Home Alone: Forgotten in Formenos by Dawn Felagund

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Chapter 1: The House in the North

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The approach to the Yuletide stretches like a path plunging downhill and thronged with candles, and the House of Fëanáro in Formenos is filled with chaos. It is a chaotic house by nature, but this is in excess of the usual order of things. If you were to sit on the hill alongside the house, you would hear it as you might a tumult of wild creatures in the forest: a great crowd of them, each noisy on its own but together? Together, were the hallways not made of the strongest stone, the enormous energy of them would make the walls twitch.

It is a chaotic house by nature, with its madly brilliant master and his seven sons, but this is the weekend of departure for the Yuletide Feast at Taniquetil, and upon that event—itself worthy uproar—have converged several other occurrences that are like storms that meet and throw off weather unnatural and godlike. For one is the literal storm coming, dark on the horizon. Tyelkormo sniffed to the north this morning, one foot raised, alongside Huan (one paw raised), and the clouds are beginning to mount against the stars. Then there is the preparation for the feast itself and the marshalling of trunks and provisions and gifts for relations unseen for a half-year. And then—a third storm insinuating itself into the tumult—Nolofinwë and his family have come on progress this year to Formenos and are staying in the House of Fëanáro and intended to depart, all of them together, in a single carriage and wagon tomorrow, stuffed like a Yuletide cracker filled to bursting with colorful, crinkle-wrapped sweets.

“We have, like, tonight!” That is Tyelkormo, his face reddened and his eyes a little distended as they flicker between the window and the cloudy north and his mother Nerdanel, who is carefully folding a particularly persnickety silk robe of her husband’s that he would allow to wrinkle, intentionally probably. She is carefully folding each side in mirror image of each other, running her hands inside the folds to make sure the silk within is smooth.

“We will make it in time, I assure you,” she says in a voice that plods like the trusty draft horse that never spooks. In this family, Nerdanel would have had to go to Lórien long ago if she did not have a near-pathological patience in the face of constant (seeming) catastrophe. “Are your trunks packed, Tyelkormo?” Tyelkormo is no trusty draft horse; he is a sensitive filly, his ears always aloft and flickering at perils imagined and magnified to dramatic proportions, worthy of flashing his lithe, shapely person across daisy-flecked meadows. With a whistle to his dog and a fanning flip of his golden hair and a mutter about being never listened to in a family of craftsmen, he flounces into the hall.

In that hall, Carnistir is raging, red-faced, after the oil that he warms and uses to smooth his hair. He has discovered how to tame his hair and discovered girls, all in a season. “Surely someone saw it!” His empty hands, palms up, are an accusation and faintly scented with lavender-infused aloe. His suspect is a beleaguered Curufinwë, who is trying to sneak more books into his trunk than he is permitted to bring, trying to defend his name while balancing them under his chin, all while attempting to evade the notice of Nelyo, who is being unreasonably strict about the packing limits imposed by Nerdanel earlier that evening.

“Amil!” comes the shriek from Turukáno. “Curufinwë is allowed to bring more than three books!” He is not, and now Nelyo is coming down the hall with a frazzled, “Wait … what?” and Curufinwë is crying and Turukáno is gloating.

“I don’t have hair oil but I have a powder foundation that might work for you,” said Írissë a voice syrupy with cruelty. Carnistir perceives the jest, and his face flushes red as though to prove its validity.

That quick, Tyelkormo has forgotten his trunk and is slipping past her and down a wide stone staircase toward the front door, to stare apprehensively at the clouds in the north with his chest thrust out in what he hopes a shapely way. Nolofinwë is coming up, and Findekáno, the former coaching the latter on the latest political gossip—for Findekáno has been the whole summer here in the north—and the twins, the youngest, are laughing to drown the rest of the chaos and chasing each other and seemingly unaware of the urgency and ambitions of their kin. Tyelkormo weaves among the all; Huan gets backed up a few steps before being able to descend.

At the foot of the stairs is a Maia—one of Aulë’s judging by his insignia. He wears the full regalia of the Lord of Earth, brown as the earth itself yet seeming to glitter with the promise of treasure, but there is something irregular about him. It is so mild as to be unnoticed by a flouncing Tyelkormo (who in fact doesn’t seem to see him at all). Perhaps it is that his hands are too pampered and clean.

“Hey!” he shouts as Tyelkormo passes in a muttering cloud of disparagements of craftsmen, liberally littered with the kinds of curses that make the soft-handed Maia blink.

Macalaurë is dragging an enormous swaddled musical instrument all by himself. The Maia watches it come, skirking with each laborious tug against the wood floor. “Hey, do you—” the Maia begins, but Macalaurë gives him a piercing, peeved look. “If you’re not going to help me …” Realizing the Maia has no plans to do so—his fattish, soft hands are rubbing together at his waist—Macalaurë emits a snort unbecoming of one with such a voice and keeps skirking his bundle across the floor.

“Your parents, the Lord Feä—” But Macalaurë ignores him, and the Maia is distracted by Írissë coming down the banister, even though she is surely far too old and the dress she was forced by Anairë to wear is fluttering about her knees.

“Your parents—” the Maia begins hopefully when she lands, light and easy as an acrobat.

“Don’t live here.” And she is capering off after Tyelkormo in a whirl of white skirts with a gray streak of dust from the bannister across the seat.

Upstairs, the combined forces of Nolofinwë and Nelyo are marshaling an illusion of order amid their respective clans, at least insofar as they have managed to separate bodily those most likely to come to fisticuffs. The Ambarussa are in the midst, their faces lighted by the excitement of chaos: of Curufinwë’s tears and Turukáno’s self-righteous and loud bloviation and Carnistir with one hand mashed against the side of his head as though to bar the noise but in reality making his hair fan out most absurdly on one side. It will become more absurd as days pass without the hair oil, still unfound. They are hoping for a fight, for bruises that they can find a dozen different and increasingly creative explanations for during the feast. These are the sorts of things that sustain them, little as they are and either underfoot or unnoticed: the sorts of stories that make faces whip toward them and tongues still, leaving a silent space for their little voices. But they are disappointed. Nelyo shepherds a sobbing Curufinwë into his room and Anairë takes Turukáno by the arm in a way that robs him of his pomposity and makes him just a dumb little kid again. Disappointed, the Ambarussa drift toward their parents’ bedroom.

Findekáno is clattering down the stairs, shoulders thrown back with the importance of a mission he’s been sent on by Nelyo, his chin lifted a little higher than his wont as though buoyed by the rumors his father trusted him with. The Maia holds out hands toward him. “Your parents—”

“Don’t live here,” he says. He does have the decorum to throw a “Sorry!” over his shoulder before he disappears down one of a labyrinth of hallways.

As far as the Maia can tell, the house is nothing but children: noisy, squabbling, sniveling, running, undignified children. Fëanáro’s children, known to be imps, and Nolofinwë’s clearly no better. He scratches at a perceived imperfection on his insignia. When he looks up, Curufinwë is frozen on the stairs, his knee raised high in an exaggerated tiptoe that he clearly hoped would go unheard. The Maia sees the porcelain face and silvery eyes and midnight hair and says with relief, “Aha! At last! Where might I find your parents, young lord?”

But in Curufinwë’s mind, his brother Nelyo is so intent on restricting his outtake of books from his domicile that he has gone to such extremities as hiring a Maia of Aulë to guard the passage between Curufinwë’s room and the library. Curufinwë freezes, trying in vain to come up with an explanation of why he is standing so on the stairway when he has been instructed to pack his trunk.

“Young lord? Young Fëanárion? Curufinwë, if I’m not mistaken?” (Now Curufinwë’s jaw drops in a way most certainly not reflective of his intelligence.) “Hey, Fëanárion!” The Maia snaps his fingers; they make a fleshy sound like a toad being dropped on a stone floor. “Kid!”

Upstairs, Ambarussa have slipped amid a gale of giggles into their parents’ room. Fëanáro’s festival robes shimmer on the bed, inviting as a pool of water in the summer they’ve left behind. The elder, Ambarussa—the rambunctious one—takes three running steps and executes a perfect swam dive onto the robes while his mother’s back is turned.

Even the pathologically patient have a limit. Nerdanel, hearing the pat-pat-pat of small feet turns in time to see the acrobatic move. She has spent the last twenty minutes preparing those robes for packing. She squawks.

Ambarto, the younger and conniving one, says, “Curufinwë is crying over books and Írissë stole Carnistir’s hair oil!”

Nerdanel extracts Ambarussa from atop the robes before he begins to backstroke them into further dishevelment. It sometimes occurs to her that these last two were a tipping point, something beyond what was perhaps natural and intended for the Elves. She and Fëanáro have not been able to be as attentive as they should, and with Nelyo gone more than he’s here—

But she has to stop that thought. She holds out Ambarussa at arm’s length. His legs are still a little podgy—both their legs are—and they have her father’s red hair and her husband’s bright eyes. They are the only ones of her sons nearer to the babies they’ve just recently been than to the men they will become. Still, she is aware of the rumpled robes, of time wasted, and grateful when Anairë appears in the doorway to ask, “Nerdanel, exactly how many books are you letting Curufinwë bring?”

“Oh, Anairë—that again?” She passes Ambarussa to her sister-in-law; Ambarto is circling between them, wanting to be picked up. Anairë, to her credit, stoops to scoop him up onto her other hip, even though she groans under their combined weight. “Take these two. Let me handle Curufinwë and Turukáno. Surely we can make terms amenable to all.”

Back in the hallway, Anairë deposits the twins onto the floor with a whoosh of relief. She cracks her spine, a hand on the small of her back. “My word,” she says. “How you have grown! Off with you, boys, now. Go pack your trunks. A storm is coming and we must load the wagons tonight if we’re to make it out before the snow starts.” And off she goes because, somewhere deeper in the house, Nolofinwë is thundering over lost gold hair clips.

The Ambarussa stand in a pocket of stillness. They twist their fingers in a nervous way they have. Snow was mentioned, but even that is not distraction enough from their sudden distress. Finally, Ambarto shifts his eyes toward his brother and Ambarussa squeaks, “Trunks?”

The Maia is still standing at the bottom of the stairs. He has a sour look upon his face, like he’s tasted something bitter, that makes the insignia on his tunic even more out of place than his plump, pale hands. Aulë tends to attract those who would bend the rules, sure, but his followers are invariably jolly in the face of tumult and would just as soon compound it like throwing logs onto an already roaring fire.

Five more children have passed him, yet none can help him locate the lord and lady of the house. He is craning his neck to peer up the stairs and down the many hallways spidering off this high-ceilinged vestibule when she is there, the broad-bodied, placid-faced Nerdanel, ushering a pair of boys (one the boy who’d frozen on the stairs before), each with a stack of books to return to the library.

“My lady!” the Maia chortles and regrets it. It sounds too delighted for the news he is about to deliver, but the Maia is beginning to get what he’s heard the Eldar call “a headache.” Thankfully, it does not seem Nerdanel notices. She smiles and inclines her head.

“I am she. I am sorry. Have you been waiting long?”

Only since the Years of the Lamps, he wants to quip. He does not. He simpers a smile at her.

“It is to be expected!” (He cannot bring himself to lie, he finds. He wants her patient façade to crack just long enough so that she can witness, as he has, the disorder she has allowed to become her normal.) “It is the eve of departure for the Yuletide Feast!” She seems unaffected. “I’m sure all houses are in tumult now.”

She is beginning to push again on the backs of the two youngsters before her. “Was there something you needed, my lord?” He realizes he is about to lose her inside that maze of a house and who knows when she will emerge again. “These two have an important mission to the library that they very much need to complete and which I must oversee.”

“There is some concern, my lady, on this festival night.” He drops his voice, as though not to scare the children. “You know that Melkor has been recently released. We have every reason to believe he can be trusted—”

“I should hope; it was Manwë who released him.”

“Yes, yes! It was Manwë who sent me! Yes! It is just that Melkor does not plan to attend the feast. He will be working in a library in Tirion, and we want to make sure that those residents with valuables in their homes in Tirion take the proper precautions because of … you know. Past transgression. But! I must be clear! I must say again that we have no reason—”

“Of course you do not. But our valuables are here. My husband locks them in a vault.” She is propelling the boys forward again. “He does not share my faith.”

But the Maia doesn’t care about that. He is peering into the house again, smiling unabashedly this time. He was wrong about the headache, it seems. He feels new-sprung from the Music, like he’s conjured a corporeal form exceedingly fair. “Which one is it?” he wonders aloud at the hallways, as though one might raise a hand and reveal to him in which direction Fëanáro’s treasury lay.