A loss of something ever felt I by arriviste

A loss of something ever felt I

Read A loss of something ever felt I

1.

We kept little state in those days after the Trees, and even in the light of the Sun we had not returned to the grand ways which had once been ours. It would have been a hollow mockery of everything that had been to sit in the throne which had been my father’s, and then each of my brother’s in turn, the one in a caretaker’s stead, the other in madness and grief and in the dark.

There was almost no one to sit beside me; no sons, and no daughter. Of nephews and niece I was equally bereft. All our children were gone, and my sisters-in-law left husbandless, and my wife – I thought it was unlikely she would return to Tirion, but I tried not to think of the future, because it dwelt no longer in Aman; it too had gone over the Sea. Aman was fixed in an eternal present, one Great Year eating its own tail to return to its beginning. Time went in circles here now, and that was preferable to time measured in a straight line, with deaths and births and tragedies marking off the years with differences.

Nor did I think of the past, for that too was gone; my father into death, and my mother to the Mountain, from which neither would return.

“You’re very ungrateful,” said Findis my sister critically. Findis did most things critically. “ ‘I must alone carry forward the banner of our house, alas, alack’ – what am I, I ask you?”

“You are not Eärwen,” I said, which was undeniable, even if it was ungrateful. Nor was she Írimë, who I would have chosen if I had been able to choose which sister would sit beside me. But Írimë was gone, with her clashing laugh and dauntless spirit, and I had Findis instead; Findis of the faint frown. Findis knew her duty, and like me, she did it. We alone of our father’s children were left, and neither of us would abandon the people who had already been abandoned so many times over by our house.

“Eärwen!” said my sister. “Don’t talk to me of Eärwen!”

She had never had anything in common with my wife. I had been surprised, after my return, to find Findis staunchly on Eärwen’s side – not only out of sympathy for the blood soaking the sand and the dead washing up along the shore-line, but because she considered Eärwen to have been shockingly let down by my children and myself when we marched in Fëanáro’s train. Our duty was to Tirion and to the Valar; so Findis saw it. It must be pleasant to see the world so clearly and so sharply! That sympathy had thinned and then ebbed away as time passed, and as Alqualondë healed, and as Eärwen did not return to me. That was dereliction of duty, in Findis’s accounting, a shortfall in what was owed to me as her husband and to Tirion as its queen.

My accounting was rather different. As I saw it, the debts were all on the other side and neither Tirion nor I would ever be able to settle them.

I was ungrateful; I had needed Findis badly, in those days before the Sun, and none of her older-sister high-handedness had grated on me then, even one open wound as I had been. She was good at administration, and our people had always admired work well done.

“I would rather not talk of Eärwen either,” I said. “It’s very late; have we many more people to see?”

“Just one,” Findis said, after consulting with our steward. “Fíriel – no patronymic nor epessë.” She studied me a moment, and the line between her brows softened. “Would you rather I saw her alone?”

“We’re dining privately tonight,” I said. “It doesn’t matter; there is no one to offend but the kitchens, should we push dinner back.”

“And yet you will worry about offending them,” Findis said. “I know you! Never mind; you may take your crown off as soon as we’re done here, if you like.”

“Thank you,” I said, with a dryness that escaped her observation. It would not have escaped Írimë, who would have made a oh dear, Findis, expression at me behind her back, nor Eärwen, who would have been less obvious, but whose eyes would have been eloquent, and whose laughter would have sounded in my head in a peal of silver bells.

“Fíriel, lord,” said our steward, and I dismissed him; he had wife and children to return to.

His retreat crossed the advance of the last petitioner, who came forward and made a slight obeisance, her grey cloak falling back from her head, and her hair falling in a sheet of tarnished silver to her shoulders.

Silver hair always made me think of my wife, but this wasn’t the pale hair of the Teleri, as light and sheeny as moonlight. That didn’t mean this wasn’t one of theirs, with a request to be made that was freighted in pain and guilt; but somehow I didn’t think so.

She had the features I thought of as classically Noldor: the high brow, the long straight nose and the sharp facial bones that had long been the canon of beauty among us. I didn’t have them, but my brothers did, and my father. It was an antique beauty, and in fact there was something about her that made me think of the dark before the Darkening. She was like the oldest among us, those first woken at Cuiviénen or born before the Journey, those who remembered when there was only the light of the stars and faintly-phosphorescent flora, the glint of spears in the night.

They gave me the same sense of unease, and had the same stillness to them, as though they were never entirely with you, but not precisely adrift in their own mind either. Part of them was watching, listening; still waiting for danger even in the peace that was Aman before the Darkening, and again after it. I was ill at ease with them not because I grudged receiving less than the full measure of their attention – that I was used to, the mind half-given to thought, to poem or painting, song or alloy or new method of plumbing – but because their wariness made it impossible for me to forget that danger and murder had come even here, and might one day come again.

She was like them; and yet unlike, because there was something uncanny still in her silence.

Beside me, Findis stiffened.

“Arafinwë,” the woman said, and her voice slid over the finwë in my name like a caress, paring it off from its stem. “I am Fíriel, and I was queen here once.”

“But you could not come back,” I said uncomprehendingly as her name fractured apart in my head like a string of beads breaking, and I heard it in its separate meanings. “The Valar spoke, and so it was decided; or else we could not have been born.”

“Serindë?” asked Findis. “The dead do not come back.”

“Yet they may,” said Fíriel, she that died, Míriel Serindë who had been. I had never seen so much as a painting of her. Her images had been shut away long before my birth, in the wing of the palace I had never entered; her seal had been replaced with my mother’s everywhere it had been, and the Ms intertwining with Fs chiselled into linked Is and Fs instead. Our father too had lived in an eternal present after a painful breaking, and he had shut the door to the past and to loss and change behind him. Only Fëanáro had carried over from that time, a fiercely beloved if troubling remainder. “That is what I have come in proof of, Arafinwë-King; that as promised, Mandos’s halls open their doors and the lost may walk out again.”

“Father?” Findis asked, when I dared not.

When Fíriel shook her head, I realised at last how Tyelkormo my nephew had come by his polished-steel hair. “What the Valar decided cannot be undone. He cannot have two wives living. And now I live.”

I was thinking of Fëanáro with more pain than I had since the Darkening.

I had not greatly mourned him, neither when he had left Aman, nor when I heard he had died so very far away. I had had too much else to mourn then, and the despoiled sands of Alqualondë where I had courted my wife and watched my children play had filled my mind and claimed priority; and I had been angry, because it was because of him that those children were gone, and my wife as well.

And now his mother stood before me, and in her brow I could see my lost brother, and in her dark eyes I could not. He had burnt like an unshielded furnace. She was like an alabaster lamp; her spirit shone through her skin, more fëa than flesh. He had been a child when she had lain down in Lorien, and she had not returned for him then. He had been half-mad and wholly distraught after Father died, and she had not returned for him then. He was in the halls of Mandos now, and she had at last returned from them; and so left him again.

“Why now?”

“Because some things must be seen to be believed,” said Fíriel, “and perhaps you will need to remember it.”

Beside me I knew that Findis’s thoughts weren’t of Dooms and deaths. I doubted she even lingered long thinking of Fëanáro, as short as he had come in her measure. What she was thinking of with the part of her mind that was Findis was of Valarin dictates and how they might alter in spirit if not altering in word, or was it perhaps vice versa, and of metaphysics and the ineffable bond of fëa and hröa; and with the part that did her duty, she was thinking of social awkwardness, and our mother; of two dowager Queens of Tirion perhaps taking tea together, and how awkward it would all be, and where would Míriel-Fíriel expect to be lodged? Should she give her the rooms that had been Father’s, or those which had been Mother’s? What would they say to one another?

“I return now to the House of Vairë, whence I dwell,” Fíriel said, and with a last glance around the hall where her husband had sat during the splendour of the Noldor before the Darkening, drew up the hood of her cloak in a dark caul over her shining head. “I will not trouble you again.”

“No trouble at all,” Findis said automatically, and when Fíriel had gone, as silently as she had come, stared at me wild-eyed.

“‘No trouble at all’?” I said, as I might have said to Írimë.

“I know,” she cried, and we burst together into laughter. It was laughter with more than a touch of hysteria, and yet afterwards I felt better.

 

2.

It was hard to remain in the eternal present when loss and change winged their way over the Sea. I had no more hope for the future than I had ever had – not for my children nor those of my brothers, not after the Doom. The halls of Mandos would not open for them. Others had walked out since Míriel; silver-haired Teleri, singing as they walked home. No one from Beleriand yet, although I thought it likely that those who had died on the Journey would still return. Findis thought even some of the Úmanyar might, one day; and perhaps those who died before Oromë had ever come to us and given us a choice.

That any of the Avari would ever walk these shores seemed unlikely, given the position the Valar took on those that flouted them.

“And yet Míriel weaves again, in the House of Vairë,” Findis had said, when I made this argument; “and she came to us; both, I believe, a sign of pity.”

“Little pity was promised,” I told her; “and by their words, I believe, the Valar stand.”

I had not mourned Fëanáro, and no further deaths touched me for several Great Years, although many were felt in Tirion by the parents, children and spouses of those who had left in Fëanáro’s train. My family across the Sea seemed whole, however sundered and splintered.

Then Irissë died. The news came from Anairë my sister in law, still lingering in Alqualondë then; my niece was dead, wild-flower Irissë forever impatiently spurring her horse ahead into darkness, as I had last seen her.

After that the deaths began to fall like blows, like the beating of the ancient brazen gong that stood in the Great Court. I felt the next two in my spirit, one after the other: Aikanáro and Angaráto, their deaths coming almost together, my sons. Aikanáro with his wild eyes and his springing hair combed back from his brow; tight-jawed Angaráto with his strong shoulders. Eldalótë my daughter-in-law, dead too, I learned from her parents; we could not sense what had become of her son Artaresto, nor whether she and Angaráto had had more children across the Sea, and whether those children lived or had died.

Next I heard from my mother that Nolofinwë was dead; he who I had understood little better than I had Fëanáro, although I had loved him far more. My brother, whose seat it was I was truly filling, whose crown I truly wore; our father had given both up long before his death, and Fëanáro – well. Fëanáro had been the best of the Noldor, and also the worst, but he had never been fit to be their king.

I mourned Nolofinwë, but the blow seemed hardly felt after my sons. I was numb; I thought I was numb.

Then Findaráto. My firstborn. The brightest, I had often thought, of all our house; perhaps it had been fatherly foolishness, to measure my slim son against towering Fëanáro and find Fëanáro wanting, but I had thought it, in my secret heart. The merriest spirit, and yet the wisest, once he was grown – passing over those misdeeds of his youth we had agreed mutually to forget.

Ëarwen was with me when he died. The wound to our spirits came at the same time, whenever he had breathed his last in Endórë, and I felt the blow resounding through me, my body ringing with pain and my ears with bronze. She told me later that for her it was a wave, and a cruel one; one that knocked her to her knees and pulled her under. We clung together in our agony, and it did not help. It could not compare to what it had been like to feel first Angaráto go, then Aikanáro, so close in death together, and Ëarwen and I still then so far apart; but nothing could improve feeling the loss of a child. I was glad she was with me now, and yet I was glad for nothing.

As a broken House, we sat silently together to eat, and everything was ash in our mouths. Findis had left, when Ëarwen and Anairë returned; she came back from Taniquetil with our mother, after Nolofinwë died, and for a time we all grieved together. Indis my mother had lost first husband and then son; Anairë first daughter, and then husband. Ëarwen and I two sons, then three.

Findis had lost father and brothers, nephews and niece, but those ties were looser than those binding husband to wife and parent to child. She had not felt any but Father. Nevertheless, she spoke to me again of the alteration in spirit of their decree which the Valar had shown in returning Miriel to the use of her body and the work of her hands; “And ‘little pity’, Arafinwë, does not mean none.”

“’Tears unnumbered will they shed’,” I quoted bitterly. “I think the Valar mean to keep to word and spirit both when it comes to the Exiled.”

“Where we have always gone wrong,” Findis said, ignoring me, “is perhaps in thinking that intention maps onto spirit, which maps onto fëa; rather, counter-intuitively, intention and hröa must be considered one, and the words themselves as equivalent to fëa. Thus the words fix and hold, but the interpretation behind them may change; so can the fëa can be parted from the original hröa, and find itself rehoused in another, without altering in itself. The essence coheres, and the interpretation changes; and the Law stands as written, but its readers find different meaning in the same words. Thus the Doom stands as it was spoken, and yet it may not always mean what it was first intended to mean...”

Living among the Vanyar had always had an observedly bad effect on Findis, but it was only then I had realised that the part of her which had always been given over to theology was not so very different from the one which had, of necessity, come down from the Mountain to deal with affairs of state. They were both dogged hair-splitters I would like to see thrown from the Mindon Eldaliéva. I had told her so, and it was shortly after that that she and our mother returned to Taniquetil.

My nephew Findekáno was next, some years after; Nolofinwë’s bright boy, another loss for Anaire. Then word came from Nerdanel, who had not communicated with us since informing us of Fëanáro’s death. Fëanáro’s sons had also begun to die. Carnistir, Tyelkormo, Curufinwë, dead at a single stroke. I kept no accountbook of my own when it came to the lives of the children of the house of Finwë, and so it brought me no joy at all that it had begun to balance. I had loved them, and I mourned my nephews all together.

Írimë, my sister. Then Turukáno, Anairë’s last living child. She stayed upright when it happened, in her court-dress at a meeting discussing education standards. I saw her face change across the room, and I knew. “It’s over,” she told us afterwards, and she didn’t mean the pain of fëar sundering. “I have no one left to lose.”

Ëarwen and I had one last hostage to the Doom, Artanis our daughter; and we had no hope left for her, only expectation of loss.

On the day hope came back to us Ëarwen was at my side and our steward was working through the list of names which had been compiled at the doors for that morning’s open petitions when he stopped, struck, as a petitioner made his way forward in a grey cloak and knelt at our feet.

“Tirmo?” Ëarwen prompted.

“Ah,” he said. “Well. The name – the names – given to me for this petitioner are – well, very strange, my lady. I suspect they were given in jest.”

“Read them out, in any case,” I said, and steeled myself for tortured names and patronyms invented by a teenage lackwit.

“Finrod called Felak-gundu, the Hewer of Caves; Nom the Wise; Atandil Friend-of-Men; King of Nargothrond Under-ground and lord of Tol Sirion that was,” said Tirmo stiffly, and we all paused for a moment, trying to work ‘Finrod’out to mean something rude, and deeply suspicious of ‘Hewer of Caves.’

“I also answer to ‘Findaráto Ingoldo Arafinwion’,” added my oldest son helpfully, letting his cloak fall back, and his yellow head, emerging, shone like a tulip. “Mother, Father – oh, don’t cry!”

“I thought you long grown past such tricks!” I told him, after the first tears and the first joy had passed.

“There are butterflies older than I am at this moment,” laughed Finrod-Findaráto my son, for the name he had used in Beleriand was that which he preferred now. “I came from the halls of Mandos straight home, like a salmon in spring, and I think I might be forgiven a little subterfuge at the door. It seemed more bearable than waiting for your audiences to be done, or making some sort of fuss. Also,” he added, “disguises are quite a habit with me now; I’m very good at them.”

 

3.

After that everything changed. I heard Ëarwen singing in my mind, as she had once done; and my son was home. Some of the news he brought was joyful – Artanis married; Artaresto grown and living and married too, with children of his own – and some of it dark. We knew now how Aikanáro and Angaráto had died, in fire and flame; and Nolofinwë, too, riding out in lonely splendour and despair to Angband to perish. Of Irissë’s end Finrod knew nothing, and nothing of those who had died after him; if he had met them in the halls he did not or could not say. “Everything I know of Beleriand is years now out of date,” he said, and if it was sometimes said lightly to put an end to our questions, there were times when he said it with real pain. There were times when he disappeared and could be found high up in the Mindon Eldaliéva, staring as far as he could see into the distance at the point where the host of Fëanáro had once passed out of sight and into song and story.

Relations with Alqualondë would never be the same ever again, but the return of so many of the slain to life had mended what gifts and were-gild and apologies could not. So it was no surprise to me to have Teleri come from Swan-Haven with word from my father-in-law; the surprise was that they had been sent by Olwë to me, and not to my wife.

“That’s very formal of Father,” Ëarwen said in some surprise. “It must be a very kingly business.”

“Rather, it is Noldorin business,” said the Teler who had entered first, and nodded at the people in his wake like that would explain everything.

I had never met them. That was my third thought; the first and second were Mother? and Findis?, and both were wrong. The woman was no one I had ever met, but Vanyar and Noldor were mixed in her face in that harmonious alloy that always read as family to me in others, and which I saw daily in my own mirror.

She said briskly, and quite without formality,

“In fact, it is not Noldorin business. It is Beleriand’s business, which means it is Valarin business; it is the Valar I would have hear me; and it is to the Valar I must go. King Olwë could do nothing for me, King Arafinwë can do little, and I do not know what King Ingwë may do, but I expect it to be rather more to the point. No offense, uncle,” she added, with a sideways glance at me. “Great-uncle? I’m sorry, it’s been so many years I can’t remember what it was I called you, in the family.”

“Who are you?” I asked, and from the curled-shell sofa Ëarwen said, almost fearfully, “Itarillë?”

“Idril,” said Itarillë, Turukáno’s daughter. I hadn’t seen her since she reached my knee. She had gone over the Sea as a child still in her mother’s arms more often than on her own small feet. “Do the Valar pay house-calls? Or must we go to them? If so, get word to King Ingwë as swiftly as may be.”

“Itarillë,” said Ëarwen, rising to embrace her, and there were tears on her cheeks. “Oh, Anairë will be – Anairë will be so very glad to see you. Let me send for her. We must – oh, we must open rooms for you; you must rest; I must send for Anairë at once.”

“I haven’t got time for any of that,” Idril said, stepping out of reach.

There was a note in her voice which was almost unstrung. She was swaying very slightly on her feet, either from exhaustion or with the kind of restless energy which had fluttered around Irissë my niece and communicated itself so clearly to all around her. I did not know her well enough to know which it was, but there were sea-stains on her gown, and a fine cloud of her hair had escaped its braids to stand in a golden nimbus wind-wrought around her head, and I thought I could see in her face the traces of great strain and loss. The man with her looked worse, and tired unto death. He looked older than any Elf I had ever met, for he was bearded, and his face was drawn and weathered.

“My dearest girl,” Ëarwen said, “you are in Aman now. There is time for anything you need, and for anything you wish. You are safe here. You can rest.”

“That is what I cannot do,” said Idril. And then, of the man, “This is my husband. Tuor. Tuor son of Huor of the House of Hador and the kindred of Húrin who were lords of Dor-lomin, Lord of the House of the Wing in the kingdom of Gondolin that was. One of the Secondborn, the Atani, the mortal children of Ëa. So, you see! I wish I had time for my family here, and time to close my eyes for even a moment – and yet I am here not for myself, but for others, and home in Beleriand my people have been dying, faster and faster; and my son is moving through whatever span of years has been granted him; and Morgoth is gathering strength and foulness and taking the kingdoms of Beleriand one by one. The safe places are almost all gone now; and our hope is gone, too.”

“But you are hope itself!” cried Ëarwen, “you and your husband. You were Exiled – and yet you are here.”

Her joy was ringing in my head in silver peals; a granddaughter for Anairë! and Here despite the Doom! and Artanis too never took up a sword at Alqualondë, nor did Artaresto, nor his children!

Her hope was painful in its tenderness; for our daughter, and for Angaráto’s son, who had been as small as Idril when I last saw him, and for the great-grandchildren Finrod had told me of, Finduilas and Artanáro, mere names that were real children somewhere over the Sea – they could come home to us too, and not die to do it.

It was tender; but I was thinking on the safe places are almost all gone now, and wondering what Idril would tell us of Finrod’s Nargothrond.

“If we are here,” said Tuor son of Huor, in a deep voice that was less musical than any I had ever heard, and yet entirely pleasant, “it is only because Lord Ulmo held his hand over us on our journey West. It is true that we must ask the Valar for aid, and swiftly; but not so swiftly we cannot rest first, and bathe, and change. Idril,” he said, and the way Idril looked at him was wrenching, for she looked at him as though he was dying before her eyes, “we have a little time.”

“Yet time is running through my hands like sand,” she said; and then she closed her eyes, and a very little of the tension left her.

 

4.

When Finrod had come home, he had come like spring. He brought hope with him, and the deep peace that lay on those who had been through death, and some of the strangeness. Idril brought change with her, change and yearning and the green smell of new things, and we were all made restless, made aware as we had never quite been before of the passing of time. The bounds of the Doom were more porous than we had thought, and yet the Doom chafed more than it ever had.

Tuor, unexpectedly, fit more easily that she did into the pattern of our days. Idril treated Tirion like it was a cage, and I thought she was more like Fëanáro, in her disdain for the Valar and her longing to cross the Sea again, in her pain and anger, than she would ever wish to hear.

They were all dead and I had not felt it. Artaresto who Idril called Orodreth, and his Umányar wife, and Finduilas his daughter. Idril thought so, at least, although the tales she had heard of Finduilas’s death were uncertain; but Artanáro was certainly alive when she Sailed, she said, and she called him Ereinion, and Gil-gilad, and said he was no longer the crawling baby Finrod spoke of but a young man decades from being of age, and already High King of the Noldor on that side of the Sea. It seemed impossible to me that one so young might be burdened with that crown, but when I suggested it ought to have been given back to Fëanáro’s sons, Idril said flatly, “I would see the sons of Fëanor dead before I saw them King.”

Childless Anairë loved her dearly, and motherless Idril, for all her own sorrow and rage at the Valar’s refusal to answer her call for aid, had given Anairë back love for love. Nevertheless, she said, “Itarillë! Nerdanel has lost three boys already, and I could not wish any more loss on her. And even were that not so, I would not wish Maitimo dead, nor Makalaurë. They are the best of her boys, though I loved the others no less.”

I could not defend them so stoutly while I remembered the blood on the sands at Alqualondë, but that was not something that could be said before Anairë, not when Findekáno and Turukáno had also drawn their swords to kill. And still I loved them, all my nephews, living and dead; bloody-handed all.

Idril said, “They left us to cross the Ice; and the Ice, whatever Finrod has told you with its edges filed off, was death itself in every step. There are Sindar children whose bodies lie at their feet, and Sindar themselves a hundredfold – you would know them as the Umányar, the Teleri who did not come, and blood of their colour was not new to the swords of the sons of Feanor.”

But then came Elwing and Ëarendil, and their coming was a storm from the Sea, and it shook all Aman as Idril had not when she came, for they came with a Silmaril.

I had tried hard, all the years since the Darkening, not to think of Silmarils. It was for the Silmarils that my father had been slain, and the House of Finwë torn apart. It was the Silmarils that had sent Fëanáro on his mad way to Beleriand like a falling star, pulling all the youth and brightness of my life in a long tail after him; and the very Silmaril Elwing and Ëarendil brought had drawn Finrod my son into darkness and death, and torn him to pieces.

“To be fair, that was the wolf,” Finrod said. He had a habit of making light about dark things; of making light even in places that had never seen it. “I never saw the Silmaril; although I am glad Beren gained it. How strange to think that he and Luthien are gone from the world forever! I thought I had grown used after all to the ways of Men, who burn so brightly and are gone so soon; and yet I am surprised to realise that they have been gone so long, and that I am to meet their granddaughter.”

We did not meet Elwing and Ëarendil until the Valar were in council. They came to us after tarrying in Alqualondë, where Elwing had seemed almost one of the Ainur among them, or so Olwë reported. I must admit that I thought then he was exaggerating, and that the radiance he described was something due to the return beyond hope of a child of lost Elwë’s House, with all that meant to the Sea-Singers who had for so long missed him.

They were not quite elven, tall Ëarendil with his strange wheat-gold hair clubbed back from his face, and Elwing, white-haired and almost white-eyed, a wild edge to her. They seemed far more alien to me than Tuor did. I had become used to his lined face, and his good common sense. He was very different, but he was entirely one thing. Elwing and Ëarendil were a mix of what was known and what was unknown, of the strange and the familiar. And Elwing did glow; there was light to her, light in her strange eyes and in her face, light that seemed to shine through her fine bones in a fashion that was not wholly that of the fëa shining through the hröa, nor the Silmaril on her breast.

I hated the jewel. And I loved it, for its light was the light of the Trees which had been lost so long ago, the light of my childhood and youth and happiness, of life before the Darkening.

We had known from Nerdanel before they came that two more of us were dead. The twins, Fëanáro’s youngest. That was all we knew, and we had been sorry for it, although Idril had warned us that our sorrow was doubtless undeserved, and Finrod, although grief was written too on his fair face, said nothing to argue with her.

“That is good news!” Elwing said when she heard, and she was fiercely pleased. Her lips drew back from her small sharp white teeth. “Two! I saw one of them die myself, in his Fëanorian red-and-silver; I know not which he was, but he was red-haired and silver-eyed, and he entered my bedroom with a sword.”

“Ambarussa,” Finrod said distantly; “or Ambarto.”

I thought of the twins as I had known them, not quite grown and alike as mirrors, save for the shades of their red-brown hair; how they had been Fëanaro’s despair when they spent more time hunting than in the forge, their chestnut horses as red-brown as they were and their laughter as silver as their hunting horns.

“Amros or Amrod, I don’t care,” Ëarendil said. “They were cowards to fall upon my home when I was away, and to bring fire and death to it! To those who had already survived and suffered from their work at Doriath! And to their own people! To Noldor from Gondolin, to those from Hithlum or Nargothrond who had not gone to the Falas!”

“And to our sons,” Elwing said. “And to our sons!”

“You would know if they were dead,” Ëarwen said, holding her small hands. “You would have felt it; you would know.”

“Why would they have slain my brothers, and yet spare my sons?”

I thought of the twins who had been Elwing’s brothers, the Sindar children who had died at my nephews’ feet. I thought of her twin sons, left alone with men in red and silver in the ruined home which had been theirs.

I did not think Maitimo and Makalaurë, as I remembered them, would hurt a child. Maitimo had been sensible and kind, and Makalaurë tender and madcap. They had been fond brothers and excellent cousins to all the children of our House – and these last twins, Elwing’s little boys, were Idril’s unseen grandsons, Turukano’s great-grandsons, my brother Nolofinwë’s great-grand-sons. They might be part Maia, and part Man, and part Sindar, whatever that all that meant in Beleriand across the Sea; but they were still children of the House of Finwë, almost the very last left living on that far shore now, save Artanis my daughter, and Gil-gilad son of my son’s son, and Maitimo and Makalaurë themselves. And perhaps Curufinwë’s small son, for I had not heard he was dead, although I did not think Nerdanel would have known either way. I had not felt Artaresto-Orodreth die, and he had been as near – or as far – from me.

But there had been a time when I would not have had to argue in my own mind that a strain of Finwë’s blood would protect children from Maitimo and Makalaurë. I would have placed my new-born child in their arms for safe-keeping and thought nothing of it; and indeed I had. I would never do so again.

“Gil-gilad will find them,” Idril said. She had not said I told you so to any of us; she had seen too much. Her whole regard was fixed on Ëarendil, the son she had thought to never see again, and all of Idril’s love and fear was no mean thing.

“I would rather find them myself,” Ëarendil said grimly, “if the Valar will let me. And even if they will not, still will I go!”

“And I,” said Elwing, and small as she was, she was also very fierce.

But it was not Ëarendil or Elwing who was sent to Endórë, in the end; nor was it Idril, or Finrod, or any of them who knew it and had loved it, who had lived there and died there, who had left family and friends and unfinished stories behind. It was a host of the Vanyar, and of the Noldor, and I.

We came at last with the Valars’ blessing to drive back the Dark forever; to break dark Angband at whose foot Nolofinwë had suffered, and in whose depths Maitimo had been tortured and changed. We had come for Morgoth, who had killed my father and begun all these centuries of pain, and all these things we accomplished but one. We had come to bring aid to Beleriand, and instead we brought an ending. It shook under our feet, and it sickened with Morgoth’s last frantic struggles, and at the very last, although I was no longer there then to see it, I heard that it vanished beneath the Sea.

Eonwë of the Ainur, who yet reminded me strongly of Findis – perhaps the influence of the Vanyar went both ways? – was the first to suggest after our arrival that we meet, “both High Kings of the Noldor together in one tent. You better had make your peace now, you know; I will not have you quarrelling and jostling for position once war is being waged!”

“Quarrel!” I cried. “With my own great-grandson, who I long to meet?”

“Nevertheless,” said Eonwë. Great Years after Fëanáro and Nolofinwë’s enmity, the Ainur still seemed convinced that the Noldor bristled full of petty-kings, all ready to argue over their due. It had never been precisely about rank and title between my brothers, but it did it not surprise me that they did not understand that.

So Gil-gilad son of Artaresto son of Angaráto rode into our camp on a great tall horse, clad all in armour and Nolofinwion blue-and-silver; but the long sheaf of fair hair that hung almost unbraided from his helmet to his hips told me who he was.

“Hm!” said this great-grandson of mine, taking me in in turn.

I didn’t know what he made of me, but I suspected it wasn’t much. It was terribly unfair, given that my brothers had both, when the occasion called for it, got themselves up far more gloriously than I was currently attired; but they had died as warrior-kings in Endórë, and I had remained in Aman, and now this son of my house looked at me like I was likely to be as useless to him as a poorly-quenched sword ruined in the forging.

When he dismounted, I realised that the illusion of being looked down upon was not due wholly to my wardrobe, or the horse. He was in great high boots which came up past his knees, and he had at least half a head on me, if not more. The Arafinwions had never quite matched the Nolofinwions or Feanarions for height, but apparently Gil-galad meant to remedy that himself.

“Grandson?” I said, and held out my hands.

“Grandfather?” he asked. His hands, taking mine, were large, and rough, and capable. “Oh, I cannot call you that! This is all very strange to me, you know; I’ve never had much family.”

“Oh, but surely,” I said, and faltered. There had always been so many of us. I had always had brothers and sisters, and Fëanaro and Nerdanel had begun to present me with a famous and record-breaking brood of nephews before I was more than a child myself; and more still had followed.

“I was sent away from Nargothrond very young,” Gil-galad said. “I had only Cirdan for a foster-father! Much later, of course, I came to know Galadriel, and Idril, and Celebrimbor. Still! Not much to rub together, is it?”

Galadriel. Artanis; the name she had taken for herself when she married, Finrod had told me. It still sounded strange to me, soft and solemn when Artanis had always been brilliant-bright, and as strong as her name, as adamant. “Celebrimbor?”

“He’s well,” Gil-galad said, shrugging one shoulder. At my look of confusion, he gave me one back in turn. “Wasn’t he born over the Sea? The only decent Fëanorian of the bunch! Perhaps if more of them had had children there’d have been a few more good ones knocking around – but as it is, there isn’t.”

Curufinwë’s son. He hadn’t been much older than Idril at the coming of the Darkening, but he’d been born in Formenos during the first exile, and I knew him not at all.

“Speaking of Fëanarions,” I began, and Gil-gilad rolled great blue eyes to the heavens.

“Must we? I hear enough of that from the twins.” At my expression, he clarified again. “Ëarendil’s lost boys, dropped off by those same Fëanorians at my court like a pair of kittens. They had the raising of them, so the lads are far more Noldor than they are Sindar, and Fëanorian Noldar, to boot; you can’t imagine how much Celeborn and Oropher love that! It’s a terrible headache.”

It was difficult to share so many hundreds of years of family news at once. Gil-galad had only the haziest idea of half of his relations left in Aman, especially of Eldalotë’s kin, but he seemed pleased to hear that Tuor lived, and showed no signs of getting any older. Ëarendil and Elwing’s choice he thought basic common sense, and the Ban on any of them coming back to Endórë quite ridiculous. All I wished to hear about now in turn was Artanis, Artanis; she was far away, her and her husband, said Gil-gilad, but he thought it very likely we would be some time in extracting Morgoth from Beleriand, and so I was certain to see her.

It took many decades longer than Gil-gilad had estimated before our work was done, but I did see Artanis again, and when I did, I never wanted to let her go, and yet I wanted to send her back to her mother at once. I wanted one child of mine to come living out of Endórë.

“Perhaps after the War,” said Galadriel my daughter, her gaze going distant over my shoulder. I was weeping despite my joy, and so was she. “It is my War, you must understand; this is my home, and this is where I have been happy, and wretched, and where I have loved greatly, and lost greatly too.” She cried to hear that Finrod lived again and was wed, and again to hear that Angaráto and Aikanáro were in Mandos still, and we walked everywhere arm-in-arm, and talked as often as we could, for ten years of the War together before it drew her away from me again.

It was a long War, and Gil-gilad and I worked together as well as Eonwë might have wished. I think he learned to be fond of me, but he was never particularly good at expressing it, and when at last the War ended, I couldn’t convince him to come with me back to Aman. For the Valar had lifted the Ban at last; Aman’s lost children might at last come home, and the Úmanyar who had never known it.

Little pity did not mean no pity. Findis had been right, so long ago, and I in too much agony to hear it. Or so I thought until Eonwë ruled on the custody of the Silmarils. There was little pity for Maitimo and Makalaurë then, not until it was far too late, and they were already fleeing into the night with their swords bloodied again and their eyes wide and staring. The beautiful, clever youths they had been were impossible to recognise in those twisted and ghastly wrecks.

I heard later that Maitimo was dead, and I was glad for his release.

And my daughter, who had raised her voice in Tirion to support the Flight; on her, Eonwë ruled, the Ban remained, until she came in humility to do penance and be judged. It was the same terms he had offered to Maitimo and Makalaurë, and I wondered at the vast ignorance of the Valar who, while we spent lifetimes trying to understand the intricate patterns of their thought, seemed not to perceive any difference themselves between the small wrong and the great.

 

5.

It was Finrod who met her first, and Finrod who worked to keep her alive until he could bring her to Lorien; Finrod who knew what it was like when darkness ate into the fëa like acid as it desecrated the flesh, and who was of better use to her, in the end, than Estë herself.

Such illness and injury was a thing of Endórë, not Aman. We had known death on these shores during the Darkening, but not malice, and not torture.

“Grandfather,” said Celebrian, spirit flickering like a candle left in a draught and worn away to the fineness of beaten gold, and then, “Grandmother,” and went from Finrod’s arms into my wife’s.

Galadriel had wept into my shoulder when we parted again for the last time at the end of the War, and then drawn away like she was putting an end to indulgence. She stood tall when I looked back at her, her face set and sure like she meant now to put down deep roots in that ruined land where she had been both happy and wretched, and which was also her gaol. And now Celebrian her daughter had come across the Sea, a cutting pared from the great tree with the cruellest of knives. I could not imagine that parting. I did not wish to.

We loved her, of course. She was made to be loved, gentle Celebrian with her silver-sheen hair and the lavender shadows under her eyes and her poor scar-crossed hands. Finrod made her laugh, and he loved to listen to her, but the stories she told him were of an Endórë he had never visited, of unfamiliar shorelines and of cities that had risen centuries after the ones he had loved were nothing but dust, of so many Men whose lives were lived in spans that seemed to last only one indrawn breath, the foster-children at her hearth who were grown when you looked next, and then suddenly old. He ceased his vigils in the Mindon Eldaliéva, but he seemed no more settled here.

“I worry I will never see them again,” she said one night, turning her face up to Tilion and closing her eyes so that the moon-light made of her face a silver mask. “My mother. My father. My husband. My children. It is not that I do not love you all dearly, or that I am not grateful for your kindness, nor the healing I have found here; but you speak of exile when you mean Endórë, , and of Aman when you mean home, and for me those words have very different meanings.”

This was what the Doom meant, in the end; that when our children came home, if ever they did, what home meant would be greatly changed. Home had gone somewhere else.

 

+1

Tirion was peopled again as it had not been since before the Darkening; those who were left behind had gone on with their lives, and so many of the leavers had come home in the long millennia since the War, year after year, over Sea or through Death, and some had still, somehow, been singing.

And then the last ship came from Endórë, sailing into the harbour of Alqualonde from which Fëanáro had departed so long ago, leaving grief and madness and so much emptiness behind him. We had known that there had been another meaningful battle fought in Aman. Manwe’s Eagles had come to Mahanaxar full of news; and Celebrimbor, who had come through Mandos without losing the worry that sat on his brow like a circlet, had heaved one long, great, shuddering sigh one morning, and said “It’s over,” as though somewhere someone had died.

When that last ship came, it was clear from some distance away that it was full of Elves; of silver heads and dark heads and even red heads. Then, once it was closer still, I could see one of a colour only found among the Vanyar and their children, the gold of my house, of my mother’s hair, which motherless Fëanáro had scorned so much and also later longed for in the strange way of Arda Marred, that we sometimes loved what we hated, and hated what we loved.

And when it drew nearer, my tall and stately daughter saw me and her mother, and Finrod her brother, and Celebrian her daughter, and rather than wait for it to dock, she stepped off the side of the ship into the clear water which had once been red with Teleri dead, and through which you could once again see pearls and shells and silver sand.

Her wet gown hobbled her, and she kirtled it up to her knees with a laugh. In the gesture I could still see Artanis-who-had-been, the long-legged boyish girl who had outrun brothers and cousins with her yellow hair behind her like a banner. “Lady Galadriel,” said one of her sailing-companions, sounding shocked.

And then, as she walked out of the water, Artanis-Galadriel my daughter was come home again, after seven thousand years, the last of the host of the Noldor who had limped blood-shod over the Ice.

“Mother,” cried Celebrian, and then, “Oh, Elrond,” and she was walking into the waves, too, and throwing herself at a tall dark man, one of Ëarendil’s lost sons come home to him and to Elwing.

But we did not shut the door on pain as cleanly as ‘the last ship’ suggested, for it was not truly that, and nor did we banish loss and change forever from timeless Aman. Over the Great Years, they came home to us from Mandos one by one, the lost children of the house of Finwë, greatly changed and yet familiar. For too many of them, home meant somewhere else; and we would wait forever without hope for the lost son of Ëarendil who had died long ago, and all the sons of his house, and for Celebrian’s daughter, who had chosen both the last of those sons and Endórë for her home. Of Makalaurë, my last nephew, the last of the host of the Noldor who had sailed away in the Swan-ships towards fire and death and legend; I have not yet heard his tale’s end.

And so we went on.

---

Chapter End Notes

I know there are other Firiels in the Tolkien canon, but I'm taking the renaming from 'Later versions of the Story of Finwe and Miriel' in Morgoth's Ring, HoME 10;

And still she is at work, though her name has been changed. For now she is named Firiel, which to the Eldar signifies 'She that died', and also 'She that sighed'.

For before the passing of Miriel the Eldar of Valinor had no word for 'dying' in this manner, though they had words for being destroyed (in body) or being slain. But fire' meant to 'expire', as of one sighing or releasing a deep breath; and at the passing of Miriel she had sighed a great sigh, and then lay still; and those who stood by said firie, 'she hath breathed forth'. This word the Eldar afterwards used of the death of Men.

 Title from the Emily Dickinson poem of the same name.

This is my first time writing for the Silmarillion, or indeed for Tolkien, so any feedback or constructive criticism (always open to this) is gratefully welcomed. ♥