#drakmir

Maeglin, #1: Giggling like a child, without a trace of past sadness

When Maeglin saw the gates, he began to smile.

When he walked to them and they opened for him, he began to laugh.

When the wide fortress doors opened and his father stood at the top, looking expectant, he almost jumped up and down with glee.

When Eol descended the stone steps and caught his son up in his arms, the laughter turned to tears.

“Welcome home.” Eol whispered into his hair and everything that Maeglin had left behind on the winding path- the fire, the betrayal, the poisonous fog and the long fall- it didn’t matter at all.

In Death, Maeglin had come home.

Peg-Leg Eol (AKA Blondie), # 36: Your eyes heavy, nightmares robbing you of sleep

Lindir knew it was a bad night when he opened the door in the wee late hours and saw Eol sitting up in bed, twisting wire. The crystal lamp beside him was blazing and his false eye was nestled in its box, the plate it set into in his face covered with a patch.

Eol didn’t look up until Lindir had stripped off his clothes and set his citar on its stand. Then he said, “I couldn’t sleep.”

Lindir laid out beside him atop the heavy blankets. He stroked Eol’s whole leg and waited.

“Everything was cracking.” Eol said.

Lindir laid his head on the other elf’s thigh.

“It was dark and cold and I was drowning.”

The wire was set aside.

“I was-” Lindir opened his arms and Eol slipped into them, pressing his good eye against the minstrel’s shoulder as though if he applied pressure it would stop the tears.

Lindir stroked Eol’s hair and murmured softly to him, sharing news from the Hall of Fire and easing away the death of Nan Elmoth as he eased away the repetitive fall from Carag Dur and the long, dark trek over the mountains.

Bit by bit Eol began to relax. As the ink of the night sky began washing out to gray he slept at last, curled up against Lindir’s side and the nightmares, for now, stored away.

Drakmir, #37: Angry at me, refusing to look me in the eyes

“Let her go.”

It is spoken with such plaintive desperation that Eol isn’t sure he hears it, at first. Then it comes again.

“Let her GO.”

He looks to Drakmir, to his man of smoke and mist, but Drakmir will not look at him. His steward’s eyes are fixed on a point just above Eol’s head and his pale hands are clenched tight.

“I can’t let her go.” Eol says. “If Curufin finds out-”

“Then you should have sent her away when she came!” The words are angry and they are poison and Drakmir has never, in over two hundred years of service, spoken thus to his master.

It is for this reason alone that he is not immediately dismissed. Instead, his Lord says, “She took Maeglin. What would you have me do?”

“The young Lord,” Drakmir says, “is wise enough to know when to return. Let her go.”

“I can’t.” Eol says.

“I know.” Drakmir replies, and turns on his heel. He strides out of the study as he has many times before and when the door shuts behind him it is with the same gentle click.

or, once again, Drakmir is not paid enough for this. 

---

Drakmir had never said he understood.

He simply obeyed.

He was a steward; it was his job. An order was given, and he obeyed it.

'Go over the mountains,' Eol had said, 'to the forest. Follow Oropher.'

Eol gave the order and Drakmir obeyed; he organized, he delegated, he reassured and he negotiated. Mornost was emptied, bit by bit, and Eol never followed.

Then the calamity came, and Drakmir knew Eol would not come.

Oropher offered such things, but Drakmir gently refused them. With Selsigil he established Myreneg, in the depths of the Greenwood; and there he waited.

Patiently.

He knew what they said about him, of course. Even those who had known him longest wondered, quietly, about his state of mind. The years passed and Drakmir kept quiet vigil. He never really settled in Myreneg, was never truly Selsigil's steward though he obeyed her every order as he had her father.

Questions remained unasked, unanswered. Deaths were accepted, losses counted.

Nissa did not ask her husband if he wished to speak to an amethyst, to any healer, to Lithwaloth. He knew she worried, and he loved her for it.

Love and duty, these were what he had always strived for; and so Drakmir loved his wife, and he held tight to his duty.

There was a second calamity, and though it was small it ripped out as many hearts; murmurs of children drowned, of bodies washing up like cordwood, of seamen both Man and Elf refusing to raise their sails.

Drakmir heard this and he made ready for a journey.

"I’ll send for you," he told his wife, and Nissa let him go uncertain if she should call herself a widow.

They thought he was mad, but no one stopped him. Selsigil asked he travel in haste, the Masters Millos made sure his travel gear was in good condition. Drakmir rode from Myreneg alone, on a gray horse.

When he reached the harbor, he knew he would be hard pressed to find any boat that would carry him. A black diamond lapel button, with its carved wolf howling, was sufficient to summon that boat.

"Where do you want to go?" The woman asked. Drakmir looked at her with ancient, knowing eyes, and said, "I know the way."

They sailed for a week, and the woman was inches from asking if he was mad, when it came into view.

She swore a round and bloody oath to Osse, and Drakmir Daerdemion said, "There won't be an efficient place to dock."

Not yet, anyway.

Still, they could float within the narrowest of the trees. As water gave way to soggy moss and finally to something like damp land, the woman looked at Drakmir and there was fear there.

He held out his hand and he said, "Follow me."

Tying her boat off, she did.

He led her down an old path, the cobbles still cracked from black roots. There were signs, here and there, of people- lost bits of clothing, a broken pail, detritus of a migration and of refugees.

The lights began to glow soft green in the branches and the woman tried to turn back but Drakmir would not let her.

The fortress's doors were open, and inside there were sounds- the sounds of life lived on a bare edge, of the remnants of a kingdom.

In the broad open courtyard surrounded by tents and lean-tos  stood a beautiful woman in rough linen and Drakmir's sailor swore again and fell to her knees, sobbing a name. As people emerged from the makeshift shelters Drakmir moved through the crowd like a ghost, like a whisp, like a good Steward.

And sitting on the steps, looking as though he had just woken up, was Eol.

Who smiled at his steward and said, "I seem to have taken on water."

Drakmir followed the line of his eyes to the radiant queen in the rags. "Much," he said, "has happened."

"Now that I don't doubt." From his side Eol pulled a stoneware bottle and popped the cork. "Tell me all about it."

(I'm actually gonna use this for a PSA first: Imminent Domain Eol is an offshoot of shortking thiccsmith Eol, AKA the Only Eol I've Got Who Either Loves Aredhel or, in consortverse, is Feanor's lover. I SAY that because Drakmir the steward was first and foremost the employee of Son of Thain Eol, who is significantly younger than Thiccsmith Eol and also an adopted dwarf. Thiccsmith Eol more closely follows the Silmarillion canon of Eol's origins, if the path is meandering off to the left. I may make another list of Eols later, just so folks aren't SUPER confused, but for now-!) Drakmir Daerdemion is not surprised when he reembodies at the same time as his beloved Nissa.

They had died together, after all- hand in hand in dark Nan Elmoth, he snapping the enchanted wooden slats that would break the forest's magic locks and she with her fingers outstretched, the thread she'd woven and stitched blind her entire life binding and tearing the flesh of the mad Feanorian host who had stumbled in.

It had been a good death, saving the people of their Lord's Hall, and Drakmir had gone into quiet oblivion sure of a single thing.

He was going where his Lord had gone, and would find him again, come what may.

When they leave the halls, there are many people to meet- Nissa's foster mother, who had been taken in the dwarvish sacking. Drakmir's own parents and sisters, lost on some lonely road. It is his eldest sister who says, grinning beneath her veils, "You've got your work cut out for you."

"I do?" Drakmir asks.

This is how he learns about Eryn Elglin.

-

His parents, understandably, are a bit put out to only have him with them for a fortnight. They don't try and stop him, though.

Rather they outfit him and Nissa both and point them towards a caravan headed in the proper direction, mainly helmed by restless vanyar and their silvan mates.

"We will come visit in the autumn," his father promises. "You should be settled by then."

-

When the wagon crests the horizon, showing the carpet of dark trees below, Nissa takes her husband's hand. She still isn't used to seeing with her new eyes, had worn a piece of silk bound across them for almost the entire trip. She'd asked the lead driver to let her know when they would come within sight of the wood, and when the call comes, Drakmir unties the silk.

His wife gazes down the road and inhales sharply, swallowing her tears.

"We make haste?" she asks her husband.

"We make haste," he promises, and helps her tie the silk back in place before he maneuvers their wagon just slightly out of the train and onwards.

-

They make it to the edge of Eryn Elglin a full hour before the caravan they had joined, an easy feat with no orcs to nip their heels, no dragons to swoop in from behind cloudcover and- for now- no feanorian cohort waiting in the low hills to demand a passing tithe.

As their wagon slowly approaches the trees and Drakmir begins to seek entry, there is a sound. A rustle, an inquiry.

Eryn Elglin seems to focus on them, her branches whispering a question, lilting and light.

She must have an answer, because a moment later...

"I owe you an apology."

He stands in the dark just before where the sun touches the outermost branches of the trees, golden eyes glinting in their black beds.

"I promised you I would return," he says, "and I could not."

Drakmir smiles, eyes filling with tears. "I know. And I am very cross with you, my Lord."

"I didn't want to see either of you for a long time. I hoped- but I should know better than to hope."

"There is always hope, my Lord." Nissa says.

He laughs and oh, they have missed that laugh, rough and crowlike. "As you say, Mistress Nissa. I don't suppose you're looking for work?"

Drakmir raises one thin eyebrow, though he cannot quite keep the smile off of his face. "Oh? Perhaps. What kind of work?"

"Oh, you know. Keeping track of elves doing all manner of foolish things. Talking idiots off of cliffs, mostly metaphorical ones. Handling the correspondence with Kings upset that I keep stealing their drudgery workers. Keeping track of the wine and the ale and the next batch of meade attempts. Ignoring the tunnel."

"What tunnel?" Drakmir asks serenely.

"You're hired," Eol says, and Eryn Elglin laughs around them, her bark rasping together and her hanging star nuts clacking.

In the stories where Eol dies, Thingol does indeed try to find a new Lord to take over Nan Elmoth. He even holds a Lord’s Moot and tries to pick out candidates. It goes about as well as you’d think. 

Since Eol’s trade contracts are always ten or twenty year agreements, and Drakmir as his Steward/Second in Command knows his way around said trade contracts, Thingol essentially has no choice but to change Nan Elmoth from a Lorded Fiefdom to a steward-led holding. 

The people of Nan Elmoth don’t stay there for long. As soon as the Silmaril comes into Menegroth, they start a slow and steady migration over the blue mountains, following other Avari tribes. The battle of the Thousand Caves is sort of the nail in Nan Elmoth’s coffin. By the time the Feanorians sack Menegroth, Nan Elmoth is all but empty. 

Drakmir, following Eol’s contingency plans (because yes, Eol had plans for everything, even a need to evacuate his entire city and lead his people to a new settlement) travels to what will be Greenwood the Great.

I have indeed mentioned Drakmir’s religion. He’s a follower of D’rak’tari, Lady of Winter and Grandmother of Wolves. D’rak’tari is an original character of Syrisa’s, and the cult (for lack of a better term) of D’rak’tari features highly in our shared writing universe as well as her own original ficworks. 

The worship of spirits, idols and demigods other than the Valar is very common in my Arda and frankly, really should have been factored in to Tolkien’s original works.

My thinking stems from my predominant writing of avari tribes, most of whom never saw Valinor. They don’t know the Ainur- they worship what they know. Aule, Yavannah, those are just names connected to people or forces they can’t understand. Osse? They can see him. Ulmo, sure. But there’s no way that the first travellers to Valinor managed to convince every elf they saw that this one religion was the way to go. 

I tend to write religious variances for all of the races of Middle Earth. Dwarves in most of my universes have minor gods they worship alongside Aule, with Eugenides being an obvious example. Hobbits have the Green Maiden, and the Summer Man, and the Winter Crone. 

as a matter of fact, I did! Here’s the first ‘draft’ if you will. 

The sound of the smack echoed across the courtyard and fire bloomed on Maeglin’s cheek. 

Maeglin’s people- those who had come with him, furvitive in the night- wanted to surge forward, to defend their lord from the strange, smokelike elf who had struck him. 

They did not know that this elf had never before touched Maeglin in hurt or anger. They did not know that violence like this was as against the nature of Drakmir Daerdemion as it was against a fish’s nature to fly. 

Tears had filled Drakmir’s eyes. 

"How dare you." He whispered. 

Maeglin straightened his head but did not touch his still stinging cheek. His own eyes were not dry. 

They stood an arm’s length apart, steward and Heir, and Maeglin’s people- his sindar and his noldor, his miners and his washerwomen and his blossom girls- held their breath. 

"There will be an inquiry." Drakmir said. 

"I understand." 

"I am giving my official resignation." 

"I will take it."

"You will visit his grave." 

Maeglin stilled at that. Drakmir turned on his heel. 

"Welcome back, my Lord." He said, and the sound of his boots as he walked away would haunt Maeglin of Nan Elmoth for years afterwards.