A Sea Change by sallysavestheday

A Sea Change

It has been more than five thousand years since Curufin crafted something purely beautiful. Since Nargothrond, at best, and even there, the fine jewelry he had made for Finrod’s people was meant to entice and undermine and betray. Afterward, with the bitterness of Celebrimbor’s renunciation ever in his throat, he could turn his hand to nothing of goodness or of grace. Even his most elegant work was martial in intent – bright steel singing destruction from within.

Now he stands at the workshop door, worrying the leather of his gloves between his hands as his heart twists with a lingering breath of fear and shame. Mandos has scoured him clean, but the call of his craft still burns as it scrapes through him. He is not sure he will be safe in this space of making. He needs the work as he needs water and air, but he is afraid of falling into the old trance, the blind dance of creation. He dreads what will fall from his guilty hands as he dreams.

The great forge is out of the question: he will not enter the space where he and Fëanor once turned out blade after blade in unending relays of fevered work. The air there still rings with the faint echoes of their fear and rage – he will not breathe it, will not cross that threshold yet, and certainly not alone.

But the smaller workshop beckons, with its store of gems and wire and delicate tools for shaping grace from the rough bones of metal and stone. They were jewel-smiths first, before the blood and the smoke and the desperate, destructive passions. That scarred bench was where he learned what beauty was, watching his father’s hands spin the hearts of emeralds into light. Nerdanel has kept it as it was, in some twist of hope or remorse or longing, and his blood warms and settles as he traces the shapes of the familiar tools, lifts the lids on the ordered boxes, rolls beads of bone and amber in his hands.

A case of Telerin make draws his fingers to the inlaid patterns of shell on its pale wooden sides. It is full of pearls, so lustrous in their watery way, and coral, with its delicate fingers, and the multicolored mirrors of abalone and saddle oyster, jingling softly as he shakes them in his hand. Some careful craftsman has carved clamshells into dreams of feathers and fishes and the elegant trails of kelp; the lines of purple and white flowing through the tiny shapes with the illusion of movement, of joy.

He thinks of Finrod, long-restored and luminous, riding into the courtyard of Nerdanel’s house not a day after Curufin’s return, hauling him in for a fierce embrace, his eyes bright, his dimples flashing, his sharp teeth shining in the sun. Finrod, who has brought his children, apples from his orchard, bottle after bottle of his father’s finest wines, and an open heart and hand when Curufin falters, still grieving, still painfully unsure. His cousin’s grace feels unearned, but he will hold it close, and learn from it, as in another life he would not have done.

Already his mind is leaping to the fine curves of a coronet or diadem, a graceful thing that will catch the light in Finrod’s eyes and hair. When they were young he would have made it frothy with gems, an excess of surf captured in stones that mirrored the stars on the sea. But Finrod has passed through the darkness, as Curufin has, and that foam is too light now, for what they have become.

His hands move of their own volition, sorting and sizing the pearls and laying out silvery wire drawn airily fine. From another chest he gathers contrasting stones: dark polished agates, fruits of the depths of fire. Their black will balance the sheen of the pearls.

All they loved and fought for lies under the sea now: stones and bones and the sunken gardens of their madness and delight. The remnants of their pain are slowly folding into nacre; softening, smoothing. Time and tide will mold them into something beautiful and new.

Curufin hums a crafting tune his father taught him long ago. He touches a pearl to his tongue and tastes its silkiness: layer after layer of increasing tranquility, curled tenderly around the gritty core.