Cradle of Stars by Dawn Felagund, Elleth

The Dark

When the society of the Noldor collapsed, it was the wives of its great princes who remained behind to salvage what we could: Indis, Nerdanel, Terentaulë, and me, Anairë. When the last traipsings of the exiles’ feet diminished upon the road, we stood in the Royal Square and darkness fell fully upon us for the first time. They’d taken all the torches and lanterns, and the place was thick with silence. We’d been bold in the crowded dark, but left alone—left behind—the silence choked us. We did not know what was yet out there, if what had destroyed the Trees might descend next upon us. We scarcely dared to breathe, stricken by a primitive terror of predators in the dark. When I imagine the scene now, I imagine the thin wail of an infant braving forth what the rest of us felt but didn’t dare to utter, but Terentaulë’s arms hung emptied at her sides, filled only hours before by Telperinquar’s plump, squirming body before Curufinwë took him away. Wet splotches were spreading over her breasts.

Just the wives were left. The infants were gone.

She was beginning to panic, whipping left and right, no longer certain in the darkness where the road descended into the Calacirya, the road they’d taken. Even the palace was but a grayish intimation at one end of the square. She was panicking in silence, her arms at her sides waiting to be filled. She started to run and came up hard against the base of a fountain. I heard her breath hitch in pain.

“Light.” That was my voice. “First we need light.”

Nerdanel was gathering up Terentaulë, her daughter-in-law. She didn’t shush her; she didn’t comfort her. The silence was deep already, and there was no comfort. She was holding her the way she used to hold her fourth-born son, the wild one who’d been born half-mad. She was making her arms into something soft and safe to rail against, until the agony in Terentaulë’s empty arms subsided.

“Go,” she said to me.

I’d never moved through the dark before. I calculated the position of our house relative to the pale shape that suggested the palace and began to make halting progress, like walking through the forest and coming to a sudden stop to find your nose an inch from the spiderweb you’d just now seen. The dark was a massed, formed thing; I kept waiting for my face to press against it, to feel its creeping tendrils in my hair. I stopped and waved my hands in front of me; they came against nothing. I began again, arms extended still, and my foot stepped into a hole made by a missing cobblestone, and I pitched forward to the ground, my wrists jarred and my arms made raw by the harsh touch of stone.

This was the dark. This was what our ancestors pushed through on their way to the sea.

I rose. No one called after me; I realized that I’d held stoic silence as I fell. I went onward, feeling with my toes now, parting my hands over and over again in front of me as though I swam through dark until I kicked a step and clambered on hands and knees into a house that offered no relief of familiarity. I waited for my eyes to adjust as they might to a dim room, but nothing eased forth from the darkness: no furniture or doorways or objects discarded; no breath of light from another room to throw the shapes of this one into relief.

I trailed my fingers along walls and unseated (and caught) objects and exhaled the pain of barked shins and stubbed toes. I found the stairs, then the hallway. I rolled on my feet to keep the silent, like I used to creep away from my sleeping children’s beds. It was like being clapped underground but that thing pressing in from beyond where I knew the windows should be: it was the sky. I counted the doorways and tried not to see where the windows should be. One. Two.

Three.

Four. My bedroom—arms fumbling through air filled only with darkness—and now to the right to my bathing chamber. There was a skylight overhead; the darkness made the room into a crypt. The Treelight had always been thin, so elevated above the plain and with only the skylight to admit light, and I’d enjoyed bathing in the quavering light of candles. I fumbled at the vanity table; bottles of herbs and soaps and lotions rang against each other. Cringing, I yanked my hands away. The drawer, the drawer-pull, then the fumbling inside, awaiting the dull rattle of waxy cylinders—

But they were gone, the candles. My husband (or someone?) had taken them.