Home Alone: Forgotten in Formenos by Dawn Felagund

Chapter 4: Serpents and Soft Hands

Meanwhile, two Maiar stand upon the chest-high walls that encloses the village of Formenos. The House of Fëanáro, apart from the village and viewed at this small distance, glitters like the Itseloktë that rises in the eastern sky early at this time of the year. Though its windows are aglow with the frantic preparations of its many residents and guests, from afar, it is as steady and calm as a ship safe in harbor.

Iniðilêz rubs his soft, pampered hands together as he contemplates it. He’s discarded the robes and insignia of Aulë; he wears now a nondescript cloak suited to the weather—the wind is beginning to whip ahead of the impending storm—and a knit hat that he stole from a little girl in the village. He is no more a Maia of Aulë than he is the artificer of Eä, though he is a Maia. In the earliest eons after his manifestation from the thought of Eru, he’d been sharply contemplative, if lazy—not given to the labors that delighted his brethren-in-thought, although he always had a critical word for how the labors of others might be better accomplished for his convenience: a decrease in clamor or a softer living space. When Melkor began to first incite his chaos into the Music, Iniðilêz became one of the first to rise, to hop with delight amid the notes of the Ainur, shattering them in the way of a small impish boy crushing snails underfoot. He’s also a kleptomaniac. Small items find their way into and disappear amid the doughy folds of his hands.

With him is Dušamanûðânâz, blowing warmth into prehensile fingers that seem to have one joint too many. Even the kindest among the Ainur wonder if Dušamanûðânâz was fully formed in the mind of Eru, or if he was a whim briefly cogitated in between the contemplation of weightier matters, rather like thinking, just before bed, of a craving for ice cream or considering about quitting one’s work and traveling the world as a stowaway on transport ships: little more than a flash of neurons gone quickly dim and forgotten. Dušamanûðânâz seems borne of such a flash in the mind of Eru. He has never been able to manifest coherently in corporeal form as his brethren can. He might have a humanoid head and animal body (or vice versa) or mismatched hands or hair or scales in improper places. Now, for instance, he has a thick, alligator-like tail protruding awkwardly from the top of his trousers (which he has lowered slightly to accommodate the tail, leaving several inches exposed of a disarmingly human buttcrack) and a thick, primordial cant to his otherwise human face, including a pair of lower incisors that nip across his upper lip. And of course the arthropodic fingers, like centipede legs.

“Aaah, this is it!” says Iniðilêz, flourishing a pudgy palm at the Fëanorians’ house.

“What is?” Dušamanûðânâz replies.

“The House of Fëanáro! The jewel in the crown! The gilding on the manuscript! The cognac in the glass!”

Metaphors are lost on Dušamanûðânâz. He is a metaphor for so many things himself that perceiving their aesthetic employment is rather like knowing the actual sound of one’s actual voice. “I like cognac!” he exclaims, though he’s never tasted it. He is thinking of Campari.

Iniðilêz ignores him. “I’ve seen it, inside. Everything we could possibly want will be in there, enough to make the Great Melkor at last notice us. Gemstones and jewelry and ingots of raw metal—”

“Toys!” exclaims Dušamanûðânâz with a spray of his overlong fingers.

“—lampstones and mechanical contrivances and those memory stones no one can shut up about—”

“His renowned collection of pornographic manuscripts!”

Iniðilêz casts his partner in crime a disgusted look. Rows of scales have begun emerging from Dušamanûðânâz’s face. “You stupid animal!” Iniðilêz yells. “Just be ready to go tomorrow night!”

“Tomorrow?”

Iniðilêz grins. Now it is his face—his perfectly human face—that is transformed and beastly. “Tomorrow, yes, yes. I have their assurance that they will be leaving early tomorrow. By tomorrow night, there will be no one home to know or care what we take.”

“Tomorrow …” Dušamanûðânâz’s voice is just a slither now, lost on the rising wind.

Chapter End Notes

A Note on Names

I am no linguist. (This is no secret.) I’ve “invented” a few names for this story, by which I mean that I’ve plundered the resources kindly made available by actual experts on Tolkien’s languages and incompetently twisted them to my own purposes.

As always, I’ve done my best. I’m probably wrong. If you know better than me and think you can do better, have at it! I’ll revise to reflect your changes.

Itseloktë: the easterly star cluster known as the Pleiades. Its Sindarin name, Remmirath, is well-known; Parma Eldalamberon XII gives the Qenya name as Itselokte. Yeah, I literally tacked on a diacritic and went with that.

Iniðilêz: The soft-handed Maia, using the word for “lily” and an inflexional ending for names, as described by Helge Kåre Fauskanger on his page on Valarin.

Dušamanûðânâz: Iniðilêz’s coconspirator, named using the word for “marred” and an inflexional ending for names (see reference above).