Archive of Our Own

you who wish to conquer pain, you must learn what makes me kind. the crumbs of love that you offer me, they’re the crumbs I've left behind. your pain is no credential here, it’s just the shadow, shadow of my wound.

- “Avalanche” by Leonard Cohen -

Many parents in this world harbour the same secret dread: that our children will wander into the same wilderness it took us decades to escape, and run lost and wailing in the dark. We do anything to prevent such a thing. We arm our toddlers with nursery rhymes about breadcrumbs and magical roads, then panic when they can't find their way home from their first walk alone to the market. The unknown path. The wrong turn. Small faces pressed against blazing windows, searching for a way out.

We live in constant fear of our children's lostness, and wonder why our attempts at guidance only serves to deepen their confusion. When asked simple questions, we panic further, unfurling elaborate philosophical maps instead of pointing toward the nearest exit. When they seem uncertain, we recite our own hard-won wisdom like an incantation, forgetting that the lyrics were written in another time, another place, another language entirely. Our children learn to smile and nod, then slip away to find their own bearings. The more desperately we try to orient them, the more thoroughly we disorient ourselves, until we find ourselves standing in the middle of a forest in the dark, tears running down our faces, calling out directions to children who had already found their way home.

There is nothing particularly remarkable about the face. About Maglor's face, that is. Handsome, perhaps, even still, even so, but certainly not remarkable. As elven faces go, it is simply an ordinary thing, just one amongst all the faces of Imladris. Certainly nothing to send six-thousand year old lords into minute-long trances gaping at a marble terrace, as stupidly beautiful as a flying fish arrested mid-leap.

The morning of Imladris's founding-day dawns exactly like it is meant to dawn, because Elrond has, obviously, post-dated (micromanaged) the founding of his city so that it will fall on calendar days too convenient in comparison with the actual founding of a sanctuary city in wartime. So yes, healing-bruise sky, thousands of years and counting... and Elrond on his palfrey, as cool and collected as someone who hadn't been counting. Though of course, he had been. The Eldar count everything: breaths between lightning and thunder, leaves fallen since the last snowmelt, the precise number of times they've thought of the dead and pushed the thought away like a boat from shore.

Elrond rides on the tallest palfrey under the watchful eye of the Last Homely House, in turn watching his city celebrate itself. Imladris stretches before him: bridges curving like harps, harpists harping three-part harmonies, towers twisting into terraces as if trying to escape their own foundations.

Imladris started out as an uneasy, tentative city. It had taken centuries for it to grow into its own gaps, and even then it did so unevenly, like a wound scabbing over. In its early days, it seemed an endless mass of scaffolding, clinging desperately to the white cliffs it was built across, lapping thirstily at the waterfalls and lakes, delving into the cliffside caves and shivering quietly in their depths. Now, it draws your eye upwards and keeps it there: spires and terraces, delicate balconies and expansive circumference-spanning stone-carvings. It had always been made with sanctuary in mind, littered with errors that let some people live on whilst others couldn’t: nooks and crannies, deep water, alleys and closed off archways. Elrond had always known that havens could be sacked, and so siege was never a distant possibility in the architecture of Rivendell, but the very foundation upon which it was built. 

Some whisper that if you stand in the middle of the city on a quiet day and call out words like Himring or Amon Ereb or Sirion or Eregion, colossal, if faint, shapes would stir under its surface of the earth like stone giants awakening. Like with all cities, the story of its founder echoes through its empty spaces. Every sky-touched tower and terrace sings of a little boy found on the beach, halfway up a palm tree, clinging desperately to his equally terrified twin’s foot as he led the way to the top.

Most of the year, it’s but a drowsy, hearth-and-cider thing. Its days slip by like shifting shadows caught on bedroom walls, their steady drift broken only by rare, uncanny flickers of the outside world. And always, always the hum of running water, telling you to hush, hush now, we have to be quiet or they’ll find us, a haven wrapped in the arms of a little boy named after his love of playing in the spray of waterfalls. In a way, Elros is the heart of the city, and it is here (if only here), that he is as alive as Elrond thinks he should have been.  

Moving through the winding, tight streets of Imladris, one might feel hungry for more of a quiet, merry life like this whilst noting, with both gratefulness and unease, that one could just as easily be Somewhere Else, and that Somewhere Else might just as easily be Somewhere Worse. Stone might crumble, says Imladris. Gates could close and the river could dry. The very ground you walk upon might at any given moment shift into another form. Sanctuaries can be sacked. You might be in danger. You might. 

The parade flows onwards past the Healing Halls. Past the little walled garden, where Cel once unsuccessfully tried to grow pumpkins, beans, and potatoes in turn. Elrond had built it all (from a distance—he is a lord) stone by stone, name by name. Banners unfurl and taste the wind, each one embroidered with constellations, the sun glancing off the water-music pavilion just so, transforming it into something that almost, almost resembles...

No. He will not think of Sirion today.

"Ada! Ada! That man's got a monkey! A monkey from Gondor!"

And then four-year-old Estel careens around the corner, his dark hair flying everywhere, freshly laundered tunic scuffed at the knee. Behind him, looking as understandably harassed as anyone around Estel tends to look, rushes Gilraen, and above them, right in line with Estel's grubby pink finger—

The world tilts. Elrond, masterfully, keeps his seat on the horse.

Because of course it is Maglor. And of course this is how Maglor turns up. All cheery and pink-cheeked behind a harp, because the man who raised him has some nerve, standing there like it’s any other day, probably playing a song backward and titling it A Drowning Reversed or A Wound Closing and Reopening. Flower metaphors and all. Elrond knows Maglor Fëanorian very well, of course. And yes, there Maglor Fëanorian stands, smiling pleasantly down at him, as if he'd simply stepped out for victuals six thousand years ago and gotten slightly delayed. His wild, dark hair curls down to his waist in a vast thunder-cloud, streaked now with three stark slivers of lightning. The Silmaril-scars on his palm catch the sun and throw it back wrong at Elrond, in the way of a broken mirror.

"Hello, my darlings," Maglor says, just for him to hear, though they’re in a crowd. And his voice is exactly as Elrond remembers it, sonorous and lethal, honey poured over broken glass, sweet and terrible in equal measure. "I hear you're having a parade. I’ve brought a plus-one."

Some nerve, Elrond cannot help but think again. Some bloody nerve. For perched on Maglor's shoulder, wearing what appears to be a red velvet vest, sits a monkey with impossibly bright eyes.

"His name," explains Maglor, with the particular militaristic satisfaction of someone detonating a carefully placed explosive, "is Finrod."

"I refuse to call it Finrod," Elrond shakes his head, calm as ever. "Maglor. Atya. I will not do such a thing. Estel—you hear me—that monkey is not named Finrod."

"You wouldn't," Maglor says darkly. “That’s why I’m here.” 

The parade continues below them, a river of colour and sound that seems to exist in a different dimension from the study where they now sit. Elrond has ushered them here: Maglor, the monkey, Gilraen, and an increasingly excited Estel who kept trying to feed the creature bits of old honeycake from his pocket. The walls are lined with histories, each one meticulously transcribed in Elrond's careful hand, and he organised his histories avidly because of course he did, because they all meshed perfectly together, the pride of Imladris. 

Maglor surveys them with an expression that might be amusement or might be exhaustion worn to translucence. Elrond blinks at him incredulously, because frankly this is ridiculous even for Maglor. The enormous harp, the monkey, the turning up at his doorstep six thousand years after, as if... it isn't even that it is particularly unpleasant to find him here. They had parted on sorrowful, tragic terms, yes, but not bad terms. In another life, Elrond would probably have cried a few joyful tears at the reunion. Now, here, monkey-and-all, it is simply disconcerting.

Can a face be untouched and ruined at once? 

For that is the Maglor sitting before Elrond, legs crossed casually, chin tilted up. Can time strangle a person and not leave fingerprints or turn faces blue? The lines that make the man are the same yet deeper, like fissures in stones where water once ran. Or does Elrond only remember wrong, or unremember parts, flatten Maglor into a mask without substance?

He had expected Maglor to, by this tangle in the hairball of their history, have become the kind of person who melted into thin air if you stop looking at him. Faded, see? At least partially. The Eldar were capable of dying from grief, and surely remorse had a shred of grief in it. So yes, faded. Some ancient fresco, enduring (but making you ask—at what cost?). It unseats him to see Maglor as he truly is, the image delivering a double dose of the perpetual insecurity of the archivist. It turns Elrond into a little boy who spends ever so long constructing a pet shipwreck from the clues and hints left behind in his mind, only to find out that the jigsaw is in fact meant to depict sunlight bouncing across the sea. The stories have said he sings his sorrows by the shore. But the man before him does not look too sorrowful. He looks downright content.

Did that mean he doesn't regret it?

What would that turn him into?

Does that mean that Elrond was raised by a man who cannot repent?

Is repentance what makes a man?

What would that mean for Elrond?

What would that say of him?

And his children—oh, the children.

"Very nice library, Elrond. Reminds me of why we keep retelling what we think we know, because to speak of it is to strip it of its reality and make certain nothing ever truly survives," Maglor blows him a kiss, jumping to his feet and nosing around the library. He runs his fingers along a shelf that curves at precisely the angle of, yes, fine, a particular library in a particular house. "Almost a recreation. Not perfectly, of course. Perfection would be obscene. But the bones of it, the skeleton of our old library, dressed in new flesh. How... archaeological of you. Finrod, just you look at this, it’s just your kind of thing."

"I built what I remembered," Elrond says stiffly. "I did not know many libraries before my own... and to construct something at the scale of the libraries in old Eregion or Lindon is frankly impossible here. So yes, our library in Amon Ereb. Because it is my only recollection of a plausible library in the circumstances."

"No," Maglor corrects, settling back into his chair with the monkey, who immediately began investigating the fruit bowl with scientific precision, excising the juiciest components. "You built what you wanted to remember. There's a difference. Amon Ereb was messier than this, less philosophical. Children played near shitters, sometimes. Dogs died in the streets. It was war, in case you forgot. Maedhros once threw a heavy plate at someone's head during a council meeting… Do you remember that? What a temper he had, in those last years. No, I’m sure you don't remember. You were far too busy playing hide-and-seek and being too afraid to visit the privy without your brother."

"Apologies. I hope you will one day find it in yourself to forgive me for having been six years old at an inconvenient point in your life."

Gilraen watches the exchange with the particular attention she normally reserved for situations that might require sudden evacuation. Her hand rests warningly on Estel's shoulder (the visitor is a kinslayer, she knows, and in very technical terms... Estel probably counts as kin), though the boy himself is entirely oblivious, wholly entranced by the monkey's dexterous peeling of a grape.

"Look at that clever monkey," Estel points out to Elrond petulantly, the latter being firmly in the child's bad books for expressly forbidding him to touch the monkey until he could get someone from the Healing Halls to examine it for diseases. "He's better than you at peeling fruit. I do wish the Monkey Man was my Ada."

"So do I," Maglor nods at him, mournfully raising his wine glass in a mock toast. "Every day, my minuscule little man, I too wish the Monkey Man had been my Ada. If only Fëanor had turned to the exotic pet trade instead of jewelcraft."

"Who's Fëanor?"

"If you tell my four-year-old son who Fëanor is," Gilraen speaks for the first time, narrowing her eyes at Maglor, "I will personally ensure that you end up in the same sublimated form as your beloved father, mark my words."

"Gilraen, please. Maglor. Atya. Why are you here?" Elrond asks finally. "Can't you have come at any other time? Quite literally any other time? Why did you choose…"

Maglor smiles, and it is like watching warming ice crack over deep water, beautiful and terrifying and irreversible. "Would you believe me, if I said I missed you tremendously?"

"No. You've clearly kept better company than me," Elrond waves a hand at the monkey, grimacing. "Let us not fool ourselves into pretending you're not here to cause problems for the sake of causing problems."

"Good. That would be humiliatingly sentimental. I'm here because I know something rather important about names, which I realised you should probably know too, given what I have very recently heard about your..." he gestures vaguely at Estel, "...semi-recent adventures in the naming of children."

Gilraen's jaw tightens almost imperceptibly. The change in Elrond's face is even more subtle, actually invisible unless you knew him. Maglor, of course, knows him very well, and catches it, the quick shift away from serene contentment into momentary self-disgust. And then the look disappears right back into the planes of his face, leaving him unchanged aside from a short, irreversible step towards complete ossification. 

“My lord,” Gilraen says quietly, taking her son by the hand and masterfully extricating him from the monkey as if she did such things every day. “Estel is a little restless. I’m going to go get him down for a nap.”

The implication being: if we talk about this again I might kill one or both of you. And emphasis on Estel intended. 

"So you're here to give me a lecture based on idle gossip, then," Elrond rips the smile right back off his face the moment Gilraen leaves, rising up and wandering over to the terrace to face the city, letting it buoy him as it always does. "Go on then, Atya dearest. Let us have your wisdom, for you can't have slithered up and down the coast for all these years as I hear, and not be at least half as wise as an Istari."

"Twice as wise, you mean. And all right, let's rip off the dressing as swiftly as we deserve, then," Maglor continues, passing Finrod an apple to peel for him, "Elwing never named you Elrond. And she certainly never named your brother Elros."

The silence that follows presses against the walls like deep-sea pressure, threatening to shatter everything inward. Elrond does not turn from his position on the terrace. 

Outside, the parade goes on, as does time: winding around half-remembered reconstructed streets, as sparrows bitch away amidst statues, as sunlight veers away from the library window and pours over the city square as if to make a point, gilded and fluid. Life, life, and life runs forwards, shadows as indigo and violet as in paintings, the sky gaudier, life, life and life palpitating away in the city he had built, all aside from this single, unfortunate, unmoving creature on the high terrace, stuck as an upturned insect. 

"That's impossible," Elrond says finally, though even as he speaks, something cold and certain settles in his chest like a stone in still water. "We are princes. Our names would have been written into the record."

Maglor's smile dimples further, though his brow furrows in apparent pain. "Would they, now? And do many records of Sirion survive? The Manor House was razed to the ground."

"Círdan would have known," Elrond's hands tighten on the railings, refusing to turn around and let Maglor see the extent of his shock (though, had he been less in shock, he would have understood that this would be, in fact, considered a relatively normal thing to go into shock over). "He would have told us. Told me."

"Círdan and I have been well-acquainted over the past dozen or so centuries. I know precious little about the fellow still, I admit, but I know this: he is not in the habit of wounding nameless little children. Or grown elves who were once nameless little children. Why would he go scratching at your scars when he can build his little grey ships, hm?"

"You lie, Maglor."

"I do indeed," Maglor sighs, rising up and joining Elrond on the terrace, resting his glass on the railing. "I lie ever so often, and ever so well. Mostly when I have my harp with me. It's a general fault, but if the Valar do not wish us to lie then they should not have given us harps," he holds his hands up, and on his face sit both guilt and honesty, writ so plain it scores him harsher than any sun. Elrond averts his gaze.

"You have never criticised her to us," he mutters quietly. "Why come now and tell me that she never names us, Maglor? Why are you not content with self-excoriation? Must I be raked by your claws too? And so publicly?"

"Believe me, boy, she is the last person I would criticise in this... naming palaver we have going here. She is the last one to blame, and it's me saying this, mind you. I never said Elwing did not name you," says Maglor. "I only said she did not name you Elrond. Do you think I lie? Tell me then, what did she call you? In your memories, in those precious fragments you've polished like jewels all these years... what did she actually call you? Surely you recall her.” 

Elrond remembers his mother. Of course he does.

She was very young, and very pretty. Elrond had spent much of Arwen's (extremely irritating and somewhat prolonged) adolescence wondering why on earth everyone kept buttering the girl up by saying she was the spitting image of Lúthien, when Elrond knew the heavy brow, the rather petulant mouth, even the nose-wrinkle as she grinned her widest, were all Elwing, Elwing, Elwing, all her grandmother, who in turn had looked like her own. But he realised quickly enough that Lúthien was drawn, painted, embroidered and sung about as far as the eye could see. Very few people had seen Elwing alive. One could only have so many portraits painted in thirty five years.

Elrond remembers his mother, of course he does. And a cold fist clenches within him as he realises that in every memory, every single one, Elwing calls them 'my loves,' 'little stars,' 'beloveds', and never their names. Never once their names, not once.

But that cannot be so. For Elwing had adored naming things.

She used to enjoy putting on a naturalist's hat covered in seaweed (camouflage, she called it), and crouching amongst barnacle-crusted rocks, cataloguing little survivals: mussels sealing themselves against exposure, anemones retracting at stone-tremors. Elwing taught her boys the names of these little creatures she had cribbed off Círdan, or her old nurses, clinging to them and sticking them to Elrond and Elros as if taxonomy might anchor them to the world they lived in. Over and over, she mapped small instances of persistence in uninhabitable places. 

(When the riders come, they find the boys curled in the same defensive posture they observed in the tideline creatures. When the world takes Beleriand back, Sirion is the first to go.)

Maglor too, taught them tree-names and read them stories about the tragedies that led to odd rock formations on cliffsides. In a world which could have borne a Beleriand, Maglor might even have been friends with his mother. Arda preserves its saddest stories, he’d said. Our world attempts to atone for its inhabitants. The land is the most tragic canvas of all. 

"Where did they go?" He asks quietly, a hand on Maglor's own. Maglor stares down at Elrond's fingers, blinking slowly. As if the pale hand cuts through the monkey and the harp and the layers and layers of pasted-on indifference and grabs the creature within. “They were there, Maglor. Our names were there. I know it. Where did they go?” 

(Maglor knows the creature within all too well. Once, it had moved through the continent like an old forest, trained, armed, commanded. People flinched at him then for good reason, people whose homes and hunger and thirst relied on the satisfaction of the oath. Elrond takes his hand and thus reveals, for an instant, the pelt under his skin and iron in his breath, the long, dark thrum of the killing-years that lives inside him. A hard-earned humanity clothes him, yes, but perhaps it does not so perfectly disguise the creature that toils so to earn it.

There is a life in which Maglor stands upright and unshadowed, no need to echo every living thing he comes across, but that life lies dim and far away, layered beneath the wreckage of this one. In some variations of his life, there is no wound to thicken into hide and no seam in his skin that glints in the afternoon sun, laid bare for Elrond to take his scalpel to.

This is the truth of Maglor in his wandering years. He has grown to despise men like himself. He finds himself averting his eyes from his own reflection sometimes, as though his own presence was a contagion and guilt could resurrect from a glance. Most days, he channels it into life, life, life and fury, monkeys and songs and taverns and sea shanties, trying to make people understand that he lives more ferociously than he ever had before, that he carries the weight of his brothers and fathers and his own deeds upon his back not out of cruelty but because someone had to. 

On those days he thinks of himself as above his brothers. He misses them tremendously, every morning and every evening. Still, he is not above looking down his nose. He’s certain they’ve all been re-embodied, clinking glasses and dancing through the evenings in Formenos. And the others too, the ones he commanded. What of them? They might be pretending that they never cheered on bloodbaths, never ran kin through with swords. 

Maglor tells himself that this life he clings to, the masks he wears, the friends he makes and the men and women he beds, they are just a part of the Noldolantë, just as much a part of himself as the martyr who sings his sorrows and does fuckall else. But there are some actions that cannot be smelted into songs, and some sculptures that cannot be recast. They look like they belong to nowhere, and so they belong to Maglor. 

In a way, he too is Imladris.) 

And so, he admits it, and not without shame.

"You're asking the wrong question, Elrond. Not where did they go, but who took them. Me, boy. It was I who took them. But oh Elrond, I swear to you. I swear to you, I have only ever meant well."

Elrond named Estel just two years ago, in the very study in which Maglor now unnames him.

"But Estel will not be an elf," Gilraen had told Elrond quietly, taking the infant back from his arms. "Estel will be raised amongst the Eldar, but he is not one of them. Estel will not be like your father. He will be like his mother. And she will, before your eyes and his own, age every year. Her skin will sag and her hair will grey. Wounds to his flesh will not heal as fast as wounds to yours, and his teeth will start to loosen in his mouth when he is six years of age."

"But your people, Gilraen," Elrond frowned at her. "They have been named after elves of yore for Age after Age. The steward of Gondor is named Ecthelion. It was Elendil who slayed Sauron. You cannot presume that he could ever bear his father-name here, raised in secrecy as he must be. And my lady, you must know I do not claim Estel's name for myself: he is Estel, but yours. Estel, the hope of your people."

"And yet so named for the hope of yours," Gilraen countered easily, rocking the boy back to sleep. "Where Aragorn was born, we do not sing of the light of Eärendil, not these days, though we know of his deeds and his blood and love him for it. But it is in your house that he is sung of still, your jewel that is strapped to his brow, and your ships that follow his light. Where Aragorn was born, much like where you were born, boys are given father-names to answer to and mother-names to keep, to listen out for all his life. The boy has a father-name to one day answer to, though he will not answer to it yet. And now, my lord, you have given him a name to keep. But you will not let him keep it, will you? All his life, he will listen out for a name he cannot keep. Look up towards a light he cannot deign to touch."

He bit down the irritation, refused to let her see how she unseated him with her simple words. Such fuss about names. The presumption that a name is a root, something that holds fast. Elrond had only ever known the one name, a shadow, a mirroring, a coupling of syllables that cast no weight of its own and only floated against the lack of his brother's. The fathers who raised him, they had three names, four to six between languages. So what if Elrond set about his life feverishly naming all he touches, stones, insects, cities, swords, smoke, as if it were a way to affix them to himself. So? Were such things crimes? Was it a crime to love?

"I do not betray him by inflicting another's tongue upon him," he said steadily. "Nor another lineage. Aragorn and I share a language and a lineage, and Estel will one day become simply a keepsake, a memento of his childhood. A single name in three, should he ascend to kingship. But if you feel so strongly, Gilraen, you may name him as you please. I apologise for not extending the courtesy—I had forgotten."

"You mean unname him, take away what you have given. My lord, do you know what violence it is to unname a child?" Gilraen shook her head dismissively, and traced the curve of her infant's—Estel's—cheek. "I shall not do such a thing to my son. He shall be Estel, if he must. Ónen i-Estel Edain, ú-chebin estel anim. One name of three."

It seemed a small word then, as small as the child himself. A little scrap of a name, already lost in the litany of labels standing guard over the only father he will ever know.

Maglor is not afraid any longer. He tells himself this. 

He is not afraid. Fear would have been simpler. Fear moves you, sharpens your corners. Remorse incessantly loops back on itself, shows you the very same rooms with the furniture rearranged over and over and over again. It blurs the memory. He tries to sew different versions of himself for thousands of years: ones who do not do the things he does, who stay when he should have left and leave when he should have stayed. But each variation belongs to another man, another life.

Am I still Makalaure?

Can Makalaure stay unforgiven?

Can he stay Makalaure if he is unforgiven?

The silence, of course, gives him no answer. He asks anyway.

Elwing used to look out to sea. 

She had a way of standing at the harbor's edge in her long silk dresses, her face turned toward the seam of the horizon, like a lighthouse keeper, or a flightless bird. Elrond and Elros were too young to realise what it truly was she’d been waiting for, and so in their minds she was simply posted there more often than not, a beacon in the wind. When they would run up to her and ask her to play, or tell-off the other twin for pinching or biting or not-sharing, or whinge about hunger after eating not ten minutes ago, she would turn around with a smile and do exactly that, though it would take a moment for her eyes to adjust to solid ground.  There were never any ships returning, on the mornings she waited. It seemed a pointless nautical reverie, this intense observation of a sky under whose expansion no gull wheeled. 

When Elrond got a little older, old enough to think of her without tears, he wondered whether it had been the ocean’s pull seeping into her marrow over the years in imperceptible currents, whether it was what the older elves called sea-longing. He never understood sea-longing, not then. He, like his mother, had never known Aman after all. To him, the concept sounded absurd, like someone reconstructing, with fragments from a shipwreck, a vessel they had never seen before. 

It didn’t make sense. For it did not seem like longing. It had felt lost. His little-mother, for she was all of five-foot-five, lost in the deep blue immensity of the sea, unreachable by any craft. Splinters of a shipwreck, yes. 

Perhaps she had foreseen her final plunge. Could she glimpse it when the tide retreated each pink evening, inevitable and radiant? Did she accept the ocean’s patient courtship, and know that the horses were closing in on Sirion? It was Ulmo who had borne her out of the waves, and turned her into a bird. Ulmo, who had chosen to close his eyes and see his mother’s frantic desire to drown as a manifestation of sea-longing, as natural as the waves themselves. 

Or perhaps it was something far more simple, Elrond would tell himself. Perhaps Elwing was waiting for a ship to return from the abyss.

His father’s ship. 

Maglor does not leave after his damning admission.

Elrond does not expect him to do such a thing (and he doesn’t want him to—god, no, he doesn’t want him to, even now), and so they go about the festival pretending nothing is wrong. It hangs there between them, then, in the brightness of the day, the taken names. His entire life, crunching beneath him, and Elrond knows he should put a hand out and pull the conversation back into the room, or perhaps the two of them should enter the dark places where lost things live, but he can't bring himself to do such a thing either.

"Why did you not fade?" He asks instead. He feels sick. His fingertips are cold and his eyelids hot.

"Why on earth would I do such a thing?" asks Maglor in turn.

"For the love of... fine, Atya. How did you not fade?" Elrond cannot help but laugh.

"Oh, I thought you'd never ask. First, I internalised the Doom of Mandos. I decided that the swiftest path to paradise was piety. All my songs became about my own inadequacy. Sadly, I was not inadequate enough for such a thing to be even partially effective. Then, I tried apologising. I wrote lament after lament, sold myself to the sorrow of others, wrote two sequels to the Noldolantë. Then, I realised that most of the people who deserved an apology from me are either dead or despise me. Did you know your father-in-law tried to shoot a poisoned dart at me when I tried turning up in Lothlórien with a lament on the fall of Doriath? Through a blowpipe, mind you. How primitive. And then..."

"And then?" Elrond closes his eyes, counts to ten, resists the urge to strangle his former foster father. "And then what?"

"And then, unfortunately, I got over it," Maglor sighs, grimacing. "You see, after I was chased from Lórien, I made a little tour around the orchards outside Gondor. Had you ever heard of a monkey before you saw mine, by the way? Remarkable fellows. I was ever so enthralled. Something within my fëa decided that if this world is one that plays host to such a marvellous creature as the Gondorian monkey, then Maglor Fëanorian wishes to stay firmly within its circles. Fading was out of the question by that point. And so here I am, monkey in tow."

"The elephant in the room, at last. Why have you brought a monkey into my city?"

"Calm down, Elrond, it is a singular monkey," Maglor raises his hands, Silmaril-scars swirling across his palm. "You're not going to get a plague of them. Well, unless any of your kinsmen get funny ideas. That Glorfindel, for instance. You might want to keep an eye on that one around my Finrod."

The monkey in question had made fast friends with Estel, discovering within him an innate generosity when it came to the doling-out of honeycake, that Maglor apparently lacked. Finrod and Estel lie sprawled across the Hall of Fire floor, making a straight road from one end of the room to the other with a collection of small, ill-obtained stones and populating it with worms and biscuit crumbs. Curatorial precision, and detached delight. 

"Finrod likes organising things," Maglor explains to Elrond, who had been observing the construction with the confusion and barely veiled joy that happened to be his general expression when Estel was concerned. "I named him after—well, you know who I named him after. He also liked organising things. Caves, mainly. And people. And doomed diplomacy, which I should probably train the monkey in at some point. But I digress."

Elrond sighs. “All right. I’ll ask you the question you’ve clearly been gagging for me to ask. Why did you name your monkey after Finrod Felagund?” 

"Oh, it wasn’t just Finrod. There’s been a monkey named after most members of the house of Finwë in my possession at some point or the other. I had to narrativise them, see, much like I did myself. And I’m sure cousin Finrod wouldn’t mind. He's dead, or at least he has spent a few moments being dead. Probably gives you a new sense of perspective, such a thing. What is a monkey after Mandos? Also, the creature has similar hair. Look—golden, see? And he's terribly brave about water. Jumps right in. Though he can actually swim, which is more than can be said for his namesake… he once made a prize dive into our fishpond, and to all our surprise and Maedhros’ envy I presume, the little fellow started actually drowning. But yes, aside from that, I’m certain that Iluvatar himself would have named my newest creature Finrod, and patted himself on the back for it."

Gilraen makes a small sound that might be horror or might be suppressed laughter. 

(It is difficult to tell with the Dúnedain. They have a complicated relationship with blasphemy.)

Later, as the parade winds through the lower city like a singing serpent, Maglor and Elrond walk the bridges. The monkey rides on Estel's shoulders, occasionally stealing flowers from the ceremonial wreaths to eat, examine or simply throw into the water below. Gilraen follows at a careful distance, close enough to intervene, far enough to allow the illusion of privacy.

"The water here," Maglor observes, "moves the wrong way."

"I beg your pardon?" Elrond looks across to where his foster father points. “Do you mean the waterfall flowing upwards? It’s just Vilya, the ring. I made the decision that if I were to drain rivers and flood banks to save the world, I could probably indulge in some small stakes architectural mischief.” 

"No, not your blasted waterfall, I mean the river itself. In Sirion, the Sirion river I mean, the current pulls eastward at this odd-looking bend, you've recreated that particular bend, I see it in that curve there, by the willow. And yet your water flows west. It's like watching someone write your name backward. Makes one feel a little nauseous, really.”

Elrond had not actually realised he’d recreated that particular bend. He had simply built what had felt right (for to him, what is remembered is what is right), what his hands seemed to know without his mind's permission. The hands remember things the eye never truly witnesses.

"Is that what you've chosen to substitute for a pulse then?" Elrond changes the subject swiftly, gritting his teeth. "Travelling through foreign-enough lands and collecting your own personal menagerie? Though I suppose, Atya dearest, I expect no better exile than this from you."

"Alas, much like Fingon whipped off lovely-tempered Maedhros' arm and Daeron whipped off my attempts at a tree conservation endeavour named after the gardens of Doriath, I simply amputated from myself the possibility of renewal," Maglor explains pleasantly. "You see, if you think I'm intolerable now, you should have seen me in Tirion. Re-embodiment would probably be the worst thing that could happen to me, short of my monkey dying. What you see before you, Elrond, is Maglor Fëanorian at his very best, though you may think of it as him at his very worst."

So it is not Mandos he fears, realises Elrond, but after. 

Those he loved as they were, who loved him as he was. Blood and claw and all. Elrond had believed, perhaps foolishly, that some fragment of the old Maglor, some irreducibly human spark, would endure despite all the tragedies of his life. But very little endures, he sees, of either the foolhardy poet-warrior, the snarling storm at Sirion, or the scatterbrained makeshift parent. The Eldar are not creatures of change. They do not, like Maglor has done, shift as the world shifts. They do not float along like wreckage from a storm long past, swimming cheerfully along the current in waters that bear no trace of his origin and offer no shore for his return.

Something must have changed him. 

But what? 

"Did I change you?" Elrond asks, and even here, even now, he cannot keep the hope out of his own voice. "Us, I mean, Elros and I. Did we change you? Even if only a little."

Maglor thinks for a moment, tapping his monkey's hand in irritation as it climbed back onto him (it had, having spent a few hours around Elrond, developed a nail-biting habit, as in, it began to bite other people's nails). "What do you wish for me to say, Elrond?" he asks tiredly. "Tell me, and I'll decide whether or not I should tune my harp for the task."

"I long for you to say yes," Elrond admits, smiling somewhat guiltily. "But I suppose I need you to tell me the truth."

"Then I'll tell you the truth. As a singer, I know how to entertain, and as a soldier I know how to end things. Those are the two things I know best, and to this day I'm afraid I know them both very well. You are very sticky children, and very loud in your stickiness," Maglor grimaces then, and then points at his monkey, which leaves his lap in favour of Elrond's shoulder. "That being said, don't reduce my monkey into a metaphor when you inevitably write this conversation into your histories. Finrod is not a metaphor, Finrod is my pride and joy. Well, Finrod might be a metaphor, actually. But he’s mine, not yours."

"The point."

"Well, quite. Faux-fatherhood, all its stubborn repetitions and relentless demands, tethers me further to the ordinary. Biscuits and blankets, so on and so forth. It adds to me in a way that implies its loss would detract from me, you see. Music without the tether leaves me drifting, war without it leaves me vicious. Through you and he, a set of fragments forces its way into a recognisable shape. Neither harmonious nor beautiful, I'm afraid, but durable despite its homeliness. Am I nothing without it, or even close to incomplete? No. But neither am I complete. In short, the monkey itself may not be your metaphor, but the fact that I have a monkey is entirely your fault."

They retreat to Elrond's private study as evening falls, the parade becoming a distant music, the creation of a separate universe, something happening to other people in another world. Finrod the monkey makes himself a nest in Elrond's manuscript shelf, carefully rearranging several priceless histories to create optimal comfort. Estel is finally coaxed to bed by Gilraen, though not before extracting promises that the monkey would still be there tomorrow, and that the Monkey Man would not have left with his newest, dearest friend.

Then, it is just the two of them and the weight of years.

"Tell me about the names," Elrond says quietly. “Maglor, I had thought… I thought my mother named me in the tradition of her own brothers. Elured and Elurin. And I followed suit in naming my own sons, Elladan and Elrohir. Do you tell me that I… that this… that it had all meant nothing?”

Maglor pours himself another glass of wine. Elrond's best, naturally, the bottle he's been saving for the return of the king or the end of the world, whichever comes first. He closes his eyes, sighing. 

"Those boys," he says. "The lost twins, your uncles. The loss of your uncles used to wake Maedhros up every night. It haunted him, every day and every night. He’d wake screaming, you know. This was before we… acquired you. It was terrible, such remorse, such… self-disgust. What I’m trying to say, Elrond, is that you’re not exactly wrong. You were named after your dead uncles. But not by the person you thought, and not for the reason you think.”

 "They were our names," says Elrond, jaw clenched as tight as his fists. “You had no right.” 

"And Maedhros was my brother," says Maglor. “But no, Elrond. I have no right.”

The simple present tense of it hangs in the air like a blade.

"He couldn’t bear it," Maglor continues, staring into his wine and swilling it around the glass absently. "Two boys, twins, around the age you were. Lost because of us, because of our men. Because of what we'd become. So when we found you, when we took you—and we did take you, let's not dress it in prettier words—we wanted to... fix it. To try and make it all mean something other than what it meant."

"So you named us after them,” Elrond snarls. “Elwing and Eärendil’s twin sons, Collateral and Damage.” 

"I sang you those names, yes, every night. Every night, those little moments I grew to love and rely on. I wove the names into your sleep like threads into cloth. Elrond and Elros, star-dome and star-foam, the heavens and the sea. Your mother's lost brothers, reborn in her lost sons. Maedhros and I needed the symmetry of it, the cloak of redemption. As if naming you after the dead could resurrect them. As if we could sing away the memory of what had been done.”

"But that's not what troubles you most," Elrond observes. “Is it?” 

Maglor's laugh is bitter as burnt honey. "No. What troubles me most is that it worked. It worked, and how well it worked. You became those names. You wore them like skin. And now I've stolen even your mother's last gift, the gift of her voice. I overwrote her song with mine. The perfect conquest. And I, Maglor, the perfect conqueror. Oh, if Atya could only see me now.” 

Elrond’s eyes widen with fury, and he slams an open palm on the table between them. Maglor does not flinch. “You dare walk into my city, a sanctuary city built in war, on the anniversary of its founding—and you dare speak to me of conquest? You dare tell me, destroyer of lands, child-thief, of your conquest? I, whom you conquered?” 

"Yes, Elrond, I do indeed dare," Maglor tells Elrond, shrugging simply. "Who but I to tell you, hm? I conquered you. I renamed you. I loved you. I love you. All these things are true at once. Names are the most efficient instruments of conquest, second only to love. Not a language in itself with all the idioms and evasions therein, but a single, repeated utterance that can brand a thing and tie it to oneself. A name is like a prayer: it is conditional on obedience. It is meaningless if not answered to. It can preserve and punish, claim lineage and sever it. Perhaps, my dear boy, you may fear your history less if you cease to believe that names are neutral conveniences, and admit the act of naming a thing is no benevolent gesture."

The truth of it sits between them like a third presence. Every name Elrond gives—to cities, to foundlings, to the very stars—is an act of claiming. Of trying to hold fast to things that cannot be held.

"I named him Estel," Elrond says quietly, a hand raised to his aching temples. “The child. I named him Estel, you know.” 

“Why?” Maglor’s voice is not unkind. It couldn’t be. 

“Because he will die,” Elrond admits, swallowing hard. “Because I took that child in my arms, knowing that I will come to love him and knowing he will die, and that his death will come in less than a blink of my eye in the relative count of years. I wanted to tether him to myself, and a name was the only thing I could think of to use. Gil-Estel, my father. Estel, my son. So I named him Estel.” 

"Without asking his mother."

"She hasn't forgiven me."

"Nor should she. You named her son Hope and told her that it was in her language, for her people. It was. And yet, it was also according to your needs. You look at a Dúnedain infant and saw naught but your own heart and an ancient Elvish lineage. The Noldor imagination at its finest."

The words sting. They are meant to sting.

Elrond nods, face still taut with rage, but starting to soften at the edges with remorse. Maglor shakes his head. “Don’t give in to it. Don’t start sitting there, feeling sorry for what you’ve done. You’ve done it. It’s done.” 

Elrond manages a laugh. “Is that so? Is that your approach to… what? Three kinslayings?”

Maglor winces, then shrugs. “I’m afraid it had to be.” 

It was the truth. Remorse was a sickness that struck without symptoms, Maglor had discovered in his long years of wandering, and it did not drag clarity alongside as a co-morbidity. He had wanted to wake one morning after days and weeks of singing himself hoarse, instantly cured of all the delusions that wrote Beleriand into being, and the curing being the first step forward, the first step towards forgetting. But such a thing had never happened. Remorse, it had turned out, was not the noble suffering promised by poets but a chronic, low-grade infection you just had to learn to live with. Who was left to forgive him? Did they even know what to forgive him for? How would such a conversation even go? 

I’m sorry I turned up to raze your city and you tried to kill yourself at the age my brothers were still playing hide and fucking seek in the fields. Oh, and that I renamed your sons, and they grew to love me. 

Oh, that’s fine, Maglor, thank you for apologising. Now, what’s for tea? 

This, of course, is why Maglor wears cloaks and masks and monkeys, and makes an almost wondrous living out of despair. It was not giving up, or being afraid of judgement. He had simply, at some point a few thousand years ago, convinced himself that the only route to true absolution was to master the art of self-deception. Elrond says nothing, but pours his foster father another glass of wine, and they leaned companionably against each other, watching the impressive fireworks display Mithrandir had cooked up. 

“It’s beautiful, Elrond,” Maglor says finally. “You’ve built a remarkable life.” 

A dimple quirks into Elrond’s cheek. “Oh? Beautiful now? Even after you’ve spent half the day letting me know exactly how much of an uncomfortable facsimile the city is?” 

The sky darkens further, and the shadows between the terraces and towers grow longer, more pronounced. Footsteps slap sharper against the cobblestones. Townsfolk spill from the sidewalks into the road, family groups into each other, and strangers share wine like childhood compatriots. They create the illusion that Imladris has always existed. That it was not built out of need. 

“You think I will fault you for uncomfortable facsimiles, Elrond?” Maglor winks at him. “After I just told you that I named you after your dead uncles so that my brother would stop screaming in his sleep?” 

Elrond actually laughs this time. “Oho? Do you like it enough to stay?” 

“Oh, Finrod would get bored of it in a few weeks, and so would I. I said it’s beautiful, didn’t I?” Maglor raises his eyebrows over his wineglass, like he used to do at dinner all those years ago. “If I liked to take root and stay inside beautiful things, I’d have married one of my cousins and had thirty children before I was five hundred. But I do like your city, patchwork facsimile as it is. Do I mistake your careful forgeries for historical fact like your citizens do? I’m afraid not. You’ve built a magnificent delusion, and I fear chained yourself to being both its curator and most devoted skeptic. Still. Still, it is beautiful.” 

As he tries to sleep, Elrond tells himself it's only exhaustion. Only the mind losing its edges. But the pictures keep flickering: his own face in too many places, scenes on scenes that never quite stay still. He's on a shore. The sea moves at its own frantic tempo and something in him tries to match it, to drown out the tremor under his ribs. A name cracks open in his hands and he's suddenly bereft; a necklace slips and splinters; a window tilts, and beyond it a face so near it blurs, hands light as birds smoothing his hair back from his face. None of it stays, but it leaves behind pulse after pulse of sorrow he can't explain. He looks up, and the stars playfully pinch hole after hole through the dark.

Light hands. Young hands. Little-girl hands.

There was once a night when he and Elros and Maglor lay in damp grass and watched star after star slide across the sky. Elros had always been a little pedant. He said, they're not sliding at all, not really. They're not, are they?

Fine, let's pretend they're rafts, drifting on a roaring black sea, Maglor replied.

Why are they drifting? Asked Elrond, ever-curious. Why does the sea roar? 

This image too, wavers, dislodged. The river rushes on, and his hands scrabble through the empty air.

Three days into Maglor's visit (for it becomes a visit, somehow, without anyone quite deciding it should be) Elrond finds him in the Hall of Fire, teaching Estel a song. Not one of the great laments or the historical ballads, and not That Song, but something simple and silly about a fish that wanted to climb a tree, an old clapping-song he’d sing for Elros and Elrond to play hand-clapping games to. The monkey sits on the boy's head, occasionally pulling his hair when he gets the words wrong, and much to Elrond’s understandable surprise (Estel tended to howl when spoken to in any manner aside from extreme deference), his son is patiently accepting the little punishment.

“Let’s try again," Maglor says patiently. "The fish doesn't 'wish' to climb, it 'dreams.' The difference matters."

"But why?" Estel asks, being the right age to learn how to use the question mark as a weapon. “Why does it matter?” 

"Because wishing is what you do when you're awake. Dreaming is what you do when the world isn't watching. The fish can only want impossible things when nobody's there to tell it about the limitations of fins."

“What’s limitations?” 

“Clearly, the memory capacity of the Edain,” sighs Maglor, raising an imaginary conductor’s wand. “Let’s go again, from the top.” 

Elrond watches from the doorway, unnoticed. This is Maglor as he was, once: patient with sticky, silly children, finding philosophy in nonsense, making the impossible seem merely difficult. The Maglor whose lullabies Elrond has sung to the people he loves most. 

Lullabies do not make kinslayers. This he knows. And yet, it never stops the worry from curdling in his chest, the only constant of all the cradles he has sung beside. For the tune endures after all, and nothing empty can truly endure: every vacant hroä holds a fragment of the fëa that once forsook it. Can a song be washed of meaning? Is tenderness immune to ideology? Groping about blindly in the dark of their dreams, Elrond had always worried that he was not watering the crops for his children to harvest, but salting the earth before the seeds could be planted. 

"You worry too much, beloved," Cel had tried to soothe him, a long time ago when he told her of his fears. "Look how peacefully they sleep through it."

"Do you think children behind siege walls do not play knucklebones with their brothers?" he’d replied, voice low and terrible. "Children can sleep under rubble, Cel. Children have.”

Now, he tells himself for the hundredth time that he is overthinking it. The clapping song is no Noldolantë. And the inherited nature of lullabies and children’s songs makes it very unlikely that Maglor wrote this one specifically for he and Elros, let alone Estel. Very unlikely that he wrote it at all. By the balance of probabilities, one of Maglor's parents must have sung him the very same tune when he was very young. One of his parents must have repeated it into his ear so often it became almost muscle memory, cycling over and over again in his mind. Which parent? he wonders idly, watching the monkey pull the boy’s hair again. 

The smile dies on his face. Oh god—which one?

(Sixteen years hence, or six thousand years ago)

The boy who would be twenty tomorrow sits in the same chair Estel had always sat in, but his feet now reach the floor. His shoulders have broadened, his jaw sharpened, and there’s something in his eyes that isn't there before that Elrond knows of, but refuses to acknowledge. One week ago, Elrond had told him his true name.

"I have something to tell you," is all he’d said to start with, and the words themselves felt, oddly, like deja vu. And Aragorn, for that was the name waiting under Estel like bone under skin, had listened intently as Elrond told him of his heritage, his destiny, his doom dressed up in glory. The boy's face went through transformations: shock, denial, anger, fear, and finally a kind of recognition, as if his body had always known what his mind just learnt.

"My name," he said slowly, "is Aragorn."

"Yes."

"But I am also Estel."

"Yes."

"And I will have another name, if I... if I become what you're telling me I might become."

“If you become the king of your people. Yes."

Now, a week later, the boy (man, technically, ridiculously, as if twenty years are enough to make anyone anything) stands and walks to the window. Beyond it, Imladries continues its eternal performance of paradise, water falling upward in certain lights, stars visible even at noon if you knew where to look.

"Maglor offered,” Aragorn says quietly, "to sing my real name back to me."

Elrond's chest tightens. "When did you speak with Maglor? You can’t have, not in the last week. Aside from the few visits… but the last one was three years ago.”

"He never left.”

“Excuse me?” Elrond blinks. “What do you mean he never left?” 

“Don't you know? He's been living in the old tower right outside the city, the one you keep saying is unstable but never bothered to fix. He fixed it. He and that monkey. He's been teaching me things. Maglor, I mean. Not Finrod. Songs, mostly, but other things too. How to lie in multiple languages, how to know when someone's lying to you. How to survive having more names than you have selves. The usual.”

The betrayal of it, the secret of it, should sting. Instead, Elrond feels only a tired recognition. Of course Maglor stayed. Of course he fixed the bloody tower. Of course he finds the one tower Elrond built 'wrong,' the one that doesn't quite match the patchwork blueprint of lost childhood homes, and makes it his home.

“Can he?" Elrond asks. "Sing your name back to you?"

Aragorn turns from the window, and for a moment, just a moment, he looks five years old again, chasing a monkey through the halls, delighted by everything, betrayed by nothing.

"He says he can. He says names are just songs with delusions of grandeur. Which I realise, you don’t need to tell me, is one of his odd little sayings that makes no sense, which he wraps himself up in to keep warm. But yes, Ada. He says he can sing Estel out of me like poison from a wound, and sing Aragorn so deep into my bones that nothing can ever call it out again. He says he can even sing me a new name, one nobody's ever worn, one that would be mine alone."

"And?" 

Elrond’s hands shake slightly, but he folds them behind his back. 

"And I told him I'll think about it."

Three years. Maglor had been here three years, nesting cheerfully in Elrond's blind spot like a headlouse, teaching his foster son's foster son how to wear multiple people at once. Still, the idea amuses him a little, comforts him more. Of course Maglor decided to stay here and bathe in his transgressions. After all, the reminder that you had hurt someone could sharpen the edges of yourself, because if you were sharp enough to hurt a thing you loved, then you were absolutely real. There’s a perverse sort of existential satisfaction in it, and Elrond knows his Atya well enough to know he basks in such things like a python in the sun.

"What did you decide? Or have you not decided?” 

Aragorn smiles, silhouetted by the sun, and it is neither Estel's smile nor the smile of a king. It is something else entirely, something that belongs only to this particular configuration of light.

"I decided that I'll be all of them. Estel when you need hope, since I suppose that was your intent. Aragorn when the world needs an heir, Strider when I need to disappear, and probably something else when there's a kingdom to be reclaimed. And when I'm alone, when nobody's watching or needing or claiming me? Then I'll be whoever I am when nobody's listening for a name to call me by."

The silence stretches between them, filled with all the weight of eighteen years, with Elrond building a boy name by name, story by story, into something that can carry the hopes of the world. And now the boy looks at him with eyes that understood the scaffolding, patient enough to imagine the blueprints. 

"Do you hate me for it?" Elrond asks, and his voice cracks slightly on the question. "For taking your name away? For giving you one that was never yours to begin with?"

“Do you hate Maglor?” 

“No. Of course not. But I probably should.” 

"Which me would hate you?" Aragorn counters, settling back into the chair but somehow making it seem smaller than it did moments before. "Estel might, if he understood what he lost. Aragorn might, if he cared more about authenticity than survival. The king I might become probably should, if he wants to claim any kind of legitimacy that isn't built on elven architecture."

He pauses, running a hand through hair that catches the afternoon light exactly the way Elrond remembers Elwing's doing, and the recognition is like a knife between his ribs.

"But the man sitting here right now? The one who's been all of those names and none of them? He loves you. Not for it, but despite it.”

“Though he shouldn’t?”

“Oh, Ada. It was wrong, but not every wrong is a kinslaying. There’s a fundamental difference between yourself and Maglor… one that Maglor himself pointed out somewhat recently, in fact.” 

"What's that?"

“You didn’t stand there watching and twiddling your thumbs as my mother leapt off a cliff to what would, in quite literally any other circumstance but that one, be certain death.” 

Elrond feels something loosen in his chest, and he barks out a laugh. “Valar. Valar, Estel. No. Of course not. I suppose I didn’t do that.” 

Aragorn stands again, and crosses to where Elrond sits. He places a hand on his shoulder. Outside, the impossible city continues its eternal dance against time.

"Will you stay?" Elrond asks, echoing a question he’s asked ever so many times before, in so many different configurations. “For a while, Aragorn?” 

"For now. Until spring, probably. Until the road calls loud enough that I can't pretend I don't hear it." Aragorn's smile is sad and fond and utterly without resentment. "But I'll come back. Names or no names, kings or no kings, I'll always come back. This is home, Ada. Whatever else I am or become, that much is always true."

He finds Gilraen by the waters that fell upward every seventh hour, and apologises once again, for the final time. 

"I just wish I knew," he confides in her, after she acknowledges it. "What it is to know what it is I miss. My name. A mother. Sirion. Valar, Gilraen. I wish I knew Sirion. I've spent my life recycling things—tragedies, names, wars, children."

“Were you happy as a child?" she takes his hand in both of hers. "It is a question I had always wished to ask you, though I never dared it before. Were you happy, Lord Elrond?"

"The worst part is, I was. There were times of unhappiness, yes, the ordinary griefs of growing up in war. And of course, in the earliest years, we missed our mother, dreadfully so, even though we did not truly remember our father. And Maedhros. When Maedhros leapt—that—that was unimaginable. But I think of it all now, and I think I was happy. Happy, in a way you finish a story in a book, and name it a good ending. When you walk by a portrait's smile and name it joy. But does the story truly end well? Is the person in the portrait truly happy? I remember the stories and images from my childhood, and I think I was happy. We were, Elros and I. And yet under the memory of joy, there is guilt. Perhaps we should not have been."

"Your mother too is a child of war," she reminds him. "Three, was she not, hidden away in the column leaving Doriath, her entire family tree razed to the ground behind her, her very soul barely solid enough for true memory to form?"

"Yes, three or four, if the records are correct. Smuggled out, strapped to the underclothing of her nurse."

The water continues its impossible ascent, each drop a small rebellion against the nature of things. Imladris is full of such rebellions. We have said this over and over again. It is full of fires that burn cold, stones that grow like plants, time chasing its own tail. Elrond built them all, these beautiful impossibilities.

"She may bear ill-feeling towards our monkey-rearing friend and his brother, I am almost certain of it. And truly, if the fellow in question does at any point show his face in Aman, I for one would be rather concerned for her sanity if she doesn't skewer him like a roasted carp the minute he steps ashore. There is such a thing as being too forgiving, after all. Frankly, if I was her, I'd probably take a mortar and pestle to the man and spread him on buttered bread every morning for the foreseeable future. There's bound to be some nutritional value to the fellow, he claims to have eaten every mushroom there is to exist."

"Spoken like a true chef," snorts Elrond. "But Gilraen, what is your point here?"

"That I understand your anxieties around your mother disliking your foster fathers, primarily because it is less an anxiety and more a certainty, considering the circumstances," she shrugs. "Of course she'll hate them. But, my lord, let me ask you this. Do you truly think a war child once smuggled out of a burning city, strapped to her nurse with scarcely a true memory of her own mother, and raised by others in a newfound refugee settlement, would ever judge her child for loving the captors who raise him? Do you think that woman, of all the people in this world, does not know of the blurred lines between love and survival?"

"I don't know your mother, Lord Elrond," she continues wearily. "And even after these rather aggravating eighteen years surrounded by the most insufferable people in the world, I still do not understand your kind. But we Dúnedain—more than any other—know children of war, my lord. Not to say anything of the mothers who birth them. We know such things far too well. I chastised you for naming Aragorn without my counsel, and I am angry that you did such a thing at all. Though I bear immense love and gratitude to you for your hospitality, and the father you gave to him, to this day I bear a grudge that you named him Estel. But never in my life have I blamed him for answering to his name. Never will I blame him for naming you Ada in Arathorn's stead. Not once, my lord. Not ever."

The water climbs upward again, and Gilraen wonders if this too might one day become one of those stories that sound fictitious even as she's living it. Everything in Rivendell has the quality of having already been transformed into narrative before it finishes happening. She watches Elrond's reflection scatter across the impossible cascade and thinks: this will sound like a song tomorrow, even to us.

"You know what haunts me," she asks, not looking at him and watching instead how the light catches the ascending droplets, "is that somewhere, in the version of this conversation I'll remember in twenty years, you'll have said something profound about names and loss. Something that makes sense of all this mess. But right now, standing here, my lord. You look so…old."

"Old, Gilraen?" Elrond turns, lip quirking up into one of the wonderful, fleeting smiles he catches from Maglor. "Very old?"

"Twice as very. My grandmother," Gilraen continues, laughing at Elrond’s aghast expression at being compared to a grandparent, "used to say that children are born knowing their real names, and the world spends the rest of their lives making them forget. She'd trace letters on my palm with her finger when I couldn’t sleep, spelling out words that could be my name. Some people lose them twice. And some gain them."

A fish swims downward through the upward-falling water, and Elrond watches it, not without envy.

"I named him Estel because—" Elrond begins, then stops.

"Because you were afraid," Gilraen finishes for him. “You were afraid you would lose him. That he would die.” 

The waterfall's song changes key: it always does at the transitions, as if the water remembers different melodies depending on which direction it's traveling. The two sit in silence for a while. 

"There's this story," Elrond says finally, his voice carrying the particular exhaustion of someone who spends centuries explaining himself to people who will never understand, "about a… sea creature. I grew up by the sea, as you know. A mermaid, who trades her voice for legs. Everyone thinks it's about sacrifice, about love conquering all. But what if it wasn’t love? What if she gave up her voice because she realised that no one will ever learn to speak her language, so she might as well be mute in theirs?"

Gilraen feels something cold settle in her chest, like a stone thrown into still water. "Is that what you think you have done? Teach my son to be beautiful and mute?"

"I think," Elrond says, watching a leaf spiral upward past his shoulder, defying gravity with the casual rebellion that characterises everything in this place, "I gave him words to hold onto when the world tries to tell him he doesn't exist. Whether those words belong to him or not seemed less important to me, than making sure he doesn't disappear entirely. That I wouldn’t lose him entirely.”

Lies made manifest, Gilraen thinks. Oh, how you love him. How you love them all. 

"Do you want to know what I used to be really afraid of?" she asks, and doesn't wait for his answer, the truth spilling out all at once. "I am afraid that you will love him so completely, so absolutely, that when the time comes for him to choose between being your son and being mine, he won't hesitate. There’s your answer, my lord. There’s your answer to the question you’re too afraid to ask us both.”

The water hangs suspended for a moment: eighth hour approaching, the brief pause between falling and rising. In that suspension, in the salt-spray, Gilraen sees her son as he is at four years old, chasing a monkey through halls he will never quite belong to, laughing like a loon, a carefree, careless bundle of life which hadn’t yet learned to question which version of himself he's performing.

"The terrible thing about love," Elrond says, his voice breaking very slowly, "is that it always believes it can save everything it touches. I looked at your baby and I thought: I will give him everything I wish I had been given. Everything I have been given. A place in my story. A name that means something. A future bright enough to justify the darkness that brought him to me."

"And did you? Save him?"

“I don’t know, Gilraen.” 

"He dreams in Westron," Gilraen says quietly. "Did you know that? All these years surrounded by Sindarin and Quenya, raised on elvish lullabies and ancient histories, and when he sleeps, when his mind is unguarded, he dreams in the language I taught him on his earliest nights.”

Elrond says nothing, but something in his stillness suggests he has not known this, that this small rebellion of the unconscious mind feels like both victory and defeat.

"The world doesn't end," Gilraen continues, watching the now-ordinary waterfall with its now-sensible direction, "even when we think our particular tragedy should stop everything in its tracks. It just keeps moving, demanding that we figure out how to live with what we've done, what we've chosen, what we've lost. My son will be king, or he will die trying. Either way, he'll do it carrying names that were never quite his, speaking prophecies that are in fact someone else's prayers."

Somewhere a clock chimes the hour, and time resumes its orderly progression, indifferent as ever. 

Elrond finds Maglor in the unstable tower, which is, he now understands, perfectly stable and has been for three years. The monkey sits in a shaft of afternoon light, methodically arranging what appears to be Elrond's missing correspondence into neat piles. Old love letters from Celebrían, ancient diplomatic missives from Gil-galad, children's drawings that Arwen made decades ago. The miniature anthropologist had apparently conducted an archaeological survey of Elrond's emotional life.

"Your filing system," Maglor says without looking up from his harp, "has always been abysmal. Finrod was simply trying to help."

The room is wrong in all the ways that made it look right. Where Elrond built Rivendell as a careful translation of lost places, Maglor simply made a space exist where it shouldn’t. The walls curve where they normally wouldn’t, the ceiling opens to the sky in a way that doesn’t look like it boded well for future rains, and the furniture looks as though it grows there rather than being placed. It is aggressively, unapologetically itself.

"Three years," Elrond says, settling into a chair that definitely wasn’t there yesterday but feels like it's been waiting for him since the Music begins. "You've been here three years. My dear Atya. Are you insane?”

“Oh, you knew," Maglor corrects him, wagging a pompous finger. "You simply chose not to know. There's a difference. One requires blindness, the other requires active participation in one's own ignorance."

The monkey, Finrod, looks up from his organisational project, nodding. Disapproval, perhaps, or maybe just the opinion of someone who spent considerable time observing the peculiar ways lesser creatures managed to avoid acknowledging the obvious, and considering itself quietly above them. 

"I spoke with Gilraen," Elrond says.

"I heard. Sound travels strangely in this place you've built. Sometimes I catch conversations from three thousand years ago. Sometimes I hear arguments that haven't happened yet. The architecture of repression has interesting acoustic properties. Anyway, yes, Gilraen. Wise woman. Fantastic figure, might I add? Arse of the century. Shame about the mortality. Give her a few thousand years and she might have figured out how to forgive you for loving her child incorrectly."

"Is that what I did? Love incorrectly?"

Maglor's hands still. "You loved the way you were taught to love. With the assumption that preservation and possession were the same thing. That love had to latch on.” 

"And you?" Elrond's voice carries decades of questions he never learns how to ask. "How did you love us?"

“Incorrectly. Obviously. I turned you into harmonies in a composition I wrote about my own guilt. Very sophisticated guilt, mind you. Guilt with excellent technical execution."

The monkey finishes sorting the correspondence and moves on to what appears to be a collection of pressed flowers that Elrond is fairly certain had been presumed destroyed when Eregion fell. But here they are, perfectly preserved, being arranged by small nimble fingers according to some logic that probably made sense if you were a creature unencumbered by the weight of historical consciousness, moving about the world like an optimistic anthropologist.

"The names," Elrond says. “Maglor, the names…”

"Yes, the names. My masterpiece of cultural ventriloquism. How I made you carry your mother's loss in my language. Taught you to be orphans in the dialect of your captors." Maglor sighs. "Very efficient, really, in strategic terms. I have conquered your history without burning a single book."

"But we were happy." The words feel like a confession, like admitting to collaboration, to complicity in his own erasure.

"Oh yes. Wonderfully happy. That's the genius of it, you see. The most effective theft always feels like rescue. The most effective annihilation always wears the mask of preservation. I saved you by teaching you to disappear into the shapes I need you to be."

A bird lands on the windowsill, or what passed for a windowsill in a room that seemed to be designed by someone with only a theoretical understanding of architecture. It regards them with the suggestion that it has opinions about their conversation, and finds them both wanting. And then it flies away, because it cannot be arsed.

"And yet."

"And yet what?"

"You stay. Here. In the wrong tower with your anthropologist monkey. You teach Aragorn songs and survival techniques and how to lie in multiple languages. You keep being what you've always been: a keeper of small, lost things."

"Perhaps that's what I am. Not a father, not a captor, not a savior. But someone who collects the debris from other people's tragedies and arranges it into patterns that look like meaning."

"Is that what we are then, you and I?” Elrond asks. "Debris?"

Maglor gestures around the room that exists in defiance of several fundamental principles of physics, out at the impossible, badly archived city. "This entire place is debris, Elrond. Beautiful, impossible debris arranged by someone who never learnt the difference between preservation and possession."

"I don't forgive you," Elrond says finally. “I love you, but I don’t forgive you.” 

“Good,” Maglor smiles, looking proud of him, truly. “Good. That’s good. Because I don’t apologise. I cannot.” 

"Then what is this?" Elrond points at himself, the room, Maglor himself. “Self-flagellation?” 

"This?" Maglor looks around the room where the monkey is now constructing what appears to be a small shrine out of pressed flowers, stolen correspondence, and Elrohir’s old drawing of a geometrically impossible horse. "This is two people who ruin each other in the name of love, sitting in a room that shouldn't exist, acknowledging that ruins remain ruins even as we gild them.”

"Will you stay?" Elrond asks.

"Where else would I go?” Maglor raises an eyebrow, winks. “Valinor?” 

“Well, yes, actually,” Elrond shrugs. “I mean afterwards, of course, not now. You could sail with me.” 

Maglor grimaces. “Why on earth would I do such a thing?” And then his face turns serious, and he draws in a shaky breath—for the first time, the first time since they first parted, Elrond finds tears in his foster father’s eyes. “But can I ask you to do something, Elrond? When you’re in Aman, I mean.” 

“Of course,” Elrond frowns. “What is it? Speak to your family?” 

“No. If they all wish to hear my voice so badly, tell Celegorm to start building a boat. I ask of you one thing only. Watch your tongue around your mother.” 

“What?” 

Maglor sighs, impatient. “The tongue is an unruly thing, Elrond. Even yours,” he explains, his story-teller cadence drawing Elrond forwards even now. “Even my father, the greatest orator I have ever known, would slip up on his words every now and then. So will you. And so I know that one day in Aman, you will be speaking casually to your mother. Perhaps a few decades on, once you have both dropped your guards around each other, feel no need to watch your words. Then there will come a moment, as mundane as a breakfast natter, that you slip up and refer to me as Atya. And the look on her face, Elrond. It will shatter the world. Watch your tongue. Call me Atya anywhere you want, however much you want. But don’t you dare say it like so, before her. The sight of that helpless, furious despair on a face so young, it would shatter the world and take you with it.” 

“How do you know?” 

“You know how I know,” whispers Maglor. “You know what I’ve seen. What I’ve never stopped seeing. That there will always be a part of me I left behind in Sirion, when I saw such a look on such a face. Do you know what it does to a man, Elrond, to be the cause of a thing like that?" 

Elrond nods, taking his foster father in, all of him. 

In this existence that sometimes resembles a vast library where all the spines have been bleached by time and curated sunlight, among all the unreadable volumes and the chapters torn away by storms we weren't alive to remember, we hunt for sentences that might still hold meaning. We collect punctuation marks, seek cohesion in the spaces between what was said and what was swallowed. There are ellipses in a biography, but also recurring motifs. Maglor is life-grabbing, this rich, remarkable man who will unsing the mistake Elrond had made with Aragorn. Maglor is also the hole in his head where there is nothing to look at, nothing at all. Is he a survival story? Is he a cautionary tale?"

Do you know what it does to a man, to be the cause of a thing like that? 

"I do, Atya." 

"I know you do. That's why I'm here. That's why you're here."

He remembers her hands most clearly.

Elwing has slim, pale hands and she bites three of her nails, wearing the others long and shaped into tan ovals. On the longest mornings, Elrond and his brother crawl into one or the other's bed and play their little twin-games under the covers until the sun strains high over the sky, telling their nurse to go away or else. Finger-counting games, hand-clapping games, story-telling games and at some point Elwing always bounces into their bedroom and says: "either the two of you head for the tub right now and have your bath… or you let me play too!"

"No you can't, you're not allowed," Elros sticks his tongue out at her, though he eagerly shuffles to the side to let her join, finding her a much more pleasant playmate than his rather pedantic twin who has no interest in finding innovative loopholes in the rules governing rock-sword-leaf. "Little girls can't play this game, it's only for boys!"

"Well, let's have another go and you can watch as a little girl beats your score in two rounds flat."

Little-girl hands, that's what their mother has. He remembers that most of all, the shaped nails and the bitten, the ease with which they learn the rhythm of every hand-clapping game in a moment. He touches them in his mind, and they are as smooth as cold stone. They were soft once, hot with life, scrabbling against a nursemaid's chest. She was given thirty five years to love and be loved like she must long to be. 

It's not allowed, he thinks. You're not allowed. Little girls cannot die, not even if they're little-mothers, not even in this world of interminable strife. Little girls cannot die. Elwing leaps off the cliff barely a hundredth of Arwen's count of years.

Little girls cannot die. Arwen. Oh Arwen, he thinks. Oh Elros. Maedhros. Cel. Oh, Arwen.

For this is the first loss. The one all the others must be measured by. 

The game is over. Elwing calls him home. 

But Elrond hears nothing at all. The sea thunders its soothing song into his ears, and he hears nothing at all. He's on the beach, and the world is on fire. Elrond stands alone on the beach, and his little-mother is gone. Tears run hot on his cheeks, though from then or now he can never be sure. Elwing is calling out for him, laughing, and he cannot hear her laughter. She’s calling him home. She’s turning to sea-foam before his eyes, calling his name over and over and over. But Elrond cannot save her, because he cannot hear her. The sea roars in his ears. The sea roars in his ears as his little-mother turns into foam, and he cannot hear her at all.