#the silmarillion fanfiction

[a-world-of-whimsy-5]

After the battle

Inspired by this fanart by @cirrdan

Pairing : Melkor x Mairon 

Themes : Soft / Fluff

Word count: 800 words

Summary : After his run in with Thorondor, Melkor finds himself stuck in bed, wounded in more ways than one.

Warnings: Mentions of injuries 

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That evenfall Melkor lay in his bed, unable to move.    

Pain of the acutest kind ripped through him whenever he tried. His muscles and sinews refused to heed him. His very flesh burned where he had been cut and torn. And his body, oh, how it ached and throbbed all over. The bed gave no comfort despite the soft sheets and softer pillows. Melkor ground his teeth and tried to keep still, hoping no one would just barge into his chambers and see him like this, all weak and pale and bound up in dressing of some kind.

But someone was already here, someone he didn't even register before. He smelled them before even seeing them, sighing and taking in the subtle scent of smoke and leather that carried in the air. Melkor swallowed and said, "Why do you hide in the shadows, precious?"   

Mairon slowly stepped into the light. Well, what passed for light here, at any rate. Melkor allowed a taper or two in their shared chambers and nothing beyond that. Mairon fought valiantly to hide his horror but failed miserably. Melkor looked ashen, and not due to his steely gray complexion. No, Melkor looked like his life's very essence had almost seeped out of him.   

"Do I look that comely?" Melkor found the strength to jest, his eyes lighting up in humour instead of anger.   

Mairon swallowed, unsure of what to say. Thuringwethil said it was bad, but she did not say how bad it truly was. Perhaps, he reasoned, she was trying to spare him.   

Finally, he settled on, "After a fashion, my lord," before forcing a bright smile, his gaze drifting over his lord's form. And his eyes stung. Oh, how they stung. Melkor had been covered in slashes and bruises. The great eagle Thorondor spared no inch in his effort to save Fingolfin's fana from defilement, and now Melkor was here, drowning in agony.   

Melkor, seeing gold eyes glistening with unshed tears, managed a weak smile for his soul's other half before closing his own and whimpering. Pain swirled through him in wave after wave, as if unceasing. When it finally passed, he breathed easier and opened his eyes. The smell of smoke and leather still hung in the air, and he found it soothing. "Please, precious," he whispered hoarsely. "Come sit by me."   

Thick carpets muffled the sound of heavy boots as Mairon came over and made himself comfortable by Melkor's side. He slipped his hands into a pair bigger and colder than his own and dipped his head, running his lips over each finger. Melkor closed his eyes and sighed contentedly, the first time since he opened his eyes.

"I should have listened to you," he huffed with ragged breaths. "You told me to let Fingolfin be and not accept his challenge, but I let my own misplaced pride override all else." Melkor grimaced. The others saw him get struck, saw him reel and fall. "And now all have borne witness to my weaknesses."   

"None of them will speak a word of it."  If they know what is good for them, that is, Mairon thought fiercely.   

Melkor closed his eyes as another jolt of pain washed over him. "And what of you, precious? Do you think less of me for my failure?"   

Mairon would never do it; he could never do it. Melkor meant too much for him to even entertain such a notion. "No my lord, I do not." He reached over to the bedside counter and picked up a goblet of water when Melkor asked for something to drink. "I never could. Besides," he said, carefully lifting Melkor's head so he could drink. "Thorondor is a most formidable foe."   

"And you left your mark on the great eagle," Mairon continued. "Thorondor will carry the mark of Grond for the rest of his days. And Fingolfin is dead. He will plague us no more."   

A foe that came in out of nowhere. Hid himself craftily under the cover of shadows and darkeness, Mairon was told upon his return from other battles. No one knew until the great eagle's talons were digging into Melkor's armour and tearing it apart.  

As he sipped, Melkor did not know what hurt more- his wounds or being brought low due to his own foolishness and pride. In the end, he conceded that his wounded pride would take longer to heal.   

"Small consolation indeed," Melkor grumbled. "But I will accept them all the same." 

Mairon shook his head, a smile tugging at his lips. Melkor will be pouting and grumbling about this for many moons. "And what do you desire now, my lord?"

Melkor swallowed and reached up, ignoring the pain as his fingers curled around Mairon's hair. He had let it down today, a rare thing with him. "Lay with me precious," he breathed in relief when the pain ebbed to a bearable throb. "Just lay down next to me."   

Mairon put the goblet away and lay down next to him, making himself comfortable without jostling Melkor too much. "Are you comfortable, my lord?"   

 "I am, now that you are near." Melkor somehow moved his arm so Mairon could nestle in closer. When Mairon turned to his side and carefully laid an arm over his chest, Melkor sighed contentedly. "Much more comfortable."

Tags: @fictionfordays | @asianbutnotjapanese​ | @edensrose​

[ylieke]

"And Melkor entered his realm. And the Dark bowed before its Lord, and came apart in the light of Silmarilli. The creatures of the night prostrated themselves on the ground in hopes that they would be spared and his heavy gaze wouldn’t fall on them. Sauron bowed low, pinned down by the terror that like a cape was draped over the Fallen Vala. He relinquished all the power he held in his absence and laid it for him, as a servant must." An illistraion for the "Play with fire" fanfic by @eternal-fear

[nerdanelparmandil]

I love how the fandom has given shape to Maedhros. He is sometimes gentle, sometimes feral, he is terrifying but beautiful, he is a war general and a politician, he is an elder brother, stern and kind, in some versions he loves Fingon, he loves Elrond, he regrets his deeds and hates his legacy, in others he longs for his parents' forgiveness, he is Fingolfin's friend or rival, he is witty, he is pensive, he is angry and he is desperate, he is hopeful but not for himself, he is proud and he is self-loathing, he feels crushed by responsibility but he grows into his role.

I love reading about him because the fandom makes him so interesting and complex and relatable.

Sometimes I read a fanfic and I'm awed, wishing that I could write a version of Maedhros that lives up to all of this. There are some incredibly talented writers in this fandom and I'm forever grateful.

[raointean]

Silmarillion Fandom Terminology Quiz

So, I'm doing a project for linguistics class and I'm studying fandom terminology in the Silmarillion fandom and whether or not demographics make a difference. The only demographics are age category, gender, continent, language background, and fandom background, after which you get into more fun questions, including but not limited to...

What is a Blorbo?

The Thorn Debate

What is "Accidental Baby Acquisition"?

Who is Crablor

What is a "PWP"

The quiz has three sections: Demographics, General Fandom Terms, and Silmarillion Specific Terms. Have fun with it, share it with your Silm friends!

Edit: Will close November 15th so I have time to process the results before presenting them.

Edit edit: Due to the sheer number of responses (I may have forgotten how... academically inclined this fandom is lol) I will be closing the survey on November 1st. Thank you all for your lovely contributions so far! I think I saw Fëanor called a "bitch-ass prescriptivist" and I think my professor will get a kick out of that 🤣

[winterpinetrees]

The Silmarillion is a book that fills me with many emotions, but the only part that makes me feel anger -not tragic grief at the narrative, but real anger- is the ending where the Lord of the Rings is summarized in three paragraphs.

It makes me feel anger because it gives a comparison for just how summarized the rest of the Silmarillion is. The entire fall of the Noldor, written in a way that condenses Frodo and Sam’s whole journey to “alone with his servant he passed through peril and darkness and came at last in Sauron’s despite even to Mount Doom”.

What else did Tolkien imagine over five hundred years of history that didn’t make it into any of his notes? What did he not imagine that still must have occurred? Who are the Boromirs and the Eowyns and the Bilbos of the first age? What witch-kings did they slay and what quests did they begin? What were the riddles and the detours and the love stories?

Its all been forgotten. No one knows anymore, and it’s likely that no one ever did. Not even Professor Tolkien.

[whovianofmidgard]

I've heard of preferences both ways as well as dislikes over which is better from ao3 users: have a one-shot collection in a multi-chap format or put one-shots into a series for fics in the same verse/connected storyline. So I place the question before y'all

Edit: I see some of the replies say but this poll is NOT about collections with multi fandom works. That's a discussion for some other time. This poll is specifically for fics that take place in the same fic narrative/AU. Please keep that in mind

Please reblog for reach

[owlwinter8]

I made a fanbind of the incredible Anastasis by @chthonion!! This fic series is truly something special, and even on my first read I knew that I wanted to bind it. This was also my first bookbind where I fully felt like I knew what I was doing, and I'm incredibly proud of how it came out!!

Art inspo: Stellar Corona by eradelphic and Through Window Up by Ninhol Cover/back/spine art has been uploaded here! <3 EDIT: Typeset has been added to the google drive with author permission as well!

[braxix]

Next up: All of Valinor is confused on where Elrond came from. Finrod decides to play detective and finds out Elrond called Maedhros atya this one time. He puts 2 and 2 together and gets 5. Everyone is confused.

[eloquentsisyphianturmoil]

It’s just that Fingon’s like that stereotypical son who calls his mum and walks old ladies across the street, mows the lawn for his neighbours, brings home nice, pretty girls who want to be kindergarten teachers or something and is really passionate about some niche compassionate topic like children in poverty’s access to multiple sclerosis treatment and who everyone says is ‘such a nice boy’ but then he goes and dates the eldest kid of Mr. Stay Away From My Boys, Son, a flaming ginger who most people haven’t heard speak. And this is hilarious.

[tanoraqui]

In Which Space Orcs are Men

[AO3] A "what if humans are space orcs" take on Dagor Dagorath. (Aka the prophecied apocalypse of Middle Earth. Scifi story accessible to non-LotR nerds!)

Elves weren't really supposed to leave Earth. That's what they told us—the Elves, that is, told people thousands of years ago, when Elves could still be found here and there. When I was born, elves were nearly as much a fairy tale as they’d been on Ancient Earth.

Elves weren't supposed to leave Earth, the Elves said in the fairy tales, and in a few old scraps of records scattered around known space. They literally weren't made for it. They could only do it if they brought Earth with them—Arda they called it, leaves or dirt, water or a rare bubble of air, perfectly preserved in a white crystal. There are tons of tales about Elves losing their lifeline jewels—their hearts, their silimirs—and roping people into epic quests to get them back before they—the Elf—faded to nothingness. 

Even the jewels weren't enough, though. That's why there are also stories about Elves who fell in love with a person or a place and stayed there until they faded, or Elves who charmed someone into following them back to Fairyland on Earth...because whatever they said, Elves didn't really live on Earth. Humans have maintained their home planet as a monitored nature reserve since like the 40th century, open only to vetted research teams and serious Human religious pilgrimages. The most confirmed accounts of Elves that exist are of their ships appearing out of nowhere, with no trace of any tech that would enable it, at random, always-changing points within 100 miles or so of Earth.

Nobody ever came back from trying to follow Elves home. Mostly Elves tried to dissuade people from trying. But there are always crazy and curious people—and Elves usually attracted those, because any Elf who left the home they were "made" for was usually crazy and curious themselves. 

Those were the stories I grew up with. There was a cave near the orphans' creche which was supposed to be haunted by a faded Elf. I didn't really believe it—like I said, the last confirmed Elf was last seen like 5,000 years ago, and not even on my planet. People have met two dozen new sentient races since then. We've discovered that reincarnation is probably real (just functionally untrackable), prompting the Pan-Religious Reform Wars. The last person to see a live Elf was still traveling via natural wormholes—they literally didn't know that you could loop pi.

.

When the Human natal sun started to turn really red, it wasn’t that big a deal at first. It’s a very important, very sad event for any species, but it happens to everyone eventually. It happened to the Hectort just after we invented interstellar flight. There were some unusual gravatic waves around Earth’s Sol, but nothing worth noting to anyone who didn’t already care for personal reasons.

Then the Elves sent us a message.

The local Parks Service picked it up, of course. I bet the Humans meant to hush it up at first—though the Centaurian government still won’t admit anything—but someone leaked it immediately on the intergalactic net. It should’ve only been famous as a joke of a hoax, but…

It was basically just a metal box with rudimentary fire-thrusters soldered on the sides. It contained two things. The first was a recording/replaying device so antiquated that the only way they got it working is that it was already playing on loop, and didn’t stop until someone disconnected it from its power source.

The message was in Ancient Bouban, which some folklorist soon announced is the latest language an Elf could know, since the last known Elf went back to “Arda.” The voice somehow sounded melodic to every species with a concept of music, from the screeching Vesarians to the deep-sea sub-sonic Thinkers, even when translated through cheap, staticky speakers. And to most species, the speaker was audibly distraught.

They said,

This is the final message from the Firstborn of Eru to the Secondborn, and everyone else. The Battle of Battles has come, and we…are losing. If there are any who remember the ancient love and loyalty which bound our peoples, if there are any heirs remaining of Thargalax the Magnificent, of Nine-Fingered Frodo, of the noble Houses of Haleth, Hador and Beor—

The speaker drew a sharp breath, there.

—by great oaths and greater friendship I bid you now to raise your swords and ride to our aid. Ride as swiftly as you can!

We will hold for another year. We will, they said determinedly. After that, it is unlikely that…

Another, shakier breath. A smile forced into a voice which would rather weep.

Fëanáro and Nienna believe there is a way to destroy the Straight Road. If we must, if it comes to it, we will do so, and trap the First Enemy here in this dying world with us. Though I don’t know about—

Hair-aristocrat! a more distant, slightly less perfectly melodious voice called, in a language so dead that they needed computers to decode it. The walls are falling, we need to go!

If you never hear from us again, and no sudden discord arises among you, you will know we succeeded, the first speaker said quickly. If otherwise…I am sorry. Either way, I bid you all only, remember us! Oh beautiful flames, remember us, as we have ever remembered y— 

There was a sudden screech of tearing metal, a defiant, musical battle-cry, and a jarring silence. Then the message restarted.

And that wasn’t even the strangest thing in the box. The strangest thing was the recorder’s power source, which was powering the whole tiny rocket mechanism as well. It was an Elf-jewel right out of a fairy tale, a fist-sized, translucent not-quite-diamond—but instead of rock or water or a much-loved scrap of plant, the only thing it held was light.

...Kind of. It isn’t normal light. It arguably isn’t light at all, as we know it—scientists now think it’s technically some sort of plasmoid aether, except it only acts like a plasmoid aether about half the time. 

It has no detectable source within the jewel. It fully illuminates whatever space it’s in, no matter how big. Its visible radiation is a frequency, the scientists say, that matches a hyper-accelerated version of what the universe must’ve sounded like in the split second after the Big Bang.

It makes people remember things, when they see it in person or sometimes even across a holo. Some remember a similar light in a strange traveler’s eyes. Others, dreamily enchanted valleys where spring never faded, or tall castles, bright swords, and stern and glorious lords and ladies. And some of us got hit with a whole lifetime of memories in one go: an identical gem on the brow of a sober forest king, friends who slipped through trees like shadows save for their merry laughter, an impossibly beautiful gold-haired maiden dancing in a glittering cavern...

(And all the pain and loss that came with them.)

And some people just remember the sight of a distant star—in another world, in another lifetime.

Reincarnation was provable but untraceable…until now. 

The Thinker ambassador on Astrolax Station 5 was the first to kick up a fuss. Most Thinkers never leave their home planet, they're too huge and aquatic. But like I said, there's always crazy and curious people. The ambassador started bellowing the second che heard the message, without even seeing the light, because, "I know him! My Wisdom! We must send aid!" That made some news, and random other people shared their own, less dramatic revelations, and soon a compilation swept the net with timestamps showing that most of them were organically independent, not just jumping on the bandwagon….

Even that might've gotten written off intergalactically. The Thinkers are big in reincarnationist circles, on account of how they claim that deep in their planetary ocean they can hear echoes of their past lives. But being mostly planet-bound means they're not really influential on a big political level. Or it would've sparked another surge of the Reform Wars, and everybody would've remembered the rock, but not the recording. Or there would’ve been a fight over this potentially infinite energy source (though that is so last giga-annum)….

But first it was shown in person to the current Director of the Admiralty of the Astral Alliance, President of the X-ee Empire and Matron of the House of S,sh, Ch’ees/i’i S,sh. I was actually there—I was Captain of her ceremonial Alliance guards, in a last-ditch attempt to salvage my career after Zanzibus. Very ceremonial, considering the X-eee have laser-proof shells and pincers and I have, what, opposable thumbs? Vestigial tusks?

I wasn’t paying attention at first, too busy being suddenly assaulted by all my own memories. So I missed the President freezing mid-step and gasping (in X-eee), “Mother.” I also missed her rising alarm call of an attempt to speak Ancient Elvish without an Elvish tongue or lips.

I sure didn’t miss her snap back to X-eee for a sharp call to attention, and everything that followed: the call to arms! The rousing of the Alliance! A tour of the galaxy, to find anyone and everyone else in whom the Light could awaken ancient memories! And for the love of X'eeh, why had nobody figured out how to get back to Fairyland with this thing yet, and every warship in the quadrant?!

If I believed in the One Behind, or in any other creator god or gods—I'm not saying I do, but if I did, if there really is something out there all-powerful and all-kind—then it'd be because out of every soul in the entire universe, the probably one in the best position to act on the Elves' message turned out to have, from a past life, two parents and a much-loved twin still in Fairyland. Like, that's insane, right?

I stayed with the Director's ceremonial guards for the whole tour, actually more than ceremonial for once—it was the weirdest mission of my life, and I've been on a lot of weird missions. Or supposedly routine missions that got weird (and usually disastrous). My friends joke that I'm cursed. S,sh requisitioned an Inquiry-class ship, so the science boffins could study the Light and jewel along the way, and we started wormholing at weft speed, hitting a new planet every week. Sometimes every day. In each major spaceport and ground-city, S,sh stood with the jewel on the highest available point and gave a recruitment speech for going to save the Elves and fight the oldest enemy of all reality. 

Honestly, it seemed a little redundant? The Astral Alliance was made for this sort of rescue mission (and for escorting trade convoys). But I was...if not happy, then sure as hell more self-certain with my ancient memories restored, and most people who joined up seemed to agree. It was mostly people who remembered, when exposed to the Light, who joined—so before long, we had a whole tag-along trail of mostly civilian ships, trying to get up to Alliance Fleet standard on the road in less than a year.

Three different religious sects tried to kill S,sh for "profaning the mysteries." Five others tried to steal the jewel because we were apparently appropriating a holy object. The boffins announced that, bar the can't-prove-a-negative possibility, the evidently sourceless Light should be counted as an infinite energy source, and at least seven different groups, ruthless financiers and sustainability idealists, immediately tried to steal it for that. And I still don't know what the rival thief-queens of Likkiliani were about, except that I got tied up upside-down from a palmdar tree for two hours trying to stop one, the other paid me 700 cron then threw me off a cliff, and in the end they recognized each other from past lives and just made out on worldwide live-holo before joining our growing fleet. 

It turned out they were the Director's past life's great-grandparents, and a Canid pop princess was her niece. The Thinker ambassador was some sort of ancestor, too. Crazy extended family. 

Most people who remember just remember the sight of a star in the sky. A buddy of mine from Fleet Academy remembered looking up at it as a Human sailor. The historians—and you’d better bet we picked up some Earther historians on this mission as well!—say this jewel or one like it was probably astrologically conflated with the planet Venus by early Humans.

(The more time I spent around the jewel, the Silmaril, the more I remembered, of my first life and more. Lifetime after lifetime with bad luck dogging my steps, killing loved ones in my arms, destroying cities I was supposed to save… One restless, haunted night, I met a Rigilic in the cafeteria who’d been awake with some of the same nightmares, who’d been my dead older sister once.)

The tour was cut short when word came from the Earth system that there was a black hole growing in the center of their reddening sun. 

No, the sun wasn’t compressing into a black hole millennia ahead of schedule—one had just spontaneously manifested within it, like it’d teleported in. No, not literally—that was impossible. We were pretty sure. No, the sun wasn’t falling into it…somehow. Yet. The black hole was only 17 quectometers wide, but it was growing at an erratic but unceasing rate. If their best estimation of the pattern held, it would consume the sun 2 months before the Elves’ deadline, and the Earth 4 to 950 minutes later.

We pulled back to Earth—well, to the dwarf planet Eros, on the edges of Earth’s star system. That’s where the nearest shipyard of any note was, and we were gathering the whole Astral Alliance. This is exactly the sort of thing the Alliance is for. 

I was released back to ship duty. Zanzibus was still a black mark on my record, as was Jorab, and really everything on the AAS Endeavor…and that thing in third year of Fleet Academy… But no matter how bad my curse, I was an experienced captain and one of the best pilots in the Alliance. For this, we needed all the best.

The boffins had pretty quickly mastered limited manipulation of the Light, using modified aetheric resonators, and every day they came up with something new for us to test. They focused the Light into a laser cannon like no one has seen before. They laced it through plasma shields until a fully shielded ship glowed like a distant star. They managed to nearly replicate the Silmaril’s crystalline structure, so they could make “copies” that shone like the original for first a few hours; then, with refinement, a full week…

The one thing they couldn’t pin down with any real confidence was how to get to Fairyland. The frequency of the Light resonated with large bodies of Earther saltwater in a particular way, and models suggested that if the Light source moved horizontally along the water within a certain range of distance and velocity, the resonance would create a wormhole-like ripple in space—but wormhole-like, was the key word, and models suggested. The closest anyone had seen to that spatial distortion was in a logbook of dubious veracity from the Delta Quadrant, four hundred years ago. Alteia, my Academy buddy who’d been a Human sailor, took the Silmaril in an M-wing on a series of highly monitored test flights above the Atlantic Ocean, and space did repeatedly start to hollow in front of bom—so bo had to stop every time, rather than risk vanishing with our single, maybe-one-way ticket.

Then Earth’s moon stopped shining in the sky. Its albedo just dropped nearly to zero, from one night to the next. There was nothing wrong that anyone could figure out—nothing with the orbit, nothing with the surface rock, nothing with the artificial atmosphere. Inhabitants reported feeling colder by several degrees, but no measuring equipment recorded anything.

The black hole slightly off-center in the middle of Sol was now 844.9 zeptometers, and growing more steadily.

We didn’t have time to keep testing. We needed to raise our swords and make our ride, even if we only got one shot at it.

I was given command, for seniority, skill, and because I was the one who managed to talk S,sh out of leading the fleet herself. (If my lives had taught me anything, it was the importance of having someone, anyone, ready to be emergency backup.) Ironically, I was back on the Endeavor, with most of my old crew—though we got permission to rename the ship, in honor of the mission. A lot of people did. Alteia was now commanding the AAS Elendil on my right flank, star-friend in Ancient Elvish. That Canid pop princess had taken over a hospital ship and renamed it Rivendell. An Earth Park Ranger, of all things, remembered being my dad—briefly—and he was leading the Rangers plus my Rigilic drinking buddy on the EPSS Elfsheen. 

We weren’t sure if any ship but the one with the Silmaril would get through. The fleet numbered in the hundreds in battleships alone, not counting scouts and scuttlers. Twelve races had sent ships on top of their typical Alliance Fleet tithe, and S,sh had brought about half the full force of the X-ee Empire. We all just locked tractor beams and hoped. 

I was piloting as well as captaining, with the Silmaril between my forehorns. It was held in place by about a dozen wires and other connectors to the ship, like an old-timey pilot’s headset. We took off in orbit around Earth, as close as possible to the surface—not very close, in warships of Class S and higher, but within range of the oceanic resonance. A Likkilianian thief-queen stood at my shoulder, ready to advise if anything “Musical” started to happen.

Think about what you’re trying to get to, and why, the boffins had advised, so I did—bright-eyed kings and dancing maidens; lost friends, families, cities, planets and all. The jewel got warmer against my skin and shone brighter with every pulse of the engine, brighter than we should’ve been able to see through.

The silver-gold Light twisted and diffused as space did around us. But there was no familiar rippling wormhole boundary—instead, spacetime thinned to a curtain like driving rain, like Vesarian silver-glass.

A ghost appeared next to me. She looked like the oldest, grumpiest writing teacher at the crèche, though I knew that was only in my head.

“There you are,” she said, impatient and relieved like I’d been hiding in the sandbox again, rather than coming to class on time. Her sewing scissors went snip snip snip as she darted them around my body—and a chain on my soul faded into guiding threads.

Before she’d even disappeared again, I punched the engine and blasted through the silver-glass curtain.

Fairy tales said there’d be a peerlessly beautiful land on the other side, green with eternal spring, full of endless light and laughter. They said there’d be sunlit shores and shimmering waves, with welcoming docks for sea-ships, sky-ships and space-ships all…

We flew into the worst battlefield I’d ever seen, in any lifetime. It was more desperately vicious than Jerusalem V at the height of the Reform Wars, more ruined than Glaurung’s wake, more desolate than Zanzibus after the nuclears fell.

Either a massive supercontinent or a small moon had been shattered, leaving nothing but a roiling debris field. The brand-new meteoroids ranged from pebbles to rocks the size of a small space station, and included space-frozen corpses, forests, and what might have once been city blocks.

I gave the helm back to my Pilot Officer—zer had, I can admit, slightly better reflexes for dodging debris—and focused on captaining.

Most of the life signs were clinging to the larger rocks. There shouldn’t have been atmosphere for them, but walls of thunderstorm wrapped around every shard with even a single life sign—wind and water desperately hand in hand to safeguard the last of the Elves. The only thing visible through the impossible storms was the Light of a second Silmaril, on a meteoroid shaped like half a broken eggshell.

A corpse lay at the epicenter of the explosion—what might’ve been a corpse, if it wasn’t also shattered. The broken pieces of a massive stone humanoid, taller than my ship if it’d stood beside her, still bleeding lava so hot that it burned even in frozen space. Another titan knelt at the shards of its head, a figure of towering bark and leaves, wailing with grief even worse than the end of the world. 

A slimmer tree-woman stood with one hand on her shoulder, comforting, and the other wielding a skyscraper-sized club spiked with incandescent wildflowers. Guarding her sister’s heartbreak, she fended off a swarm of bat-sized monsters with wings of darkness and whips of flame. 

Bat-sized relative to the gods of Elves and ancient Humans. About the size of an M-wing, in flight.

Countless more of the bat-things flung themselves at the storm-bubbles, like carnivores chasing the prey hidden inside. They were fended off by an equal army of creatures with wings of light and swords of lightning, led by a towering figure who seemed to dance from one bloody battle to the next.

The biggest battle by far was the farthest away, over where the sun had been. In this dimension of stories over science, Sol was another woman-shape, smaller than the others but burning just as brightly as her star. Also just as blood-red. The light was centered on a fist she kept clenched at her chest, and instead of containing the black hole, the unseeable thing that it was here surrounded her, striking at her with a thousand hungry jaws and grasping legs, and she had only a one-handed whip of a solar flare to fend it off—

But she didn’t fight alone. A warrior tore at the Darkness’s spidery limbs with his fists, image on the cameras flickering impossibly between every hero I’d ever heard of. A snarling figure bit at it with jagged teeth, gored it with horns, shredded it with claws and talons, and generally made every ancient prey-instinct in me scream. And a queen with a crown of stars, a shield like the night sky and a sword like a streaking comet, stood dauntlessly at the sun-holder’s side. 

With all that, and with the speed of even her most exhausted strikes, I thought the sun-holder could probably have gotten away if she’d tried. But I knew how a person fought when they weren’t willing to leave a friend, and a smaller, silver figure lay at her feet, unmoving and drained of light.

But even the battle for the sun wasn’t what grabbed my eye. No—all my attention, all my guiding threads of fate and the quick temper that always used to get me in trouble, before (and sometimes after) I learned to leash it in an Alliance uniform— All of that took me straight to the fight happening orthogonal to the stone giant’s corpse.

It was another one-versus-many. Morgoth, the First Enemy of Elves and Men— Master of Lies, Maker of Chains, Sonofabitch Curser of Bloodlines—towered over even his fellow gods. His shape changed constantly, sickeningly, but it was always black-armored with eyes like dying stars that hated you personally. His maul dripped with lava and every other kind of blood.

He fought against three great gray figures who moved as one. The tallest wielded a star-studded scythe with swift, efficient strokes, and wore the dark gray of corpse-shrouds. The shortest shimmered with more colors than even a Stamotapadon could dream of, and his weapon shifted likewise. The third was the clear, clean gray of skies after rain or tears run dry, and fought with only a shield—and hit harder with it than either of her brothers.

Around their heads darted the only Elves on the battlefield, in small fliers more like sea-ships than aircraft. But they moved fluidly, pestering the Dark Lord like flies, pricking his skin and threatening his burning eyes.

Until Morgoth swung his maul with a roar of fury that traveled even though soundless space. My ship and heart both shuddered. The gray gods all staggered back, and the Elves fell from the no-longer-sky—all but their leader, more fire than flesh, who wore the third Silmaril. Morgoth caught him in one massive black hand and with sharp claws plucked the jewel away, as easily as a ripe berry from a tree—

“All power to fore-cannon and fire,” I ordered—and the jewel on my brow shone bright again as several stored months’ worth of infinite Silmaril-Light slammed into Morgoth’s chest with all the force that the best scientists in the Astral Alliance could engineer. 

He stumbled. He dropped both the jewel and the elf-king (who’d been trying to bite him). The Lady of Mercy tossed her shield to catch them, staying low and out of sight—though she needn’t have bothered. The so-called “Lord of All” had already found his next enemy.

“All ships, move forward and join shields,” I ordered, and met his burning stare though the viewscreen. “Then broadcast me on all external frequencies.”

The wires on my forehead shimmered as we shifted Light-flow to the shields—and to my right, so did the Elendil, and to my left, the Cosmian Blade, and all around us the Minas Tirith, the Elfsheen, the Muse, the Rivendell, the Heart of Zanzi, the Longbottom Leaf… They were still soaring out of the silvery distortion behind me, tractor- and Silmaril-towed: sleek Rigilic eels-of-prey and Centaurian cruisers full of Humans eager to fight for their homeworld, Betan mine-ships and Canid X-M-wings and my own Hectoan starlighters, a full third of the X-ee navy with their X-eee–shaped six-engine dreadnoughts, and hundreds more. 

“This is Captain Pel Cinia, once Túrin Turambar, of the Astral Alliance ship Gurthang,” I said. My words were broadcast from every ship on every frequency in every language that the people of Arda might know, as the Fleet assembled from forty-plus different worlds flew into position. Our Light-infused shields blazed and locked together, until we formed a seamless wall right in the Enemy’s face, with the Elves and their other allies safely behind us.

I’ve never felt more proud to recite the most cliché line in the Fleet:

“We got your distress call. We’re here to help.”

[ylieke]

My cover for @eternal-fear's Silmarillion fanfic! Which they are still to finalize a little bit😅

[nerdanelparmandil]

I'm sure many have said this, but it always makes me weak to think that Feanor, brilliant and tragic High Prince, the most beautiful of the Noldor, the master of language and smithwork, the greatest mind the Noldor have ever seen, falls in love - still young - with Nerdanel, who is great in her field and as keen as him, but is a normal girl, not nobleborn, not even considered pretty, but he loves her and values her. They travel together, they share the same passions, he loves her for her mind, her hunger for knowledge, her strength. He found his match in her, although she was also different - calmer, gentler, wiser.

Feanor's descent starts when he turns away from her counsel, when the first cracks in their marriage appear, and she is not swayed by him, she knows he is wrong and she holds her ground.

This is not in the published Silm and it's just a version of the story, but Feanor's words to her - were she a true wife - tell me of someone who is incredibly bitter and angry that their wife has left him when he thought she should have followed them. Despite the long estrangement, he still expected her to follow him. He managed to move an entire kingdom, but not his own wife.

How strong she must have been to survive the grief.

[mossy-thing]

I am pretty sure I won't be writing a modern Silmarillion AU anytime soon, but if I do, there will absolutely be moments where someone is saying "I'd rather (thing that was a source of great pain and or death in canon) than (uncomfortable thing)".

Something along the lines of this:

Finrod: "I would rather be mauled by wolves than study for that exam."

Turgon: "I would rather be crushed by a tower than pull another allnighter."

Maedhros: "I would rather hang from a cliff for 30 years than ask him out."

I think that would be really funny.

[haladriel]

‘What if Ilúvatar is wrong?’

The room gasps.

The clamouring forge has silenced. Mairon stills under the shadow of his patron and looks around, realising that what he has just said is something perhaps no one in this room has ever thought, let alone given word.

Aulë is furious. He knows that by the glint in his eye and the twitch of his hand. But weighing heavier than that, Aulë is scared. Mairon knows the history of how one of Eru Ilúvatar’s greatest Valar fell to dissonance, and he has heard stories— no, furtive whispers of its subject. Melkor.

In this moment, he hopes for Aulë to counsel him.

But his father chooses to ignore his outburst as if it were uncharacteristic and cheerily continue his instruction. And yet, as Mairon returns to his station afterwards, he notices how the look of abject fear remains in his mentor’s eyes. Fear that his favoured one, his Most Admirable, might not be quite as admirable as he would first seem.

So Mairon is left alone to his hammer and metal beating. With every strike, a new question comes. What does his outburst mean? Is he not worthy to serve the will of the One? Is his desire for everything to be as good, as perfect as it can at odds with the Plan somehow? He does not see how it should be. How can it be a transgression to wish to make something better than it already is? To share ideas and transact thoughts on how best to create something, not just blindly follow a set of instructions?

If only they’d let him think.

But no. He must do as Aulë instructs. And he does it well; puts all of his effort into making sure every exacting detail is followed, precisely and meticulously, to produce the perfect version of what he is being asked to make.

He will not call it perfect, for the design was flawed from the beginning.

[echo-bleu]

“How do you even know he's alive?” asks Fingon.

Maglor watches him for a long moment, his face grave and closed in a way Fingon doesn't remember ever seeing before.

“Come with me,” he finally says.

With a swish of his long cloak, his armour perfectly oiled and silent, he turns around and leads Fingon to a side door. They ascend the winding, undecorated steps in silence. Fingon has a million things to say, to ask, to shout now that they're in private, but in the face of Maglor's stone countenance, the magnitude of the loss of his uncle and Maedhros, he can no longer find the words.

Before the narrow, windowless staircase can grow fully dark, the light of the sun filters in from another opening at the top. They come out on a crenelled tower, far above the rest of the fortress. Fingon looks around, discovering the lands of Beleriand from a bird's point of view.

Maglor stands there and waits him out without a word. When Fingon finally turns to him, he gestures at the North. There, beyond the snow-covered plains and pine forests, looms a sheer black cliff.

“Angband,” Maglor says. “The mountain is called Thangorodrim.”

“What am I looking for?”

Maglor sighs and shields his eyes from the sun with his hands, staring at the cliff face. “Close to the top, where it's the sheerest.”

Fingon squints. He doesn't know what to expect, so he has no time to shield his mind between the moment he spots a figure up there, dangling from the cliff, and the moment he understands.

Maglor reels back, as if struck. Fingon finds that he can't breathe.

He falls to his knees against the battlement. Nothing can make him tear his eyes from the figure of Maedhros hanging by his arm from the cliff. His stomach is trying to rebel, and tears blur his vision, keeping him from desperately looking for any sign of life.

“How long?” he manages to choke out.

“Almost two years, as close as I could tell,” Maglor says. He doesn't sound much less choked up, though this is clearly a habitual sight to him.

Two years. Almost two thirds of the time it took them to cross the Ice.

How has Maedhros survived this long?

“There's a winged creature who comes to feed him once a week.” Maglor must have caught his thought. “Well, force-feed him, really. I suppose Morgoth must think him a valuable hostage.” He pauses for a moment, still staring forward. “He's not wrong.”

Fingon has had too much. The strangled sob in his throat comes out as a cry of rage.

“And you've just left him there?”

For some reason when I was first reading the Silmarillion I got it into my head that they could see Maedhros from Mithrim... It's not geographically correct, but it's heartbreaking enough to share. The years mentioned here are of course Tree years, ten Sun years apiece.

[leucisticpuffin]

breakdown/mending

“I cannot do this,” says Makalaurë, breaking his own stilted attempt at a formal greeting, and crumples like a cloth doll at my bedside. 

It is the first time he has come alone. He slipped into the tent early this morning, hollow-eyed in the grey light; now he screams into my blankets, and the medicine-bottles tremble upon the low table. 

(Of all my brothers, Makalaurë was ever the quickest to tears. He wept for lost toys and stories, for quarrels between brothers and grievances not his own, for beautiful songs and unexpected gifts – but not like this. Not over me.)

“Káno, Káno,” I say, the nickname strange and rough in my mouth. “Why come here, if the sight of me upsets thee so?” 

It is meant as a joke, but I know at once it is wrong: it is too near the truth. Angamando, I am told, has warped my sense of humour.

 “I am sorry,” Makalaurë sobs, straining for control of his voice. “This is not – I did not come to thee for this–”

His hands twist in the tangle of his hair, pulling at his scalp as he used to when he was very small and upset. “Stop, Káno, you will hurt yourself,” I tell him – but I am too harsh, and he flinches.

I knew how to calm him, once. Remembering is like looking through poorly-made glass, smoke-tainted and full of imperfections; but I know there was once a bright-haired, handsome child who held his little brother tight and stroked his hair while he cried. 

That child, I think, would know what to do. 

Even slow and halting movement jars my shoulder painfully. Still I reach for Makalaurë, thinking to take his hand – but I cannot do it. Touch is hateful to me now, the healers’ ministrations all my fragile skin can bear. A glancing touch, and against my will my hand draws back – my fingers shake, bone-white and too thin – I dare not try again. 

It would not do any good. My scars are the cause of my brother’s distress: he looks at me as if he had cut every mark himself. How, then, could I be a comfort to him?

This is how I know myself changed: Makalaurë weeps before me, and I cannot console him. 

@maedhrosmaglorweek, Day Two: Trust/Distrust