Copper and Cinders by Elisif

Chapter 1

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Laurë’s music tablets were unsalvageable. Maedhris had broken the news to her once she was lucid that they had melted in her saddlebags from the searing heat of the dragonfire, had clasped her palm and warned her not to suffer the pain of looking at what had become of the only written records of her finest compositions they knew to survive— for who knew if anywhere in Beleriand save Himring wasn’t currently aflame? – but it had been a week since she had come to Himring, and curiosity had gotten the better of her. With still-bandaged hands, she had heaved her saddle bags (the ruined tablets were of course immensely heavy) from their place in the corner onto the bed, emptied them of their contents, and immediately regretted doing so. She had seized them as she fled, weight be damned, expecting copper would be safer than paper in the inferno that was her only possible passage to safety. Now, the metal tablets- punctured with a stylus so the lines and dots of the music notation could later be filled with ink and used to print copies thereof - had melted, burned together into a formless, almost-rectangular mass, the narrow sheets fused on top of one another, note indentations where visible pooled and bubbled into craters and holes.
And Maedhris, she realised, was watching her look upon their utter destruction just as she had begged her not to, visible standing sadly in the open doorway behind her with her hand clutched to a fold of her crimson skirt in the reflection of a candle sconce on the opposite wall.
“It is alright Maedhris,” she said hurriedly packing away the fused mass of tablets, desperate not to give her sister something else to feel guilty over. “I remember my own parts of these pieces, those that I sing or perform myself. It is the orchestrations that are the problem. I only have so much space in my mind for music if I do not learn it by means of my hands…”
She turned around. Her elder sister’s lips were pressed tight as she stepped forwards into the chamber, her expression conflicted as her eyes flickered to from the ruined tablets to her sister’s face.
“Come with m,” she finally said, pausing to tower over her.
She turned and Maedhris held out her hand. She pulled her younger sister gently to her feet, then guided her out into the corridor and then out of doors, pausing for Laurë to catch her breath when they step out into the dense swirl of smoke and ash that open air in Himring has now become- her lungs were still recovering from the damage they had sustained in the burning of the gap, and she gratefully accepted her sister’s off of a handkerchief to cover her face as they crossed the high rampart of the ever-cold fortress’ inner wall. Arms linked, they reached the tower whose doorway had the handle set on the left that led to Maedhris’ private bedroom and study. She stepped inside, shook the ashes from her robes and gowns as best she could while her sister bolted the door, then Maedhris motioned for her to sit down on the heavily padded setee.
“Wait here,” she said, brushing an unfurling braid away from her cheek with the stump of her right arm.
Laurë watched as she paced across the chamber and knelt with her vast red skirt fanning out across the matted rushes to fiddle with the locks of a small wooden chest below the window, the buckles engineered by Curufindë to yield to the turns of a single hand. Humming to herself, she lifted aside weighted bundles of jewels wrapped in paper, combs, sheathed knives of various designs and origins (she had complained in the past of how she would love for a subject to attempt to flatter her with a gift less blindingly obvious than yet another left-handed dagger), laid them all across the bed, and finally came across a worn book of manuscript papers, stitched down the side but not fully bound, yellowed with obviously great age. She cradled the bundle in the crook of her right arm, snapped the chest shut, then paced back across the room and sitting down beside Laurë so their shoulders touch, laid it ceremoniously in her lap.
Laurë hesitantly turned the first yellowed pages, recognised the impossibly elegant hand that had scripted the unwavering tengwar long ago, flicked still further through the ancient pages.
“This is from Tirion!” she exclaimed.
Maedhris gently reached over and turned from the fly-leaf to the first page. Blushing slightly, she whispered:
“It is my research into alloys and metallurgy, from when I was still under Father’s tutelage.”
Laurë turned a few more pages, more gently this time in genuine curiosity, painfully recognising their father’s hand providing commentary and notes in the margins, sometimes elegantly inked, sometimes written in a more rushed manner. (“Scribbled” was a word that honestly couldn’t apply to Fëanor’s writing even at its sloppiest).
She paused, looked over at Maedhris.
“Do the others know that you still have this?”
“Well, no… I found it in the chest they tried to hide from me in Mithrim, along with my gloves and my sword and my forge tools…”
Laurë winced, the memory rolling back to her. It was she who had hid the chest, in preparation for her sister’s return from the care of the Nolofinwëans. How Maedhris had ever managed to undo the buckles—
“I bribed Tyelperinquar to open it for me with seedcake, if you were wondering.”
Maedhris rose to her feet, smoothed the crumpled folds in her skirt flat with her stump, paced across the chamber, with her back turned quietly poured herself a glass of wine from the decanter laid ready on the desk. Laurë shut the manuscript and laid her palm across it, looked up to meet the eyes of her sister, sipping from the amber-coloured glass with her right arm cradled in the crook of her left. She sighed, still confused.
“Do you- do you want me to resume smithcraft until my hands heal sufficiently for me to play the harp again?”
“No! I— Well you see, a great deal of it concerns the melting properties of metals, such materials as have the ability to withstand fire, so I thought …Maybe we could find the means to make music prints of greater endurance than those you lost”
Laurë bit down on her lips. Her sister’s intention was touching now that she understood it, but metal meant for printing music in the form she had developed needed to be soft enough to be noticeably indented by a stylus through a layer of parchment, which surely made it vulnerable to fire by nature….
“If anything is to survive of us, to last beyond… I would want it to be your music, Laurë.”
Maedhris said nothing, turned her back to stare out of the window, gazed out at the flames and smoke rising beyond Himring’s walls, the pall of swirling black and scarlet stretching as far as the eye could see. Laurë pushed herself upwards of the overly soft bench coverings, lifted her dress up off of the damp rushes and walked across the chamber, pausing halfway to where her sister stood. Maedhris’ head was bowed, visibly tense, clutching her wineglass away from her body with pressed fingertips tight enough to shatter it, her eyes softly closed.
Breathing deeply, Laurë moved forward, dropped her handhold on her gown to gently embrace her sister from behind, wrapped her arms tightly around the embroidered folds just below her breasts, rested her head upon Maedhris’ shoulder, breathed in the scent of smoke emanating from the crushed velvet folds of her gown and the for once unkempt tangles of her copper hair, murmuring soft words of comfort as she had done so often in the past.
Maedhris yielded to her embrace for a moment, but then worked her left arm free to set her wine-glass down on the desk and turn to take Laurë into her own arms, rest her head atop her sister’s.
Laurë glanced upwards, smiled slightly.
“You have white in your hair,” she said.
She reached upwards to pluck a wisp of whitened ash from where it was ensnared in her sister’s curls, one among many now that she had noticed. She held it in her fingertips, half-smiling, but Maedhris’s expression hardened; eyes facing downwards, she reached over and gently tugged a cinder from one of Laurë’s own smoke-scented curls. Their eyes met, both of them staring down at her fingertips.
No words were exchanged; then once more they fell into each other’s arms, and with tired eyes and whitened hair Fëanor’s eldest daughters waited for the night to fall.