Hidden, Healing, Shaped to Touch by Lferion

Hidded, Healing, Shaped to Touch

During the long, strange years After the Sun, and before the awareness among the Smiths (even her father, her mother, Aule himself) had become inescapable that War was coming, that Morgoth must be defeated and there were no longer enough people -- Elves or otherwise -- in Beleriand to win victory themselves, and the making of the material of war became imperative, Nerdanel had made sculptures. Not statues, not the likenesses she was known for, but abstract pieces intended to be touched as much as seen, interacted with closely, even intimately, not viewed from a distance. Some of them were intimate indeed.

The first one she made of that set was for herself. (There had been one long years before that celebrated Anairë carrying Findekáno, and his birth: part study, part experiment, part exploration. A precursor perhaps, but one springing from a different source.) An exercise in memory, how her hands, lips, body remembered him, knew him, as her lover, her husband, the father of their children, her partner in intimacies, in play and comfort, in practical inquiry and exploration of what their bodies did, what they liked. Where ecstasy might be found and what it looked like, felt like, making love.

She had shaped his breasts first, a hint of the angled flatness before Maitimo's begetting, the subtle curve that gradually emerged while Maitimo grew within and never fully subsided, not even after Ambarussa were grown: a sweet, responsive handful, nipples that peaked eagerly for her, her favorite state. And finally, grown great with milk as she with child, generous and full. Not in some kind of line or careful pattern, isolated study, but flowing into other shapes and parts, the cleft of buttocks, inviting deeper touch, the join of hip and thigh -- all her favorite parts hinted at or plain.

Faniel had blushed quite comprehensively when she first saw and touched it finished -- the season being summer, when even the high sticklers for fashion wore only hip-wraps, breast-bands optional, one's skin a surface, background for display: of paint or gem-work, lace or ink or knot-work, art of many kinds. She was not embarrassed, but in a state of rare arousal, to both of their surprise. So the piece went to live in Nerdanel's inner chamber, in a niche she made that she could close or curtain, or leave displayed at any angle, near enough to touch. A private, carnal pleasure.

Nerdanel made other touch-sculptures, memory pieces; some for friends, some for the challenge, some as exemplars of what the form could do. Each had revelatory and hidden aspects, and each invited the hand, the body to engage with the piece in some manner, often sensual, even carnal. There were those who thought them inappropriate, even disturbing, an attitude she had no patience with. What she did have patience for -- as more and more ships returned from the War -- were those whose hroar had been reshaped, made other by battle, accident, torment, Gorthaur's schemes. For them she shaped what she could.