinetically shoved the circle out of the way and Daeron climbed through after. Maglor made sure no one was behind them (no one was) and then did the same thing. “Well, I hadn’t expected this.”

“Neither had I.”

Before them streched a massive cavern with a narrow natural bridge crossing the giant chasm in the ground. It was badly lit in the color spectrum Maglor associated with fires, not artificial lights. And another identical door opposite. But the bad feeling— the darkness— was growing. He reignited his lightsaber. Daeron eyed the green blade and gestured. “After you.”

Maglor cautiously walked toward the natuaral bridge. He was part of the way across when a whip of fire snapped out of the darkness on the other side of the chasm. Maglor swung his blade at it, and though the whip was cut apart, the length quickly grew again.

“I don’t like this,” he muttered and centered himself on the bridge. He wasn’t afraid of heights— something that both living on Coruscant had taught him as well as being a Jedi and being able to catch himself after falling off tall objects— but he still didn’t want to look down. He had the feeling he wouldn’t be able to see the bottom anyway.

The whip-holder stepped out of the darkness. It was…

“What in the Song is that?”

“What the hell is that?”

Maglor and Daeron had spoken at the same time. Maglor said after a second, “It’s like a rancor got melded with something.”

“A balrog,” Daeron said flatly. “Fire demons. Native to Arda. There aren’t many people who can say they’ve faced one and lived.”

Maglor looked at the creature. Rancor’s head, rancor’s body, rancor’s claws. And a balrog’s— wings, tail, whip of fire? “I think I know why there was a lab here.”

“Spare me the philosophical musings. We either kill it or it kills us.”

“I handle the whip, you deal with the rest?”

“Ha. I don’t think it will be that neat.” They both ducked as the whip came at them again.

Maglor tugged at the handle with the Force. The rancor-balrog tightened its grip, but it was no match for a Jedi. The whip came sailing out of its hand and Maglor dropped it into the chasm. Maybe there were more of the creatures down there. Maybe not. They had to deal with this one.

Dearon blasted it but the bolts did nothing except ignite the creature. Which didn’t seem to bother it at all. “Well, stars above.”

That was a new curse. “Agreed.”

Maglor reached out with the Force to connect with the creature’s mind and maybe reason with it. Nope, not happening. The creature was doing precisely what it wanted to and was trained to do: stop intruders from escaping. “Be prepared to run,” he said softly as he fished the datacard out of a belt pouch and held it out behind him to Dearon.

He could feel Daeron looking at him. He definitely heard the blaster sliding back into its holster and felt the slight weight in his hand vanish. “May the Force be with you, Maglor.”

Maglor ran at the hybrid.

Maglor woke. “Ow.”

The bright light didn’t dim but he did at least recognize where he was: in the Temple’s healing halls, one of the rooms with a view of the outside. He’d be here for a while, then.

Mace Windu studied him from a chair at his bedside. “Are you aware of everything that has happened in the past six months?”

Maglore stared at him. “Six months?” He’d thought it was closer to six weeks. Pain did funny things to time perception.

“I’ll take that as a no.” He steepled his hands. “Your sacrifice allowed Daeron to return to the ship. To make a long story very short: the datacard held information that led to Kamino, which lead to Darth Tyranus aka Count Dooku and from there led to Darth Sidious. Who was none other than Chancellor Palpatine. Who tried to escape, pulled a red lightsaber in the middle of the Senate chamber, and was put down by half a dozen Jedi, including yours truly. How in the blazes of the Force did you manage to start the unraveling of a galaxy-spanning consipiracy to turn the government of the galaxy into another Sith Empire while being experimented on in a laboratory by the same people who created that rancor-balrog hybrid?”

“Uh…” He was usually a little more articulate than this. He’d blame the painkillers. “The Force was with me?”

Mace didn’t even crack a smile. “You missed most of the inquests. You’re also fortunate we found you. You have Daeron and Prince Nelyafinwë to thank for that, by the way.”

“I’ll send them a card,” Maglor said dryly.

“You’d better,” Mace shot back. “Given you also managed to solve the Eldamaran succession crisis, which you were flatly forbidden from interfering in.”

“You’re welcome.”

Mace sighed. “Maglor, the Senate wanted to give you a medal. Or to tar, feather, and string you up in Republic Square for daring to question Palpatine. Opinions varied and still vary.”

“I’m stuck here until I’m healed regardless.”

“Mmmm.” He leaned forward. “The offer to recover on Arda is open.”

He didn’t need to think twice about it. “No. My home and family are here. I’m staying.” He gestured at the window. “Besides, where else could I get a view like that?”

Deadpan, Mace said, “Hosnian Prime.” Mace finally cracked a smile. “I’m glad you survived, Maglor. Though I’m going to deny this if anyone asks, the Temple rumor mill says you’re being considered for a spot on the High Council.”

“Is it true?”

Mace’s expression shifted very deliberately into what civilians would call Jedi nuetral. “Be well, Maglor.” He stood and walked to the door.

“Mace!”

His friend simply tilted the corner of his mouth up in a smile and walked out of the room.

Leave a Comment