Thank you for the prompt!!

27: Have I endured loneliness with grace?

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One of Maglor’s favorite things about living by the sea had always been the strange things that got brought in on the tides. Nowadays it was mostly garbage, and he counted himself lucky to find bits of sea glass he could add to his collection of jars on his kitchen windowsill where they caught the sun and shone, instead of cans or pieces of plastic that needed to be cleared away.

Over the course of his very long life he had found a handful of messages in bottles, but it had been a very long time. So when he found the glass bottle on his little stretch of pebbly beach, he picked it up with the intention of tossing it into his recycling. But it wasn’t, he found, just another beer bottle. It was clear glass, with no scratches or chips to be seen, and bigger—half the size, perhaps, of a bottle of wine. And inside was not liquid, not even seawater, for it was firmly stoppered and sealed with wax. When Maglor turned it over he found pressed into the top of the wax an eight-pointed star that he had not seen for years beyond count. In his shock he dropped the bottle, but instead of shattering it just bounced and rolled over the stones, its contents rattling around inside.

He stared at it for some minutes, until a wave washed up and nearly dragged it back into the sea. Then he lunged forward to snatch it out of the foam, suddenly panicked at the thought of losing it. As he turned away from the water he thought he heard an echo of laughter, and wondered a little at it—for he had not heard either Ossë’s voice or Uinen’s in a very long time, either.

At home he set the bottle on the kitchen table and regarded it for a long time before he got up the nerve to cut through the wax seal and pull out the cork. Onto the table spilled a necklace, garnets and gold on a chain of braided gold. He recognized the work immediately, and couldn’t really believe it. With the necklace came a small piece of parchment, tightly rolled and tied with a golden ribbon.

Maglor picked up the necklace, turning the stones, and finding that they did not reflect the light over his kitchen table but shone with light of their own—in his hands he held a little bit of the sunlight that lit Valinor far away. In his hands he held, for the first time since he had thrown away the Silmaril, the work of his father.

He set it carefully back onto the table, and picked up the parchment. The ribbon came loose with only a slight tug on one end, and he unrolled it to find Fëanor’s writing, bold and graceful, across the page. Macalaurë, the Straight Road remains open. Why do you linger in lonely exile? It is time to come home.

The parchment rolled up again when he released it, and it fell onto the table. A necklace, a letter, a bottle. A gift, a summons, a miracle.

After a week, he made his choice. After a month he bought a sailboat and packed what few things he did not want to part with. The day after that, he watched the coastline fade away into the stars on the horizon, and then, at long last, turned his face westward and did not look back again.

Unless I have a very strong idea of where the story actually begins, which isn’t often (I usually have an idea or an image and then have to write my way to it, if that makes sense), I usually have to write a bunch of words, delete them, write another bunch of words, delete those, and rinse and repeat until I figure out what the problem is–for the fic I’ve been attempting to start for the last week, I think I need to switch both the starting point AND the POV character–and it’s very annoying, lol. But once I get past that part I rarely do the write-a-bunch-and-then-delete it thing, but at least if I do start doing that in the middle of a story I know it means I need to go back a scene and change direction. When I’m just starting out it’s all flailing around in the dark and repeatedly smacking my face into the wall, metaphorically speaking.

Hi!

I started writing when I was 13-ish, and my best friend introduced me to the concept of fanfic–we both wanted more Tamora Pierce stories–though I didn’t actually get very involved in fandom, and pretty quickly dropped fanfic in favor of original fantasy stories starring myself and my friends. I have a lot of fond memories of sitting in her family’s computer room with my notebook while we took turns typing up our respective stories. I also still play around in that world I made up back then, sometimes, though it looks a lot different nowadays and only a handful of the characters resemble their original concepts at all, and I don’t share it with anyone anymore.

I got into Tolkien when I was 15, so a couple of years after ROTK came out–I don’t really remember how, since I’d read LOTR before seeing ROTK in theaters (another very fond memory–the first movie my other best friend and I were permitted to go see without an adult) and I don’t remember it making a significant impression at the time. It took a while for me to get into the Silmarillion–I picked it up expecting another LOTR and kind of bounced off, which I think happens to a lot of people–but that was when I started getting into writing fanfic but also getting into fandom for the first time, and obviously I never looked back, lol, especially when I finally reread the Silm, fell down that rabbit hole, and got up the nerve to join the SWG and started making friends.

🦉 give yourself a piece of writing advice

My most self-indulgent ideas lately have turned out to be my best ideas, so my advice to myself is to keep leaning into it and stop second guessing.