Luminous by StarSpray

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"...but many things [Nerdanel] wrought also of her own thought in shapes strong and strange but beautiful." - Morgoth's Ring, "The Later Quenta Silmarillion"

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Mahtan opened the store cupboard where he kept his metal wires and frowned. He was nearly done with a commission for King Olwë and needed length of silver, but all that remained on the shelf was a small spool of copper. "Love, what happened to all my wire?" he called over his shoulder.

"Ask your daughter," came the reply, though Mahtan wasn't at all sure Nixeriel had heard him. All of her focus was on the gemcraft before her on the table. The green and blue stones glittered brightly in the Mingling light that streamed through the wide windows.

"Which one?" Mahtan asked, and received no answer at all. He left the workshop and found one daughter singing in the vegetable garden, not a scrap of metal wire in sight. "Lúcellë," he called when the song came to an end, "where is Nerdanel?"

"In the workroom by the forge, I think," said Lúcellë. "She was talking of making a sculpture, but I never heard of a sculpture made of only wire."

Mahtan had, but never with as much wire as was missing from his cupboards. He thanked Lúcellë and wished her luck with her sweet peas and melons before going to Nerdanel's workroom. The doors and windows were shut, which was unusual, but the door was unlocked. He opened it and found the room surprisingly dark, lit by a wavering light that flickered strangely on the walls.

"Nerdanel?" he said.

"Here," came her muffled reply. He opened the door further, stepped over a few coils of copper wire, and found Nerdanel seated on the floor with her legs crossed and her brow furrowed, as focused on her work as her mother. All around her was wire, twisted and braided together in strange shapes. Mahtan thought at first they might be vines, but that did not seem right. Perhaps tree roots? But that did not explain all. In places Nerdanel had set gemstones, green and blue and red, and in many more spaces she had set candles, little things that burned with tiny flames that were caught and reflected and refracted by the bright metals and by the gems. In some places they were hung so that they swung gently, or rotated in place.

Nerdanel set one more candle into a holder made of silver wires braided together, and then looked up at Mahtan. He surveyed the whole again, and then looked back down at her. "How are you going to get out of there?" he asked. She giggled and answered by crawling out of an archway at the bottom. Only Nerdanel or Lúcellë could possibly fit inside. "And what is it meant to be?" Mahtan asked.

Nerdanel's smile faltered a little. The flickering shadows played over her face. "It's…a feeling," she said finally. "It's the feeling I felt when we went to Valmar and heard Elemmírë sing about the Great Journey. I suppose it's a little bit the great roots of the trees in the forests of the Outer Lands, but…"

Mahtan looked again. It was tree roots and the torches of the Elves as they traveled through the twilit lands of Middle-earth, but he saw also other echoes of Elemmírë's song, of Yavanna's hands reaching down into the earth and of Aulë's fires deep within it, and of the stars of Varda, and the flickering lights gave the illusion of movement as of branches swaying in the breeze. And at the same time it was merely wire twisted into strange and interesting forms, illuminated warmly from within, that looked like nothing else at all.

"It's beautiful, love," he said, and Nerdanel beamed. "But I'm afraid you'll have to leave it for the moment. You've taken all of my silver wire, and now you must help me make more."