The Sandglass Runs by Dawn Felagund, NelyafinweFeanorion

Batten Down

Which brings me to now.

I don’t have to worry much about what my mentoring duties of Artaher will look like because, as soon as we arrive in Ostonúmë, we are met by an entourage of his family—Arafinwë and Eärwen and Findaráto—and they pet and console him and ask little mewling questions for the entirety of the interminable carriage ride back to Tirion. I decide I don’t care. Námo himself could insist that I must mentor this flop but that doesn’t mean that I will. I’ve violated nearly every rule they set forth for me when I had my own turn sitting, trembling and afraid, the touch of mere air on my new skin like passing my arm too low over a gout of steam, on the cot in Námo’s halls, naked except for a silken shroud. In that moment, I’d been certain of my obedience; I hadn’t factored on how absurd this new world would be.

I stare out the window and try to ignore the hushed meep-meep-meep of conversation that reminds me of infants and crèches. Actually, I could never dignify myself to even talk to my daughters in that way when they were small. Valinor used to be mostly empty beyond its few glittering cities and Aman certainly was. The Valar used to make maps that conveniently faded at the boundaries of their authority, even though there were people and villages in those hinterlands. But Valinor is empty no more. Even Aman can no longer go unmapped. Every road brings a march of shops and houses that thicken as we approach a village. Villages used to convene upon the main road with spur roads off it like branches on a tree; these roads would quite literally fade into the forest or prairie at their ends. Villages now are senseless clots of roadways and shopping blocks and one-way streets and apartments and pedestrian boardwalks and traffic control; the roads bend and buckle back into each other—nothing simply ends here—so that there is a constant flow of new carriages trying to join the existing stream. Every one now is outfitted with absurd little rubber horns ostensibly intended to signal other carriages but usually used to rebuke those who slide into a gap not quite large enough that forces the driver to pull up short on the reins.

wa-HONK

Artaher flinches, and I feel a flash of pity for him. Back when I was reembodied, when the Eldarin people were still unprepared for such an eventuality, before it became an industry, the servants of Námo escorted you a certain distance into his forest and then let you find the rest of the way yourself. This was far from pleasant or ideal. They are not suitable companions for any of the Quendi, and their pantomimes of our behavior had the opposite of the intended effect, but they were quiet and liked things colorless and dim, and when every nerve in your body feels like it is waving exposed in the wind, even their creepiness became tolerable if it gave a little peace.

Aunt Eärwen has raised her hand to Artaher’s shoulder. She means to comfort him, but he is inclining away from it because it hurts, and she seems oblivious. Another carriage cuts in front of us. wa-HONK and Artaher flinches again, and she sets her hand more firmly upon him till he is nearly tipped over, and even with my mind pressed shut to his thoughts, his distress is coming off him in red waves the way an open, red-hot oven will shimmer the air in front of it. I look back out the window, but my stomach is turning, remembering the first night I was bidden to sleep in my new body, when I couldn’t figure out how to lay down upon a body that felt scalded, and even when I wept, the tears hurt my face.

“Don’t touch him!” I realize I have blurted out. “His skin is new. It hurts. Leave him be!”

Aunt Eärwen’s eyes go wide, and her hand jerks back, the fingers curling upon themselves like a questing creature suddenly startled by a predator.

I whip around to face Findaráto. “Have you prepared them with nothing? You remember what this is like! Who cares about your dumb campaign, this is your brother.” And I turn to Arafinwë. “And you should too. This is not the first son you’ve seen returned.”

“It wasn’t that bad for me,” says Findaráto in a voice infuriatingly free of defensiveness but brimming with wounded innocence.

“Of course it wasn’t,” I snip and go back to my window. wa-HONK. Another interloper is easing in front of us from a carriage park, waving listlessly at our driver’s horn. I lunge forward to the window that separates us from the driver and shout through the glass, “For fuck’s sake, stop honking!”

Arafinwë should be used to profanity; he’s my father’s half-brother after all. His lips are parted like he knows he should say something but can’t quite muster the words. He’s had a dozen uneventful, tranquil lunches with me where I barely say a word and “Caranthir the dark” is but a construct for him to perform his guilt upon. Until now, I was a character in history, and his ability to empathize with me wasn’t much different than bringing a controversial, countertextual reading of an antagonist to a meeting of a book club. It wasn’t much different than his stupid republic, enacted only because he had the authority to make it so; there was no uprising, no marshaling under torches, no risk, no rebellion. He is seeing me differently now.

“Pengolodh was right,” I quip as I return to my seat.

Now the carriage ride is quiet, and awkwardly so. My aunt and uncle, I sense, have had the realization akin to a person walking across a frozen pond and, halfway across, discovering the ice is thinner than they knew. Findaráto has a maddening expression that conveys equal parts disappointment and practiced nonjudgment. Only Artaher is looking at me.

I’ve never liked meeting people’s eyes. When I was younger, it made the torrent of emotions seem even stronger; now that I can close my mind to them, I find that looking at someone’s eyes still allows a trickle, an intimation of what I have shut out. I do not realize that Artaher is looking at me when I let my eyes pass over him, and the complexity of what I see in his eyes before I swiftly look down at my own knees is more than I can parse without opening my mind to him.

I have never seen much of my cousin. When we were young, he traveled in a pack with his brothers Angaráto and Aikanáro and my brothers Tyelkormo and Curufinwë. My brothers were not always kind to me but neither was I always kind to them, and our antagonism was the opportunistic kind typical of siblings close in age, part of a large family, and ever jockeying to be noticed. My brothers’ unkindness was but a thread in a larger weft where they’d tease me over something one of our cousins had siphoned from my thoughts in the afternoon and, by evening, would come to my room for consolation during one of our parents’ increasingly vicious fights. Angaráto and Aikanáro stood forth in my mind as the ringleaders; I felt them ever at the perimeter of my mind, like coyotes looking for a break in a fence; they had their choice of victims and consistently chose me. And Artaher—he was there. I remember him there. But in my memory, he stood at the back, his face partially obscured by hair he tended to wear unbound. He prowled against my mind too, but he never had to search for an opening; he simply took it.

I batten down my mind as Námo instructed me. I tuck away the tendrils of my thoughts and draw in my emotions, almost like an inhalation, breathing in scent and smoke, and then I close my mind upon it. It is a feeling like gritting your teeth. Thus armed, I raise my eyes to his and stare back until he is the one to look away.