Like Butterflies on the Wind by Elisif

Chapter 1

Read Chapter 1

This night, there will be no stars. The sky tells us so, mired in grey over this encampment I ordered hastily erected on a roadside when it became clear that in the snow, we would not reach our destination by dawn.

The anger of the soldiers at the delay, the labour and discomfort of another night in the field however much it has been routine in the years past is palpable. Tramping through the cleared snow between the lines of tents, I can hear them speak of me: cruel-hearted, half-mad the third-born, in all likelihood thinking only of a crown.

Here, on the road for Doriath, it is a lie, but it was true at least once. When father died, I could think only of a crown.  Makalaurë, in near-hysterics at the shock of his shock of his accession to the throne later summoned me to demand an answer as to why it was the son of Fëanor named for his temper and his fury who stood silent while gracious Maitimo broke fingers against Father’s vacant armour in despair, screamed at me to answer how the already broken world had inverted itself such that it was Curufinwë and not me who had pursued Father’s ashes like a child chasing a butterfly calling “come back, come back” when he died.

The truth I dared not utter in my defence at my brother’s coronation was that I had been all but blinded by the image in my memory of a crown long lost to us.

A child’s crown; Míriel’s. Its simple base of forged gold had been hers in childhood, gifted to her on her naming-day and even in its simplicity well-loved, but anticipating a child of her own my grandmother had had it reforged and needled a circle of seemingly living flames and flying cinders onto the frame in the most exquisite free-handed beadwork imaginable. The tiny circle of flame wrought in her hands for an infant’s head had taken her place at father’s essecarmë ceremony and as it had Father, crowned in fire every infant our small family thereafter.

Shortly after Carnistir was born, our Mother, leaving white marble-dust handprints on our tunic-backs as she literally pushed us out from underfoot sent Curufinwë and I to fetch it from the store-room. There we found that— Eru knows how such an error ever befell an heirloom in a house of craftspeople – the crown had been improperly stored and save the teardrop-shaped flames which had been beaded onto wires to retain their shape, the threads holding together the ring of fire had disintegrated or else had been eaten by some unnamed insect, and the beads of the flying cinders adjoining the flames fell away in Curufinwë’s callused fingertips when he lifted it.

“I could create something new incorporating the remaining pieces,” Curufinwë said, biting down on his lip as he studied one of the wire-wrought flames between his thumb and forefinger while we both sat studying the ruined crown on the dust-smeared store-room floor contemplating certain death at Father’s hands. In my haste tripping over my cloak which I had prior been sitting upon, I leapt to my feet.

“Are you mad? Father will slaughter you if he sees you taking Míriel’s work apart!” I yelled. (Seeing as animals and carelessness were involved, a way would be found to implicate me in the crown’s destruction, I was certain of it).

Curufinwë took the crown into his hands, drew it against his chest as he stood up, more loose beads scattering onto the floor. 

“And should he simply find it ruined and nothing done about it? Will you bear his wrath then?”

We stood in silence for some moments; finally, I glanced down at the skilled hands of my little brother and for once set aside a young lifetime’s worth of resentment and jealousy.

 “I swear I can keep him out of the forge for a few hours at least. Will that be long enough for you?”

He nodded.

Together, we swept up the loose beads into a fold of Curufinwë’s cloak; true to my word, I chased after Father in time to catch him returning from Tirion with a linguistic text I knew he detested in my hands and an unanticipated agreement to his criticisms of it on my tongue, sacrificed the following seemingly endless hours of daylight out of fear and out of sworn loyalty to my brother.

Later that night, with my heels pressed to the skirting board and head held back against the wall just outside of Father’s study, ,my heart hammering against my chest, I listened in as Curufinwë received Father’s verdict on the crown.

 “Then you are not angry, father?”

 “Beholding the work of your hands in my own?” he answered. Then:

“I ask of my sons that they fulfil my desires, and that desire is that you create. You have fulfilled that wish, Curufinwë; how then could I be angry?”

Holding my breath, with the rough newly applied plaster of the wall scratching my forehead, I pressed my eye to the crack between the door and wall and peered into the lamplit study. Curufinwë, standing on tiptoe had nestled his head against Father’s shoulder and reached his arms around him, and Father in turn was softly stroking the trembling small of his back; in the other, he held the restored crown aloft to the silver evening light. The beaded flames had been cautiously excised from their ruined frame and pressed onto teardrop-shaped discs of beaten gold which were fixed upright to the base of the tiny crown and bent and twisted to seemingly flutter like the flames they represented. Around them, fine gold wires had then been fixed from either side of the golden crown-base to meet over the flame-leaves in vaulted points like the arches of a golden cathedral, the free flame seemingly trapped alive and pulsing within.

Years later in another world I remembered that Mandos was said to have golden arches.

...

He rewards us for giving him what he desires at the time, Maitimo told me once, embracing me like a child half my age, wiping away my tears and running his fingers through my tangled hair after arriving for the daily exchange of dreams that was our shared, secret ritual to find me spying on Curufinwë’s private forge lessons from the attic with the spyglass Uncle Arafinwë had gifted me on my begetting-day, “not that you need it with those sharp eyes of yours”. Right now it is works of hand that he wants, but mayhap it will not always be so. A time will come for the hunter to prove himself in this family, one day, I am sure of it!

The Hunter. Me, even if my family could never agree on how or where I first acquired the title.

“When you were born, it seemed that every time I turned back to look at you butterflies would have landed on your cradle,” I heard my Mother say, “and even then you would reach out to catch them, and cry when you could not.”

“Nay,” I heard Makalaurë say in return, “Nolofinwë and Anairë had a fair-haired cat by that name, and the first time Findekáno came to our house he pointed and shouted “hunter, hunter!” when he saw you.”

People seemed to prefer Makalaurë’s recounting of events to my Mother’s, if only for the sake of taunting my shame-faced cousin scarlet.

But whichever account was the truth, whether it was in fact my own memory or simply a vision crafted in that blurred, ethereal melding of truth and tale that so often shapes one’s earliest recollections, I remembered the butterflies.

There were three of them, always; pale yellow like Laurelin’s blossoms when reflected on distorted glass, wings brittle as paper fans used by my Telerin Aunt, voices I could not understand and trails of flight I could not follow, and whensoever I outstretched my fingers to feel the grace of their silken wings against my skin, they slipped free of my grasp. Always.

Butterflies in time came to be my least favourite of all animals, for of all of them it was butterflies I most desperately desired to catch and hold –not to entrap or Arda forbid crush them, you understand, but simply to know that I could – and they, seemingly alone of all birds and beasts, eluded me.

All my childhood, they taunted me, it seemed, left me running ragged in their pursuit and unable to understand, why. Was I not the hunter? If I was, why then did they elude my grasp? And without that title, if I was not the Hunter, was I anything at all?

That question found its answer in time: when we swore, I was first.

...

“Why?”

My nephew Tyelperinquar, then only a small child, was the first to ask it, sobbing so desperately that his favoured blanket was soaked in tears and the raised, eight-pointed stars embroidered onto it by his mother caked in snot as I explained to him the reason his favourite uncle would never again be returning “home”.

We swore an oath, came my answer, kneeling in the faint lamplight by his bed to kiss his forehead with his soaked tiny palm clutched in my hands. Child, we swore an oath.

“But why?” Tyelperinquar, now a broad-chested man with battle-scars and a private retinue and convictions all his own echoes back to me as he departs his father’s tent in fury, his voice rising over water buckets being upturned over dying fires and soldiers pissing against trees and horses whinnying in the chaos of an encampment the night before battle. Searching for answers on the last night of his world, I suppose, for he asks after enough of them.

Why does it consume you so? Why is that you of all of them can think seemingly on nothing else? Why do you think the oath your own, as though it is not the burden of all of us?

Muttering insults at his father and allowing no answers, he mounts and departs, fades into darkness.

A pity, as the one answer to all those questions is simple really: in the end, in the hour in which his need from us was greatest, my father did not call for skill in shaping silver or tempering weaponblades, advanced knowledge of compounds and alloys, new works of artistry wrought in metal by our hands. He called for stealth.

Drive.

 Chase.

Pursuit beyond the very reaches of the world.

Can I, Tyelkormo, if my  mother’s account is to be believed named the Hunter from my earliest half-hearted grasps at butterflies in my cradle, truly be blamed for in that hour reaching for my sword?

...

One last time, we review our battle-plans for the morrow. For once, the discussion is civil, perhaps with Maedhros already retired to our tent— do you truly think we require plans to succeed in killing things? You find who you want to kill and you put your sword in them until they bleed to death, that’s all there is to battle – but Curufin was insistent, perhaps in the repetition of strategy seeking to distract himself from the memory of the fight with his son.

We finish our discussion, return the worn maps to their gilded cases and swords to their sheaths.

Pausing only to offer a treat to one of Amrod’s wolf-hounds and scratch it briefly behind the ears, I depart the sound-smothering velvet-lined tent and pause as if to draw breath with my ears and take peace in the faint rustlings of untold insects and nestlings of sleeping birds and other creatures that resounds in my ears, that reassuring background presence I have learned never to take for granted such that even its briefest absence is sickening to me.

Some days— Weeks? Months? – after the darkening, Makalaurë found me doubled over and retching onto the dead grass outside of our hastily erected encampment, took me into his arms and dabbed the sick from my face while I gasped for breath against his chest.

 “Is it the darkness?” he asked.

 “No,” I said, our roles seemingly reversed, “it is the silence.”

I broke down. I explained to him, looking down at me in confusion how the sounds of life, the conscious voices and unconscious noises of bird, of beast, of insect, fish and fowl; all, all had fallen deathly still, as though the earth was proclaiming its death in a message meant for my ears alone, screaming to me that it was no more even in the sleep in which the others at least could escape.

It was after that that the butterflies first began to appear in my dreams.

“Night” after “night”, at the brush of their faint, spectral wings against my outstretched fingertips, I learned of the paradox that is unquenched, unsated desire for something that is yet detested to the point of rage. I hated them for the reminder of the creatures they imitated as if in mockery of the now stifled, short-lived children of Valinor’s summers, but still I gorged myself drunk on the desperate longing for that mere glimpse of the light of the old world that it seemed three butterflies imagined in dreams alone now could offer me, before in dreams as in life, they flew free.

Those were the dark years, setting unhonourable snares and unkindly traps for rats and squirrels, thinking I’d die for want of warmth and light. I believe I lost my mind in those years— we all did, each for our own respective reasons. Others hated the new lights that graced the sky when they at last appeared, said they shone on in mockery of all those lost; I declare I went as mad on the return of sound to the earth and light to the sky as I had gone at its departure, telling my brothers they could chain me to a wall ere they could keep me indoors for even another instant.

I nearly wept the first time I saw a butterfly again. I am ashamed to admit that I was meant to stay at Maitimo’s side at the time, hold his phantom right hand while he slept to ward off the pain, but driven half-mad by the stink of blood from his wrist and infection from almost everywhere else, the stifling heat of the sick-room, I leapt up to stand by and open the window— only for a moment— and found a butterfly upon the sill.

“Tyelkormo!”

I leapt to his side frantically murmuring apologies, bowing my head in guilt as I took his fingers into my own, but then realised that he was not in fact angry, but confused.

“I thought you hated butterflies,” he said. “Have you really changed— so much?”

“No, it is just that—“

I looked back at the empty windowsill. What were butterflies to one who suffered night-terrors so acute they were more closely akin to seizures? I concocted a lie I cannot remember, vowed to myself that one day I would tell him about the butterflies, ask for guidance on that paradox of pleasure and pain I had come to know in the darkness when he was recovered, when my own life no longer seemed so petty.

So I thought. But in the end, I never told Maitimo, in whom I had once confided all my dreams in childhood, nor indeed anyone else, of the butterflies. With the rising of the sun and the revelations that accompanied it, any pleasure in their presence had ceased; there was only the slow taunt of my inability to grasp them, however desperately I tried.

To this day they haunt my dreams.

I fall asleep on the road to Doriath and dream of spring in Valinor.

...

“Celegorm!”

The sound of my Sindarised name snuffs spring in Valinor like a candle between spit-dampened fingertips and the sunlit meadow in Oromë’s Halls becomes darkness and fur coverlets worn linen-thin on stony ground, the summer wind to the stink of lanolin and sweat that pools in the oppressively damp air of a tent warmed only by breath and bodyheat. I take note of my surroundings one sensation at a time as I lie flat on my back breathing heavily, then detect an alien touch of pressured flesh against my bared skin, and jerk backwards in fear.

I outstretch my arm, frantically touch the cold contours of various pieces of armour scattered aside the pallet before my fingertips sink into worn and aged velvet. I yank the velvet bag on my chest, sit up, loosen the drawstring and pull the ancient lampstone free of its case.

My eyes adjust and I realise to my horror that the object of my visible repulsion was the push of my brother Maedhros’ stump against my sweat-soaked chest; he has drawn back from where he was kneeling over me, with his arm held to his chest.

“You cried out in your sleep,” he says. “I wanted to wake you, but...  You were dreaming of terrors, weren’t you?”

 “No. Of butterflies.”

Silence.

He sighs; then, shaking his head in dismissal he turns his back on me and begins the awkward process of rearranging the pile of furs and coverlets he kicked off of the pallet back over himself. After an embarrassed moment of watching him struggle, I decidedly fling the lampstone across the tent, reach over and ignoring his mumbled protest pull the heavy furs back onto the bed and over him, tuck them in around his shoulders.

He falls quiet, mumbles a course thank you, then buries his head and closes his eyes. Then, as I retrieve the lampstone and return it to its case, I hear him mutter:

“I would that our dreams could be exchanged, brother.”

I climb back beneath the coverlets, close my own eyes, and awaken looking upon the gates of Angband.

My nostrils are struck by the acrid stink of charred flesh and melted metal; drawing my eyes from the gates I look down and realise that once more, I am standing over Atar’s body as the fire of life leaves him; his limbs and armour alike twisted and broken, the tooled engraving wrought on his breastplate and gauntlets melted into blurred shapeless waves leaving the gilded silver now a charred black, his exposed flesh raw and burned.

He is past speaking, can only groan; I relive him seeing him wince as Maedhros lays the back of his hand atop his burned forehead, Carnistir and Ambarussa silently pushing aside each other’s wrists in competition for his now-free hand only to finally divide it between them, their outstretched fingertips meeting at the centre of his blistered palm. Once it was a family joke, attempting to share two hands between fourteen, but now...

As unprepared as I was in life, I watch as his spirit ignites and burns, as my Father turns to cinders on the wind.

 Only now, in sleep, it is my brothers who stand silent and withdrawn, and I realise that I may here yet redeem myself, in this fantasy wrought in unstilled dreams. Reliving my father’s passing on the road for Doriath, I set aside the image of a crown that shamed me in life and do as I— the strong-bodied, the hasty-riser, the hunter – should have done.

I fulfil my duty, leap screaming to my feet, grapple at the fleeting ashes, like an angered child seize at the drifting cinders with my fists in the fury that should in that moment have been mine. But like butterflies on the wind, the ashes flutter free and pass onwards into a world that is not my own and I am left grasping empty-handed at the elusive, everlasting dark.