#and a name lost due to maedhros and maglor can definitely play into that. they kept their lives but lost their names. is this anything | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

sweetteaanddragons · 4 years

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Role Reversal: Kid Swap Edition

A while back, I got very bored and started playing around with what if’s. Since The Usual Way was giving me trouble, I decided to come back and try to actually write one of them.

So welcome to Role Reversal: Kid Swap Edition, where Fingon and co. are the sons of Feanor, Maedhros and co. are the sons of Fingolfin, and Finarfin’s kids are staying out of this mess.

(Note: I am aware that, due to the Finweans propensity for naming children for birth order, hair color, and spite, names would have definitely changed in this AU. I was not, however, interested in trying to deal with that, so names are in the form they are most commonly written as in the Silmarillion.)

. . .

By the time they arrive, the land before Thangorodrim is empty, and Maedhros wonders for a frozen moment if the land has swallowed his uncle and his followers whole. If the fire they saw across the waves swept over every last one of his (half) cousins, and the wind has blown the ash away.

Sense returns at the same moment as they are ambushed by orcs: It is far more likely that the Enemy has simply eaten them up and spat out their bones.

This thought might be more sensible, but it is not at all comforting.

The win the battle, and Fingolfin leads them forward triumphantly. They establish a camp beside Lake Mithrim.

The first scouts they send out bring back reports that they are not the first to have camped beside this lake. There are still traces, faint though they are, that a large host once camped just on the other side.

Maglor is beginning to get that look he gets right before he writes an ill advised song. Maedhros drags him aside and tells him in no uncertain terms that he will not be singing any tales about what may have befallen that camp.

Soon, that may change, he knows. Soon, they may have to ask him to, so that they can spin a tale that will let their people move forward, but it will have to be carefully constructed - a call to revenge, not a lament or, as is currently being whispered in the camp, a ghost story.

Maedhros feels sick just at the thought.

Where is his uncle? Even before, when Feanor vanished in the night, he could not stay invisible long before he set off a conflagration that could be seen even across the great sea. Even if he is gone, surely he cannot have been vanquished and left so very little to mark his passing.

Where are his cousins? Where is Aredhel, who Celegorm searches for when he pretends to be hunting? Where are Turgon and little Idril? Where is Aegon?

Where is Fingon?

The second scouts they send out bring back word of a group of elves, but they are not the elves they are looking for.

Fingolfin sends Maedhros anyway, because perhaps they know something.

He also sends a heavily armored guard because if there is anything they have learned since darkness fell it is that not even fellow elves can always be trusted.

Círdan welcomes him warily. They are not the first elves he has seen come to these shores on the swings of seemingly glorious victory. This is what Círdan knows:

Feanor came on his ships with his followers and his children. They had pushed back the foes that had so beleaguered Círdan and had pushed on to the Black Gate itself.

Feanor had fallen in the doing.

Fingon had then been king, but not, it seems, for long. Something had happened - an envoy, an ambush, Círdan knows little except that there had been something about an Oath - and Fingon had been taken.

Círdan has lost elves to Morgoth before. Taken, he knows, is worse than dead. The dead are never released to haunt the edges of their camps, seeking to prey on those who more closely resemble whole.

He is not quite able to fully communicate this to Maedhros, and eventually he must give up trying and continue.

Turgon had then been king, Cirdan knows, for Cirdan had gone to counsel him on what to do about his brother. Turgon had listened to him when he had warned that taken must be treated as dead. Turgon had then told him a little, a very little, about a dream. A dream he said was from Ulmo.

Turgon, Maedhros remembers, Turgon alone of Feanor’s sons had not fought at Alqualonde, a claim Maedhros himself could not make, having thrown himself into the fray when he arrived and saw his cousins hard pressed. Turgon had been favored by Ulmo before the Doom. He might hold enough favor to receive a dream still.

Or perhaps, in the shadow of the dark foe’s gate, a different Vala had invaded his dreams.

Either way, within a week, both Turgon and his host had been gone, vanishing like the morning mists, and all Cirdan’s efforts to find them had come to naught.

He should have been able to track a host that large, Maedhros knows, thinking of their own broad trail across the Ice. It would have been slow and unwieldy, and the ground should have born their marks for a long time.

With a Vala, fair or foul, involved, however, all bets are off.

Maedhros rides back toward his father.

When they are almost there, he sends his guard on ahead, against their protests.

He alters his own course just slightly.

There is one cousin, at least, he now knows exactly where to find.

#maedhros #cirdan #alternate universe #canon divergence #fic #silmarillion #first age #bullet point fic

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