Neldë Nelquain mí Orelesta by Chestnut_pod

Neldë Nelquain mí Orelesta

The light goes out. 

The darkness presses against every eye in Aman. It is worse that it is not total – that the stars continue to shine, that lamps do not gutter, that candles are not quenched. If the death of the Trees had ushered in the darkness of the deep cave or sea floor, the kind of darkness the eye rebels against in sparkles and iridescent pulses within the retina, it would have been better. Instead Elemmírë sees the world die and then stumble onwards, revenant: endless ashen night stained red and yellow and orange where the fires bravely flicker. 

The water clocks did not stop with the world, and the hour-candles still burn. Elemmírë counts the days. 

There is a moment where it seems there might be hope. Our Teacher Fëanor's great work kept the last of the light of the Lamps in a crystal vault, where they illuminated folly and formulae for only his chosen students. Fëanor does not respect those who require help in making light. Yet it seems the Silmarils might bring light back to the world. It seems that way for perhaps a day. Elemmírë counts. 

Then the news comes – the Silmarils are stolen, and the King slain, and though he is the first, he is not the last. Elemmírë counts. 

Twenty-four thousand Noldor gone in a night. They are not dead, but they might as well be dead. They leave death in their wake. It is worse than the plagues that haunted Cuiviénen. The lamps begin to flicker out, without the engineers to maintain them. The stars wheel and shine, their colors brighter and clearer than Elemmírë has ever seen them. Those few who are left in Tirion light fires in the squares and streets and huddle ‘round them. The leaden darkness rolls on. Elemmírë counts. In the firelight, she begins to write.

The Noldor burn all they can find to burn. Those who remember the dark before the first blossoming of the Trees wend through the hinterland to gather sticks and sheafs of grass. They walk with bows and arrows, for the eyes of the creatures of Aman who were docile in the years of light are full of strange fires in the long darkness. Those who have only known brightness everlasting do not stray from the city. They burn clothes, furniture, papers, the innards of mattresses. Elemmírë counts. Elemmírë writes. 

While the darkness persists, she writes of light. She counts off each kind of spark and dazzle and ray and gleam – all that had been contained within the Trees, now broken. She gathers them up in her heart, while the sparks of the fires fly up into the endless night, and their smoke veils the flickering stars. She counts the days. 

The song is ready the day Telperion’s final blossom is ready. Without the flower, the Tree is only so much twisted wood – another body, the last of the bodies of the Darkening. Those who remain in Tirion take it to be burned. They stack it on high Túna and set a torch to it. Flames flare up in an instant – prosaic, yellow, red. Sparks fly to the stars.

Elemmíre stands before the pyre and sings to the Eldar. While she has counted the days, she has counted every kind of light. She sings of the light in the Trees, the ancient light of stars, the light of fires keeping the cold away, the light of glowworms, the light of algae, the light that lingers in the Eldar’s eyes, the light of fluorite, the light of bearing a burden and not putting it down, the light of the forge, the light between lovers and between brothers, the light of a volcano, the light of candles and lamps and lanterns, the light of repairing what has been broken. Her song is the song of radiance. She has counted lights for every day of darkness, drifting from spark of family to spark of family where the Elves of Aman push back the night together. 

Her song has a climax; she reaches it. Behind her, the bonfire cremating Telperion’s corpse collapses on itself, and a great spherical gout of flame rushes out from the pyre and flies into the sky. It lights the eyes of all the gathered Elves huddled together to last out the darkness, each some small reflected glint of the greater light. Elemmírë’s final note fades with the fire. It fades, but the darkness does not return. 

In the West, the last flower of Telperion rises.

The light comes back.

Chapter End Notes

Neldë Nelequain mí Orelesta: 33 of the measure, as close to a direct translation of Lag BaOmer as I could get. "Orelesta," grain-measure, is here because I think it's the best translation of "omer," even though this fic has nothing to do with grain. It would have bothered me to have a less accurate translation. 

Lag BaOmer is a somewhat mysterious holiday that takes place between Passover and Shavuot, on the 33rd day of the Omer count. Some stories say it commemorates the death of 24,000 of Rabbi Akiva's students to a plague they incurred through disrespect among themselves. Of the five who survived, one was the Rashbi, supposed author of the Zohar, the Radiance, one of the foundational texts of the Kabbalah. On the day the plague ended, he revealed his great work. Later Kabbalist Yitzchak Luria interpreted the Zohar and developed a notion foundational to modern understandings of tikkun olam, the repair of the world: gathering the shards of the world's original light, which shattered and scattered over all the world. When we act justly, we gather together sparks, building the world back -- and we are ourselves sparks of the light without end, even when we do wrong. We can always be gathered in our turn.