The Sandglass Runs by Dawn Felagund, NelyafinweFeanorion

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Consolation Prize

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There is a tavern in the Calarnómë—well, tavern is a bit dignified—that is literally a cave. Or, more an indentation in the rock. It is accessible only by ladder, which isn’t so bad when arriving but can make leaving difficult once you’ve tossed back a few. The appeal of the place is the trickle of cool water down the back wall, the perfect temperature to pour over sugar cubes and into absinthe.

Since becoming a revolutionary, Amarië has taken to drinking absinthe to inspire her poetry. I suspect she likes the edginess it lends her fair, blatantly Vanyarin mien. I know she comes here at least once a week for a few glasses and settles onto a stone ledge that serves as a natural bench to write. Absinthe reminds me of the licorice candy that Curufinwë used to beg for as a child and that our father kept in the house in sickening profusion, but I nurse a glass and wait.

I am dreadfully fucking confused. I’m like a jigsaw puzzle with all the pieces there but locked together in nonsensical and ill-fitting ways. An Arafinwion! And Artaher at that—himself such an easy target of my disdain because he was so soft-seeming and dull where his brothers were red-dyed heroes. I don’t know what to think: of him, of me, of us. Of the constellation of others that have suffered me over the ages, Amarië the Silmaril among them. If my confusion requires proof, just look at that metaphor about the jigsaw puzzle—hell, the one about the constellations—and imagine that coming out of my mouth under more stable circumstances.

On the third night, Amarië comes. Her hair—cropped to ear-length—is held back with a scrap of cloth that was once part of the uniforms worn by the palace chamber maids. I remember her telling me that a friend of hers was repurposing old palace uniforms into headscarves to show recognition of the many unnamed laborers who sustained our monarchial system for five ages. One of her boots is untied. She wears a man’s trousers—too large and with a hole in the knee—and what she told me once is called a tanktop and leaves her shoulders and arms bare. A couple people call to her when she enters, but she doesn’t stop to talk and settles into her place, three seats down from me, and begins to write without even noticing I’m there.

Well, I didn’t expect this. I shift and cough, hoping she’ll look up to see me, but she is intent on her writing, pausing only to thank the server who brings her absinthe. I’m keenly aware that my ability to draw her notice has an expiration time. The longer I wait, the more awkward I feel, and eventually it will be simply weird that I sat so long and so near her and didn’t call her name, so I gin up my courage and whisper, “Amarië!”

She doesn’t hear.

More of hiss: “Amarië!”

Nothing.

I am gathering my things to leave when a woman seated on the floor in front of her nudges her knee and says, “Amarië? That guy is trying to get your attention.”

And then there is the delight and surprise that I expected, conducted as always at arm’s length. Amarië is careful never to touch much less hug me. I see her casually touch the arms and wrists of people all the time, and she greets her other friends with a hug, but with me, it is only words. Parting is sometimes awkward when everyone else is hugging and she is hugging everyone else and some people are even hugging me, and we just smile extra hard at each other and sometimes she bobs her head and gives me a little wave to say goodbye.

Her joy does last long before her brow furrows and she says, “Wait, aren’t you supposed to—”

“Be in Tol Eressëa, yeah. I left early.”

I believe I have made abundantly clear by this point that I do not ascribe to Fifth Age Tirion’s conviction that every problem can be solved by talking it out. Actually, I am not a proponent of talking about difficult things at all. If I must talk, I would rather my conversations be confined to inquiries that bob in a clear question-answer-question-answer exchange like a child’s touchball game. This is why I do not like therapy. “Talk about how you felt when—” and the act of talking brings the painful problem to the fore when the long ages of my life—most of them spent in the halls of Mandos—had largely subdued my memories to where I didn’t really think of my former problems at all. “Wounds heal best when allowed to be touched by the air,” my therapist quipped once at me when I was being resistant (defiant, she said) to sharing.

“Open wounds breed maggots” was my reply.

I have never desired to wallow in what happened with my cousins. My brother Nelyo—so often conscripted as the arbiter of family squabbles—might disagree, but I would contend that my reactions to my cousins aren’t much different than the reaction of a hand, once burned, that flinches away faster from a fire than a hand unscarred. But now that Arafinwions are emerging from Mandos like fleas off a dog, the bandage is off the wound. And Artaher—I don’t know what to think of Artaher, of the mingling of my ancient shame; of Taryindë standing, feet spread wide, over me at the Nirnaeth; of Artaher’s insistence that we share much in common; of my daughter, waiting on the rocks for me to swim home; of Artaher bringing me to his bed but refusing to make love to me even when I clawed for it.

After that night, my body is awake again. It aches at night. But I’m not sure what exactly I crave.

Therapists have read too many cheap novels and seen too many amateur theatrical productions, where conflicts simmer and build and are resolved in a flight of impassioned, eloquent speech, only to wither like the rose that—having put its full power into a bloom—dies on the vine. Conflicts don’t end that way, not in reality. Yet I want to say something to Amarië. It’s like the first stitch in closing whatever ripped open so long ago between Artaher and me. Instead, I say, “It wasn’t a good fit for me,” and realizing I was probably confusing, add, “The trip.”

“I assumed that. I didn’t think it would be. Although I respect her independence and accomplishments as a woman in a patriarchal setting, Artanis has a colonial mindset.”

The words colonial mindset usually touch off long rants from Amarië, but almost as though she knows I’ve come here to say something important—which isn’t a difficult inference to make since she knows I don’t like absinthe—she backs away from her usual diatribe. She chews her lip and stares pointedly at me. I try to dig deeper. Ulmo’s water, this is hard, like making progressively deeper cuts to remove something lodged in yourself. “You are my best friend,” I say.

Don’t think that this confession was lovely or heartfelt or anything but mumbled and followed by a dash of absinthe down my throat. Nonetheless her eyebrows quirk in surprise, and she says, “That’s lovely to know, Carnistir; you are also dear to me.”

“I know I’m not your best friend. It’s fine. You’re really my only friend.”

I’m losing the courage to cut. The pleasant shine of surprise on her face fades a bit. I knock back the rest of the drink. Manwë’s wind, it tastes awful, like my brother’s spoiled candy. But the gesture is one of courage. I take a deep breath, plunk my glass down, and say what I’ve come to say.

“That thing that happened when we were younger.”

She looks confused. She pauses, and I know she is riffling through memories like pictures in an album. “You mean—”

“Yeah. That.”

“When—?”

“Yes.”

A lopsided smile, meant to be reassuring; a hand reaching out but stopping shy of touching me. An act: I know her. She’s a performance artist; with a shrug of her shoulders and a scrinch of her nose, she becomes someone else, someone softer and reassuring. “I didn’t think much of it. It was just—”

“I made you a ring. I had it in my pocket that night, that night you chose Findaráto.” I wince. That sounds wrong, like I’m placing the blame upon her. “I don’t mean it that way, like you should have chosen me or even knew I was an opt—”

Wink. Scrinch. Smile. “I know. It’s fine.”

I am becoming frustrated. I don’t want her to act out sweet nonchalance. I want to stab deep enough to finally bring this out of me. “But I had a ring,” I insist. “I don’t still have it or anything. It was also really ugly. I pounded out plow blades. I had no real skill in the forge. I threw it in the river. But they convinced me that …”

When the veneer falls away, I expect any number of reactions from her. I expect her to be gently pitying, or knowing Amarië, incensed on my behalf. I expect her to organize a letter-writing campaign to stop the release of further Arafinwions until full reparations are made. I expect her to author an alternate history of the First Age, exposing just how many disasters originated not with the Oath and the Kinslaying but with Artaher, Angaráto, and Aikanáro siphoning off my adoring thoughts of Amarië and feeding them back to me as hope. Hope that hammered out an ugly ring and a stammering, stupid proposal. I don’t expect her to be angry.

But she is. “For the love of the stars, Carnistir, what a foolish grudge to hold onto.” She’s not just annoyed; she’s not acting anymore either; she’s really angry. Her eyebrows knit together in the middle, and it makes her face look small and pinched. This is different from the anger she stages when she reads her poems or when we perform our songs together; she glows with that anger. On the stage, she is always a construction of beauty. She is not glowing now, or beautiful. “Are you going to tell me that your life with Taryindë was a consolation prize? Your daughters? An inferior choice to going into exile without me? You think that loving me and going to Endor without me made Findaráto’s life better than yours? You truly believe that Findaráto’s life was better than yours?”

Of course it was. He was—he is—Findaráto, the promise of the three kindreds of the Eldar, exalted from the moment of his birth: a scholar and an artisan and an orator and a peaceweaver and a king. He was apart from all of us; even Nelyo sometimes slipped into his shadow. And I had not even a glimmer of any of those things. My confusion that she would wonder at her own lover’s blatant superiority gives me pause, but at least I try, “I suppose. I mean—”

“Nargothrond, living in a cave, in a doomed kingdom made in imitation of what he’d lost, alone, was preferable to your lands, your lake, your wife and daughters? The way I see it? You were spared. All those years you lived free under the open sky in a prosperous realm, improving the lives of those who lived around you, doing exactly what you’d gone there to do. I don’t believe in violent action, but there is something to be said for pursuing and confronting Morgoth after what he did to your family, and whether you were successful or not, that’s what you did. And we won’t even discuss your death compared to Findaráto’s because it’s not something I can think about, much less am ready to talk about.” She opens her notebook upon her knees. “I came here to write. I mean to. Now leave me be.” And she gives me a final sidelong glare just to make sure I’m absolutely certain how she feels about me before assaulting the page with angry scratches.

I leave without saying goodbye.

I go home and don’t even change my clothes before storming into my workshop. It’s a good shirt but who cares. I pick up my pocket palantír, but the work perfecting it is delicate, the kind of work best done after a day when I’ve been harangued in my kiosk all day and need to disappear inside my own thoughts for a while. Not when confusion and lust and injury vie with each other in a shouting match in my brain. That calls for hammering things. I used to beat the hell out of farm tools after enduring the subtle unkindness of Aikanáro, Angaráto, and yes, Artaher. Artaher, whose contours I was too drunk to remember, so my imagination fills in the blanks: the way his fingers lace with mine to slide my hand away, even as he clasps me to him. I am experimenting with a washing tub that launders clothes by being rolled down a hill and returned to its place using a pulley system. It’s a dull project, not even a great idea, but the shower of noise it makes as I bang it into shape is stronger than the memory (or imagining?) of wispy blond hair and sea-blue eyes. I bang and bang until I’m certain my mother will come out and beg me to stop. She doesn’t, and the stupid contraption is finished by the time I’ve banished him from my mind.