Home Alone: Forgotten in Formenos by Dawn Felagund

---

Chapter 7: Ainur with Filthy Feär

---

The Ambarussa wake up late the next morning. The snow is still coming down fast and thick outside the small dormer windows, filling the room with a milky, slightly opaque light. Without speaking, they decide to wait in bed for someone to come up the stairs to get them; the thought shimmers in the space between them. They will also pretend not to hear if someone calls from the bottom of the steps but make that person climb the stairs—which are not short and are steep—and will pretend to be asleep and make that person wake them.

Ambarto thinks the idea that, if the person is not kind about it, they will pretend to be dead, which is a favorite tactic when Tyelkormo or Carnistir are sent to wake them because they like to grab and shake them. So the twins do what anyone would do under such circumstances, go limp and slack-jawed, and stop breathing. When the chosen brother runs off yelling to the nearest parent that the twins are being obstinate, they arise and follow after, scrubbing their eyes with sleepy little fists, to ask what all the yelling is about.

While they wait, they share the jam and bread from last night, which has gone stale, and get the fold-out bed deliberately full of crumbs, which will serve their mother right the next time she stays here to give their father peace for his contemplation and creativity and has to change the sheets because of the exile and shoddy dinner she forced upon them.

They wait. And wait and wait. And wait and wait and wait. No one comes.

At last, hand in hand, they descend the stairs and poke their heads around the corner. The hallway is a row of shuttered doors like eyes and lips sealed upon secrets. Their stockinged feet make the barest of sounds on the floors and stairs as they descend to the next level. In the kitchen, last night’s dishes still dry on the racks, so their father has not arisen yet, for putting away the previous night’s mess is the first thing he would do (or more likely send one of his sons to do). The big stew kettle dries centermost, and the surviving chipmunk bowl looks lonely amid the bigger-sized dishes of their relatives. They avoid looking at or thinking of either by going into the dining room

The dining room still smells of the stew that Nelyo was only partly successful in scrubbing from the carpet; there is a pungent undernote of soap beneath a spicy, meaty miasma still thick in the air. A clean tablecloth covers the trestle table, so fresh that it is still creased, and someone has arranged breakfast settings. There are two bowls of fruit. The place settings are unused. The fruit is untouched.

On near-silent feet, they go to the vestibule and open the front door. The snow is knee-deep and drifted higher in places; a sugary fall of it sprinkles through the front door and across the vestibule floor. The snow and wind have subsided from their mid-night wildness. The snow comes down, heavy, falling in fat, wet flakes direct from cloud to ground. The road to Formenos and away south toward Tirion are unblemished by tracks. “They didn’t leave,” Ambarto observes, “else there would be tracks on the road.”

“And they would’ve eaten breakfast first,” Ambarussa adds. “No way would Tyelkormo go out on the road hungry!”

The shimmering spot between them nearly glistens like a newborn star or like the sharp spark that leaps from your hand if you touch metal after scuffing feet on the carpet. It is a keen-edged, elated thing, but still small and cautious. Neither of them wants to be the first to give voice to it. Both listen behind them; their ears would swivel back if they were beasts. They tease apart the silence of the house, waiting for the shuffle of a foot or a breath or a snicker. They wait for their families to jump out, hands waving, and scream, “Surprise!” It would be some elaborate punishment for what they said to their mother. They are convinced that, of all the ways their family might treat them the morning after what they have already, in that shared spark of thought, capitalized into the Great Stew Incident, it will not be one of mercy and kindness. Their own undercurrent of guilt and their ever-abiding conviction that, by being the youngest, they are also the most disappointing brooks no room for any reaction but one that punishes.

However, there is no sound behind them. They close the door and meander through the labyrinthine hallways, calling the names of their relatives. “Amil! Atar! Nelyo! Uncle Nolofinwë! Turukáno! Tyelkormo! We’re up now! You can come out!” They pretend to be naïve of the spite at the heart of such a trick. They do not say they are sorry.

Finally, after wandering all the halls and surreptitiously checking the best hiding places, they find themselves back in the vestibule, before the front door. Neither wants to say anything. Ambarussa is pushing his feet into the little drifting of snow on the floor. The silence is so absolute that they can hear the plop of snowflakes piling up beyond the door.

“We’ve done it—” Ambarto begins at last, and the seal broken off the silence, Ambarussa finishes for him:

“We made our family disappear!”

The House of Fëanáro in Formenos is a sprawling playground to a small child left untended. It doubles into and hooks back upon itself like a maze inside one of the puzzle books sold to children in Tirion for long journeys on the road; it is filled with tools and substances and materials that are hazardous and irresistible. There are all the projects—most unfinished, all usually untouchable—that mark it as the home of brilliant, idiosyncratic minds. And of course, there is the forbidden: Fëanáro draws looser boundaries than most of the Noldor (themselves as a people disinclined to hard-inked borders), a predilection that only intensified after Curufinwë began to grow and Fëanáro no longer expected to again become the father of young children, and it is Nerdanel and Nelyo who keep the twins within a smaller, more age-appropriate sphere. But all of those closed doors and locked cabinets and unreachable shelves are suddenly brought deliciously within the grasp of their small hands and bright, curious eyes.

Within the first hours of their freedom, they manage to commit the following:

First, they breakfast upon stored biscuits dipped in caramel. They have watched Fëanáro and Nelyo make caramel many times. Theirs is a little smoky and they scorch one of Fëanáro’s favorite saucepans in making it and they briefly light a dishrag on fire, but it comes out in syrupy—if slightly grainy—and more importantly prodigious quantities.

Fueled by sugar, secondly, they conduct a thorough investigation of who is the more proficient wrestler. They accomplish this in their parents’ vast bed. Fëanáro and Nerdanel both would be proud of their deployment of the scientific method in making that determination. They keep score with one of Nelyo’s quills with tick marks on the wall.

(Ambarussa wins.)

Third, they douse the long lower hallway—which descends at a slight slant toward the wine and root cellars—in soapy water and slide its length in their swim clothes to see who can touch the far wall the fastest and without breaking any of their parents’ art pieces placed upon tables at intervals along the hallway. Ambarussa earns the better time but breaks two vases and so does not triumph this time. Ambarto runs for a fresh quill to keep score because Ambarussa broke the tip of the last one.

A little worn out from their exertions, fourthly, they use the ladders in the library to access Fëanáro’s top-shelf collection. The ladders, which glide from shelf to shelf on casters, are usually strictly off-limits on pain of dish duty for a full fortnight. (And that this is a restriction that applies only to them—not even insipid little Curufinwë—has rankled since they learned to read two summers ago and have done quite well at it and yet are still denied full access to the library.) At first, they ride back and forth on the ladder, taking turns running each other around the library, but as aforementioned, they are coming off their sugar high from breakfast, so their enthusiasm flags quickly. The ladder is not as fun as it seems; not nearly as fun as the soapy floor in the lower hallway. Ambarto notices a book titled The Erotic Avari; he has no idea what erotic means, but he knows Avari are Wood-elves, and Wood-elves hold a particular mythic fascination for the twins, who imagine their lives as wholly Noldorin except that they dwell in a treehouse. If given a choice of domiciles, both twins would choose a treehouse. However, once opened, they do not spend long with the book and page through relatively quickly once they realize that its pictures are all of mushy, kissy stuff, all conducted sans raiment.

“Eww,” says Ambarussa as the back cover falls closed.

They abandon the library and refuel with the dregs in the caramel pot, hardened to a taffy-like stretchiness and sticky enough that they temporarily glue their teeth together.

Reenergized, fifthly, they raid Macalaurë’s costume closet and play a game called Monsters & Mayhem, which needs no explanation being exactly like it sounds.

Sixth, they use the contraption that Carnistir made to carry the laundry from the bedroom to the lower levels for washing like a rollercoaster for their toys. Then they use it like a rollercoaster for each other.

Finally they sit down and enjoy a chocolate fountain lunch, dipping in pieces of the various fruits that Fëanáro set out for breakfast. When the fruit becomes unsatisfying—and the fountain is still churning out sheets of sweet, liquified chocolate (they suddenly become evangelists of their father’s waste-not mentality and are determined to finish a portion Fëanáro stored labeled for dessert for twenty)—they make popcorn over the stove and dip that instead. The dining room becomes so smoky that they carry the fountain and the popcorn bowl into the living room.

The living room opens on a patio piled high with snow and still bears evidence of their disappeared family: a book belonging to their father, Írissë’s discarded dress shoes, Nerdanel’s sketchbook, Macalaurë’s alto recorder, a stack of books Turukáno hid, intending to recover and pack them later. And centermost, on the low table where the twins color and Nelyo taught them to read and Fëanáro props his linty socked feet while writing scathing letters in answer to articles published in the Tirion linguistic journals, is one of Carnistir’s memory stones.

Carnistir is the understated genius of the family. The middle son, he is the practical fulcrum upon which the wild, savant brilliance of his kin balances. He is no scholar, his voice rasps like a jay on a cold morning when he tries to sing, and his skill in the forge goes little beyond fireplace pokers and plowshares, but his misanthropism is so deep and his social awkwardness so profound that, in avoiding other human beings, he has unlocked a little cupboard deep in his brain and found it well-stocked with practical and mechanical acumen. Much of his energy, then, is turned toward devices that simplify the tedious and everyday—that is his family’s perspective—and (from his perspective) allow him to avoid interacting with others and to remain in his room for the longest duration possible.

His current obsession is the memory stones. It was Fëanáro who began to explore the possibilities of crystals to store memories and project them distances to others, but as was Fëanáro’s wont, he was easily diverted—in this particular case, over an argument in the Lambengolmor’s linguistic journal about the theorized evolution of Valarin from an ur-language. But he’d taken thorough notes for once, and Carnistir was able to employ them to pick up his father’s work where it left off, at least as far as replicating what he’d done so far and nudging his work bit by bit in a progressive direction.

Carnistir is completely uninterested in using crystals to communicate with far-flung persons. In fact, he can imagine little that would be more unpleasant than being forced to talk with someone when distance has granted him a polite reprieve from feigning social nicety. However, he is intrigued by the notion of using crystals to store one’s speech. In his utopian vision, he communicates exclusively with his family through these crystals, dispatched from his room upon a series of mechanical robots programmed to proceed to a specific relative’s quarters, drop the stone, and then come back. Later, the robot will retrieve the stone, which may or may not contain a message back from its recipient. How much easier communication would be if he didn’t have to go into it dreading an argument or an emotional response, if the thick walls of Formenos came between his preferences, demands, and decrees and his family’s reaction to them!

His family has coopted his work in unexpected ways. This bothers him not as long as his own intentions remain attainable; Fëanáro, after all, describes creative achievement as more akin to a bacchanalia of vultures than the thin-air giddiness of a single soaring eagle. Nelyo uses the stones to record lectures on the dull topics he enjoys and thus maintains both a political career in Tirion and a series of apprentices scattered about Aman who are also interested in dull scholarship. Tyelkormo has secreted one away and takes an image of himself each day and likes to watch them in progression as proof that he is growing into his nose and not becoming uglier each day like Carnistir claims. But Macalaurë has produced the most popular usage by far: He records his songs and stories onto them and thus finds the ad nauseum demands for performances no longer devour his composition time.

Beside their bed, the twins have a stone that plays Macalaurë singing and strumming a lullaby on his harp. This does not enthrall them. Macalaurë singing and strumming is part of the background noise of their lives. Their parents are the only ones who activate it, on nights when they are too busy for a bedtime story. It is the stones they are forbidden to see or listen to that capture their imaginations in a vice that they could not escape from if they wanted to. Last night, for instance, the family gathered in this very room to listen to one of Macalaurë’s stories that has been much gossiped about in Tirion. It is not his finest work, but it is of dubitable taste and sensational enough that it commands a level of attention that a masterpiece could never hope to attain. The whole family gathered to hear it—except the twins, that is. The gathering was carefully contrived to transpire while it was believed that the twins were playing and distracted by an early Yule gift they were permitted to open. When they heard the house fall quiet by degrees around them, their feet were set to wandering, the way a beast will become restless by the silent, charged air preceding a storm. But they were met at the living room door by Macalaurë, who told them, “This isn’t really for you. When you’re a little older,” before gently closing the door in their faces. Around his knees, they saw literally every person in the house gathered around the memory stone. Even Nolofinwë, who’d expressed disapproval of the topic, was there. (“If my people are discussing it,” he was prepared to say, if challenged, “then I should be likewise conversant.” But he was not challenged.)

But the memory stone is there now, on the low table, unguarded. AINUR WITH FILTHY FEÄR, says the base that cradles the stone, carved in Macalaurë’s artless majuscule. The stone is smudged with fingerprints from much watching.

Ambarto adds his caramely, chocolately ones to the haze. The stone between their beds is activated with a touch, and he assumes this one will be as well. He is not disappointed.

At first, it is Macalaurë’s voice coming from the stone and they scoff. They don’t like to believe that their brother is terribly exceptional. But quickly, they are rapt.

Macalaurë is a master impersonator. He can soothe like Nerdanel, bellow like Tyelkormo, and simper like Curufinwë. The twins have been tricked by him more times than they care to recall. The voice now is no longer Macalaurë; it is the harsh accent used by some of the Ainur who do not often incorporate as Elves and speak primarily Valarin. These were the Ainur who (according to Fëanáro’s theory) primarily flocked to become Melkor’s servants, lacking interest in and empathy for the Eruhíni. The gravely voice surely cannot be their brother. Ambarto almost chickens out and touches the stone again to shut it down, but Ambarussa grabs his hand.

“I have brought a delivery of thraaalls, milord,” says the one with the gravely whine. At this, the twins gasp. They do not know what the word thralls means, but it litters the edges of stories they are not allowed to hear, and they can imagine.

“How many you got?”

(Like his father, Macalaurë always depicts Melkor as having exceedingly poor grammar.)

“Two dozen, milord. Enough to haul the coal.”

“I tell you what, Igasêz. I’m gonna need three dozen, thralls enough to haul the coal and push the carts.”

“Three! But milord! You told me two!”

“You question me? You? Who’ve been scroungin in the murk and dressin up like Eönwë and smoochin with Gothmogûz? I tell you what, Igasêz. I’m gonna give ya to the count of ten to get outta here and start bringin my thralls before I make a grinder outta ya and toss ya to my Balrogs.”

“Alright, milord! I’m sorry!”

“One, two—ten!”

And there is a roar like of flames rushing to fill the dark vacuums that still lurk at the heart of the world. The noise is such that it hides the twins’ doubled gasp but not the shriek of the poor Igasêz, rendered into devil’s food. They both scramble back, crabwise on hands and feet, smooshing chocolate-dipped popcorn into the mistreated and tired living room carpet. Ambarto is mewling, and it is Ambarussa who thinks first to thrust out his hand and stop the memory stone in its recitation, leaving a popcorn studded smear of chocolate across its face, and to throw back his head and yell, “Amiiil!”