The Line of Kings by Michiru

Artanáro

When the smoke clears, his son still needs a name.

First Age Year 455

His son has his father’s eyes, the quick silver-grey that had frightened him as a child. Naltariel had named him for those eyes—Gil-galad, for she said they reminded her of starlight.

Artaher has not yet given his son a name. There was no time to think of such things during the siege of Tol Sirion. Now he has time, and all he can think about is his father. His rare laugh and lingering frown, his head almost always bent over parchment and his fingers perpetually stained with ink.

Ingoldo says that Barahir weighted his father’s corpse and sank it in a pool to prevent the spiders from laying their eggs in it, but Artaher cannot picture his father dead. Much less drowned in one of Dorthonion’s clear springs, so like the water flashing beneath the Ice long ago, when Father had seemed the one constant in his life.

“Orodreth?” Laegalad prompts carefully; she has been hesitant in his company since their arrival in Nargothrond. It has become easier to slip into Quenya these days, and even when he thinks Laegalad it comes out Naltariel, but she has yet to confront him over it. It seems, at times, when he mashes the two languages together and her eyes tighten, that she looks to Dorthonion and then back to him, and says nothing.

Her hand brushes his hair back over his shoulder, and her breath is warm at the junction of his neck and shoulder. His father’s voice sings out across the Ice in Valmar, creating nonsense lines just to recite them in different dialects. Celeborn’s eyes at his aunt’s side go cold as he says in blunt Sindarin, “Angrod’s son.”

“Artanáro,” he proclaims. Naltariel does not contradict him.

Chapter End Notes

Artanáro, of course, is the Quenya form of Rodnor, Gil-galad’s father-name. For some reason, Tolkien gave Gil-galad a father-name in Quenya, even though he is clear that Gil-galad was born in Beleriand, and certainly after Thingol’s Ban (Peoples of Middle-earth 350). Clearly, it suits my purposes just fine.