Home Alone: Forgotten in Formenos by Dawn Felagund

Chapter 14: A Roast by Any Other Name

You’ve doubtlessly heard of the forge-moth: a moth once of pure powdery white wings that, upon the arrival of the Noldor, in regions where forgework became common, evolved over the course of years to a darker hue that would allow it to lie undetected upon the forge walls, to eventually dance and die among the flames. The moth was a wonder to Noldorin naturalists, who marveled in their eternal lives that something could change so quickly for no greater reason than to lie quietly and undisturbed near to what it loved.

Natural philosophers had long noted that nature provided all in twain, in wondrous and hideous aspect. Dušamanûðânâz is the hideous aspect of the same principal as the forge-moth. He lies in wait against the snow, curled and plumped and legless as a grub. The coiled fat of his body keeps him warm, and the dingy paleness of his body keeps him camouflaged. Iniðilêz had the brilliant idea to stay and attempt to observe the exodus of Melkor and the unfortunate Igasêz—just a corpse now, his spirit having fled the torments exacted upon it—to extract what information they could to best serve their lord (and avoid the same fate). Now, Iniðilêz huddles behind the mounded form of Dušamanûðânâz, stiffened against shivering and exuding a slow trickle of magic to keep himself hidden. The snow is so white and omnipresent that the white of it is beginning a kaleidoscopic whirl behind his eyes: amoebic shapes squirming amid each other, breaking apart, rejoining, a thousand shades of white bubbling mitotically in meandering patterns across the snow and—

“How odd!” Dušamanûðânâz’s voice is like an eruption of gas punched out from between two flaccid folds of dough.

“Shut it,” says Iniðilêz. “It’s just snow blindness.” The amoebae pinwheel faster behind his eyes. His certainty that Melkor has assumed some sort of incorporeality to flee the house is proportional to his irritation, both growing exponentially as a bacterial rot.

“Right you are, boss,” Dušamanûðânâz replies. Silence resumes, the wintry kind where you can hear the tiny crumpling fall of snowflakes. Then a slurping laugh. “But it looks like two little children, the snow blindness!”

“Shut it!”

“The detail—just remarkable! I can even hear its snowshoes, the snow blindness!”

At this, Iniðilêz rouses himself to look over the hump of Dušamanûðânâz’s thorax. He is drawing back his podgy fist to drive it into Dušamanûðânâz’s even podgier body when he realizes that Dušamanûðânâz isn’t describing snow blindness after all but two actual children in actual snowshoes, making stumping progress from the house to a squat stone outbuilding near the edge of the forest. Iniðilêz blinks away the amoebae. The children are identically dressed but in different colors. They are small, the age of running noses and peeping voices. An annoying age. A helpless age.

Iniðilêz pokes his finger repeatedly into Dušamanûðânâz’s back, leaving a trail of dimples. Dušamanûðânâz squirms. “Those are Fëanáro’s twin brats!” And with a slow dawning realization, he understands that he and Dušamanûðânâz have been had. Melkor was never here. It was some trick they effected on the thickskulled Dušamanûðânâz. Iniðilêz casts an irritated glanced at his partner.

Dušamanûðânâz gawps and confirms all that Iniðilêz is thinking. “But Fëanáro’s not here!”

“Exactly!”

“Then … they’re not here either?” His mouth is drooping to take up more of his form as he thinks.

“No, dummy! They’re right there!”

“Then Fëanáro is home? What a shame! I sure wanted them jewels!”

The Ambarussa, shuffling through the snow to the outbuilding that houses the family’s cold cellar, assume that the wet whumping sound they hear is a mass of snow dropping from a tree. They don’t look back to see the whirling gauntlet of Iniðilêz’s small, fat fists pummeling Dušamanûðânâz into a quivering, furred shape against the snow. They have decided that, if they must spend Yule alone (and it is increasingly clear that they must, that the curse they uttered was a powerful, possibly permanent, one), then they will at least have a roast. Fëanáro always makes a roast for the Yule, and while they have no idea how to make a roast, they had no idea how to do many of the things they’ve now done and wordlessly reached the decision to at least try. Amid the gargantuan briskets and shanks, they find a single small roast, so small that they wonder why Fëanáro would have stored such a cut, and it seems meant to be.

They retrace their steps back to the house, stepping between their footprints to make a pair of parallel tracks in the snow. Ambarussa cradles in his hands the roast just big enough for two.

Meanwhile, Iniðilêz and Dušamanûðânâz are slinking toward the house. Dušamanûðânâz, now that he’s not being beaten, has regained enough control to fade his fur back to white. Long of foot and tooth, he resembles a snowshoe hare—or what Eru’s rough draft of a snowshoe hare might have looked like before he threw the sketch into the Flame Imperishable and began again. Iniðilêz is again sweating tiny trickles of magic, enough to keep himself invisible. Were one to look at his spot in the snow, one’s eyes would be needled by a denser-than-expected nest of sparkles that nonetheless seem to contain no light.

They creep to the window.

The kitchen beyond is impeccable and gleaming with an array of implements forged by Fëanáro himself. The twins are standing, each on a chair, working at the heavy block in the center of the room. Their backs are turned to the window. One is cutting herbs with a small knife—the herbs themselves line the windowsills of the kitchen and give the sense of peering through a small jungle—and the other is rubbing the herb mixture into an unimpressive lump of meat. Neither is speaking, but the space between their identical red-haired heads shimmers with their shared thoughts.

“It’s just like I told you,” hisses Iniðilêz to Dušamanûðânâz. “They’re all alone.”

Ambarto is the one using the little knife to carefully pare the herbs, pungent and verdant with life, into a rub worthy of the small but fine roast they’ve chosen from their father’s cellar. Honed by Fëanáro’s own hand, the blade is whetted to a sharpness that cuts painless and silent as a whisper; the knife itself is bright as a mirror. In fact, Ambarto is about to send a giggling thought to Ambarussa, remembering how they caught Tyelkormo studying his pimples once in the reflection of a kitchen knife while he was supposed to be peeling apples for sauce, but the surface of the knife catches something strange in reflection that pulls him up short.

He can see one of the kitchen windows as a winter-white rectangle, and the stoic little pots of herbs along its lower margin, and something creeping and strange moving behind them.

Without pausing in the rhythm clop-clop of his knife, he nudges his brother with his mind. Ambarussa, who ever acts before thinking, sees what Ambarto has spied and gasps. His eyes pop wide and round and he lets out a reflexive bleat: “Atar!”

Taking his lead, Ambarto echoes, “Atar! Which one is the tarragon again?” He peers through the door as though watching for the father who isn’t there, who is leagues away behind an impenetrable wall of snow.

The shapes beyond the window sink away, but Iniðilêz wears a smile like a ragged blade. His hands are softly squelching against each other with delight. Just as Ambarto spied him in the reflection in his blade, so Iniðilêz spied the flicker of terror in the small boy’s eyes and noted the stiff set of the other boy’s shoulders as he tossed his blatantly fraudulent cry to his absent father. “Tonight!” Iniðilêz crows. “We return tonight.”

Dušamanûðânâz casts a puzzled look at the window. His rabbity teeth have grown long, and his words lisp out from behind them. “But the kidth are thtill here in the houthe!”

“Who cares! They’re just two dumb little kids! If anything, we’ll add them like a pair of red-headed cherries on the rim of the cocktail of riches we deliver unto our Lord.” His hands squirm.

“Cherrieth! I like cherrieth! On ithe cream. I’m not allowed to have cocktailth. I get thilly.”

Iniðilêz ignores him. “We’ll come back tonight, in the silver hours, the time when small boys are in bed and afraid to come out. And we’ll come in.” He raises his prybar. Dušamanûðânâz raises his and grins around the teeth now curving under his chin. Delicate as though they were wielding champagne glasses, they clink them together.