Cradle of Stars by Dawn Felagund, Elleth

Swathed/Shorn

When we passed beneath the stone arch leading into the city, I discovered why the lights were so dim. Each was draped in cloth just thin enough to allow a muffled light to emerge. Even the strands that wrapped the towers were overwrapped in fabric now; the wind from the sea caught it and tattered it like cobwebs.

"Douse your torches," I commanded my retinue in a whisper. This was a city in mourning, and the torchlight seemed profane in contrast to the dulled light of the swaddled lamps.

Tirion post-Darkening hummed with activity: desperate and contrived to keep the grief from our gates. Alqualondë wore its grief in stunned, paralyzed silence. Normally, carts rattled in the streets and vendors cried their wares; delicate silver chimes and Aeolian harps played at the whim of the wind. We passed one garden where a wind-gnarled tree, half-dead, usually sported both lanterns and windchimes in abundance. The lanterns were draped in fabric; the chimes lay in rows on the ground. Only the wind dared voice itself in the silent city. It moaned in the doorways and elicited tired groans from the buildings, sounds normally lost in the musical bustle of the city.

The Teleri were famously hospitable. Finwë would tell a story of going to a feast at Olwë's palace and eating nothing once there because he'd been summoned into so many homes along the road and fed oysters and fish stew and the delicate confections of seaweed and wild rice. But today I saw people appear only to shut doors or draw curtains across windows: but hints of movement in the gloom.

We came to the broad stairs that led up to the palace. The Telerin palace did not aspire to the sky as did those of the Noldor and Vanyar; it spread low, no more than three stories, with balconies and rooftop terraces providing as much living space as the rooms within. The design had been a collaboration between Olwë and Finwë, the former insisting on its peculiar aesthetic while the latter managed the mathematics that it might resemble a nautilus shell, spiraling outward from a tower that flashed a pale blue light upon the sea, a message to the mariners that the Telerin kingdom thrived.

That light was not wrapped. It was gone entirely.

There were no guards at the door. Perhaps they had been slain; perhaps the assault the Teleri had already endured had proven their futility. What could happen that was worse than what already had? I knew this wide concourse, open to the sky; I knew these pools and fountains, once playful and now lying still. More chimes lay alongside the path, stretched out in funerary neatness. Each of the myriad lanterns wore its own long cloak of thin fabric.

As I walked, I rehearsed what I would say to Olwë. I'd rehearsed it with Nerdanel and Terentaulë before departing—Indis had been, like me, ordered on a mission to Máhanaxar—and practiced it on the journey to forget the darkness. There was no choice but to lay bare our sorrow and our willingness to atone for our kin. I had heard that when the Three Ambassadors came before the Valar for the first time, Ingwë lay upon his face on the ground, so enormous was his deference; I considered that I might do that but, coming from a Noldo, worried that it might seem overwrought. We were never the ones to defer. I worried that I would weep, then worried that I would not be able to.

The doors to the receiving room stood open. The room beyond had once dripped with lanterns of all colors upon chains of all lengths, hanging from the ceiling. It was said that each household had made and contributed one, some forged of pure silver and others woven nets of humble beach grass. With the lanterns cloaked, the room was now dim and gray, as though mist-choked. I hesitated, looking for a guard or a herald or anyone to announce me, but there was no one. No matter. I squared my shoulders and proceeded forth into the room.

Olwë had permitted a gift of a throne from Ingwë and Finwë: a rock, really, with an alcove like a seat and embedded with ancient shells that remembered the Years of the Lamps. The shallow pool around it used to be filled with lampstones and lit it from below with a shimmering blue light. Now, the throne hulked at the end of the receiving room, the pool around it dark and still. It was empty.

There was one person in the room: a boy, a scribe perhaps, working over an angled scribal desk likely left here by the last Noldorin scribe to serve here, who may well have taken up arms against the very people who'd hosted him. The boy at the desk now was Telerin, his bones jutting from beneath the meager, pale fabric that he wore as a symbol of grief. His hair was unevenly shorn, hanging past his earlobes on one side and barely covering his eartips on the other. I squinted into the gloom. Was he one of Olwë's grandsons, perhaps, the son—or even the grandson—of one of Eärwen's brothers? (Arafinwë had told us that all of their own children had gone with the kinslayers.) Both of her brothers had been slain in the attack; Arafinwë did not know about their children.

I took a loud intake of breath to make the boy look up. "Pardon me? I am Anairë, come from the clean-handed Noldor of Tirion, who did not take up arms against your people but wish to atone however we may for the crimes of our kin. I would dearly desire to speak to your king."

The figure rose from behind the desk. Shoulders jutted beneath a roughspun tunic; slender, bony hands; a tiny, pointed chin; a body that was but a whisper inside its clothing made overlarge by starvation. The hint of—breasts? Surely not, but yes: breasts once made full by the nurturance of five children, sea-green eyes squinting with a grief and exhaustion that might have been a mirror of my own face, fingers twisting and wrapping themselves in the edge of the tunic. Her tunic.

The person before me was no scribe, no boy. She was Eärwen.