The Bearer of Light by Dawn Felagund

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The Bearer of Light

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The towers of Tirion aspired above the morning mist, austere towers of steel and cement and limestone, sturdy as cliffs and delicate as silver rods. Fëanáro Finwion, in his jostling, less-then-monarchial wagon from Formenos, had shut his eyes. He was a study of nonchalance. His eyes were only lightly closed and still roving beneath his eyelids, as though taking in the scenery provided by his memory if not yet his senses. His shoulders slumped, just slightly. He heard his heart beating, steady, slow.

His hands weren't balled in fists, but his fingers were folded over at the knuckle, and his fingernails bit lightly into his skin through the plain linen of his trousers. They ruined, he realized, the picture of nonchalance. One by one, he unfolded them. Laid them straight upon his thighs. Relaxed, untrembling. Once, he'd climbed a tree, too high even for his comfort, to get at the eggs in a nest of hawks. Nerdanel stood below, wide-eyed, watching, heavy with their first child, with Nelyo. Somewhere, he'd heard that eggs preserved the health of women with child, and that slip of information--the source of which he could not even recall--and his unspeakable love for the red-haired daughter of a blacksmith had provoked the daring act he contemplated. Then as now, deliberately, he unfolded each finger from where it clutched the branch. The bark left stinging imprints, reminders of a fear that he dared not feel. His feet draped the branches. Gently, his body arched straight, as though he grew as a limb from the tree itself. He was conscious of how he must look to Nerdanel below. He imagined her clutched hands relaxing. His heartbeat slowed.

Then, as now, he'd been returning from the North to Valinor.

For a full fifteen minutes, Fëanáro sat with his eyes closed. There was no one to see him but, had there been, they might have imagined him napping as the city of his birth passed on the horizon to his right as a blaze of light. He let his eyes slip open. He regarded the light of the Trees on the towers as a haze of light in the periphery of his vision. It would not hurt. Slowly, he turned toward it.

The pain was less than a fist into a pile of feathers. His heartbeat didn't change. The light made his eyes--deprived for the week-long journey from Formenos--ache just slightly. He carefully and steadily blinked.

His fingers had folded over at the knuckle. One by one, gently, he unfolded each finger.

~oOo~

Fëanáro traveled light when he went to obey Manwë's summons to Taniquetil. A canvas bag held a change of clothes, a plain robe for the festival, and a few personal items. He brought his silver circlet and, as ever, wore the slim golden band on his right hand. The circlet was wrapped in more linen than it required so it wouldn't slide out during the rough journey and surprise him when he opened the bag. He brought no family. The wagon was loaned by one of the middling families of Formenos--he would not even accept a carriage from the lords there--and the driver was the fellow who carried the post between the various cities of Aman and who had grown comfortable with silence. His sack of letters was larger than Fëanáro's canvas bag.

Two nights ago, after the driver doused the fire where they'd prepared their shared and humble supper and retreated to a nook beneath a tree to sleep, Fëanáro extracted the circlet from the bag and unwound the length of linen in which he'd swaddled it. His palms were damp; his heart too fast to detect a rhythm. His bones seemed to ache from the mere touch of his flesh upon them. As the final length of cloth fell away, starlight ran along the braided silver the way fire will catch an alcohol-soaked fuse. His fists had closed upon it; in his ardor, he'd bent the circlet into a crooked oval. For hours, he gazed upon it, watching the nearly imperceptible shifting of the light upon it as the stars inched along their paths overhead. Slowly, his hands relaxed, and when he woke the next morning, having tipped onto his side beside the remains of the fire, his neck was stiff and the circlet was cradled in his arms.

Upon passing the gates of Valmar, he touched the arm of the driver, and the wagon stopped and Fëanáro climbed down with his canvas bag slung over his shoulder. Manwë had summoned Fëanáro immediately to his halls upon arrival, but none knew that he had arrived: Certainly, they didn't expect the High Prince of the Noldor in a postal wagon and wearing clothes still stained with travel. And unadorned.

Telerin silversmiths had come to Valmar as they'd gone to Tirion: either those too mediocre at their craft to please the discerning eye of their own people or those illustrious enough to hope for commission from House of the High King or even the Valar. Fëanáro walked in and out of many silversmiths' shops before finding one where he found the artisan's skill adequate to repair his circlet. The shop was lit round with Fëanorian lamps of poor quality--he freed one from its mesh cage and clutched it tight in his fist, but it barely pinkened even the cracks between his fingers--yet even the meager light undulated upon the sinuous curves of the artisan's work as light will play on water . When she emerged from the back of the shop, Fëanáro had set five lampstones of unsurpassed quality upon the counter, his circlet beside. Without a word, she began work on repairing the circlet. He went around the shop and replaced five of the lampstones with his own. The dim ones made by an unknown, careless hand, he cast into the street.

~oOo~

He was, of course, given a room in Ilmarin. He should have been taken immediately before Manwë, but perhaps sensing his weariness--or perhaps shamed by his attire--Manwë's servants brought him first to his room instead. In a steady and silent stream, they brought hot water and towels, a decanter of wine, a tray of fresh bread and fruit. Fëanáro ignored it all and sat upon his bed. A wide window faced the direction of Ezellohar, where Laurelin was dimming. As Her ardor dimmed, he watched the golden light recede from where it bathed his legs until it covered only his bared foot. The Mingling was nigh.

Irmo Lórien was beside him. With the tearing sensation of a scab lifted from an unhealed wound, the memory returned to him of playing upon the floor as a child and being surprised by Irmo and Námo beside him, having come on silent feet. The blue-eyed healer was forever associated in his mind with his serpent-eyed brother. Fear stirred in Fëanáro's heart and he glanced over the shoulder opposite where Irmo stood, but no one was there.

"You are unwell," said Irmo.

"I have every reason to be, do I not?" Fëanáro meant the remark to be biting but it came out differently, like a sword dulled by overuse.

"It is the not the exile that afflicts you, Fëanáro. That is a convenient reason believable to most, but it is not the reason."

Irmo placed his hand on the side of Fëanáro's face, and he flinched away. He nearly hissed, as he would have done as a child, the devastating news delivered, to be touched by the hand that handed his mother to the serpent-eyed Lord of Death as a parent hands over a child in marriage. Telperion kindled; the mingled Light crept up his foot.

"Does not even the mingled Light of the Trees affect you anymore?" Irmo asked.

"Of course it does." Yet his bones still ached, assuaged not by the Light of the Trees as they had been by the play of starlight on a silver circlet of his fashioning.

"But less, no, now that you believe you have perfected it?" There was no provocation in the Vala's voice but Fëanáro replied with rancor nonetheless: "I have done what you did not and made a form where Light can belong to any, not just those chosen by the Valar."

"Or it can belong to you. You miss it, do you not? You long for it?"

"I long for my family. For my father, for my sons."

"Are not the Silmarils akin to your sons?"

~oOo~

Tyelkormo was the hysterical one, the one prone to outbursts even after his other brothers had all outgrown that urge and learned to restrain rash words behind a mouth held disciplined and straight. Fëanáro had learned to think of these moments as those that would evade history; already, the loremasters (in Tirion anyway, or some of them) were writing of the worshipful, wide-eyed loyalty of his sons, to the last one condemning themselves to exile beside him, as yet further evidence of their High Prince's greatness. The boys could be exceedingly dignified in public, especially after the exile, and Tyelkormo most of all--save his brother Nelyo--with his height and his broad shoulders carried with an easy grace, with his fair face and golden hair. It was expected that, in the lightless winters in Formenos, they all would break every now and then. But Tyelkormo--Tyelkormo at times seemed to possess a measure of madness.

Fëanáro could not remember what Tyelkormo perceived as an insult or even whether it had indeed been intended as such (this was certainly not beneath Fëanáro in those days) but it'd had something to do with the Silmarils. Fëanáro remembered only stepping from his treasury where he kept them and feeling grimed in the ordinary half-light, of becoming aware of the stench of soured flesh that was his own, and Tyelkormo coming at him down the hall, blue eyes wild with madness and tears and snot dripping off his upper lip. Nelyo had one of his arms and Carnistir the other, and they arrested him before he reached Fëanáro. Nelyo was pattering on with some nonsense meant to be soothing but drowned out by Tyelkormo's volume if not ardor; Carnistir was steadily and silently weeping, as he always did when faced with the hurt of another, and seemingly unaware of it, as he always seemed to be.

"They are all you love now! Those rocks! You stopped loving Amil and drove her away!"

Fëanáro indeed looked daily to the horizon, hoping to see his wife's silhouette on the dim golden horizon, but it was more for the triumph her return would bring than any longing for her love. The historians, he thought, would note her passage, and what a story it would be! He would at last have all he needed to wrest a new society from the land of the Valar: the King of the Noldor, his seven sons, his wife once loyal to the Valar but swayed by his greatness to forge her loyalties anew. And the three Silmarils, the way by which Light could become freely bestowed: one to Nelyo for his diplomacy, one to Carnistir for his sight, and the third to Curufinwë for his craft and cunning. Both Curufinwë and his Silmaril, of course, Fëanáro would himself keep. They would be unstoppable, but for the lack of Nerdanel and his seeming inability to bestow even one of his sons with a stone so that he might learn to wield it.

"You have stopped even loving us!"

He pondered this. He'd once held Tyelkormo in his arms, torn at last from his wife's body after a labor that threatened to claim the lives of both mother and child, and believed he'd never love anyone more. Yet now his midsection felt filled with feathers and no longer prone to the thundering weight of love upon his heart and gut. Tyelkormo's words, he thought, should have been enough to rearrange his organs with the force of a fist driven straight through flesh. He even caught his breath, awaiting the pain that he knew should come. As it was, it only sent the feathers in silent disarray, and Fëanáro felt nothing.

Carnistir let slip his brother's arm then, and the ill-placed slap managed by a Tyelkormo surprised at his sudden freedom left three scratches along Fëanáro's jaw before Nelyo caught his arm and captured him in an embrace. But the madness was even then leaving him, and he sank to his knees, gagging up something clear and viscous that ran from his mouth in a syrupy string and pooled on the floor. Nelyo held him and soothed him, and Fëanáro was forgotten and stepped past them. Carnistir turned to the wall and hid his face as he passed.

~oOo~

"It is time to dress for the festival, my prince." The servant waited upon the Valar, but his words to Fëanáro--a mere Noldo, a mere subject of this great kingdom--trembled as he spoke them. He'd laid out Fëanáro's plain robes and circlet upon the bed. He approached where Fëanáro sat in a rigid chair in a shadowy corner and gently lifted the tunic from his shoulders.

"I can dress myself!" The servant shrank away.

He turned his eyes away when Fëanáro began to unlace his trousers, but Fëanáro ordered, "Look upon me!" and the servant did, with difficulty. "Even unadorned, I have the potential for greatness beyond the greatest works of your masters." He realized that the golden band was still upon his fingers and he went to slip it off with his teeth, where he could hold it beneath his tongue and keep it ever with him yet out of sight, but he could not pull it off. He bit the gold band and laughed softly around it. The servant's eyebrows creased briefly and slightly but he did as he was told, and watched.

~oOo~

They kept Fëanáro aside, in a room by himself, while they announced the important guests in attendance. Another servant, indistinguishable from the one given Fëanáro, appeared at last and whispered something to his servant. They beckoned him down the corridor and held aside the curtain that led into the feast hall.

The Valar, ever theatrical, had planned Fëanáro's entrance for last, even after the reigning King of the Noldor, Nolofinwë; even after the High King of the Eldar. He could see them all in the hall, arrayed in their best, mostly in shadow, for the hall was thus far lit only by candlelight. Fëanáro chuckled at the awkwardly obvious symbolism cooked up by the Valar. "Let them sit in primitive light," he whispered, imagining what the Valar must have said, in planning this festival, "and let him come in last of all. Let him bring them all into Light!"

Fëanáro heard his name called by the herald. There was an audible intake of breath from the people waiting within, as though they expected some sharp pain to assail them from the shadows and wished to bear it in silence. Eyes straining in the candlelight sought the first relief of light from the Silmarils.

Fëanáro stepped into the candlelit hall. He'd not bothered to bring festival slippers, and his boots rang loud against the marble floor. All present held their breath. He was unadorned; no Silmarils, not even a well-crafted lampstone insignificant enough to give away by the handful to a Teleri silversmith, gave the comfort of Light to the hall. The candles flickered with laughter at his passing. He walked upon perfect silence, perfect, breathless awe. Took his place in the shadows with the others. No one breathed save him.