[Anguirel]

That voice, again! That much-beloved voice that seemed to physically lance the funeral shroud of despair...

Malris jerked bolt upright, listening with more attention than he could summon in the normal course of events. Partly, of course, there was the fact that the song was fascinating, enlivening, for its own sake, the poetry of the arrangement, filled with verbal tricks that surprised and delighted the listener.

"No one ever beat Maglor, no one," he muttered in something like disbelief. Becoming more aware of the space around him, he turned to Tasa, smiling slightly; though with the enthralment in which the song held him, he scarcely had energy left to express happiness.

Then, of course, there was the reassuring nature of the tidings the voice brought.

"The smith must be Lindir," he whispered, not wanting to disturb the staves of the music, behaving almost as if Maglor was close at hand and could be distracted by his speech, out of turn as it was. "They've cured Lindir's wound! The other party must have encountered the Diviner..."

Remember when this tower was yours
Malris: look to the shaft.

"Of course!" Malris cried, now throwing his sensitivity aside. "What a fool I was...why did I not think of it the moment the door failed?"

But the singer was still not finished, and had still more reassurance to deliver. When he realised his wife was freed from her long agony...separated presumably at last from those...creatures...Malris did not forgo weeping, though he wept silently, his eyes growing unaccustomedly large as he thanked the Powers of the West again and again, filled with emotion he scarcely understood.

"Maglor says Mandos will not take him. There he is pessimistic," Malris muttered. "A truer friend...saving you, Tasa, and His Lordship, and perhaps Endamir...there never was. If the Valar possess hearts...but come, Tasa. I must show you the secret way out of this bastion."

Malris got to his feet with some difficulty, his mind still partly absorbed by the memory of the song's last notes. He offered his arm to Tasa, waiting for her to rise and join him.

"It lies beneath the penultimate stair...and leads to the corridors beneath the fortress. A labyrinth with a thousand purposes...and who knows what state of repair it will be in...but it's a hope, Tasa. A way, promised by the Lord Maglor himself...we're going to find the others, and then we'll soon be home."