So sorry for deleting chapters! I've just changed the concept of this story a little, hence the confusion, but no more mess, I promise ;) This chapter stays here, the next shall be new.

Maeglin

A young swallow sat on Maeglin's nose only to fly away swiftly. The Elf felt it, however, awakening. Rhond*, it came to him, and the thought wheeled in his head, repeating itself again and again endlessly as he lay motionless on the icy floor. Yes, the floor was as cold as ice, and he felt its coldness. I trond, i trond, i trond!

He slowly opened his eyes and his gaze moved lazily but hungrily across the black night sky stretching high above him, strewn with dozens of stars. Maeglin used to like stars once, back when he had been a child, these little shy and only lamps shining merrily over the choking blackness of Father's house and the woods of Nan Elmoth... Ah, just to reach for their light and throw it into the crucible as steel once in Gondolin's smithy... To feel the tongs again in the hands, and the hammer, and the burin, and watch the new be born in the sizzle and glow of the fire and begin to live in its deadness.

Maeglin suddenly realised that his fingers were involuntarily clenching, as if holding an invisible tool, and his breathing stopped for a moment in amazement and delight. Since he had a body again, he also had hands, he had hands!

He rose feverishly to sit and began to scrutinise them, each of the long, slender fingers, one by one. Nothing had changed, everything was the same as before... Or earlier even than before, in his childhood and early youth, when his fingers had still been smooth, with no scars or burns, without a shade of that particular delicate roughness given to them along with the years spent in the smithy and the mine.

His heart hammered as he picked himself off the floor. I trond! Suddenly he desired to see more than the hands, to see everything, and let himself run, amain and unconsciously, through a cloister as long and glistening as an ice-bound river, along a row of pillars, silvery even in the faint glow of stars and the sickle of moon.

At last he halted, though, having realised his own folly, and laughed darkly. Yes, you are but a fool, Maeglin, son of Eöl, if the body was able to capture your memory even for a moment. We truly wholly belong to Arda, if even years in the Void do not allow us to free ourselves from thoughts only of our own bodies. Blessed are the Men, who are at last given a chance to value their souls more than their own hands... Blessed? Be damned Men! She wed the Man, she loved the Man, she did, she did...!

What mirror could he have found hither anyway and why would he need it? Why would he need a looking glass?

'Hateful glances you are gifting me, Maeglin, the Sharp Glance,' Father had sneered once, back in Nan Elmoth, 'even as I am telling you the truth only: for desire is the only truth about people. Everything is based on desire, everyone desires. Desire is hasty and greedy, it devours slowly, burns till we become nothing but ashes, yet even then we cannot free ourselves from it. Desire steers everything, breeds the greatest beauty and the greatest doom. Hateful glances you keep gifting me, yet you are nought but the fruit of my blood. I might see myself in you as in a looking glass, for you are me. Yes, Maeglin, you are me, and ah, you do desire as well! Ah, you do!' Father had chuckled, his chuckle like the contented grunts of a wolf.

The memory of that laughter, vivid as heavy heartbeats in his chest obscured Maeglin's eyes in a haze of darkness. Eöl's laughter soon transformed into the clang of swords, the rumble of crashing walls. Fire everywhere, lots of fire mussing every corner of the Hidden City with cruel grace, and puffs of smoke, choking grey clouds...

Maeglin's heart began to sink. At the last moment, he searched the air with his hand for anything to lean on and not fall inertly to the floor. His fingers began to move, getting to know the structure of the material: it was not a wall, it was not a pillar, and not a rock either... it was the porous bark of a tree, Maeglin realised, his fingers slipping amidst its rough valleys and sliding into the heights. Astonished, he lifted his head and shuddered. He had never seen such a tree: in the poor light of night it looked almost ghastly, its strange red leaves blackening in the gloom, resembling hundreds of hands dipped in clotted blood. And, the tree... was staring at him as hungrily as though it wanted to suck the soul out of him to the last shred.

Not many of those shreds still remained, Maeglin laughed painfully. He might have had back the body of an Elf, yet his soul was now that of an Orc or something even more hideous.

The tree watched with the omniscient, mocking gaze of Father, the omniscient gaze of... Maeglin froze when a sudden sound coming from behind began to vibrate in the silence of the air and in his ears. The uneven, almost noiseless thud of footsteps against the floor. Thudump-thump. Thudump-thump. Thudump-thump.

Always are we accompanied by some shadow, without looking back, the Elf smiled with helpless derision. Here he is, King of the World, Lord of the Fates of Arda, able to outwit the powers of the Valar and escape the Void, yet unable to dispose of lameness gifted him by Grandfather Fingolfin.

He waited, his heartbeat like a herd of galloping horses competing with the ever-louder sound of footsteps. He did not leave his place even when he already felt close the presence of another body. After a moment, a black-gloved hand emerged from behind Maeglin's own back, holding the golden handle of a little mirror, which it placed at the height of his face. "Is this what thou have sought?"

Quenya!, Maeglin wondered. Why? He had never spoken to him in Quenya before. The Elf had heard him use Valarin once, when he had been particularly pleased, and to him he had always spoken in Sindarin, yet never in Quenya. After all, he loathed the Noldor far more than he could ever loathe the Sindar. So why now...?

Quickly, however, something entirely else caught Maeglin's attention. His gaze moved across the glass of the mirror from the reflection of his own face and glittering dark eyes to another face, gleaming like a crystal even in the gloom of night, with eyes as blue as cloudless skies. Maeglin's heart fluttered in boundless terror and he turned around hastily.

The figure he beheld had nothing of the rough, monstrous silhouette of Morgoth that he remembered. Standing before him was now Morgoth full of a charm that even the most gorgeous Eldar must have lacked. His hair, long and sleek, shone with silvery moon-tints, falling over the black robe which his tall, slender figure was clad in. Starlight illuminated his pale, almost white face and the ornaments of his robe that glimmered like ice crystals.

Maeglin stared at him for a while as though bewitched, wondering if this was the visible form Eru had created for him, the finest of his Ainur, at the very beginning of history, in the time of the Great Music, or if he had invented it anew for himself. For it was Morgoth no longer, but Melkor again, who in this ruthless, cruel beauty seemed to Maeglin a thousandfold more terrible than Morgoth might have ever been. Now Quenya could forsooth sound like music in his mouth.

Morgoth sank his gaze into the thin moon crescent and watched it for a moment almost in bliss, wanting, as it were, to draw a particle of its light for himself. The light not his that he loathed. "Welcome back to Arda, Lómion," he said afterwards, a shade of a bold smile appearing on his face.

The sound of the name given to him by Mother was too much for Maeglin. His legs buckled as he finally felt the full weight of his black heart, his own darkness, yet still he broke off again to run. Not far he got, however, halting at the last moment, grabbing a pillar with his hand, then clinging to it with his whole body in terror. He realised they were high up, very high up, and that the pillars were carved into the sharp and silvery rocks of the mountains, yet were they not the volcanos of Thangorodrim, nor was it Angband. He stood at the edge of an ice wall, and before him stretched an abyss, and at its bottom, bathed in a sea of darkness, brooding woods and woods with no end. Nan Elmoth repeating thousand and more times.

Then, unexpectedly, the swallow reappeared and soared upwards into the nightly sky with a graceful flight. Maeglin's black eyes clung to its path as though it was the only remnant of life in the depths of death.

* Rhond / i trond - a body / the body