More, More, More by sallysavestheday

More, More, More

Fëanor idly tolerates most of his brothers’ children, once they grow beyond their charming childhoods and begin to align more clearly with Fingolfin and Finarfin’s attitudes and ways. Aredhel, however, he enjoys. He appreciates her electric eccentricity, her vibrancy, and the quicksilver grin she shares with his own father (and uses to the same taming effect on those who despair of her wildness). He finds her ability to appear and disappear at will amusing, perhaps because, as he does, she more often than not leaves chaos in her wake.

While Finrod and Fingon’s friendships with Maglor and Maedhros are freighted with risk, always walking the tightrope of politics, Aredhel and Celegorm enjoy Fëanor’s blessing to range the wilds of Aman without constraint. Sometimes he ventures out with them, probing the remote reaches for new minerals, tracking the shifting patterns of the stars, chasing the languages of the wild things -- the wolves and the weasels and the bees.

He sings, for them and with them, as their campfires burn steadily under the sprawl of the sky, and his smoky baritone soothes her. The deep fire of it matches a yearning, a restlessness, that flickers in Aredhel’s heart.

Her own father is measured, and kind, and patient, and she loves him dearly. But there is something about Fëanor that speaks to her: his barely-restrained intemperance, the itch that almost visibly travels over his skin when a new thing catches his attention or a wild wind tangles his hair. Even after the great breach between their families, she will remember the hours she spent in his company with pleasure and regret. They knew each other, as few others do.

They are both falcons, hooded and bating, longing for the rising spirals of the air.

In the dark, on the Ice, Aredhel furiously recognizes her uncle’s teachings in the way she economizes movement to conserve heat, the tricks she uses to spark fire efficiently from almost no fuel, the calculated angle and plant and timing of the lance strikes with which she downs the great bears and hauls the placid seals from the deeps.

When she rides the chain of the great convoys that carry a third of her people to Gondolin, she sings the world to silence and mystery as Fëanor did, all smoke and secrets, hiding them from sight. She remembers him teasing her for wearing white, ghost-like yet unmistakable if she willed it, as she glimmers into and out of the world’s awareness, drawing the mountain’s shadows down.

Nan Elmoth’s darkness beckons and teases in the same way her uncle’s inscrutable depths could never be plumbed. There is danger there, and uncertainty. The possibilities spark a tremble in her throat as she hesitates at the margins of the forest, poised for a tumble into the unknown. She passes under the trees remembering nights in Aman’s empty corners, and the mists and mysteries of the stories Fëanor told. He had focused those keen eyes on her over the fire, asked her what greatness she would seek in the soft world of Tirion, and her heart had jumped up, answering his call.

Mad he may have been, in the end, but she can almost understand it: that unspeakable grief drawn from an excess of loving, from ambition in a world that seemed too small.

When she steps in front of Ëol’s poisoned dart, she echoes Fëanor’s desperate daring. The world is a knife’s edge, for those with their restlessness. Sooner or later, they teeter and fall.