Sawdust by StarSpray

Sawdust

Her first truly clear memory of her father takes place in his workshop. It is a bright, airy building with many windows tucked away behind the palace in Tirion where no one would expect to find the king. In the memory it is summer, the day's head laden with the smell of flowers. Findis is too small to walk far on her own, and she is carried into the workshop on Finwë's hip. He sets her down on a table, uncaring of the dust that puffs up and gets all over her small dress, and rolls up his sleeves. He shows her many things, mostly small carvings and toys that will eventually find their way to her own nursery. Findis watches, entranced, as he takes up his tools and begins a new carving, taking a shapeless lump of wood and turning it into a leaping hound before her eyes. As he does he tells her of the wolves that the Eldar had befriended on the shores of Cuiviénen that had become their friends and companions, and whose descendants are the hounds that had come into the West with them.

As she grows older he teaches her the names of the tools and how to use them, and one of Findis' most treasured memories is the look on his face when she presents him with her first carving: a small, very rough little thing only just recognizable as a hound. It takes a prideful place on a shelf near a window where the Treelight shines brightest.

Finwë brings her other siblings into the workshop, too, as they get big enough, but Findis is the only one who lingers there. Lalwen prefers wide open spaces, and dancing with their mother under the Mingling Light. Nolofinwë's craft is ink on paper, and then paint on canvas. Arafinwë only laughs and rides off to Alqualondë to swim and dive for pearls with the Teleri.

Afternoons in the woodworking shop grow shorter, though, as Findis—as her brothers—get older, and then fewer and farther between. There is unrest growing, and while Findis can slip away to escape from it, rolling up her sleeves and covering herself in sawdust, her father cannot.

And then he leaves Tirion entirely, gone to Formenos furious that the Valar have overstepped. By now Findis has gotten very good at carving hounds. She slips one into his saddlebag just before he departs, and hopes that he will find it and remember that he has other children who love him as dearly as Fëanáro.

He does not return.

Findis never sees the body. She does not want to know what Melkor did to her father, or to his body after. Someone tells her that they found a little wooden hound in his pocket. She watches her siblings march away, their grief turned to anger and need for vengeance, and she watches her mother, shrunken and pale, leave for Ingwë's house to grieve in quiet, and in the darkness that shrouds Tirion, without even starlight to ease it, she goes to the workshop. It is no longer light and airy, but dark and dusty and stifling. Like a tomb, she thinks, and only then does she weep, sitting on a half-done bench and letting her tears fall silently into the sawdust at her feet.