Archive of Our Own ^beta

Maglor was having a terrible day, which was a real shame since it started off so promisingly too.

The sky had been a crystalline blue, for once free of the vapours of Angband. Outside his window, a swallow had chirped a tuneful melody that he found himself whistling along to all morning. Today will be a good day, he told himself, it will be, it will be, it will be, and ignored the urge to dig his nails – sharpened to a lethal point – into his skin, rip it up, turn it inside out, and wear it as a slick, meat-red mantle over his bones.

Of course, it was not to be. It all went downhill around noon when he stumbled onto Elrond, a pair of gardening shears in hand and drifts of hair around his feet like black snow. The boy froze the minute he spotted Maglor and terror eclipsed his eyes.

“You little,” Maglor breathed, taking in the scene, “wretch.”

For weeks now, Elrond had been begging him to please, please cut his hair short. And of course, like any self-respecting Elda, Maglor had strictly forbidden it. No foster of the House of Fëanor would shame themselves with cropped hair, not under his care, not ever. The very thought was disgraceful.

You are not a mortal thrall, he had told the boy in no uncertain terms, you are a prince of the Noldor, and you will conduct yourself as such. When that had only caused tears and stubborn sulking, he resorted instead to plying him with reasoned sweetness. Child, an Elda’s hair is their pride. It is the crown upon your head. I can no more allow you to shear it than I could let you walk around unclothed. ‘Tis unseemly. And you have the most beautiful locks, why ever would you want to be rid of them?

And truly, they were beautiful – the famed ebony which the Noldor so coveted, smooth as the finest silk, with a sheen that reflected starlight as though a mirror. Hair so lovely would have been the envy of all Tirion. Nay, of Valinor whole, and often Maglor, too, found himself envious of the thick, dark fall of it. 

Many a night he had spent, running a comb through the twins’ hair until it spilled like ink over his hands, braiding it in elaborate styles and embellishing it with the few baubles he still had left in his possession. The practice settled something within him; some soft, nurturing side of him that shrieked to be fed, and yet was suffocated under the weight of his manifold cruelties most of the time, cried out in grateful relief. He had never before indulged it, afraid of what would come spilling out if he opened the door even a crack, but with all the obdurate persistence unique to children, the twins had managed to drag it into the light of day. Maglor, helpless in the face of their joint strength, succumbed and allowed himself to be tamed, to be made anew into an alien, parent-shaped form. And he had to admit: he liked it. He enjoyed how much the children seemed to need him, how entirely dependent they were on him for their care and keeping. He enjoyed bandaging their scrapes, and teaching them their letters, and telling them off for roughhousing. It fulfilled him in a way nothing ever had, and more than all else, he relished in their childlike adoration, soaked in it like the perfumed waters in which he used to bathe, fed on it like the finest victuals served at a king’s table.

Whenever he did the boys’ hair, he was reminded of his own mother. It was Nerdanel who taught him how to braid with her adept, clay-flecked hands, who did his hair up for him every night before bed until he was old enough to spurn her attentions. As he portioned out the twins’ jet hair into even strands for plaiting, his thoughts would, without fail, wander to her. 

Where was Nerdanel now? He imagined her back in their townhouse in Tirion, in her workshop perhaps. Or maybe in Mahtan’s country estate. Did she think of him at all? Her son across the sea. Did she miss him as he missed her?

I have children of my own now, Ammë, he would think of telling her. There was so much he would ask her if he could, so many questions that only revealed themselves after he, too, learned what it was to nurture small lives with the warmth of his soul.

Had she ever felt as he did? When she gathered his unruly locks together, did she too feel the acid burn of resentment in the back of her throat? Was she ever seized with the urge to grab the back of a small skull and bash it into the mirror till blood spurted? More and more, Maglor grew certain that this was just what it meant to be a mother – to be hatefully jealous of your children’s youth, their beauty, the vestige of innocence they clung onto with undimmed eyes, to resent that they had their whole lives before them while you had already ruined yours.

But despite these occasional falterings of his heart, Maglor did his best. He loved the children truly. He took them in out of the generosity of his spirit, raised them to the best of his abilities, went without food so they could eat, went without sleep so they could rest. He was good to them. And this – this was how he was repaid: flagrant disobedience. Insults to the dignity of his house.

Rage built in him like an orchestra reaching for crescendo.

Tufts of hair stuck up from Elrond’s skull in a choppy, uneven cut. Some tendrils were still long enough to graze the small of his back, while others barely reached his chin. “I told you,” he said, mouth trembling but the jut of his chin mulish, “I wanted it gone.”

It peaked.

“And I said no!” His shriek set the windows rattling, power leaking into his voice. 

Elrond flinched away, before crying out, “It’s not fair! Mama would have let me –”

“Mama?” 

Oh, Elrond knew better than to mention Elwing in front of him. Nothing boiled his blood more than the thought of her – the girl-child with the bird-bones and the blazing, furious defiance. Clothed in nothing but a sleep-shift and the blood of her people, armed with a stubborn, obliterating force of will that would have her look death and darkness in the eye and spurn it, instead carving out another way through the sheer grit of her teeth.

Striding forward, he grabbed Elrond’s face, sharp nails digging into the fat of his cheek, and bent down so they were eye to eye. Saccharine venom oozed from his every pore.

“Your mama left you, sweet boy,” he crooned, “Remember? She jumped off that cliff, straight down into the sea, got dashed open on the rocks. And you know why? Because she couldn’t stand to be with you any more. She hated you.”

Where his nail pierced skin, a single drop of blood beaded and traced a crimson rivulet down tear-wet flesh. “Say it!”

Elrond was crying in earnest now, all hiccups and slimy face, but he knew better than to disobey. Blubbering, he repeated, “Ma- ma- Mama hates me.”

Letting go, Maglor knelt beside him and smoothed a hand over the mangled remains of his hair. “That’s right, darling,” he sing-songed, “Your mother hated you so much she would rather die than stay by your side. But not me. Not Maglor. I took you in, even when I didn’t have to – I could have left you and Elros back in the Havens, let the orcs eat you. But I didn’t,” he cradled the boy’s face, “because I love you.”

Lips twisting in an expression of pious, pitying, regret – a saint beholding a leper – he shook his head mournfully. “But you’re ugly now.”

Turning the boy around by the shoulders, he brought him face to face with the mirror set on the wall. Elrond’s reflection stared back at him. With his hair all chopped up and his face beetroot red, stained with tears and mucus, hitching for breath, he looked ridiculous.

“Look at yourself,” Maglor said, the picture of disappointed beneficence, “See how hideous you are?”

Scrubbing ineffectually at his face through his sobs and hiccuping for breath, Elrond nodded.

 “Say it.”

“’m – I’m ugly now.”

Maglor sighed. “I don’t know if I can love such an ugly little boy. What a shame – if only you’d listened to me.”

He left Elrond there, wailing and stuttering out apologies, begging him to come back, promising he would be good from now on. But the pathetic display, rather than vindicate him, just further soured his mood. The day was thoroughly ruined. Bursting into his chambers in a furious storm, he wrenched ornaments out of his braids and hurled them onto the vanity.

That damn bird was still singing.

Some great abscess had been punctured, and now the pus was free-flowing through him. The incident needled into his skin, burrowed inside. A swarm of insects had crawled into his mouth, and their spindly, lacquered legs were skittering around the soft flesh of his innards. They were overflowing from his ears, his nostrils, from around his eyes, bulging back out of his mouth. Mould grew in fluorescent patches along his skin, mycelia spreading its roots into him, hooking into his meat and bones, multiplying. He was putrefying where he stood. Death by decay. Bloody gouges he left along his body trying to dislodge the gangrene, to no avail. He felt grotesque; a marionette clumsily constructed, all the wrong pieces jammed together.

Chirp, chirp, chirp, went the little bird.

He was hideous, misshapen and repellent. Marred. It was all wrong. All wrong, all wrong, all wrong. 

Why? Why would Elrond do something like that?

To be beautiful was to approach the divine. The elder children of Ilúvatar were the fairest of all earthly creatures. Their purpose upon Arda was to bring beauty into the world, such was their sacred calling, and for that they had been crafted by the unerring hands of the All-Father. Great beauty was a sign of His favour, and to seek to alter it was to defile the Song. Yet with the feckless temerity of youth, Elrond had blasphemed, hacked off the long, silken rope of his hair as though it were nothing, as though he were not marring himself. And for what? A brief moment of fleeting satisfaction? Childish rebellion? Maglor could not understand it.

(Liar, hissed the voice that had dogged his every thought since he was old enough to think in words, mellifluous and indomitable.)

The twins were uncommonly lovely – dark of hair and fair of eye; conforming so exactly to Noldorin aesthetic ideals that one would be hard pressed to find evidence of their diluted blood from the fineness of their features. And Elrond’s careless disregard of that immeasurable gift set ire thrumming in Maglor’s bones.

He, too, had been born a perfect paragon of Noldor beauty, his birth celebrated for weeks in the streets of Tirion: another son born to the High Prince, and this one with the look of Finwe about him. And indeed, of all his brothers, Maglor had taken after their father the most – that is, until Curufin was born – not just in visage but in his prodigious talent. It had been a matter of pride in the days of old, but if that similitude awarded him prestige, equally it had entailed responsibility too. To be a prince of the Noldor was to be faultless, above reproach, for they were the most blessed of all the Speaking People and nowhere was their nobility of spirit and greatness of mind exemplified better than in their High Prince and his sons. 

Chirp, chirp, chirp.

Fëanor was the ideal of the Noldo Man – mightiest in stature and beauty and skill of all the Children of Ilúvatar, proclaimed so by the Valar themselves: proof of the ascendancy of their people. He was the benchmark, the mould into which they, his sons, were cast, and at all times they strove to contort themselves into his shape. To stray from the path he set was unthinkable, to do anything that might bring shame to their house, out of the question.

Unlike Elrond, Maglor understood perfectly well the exigencies of rank, the politics of aesthetic. Beauty was power and power was beauty, and beauty, a narrow shelf on a cliff, high above ground. Elevated, yes, but a single misstep and one would come tumbling down, bones crushed by velocity and uncaring rock. Only a fool would risk the fall. And, make no mistake, it was foolishness that drove Elrond today. Foolishness and hubris. It disgusted Maglor, showed a deficiency of character he grieved to see in one he loved so dearly.

Blood tells, he thought, blood always tells. The evidence of the boys’ polluted lineage would always present itself like a hundred tiny cracks splintering through a misleading facade – gold-plated lead.

With careful, slow steps, he approached the window and unlatched it. Coaxed the sweet songbird into his cupped hands, felt its frantic little heart beat against the net of his fingers.

(And if a part of him admired the boy’s courage, his conviction, that writhed in yearning and envy, well – it was but a moment of weakness. Nothing more.

Nothing more, he insisted and quashed it mercilessly.)

Crack went the little bird.

Dinner that night was a tense affair. Elrond sat red-nosed and swollen-eyed, and next to him, a subdued Elros tried to silently cajole him into eating. Someone had evened out the mess of Elrond’s hair, and it now fell in a sleek curtain down to his chin – Maedhros, probably, given the pointed stare burning a hole in the side of his head. Went tattling to Papa, I see, Maglor thought nastily, and pretended he couldn’t feel the sear of his brother’s eyes on him as he poured yet another glass of some disgusting fermented Dark-elf swill for himself. What they put in it, he didn’t know –some strange collection of fungi and semi-poisonous plants he was told – but the spirit was the only thing that helped when he felt this way, like a collection of cards stacked together in the shape of an elf, one careless exhale away from falling apart into an indeterminate heap.

Bitter, he couldn’t help but think in Maedhros’ direction: You didn’t even want them. You would have been content to toss them in the sea after their mother, to slay them and leave their carcasses for the carrion birds. Now look at you, wrapped around their fingers.

But of course, who wouldn’t be taken by their sweet, lamblike innocence? Their large, lambent eyes and high voices? Even the worst monsters would soften in the face of such purity. 

He poured another glass. His vision was darkening at the corners. A discreet, disapproving cough sounded from beside him, and Maglor rolled his eyes behind the rim of his goblet. Maedhros had particular ideas about ‘not getting drunk in front of the children’ and ‘setting a good example.’

We pulled them out from under their nanny’s corpse, Nelyo, he’d responded the last time he had brought it up, I think that ship has long sailed.

By the time he escaped the table, he was well and truly sloshed. The lines he so painstakingly maintained in the inner architecture of his soul were all blurred, the walls crashing down, all his desires floating closer to the surface and yet buried under a thick pane of glass – at once in sight and out of reach. As he stumbled drunkenly to his room, he caught a glimpse of his reflection in a mirror – the very same one before which he had forced Elrond that morning – and in it stood a woman.

She was – majestic. Terrible and fair, A sea in storm, both destruction and deliverance.

Arousal swept through him at the sight of her. Tipping forward, he fell against the glass, barely catching himself with his hands. He and the woman were nose to nose now, conjoined by an ephemeral alchemy. Her face was his, but softer, paints applied in the way of elf-maids rather than the strong lines favoured by Noldo men. Kohl outlined grey eyes in thick, whorish strokes, nothing like the sparing, elegant touch to which he constrained himself. Gold dripped from a pierced nostril, the deep neck of a gown hinted at a temptingly meagre decolletage. That gamine figure pressed against his through the sheet of glass, and desire throbbed in his gut. He wanted her. He wanted – he wanted –

Hands roamed the mirror, groping and grasping, hungering for flesh but meeting only a cold, merciless surface. By margins, the glass dissolved betwixt them. Where one body began and the other ended was now uncertain. They were each the other, indissoluble. What was reflection and what was object? What was truth and what was lie?

Maglor laved her tongue across the quicksilver surface, in love, so in love, hips rocking against the unyielding frame. By the time she pried herself away, she was panting and shuddering. Rapturous. The journey to her rooms was a torment, and many a time she had to pause in order to sag against a wall and stuff a hand down her trousers. Finally, she reached her door and staggered through, shedding the confining garments that grew slithering vines and crawled along her skin, wrapped around her throat and strangled her as she wrested them off. Collapsing unclothed onto her bed, she fetched the flask of oil secreted away in the nightstand and crawled under the blankets.

The room was swathed in cottony blackness, womb-like in its primal comfort. Maglor groaned, imagining herself back in Nerdanel’s belly, but this time she would be born right, the way she was meant to be. Her hands fell to her stomach and caressed it, and, unbidden, her mind supplied a vision of her own gravid belly, heavy with life, the twin lights of her children flickering beneath the sinewy, gamy walls of flesh and muscle. Rocked by potent arousal, she writhed against the sheets. Yes, yes. This was how it was meant to be. Her boys growing in her. Oh, how they strained her flesh, how they roiled and kicked within her, bulging out from under her skin. She was teeming with vitality, the Flame Imperishable setting her aglow from the inside out, the shadow of her bones stark against the curtain of flesh.

With all the drink she had imbibed, her shaft lay flaccid against her, even with the overwhelming strength of her desire, and for that she was grateful; the sensation of being erect made her retch on the best of days. Instead, a diffuse concupiscence spread through her, hot but leisurely. Like a nice, warm bath. Pinching a nipple, Maglor envisioned herself bursting with milk, lush and fecund. Oil-wet fingers circled her cunt, and moaning, she pushed them in.

Surrendering to the tidal waves of pleasure, she allowed herself to be carried away, borne aloft by the undulating waters of her desire. It lapped at her, enveloped her, amniotic and all-encompassing. She continued to pump her fingers into her hole, moaning every time she grazed the spot hidden away inside her fluttering channel. Her flesh was soft and clinging, and she wished she could force her arm all the way inside – up into her womb and through its fibrous opening to grasp the bloody and vast potentiality within her. Run her hands over it, feel it pulse between her fingers, copper-slick and fleshy.

So lost was she in her drunken daze and lustful stupor that she heard not the knock on the door or the creak of it opening. Only when a small and hesitant voice called out, “Maglor?” did she notice she was no longer alone. Lifting her head, she saw Elrond, hovering uncertainly by the door. He’d been crying again. Her fingers paused their movement as concern swelled in her. 

“What’s wrong?” she asked, thinking he had taken ill.

It was too dark to see his face properly, but she could hear him take a tentative step forward. “I’m sorry about this morning. Please don’t be angry with me,” he pleaded, sounding miserable and close to tears. “I shan’t do it again, I promise! I can be good. Just please don’t hate me!”

Love bloomed in her like the bloating of a corpse. That’s my baby, she thought. He made her a mother. She could feel him, growing inside her, swelling her gut. Beneath the blanket, she started moving her fingers again. In and out, in and out, in and out.

“Come here, darling.” She beckoned him forward, and eagerly, he clambered onto the bed, only to pause in confusion when he noticed her arm pumping.

“What…what are you doing?” 

She stifled a whimper as her fingers found her prostate again and, gasping, said, "I want to forgive you, child. But you hurt me so terribly.”

Distress flooded what little of Elrond’s face she could see in the dim gloom. “Please! I’ll do anything.”

“Anything?”

He nodded vigorously.

It was a heady thrill, the absolute control she had over him. He would do whatever she asked in order to win back her affection. Oh, you poor lamb. Never before had she felt so powerful; not when she cut through throngs of confused fishermen, or cosseted and screaming Iathrim, not when she ruled over the Gap, a wild and vicious warlord. Outside this moment, the world raged on, uncaring of all it trampled, unbowing to all; nothing and no one could control it. In the morning, she would wake from her stupor and go back to pretending the walls of her life were not closing in on her, that she was not trapped in a small, dark room, running out of air, her throat raw from screams no one seemed to hear, not even her most beloved brother. But here, right now, Maglor was god.

She drew back the blanket. “Come, child, lie with me.” Noticing her nudity, Elrond flushed, but, after a second’s hesitation, obediently slid in beside her. With the hand not presently three fingers deep in her cunt, she held him close and brought his head to rest against her chest. She sighed in bliss. The weight of it felt so natural.

“Go on now,” she said dreamily. “Nurse from me. Just like you used to when you were a babe, remember?”

Pressed so close together, she felt it when he stiffened in her grasp. He tried to squirm away, but she held him fast.

“What?” He sounded confused. “I don’t–”

“I thought you wanted to be good, Elrond,” she interrupted, voice sharp and cold, “You said you would do anything. Or do you not want my forgiveness?”

“I do! I do.”

“Then this is what you must do to earn it.”

She guided his head to a peaked nipple and waited. The gust of air from his nostrils against the pebbled skin made her toes curl. Slowly, hesitantly, Elrond closed his mouth around the bud and gave a timid suck, and she all but thrashed in ecstasy. The humid heat of it, the thready pull of her baby’s mouth on her teat, it was unmaking her. She was being reforged, ascending to her true form.

She worked her fingers more vigorously still, slamming them in and out, spreading them inside her, swivelling them around. Milk flowed through her breast – a queer, tingling sensation – and out her nipple into her child’s hungry mouth, sustaining him, giving him life. Fumbling for his hand, clenched into a fist at his side, she uncurled it and laid it on her protuberant gut. 

“Feel that? That’s you and Elros, my perfect, beautiful children, safe in my womb. You’re so – oh – you’re so big inside me.”

The suckling stuttered to a stop before it picked up again, even slower this time. 

Soon, it would be time to birth them. They would come into the world in a gush of blood and viscera and afterbirth, slimy with fluid, a disgorged placenta following in their trail, proof of her fertility, her ability to carry new life within her. She could almost imagine the heavy weight of them sliding down her channel, stretching her out irreparably, altering her body at their whim. It would be the most ecstatic pain. She would emerge from it sanctified. Unmistakably a woman.

Elrond drew back, her nipple popping out of his mouth. “Maglor, are we almost done?” he asked, voice plaintive and quivering.

“Ungh – almost, darling. Almost. You’re being such a good boy.” She was so close. So close. Her peak hovered just within reach. “Just do one more thing for me, my sweet boy – call me Ammë.”

He recoiled. “But you’re not my–”

“Say it!” she shrieked.

“Ammë! Ammë. I love you, Ammë, I’m sorry.”

And with a shrill cry, Maglor toppled over the peak, free-falling into bliss that rocked her whole body in rippling shockwaves.

Afterwards, she sagged back into bed, sated and restful, and pulled Elrond close to her, laying a kiss to his head. “Don’t tell anyone about this, hm. Wouldn’t want Elros to get jealous, would we?”

Hesitant, he shook his head before piping up hopefully, “Am I forgiven now?”

“Yes, child,” she said, indulgent, and then, suddenly growing serious, tipped his face up with a finger under his chin, “But if you ever touch your hair again, I will take a razor and lay your scalp bare, and then I will do the same to your brother. Understand?” 

Sniffling, the boy nodded, and Maglor tucked him under her arm. “Come now, you can sleep with me tonight.” 

The long, dark hours passed them by as slumber took her, and when the sun rose, Maglor got up and went about his business.

Today, he thought, will be a good day.