The Dark Beneath the Stars by Ithilwen

The Meteor

Chapter 4 – The Meteor

From Losgar we marched east.

I do not think we who were born in Aman truly appreciated the sheer size of the land we had come to until we began to traverse it. In Tirion, our course of action had seemed simple: sail east, find and defeat Moringotto, reclaim our Silmarils. But how does one confront a foe whose location is completely unknown? Moringotto could be anywhere in this vast, shadowed land. In what direction should we march?

Initially we'd had little choice in the matter. Tall mountains blocked our way north and south; the only reasonable way forward was to follow the course of the Firth eastward. And so you dutifully marched behind Father and I dutifully marched behind you as we made our slow way along the shoreline of the steadily narrowing sliver of sea, hoping that we would come to a traversable gap in the mountains where the slender Firth ended. Finally we did, and at last found ourselves on the eastern side of the mountains, in a strange land covered in patchy conifer forests. After much wandering we found the large lake where Father decided to stop and build fortifications. For it was plain to all of us that we would need a more organized plan than this mere stumbling about if we were ever to discover the location of our hated enemy. A fixed encampment would serve as a good basis from which our scouting parties could depart.

Everything was strange to us in this new land: the plants (so unlike those of Aman, which could never have grown, much less thrived, on mere starlight), the animals, even the rocks. But by far the strangest aspect of this land was the sky overhead. Until the death of the Trees, those of us born in Aman had never seen any but the brightest stars – and those only as rare and widely scattered dim specks of light in a heaven alternately golden and silvery with Treelight. But here there was no Treelight to obscure the stars, which shone down on us in their thousands with a cold (and to our guilty hearts, decidedly unfriendly) light. We who had always known Light did not at first know how to move in shadow, and our progress was slow and clumsy. But there were some among Father's people who had been born in this twilight land, and who remembered the Great Journey and their life before at Cuiviénen. From them, we learned. They showed us how to hunt, fish, and gather what this land had to offer. And they showed us how to trace in the sky overhead the star-patterns they had named so long before, and how to measure the passage of time by the wheeling of the heavens rather than the brightening and dimming of the Trees.

As we all became more comfortable under the stars, our initial uneasiness with them was slowly replaced by fascination. Some of the brighter ones were not fixed in place, as their lesser kin were, but wandered leisurely through the sky, travelers on some strange celestial road. How eagerly you followed their progress, Maitimo! Did you view them as companions on our road? And occasionally a star would seemingly come unmoored and streak across the heavens before abruptly flickering out. One night hundreds of stars came loose in this way, and you feared Varda's work was somehow being undone by Moringotto – but when the rain of dying stars ceased we could see no obvious change in the sky, which was as star-filled as before.

Not long after arriving at the lake, a prince – nay, a king – of stars fell. I am sure you remember it. Mightier by far than the common stars we'd seen come loose earlier, bright as a torch, it raced across the firmament, leaving in its wake a lingering yellow-orange trail. Swiftly streaking northward, the dying star made it almost to the edge of the horizon before it finally flickered out. We all paused in our labors to admire it, and mourn its passing, and to wonder what had caused it to fall, and what its passage meant.

We soon found out. Not a quarter-turn of the sky later, the forces of Moringotto attacked.

We fought for ten full turnings of the sky. The Orcs had numbers in their favor, but in ours was anger, and might unmatched in arms. You and I and our younger brothers drove the hosts of Moringotto before us like cattle. How we laughed as we watched the pitiful few survivors who'd managed to keep ahead of our swords scurry away north as fast as their stunted limbs could carry them! "So that is where our enemy is hiding," you said to me. Now we knew in which direction we needed to head in order to retrieve the Silmaril.

It was not until the last of the Orcs had fled into the distance that we noticed Father was no longer among us.

*******

You were the first to find him, far out in the northern plain, surrounded by mighty creatures of flame wielding terrible whips of fire. These dreadful minions of Moringotto fled at the arrival of your host. Father was all but unrecognizable; most of his skin had been charred black, and he was bleeding heavily from many sword wounds. I think in our hearts we all knew his fëa was too damaged to be healed, but we were still too new to death to accept it with equanimity. So we lied to him, and to ourselves, as we slowly bore him back in the direction of the lake, telling Father that soon he would be hale again, and paid no attention to his silence.

Ever since Losgar there had been an unspoken but undeniable tension between Father and you, a coolness where once there was warmth. Father had never repeated his hurtful assertion, and for his own part you acted as though you'd forgotten that Father had ever questioned your loyalty. To casual eyes the two of you seemed what you had always been: a proud father, a dutiful son. If Curufinwë Atarinkë was now more in Father's company that his firstborn, well that was hardly remarkable, for everyone knew they had similar gifts. And if Fëanáro's eldest was now more often to be found among the younger Aman-born than with his own family, well that was expected too, for had you not always been the most popular of us? No one outside our immediate family was aware of the serpent quietly slumbering within our family's midst. For my part, I think Father had come to regret his hasty words, and would have taken them back if he could – if only because during our lengthy wanderings he'd slowly come to realize just how many of our vanguard looked more to you than to him. But words once uttered cannot be recalled, and your own bearing plainly showed that while you might be willing to forget, you were not yet entirely willing to forgive. And so nothing more was said of the matter, on either side.

But at the last, when Father felt his strength fail, it was to you, Maitimo, and not our brother Curufinwë that he first looked. It was your eyes he met when he called upon us all to uphold our Oath and to avenge him. And unable in the end to deny your own love for our father despite the pain he'd caused you earlier, and perhaps still hoping to please Father at last, you lead us all in repeating the Oath. But Father's fëa fled before the final words were uttered. If you had indeed earned Father's approval with this final act of filial loyalty, none of us would never know it.

I have heard others whispering of how, when he died, the departure of the great Curufinwë Fëanáro's fiery fëa instantly reduced his hröa to ash. I suppose it's possible that some of my younger brothers are encouraging this tale – sensible, I suppose, given that it binds our people even closer together in our shared purpose of revenge. But only you and I and our little brothers were with Father at his passing, for when we saw his time had come you sent our soldiers on ahead, that we might mourn our fearful loss undisturbed. And I can say that if Father's form was at last reduced to ash, it is only because we piled on a great deal of wood. It seemed disrespectful somehow to merely lay him into the earth to rot, you told us when you ordered his body placed on that pyre. All his life he'd worked with fire. That a fire should claim the brightest star of the Noldor at the end was only fitting.