The Sandglass Runs by Dawn Felagund, NelyafinweFeanorion

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Lichen

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“It is one of his greatest regrets, what was done to you. I know it is.”

Arafinwë was eating a salad piled high with fruit and almonds, and fastidiously poking at the array of toppings with his fork gave him ample pretense to avoid looking into my eyes. I was fine with that; I was eating a slab of roast venison, and concentrating on sawing at it with a knife gave me a pretense to avoid looking into his. But when he pronounced this, he abandoned trying to spear a blueberry to look up into my face.

I hate the blue eyes in the Arafinwion line. My brother Tyelkormo had blue eyes, but his were dark and guileless whereas the Arafinwions? They were pale and piercing and beautiful and terrible. You know how when, on an overcast day, the clouds break just enough to let a beam of light spear the sea? They were that color. It was hard to look away.

I was enduring one of what I’d come to term Arafinwë’s “guilty lunches.” Once a year or so, Arafinwë insisted on inviting me out to lunch at one of the mediocre restaurants he loved, where he’d pour out his regrets where I was concerned. It seemed, upon receiving news of the Outer Lands as history brought back after the War of Wrath, he viewed certain events involving me and his sons as something for which he was partly to blame. And he was. These lunches were not an opportunity, in my mind, to offer consolation much less forgiveness; they were a chance to order the best, most expensive thing on the menu (often not very great, even if expensive) and enjoy my free lunch while trying not to relive much of what he was self-flagellating over.

This particular lunch had been about Artaher. Mad with pride at its democratic experiment, the historiographical establishment in Tirion had decided that Artaher was the Arafinwion most like his father and a hallowed innocent somehow swept up in the exile and journey east. Otherwise, he’d have been a republican and revolutionary, right alongside his father. Pictures of him in the history texts tended to show him loose-haired and soft-eyed, beatifically unsmiling with a suggestion of suffering in the lines of his mouth. Those who hadn’t come east tended to drop those of us who had into one of two bins: the rabble-rousers and the passengers. The rabble-rousers included all of us (Fëanáro’s sons), Findekáno, and Írissë. The passengers were Nolofinwë, Turukáno, and all of Arafinwë’s children—they all wanted something concrete in the Outer Lands but had maintained certain ethical lines they refused to cross (whereas, I suppose, the rest of us danced across them with impunity). Artaher, though, was his own category, and historians couldn’t seem to agree whether he’d been simply passive in coming along with the rest of us or if his attendance was to be read as an act of resistance. No matter where they came down, though, they all saw him as soft and pliant—essentially harmless.

My memories of him were more complicated.

I wasn’t born with many gifts, but I was exceptional in mindspeak. It came from my grandfather Finwë, skipped my father entirely (whose perception of other’s thoughts and feelings could be summed up as “blissfully ignorant”), and then pooled entirely in me, out of all seven sons, the way that rainwater will collect at the lowest point in a plain. None of my brothers had it. Just me. I suppose, lacking all other gifts, something had to arise. “Nature abhors a vacuum”—I remember that from Nelyo’s science lessons when I was still a boy. Even in lightless, rocky crags, lichen flourishes. Among an exceptionally gifted and storied people, I was that vacuum—at best mediocre at both scholarship and forgework—and so the mindspeak flourished within me. I never thought of it as anything but a curse.

Arafinwë is a case in this point also. Likewise painfully mediocre when compared to his two elder brothers, he received the entirety of the “gift” of mindspeak from Finwë, and he passed it on to all of his children in some measure.

That meant that, among the grandchildren, I had it, and Arafinwë’s children had it. No one ever bothered to tell me what it was. I assumed that everyone experienced other people the way I did: as a roar of color and texture that scintillated and prickled and furred with their emotions. I did not assume myself abnormal; it was much later that I realized the depth of my deviance. But my mind was wide open to it all the time. When people were at peace, it wasn’t bad—I remember sleeping in Nelyo’s arms, awash in his blue, cool like silk—but when others suffered even minutely, it was like having my eyes taped open and being forced to look at wounds. As my family disintegrated, the wounds deepened and festered. I was powerless to look away.

Arafinwë, naturally, taught his children better than my parents did. To be clear, I don’t blame Fëanáro and Nerdanel; they knew I was strange but had no notion why. Perhaps Finwë could have helped me, but he’d entangled himself too thoroughly in his own bad choices to spare much time for any of the grandchildren. At times, he would reach out and soothe me, but he never taught me to control it or—blood of Varda—shut the fucking thing off. Arafinwë’s children, though, not only controlled it but mastered it like any art, under their father’s tutelage.

And what I didn’t know? Until it was too late? That I wasn’t just receiving the emotions of others; I was broadcasting my own—and most of my deepest, most intimate thoughts—as though through a megaphone, to anyone who cared to listen. The thoughts of a young, troubled boy weren’t of much interest to my grandfather and Arafinwë and other adults who could have heard them if they’d chosen, but to my cousins? It was like I left my diary open on the kitchen table each night and invited them to read of me.

Findaráto couldn’t have cared less. Though younger than me by four years, as a firstborn son, he was coaxed and cultivated in all that he did. By the time we were adolescents, I already had the sense that his station was above mine, as a fourth-born son and an unpromising, unusual one at that. And he was the hope of the three Eldarin kindreds: the brilliant convergence of the three rays of each kindred, like the heart of a star; a sickening metaphor, but if you’d seen how people went doe-eyed at the mere mention of his name, you’d know it necessary sentimentalism. Though younger than me, he felt older—and inaccessible. Artanis was too young, at first, and later glommed so thoroughly onto Írissë that I wasn’t worth her attention either. But my middle cousins?

My middle cousins.

Artaher, Angaráto, and Aikanáro.

They were cruel to me.

As insipid and sentimental and stupid as Arafinwë can be, to his credit, he has never shied from empathy and the truth that empathy can reveal. When word reached him of the conflicts between me and his sons—a groundless conflict I’d initiated, as the histories were careful to note, for there was no reason for me to hate the sons of Arafinwë—he didn’t take them at their word that such incidents were entirely unprovoked, and I suppose he has had four ages since to look back on the social dynamics of our adolescence and young adulthood, conducted largely out of sight but surely not entirely unobserved, and eventually, he came to his own conclusions.

“In retrospect, I see that I should have done more to teach you.” He always led off with this. “To control it. Fëanáro had no way to know—even Nerdanel. Her gifts are differently oriented.”

Arafinwë has stewed on this for four ages. My stay in Mandos was agony and indignity, but if I came away with one thing of value, it was the teachings that none would give me in my youth. I kept my mind closed now. But made an exception, once, at one of our lunches so that I could perceive the depth of his guilt. If only he’d taught me, maybe? Maybe I wouldn’t have become Caranthir the dark.

I let my mind snick shut.

“I know they were not always kind to you.” They were never kind to me, but I left it alone. “Angaráto, Aikanáro … I accept their role in what happened … after.” He munched contemplatively on a bite of lettuce; I could hear his teeth crunching and disciplined my face not to look disgusted. He swallowed. “But Artaher … he had his own … struggles. Maybe you know? My father insisted you were the most perceptive of all of them. Artaher was next. He was tenderhearted; he wanted to belong. He followed where he never should have gone.”

And then the killing stroke: “It is one of his greatest regrets, what was done to you. I know it is.”