Title: Ever On
Fandom: Silmarillion
Challenge: The Last Word
Other prompt: SWG September challenge: Turgon's Rock Opera; prompt Patti Smith's Because the Night
Rating: G
Length: 250
Content notes: N/A
Author notes: Thanks go to Runa for encouragement & sanity-checking.
Summary: What does "The End" even mean?


Maedhros shut the book,contemplating the last words: The End in a flourish of red ink. Simple, clear, unambiguous. There were no more words on the page to read. The story was finished.

But stories were never finished, except in books, occasionally bed-times. One's own part might end, in death or because things moved on without one, but the story went on — other people doing things and the consequences of those actions, people reacting and thinking, planning and doing and failing to do, over and over and on. And on and on and on, sometimes. How else was he sitting here, a book in his hands, more books on the shelf, with Fingon beside him, writing something, and his father across the room, being interrogated in the most persistently polite manner Maedhros ever had the pleasure to witness, by Bilbo Baggins, Hobbit once of the Shire, now of Aman for as long as he cared to stay, Ringbearer, poet, historian, whose own deeds were a matter of song and story. The sun was setting, painting a golden road on the lake below the house, glinting on the nib of Fingon's pen, the simple hammered band on his finger, match to the one on his own hand. Soon Gil-Estel would rise, and someone would light the lamps, call them in to supper, and evening would become night, and then morning again.

Stones and stars, rings and roads, going on, looping back, notes in the song, a river of words without end.