The Sandglass Runs by Dawn Felagund, NelyafinweFeanorion

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Things

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I’ve never actually been up to Artaher’s room or even in the upstairs of Arafinwë’s house at all. The stairs are covered in a dingy, pale purple carpet that muffles my footsteps. The walls to either side are crowded with portraits of Arafinwë’s children and a progression of their childhood artwork: a museum to the life they left behind. Artanis is first, young and lovely, unknowing of her future as one of the Wise, the bearer of Nenya, and an Eressëan resort magnate. Aikanáro and Angaráto smile out as young men from a canvas with the audacious faces of bullies and heroes. I glower at them. Next is Artaher, done in watercolors, soft-haired and dreamy-eyed even then. I try to harden myself against him too, but something inside me has become pliable and goes soft under the weight of—what exactly?

“I do love you, you stupid son of an ass,” I mumble and then stomp up the rest of the stairs and past Findaráto’s portrait without even glancing at it.

There is only one door closed, and I assume it is his, so I take the liberty to open it and periscope my head inside just in case I’m wrong. I’m not. He is lying on his side with his back to the door, but he turns when he hears the door open. Eyes squinched and bleary with sleep, it takes him a moment to register my face, giving me time to look at his. He looks awful, his face gray like congealed porridge, his cheeks pinched by weariness—nothing like the lovely young man whose portrait hangs in the stairway.

When he sees me, though, he transforms. He brightens and sits up. He is clearly wearing only a nightshirt and, realizing the amount of thigh he has bared, quickly yanks the blanket back around his waist. “I didn’t come up here to see your bare ass,” I snark at him, and he laughs, and I hear myself laughing too.

“Carnistir, I didn’t expect—” The words are subsumed by his smile.

I’m not sure where to sit. The chair by the bed reminds me of visiting an invalid—of my brother after Thangorodrim, of dying soldiers, of Haleth in her last days—but the bed— I can’t sit on the bed.

I sit on the floor.

“You,” I said, “left me down there.” I jab my finger into the putrid purple carpet that must cover all the upstairs floors. I realize that I am performing myself—my irritation, my temper—to make him laugh and cover the fact that I have no idea what to say. This has never been expected of me: polite concessions to the needs of others. I am reeling with confusion, and irritation is a much more pleasant and predictable feeling. “Do you know how loud and how many people are down there?”

“I do, actually. I can hear quite a bit from up here. I … wanted to come down, Carnistir. But—”

With that, a chasm yawns between us. I realize that, after a year of seeing him nearly every day, I know very little about him. There were Mortals, the Haladin, who dwelled for a time in my lands, and I am familiar with the concept of sickness from them, but he is no Mortal. I keep my mind pressed shut now, but in my prior life, I had felt his Elven feä against mine many times—and listen to me! He was born before the Mortals even arose, for the love of Varda, and our kind is not subject to sickness. Yet as his initial joy at seeing me subsides, he is withering like a blossom at summer’s end, his color fading and his strength waning till he must lie down again, though facing me this time and the performance of a smile on his lips.

I don’t know how to ask until I hear myself say, “What is this with you.”

“You should know better than anyone.”

I feel anger kindle in my chest. It is not a mimicry this time. “Everyone keeps saying that. You keep saying that, that we are alike, and we could not be more different.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever known anyone more like me than you are.”

Losing control is one thing. Being watched while losing control is unbearable. The heat in my face floods in so fast that I feel it as pressure; my body quivers. There goes Carnistir, flouncing again! I don’t remember which of his brothers it was—it wasn’t him—but I left as swiftly and noisily as I could so as not to hear them laughing behind me. I push against the floor to stand. His hand shoots out; stretching, he can brush me with his fingertips. “No! Carnistir …”

I stay.

“What happens with you,” he goes on, “when you know what others feel? And cannot shut it down? Something a lot like that happens to me too.”

“I do control it, though. Now, anyway. Námo taught me; he would not have released me if my mind was not all but nailed shut to the likes of you. You did enough damage the first time, and I suspect he is not eager to see me again.”

“I thought he taught me too,” Artaher says. His voice is thin and reedy, and I realize he is trying not to weep.

“So what do you see? People as colors? Textures? Do you pour out your secrets to anyone tuned in to listen?”

“It is not quite the same with me. I—” He pauses to consider his next words. “I … move through time? I see into the past, and into the future. And like you, it’s not anything I’ve ever been able to control, so Námo taught me to shut it out altogether. But I— Well, it reopened. I saw things.”

“Things,” I say. “What things?”

He shakes his head against the pillow, even as he begins to speak. He never tells me what he saw. But the party below quiets and then dies, and he tells me many things I might have learned in the past year if I’d ever thought to ask.