The Starless Road

Turgon came down the stairs one morning with a satchel stuffed full of rolled-up plans and a shovel over his shoulder, looking exceedingly pleased with himself.

“Where are you going?” Fingon said.

“Come with me and see!” Turgon proposed. “We could use you, in fact.”

“We? And use me for what?” Fingon said, though he already knew he would say yes. His grave once-kingly brother was seldom so light of heart. The ancient days of exile in Middle-earth seemed most often to Fingon like a dark dream from very long ago, but Turgon had always been of a solemner character, and though he would not have left Mandos if his heart was overburdened – as their sister’s heart was, and their father’s who waited yet for his proud brother’s relenting – he had loved Gondolin in the mountains, and mourned her yet.

“Digging,” said Turgon. “And we is Finrod and I, and that should tell you all you need to know.”

Fingon eyed the satchel of plans in some alarm. “There’s hardly room on Eressëa to build yourselves a hidden city!”

“No: but we can dig a hole,” Turgon said. “Finrod’s idea, and I laughed at him, but then we started talking over plans, and now I am looking forward to it.”

Fingon stared at him. “But who wants to live in a hole?” he demanded.

“Hobbits!” said Turgon cheerfully, and handed him the shovel.

Hobbits! They had briefly been a source of great wonder and amusement to the Elves of Tol Eressëa, and then most had lost interest in them. Two had come over the Sea on the Last Ship of the Third Age, and a rare tale with them – the latest of the Great Tales, in fact. But the Hobbits themselves were not, by any stretch of the imagination, Great: nor, though these two were learned for their kind, could they be called Wise. So they were given a small house – on the eastern shore of the island, since that was what they asked for – and then the Noldor left them more or less to themselves. Some curious folk went to see them, and hear the story of the War of the Ring out of their mouths, and laugh besides at their odd way of speaking.  And they had friends about the country, but those friends were for the most part those who had known them in Middle-Earth. Olórin Mithrandir who loved them well was often their guest, and some others of his high race: and Elrond Half-elven held them in remarkable affection, and Fingon’s cousin Galadriel honoured them. All this Fingon had known, and not thought much about. What was he to a Hobbit, or a Hobbit to him?

But of course Finrod had befriended them.

“Say him, Fingon,” Turgon said as they walked down the coast road where the salt spray broke against the tumbled rocks to their right, “for Bilbo Baggins did not linger here long. It is Frodo the Ringbearer who has dwelt these last few years on the eastern shore. He is a quiet sort, and there is a shadow on him, but Finrod likes him very much.”

“Of course he does!” said Fingon. “Do they really live in holes?”

“It is their great preference, apparently! Though we should never have learned it from Frodo. He is much too polite to complain of Elven hospitality.”

“Then however did you come to this?” said Fingon, hoisting the shovel. “Has Finrod bullied it out of him after all these years?”

They both laughed at the idea of Finrod bullying anyone. “No,” said Turgon, “we have another source now, and he gave it all away, entirely by accident. And now Finrod is determined to bestow the gift – I believe he has been trying to give poor Frodo some gift worthy of their friendship all this time, and Frodo wants so little that Finrod has been quite frustrated. But he has hit on it at last: the Hobbits are too aged in the way of their kind now for the digging of holes, but even Frodo could not deny that he still loved the memory of his own Hobbit-hole, far away in his Shire!”

“They are aged? But I thought you said there was only one,” said Fingon.

“There was!” Turgon said. “And now there are two. You had better meet the second one, brother, for you share a name, or nearly!”

So they came to the low hill that looked eastwards across the Sea from the shores of Tol Eressëa, and there they found Finrod with his sleeves rolled up and his eyes alight with satisfaction, and more tools; and two elderly Hobbits, only one of whom Fingon had met before. Frodo the Ringbearer looked very much amused, and his rosy-cheeked and white-haired companion deeply embarrassed.

“Turgon!” cried Finrod – in the accent of the Westron tongue, which it seemed they were to use for the Hobbits’ sakes. “Tell me you brought the plans!”

“I brought them; and here’s my brother to help us dig, but let’s have introductions first. Here’s two of a kind – Fingon the Valiant, Samwise the Brave!”

“At your service!” said Fingon, rather charmed, and hoping his accent was intelligible.

“At yours and your family’s!” said the old Hobbit immediately, so he had not done too badly. “Oh dear, now – and your brother too, sir – there’s no call for all this fuss, I’m sure.”

“Now, Sam, you have only yourself to blame. You said it yourself: quite the best country in the world, I’m sure, lacking only a nice snug Hobbit-hole or two,” said Frodo. He was laughing.

“You cannot blame us for seeking improvement, Master Samwise,” said Turgon gravely. “If our country lacks some good thing, we must try to build it. You shall have to let us know how we do!”

Poor old Sam was astonished and stammered hopelessly in reply. Turgon and Finrod unrolled all their plans and laid them out on the grass, and called upon Frodo to give his opinion. “Don’t look at me!” Frodo said, laughing. “I have never built a Hobbit-hole before either! Sam can help you.”

Sam was slightly nervous to be called upon in such high-seeming company, but he did in fact know a great deal of the building of Hobbit-holes, and had overseen many such projects in his own country. Fingon sat on the slope and laughed at the spectacle of his younger brother the city-builder being corrected and even scolded over his sketches by a snowy-haired Hobbit-grandfather who barely came up to his hip. Frodo the Ringbearer came and sat close by him and laughed also, and his eyes lingered on Sam with great affection. “I have missed him!” he said. “It is as if the Shire had plucked itself up root and branch and sailed across the Sea to plant itself around me. Dear Sam!”

Fingon glanced at his cousin’s friend. Frodo looked younger than Sam, but felt older. His hair was silver, not white, and his face though little lined had an oddly transparent look, as if he were not altogether in the world. Fingon could see what Turgon had meant. There was a shadow on the Ringbearer. It was an old scar long-healed, like the scar on his four-fingered right hand: it might trouble him no more, but the marring it had made was permanent. Frodo quieted at Fingon’s look. Then he smiled. “I know, I know!” he said. “But done cannot be undone: and it is healed, and I am glad of that.”

“Pardon me if I woke the grief!” Fingon said.

Frodo smiled again. Then he said, “Do you think we should tell Sam that your brother is teasing him about the fountains?”

Sam was indeed speaking very firmly to Turgon on the subject of what was and was not appropriate decoration for a Hobbit-hole. Turgon without so much as a flicker of a smile was insisting that he had never built anything which did not have at least three courtyards and a fountain and was not going to start now. Finrod appeared close to collapsing from laughter. “Now see here, my lad!” Sam said sternly when Turgon proposed straight-faced that a mighty gate or two might also be a felicitous addition to the Shire-style. At that Finrod did collapse, throwing himself backward on the grass to laugh, and Fingon laughed too, and Frodo’s shoulders shook. Sam gave Turgon a reproachful look. “I do believe you’re making fun!” he said.

“He is not a lad, Sam!” said Frodo. “He is much, much older than either of us.”

“But very childish all the same,” Fingon said, “and it’s an older brother’s place to say so, Turgon, so don’t give me that look! I was brought here to dig. Are we digging, or do you have more jokes to make first?”

“We can joke and dig at the same time,” Finrod said, “if Master Samwise will approve of the plans.”

“Well, they’ll do,” said Sam. “None of your gates and fountains, mind! It’s not proper. And be sure you leave a bit of garden – that’s important!”

They dug, and they joked, and they sang as well: and before long they had more help, for others heard the singing and came to see what was toward, and then thought it a merry business and joined in. The more Elves came to help dig the Hobbit-hole the more Frodo looked amused and Sam embarrassed. By nightfall they had done a fair amount of the necessary excavation, and when the stars shone out they stopped to eat and drink and sing together. Sam and Frodo sat up and listened bright-eyed to the singing, though Sam nodded and eventually went to sleep there on the grass. “We are both too old for a bed like this!” said Frodo regretfully, and woke him up and took him back to the small house further down the shore which he had once shared with Bilbo. But the Elves sang together under the stars for most of the night.

Fingon was among the singers. Only when the night was drawing on the morning-dim just before dawn, and the party had for the most part broken up, he picked his way down the hillside to the dunes below and so to the edge of the Sea. He stood a little while watching long straight low-rippling waves break on the strand, each crowning itself for a moment with lacy foam before it vanished.

“Are you well?” said a voice behind him. It was Finrod who had followed him down.

“Why would I not be?” Fingon said, and Finrod made no answer, but came and stood on the beach as well. The tide came in until the little waves were breaking around their boots, and the salt wind snapped at their hair. Fingon thought of memories like a dark dream from very long ago – yet not altogether dark – and of grief like a scar that was healed but not undone. What Finrod thought of he did not say.

Finally Finrod laughed and said, “Shall we leave Turgon to do all the rest by himself?”

“No, we must supervise him,” Fingon said, “for Master Samwise does not want any fountains!”

The Hobbit-hole did not, in the end, take very long to build – not as Elves reckoned it, and not even as the Hobbits reckoned it: Sam exclaimed over how quickly they worked. As it drew near completion Fingon began to see the appeal of it. He still did not much like the thought of living in a hole himself, but if one had to do so then the Hobbit-hole that Finrod and Turgon had built, with its long rooms delved in the sides of the hill, and its round windows looking east and west, and its high ceilings and warm wooden floors, seemed the right sort of way to go about it. There was a garden laid out too on the leeside of the hill, sheltered from the sea winds, which Sam had had the ordering of; and a row of tough young fir-trees had been planted as a windbreak.

When all was done everyone who had helped – and it was, by this point, half the Noldor on the island – came to assist Frodo and Sam in moving their things into their new home, and for the party afterwards. It was September 22nd in the Shire-count, and it was Frodo’s one hundred and fifteenth birthday. The celebrations lasted long into the night, for though Elves are not in the habit of celebrating birthdays (having in this matter customs of their own) they are extraordinarily fond of parties and seldom allow a good excuse to pass them by. Most of the Hobbits’ own personal friends came also, and Frodo and Sam spent a good part of the evening smoking pipe-weed with Olórin Mithrandir, whom they called Gandalf, and who appeared to find everything about the building of a Hobbit-hole on Tol Eressëa quite overwhelmingly funny.

After the dancing Finrod took out his harp and cried, “Hear now the tale of Frodo of the Nine Fingers and the Ring of Doom!”  Everyone was very much pleased, for it was an excellent tale, and Finrod told it extremely well. Only at one point was he interrupted: for Frodo stopped him at the part of the story where Samwise the Brave dared to rescue his master from the Tower of Cirith Ungol, and said he had not done it justice, and told it again. He gave it in much simpler words, but very strongly, and the Elves who had laughed the first time at the Orcs’ fear of an imaginary Elf-warrior with sword and axe were greatly moved by the courage of Samwise. Many of them wept when Frodo sang in his thin voice the hymn of the stars by which Sam had woken him to hope and so found him.

Fingon wept too.

He was still weeping, silently, when Finrod took up the tale again for the dark journey through Mordor. Frodo now was very pale, and Sam held his hand. Finrod brought the story to the Cracks of Doom and the final unlooked-for chance that had in the end delivered all: then came the fall of Gollum and his Precious into the eternal fire, and the breaking of the Dark Tower, and the Eagles flying to the rescue even as Mount Doom convulsed. The king was crowned and the story ended, and Finrod called out the ringing final shout, praise them with great praise! All the Elves shouted it back, but Frodo still sat silent. There were tears yet upon Fingon’s cheeks. Turgon on his right hand quietly spoke his name.

“A good tale,” Fingon said, “with a good ending.” He smiled as best he could.

The three of them breakfasted the next day with the Hobbits and Gandalf, who was not yet done laughing at the very existence of the Hobbit-hole. It was a merry meal, and Frodo and Sam pottered about very cheerfully, and plied them with eggs, and toast, and sausages, and bacon, and new potatoes, and fried mushrooms, and fresh fruit and vegetables, and tremendous quantities of tea – a proper Shire breakfast, in fact, which Gandalf consumed with tremendous satisfaction, and the three Elves with appreciative amusement. “It’s the least we can do,” said Sam, “to say our thank you kindlys. Not even dear old Strider could have been kinder, I’m sure, and he’s a very important fellow, you know – a great king!”

Gandalf chuckled. "There are three great kings sitting around your breakfast-table, Master Samwise, and they have laboured long to build with their own hands a house you shall not use for more than what might be, to them, an eyeblink – so I think you may say they are at least as generous as Aragorn.” Sam was thrown into embarrassment by this, though Frodo laughed.

“But the Noldor have always loved to work by their hands,” Finrod said, “and besides, we are three kings with few other matters demanding our attention just now. Whereas our kinsman across the water remembers your small folk even when great matters press upon him, and less time is allotted him to think of all. I for one am glad to deserve such a high comparison. So do not look so confused, Master Samwise! Truly we may say, in what I believe is the Shire-fashion: it was our pleasure!”

“Yours, certainly,” said Fingon, laughing.

“Now, cousin, no one forced you to dig!” Finrod said, and Turgon elbowed Fingon too, and all were still laughing while Sam exclaimed, astonished, “Why, is our Strider a relation of yours?”

“He and the Queen Arwen are both grandchildren of mine in some degree,” said Turgon, “though I shall never meet them: and they are far distant from me, and Elessar the further.”

Then nothing would do for Sam but that he must have the whole family tree laid out for him, or as much of it as could be fitted onto the back of some of the remaining Hobbit-hole plans. Frodo was pleased by this too, though he knew nearly all of it already: for Hobbits are very fond of genealogies, and only find them more satisfying if already well-understood. Before long Gandalf stood up with a snort of laughter. “Hobbits and Elves are more alike than I ever suspected! I can see you will be at this for hours yet. I must be on my way!”

The family tree necessarily came with a great many stories attached, and though Sam had heard many of them before, and Frodo nearly all, both begged to hear them again. Sam wondered at how they all joined into one another: for many of the Great Tales, it seemed, were not often told in the Shire. “It really is all one story!” he said. After a while Finrod got his harp out again and began to sing, and Sam looked up astonished halfway through the lay of Beren and Lúthien and said, “Why, but that’s you in the tale!”

“Sam!” said Frodo. “Did you really not realise?”

“Well,” said Sam, “I suppose I did, but then again it’s very hard for an old Hobbit to take in, you know. Stories of that kind don’t usually happen to people one knows – even Elves one knows."

“Don’t they, indeed! As if you weren’t yourself the hero of just such a story!” Frodo said.

“Not the hero, Mr Frodo,” said Sam reproachfully. “I only did a very small part – just what anyone would do, really, if they found they had to.”

“I never heard that courage was anything more,” Fingon said.

“And there speaks an expert,” Finrod said, smiling.

“Yes,” said Frodo. “You were even introduced, Sam: Fingon the Valiant and Samwise the Brave! You should take his word on heroics, if you won’t take mine. Wasn’t the story of the Rescue on the Cliff always one of your favourites? With the singing, remember, and the Eagle! I think you must have had it in your mind somewhere in the Orc-tower on Cirith Ungol – though that was a smaller fortress, and the Eagles came later.”

Sam looked at Fingon with wide eyes. Fingon smiled. “You may have faced a smaller fortress,” he said, “but you are also rather smaller than I am. I do not think your courage was any less. I am glad if my tale was any help to you in a place so dark as that.” He paused. “And glad too that it came to a better end,” he said.

Finrod looked at him with concern, though Turgon was kind enough to look away. Frodo’s expression was suddenly much distressed. “But I thought that story had a happy ending,” said Sam. “You saved your friend, and an Eagle came: that’s how we’ve always told it in the Shire.”

“That is how it went,” Fingon said. “But it might have been better if I had done as my friend asked me, and killed him there. He came to great grief in the end.”

“Do not wish so noble a deed undone!” Finrod said softly.

“What happened?” said Sam.

“Sam –” said Frodo.

“No, it is right to tell it,” Fingon said. “It is all part of the same story.”

Turgon went back to the first of the family trees they had drawn for the Hobbits, and added to it in quick firm strokes what had until then been omitted: Míriel and her descent, and the seven sons of Fëanor. He wrote down Celebrimbor Curufin’s son as well. “That is a name you should know,” he said, “for he was the Ring-forger, greatly deceived. Yet the Three were fair, and many fair things were done by them!”

Then Finrod sang from the Noldolantë, of the devastation of Nargothrond and the ruin of Doriath and the fall of Gondolin, and of the destruction wrought by the Oathbound as they sought the Silmaril of Beren and Lúthien. Sam murmured at the tale of Elwing’s flight from Sirion. “In the Shire we always say it was a band of wicked thieves that came to rob the Dawnstar’s wife.”

“So it was,” answered Finrod, “alas!”

And he sang the rest to its sad ending: the last two brothers fallen from all they might have been to nothing more than common thieves and murderers, doomed by the oath which in the end they could neither fulfil nor escape. Fingon wept to hear it, and his brother wept with him, and Finrod’s eyes were not dry as he sang. Frodo’s face was full of solemn pity, and Sam said, with a hiccupping sob, “Why, they could never have done it at all! Not from the very beginning! If that isn’t hard!”

“Hard,” said Turgon sadly, “but just.”

“And that’s the ending?” Sam said. “They’re all gone, and won’t come back, as you Elves seem to, to start trying to put out the stars, or anything of that kind?”

“No,” said Finrod, “though if they did return, they should have to try. Their oath would not let them do otherwise! But the Sons of Fëanor shall await their final doom in the Halls of Mandos until the world’s end – all but two.”

“That poor fellow on the beach!” Sam said.

“Two?” said Frodo, and then, “But I beg your pardon – I should not ask.”

“It is not a secret,” said Finrod. But he said no more.

“Two,” said Fingon quietly. “For Maglor the Unforgiven, last of the Exiles, shall wander the shores of Middle-earth and there fade until nothing remains save a voice of sorrow, and even then he shall have no rest. But Maedhros his brother sought destruction body and spirit, and found both. When Mandos summoned him, he refused, and first of them all he has been taken by the void that they swore themselves to. He is not in the world, and will not come again. Deeper darknesses are there than that which Morgoth made below Thangorodrim!” He paused and looked at Finrod. “Should I not then have killed him as he asked me?”

“No!” said Finrod, but Turgon said nothing.

Sam grew even more upset. “Now that’s not right,” he said, “that can’t be right! Just or not – and I don’t know that it is, begging your pardon, sir – still, no story should end that way!”

“It is ended all the same,” Fingon said.

“But your friend – after all that – though he did very great wrong, it doesn’t seem that he altogether wished to: and he was your friend, anyway, so he can’t have been wicked right through. Not that not wishing to is any excuse, mind,” added Sam conscientiously, “but I tell you, I’ve children of my own, and shame on me if I ever got them into such a bind as that stubborn old father of theirs! It’s a very great shame, and I’ll stand by that. Some of ‘em seem to have done worse with it than others: but your friend still sounds more sad than bad, if you understand me.”

"All evil is sad, Sam," said Frodo.

There was a silence. Fingon looked at Frodo and perceived once again, more strongly than before, the scarring and strange transparency that was upon him. The Ringbearer paused as if deep in thought: very young indeed was he by Elf-reckoning, and yet none of them dared to speak before him.

“Yes, all evil is sad!” he said. “Do you not remember Gollum? Slinker and Stinker, as you called him, but both were once Sméagol, who might have been otherwise: and how unhappy he was!”

“He was a Slinker, and a Stinker too,” said Sam, “and I don’t care how unhappy he was, he still got what he deserved. He would have killed you, Mr Frodo, and you wouldn’t have been the first.”

“And I would have killed him – for the Ring!” Frodo said. “If Gollum deserved the fire, Sam, then in the end I deserved it too. I should have been just like him in time, and you might have called me both those names, quite rightly. What difference was there between us at last? Only that I had my Sam to drag me away – and if I had not, I think I would have thrown myself into the Cracks of Doom after him. Do you remember what I said to you then? Hopes fail in this world; there is no escape – and it’s true! It’s true!” He laughed softly, yet it seemed to Fingon he might also have wept. “And you said to me: we could at least go further from this dangerous place!”

“And wasn’t I right?” said Sam. “See how far away from there we are now!”

“Of course you were,” said Frodo. “I should not have despaired.” But he touched with his left hand the scarred place on his right.

“They are a small folk,” said Turgon as they all three walked down the coast road later, “but for a moment there I thought myself in the presence of one of the Wise: nay, the wisest.”

“Such is the grief of mortals!” Finrod said.

But Fingon said nothing.

He bade the other two farewell a little further on, and picked his way down the jumbled wall of stone to the narrow band of shingle at the shore. It was not wide enough there for two to walk abreast. Small waves broke one after the other, and a gull swooped and dived alone a little way out to sea. Fingon did not have his harp with him, or he might have made a song of the moment, and of the grief. He had thought the old wounds healed. Indeed they had been healed: and now they were torn open again.

He looked up when his brother scrambled down the rocks beside him. “We argued,” Turgon said, “over which of us should come back to you. But I thought Finrod might be more than you could bear just now.”

“It is not that I object to being told to hope,” said Fingon.

“Nor I! But all the same –"

“Finrod!” Fingon said, which summed it up perfectly for both of them.

They watched the gull in its circling flights for a while. Low clouds were gathering in the East, promising rain, but they were still thin, and bright rays of the Sun pierced them and set dazzle and shadow at play on the waves. The water was clear by their feet, and blue-green further out, and deepened to darkest navy at the horizon.

“We could at least go a little further from the fire! So I should have said to him,” said Fingon at last, “if I had been there.”

“I know you loved him well,” said Turgon. “If you had been there I do not believe he should ever have come so close to it.”

“No? But he was bound! Still, anything a friend might do, I would gladly have done.”

“I know it! Tears unnumbered I wept for you, brother, and you came to that battle for his sake – or so I deem.”

Fingon did not deny it. “Shall I hope?” he murmured, watching the gull dive. “But what hope is there? I do not know.” He shook his head. “Then shall I wait? But who else will help him?”

There was a pause filled only with the sound of the water, and then Turgon said, “If there was any way to the Void, Fingon, I believe you would take it, and drag him home yourself.”

“Of course I would!” said Fingon. “But where shall I find the road?”

“Do not look for it!” Turgon said. “Too often already have I watched my brothers throw themselves boldly into darkness – and my sister, too.”

“Argon is worse than I am,” Fingon said.

“You are as bad as each other, and Aredhel was worst of all,” said Turgon. “I still hope to see her again! But I would have no such hope for you, if you set out on that quest. Nor does Maedhros deserve it – no, not even though you loved him well.”

“Do not speak to me of deserts!” Fingon said. “Did Frodo deserve Samwise?”

“Not at the end, perhaps. But he earned Sam’s love long before that,” said Turgon. Fingon gave him a look under his brows. “I take your meaning! But Fingon –“

“I am not afraid,” Fingon said. He sighed. “Yet where shall I find the road?”

They were quiet for a time.

“Finrod was right,” said Turgon eventually. “No matter what came of it, you should not wish a noble deed undone. I believe worse things might have come to pass if you had not saved him when you did. You were not there, but believe me, we were near enough to another kinslaying by the time you brought him back.”

“I know,” Fingon said. “I remember.” He paused a moment. “Not a word he spoke to me after he begged for death that second time,” he said, “though he cried out when he felt my blade at his wrist. Yet not a word while we fled, not a word once Thorondor set us down, not a word even while I bound the wound I gave him. I feared he would die - that I had only killed him more slowly and painfully. Then we came to the lakeshore where you were all wrangling. I was half-carrying him, and I thought he walked as one who was dead already: and I could hear all the bitter words you spoke to each other carried across the water on the wind. None of you saw us come, because you were too angry to look. There were the sons of Fëanor on the one side, and you and Aredhel and Father on the other with Finrod and Galadriel, and there was murder in all your looks just then –”

“We thought you must be dead, and they called you a fool for going at all,” murmured Turgon.

“– and Maedhros lifted up his head at last and said –"

“Maglor, for once in your life will you hold your tongue?” quoted Turgon. He laughed suddenly. “I remember! And the looks on their faces!”

Fingon laughed too, more softly. “And the looks on all of yours!”

“It was a noble deed,” said Turgon. “But do not seek to better it. The time of such deeds is over, and the time of peace is come. Those tales are ended now.” He offered Fingon his hand. Fingon took it. “Finrod thinks mortals bring changefulness wherever they go,” Turgon said, pulling him to his feet there on the shingle. “He makes a strong argument for it, and today I have seen it. But do not let them change you overmuch! You have been happy, and should be still.”

“I know,” Fingon said. “I know!”

Yet all day the thought remained in his mind, of the road that was not and could not be. At nightfall he walked back down the coast road to the Hobbit-hole, where lights were shining in all the windows. The two old Hobbits greeted him kindly, and then Frodo looked at his face and said, “Pardon me if I woke the grief!”

Fingon shook his head. “I only came to ask your advice,” he said, and explained what was in his heart.

“There are many people in this land a good deal wiser than I am,” said Frodo, when he had heard all. “And I do not know if there is a road, as you call it.”

Then Sam said, “Still, as we say in the Shire, where there’s a will, there’s a way! Here’s my advice to you, my lad, if you’ll listen to an old Hobbit: wherever you end up going, be sure to take some rope.”

“Rope?” said Fingon.

“If you don’t have it,” said Sam, “you’re certain to want it!”

All at once Frodo laughed. Then he got up and went into another room, and when he came back he held in his hand something small and bright. “This has become a mathom, as Hobbits term them,” he said, “a gift which one no longer needs, and yet cannot throw away: and the only thing to be done with those, really, is to give them once again. I believe I know something of the void.” He placed in Fingon’s hand the star-glass of Galadriel, with Eärendil’s light shining softly inside it. “Take that!” he said. “You may need it even more than rope!”

Fingon was astonished by the generosity of the gift, and thanked him over and over. But Frodo only seemed pleased. “I am of Sam’s opinion,” he said. “I do not believe stories should finish sadly: or that they will, in the end.”

Fingon went away again with the star-glass tucked into an inner pocket, and some more lightness in his step. But he had not gone far – only to the little empty house the Hobbits had lived in before their hole was dug – before he remembered that still there was no road. Then abruptly his spirit was cast down. “How shall I find it?” he asked the night, and no one answered him.

But he had the will, he reminded himself. He would find the way. He sat down under a tree that grew a little way off from the empty house, and looked up into the lights of heaven. After a while a song came to him, so he sang it. It was a simple tune with simple words in the Westron-tongue that he had been speaking a great deal of lately. It praised the Sun and stars. Only when it was done did Fingon realise it was the song Sam had sung in the Tower of Cirith Ungol, and that he had last heard it when Frodo told the story at his Birthday-party.

“There must be a way,” he said then, and he cast himself down on the grass beneath the tree and prayed for it, since he did not know how else it might be found.

He woke – so it seemed to him – in the garden of Lórien. Fingon blinked, for he was quite certain that was not where he had been before. He had his bow and dagger and harp, and a coil of slender rope besides tied several times about his waist and looped over his shoulder. And when he reached into his inner pocket, the star-glass was still there.

He looked about him then and found the garden was quite empty, which was strange. Under a stand of trees on a low hill there stood an ivory gate which had never been there before. Fingon got up and went towards it.

Wait! said a voice, very soft and deep, and entirely without sound.

Fingon turned and looked up into the solemn and gentle face of the Lord of Dream.

It is a rash deed your heart desires, said the Vala. Rest and healing you may seek with me: or with my brother, perhaps. Grief too you may honour within the circles of this world. Will you not turn back?

“Forgive me!” Fingon said. “If there is a road, I must take it.”

Say not ‘must’, said Irmo. Yet there is a road. Two gates pass beyond what Is. One is in my brother’s keeping: the other is mine. We cannot go through them ourselves, nor do we know what lies beyond: thence we once came, but now we dwell in Time, and our vision does not extend so far. You will get no help of us there. No prayer there spoken can reach us. You will walk alone, and the way is darker than you know.

“I shall take it all the same,” Fingon said.

Then do not leave the road, Irmo said. No more than that can I say!

Fingon bowed deeply. Then he walked up the hill to the ivory gate, and passed through it, and so out of memory and time altogether.

Fingon walked through the ivory gate of Lórien without hesitation, but at the last moment he closed his eyes, because he was afraid. Who knew what lay in the Void? Only one thing could he think of that had come from there since the world began: and that was Ungoliant, slayer of the Trees.

So his eyes were closed, and he laid his hand on his breast, over the star-glass. He did not take up bow or dagger, for if another Ungoliant lurked just beyond the gate they would do him no good. Nor would the star-glass – which had not, in the tale of the Ring, availed more than a little against just one of Ungoliant’s brood: which was only an echo of the light which that dreadful monster had long ago destroyed. Perhaps, Fingon thought in the swift instant as he stepped through, he would be leapt upon at once and shredded into unbeing. Perhaps Maedhros had met just that fate already, long ago. Perhaps Turgon had been right, and this was a fool’s errand, and now Fingon’s brother would have one more reason to grieve and no hope of the grief ever ending.

He paused an instant on the far side of the gate, with his eyes still tight shut, waiting for the immediate destruction he more than half-expected. But it did not come, so Fingon opened his eyes.

Then he stared.

He could not have said how long he stood still, ivory pillars rising either side of him, staring. Perhaps time meant nothing at all. At last he could be silent no more: and he stretched out both his hands as if he might embrace all, and cried gladly: Culúrien, Malinalda, Laurelin; Ninquelótë, Silpion, Telperion!

The light, the light, unforgotten but lost – the light of the Two Trees of Valinor! Fingon was still standing upon a hill in Lórien, beneath a stand of trees, as if the gate had led nowhere at all and been only a decoration for the garden: but all was changed. It was the hour of the day’s ending, when Telperion waxed and Laurelin waned, and softly gold was withdrawn and silver spread his shimmering cloak over the blissful land. In three long ages of the world Fingon had not seen such a sight, and here it was, just as it had been when he himself had been no older than Frodo or Sam: gold still lingering in the upper air, and silver pooling beneath the trees. What need had anyone of a star-glass, when so much glory shone about them?

Yet no one answered his shout of praise, and all was utterly silent. Fingon looked about, and slowly dropped his hands to his sides. The garden was empty. There was no sign of Irmo, nor any hint of the soft weight in the air which bespoke the Dream-lord’s presence unseen. No bird called out, and no wild thing stirred in the grass, and no breath of wind shook the leaves on the trees. There was only light and silence.

“But how can this be the Void?” he asked the empty garden.

He had thought it would be dark.

Then Fingon looking down finally saw the road. He was standing on it. It started at the ivory gate, and unspooled away down the hill and out of the garden. It was a narrow grey ribbon that did not seem to be made out of anything much: not stone, not brick, not wood or metal, nor beaten earth, nor trodden grass: just grey. Fingon bent and touched it with his fingertips, curious, but he could not have said what the texture was. It was closest, perhaps, to some kind of cloth.

It did not look that ill a path. It was not broad, but it was very clear, and Fingon doubted he would have much difficulty staying on it. And he had come here with an errand, and Maedhros was not anywhere he could see. There was nothing for it to follow the road and see where it led.

So he set off. He could think of worse places to walk a strange road than this. Silver light was still gathering about him, like the light of the Moon in the world he had come from, but infinitely more splendid. The Moon was a guttering candle to this. Beyond Lórien the grey road turned aside and went across the meadows under the eaves of the woods, which was just the way Fingon would have chosen to go himself. He nearly laughed as he followed it, and the still trees bent their branches low over him like sculptures cast in mithril. Past the woods the road went down into a little river not more than ankle-deep. The way was quite clear to see even under the bright-shining water, like a crossing of two ribbons, grey and silver. The river gurgled a cheerful little tune as it ran over the rocks, which was the first sound Fingon had heard in – hours? Days? It was hard to count time: but the light was still the silver of Telperion’s flowering, so it could not have been that long. He waded across the water and found that his grey path now turned to thread its way among the reeds along the waterside. Still it was not hard to follow, and the sound of the water made the walk feel less lonely. He had still seen no beast and heard no bird. Nothing moved but Fingon, and nothing spoke but the voice of the river. The light was beautiful, but the country it illuminated was utterly empty.

No sooner had he had the thought than he thought he saw someone in the distance. Fingon at once started to hasten along the path: for there were few people he was likely to meet here, and there was one he was looking for. The road took him the right way, and soon strong hope and joy rose in him. It was a long way off, but his eyes were sharp, and how many tall red-headed Elves could there be wandering this side of the ivory gate?

But the figure had not seen him, and was walking the wrong way. Fingon called out, “Maedhros!”

The distant figure stopped, turned, and waved.

It was him.

Fingon ran down the grey road as fast as his feet would carry him. Maedhros waited for him in the shade of a slim young birch tree. “You’re in a rush today!” he said when Fingon got close enough. “Where are you hurrying off to?” He was leaning against the tree trunk, arms folded, smiling: and the light of Telperion turned the white birchbark silver, and shone in Maedhros’s hair. Fingon said nothing. Maedhros gave him an odd look. “Are you all right?”

It was him and not him. It was like the light of the Trees, because here too was something Fingon had not seen since the world was young. This was Maedhros as he had been, with no shadow in his eyes and no strain in his smile, carrying neither sword nor dagger nor any other weapon, and indeed looking quite surprised when he took in Fingon’s dagger and bow. “What on earth are you hunting?” he said: for the bow was a warbow, twin to the one Fingon had taken with him to Thangorodrim long ago. “I can’t wait to hear how the rope comes into it.”

“Maedhros,” Fingon said, and could not say more.

Maedhros’s surprised look turned into one of true concern. “You’re not all right,” he said, coming forward. “You should have said. Sit down, sit down!”

Fingon sat – half-fell – right there on the grey road, still staring at him. Maedhros came and knelt before him and took his hands – both his hands, in both of his: Fingon looked down at them, left and right, and did not hear his name repeated over and over until Maedhros near-shouted it. “Fingon!” He looked very concerned now. “All is not well with you: we should seek out Estë on Lórellin.”

“I have just come from Lórien,” Fingon said. He did not say, and no one was there. He could not bring himself to say it, not to this Maedhros, who looked so young. “Maedhros, I am well, I am. I am only glad to see you.”

Maedhros smiled at that. “Well, I’m always glad to see you! Shall we go along together for a while, then? Unless you’re in too much of a hurry to walk with me!”

Fingon laughed horribly at that, and could not explain why. Maedhros still looked concerned for him, though he was inexpertly trying to hide it. He helped Fingon back to his feet, and dusted him off, and took his hand: his left hand, in Maedhros’s right, which was warm.

“Where are you going, anyway?” Maedhros said. “And what is the rope for?”

“I came to bring you home,” Fingon said.

Maedhros started laughing. “Daring of you! Still, we’re going the right way for it.”

When Fingon looked down he saw that he was indeed still standing on the grey road, though Maedhros walked in the grass beside it.

"You’ll be – I wish I could say very welcome, but never mind,” Maedhros said as they went. “You’ll be very welcome to me, and maybe we’ll be lucky and Father will be in the forge and forget about dinner. Mother scolded him after last time anyway, so it’s just possible that he’ll mind his manners even if he does see you. In any case you know he doesn’t mean it.” He grinned. “At least not all of it!”

“Maedhros –” Fingon said, but Maedhros did not heed him.

They kept walking, and Maedhros kept Fingon’s hand in his and talked comfortably of small things: his parents’ doings, and their grandfather’s sayings, and assorted minor scrapes his brothers had either fallen into or pulled themselves out of in some clever way, or which at the worst Maedhros had had to rescue them from. He asked after Fingon’s brothers, and his sister, and said that Celegorm missed Aredhel: then he paused and frowned a moment, and suddenly began a rambling series of anecdotes about Celegorm and his dog. Huan was a puppy in some stories and a full-grown hound in others, and in none of them the mighty beast that had wrestled Carcharoth. Fingon did not speak much. He was close to tears. Several times he thought of turning them about and dragging this Maedhros back up the path with him to Lórien and the ivory gate, but something restrained him. This was not the person he had thought to find. How could he drag a happy youth like this back to the ruins of a life his older self had flung away in despair?

The silver light of Telperion still filled all the air, very bright now as the great Tree waxed to its full brilliance: like and yet unlike the light of day, for all it touched was glorified. Fingon had resigned himself to grieving for it forever, yet here it was. Perhaps he should not go back either. Perhaps that was the answer: to stay here in this other place, more than memory, less than true, where the Trees still shone with light undefiled, and only the little silver river broke the silence laughing in its course.

Yet as he thought it Maedhros jerked and stumbled, cutting himself off mid-sentence, letting go of Fingon’s hand to catch his balance. “Sorry!” he said. “Something blew into my face.” He pushed his hair back from his brow and then took Fingon’s hand again, but Fingon looked at him in doubt, for there had not yet been even the smallest breath of wind.

And now he was looking – really looking, as he had not been quite able to bear to do before – he saw that Maedhros blinked and screwed up his eyes often, as if there was some strong wind blowing that only he could feel. Sometimes he grimaced and with his free hand scrubbed at his eyes, or ran his fingers through his own hair, as if trying to get rid of something Fingon could not see. “What is it?” Fingon said.

“Nothing!” said Maedhros.

“Something is troubling you,” Fingon said. “Here, let me.” He reached out just as Maedhros blinked hard and turned his head to the side again. Fingon brushed his hand through his cousin’s hair. When he brought it away there was a faintly sticky silken thread, nearly invisible, tangled with his fingers. “Cobwebs?” he said.

“I don’t know where they’re coming from!” said Maedhros.

It was almost impossible to see the fragment of cobweb at all. It was very small and very fine, and alone of all the things about them it did not glimmer in Telperion’s light. Then Fingon realised: no, not alone. The grey road he had followed down from Lorien’s gate did not shine either.

Maedhros made a frustrated sound. “There’s another one!” he said, and passed his hand over his face to get rid of it. Fingon looked around, but he could not see where they were coming from. None of them had touched him yet. “I’ll be glad to get home,” Maedhros said. “It looks like it’s a good time of year to be a spider – and best of luck to them, but I wish they’d keep their business to themselves.” Then he made a face and combed his hand through his hair again: and when he brought it away Fingon saw something small and black and many-legged in the palm of his hand. “Ugh!” said Maedhros, and flicked the spider away into the grass. It crawled swiftly into the shadow of a thorny bush close by. There was movement where it went, as if there were other spiders there: and even when it had been fully in the light, the light had not illuminated it. More thornbushes climbed up the bank, and patches of shadow stretched between them.

Then it seemed to Fingon that the laughter of the river did not sound so merry as he had thought. In fact there was a repetitive jangle to it, and a hollowness underneath. They were passing under a willow tree leaning out over the water. More silken-fine cobwebs were strung between its branches. The webs were very hard to see, for the light hardly touched them: but they cast shadows, and the shadows looked wrong, asymmetric and ragged and ugly as no true spider’s web would ever be. Fingon took Maedhros’s hand and dragged him on.

Maedhros seemed to catch something of Fingon’s urgent mood, and did not speak of small family doings anymore, or of anything at all. He began to look afraid. More thorny tangled growths sprang up on either hand as Fingon hurried them along the valley. When he glanced back dark shrubs had grown up across the path behind them. There was no light underneath them. No, there was Unlight underneath them – the shadow that nothing bright or good could ever shine through. And in that Unlight many small ugly long-legged things crawled eagerly over one another, and whispered in tiny cruel voices, and waited.

They had been waiting a long time. They were very patient, Ungoliant’s sisters, and they wove their webs with care. Little food of this kind could be found in their realm. They were not fat and swollen as Ungoliant and her brood had become feeding on the richness of Arda. But great or small they would swallow everything in the end, and they knew it, and in the dark they squirmed and chittered in merciless anticipation.

Fingon gripped Maedhros’s fingers tight enough that his cousin made a surprised protest at the pain. Fingon did not relent. He pulled them on faster.

At last they came to the end of the river’s little valley, where the brook leapt over a low waterfall and ran down towards the coast: and there should have been a wind blowing across them as they stood at the top of the fall, but instead there was a rising stench coming from behind. The grey road went scrambling down the rocks beside the waterfall. Fingon jumped. “This way!” he said. Maedhros skidded down the rocks behind him, and then they both ran a little way further, and stopped and looked back. The spiders had not followed them, but the little river valley looked very dark.

Maedhros shuddered. “Those things!” he said. “I hate them! Where do they come from?” He looked at Fingon. “I’m glad you were there with me, at least. Do you know – it’s the strangest thing – it feels like it’s been a very long time since I’ve seen you?”

“So it has been!” Fingon said, and once again he felt like weeping.

Maedhros shook his head and folded his arms, and then hugged himself a little as if he felt some cold wind. The silver light of Telperion still shone in his hair. He looked so young. “Let’s go home,” he said. “Come on. I don’t care what Father says about it!” He took Fingon’s left hand in his right once more and made as if to set off across the meadows in the direction of the house that Fëanor had built for himself.

Fingon knew – knew without having to see it for himself – that Fëanor was not there, nor even a shadow of a memory of him; nor Nerdanel, nor Finwë, nor any of Maedhros’s brothers: that the city of Tirion might be there in the light of the Trees, but no one would be in it. Not a bird, not a beast, not a breath of air would ever stir here, and Lorien’s garden was empty, and no healing waited on Lórellin. In all this fair dead dream of what had once been there was nothing but a ghost of innocence and the waiting spiders.

Yet still he nearly went with him. He had already taken one step off the road when he remembered Irmo’s warning and stopped.

Maedhros stopped too and looked at him, confused. Fingon looked back up again to the cleft of the dark valley, and then up above it. Though silver flooded all the air night seemed to press heavily on it from above. In the dark heaven there was a suggestion once again of squirming movement. There was not a single star in the sky. He looked down to where he had one boot planted in the silvery grass. Already the road was starting to fade from view. If he took another step, it would vanish.

“Aren’t you coming?” Maedhros said.

Fingon swallowed hard and put both feet back on the grey road. Maedhros stood staring at him, still holding onto his hand with a loose uncertain grip. Fingon abruptly pulled him close by it, flung his arms about his neck and pressed his face into his shoulder. His cousin embraced him in return, a little awkwardly.

“You are very dear to me,” Fingon murmured. “But you are not who I am looking for.”

Reluctantly he let him go. Maedhros blinked at him a couple of times. “Oh – very well,” he said. “Be that way! You had better come another time.”

“I would if I could!” Fingon said.

Yet if anything at all could be saved from the Void, he did not think it was this.

It was Maedhros who turned away first, and went off alone and quite cheerful-seeming into the empty countryside where Ungoliant’s sisters still waited for him. Fingon had to force himself to look away. Otherwise he might have forgotten all Irmo had said and run after him, and so lost the grey road forever. He planted both feet firmly on it. The way back to the ivory gate now led through the valley of spiders, so there was no way to go but on.

On he went. Before long the silver light of Telperion’s ghost began to crack and fade around him, chewed at the edges by Ungoliant’s sisters. Shadows grew, and dark shapes moved in them. But the road stayed clear. Fingon knew he was going the right way when it wound about and down to the shores of the Sea, and he heard the sounds of battle in the distance: for he was coming to Alqualondë.

 Now if Fingon might have done it, he would have looked away. For if this was a place of memory and yet not memory, he knew what he would soon see, and he was ashamed. But though the road was clear it was not straight, so he had to watch where he put his feet, and look ever ahead to what was coming. Shadowy many-legged things moved in the dark about him, and then flames sprung up here and there which illuminated nothing. There was shouting and the clash of steel in the dark. Fingon remembered this: for he had been at the van of his father’s host, and just so in the time of Darkening had he come to the shores of the Sea, and just so had he heard the shouting and steel.

Thin wraithshapes sprang up on either side of Fingon, and more marched behind him. To his left and right he half-saw his cousins Angrod and Aegnor, tall and fair and warlike, yet half-transparent: both looked to him, and the flames that flickered in the endless night were shining too in their eyes. A dark soft-heaving sea lay ahead, and on its back the white ships of the Teleri in fair array. Little had Fingon thought of this moment during the years of his exile, for there had been too much else to think of in Middle-earth, and the memory besides was not easy to examine too closely. But he had been forced to examine it all the same in the end, for at last he too had tasted the bitterness of Death. Little had he thought of it in Middle-earth, but little else had he thought of in the Halls of Mandos.

First for a long time his heart had said, but what else could I do? They were my cousins! Then as the petulant defence began to seem thin he had tried in growing anger to turn the blame aside. The crime was theirs, not mine. I meant no evil. I did not know. Yet his spirit had not been quiet, and long he had repeated again and again in the dark halls I did not know! – though there was no one else at hand who needed to be convinced. Many long and restless years had passed before Fingon had finally arrived by himself at a new thought, which was that not knowing – or indeed not wishing to – was not, in fact, an excuse.

Then at once he had known what he must do, and almost as soon as he saw it Mandos sent him forth without a word to do it. Reclothed in flesh he had walked again to the shores of Eldamar and come at nightfall to Olwë’s court, and there he had abased himself and waited on his knees with bowed head. Nothing Fingon had done in all his life had ever scared him so much. The King of the Teleri had looked on him grimly, and told him he was brash and over-quick in his coming as he had ever been. Fingon had trembled before him.

Then Olwë said that he and all his folk had better things to do than sit day and night in judgment over the penitent Noldor: which was Mandos’s charge in any case, and it might be presumed that Námo knew his business. So Fingon learned that he was not the first to walk from Mandos to the shore – nay, many had walked that road, since Finrod first of all the Exiles had come to kneel at his kinsman’s feet and there been raised up. Olwë raised him up too and informed him that if he had stopped to ask anyone he might have learned that this ceremony was usually performed on the third Tuesday of the month, the suppliants waiting penitent until that time, and Fingon was a week early. Valiant? Say rather, hasty! the king had said, and many had laughed. Fingon had blushed at it: but if such laughter was the worst of his punishment – as indeed it was – then he knew it was a more merciful fate than he deserved. Thereafter he had gone to live among the former Exiles on Tol Eressëa, where those they had wronged might be spared the daily sight of them. So did sewn wounds heal to scars, and scars slowly fade: and in after ages now and then some of the Teleri sailed out to see them.

Yet now Fingon stood here again upon the brink, Angrod and Aegnor at his left and right, and an army of wraiths behind him. Maedhros sprang forth out of the dark, bleeding from a cut on his cheek and laughing wildly, and called his name in glad tones. “We are not beaten yet – fail not, falter not – we shall have them!” he cried. “Amrod, Amras, Caranthir, once more! Fingon, cousins, I am heartily glad to see you.” He half-embraced Fingon, left arm about his shoulders: in his right hand he held his bloodied sword. “Now for freedom!” he said fiercely by Fingon’s ear, and when he stepped back his smile was more dreadful than his laughter had been, and the flames that illuminated nothing shone in his eyes too.

Then he was turning and running back into the dark, and Fingon felt a lurch in his heart that was the memory of his first taste of battle-joy. In that same instant saw three wraiths running ahead with bared blades: there Angrod, and there Aegnor, and there between them Fingon himself, first of the three. He had followed Maedhros, and the other two had followed him: and all Fingolfin’s host had come after them. Fingon stretched out his hand as if he might catch his own ghost and hold him back. But the pale shape was gone into the dark, and all the army of wraiths was sweeping by him to their cruel work. They had meant no evil. They had not known. They had not stopped to ask.

Fingon stood alone again on the grey road listening to the battle-cries and the screaming, and he thought suddenly that Maedhros had known. He had known full well what he was doing, and had spoken to Fingon the bold words of Fëanor, knowing just what their effect would be.

The road led on. Its destination would not get any less dreadful if Fingon waited. He had come here for a reason. He slipped a hand into the pocket at his breast where the star-glass of Galadriel lay. It was still there.

He went on.

He thought he would have to see it all, battle and slaughter: but it was not so. Only the sound of it rose ever louder around him as more and more hideous flames flared up in the awful darkness. Even when he came to the very edge of the Sea and the moorings of the pale ships he saw no one. But the wailing of the Teleri was all about him: and then the grey road led into the water, and lay just under its dark surface as if floating there. Fingon hesitated, but there was no other way. He stepped out.

Instantly the sounds of the Kinslaying stopped. Red flames were still flickering in the dark. The white ships silently began to move, gliding with him as he walked. The grey road followed the line of the dark coast. Dark water rippled over it, and it seemed to have no more thickness indeed than a silk ribbon, yet it was sturdy enough to walk on. The stolen ships swept forward under full sail, though there was no wind to drive them.

Then all at once the ships vanished. The grey road suddenly veered off one way. Fingon stopped with the dark water lapping at his boots, and looked west. On the shore he saw small forms moving, exiled from their home and abandoned by their kin. All too well he remembered the cold road that lay ahead of them.

But this road went on over the Sea, and it was lit by flickering red fires that hovered over the dark water. Fingon curled his hands into tight fists and felt his fingernails press against his palms. Many many wounds had been healed in Valinor, and here it seemed every last one of them was to be torn open again. He had thrown himself into an evil battle without a second thought when Maedhros laughed and called his name, and still he had been betrayed and left on the dark shore.

“But I already forgave him,” he said, not knowing who he was speaking to. Yet it seemed to him that someone or something had asked the question.

Whatever it was it withdrew, though not completely. Fingon then made the mistake of looking down and felt a moment of vertigo. For he had thought himself standing on a road across the Sea, but now it seemed to him as though he stood on a mere cobweb strung across a bottomless abyss, and down in the endless dark the squamous beasts of the Void were moving.

Still there were the red fires now half-lighting the way, and the grey road was forever clear. Fingon set off across the abyss.

 It was a long way to walk. The road no longer turned and twisted, but ran straight between the flickering columns of evil-gleaming fire that punctuated the dreadful dark. The abyss below was twin to that above, and soon Fingon began to think that there was no real difference between them. This was not the world where Sea and Sky were two different things: this was the Void, and here there was only the road and the nothingness around it. Fingon would have given a great deal to see even a single star. He almost looked forward to reaching the pillars of fire that punctuated the night: at least he did until he reached them, but every time he drew near to one he saw by the sick red half-light hints of movement at the edges of his vision, and remembered again how many greedy creeping shadow-things waited and watched him from the nothingness all around.

At last in the uttermost distance he saw flames rising not as a flickering outpost but as a tall red tower stretching to heaven. The road led right towards them. Fingon speeded his steps, and soon he saw the shore rising out of the black sea, and the mouth of the firth of Drengist as it ran down from the mountains. There at the base of the red tower of fire were the swan-ships of the Teleri, all turned to black skeletons that blazed and were not consumed in the firestorm’s embrace. The road led so straight towards the flame that Fingon thought in horror that he would have to go right through it.

But at the very last moment it turned aside, and though he felt the heat of the flames on his face they did not touch him. The grey road went instead along the strand a little way and up the hill. There Maedhros stood alone with his back to the fire, looking out to sea: and his face was greatly troubled.

Fingon said with satisfaction to the thing that still seemed to be asking him some question: “See, he repented it. I was right to forgive him!”

It seemed this Maedhros could not see him, for though the grey road ran right past his feet and Fingon stopped at his elbow he did not turn around. Fingon watched him watching the dark water and felt as if something in his heart that had been squeezed and twisted up for a very long time was loosening. He had heard the story, of course, of how Maedhros had dared to disagree with his father at Losgar, and then stood aside: and the way Maglor had told it, he had even spoken Fingon’s name. But Maglor was a great teller of stories, and Fingon had known him occasionally bend the truth to shape a tale better. And the Noldolantë told of the shipburning at Losgar and the rescue from Thangorodrim in the same canto, and balanced one against the other.

As if in answer to Fingon’s thought Maglor at that moment came quickly striding up the hill. “Have you been enjoying yourself?” asked Maedhros flatly.

“It might be for the best,” Maglor said. “If they turn back now I daresay they’ll be allowed to go home after all: and those of us who are here now are here with our whole hearts. We need worry no more about quarrelling amongst ourselves.”

Maedhros laughed low. “You think so!”

“They’ll be fine!” Maglor said. “All our cousins, and Fingon too. Don’t look at me like that! I mean it. You’re not the only person who has friends, you know. Anyway that’s not what I came to ask you. Is Amrod here? Or did he come this way? I can’t find him.”

“I haven’t seen him,” Maedhros said. Then suddenly he went very still, and a great look of horror came over his face. He turned at last and looked back at the burning ships.

Maglor looked too. Then he paled. “No!” he said, and at once he ran back down the hill towards the fire. But Maedhros did not move. The red column of flame still gnawed eagerly on the blackened carcasses of the ships, but now it had consumed nearly all. Even as Fingon looked, the last charred beams fell into ash and nothing and collapsed, and the fire winked out as if it had swallowed itself. All was dark on the shore, and a strong smell of smoke and burning abode all around. Then the smell changed, becoming a fouler and mustier stench, and in the shadows at the ocean’s edge Fingon thought he saw spiders moving.

He looked back to Maedhros – but Maedhros was gone. Fingon stood alone on the hill above Losgar: alone on the narrow grey road.

So he followed it. What else could he do? And up and through the hills it went, and past one mountain range and then into another: for this was Beleriand and yet not Beleriand, and the relation of place and time was not as it should have been. Barely a glimpse did Fingon get of Hithlum as the road sped by it, and what he saw looked strange to his eyes. And now he came to the Eithel Sirion on the Mountains of Shadow. There ahead he saw a semicircle of six still figures that were the six remaining sons of Fëanor, each of them on one knee: and their father was midmost, but he could not stand.

And Fingon stood still, for even the memory of the Eldar could not express or contain as it had been in life the mighty power of the spirit of Fëanor. Fingon had never loved his uncle overmuch, but his heart still stirred just at the memory of the dread speech Fëanor had once made in Tirion, which had called Fingon’s heart on to freedom, and of which so much evil had come. Now here dying lay the greatest of all the Noldor – though not the wisest – and even mortally wounded he was both very terrible and very splendid. Fingon could not see his face: but he heard him speak and three times lay a mighty curse on the name of Morgoth, and he trembled at it.

Then Fëanor without glancing to either side held out his hands, and Curufin took the left, but Maedhros the right. Both their faces were very pale, but tearless: so too all the other brothers. “See it done,” said Fëanor, “and wreak my vengeance on him!”

“We shall!” Fingon thought he heard one of them say, but he did not see which, and in any case their father did not hear. For as soon as he had finished speaking suddenly a great flame leapt up all about him, as red and terrible as the flames of Losgar, and his sons who had been grasping his hands had to let go and flinch back and turn their faces away. The passing of Fëanor’s spirit made a mighty pyre of his own flesh, and the fire leapt up to heaven like a dreadful flare and was gone. Six brothers crouched now around nothing, and looked at one another: and Fingon stepped forward a little at last, and saw that Maglor and Celegorm and Caranthir all wept, and Amras looked away: but Curufin’s face was twisted in a terrible rage, and Maedhros at first had no expression at all.

Then he stood, and softly he began to speak. And as he spoke swiftly one by one his brothers stood also and joined their voices to his, and their chant grew louder until their cry rang defiantly from the heights:

Be he foe or friend, be he foul or clean
Brood of Morgoth or bright Vala,
Elda or Maia or Aftercomer,
Neither law, nor love, nor league of swords,
Dread nor danger, not Doom itself
Shall defend him from Fëanáro, and Fëanáro's kin,
Whoso hideth or hoardeth, or in hand taketh,
Finding keepeth or afar casteth
A Silmaril. This swear we all...
Death we will deal him ere Day's ending,
Woe unto world's end! Our word hear thou,
Eru Allfather! To the everlasting
Darkness doom us if our deed faileth...
On the holy mountain hear in witness
and our vow remember,
Manwë and Varda!

Still Maedhros had no expression on his face. But he turned and looked back to the West at the last, and then Fingon saw in his eyes a dreadful fire, the echo of the fires of the Kinslaying, of Losgar and of Eithel Sirion: the fire of his father’s burning.

Fingon had seen that fire in him before. Indeed he had not seen him in long ages without it. But he had always thought it came from the torments of Thangorodrim.

“Maedhros!” he said.

But Maedhros did not hear him: and now he looked away again to the North.

Now the grey road went on, and Fingon believed he knew where it was going: for it seemed to him that he was walking through the years and deeds of the First Age, and if so then for Maedhros next must come the torment on Thangorodrim. And indeed the road down from the Eithel Sirion seemed to be turning that way. Fingon steeled his courage. It had been a very terrible place, and he did not want to watch Maedhros suffer. Yet he was not altogether unhappy, for at least he knew that that suffering had ended, and how it was to be done. He had his bow and dagger and harp, and if his own ghost or memory failed to turn up as appointed, Fingon could and gladly would deliver Maedhros himself.

But the road wandered thin and grey in the dark, and nothing could be seen of the evil cliffs. In fact all was quiet, and soon the shapes of ghostly Beleriand fell away, and the darkness pressed around him again. It did not seem so full and greedy a darkness as before. There was no sign of the spiders. But there were also no stars. This was what Fingon had expected from the Void: utter emptiness, infinite silence. He felt very small, lost in so great and cold a night. The dreary road did not seem to be going anywhere.

At last as from afar he heard the sound of trumpets. Echoes rang from their call brash and glad in the silence. Fingon wondered at them, and felt his heart lifted.

Then quite suddenly he remembered where he was. Of course! This was the East-road across Ard-galen, which he had taken many times, fearing no Orc nor any mischief of Morgoth: for the watch on Angband would hold, and Angrod and Aegnor besides held the mountains at his right. And Fingon was well-horsed and clad in blue and silver, and drawing near to where he wished to go, and the Sun beat down on him and on all the bold young green of the northlands in Spring. So he cried to his horse and she sprang to a gallop, as glad as Fingon himself for speed and good weather, and glad too for the straight grey road that led past the highlands and then bent southeast, round the rocky skirts of Dorthonion to Himring.

In the high cold courtyard Fingon flung himself from horseback almost straight into Maedhros’s arms. Maedhros laughed at him, and then said, “But what’s this I hear of you? A fire-drake!”

“Yes, a fire-drake! So we named it, anyway, for our dear northern neighbour neglected to send us any message regarding his latest innovation, and we do not know what he would wish us to term the beast.”

Maedhros shook his head sadly. “He has always had such poor manners.”

Fingon laughed. “Well, whatever it was supposed to be called, he may now call it stuffed-full-of-arrows, for so it was, and went scurrying back to Angband as fast as its ugly legs could carry it. And everyone else has already had the chance to praise me, so I thought I had better come and see you. I would not want you to feel slighted in this.”

“But I do feel slighted,” said Maedhros, “to come last!”

“It is a cunning ruse of mine,” Fingon said. “Since you are last, I need not hasten away. I mean to linger here awhile – if I am welcome! – and you may consider at leisure how best to laud my victory.”

“We can send a message to Maglor,” Maedhros said, “and he’ll make a song of it.”

“Very good: but I want your praises, not his!”

“Mine are seldom so neatly phrased. But you are very welcome here for as long as you choose to stay – and that will give me some time to think about it!”

So they went inside together, and Fingon greeted and was honoured by a great many of Maedhros’s people, who asked where the rest of Fingon’s company were. “They are coming, they are coming! I rode ahead,” Fingon said, and many laughed. There was food brought out and music in the great hall. Maedhros presided over all a little merrier than was his wont: for his expression was grave, but his eyes laughed, which pleased Fingon as much or more than all the admiring attention he was getting.

Time then seemed to blur a little. Presumably the feasting took as long as such feasts always did, but Fingon found he had somehow missed quite a lot of it. Now the hour was late and he walked alone through familiar halls, pausing here and there to be hailed merrily as high prince and first captain of the Noldor, before he came to Maedhros’s private chambers. Here none but the Lord of Himring ever entered unbidden, not even to sweep the floors and lay the fires: but Fingon did not knock.

Maedhros was writing, in scrawled swift characters poorly formed: left-handed swordplay he had learned well, but his father’s alphabet defied him when he wished to write quickly. He looked up at once when Fingon entered. “A fire-drake, Fingon!” he said.

“Don’t look like that! There’s not a scratch on me,” said Fingon.

“One day there will be!”

“Perhaps there will. Still, better that than to run craven before Morgoth’s mischief.”

“True,” Maedhros said. “Forgive me: there is a spirit of cowardice slips into my breast now and then when I am weary, and it fears for you. But truly I rejoice in your boldness. I have not thought of a praise yet.”

“I find I can do without it,” Fingon said. He took the pen out of Maedhros’s hand and laid it aside without looking.

“Fingon, you’ve blotted my records,” Maedhros said.

“I rode all the way here and all you have to say to me is you’ve blotted my records?”

“Everything else I might say you already know,” Maedhros said, “except for your praise, which you claim you can do without.” He stood up. He was smiling.

Fingon rolled his eyes. “I don’t know why I love you,” he said. Maedhros laughed: and then Fingon went to his arms.

Afterwards, sprawled among woven bright-patterned blankets, Maedhros said, “How long can you stay, really?”

“Oh – a week, a month. Six months. Ten years,” Fingon said, and laid his head on Maedhros’s breast. “Or a hundred. Or forever, in fact. Only getting up now and then to slay an Orc-band or two.” Maedhros’s hand was resting in his hair. He had started undoing Fingon’s braids earlier, as was ever his pleasure: and Fingon had succeeded in distracting him before he was done, as was his pleasure, and now no doubt braids and ribbons alike were all of a tangle. Fingon did not care in the least.

“Not forever, Fingon,” Maedhros said.

“No: but as long as I can, I shall!”

“Your father will think I’ve kidnapped you.”

“Well, we can’t have that,” Fingon said. “Send him a letter. Tell him you’ve married me.”

“Oh yes!” said Maedhros softly. Fingon could feel him shaking with laughter. “Because that would certainly set his mind at rest!”

“He might feel at least that it explained a thing or two,” Fingon murmured. “Hush! Don’t laugh so loud. I have defeated a fire-drake, and ridden a long way, and a great many people have sung my own praises at me, and now it seems I am kidnapped, so the least you could do is let me rest.”

Maedhros’s hand passed once more over his hair. “Of course!” he said.

Fingon fell a while into dreaming. Yet he was not so deep in dreams that he did not hear Maedhros say quietly, “If I could, I would.” Afterwards he was silent for a time, and then at last he added, very low, Beloved! And it seemed to Fingon as he dreamed that Maedhros laid that name upon him as it were a rich mantle about his shoulders, or a precious gem to bind upon his brow. Yet he sounded afraid.

Fingon would have woken if he could and spoken the word back to him with other words of love besides: but he was very tired. And it was pleasant beyond all things to lie there and hear Maedhros’s heartbeat and feel his breathing, and know furthermore that while Fingon rested Maedhros must perforce rest too – which he seldom did otherwise, with the watch on the North eating at him night and day. Six months in the end this stay had lasted, before Fingon had ridden home just ahead of the winter, and it was a fair memory. So too were the memories of other such visits during the Long Peace – a month here, two there, half a year now and again, before they returned each to his appointed task, Fingon to patrolling and Maedhros to his watch. Some must have guessed how it was with them, and some had surely known – Maglor, Fingon thought, ever Maedhros’s favourite brother; and he little doubted that Finrod’s wise eyes had seen the way of things. It had all been part and parcel of the madness of Middle-earth. Nothing had seemed impossible in those days, and one breaking of custom as sane as another; and Maedhros had welcomed him again and again, and the flame in him had seemed to burn less dreadfully when they were together. Those had been joyful days despite all – through sorrow, Fingon thought, to find joy; or freedom at least; and certainly they had been free –

Then he sat up abruptly in bed.

Maedhros lay beside him and his breathing was even. Something was dreadfully wrong. Fingon had not been here in centuries. No, this familiar fortress had been ruined long ages ago. This was a memory, a dream, a Void-echo: no more real than the light of Telperion’s ghost had been. How had he forgotten? Fingon looked around in rising panic. Had he lost the road?

But it was there, grey and narrow. It led from the side of the bed to the chamber door. Fingon’s heart was still pounding, but he bade himself be calm. He had not failed. Not yet. The road was there. And there lay harp, and bow, and dagger, with the rest of his clothes on the floor: and the rope was hanging looped on the bedpost, and the star-glass – Fingon groped for his clothes – yes, it was still in his pocket.

He got up and dressed himself, making sure to plant both feet firmly on the grey path. But when he was clothed he stopped and sat down again on the side of the bed. The road was still at his feet, but he had yet to take up any of the things he must carry away with him, and when he reached for the coil of rope he found his hand instead pausing in the air before dropping onto Maedhros’s shoulder. Fingon looked at him for a long time. There had been joy for them now and again. There had been joy. Maedhros lay with his face pillowed on his right arm, and Fingon could see the place where his own blade had maimed him. Still there had been joy!

He let his hand fall away from Maedhros’s shoulder. Maedhros stirred. “Fingon?” he said. He took in Fingon’s appearance and said, “So soon?” but then at once, “Very well! Be wary of fire-drakes!”

Fingon said nothing. Maedhros looked at him, and at where he was looking, and frowned. “Do you dwell on that yet? Do not!” he said. “I have scars I do not love, but that is not one of them.”

Fingon paused, for he had no memory of those words. Maedhros had not spoken them to him when this night had happened back in the world. “How can you love it?” he said.

Maedhros sat up. He reached out for Fingon’s hand and laid it over the ruin of his right arm, where the white lines of the scarring lay from the flap of skin sewn across the stump. “When I look at it I remember that I live,” he said. “He could have killed me, but did not. He chose instead to amuse himself with tortures, and so his own evil has betrayed him: for I endured, and I live. If you had not saved me when you did I do not believe the Noldor would ever have ended their old quarrels, and so it is through his own cruelty that the Morgoth now cowers in his fortress fearing our leaguer against him. One day he shall pay what he owes me, and his debt is even greater than it was: I do not forget what I endured. And I live! I live because you loved me, though you could hardly have believed me worthy of it then: and because you are valiant. How could I ever be sorry to remember that?”

Fingon swallowed. “What then are the scars you do not love?” he said.

A silent moment went by. Then Maedhros guided his hand to a long cruel mark that curled about his flank. “The lash,” he said. “And this,” of five white lines about his upper arm, “the fiery fingerprints of Morgoth’s slaves. And there is besides a Balrog-captain wears a necklace of teeth, two of which are mine: I shall hold him accountable for them yet. If you want to touch those scars I shall have to stop talking. They are at the back.”

Fingon shook his head and kissed him instead: yet still he kept his feet on the road. Maedhros laughed softly when they parted. “Well, that’s one way to go about it,” he said. He still held Fingon’s hand. After a moment his expression turned grave, and he guided it to one last scar: the fine white line on his cheek, near invisible, that he had got at Alqualondë. “This too I rue,” he said. “It was ill-won: I wonder if it was not Morgoth’s hand at work somehow. We did not need the ships. You and your father and all your people proved that in your crossing, and all must honour it. And we should have better allies to the south if we had not done what we did – allies we may yet need.”

Fingon thought of what he had so lately seen, Maedhros bloody-handed and laughing dreadfully as he called out for aid at the shores of the Sea. And as he thought of it he found there was an odd doubling in his thoughts. For now he had two memories of that time, and it seemed to him that the first time Maedhros had not been quite so dreadful – though certainly he had laughed, and certainly urged them on. Yet had he not been wild-eyed and frightened too? Had Fingon been any better – who had not known, and should have stopped to ask? He thought of the spiders that had lurked in the dark, and felt a sudden certainty: wherever they were, there he would see only the worst and most vile shapes out of memory – for that was what they rejoiced in.

His road was waiting for him. Fingon would gladly have lingered longer in this pocket of peace, but he suspected that was a dangerous wish. It was not the lord of Himring he had come in search of, any more than the boy in Valinor. He turned his hand to lay his palm against Maedhros’s cheek, and kissed his brow. “I will find you again!” he said.

“Go safely!” said Maedhros. “And I meant it – be wary of dragons!”

Dragons, thought Fingon suddenly only a little way further down the starless road. They had not called them so until some years had passed after the time of Glaurung’s first issue from Angband. He looked back over his shoulder in doubt, thinking also of the boy in Valinor, whom Fingon now thought had frowned at odd moments, and clearly known more about the spiders than he wished to. What were they, these memories of Maedhros? Were they visions only? And if so, whose?

Nothing answered him, and the way back looked dim. Fingon knew he had better go on. Soon once again there was nothing around him but the silent and infinite emptiness. More than once he nearly took out the star-glass, if only for the cheer and company of some light. But he restrained himself: for he guessed that it would probably attract more spiders.

Then once again as he walked it seemed to him that something tapped him on the shoulder and asked him a question.

At first he ignored it. But the inquiry was very insistent. “It was not without reason that I loved him,” Fingon said at last. “Fell fires burned in him maybe, but they were not all of him. He thought deeply, and repented much. Many evils were about him, and he was steadfast.” Still the questioner was unsatisfied. “Oh, what do you know, void-creature!” Fingon said. “He was no fire-drake: he was my friend. I loved him and he loved me. Is that not enough? Begone!”

And it seemed to him that the questioner was gone. He still did not know what it had been, or what its interest was in him. He hoped it would not return.

On he went along the grey road. Now and then he thought he saw or half-felt movement in the shadows, but if so then whatever moved was alone and not strong, and did not try to draw nigh. On through the endless night, and Fingon’s hand fell after a while to the hilt of his dagger. Nothing attacked him, but it seemed that the silence was waiting for something.

Then the road suddenly dipped and began to run as it were down a steep hill, though there was no hill underneath it to cause the change. It was not easy to walk now. The angle of the slope almost demanded a run, and Fingon’s feet sped a little along the grey path, though he held himself back as best he could: for he feared what lay at the bottom of such an incline. And he was right to fear, for just as he saw the path flatten out again suddenly something huge and terrible flared out, flame and not flame, light and not light. For an instant the blanketing darkness was undone and replaced with something worse, mercilessly bright in all directions, burning with a cold more terrible than the cold of the Grinding Ice. Silhouetted against the lightning flash Fingon thought he saw many black long-legged crawling things: but among them there was a terrible serpent-shape, armoured in glitter and gleam. It was Glaurung the Golden, or something very like him: not as he had been when Fingon and his horsemen had chased him with arrows back between his master’s legs, but as he had come forth in full might to sear the plains of Ard-Galen at Dagor Bragollach.

Be wary of dragons!

Then darkness heavy and soft fell again, and only the road could be seen. Fingon stood frozen with his dagger in his hand. Almost he laughed at himself. What could he do with a dagger against such a beast as that! And there had been so many spiders: far more than he had supposed, and much greater in size. He could not see now where they were. Most had been well away from the grey line of the road – most, but not all: and it was clear from their arrangement that they all knew well where it lay. And the dragon might come forth at any moment.

Yet this was his road, and he had no other. He stood up a little straighter. He went on.

Before long he heard a sound as of a horse’s hooves. He half-turned, for it came from his right, and in the flash of hideous revelation he had seen nothing that way but spiders. But there was a rider coming, riding hard from dark to dark. When he came to the road his horse’s muscles all bunched and it leapt across as if it were overleaping some high barrier. Fingon cried out. It was Rochallor his father’s horse: and the rider was Fingolfin the High King, Fingon’s father, and his eyes were ablaze.

But already he was gone again into the night. Just so he had ridden forth to issue his challenge before Morgoth’s gates, and in his despair Fingon had not been able to restrain him. Long had Fingolfin been determined to finish his brother’s war and see his father’s slayer cast down, and when he believed all for naught then his rage had been as true in its course as the fires of a falling star.

Fingon looked down at his feet on the grey path, and looked off to the left where his father had vanished. Irmo’s warning was in his mind, and yet he did not wish to heed it. He had come here on one errand, but here was another and a greater. How should he not turn aside for his father’s sake?

He took a deep breath. There were many spiders in the dark. Somewhere there was a dragon. “I am not afraid,” he said.

And yet at that moment it was of all things the words of King Olwë that came into his mind. Brash and overquick: so had Fingon been named as he knelt at the king’s feet, who among the Exiles had ever been lauded as a captain most valiant.

Brash and overquick.

There were many shadows in this place. Fingon knew his father had never come to the Void. His spirit sat in Mandos’s halls.

Whoever that rider was, it could not have been him.

Fingon’s heart was much grieved, but he slid his dagger back into his sheath. Once more he looked to the grey road. What a dull and miserable path it was!

On he went.

Neither spiders nor dragon troubled Fingon as he walked on his road. But he began to feel very weary. A great weight seemed to be pressing on him. For a long time he could not think what it might be. Then he paused and reached up, and found he was wearing a silver crown.

“Of course,” he murmured. If his father was dead, then he must be king. And he felt as he had felt before a sudden sense of knowing where he was and what was happening: but this time he saw through it, and resisted it, and so though he was clad once more in blue and silver he did not start believing himself back in Beleriand. This was the Void, and there was the road: and no fair landscape appeared about him. But the crown, it seemed, he had to put up with. It was not light.

Mithrandir, Fingon thought, had been overkind when he told the Hobbits they had three great kings about their breakfast table. Fingon had been an Elvenking in Middle-earth, certainly: but the loremasters argued about whose reign was briefer, his or Maedhros’s, and most chose to count Maedhros’s years in Thangorodrim as kingship still, and so made Fingon’s rule the shortest. Less than a score of mortal years had he worn this crown. He did not know that he had been, in that very short time, particularly great.

He tried to think only of the road.

Before long a tall figure began to walk the shadows at his side, as if another path lay there. This time Fingon was half-expecting Maedhros.

“It can be done,” Maedhros said, as if he was carrying on a conversation already begun. “Beren and Lúthien proved it: and if a mortal Man and a Grey-Elf maiden may do such deeds, what cannot be done by all Beleriand leagued in friendship with the might of the Noldor?”

“I do not disagree with you,” Fingon said, as he had said before. He knew that this conversation was only a ghost of the real one, but it seemed that the ghost was determined to speak with his tongue. He could not say, Maedhros, is that you or we knew too little of what we faced or even Lúthien was no ordinary Elf-maid! “Time and time again I have said it, and you and I have better cause than any to believe it. Wherever we have friendship, we are strong.”

“I thought so little of Men at their first coming!” Maedhros said.

“Finrod knew better. You should have seen the House of Hador at Eithel Sirion, Maedhros! It is not that they are fearless, precisely: it goes beyond that. I would almost say that they are greatly afraid. They know very well how weak they are. But they make of their terror a mighty defiance, and so there is nothing they will not dare.”

Maedhros laughed. “No wonder you like them!”

They walked on a little way together in the dark. There was much in Fingon’s heart he could not say – not while he wore this crown. Maedhros walked with a light step. There was a fire in his eyes, and yet he smiled. “Too long have I lived with little hope,” he said, “for there seemed little to found my hopes upon. But now!” Suddenly he turned to Fingon and seized his hand. “We shall have the Orcs out of this fair land,” he said, “and Morgoth out of his fortress: we shall avenge your father and mine: then for the Oath – and then for freedom!”

Fingon grasped his hand tightly. “Long have I wished to see you freed from that bond,” he said. “But I know King Thingol sent you an unfriendly answer.”

Maedhros’s look was rueful. “We sent to him in too much haste: we should have taken our time over the message. Maglor said even then that we had better not sound quite so much like –”

“Like the Sons of Fëanor?” Fingon said.

“Well, so we are!” Maedhros laughed a moment, and then he shook his head. “Celegorm and Curufin are blustering, being ashamed of themselves. They should have gone to aid Finrod, and they know it. I shall restrain them. Let Lúthien keep what was so hard-won!” He looked into the distance, and added softly, “After all the years of Men are short.”

Then he turned to Fingon again, and his smile was nearly as bright as it had once been in Valinor: and he brought Fingon’s hand to his lips and kissed it before he let it go. He said no more. They walked on. But Fingon remembered thinking then, as he still thought now, that Maedhros’s brothers were not much given to bluster.

Before long a very great darkness came up, and Fingon could no longer see Maedhros at his side. Now it seemed to him he was again walking in green Beleriand, over the fields of Hithlum. He was coming by the grey road once more to Eithel Sirion, and he knew all too well what lay ahead of him. They had had much to found their hopes on, on that bright morning: great strength of alliance, great friendship, great hearts: and Turgon besides coming all unlooked-for with ten thousand bright spears of the Gondolindrim.

“O my friend!” he said softly.

The road did not take Fingon into the Nirnaeth. He was prepared for it: he was ready. Well he remembered the way of the battle, and almost he managed to lift his own heart thinking that at least he should look on Húrin again, whom he had accounted a friend. But the grey path led him around the south of the field and away to the East, only a little way north of the east-road of Ard-galen which he had ridden so many times: and he heard the clash of steel, but saw it not.

And then there was a great silence, and all but the dim road melted away. Fingon reaching up found he was no longer wearing the silver crown. It was rather a relief to be rid of it. But he did not know where he was.

At last he found his grey path leading him into a little grey room all of stone, and he did not recognise it.

Maedhros sat there alone. Fingon spoke his name, but it seemed he was not heard. Then he looked around, and stood confused: for he was on the road, and yet the road did not seem to go anywhere. Was this the end of his journey?

“Maedhros!” he said again.

But still Maedhros did not move.

He was looking right at Fingon: he was looking right through him. Fingon turned and looked back over his shoulder to see what it was that held Maedhros so transfixed. But there was nothing there save a great blackness.

In the upper corner of the room, under the vault of the stony roof, a small black spider was spinning a web.

A long time went by. Fingon stood helpless and unheeded at the road’s end. Maedhros looked at nothing.

Then Maglor came in and walked with slow steps to his brother’s side. “Maedhros!” he called softly, just as Fingon had. But this call Maedhros heard. He blinked once, and then shook his head very slightly.

“Shall I call for wine?” Maglor said. He was injured: his right arm was much-bandaged.

“No,” said Maedhros.

“Bread, then.”

“No.”

“You would do better to eat and rest,” said Maglor.

“Did you see it?” Maedhros said.

Maglor said nothing.

There was silence for a time. In it Fingon tried again to speak to them, to both of them: but neither of them heeded him. He had half-known they would not.

Then in a low voice Maedhros began to speak. He spoke a curse. He cursed in terrible words the treachery of Men and of all the House of Ulfang: and he named the betrayers one by one and cursed them over again: and then his voice failed, but Maglor took it up, and standing by his brother spoke in proud cold tones a third curse, near as mighty as any of Fëanor’s, to fall ever and again on those who had betrayed the great alliance and brought all to destruction. “So shall it be!” he said, when he was done.

But Maedhros wept as a child might. His face was hidden in his left hand, and when he once looked up, his eyes fell upon his maimed right arm, and then he wept harder. Above him the small black spider, done with one web, swung on a rope of silk to another corner of the vaults and began a new weaving.

Fingon’s heart twisted in his breast to see one he loved so undone. He wanted to kneel at Maedhros’s feet and take his hand: to speak him fairly, and promise comfort, and tell him furthermore to take the bread and wine his brother offered him. But these things he could not do. When he had no more tears Maedhros spoke in a dull voice. “They trod him in the dust,” he said. Maglor looked as though he would speak, but then seemed to think better of it. “Even in the mire they made of his lifeblood; they bore him down amidst his banners, and he was alone – yet he was not afraid. I know it. Not he!”

I was, Fingon might have said. He had been, at the very end. But the brothers would not have heard him.

Maglor did what Fingon could not do and took Maedhros’s hand. “We shall see him avenged,” he said.

“Shall we!” said Maedhros, and laughed terribly. He pulled his hand away and stood. “So we said of Amrod and Argon: and of our father, and of our uncle: of Angrod and Aegnor and Finrod we said the same: of every one of the Noldor who fell defending our leaguer while it lasted: and it is broken, and all is ashes! Shall we be avenged? No.” He looked at last away from whatever dreadful sight his eyes were seeing, and turned to Maglor. “No, we shall not.”

“Say not so!” Maglor said. “Despair will not aid us.”

“Despair? Say rather truth. Nothing will aid us. It was ever thus. Our father knew it ere he died. We have chosen an enemy we cannot defeat – not by courage, not by strength of arms, not by friendship, not by any hope. Well, enough of him!” Maedhros nearly shouted it. Then he said it again more quietly: “Enough of him.”

“Maedhros –” Maglor said.

Maedhros looked around the grey room. Fingon looked too, and saw now that there were many small spiders lairing in the shadows of the vaulting. Their webs overlapped one another, making a net out of all that lay above: and Fingon thought that this was their intent, and that when their net was complete they should let it fall, as a fisherman might, to catch what could be taken.

“Do you remember what you said to me above Losgar?” Maedhros said. “That those who came to Middle-earth with us then were here with their whole hearts. Do you remember?”

“I remember,” Maglor said.

“But I have not been heart-whole all this time,” Maedhros said. “I have not. Two ways at once I have tried to turn, and so come nowhere in the end. I have been a fool.”

“You have led us well.”

“Have I! To such a pass as this!” Maedhros’s whole face was twisted with grief. Fingon hardly recognised him. “No, Maglor. No, you were right. And I shall be wholehearted now. I must be wholehearted now.”

Maglor licked his lips and said in a low voice, “I for one dare not face Lúthien.”

“We need not face her,” Maedhros said coldly. “The years of Men are short.”

As he said it the grey room fell away. But the net of cobwebs above did not. It spread itself in every direction, and small black things were crawling in it. Fingon suddenly saw the road again, like a grey thread leading off into the shadows. Maedhros turned away and walked down it, and Maglor stood looking silently after him a while, and then followed.

And Fingon knew he must follow too: until the road reached its end.

Something odd began to happen as Fingon walked along the road. The net of cobwebs above vanished as if lost in a mist, and before long a very strange sound came to his ears. It was the sound of laughter. Not the hollow jangling laughter of the river in false Valinor, nor the chittering pleasure of the small spiders, nor any laugh of Maedhros’s, familiar or terrible. Fingon did not recognise the happy voices at all. But they did not sound evil. In fact they were a great relief after hearing and seeing so much grief. He dawdled a little, listening, wondering what new vision this portended. If what had come so far was any guide, it was most likely to be a sad one. But it did not sound sad.

Because he was dawdling and listening he did not at first notice the narrow grey path starting to broaden out into a wide clearway. Then he looked up and saw that it was now wide enough for six to walk abreast. At just the point where it reached its full width there was a low barrier set up, made of nothing more than broken leafy branches. It was not well-built. Fingon could have kicked it over. In fact he was about to do just that when the laughter suddenly grew very loud, and two small figures no taller than Hobbits ran out of the shadows and took up posts like guards behind the barricade.

“Halt!” cried one in a high clear voice. “Who goes there?”

The other one laughed again. Here were the voices which Fingon had heard in the shadows. But they were not Hobbits. They were two Elf-children, much pleased with themselves, and alike as two leaves of the same tree.

“These are our woods,” said the boy who had cried the halt. “None may pass without our leave and the King’s.” He was trying very hard to be stern, but it was plain that he would break out into giggling at any moment. His brother was leaning on the toy barricade and snickering helplessly. “What business have you in Doriath?”

“Doriath?” said Fingon.

And he looked around, and saw that there was indeed a fair woodland all about him.

“Forgive me,” he said. “I did not mean to intrude on your country. But I am a traveller, and this is my road.” He paused. “Might I ask who you are?” These children were the first things apart from Maedhros’s ghosts to speak directly to him since he had come to the Void. And they did not have the wraithlike appearance of the host at Alqualondë, or – now Fingon thought of it – of the friends and followers of Maedhros who had greeted him at Himring. They looked as solid as he was.

His question sent both into gales of laughter, and then the spokesman after a moment’s thought said, “Obviously we are Mablung and Beleg.”

Fingon smiled despite himself. There were not very many children on Tol Eressëa. It was a long time since he had had cause to speak to one. “Great heroes of the Sindar,” he said as gravely as he could: he had met both, for they had joined with his host at Nirnaeth, and these were certainly not they. “Which is which?”

This seemed to stymie the boys a moment. Then the one who had not yet spoken snorted and said, “I must be Beleg, because I have a friend who is always in trouble.”

“I am not!” cried his brother in outrage.

“You are.”

“Not!”

“Are!”

They fell to scuffling a moment, which startled Fingon: so did the Man-children of the House of Hador, but no child of Elves he had ever met would do so. It lasted only a few seconds, and seemed entirely good-humoured: then swiftly they remembered Fingon was there and returned to their guard on the leafy barricade. The spokesman drew himself up as tall as he could and said, “Now you know who we are, but you have not yet told us your business! You cannot pass till you do.”

“Besides, we want to know,” said his brother.

Fingon hesitated. “I have a friend,” he said, “who is in a great deal of trouble. I am looking for him, and my road lies this way. May I pass?”

“Why is he in trouble? What did he do?” said one of the twins.

“A great many wicked things, I believe,” said Fingon, “though I was not there for most of them. But he is my friend all the same.”

The boys exchanged looks. Then they pulled aside the middle branches of their little barricade to make an opening. “Pass!” cried the one who had spoken first and more freely. “And good fortune!”

But the other said, “You should be careful. Beleg came to no good end: that’s in the stories.”

“Only because Túrin was cursed,” his brother said. He looked at Fingon. “Is your friend cursed?”

“It may be so,” Fingon admitted.

The child looked solemn. “Then you will need a great deal of good fortune to get anywhere. But you can go this way! If you tell our father your quest, perhaps he will help you. Our father is very noble.”

“Who is your father?” Fingon said as he stepped through the gap in the branches.

“Dior the Beautiful,” cried the boy proudly, “Lúthien’s son, Thingol’s heir, of threefold race: Dior the king!”

The last words echoed in the dark. Fingon turned swiftly about, but the twins were gone, and the barricade with them. Tall graceful trees still seemed to be growing about the road, but there were shadows heaped between them, and in their branches were many spiderwebs.

So Fingon came on the broad grey road through Doriath to a bridge and a gate under a rocky hill, and thence down into the living caves of Menegroth. On the threshold of the great hall he stood astonished. When his cousins of Finarfin’s house had claimed the dwelling of Thingol and Melian was fair, he had supposed it fair after the manner of Middle-earth. But here under hill wrought in stone and silk was a vision of the glory of Valinor undarkened. Looking at it Fingon understood how it was that his cousin Galadriel had for long years hardly been able to bring herself to leave it, though she was as fierce a foe of Morgoth as any of his kin, and had come to Middle-earth seeking a kingdom of her own.

“And we called you only Grey-elves!” he said aloud. The Noldor had wrought many fair kingdoms in Beleriand, but for all their craft and all their strength they had built nothing like this.

At the far end of the hall on a high dais were two great thrones. Before them stood a tall king. His crown was wrought of ivory, and for adornment it had not gemstones but green leaves of the forest, as if to say that jewels of mere stone were not enough to honour such majesty. His hair was long and dark, and his eyes were very bright: he was young and fair and splendid, Dior Eluchíl of threefold race, worthy son of Beren and Lúthien. Fingon nearly bowed before him.

Then he realised that the king saw him not. His bright eyes were watching the doors to his hall, and the wide road Fingon stood on led right to his feet. Fingon turned and looked back. Behind him along the hall of stone six walked abreast in fell array. They came armed and armoured, with a wraithlike band of their own folk walking behind them, and their faces were very still. Into the throne room they advanced – Amras’s shoulder passing straight through Fingon as if he was not there – and halted under Dior’s calm gaze.

Fingon looked back and forth between his cousins and the King of Doriath in surprise and sorrow. Dior was only a Grey-elf and the son of a mortal Man besides, and he looked down upon six princes of high race, born in Valinor under the light of the Trees. Yet he was fair, and they were not. Indeed they looked more closely akin to the race of Men than he did: for the years had carved unhappy lines upon their faces, and they were marked by pain and sorrow and long bitterness, by pride and cruelty and hypocrisy, by angers old and new, and by grief that did not end. The light in their eyes still shone, but it was much diminished. In its diminishing the fire in Maedhros burned ever more clearly. Fingon looked on it in great grief. It was like a brand.

“What brings six vagabonds to Menegroth at this hour, unannounced and unwelcome?” said Dior. “I sent no answer to your proud message. Was that not answer enough?”

“Shall a darkling child of mortal race speak so to princes of the Noldor?” demanded Caranthir.

“When I see princes, I shall speak them fairly,” said Dior. “As I am beset by a band of robbers, and ill-mannered robbers besides, I speak to them as they deserve – nay, more kindly than they deserve. The Sons of Fëanor are not unknown to the blood of Lúthien! For thou I know, and thou,” he said, looking first at Celegorm and then at Curufin. “Greatly did ye seek to wrong my mother, and it were justice that neither should leave Doriath alive. But ye failed: and I am merciful. So I say to you all: begone!”

Celegorm snarled, and Curufin’s hand fell to the hilt of his sword. But Maedhros spoke, very calmly, and the whole room fell silent at the sound of his voice. It had in it the strength of one who had once also been a king. “Dior, because your grandfather and ours were friends on the shores of Cuiviénen, I will say it once again,” he said. “We do not wish to be your enemies. Do not let your pride bring you to an evil end. Return now to the rightful owners what was stolen from a thief, and we shall go in peace and bless your name.”

“Maedhros!” said Dior. Suddenly he smiled, though sadly. “May I call you so? Do you really think I speak in pride? No: it is pity. If you will not be my enemy then I shall not be yours. The terms of your oath I believe I know, and they are not kind. One Silmaril there is in Doriath: six brothers I see before me. Which of you shall possess it? And shall the others not then slay him?”

None of the brothers answered him. Fingon saw Maedhros’s eyes widen very slightly, and Maglor go still: but Celegorm and Curufin and Caranthir were all unmoved, and Amras looked away.

“I think they must, until one stands alone. And I see that some of you think so too,” said Dior. “Not gladly would I be the cause of so terrible a grief! So, because our grandfathers were friends on the shores of Cuiviénen, I say to you again: begone. Go from this place in peace. None shall hinder you, though my mother’s wrong demands it. Go! Go now! Do some better deed than this!”

But Maedhros said quietly, “That we may not do.”

With a ringing sound he drew his sword. Fingon knew the blade. It was the same that Maedhros had carried as Lord of Himring, forged in Hithlum by smiths of Fingolfin’s folk. Fingon had given it to Maedhros himself.

Then came the battle. In vain Fingon reached out to try and hold his cousins back: his hands passed through them as if he were the ghost. Maedhros and Maglor both went straight for Dior, and Amras and Curufin swung about to guard their backs, while Caranthir and Celegorm snapped orders to their followers. Caranthir’s band surged forward to hew down the Doriathrim trying to come to the aid of their king. Celegorm’s men divided into companies and darted away through the many doors to the throne room while Celegorm cried behind them, Hunt! As if the walls had fallen away Fingon could see them, obedient to their lord’s command, hunting through the many halls and caverns of Menegroth, driving women and children before them, slaying all who took up arms against them, and slashing down the fair hangings which Queen Melian and her women had made long ago.

The people of Doriath fought back as best they could, and their defence was strong: for there were more of them, and they were defending a home they loved. But few of Thingol’s people had ever gone to war. They had trusted in Melian’s arts to protect them, and even those who had kept the border-guard had used much in the way of secrecy and stealth when they fought marauding Orc-bands, and seldom come forth to open battle. But they were fighting the Noldor of the East-March, the Noldor of the long siege: the veterans of Dagor Bragollach, the survivors of the forcing of Aglon and the overthrow of Himring, who had fought again at Nirnaeth Arnoediad, and were not dead yet. Morgoth himself had taught them the art of war. They had learned the lesson well.

Dior was alone on the dais. His guard tried to come to him, but could not get past Curufin and Amras and those who stood with them. He was no mean swordsman: Fingon could think of a dozen engagements where he would have been glad to have such a warrior standing at his side. But Maedhros with that long blade in his left hand was terrible as a cold wind from the North, and Maglor with twin swords was like a storm on the Sea. Dior fell back before them, and Maglor cried to him to yield.

At that moment two of Celegorm’s servants dragged a woman into the throne room. She was tall and fair as a young birch tree, and she struggled and kicked at her captors.

Dior saw her and cried out, Nimloth!

Celegorm levelled his spear and set the point at the queen’s breast. “Give up the Silmaril,” he said, “and we may let her go.”

Dior stared in horror – a horror Fingon shared: that any kinsman of his should come to such a deed as this! – while Nimloth stood still with that sharp blade under her breastbone. A faint trickle of red stained her white gown. Celegorm had pierced the cloth, and the skin underneath it.

Then suddenly she raised up her head, and her eyes flashed defiance. “Give them nothing, my love,” she cried, “for they are no better than Orcs, and we do not surrender to evildoers!”

So saying she met Celegorm’s eyes, and smiled, and snatching her arms out of the restraining hands of her captors she flung herself forward and drove her breast upon the point of his spear. Celegorm dropped the weapon, weighted as it suddenly was with the queen’s corpse. There was a look of shock on his face. A moment of great stillness settled in the throne room. In that stillness Fingon saw small black shapes entering in by every door.

Dior roared in agony and rage and flung himself once again to the attack. Nearly he cleaved Maglor’s head from his shoulders, for Maglor was frozen in horror. Only at the last moment did Maedhros turn aside the attack on his brother’s life, and Dior’s blade merely sliced deeply just above Maglor’s ear. The Doriathrim attacked with renewed courage, and many of the Noldor fell then. Celegorm still without a weapon was hewn down where he stood, and Caranthir fell before the furious assault, and Curufin was killed by Dior’s guard. But Maedhros killed Dior, and flung his bleeding corpse upon the throne of Melian. Then with a wrathful cry he turned on those who had slain his brothers.

Once again, though it was madness, Fingon tried to reach out and hold him back. There were tears on his face as he did it. Maedhros slipped heedlessly through his hands, and now despite all he was smiling – smiling that same dreadful smile he had worn at Alqualondë. In the end Fingon could not bear it, and covered his eyes. But he could still hear the sounds of the slaughter.

It was a long time before all was still.

Fingon looked up.

Three brothers lingered in the empty throne room. All of them were bloody to the elbows. Maglor sat tiredly at the edge of the dais with a reddening rag pressed to the head wound Dior had given him. Amras stood apart, arms folded, head tipped back, eyes closed: and he swayed a little, as if a great weariness was upon him. But Maedhros stood upon the dais where Dior had so lately stood above him. The corpse of the king had disappeared, though the throne of Melian was still defiled with dreadful stains. Three still figures lay in a row at Maedhros’s feet.

Fingon looked down, at the grey road: and up, at where small spiders crawled eagerly through the ruined hangings of Menegroth: and for the first time he thought of turning back.

He went forward.

Each of the three dead brothers had his weapon laid by his side. There was Curufin’s mighty sword self-forged, and Caranthir’s twin battleaxes, and Celegorm’s long hunting spear. Its sharp blade was still stained with Nimloth’s blood.

“Why did she do that?” Maedhros said softly.

Maglor snorted, and then winced at the pain.

Fingon looked at his dead cousins. Celegorm was barely recognisable: his face was hacked and ruined, his fair hair matted with blood. Caranthir wore a look of outrage, as if astounded that the blade which had pierced him had dared lift itself against a prince of the Noldor. Curufin’s throat had been cut. Fingon looked then at Maedhros, but Maedhros was still gazing at his brothers, and did not seem likely to stop. Fingon did not try to speak to him. It was plain that he was no more than a ghost to the figures in this vision. Besides, he did not want to.

“They are dead,” Maedhros said, and there was no grief in his voice, only a great soft surprise. “They are dead.”

“They are dead,” said Amras, “and we have gained no Silmaril. At least we shall not have to murder each other for it.” He laughed. It was an awful sound. “I don’t give much for my chances against Maglor: or yours, my cripple brother!”

“I would not,” Maglor said.

“Oh yes you would,” said Amras. He turned to look at them, and his gaze fell upon the row of corpses. His face twisted. “There they lie: they are dead. I wish I was dead too! We should all be dead: we should all have burned at Losgar!”

“Amras,” Maedhros said.

“Don’t Amras me,” Amras said. “I wish I was dead; but I hope to see you die first. Why did we come here?”

“We all agreed it,” Maedhros said.

“Did we! But no, we did,” Amras said. “So we did. I said to my father I should avenge him upon Morgoth: but who shall avenge me on my father?”

“Amras!” cried Maedhros and Maglor both at once.

Amras sneered at them. “Do you think he didn’t know?” he said. “He cast the first torch himself; do you really think he didn’t know?”

“He didn’t know!” said Maglor.

“They are dead: Fëanor’s latest victims. Amrod shall have some company in the Everlasting Darkness,” Amras said. “And more by and by! So much for them.” He looked at Maedhros. “The Silmaril is well out of Doriath by now, along with the daughter. Some of my best went after them, who are near as good as I am: but we do not know these woods, and the Sindar have dwelled here long. They went by secret ways. We shall not catch up with them.”

“There will be another chance,” Maedhros said. He looked down at his dead brothers again. He did not seem able to stop looking at them. Then he paused and glanced up. “Wait, the daughter?”

“Dior’s and Nimloth’s: barely more than a babe.”

“What of her brothers?” Maedhros said. “There are two, are there not? We might take them, and make a trade.” He said it quite calmly. Fingon looked at him and felt sickened.

“Celegorm’s people drove them into the woods,” Amras said. “They are angry! That was hours ago.”

Then Maedhros stood suddenly very still.

“Into the woods!” he said. “But they are children. We are not so far from the pass of Aglon here – if an Orc-band came by –”

He fell silent. In that silence Maglor looked up and said, “There are worse things than Orcs north of Doriath!”

“Which way did they go?” Maedhros said urgently. “Amras, do you know which way they went?”

“North,” Amras said. “They went north.”

Maedhros and Maglor exchanged a horrified look.

North of Doriath! Fingon was every bit as horrified. North of Doriath lay Nan Dungortheb, home to Ungoliant’s brood. Fingon’s sister Aredhel had once barely escaped from there with her life: and she was a daughter of Fingolfin, fierce and valiant and full-grown besides, with great strength of spirit given to her by the light she had been born in, and well-mounted on a horse descended from steeds of Oromë. He thought of the two merry boys he had met on the road through the woods, who had so lightly bidden him pass and wished him good fortune. North of Doriath!

“Help me!” Maedhros said.

But Amras said, “It is too late! It was hours ago.”

And Maglor said nothing at all.

Maedhros strode swiftly to great doors and there paused. He was on the grey road, Fingon saw: it had looped around and narrowed again, crossing over itself. Dark shapes moved around it. Maedhros looked back over his shoulder. “What are their names?” he said.

“Eluréd,” said Maglor, “and Elurín!”

Maedhros nodded and went out alone.

Fingon took a very deep breath. The throne room of Menegroth was already starting to fade into a greedy many-legged nothingness. Trees were springing up around him again, heavily laden now with webbing. Amras and Maglor were gone. He could see no one. Somewhere in the unseen distance he heard Maedhros’s voice.

“Eluréd!” it cried. “Elurín!”

Fingon gritted his teeth and followed the road.

Now the fair woods of Doriath were filled with Unlight, and thick ropes of cobweb made a cage about the pathway. Ever and again Fingon heard Maedhros’s voice calling the twins’ names: Eluréd, floating through the dark trees, Elurín! Fingon, remembering that the boys had been able to see and hear him, took up the cry too. There were no echoes. All sounds fell upon that cobwebbed forest as if dead already, and were swallowed by it. Maedhros’s calls grew more and more desperate, and now and then there was a please! along with the twins’ names: but nothing answered him.

Then Fingon heard another sound ahead of him: not spider-chittering, but quiet sobbing. There was little to be seen in the darkness, but he ran along the road and the sound drew closer. It must be them. “Eluréd, Elurín!” Fingon called softly.

The road bent round a patch of Unlight and into a grove of trees, and there were the twins again at last. Now that Fingon had seen their parents it was plain that the sons strongly resembled their father: but both had Nimloth’s eyes. They sat clinging to each other beneath a tree so thick with cobwebs that it was bent and straining under the weight. One brother looked about fearfully, and the other sobbed against his shoulder.

“There you are!” Fingon said in relief.

They both looked at him in horror.

“It’s you!” said one. His brother was crying too hard to speak. “You! Don’t hurt us!” He scrambled to his feet and dragged his brother up after him, though the boy could barely stand.

“I won’t!” Fingon said. “Come away from there: it’s not safe.”

But the twins only backed further into the shade of the cobwebbed tree, and they looked in terror at his dagger and his bow. “They killed everyone,” the weeping child gulped, “they killed everyone: these are our woods!”

“I will not hurt you. I swear it,” Fingon said. “Please come away!”

“You were here before, you were looking for your friend – but you’re his friend,” accused the twin who was not crying. Fingon still did not know if he was Eluréd or Elurín. “Aren’t you? You’re his friend! How can you be his friend?”

Fingon held out both his hands. “Please!” he said.

But at that moment a voice rang out somewhere behind him. It called out: Eluréd, Elurín!

Both children froze and looked in the direction of the sound. “It’s him!” one of them whispered.

“We have to keep going,” said the other.

“I can’t!”

“He’ll find us otherwise: do you want that? This way!”

“Don’t!” Fingon said.

But the twins looked at him in fear and disgust, and did not listen. Hand in hand they ran together the only way they could go – along the grey road: for there were great drifts of cobweb choking the trees in every other direction. Fingon snatched at them as they rushed past him, but they ducked and fled away.

At once Fingon ran after them. He could see their two small shadows far up ahead as they dashed along the road. Eluréd, Elurín! still rang out behind them, and Fingon thought when they heard it they ran faster: now falling and stumbling, now scrambling up again, but they never stopped and could not turn aside. The spiders of Nan Dungortheb, creeping down from their hideous lairs into regions where Melian had never permitted them to go, had made of their webs a tunnel that went only one way. It promised escape ever just ahead, steering the twins north and north and north until they came at last to the valley: and there just on the brink Fingon halted and stared in horror across the spider-choked darkness where no sign of the boys could be seen.

All was fading around him save the grey road. The trees of Doriath vanished, and so did Nan Dungortheb: but Fingon thought the spiders were still there, for their stench had not faded. One last time in the darkness behind him he heard Maedhros crying, Eluréd, Elurín!

Then all was silence.

Fingon thought he knew now why the twins had been able to see him. They were not visions: they were not Void-ghosts. Driven out alone they had met with something that did not spare innocence. They had been taken by Ungoliant’s brood and unmade. Their spirits had never come to Mandos. They were here.

He stared into nothing.

Something asked a question. It asked it very fiercely.

This time Fingon did not have an answer.

Now a mist came up all around him. For the first time the road was hard to see. Fingon could barely make out what lay five feet ahead. But he knew there must be spiders in the evil fog somewhere. He could smell them.

He stood very still. He would have prayed, if he could: but Irmo had warned him that none of the Valar could hear him here. Should he turn back?

Should he turn back?

The mist was dank with the rotting stench of the spiders.

“I will see it to the end,” Fingon said quietly.

And he went on.

Next must come Sirion. Assuredly it would be Sirion. Fingon waited grimly for the mist to clear, but it did not. If anything it grew thicker. It was very hard to see. He had to keep his head bent down and watch where he put his feet. When would it come? What new horror would the Void show him there?

“Alqualondë you said you rued,” he murmured as he placed his feet one in front of the other on the grey path. “Doriath was sheer madness. But to come to it again – after that; after the twins!” He could not even weep. He was too angry. “Maedhros!” he said. “Did I ever know you at all?”

There was no answer.

When would it come?

The mist grew thicker and thicker. It stank. Suddenly something heavy and soft fell with a thud onto the road before Fingon’s feet. Fingon stopped. It was Amras, dead, sprawled in a growing pool of blood. Amras had died at Sirion. Fingon looked around, but he could see nothing through the fog.

He stopped and listened, straining his ears. He thought he could just make out, on the very edge of hearing, some confused shouting and the sounds of clashed steel.

Even in death Amras looked miserable. Fingon stood over his corpse a while. Eventually its shape turned thin and wraithlike, and then vanished: or else the mist swept it up as a part of itself. Only the grey road remained.

Fingon walked on. The fog did not clear. The smell of it!

Finally just ahead he saw something odd. There was a door there. It was not a very attractive door: in fact it was quite poorly made, rough planks of wood nailed together across a frame, a rusting iron ring for a handle. But the road led straight through it. Around it there was nothing but the stinking murk.

Fingon set his hand to the door and pushed. It swung open, and he found himself in a small plain room. It was not a particularly homely room. It looked like it had been made by Men: there were signs of that characteristic speedy and shoddy work everywhere. But there was no mist, and no spiders, which made it the fairest place Fingon had seen in what felt like a very long time. And there was a window that seemed to look out on someplace bright: and sitting by the window with a book there was a boy.

He looked up when Fingon came in. Fingon’s breath caught before he realised his mistake. This was not Dior Eluchíl. But it was someone who looked very like him: albeit younger, and lankier, and not quite so fair. He did not see Fingon, but he watched the doorway patiently. Fingon came a little further into the room.

Then he heard behind him an angry shout and someone walking quickly – no, stamping – along what sounded like a wooden floor. The boy at the window rolled his eyes. “There it is,” he murmured.

A moment later another boy stormed in. His look was furious: his hands were clenched in fists. He went right to the table under the window and stood there in silent wrath for a moment. Then he took up a dagger that lay at hand, knotted his own long dark hair around his fist in a hank, and began to saw it off. The first boy looked startled and began to speak. “Don’t!” said the other, still hacking at his hair. Roughly chopped dark locks fell on the floor. When he was done the angry boy snatched the cord that held his brother’s hair back from his face in a horsetail – not bothering to ask – and used it to put what was left of his own up into a warrior’s topknot after the manner of the Men of the House of Hador. “There!” he snarled, and cast the dagger down. “Elves! I hate them!”

“All of them?” said his brother mildly. His hair was now falling about his face. Fingon finally recognised him. He had met him before, in Eressëa. He was Elrond Half-elven: which meant that his brother must be Elros Tar-Minyatur, mightiest of all the kings of Men.

He did not, at this moment, look particularly mighty. He looked very young. They both did. Fingon stared. The twins were not identical, though both were dark-haired and grey-eyed. Elrond looked very much like his grandfather Dior. But Elros, even with his hair mostly shorn, was plainly of the house of Finwë: plainly, in fact, Turgon’s great-grandson, and so much like him that Fingon could not look away.

Elrond was still waiting for an answer to his question.

Elros sighed. His shoulders slumped. “Not all of them,” he said. “But them I hate. Thuron and Thurin. I hate them so much!”

“I wish you wouldn’t call them that,” Elrond said.

Fingon frowned at the names. He had heard them before somewhere, and that recently – but where? Then he remembered. He had heard those names, but in the Westron speech. Stinker and Slinker: they were Sam’s names for Gollum.

“I’ll call them what they are,” Elros said, “and that’s what they are.” He sat down on the floor by his brother’s chair, put his arms around his knees, and glowered. “Elves!” he said again. “With their proud looks, and their that might not be wise, and their jewellery and their hair: and their sitting around all whatever shall we do for hundreds of years and doing nothing until – oh, shall we murder some people? Perhaps! Or perhaps we had better sing a lovely song! Or better yet, why not both? Elves! I do hate them!”

“I had no idea you disliked songs so much,” Elrond said. “Maglor will be sorry for it. You are a better harpist than I am.”

“You know I don’t hate songs!” Elros said, and glared at nothing. He looked like Turgon, Fingon thought, but he did not sound like him. Turgon had not such a temper.

“What happened?” Elrond said.

At first Elros did not answer. Then he put his head down on his knees and said forlornly, “Our father is out there!”

Elrond said nothing.

“He is out there: he is fighting dragons, Elrond. We should be there too. We are old enough now. I am as fine a swordsman as any captain of the Noldor.”

“Did Maedhros say so?” Elrond said. “It was no mean saying. He does not give compliments lightly.”

“He gives nothing lightly,” Elros said. “He is a bitter old stick. Thuron! I hate him worse.”

“Yet he taught you the use of a sword,” Elrond said.

“I hope I may live to use it on him. So may all evil undo itself!”

“Do not say so!” said Elrond. “They are kin to us, and we are not like them.”

“I hate him worse,” said Elros again. “Except for when I hate Thurin worse, for his hypocrisy. At least Thuron does not lie.”

“I have never heard Maglor tell a lie,” said Elrond.

“Except to himself!” Elros said. And Elrond said nothing.

A moment went by. Then Elros scowled. “We are old enough now, Elrond. Our father is out there. This is our country. We are not fugitives or foreigners picking a fight. We were born here. Who are they to stop us? Nothing but jailors. We should be with our father. This is our war!”

Elrond made no answer.

“This is our war,” said Elros again, more softly, and Fingon thought he might weep. “It’s only them keeping us here.”

“Is it not their war?” said Elrond.

His brother gave him a look.

“I never heard that they came out of the West for any other reason,” Elrond said, “than to see Morgoth cast down. And many they loved are dead besides – dead by Morgoth’s malice – not least their father! Surely it is their war: and it is only us keeping them here.” Elros seemed about to speak. “I know what you would say! That they should go, and we should go: that we should aid our father, and they should die with honour facing the evil they came to face.”

“It would be a better end than any of their accursed brothers met, and a better end than they deserve!” Elros said.

“But if they went,” Elrond said, “I believe the war would fail.”

Elros paused. “Fail? With all the hosts of the West, with the Valar themselves, and our father too – what are you talking about? How fail?”

“Again and again the Oath of Fëanor has managed to turn itself to Morgoth’s service,” Elrond said. “Think on it! It is an evil bond, and the Dark Lord knows how to make use of those. Surely all evil serves him in the end.”

“There are two of them, Elrond,” said Elros. “Two scarred old Elves are not going to overthrow the whole host of the West by accident.”

“I do not think it is impossible,”said Elrond, “for the small to undo the great.” He looked down at his brother, and then flicked his ear. Elros protested, and Elrond showed him a few strands of jaggedly cut hair he had failed to brush away. “Maybe it is our purpose in this war,” he said, “to be the only thing keeping them here.”

“That is easy for you to say,” said Elros sulkily.

“No,” said Elrond. “Not really.”

Neither of the boys said anything for a while. Fingon saw movement, and looked to the door. Maglor stood silently there. There was a white streak in his hair now, from the scar he had got at Doriath. He did look old. His eyes lingered on Elros with his chopped hair, and his look was grieved. Fingon thought he saw a shadow in the doorway behind him. Was Maedhros there too? Was it both of them?

“Their stupid oath,” said Elros at length, very low. “They should break their oath. They should have broken it long ago.”

“Maybe they should never have sworn it, but it is too late for that,” Elrond said. “And they cannot break it. They called the One to witness: no one else can release them.”

“I say they should break it now!” Elros said.

“Who are you to say so?”

“A child of Ilúvatar,” Elros said. “Is that not enough? If they need a message from the One, anyone can deliver it. Everyone knows it. They should break their oath, and take the consequences.”

“Even the Darkness Everlasting?”

“Don't they deserve it?”

“Have some pity, Elros!”

“Why?” said Elros. “Did they pity our mother?”

Elrond was quiet for a moment. At last he said, “Surely no one needs pity more than the pitiless.”

Elros snorted and did not answer. Fingon glanced at the doorway. Maglor was still there. He did not move an inch. Was that Maedhros behind him? Was it both of them?

Eventually Elros said, “I still think they should break their oath.”

“That is easy for you to say,” Elrond said crisply.

“I think so all the same,” Elros said. “Or else I think we may as well all just lie down and die, and our father too, and the dragons can have us. I do think so. Because if the Allfather is of a nature that would prefer the keeping of such an oath as that, we all have worse to fear than Morgoth.”

“Elros!” said Elrond, near as shocked and reproving as Fingon felt. Had his cousins raised these boys to ill-speech like this? But Maglor in the doorway looked appalled as well.

Elros laughed, only a little ashamed. “After all I am a child of Men,” he said.

“You are impossible,” said Elrond sternly: but he was not yet Elrond the Wise, who had lived through two ages of the world, and it was not a very convincing sternness. His brother only laughed at him. Elrond sighed and reached for the dagger. “If you are then so am I,” he said. “Help me with this. Yours looks a mess.”

“I won't,” said Elros. “You like your hair. Leave it!”

The brothers started arguing, not very seriously. Maglor in the doorway smiled a little – no more than a quirk of the lips, and it looked out of place on a face so accustomed to sorrow – and turned away. There was no one behind him after all: unless Maedhros had been there and left already. Fingon suddenly bethought himself of his road. He would have been glad to stay here awhile, where there were no spiders and no foul mists. The brothers in their good-natured disagreement reminded him of his own family; though despite appearances Elrond was more like Turgon for good sense, and if any of them had anything like Elros’s quick high-couraged spirit it was him.

He would have liked to linger. But the road went on.

Beyond the plain little room the stinking mist seemed to have lifted. Once again the grey road was clear. Fingon looked at it in loathing. “You should have broken your oath,” he said. “Anyone could have told you; or you could have worked it out for yourself. You should have broken your oath before it came to this, and borne the consequences. You should have faced the judgment you deserved. He whom I loved would have known it.”

The silence asked him nothing. Instead it made a suggestion.

Fingon turned around. The road behind him was as clear as the road before: two colourless ribbons laid upon the lightless night. Fingon touched the star-glass where it lay hidden at his breast. Back, then? He had sought one he loved: but that Maedhros, if he had ever existed at all, had been lost before he came here. What was this if not a consequence well-deserved? What was this, if not justice?

Back to the gate? Back, alone?

Fingon took a step back the way he had come. Then another.

He stopped.

“Who needs pity more than the pitiless?” he asked the darkness.

There was no reply. Fingon turned and looked again at the way forward. It was hardly possible to tell the difference. The road looked the same both ways.

“But the twins, Maedhros!” he said.

Could he backtrack to Doriath and find those two lost spirits there? Could he save them at least from this fate?

“Would you have gone back if you could?” he said.

He remembered the unhappy voice calling Eluréd, Elurín, and hoped he knew the answer.

Still he could not decide. He might have stood there forever.

Then suddenly there came a flash of that same merciless light which had once before revealed in all its terror the full hideousness of the darkness. Fingon cried out and covered his eyes. It hurt to look upon. But he saw as a ghostly afterimage that what lay about him was somehow even worse than it had been before. The grey road now ran through a funnel of cobwebs that made a net of the night in every other direction – a net filled with thousands of spiders, most larger than he was. And tearing through the cobwebs with jaws of flame there had been something even worse, something –

Fingon forced his eyes open. All was not dark. Red fire flared out in the shadows, and behind and above it he saw a luminous pair of golden eyes – dragon-eyes.

He had just time to realise that they saw him too. Then the dragon was coming for him in a cloud of red fire.

Fingon threw himself to the side just before the fireball hit the road where he had been standing. The grey strand burnt and crisped with a terrible stench. Fingon leapt back to his feet. He was standing on dark nothing. The dragon fixed its golden eyes on him again. Bow or dagger? Bow. Fingon set an arrow to the string and loosed, and another, and another, and all bounced uselessly off the monster’s armour. It opened its jaws wide. Red flame dwelt within. Fingon threw himself flat and the blast passed just over his head.

The dragon advanced on him. He scrambled away from a slash of its long claws. He was standing in pitch darkness now. It was clear that archery would do him no good. He went for his dagger instead, and heard chittering laughter somewhere in the dark. The dragon spat a gout of flame and charged through it. Fingon could not stand before it: once again he darted aside. The great monster turned faster than he would have believed possible and its long spiked tail whipped round like a lash. Fingon scrambled away again, but he did not dare go far. The road, he thought: the spiders!

The dragon fixed its golden eyes on him once more. Fear no cobweb, little Elf, it said. The spiders flee before me. Everything does!

And with a mighty roar it charged.

Fingon ducked under a spurt of flame and dived between the slashing talons with his dagger in hand. Weak spots, dragons had weak spots. Their armour was never perfect. That was in all the stories. So Túrin had slain Glaurung, and Eärendil Ancalagon the Black; so Bard in the Hobbit-tales had slain Smaug. Somewhere under this mighty beast there would be a chance.

The dragon laughed dreadfully over him. But I am greater than all of them, it said. They were merely shadows. I am the splendid truth. Stab as you will, little Elf! You can get out your star-glass to give you a better view. No blade of yours will harm me. It stamped its clawed feet and roared its satisfaction while Fingon found his dagger quickly blunted on its golden scales. Finished? the monster asked him. Would you like to try again?

“I am not afraid of you,” Fingon said. The dragon kicked at him with its hind-legs where he crouched under its belly. He darted swiftly out of range of the sharp golden claws, but it was fast. He barely managed to get clear, and swiftly it swung about and blew a wisp of fire to make him move again. Now he had to stare into its golden eyes.

Fearless! How nice for you! the dragon said. It won’t make any difference.

This time its charge was not wild. Fingon went to dodge again and found he had only ducked a feint. The beast threw him down and pinned him under the talons of one massive foreleg. Its golden eyes loomed directly over him. With its other foreclaw it delicately plucked Fingon’s dagger out of his hand and flicked it away into the darkness. Fingon did not hear it land anywhere. He thought of the heaving bottomless depths he had seen beneath him as he walked parts of the road. He did not think there was any way to get the dagger back.

The dragon bared its teeth in a lizardly smile and laid the tip of one bright golden talon at Fingon’s throat. He struggled against the weight on him, but he could barely move. The dragon, seeming amused, pressed its weight down on him harder until even drawing breath was difficult.

Really, little Elf, I think this is for the best, it said. The spiders would only have killed you slowly.

It opened its massive jaws wide. At the back of its throat Fingon saw only shadow. Then in the shadow there appeared a single point of red light: the harbinger of flame.

He cried out.

Something out of the darkness shouted, “Hoi!”

The dragon turned its head and spat the flame meant for Fingon’s destruction at the sound. But it missed, and by the red light Fingon saw a tall figure leaping forward with another yell of challenge. The dragon roared in outrage, but its golden eyes were blinking furiously. The challenger wielded a sword that shone with a pale fire, and the monster did not like that light. It belched more flame: the challenger cried, “Adûnat izindi batân!” and held his sword aloft. Red fire parted about him like water parting about the prow of a ship.

Fingon was still pinned beneath that great claw. The challenger sprang past a scaly foreleg and slashed at the bed of one of the golden talons. The dragon with a bellow of pain recoiled from the bite of the pale sword. The challenger gave Fingon a swift hand up, and then turned to face the monster again.

Thief! the dragon said. Fear me!

But the challenger laughed and attacked.

He was swift and fierce. He darted in and out between the dragon’s slashing claws, turning aside great curtains of red flame and laughing. He wielded the pale sword left-handed, and he was a wicked swordsman, cunning and forceful, skilled as any captain of the Noldor. The dragon could not touch him. It snarled and screeched and spat useless jets of fire. Fingon found his balance and quickly set an arrow to his bow. The strange warrior called out without looking around, “Pick your shots! Save your arrows! Get the eyes if you can!”

Fingon waited for his moment. When he let his first arrow fly the leftmost of the glowing golden eyes winked out, neatly punctured. The dragon bellowed furiously. The warrior shouted another glad battle-cry and pressed the advantage. Now the dragon could not see the sword it loathed and had to keep twisting frantically to keep it in view. Fingon already had another arrow on the bowstring. When the warrior had the monster fully occupied fending off a swift flurry of blows he let fly, and the second golden eye vanished as well. The blinded beast howled and swung its head about with nostrils flaring as if to find its tormentors by scent alone. Its great snout thrust forward in Fingon’s direction. You shall burn, it hissed, and opened its jaws very wide. Once again Fingon saw the little red flicker of waking flame.

The warrior darted forward and plunged the pale sword straight down into the reddening shadows of the dragon’s throat.

Now the monster screamed and thrashed around the blade. It kept screaming and thrashing for some time. Black blood poured from its jaws. The warrior undaunted put his weight behind the sword and twisted. The dragon screeched one last time and shuddered all over before its great bulk went limp.

“There!” said the dragonslayer. He withdrew the weapon unstained from the corpse’s sagging maw and turned to Fingon. “Good aim!” he said.

Fingon stared at him. “Turgon?”

He saw his mistake almost at once, even as the familiar eyes crinkled with laughter. This was not Fingon’s brother. For one thing he was taller. Turgon was nearly the tallest Elf in all the West, but Fingon rather thought this warrior would be able to look down on him. He certainly stood head and shoulders over Fingon. To that great height he added great breadth in the shoulder after the way of Men. Mighty strength of body indeed had lain behind that forceful sword-arm. But all the same his face was very familiar indeed, even with laughter lines about the eyes and the short-chopped hair now greying at the temples. That hair was still knotted up in a warrior’s topknot. It was only slightly tidier than the one he had given himself using his brother’s dagger.

Elros Tar-Minyatur, mightiest of all the kings of Men, grinned at Fingon and offered his hand to clasp. “You must be my uncle,” he said, “give or take a few greats. A pleasure!”

“A pleasure,” Fingon echoed thoughtlessly, and took his hand across the dead dragon’s snout as if this were a meeting of long-parted kinsmen at the harbours of Eressëa. Elros started laughing at the absurdity of it. Fingon could not help laughing too. Then he said, “But what are you doing here?”

“Killing dragons,” said Elros, “what else? You are very welcome!”

“I am heartily grateful,” Fingon said. “I would be dead if you had not helped me.”

“Worse than dead,” Elros said. “But think nothing of it! It was my pleasure. A vile beast – as they all are.” He gave the dragon’s corpse a kick.

“I should have brought a better blade than a dagger,” Fingon said.

“There is no Elven-blade or Dwarf-steel or sword of Men that would have done you any good,” Elros said. “You did as well as any of the Eldar could! But the dragons were made for your destruction, and their maker knew his business, alas.”

“Not just for our destruction, surely,” Fingon said.

“Well, no. For the destruction of all,” said Elros. “But the old Enemy does not understand the fates of Men all that well, and now and then he slips up. You may be sure that when he created the race of dragons it was not his intention to bring forth the dragonslayers – but he did, and it has been a great embarrassment to him ever since. So may all evil undo itself!” He laughed. “No, you did well, you did well. Good aim, as I said. That old worm has been tracking you since you got here: everything in this darkness is hungry for fresh meat. But the spiders will take his corpse, and serve him right.”

At the mention of spiders Fingon looked around. He could neither see nor hear any sign of them. Nor could he smell their familiar stench. It seemed the dragon had spoken true. They had fled before the flame, and the shadows were empty for now.

Then he realised what else he could not see.

Elros looked at him with pity. “Lost your road, have you?” he said. “Come. I can take you back to the gate.”

Fingon did not take the hand that was offered to him. Elros looked at him, and looked. After a moment he let his hand drop.

“I have to find the road,” Fingon said. “Will you help me?”

“Help you?” said Elros. “I already gave you as much help as you ever earned in your life – no, more! That was not a small dragon, you know. I will take you back to the gate.”

“Please!”

Elros paused.

“You I would help,” he said at last. “You, gladly: because you are brave, and because you ask it, and besides we are kin. But that is not what you are asking. You are asking me to help him.” He looked grim. “Old Thuron: old stinker that he was! My mother would have drowned herself to escape him, and if she survived it was no thanks to him. And my uncles he chased into the forest and drove before him to the spiders’ embrace; and my grandfather he slew in his own hall. Help him? Why should I help him?” He gave Fingon a searching look. “For that matter, why should you?”

Fingon said nothing. There was nothing he could say. He was not even certain that he was right to ask for his road again. He had been half set on abandoning his quest when the dragon came: half set, and half unsure.

“Why should anyone?” Elros said. And he shook his head, and turned away, and looked down on the corpse of the dragon.

After a moment he gave it one more vicious kick.

“I –” said Fingon.

Elros held up a hand to stop him. It was just as well, because Fingon did not know what he would have said.

Then, as if entirely to himself, Elros began to speak.

“Well, why?” he said. “Tell me why. For regret? But regret not acted on is worse than nothing. Three times he came to the slaughter: ignorance only answers for one – if that! What did he ever do to deserve anything of me? He kept me from my father’s war, and perhaps I would have died. But what of that? All men die. He kept my brother from the war too, maybe. Still that answers nothing. He drove the twins before him into the forest. Yet he sought them long, and did not mean to chase them to the spiders. There was another will at work than his – that time! It is not nothing, I suppose, but it is not much, to have repented too late and managed half an act of mercy worse than none. Still it was a half.” Elros paused, looking at nothing, and continued more low: “And then to spare Elwing’s sons – and raise them well enough – the harp and the sword we learned of our cousins, and they kept us from the war. But the credit belongs to Maglor, if anyone. Surely, if they were ashamed enough to spare the twins – the second time! – then the credit belongs to Maglor. And Maglor loved us better. Call it half a mercy again. Perhaps a little less than half. Well, is a half and a half not one? I never heard otherwise. But a half and less than half – what is that? What would my brother say? Then round it up. Call it one. Is it generous? Yes it is! But we are not like them. Who needs pity more than the pitiless?”

He looked at Fingon again. Fingon waited. He did not know what answer he would hear. He was not even entirely sure what answer he wanted to hear.

“For one act of mercy,” Elros said, “you get one hint.”

He held out his hand again.

“Come,” he said. “The dragon burnt a good stretch of it. I’ll take you on ahead.”

Fingon nodded. He took Elros’s hand.

Elros led Fingon fearlessly through the night, in and out of patches of Unlight, slashing through cobwebs with his pale sword. He seemed to know where he was going. Fingon could not tell how. Finally in the distance they saw the grey strand that was the road. Fingon’s heart seemed to beat faster. Elros looked at it and shook his head. “It loops round,” he said. “We can make it shorter. This way!”

Into the dark they plunged again. Fingon nearly asked how Elros could possibly tell one direction from another. They all looked the same to him, and all equally terrible.

Finally Elros stopped short. “Here!” he said.

Fingon looked down and saw the grey road at his feet.

“We’ve skipped ahead,” Elros said, “as far as I can take you. We are nearly at the road’s end here. This is where we part.”

“Thank you,” Fingon said. “With all my heart.”

“It was my pleasure,” said Elros. “I always wanted to meet you. You were one of the better songs. Give me your hand!” Fingon did. Elros gripped it tight it in farewell after the manner of Men, and then suddenly he laughed and pulled Fingon into a strong back-pounding embrace that nearly lifted him off his feet. That too was after the manner of Men, but no Man Fingon had met in Middle-earth had ever dared do it to him. Elros kissed him on both cheeks. Fingon laughed in surprise and returned the salute.

“I’ll wish you luck for your own sake,” Elros said, “if not altogether for his. Save your arrows: pick your shots: don’t argue with any dragons. Go safely!” He stepped back off the road and bowed. “Perhaps we’ll meet again someday, in some better place than this.”

“Will you meet more dragons in the dark?” Fingon said.

“I fear nothing,” said Elros. “I am well-armed.” He drew his long pale sword again. Suddenly he paused and turned the blade, angling it so Fingon could see: an Elven-blade of fine craftsmanship, forged many ages ago in Hithlum by the smiths of Fingolfin’s folk. Maedhros had worn it in Doriath. Fingon had given it to him himself, long before, on a cold night in Himring, standing on the battlements under the light of the stars.

“There,” Elros said. “He did not take it with him on the last day. He borrowed a sword of Maglor’s, though it was not so fine a blade. He did not even take it to Sirion, I believe. He gave it to me, and told me I was worthy of it; and I wore it all the days of my life, and it was laid upon my tomb in Westernesse. The Sea swallowed it long ago: yet it is here, and I fear no dragon. So perhaps it is one after all. The gifts of love are never ill-given!” He smiled. “Now good fortune to you, kinsman – uncle! I’ll be on my way, and you had better be on yours.”

He turned and strode away into the dark. Soon his tall figure vanished in the shadows.

Fingon looked down at his grey road. He had his bow and harp still, and rope and star-glass, but only a few arrows left, and no dagger. It had not done him much good against the dragon, but he regretted its loss. And what now? He was nearly at the road’s end. There was a gulf somewhere behind him where it had been burnt by dragonfire.

Fingon thought then of Maedhros keeping that sword: keeping it safe, keeping it aside; carrying a lesser blade at Sirion and at the end. He had not taken it to the slaughter. He had given it to Elros: only a boy, still as fine a swordsman as any captain of the Noldor – and left-handed, too.

“Was there something left of you?” he asked the darkness. “I say there was. I say there might have been!”

Let it be enough!

Fingon stamped his feet a time or two on the grey path. He looked ahead.

He set off along the road.

The road that Elros had left Fingon on was a thin grey thread, but it did not stay thin for long. Swiftly now it broadened out more widely even than it had in Doriath. Soon it became a mighty thoroughfare, flat and straight. An army might have marched along it without difficulty. Fingon felt very small upon its broad back. Still at least it was easy to see where he was going.

Soon in the distance he saw a great dark shape. The road ran straight up to it. Fingon looked at it curiously, but could not make out much about it: it was too hard to distinguish it from the darkness all around. Only when he was already in its shadow did he see that it was a gigantic wall. It was utterly smooth and utterly black. It reached from the nothingness infinitely far below up into the nothingness infinitely far above. There was no way around it and no way to climb it. It seemed to be made, vaguely, of stone: or it might have been glass, but if so it was a black glass that reflected nothing.

It did not look like a passable barrier. But the wide road ran straight towards it: so either there must be a way through, or he would have to go around it, as with the fires at Losgar. Fingon kept walking. The road ran on, and on, and on, right up to the black wall. Then the wall came down straight across it.

Set in the wall’s dark face there was an iron gate barely wide enough for one. It was barred and chained with mighty chains. There was no visible way to open it. The road went up to it and presumably kept going on the other side. At any rate it vanished under the wall. Fingon could not see any way either around or through.

But there had to be a way. He had not come this far to give up now.

Forward he went.

He saw nothing, heard nothing, smelled no spiders. But as he came to the gate he suddenly perceived that something was watching him – no, two somethings – from the darkness on either side of the gate. He had only missed them because they shared the lightless glassy appearance of the wall. They stood in recesses in its black surface – unless they were part of the wall itself. It was hard to tell. Almost they might have been carved from its dark substance. Each held a long spear. Neither moved. Fingon did not know how he knew that they were watching him, but he could feel it all the same. Their look had no malice in it and no kindness either. It was entirely without feeling, and it was very hard to bear. But Fingon had borne too much by now to be afraid of things that only looked at him. He went forward.

Just as he came to the gate both figures moved at once. They took one step down onto the road. Their black spears swung down and crossed in front of him. It was a barrier and a pointed refusal. Fingon looked up at their faces.

Something strange seemed to happen then: for he saw many faces at once. The two figures with their spears were Elrond Half-elven and Elros Tar-Minyatur, one weighed under the burden of long grief, one fierce and unforgiving beneath his winged crown. And they were Fingon’s cousins Amras and Amrod, wrapped in shadow and engulfed in flame. And for a moment they were Lórien and Mandos, Irmo and Námo, the lords of spirit in all their dread and majesty. Then the twain advanced one step more, their spears still a cross to force Fingon back, and his heart did quail inside him as he was compelled to back away. For all the images his mind had tried to comfort him with shredded apart, and he saw at last that the two who blocked his way were made of nothing but stone and black glass and the infinite starless night. They were the guardians of the gate, the watchers on the prison wall; and they had no faces at all.

“Go back!” said the one on the right in a stern and terrible voice. “There is no way forward. Go back!”

The left-hand guardian said nothing. But it watched him, and the weight of its faceless gaze was worse than the dreadful voice of the other.

Fingon was shaking where he stood. But he said, “I will not. I must go on.”

“This gate is closed. It will not open. You have no business here. Go back!”

“I do have business here,” Fingon said. “This is my road.”

The stern guardian said, “It is not your road. If it was, the gate would open for you. Go back!”

But the one on the left, in a voice that was still terrible but more sorrowful than stern, said, “What is your business?”

“I seek one I loved,” Fingon said. The two guardians bent their eyes-that-were-not upon his face, and he thought his blood might freeze in his veins just from the chill of it. But he stood his ground and said it again. “I seek one I loved.”

There was silence. It was a silence absolute, unbroken, empty: the silence of the Void.

Into the silence the stern guardian spoke.

“You seek a thief,” it said. The words fell heavy as stones. “One who stole light, and life, and innocence, till at last by the gem he stole he knew himself, and in so knowing damned himself. The one you seek is thrice a murderer, thrice-accursed, doomed by his own word, justly sealed in a prison of his own making. You know this.”

“I know,” Fingon said.

“And you say you loved him.”

“Yes,” Fingon said, in a voice as steady as he could make it.

“Do you love him still?”

Fingon swallowed hard. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know.” The stern guardian seemed about to speak. Fingon finished quickly, “Still I would not leave my greatest enemy in a place like this.”

Silence again: infinite, merciless.

Then the left-hand guardian spoke. “You may yet meet your greatest Enemy here,” it said. “Before Time and beyond it he claimed this kingdom as his own, and no other will he have – not though it were a thousand times as blissful as Eldamar before the Trees were slain!”

Fingon felt a thrill of deeper fear go through him. “Morgoth is here?”

“Of course he is,” said the other. “How many times must we say it? Go back!”

Fingon swallowed. “All the more I must go on,” he said. “I will not leave Maedhros in Morgoth’s realm. I loved him too well for that.”

“Your love will not save him,” said the stern one. “Think you that Melkor was never loved? He was – he was! And what was Fëanor’s fall to his, that once stood infinitely further above him than you stand above the Halflings? And what were the sons but the shadows and reflections of the father? There is no way forward. Go back!”

“I will not go back,” Fingon said.

But the gate was shut, and the guardians unmoved held their spears crossed before him. Fingon stood still. Behind him lay a ragged ruined road through a lifetime of proud fault and overlate regret, where stinking fog swept steadily over all, and only patches of light pierced the shadows where spiders ruled: a riverbank in Valinor, an evening in Himring, two boys arguing by a window that looked out on someplace bright. A net of cobwebs lay over all, and would take all by and by; and if there was anything left over then more than one dragon prowled in the dark. There was no way forward. But Fingon would not go back.

He had a few arrows left. But his spirit shied away from that thought in horror. These two were grim indeed, but they did not feel evil. He suspected the image of the majesty of Irmo and Námo had come closest to the truth of them. He would not assail them. Even if he had had the will to try, he thought it would avail him nothing.

“Go back!” said the stern one again.

“I can’t!” said Fingon miserably.

Then suddenly he remembered the star-glass at his breast. He fumbled for it as the two guardians stood watching him. He did not entirely know what he expected it to do, but Frodo the Ringbearer had given it to him: Frodo, who knew something of the Void.

He pulled it out. The glass glimmered softly in his hand. Fingon stared at it. He had seen its light before, of course, when Frodo gave it to him. He had thought it fair beyond words. But that had been in the Undying Lands, where anyone looking west at eventide or morning might be blessed by the sight of Eärendil sinking or rising, where anyone looking up at any time of night or day might see Sun or Moon or the countless stars of heaven, and where the light of the Trees still had its last reflection in the eyes of the High-elves. But here! To see that light here, in this darkness that had never known the relief of a star! Though it was only a little handful of light, only a reflection of a reflection stoppered in a phial, Fingon thought in shock and joy that he had never known light at all till now. He knew that other things than him would see it, and that many of them would hate it. He had no doubt it would draw the hungry spiders. Still he held it up in his right hand, and as the joy of it rose in his heart the light of Eärendil blazed out about the Phial of Galadriel like a sphere of white crystal.

Some things in the black night saw it. He heard angry chittering behind him somewhere. But they did not dare approach, not yet, and besides Fingon could spare no attention for what was happening behind him. He was too astonished by what he could see before. For in the light of the star-glass the great black wall was transformed. It was glass itself after all, and not so black as it had appeared. It reflected the starlight and then refracted it, over and over, glittering arcs of light rebounding through all the infinite night until the whole dark wall was aglow with a pale and splendid shimmer. The spider-chittering behind Fingon began to sound frightened. They had never beheld such a thing, and they withdrew in loathing as the towering crystal wall became a beacon in the night. Fingon looked up at it in wonder and laughed. Nothing but laughter seemed enough to encompass how it felt to look on such a sight as that: so great, so fair, so unexpected.

It did not last long. As the light leapt from surface to surface and grew brighter and brighter, the crystalline substance of the wall seemed to evaporate altogether: and once it was gone the starlight faded again, and only darkness remained where it had been. Fingon lowered the glass in grief at the loss as the last pale glimmers vanished. Only the brave little flare of the Phial remained.

Then he realised what it meant. The wall was gone. The gate was gone too. His road lay clear ahead of him. And a clatter he had barely heard had been the two grim guardians dropping their spears.

Still they stood before him. Fingon held forth the star-glass meaning to fend them off. But by its light he saw that they had faces after all. They had faces, and he knew them.

“Eluréd!” he said. “Elurín!”

“I forgot,” said the left-hand twin softly. He had shrunk from a tall and terrible thing of night into an ordinary Elf-child. “I forgot it looked like that.”

“I am very glad to see you,” Fingon said. “I feared you might both be lost forever.” There was still a barrier across the road behind them, but it was not the great black wall, only another leafy barricade like the one the boys had made in Doriath. That reminded him of something. “You never told me which was which. Tell me now!”

But the boys only looked at him. Eventually one of them said, “We don’t know.”

“The spiders drank our names,” said the other.

Fingon’s heart twisted. But the boys did not seem much distressed. They both looked upon the light of the star-glass still, and as they looked they drew a little closer together, and then one took the other’s hand.

“You brought it here!” he said.

Fingon said, “May I pass?”

“We cannot stop you,” the child said. Fingon thought it might have been the one who was so stern before. “It’s true, though. There’s no way on.”

“And if you do go on,” said the other one, “there’s no way back.”

“I will find a way,” said Fingon. “And you two must come with me. I will take you home as well. Come!” He held out his hand to the nearer twin.

The boy did not take it. He looked up at Fingon for a long moment. Though the light of the star-glass had given him back his face, it had not touched his eyes. They were still black as the everlasting night. “We can’t,” he said.

“Of course you can!” said Fingon.

But his brother said, “That is not our fate.” He bent to pick up his spear. It was much too large a weapon for such a small child.

“The wall is gone!” Fingon said. “You need not guard it anymore.”

“It’s only the light that broke it,” said the boy. “It rebuilds itself.” He sighed, and picked up the other spear too, and passed it to his brother. Then he planted the butt of his own upon the road and leaned wearily against the shaft. His eyes were fixed once more on the star-glass. “Thank you, though,” he said. “For the light.”

Fingon did not let himself think about it. He held out the glass. “Take it!” he said.

One of the twins reached out. But his hand passed straight through Galadriel’s phial, and where it crossed the crystalline sphere of white light about the glass his arm seemed to be made of shadow. “I told you,” said the other, “that is not our fate!”

“I know,” said his twin. He looked at Fingon. “Anyway you’re sure to need it,” he said. “If you do find a way. We only watch the road.”

“I’m sorry,” Fingon said.

“I hope you find your friend. No, I do!” said the boy, in response to a look from his brother. He was the sorrowful one. “No one should have to stay here.”

“Is there no way you can take the glass?” said Fingon. “Can anyone help you?”

The stern twin said, “Not you!” He went and stood by the leafy barrier with his spear. His brother trudged over to him and took up a post opposite. He looked at Fingon and the star-glass for another long moment.

“Halt!” he said softly at last. “Who goes there?”

Fingon could have wept. But he answered as he should. “Fingon,” he said, “Fingolfin’s son, called Valiant.”

“What business have you here?”

“I seek one I loved,” Fingon said.

“Why came he here?”

“Because he had done a great many wicked things,” Fingon said. As he said it he looked between the twins in great sorrow.

There was a pause.

Then the stern one said, “I once had a friend who was always in trouble.”

“You did not,” muttered his brother.

“You carry light with you. You broke the wall. We may not hinder you. Pass!” He stood aside. “But be wary!”

“Pass!” echoed the other. He stood aside too, and pulled away part of the leafy barrier to make a gap just wide enough to walk through. “And good fortune!”

Fingon solemnly walked between them, still holding up the glimmering star-glass. When he was past them he turned about. This time they had not vanished. They stood with their spears watching him –

No. They were watching the light.

Fingon could hear somewhere in the dark distance some soft clicking and chittering spider-noises. They could see the star that glimmered in their dark, and the beacon it had made of the wall was gone. Now they would come back to see if there was any prey for them here. Still he did not put the phial away. He held it up and walked backwards along the grey road for as long as he could, until the twins vanished in the shadows, and he thought he saw the wall come down across the road behind him again.

Only then did he put the star-glass back in the pocket at his breast.

Now once again there was nothing to be seen except the grey road clear and straight and still wide enough for an army. Fingon walked along it with calm determination. Whatever came, be it spider or dragon, vision or dream, Void-ghost or true spirit, or even Morgoth himself; whatever lay in the darkness, he would face it. He carried Eärendil’s light. It had not been enough to save the twins. But for its sake he would honour them to the road’s end: for its sake, and for pity’s sake, and for the sake of gifts once given in love.

Before long he came to a chasm. It was a black pit that cut straight across the road, deep as the wall had been high. Fingon stood on its jagged lip where the road seemed to end and peered over. Down in the dark ugly things moved. He looked out across the gulf. It was very wide. But on the furthest edge he thought he could see a line of grey. The road began again there.

There is no way on! the twins had said.

He looked about him. There were a few vague shapes in the dark. Piles of rock, heaped at the chasm’s edge: and something upturned that half-curved and then fell away into a mess of rotted planks. Fingon blinked at it. Once upon a time it must have been a boat. He could think of no reason at all why there would be a rotting boat here.

He crouched again at the edge and looked down. It looked a very long way to fall. Then he strained his eyes looking across. At the side of the road he thought he could make out a shape like a broken upreaching hand. Was that a withered tree?

Fingon smiled.

He unslung the rope he had carried with him all this way about his waist and across his shoulder. One end he looped about a sturdy rock that stood on the edge of the black gulf. Then he knotted the other end of the rope about one of his few remaining arrows and took aim. The arrow flew true: Elven-rope was light. It stuck quivering in the trunk of the dead tree. Fingon tugged it taut, knotted the spare again about the sturdy rock, and looked out over the slender bridge he had made. Any Elf could walk such a path, though normally they were a little more sturdily fastened. If that tree-trunk snapped, or if the arrow had not sunk deep enough into it, there was a good chance that Fingon would tumble down into the chasm. But if he had not had the rope he would have had to sit helplessly on the edge forever. “Bless you, Samwise!” he said.

He slung his bow on his back again. He took a deep breath and looked about him.

He ran across his bridge.

The dead tree did snap: but it was just as Fingon reached the far side, and he managed to spring back onto the road before the rope path sagged. He looked back across the chasm with some satisfaction. He knew the rope was well-fastened at the other end, because he had knotted it about the rocky outcrop there himself. Now he was here he could see more such outcroppings on this edge too. He retied the end of the bridge around one, double-checked the knots, and reclaimed his arrow from the tree-trunk.

The grey road beckoned. It could not be much further now. Fingon walked on.

He was right. He did not have far to go.

Ahead of him in the darkness loomed three black mountains. Under the shadow of those hideous peaks lay a great black gate. More dreadful than anything he had seen yet in the Void were those crags and that gate. A malice seemed to emanate from them that was darker and crueller than the lazy greed of the spiders; fiercer and more terrible than the hunger of the dragon.

Fingon stood for a time looking silently upon the peaks of Thangorodrim. The grey road ended beneath them. There was no sign of Maedhros.

Still, he had come this far. And he did not really need the road anymore. He knew where he was going now. 

After all he had done this before.

Fingon walked to the end of the grey road. It trailed off raggedly not far from the evil gate. Here – or not here: back in the world – Fingolfin had bidden a host still ragged from the crossing of the Helcaraxë pause and sound defiant trumpets. It had not looked quite so foul then. Or no, the gate and peaks had. They did not change. But there had been grass growing round and about. Morgoth had not yet blighted Ard-galen at that time. Fingon had stood at his father’s right hand, as Turgon had been at his left, and the three of them had looked upon the stronghold of their Enemy in bitterness and determination. The Noldor of Fingolfin’s host had come to seek freedom, to build kingdoms, to hold to their own. For friendship’s sake or in defiance of Morgoth or else out of pure stubbornness they had marched to Middle-earth. But one of them had come for his brother: and though Fingon’s heart had been ready at that trumpet-call to dare all against the fortress, his father had frowned at the mountains of slag and murmured, “If he has not done it yet, we shall not do it by trumpeting!”

They had not known then that Fëanor was dead. The rumour had been delivered to them, but Fingolfin had not believed it. “No, Fingon,” he had said, before Fingon could say anything, “take counsel with your courage: we shall need both.” And he had commanded the host to turn away.

Fingon stepped off the end of the road onto black nothingness, and missed his father desperately: his father, and his brother – nay, both his brothers, and his sister too – and the green of Ard-galen. And he missed the Moon, which not yet scorched had hung round and full above them; and the stars a river of light beyond; and home, too. He missed home with a trebled longing: long-ago Tirion the home of his youth, and the pine-greens and open plains of Hithlum by Mithrim’s shore, and Tol Eressëa where the Exiles had learned peace again. And he thought of the shining Sea that cast itself forever and again upon the western shore, and of the cry of a single circling gull, and a longing he had not tasted in thousands of years fell upon him again: O to hear the gulls crying, the wind calling, the waves breaking!

Never mind no ships: there was no sea in the Void to sail them on. It had been sheer madness to come here. Fingon touched the star-glass at his breast. Yes, sheer madness: but here he was. He laughed at himself a little.

Then he sprang up to the lower slopes of the nearest dark mountain. There were three, and the central one over the gate was the tallest and most terrible and the place where he needed to go. He remembered very well what a misery these crags of ash and slag were to climb. There was a route up, but it existed only as an accident of Thangorodrim’s ill-making, and it involved a great deal of knee-scrape scrambling around and along and up the shoulders of the two lesser mountains, as well as a perilous walk along the narrow iron rail that was the outermost edge of the evil gate. Fingon had had to work it out as he went last time, looking over his shoulder every moment for guards and watchers. But this time he knew what to do.

The grey road quickly receded below him. If he glanced down he could still see it. It did not look so wide from up here. Fingon climbed quickly. As before he kept an eye out for guards, but there were none. More than once last time he had had to press himself flat against the slag and hold his breath as some evil thing issued from an exit that nothing with a body could use and darted at play around the mountains of ash before setting off to some wicked and distant errand. Most of those had been the blood-sucking spirits that served Morgoth gleefully and rejoiced in the night. But there were no vampires now. There was nothing. There was not even a wind. There had been a wind before, a stiff one, coming down from the North. The heights of Thangorodrim had been too hot to touch in places, but the stinking air had been freezing cold. Now the whole ugly place only felt dead – or not even that. Even dead things had once been alive.

Fingon kept climbing. The grey road passed in and out of sight as his path wove back and forth across the steep slopes of the mountains, and grew smaller and smaller. When he looked out the way he had come he could see it leading off into the silent distance. He paused a moment. The chasm was not all that far away. He could see the place where the road was cut off by black nothing and then reappeared across the gulf. If he strained his eyes he could also just make out the thin pale line of the rope. It was still there. Once he found Maedhros there would be a way back.

Here was the place where the wandering scrambling path up the mountains seemed to come to a dead end with steep sides all about. Fingon set his foot in the crook of a wicked spike of rock and used both hands to heave himself up and over the ledge. He had nearly been caught here last time. A shrieking black thing had erupted out of the ground not ten feet away and set out due East. If it had seen him then Morgoth would have had two grandsons of Finwë for his entertainment: and Fingon did not like to think of what might have become of the rest of the Noldor after that. But it had been in too much of a hurry, and the darkness had hidden him. “So may all evil undo itself,” Fingon murmured.

He could see the road again from here, and he thought he could make out the great wall beyond it. Light would break it, and then – well. Fingon had not entirely given up on the twins. Maedhros could help him persuade them. If they could only be brought as far as the gate – perhaps it was not their fate, but they were only children. Surely none of the Valar would be so cruel as to deny them passage. Mandos himself could not be that stern. And the part of Fingon that had long ago thought of healing the feuds of the Noldor also thought now: if the eldest son of Fëanor returned to Valinor with Elwing’s brothers, there were a few questions that might not be quite so ferociously asked.

Here was the iron rail across the top of the black gate, with mighty spikes guarding it either side. Fingon remembered it as a fearsome path, but in fact it was not so thin or so flimsy as the rope across the chasm. He took it at a run. Now he stood above the gate on a squared-off flat patch that looked out across the approach. Here, last time, there had been an Orc watchman, but it had been asleep, and Fingon had crept by. There was no one now. Was Morgoth’s fortress entirely emptied?

Fingon looked out one last time to road, chasm, rope, wall: the way home. A hard path lay ahead of him. Nor had he forgotten that there was one help he would not get this time. No prayer would come to Manwë: no Eagle would come to him. He would have to think of some other way to deliver Maedhros from his torment. But he would do it. What was the Hobbit-saying? A will and a way: and Fingon had the will, and over and over he had found the way.

As Fingon looked upon the way back something caught his attention. Far below him, at the foot of the great gate, there was a dim grey raggedness. Spiders had been here, it seemed. That dim disorder looked like cobwebs to him. But his path lay elsewhere.

Now for the last ascent!

Last time Fingon had done this despair had been beginning to grow in him at this point. He had thought he might never find an entrance, and had not known he did not need one. But now he had hope, and it speeded his climb: though he was still wary, and looked over his shoulder often, and listened. Even if there were no slaves of Morgoth here – and it would be very foolish to be too sure of that – this was still the Void. There were spiders. There were dragons.

At last he came to the uttermost height, the flat place underneath the high wall where the sides of the central peak sheared off into a cliff. Fingon was thinking, as he tipped his head back to get a better look, that he had in fact been stupid: he should have brought the rope with him, and now he might have to go back for it. But all at once the thought fled. All thoughts fled.

Maedhros was not there.

The adamant shackle was. Fingon could see the place where it was stapled into the cliff. But there was no prisoner, no sign of him, no way to know where he had been taken or when. Fingon without thinking cried out his name, and the silence of the Void swallowed the sound. He stood at a loss for a moment. Then despair did begin to whisper softly to him. If not here, then where? If not this way, then how?

No. Fingon would not surrender, not now. Maedhros was here somewhere. Fingon had glimpsed him over and over as he walked the road through the Void. There was something left, there was something to be found, and the road had ended here, so it was here. Morgoth’s kingdom would not defeat him. He was not afraid.

He took up his harp, that he had carried with him all this way, and sang. It was the same song of Valinor undarkened that he had sung on these heights in Middle-earth long ago. Fingon put into it the waves breaking on the shore, and the sight of Eärendil rising in the West, and his memory of brave trumpets blowing under the Moon.

But the little thread of music fell heavily on the desolation, and no echoes rang out. No voice was raised to join Fingon’s, which sounded to his own ears even thinner and smaller than Frodo’s had been when he interrupted Finrod at his Birthday-party. He tried to sing out louder, and the silence only seemed to press more heavily about him. The Void was not interested in songs of light. It was not moved by the defiance of trumpets.

Fingon sat down upon the dark dry patch of ash and slag and hid his face for a time.

Morgoth had ever been inventive in the matter of torments. This was where the road had brought him. There had to be a way. If not on the heights, then it must be the depths.

There had been no way in, when Fingon had sought his friend in Angband in Middle-earth. There had been no way in, for the gate was mighty and heavily guarded. But he had seen no guards here. He bethought himself of the glimpse he had had of spiderwebs at the mountains’ feet. The spiders were unmakers, and it looked like they had been busy below.

Fingon picked his way back down the mountain. It was no easier than the way up, and it took longer, for weariness and despair were taking a toll on him. But he would find a way. He had to. He looked back out at the grey road as he stood on the watchpost above the iron gate. There was the rope. He even thought he could see the withered tree with its snapped trunk leaning out drunkenly over the abyss.

Back to the bottom of the mountain – back to the ragged end of the grey road. Fingon made for the gate. Last time he had not come so close to it. There had been eyes on it and all around it, eyes that had been set there after Fingolfin’s host blew their challenge, eyes made for seeing in the dark; and Fingon might be valiant, but he was not mad. But now he trudged straight towards it. As before he thought he felt a black cloud of malice issuing from it. He was walking straight into it. It was like setting your face into the bitter east wind that scoured the Helcaraxë. It was a cold that burned.

But the spiders of the Void had been at the gate. They were not there now, but they had spun grey webs all about the lower reaches of the entrance to Angband, and the webs were so heavy they had pulled the iron out of true in a dozen places. Dark openings gaped like mouths. The cobwebs had been there so long that they had lost a great deal of their stickiness. Fingon had to tug a few strands of his hair away from one as he picked his way through the criss-crossing traplines in the largest of the passages, but that was the worst of it.

Then he stood within the gates of evil’s fortress, at the top of a long hall carved against the grain of the stone and sloping ever downwards. It was not entirely dark. Lanterns hung here and there in the gloom burning with pitchy fire. As Fingon’s eyes adjusted he saw that there were many lesser passageways leading off from this great tunnel. Their openings were jagged gashes in the rock, very horrible to look upon. He thought of fair Menegroth, made by Elf-lore and Dwarf-craft and the wisdom of Melian into the most beautiful dwelling in Middle-earth. This seemed like a black parody. In every place where some grace might have crept in – if only by pure accident – the evil will of the builders had forbidden it. Ceilings had been tumbled down and floors dug up rather than allow any hint of beauty to make itself known.

It was utterly empty. There were not even any spiders, though some of the lesser passages were choked with webs. Fingon tried to breathe shallowly: the air stank worse than anything he had smelled in the Void so far, worse even than the dank murk that had swallowed Sirion. It was a musty rotting stench, a spider-stench. If Morgoth was short on Orcs and Balrogs to serve him here, it seemed he had found adequate replacements. Fingon had never known a more evil place.

Advancing straight down the main red-lit tunnel seemed risky. He crept forward only a little way, until he reached a passage where no spiderwebs could be seen. Iron bars blocked it, but they were set too far apart to hinder an Elf. Fingon slipped between them and into the stinking buried dark.

He went softly and secretly. He kept away from cobwebs. Though the hallways of Angband were a miserable labyrinth that several times delivered him back to a passage he had seen before, he turned his footsteps always downwards and so eventually managed to make some progress. He saw nothing and no one: no Orc, no Balrog, no vampire or wolf; no dragons; no spiders. No Morgoth, either. And no Maedhros. Fingon peered through iron-grilled windows into the rooms he passed, and saw terrible things lying within: instruments of torture, weapons of war, vile machines with no purpose he could guess at all. But there was nothing here that lived. All was dark, and smelled of rot, save for the occasional smoking red torch: those smelled of tar and roasting meat, and turned Fingon’s stomach.

Down, down, ever down, through the maze of ugly tunnels and uglier caverns, occasionally picking his way past a ragged cobweb barricade when there was no other way on, trying to ignore the sights and the smells around him. There was nothing here but evil, Fingon thought at one point. Then he shoved the thought away.

At length he came to a gigantic cavern lit from above by a ball of red flame that smoked in an iron bowl hung from the great ceiling. On Fingon’s right lay the sloping beginnings of a great tunnel, and he rather thought it was the main passageway back up to the gate. On his left there was a double door. It was as high as the hall, black as the everlasting dark, graven with vile figures that cavorted wickedly about a central giant faceless and crowned with a three-pronged crown. But the crown was slightly distorted, for the door stood open a crack, and the King who sat in the midst of the monstrous revel was broken in half, and blackness bisected him. The dark seemed almost to billow out of the cracked doorway. With it came more strongly than Fingon had felt it anywhere else a sense of that terrible malice, like a poisonous cloud. He nearly choked on it.

He thought he knew what lay in there. These were the doors to Morgoth’s throne room. Up this great passageway he had come dragging Grond his hammer to face Fingolfin’s challenge long ago. Down there now the Dark Lord must lurk. But if the tales of the War of Wrath were true, then there was a chain upon him, and his feet had been hewn from under him. He might be terrible, but he would not and could not come forth again.

Beside the great door to the throne room there was a lesser archway: and there in the red gloom Fingon thought he saw the beginnings of a stair. He set his face against the churning cloud of malice and went forward. He was not his father. He was not here to issue in despair a demand for a battle he could not win. He was here to find Maedhros: and with a little luck perhaps Morgoth would never know he had come until they were already gone.

The stairs were very steep, and wound around and around for a long time. Cobwebs here and there brushed Fingon’s hair and arms: not the mighty ropey webs that hung over so much of this fortress, but delicately woven silken threads. They were not all that sticky, and there was no sign of the spiders who had made them. Fingon brushed them away and continued his descent.

At last he came to a dark chamber deep in the bowels of – wherever this was. One red torch illuminated the stinking gloom. Fingon could not be sure, but he thought of the twisting stairway and the great hall up above, and he suspected that he now stood directly underneath the throne room of Morgoth.

There were still no guards. But he had undoubtedly come to the prison.

Fingon walked along a long row of cells cut in the rock all barred and bolted. Most of them were barely large enough for an Elf to stand up in: some were not even that. It was no longer a labyrinth. The builders had plainly made this place with the opposite intention: they wanted to be able to find what they were looking for easily. Each cell had a number painted over the door. At the end of the row the corridor turned abruptly and wound back the other way, along another row that was identical to the first – except that the numbers were different.

Fingon walked along that row too, and the next, and the next. He explored every inch of the evil place. He saw the chains and the shackles, the interrogation rooms, the guard-hall where there was still a feeding schedule pinned up by the door next to a patrol schedule and a blank slate board with ORDERS chalked at the top. No one was there.

Every cell was empty.

At last Fingon admitted to himself that he would not find Maedhros here. It must be back to the labyrinth of Angband. Somewhere, surely. He had to be somewhere. He climbed up the spiralling prison stairs again. The frail cobwebs seemed to have respun themselves while he was exploring the dungeon. Once again he had to keep brushing them away. There were still no spiders to do the spinning.

Back in the hall before the throne room doors, under the red light of the hideous lantern, Fingon rested a moment under the archway. He kept one hand pressed to the wall: otherwise he might have slumped against it. He was tired, and climbing that oversteep stair back up towards the choking cloud of malice that boiled out of the throne room had not been easy.

As he stood there exhausted wondering where to go next – there was no doubt that he had missed a great deal in the labyrinth: he probably had to find a way behind some of the thicker cobweb barricades – his eyes fell on something he had not noticed before. He had been trying not to look directly at the black doors, and so he had not seen the grey glimmer at their base. It started just where the doors were cracked open, and led off into the utter blackness on the other side. It was thin and fragile, made of nothing very much, but perfectly clear: as it had ever been, like a grey ribbon laid upon the night.

It was the road.

Fingon looked slowly up along the great red tunnel. Now he was looking for it he could see that there were scraps of grey weaving in and out of the chaos here and there. Maybe a dragon had burned it. Maybe spiders had gone to work unmaking it. But once it must have led directly from the chasm through the main gate of Angband and straight down the gullet of the fortress to the great black door.

He closed his eyes tight. “Must I?” he whispered.

And something without a voice spoke to him, as it had many times before. This time, for the first time, it spoke in words.

Say not ‘must’, it said.

And it nudged him gently and reminded him of the view he had seen from the lookout on Thangorodrim: the road back, the rope across the chasm, the wall that light could break. Fingon could turn back. Nothing would force him to go on. Nothing would punish him for turning away. No one asked this of him, or expected it, or thought it necessary – or justifiable, or wise. Say not must! Fingon had never bound himself, and no oath had brought him to this place. He could turn back whenever he wanted. Even now; even here. It was not too late to give up and go home. In fact, the silent speaker seemed to suggest, that would be a very good idea.

Fingon found he was swaying a little where he stood. The red hall stank. The stone wall was cold. The grey road led down into the very heart of evil. And he could still turn around and go home. The presence that was not there withdrew a little, as if it did not wish to push him one way or the other by too much urgency. It seemed concerned for him.

“Thank you,” Fingon said to it, though almost he wished he had not been reminded that he could stop. Still it seemed to be kindly meant. Kindness, here, was nothing to sniff at.

“But all the same,” he said, “I think I will go on.”

Nothing answered him, or seemed to care. But saying it out loud stiffened Fingon’s resolve. Some of the weariness fell away. He made himself stand up straight, and took a deep breath, though the stench of the air was enough to choke him. He touched the star-glass at his breast, and thought for a moment. Then one last time he unslung the bow from his back and set an arrow to the string. He held it angled downwards: but if need arose at least he would have one quick shot.

He could hardly believe that he was going to do this. Almost he laughed at himself again. It seemed he was his father’s son after all. Into the dark with a challenge for the Dark Lord! But not in rage; not in despair. Only in the certainty that the only person who could ever deserve eternity in Morgoth’s kingdom was Morgoth himself.

He walked forwards to the place where the double door hung ajar. It had looked a tiny crack, but that was only because the doors were so huge. The gap was more than large enough to let Fingon pass. Malice bubbled in the shadows beyond. But there was the grey road, starting just at the threshold. Fingon stepped onto it. Just above him one half of the graven king with his three-pronged crown leered down at him. Fingon gave it a look. “I am not afraid of you,” he lied.

Into the dark with bow and star-glass and maybe half a dozen arrows left. Well, he might as well have gone into the dark with nothing at all, for all the difference those would make. Yet he was comforted by the thought of the light at his breast.

He went forward.

It was pitch black. Fingon could see nothing but the road. But he felt himself observed. The hideous cloud of malice was all about him. And oh, the smell: like the unclean stink of some foul battlefield, like a rotting thing picked at by vultures, like death. Though there was no sign of walls or roof – only a vast cruel dark – nonetheless he knew himself enclosed. The malignant watchful awareness all around him reminded him of the stinking fog that had swallowed up the vision of Sirion. It was like that, but much worse.

The grey road split the darkness into two halves, but there was no distinction to be drawn between them. Fingon with his bow and arrow walked on. What would he do when he reached the end? Was he to stand before Morgoth and make demands – or pleas – or threats? This was madness. This was impossible.

He did not let his steps falter. He refused to give the watching evil that pleasure.

The path down the centre of the throne room seemed to go on for a very long time, and it was not until he was nearly at the end that Fingon finally saw something that was not the louring dark. Ahead of him something strange had happened to the road. The grey ribbon that had lain so tidily upon the night till now had split, and split, and split again, dividing a hundred and then a thousand times into silken-fine threads, and the threads knotted and overwove each other, in and out, spreading and rising over some object that lay at the road’s end. The tangled web carpeted out the shape of a great dais which otherwise Fingon could not have seen. Upon the dais, seeming almost chained to it by the sticky-shining grey threads, there stood an iron throne. It was massive: sized for one much greater than any Child of Iluvátar, the mightiest of his ancient race. But the cobwebs – and they were cobwebs, delicate and strong – had draped the throne in ragged grey curtains of musty spidersilk. Anchoring threads extended off beyond it into the blackness all around.

Fingon stared up at the iron throne of Morgoth. It was empty.

No. It was not.

He sprang up onto the dais. The sticky threads of the road’s end tried to tangle his feet: he kicked them away and they parted. A still figure lay on that iron chair. Fingon had nearly missed it, for even a full-grown Elf looked almost laughably small curled up in the merciless expanse of that seat sized for a giant; and besides the body lay as still as one dead, and was so covered in cobwebs that almost nothing could be seen of him. But there was a flash of bright hair, and as Fingon pulled himself up onto the seat he heard again very soft the faint rattle of a shallow breath. It was him. It was him.

Something in the darkness started to laugh.

Fingon froze. The laughter came from up above. Quickly he set his arrow back to his bowstring and swung it up to aim at the sound: but the sound moved as he did it, and now came from the left, now the right, now behind him in the shadows, now everywhere: low, cruel, satisfied snickering.

Well, well, well, whispered a voice in the shadows. What have we here?

“Show yourself!” Fingon cried.

If you are so eager to see me, said the voice, the power lies with you; though I suspect you will regret it.

Fingon hesitated. But he would rather know what he was facing. He kept the bow in his left hand, and with his right he fumbled for the star-glass. When he pulled it out into the open it did not glimmer softly: it flashed, a great white flash that defiantly lit the whole throne room. Then the light shrank to a white beacon about Fingon’s hand. He was grateful for that. One glimpse had been enough.

A hideous swollen beast lurked above him. Its long hairy legs, each ending in a huge black claw, were so large that they bent around the walls of the throne room and had taken the place of some of the ugly pillars that had once supported the roof. Most of the bulk of the creature was on the ceiling: its gigantic head was somewhere above the throne, and its many glittering eyes watched Fingon with malicious amusement. To call the thing a spider was an insult to the race of spiders back in the world. The little weavers that hung their webs in the gardens of Yavanna ready to be graced with the morning dew had nothing in common with this evil thing. Its misshapen back had a suggestion of heaving movement, as if many more crawling things lay just under the surface of its skin ready to burst forth at any moment. Its great maw moved ceaselessly, chewing on nothing, always greedy for more. A hideous stench wafted from it, and with it that sense of hungry, watching malice.

I told you you would regret it, said the spider queen. I am so ugly!

She said it with amusement, with pride, and she laughed again: her low horrible laugh that had an edge of the chittering spider-song to it.

“I do not fear you, servant of Morgoth!” Fingon snapped.

Servant of who? said the spider queen.

Fingon hesitated.

No, wait, wait, don’t say anything, it’ll come to me, said the spider, and then, Oh! Him! Yes, I know him. But just because he calls himself a king doesn’t mean he is one, little fly. Nothing rules me.

“Where is he?” Fingon demanded.

Why should I know? He’s around. Somewhere. He doesn’t go wandering about much these days. Horrible laughter again. He hasn’t got any feet! So he sits about feeling sorry for himself, as you people tend to. Now and then he spits out a dragon. No doubt if you’d left the road you would have found him eventually. But you did not. You walked it all the way here. All the way into my lair, little fly. How lovely it is to have a visitor!

There were scuttling sounds in the darkness then; there were great heaving movements, and the silken threads that anchored the iron throne trembled. A great hideous head dipped down until the countless many-sided eyes could peer at Fingon from just above the back of the throne. The light of the star-glass illuminated it there. Fingon almost it wished it did not.

It’s been a very long time, the spider queen said, since I had a visitor. But here you are with your little light. Now what is it one says? ‘How was your journey?’ She laughed. Well, how was it? Did you enjoy the road? I see you met the little twins. The little husks, I should say. Her maw moved restlessly. They were a worthy offering. Simply delicious. And now here you are. My very own visitor; though you’re not the most sparkling conversationalist. Still I never complain. Tell me, little fly, why did you come here? Was there something you wanted?

“I came for Maedhros,” Fingon said. He stepped forward. The still form under the cobwebs had not moved, not when Fingon spoke, not when he brought out the star-glass, not when the spider scuttled down her web towards them. But it was him; and Eärendil’s light picked out the red of his hair. “I came to bring him home.”

Oh, no, the spider queen said. I’m afraid you can’t do that. Goodness, did you really think they’d let you? The busybody gatekeepers who keep us out of your world – they are so terribly fussy. I will save you the trouble and tell you now. No evil thing may be brought out of the Void.

Fingon said nothing. But his heart sank.

Rather unkind of them to let you set out at all, under the circumstances, the spider queen carried on, with malicious, condescending sympathy. Here he is, and here he will stay. He has a debt to pay in any case. He made a bargain long ago, and though perhaps he did not know it was me he was making it with, still no one can say he did not know the terms. Those, after all, he wrote himself. And I have kept them to the letter.

“What terms?” Fingon demanded, trying not to think of no evil thing.

I am a weaver, little fly, said the spider queen. And your friend here asked me for a road. Can you deny I gave him one?

“You,” said Fingon. “You made the road.” The grey path he had walked the whole way here - the cobweb - 

Well, yes and no, the spider queen said. I played a part, certainly. But can you really say it was I who made it, if he chose every step? I wove entirely to his specifications: as wide as he wanted it, straight or winding, never failing. He cannot justly complain of me now. I have never betrayed him – which you must admit is particularly noble of me given how many people he managed to betray! No, you need not look on me with so much loathing. I am not to blame for what you have seen. I only wove the road he asked me for: I only ask the price that I am owed. He is mine now. Even spiders must eat, little fly. And you wrinkle your nose at me, do you? But dying things rot, and rotting things stink, and that is their nature. We who consume what rots must of necessity pick up a little of the stench. Oh, did you think the smell was mine? No. I am not dying. In fact I find I am doing very nicely. There was such a lot in him! The great spider flared her terrible jaws in another spider-laugh. Not very much left now, of course. Maybe I’ll have you next. You walked my road, didn’t you?

“I thought you said the road was his,” Fingon said.

What’s the difference? said the spider quickly.

Fingon saw that she was trying to cheat. Anger was already stirring in him: determination joined it. Even if she spoke the truth – even if they would not be allowed back into the world – this was an evil he would not bear. That a monster like this should crouch over what was left of Maedhros and laugh!

“You shall not have me, and you shall have no more of him,” he said. “You have been paid in full, creature. Even Ungoliant was not permitted to consume all.” He took careful note of where the spider’s eyes were, and set down the star-glass by his feet. He was expecting it to dim once it was not in his hand, but the sphere of white light still shone out boldly: and the motionless figure under the cobwebs let out a low moan.

Oh, her! said the spider. You people always makes such a fuss about her! She wasn’t anything special. There are millions of us; more indeed than there are stars in your sky.

“And if you do not leave him now,” Fingon said, and set an arrow to his bow, “there will be one less.”

You wouldn’t dare, the spider said.

Fingon took the shot. The arrow flew true. The spider’s great eyes were not small targets.

Ouch! That hurt! she cried.

Fingon grimly sent another arrow into her eye next to the first. This time something strange happened: for as the arrow left his bow the light of the star-glass seemed to leap up to its point, and it left a white trail in the air for a few seconds as it flew. The spider hissed. Fingon’s third arrow was a dart of pale fire, and when it struck her she screamed and withdrew swiftly up into the shadows overhead. But the pale trail of the arrows clung to her, and he could still see his target, one lit spot in the vile dark. He had three arrows left. He sent them swiftly up one after another, and the light of the star-glass flashed upon every one: and the last arrow flew as a star rising, and there was a smell of burning and a screech from the spider when it found its target.

The arrows had not killed her. They had not even injured her very badly. But she was a cowardly old thing, and had never met with anything that dared to resist her before. Half-blind and furious she scuttled away into the shadows up above. Secret tunnels lay there for her to flee into. She had no interest in prey that fought back. Oh, fine, fine! But just you wait! she snapped as she went. One day we will have you, little fly. We will eat your stars. We will eat everything. Just you wait!

And then she was gone. The cloud of malignancy she moved in was gone with her. Now there was only stillness and silence, the emptiness of the Void: and Maedhros, lying curled on the iron throne. He had managed to move, just a little, under the cobwebs. He had turned his face away from the light.

Fingon fell to his knees at his side. He had no dagger. With his bare hands he tore at the tangle of sticky-fine cobwebs that covered his friend. “Maedhros!” he said.

But Maedhros said nothing. Fingon saw that he flinched from the glow of the star-glass, and carefully set it to one side. He did not like to put it away entirely in such an evil place as this. He pulled the worst of the spider’s trap away, and it disintegrated in his hands, leaving a sticky residue. There were many layers of it, and parts of it were torn, as if Maedhros had struggled once: but the upper layers were undisturbed.

Maedhros still did not respond: not to Fingon’s touch, not to the sound of his voice, not to his own name. Fingon thought he might be unconscious. But as he ripped off the worst of the spiderwebs about Maedhros’s face he saw his eyes were open. Yet something was terribly wrong: for they were dark from side to side. He was nighteyed – just like the twins; the twins who said that they could not be saved. Fingon cried out in grief. He reached for the star-glass, hoping it was only a trick of the shadows in here. When he held it up over Maedhros’s face he saw that it was not so. There was darkness behind Maedhros’s eyes in truth. Yet all hope was not gone; for though no light remained in them Fingon saw just before Maedhros winced and tried to turn his face away again that his eyes had not vanished altogether into Void. Shadow was in them, but he thought he had seen a suggestion of iris and pupil there still. He breathed out in relief. “I am sorry,” he said, “I had to check. Look –” he put the star-glass down, “there, it’s gone.”

But Maedhros still said nothing. He lay breathing shallowly in the same curled shape he had been webbed in, with his one good hand clenched tight at his breast. Fingon was not even sure he knew that anyone was there. He rested his hand on Maedhros’s shoulder and called his name again, and again, ever more softly. He glanced up nervously to the shadows where the spider queen had vanished. He had scared her off for now, but he did not doubt she would come back in the end; especially if they just sat here. “Maedhros!” he called again, more hopelessly, but it was no use. Maedhros would not hear him.

Fingon sat cross-legged by his side. He swallowed hard.

He took up his harp.

He did not have anything much in mind to play. He started with that old song of Valinor undarkened, as one that Maedhros might remember from a dark place not that different to this. Just as on the peaks it sounded very thin. Fingon sang it anyway. And then he sang others like it, songs of their youth in a fair country long ago; and after that songs of Middle-earth, not only the Exile-hymns but also the merrier tunes he remembered, tunes that had been played in the hall of Himring or by the shores of Mithrim on festival nights; songs of defiance and good cheer in the darkness which he had not needed for a long time. They were songs of old joy. For there had been joy – there had been!

And after that he found his heart and voice turning quite naturally to later musics, songs of forgiveness and healing and a new star rising: the songs of the Exiles Returned. But nothing moved the still figure on the ground. Fingon closed his eyes and kept singing, for himself now as much as for Maedhros: to remind himself that there was some world that existed apart from this dark. At last without quite meaning to he found himself singing a song in the Westron-tongue that had come to Middle-earth long after he had died and left it forever; a song that would never have been known in Valinor if it had not been brought there by a Hobbit. It was a simple tune, with simple words. It praised the Sun and stars.

He sang it to the end, and then he lifted his fingers from the harpstrings, and sighed, and opened his eyes.

Maedhros was looking at him.

He had not moved much. He had only turned his head. But his eyes no longer stared sightlessly. He was looking. Fingon’s heart leapt. “Maedhros!” he said. “Do you hear me yet?”

“Fingon,” Maedhros whispered, in a voice as dry as a dead reed. “No.” He closed his eyes again. “No, no,” he said, and though that weak voice could barely carry a feeling at all still Fingon could see the way his expression went tight as if he were in pain. “Not here,” he said, “no, please – not you!”

“It is me,” Fingon said. “I came to bring you home. We can’t stay here. The spider will be back. Come!”

He knew Maedhros heard him; for he trembled. But he did not answer, and did not move again, and did not open his eyes. Fingon carefully laid his hand on Maedhros’s shoulder. It was not pleasant to touch him. His skin was cold and clammy, and it was hard to tell what was the sticky remains of spidersilk and what was the ragged scraps of a colourless garment he had once been wearing. All the muscles in his back were knotted tight. He was much too thin, Fingon thought unhappily. He could feel bone beneath the skin. “Maedhros!” he said. “Come away!”

Still Maedhros would not move. Fingon risked shaking him a little, which had no effect. He glanced nervously up into the empty shadows above. He could not feel the cloud of poisonous malice up there. What if she could hide herself? Would he know when she returned? Would she lurk where he could not see her and leap on them from the dark? How he hated this hideous throne room! And here they were sitting on Morgoth’s great throne: easy prey, out in the open. It was no fit place for a pair of Elves in any case. Fingon remembered then how the spider queen had laughed, how the twins in their aspect as gatekeepers had warned: the spiders had no doubt cheated, but nonetheless this was a prison of Maedhros’s own making. He frowned down at the still form lying beside him. “This? Really?” he said. “It’s past time I took you home. Get up! Must you always be so stubborn?”

Nothing. But Fingon felt a little better remembering that Maedhros was stubborn; was always stubborn; had not had his stubbornness reduced at all, it seemed, by the spider queen’s predations. “Very well,” he said. “Be that way! We’re leaving all the same.”

He picked up the star-glass and with great regret put it back in his pocket. At once blackness fell on them; but there was the clear grey road leading straight back to the awful doors. The spider queen had undone herself. They could follow it one way as well as another. Fingon’s harp and bow went onto his back. Maedhros still hadn’t moved. He was a skeletal ruin of himself, and did not look heavy: but he was inconveniently tall. It wasn’t that far to go, Fingon told himself. Up the road to the doors, up the tunnel to the evil gate: then chasm, rope, road; break the wall, find the twins; home. He suspected he would not have to carry Maedhros the whole way. His cousin was stubborn, but he was proud. Indeed those were nearly two ways of saying the same thing. Sooner or later, and probably sooner, he would be embarrassed enough to walk.

First to get away from this horrible place!

Fingon dragged Maedhros to the edge of the great seat. Getting him down off it was a little tricky when he would not cooperate, but at least it was down and not up. Up would have been impossible. Fingon dropped lightly onto the cobwebbed dais and pulled Maedhros after him. He nearly laughed when Maedhros' eyes opened for just a second and his expression wore a brief ghost of surprise, before he remembered he was being stubborn and slumped miserably against the throne’s base. 

The very darkness of the room seemed offended by the thought of laughter. But it was absurd. It was. All of this was absurd: that Fingon had come here at all, that he had managed to scare off the spider queen with six shining arrows that had barely harmed her, and that Maedhros had chosen this time of all times to behave like a tired unhappy child. He was at least sitting now, not lying flat. He was still in that same curled up position, his head bent so far forward that Fingon could not see his face, his one good hand locked into a tight fist at his breast. There was no sign yet of the spider queen returning. “Come now!” Fingon said.

He managed to drag Maedhros to his feet, and got his arm slung about Fingon’s shoulders. He was so light! But once he was standing he did not try to sit down again. Perhaps resisting seemed like too much effort; but Fingon’s task was made easier. He had feared he was going to have to put Maedhros on his back. He looked to the end of the road. Not far, he told himself. Not far at all.

He started walking. Maedhros let himself be dragged along. He did not walk so much as stumble, and three times he fell and refused to get up. But each time Fingon picked him up, got his arm slung back around his shoulders, and went on. Up the road. It was sloped, which Fingon had not noticed on the way down: only very subtly, but it angled down towards the iron throne, and so now they were climbing uphill. He would not have noticed it now if he had been alone, but Maedhros made it a very difficult ascent. He was a lighter burden than he should have been, but a burden all the same.

At last they reached the doors, and there Fingon had to rest. Maedhros slumped against him as he looked up once again at the halved carving of the faceless king of evil. Morgoth was not even here. He was maimed and chained somewhere in the Void, feeling sorry for himself – if the spider queen could be believed – and setting his dragons loose to roam. But he had never been here. This was Maedhros’s prison, self-made. Fingon held onto him tighter. “You have a great deal to be ashamed of,” he murmured. “But I think perhaps you overestimated yourself, Maedhros. You are not exactly a Morgoth. For one thing you are not tall enough.”

Maedhros said nothing. He did smell. The spider had not lied. The musty stench of despair clung to him. But they were leaving. Fingon looked at the great red hall under the ball of stinking fire in its iron bowl, and the tunnel beyond it that led up to the gate. He did not even consider attempting the maze of Angband. He did not think there was anyone here but spiders, and the spiders could find them anywhere. There was nothing to be gained by stealth. It was not far, he told himself again. There was no road for this part, and the ground was uneven. But it was not far.

On they went. Now Maedhros’s refusal to actually walk or to look where he was going began to become irritating, and then infuriating. The ground was badly broken and Fingon had to watch where his own feet went. It was very hard to do that and also keep track of where Maedhros was and whether there was anything in his path to trip him: and if he tripped, he fell, and if he fell, Fingon had to stop and get him up again. More than once Maedhros lost his balance spectacularly enough that he ended up dragging Fingon down with him, and Fingon had to catch his breath and dust himself off and wince at the scrapes on his hands before he could go on. But he went on. They both went on. When they reached a particularly broken-down section of tunnel Fingon hesitated, thinking. It would be easier, perhaps, if he left Maedhros here for a moment and went ahead to scout a fair path for them both. He could come back for him afterwards.

He almost did it, but as he went to unhook Maedhros’s arm from over his shoulders his heart cried out a protest. He had not looked for Maedhros all this time to leave him slumped alone in such a place as this – no, not even for a moment. He half-feared the spider queen creeping down the walls behind his back: or else that Maedhros himself might get up and turn around and walk back down into the dark. Fingon had no wish to pass through those black doors ever again.

Together, then. Let Maedhros be as infuriating as he pleased about it. Fingon could be stubborn too. They went on across the ruins, and Fingon watched Maedhros’s bare feet instead of his own, and steered him away from the jagged stone shards and scraps of sticky cobweb that littered the tunnel floor. It meant that Fingon himself was the one who tripped and slowed them down – several times, in fact – but he found he minded that less.

It took a long time to reach the gate that way, but they reached it. Fingon had feared to find spiders waiting for them here among their webs, but there were none. The black passages they had made in the buckling iron gaped wide. They did not look quite so awful from this side – perhaps because now they were the way out. Fingon pushed Maedhros towards the widest opening. The cobwebs hanging in it looked heavier and stickier than he remembered. Still it was the way out. “Come on!” he said.

If Maedhros’s refusal to help himself at all had been infuriating in the tunnel, it was very nearly unbearable at the gate. They were so close to escape! But still he would do nothing, and it was much harder to steer and shove him when there was so little space to move in and spiderwebs hung all about. Fingon almost cried in frustration. Still he would not give up, though more than once he found himself reduced to useless pleading, and he spent so much time tearing the cobwebs off Maedhros that he gave up worrying about himself and at one point very nearly got hopelessly tangled.

It took a long time to get past the gate. But they did it; and then they were on the other side, free of Angband at last, out in the open under the shadow of the peaks of Thangorodrim. Maedhros immediately slumped with his back against the gate. Fingon sat down next to him. The grey road began again up ahead. Fingon would gladly have marched straight for it if he had only had the strength, but he was exhausted and covered in cobwebs, and he was going to have to drag Maedhros again. A moment’s pause. Then for road and chasm. He tipped his head back and took a few deep breaths.

“You are impossible,” he said. “I don’t know why I love you.”

Then he stopped speaking as two things hit him at once.

One was a memory – a memory recently relived: an evening in Himring during the Long Peace, that old teasing and old happiness, I don’t know why I love you, and Maedhros laughing as he opened his arms. The other was a revelation, astonished, delighted, relieved: the answer to the twins’ question on the road. Do you love him still? Fingon had dared Angband, walked into that throne room, faced down that spider, all for pity’s sake. But it was more than pity that had made him drag Maedhros all the way up the tunnel and through that gate.

He was so glad to know it he had to say it aloud. “But I do,” he said. “I do!”

“Fingon,” said Maedhros.

Fingon looked at him. His eyes were open. He was sitting up. His expression was very grave – but at least he had an expression. “There you are,” Fingon said.

“It really is you,” said Maedhros unhappily. “Why did you come?”

“To bring you home,” Fingon said, and then: “Because I love you.”

Maedhros said, “You should not have done it.”

“But I did it all the same.”

“When did I ever deserve your love?”

Fingon thought of long-ago friendship in a bright country; of moments of joy in very dark times. But he said, “I don’t know that that has anything to do with it, really.”

“Fingon,” said Maedhros. He bowed his head. In a low fierce voice he said, “I would rather suffer any greater punishment the Void could discover than see you here. You should not have come. There is no way back. That you should be trapped here for my sake! Fingon, there is no way back.”

“But there is,” Fingon said. “If you’re talking about the chasm, well, I took advice from an expert and brought rope, and it has proved very useful. Let me try, Maedhros! I came to bring you home, and I still mean to do it. We have come this far, and you did not make it easy. Will you walk yet? I confess I would be grateful; though I will drag you all the way if I have to.”

Maedhros looked at him silently. In his shadowed eyes Fingon thought he saw a flicker of the old flame. “I will walk,” he said eventually. “But there is no way back.”

Fingon got up, and Maedhros struggled to his feet. He would not take the hand Fingon offered him. His right arm ended in a scarred stump, just as it had in the world; though they were not in the world here, and Fingon did not think either of them was standing here in the flesh. He knew, after all, what had become of Maedhros’s body. Though he had tried very hard not to think about it at the time, he remembered the smell of roasting meat that came from the torches in the empty fortress behind them. Still Maedhros had all his scars: the missing hand, the white line on his cheek from Alqualondë, the mark of the lash about his flank and the Balrog-fingerprints on his bicep, both visible through the cobwebbed rags he wore. His spirit, it seemed, was committed to them. And his good hand he kept curled in a protectively tight fist. Suddenly Fingon realised that he was holding something.

A Silmaril? No, not a Silmaril: Maedhros had walked into the fire carrying one, but he could not have brought it here – could he? No! Fingon would have been able to see it. The lesser light of the star-glass in his hand had been enough to turn the fine skin of his fingers translucent: how could a Silmaril fail to light the darkness in the throne room? It was something else, but he could not guess what. He looked up and saw that Maedhros was watching his face grimly.

“What is it?” Fingon said.

Maedhros shook his head.

Fingon would have liked to take his hand, but it was plain Maedhros would not let him. Whatever he was holding mattered to him. They walked side by side along the grey road, not touching. Neither of them said anything. Fingon had guessed well earlier: now Maedhros’s pride was awake again, he seemed determined to walk on his own. He was still weak, and paused often. Fingon slowed his steps to keep them side by side, and waited when Maedhros had to stop and catch his breath. When Maedhros saw that he looked grim and pushed himself to go faster, but that only made him stumble, and when he fell he could not catch himself – not with a stump and a closed fist. He cried out in pain and then flinched away when Fingon tried to help him up. “I can do it,” he said.

“All right,” Fingon said. “All right.” He waited, again: longer, this time. He did not look at Maedhros, who hated so much to be seen like this. He looked ahead to where he could see the withered tree like a broken hand reaching up on the brink of the abyss in the distance. Not far now, he told himself again. Not far, not far. It was a very long way back to the ivory gate: but take the road a step at a time, and the journey must eventually end.

Maedhros began trudging forward again. Fingon stayed beside him. Not far, not far, he thought again, and it seemed as though his footsteps kept pace with the thought. The withered tree drew nearer and nearer. Not far at all.

But something was wrong.

At first Fingon told himself it was the gloom of the Void deceiving his eyes. As they drew closer he saw that it was not so. But still he led them on, right up to the edge of the chasm, under the withered tree, as far as they could get from the peaks of Thangorodrim and the black gate beneath them: that far, and no further. There was no way on. The rope was not there.

There was not even a trace of it on this side, and the rocks where Fingon had fastened this end of the bridge and double-checked the knots were bare. Fingon strained his eyes and thought he could see the other end still knotted around an outcropping across the black gap. There was not much rope there either. It looked as though someone had sawed through it, and there was a glint lying on the road that might have been a discarded dagger.

Who had done it? Some spider, some dragon, some wandering malignant Void-thing, some stranger in the dark. Fingon even thought for a moment of the twins, but he discarded that: he did not believe they would, and in any case he doubted they would stray so far from the wall they guarded. It made no difference who. The rope was gone. Without it the chasm was impassable. Fingon looked on it in despair; and he took out the star-glass, and held it up for a better view, and so only confirmed for himself that it was indeed his own lost dagger lying in the road on the far side of the abyss.

He turned to Maedhros.

Maedhros was already sitting down, slumped among the outcroppings on the edge. He had turned his face once more from the light. “I told you,” he said without looking up. “There’s no way back.”

“We could follow it round and look for another crossing,” Fingon said. “Or an end to it –”

“It goes all the way round,” Maedhros said. “You could jump in, I suppose. I never dared. You can see what’s down there, or some of it. I suspect in any case you’d only end up back here.”

“Maedhros –”

“There’s no way back,” Maedhros said. In a dull voice he added, “No evil thing may be brought out of the Void.”

“There must be a way.”

Maedhros shook his head. “That I should have brought you to this!” he said. “There was a time I thought I would give anything to see you again – but not here! Never here! You whom I loved – you who were the best of my life – that you should be prisoned here for my sake –”

He started to cry.

Fingon sat down next to him as he sobbed. The rocks were cold and uncomfortable at his back. He set the star-glass down on his other side, where it would not disturb Maedhros, but would still give him a comforting glimmer to look at. If it was all the light he was ever going to see again, he saw no reason to ration it. Maedhros’s shoulders were shaking as he wept. Fingon thought about home: about the Sun and Moon and stars, the sound of the waves breaking on the shores of Eressëa, the voices of the singers rising into the night, the revels and the dances, the green grass and the wind in the trees. His brothers would grieve for him, and his mother too, who had already lost so much. And he thought of the ivory gate: imagined coming to it with Maedhros at his side only to find that the way was barred for one of them. Would he have been able to bear it? Could he have left Maedhros behind – left him here – for the sake of home and a sky with stars? Or would he have stayed here after all rather than abandon Maedhros alone? Would he have been able to live with himself afterwards either way?

Well, he did not have to find out. Here they were. Here they would stay. The twins too: there would be no second chance to attempt their rescue. Fingon thought on the whole he was sorriest for that. He had been determined to try. As for the rest – he put his hand on Maedhros’s bony shoulder again. He could feel him shuddering with grief. “Listen,” he said. “If all I achieved in coming here was to teach that spider what an arrow in the eye feels like and drag you off that throne, then I am still glad I came.” Maedhros did not answer him. He was now weeping silently. Fingon thought of something else. “And I do not think I was the best of your life, really,” he said. “Elrond Peredhel dwells yet in Valinor: and I met Elros, when I lost the road. He still has the sword you gave him.”

Maedhros looked up then. “Elros?” he said hoarsely. His face was tearstained. Sticky grey stuff remained in his hair, matted so thickly with the red it looked almost like it was growing there. And his cheeks were hollow, and his garment was ragged, and his eyes were dim and shadowed save where the last flickers of red flame burned: but there was not so much darkness in them as Fingon had thought. He had overestimated how bad it was down in the throne room – either that, or some of the worst had been washed away by weeping. “You saw him here?” Maedhros said.

“I did,” Fingon said, and then it occurred to him that Maedhros might not know, so he explained: “He chose the fate of Men. And I suppose we are beyond the world here! He did not seem much troubled by anything that prowls in the dark. He slew a dragon; and it would have had me otherwise.”

“A dragon!” Maedhros said, and he made a choking sound that might have been a sob or a laugh. “Of course he did! The fate of Men, really? But then he never thought much of Elves.” He paused and then added, with a grim twist of humour, “For some reason.”

“He saved my life,” Fingon said. “He is a fearsome swordsman.”

Maedhros looked into nothing. “I said they should know,” he said softly. “Maglor would not have had them taught the use of weapons; let us not raise them to war, he said; but I thought of all I had seen of Middle-earth, and I said they should know. Ugly lessons to teach a child! They loved me not: how could they? Nor did I ask them to. It would have been wrong to ask it, after Elwing fled before me. I know what they called me. Maglor cared for them; I only taught them the sword. They were quick students both – Elrond the quicker, Elros the fiercer. He surpassed me in the end, and I gave him your sword – brave heart that he was, it seemed only right – and besides he was tall! I hoped he should never use it at all: or if he did, use it on me, as he half-wished to all along. But he never had a chance for that. A dragon – a dragon! As his father before him! Was he pleased with himself? No, you need not say it; I know he was.”

“He was,” Fingon said. “A worthy son of Eärendil! It was no small beast. But in life, Maedhros, in life, he seldom needed that sword. He became the mightiest of all the kings of Men, and lived long and well in a time of peace.”

“Good!” Maedhros said. He met Fingon’s eyes, half-smiling. It was an expression that sat strangely on his haggard face. Tentatively he said, “And Elrond?”

“He needed your lessons now and then,” Fingon said. “Two ages of the world he dwelled in Middle-earth after he chose the life of the Eldar: and Middle-earth is never peaceful long. Sauron did not wait many years before he set himself up in his old master’s place, and he achieved much that was evil. Still less he achieved than he might have done, because Elrond and others as wise as he kept the watch. That Dark Lord was cast down utterly at last, and might not have been had it not been for the House of Elrond in the Misty Mountains, and the rest and protection it offered for a little while to those who fled before the Shadow. Or so I am told! I was not there. But the tales come to us across the Sea.”

“And now he dwells in Valinor,” Maedhros said. “As do you?”

“As did I: on Tol Eressëa, along with most of the Exiles Returned.” And then since Maedhros seemed afraid to ask Fingon began telling him things, small doings and family gossip, Argon’s latest scrapes and Finrod’s long-overdue wedding to Amarië. He talked for a long time. It did not seem proper to hold anything back. Stories of home were like the light of the star-glass: they were all they would have to sustain them here, and it would be senseless to ration them. Nor did it seem fair that Fingon should have so much more than Maedhros when they were here together. So he shared, and shared, and shared, talking until he was hoarse and counting it a great victory when he managed to make Maedhros laugh a little at the story of Turgon and the Hobbit-hole. The infinite night pressed around them, and the deep chasm lay before them, and the dark fortress loomed behind. There was no way out. There was no way back. Grief was making a seat for itself deep in Fingon’s heart as he talked of home and all the things he would never know again. But he had chosen this road for love first of all, and he refused to regret it.

At last he could talk no more. Maedhros leaned his elbow on his knee and his head on his tight-closed fist and looked at him. “Thank you!” he said. “Thank you.” He hesitated. “My brothers –”

Fingon had known he would ask. “Five sit in Mandos,” he said. “Maglor wanders in exile still.”

“But not here,” Maedhros said. He looked sad, and sounded it, but Fingon thought he was relieved too. “An exile in Middle-earth – ah, and that is for my account too, perhaps! But not here.”

“Even you did not have to be here, Maedhros,” Fingon said. “The summons of Mandos –”

“You need not remind me that I am a fool,” said Maedhros sharply. He closed his eyes. After a moment he went on in a pitiful voice, “And you here – you! Do not think I am not grateful. Still that I should have brought you to this!”

“Maedhros,” Fingon said, for this struck him as self-pity. It was not as if Maedhros had forced him to come looking. No one had.

But Maedhros said nothing. He kept his eyes closed, and rested his forehead on his closed fist, and did not say a word. Fingon glanced out again at the chasm, but nothing had changed. Of course not: why would it? The rope was gone, and there would not be another.

He looked at Maedhros again. How terribly changed he was, and yet how familiar! It was not the case that some mad cruel stranger had taken on the name and face of Fingon’s love and committed so many dreadful crimes. Fingon thought he had half-convinced himself it was so, long ago when he first heard the tales. But no: it was Maedhros he had loved, and it was Maedhros who had failed. It was Maedhros who had betrayed him at Alqualondë, welcomed him on Himring-height, kissed his hand in green Ard-galen, drawn the sword Fingon gave him at Doriath. It was Maedhros who had chosen the road to Sirion – no doubt of that, after what Fingon had seen, and knowing what he knew of his cousins: he did not need a Void-vision to tell him that neither Amras nor Maglor had picked that evil path. It was Maedhros who had forced Maglor on when he would rather have yielded, and Maedhros who had chosen the chasm, chosen fire and shadow, trying at the last to become master of his own punishment.

And it was still Maedhros whom Fingon loved. He had taught Elrond and Elros the sword, because he loved them and feared they would need it. That had not been a stranger’s doing either.

It was hard to know all this. But Fingon was glad he knew. Yes, glad, he thought, looking at Maedhros’s gaunt familiar face, the tight lines of pain drawn across his forehead and about his mouth. He was glad he knew, and that meant he was glad he was here. He did not say anything. They would have the rest of eternity to spend talking to each other. For now Fingon was content to look.

He looked.

Eventually he frowned.

“Maedhros,” he said, “what are you holding?”

Maedhros did not open his eyes. “It has nothing to do with you,” he said.

Fingon kept looking at him. He could not help the frown. Though Maedhros was still, his expression shifted minutely now and again, and every time the lines of pain deepened. He clenched and relaxed his fist, knuckles whitening again and again, and the pain on his face went along with those small movements. “It’s hurting you,” Fingon said. “Has it been hurting you all this time?”

“Leave it alone,” Maedhros said.

“Maedhros, what is it?” said Fingon. He had been sure it was impossible, but – “Is it a Silmaril?”

Maedhros gave a short bitter ha! of laughter.

“Then what?”

“Nothing to do with you, Fingon, as I said,” said Maedhros. “Leave it be. Leave me be.”

But still his face was marked with ever-deepening lines of pain. “I will not,” Fingon said. “At least show me!”

Maedhros only brought his closed fist to his breast, and curled his body tighter around it. It was almost the same position Fingon had found him webbed in. Fingon reached out and Maedhros flinched away. Fingon did not back down. He could not watch Maedhros do this to himself. He laid his hand on Maedhros’s closed fist, meaning to pry it open gently, and Maedhros jerked away and looked up furiously and drew his arm back as if for a blow. Fingon stared. Red flame had leapt up as if from nowhere in Maedhros’s eyes.

Maedhros froze when their eyes met. All at once he seemed to collapse in on himself. “I am sorry, I am sorry!” he said miserably. Then he winced, stung again by some unseen pain.

“Maedhros,” said Fingon, “what is it?” Maedhros only looked miserable. “It doesn’t matter,” Fingon decided at once. “I don’t care. Only cast it away!”

“I can’t,” Maedhros said.

“You can. Of course you can!”

“Fingon, I can’t.”

“Not even in the Void?” Fingon said. “What difference can it make? Where can you throw things away, if not here?”

“It’s the last thing I have,” said Maedhros. “It’s mine.” The fire in him flickered a moment and then seemed to grow stronger. It made him look more like his old self again, but it was not easy to look upon.

“It’s hurting you,” Fingon said.

“It’s still mine.”

“Maedhros, please!”

“No,” said Maedhros. He looked grim. “I’m sorry, Fingon! But no.”

Fingon reached out again, and this time Maedhros did not flinch or move away. Fingon could feel the tension humming in him as Fingon wrapped both his hands about Maedhros’s white-knuckled fist. His expression was very cold. If Fingon tried to force it he thought they probably would come to blows. He did not wish to compel Maedhros to do anything. He kept his hands where they were, and bowed his head over them: and then he brought Maedhros’s fist to his lips and kissed his knuckles. “If you will not, you will not,” he said. “I wish you would. I hate to see you in pain.”

“I can’t!” Maedhros said again, but now he sounded helpless, not grim, and when Fingon looked up his expression was helpless too.

They looked at each other for a little while. Finally Fingon said, “Have you tried?”

Maedhros shook his head. He looked like he might start to cry again.

Fingon felt like crying too. He bowed his head once more over Maedhros’s hand, and kissed his white knuckles a second time, and said, “You have enough sorrow and shame to bear without clinging to more pain – and in such a place as this, too. I wish you would cast it away. I know how stubborn you are: but I would beg if I thought you would listen!”

“Fingon,” Maedhros said in a choked voice.

Fingon might have let him go then. Surely it was enough that Maedhros was already in pain. There was no need to push him to tears over what he could not or would not change. But as he crouched there with bowed head clinging to Maedhros’s closed hand he thought he heard something speaking to him. It might have been only the prompting of his own heart. But it seemed to say: Ask!

Fingon looked up and met Maedhros’s eyes and with all his heart said, “Please!”

Maedhros jerked his hand out of Fingon’s grasp. There were tears on his cheeks, but when he spoke there was no grief in his voice. There was nothing there but anger. “Fine! Fine!” he said fiercely. “If it means so much to you!”

Still he hesitated a moment. Then his face twisted and he held his arm out over the abyss. He did not have to move to do it. They were that close to the edge. Maedhros waited a moment more, grimacing. Then he opened his hand. Fingon saw the last of his scars, livid and terrible: the burns on his palm from the holy light of the Silmarils. In their midst lay something small and black. A tiny spider, Fingon thought: no, a sharp-edged piece of dead stone: no, a jagged shard of black glass, like the wall that bounded this prison.

Then with a gasp as if it were a terrible effort Maedhros turned his hand over, and whatever it was it fell into the dark. Fingon saw then that it was a broken chunk of adamant – no, a tiny flickering flame – no, neither of those. Just before it vanished forever in the abyss it seemed to gleam with a pale light. It might have been a pearl.

Whatever it was, it was gone. Maedhros flexed his open hand, once, twice. His expression was dreadful. He did not look like he was in any less pain than before. And as Fingon looked at him something seemed to dwindle and shrink within him. Grey and grieved he looked: scarred and old. He had been flame, and now he was ash.

“There,” he said. “It’s gone. Are you happy?”

“Of course not!” Fingon said.

But at last he could do something that had been denied him till now. He reached out and took Maedhros’s hand. The scar of the Silmaril was old and shiny. Fingon pressed their palms together, and intertwined their fingers, and then all at once he dragged Maedhros to him.

It was a true embrace at last, his arms around Maedhros’s thin body and his face in Maedhros’s hair: which was matted and dirty and had cobwebs in it, and smelled besides, but it was him, it was him. After only a few seconds Maedhros’s arms came up about Fingon in turn, and he put his face against Fingon’s shoulder, and his hand went into Fingon’s hair. As so often before he ran the length of one of Fingon’s braids through his palm. Then he tangled all his fingers in Fingon’s hair and pulled him in even closer, so there was not a breath of space left between them. Fingon closed his eyes tight and let himself feel. “It is you,” he said. “It is.”

“It’s me,” Maedhros agreed, though he did not sound quite sure about it.

They stayed like that for a long time. Eventually Maedhros laughed a little, and changed from clinging to Fingon’s hair to stroking it. Fingon himself felt no desire to move at all. It was not as if there was anywhere to go. Here seemed like the best place he was likely to find in the Void. Maedhros stroked his hair carefully, and touched the nape of his neck, and at one point jarred the harp so all the strings sounded a protest. “Sorry,” he whispered, but Fingon held him tighter and said nothing at all.

Then Maedhros pulled away from him. Fingon looked up with a protest on his lips. Maedhros said, “Do you hear that?”

“Hear what?” said Fingon.

But then he did hear it. Somewhere very far away there was a rushing sound. It was barely more than a whisper at first, but it quickly grew louder, and louder, until it rose to a roar. There was a rumbling and a moaning and a deep pounding echo in that roar, and still it grew louder – Fingon got to his feet and picked up the star-glass – and louder, and louder, and still he could not see where it was coming from. Maedhros stood up too. They looked about, and looked at each other, and the rushing sound grew and grew, and then just as Fingon finally heard the last note of the great chorus of sound – the splashing – they both at once looked down into the chasm.

Far down in the dark there was white spray rising.

Or at least it was a long way down when they first glimpsed it. But the water was rising so quickly that in a few seconds it was bare yards away, and then the first foaming waves washed over the edge of the gulf and splashed their feet. Maedhros, barefoot, yelped at the cold. Fingon suddenly remembered the rotten boat he had seen on the other side. This was not an abyss at all. This was a river!

He exchanged an astonished look with Maedhros. More waves crashed on the chasm’s rocky edge. The river was not done rising. In fact though the gulf was brimming over the waves were getting bigger: and still the water roared and bubbled, and fierce foam-flecked whirlpools were forming halfway across where the current was strongest. A wave slopped over the rocky outcroppings at the edge and splashed Fingon up to his knees. The snapped trunk of the withered tree finally broke cleanly in two under the assault. Swiftly and joyfully the waters carried off their prize, and the whirlpools seized the log and set it spinning frantically. Then another mighty wave curled over the edge. Fingon felt the spray on his face as it broke. The after-eddies tore up some of the cobweb road, and the flood was still rising.

“It’s coming!” Maedhros said.

“Run!” said Fingon.

Together they ran just ahead of the flood. They pelted down the grey road with foaming water lapping at their feet. Fingon glanced back and saw a great wave washing across the gloom behind them like a dark wall. If it fell upon them they would be utterly swept away. There was no question about where to go. He sprang up onto the lower slopes of the black mountains, and Maedhros came after him. The dark wave hurled itself down on the ugly slope in a mighty cloud of white spray, and they both stopped a moment to stare at the glory of it.

Then Fingon saw another even larger wall of water rolling in behind it. They did not have time to stand and stare. “This way!” he said, and they managed to get above the wave’s reach just before it crashed as well, roar and grumble and sheets of white foam; and once again Fingon felt spray on his face. He could taste it too, in the air, just a hint of salt. The sea, he thought: the sea!

When the second wave receded, it did not recede far. Already the grey road was drowned. Dark water white-laced lapped hungrily around the feet of Thangorodrim. It was pouring through the entrance to Angband, and fierce churning whirlpools were forming about the gate. “The sea!” Maedhros said, stopping and staring again.

Fingon took his hand and dragged him on up the mountainside. Maedhros stumbled after him. He kept turning around to look. “I know!” Fingon said at last. “And it’s wonderful, but I don’t want to drown in it!”

Maedhros gave a surprised-sounding laugh. “I suppose not!” he said. They climbed swiftly up until they reached the iron bar that ran along the top of the gate; but there was no gate now. Little waves were breaking about the double row of spikes that had crowned it. Fingon worried about Maedhros’s balance, but he ran the treacherous path as easily as Fingon did: he seemed to have got some of his strength back somewhere between the chasm’s brink and here. On and up the mountain they went. It was a mountain that was shrinking every minute. The flood was swallowing Thangorodrim steadily, and Fingon and Maedhros could barely keep ahead of it. The path was treacherous as it had been the last two times Fingon had made this climb – third time pays for all! he thought wildly – and Maedhros plainly found it even harder one-handed. He no longer scorned help when Fingon offered it. At one point Fingon had to heave himself up a sheer slope of rock while Maedhros waited with the water already rising past his knees: only then could he turn around and haul Maedhros up after him.

Up and up they went, until they came to the flat patch of scree under the cliff where the adamant shackle hung. Here Fingon paused. As far as he knew there was no way on, and the water was up around his ankles already. “This way!” Maedhros said, and he urged Fingon up onto what had looked from the flat like a crumbling pile of rock. Indeed it was: but from the top there was an easy jump to another slightly higher pile, and then up to the top of a crag which swung out at a mad angle from the side of the central mountain; and if one ran along that to the end and jumped and was not afraid of the sharp rocks at the landing, it was a route onto a similar crag on the next mountain over. The landing did not look as bad as it could have been. It was half underwater. Fingon took the jump first and caught Maedhros when he came after, and together they waded and splashed back onto the slope.

Here was another ill-made path leading upwards. Now Maedhros led and Fingon followed him. “I had plenty of time,” Maedhros called back over his shoulder, “to get a good look at what was up here!” He had to raise his voice to be heard over the waves breaking. Fingon glanced back at the central peak. Already they had climbed high enough that they were level with the adamant shackle. Maedhros would have been able to see this path from there. But he seemed quite cheerful about it: and it was saving them now.

At last there was nowhere left to climb. They had reached the peak – though it was not a peak now. Nothing remained of Thangorodrim but three low black islands in a wide dark ocean. The central one was still the tallest. It was an evil-looking crag, but as Fingon and Maedhros watched one last great wave crashed upon it, and the whole black height of the middle peak came crumbling down and was swallowed up by the foam. Nothing remained where it had been.

Maedhros was smiling. He said, “I always regretted not seeing that one fall!”

“Well, you have seen it now,” said Fingon, and smiled too.

The water stopped rising. There were no more mighty waves. Now little wavelets broke gently on the black slag. Fingon sat down to watch them, and Maedhros sat beside him. There was just room on their black island for both of them. There was nothing else to be seen but a double darkness: a wide lightless ocean, and above it the everlasting night. Yet Fingon kept smiling. Certainly it was dark, but it was a better dark than the one that had come before. Now they had a sea, and just by existing the sea had created a sky. It was a black and starless sky, but any sky was better than none. He leaned against Maedhros’s thin shoulder.

Maedhros put his arm around him. “Well,” he said after a moment, “I am glad you’re here.”

“As am I,” said Fingon.

“Though I did not deserve it,” Maedhros said. There was no self-pity now. It was just a statement of fact.

“That is what Turgon said,” said Fingon. “I still say it has nothing to do with it.”

“And it was very rash of you to come at all.”

“Yes; that is what Irmo said!”

“The wisest of your siblings and the Lord of Dream! Fingon, will you never take good counsel when it’s offered?”

“Maybe someday,” Fingon said. He reluctantly pulled himself away from Maedhros’s side so he could dip his hands in the water. It was cool, but not freezing: the cold of a Hithlum spring, maybe. Fingon splashed some on his face, and felt refreshed for it. Then he remembered he was still all over cobwebs from that miserable scramble through the gate of Angband. He took more handfuls of water and sluiced off the worst of it. The sticky spidersilk disintegrated quickly in the cold water. Fingon ran his damp hands through his hair, tugging away more cobwebby strands, and washed them off in the dark sea. He felt much better for it. At last he turned to Maedhros, who was watching him silently, and lifted his brows. “You look terrible,” he said. “And you smell.”

Maedhros flinched. Then he laughed and said, “Thank you very much!” But he came and knelt by Fingon and started to wash away the worst of the webs that still clung to him. Fingon helped as best he could. Maedhros’s hair was the worst: it was thickly matted and knotted with spider silk, and even with the cobwebs torn away the foul tangles remained. After a moment Fingon got out the star-glass. Maedhros flinched away from the light, but then turned and looked and said with surprise, “It is not that bad!” After that he looked for a little while: then he winced and screwed up his eyes, and looked away again. But he kept sneaking glances at the little light.

Fingon meanwhile tried to use the clearer view the light gave him to sort out some of the tangles in Maedhros’s hair. But it was hopeless, and Maedhros winced and grumbled when he pulled. It took Fingon a while to work out that not all of the colourless strands were cobwebs. Some of Maedhros’s hair had turned grey. Fingon mourned for the bright copper-colour he remembered. But the grey was not that bad. Silvery, he thought: like Frodo the Ringbearer.

“Enough!” said Maedhros at last. “I think you’ve done as much as anyone can.” He did look better. He also smelled better. Fingon sat down next to him again. He set the star-glass down between them. “What is that?” Maedhros said. “It looks like –”

He cut himself off.

“Galadriel made it,” said Fingon. “To be a light in dark places. The light is Eärendil’s; the star, I mean.”

“So there is something of my father’s in it after all,” Maedhros said. “No darker place than this!”

He looked out across the black sea. Fingon looked too. There was nothing there.

“No way back,” Maedhros said.

“No: but I think I like this better than the chasm,” said Fingon. “I certainly prefer it to Angband and the spider queen.”

“A sea! Where did it come from?” said Maedhros, and he shook his head wonderingly, and took Fingon’s hand again. Fingon held onto him tightly. He picked up the star-glass in his other hand and held it up, wondering if perhaps he could get a glimpse of that broken tree. He felt rather attached to it now, and would have liked to know what had become of it.

There was no sign of any driftwood. But Maedhros exclaimed. Where the light of the star-glass fell on the dark water it illuminated a path, one that seemed to be made of nothing but pale fire. It was like the track laid down by the Sun as she sank beneath the western waves beyond the shores of Middle-earth: like that, but not so fierce in colour.

“It’s not a road,” Maedhros said. “It cannot be. There is no road from here. We’re on a mountain!”

“We’re on an island,” Fingon said. He stood up. He took a deep breath. He was possibly about to get very cold and wet.

He stepped onto the road of light: and it held him.

Fingon laughed and turned back to Maedhros. “Come on!” he said.

“There is no way back,” said Maedhros, but he stood up.

Fingon held out his hand. “No,” he said, “but there might be a way on!”

They walked the road of light. It felt very precarious. They could not see further ahead than what the star-glass illuminated, which was not all that much; and their pathway faded and vanished behind them as they went. But Fingon held Maedhros’s hand, and kept the phial aloft, and felt hopeful. They had a sea and a sky and a light in the dark: and if he had to walk through the Void, it was much better not to walk alone. Neither of them spoke much. The deep water lapped around Fingon’s boots and Maedhros’s bare feet. There were no spiders. Fingon thought of the spider queen hiding down in her lair with six arrows in her eye, and hoped she had drowned.

“There might still be dragons,” Maedhros said, as if answering the thought.

“I don’t think fire-drakes swim,” Fingon said.

“Some of them can fly!” said Maedhros, but his tone was less gloomy than his words.

At last the road of light seemed to end. It had not led anywhere. They were standing on a tiny patch of bright water in the midst of darkness still. But the star-glass lit nothing more. “Now what?” Maedhros said. “I told you! We had better go back.”

“No,” Fingon said. He handed the glass to Maedhros. “Hold this!”

Maedhros made a startled sound and nearly fumbled it. He looked as though he expected it to burn him. But it did not; Fingon had not thought it would. Maedhros held the light up. Fingon looked around, and then carefully took one step forward.

“Fingon!” Maedhros said in alarm.

“It’s solid!” said Fingon. The black water here was only a film over the top of something broad and dark underneath. “We can go this way.”

They went forward a little way, and then Maedhros gave an alarmed cry and did drop the glass in the shallow water by their feet as he hauled Fingon back from the edge of a cliff he had not seen. The fallen phial illuminated a rippling pool of light. Water was flowing softly over the edge, creating a great fine curtain of water pouring steadily into the dark, a waterfall that extended as far as Fingon could see in either direction. He looked back at the ocean that had swallowed Maedhros’s prison. It was not getting any shallower. There must still be more water fountaining up from the abyss. Then he realised where they were.

“We are standing on the wall!” he said. He had thought it went up forever: it had looked like it went up forever. But no. Here they were on top of it. He looked out over the edge again, though Maedhros said his name nervously. Were the twins down there? He could see no sign of them, and no way down. But far far below he could make out a tiny ribbon of grey. It was the cobweb road that had looked so wide and straight as he came to the gate. “Come and look!” Fingon said.

“I would rather not,” said Maedhros.

“No – look!” said Fingon.

Maedhros came and stood beside him and saw what he was seeing. The grey road was disintegrating as the waterfall pounded down on it. While they watched it coming apart they heard a great groaning sound, as of stone and metal under terrible strain. Then far below them the gate burst, and a foaming river poured out through it into the dark. Fingon imagined the ocean behind them spreading and spreading, washing away the whole cobweb road from beginning to end: the whole road and everything that lay along it. Good and evil, fair memories and foul, all the way back to the ghost of Valinor undefiled: let them drown, drown like Beleriand, and lie washed clean under this dark sea.

It occurred to Fingon then that the ivory gate was going to be drowned too.

Well, he had not had much hope for it anyway.

“I hope the twins got away from there,” he said, watching the dark waters swirling out of the gate.

“You did meet them,” Maedhros said.

Fingon looked at him. He looked very unhappy. “I was not sure you heard me when I was talking to the spider queen,” he said.

“You? No,” said Maedhros. “But I heard her.” He crouched on the edge, and picked up the star-glass, and looked out hopelessly into the watery gloom below. “I could never find them!” he said.

“I’m sure they got away,” Fingon said. Surely they had. Surely they must have left. What sense was there in staying to guard a prison that was empty? But in his heart he was afraid. They were only children.

“Well, we can’t do anything by standing here,” was all he said. “Maybe if we keep going we’ll find a way down. Then we can search for them together.”

Maedhros looked no happier. But he gave the phial back to Fingon, and consented to walk along the top of the wall. There was no way to know which direction to go. Fingon just guessed, and turned to the right. Side by side they walked along the dark height, listening to the waterfall pour down, and little ripples splashed their feet as they went.

They had been walking some time when Maedhros said, “Look there!”

He went and crouched at the edge. Fingon brought the light over and saw that the curtain of the waterfall was broken here by a narrow slippery stairway that wound uncertainly back and forth up the sheer face of the wall. It looked a very dangerous path, and Fingon could not see what was below. But Maedhros looked up at him beseechingly; and it was not as if they could count on a better way down. There was no doubt in Fingon’s mind that they must seek the twins. He held up the star-glass one last time, looking back at the ocean behind them.

Then something caught his eye.

“What’s that?” he said.

There was an odd shadowy shape up ahead in the dark. Fingon marked where the narrow stair lay and tugged Maedhros towards it to investigate. It was not until they were very close that he could make sense of it. A tree or a post he had thought it, but it was neither. Two long black spears had been planted side by side in a muddy mound and abandoned. There were footprints in the mud – small footprints, and fresh.

“Those are their spears,” he said. “They came up the stair in the dark. They were here!”

“We go after them,” Maedhros said.

Fingon nodded. But before they went on he stood a second before the twin black shafts, and then without letting himself think about it unslung his warbow and empty quiver from his back. He left them resting in the mud at the base of the spears. They would do him no more good, and seemed a fit tribute to that dark monument.

“Come on!” Maedhros said, and for the first time when they went on it was Fingon who had to hurry to keep pace.

They did not seem to be on the wall anymore. There was more mud underfoot, though they saw no more small footprints. The ocean and waterfall receded from view, and they were no longer walking through shallow water, but Fingon could still hear waves splashing off to his right. They did not see the twins, but Maedhros walked with purpose, and looked around often. “What way could they have gone but this?” he said. Then he hesitated. “Unless we passed them in the dark!”

“They would see the star-glass,” Fingon said. “I believe they would come to it.”

“Eluréd! Elurín!” Maedhros called. But nothing answered him.

“They do not know their names!” Fingon said.

Maedhros looked wretched for a moment. Then he said again, “But they must have come this way!”

They set out again along the muddy path. Fingon held the light aloft. Very small it was in such a great blackness, but still a great deal better than nothing. Perhaps it would draw evil things to hunt them, but he had not heard any spider-chittering since their queen had fled before him in the throne room.

Before long he began to notice something strange.

There were green things growing in the mud.

At first it was only a stray tough weed here and there. Fingon hardly believed it when he saw the first one, and said nothing. But then there was another, then two together, and then Maedhros noticed one and exclaimed, so Fingon did not need to point them out after all. Before long there were small patches of grass at the roadside, and then something approaching a verge. Fingon’s spirits mounted ever higher. This hardly felt like the Void at all. If there had only been stars! Still they had their light. And they were now most certainly on a road, and not a grey cobweb strand either: a real road that appeared to lead somewhere. Fingon thought he agreed with Maedhros. Surely the twins had come this way!

They kept going. In one patch of weeds by the roadside Fingon thought he saw a small white flower like a star.

“What’s up there?” Maedhros said, looking ahead.

Fingon looked too. “I think the road splits,” he said.

He was right. They were coming to a fork in the path. Around it the grass grew thick and green: but thicker and greener on the right-hand side.

Just at the point where the road divided in two an old man in a battered hat sat upon a tussock. He was thoughtfully smoking a pipe, Hobbit-fashion, and blew a smoke ring now and again. He looked up when Fingon and Maedhros got close. Fingon looked at him in astonishment.

“Gandalf?” he said.

“You have been spending a great deal of time with Hobbits if you call me by that name!” said the old man.

“Olórin – Mithrandir!” Fingon said.

The wizard inclined his head. “Whatever name you please!”

“Have you seen –” said Maedhros quickly.

The wizard gave him a fierce look. “The twins?”

Maedhros was silent.

“You will never find them! Because of you they went into darkness undeserved, and your spirit must bear the weight of that crime as long as you have a spirit. Done cannot be undone, Maedhros! Not by you: not by anyone.”

“But they didn’t deserve it,” Maedhros said.

“You must bear that as well,” said the wizard sternly. “Ask me no more! Eluréd and Elurín are beyond your help. And now you are near the end of your journey. I am here to see that you find your way.”

Maedhros stood silent and griefstricken. Fingon swallowed hard and reached for his hand. Maedhros did not react when he tangled their fingers together. Fingon had not thought he would. He looked at the wizard. If they could not save the twins, they could at least finish their journey.

“Which is our road, then?” he said.

“That one,” said the wizard, nodding down the right-hand fork where the grass grew green.

“Where does it lead?”

“Why, home, of course! Where else?” The wizard smiled at Fingon’s expression. “No, I am not speaking in riddles, though I have been known to do so. Home I said and Home I meant: to the gates of Arda, and then wherever you please. Home to hearth and hall and firelight, to the woods and meads and rivers that you know: and to your family, who will be very pleased to see you, for once again you have them worried. Off you go now! It is not far at all.”

Fingon with joy and relief turned towards the greenway. But as he went forward Maedhros’s fingers slipped from his. Fingon turned back and saw him still standing at the sundering of the ways. The wizard puffed on his pipe. Maedhros was looking at the other path. It was very dark that way. It led once more into the night where no stars shone.

“Maedhros?” Fingon said.

“That is not your road,” said the wizard. He had been stern before, but he was gentle now. “But you may take it if you wish. After all this fuss it hardly seems kind to deny you.”

“Where does it lead?” Maedhros said.

“Beyond the world’s end, as you have already guessed. And after that – who can say? Not even the Lord of Mandos could tell you. Yes, you may go that way, and I can understand why it might appeal to you. I do not claim that it is the easier path: to my mind, neither is easier: but certainly it is altogether beyond the reach of oaths! Only beware. Once you step onto that road, you really cannot turn back, for as you see it is much too narrow to be a highway, and it would cause a great deal of confusion to have people running up and down it all the time.”

“I understand,” Maedhros said.

“You may take nothing with you,” the wizard said. “And it is dark, and people have been known to get lost. Still for you perhaps it would be the easier path.”

“The only path, surely,” Maedhros said. “No evil thing may be brought out of the Void.”

“Quite right,” said the wizard, “so it is a good thing you threw it away!”

Maedhros looked up quickly.

“Which is not to say that it is gone for good. Things you lose here have a way of coming back. You may find you need to throw it away over and over, and I cannot promise that it will get any easier. Still I have told you that both ways are open to you. You are the one who must choose.”

Maedhros nodded once. He looked at Fingon. “Thank you,” he said, and smiled a little.

Fingon stared at him. His heart yearned for the greenway, where small white flowers were growing in the grass. The left-hand fork looked very dreadful to him. The road was narrow and hard, and quickly vanished in the dark. “Must you?” he said.

“I think so,” said Maedhros. “I’m sorry. Go home, Fingon! Go home; and give them my love.”

Fingon looked longingly down the greenway. Then he looked at the wizard. “May he not take a friend with him?” he said.

“Take? No, not take. He may not take anything.” The wizard looked at Fingon under his brows. His eyes were very bright. “Still a friend might go with him, if he chose. But the rules are just the same. You could not turn back either, Fingon, and that road would be very hard for you.”

“I am not afraid,” Fingon said. He did not have much left to carry anyway. With some regret laid down his harp in the grass at the roadside. Then he looked at the star-glass he held. “It seems wrong to leave this lying in the mud,” he said. “Eärendil’s light is in it, and twice now it has been a noble gift. If I give it to you, will you see that it is given again to someone who has need of it?”

“I shall,” said the wizard gravely, and accepted it from his hand.

“Fingon!” said Maedhros.

Fingon smiled at him. Now he had put everything down the dark road did not look quite so forbidding after all, though he still regretted the greenway. “Shall we go?” he said.

“No,” said Maedhros. “You need to go home.”

“And leave you to walk in the dark by yourself? Not for the world!”

Maedhros looked wretched. “Fingon, I don’t want to drag you this way.”

“You are not dragging me anywhere,” Fingon said. “I never had to come looking for you at all. I chose to. It would be very poor-spirited of me to leave you now!”

“You must go home.”

“So I shall – if you come with me.”

“There is no place for me there,” Maedhros said.

Fingon frowned at him. “Nonsense!”

“I doubt very much that you can change his mind, Maedhros,” the wizard said. “He has seen the worst of you by now, you know. If he was going to abandon you, he would have done it already.”

“Tell him he must not,” Maedhros said.

“I?” said the wizard. “No. I am not one for telling, as a rule. To say must and ought to people against their hearts only offends them, and evil was never turned to good by mere command. Nor does this chance strike me as evil. There are few greater goods than good friends, and one ought not complain about them. It seems that either he will go with you, or you shall have to go with him. Yes, and in fact I believe I agree with him: whichever way you end up going, it had much better be together!”

“But which way?” Maedhros said.

“I shall not tell you that either.”

“Can you give us no counsel?” Fingon said.

The wizard lifted his brows. “I can give a great deal of counsel, but I cannot choose for you. Let me say this, then. The dark road would be easier for Maedhros and harder for you; the opposite is true of the greenway. But neither will be altogether easy, and neither altogether hard. And though the choice is given to you, and you may make it freely, the greenway is the path you both were meant for – if that means anything to you!”

Fingon and Maedhros looked at each other.

“Let it be the dark road,” Fingon said. “You have borne quite enough already.”

“It would be selfish beyond words,” Maedhros said. “You have walked more dark paths for me than anyone ever should, and you would not have needed to face any of them if I had not chosen so badly so many times.”

Fingon rolled his eyes. “What has that to do with anything? I say let it be the dark road, for your sake.”

“No,” Maedhros said. “You’d hate it. I think I had better be the brave one for once.” He looked at the wizard. “Is that right?”

“What do you think?” the wizard said.

“That’s not helpful.”

“I am not helpful, precisely, and I never answer questions that people can answer for themselves. Is that right? You should know: or if you do not, you should try to!”

“It’s right,” Maedhros said. “At least, I think so.” He came and took Fingon’s hand, and they stood at the lip of the greenway. Fingon looked at his harp and saw that grass was already growing up through it and taking it to pieces. He did not think he could reclaim it now. He did not even consider trying to ask the wizard for the star-glass back. He had given it: let it be given again. Let it come to someone who needed it.

The wizard settled back onto his tussock with his Hobbit-pipe. He seemed prepared to sit there for some time. Fingon and Maedhros looked down the green road.

“I’m terrified,” Maedhros said.

“It won’t be that bad,” said Fingon. “People will be glad to see you.”

“Really.”

“Well, some of them,” Fingon admitted, but he squeezed Maedhros’s hand. “Let’s go home.”

Maedhros took a deep breath. “Let’s go home.”

Not more than a hundred yards down the greenway their fair path opened out into a low meadow. Fingon stared. Two gates stood before them. One was the polished ivory gate of Lórien. “But I thought it was drowned!” he said.

Beside the ivory gate stood another, much darker in colour. It might have been made of ivory too, though ivory old and discoloured; or of horn; or perhaps of bone. Lórien’s gate was fair to look upon, finely wrought and carved into elegant fluting shapes. But the gate kept by his brother was plain and very grim. Fingon looked between them in confusion.

“Which one should we take?” Maedhros said. His voice was steady, but Fingon could feel that he trembled.

Fingon shook his head. He did not know. Ivory, he thought. Ivory? Lórien had sent him off on this journey: had warned him to keep to the road, and fitted him besides with fair gifts. Though the harp had been Fingon’s own, he had left both dagger and bow behind in Middle-earth, and he owned them only in memory. And the rope he had never seen before at all. He had much to thank the Dream-lord for. And Irmo was kind: sorrowful, not stern, and spouse to gentle Estë.

But it was not as if the judgment of Mandos could be avoided.

Fingon tried to think.

Then he said, “Oh!”

“What?” said Maedhros.

Fingon smiled at him. “You were right,” he said. “There’s no way back. Every time I tried to go backwards something went wrong. It must be the dark gate.”

“You’re sure?” Maedhros said.

“I am!” He tugged Maedhros along with him. It was a forbidding portal, but its terror stemmed from its majesty, not from any evil. “Ready?” Fingon said.

“No!” said Maedhros.

Fingon laughed and dragged him forwards. As they drew close to the gate he heard a sound like falling water. And at the very last moment, just as he stepped across the dark threshold with Maedhros’s hand in his, he had an urge to look back and see if he could see who the wizard was waiting for with the star-glass. But on the whole he thought he had better not.

Fingon woke and immediately screwed his eyes tight shut, because something much too bright was shining down on him. He felt very stiff all over, and there was something heavy on his legs. A poor night’s rest and a poor waking, he thought: and he had had the strangest dream!

Then he remembered the dark gate.

His eyes flew open. He was lying on a grassy bed under a grove of trees on Estë’s isle of Lórellin. The very bright thing shining on him was the Sun, and her light was in fact filtering dimly through the green leaves overhead, with only the occasional bright shaft illuminating the drifting pollen in the air: yet to Fingon, whose eyes had grown accustomed to the darkness beyond the world, it seemed like the brightest thing he had ever seen. How extraordinary to have a Sun!

Maedhros lay with his head in Fingon’s lap. He looked just as Fingon had last seen him on the other side of the gate: thin and ragged and barefoot, with grey streaks in his tangled hair, and old scars plainly visible through the ruins of his clothes. He was curled up as small as he could get, his face buried in his folded arms. Fingon laid a hand on his shoulder and felt him tremble. He was awake. But he did not move. Fingon thought: not this again! “Maedhros!” he said, and would have said more, but a sudden awe fell on him. He knew himself in the presence of one of the Powers, and was silent.

Out of the air and dappled sunlight a soft-shining shape gathered itself. Then Estë the Healer stood above them, all arrayed in grey: she who was seldom seen abroad by day. “You are awake!” she said with delight. But she stopped speaking abruptly as she saw who else was there. Then it was that Fingon saw a sight which very few had ever seen: one of the Queens of the Valar, wide-eyed, lifting her hand to cover her mouth in shock.

Still Maedhros trembled and did not move. Fingon could feel how afraid he was. He looked up mutely at Estë and tightened his comforting grip on Maedhros’s shoulder. There would be a judgement, he knew: there would have to be. But now? Here?

“O brave!” said Estë at last, and she smiled. “This was a rare deed. And would you defend him even from me? You need not. None who suffer need fear me – though many do.” She knelt down in the grass. “Maedhros,” she said, “look up! It will not hurt as much as you think. Look up, son of Fëanor. It is morning!”

Fingon thought of how the Sun had seemed too bright to him. How unbearable must she seem to Maedhros, who had been in the darkness so much longer? But though Estë softly called his name again, Maedhros still hid his face. Estë looked at Fingon. “Tell him!” she said.

She was among the gentler Powers, and her commands had not the fearsome weight of those given by some greater and sterner than she. But it was a command nonetheless. When she spoke Fingon felt as though air and sunlight and the green grove all spoke too in her soft voice, and all together they said that the world was good, and might yet be made better, given help, given time.

“Maedhros,” he said softly, “she’s right. Look up! Remember the star-glass – it wasn’t as bad as you thought it would be either.” He shook Maedhros’s thin shoulder. “Come now! Do you mean to lie here forever? It won’t get easier if you wait, and besides I shall need my legs back at some point. Look up!”

Maedhros shuddered. But Fingon reached for his hand, and gently tugged it away from where it was curled protectively about his face, and held onto it. Then at last Maedhros lifted his head.

He did exactly the same thing Fingon had done and screwed his eyes shut at once. Then he said, “Oh!” and opened them again. He blinked hard several times, and rubbed his eyes with his maimed right arm, and then stared about him. “It’s bright!” he said. He looked around at the trees, the dappled green shadows, the shafts of sunlight piercing the canopy. “It doesn’t hurt,” he said.  He swallowed audibly. “It’s beautiful.”

“Thank you,” said Estë. “We do our best!”

Maedhros paled as he looked at her. Fingon squeezed his hand. “Thank you,” Maedhros managed, in a small voice, and Fingon did not think he was only talking about the grove.

Estë inclined her head gravely. Then she laid her shining hand on Maedhros’s brow. It did not seem to trouble her at all that he was ragged and dirty – that he was indeed the only thing on her green isle that was not fair to look upon. She spoke no word, and her expression was solemn. Maedhros closed his eyes. Fingon wondered what he was hearing. He did not think he would ever know.

“There!” said Estë at last, and she stood up again, and dusted off her grass-stained skirt in the most normal way, as if she was only an ordinary Elf-maid. “That is much better already: though it will take time, and plenty of work. And it will be your work far more than mine!”

“Thank you,” said Maedhros again. Fingon echoed him softly. Then he and Maedhros looked at each other, and Fingon saw something that made his spirit swell with joy. Not a trace of shadow remained in Maedhros’s eyes, nor of that old red flame. He looked at the world now with the eyes of one of the Sindar or the Silvan Elves of Middle-earth. Perhaps they were not so bright as they should have been, for a High-elf born in the light of the Trees: but they were infinitely better than they might have been. After a moment when they only gazed at each other Maedhros quirked an eyebrow and smiled at him a little. Fingon smiled back.

Then he glanced up at Estë. She gave him a small conspiratorial nod.

“I do not think Lórellin is the place for you anymore,” she said. “Either of you!”

“I understand,” said Fingon. He stood up, and offered Maedhros a hand to get to his feet.

Maedhros swayed a little where he stood, and did not let go of Fingon, but he did not actually fall over, which Fingon had half-feared he would. “Where are we going?” he said.

“It must be Eressëa,” said Fingon. Then he stopped as he remembered just how far it was from Lórien to the coast – the coast where they needs must borrow a boat from the Teleri to sail out to the Lonely Isle, and the thought of that awkward conversation was unnerving enough by itself! But as if that was not bad enough, between here and there they would pass many curious onlookers. The garden of Lórien, though quiet, was seldom empty, and other busier realms lay beyond it. Would Maedhros have to walk the whole way as he was – barefoot and ragged before all those watching eyes? Fingon’s penitential road from Mandos to kneel at Olwë’s feet had not been half so hard!

“I can’t!” Maedhros said faintly.

But he looked at Fingon and something of the old stubbornness came into his expression. His shoulders straightened: his jaw firmed.

“I must,” he said.

“We can wait a while!” said Fingon. He gave Estë a beseeching look. “Can’t we?”

Estë lifted her brows and said nothing. It would not get easier, Fingon knew, if they waited. It might even get harder.

“I said I would be brave,” Maedhros said. He grimaced. “I did not realise I would have to start straight away. But it won’t get any easier, Fingon. Will you be with me at least?”

“Of course I will!” Fingon said.

“Then we had better go.”

They both bowed to Estë, who lifted a hand in grave farewell. Hand in hand then they walked towards the gap in the trees that led away from the grove. Just as Fingon caught a glimpse afar off of curved white bridge that was their road, Estë cried behind them, “Wait!”

Fingon and Maedhros stopped and turned. The Healer stood under the trees smiling. As they looked upon her smile it gave way to soft laughter like the sound of flowing water. “Very well!” she said. “Why not? But mind my trees!”

Maedhros gave Fingon a confused look. Fingon shook his head, just as baffled.

Suddenly they heard a wild glad call above. It was the same proud fierce Eagle-scream that had long ago given Fingon reason to hope when he thought all hope was gone. There came the sound of great wings beating, and a moment later a mighty Eagle crashed through the canopy in a flurry of bright feathers and scattered green leaves.

“I said mind my trees!” said Estë.

The Eagle folded its wings and looked, so far as such a great lord of the upper airs could manage it, sheepish. Then it tilted its head and fixed one brilliant golden eye first on Fingon, and then on Maedhros. It said nothing; but it was perfectly obvious what they were meant to do.

They both climbed onto the Eagle’s broad back. It was not quite so great as Thorondor had been, but still many many times larger than any normal bird. Just as he had long ago, Fingon made sure that Maedhros sat before him so that Fingon could hold onto him. “I am not all that likely to fall this time!” said Maedhros over his shoulder.

“Indulge me!” Fingon said.

The Eagle gave a cry and made what should have been an impossible leap up into the air. Its wings spread wide, but it scattered no leaves this time. It circled and rose steadily above Lórien and then turned its course eastwards, and the cold wind of its swift flight blew Fingon’s hair back from his face.

Fingon felt that on the whole it was a very great indulgence to be under the Sun and carried on these broad wings with his arms around Maedhros’s waist. And if he closed his eyes and rested his face against Maedhros’s shoulder, well, Maedhros already knew how he felt, and the Eagle was not likely to tell anyone.

The Eagle carried them over land and sea and set them down on top of a low hill on the eastern shores of Tol Eressëa. Fingon was very grateful. He had half-expected to be brought before the throne of Manwë and ordered to explain himself immediately, and it was clear from Maedhros’s expression that he had thought the same. But the Eagle simply left them there without a word and took off again. Soon even to Elven eyes it was only a dark speck in the clear sky.

Fingon looked around, slightly confused. There was no one in sight. It took him a moment to recognise where he was. But there was the stand of tough fir-trees the Elves had planted as a windbreak, now grown tall and strong: and there was the white stone path winding down to the coast road, and there the garden gate. And there was a garden under the green hill, beautifully laid out and well-tended. There were hyacinths in bloom, and the golden daffodils were beginning to open. All about them was the good green growth that promised fair flowering all through the year, and here and there strong young saplings growing tall: and there was a bench at the far end of the garden, angled to catch the last of the westering sun at eventide. Close under the foot of the hill lay a vegetable patch. There and only there everything was laid out in strict rows and growing accorded to the practical-minded preferences of a purely Hobbitish tradition of gardening: for Hobbits feel it is much more sensible to have your potatoes and your carrots and your beans and peas and lettuces where you can get them quickly when you want them, and so they prefer to grow their vegetables and herbs in neat rows, ideally right outside the kitchen door.

This was Sam’s garden: well, Sam’s and Frodo’s, but Fingon suspected mostly Sam’s. Fingon and Maedhros were standing on top of the low hill that looked East and West, and the Hobbit-hole was right under their feet. This was not where Fingon had expected to be brought, but he smiled to see it. It was a homely place!

“Come,” he said to Maedhros. “You must meet the Halflings. Without their advice I should never have found you.”

“Very well,” said Maedhros, “though I can’t imagine I look like the sort of guest anyone wants in their home.”

“They won’t mind,” said Fingon. “Come on!”

They went down the hill together and found the round front door open. Fingon knocked and called out, but no one answered him. “What’s that smell?” said Maedhros.

Fingon breathed in deeply. “Bacon!”

He knocked again, but he did not expect an answer now. Hobbits at mealtimes were not easily distracted. “We had better wait,” said Maedhros.

“The door is open!” Fingon said. “They won’t mind, I promise.”

“They might!”

“You haven’t met them. They are a friendly folk.” Besides Fingon had heard Maedhros’s stomach grumble at the mention of bacon: and the smell was making him hungry too. He had to duck his head to get through the door, but Finrod and Turgon had designed the dwelling with ceilings high enough to accommodate Elven visitors. Maedhros misjudged the doorframe and said, “Ouch!” but once he was inside he could stand up straight. Turgon was taller than he was, after all.

“This way!” said Fingon, and raised his voice a little. “Frodo?” he called. “Sam?”

Still there was no answer. Fingon led Maedhros down the hall and peered around the door into the warm cheerful kitchen.

There he saw a merry sight: a table laden with good food cooked Shire-fashion, and one white-haired and rosy-cheeked old Hobbit seated at breakfast, and another silvery and upright and busy with the tea. The kettle was making such a racket as it boiled that neither Frodo nor Sam had heard them come in. Fingon rapped politely on the door. “Hello!” he said in the Westron-tongue, raising his voice above the song of the kettle. “We are very sorry to interrupt you at breakfast; but may we come in?”

Sam and Frodo both looked up, and Sam gave a shout of surprise, and Frodo nearly dropped the kettle of boiling water: which might have ended very badly indeed, but he recovered himself just in time and hung it carefully back on its hook above the fire. Then he turned to Fingon with a glad exclamation. “I am so very pleased to see you!” he said. “We thought – that is – my goodness.” He had just spotted Maedhros hovering nervously behind Fingon. His eyes went wide. But immediately he switched to speaking in Quenya; for of course Maedhros had not spent the last few ages amusing himself with strange languages as most Elves did now and again, and he did not know a word of Westron. “Welcome!” Frodo said, in his careful educated accent. “Welcome, welcome: of course you must come in! It’s second breakfast, and there’s plenty left. I’ll make the tea.”

Sam was on his feet too now, though he had levered himself up more slowly. “Why, you found him!” he said in Westron, and his broad smile crinkled up his bright eyes.

“Will you introduce us?” Frodo said.

Fingon came further into the room, and brought Maedhros with him. “Here are Frodo the Ringbearer and Samwise the Brave, two Hobbits of the Shire,” he said, “great heroes of the Third Age! And this is my cousin and very dear friend Maedhros.”

He was about to repeat himself in Westron for Sam’s benefit, but Sam said in creditable if broadly-accented Quenya, “At your service!” and bobbed his head in a half-bow. It was plain that his aged bones would not let him do the full courtesy.

“At your service!” said Frodo too.

“At yours and your family’s!” said Maedhros, so he must have remembered something of Hobbit-manners from Fingon’s tale of Turgon and the Hobbit-hole. He was looking at the two Halflings in great wonder. It occurred to Fingon that although he had touched on the story of the War of the Ring when he spoke of home on the edge of the chasm, he had not at any point mentioned to Maedhros exactly what size Hobbits were. When Frodo turned back to the tea and Sam went and fetched two more bowls, Maedhros leaned in and whispered, “Fingon, they are so small!”

“I know! But theirs is a great-hearted race,” Fingon whispered back. Sam summoned them to the low table, where they folded themselves up small to sit. Frodo set steaming mugs of tea before them. Fingon closed his hands around his and was heartily grateful for the warmth.

Frodo was smiling, with something wry and amused in his wise old eyes: Fingon rather thought he had overheard their whispers. “I suspect it’s been some time since you last had something to eat,” he said. “It had better not be the bacon, I’m afraid! Don’t tax your stomachs too soon. Remember how it was for us, Sam?”

“All that splendid food Strider laid on for the celebration, and I could barely manage a morsel!” said Sam mournfully. “Try the –” he gestured.

“Porridge,” said Frodo, giving him the word.

“Porridge!” repeated Sam.

“You have learned a great deal of our tongue!” Fingon said. Maedhros sat quietly next to him with his hand around the mug of tea. He was sitting close enough to Fingon that Fingon could feel the warmth of him all down his side.

Sam looked embarrassed. “Well, I do all right,” he said. “I’ve had some time to learn! I knew a little already: for reading, you understand. But there’s a great many words I don’t know, that didn’t make it into any tales; you never hear about Beren and Lúthien eating porridge, though I suppose they must have done now and again. And I know I get the sounds all wrong. Frodo here keeps trying to teach me, and even Lord Finrod gave it a go: but I’m only an old Hobbit, and I’ll admit that most of the time I can’t for the life of me hear the difference.”

Maedhros smiled at for the life of me. Sam did indeed have a very strong Shire-accent. But Fingon found he did not mind it: it was perfectly intelligible, and even a little charming. Then he frowned. “Some time?” he said. “How long?”

Even as he said it he was thinking of the spring flowers in the garden. It had been September when he set out through the ivory gate. Six months at least he must have been walking in the dark.

“It is seven years and more,” said Frodo quietly, “since we saw you last.”

Maedhros looked up sharply: no smile on his face now. Fingon stared at Frodo.

“That was the night you came to us and asked about the road, and we said we knew none, and I gave you the star-glass. I often wondered afterwards if I had done the right thing! Your brothers found you the next morning under the tree off yonder, asleep but not asleep, like one dead: and none could tell whither your spirit had fled, for Mandos himself said he knew nothing about it.”

“Irmo knew!” Fingon said.

Frodo looked grave. “He kept his counsel, then.”

Seven years! It was not that long by Elven-reckoning: but it was not nothing, either. It was long enough to grieve. And it was plain that Fingon had left grief behind him. His heart was sore when he thought of his younger brothers finding him lifeless, bearing him up and away to Estë, and learning that there was no help to be had within the circles of the world. And though seven years was not long to Elves, it was long enough for the Halflings. Sam’s face was more lined, his movements much slower, and he had not found it easy to stand up, nor to sit down again; there was a well-shaped wooden cane resting by his seat, and though he had not used it when he went to fetch the bowls, now and then his gnarled hand strayed to the handle. Silvery Frodo was plainly the stronger of the two, but he looked more transparent than ever. And Fingon thought of that well-grown garden, of those strong young fir trees all the stronger for seven seasons’ growth. Seven years: no, it was not nothing.

Maedhros leaned into him. After a moment he laid his hand over Fingon’s where it rested on the table.

“Well!” Sam said. “So it’s been a bit of time, that’s true. But here you are now, which is the important thing. Drink your tea before it’s cold, and I’ll serve you a bit of that porridge: and Frodo will go run you a bath apiece, for if you don’t mind my saying so it’s plain to me you need them!”

This was in fact a polite way of saying that Maedhros needed a bath: for Fingon had come out of the Void in more or less the same state as he went into it. Maedhros looked rueful but said, “I would be grateful!”

“As would I,” said Fingon, for the thought of hot water was very appealing.

Frodo laughed. “And you haven’t seen the bathroom yet!”

They drank their tea. Fingon managed most of a bowl of porridge, though his stomach did rebel eventually, and Maedhros could not eat more than half of his. “There now!” Sam said at last. “Let’s see about those baths!”

He braced himself on the table as he got slowly to his feet. When he stumbled Maedhros automatically went to catch him. “Thank you kindly!” said Sam, and picked up his cane. “My old bones don’t think much of these damp spring mornings: but come summer I’ll be right as rain.”

He conducted them to the bathroom, where two steaming baths were waiting in deep tubs. When Fingon saw the room he had to lean against the wall and laugh till his sides hurt. Frodo looked very pleased, and Maedhros quite baffled. The whole room was obviously of Turgon’s design. It was all properly plumbed according to the best ingenuity of the Gondolindrim, with hot and cold water that ran at the turn of a tap. Between the bathtubs, placed on its own very small and entirely absurd marble plinth, a small fountain was splashing cheerfully. There were polished sapphires set about its base.

“I know!” said Frodo to Fingon’s helpless laughter.

 “What on earth is it for?” said Maedhros.

“Nothing at all!” Frodo said.

“My brother,” said Fingon, wiping his streaming eyes, “my brother thinks he is very funny.”

“Oh, that!” said Sam, coming into the bathroom behind them. “I always forget it’s there.”

Then Fingon and Maedhros stripped off and washed themselves, and soaked a long time in the hot water after. They heard the Hobbits going about their Hobbit-hole carolling a bathtime song in their own language, and at Maedhros’s inquiring look Fingon attempted a translation. He made a fair job of it, he thought: anyway Maedhros laughed at the bit about the fountain.

Long after they were both scrubbed clean and their fingers were wrinkled Maedhros was still trying to get the tangles out of his hair. Frodo came in at last with a pile of clothes. “Sometimes our visitors leave things behind. I think these will fit!” he said, and then he saw the problem and frowned. “Shall I fetch a comb?”

Sam looked over Frodo’s shoulder and clicked his tongue. “A comb won’t do it,” he said. “Better get the scissors.”

While Frodo fetched scissors from the kitchen Sam explained that his own daughter Elanor had once managed to acquire tangles nearly as bad playing with her Cotton cousins in the muddy fields down near Bywater. “All her pretty golden curls we had to cut off!” he said. “My Rosie near wept over it, though that was half because Elanor was crying so hard. And after that she went about shorn like a sheep for a summer, poor thing. But it’s only hair; it grows back! And here’s Frodo with those scissors. Let me!”

He picked his way across the wet floor and went to work on Maedhros’s hair. Snip, snip, went the scissors, and hanks of hopelessly matted red and grey fell away. Fingon watched it fall with a tight feeling in his chest. Sam knew what he was doing, for it was the custom of Hobbit-men to wear their hair short, and he had often cut his own sons’ hair. He did his best, but all the same when he was done Maedhros did not have very much hair left.

“Now you rinse that off!” Sam said bracingly, “and see if it doesn’t feel better!”

Maedhros ducked his head under the lukewarm water, and came up again, and scrubbed his hand back through the shorn locks. “It does!” he admitted, though his expression was very strange. He looked up at Sam. “Thank you – no, wait – thank you kindly!”

“You’re very welcome, lad!” said Sam. Frodo, waiting in the doorway, caught Fingon’s eye and smiled.

Then the Hobbits left them, and Fingon and Maedhros got out of their baths and dressed themselves in the clothes Frodo had found for them. Fingon thought he recognised the robe Maedhros was wearing. It looked to him like one of Turgon’s. Maedhros belted it loosely and made a face and scrubbed his hand through his short hair again. It was already nearly dry. “It feels so strange!” he said.

It looked strange, too. Even fully dressed, Maedhros seemed almost naked so shorn. Fingon watched him glance down at the matted tangles Sam had cut away and grimace. Then he looked up and met Fingon’s eyes. “How bad is the grey?” he asked, sounding as if he did not entirely want to know.

It was not nearly as bad as it had looked before. “It’s only at the temples,” Fingon said. “It’s not bad at all. I like it, in fact.”

“Really?”

“I do!” Fingon said. He finished belting his own robe – only slightly too big for him – and went to Maedhros’s side. “How do you feel?”

“Better. Much better – much. Though I think if I lay down to sleep I should not get up for a week. I am so very tired.” Maedhros smiled. “It is a better weariness than I have known in a long time.”

“I would be glad of some rest as well,” Fingon said. “It seems I have not slept in seven years. But I must find my brothers, and my mother too, and tell them I am well.”

“My mother!” said Maedhros in a soft voice. He swallowed hard. “My grandfather! And all of you – all the family. And –”

He looked frightened again. “Don’t try to worry about everything at once!” Fingon said. “It won’t help: you can only do one thing at a time. Rest first.”

“And a judgement,” Maedhros said. “I know there will be a judgement.”

“Yes, but not yet. The Eagle brought us here, remember!”

“It was kind of them,” Maedhros said. His mouth twisted a little at the corner. “They are kind! How did I forget they were kind? How could I ever forget?”

Fingon thought of the spider queen. Maedhros had many scars, and not all of them were scars of the body. He said nothing: only opened his arms. Maedhros with a laugh that was not quite a sob came to him and held on. “It will be all right,” Fingon said, though he was not entirely sure of it. But he hoped. “The worst is past. Everything will be all right.”

They broke apart eventually. Fingon sat on a low damp bench by the door and plaited some of the gold back into his wet hair. Maedhros watched him with a smile. “It is so long since I have seen you do that,” he said.

After that they went out in search of the Hobbits. Fingon planned to ask them for a bedchamber. He was sure they would have something suitable, for they were plainly used to regular hospitality, and he suspected that Frodo and Sam would agree entirely with him that the next important thing was to get Maedhros to sleep for a while. Then perhaps Fingon could go looking for his family: though he did not entirely like the thought of leaving Maedhros now. Perhaps Frodo or Sam would know of some way to send a message.

There were voices down the hallway to their left. Maedhros knocked his head on a hanging lamp and said, “Ouch!” again. Fingon snickered and took his hand to draw him on. There were many doorways opening off the hall to the left and right – the Hobbits seemed to have expanded their dwelling in the last seven years, Fingon did not remember digging all of these – but he could see sunlight ahead. At the end of the hallway they walked together straight into the bright east-facing morning room where Frodo and Sam were sitting in comfortable armchairs. Fingon said, “Frodo, could we perhaps –”

He stopped talking. The Hobbits had visitors.

Turgon leapt to his feet so quickly that the low stool he had been sitting on was knocked over with a clatter. Finrod stared in silent astonishment.

“– that is,” said Frodo lamely, finishing whatever he had been saying before, “well – I suppose I don’t need to tell you anymore!”

Turgon gave a low exclamation. Fingon opened his mouth, but he did not have time to actually say anything before his brother strode forwards and swept him up in a tight embrace. Fingon grinned and returned it whole-heartedly. He was strongly reminded of Elros. When Turgon stepped back, put his hands on Fingon’s shoulders, and stared at him, Fingon saw that the resemblance was just as marked as he had thought.

Then Turgon looked at Maedhros, who stood awkwardly in the doorway, and his expression became very hard to read.

Silence fell in the bright room.

Finrod stood up and came forward. He looked Maedhros up and down. Maedhros flinched before that calm look. Finrod reached out and took his unresisting hand and wrapped it in both of his. “Cousin,” he said. “Long has it been since we hunted together between Celon and Gelion in the youth of the world.”

“Long indeed,” Maedhros said after a moment, looking down at their joined hands.

Finrod smiled. “Too long altogether, Maedhros. Let me see your face.” Maedhros glanced up, startled. Finrod’s smile grew wider. “It is so very good to see you!” he said, and he pulled Maedhros in.

Fingon could see the shocked look on Maedhros’s face as Finrod embraced him. He was slow to return the gesture, and did it awkwardly at first, but their cousin did not let him go. Only when the tension had finally fled from Maedhros’s tall thin shape did Finrod step back, grinning, look him up and down once more, and finally kiss him soundly on both cheeks. At last he turned to Fingon, leaving Maedhros standing still shocked-looking behind him. “Fingon the Valiant once again!” Finrod said. “You must have a tale to tell, and it is a while since I heard a new one. Wherever did you find your road?”

“I –” said Fingon, but he did not carry on. Turgon was still looking at Maedhros, and his expression was still impossible to read. Maedhros bit his lip and met Turgon's eyes and did not look away. Turgon’s unreadable look deepened into a silent frown.

Abruptly he stepped past Fingon, though Fingon snatched at him a moment too late. “Now then!” said Sam, and Frodo stood up with a disapproving exclamation, and Finrod looked worried: but Maedhros waited calmly. Turgon drew his arm back, and then his palm met Maedhros’s cheek in an open-handed slap.

Maedhros’s head snapped to the side. Turgon was strong. He worked his jaw a little. A reddening handprint was appearing on his cheek. “That is better than I was expecting,” he said quietly.

“That,” said Turgon, “was for my grandson, for my grandson’s wife, and for all her kin.” Then he laid both hands on Maedhros’s shoulders and gave him a good hard shake. “And that is for being too proud to keep living, and too stubborn to answer the summons of Mandos, and so forcing my brother to go chasing after you in the Void! And since it seems no one can talk him out of his affection for you, may I say on my own behalf and on my mother’s too, indeed on behalf of all the family, that we would all appreciate it very much if you stayed out of trouble from now on.”

“I intend to!” Maedhros said.

“You had better do more than intend!” Turgon shook his head, still frowning. But then his mouth lifted a little at the corner. He turned to Fingon. “Of course you did,” he said, “of course you did. I told you not to: but of course you did!”

“I am sorry,” Fingon said. Turgon lifted his brows. “I am sorry for causing you grief,” Fingon corrected himself. “Indeed for all the grief I have caused. I’m not sorry I went! You need not make such a fuss about telling me what to do. I am your older brother, you know: I am not likely to listen.”

“I know it, and yet I keep hoping,” Turgon said. He looked at Maedhros again. “I meant it! Stay out of trouble!”

“I shall,” Maedhros said, with something of that old determination about his eyes and the set of his jaw. Turgon gave him a swift stern nod.

“Why, Turgon,” said Finrod, amused, “this was an extraordinarily Mannish way of expressing yourself.”

“One of us has a Man for a son-in-law, and it is not you!” said Turgon in lofty tones. Then he looked at Maedhros and chuckled darkly. “Besides, it was nothing of the kind. Tuor would have knocked you down. And may yet!”

“Surely the very least I deserve,” said Maedhros.

“Your deserts are not my business,” Turgon said, “and you may be glad of that. Welcome home, cousin!”

The tension in the bright room seemed to disappear after that. They sat down together, and Frodo made them all tea. Finrod asked again for Fingon to tell the tale of his road, and Sam seconded the request. Fingon hesitated, looking at Maedhros. But Maedhros said, “You may as well.”

“It was a dark path to walk,” Fingon said.

“I know,” said Maedhros. “I was there!”

Fingon thought of the happy youth in Valinor who had known more than he admitted to himself of the spiders; of the Maedhros who had spoken of his scars at Himring. He knew Maedhros’s spirit had been imprisoned and tangled in the spider queen’s webs all that time. But the Void was not like the real world. More than one thing could be true at once.

He told the tale. It took a long time. He kept getting interrupted. Finrod wanted to know more about the voice which had questioned Fingon so often, though Fingon could tell him nothing; and Turgon wished to hear more of Elros; and Frodo and Sam were interested in everything. Maedhros looked down at his tea and said very little. He did add a word or two to Fingon’s description of the flood rising from the bottomless abyss. “If we had been swept away then,” he said, “I don’t believe I should have minded.”

Fingon thought about it. “No, nor I,” he agreed. “But I do not think we would be here now.”

At last Fingon reached the story’s end and the dark gate. He skipped over the argument at the sundering of ways. It somehow did not seem quite right to tell it. “And then we woke on Lórellin,” he said, “and an Eagle brought us here, and here we are.”

There was quiet in the morning room. The light from the eastern windows was not so bright. It was getting on towards lunchtime.

At last Sam drew in a deep breath.

“Well I never!” he said.

Well I never seemed to be the general opinion of all the Elves of the West, and over the months that Fingon and Maedhros stayed with the Hobbits a great many of them felt called upon to visit the Hobbit-hole and say it in person. “As gossipy as Shire-folk!” said Sam, but it did not trouble him much. Once only he came back from seeing off an insistent group of nosy visitors shaking his snowy head. “Sackville-Bagginses!” he said darkly: and this obscure but clearly serious term of disapprobation made Frodo laugh.

The Hobbits were very good at politely getting rid of unwanted visitors. Fingon indeed had never seen anything quite so effective as Frodo looking aggressively frail and pointedly failing to offer anyone any tea. Sam’s firm well-mannered good day! was also generally successful: when that failed, his usual gambit was to thank unexpected guests very much for coming to help him with the weeding, since being so old he could not tend his garden himself. This both saved Maedhros from immediately having to deal with crowds of curious acquaintances and gained Sam a few helpful under-gardeners: for Elves do appreciate the importance of looking after a flowerbed properly. Fingon too found himself put to work in the vegetable patch now and again. Frodo laughed at it. “Sam is a tyrant!” he said. “I am only thankful he’s finally sparing me! You must stay as long as you please, and not only to help in the garden. We are very happy to be your hosts, I assure you, and managing gossipy neighbours is a skill every Hobbit learns in childhood. It is our pleasure.”

There were some visitors whom the Hobbits did not fend off. The day after Fingon and Maedhros returned from the Void, at just the time when the first stars were shining out and Eärendil was rising in the West for his nightly journey, two tall and stately Elf-women with proud bearing and shining eyes came walking arm in arm down the coast road.

Fingon was then standing on the hillside, listening to the wind and water and watching the stars come out, with Maedhros sitting quietly in the grass beside him. Maedhros had slept most of a night and day, and eaten well at the Hobbits’ table, and for the first time he did not look quite so hollow. Fingon caught a glimpse of the approaching pair out of the corner of his eye and turned and smiled. His mother Anairë, seeing him, stopped and lifted her hand. Fingon ran down the hill to greet her and take her hands in his. She was laughing and weeping at once as she looked at him, just as she had when he had first come to her in Tirion on Túna after Olwë had sent him away forgiven. Fingon laughed and wept too. Seven years! Yes, it was long enough to grieve. “I am sorry,” he told her, “I am sorry!”

“I am only glad to have you home,” Anairë said.

Then she was silent, looking at the companion who had walked the coast road with her.

Maedhros did not run down the hill. He walked slowly. Nerdanel his mother watched his progress with a face as still as a figure carved in stone. Fingon had always thought her very nearly as alarming as her husband. But Anairë was smiling as she watched, and clutching tightly at Fingon’s arm: between his mother and his aunts, Fingon knew, there had grown in past ages a deep friendship forged in shared grief.

At last Maedhros drew near, and his face too was still as he stood before his mother. A little uncertainty crept into his look as Nerdanel took in his thinness, his grey hair, his scars. Very alike they were, tall and proud and copper-crowned, but the son looked older than the mother. Nerdanel drew in a deep breath and let it out again.

“My son has come home to me,” she said. She did not smile, but her eyes were bright indeed. She held out her hands.

Anairë clung to Fingon’s arm. She was barely able to contain her delight as her friend embraced her son. Fingon saw the twist of grief and joy on Maedhros’s face before it was hidden in his mother’s hair. They held one another for a long time. When they broke apart Nerdanel’s expression had not changed, but tears were pouring freely down her face, unregarded.

“At last – at last!” she said, in a voice that did not shake at all.

Long the four of them sat under the stars that night. It was Fingon and his mother who did most of the talking; but then, there was much that did not need to be said.

That was almost the hardest reunion for Maedhros. Fingon thought there was only one which was harder. It came two days later, just as the Hobbits were preparing for afternoon tea, which they meant to have as a picnic in the garden. Fingon and Maedhros were helping by carrying things where they were told. As they stood on the lawn discussing what exactly Frodo had meant by the sunny spot by the tree! – there were three or four places it might have been – Maedhros suddenly dropped the blankets he had under his arm. Fingon looked where he was looking and saw the trio who had just let themselves in by the white garden gate. His cousin Galadriel had her golden hair all loose about her face, and she was smiling. On her left walked Olórin Mithrandir, and on her right was Elrond Half-elven. Back near the kitchen door Sam called out gladly, “Why, it’s Gandalf!”

Maedhros swallowed. “He said it would be hard!” he said, but he was not even looking at the wizard.

The three visitors came up to them, and Gandalf stooped and picked up the picnic blanket, and Galadriel came and kissed Fingon’s cheek in greeting. But Elrond was looking at Maedhros, and Maedhros said nothing.

“Come!” said Elrond at last. Away they went together over the hill towards the seashore. Fingon looked after Maedhros’s retreating back.

“That is a private conversation, I believe. You must let him out of your sight sooner or later, you know!” Gandalf said to him. He unfolded the blanket and spread it carefully upon the grass. Then he paused and looked at Fingon and gave him a nod and what might have been a swift flicker of a wink. “Now where are those Hobbits?” he said. Off he went towards the kitchen door, only stopping along the way to admire the nodding yellow sweep of Sam’s daffodils along the path.

Fingon, chastened, was left with Galadriel. She laughed gently at him, and seated herself on the Hobbits’ picnic blanket with as much grace and dignity as if it had been a throne. She gestured to Fingon to sit beside her, which he did: and the wind blew in Galadriel’s golden hair, and she gave Fingon a sidelong look and smiled.

“Something I have heard of your journey,” she said, “though I should like to hear it all from your own lips by and by: for Finrod my brother is a fair rhymer, but he was not there! But first tell me, cousin: what have you done with the star-glass of Galadriel? For I was its maker, and shall never now make anything greater or fairer: therefore I have an interest in its fate.”

Fingon had said nothing of it in front of Finrod and Turgon and the Hobbits, but he nearly told Galadriel all: the sundering of ways and the argument there. And if he had, he did not think she would have been much surprised. But instead he said only, “I gave it beyond the world to one I thought was Olórin Mithrandir, and he said it should be given again to one who was in need. And yet,” – he paused – “yet now I wonder if it was him at all.”

He had not realised he was thinking it till he said it. It had been the wizard Gandalf. He was almost sure. But how had he ever come there?

“Mithrandir it might have been!” Galadriel said. “For he has been beyond the world, and Time has no meaning there. But then again, perhaps not.” And her smile grew wider till it seemed she might break out into laughter. Fingon looked on her with some wonder, and saw that it was very true what many said, that Galadriel of the house of Finarfin came closest of all the Noldor to what Fëanor should have been. For she was very great in spirit, and all her fairness in form was but the mirror of her fairness of thought, and there was a light in her which had not been dimmed by Middle-earth. Nay, it had grown stronger. Pressed upon by darkness for years beyond counting she had come to greater knowledge than any other living thing of the Light’s true worth: and she had been tempted, and she had not fallen.

“So my star is given again. Let it come to one in need!” she said. “For that is why I made it. Perhaps our cousin Maglor shall find it on the sea-shore: or perhaps some mortal yet unborn will carry its light into dim places we do not know. Finrod will have theories. I believe I shall content myself with hope.”

“I too,” Fingon said.

Gandalf came outside again with the two Hobbits, all of them laden with plates of sandwiches, and they all sat down to tea on the lawn. There were so many sandwiches that there were still a few left when Elrond and Maedhros came back from their private conversation, Elrond quite calm and Maedhros looking shaken but not unhappy. Elrond seated himself on the grass between Fingon and Galadriel. “Did you really meet my brother?” he asked.

“Yes!” said Fingon. “He killed a dragon.”

“It was quite unnecessary to tell me that part,” Elrond assured him. “Naturally he did.”

The Hobbits had put Fingon and Maedhros in the same chamber, which Fingon was grateful for. “Don’t mention it!” Sam said firmly, when Fingon tried to thank them. He plainly understood perfectly well why it was that Fingon preferred not to let Maedhros out of his sight for too long. Frodo looked amused and said nothing about it at all.

Maedhros slept a good deal, especially at first. The haggardness quickly left his face, and the hollowness more slowly. Before long he was eating better, though he was still very thin. His hair began to grow back, copper and silver, and Fingon liked it more and more. He worried that they were overstaying their welcome, but Frodo insisted it was nothing of the kind.

“It is in fact very convenient to have you here,” he said. “You can fetch and carry, and lift heavy things, and do some of the weeding, and we appreciate it very much. There is a reason your brother and cousin were visiting us nearly every day before you turned up, you know. Sam and I are old, and we are growing frail: Sam especially, though he will not admit it! He is older than I am, I believe, though I have lived longer if you only count the years. It seems to me that my life came to a pause, as it were, when Bilbo died, and did not begin again until Sam arrived in the West. I have lived more in the last eight years than I managed in fifty before that! But Sam has had many long full years in the Shire, and been a father and a grandfather and a gardener and a mayor and many more things besides: not least a mariner, which you may be sure was not at all to his taste, but he sailed the Sea all the same to find me again, and I am beyond glad of it! But he is old. We are both old, and I could linger longer, but Sam is getting weary. You must stay as long as you please, as long as you need. We who have been hosted so well are very glad to be your hosts. And when you go, I believe we shall too. We have one more journey to make.”

“Not so soon!” Fingon said, much grieved by the thought. “Is this not a good country?”

“Oh, the best in the world!” Frodo said. “But we are guests here ourselves, really: and it is a poor guest who stays forever. And in fact it’s such a good country that it’s a little much for a mortal to bear. There’s a reason Bilbo and I asked for a house as far to the east as we could get! To live in the Undying Lands is like visiting a house with a table that is never empty: all the food rich and good as a Hobbit could desire, and always more – and more – and more – and just when you think you are stuffed full and can’t manage another morsel, someone brings out the plum-cake! Even the most determined Hobbit can only manage so much cake. Isn’t that right, Sam?” Sam had just come in. He was walking with the cane today. Fingon went swiftly to help him to his armchair.

“None of my children were brought up to gorge themselves!” Sam said when he was seated. “Eat well when it’s time and say thank you when you’re done, that’s the proper Shire-manners. What’s this about, then?”

“I was only explaining how the West is like a plum-cake.”

Sam looked struck. “That’s just the way to say it, Frodo,” he said. “I couldn’t have put it better myself. Well, of course I couldn’t, for I haven’t your way with these things.”

“Now, Sam, you are the poet, not I!”

“Not a poet,” said Sam reproachfully. “A rhymer now and then, maybe!”

Fingon laughed. They were a merry old pair. He was all the sorrier at the thought of their departure. To have this homely house left empty seemed to him a very great shame. But Frodo was explaining the gist of his conversation with Fingon to Sam, and Sam was nodding. “And the further in you go, the richer it is,” Frodo said. “Though I should like to see it: I should like to travel to the mountains, perhaps, before I die! But I thought I had better stay here on the eastern shore and wait for you before I went.”

“You couldn’t have known I would come, Frodo my dear!” said Sam.

“No,” said Frodo, “but I hoped! In any case," turning back to Fingon, "yes, yes, stay as long as you please, for we are glad to have you: and when you will go, you shall go, and then we are for the road. And in fact, Sam, I knew you’d come. Even after all these years I don’t believe you’d let me make any sort of journey unsupervised!”

“Don’t you leave him!” was all Sam said, but his lined face crinkled up in a smile. “I’ve had my time, and my Rosie’s gone afore me. I’d be well pleased to see the mountains first, mind.”

They chattered to one another, planning their journey, and before long Frodo got up and fetched some maps for Sam to peer at. In the end Fingon slipped quietly from the room, leaving the Hobbits speaking to one another of Tirion and Valmar, of fair Lórien and the gardens of Yavanna: places that Fingon had almost begun to take for granted again, but to the Hobbits they were wondrous names. He went in pensive mood down the hallway to the chamber he and Maedhros shared.

Maedhros was asleep again. He slept these days as if it were the greatest luxury in the world to rest undisturbed for hours on end and he meant to take full advantage of it while he had the chance. There were two beds in the room, but Fingon lay down on Maedhros’s bed beside him and put an arm around his waist. The ends of Maedhros’s hair tickled his face, but Fingon only drew closer and closed his eyes. Maedhros stirred and said his name in a questioning tone.

“It’s nothing,” Fingon said.

“It’s not,” said Maedhros, and he turned over. Grey hair fell into his eyes. Fingon lifted his hand and pushed it back. Maedhros watched him seriously. “What’s wrong?”

Fingon paused a moment. Then he explained about the Hobbits and the journey they were planning. Maedhros looked grieved as well when he understood. He appreciated their kindly hosts as much as Fingon did. Now and then Fingon had heard him talking with Frodo late into the night. “But it is their road!” he said at last. “And at least neither will go alone.”

Fingon nodded. After a moment he said, “I would not have let you go alone.”

“I know,” said Maedhros. “But I am glad it was the greenway in the end.”

“So am I!” Fingon admitted. Maedhros laughed softly. “I know it has been hard.”

“Hard? No. Not hard: not really, not yet. When I think of –” Maedhros halted. After a moment he began again in a low voice. “Elwing,” he said. “Idril and Tuor. Melian, if she will permit me to stand in her presence. Olwë and all his folk; and all those who have come forth from Mandos of the peoples of Doriath and Sirion. I know there are many who have not, too wounded in their hearts to walk in the world again. That I should lie here beside you, and so many I wronged sit in lasting sorrow! And then – shall I list them all, those I disobeyed, those who warned me in vain? Then let me name my own mother first: and after her but not less than her all the Powers of this world. I might have argued with my father. You know I was not afraid to argue with my father. But I loved him – I agreed with him – I followed him! I raised him in my heart to what he never was, even before – even before.” He stopped. Then in a voice that was barely more than a whisper he said, “And O my father, robbed and wronged and unfulfilled! And O my ruined brothers! O Maglor!” Fingon reached for him. “And you!” Maedhros said. “At least that one is easy. Fingon, I am sorry!”

“You are forgiven,” said Fingon at once. “I forgive you; I forgave you already.”

“I never deserved it.”

“Will you never leave that alone? I love you. Deserving has nothing to do with it.”

“And I love you,” Maedhros said. Fingon began to smile. Maedhros’s eyes widened. “Had I not said it? I had not said it!”

“No,” Fingon said. “I did not quite like to ask. It has been such a long time.”

“That has nothing to do with it!”

Fingon laughed, for happiness and because Maedhros’s outraged look was easy to laugh at. Maedhros laughed with him, more quietly. At last they fell silent, still looking at each other; and Fingon brushed Maedhros’s grey hair away from his eyes again and leaned in and kissed him.

Maedhros kissed him back uncertainly. He broke away to say, “Are you sure?”

Fingon frowned. “I do wish you would stop asking such stupid questions,” he said, and while Maedhros was still laughing he kissed him again.

They did that for a little while. The sunlight that shone through the west-facing windows deepened into evening gold before it dimmed altogether into dusk, and they heard the Hobbits coming in from the garden where they sat each day to watch the sunset. At last the two of them only lay quietly in each other’s arms and looked at each other. Eventually Maedhros smiled and lifted his brows.

Fingon blinked. Had he just glimpsed a flicker of the old light in those dimmed eyes? Was it only his own eyes reflected?

While he was distracted Maedhros’s mood turned swiftly serious again. Now he looked grave. “There will be a judgement,” he said. “There will be. And I will face it. I will be ready, whatever it is.” He pulled a face. “It can hardly be worse.”

“It will not be as bad as you think,” Fingon said.

“You don’t know that,” Maedhros said, but held him a little tighter. “Perhaps it should be. There are some wrongs I cannot even try to right.”

Fingon said nothing. There was nothing he could say: or at least, nothing he dared say.

“There will be a judgement,” Maedhros said again. “But even this much kindness is more than I could ever have hoped for. The Sun and the stars; this homely house; to have seen my mother again! And you: always you. You need not have done any of it.”

“I know,” said Fingon. “I know that! But I love you, so I did.”

*

At the point where a muddy road divided in two, an old man in a battered hat sat upon a grassy tussock. In his hand he held a clear phial that gave out a steady pale gleam of light. In his mouth he had a pipe. Now and then he blew a smoke ring, and the light caught the curling edges of smoke and made it shimmer as it dissipated. The wizard smiled at it, and began to blow more complicated shapes: a spray of flowers, a ship, a dragon. They shone briefly and vanished.

By and by a tall figure came striding down the road. The wizard looked up with a frown. “Elros Tar-Minyatur!” he said. “You took your time getting here!”

Elros looked only a little sheepish. “I was enjoying myself,” he said.

“So I see. And how many dragons have you slain?”

“Not enough for my taste: but to keep them all for myself would be greedy. And it is as well I took my time, sir. Look who I found!”

Two small shadows were skulking behind him as if afraid. Elros laid one hand on each of their shoulders and chivvied them forward, and as they stepped into the circle of light given off by the star-glass they became two small boys.

“Eluréd!” said the wizard to the one on the left. “Elurín!” to the one on the right. The twins exchanged a startled look. “I am very glad to see you!” said the wizard.

“There!” said Elros. “I told you someone would know.”

“Thank you,” said Elurín in a voice that was small but steady. His brother reached nervously for his hand.

“I have been waiting for you for a long time. A choice now lies before you both,” said the wizard. “You see here there are two roads. Both are open to you, and each may go whichever way he pleases. You must choose your paths.”

“Is there a right answer?” said Elurín.

Eluréd nudged him hard. “He just said it’s either way!”

The wizard smiled. “Yes, either way. There are no wrong answers here.”

The twins conferred in low voices for a moment. Then Eluréd looked up and said, “Do we have to go the same way?”

“Not at all – unless you want to!”

The twins argued a while longer. Elros and the wizard exchanged glances over their heads, and both smiled.

Finally Elurín turned to Elros and said, “What about you? Do you have to choose a road too?”

“I already chose,” said Elros. “I am going that way.” He nodded to the dark left-hand path.

“Why?” said Eluréd.

“To see what’s at the end, of course. Why else?”

The twins seemed struck by this. They whispered together a little more. Then Elurín – the calmer of the two, and so the spokesman – turned to the wizard and said, “We would like to go with Elros, please.”

“Both of you?”

“Yes!” said Eluréd, though he gave the dark path a nervous look.

“He has a sword, at least,” Elurín said to him.

“Oh!” said Elros. “I almost forgot.” He took off his swordbelt and long scabbard, and together with his bright sword he dropped them in the grass at the roadside. It was still just possible to make out the remnants of a harp lying there. The grass had almost completely grown over it. Elros paused when he saw it, and then laughed to himself and turned away.

The twins looked alarmed.

“You cannot take anything with you on the dark road!” Elros explained.

“What if there are dragons?” said Elurín.

“I don’t believe there will be: but if there are, we shall have to think of a different way to deal with them.”

“Will you still go that way?” the wizard asked.

“Yes,” said Eluréd at once.

Elurín took a little longer to think about it, but finally he said, “Yes,” as well. His expression was determined, but his mouth trembled a little when he added, “Though it is so dark!”

“It would certainly be easier if we had a light,” said Elros, and he gave the wizard an expectant look.

“You are incorrigible,” said the wizard. “It would break every rule there is: as you know very well! Besides you have no need of one.”

“Not I,” Elros admitted. He crouched a little to bring himself closer to the twins’ height, and said to them both in a loud whisper, “Ask him! He’s got a very soft heart really.”

Eluréd and Elurín exchanged another glance, and then they both went up to the wizard. As they drew close to the shining star-glass their shapes seemed to become more solid, though their eyes stayed dark.

“Please may we have a light, sir?” said Eluréd winningly.

“Please?” said Elurín, though he looked a little disgusted by his brother’s attempt at charm.

“They are only children,” Elros put in.

The wizard looked cross, and frowned very sternly, and puffed on his pipe for a long time, but finally he said, “Oh, very well, very well! Since you ask so politely! Here!”

He handed the star-glass to Eluréd.

“I can’t!” Eluréd began to say, and then cut himself off in astonishment as the wizard gently closed his fingers for him around the gift. His body did not turn to shadow. He looked more solid than ever. His mouth fell open as he stared at the light he held, and when at last he looked up the night had fled from his eyes. They were grey.

At once he handed the phial to his brother. Now it was Elurín’s turn to look shocked as the shadow fell away from him. “Oh,” he said. “But I thought we – I thought – oh!” He turned to the wizard. “Thank you,” he said. “Thank you!” Something occurred to him. He elbowed his brother. “Say thank you!”

“Thank you,” Eluréd mumbled, though he was still staring at the star-glass his brother held.

Elros looked both pleased and amused. “You cunning old soul,” he said. “All that talk of breaking rules! I believe you meant to give it to them all along.”

“Nothing of the kind!” said the wizard with an innocent air, but he hurried quickly on. “Now you have wasted quite enough time. Your choice is made: your road is waiting for you. Off you go!”

Elros gave the dark path a considering look. “I don’t believe it’s wide enough for three to walk abreast. Who wants to ride on my shoulders?”

“Me!” said both the twins at once, and then they paused for some urgent discussion.

Finally Eluréd said graciously, “Elurín can go first.”

“Then you can hold my hand,” said Elros. He lifted Elurín up and onto his shoulders. “Oof! All right. Where’s the glass? Pass it up! You hold that, and we won’t have any trouble seeing our way. And you give me your hand – like that – good! Farewell to you, sir. And off we go!”

“Farewell!” said the wizard.

Soon Elros and the twins vanished in the dark, and their shapes could not be seen. But it was easy enough to work out which way they had gone, for the pale glimmer of the phial of Galadriel shone brightly in the Void. Sitting on the tussock at the sundering of ways the wizard smoked his Hobbit-pipe and watched its passage with satisfaction: one small star on the starless road.

*

Mistlice ðreala gebyriað for synnum bendas oððe dyntas carcernðystra lobban.
Various punishments are proper for sins: bonds or blows, prison darkness, spiders.

- The Law Of The Penitent