"Atar?"
Makalaurë stood uncertainly in the doorway to Fëanáro's study.
"Káno." Fëanáro didn't turn towards him, but he did put down his pen. "You couldn't sleep?"
He shook his head, though his father couldn't see it. "No."
Fëanáro did turn around then. "Why not?"
Makalaurë took a deep breath. "Nightmares." He said it small, not quite wanting to be heard. "I think there's something underneath my bed."
Fëanáro tilted his head slightly to the left. Makalaurë waited for him to laugh, say he was being silly and was really getting too old for this and should go back to bed. That was what Nerdanel always said, and Maitimo let Makalaurë stay with him but Makalaurë could tell he thought the same thing.
But he didn't laugh, didn't say any of that. Instead he leaned forward towards Makalaurë and whispered, "Do you want me to slay the monster for you?"
"Yes, please."
"Then you have to be quiet," Fëanáro whispered as he stood up. "We don't want it to hear us."
Fëanáro grabbed his sword on the way out. Makalaurë smiled, and followed his father.
When they reached Makalurë's bedroom door, Fëanáro stopped and turned to him. "I'm going to need you to stand guard. Can you do that?"
Makalaurë was eager to agree, though his stomach churned.
When Fëanáro entered his room and slowly, quietly, shut the door behind him, it only grew worse.
Through the door, Makalaurë did not hear the clash of metal on metal.
But he heard other things: the scrape of claws, the thud of books hitting the floor, the huffing of a fighter's breath.
And he heard Fëanáro's yell of triumph.
When Fëanáro left his room, he was grinning ear to ear in triumph, and spattered with red monster's blood.
(Later, Maglor looks back and realizes that it was probably some kind of sauce, that his father had disheveled his own appearance and strewn objects about Maglor's room himself. And he laughs, at Fëanor for doing it and at himself for believing it.)
"The monster will never trouble you again," Fëanáro says, and he's right. Makalaurë doesn't have another nightmare — at least, not as a child.
He slept well for the rest of the night, and so he didn't see his father burning the hideous, monstrous corpse outside his window.
Neither did anybody else.