Home Alone: Forgotten in Formenos by Dawn Felagund

Chapter 2: The Wight

The Ambarussa stand in the middle of the upstairs hallway, a little red-headed island in the middle of a thundering highway of relatives scampering for laundry and toilet effects and accessories to borrow, reclaim, or steal. In a family where the question of genius is less about its existence and more about the form it takes in each member of Finwë’s illustrious family, they are exceedingly small and ordinary, and if genius exists in their little, podgy, pale forms, it has not yet exerted so much as a glimmer. They are merely cute, and not even so much of that to avoid being thought annoying.

“Our trunk?” peeps Ambarto to his brother. Both are full of the certainty, common in the young who dwell amid the mature and competent with little exposure to their own kind, that they will be expected to decipher this task on their own, and if they cannot, will be punished in some intolerable way. At the very least, they expect, there will be shame and much huffing by whomever ends up doing the task for them, and then blame for the tardiness precipitated by their incompetence.

They decide to seek help now. The decision is reached without discussion, as a simultaneous realization in the spot midway between their red heads, where they like to imagine there is a little glimmer like a shared thought. They try Nelyo first. He is brisking by, and Ambarussa paws at his sleeve and mewls, “Nelyo!” but he carries on, though he does toss his chin briefly over his shoulder and says, “I can’t right now, loves!” He rounds a corner as he says it and “loves” floats around the wall, just his voice.

They don’t dare Uncle Nolofinwë when he passes with his face set in a scowl; they step against the wall because they are not sure he sees them and might trample them. Írissë appears a moment later, and when they try to waylay her, she rips her arm out of their grasp and snaps, “Why would you assume I am here to help you? Because I am a girl?” Into Tyelkormo’s room she whirls. Carnistir tells them plainly to “Fuck off,” and to ease the sting of his rejection, they whisper to each other when he is gone about the frizz of hair ballooning on one side of his head, pulled unwittingly into disarray earlier and still unrepaired.

“He looks like an airship,” says Ambarto, “with the sails made of just snakes.”

“Black snakes.”

“Dumb black snakes.”

This gives them the courage to go, hand in hand, to the door to Tyelkormo’s room. Tyelkormo’s room is an Arcadia of forbidden joys for a small boy. He has glass tanks filled with all sorts of squirming, clawed, fanged creatures and plants that twine up the walls and crawl toward the windows. These are also filled with creatures; Nerdanel insists he keep the door closed. There are books too, hidden under the bed; not the kind of books that Fëanáro and Nerdanel and their brothers use to line the walls of their rooms but the kind that made him scream when they caught him looking through them and throw a geode at their head. Thankfully, they have two heads, the geode flew harmlessly through the shimmering spot where their thoughts meld. Then there is a lot of candy, which Tyelkormo squirrels away like the literal squirrel that was in his room for awhile till it got into Macalaurë’s hair while he was returning Tyelkormo’s laundry and Nerdanel made Tyelkormo get rid of it.

Írissë is lounging on Tyelkormo’s bed, paging slowly through a craftsman’s handbill for crossbows. One foot hangs off the end of the bed and bobs slowly up and down with its slipper dangling by a single toe. Both Ambarussa wince when they see that Tyelkormo—even Tyelkormo!—is packing his trunk as instructed, layering his fancy clothing with weapons, even though hunting is prohibited in Taniquetil, the animals there friendly and encroaching upon the path like in a storybook. “If my mother even glances in this,” he is saying, “she’ll see my longbow. But I really want my longbow.”

“So take it and your shortbow” is Írissë’s senseless solution that nonetheless appeals to Tyelkormo because he bobs his head in a nod and both bows are buried amid his socks and underthings.

“Tyelkormo?” It is Ambarto, the younger and conniving one. He’s made his eyes glassy and wide like a doll’s; his hands knit and twist in front of him. “Tyelkormo?”

Tyelkormo’s head whips up. He is growing into his face but still ugly in the awkward way of adolescence: his nose having blossomed in his face while his lips remained small and rose-like. He worked over-hard on his hair as a result but lacked the manual dexterity of his kin, and his braids made his skull a complex of ridges and lumps. He would become handsome someday, but this was not a good year for him.

“What!” he blurts. Much of what Tyelkormo says these days seems to be said by blurting, excess exclamation points erupting upon his speech like so many pimples upon his forehead.

“Amil said we have to pack a trunk. We don’t know how to pack a trunk.”

There is an unfortunate whine at the end of Ambarto’s plea. Tyelkormo will soothe the whining of his hound with scraps off the table, but otherwise, the sound—familiar as his own awkward face in the mirror each morning after so many years as one of the eldest of the Finwion grandchildren—sets his teeth on edge. Literally, he grits his teeth, making his face into a remarkably square shape. His jawbones bow out and his chin disappears. Fëanáro could teach basic geometry by it. The pimples become a constellation of small blushes as the blood rushes into his face.

“I would not pack your trunk for you,” he says with the pointed enunciation of the deliberately cruel, “if I was filling it with your dismembered, wolf-mangled corpses.”

Írissë burbles with laughter. The foot off the end of the bed swings harder; the slipper creeps closer to falling but yet hangs on to her toe.

The twins have identical looks of wide-eyed horror. They are at the age where ghost stories, the stories of wolves and beasts in the forest, loom overlarge in their imaginations. Even swaddled in quilts, with soft pillows beneath their heads and their nightlight revolving a silent parade of gentle animal shapes along their walls, they felt the prickle of danger at night and cling to each other, even the tiniest creak of the house causing their hearts to start into alertness.

Írissë grins at the effect her adored older cousin has on the Ambarussa. “Oh just look at the babies!” The slipper falls with a slap to the floor, and she sashays to the window. “If this storm comes like you think, Tyelko, because our dumb parents don’t know how to listen, then we might have to eat the stupid babies on the road to survive.” She pushes aside the curtain so that it looks like she is surveying the storm (which is in fact approaching from the opposite side of the house). “Hey—?” she inquires in a small and remarkably unguarded voice that sends Tyelkormo and the Ambarussa scampering for the window. Tyelkormo wedges himself into the middle for the best view.

Upon the early fall of snow stands an Elf, white-clad and with exceptionally pale skin. His silver hair is unbound and his clothing meager for what the weather would seem to demand. He might be invisible against the white backdrop but that he is dragging a branch laden with thousands of tiny red berries, leaving a scratch upon the face of the snow that effaces the prints of his bare, white feet.

“The Wight!” Tyelkormo breathes.

“Who is he?” Ambarussa, the elder, the bold, rambunctious one, does not sound so bold in that moment.

Tyelkormo’s face flicks toward Írissë, then his twin brothers to be sure they are listening. “The Wight,” he says again, his voice firmer this time with the authority of age. “My father tolerates him living here, in our forest. I don’t know why. I’d as soon send him away, but you know Fëanáro—he always has a place for the miscreants, and he doesn’t recognize the same … boundaries … as most of the Eldar.”

“Boundaries?” asks Írissë in a voice dripping with curiosity. Írissë is always concerned with boundaries; better that she can violate them.

“Yes. You know none of the Eldar would normally tolerate an Elf who used to be an Orc.”

“An Orc?!” Ambarto the younger squeaks out an interrobang.

In truth, neither twin really knows what an Orc is. Tyelkormo himself does not know much, but he’s spent well-nigh five decades at Fëanáro’s knee, hearing all the idiosyncratic and inappropriate matters that compromise Fëanáro’s research delivered in the kinds of blots and splashes that beg the imagination to fill in details. And Fëanáro is himself interested in Orcs and mentions them with some frequency, though generally after the twins have been put to bed, by request of Nerdanel. Such expositions are always delivered with a clinical detachment and in multisyllabic vocabulary that somehow makes them worse, like hearing a healer describe a dismemberment entirely in jargon. The imagination runs wild upon the plains of such coldly flat facts—especially Tyelkormo’s because he knows relatively few of the larger words and so will lie awake and plumb the darkest tunnels of his imagination, dreaming what they might mean (he’d never confess this to anyone)—and Macalaurë does not help either. He has a phenomenal vocabulary and enough training as a historian to convert his father’s research into blood-chilling—if not entirely accurate—fireside stories aimed entirely at terrifying his younger brothers. Carnistir has lately been using their father’s memory stones to record the best—or perhaps worst—of them, and Tyelkormo has developed the unwholesome habit of listening to them ad nauseum when he is stuck inside bored on rainy days.

Ambarussa are little enough to be thus far spared all of this—although one could not live with Fëanáro and his sons for even a few years without some exposure to insalubrious topics—but Tyelkormo clearly believes it time for that to change. It was Nerdanel who forbade it, after all, and he finds himself particularly salty with his mother on account of her too-calm response to his histrionics about the coming storm. The tale of the Wight that he is about to fabricate is a pastiche of these myriad tales heard from his father and brothers.

“Orrrcs.” His voice plummets as deep as it can go, a subterranean growl the sounds of which alone conjures the imagination of something eyeless, warped, and creeping. “Yes, children. The Wight, he used to be an Orc.”

“That can’t be,” says Írissë, but her voice lacks its flippant note of conviction.

“It happened like this,” Tyelkormo goes on. “That one down there, the Wight—he was captured by the Dark Lord when our people were still at the lake. He was one of the first to go. Melkor didn’t know what he was doing yet. He hurt him too deep, or maybe the Wight was weak … but he died, died there in Melkor’s dungeons, and he came here, to Aman, to the Halls.

“No one knows why Námo released him. He was new at it too, I suppose, the reembodiment business. He remade him a new fair body, all in white. But they say—they say that his feä is still corrupt, still remembers the dungeons, and it is only a matter of time before that darkness inside him? It overwhelms him and he goes mad and does the Dark Lord’s bidding again.

“My father likes him for what he knows of Orrrcs. My father is interested in those. So he tolerates him in the forest—for now. And the Wight, he drags out those branches full of those dumb bitter red berries. They’re poisonous if you have too much, just ask Curufinwë, he likes them and ate a bunch and was on the can for days!”

Poop jokes derail Tyelkormo easily. He laughs, too loud, and the pale Elf below tips his face up toward the window. His eyes are milky, occluded, like one who has no need of light, having learned the feral art of survival by scent and sound alone. Four pairs of hands scrabble to pull the curtains across the window, and it is hard to know who is squeaking with fear; maybe it is all of them.

“Maybe he is bringing them as decorations. The branches.” Írissë’s arms, bare in her short-sleeved dress, are as riddled with bumps as a fresh-plucked chicken. “They are a traditional Yuletide decoration. That’s what my mother says.” She tries to recapture her earlier swaggering attitude but her voice is watery, wavy.

Tyelkormo sighs. “I just hope I am not here when he decides to go mad. I don’t know that any of us, even Nelyo—even Atar—could save these little guys.” He places a suddenly fraternal hand on each of the twins’ heads.

Outside the window, they all imagine they hear the sound of branches dragging in the snow: scrrrip. Scrrrip. Scrrrrrip. And a littering of tiny red berries left like droplets of blood.