Home Alone: Forgotten in Formenos by Dawn Felagund

Chapter 17: Battle Plan

The twins unfurl the battle plan on the low table in the living room, pinned at each of its four corners by a metronome, a jeweler’s loupe, The Erotic Avari, and of course, the memory stone that plays Ainur with Filthy Feär. As Laurelin’s golden light reposes and the silver light of Telperion rises to replace it beyond the patio doors, the twins scurry to enact the plans carefully drawn in colored pencil. They cook a fresh pot of caramel and lug palantíri as heavy as medicine balls. They juggle am armful of fragile vases, melt down a pot of soap, and Ambarussa is once seen fumbling with a crossbow. There is a delicate operation involving three piranhas. At last, they meet back where they have begun, small chests heaving from exertion. They stare into each other’s eyes. The air shimmers. They are ready.

Ambarto lifts away the four disparate paperweights, and the plan noisily furls itself anew. Ambarussa picks it up and carries it scepter-like into the kitchen.

For a moment, they stand in tense readiness, their nerves singing like one of Carnistir’s experiments with electricity. Ambarussa’s nose twitches first, rabbit-like, then they are both aware of the aroma of the roast they put in the oven earlier. The scent is identical to that which seeped from the light- and love-filled houses in the village, and it has an effect on the twins like dragging a warm blanket from their feet to their chins and snuggling beneath. They both become aware that they are ravenously hungry, and a timid peek into the shimmering maw of the oven reveals that the roast is perfectly cooked and ready to eat. But even more than hunger, the scent kindles a yearning for kinship and love and tradition. While the roast rests on the block in the kitchen, they dress the table fit for a progression of the King, with a pair of gilded candles and plates bearing the eight points of their father’s star sigil. Ambarto folds a pair of livid crimson napkins into a pair of birds rising, wings outspread; Nelyo sought many times to teach him how to properly set a table, but he whined and squirmed until even their brother—usually patient to an inhuman degree—grew frustrated and desisted. Ambarto is pleased that something of what Nelyo taught was retained; he feels a pinch of guilt for the whining and the squirming, only to discover that what Nelyo proffered he wanted after all. Ambarussa delves for and finds the good silver cutlery to replace their usual pewter implements, designed to withstand the hard use of seven sons. Ambarto has put on a pot of wine to mull, and when it is warm, he fills two goblets while Ambarussa, bearing the honor of the eldest, carries forth and then carves the roast.

They sit opposite each other at the middle of the table. Normally, their parents would be at the heads and an array of brothers and apprentices and cousins on either side. Tonight, they are alone.

They join hands, and Ambarussa speaks the Eruhantalë. He gets the ancient Quendian inflections almost right, given the amount of wriggling and eye-rolling that typically attended his linguistics schoolwork. At the end, the silence hangs heavy, somnolent with the scent of food and wine, yet they do not release hands. At last, Ambarto breathes deep, and the shimmer between them grows still. “I would like to have our family back. I know that this prayer is for recognition of blessings and gratitude but … whatever curse we wrought, it was wrong for us to wish it so. If we must bear the consequences of our foolery then we must, but Eru Ilúvatar, if you can find it in your plan to bring our family back, we’d very much like to see them.” And so the shimmer becomes sound.

Earlier, Ambarto brought a memory stone that contains a recording of Macalaurë on the harp, playing a traditional hymn to Eru, composed before the Quendi learned of the intercessionary Valar and began directing their hymns to them. The hymn was about the wisdom of what the ancient Quendi called the slumbering season—the winter—a time of rest that, in their lust for ease and plenty, the Quendi would have foregone had the seasons been theirs to set. The twins set to their supper, experiencing some of the attrition in manners typical of hungry small boys given a plate piled with food. They say little, and the music sparkles through their minds as they eat.

Ambarussa is cutting a third slab from the dwindling roast when they perceive it: a whisper of static and the scrabbling fingers of electricity behind their eyeballs. He gently sets down the knife and touches the memory stone to silence it. The slumbering season has ended.

Both twins creep to the front door. The keyhole boils with violet crackles like lightning. Iniðilêz is trying unsuccessfully again to ensorcell his way into the house. Ambarto, who more often pauses to wonder, ponders why it should be unsuccessful. It is simply a brass lock, in the innocence of Aman wrought with less care, perhaps, than a plowshare would be. It should not withstand any of the Ainur, even one so cloddish as Iniðilêz. But before he can think much more of it, Ambarussa is gesturing to him, then dashing to the back of the house. The plan has begun.

“Blast it!” The voice has the snappish quality of a weasel that beheads a coop full of chickens and forgoes a single bite of meat. “You! Go around the back and get in that way. It’s that big pane of glass; you can break it with a stone then let me in.”

“I wonder why your magic isn’t working.” Dušamanûðânâz’s voice suggests the kinds of creatures that hunker on the verge of the sea within reach of unsuspecting footfalls and squirt poison when stepped upon.

“That’s not your damn concern! Just go!” Iniðilêz snaps.

“Okie.” Like the brainless bottomfeeder, Dušamanûðânâz lacks the wits to perceive when he’s being misused. He ducks his head and goes. Ambarto hears the diminishing sounds of slushing as he wades off through the snow.

In Iniðilêz’s voice, he perceives the fraying of something between the two Maiar. It’s the way a saddle girth will show wear, he thinks to himself. It will hold on by force of habit, enough seem reliable and secure, until it holds on no more. And then it will dump its rider when going over a fallen tree in the forest. He makes note of this.

And then he scuttles to the top of the ladder propped against the wall beside the front door. The façade of his parents’ home is adorned with a stained-glass rose window devised by Formenos’s most skilled glassmaker. It shows the wheel of the seasons in resplendent hues that, at the Mingling, bathe the vestibule in a patchwork of shimmering colors. At its center is the eight-pointed star of his father's house, done in glass colored like flame. Because Fëanáro abhors the use of servants but equally the wasting of much of his time in house-chores, it is also constructed thus that the panes, once unlatched, swing inward for easy cleaning. Cleaning the rose window is typically a chore assigned to the tallest sons and slowly relegated, by force of seniority, to the youngest. Ambarto has cleaned it many times and is familiar with its mechanisms.

The ladder has a shelf at the top from the handy series of inventions devised by Carnistir; upon it, Ambarto has placed one of Curufinwë’s small braziers and one of Tyelkormo’s fishing poles. He exhales gently upon the coals, which first blush, then brighten, to a livid red. At the door below, Iniðilêz has given up on sorcery and is working at the lock with his prybar and a stream of invectives of the kind typical of graffiti upon the privy walls in Angband.

Ambarto reaches up and loosens the lowermost mechanism on the rose window.

Meanwhile, at the back of the house, Ambarussa has taken up a conspicuous place on the inside of the glass patio door. He has kindled all of the lamps in the room and drawn back the drapes so it is impossible not to be seen. He is the braver of the two, and he is terrified. His ankles rattle inside his boots as he stands, weaponless, listening to the crescendoing tread of Dušamanûðânâz slushing through the snow. He wishes he’d brought at least the carving knife from the dining room, but it is too late to even run back. All he holds in his hand is the switch he just flipped, leading to a portable heating element that Fëanáro takes when doing offsite repair work. It snakes from his hand, out the top of the glass door, and its crystals blaze to life along the roofline. Slush slush slush—and Dušamanûðânâz stands before him, just a pane of glass between them.

Short of assembling one of the pyrotechnician’s signs that blaze with the many-hued products of chemical reactions within twists of glass tubes and advertising his presence, Ambarussa could not have announced himself more plainly. All the same, Dušamanûðânâz gets to work on the door with his prybar, oblivious to the small boy standing a mere arm-length away. Ambarussa shifts a little, then fidgets. Then waves his hand, does jumping jacks, turns a cartwheel. Dušamanûðânâz has assumed a form alike to the mindless creatures that huddle beneath the sand, cracking their shells only long enough to uncurl a flaccid tongue into the sea to lick even stupider, more unfortunate creatures from the currents. He is gray and quivering, nonskeletal; his body invaginates around the prybar when he tries to use it. He curses. The squelching notes of his voice echo loudly enough in the shell that encases his head that he does not hear the perilous crack overhead. He leans harder into the prybar until the gray mass of his body almost subsumes it.

Anyone who lives in a cold, snowy clime knows the perils that snow and ice present at egresses. The slightest intimation of warmth—it doesn’t even have to nudge the mercury above the freeze-line—will cause the snow to slough and curl from the eaves like overgrown fingernails until, overcome by its own weight, the curlicues of snow let go, pulling with them all of the snow and ice amassed on the roof behind them. It is not uncommon, at the height of winter in the north, for the debris slipped off the roof to pile to the tops of the windows. Normally, the tragedy of such a release at the moment one enters or exists a door is prevented, in the north, by barriers that withhold and divert the snow and ice. Upon their return this evening, Ambarussa climbed to the roof and removed these from over the patio door.

Ambarussa walks to the glass door and raps on it three times. After a moment of twisting himself upon the prybar, Dušamanûðânâz looks up. The lust in his face is that of his invertebrate prototype upon sensing something wounded and ordinarily beyond its ken, borne helplessly upon the waves toward it. Both hands press the glass in unbridled desire, leaving a pair of humid handprints. His nose turns up, piglike, from the same pressure, and the fog of his breath momentarily obscures the curdled mass that is his face behind the glass.

The snow overhead, goaded by the heat from the element run along its edge, lets go. Now do not think of an innocent shower of snow, tossed from the hand of a playful child at the fleeing shape of his friend, when imagining what such a disgorgement is like. The snow there has become annealed by the freeze-thaw cycle and honed by the wind to slabs that would suit equally well for use in armor. These slabs are peppered with icicles, keen as blades. This is what showers upon Dušamanûðânâz.

It seems like it might never end. His body writhes inside a blizzard’s worth of raining snow and stinging ice drawn down from the roof. When at last it ends, punctuated by a final icicle that lodges itself inside the fold atop his head like an exclamation point, Ambarussa is gone and Dušamanûðânâz is so angry that he seizes the door handle, meaning to tear his way inside with brute strength alone. The door—which was never locked—whips open. A small avalanche of snow and ice tumble inside, and Dušamanûðânâz flips ass over tin cup like a gelid acrobat, flopping upon his back with a sound like dropping a handful of dough upon the board. And he is … sticky. Unnaturally sticky.

Meanwhile, at the front door, Iniðilêz has succeeded at chipping the paint on the doorjamb when something tickles the top of his head. He swivels his face skyward, the flesh sinking back to give Ambarto a shuddering look at him grossly wide-eyed and thin-lipped, his eyeballs—showing white all around—roving to find what touched him. It is a key, now drawn out of reach. Iniðilêz jumps to grab it. His fingers graze it, and Ambarto pulls it higher. He jumps higher, propelling himself this time with sorcery, which sizzles from his feet like the trail on a rocket for a split second before fizzling like a doused fire, his magic again mysteriously curbed, like a dog on a leash. Again, he almost reaches the key. He gathers himself for a third attempt, propels himself as high as nature and his podgy legs will allow, watches as one sausage-like finger makes an asymptotic approach to the key, nearer and nearer but never touching—and then he falls back to the front step.

This time, his foot hits a patch of ice, and he continues his descent all the way to his globular ass, his legs jutting in front of him in an ignoble V. A lungful of wind escapes him as a massive OOOF, and he hears smothered giggling from above. The key is back, dangling now just in front of his nose. Simmering with shame, he reaches forward to snatch it before the devilish little Fëanárion entices him to jump for it again.

What he missed, as he topped to his ass, was the first key being abruptly yanked away and quickly, if delicately, replaced by a spare left heating in the brazier. It is red hot when it begins it descent upon Tyelkormo’s fishing line; its cherry-red hue has dimmed a little in the cold air by the time of its arrival, and Iniðilêz fails to notice it. Its heat, however, has not appreciably dimmed. It bites with wounding agony and leaves a pink key-shaped brand upon the powder-white paw of Iniðilêz.

A snow-doused Dušamanûðânâz hears his partner in crime howl as he begins to extricate himself from whatever sticky substance he has landed in. Rage has honed the shape of his body. He has shed the primeval softness of his body and assumed the snicking-deadly acuity of a mantis that lurks beneath a palm leaf to scissor the wings from a butterfly. Having dressed himself this morning to suit his pseudopodic form, his clothes droop upon him, and he wallows in his boots. He extracts his back from the sticky mess he has landed in, scooping out a clump of it on a tarsus, from which it begins to drop slowly. It has a merry amber color that, to an undarkened mind, would call forth the recollection of autumn festivals and the tiny crack of biting into chocolates. It is caramel.

Dušamanûðânâz is not known for attentional prowess. For several minutes, he laps the caramel from his tarsi, until it begins to cement his jaws together, and he remembers he is there with Iniðilêz to rob the Fëanorian vaults. And Iniðilêz is doubtlessly in the house by now. Like most mean-minded things, Dušamanûðânâz possesses a measure of fear for his own safety, and he feels this small part cower inside him to imagine Iniðilêz’s displeasure if he enters this room and finds Dušamanûðânâz wading in a pool of caramel, eating, while the wicked little Fëanárion—just moments ago within grabbing distance of his pedipalps—scampers off to safety. He clambers upright. The caramel has been liberally painted upon the floor all around him. In fact, it covers the entire floor of the living room save a path left by the brat to allow for his own exodus, and even now, the caramel is beginning its glacial crawl inward upon this bared stripe of floor.

Dušamanûðânâz minces across the floor toward it. The caramel, cooled by the inrush of snow and the cold air from the open door, has become very sticky. He walks right out of first his boots, then his socks, already loose upon legs that maintain a human shape but insectile thinness. They leave his tiny, four-toed humanoid feet bared. No matter. He wrenches them from the caramel and tucks them beneath a prehensile arm. He will put them on again once he reaches dry floor. He tiptoes quickly to the ever-diminishing bare strip of floor, where he leaves a fan of caramel-colored toeprints.

“I’m right here!” The little Fëanárion brat is waving from the next doorway. “Aren’t you gonna come and get me?”

The cleared path is now a balance beam’s width. Dušamanûðânâz must hurry, or he’ll be mired in caramel again. He skitters, heel-to-toe, as quickly as he can, the cleared path closing behind him as he goes. He watches it over his shoulder, thinking it is a rather impressive effect. Heroic even, like crossing a rope bridge, his foot leaving a plank just as it falls away. It is like something out of a story. His primal brain tries to conjure a way he might describe it later to Iniðilêz and—dare he imagine?—even Melkor, to impress upon them a valorous mien. A tiny ember of ambition glows within his perivisceral sinus, the same aspiration that first drove his kind to drag themselves from the sea and begin eating each other.

When he crosses the doorjamb, he is imagining the accolades that await him when he brings the Fëanárian jewels filling a little Fëanárion skull to its brim, his compound eyes roving the room to find the boy. Had he been more vigilant of the ground beneath his feet—caring less about the collapsing caramel bridge behind him and vengeance upon the son of Fëanáro before him—he would have noticed how the floor scintillated in the spill of brilliance from the room behind him. As it is, he takes three sweeping steps before the agony of the broken glass embedded in the bottoms of his teensy feet makes its way to what passes for his brain.

Because his steps are so wide, with just three strides, he finds himself marooned in the middle of the kitchen. Shattered glassware spreads like a glittering sea to all sides of him. The immediate pain is such that he jitters away from it and only embeds more glass in his feet. Had he been more intentional in his movements, three large strides could have brought him the rest of the way across the room to the entryway to the dining room. As it is, he highsteps around most of the room as aimlessly as a moth caught inside a lantern, making high-pitched “Hoo! Hoo! Ah! Ah!” sounds as he goes. He swings through a triple pirouette, pinwheels out a series of wings, ends with a tour jeté. Eventually and by pure chance alone, he reels into the dining room and collapses into the chair just recently vacated by Ambarussa during their supper, the soles of his feet bristling glass like a porcupine wields quills.