west of the moon, east of the sun

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.