In Time, Stronger than Silima by Himring

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Chapter 1

[Names: Curufinwe Feanaro=Feanor; Findarato Ingoldo=Finrod (nickname: Ingo); Findekano=Fingon, Kanafinwe Makalaure=Maglor; Nelyafinwe Maitimo=Maedhros; Turkafinwe Tyelkormo=Celegorm (nickname: Turko)]

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The call reaches him during a period of rest. He actually needs those periods of rest now; it is no longer a game he and his brethren are playing to imitate the Children. To a human, these periods of rest would seem incredibly short. Nevertheless, to be disturbed in them renders him as grumpy and irritable as Queen Tar-Vanimelde disturbed in the midst of a ten-hour beauty sleep.

‘It’s scorching the rafters again’, the Maia who has awakened him reports.

‘He’, he corrects automatically, while performing the Valarin equivalent of smoothing crumpled robes and picking lint off his sleeve.

Then he follows the Maia to the place—although it is not exactly a place—where the most inconvenient inmate of the Halls of Mandos requires his attention. This is what it looks like: a fiery pillar towering all the way to the roof and charring the rafters. Strictly speaking, the Halls have no rafters. The fire is managing to singe those non-existent rafters nonetheless. Strictly speaking, the Halls have no floor either. And yet the heat of the flames is causing the green marble of the flagstones at their base to crack. Namo does not doubt that if he allows the flames to rage unchecked, the Halls of Mandos will collapse in on themselves like a more mundane building consumed by the world’s fire.

Like everything else here, the fiery pillar has no mass, no substance, but it looks solid. It looks motionless, too, but Namo knows from experience that the flames are in fact rotating at blinding speed, whipped to a frenzy of motion that renders that insubstantial column, even to a Vala, impenetrable as silima. Brute force will not avail him—not that it was ever his first choice, but he has tried it in the past. In the long years that have passed since the Drowning of Beleriand, he has tried every approach he could think of and some he would have originally never have contemplated. Now he braces himself for another attempt.

‘Nelyafinwe Maitimo!’ he begins in his most authoritative tones—for after all he is the Doomsman of the Valar. ‘By your behaviour you continue to endanger the fabric of the Hall of Mandos. I hereby order you: desist.’

He contemplates the pillar without much hope.  It seems entirely unaffected by his command. The non-existent rafters emit a faint whiff of charcoal. Another small crack opens up in the green marble floor. By the power innate in him, he reinforces the spatial fabric around the pillar and tries again:

‘Nelyafinwe Maitimo! Cease your pointless resistance! You are inflicting unnecessary pain on yourself and inconveniencing others!’

If the whirling flames before him can hear him, there is no evidence of it. He makes his final bid:

‘Nelyafinwe Maitimo! Emerge! All is forgiven, I tell you!’

That is a substantial exaggeration, almost a lie—although if he had attempted to devise a comprehensive punishment for Nelyafinwe Maitimo’s crimes, it would never have occurred to him to inflict such a torment on him. He is not in the business of devising punishments, though, even if sometimes he himself is hard put to tell the difference.

He could have saved himself the trouble of economizing with the truth, however, for predictably the flames show no reaction whatsoever. He should have known better, from experience, than to extend forgiveness to a Feanorion and expect grateful acceptance. Nelyafinwe Maitimo may have been more mild-mannered than some in life, but he is proving the most recalcitrant of a thoroughly recalcitrant bunch in death.

***

Celegorm, for instance. ‘Forgiven. Says who?’ Forcing the words from his lacerated throat, before he summarily withdrew into the dark pit of his imagination and summoned the wolves to tear him apart again.

***

Namo stares at the fiery pillar with loathing. Sometimes he wishes he had never summoned Nelyafinwe Maitimo to Mandos. Assuming, that is, that Nelyafinwe Maitimo is here because he answered his summons. There are times when he is not so sure of that. Maybe the Feanorion just turned up in Mandos on his own initiative to make some kind of obscure Feanorian point?

Pesky Feanorian brats and their Silmarils. His brethren keep insisting how important those are. Trees! Jewels! Stars! He feels his brothers and sisters are far too enamoured of the work of their hands—so obsessed with what is contained in those Silmarils they might as well be Noldor themselves.

He is positively itching to seize Nelyafinwe Maitimo, cast him out into the Outer Darkness and rid himself of him forever. Would he not have every justification for doing so? Did not the Noldo and his brothers invoke Outer Darkness not once, but twice in swearing their blasphemous Oath? Did the Feanorion not speak of Outer Darkness again almost with longing during those final years of Beleriand, half-jokingly though it was?  So would it not be right and just to grant Nelyafinwe Maitimo surcease of his pain? Would it not be a mercy even?  All that anguish-ridden existence of his brought to a full stop and erased as if it had never been...

No, the Feanorion is wanted for the Project.  And the Project...

Namo, too, once loved the Children. He loved the idea of them, could hardly wait to see them in reality, for after all they would be his to deal with, much more immediately so than Aule’s or Orome’s. He was all anticipation—until the first of the Children turned up on his doorstep, hurt, bewildered and inarticulate in their anger. Quendi! Before they had even learned to speak properly, they were already learning how to die, in terror and in pain. He had known this was to come and found at once that none of his foreknowledge had prepared him for the experience: his experience of them, theirs of Arda Marred.  Their propensity for suffering outrageously—excessively,   unnecessarily!—was only outstripped by their readiness to inflict outrageous, excessive, unnecessary suffering on others. Men, when they finally arrived on the scene, were even worse, if possible, but at least they, each of them, eventually left again and departed elsewhere...

The Project. Nelyafinwe Maitimo is wanted for the Project. Namo used to believe wholeheartedly, unquestioningly in the Project; he was convinced that it was for the benefit of the Children as much as anyone else’s.  He clung to that conviction, clings to it still. He needs to. Increasingly he has felt that the end needs to justify the means. For if the Project is not to the Ultimate Good of All, if the Marring of Arda is not for a Purpose—then is not all that distinguishes Namo from Melkor a matter of degrees: degrees of power, degrees of neglect, degrees of violence? It is not enough!

He was desperately clinging to his convictions when she came, Luthien. They say, out there, that she was the first to teach him pity. That is not quite what happened. Powerful Vala that he is, he had not dared to take note of the emotions tightly coiled within him. He was afraid. But she, being half-Maia, could see him clearly and, being half-Elda, could recognize what she saw and so she unflinchingly named it for him: pity and doubt. Not hate of the Children, as he had feared, and so, in his relief, he rewarded her by letting her go, her and her lover, where she wished to go...

But his doubt is in the open now, revealed to him. Nelyafinwe Maitimo is wanted for the Project. Does that justify what the Project is doing to Nelyafinwe Maitimo? Namo, the mighty Ainu, who entered Ea on a one-way ticket, on a contract without escape clause, who cannot resign his job, cannot leave, cannot get out...stares at a pillar of fire.

***

 

Listen. In the Halls of Mandos, the Nightingale sings. The echoes of the voice of Luthien Tinuviel, who is long gone, linger here, impossibly in this impossible place. And her song questions both sides of the equation, for the price was always too high, the scales of justice broken from the beginning. And yet, having gained the exit, she chose to return, chose to live again. She chose to go back to doom-laden Beleriand, even if only for a while.

And Maedhros, who sees nothing, who hears nothing, who is only pain through and through—nevertheless somehow retains in the still, numb centre of his pain the memory of the memory of this:

the face of Feanaro blazing with the fire of an entirely new idea, the intense concentration of Nerdanel as she carefully taps the chisel, Finwe walking through the streets of Tirion as if they were his own front garden—and Findekano;

Makalaure’s delighted laugh as he at last finds the right note, Tyelkormo absentmindedly stroking his dog’s ears, Elrond’s worried frown as he considers the entangled emotions of elves and men—and Findekano;

one word slotting correctly into its place, one gesture in perfect balance, one page turning exactly in time with the rhythm of thought— and Findekano, who spends days alone and nights crowded with memory, waiting.

***

Namo starts.

Was there or was there not something that appeared just now, whirling within the rapid dance of saffron and blue flames?  He has been gazing so long at the pillar of fire that even a Vala might be seeing things. But was there not just the tiniest glimpse of a wisp of red hair? Was it an illusion, the appearance of slender fingers whipping past, outstretched, almost a wave?

Namo surrounds the pillar and scans it from top to bottom, all Valarin senses fine-tuned to the highest pitch. Nothing. Nelyafinwe Maitimo remains locked impenetrably in his pain, like light locked into the heart of a Silmaril.

But Namo finds he has given up on nothing, not on the Project, not on the Children, not on Nelyafinwe Maitimo. He will get him out of there, however long it takes. The one thing he has got is time, until the End of Arda.

Namo, who entered Arda knowing everything about everyone and is gradually coming to terms with the fact that, by the end, he will know nothing for certain about anyone, gathers himself and strengthens his resolution once again. It will be a long haul.

And it may be that when the One finally comes to declare his Judgement—and yet, after all this, how dare he?—and yet after all this, how dare he not?—Namo will be released to cast himself at his feet and plead for mercy for one and all, and it will be Nienna who will stand the accuser, the wellsprings of her pity having run dry. But that would be symmetrical and almost tidy—and so it is very likely not true.

***

In his bed in Tirion, Finrod is finding his dreams troubled by wolves again, so he rises up from where he is lying beside Amarie and wafts westward across Valinor in a golden mist until he reaches the black iron doors, slipping through the Finrod-shaped crack that has been carefully arranged for him. Seeing nothing, he is sure his cousin is there.

‘Tyelkormo’, he begins patiently, one more time—and suddenly loses his temper.

‘Turko,’ he snaps, ‘stop it right there! No more wolves, do you hear me? I’ve had it, with those wolves!’

This time, Celegorm hears him.

‘Ingo? Ingo, I’m so sorry. No more wolves, I promise...’

And slips, comforted, into a lesser nightmare.

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Chapter End Notes

 

This story seems to require apologies (not that I had much choice about writing it), so I extend my sincerest apologies to everyone and promise I did the best with it I could.

I got the idea that Celegorm would have spent time in Mandos facing wolves from Minviendha's story Mandos.