Museum for the Forgotten by Dawn Felagund

Museum for the Forgotten

Read Museum for the Forgotten

There always used to be a fountain at the place where the third circle of Tirion descended to the second: a running horse with water frothing up around it. I was never sure if the water was supposed to impersonate (badly) the motion of its mane or if the horse was supposed to be plunging along the seaside and kicking up a ruckus in the waves with its hooves. In any case, it was ridiculous.

And now it was gone. In its place was something called a "peace garden": artificially tiny trees whacked and wired into geometric shapes, casting tiny geometric shadows over grass that was either clipped daily or had been genetically coaxed to also stay small. (Small and spear-sharp, I learned, the one time I tried to sit on it.) This so-called "peace garden" was supposed to serve as a haven for people like me, returned from Mandos and presumed in further need of healing and peace.

Progress, I have decided, can be measured by the imposition of the newly inane over the comfortably familiar and reluctantly beloved inane. I loathe to confess that my heart squeezed with disappointment when I rounded the corner and saw that hideous horse statue gone, but it did. And every time thereafter. Growth implies an organic motion and the making of room by the old for the new. Progress suggests a headlong plunge through brush and briar to make a path no matter the cost.

I tried to justify my despair for the frothing horse statue by attaching it to memories that, if I was being honest, I'd only elevated as justification for my despair over the loss of the frothing horse statue. There was the time that Artaresto and I sat on the edge of it and ate pieces of cheese with bread before continuing out of the city to go hunting. There was the time that I stood there for several minutes being misted by the water while Findekáno propped his foot onto the edge of the pool in an attempt to repair a broken bootlace. That was about it. I allowed myself to feel a pang for the losses of Artaresto and Findekáno and the symbolism of my grief in the absence of the frothing horse fountain.

It was not the only sign of "progress." A few new towers had been added to the upper circles of Tirion, and the skyline of the city looked bristly and unfriendly. A shop that sold fishcakes (which I had eaten sometimes with Amarië) had become a shop that sold sweets (which I no longer preferred after reembodiment). The tree that grew in the middle of the royal road was gone. Even the stump was gone, and the road that once curved around it had been reshaped and straightened. The story had always gone that, as a child, Fëanáro had found it as a sapling growing in the road and had cried when he learned the gardeners planned to uproot it, and so Finwë had ordered it kept where it was, even when the road had to be redone to make room for it. Whether it had been cut down after Fëanáro's banishment or whether it had suffered a natural demise I did not know, only that it was gone and the view I had of my uncle's house from my father's house was more direct than I preferred.

And my father had taken to political experimentation. In recounting the progress of the Noldorin people, I should not fail to mention that.

~oOo~

"Your dreams this week? What do you remember of those?"

I had a therapist now and I saw her weekly and everything she said was phrased as a question. Therapists were a new thing now too. We hadn't needed them in Aman before the Darkening (or so we'd claimed), and in Beleriand, we suppressed our emotions by chiseling out cities and dying heroically, but between the trauma of the Darkening and the kinslaying and now the first exiles beginning to be reembodied, therapists were in high demand and Irmo's status had rise accordingly. We'd used to secretly pity him for being excluded from the Aratar. Now, according to my father, more Noldor went to study with Irmo than any of the Valar except Aulë, and even Aulë was losing ground. He still wasn't numbered among the Aratar, but that seemed to matter less when his name was always on everyone's lips.

My therapist's office was another sign of unwelcome progress. Previously, it had belonged to a rugmaker who produced especially tacky wares: mostly lewd scenes from the Valarin myths rendered in overbright colors and deep piles. Amarië and I used to giggle over them and threaten to buy one as a wedding present for the other. I decided to use him to dodge the question about the dreams. "What happened to the rugmaker who used to be here?" I asked.

"How would you feel if I told you he was also an exile and also died in Middle-earth and is waiting to be reembodied?"

It was hard to imagine someone so ferociously untalented mustering the energy to join a rebellion and hard to imagine someone who had rendered Valarin genitalia in nap as capable of dying. But I suppose people might say that about me too. I had been faithful to the Valar and lived a life of unclouded joy here and hadn't produced much of true, utilitarian worth until I crossed to Middle-earth. The explanations for our desertion of Aman I'd heard from those who'd stayed behind were many--we were swayed by Fëanáro, we were swayed by desire for revenge, we wanted lands of our own, we wanted out from the yoke of the Valar--but none gave enough account to the Darkening as a reason. No matter the reason, the Darkening undercut them all. It is hard to describe the impact of such a drastic thing. The cessation of gravity might have been worse. If my therapist wanted to hear of dreams, I still fell asleep sometimes with the moon in my window and laughed to think that when I opened my eyes again, it would be the suffused light of Laurelin slowly overtaking Telperion at the Mingling. And yet I always opened my eyes to the unsparing light of the sun that had watched me die.

But I said, "I suppose Valarin sex was less alluring without treelight to view it by, which was true of a lot of things we found important before," but she didn't miss a beat. "What of your dreams, Findaráto? Do you remember anything of your dreams this week?"

~oOo~

After therapy, I had lunch with my father at a terrace café just below the royal quarters, which he had renamed the administrative district. Before the Darkening, my family had a chef who prepared most of our meals. (He went with Uncle Nolofinwë's people and died during the first kinslaying when he was knocked overboard and drowned in armor he'd never had reason to wear before that day.) My father would often feel guilty and send him home for a holiday and prepare our meals for us in his stead, but like much of what he attempted, my father was a mediocre cook, and his guilt over the chef's work-life balance had the unintended consequences of sending his children, as soon as we were old enough, to the homes of relatives and friends or to street vendors on the lower levels for our meals.

Now, my father took most of his meals in restaurants of varying quality. Once, the presence of the High King of the Noldor would have required weeks of preparation for such establishments; now, he simply appeared and queued like everyone else. My father had unkinged himself.

Artanis had once made the cynical but not incorrect observation that our father's solid mediocrity in the crafts and intellectual pursuits so valued by the Noldor had the advantage of freeing him to maintain diplomacy within our family. That Finwë's death and the Darkening were the forces that eventually ruptured our family--and even that breach had been partly healed in Beleriand--speaks to all that my father accomplished while looking like he was capable of doing nothing of value at all. But one interest he'd held prior to the Darkening was political philosophy, and he hadn't been entirely middling in this pursuit. He'd even read papers on a handful of occasions at meetings of the loremasters of political philosophy, and although he was always stridently disagreed with, it wasn't for the unsoundness of his arguments but for distaste for his positions.

Fëanáro, who as far as I'd been able to tell dabbled and excelled in all things, had also taken up political philosophy at a point when the arguments in favor of naming high prince the eldest son of the sitting king and queen--that would have been Finwë and Indis, and therefore Nolofinwë as high prince--had begun to dominate. Unexpectedly, he hadn't argued in favor of himself and his own rights, as everyone suspected he would when his name first appeared on the list of speakers at a meeting of the loremasters of political philosophy. Instead, he'd argued against kingship entirely.

I still don't know whether he believed what he wrote. I think he liked to say shocking things and race down the switchback of intellectual inquiry for the pure joy of finding where it led without falling. Nolofinwë had been dismayed and the other loremasters scandalized. Finwë had been proud of him in the befuddled way that he was proud of many of his eldest son's accomplishments without fully understanding much else about them than that they belonged to his eldest son. Fëanáro had been pleased. For a few seasons, he read regularly at the meetings of the political philosophers and then, as with most things, he lost interest.

My father had gone to those meetings, probably because both of his brothers were to attend and that suggested a potential need for his services as a peaceweaver. But as ever, he understood that this could not be seen as the reason. With great earnestness, he read the same books and papers that the other attendees read. He occasionally chimed in with some banal and forgettable observation at meetings. Once Fëanáro stopped attending, I stopped noticing his activities in political philosophy as well, but he apparently kept reading and attending even without me to notice, and a few years after Fëanáro's scandal, he presented his first in a series of papers making a similar argument to Fëanáro's but better and more carefully defended and, if anything, more radical. Fëanáro had argued for a system based in merit, where those most accomplished in the arts and sciences relevant to governance should assume that governance. (This wasn't as self-interested as it sounds. Nolofinwë was also highly accomplished and, if anything, more accomplished than Fëanáro in those "arts and sciences relevant to governance," although Fëanáro's brief and brilliant appearance on the stage of political philosophy seemed to carry the threat that he could become a viable contender if necessary.) My father argued for a voice for all people, no matter their intelligence or skill, an idea antithetical to so many of the deeply held views of the Noldor, many of the brightest of whom had politely tolerated him in the same way that one tolerates the railing that slightly impedes one's view but also prevents one--or in this case, the entire Noldorin people--from plunging to one's death: useful, yes, but mundane enough to become unseen over time. The railing was suddenly enticing all kinds of strange plants to climb upon it and very much making itself seen.

My father's arguments were sound, although I did not agree with them, for reasons different from those of most of his detractors. I had been a king in Middle-earth, and I do not believe that Nargothrond would have survived and thrived as long as it had under any other leadership but mine. But my opposition mattered not. In the vacuum created by the exile and deaths of those most opposed to his arguments, my father had begun to enact his ideas.

And so he ate now in restaurants, amidst his--no, the--people, at no better table and enjoying no different fare than they did, wearing the plain linen tunics to which he'd been partial in the privacy of our home and no jewels but his wedding band. (His hands were prone to sweating, and rings and wristlets inevitably irritated his skin, the heavier and more ornate exacting the harshest toll on his flesh.) If the kitchen was slow, he waited too. If a menu item was sold out, no one scrambled to procure it for him. No one called him king or my lord or really anything at all. Most people didn't even seem to notice that he was there unless they were being paid to do so.

"How was therapy?" he asked me over cheese and olives before pressing his fingers to his lips as though he'd belched loudly. "Or no! Am I not supposed to ask that?"

This was one of the nicer places my father ate. The view was spectacular, looking to the northwest where the Ezellohar used to be and a memorial tower of some crystalline substance now threw back colored darts of sunlight. Shadows from the clouds moved across the forest. Somewhere in that forest was Fëanáro's house, preserved but empty, and beyond it, the foothills leading to the bluish haze of mountains. In the east, a sliver of waning moon rose from the direction of the sea. "You can ask," I said around an olive, "but it is usually pretty uneventful and today was no exception."

"I suppose, then, that your therapist did not prepare you for anything … eventful?"

"No. At the moment, she seems to be entirely fixated on my dreams. Unless this event is to take place in my head while I'm asleep, I doubt she'd be interested."

My father didn't seem to get the humor. He was trying to catch the eye of a server. Many of the diners signaled with their hand when they needed something but my father found that demeaning, too like the summoning of a servant. Eyes and speech, he said, were the only fully equal, fully human ways to acknowledge each other. At last, he succeeded, and our half-full glasses were refilled with water.

"I wanted you to have a full glass of water because I am about to tell you something momentous," he told me carefully. The way my father breaks big news, it is hard to imagine that he did not like the pomp and circumstance that surrounded being a king. It seems he would have liked being preceded by a fanfare. He took a drink of water, looking at me over the rim of his glass as he did, but I feigned ignorance of his intent and refused to touch mine.

"Your cousin," he said, and his voice was a little breathy from the cold water, "is about to be reembodied. Actually, probably has been by now."

My father had been summoned to Mandos by Námo when I was reembodied. This was unusual. Námo's usual approach was to conduct in secret the entire gory and slightly sinister process of making a new body to cloak a feä and then release that feä, body in tow, back into the world to decide when and how (or if) it would return to its loved ones. I sometimes wondered if any foundered and died in the vast forest surrounding his halls. I suppose he made the exception because I was the first of Finwë's descendents to be reembodied and because my father was the king--the Valar have refused to accept or acknowledge my father's reordering of the political system of Tirion--or maybe because the singularity of my death made even the indifferent Námo take some small measure of pity before leaving me to walk myself halfway across Aman and back to Tirion alone. In any case, my father was told then of the circumstances of my death and of the possibility of lingering trauma, and he saw my body restored by Námo as it had been before I died, before Námo worked his arts upon it. I know these things because my mother told me. She said my father was perturbed by it, and she wished Námo had had the sense to ask her to go instead. In any case, my father seems to have interpreted the distressing circumstances of my death as meaning that I would be more sensitive to the ripples presented by life in Valinor. He doesn't seem to realize that centuries of life in Middle-earth, as a king in Middle-earth--where a decision, a reaction might mean the difference between life or death for thousands of people--had inured me to the tiny dramas of Valinor.

"Which cousin?" I reached past the brimming glass of water to sip at the cider I had ordered.

"Carnistir." His eyebrows lifted in such a way that I knew he found this fact not only surprising but perhaps inappropriate.

The main course was delivered: fish from Alqualondë for my father and a venison stew for me. He'd looked surprised when I'd ordered it, and I'd resisted explaining myself. It seemed half of what I said to him these days began with, "When I was in Beleriand …" and it seemed cruel somehow to keep reminding him how much of my life he'd missed.

The arrival of the food gave me a minute in which to be preoccupied with selecting silverware and sampling the stew and for him to cut a tiny bite off of the edge of his fish and carefully chew it and thus be pardoned from speaking. Finally, I said, "It makes sense," even though I knew better than he did that Námo made the least sense of all of the Valar and "sense" had not factored into the decision to return Carnistir, at least not in as I understood it. "He has great skill in mindspeak, and he did much in Beleriand to establish cohesion among various peoples."

I could see that my father wanted to say something to that, but he was very committed these days to being nonjudgmental. He chewed his fish and nodded vigorously, finally saying, "Your commitment to fairness has always impressed me, Findaráto. That is one thing about you that has not changed. To welcome your cousin, who ha--" he caught himself--"was not overly fond of you."

"Carnistir didn't hate me," I said, opting for his first choice of words. "He was the only one in his family as gifted as he was in mindspeak." That was true; mindspeak was one of the few domains in which Fëanáro had been thoroughly mediocre. Nerdanel had some small skill but was better known for observing and thus learning about people, a gift she translated into her art. "He had no one to teach him, as you taught us and Grandfather Finwë taught you. I'd imagine he felt … undressed … around us. And you know as well as I that my brothers could be cruel."

He looked like he wanted to protest that, but the server arrived then with a fresh pitcher of cider, and we both allowed ourselves to be distracted by the amber liquid chattering into our glasses and let the conversation lapse.

~oOo~

It was exactly four weeks later when I saw Carnistir for the first time. I knew it was exact because I was walking home from my therapist's office and the same hangnail-thin moon hung in the east. I'd succeeded again in deflecting her questions about my dreams (partly by talking about my cousin's reembodiment, to which she asked, "How does it make you feel that someone with his checkered past has been returned to life so shortly after you have?" and I wondered if I was the only person in Tirion who felt charitably toward Morifinwë Carnistir), but I was growing tired and expected, if she kept up her onslaught, that I might capitulate sometime soon and actually tell her what I dreamed.

He was walking with Nerdanel. She had her hand lightly on his arm, cleverly creating the impression that he was escorting her, but I was certain that she was guiding him. He was staring at the ground between his feet as he walked and might have walked headlong over the edge of one of the circles of the city without his mother's gentle hand upon him. He was tidy and clean, but the expression on his face left no doubt that he did not want to be spoken to or acknowledged. I obliged.

I reached my mind out to his, but he was carefully shut up inside of himself. This startled me; this was new. Poor Carnistir had always reminded me, with his mindspeak, of a person left to bumble blindfolded through the world, always groping around himself and frequently crashing into things in painful and humiliating ways. He had been unable to shelter his mind and so he'd felt everything with which he'd had contact. It was no wonder he'd been sullen; he probably should have gone mad.

Námo had done more than heal him, it seemed, but had taught him what our grandfather or someone should have had the mercy to teach him ages before. (I even dared the thought that it could have been me. I'd been younger, yes, but only by a few years, and he'd been difficult to know much less love, yes, but it would have been the kind thing to do nonetheless. Lulled into romanticizing the past and the troubled man before me, I felt guilty for what my young self hadn't done and the harm my omission possibly inflicted upon my people. I imagined him flowering under my friendship when I knew perfectly well he'd never have permitted any such intimacy.) His mind, at last, was sheltered.

They passed me and Carnistir looked up and caught my eye for the briefest moment. I wiggled my fingers at him and he flushed red and looked away. It occurred to me that they were heading down the street from which I'd come, so he probably had the same therapist I did. I wondered who she'd pleased or angered to earn the clientele of both newly reembodied Noldorin princes. I wondered if she pestered him about his dreams like she did me. I recalled her remark to me about his "checkered past"--a remark that was less than an hour old--and pitied him.

It felt good to walk, so I did, quickly and with my head lowered much like my cousin. The city was becoming familiar again, I realized; the longing I felt wasn't for statuary or shops but for the idealistic boy I'd been who'd known such things, even for the king content to leave them and remake his world as he wanted, not for the cynical twice-born who'd so quickly come to accept this absurd new world that I questioned whether he'd brought any sense out of Mandos.

The I arrived at the gate leading down from the second circle and rounded the corner where the frothing horse fountain should be, and that stupid peace garden was there instead, its poor grass still bleeding from the gardeners' morning ministrations that left it so painfully short and sharp, its poor little trees hacked into globes and keystones and bricks, put there for people like me who had seen enough of the world as it was and might be lulled by an illusion as carefully constructed as Valinor had once been.

I'd had enough of walking. I climbed the streets to the administrative district and home. This new world hadn't entirely assimilated me yet. Maybe I had some sense after all.

~oOo~

The uppermost part of Tirion had once been the royal district. The palace was there, and mansions belonging to my father and his brothers, and palatial homes belonging to the favorites of my grandfather. The royal district gleamed of white marble; I remember it had been very hot, even at night. The air was fragrant with the scent of orange blossoms, the streets and gardens impeccable, the servants ubiquitous and invisible as they presided over the simple routines of living so that the king, his sons, and his lords didn't have to.

After my father unkinged himself, it made little sense to continue calling it the royal district. He no longer considered himself royalty but a man like any other who sometimes ended up seated behind a tall person at plays and dusted his own floors. He called it the administrative district instead. Most of the houses, which belonged to lords long exiled, had been given over to the offices needed for his new government. Government no longer occurred in a council room with a throne at its head but was a sprawling, many-armed thing like a monster from the old Valarin myths that seeped and spread. The Valar refused to refer to the top of the city as the administrative district, but they'd been glad to accept my father's offer of offices for their servants to facilitate collaboration with the Noldorin people in the restoration of the glorification of Tirion (in my father's words).

Apparently, after healing from the worst hurts of the Darkening and the kinslaying, my father did move briefly into the palace, but he'd long since returned to the pink stone house in which I'd grown up, but he'd claimed only the smallest wing of it for himself and my mother, insisting the whole thing took too much effort to keep clean and was foolish for a mere two people to inhabit. The rest of it was renovated into apartments for artists and the workers in the offices that occupied what were once the vast bedchambers and dining halls of the Tirion lords.

The palace he converted into a museum. The main of it--including my grandfather's receiving hall--was given over to a memorial of the Teleri slain at Alqualondë. The wing where Fëanáro was born and grew up and Míriel eventually sickened was dedicated to the Two Trees. Most of the people of Tirion, my father reminded me, had never seen them. They occupied the same place as myth in the minds of those who had never known light other than that of the sun.

The wing where my grandfather brought home Indis as his bride, where my Uncle Nolofinwë and my father had been boys together and that had been as a second home to their children when we were small, he was having renovated now, each room to represent a different region of Beleriand. Of late, he'd been trying to talk me into recreating part of Nargothrond in the rooms that had been Finwë and Indis's bedchamber. My therapist thought it was a good idea. He mentioned it the other night ,when we had what she termed "family therapy." This was a new component of my therapeutic regimen during which my mother and my father surrounded me on her couch and she tossed her questions at all of us about my progress or lack thereof. I couldn't really tell where I stood with her, only that she liked my father's idea because "Did I think it might unlock some of my dreams?"

Amarië was in Tirion this week and so she attended family therapy with me and my parents too and then dutifully strolled around the empty rooms in which my father wanted me to remake my underground kingdom. The rooms had been stripped down to bare stone floors and walls. It was simultaneously nothing like Nargothrond had been when I'd first been introduced to it by Thingol's guides and nothing like the room I'd left behind without looking back. Our footsteps echoed as we walked, a cold and loveless sound. The light that came through the windows seemed very thin, the windows themselves rather small. In my memories, these rooms were filled with light.

Their bed had been over there. I remembered when Angaráto was being born and Artaresto and I had been sent to Finwë and Indis, and we'd tumbled together at the bottom of their bed while Finwë leafed through documents and Indis read poetry and, somewhere in the silver night beyond the windows, our brother was born.

I walked to the spot and bounced on the balls of my feet, trying to find there the softness of the bed or the safety of their love, but both were long gone.

"I suppose you worked with worse in Beleriand," Amarië said. She was strolling through the room, gazing up into the cobwebbed ceiling, her arms folded under her breasts, each hand cupping the opposite elbow. She'd cut her hair short--it came just past her ears now with raggedy ends--and wore breeches and sandals and a tunic far too large for her.

"In a way, yes," I said, trying to be cryptic but she smiled, understanding: the setting had been more difficult, yes, but I'd had the fire and enthusiasm of youth. Whereas now--

"I don't want to do this," I said.

"I know."

"I don't see how anyone needs to see Nargothrond again. For those of us who knew it, I will only insult its memory. For those who didn't--"

Why? was my unspoken conclusion to that sentence. Our centuries in Beleriand were generally regarded as a disaster, like the child who runs away from home and becomes not only lost but kidnapped and eaten by Balrogs. We were assumed to accept that we achieved and learned there was primitive beside what had been achieved within the relative peace of Valinor.

My grandparents' bathing chamber had a sunken tub the size of a small pond. It had been a wedding gift to Indis from my grandfather; she was fond of swimming. As children, Artaresto and I called it the pool. "Can we get in the pool?" we'd ask whenever we'd visit. On the night Angaráto was born, before we were permitted into their bed, we splashed and played in the pool made hot by dozens of buckets of steaming water carried up by servants, some of whom waded in with us and attempted to administer soap and scrubbing. Now, the pool had long stood emptied. A thread-thin crack ran most the length of the marble basin. I climbed down the sides and wandered around the middle.

"So make it look like what you want," Amarië said. "Who's going to know?"

We wandered into the main hall. It was swathed in pale blues and violets, like twilight upon the sea. My Aunt Nerdanel's uncannily lifelike statues emerged from draperies and arose from muttering fountains: the slain, encountering us at every turn, their lifelike faces frozen at a happier time. I felt the urge to walk quickly through and leave. A marble child pointed at an unseen bird; two girls giggled as they mended a net together; a weary fisherman rested on the edge of a fountain. This was supposedly for the Teleri, although why they'd come all the way to Tirion and climb to its top to mourn their dead was beyond me. All I saw there were tourists.

~oOo~

Amarië had a reading that night. Of all that had changed in Valinor, I resented that she'd changed the least. I don't think I could have loved her if she still wrote lilting poems about nightingales and starlight and chaste kisses beneath willow trees, not after the Darkening. An apprentice of the great Vanyarin poet Elemmírë, she'd always been gifted but in the way that a pastry chef is gifted with sugar and frosting: the adornments but not the subsistence of life, melting quickly on the tongue. The body and mind wounded needs bread, not cakes.

Not that Amarië's poetry was exactly bread either, or if it was, it was bread made with sand, meant to be harsh and bitter on the tongue, filling even as it left an inexplicable hunger. She found the rare unlovely bits of Quenya and clashed and clattered them together; her poetry inspired restlessness and quickened the pulse just a little. It found the flaws in Valinor and uncurtained them with voyeuristic glee. It's a pity she'd been still trilling about nightingales when Fëanáro led his rebellion; she would have been a fit bard to accompany him at the helm to Middle-earth.

My father had apparently offered her an apartment in the administrative district, but she chose to live in one of the lower districts, in a single room near a concourse out of the city. Artists and poets gathered there, and in her company, I quickly learned that more alleys than not ended in a hollowed out space for a bar or café that one had to know was there to find. She divided her time between Tirion and Taniquetil, where she occupied the spare room that belonged to her parents, who had resigned themselves to accepting her, short hair, unlovely poems, politics, and all. (They still weren't happy about her untitled but celebrated poem about the final time before I left that she and I made love, upon a worktable in a smithy. In truth--and I never told her this--it made me uncomfortable too.) She was one of the most ardent supporters of my father's agenda and most of her poems, in their hearts, were about empowerment and oppression. She, in his words, made dry philosophy into art and stirred the heart where he stirred the mind.

She was tinting her lips while I reclined on her bed and tried to look casual about it. Her apartment was on the ground floor, and I could never quite dispel the worry of being seen and made into a scandal, even though it hardly mattered now. This was not the Time of the Trees, when we loved wantonly and feigned chastity. She wore all black to her readings except for a floppy Telerin fisherman's hat and dark makeup on her mouth and eyes, and she pressed the easy wave out of her hair until it looked like she'd styled it with gardener's shears. She wore a wristlet of withered roses. She looked nothing like Amarië.

She sounded nothing like Amarië either. Amarië used to become nervous before readings, worrying over who would attend and what they would think and the possibility of patronage. She nibbled her nails and jittered her foot. Amarië now had poise enough to draw a thin line along her eyelashes without her hand trembling. Amarië now refused patronage or compensation for her work and cared not whether people liked it and expected to not be understood. Amarië now was consumed with The Truth. "I don't think anyone will get it, except maybe Arafinwë and a few others who have read deep into the theory but that hardly matters, Findaráto; it is the truth and so I must speak it. It's going to sound so ugly! I know it!" she told me as she rolled black silken tights onto her slender pale legs. "People will hate it, but it's true, so it must be said. People will evolve. They didn't understand your father's ideas at first either and look at all he has done. The truth is ugly sometimes, it is!"

She wasn't reading tonight at one of her alley-end cafés but at a restaurant midway up the city that carefully styled itself as radical and, she told me, was a favorite of what she termed after-work artists: those who held productive careers by day and practiced art in the few hours remaining them at night; many worked in the administrative district, I surmised. Amarië was perhaps the first truly radical thing to enter its doors; the art on its walls was just too deliberately morose, the old propaganda hung artfully askance, the lights dimmed to dinginess without becoming sordid. The manager had expressed surprised when she refused a reading fee.

The place was packed when we arrived. My father was already there with a table along the edge of the room and a potted plant with weird snaky leaves partially obstructing our view of the stage. He embraced her and they exchanged a few words about the importance of her message and the chance to deepen understanding among those with few opportunities to go deep into the philosophy. They clasped hands between them as they spoke. He embraced me next and said, "Findaráto. Good to see you, son. Did you take a look at those rooms and think about their potential to represent Nargothrond to our people?"

"I don't think--" I began to say, but the manager appeared then and offered us free drinks and food and scanned the room for someone to displace while promising us a better table but my father waved it all away, and I couldn't help but wonder if he'd seated himself behind the plant with this very scenario in mind. The routine, however, had the effect of distracting him from Nargothrond. The manager receded while pleading to let him know if we needed anything, anything at all, and Amarië embraced and kissed me quickly and squeezed my father's hand and was on her way to take the stage.

I'd attended many of her readings and had long-since memorized her most successful poems. I caught my lips moving along with her recitations; even some of the impassioned speeches she made between poems had become familiar, her voice breaking at predictable places and thrilling with rage at others; at one point, she strode from the stage, seemingly overcome with emotion. I counted to eight, and she was back, her fist before her lips as though trying to force something back inside. I caught myself studying an old poster for a meeting of the Lambengolmor painted by Fëanáro himself and forced my attention back on the stage, where she was composing herself in the same manner that I'd seen her compose herself a half-dozen times at these shows. In her eight seconds off-stage, she'd smudged some of her eye makeup onto her cheek. The audience was riveted. They roared with rage when they were supposed to and let their faces crumple in grief at the right moments. Stuck as I was behind the snaky plant, the audience was the most interesting thing to watch. (I made up my mind to pull my chair away from the table for the second act to get a better view.) It was like watching waves come into shore. One person who understood what she was saying would cringe or shout or clap her hands together and those who had no clue what she was saying would take the cue and imitate the adjacent person, each a split second behind the prior so that the room rippled with motion and sound.

She scuffed her toes on the stage. This was what she did before her final poem before the intermission. She always read something shocking, usually about the Valar and the Darkening as proof the "inferiority of the vaunted ones" (to borrow hers and my father's language) and eased into it by acting as though she had to consider whether the audience could handle it. She scuffed and considered. Someone whooped and a few answering whoops arose around the room. She scuffed and rubbed her forehead. Someone yelled, "C'mon!"

"This next poem I have never read before," she said, and that snapped my attention back to the stage. This was a break in the routine. What of, I wondered, the inferiority of the vaunted ones? She'd said nothing about reading something new; usually, she rehearsed new material before me or when we went to visit my father. "I want to remake the very world to which we belong, the very order imposed upon us by Eru Ilúvatar, to reveal the inferiority of the vaunted ones and champion the cause of quotidian, and these are ideas deeply hated by both the people of the Vanyar and the Noldor and of the Ainur who seek to impose governance upon us. I know I will the bear the repercussions of that loathing. I already do. And yet I expect to be judged more for this poem than any other. The poem is called 'Childless.'"

No one was looking at me as she recited it but I felt like everyone must be acutely aware in that moment that I was in the room, as the woman I'd intended to make my wife (still would except that she no longer believed in the institution of marriage, as she called it) spoke of how she would never bring a child into the world. Spoke the child she (we) had once longed for, in a whimsical reversal of tone that nearly recalled her old poetry. But not now. Not into this world.

This was news to me. I felt like I must be wearing my anguish openly, but when I scanned the room again, no one was looking at me, not even my father; he was leaning forward, elbows on knees and hands clasped upon each other, riveted to her every world. And it was his grandchild she was annulling. Maybe no one dared look at me? Of course, I couldn't resent her for changing. Not Amarië. Not after the Darkening; not after all she'd seen and survived, a large part of it due to me.

Applause roared as she finished. My father leaned toward me. "Your wife," he said, having nearly to shout to be heard over the applause, "is an unmatched talent."

Amarië had been trained to remain for the duration of the adulation, bowing every fifteen seconds. I remember being very young and applauding until my hands were raw so that she could practice keeping an even count in her mind. Amarië now shouted over the applause. "That's intermission, friends. Eat, drink, be generous to your servers and each other!" That was the line she always used to see herself off the stage. Then she was bounding across the room, beaming despite the cumbrous words and emotional contortions of the past half-hour, buoyed by the rush of performing, grasping hands and smiling thanks at the people who caught her arms to congratulate her. A few people still stood to applaud her passage, unwittingly revealing themselves in their adulation as ignorant of the alley-end cafés and their conventions and their politics that assumed that something as simple as saying the truth required no admiration but rather action. She bounded into my arms, accepting a kiss on the cheek from my father and already turning to greet three people who had crossed the room to see her, to gush over the clarity they had now, her words, her voice, such truth!

She felt so small in my arms, like a bird. The noise in the restaurant had risen suddenly to fill the vacuum left by the enormous absence of her tiny form on the stage. Two of her friends were there, having come up from the lower districts to see her, and she and they and my father were all talking at once, and it was easy for me to slip away.

The relative silence of the night seemed to roar in my ears in contrast. I heard the clopping of a horse's hooves rising to the upper districts of the city and then even that sound was gone. Tirion used to sit like an island of light upon the plain of Valinor, rivaled only by the Ezellohar on the horizon to the northwest, but the influx of so many reembodied Elves--exiles and Sindar and Avari--and the normal process of birth, unstopped by Morgoth's betrayal and the Darkening and our rebellion and leavetaking, caused the city to spill onto the plain, like after holding strong for all these millennia, it was weakening and leaking light. As far as my eye could see were pinpricks of light, most of them belonging to Elves who weren't here the last time I'd taken in this view. Of course, neither did the moon hang fat and orange over the Calacirya to the east then. It's going to be hot tomorrow, came the thought before I realized I'd summoned the wisdom of Bëor's people, who had never known a sky without a moon.

I watched the moon draw free of the mountains and remembered my ominous words to Artanis about leaving no realm for a son to inherit and chuckled. It was one of the only times in Nargothrond that I'd spoken of my regret (truthfully, felt all of the time) for the life I'd left behind with Amarië. And now-- I laughed, sounded mad, didn't care. I had Amarië and Nargothrond in a palace bedroom, presumably to endure, at least until the tide of democratic opinion demanded something new in its stead: the realm and no child to inherit it.

I was admitted without notice back into the noise of the restaurant. Amarië's break was ending, and she was finishing the last of a pint of black beer while a girlfriend dabbed at the smudge of makeup she'd artfully scraped down her cheek during her performance. They were talking in low, heated tones in the Vanyarin dialect about a recent paper published by one of Manwë's scholars, a monarchist, I knew, from hearing Amarië and my father discuss his work before. I had once prided myself on being able to greet each person in Nargothrond by name. My head was filling now with the names of scholars and artists and activists and poets as I tried to make sense of this new world.

My father had maintained his gentle manner, even when speaking on matters on which I knew he felt strongly, but Amarië and her friend were angry, and he looked left aside, unable as ever to penetrate (perhaps to fully comprehend) the stirring of passion toward anger and not love. I went over to him, and when Amarië jogged back to the stage, took the seat beside him and watched the rest of her show with him from behind the potted plant.

~oOo~

There were two revolutions, therapy-wise, this week. For the first, my therapist gave me a blank book with a black cover and instructed me to begin what she termed "sketch-journaling." I had become quite artful in avoiding her questions about my dreams, and it seemed she had finally reached her threshold for frustration, or maybe someone in the Office of Mandos in the administrative district had decreed that she had to squeeze my dreams from me before a certain time or else take a new approach. I didn't know the reason for the change. All I knew was that I was to spend a half-hour per day, drawing in my sketch journal, and that I no longer had to attend family therapy. In my family, we didn't agree on everything--many things, beginning with our politics--but we coexisted, and I think she found us dull.

The second thing was that Carnistir stopped attending therapy altogether.

I had decided to use my sketch journal to record my memories of things that were gone from Tirion. Elves have prodigious memories, but even the most capacious vessel will begin to spill sand if overfilled, and it seemed I was reaching that point. I found, upon reaching a place in the city where the old had been replaced by something new, that I was no longer jarred by the absence of the familiar. I knew it was only a matter of time before I passed those places without thinking of the past at all, and then not long before I would not remember it being any other way, and I'd have to read about myself in the history books to summon forth the tattered scraps of memory of who I'd been. (Or was it? Time makes fiction of everything, I've learned.)

Naturally, I began by sketching the foaming horse fountain. I was spending a good bit of time on sketch-journaling, well over the half-hour I had agreed to. I don't know if it was my therapist's intent that I should compile a book of masterpieces, but surely my case file informed her of the risk of that possibility. I was intent on getting the musculature in the horse just right and conveying the movement of the water using only the subtle shadings of my pencil. I had to erase a lot; it has been hundreds of years since last I drew. But I was seeing my memory assembling itself on the page, so it was worth the time. And I had hundreds of these memories, so it would be a good long time before I ran out of things to draw. I was determined not to spoil the innocent white pages of the book with my dreams.

I was with Amarië, who was working on a project for my father and compiling written copies of poetry for the Noldorin People's Library, an institution he'd established with her help to collect and preserve documents and artifacts related to the transition from a monarchy to a democratic government. Amarië wouldn't have thought of writing down a poem when I left her, but she'd become quite the folkorist in my absence. It was Amarië who told me about Carnistir.

"How can that be?" I asked. I was surprised enough that my pencil left the paper for the first time in two hours. My hand, accustomed to drawing, twirled it idly across the air. "It is one of the conditions of our release, that we have to attend therapy as required for at least twenty years."

She shrugged. "He went twice. I suppose he is calling Námo's bluff, seeing if he will truly send him back to Mandos for noncompliance."

Maybe he wants to go back, I found myself thinking as I resumed shading the stones at the base of the fountain, trying to convey their exact coloration. What I said: "I don't think that's possible. Mandos is not for the living. I doubt one living could even enter there."

"Your father did. To see you."

"He entered only just within the gates. There is a section for the living; that's where he was. He did not pass beyond. The halls of Mandos are …" I struggled to articulate what I meant to say, probably because there are no words for an experience that until recently only few have known. I concluded weakly, "Only for the dead."

We were both intent upon our work for some minutes before she spoke again. I was intent on the delicate machinery of the horse's foreleg and, in the process of delving my memory, had forgotten all about Mandos. Amarië, though, must have been stewing upon it. "Your father. He said you were … bad. Ruined." She was staring intently at the page she was editing. "Those were his exact words: 'He was ruined.'" She swallowed hard, glanced quickly at me, and returned just as quickly to her work. Writing still looked awkward for her; that hadn't changed.

"I suppose I was repaired," I said, but I didn't believe it. Ruined: something destroyed by violence and time and resistant to repair. I wondered why I'd been reembodied. I still ached in my body at times, but it was in my memory where the most grievous hurt lay. Námo had explained to my father and me, as I sat before him, newly reembodied and clad in the silk garments given to new bodies, that he was left with a delicate choice for each reembodied Elf: healing too many hurtful memories meant erasing parts of the essential person I had been. Memories, he said, were like the ivy climbing a brick building, simultaneously fracturing and holding it together. With my memories gone, I would be innocently blissful, but I would not be myself, or anyone, really; how much of an adult is his past, his memories? He had to strike the perfect balance between healing what would hurt the most and leaving enough intact that my personality remained. I knew nothing of how he'd made that decision, but I knew I remembered essentially everything of my past. Everything.

Except the way the water played around the left forefoot? I sketched, erased, sketched, erased, sketched, erased. When it was passable at last, Amarië was squinting again at her poem. She was intent; I was stewing. I thumbed through the book. Still on page one, I had so many unstained, white pages to fill with the things I wished hadn't changed. Why was it those I'd lose first, not the memories I wished I could have returned without?

The forefoot was imperfect. I erased it again. It was good paper; it was only just beginning to thin.

I thought about Carnistir. He had never had my skills in evasive diplomacy. I remembered him standing in the middle of council and rebuking my brother as he'd deserved hundreds of times before. The stunned expressions. Why now? Why can't he hold this in? The certainty, whispering through my own thoughts: I would have, he is stunted socially, always has been.

"Tell me of your dreams? What of your dreams? What have you dreamed this week?" It would have worn at him worse than it had at me.

"I can't forget about it. I think about it all the time."

Only when I noticed Amarië staring at me, her blue eyes wide and the page soaking up ink from the pen she was neglecting, did I realize that I had spoken the answer I'd resisted all this time. I wondered what her response would be. She'd looked ugliness in the face in her art, yet only from behind the walls of the Pelóri. The Darkening had come here, yes, but it left us no worse off than the rest of Arda, save what we knew of what could have been. The great trauma of being ripped from vaunt to mediocrity. There was a difference between the fight she and my father waged here with hearts and minds and those we'd waged in Beleriand with blade and blood and naked hands.

She could dismiss me. She should dismiss me. Something vaguely reassuring like: "I'm sure you do." "Of course you do." "I'd worry about you, Findaráto, if you didn't."

And I'd go back to drawing, and she'd redo her page, and we'd never talk of it again. The forefoot was taking shape at last beneath my pencil. My memory was suddenly sharp, made so in the same way that pain will make you suddenly aware of parts of your body you normally neglect to notice. The foot would extend into a perfect drawing, an absurd memory slowly picked clean and hung on display. We would drift apart as our memories of our life shared became too tenuous to bridge the difference in what we'd become in these last long ages. It would take a while, but it was beginning here, in this moment.

Except she said, in a voice low with apprehension, "Think about … what?"

It's not a quick thing, to be eaten alive. The wolf was well-fed; it did not gulp its prey. It browsed with the same leisure that Amarië and I used to allow our fingers to wander and select over a plate of fruit between us. We could not see much: We heard, we smelled, we imagined. My skin thrilled with the expectation of being next. I simultaneously wished it to be over and yet hoped (oh the shame of it, for I was called loyal and brave in the songs! here was the inferiority of the vaunted ones!) that another would be chosen and that I'd live another day or few with the pain behind the screams, dulling eventually to sobs, then moans, still only in the dark corners of my imagination.

Námo had summoned flesh to fill my wounds, drawn my lacerations tight and shut them like silenced lips, beckoned out the blood behind my contusions to leave skin unblemished, but he could not take the memory of those long weeks, listening to my friends slowly dying one by one and knowing that I was grateful, in a way, for their pain because it wasn't mine.

I told Amarië this. The pen lay on the paper, forgotten, and her hands pressed the tabletop and she said nothing. I picked up my eraser and set it down again, and discovering I had drawn the perfect forefoot, hid my face in the crook of my arm.

~oOo~

My father was quite expeditious in having the rocks delivered that I said I needed. And they were perfect: flawless and easily carved. Nargothrond would take shape here in just a fraction of the time it had taken in the unhewn caves along the Narog.

"What is it for?" Amarië asked, wiping her hands on the towel she always wore on her belt. She detested the feeling of stone dust on her hands but fetched the tools I asked for without complaint, helping me by day to realize Nargothrond in my grandparents' bedchamber in the palace. In exchange, at night, I copied the poems for the Noldorin People's Library for her so she could go to tea and read poetry in the alley-end cafés.

I opened the sketch journal and showed her the drawing of the horse in the foaming fountain. Her brow wrinkled as she pondered it, and I knew she was secretly thinking it was hideous and was surprised that I'd allowed such a thing in Nargothrond. Maybe the secret kingdom had, after all, more than a dose of myth? Maybe we truly had been primitive in Beleriand?

"It used to be where the third circle descended to the second. That peace garden is there now."

She took the book from my hands and looked closer, then shook her head. "I don't remember it."

It probably deserved to be forgotten and certainly never had even a passing resemblance in Nargothrond. It would exist there now, for the tourists, the administrative workers on their lunch breaks, my father. What did they know.