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It is three hundred years before Arwen tells Elrond, offhand in a conversation about something else, that on one rainy night two months after Celebrìan sailed, Maglor saved her life without knowing it. She says it in passing, like it's something obvious, something she expects him to already know.
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Arwen Undomiel had been the first of Elrond's children to have met Maglor — she found him sleeping in a forest, kicked him awake, and all but demanded that he be her very best friend. She was all of four years old then — a terribly behaved, remarkably rude little chatterbox.
When Maglor received a beautifully decorated handwritten invite for Arwen's fifth begetting day, personally addressed to him in Celebrìan's looping cursive, he spent a week carving a music box that sang for hours after a single twist of the handle, borrowed a heavy duty set of ravens from Cìrdan, and sent the whole lot to Imladris. He did not turn up himself.
When he received a beautifully decorated handwritten invite for Arwen's sixth begetting day, personally addressed to him in Celebrìan's looping cursive, he started work on another hand carved toy, possibly something she could run around with — work off some of her immense energy stores. A week into the process, he received a second note, short, succinct and ominous:
Hello Master Maglor
If you don't come HOME for my begetting day. Next time you sleep. I will kill. You.
- Love Your best friend, Arwen (I can rite now)
It came in a plain paper envelope, ensconced in a note written by an adolescent boy's hand:
We're sorry Master Maglor, she made us do it, don't tell Ada we've nicked his falcon or he will give us h— because somehow it'll be our fault even though we're not the ones sending death threats to kinslayers. Please come, we'd love to meet you! Love from E&E.
PS you owe us a begetting day present too, one each thank you, you can't fob us off with a joint present.
Maglor had chuckled at the letter, not least because of the iron fist Celebrìan must be running the household with, for the twins to censor the word "hell" even whilst being emissaries for, as they put it so eloquently, "death threats to kinslayers".
He never lived in Imladris, and had no desire to: though Elrond and Celebrìan invited him repeatedly, he had always said no. He liked his sorrowful transience, his nomadic lifestyle. He even liked his wary, mildly eccentric sometimes-neighbour Cìrdan. Maglor himself was a bit of an eccentric those days, anyhow.
When he missed the pull of roots, he grew carrots and radishes. He had a series of badly behaved cats. He learned craft after craft, there by the sea: learned to carve toys, grow herbs, speak to cats, embroider lace. He had no desire to ever visit Imladris, and was content for the family to visit him – whenever Cìrdan wrote to them to say Maglor had arrived at his shore. Usually it was sometime in April, or perhaps May – somewhere in the belly of spring.
The day he received Arwen's death threat and the twins' apology, Maglor finished carving her begetting day present and started on two presents for the boys. He did not ask Cìrdan for a heavy duty bird this time. Instead, he asked to borrow a horse and a travelling cloak.
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The night he saves Arwen Undomiel's life, it is one in the morning, and Maglor is fast asleep in Cìrdan's spare room, where he had been for the past week – having decided that sleeping in the rain was not conducive to musical pursuits. Arwen comes rushing into the dark, stumbles over the threshold.
"Arwen!" he shoots up in bed, seeing her tall figure in his doorway. "Arwen, is that you?"
"Cìrdan wrote to Ada yesterday," she whispered as he swiftly lit the lamp on his bedside. She is pale and feverish, soaked to the bone, he realises, she must have ridden hard overnight — without an escort. "C-c-c-Cìrdan, he — he-he said you were here."
"Arwen! You are freezing, girl. Have I not impressed upon you, you cannot come here alone," he starts, fear sharpening his tone, making it sound angry as he rummages in the wardrobe for a towel. "These are dangerous times, there are reports of yrrch activity everywhere, your father will… Arwen?"
"Please, please come to Imladris, Maglor, please," Arwen sinks to the floor at his threshold, weeping as if her heart would break. "Please, please, please come home with me."
Maglor takes a step back, suddenly afraid. Arwen's tears weren't because he was sharp with her, he knows that — the girl had always possessed a remarkable tolerance for scoldings (she had been a certified hellion in her youth, after all) and her normal reaction to being chastised, even as an adult, was to cackle and do whatever it was again. So this reaction makes Maglor's heart rise in his throat.
"My sweet, what has happened?" he approaches her slowly, draping one of his own robes around her, frightened by the storm of hysterical sobbing. "Arwen, hush, hush, my child. Come, get off the floor and sit with me, tell Maglor what hurts you so."
She does not reply or move, only collapses into his arms, but Cìrdan walks towards the door, his own eyes heavy with sorrow. "I would have told you earlier, but I had a feeling she would come. Do not be harsh on her for travelling alone, Maglor. She is very distressed."
"No, no, of course not," Maglor kisses Arwen's hair, strokes it back from her face. He looks up, dreading whatever news Cìrdan is about to deliver. "What is it? Tell me, Cìrdan!"
"Last autumn, Celebrìan was taken from her escort in the Redhorn on her way to Lothlorien, and taken into a cave by yrrch," he says, paler than the stars, barely audible over the girl's weeping. "She underwent torment for some weeks, and though Elrond healed her, the wounds to the fëa were too grievous. She left for Valinor last month, from this very shore."
Maglor sits on the floor beside Arwen, stunned. His hands shake — Celebrìan. Beautiful, chatty, eccentric Celebrìan, who sent him ridiculous presents on whichever day she decides is his begetting day (different days each year, because she did not believe in calendars). The waver in Cìrdan's voice when he said torment makes it crystal clear, the kind of torment it was.
He tries to picture her. Hollowed-out, atrophied cheeks, undereye circles, thin shadows under her clothes like a skeleton dressed up for solstice, bones still visible underneath. That woman, he thinks vaguely and a little madly, that woman had thrived on being alive. Sharp edges, breakable bones, wide-wide blue-blue eyes and utterly confident in her own beauty. Oh, Celebrìan. What have they done to you?
Arwen is weeping and weeping. Maglor does not. He gathers her into his arms, the breathless, terrified girl, and whisper-sings an old song about crows.
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Imladris made new patterns inside him each time he visited. When Arwen was seven, Maglor took her for a walk, flocked by a murder of crows. She rode tall on Maglor's back, and it was warm but not hot, and the trees above them provided shade in patterns, offering surprise parcels of pure light in sudden mouthfuls. Arwen stretched out her chubby little arm in these places and watched the shadows of birds play across her wrist and elbow.
"Murders," she said softly.
"Yes, starchild. Magpies."
When Arwen had first met Maglor, they had stood under a living canopy of crows, and Elrond had told her a flock of crows was called a murder. And because Arwen was only four then, she had assumed murder was the right term to refer to all groups of birds, and nobody had wanted to properly correct her because it was the kind of mistake that parents greedily hoarded, to cling on to when elflings were no longer three feet tall and gap-toothed.
Arwen nodded off to sleep midway through the walk, her sharp chin digging into Maglor's shoulder. In Imladris, everything he did felt a little like autopsy, or reanimating a corpse. A little like digging up old things and making them talk. A little like granting fossils language.
Imladris, with its crows and trees and absence of death, wrote canons for its children. For the children of Imladris, all murders had feathers and wings.
Elrond was certain that only Maglor, perpetually hounded by the odd, the eidolic, the eerie and otherworldly, could sing such a little hellion as Arwen into falling asleep against his shoulder in five minutes instead of pulling her through the six uninterrupted stories she demanded each time she was meant to go for an afternoon nap. He folded the image up like a mathematically impossible future that had come softly, unexpectedly, true.
When he told Celebrìan about how much their children loved this doomed kinslayer, she had rolled her eyes at his shock and was utterly unsurprised herself. After all, what was a lullaby or two for the elf that had made two orphaned twins not just believe the world hadn't ended—but saved it for them?
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"Ada hasn't cried once. But he is just so furious all the time," she continues, hiccuping, burrowing into Maglor's shoulder. "I have never seen him so angry, never. I had never even heard him raise his voice before this. But now — but now, oh Maglor, he and the twins clash each time they return, they end up screaming at each other, all three of them, the most hurtful things. And then always the twins will leave in the night, and Ada will go outside and shout and command them to stay and they will always leave. And then he will come back inside and lock himself in his study and fume and I never know what to say to him because I am so, so, so scared for the twins too, but he doesn't cry, he never lets them see how unhappy it makes him so they don't understand, and then, and then they come back hurt and it starts all over again!"
"And now he will be so angry with me because I didn't take his leave and just left, but I couldn't take it, I couldn't take it, Maglor, and he's going to be so, so worried!"
"Do you know what Cìrdan is doing right now?" he clasps her hand in his, stroking it as she shakes her head tremulously. "He is writing to your Ada right this minute, my pet. He is going to send the letter with his fastest raven, so don't worry for a moment, he will get it by morning, and know you are safe here with us. And if he locks himself in his study, I will kick the damned door open myself, for then I will know he has not read Cìrdan's letter, hm? How does that sound to you?"
"Then, let me tell you what I will do after that, my starchild," he wipes a wet hair off her cheek. "I will ride as hard as I can, and I will find your brothers. I will drag them home by the ears if need be. Can you picture that? Me dragging your six-foot-four big brothers by their ears all the way to Imladris?"
Arwen laughs wetly, sniffing: "Glorfindel said he would tie them to him next time he sees them, like he used to do when they were toddlers."
"And if he doesn't," Maglor assures her. "Then I will, believe me. They won't even be able to use the bathroom without me tugging on their leash from outside. That is a promise."
Maglor leans his head on her shoulder, both still on the stone cold floor.
"Aha, look who is here to see you," he points at the window where a fat silver cat with a perpetual scowl had just clambered in, with absolutely no grace at all. "I think he wants to meet you, but be careful, the last time Cìrdan went near him, he bit his toe and hung on for at least an hour."
Arwen wipes her eyes, giggles. "Is that old Thingol?"
"No, no, Thingol died centuries ago," Maglor smiles at the memory of poor mangy Thingol, so named to piss off Cìrdan, as Arwen cautiously approaches this new cat. "This one is Cello."
"Cello? That's such a strange name!"
"Short for Celeborn," he admits, winking. "Named for the face your Daer-ada makes each time I am mentioned in his presence."
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When Arwen was ten and Celebrìan was away, she was swinging from a branch on a tree and crashed straight to the ground. Elrond had healed her and attached her tooth back, immediately, and as wonderful a father as Elrond was, before Arwen he had raised twin boys who knocked out each other's teeth on a daily basis (and was a twin boy who had teeth knocked out on a daily basis) so he gave her a kiss on the forehead, tucked her into bed, and told her to go to sleep and it wouldn't hurt at all in the morning.
She was sniffling away in bed at midnight worrying that the tooth was reattached wonky, or backwards or crooked, or if it might fall out, when she heard a tapping at the window.
And there stood Maglor, with a remarkably ugly cat in each hand, miming don't cry! and mouthing through a wide grin — see what I have for you!
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An hour before dawn, he gets the rowboat ready and makes her wrap up warm.
"Come, the sea will sparkle today," he reaches a hand out to her. "Remember how much you loved sea-sparkles as an elfling?"
The oars cut through the dark water with a rhythm that matches their steady breathing. It has been almost a thousand years since they last ventured out like this, the two of them alone on the sea, yet the memory feels fresh, folded between time’s pages. Arwen sits opposite him, her eyes as dull and clouded as they were when she ran in. But he sees it still, a flicker beneath the surface, waiting.
The night spreads its velvet cloak across the sky, and the sea responds, shimmering in secret. As they drift deeper, the water begins to glow, a quiet magic stirring from beneath. Bioluminescence — little bits of plankton and seaweed and other little things that gathered together to blink and be beautiful together. Sea-sparkles, she used to call them, as if the word bioluminescence could not contain its beauty. Arwen leans over the boat’s edge, her fingers skimming the surface, and for a moment, the years between her and Elros melt away.
“I used to think it was alive,” she whispers, watching the water ignite under her touch, the glow dancing like caught fireflies.
Maglor smiles, dipping an oar gently into the sea, letting the droplets fall like stars. “In a way, it is.”
She looks at him then, and for the first time in a year, her eyes momentarily hold the same wild light. It winks out almost immediately but the sea reflects it back, eternal and ephemeral, bounces it across the water and lets it float there as though it is waiting for her, like a reminder for her to return.
"I lied," Arwen admits after a long time, eyes cast to her feet and the wooden boat-bottom. "It's… it's not just that Ada and the twins are angry at each other. I lied, Maglor. It's not just that. It's something else too. But it's such a childish worry, such a stupid, stupid problem."
"What is it?" he asks her, stilling the oars. "If you would like to tell me, that is."
"Ada has not looked me in the eye once, since the third day after Ammë was brought back. Not once," Arwen's hands are shaking, blue and sparkling at the tips. "We used to be so close, used to be such friends. He and I would talk together for hours and hours. You know that. But he can't even look at me any more."
"But why? Do you think he blames you? Because he does not, I can —"
"No, no, he doesn't, of course he doesn't,"
"Ammë didn't let Ada touch her," she continued almost silently. "When she was first brought in. She was unconscious at the start, when Ada was healing her biggest wounds, was unconscious for two whole days and he stood there working on her for those two days. And after that she woke up, and each time he tried to approach, she would scream and scream and thrash out. The same it was, with Elladan and Elrohir, not to mention the aides. And Daernaneth was in Lothlorien, so she could not arrive in the time we had."
She runs a pale hand under her eyes, looking almost surprised to find them dry, as if she was so used to tears it became a constant.
"She was bleeding all over her thighs, you see, and she needed those wounds cleaned too, and she wasn't letting Ada near enough to sedate her. He hadn't gotten around to those yet because he was working on the poisoned injuries at first, but after she woke up she didn't let him go near her at all —- Maglor, I could hear him inside the healing halls, begging and begging with her to let him near her."
"I could hear Ada's voice from outside, pleading — please Cel, please do not make me do this to her, please let me do it, anyone else, anyone at all. Please do not make me do this to her. He sounded frantic, Maglor — I — I hear him each night in my dreams, just that desperate sentence over and over again. Please do not make me do this to her, please. I did not understand, sitting there, what he meant. I had assumed the her meant Ammë, you see, I didn't understand why he was speaking in the third person."
"Make her do what?" Maglor asks. His lips are numb from the cold. He does not interject too much into the conversation, lets her talk as much as she needs.
"After some time of this, just that same begging, Ada comes into the hallway, looking like a ghost. And he could hardly speak, could hardly ask what he needed to ask. Glorfindel walked over to me, took me aside and through his tears he explained that Ammë needed to have the wounds on her thighs cleaned and bandaged, but was refusing to let anyone but family to even approach her, refusing to let any males touch her at all."
Maglor pales. Arwen had two brothers and a father. Which means —
"I have nightmares about it every night, Maglor," Arwen shudders a little, though her face was blank and white. "Standing there, hands shaking and shaking as I tried to listen to instructions, Ada could barely get out. I was standing there, stitching her wounds and cleaning them, and in doing that, knowing exactly what had happened to her."
"And Ada was beside himself. I have never seen him like that, Maglor. Not once, not even when Ammë sailed, not even when we first received news of her kidnapping, not even when she was first brought in and he was healing her largest wounds, wounds that could kill her — he was sorrowful, yes, but this… this was something else. I thought he was losing his mind. It killed something inside him, watching me have to do something like that. I can never forget it, never, never."
"Oh, Maglor, I dream of it each night. His face. The pleading. Ammë's blood on my hands. The needle in my fingers. I was so frightened. And that moment of utter terror near the end when I was halfway through closing a wound, waiting for Ada's instruction only to find he had been rendered completely incoherent — and I panicked, because I didn't, I didn't know how to close the wound, I couldn't understand a word he was saying, and I was calling out for help, stood there with my hands just like that —" she mimes holding a needle and cloth in her shaking fingers. "Just like that, until Glorfindel ran back inside."
"Oh Valar," Maglor shivers, head in his hands. "Oh, Valar. Arwen. I don't know what to say."
"It was all right after that," she says, with a twisted, pale smile which slid off her face immediately. "Glorfindel walked straight to Ada, struck him hard across the face twice, and that did the job, he — he started instructing me again. I managed it, in the end. She was clean. The wounds were closed."
"And then Ada came to me later that evening when I was in the solar, asking me if I could ever forgive him," her voice trembles for the first time. "He begged me not to tell Amme that it was… that it was me who… he said it would… he said it would kill her. Knowing that I had to do something like that."
"Oh, Arwen," Maglor groans. "Oh, my dove."
"Of course I wouldn't have told her, even if he didn't ask. And nor would Glorfindel, obviously not. But when Ada asked the boys to do the same, Elladan spat at his feet and they left home in the hour, saying they've lost all respect for him. And that's why they've all been at each other's throats. That was what it was over — me. They were arguing over me. And since that day, Ada hasn't looked me in the eye once. Because he's so ashamed. Not even when speaking to me, he's never once held my eye."
"So that's the real truth, Maglor. I don't have nightmares about Ammë sailing. I understand why she did, and I am at peace that she is at peace. No, I keep thinking about that moment in the healing hall. That moment follows me everywhere. Everywhere I look. And it always frightens me so much — that split second. I find myself there every day. When I called out for help, as I stood there with Ammë half-conscious and Ada out of his mind, and for a moment, nobody came. I was standing there, screaming and screaming and screaming, and nobody came."
Maglor is trembling all over. He presses his head further into his hands.
At first, he thinks he is angry at his son, furious at Elrond for not only instructing his daughter to clean the wounds, but to lose control and turn the moment from unbearable to nightmarish.
But he finds it impossible to truly fully blame him either. Elrond, who would climb any mountain to bring his children the moon, standing there as his daughter stitched her mother's wounds incurred by a torment too terrible to even think about. His son, who spent centuries indulging little Arwen's every whim, from basket-beds for rats, to birdwatching trips, to dousing everything she ate in honey.
Little Arwen used to scream and cry when beetles and mice died, used to wail for hours when she scraped her knee. To stand there helplessly, watching that little girl clean her mother's wounds, wounds that nobody should see on anyone, let alone a daughter on her mother — who could blame him for his reaction in that moment?
Still, Maglor feels a dull anger throb in his throat. He doesn't know why. Doesn't know what it is he blames him for, doesn't know if there is anything to blame at all. Still, he looks at his near-skeletal granddaughter, and feels a misplaced paternalistic desire to discipline his son.
Maglor realises that Elladan and Elrohir (and Elrond, in his way) were not trying to run to something. They were running, running, running away from their home, their home which Celebrìan had stitched together with her steady, capable hands. But the boys could go fight in the mountains, and Elrond could lock the door and lose himself in his memories. But what could Arwen have done? What could she have done but come here, blinded by tears, and fall at his feet?
He makes a decision.
"You are not going back to that house," he tells her quietly. "Tomorrow. Tomorrow, I will take you to Lothlorien. And I don't give a damn if Celeborn hauls me out on a pike, I will make sure you get there. And you must stay there, Arwen, for as long as it takes."
"As long as it takes to do what?" Arwen looks dead on her feet. She dangles her hand in the water, sees the little sea-sparkles crawl across her fingers, and blinks blankly at them. She plucks one off, watches it shimmer in the moonlight.
"As long as it takes to become yourself again. To become the Arwen that you were, and will one day be again. Can you do that?"
She looks at him, smiles wanly. They sit like that in complete silence, for almost an hour. They sit in silence until Maglor begins readying the oars to row back, and Arwen holds out a hand wet with seawater. On the very tip of her pointer, a tiny sea-sparkle winks.
"Oh, what is this for?" he asks, laughing a little. "A new setting for a ring?"
"It's for you," she says vaguely. "To thank you for tonight. Maglor, I think you've just saved my life."
"Saved your life?" his voice breaks for the first time that night, slips past the ragged control he's tried so hard to maintain, as he reaches out to touch the sparkle. "Arwen… oh, my girl. What do you mean by that?"
He doesn't want to know. Valar, he doesn't want to know.
"All these months, Maglor," she whispers, like she is telling him another secret, graver than the one before. "All these months… I did not want forever — at least, not for forever. And I hated feeling like that. I hated no longer wanting forever. But every night since that day I have woken into that moment, where I was standing there screaming, and nobody came. "
Arwen pauses, watches the blinking blue lights around them.
"Don't tell Ada," she says at last. "It would break his heart."
The dull, inexplicable anger towards his son grows, threatening to choke him. Arwen takes a shuddering breath, looks out at sea while Maglor tries to will away the sudden rush of tears that had risen in his eyes unbidden.
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There was no physical representation of a new year, the day after Arwen Undomiel turned seven. The world did not wipe itself clean just because she had turned seven. It was her first lesson in temporality: that the Eldar could not afford to press their lifespans into a calendar’s firm structure.
She sat on Maglor's lap and gazed out sulkily at the landscape, at their grinning garden. The wind teased the flowers into a simple, barely choreographed sway, grey snow sliding off the steps as it melted. Arwen Undómiel was seven years old, and everything looked exactly the same.
“I don’t feel any different,” she told Maglor. The warm fog of her handprint against the window shone, then faded. "But I'm a whole year older. I don’t feel a whole year older."
“I don’t think we’re supposed to,” he told her gently. “If we grew up too much each begetting day, then we would run out of begetting days very fast.”
"Do you know when your begetting day was?"
"No, I’m afraid not," Maglor admitted. "Though I’m certain most people my age do not remember their begetting days."
"I'm going to have one billion billion begetting days,” Arwen declared. "And I'll remember every single one."
Maglor knew that she only said it so adamantly because she was seven years old, and because she was copying her father, who had a habit of relating the evening's dinner menu with the academic confidence of prophecy. Still, it made him shudder a little.
"You better come for all the begetting days, Maglor!" she added bossily, cutting into his silence. "Or I'll kill you. You know I will, I have the sharp scissors now. I took them from Amme's sewing box."
He grinned and teased her, poking her in the ribs. “All one billion billion of them?”
"Every single one. You have to because I say so."
"All right, starchild, I will come every single time."
He didn’t say "forever." Forever was too cliché an addition, too unquantifiable, too obvious. Forever went unspoken between them, like a back-room deal. Of course, they meant forever. Handshake, crossed hearts, an oathkeeper’s word: eternity taken for granted. When Maglor promised a thing, he pledged himself for life.
For once, it wasn’t even his Fëanorian tendency to sniff out any opportunity to make little oaths and carry them through, like a defective cross between attack dog and scenthound. It was only that the winter Arwen Undómiel had turned seven, it had never once crossed Maglor’s mind that she could ever be anything but eternal.
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"In you get," he picks Cello the cat up by the scruff, puts him in a wicker basket with a slice of cheese and straps the whole contraption to Arwen's horse. "You're going on a one way trip, and you'll go to Cat Valinor if you're good. By which I mean, if you go find your namesake's most precious tree, and take a massive shite under it thrice a day."
"Maglor!" Arwen throws a piece of hay at him, covering her eyes as he throws it back at her. "Ouch! Thank you for the cat, I love him, but you are so horrible to Daer-ada!"
"Now, that is your fault, you know?" he grins, lifting her up onto her horse. "Do you know why?"
"What have I done?"
"Do you not remember?" he gets up onto his own horse. "Your eighth begetting day, when poor Celeborn asked you what you wished to be when you were older, and he had meant you to say you would excel at painting, or singing, or dancing or horsemanship even. And do you know what you did, Arwen Undomiel?"
"No! What did I do?" Arwen's grey eyes widened. "Tell me!"
"You walked up to your darling Daer-ada, sat on his knee ever so nicely, and told him you would like to be a kinslayer, just like Maglor!"
He rides pressed close to her, close to the composition of Arwen, all score and mathematics, the good and better, the glad and gladder. Maglor doesn't know what she will come to in the end. To tell the truth, he is afraid to know her end.
I was standing there, screaming and screaming and screaming, and for a moment, nobody came.
He tells Galadriel and the fuming Celeborn who can barely meet his eye for daring to step foot in Lothlorien, once Arwen (and the cat) are taken inside to rest, why he brought her here. He admits what she had to do, and what she has woken each night about. Celeborn's face is black as thunder, and Galadriel turns around, hurries back inside to hide her face in Arwen's hair.
And finally, as he apologises reflexively for Elrond's decision to make Arwen stitch those terrible wounds, apologies that he had not thought of any other option, Maglor feels the tears he had suppressed for the past day suddenly surge up without warning. And then he is crying like a child in front of Celeborn, and he hates himself for it because Celeborn already hates him and Celeborn had looked so furious when he heard and he must despise him and Elrond and he was the last person who —
He feels a hand on his shoulder.
"Maglor, do not apologise."
"He could have — I don't — he could have, he's my son, he's my son, I am sorry – she was dying, and he could have at least looked her in the eye —"
"What could he have done?" Celeborn asks him, voice low, the hand on his shoulder tightening. "In that moment, what could Elrond have done but to ask her to do such a thing?"
Maglor's head shoots up in shock, and to his surprise there is not a trace of blame or even the old enmity in Celeborn's countenance. There is only a terrible, twisted grief.
"Do not blame him, Maglor," he says. "What could he have done?"
"Arwen is fading!" Maglor chokes out, his voice rising but wavering feverishly, Arwen's gaunt face beating a pattern under his eyelids to the rhythm of that dull paternal anger. "Do you of all people forgive him for that choice? You are the last person I would have expected to do so, Celeborn. Even his sons, who idolise him, spat at his feet and refuse to look him in the eye, and he himself has not said a word about it after that day! The reason those boys do not return is that he has not said a word to them about that day, and I am certain Elrond regrets it but… "
"Are you not angry in the slightest?" he continues in a more resigned, helpless voice, panting with the force of his speech. "You are not prone to such easy forgiveness, Celeborn, we both know this."
"It's not that I forgive him," says the lord. "It is that there is nothing to forgive."
Celeborn takes a deep, shuddering breath.
"Cìrdan once told me," he says, voice unsteady, light thinning around them like an old scarf unravelling. "An Age or two ago. He told me about something called The Great Impossible."
"What is that?" Maglor asks.
"I would have thought, Maglor, that you of all people will be intimately familiar with The Great Impossible."
"It is five thousand years ago, I have taken over your camp and I have a sword at the throats of your foster sons, both at once. I will ask you a question, and you must answer in three seconds."
"All right," the Fëanorian dragged in a breath. "Ask me."
"Elrond or Elros?"
Maglor pales. His heart seizes within him.
"I, I can't —"
"No," snaps Celeborn. "Time's up! They are both dead."
They stand there, breathing heavily.
"That, Maglor. That is The Great Impossible."
"The Great Impossible isn’t a choice," he continues. "The Great Impossible is a parent of twins told to drown one or both will die. It is not a choice, it is the absence of choice, a decision made in the heart’s darkest corners, where mercy suffocates beneath necessity. Nobody in the world, no matter how far sighted, expects it, because it is unthinkable. You cannot choose which of your children will drown; you cannot decide which half of your soul must wither; not until you must. The Great Impossible hollows you, renders flesh into something less than itself. It asks nothing, but it demands everything. It lives in warped mirrors, forever closer than it looks."
Maglor knows this song like it is his own. It is his own.
Celeborn grasps Maglor's hand. It is surreal. Surreal that this is happening here. That it is Celeborn doing this, Celeborn who raged at Elrond when Celebrìan was first taken, Celeborn who hates everything to do with Maglor and more, holding him so kindly and defending his son so fiercely.
"It’s a moment suspended outside of time, where right and wrong dissolve into nothing, leaving only the weight of the choice itself — unbearable, silent, but crushing. And when it is over, you are left with the remains of yourself, neither whole nor truly broken."
Celeborn is weeping as he speaks, his words heavy with old tears.
“You and I both know that Elrond will carry that decision,” he continues quietly, “until the breaking of the world. There is no word for that kind of burden. Do not add to it with anger. Forgive him, Maglor."
He pauses then, as if listening for something, but the dusk has deepened into night and there is nothing left but surreal silence.
And so three days later, when Maglor arrives in Imladris with the chastised twins in tow, and a frantic Elrond throws himself at him right at the gates because Galadriel told me why she ran and I am so sorry, my baby, she was my baby, I am so, so, so sorry, I did that to her, Atya, Atya what have I done, what have I done to my little girl, my baby girl, she was my baby, Atya until the boys cling to them too, shaking, apologising repeatedly for ever having thought that decision hadn't impacted their father when it is so clearly killing him, and oh Valar they miss Arwen, they all miss her so much.
Here, Maglor does not turn to anger or moralising, and instead channels Celeborn's words. He holds him, holds the twins, and murmurs a simple phrase, over and over again: What else could you have done?
Inexplicably, the image that jumps into his mind, standing at the gates to Elrond's home, is Elwing. And something twists in him at Celeborn's kindness to have offered him a hypothetical scenario to showcase The Great Impossible, a choice between Elrond and Elros that he never actually had to make, and not the very real Great Impossible that he and his brother had helped drag to Sirion.
Elwing. That wide-eyed, frightened woman with hair still mussed from sleep, younger by millennia than Arwen herself, god, god, thirty one years old, a jewel in her hands and terror in her eyes. Behind her, a window to the stars. Before her, a sword dripping with blood. And barely visible behind him, two little boys, clutching each other. And she jumped.
In the face of The Great Impossible, Elwing jumped, and jumping was the wrong choice because it left behind her babies and so she would answer for that choice for eternity. She will live without her sons and know they never had cause to long for her. It is the first time Maglor thinks of her in five thousand years, the first time he thinks of her without hatred, because who was he — who was he to judge Elwing? Who was he to judge her son?
What would Nerdanel have done? What would Fëanor have done? What could any of us do, in the face of the great impossible?
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He renames the cat, and sends it a litterbox.
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When Maglor receives a beautifully decorated handwritten invite for Arwen's wedding day, personally addressed to him in her own looping cursive, he sits up for weeks on end, weaving sparkling stones into the lace of her marriage veil. The lightest sapphire he could find to adorn the middle of the circle, and then a thousand miniscule blue stones sweeping down her back.
She runs it over her fingers when he gives it to her, and she looks up at him, her smile tear-bright.
"A sea-sparkle?" she asks softly, running a light finger across the sapphire. "This one, for the time you saved my life."
"A beautiful stone for the most beautiful life," he tells her, and thought those words and the sapphire, may at least begin to impress on her silently that he doesn't think that she is wasting her life by wedding Aragorn, that her wonderful, star-bright life was enough, was enough for him if it is enough for her.
Arwen understands. Arwen has always understood him.
He watches her turn the veil over and over in his fingers. "Oh, there are thousands!" she exclaims, laughing.
Maglor leans his head on her shoulder, takes her hand in his, the star-studded veil draped across their joined wrists. He thinks of a little green boot kicking him awake in a forest by the sea, and the little girl that blackmailed him to sing — not just a lullaby but belt out a full ballad in the Hall of Fire to the first standing ovation he has ever received. Of the notes she used to send him before her begetting days, threatening dire consequences if he didn't show up, and the times she fell asleep on his shoulder after he braided her hair to a song.
"And so what are these thousand little ones for?" Arwen teases affectionately, shuffling closer to Maglor, linking their elbows. "You have only saved my life once, you know."
"I know," he tells her. "Those ones are for all the times you've saved mine."
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"We were hiding from the Nazis and there was a woman with us, she had just given birth recently and the newborn was hungry, wanted its mother's breast. But the mother is starving, her milk has dried and the Nazis are nearby with dogs. It was going to cry. And if the dogs hear the baby, we are all dead. All of us, all thirty of us. Do you understand? We make a decision. Nobody tells her of it, but she guesses it herself. And then she carries it through. We cannot lift our eyes. We cannot look at the mother, as she makes that decision and carries it through."
Svetlana Alexievich, The Unwomanly Face of War