Seven Sons by Artaxastra

Chapter 1

They come one by one, her sons, to the halls of Mandos.  Ambarussa comes first, in confusion and doubt, wondering what happened to him.  It is not long before he is released to his mother’s care. 

It is long years before the next ones come, and they are detained long in Mandos’ halls, Tyelcormo who is known as the Cruel, Carnistir and Atarinkë, who nurses still his resentments.  They have slain their kin and more, persecuted a long war against those innocent of any crime against them, and justice demands that they remain to contemplate their errors.  Nerdanel comes often, hoping to see them, but Mandos is not hasty.

Before they are released, Ambarto arrives, the youngest of her children.  It is he she sees first, and that apparently by accident in one of the antechambers.  He is tall and though like all of her people he is young seeming, he is not the boy who set out with his father, but a man worn with weal and woe.  “I was killed at the Havens of Sirion,” he says, “And came here with those I slew, manservants and maidservants and children, those who fled Gondolin and Doriath and ruin only to find it there.  We did not get the Silmaril.”  He casts his cloak over his head, goes in, and speaks to her no more that day.

And so Nerdanel walks in the gardens where those who will soon be given leave to depart may stray and hears them curse her husband and her sons.  Seven sons of Feanor, they say.  Seven destroyers.  That is what they name them, these Sindar from Doriath and Ossiriand.  Nerdanel does not weep.

Ambarto has come to her care and the Valar have gone forth with an army and returned before Maitimo comes, the best of her children or so she thought.  He kneels silent in the garden and does not speak, his hair like flame unbound around him, wrestling with pain that is now only in his mind.  He goes to the Halls of Nienna where they promise, in time, he will find healing.

But Makalaurë does not come.

Chapter End Notes

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