50 Prompts: AU Silmarillion by Urloth

Prompt: Shroud (Fëanáro and Míriel)

Warnings: Disturbing imagery, and Body Horror. Cannot emphasise the Body Horror enough.

Summary: As the interest in the Silmarilli grows, Fëanáro takes a drastic step to hide them from the Valar whose interest disturbs him the most.

T’was but a shell. This Fëanáro had told himself so many times before. His hands trembled as he knelt beside her. Just a shell; no life, no person within. The casing but not what was valuable.

The maidens had long ago left to go about their business, and so he sat there in the quiet corner where his mother’s mausoleum stood, merely a roof over her body to protect her from the rare bad weather, supported by intricate pillars depicting the formation of the world through song. His mother was lying upon her bier, her face that horrifying blankness that had driven him away and meant he so rarely visited.

 He stroked her hair with a hand that was still shaking, and hated how cool the long silver tresses were. The scalp produced the most heat of a body, and hair should be warm, especially so close to the scalp. Then he moved down her body and slit open her dress over her abdomen with the sharp razor he had brought with him for this purpose. He had selected the blade for its ability to leave precise, clean cuts so fine that you could barely see them.

 It hurt to do this. It sickened him but here was the one place they would never look. He thought of their avarice, and their attempt to appropriate the symbolism of his independence from them for their own pleasure and vainglory. He could not describe it, the feeling of wrongness he felt when they beheld the jewels, or the feeling of dread. He could easily describe the anger though, and the offence. He closed his eyes, swallowed back tears, then remembering the anatomy he had studied to carefully, cut into his mother’s abdomen. There was no blood. Simply flesh. It was worse than if there had been blood.

Bile rose. He swallowed it down, and forced his hands to still entirely. He thought of the forge, of his workrooms, of his library when his work consumed him in the final stages, and left no room for mistakes.

It seemed a horrible irony, this plan of his. He had injured her via her womb before, and now it seemed he was injuring her again. Though perhaps he was returning what he had stolen in a strange way.

At first there was resistance. He had made the wound as small as possible, and used the clamp he had brought to open it up and reveal the opened organ in question. Each of the jewels was gently pushed into the flesh with some effort but at last all three were gone, their glow consumed by her empty flesh.

He froze suddenly, thinking he heard footsteps.

Matimo murmured the all clear a few moments later after Tyelkormo and Makalaurë came back, having made sure no one was near by. Fëanáro’s sons returned to keeping watch as he took the thread and needle he had brought with him, healer’s standard, and with his neatest stitches he closed the wound he had dealt her.

"I am sorry," he whispered, and with new thread and needle, glad he had remembered the colour of the dress Lorien had dressed her in, he sewed her dress shut. It seemed over kill to cover his tracks like this but he wanted to fix as much of the damage he had caused as he could. He wrapped her back in her shroud, and pulled the blanket that lay over her, heavily embroidered with the work of her own hand to form the crest of Finwë twined with her own with bright silk and gold thread.

 He stroked the repurposed tapestry which had hung in his bedroom as a child, when the days had still been warm and full of the love of both of his parents. Then at last he stood back and stared at her. She looked as she had when he had arrived, no indication of what she was now hiding within her. 

"I love you," he told Míriel, stroking Þerindë’s cheek, so soft but so wrong without the heat of life in it. He tucked his hands against each other, pushing them into his sleeves to try and warm them up, suddenly chilled right through, “I love you. Thank you.”