Cradle of Stars by Dawn Felagund, Elleth

An Hour to Grieve

We accustomed quickly. Nerdanel—who had, after all, spent much of her life listening to the heretical musings of Fëanáro—remarked that we were living as we’d been intended: “Eru Ilúvatar awakened us in the darkness of Endórë, after all,” she said. “Our bodies grew used to the constant light as bodies will soften to any indulgence, but we are built to survive the darkness.”

The filthy cloud Melkor spewed to cover the stars also receded and we had their thin light again, enough at least to rime the most perilous edges of things with a faint piping of silver. We found candles and torches and braziers, and we discovered that all manner of things could give light: rags, dried grasses, the wood furniture of abandoned houses. Paper, lovingly crafted for books and left in stacks on the desks of exiled scribes. I wondered that I did not feel more regret for sacrificing it for light.

We found more people. Every day, more came forth. The hill, they said, wore a corona of firelight from the torches we arrayed around the royal square, so they knew there were people there, and they guided themselves by the light of the Mindon Eldaliéva, which—darkened at first as though in shock from the ravages of Melkor—had returned along with the light of the stars. After the first people arrived, summoned by the traces of torchlight against a backdrop of darkness, we drained the fountain and built a bonfire there: a beacon to all who were left in the lower city and upon the plain and who would come. The first people were made hesitant by the dark but the ones who came later came with greater confidence. Perhaps it was as Nerdanel said.

Coming into the light, they wept. Our humanity had become caught up in the shape and sight of ourselves, and the sight of feet and hands and faces brought the full weight of what we’d lost. We gave each new arrival an hour to grieve and then we found them work to do. We’d taken our hours too, the Four Queens, as they called us. By the time I’d returned from seeking (and not finding) the candles, Terentaulë’s empty arms were gesturing in the direction of the orchards that had been lately giving greatest yield, for after light, we would require food. Indis—who’d lost her children to exile and her husband to death—was gathering weapons and armor from the private collections in the palace (the public displays had already been raided) so that we might defend ourselves against what we still feared in the dark. Nerdanel was taking inventory of the supplies we had and identifying the nearest forges and workrooms to fashion what was missing, beginning with torches and lamps.

There were a few men among those left behind but most were women, women who loved their land and had secure enough in their husbands’ and children’s love for that land (and them) to stay behind, confident they would stay too. We did not speak of that grief, of being subsidiary to a cause, worth abandoning to serve an ideal less formless than the breath passing our lips. Many arrived, certain they would find their husbands/daughters/sons among the people of the corona on the hill. We gave them an hour to search among our faces and to drift to the edge of the reach of our light, to peer into the darkness beyond, to stare and wait—and then we found them work to do.

I was in charge of those assignments and of keeping the records of who went where and did what. I’d been a scholar, a linguist, before the Darkening, and never before had the uselessness of my work stood so starkly as it did now. Nerdanel was a craftswoman and Terentaulë an arborist, both with skills ready for practical use; once a great athlete among the Vanyarin people, Indis instructed the people in the use of sword and shield and our fear, though still present, was managed at least. We’d still received no word from the Valar and were too few to spare a messenger to Máhanaxar, and we didn’t know what to expect from the dark, so we proceeded with the expectation that we’d be required to defend ourselves. But I—I stood in their midst and didn’t know what to do with my empty hands and my brilliant, useless mind.

It was Indis—sweet, diplomatic Indis—who assigned me as our tender new society’s first bureaucrat: recording, tracking, assigning, and monitoring the many tedious, minute workings of our village atop Túna. Perhaps she believed my husband’s skill might have translated to me. It had not: In the first days, I was whelmed beneath the sheer volume of tiny tasks and fumbled like a drowning swimmer clawing to reach the surface. There was confusion and shortages because of me. I had always felt a secret disappointment in my husband, when he was still his father’s seneschal, for not striving for more; in those first dark days, I realized and appreciated the full breadth of his accomplishments. On the night he joined in slaying Eärwen’s people, I spoke my apology to the wind and bade Manwë—for I had betrayed no one and no thing—to see it whispered into my husband’s ear.