When All Other Lights Go Out by sallysavestheday

A Captured Star

Death is dim, and warm, and quiet, Fëanor thinks. He can almost understand its appeal.

He is hidden in the linen closet, stretched out on a chest in a careful imitation of his mother’s pose in Lórien, cocooned in a tapestry of her making, imagining her end.

The walls are thick and the door well-fitted, admitting only a sliver of light and minimizing sound. After the uproar of Míriel’s departure, the absence of stimulation is soothing. The burning ache in his chest retreats, some, and his heartbeat finally slows. Fëanor slides into a fitful sleep, dreaming, as always, of fire.

He wakes to find the dark has cooled around him, clotting and settling. He strains his eyes to find the door, but there is no light from the hall. The chest rattles under him as he tries to rise, and Míriel’s weaving grips him like a shroud.

Finwë finds him by his screams: the desperate fire of his voice seeps under the door and nearly sets the air ablaze.

Fëanor hurls himself at his father, gasping and sobbing. The light of the candle Finwë carries wavers as he kneels to hold his son. Fëanor flails, keening. The flame goes out.

Curled against his father’s chest, Fëanor weeps for his absent mother, lost to the dark.

Ever after, he chases light.

Gemcraft is the core of it: singing to the hearts of the stones until they shine with their own radiance, pooling colors in the palm of the hand like water or sap or wine. The jewels echo his own Song, layering and building the light in a fugue that taps his heart. He is twined with their music, burning into them as the tune builds and builds and builds.

Lamps grow from that intimate knowledge of the light at the center of things. Fëanor’s lamps are bright and steady, with a perpetual glow that banishes shadows and makes edges clear and bright. Not for him the taper’s shimmer, the oil’s smoky flame. His lights burn with indifferent constancy in mist and rain and sleet, their endurance a comfort, a guard. A warning, perhaps.

He hangs chains of them in the great ballroom of his father’s palace when Finwë weds again: living gems singing in cases of brilliantly-faceted, unbreakable glass. The light catches on the jewels in the king’s crown, the glow of the great rubies set there breaking into shards of red on the smooth skin of his brow. Indis reaches up to wipe at the spots of fractured light, laughing as her pale hand comes away clean.

Fëanor leaves them there, dancing under his gift of captured stars. He rides out from Tirion, beyond the range of Treelight, into the empty bowl of the night. He hunches under his cloak on a lonely mountainside until long after the feasting is over, wiping angry tears from his cheeks and tossing the clearest and brightest of his gems from hand to hand.

Ill at ease in the face of his father’s joy, he retreats to the wild lands, the deep mountains, all the starlit corners of Aman where minerals seam the earth and hidden jewels sing. Hauling the rarest of metals and fistfuls of gems, he presents himself to Mahtan, prideful and bold. The great smith takes his measure – the bruised heart, the bright eyes, the hopeful eagerness under the brash exterior – and welcomes him home.

Fëanor grows stronger in Mahtan’s forge, keener of mind and of hand, drawing the light from stones with a twist of his wrist and a swift pulse of Song. The fairest of them he crafts into a bracelet for Nerdanel, holding his breath when he gifts it to her, laughing with relief and the unexpected possibility of happiness as she kisses him and fastens it on.

Marriage and fatherhood soften his pursuit of light but make it more potent. He drapes his unorthodox wife in jewels that radiate his fierce devotion, glowing at her throat, on her wrists and fingers, tangling in her hair. Each room of their home is full of warmth and power, lit within by lamps that spring alight with a touch and hold a steady glow. The nursery is never dark, never cold, never entirely still – the soft lights Fëanor rings it with hum tenderly as their babies sleep. His children grow tall in that light, in the luster of their parents’ adoration.

It is not until Maglor moves into rooms of his own that the trouble begins.

Half-grown and eager to be away, he still misses the warm lights of the nursery. He sings to comfort himself, but the tunes send his mind shivering into dark corners and fearful dreams. The tales of Grandmother Míriel leave him shuddering, sleepless, through night after night, afraid to close his eyes lest he never wake again. Maglor has seen Fëanor’s face when that lost mother is mentioned, and he quakes at the thought of telling him his troubles. He swallows his terrors, tries to outrun his dreams.

Maedhros hears him weeping through the walls. He coaxes out the secret of Maglor’s fears – that dread of death and darkness – and tries to comfort him. Darkness is never absolute, he argues; even behind the clouds there are stars. But Maglor is inconsolable, his mind churning with Míriel’s imagined loneliness, her unending suspension in solitude, in silence, in the dark. His nights remain battlefields, every breath a lament.

Maedhros finds Fëanor in his workshop, frowning over plans for some magnificent engine, and asks him to share the secret of the lights. The fierce heat of his father’s attention can be painful, but it softens with pleasure when Maedhros makes his purpose clear. Fëanor glows with pride: his sons love each other in a way that he and Indis’ boys do not. He has raised them to this bond, this tender entanglement. All their lives they will have each other: they will never be lonely, never weep silently outside the circle of their family’s care.

Fëanor abandons the task of the moment and turns his bright energy and focus to Maedhros. Together, they draft a design for a lamp to keep Maglor company: the family device worked in jeweled glass with the purest of gems at the center, sung through with strength and comfort and love. No toy, this; it will be both beautiful and practical, designed to soothe and inspire.

Maedhros loves glass-work: the magic of the transformation, the heat and the flow, the subtle dangers in the dance between liquid and solid, between fine grains and cascading light. He plans his coloring carefully: cadmium and selenium for the red; cerium, sulfur, and carbon for the yellow. A black copper oxide that spills into blue with the touch of the heat. A bare pinch of coloring in each batch of silica, ground carefully, painstakingly fine.

As the sand melts and the colors flow, Fëanor wraps an arm around Maedhros’ shoulders and kisses his temple. How fortunate he is, to have a son who crafts with such purpose and love. Maedhros leans tenderly into his father’s hold. The furnace light catches on his forehead; it trembles and glows in his fiery hair.

Fëanor leaves the shaping to Maedhros, watching as his long fingers coax the forms he can see in his mind’s eye from the brilliant glass. The star takes shape, each ray drawn finer than fine, glittering in the palm of his hand. When it is cooled and assembled and leaded into its frame, Fëanor opens his strongbox and offers Maedhros the choice of his private store of gems. They spark and shimmer against the cushioning velvet, potent, waiting to be called into light.

Maedhros hums, considering, then touches one with a careful finger. It vibrates under his touch, welcoming the attention, and he laughs and tosses it to his father with a grin.

Fëanor fits the gem into its setting, then teaches Maedhros the tune to awaken it: his own heart’s deep music, an echo of the enduring Song. He cups his son’s hands around the lamp, smiling.

“Now, Nelyo. Sing.”

Maedhros sings his love into the gem as Fëanor hums softly in harmony beneath him: strengthening, buttressing, ensuring that the glass will not break or the song dim, even with the roughest of handling.

The lamp trembles to life between Maedhros’ palms, then steadies. The colors shine clearly, with a gentleness that consoles and cheers. Maedhros is beautiful in the soft light: serious, tender, his young face sweet and open, imagining an end to another’s fears.