The Tapestries by Dawn Felagund

It’s a funny thing, dying.

It was nothing that I expected to do, charging headlong toward the mountains with my helm slipping down my sweaty forehead, alone except for the crunch of my footfalls in the dirt and the rasp of my breathing. I didn’t even pause to ponder it. I didn’t even pause to be afraid. It just happened: one moment, I was fighting and laughing and certain of my victory—for what was the other option?—and dancing from foot to foot with the starlight darting off of my blade; the next, I was flat upon my back and trying not to hear the certainty in Maitimo’s voice as he spoke to Curufinwë, quietly, so that the others would not hear: “It will not be long now.” The next, I was trying to tell my sons that I loved them, but those were not my words. I did not want to tell them that I loved them, not because I did not but because I didn’t want to give in, make that concession to death.

Of course, death claimed me. When I was among the living, it seemed an easy thing in concept, staving off death, like when I used to eat candy with one hand and hold off one of my children with the other, a hand on his forehead, as he huffed and panted and strove against my hand for that tiny reward. I imagined that if I told it sternly—no—then it would go away like a rebuked child. Not the case. Rather like falling rain will soak one whether he wishes it or not, so death weaseled into my body and squeezed out the life; it leaked from my mouth and nose and pores, it stunk. It hurt too, and I hadn’t expected that.

My sons had given up on my wounds. Make him comfortable, I heard one of them say. Carnistir? Always the most perceptive of my children, I wondered if he felt it now, smelled the sharp stink of life like ozone leaking from my pores. They took turns, holding my hand. They used to hold my hand when they were small; they used to hide behind my legs when strangers approached, like I was significant enough to protect them. They’d been weaned of that habit long ago, when I’d taken them to the forge with me for the first time, when they’d been trusted with a colt of their own to train, when they’d first tasted freedom and disappointment, they’d grown out of holding my hand. Even the little ones, the twins, whom I wished small enough to curl in my lap forever; one day, and they’d been running on the path before me, long legs already having lost the chubby roundness of babyhood, like two little whips of fire who no longer needed to hold my hand.

Maitimo, sweet and organized Maitimo, gave each of them a moment alone with me. None of them said much. Tyelkormo—who despite his vociferous malevolence remained the most naïve of my sons, caught somehow eternally in the startled blushes of adolescence—cried a little. Curufinwë spoke heartfelt sentiments as a father should expect from his favored son but they sounded like he was reading from a book, words thick and saccharine upon his tongue. Macalaurë said little but gazed into space, like he didn’t want to look at me like this; I wanted him to sing to me but didn’t know how to ask, and eventually his hand left mine, and he was gone from my side. The twins came and Telvo tried to tell me a joke and Pityo shouted at him, and Telvo whirled upon him. “What? Maybe if he smiles, he’ll get better!” and Pityo replied, “You’re a fool!” and that was the last words I heard from my youngest sons for a long time. All of time?

Maitimo came next-to-last and admitted that he was frightened to be King without me—as though he would have ever been King with me—but that had ceased to concern me. The plights of the Noldor were already behind me. Death has that power: to dim what once seemed of such great consequence. He did not stay long because Carnistir had yet to speak to me and was stepping from foot to foot like a nervous colt or a child that has to use the lavatory.

Carnistir knelt beside me, my dark son, the one to whom I was least close in life. “Hugging Carnistir is like hugging a cactus,” Tyelkormo used to joke, earning a fist in the ribs from his dark brother. More like an eel, both treacherous and shy, darting out of sight as soon as he came under my notice, wriggling from my attempts to love him like I loved his brothers. Now, I lifted my arm and touched his shoulder like we were friends; he caught my hand and folded it on my chest. “I’ll see you soon,” he whispered. “We all will.”

And…I died.

It seemed like it should have been more dramatic, but it was like the ending of a road: One moment, you’re walking along and concerned with the pending rain and the blister on your toe, the next, the road is gone and you are standing someplace strange, amid knee-high weeds and rugged rocks yet to be crushed beneath the boots of civilization. It feels like it should come with a warning or at least a bright flag, but of course, it doesn’t because no one expects it to end. It was designed with a destination in mind. It just hasn’t reached it—my life or the road.

What had been my destination? Married, seven sons, a lifetime of accomplishment, two exiles, the deaths of two parents, forging a life in a new land—then it all ended. Just like that.

I thought, Oh. I felt rather disappointed. I’d expected maybe lightning or a falling star or at least torrents of tears from my seven sons, who were sitting around morose and silent and dry-eyed.

Then came the pain. Like I said, that I didn’t expect.

It wasn’t anything bodily for I had no body to hurt any longer. It was lying upon the ground, rather uncomfortable-looking despite my sons’ best attempts to do differently. The pain came not in my body but in the severing of my spirit from it. I was reminded of being torn in half, of the pictures in the books of torture methods collected by historians from Angband. The Elves stretched upon a frame, each limb with its own manacle attached to a series of cranks and pulleys. I would trace them with my finger, figure how they hooked together, the logic of it. Logic calms a writhing stomach if nothing else does. I considered the chains so that I didn’t have to consider the more delicate web of nerves beneath the skin of the victims, so that I didn’t have to consider the effects on that. All of the chains and pulleys culminated in a single crank that when turned tore the body of the victim in opposite directions, effectively ripping them in twain with little effort from their tormentors.

I imagine the sundering of body and spirit to be something like that, only the pain is not concentrated in cord and bone and flesh but pervades, as though every bit of my being was being shredded bit by bit. It is a bloodless, secret pain. If I had a throat to scream, I would have. To the Void with pride, that hurt. My spirit was being drawn from my body in a pale thread, coming through my skin. The light was going out of my eyes. If it didn’t hurt so badly, I might have been interested to watch this.

Then: it was done.

Nerdanel used to claim not to remember the pain of childbirth. Grabbing at me in our bed at night, I would laugh, How quickly you forget! And she would answer, What is there to remember? pressing her lips to mind; grinding our hips together.  All of the screaming, the agony, the curses lobbed in my direction for the better part of a day: forgotten. I’d wondered if she was mad.

But as quickly as my spirit and body were separated, the pain ended, and I forgot it. Even the memory was dissipating upon the wind. As I was doing, I realized.

A strong wind was blowing into the west. I looked down at my children for the last time. Only Carnistir was looking up, right at me, as though the glittering spiritual stuff that was being shredded on the wind was something that he could see. Nonsense.

He lifted his hand at his hip and wiggled his fingers. He used to wave goodbye to me like that when he was very small, not wanting to draw attention to himself with much waving about of arms, as his brothers were wont to do.

Then—

It wasn’t quite awakening. I wasn’t sure what to call it.

Awakening implies an opening of the eyes, a slow recovery of consciousness. Consciousness, of course, requires a brain, which I no longer had. So where were these thoughts, these words housed? That was a very good question. Perhaps we’d had it all wrong, assuming the brain to be the center of things. Maybe it was the spirit, as the Vanyar—may they be blessed in their foolish, ritualistic stupidity—have always believed, despite stern evidence to the contrary.

Regardless, something like awakening happened to me. It was more like shining a light on a page and letting the words come into focus, from a mass of complete blackness to something that can be read and understood and interpreted and repeated. The light came over me slowly, and there were words written upon me: memories, thoughts, beliefs. Telvo’s joke—unanswered. Nelyo’s first word. Every treatise that I’d ever written, even the ones I’d ripped to shreds before letting anyone read them, perilous in my pride. There were images too, threaded through the white spaces. There was Nerdanel on our wedding night and Macalaurë sleeping in Nelyo’s arms on the day that he was born and the last time that I saw my father, when he kissed me at the gates at Formenos, and I knew that he did not agree but he understood my need to go.

I ran my hand over Nerdanel, as though I could rekindle those first caresses—but no, I didn’t have hands any longer. And with that realization, Nerdanel faded, just when the progress she’d made on unlacing her tunic had started to get exciting.

It was then that I realized that it was all an illusion. I was nothing.

My whole remembered life, I’d been bound by my body. Unable to reach objects beyond the stretch of my arms; neatly bound inside a space that took up a set amount of room in my bed and in my forge, that always fit into chairs at feasts. There was a comfortable spot on the palm of my hand where Nerdanel’s hand fit, rather like the worn spots in an old shoe that makes it impossible to throw away. A curve to my body when I slept, where my sons used to curl when they were small and had nightmares. No longer. Now I was nothing.

It is frightening, to be nothing, to turn to inspect the room and realize that you can see everything and yet nothing: everything because you are no longer constrained by where you point your eyes; nothing because there is nothing to see. Where is the need for rooms for the dead? The space around me didn’t even have a color. I had set my thoughts on seeing black, but no, it was gray, or brown, or exploding with the colors of phantasmagoria, or—nothing.

And I was expanding to fill it, the way that a tendril of smoke will catch on the breeze and rip apart, and soon, there is no memory of it. Panic touched my—what? Once, I would have said heart, but I had a heart no longer, no nerves along which excitement courses, no breath to come fast in my chest, no “whirlwind thoughts” like leaves stirred by the wind and cluttering my brain. Only there was panic, for certain: a deep, innate panic that is rooted in nothing tangible. It just is. We used to argue—we scholars with nothing better to do with our time than argue over unanswerable questions—about whether Elves were created with the ability to fear or if this had been taught to them by Melkor. I was of the school of thought that said that Melkor created fear. Vehemently, my fist smiting my own palm, I argued this: that Melkor was the cause of all blights upon the world. I see now that I was wrong. Fear was yet another of Eru’s strange gifts, a sort of spiritual armor that kept us safe, that did not require us to plunge from a cliff or into the mouth of the Beast in order to learn it.

And the reaction to fear: we open our mouths and scream from the depths of our chests or we cower and shiver and hope that it passes. Yet I could do neither. I had no voice; I had no body to clutch and cower; I had no voice any longer. Fear was unending and unrelieved.

Yet it was not.

In the way that I used to blink my eye, a shutter closed and snapped open just as quickly, and my vague spiritual sense of self was bobbing in the darkness, and I had no reason to fear. The fear had fled, like that. Like that. I laughed and thought of how my sons used to click their fingers and—with wide-eyed innocence—claim that accidents happened like that. A glass spilled, broken; their little brother fallen and hurt; a wolf we’d been hunting stolen another sheep like that. It used to make me angry. Like what? Don’t use unreferenced pronouns; it insults my intelligence.

Like what, Fëanáro? I asked myself. I laughed. Well, I didn’t laugh: I had no breath, chest, voice in which to generate laughter, but I did feel a shameful sense of irony, an abashed admission of wrongness after all these years. Yet they weren’t here to receive my apology. Like that. I realized that I was an unreferenced pronoun. How to call myself now, a thing of nothingness yet with this consciousness formulating ridiculous questions. (“Still formulating ridiculous questions” came Nerdanel’s voice, her laugh like a ripple of fingers across the water.) I realized that I had become like that.

So this was the halls of Mandos. At least, I supposed that it was, though I don’t recall hearing a call or answering it. That was how my father said it was. Your mother heard the call of Mandos. I used to listen for that, on still afternoons at the Mingling of the Lights when even the birdsong would cease, when the wind would pause and the trees would bow their leaves like heads lowered in prayer. I thought that it would sound like a bell, the dinnerbell that farmers used to summon their servants and their broods from the fields. I imagined spirits streaming towards the sound, hungry for something.

But I had heard nothing; I had made no choice. I had been led to believe that there would be a choice at least, that I might remain as a wraith in the lands of my choosing if I had desired it. I suddenly wished desperately for my body so that I might hunker and pout and let it be known my dissatisfaction with this matter, with my lack of a choice. The time between my death—my last sight of my sons standing over me and a memory of blinding pain that I could not now quite believe—and this moment: like that. I wondered how long it had been, how long I had been here. Time was not linear here—I sensed that—but nebulous, and I was ricocheting around inside of it like a fly caught in a jar. One moment, I felt the ache of centuries; the next, my arrival here was instantaneous, the memory of the pain of death still fresh. If I had a head, it would have ached. Time plunges forward, with or without us. There’s no going back. Those were the hard and fast rules, the words mercilessly told to my sons, when they cried in regret over something they’d done and wished to change. Later, said to Nerdanel too, when she faulted me for the past, the one thing I could not fix. Yet it was not so here. I boggled.

So this was the halls of Mandos.

Stern gray walls had manifested to hold me, and I muddled between them, testing my limits and discovering that they were tight about me. I sighed—or I would have, if I could. Just like a Vala to sweep me against my will to this wretched place and lock me into a cage.

But after a short while, I became aware that I was not alone. I bounced around in my box for a while, and then I became aware that I occasionally bounced into—no, not “into” but through—others like myself, vaporous creatures. I felt the wind of their thoughts passing through mine, that’s how I knew. How do I know that they were not my own thoughts? They were colored differently, the way that two painters can look at the same scene and paint it completely differently. There was a different tincture to their thoughts. Some were dark and bleak (more like mine, I was willing to admit) and others were so bright that I wished for eyes to squint against them. I caught snatches of memory mostly: someone’s begetting day and a Winter Feast and more than a few romps with pretty, scantily clad females that I suspected never achieved the honor of “wife.” But occasionally, I would catch a whiff of perception, and I became aware that somewhere above me was a supposed place of peace, a garden of roses and grapes, strange as that sounded.

So I drifted toward the ceiling, and it dissolved and there they were: the roses and the grapes. Fascinating. So it seems that there was more to the Halls of Mandos than gray prison-boxes after all.

Roses and grapes: they bowed and swayed as the spirits passed among them, not with any physical generation of wind but in the same sense that people inevitably lean to each other, seek solace in others. The roses hung heavy and bright as blood at the ends of their branches, branches riddled with thorns that tore at the spirits but could not hold them. Among them: grapes, woven amid the thorny branches as though it was an arbor. They were red-purple and fat, the color of congealed blood. There was even birdsong here—or at least a rippling across my spiritual substance that evoked memories of birdsong, tracing sharp and keen as a knife inside my memory. How nice, I thought.

How nice it would be to stand beside them, to see if my spirit recalled the scent of roses—and I was there. Easy enough.

A rose lifted its red face to me, as though I’d cupped it from beneath and presented it to my nose for sniffing. Its petals were as heavy and red as folds of flesh, the velvety insides of skin, tight at the center as a secret. I had so many memories of roses but one returned to me then: Nerdanel, young—both of us young and so certain of our love for each other—and the Spring Festival, the Festival of Roses, some called it. I would escort her, in defiance of propriety that dictated that one unmarried and of my station should escort an unwed daughter of one of my father’s lords. But I would not. I’d gone to my father’s rose garden teeming with the almost sickening scent of roses at the height of bloom, so thick that it could nearly be tasted. I’d had a set of shears nicked from the forge and stuck into the back waistband of my breeches. One by one, I’d turned the faces of the roses to me. Their angry thorns bit at my hands, and I bled upon the tiny, ragged-edged leaves. One by one, I’d rejected them. A tiny blight, a miniscule incongruity in shape, a petal barely curled at the edge. Rejected. All but one, bright as a drop of blood—bright as the roses here, of my blood upon my hopeful hands numb to the thorns that tore them—worthy of serving as a symbol of my love for Nerdanel.

But Nerdanel, she’d cried when I proudly presented it to her. Wept into the perfect face of the rose. “Oh, Fëanáro. You’ve killed it.” Such beauty, ripe in her hands and dying. “I am not worthy of its death.”

I’d been angry and—in my rash foolery—declared that I should have taken a lord’s daughter, who at least would know how to appreciate a gift. Harsh words act as bandages around an aching heart; she might have taken the shears from the back of my breeches and stabbed them into my chest, for the rejection I felt then from a girl no one believed worthy of polishing my boots much less worthy of hours of searching for the perfect rose deep among the thorns of the King’s garden. It had been our first fight, and we would recall it with laughter one day. Then later, without humor, for then it seemed a portent.

Each of the roses was as bright and perfect as the one I’d given Nerdanel, ironic for they dwell in the House of the Dead. I wondered what she would say to know that perfect roses that die to serve as gifts for unworthy lovers live anew among the spirits of the departed.

I delved the tight, velvety petals of this perfect rose. Its thorns wrapped me, held me, each as sharp as a memory best left forgotten, extracting painful recollections in the place of blood. Around me, the other spirits whipped and whirled, and I wondered what they recalled, when the thorns grabbed hold of them.

And beside the roses, the grapes, nodding overripe upon the branches. From the depths of the rose beneath me, something moved; the petals rustled and two fell away, meandering like tears into the depthless haze of the Halls. The rose was no longer perfect. The petals spread open then and something emerged: a bee—or I thought it was a bee—with a slick black body, metallic, and blown glass wings broken by thick veins. Deep within me, something was buzzing. The birdsong had ceased. The bee pulled the long cylinder of its abdomen free of the ruined rose, brandishing a stinger like a darning needle but black like the rest of it. It had been Tyelkormo who’d taught me not to fear bees, who’d held me around the chest with his hand over my shamefully pounding heart and lifted by upraised palm to the hive. “Trust them. Trust me.” And they’d crawled across my palm, down my arm, tickled my face. My heartbeat slowed, and he’d released me. “I will tell no one,” he’d said. I’d laughed. Such a powerful man as I, frightened of a bee that had traversed the palm of my hand, that could be crushed with a flick of my fingers and yet remained fearless.

So I forced myself not to shrink away, and with a whirr of wings, the black bee ignored me and landed upon a grape. Such an unnatural thing—the bee—with red eyes faceted like rubies and that stinger— For Tyelkormo, I did not allow fear to shudder through me. On chitinous legs, the bee crawled across the grape. Its belly curved, its stinger scratched the grape’s distended purple-red skin, and there was a whisper of sound, of something cut and hurting, and the grape exploded in a silent burst of blood.

I fled. Without thought, I fled, without thought except to put as much space between this strange place and myself as I could. Only once had I run in such pure terror: on the night of the Darkening. We all ran. Courage touched our hearts only later, made some of us turn back before others and earn the titles of heroes. First, we ran.

For how long did I run? Time stretched and constricted, and I lost all sense of myself. I was many places at once; I filled the halls of Mandos; I was the halls of Mandos and I felt the other spirits circulating within me in the same way that I used to lie awake and restless beside the sleeping body of my wife and listen to the blood racing through my body. Even the grapes and roses, part of me; even that hideous bee. I could not rid myself of it and so I fled. And fled. And the years fell away behind me.

“You might consider, Fëanáro, why you fear this place. Why you have spent your time fleeing without thought to why you are here and whether you may be healed.”

Námo sat across from me. Sort of. I saw Námo sitting across from me in his dark gray, cheerless robes, with his dark hair tied back from his face and slick as a helmet, with his slanted eyes and cat-green irises. Feet side by side, lost amid folds of cloth; hands folded upon his knees. Shoulders squared. But his features became blurred with bursts of static, and I began to understand something about the halls of Mandos and my perceptions here.

“I have spent the better part of ten years chasing you. Alas, you are as stubborn in death as in life, and you eluded me. Or rather, you strove to where I felt sorry enough to allow you to elude me.” A crooked smile that skewed and melted for a moment, a bloody wound rending the side of his face, before I forced myself to replicate that blinking feeling and his unblemished countenance was restored.

“The grapes and roses, they have been a comfort to newly arrived fëar since your mother contrived them upon her own arrival here. Yet you see darkness among them. Why do you think that is, Fëanáro?”

Fëanáro. He was the only Vala to call me that; the rest knew me as Curufinwë, though I had declared my name to be Fëanáro even before my Essecarmë. I had asked Námo once, Why do you call me that? I’d hated his green eyes; they left me with a feeling of having my body numbed and my skin peeled away. Why, your mother wishes that to be your name, he’d replied. Fëanáro.

Your mother wishes—

Not “wished.” Wishes.

In the weakness of youth, I’d let my composure fracture and then crumble completely; I’d fallen to my knees before him and wrapped his robe-shrouded knees with my trembling arms. He was cold; it was like embracing fog. My mother, please. Please let me see her! Please!

He’d unwrapped my arms from his legs. I’d never expected Námo to be strong, not like Oromë or Tulkas, but his hands peeled me free of him like I was of no more consequence than an insect. Be cautious of your wishes, young Fëanáro. Your mother has chosen death. What then do you choose?

For a brief, elated moment, I’d thought, I choose death too! Let him plunge his fog-cold hands into my body hot with life; let him rip free my spirit and whisk it to his halls to sit alongside my mother. But my work in Aulë’s forge had come to where I could not sleep at night for excitement and my father had to press me to my bed by my shoulders to get me to lie still, holding me there for hours sometimes until my mind succumbed and let me sleep. And I was in love. I had a fleeting thought of Nerdanel, weeping alongside my body in Lórien as my father had wept alongside the prone form of my mother. And there was my father, opposite her: He would not survive it this time. Like a blight spreading among a herd, so grief would take the Noldor, one by one. And I’d lost my nerve.

Námo sat as he had that day, opposite me, as though he had retrieved that long-ago memory and used it to paint an image of himself upon the gray air. My mother….

“Is here, of course. And grieved that you have at last chosen to join her.”

Behind Námo, something manifested from the gloom of the Halls, the way that trees seem to emerge in layers from a foggy morning. They arched overhead too and beneath us. Bars. A gilded cage, swinging from the ceiling, and I the bright and useless canary within it.

Nolofinwë had given Tyelkormo a caged nightingale for his twentieth begetting day, knowing my son’s love for Yavanna’s creatures, especially the birds. “I’m sorry that I cannot make it to the feast. You will take it to him for me?”

I’d released it on the ride home, watched its frantic wings carry it from me until it became a speck against the dark trees. I’d given him a jewel from my own collection, more splendid than anything Nolofinwë would contrive, but I’d attached Nolofinwë’s name to it without compunction, and Tyelkormo had gasped in wonder and never known the deception. On my journeys home from Tirion sometimes, as silver night made the fields look as though they wore a sheen of frost, I would hear a nightingale’s song and look at the bright jewel at the throat of my son sleeping in the chariot beside me, and I knew that I’d made the right choice.

Now I am bitter, for who shall free me?

Námo laughs, as though he perceives my thoughts. I suppose that he does.

“In ten years, Fëanáro, you have been so busy running from shadows (that do not exist, I might add) that you still don’t understand, do you?”

What was there to understand?

I want to see my mother.

In the next instant, we were walking down a long and narrow hallway. If I had arms, I could stretch them to either side and brush both walls with my fingers.

The walls were lined with tapestries. I recognized many—most—all—of them. Memories made a sound and spark like flints struck together, and I winced. There was my mother in Lórien and my father’s wedding to Indis and my first lesson with Aulë and the first time I glimpsed Nerdanel, an apparition moving through the trees. I stretched out to touch her, to wrap around the fibers of the tapestry, to return to that moment. Surely, in the halls of Mandos, the tapestries that manifested from beneath the fingers of Vairë the Weaver and Míriel Þerindë had some magic in them, some ability to return me to a moment lost in time and memory. But it was just a tapestry, and up close, Nerdanel’s face dissolved into a series of tiny, precise stitches, and even the magic of memory was gone.

We came to others upon which I did not wish to look: swords darkened by nightfall and blood alike in the hands of my children. My children! How could I?

“I have asked the same thing many times, Fëanáro. But it is a futile question. We cannot change it now.”

We’d come to the last tapestry in the hallway, and I recognized my sons again, standing around me as I died. Only I was not in the picture; the tapestry peered up, into their faces made distant as though the weaver had been lying on the ground. Their faces were grim.

I laughed. Don’t you think that someone important is missing there?

“But you are there, Fëanáro. This—and all of the others—are from your point of view.”

Of course they were. I blinked at them. But surely I had not witnessed such things: my son Curufinwë holding the hair of a mariner to cut his throat; Macalaurë and Tyelkormo embracing in triumph of the ships burning behind them, their beautiful faces graven with vengeful grins. That was not the way of it at all.

You deceive me!

Námo laughed; it was humorless, like stones rattling together. “Such genius, Fëanáro, and yet such a lack of comprehension! This place is like your memories; it becomes what you make of it.”

I recalled again the afternoon in the forest, my hand upraised and cupped by my son Tyelkormo, a place for bees to land. His touch had been light; he’d trusted that I would not pull away. And I trusted that he would not allow me to be hurt.

What could I trust here?

The kinslaying at Alqualondë made a whole series of tapestries, as did the burning of the ships at Losgar. There was one each for the birth of my sons, three for my marriage, four for the making of the Silmarils. But the theft and burning of the ships: I lost count of them all. So those events must have been more important than I’d thought.

I had commandeered Olwë’s ship. It seemed appropriate—a King’s ship for a King—and also spiteful, that I should underscore his defeat by taking his ship for myself, raising my banner along his sails. His son Alpaher had defended the ship to the end, when the other mariners fled before our blades and the blood on our faces and—we liked to believe—our undeniable authority granted by the righteousness of what we pursued. Not Alpaher. He stood with three lads who I knew had been his friends since youth. They smelled of fear but they stood fast.

Alpaher was a mere thirty years younger than me, close enough in age that we were peers in adulthood and he’d followed me like a loyal dog when he’d been small. For his twentieth begetting day—when I was still flush with the generous joy of a new husband and father, wanting to collect smiles the way that some collected colored glass or pearls—I made for him a pendant of a cobalt-blue stone that glistened like Treelight on the water. It had taken weeks to perfect the formula and many more to create the stone and set it upon a chain so fine that it was nearly invisible against his throat. I never made its like again, and its formula I kept even from Nelyo’s curious eyes, when Nelyo was still interested in gemcraft, that is.

He’d gasped upon seeing it and put it immediately around his neck. When I saw him after that, he always wore it. At first, this gladdened me, but then something dark like a thorn lodged in my heart and it began to irritate me. I believed that he wore it only in an act of sycophancy. And the way he greeted me—bell-bright voice “Fëanáro!” and a grin splitting his face—I saw as mockery.

But when we boarded Olwë’s ship, Alpaher stood between us and the helm. He’d taken a blade off of one of my fallen warriors, but he did not know how to hold it. He would be easily disarmed by Curufinwë. And at his throat, he wore the frail chain with the blue seastone upon it, sparkling with a light that would never again dance upon the water.

They fought harder than I expected, Alpaher and his three friends with whom—bare years earlier—I had sat beside the sea, getting slowly drunk on heady Telerin wine, and laughing like the child I’d never had the chance to be. My heart had felt freer that day than it had in a century, but that day and that freedom seemed an illusion as I slowly drew my blade from its scabbard, letting their eyes take in the entire bloodied length of it.

“Relinquish the ship,” I’d said. “I do not want to fight you, Alpaher. I do not want your blood on this blade.”

“Then understand that I cannot do as you ask.” His voice had quavered. Triumphantly, I’d thought that none of my sons’ voices shook like that, with such cowardice. But when I stared into the tapestry years later—dead myself, my courage rendered useless—I heard differently: I heard voices that trembled with shame and fear, agony and doubt, whispering behind me. Of what? Sedition? Not my sons, surely.

It had not been a fair fight, four against eight, but they fought hard, tireless even when wounded. It was I who killed the first of them—the friend of Alpaher who’d stood at his wedding short years ago—with a sweeping blow to the throat that sprayed me with his blood, and I turned then to see that Alpaher and one of the others had overwhelmed Carnistir and held him by his feet, ready to drop him headfirst the long way to the sea below. How he’d screamed in terror, and that was my justification to do what I did, to pull Alpaher away and grapple him to the ground; with my knees upon his chest, slowly I crushed the breath from him, and my blade plunged in just below his breastbone and traced a slow and intentional incision down the length of his belly, spilling his innards and sealing his fate. He looked into my eyes as I did it, and the stone at his throat winked at me as the sea never would again.

I tore it from his throat, this artifact of mine that I’d loved and given to him, knowing that he would love it more. As the light went from his eyes, I cast the stone aside and let it roll from the deck and drop to the ocean below. He was trying to put himself together, yet he watched it roll away, and a blood-slick hand grasped for it, falling upon the deck and leaving a bloodied handprint that nothing would wash away.

I had missed that tapestry on my walk with Námo, but I saw it now, between the collection of kinslaying and Losgar tapestries: Alpaher upon the deck of his father’s ship, his insides spilling through one hand and the other grasping for a wink of something at the very edge of the tapestry: the seastone, I knew. So it was the stone and not me that he’d loved all along, I’d thought at the time. But in the tapestry, his eyes were not on the stone; they stared out at me, meeting my own, and years after his death—my death—I saw that the loss of the stone was not his grief at all.

We’d tossed his body from the ship along with those of his friends. The decks ran red with their blood; even when drew buckets of water from the sea and washed the mess away, we would turn and it would have reappeared, as though it had welled from the wood of the ship itself. It stunk of metal, of the blades that had spilled it.

We set sail upon the sea. The waves tipped and pitched us as though exacting the vengeance of the Teleri who’d perished beneath our blades; we watched many of our ships founder, masts snapped and sails torn, Noldor—men, women, children—tossed into the red-frothed waves, screaming for mercy that would not be delivered.

Gladly, we became victims.

I stared into the tapestry.

I had forgotten it: the sight of the dark sea and the tangle of masts filling the horizon, sails fat with wind—sails that should have been lowered, but how were we to know?—and whitecaps that stretched into pale arms seeking salvation that they would not find. Maitimo tried to throw a rope to some of them, but the rope was torn from his hands. They crashed into the side of our boat, scrabbling fruitlessly and tearing their fingernails on the slick sides. We watched them sink, one by one, beneath the waves, and felt their bodies bump against the hull.

We wailed and wept with each loss; we cursed Ossë for his cruelty. The sea leapt high and soaked the decks and washed the blood from our hands. As we tore our hair, we forgot that the blood had been there. We became victims with the ease of stepping into a pair of shoes. We lamented and mentioned not the blood on our hands, and quickly, we came to believe it.

We avoided the decks where the slaughter had been the worst, for those would not come clean, and victims we could not be with such guilt on our consciences. We saw not the justice of that night because we refused to see it.

Our reasons were many, for the kinslaying. We blamed the Teleri, for casting our people into the sea where they might drown. Loudly, I told of the actions of Alpaher and his friends, preparing to drop my son to his death over the side of the ship. Perhaps he would have survived; probably, even—but this I did not mention. Carnistir sat at my side, sullen and soaked by the sea, and the people raised their voices in answer. Their ships or your child? You had no choice! How dare they equate the two! We blamed the Teleri for refusing to return our kindness, for many engineers and builders we’d sent to their Havens, to erect the beautiful lamplit city on the coast. Beneath that came a whisper: of long friendship with Ulmo and Ossë and conspiracy against us. Traitors! What an emotion-laden word! I watched the faces of my people darken with the mere thought of it.

And above all that: Finwë. We acted in honor of Finwë, and if the Teleri meant not to respect his memory by lending their ships, then they had truly squandered friendship with the Noldor. We let ourselves feel used, humiliated, by the help we’d so generously given when they had no hopes of making even meager reparations. And I spoke of my father and what he’d described as a beautiful friendship as old as Elvenkind with the Telerin King Olwë, a friendship that he believed had driven the Teleri against great odds to our shores. With clever tears choking my voice, I spoke of my father and how he had loved us, the Noldor, his people. “In his memory, we sail to the Outer Lands. In his memory, we will do vengeance for him, at any cost.”

Any cost. So the kinslaying at Alqualondë was not an escalation of tempers or borne of our frustrations or even a convenient solution—for loremasters would try to understand that awful hour and suggest all of these things, unable—unwilling—to believe that Elves of Aman would turn so quickly to murder—but an act done of greater moral good, for we must act always, henceforth, with the thought of banishing Morgoth foremost in our thoughts and actions.

We did not even notice, when the lies became truth. When we began to speak of the “attempted” kinslaying at Alqualondë: “attempted” because, of course, the kinslayers, the Teleri, had been unsuccessful. We had defended ourselves.

I paced between the tapestries, becoming frantic. Behind me, Námo stood with folded hands.

All lies? I asked. I wished for hands to tear the tapestries to shreds—but no, I could only weave among them, become them, become truth at last.

All lies?

“I would not say ‘lies,’ Fëanáro,” said Námo. “Memory is a malleable thing. It becomes what you wish it to be. Many things are that way—that is, they become what you expect of them.”

I infused myself amid the bloodied sea, and I could smell the blood and acidic reek of fear—sweat and tears and something baser than that: the stink of Morgoth’s dungeons, perhaps—and I could hear the screams of the Teleri dying upon our blades and the wet sound of tearing flesh. I saw someone running and Tyelkormo gashing his back with his blade, turning him over to find that he was actually a maiden; he paused and moved on, and her blood ran into the sea.

Why could I become this tapestry—this tapestry of pain and fear, upon which lies were built—and the others detailing the happy times in my life remained elusive?

“Many things become what you expect of them,” Námo said again, behind me. With my strange perception, I saw him leave the corridor. Frenzied, I felt myself fill that place; I felt myself enter each tapestry in turn, the truth unraveling like loose threads in my memory.

So I am evil, then. My whole existence founded on lies. Depraved. It is truly as Nolofinwë’s loremasters are doubtlessly spewing by now, and I am a shameless miscreant.

Námo was seated across from me again. As before, we were in the gilded cage. And as before, he sat in the tidy posture, just as he had on the day that he had denied me my mother. His imaged waxed and waned like a tiny flame caught in the wind, growing bright one moment and the next guttering almost to nothingness. Bizarrely, Námo’s hand seemed to melt into the knee on which it was resting, and when he lifted a hand to silence me—though I had not been speaking—his knee stretched upward with his hand like taffy. I waited to feel horror and did not. I felt numb.

“I have said nothing like that, Fëanáro,” he said. I realized that his lips were moving but did not match the words he was saying. “There is no evil. Just perspective. Your loremasters are not lying when they speak of the Teleri trying to drive your people into the sea, nor are they lying when they speak of your terror, facing Ossë’s wrath. But then, Nolofinwë’s loremasters do not lie when they speak of the merciless ease with which you killed the relatively unarmed Teleri. Even Melkor possesses a perspective in which he is not evil but persecuted.”

How did I even come to be here? With you?

“You died.”

Not that! In this cage? I did not will it.

Námo’s head turned slowly to the left, then slowly to the right. “I see no cage.”

A shadow flitted across my perception like a hand passing quickly over eyes.

The cage was gone, and I was back in the hall with the tapestries. I was standing before those of the burning at Losgar and wondering what secrets lay woven within their threads, what deceptions they would dispel. Behind me lay the tapestries illustrating the kinslaying of Alqualondë, a long smear of red-silk thread. But I did not look back at those. They lay behind me, as much did these days.

The first tapestry was filled with flame. I felt the heat on my face as I had that day, my throat tight and sore with the smoke. My heart raced with joyful vengeance. Only I had no face, no throat, no heart. But amid the fibers of flame, so easily taken apart into harmless red and gold, I burned.

We did not know how to sail. We were Noldor. Mayhap, we were cast into the sea as much for our ignorance and our folly as for Ossë’s wrath, but of course, we would not consider this. I’d been given a dory by Olwë as a child, for one of my begetting days, but my interest in the sea was trumped by my hunger for creation and, later, for Nerdanel, and so I’d never learned to use the thing. The dory bobbed in the water at the end of the King’s pier for many years, eventually became a plaything for his children (seeing as I never used it), and was eventually sunk by Alpaher when he collided with his friend’s larger boat while trying to race through too narrow a strait, driving himself into a rock.

I believed that the storm would end, the sea would subside: It had to! This was the way of things. After horror comes peace; we could not be asked to endure such terror for the whole of our journey. My sons were frantic and afraid. Many of them had never been on a ship before. One of the twins was relentlessly sick over the side; they pled with me with their eyes: Solve this! Save us!

Always had I been their savior. This is the responsibility of a father to his sons, after all. I was the one to lift them when they fell and blot the blood from their torn flesh; I kissed their cheeks, tasted their tears. Many of my nights with Nerdanel were interrupted by tiny voices: “Atar?” Tears bubbling in their throats, sleepy eyes blinking and wide, taking apart the darkness and looking frantically for that nightmare hiding in the shadows behind them. “Atar? Sleep with you?” My desire for my wife set aside—an amused smile on her lips as her fingers stroked my hair—and my body transformed from husband to father, my side curved like a tehta to shelter their tiny, quivering bodies.

But this—this was unsolvable. Maitimo and I fought the sails until our arms ached and would ache with the memory for days after, but we were no match for one of the Ainur. Even as I had strove against the Valar; even as I had held us as equals, I was humbled by this.

In the end, it was not me who saved us but the land: a shadow on the horizon, growing larger in our sights. We lowered the sails to stop ourselves from being dashed to pieces on the rocks, but we were too late. We cut sharply into the Firth—again, too late. We didn’t know how to sail. We were Noldor.

We cut too close to the shores at Drengist and the bellies of the ships were torn open on the rocks. The ships pitched and we were cast to our faces upon the decks, where the stink of blood still lingered. Some were knocked unconscious or slipped overboard and were lost in the chaos that followed. Such was our speed that we slid all the way to the gravelly beaches before coming to a painful halt; one of the ships behind us crashed into the stern of the King’s ship and began to take water but only sunk so far into the shallows.

Then, for a moment: silence.

But not for long. Clamor arose in its wake, enlivening the darkness pierced only by the stars. A lamp had overturned on one of the ships, and those aboard were hurrying to stamp it out. Some were sick over the railings, stomachs twisted by our tortuous journey at last relieving themselves of their contents. There was much splashing and shouting as people searched the other ships for loved ones and cried in lament when they discovered that—in too many cases—they’d been among those lost at sea. Even the cries of reunion sounded less joyful in the darkness and more akin to the cried of vultures happened upon their next meal.

Nelyo had leaped immediately to the neighboring ship—the one caught aflame—and was throwing his cloak, his good cloak, the one that I had had made for him for his two hundredth begetting day, over the flames. Inexplicable anger pinched my gut. I glanced back over the dark sea now grown calm and flat as a sliver of ebony and the first sparks of treachery flared to life in my thoughts.

Pressing the tapestry, I discovered that it had changed: The flames on the ships were diminished, and Nelyo was tossing his cloak over them. His good cloak that I had had made for his two hundredth begetting day, wasted in futility. The ships: still whole, taking on water, but still whole. Námo drifted behind me.

“It is what you make of it,” he said.

I’d lowered myself down the side of the ship. The beach that met my feet was different—less forgiving—than that to which I was accustomed; there were rocks rather than sand, as black as the sea, and they bit through even the thick soles of my boots. Others had lowered themselves as well and were running from ship to ship, calling names of those aboard other ships. My thoughts were not with them; they focused solely on the splintered bellies of the ships.

Treachery raged—as hot as the center of a forge-fire—deep in my most secret thoughts. But not secret for long.

No, soon it would blaze forth with such profusion that even those on the opposite shore would be left with no doubt.

In life, I had begrudged the fact that I had to sleep. Sleep took me from my work, from matters far more important than the self-indulgency of repose. Now that I was dead, though, I missed it. In the hall of tapestries, I wished to curl upon a flat surface, close my eyes, and lose myself to forgetfulness.

Námo manifested from the space in front of me: a churning and billowing of gray substance organizing itself like an army upon the field to form lips, nose, cheekbones. Gray robes boiled from nothingness and into fruition. The stuff that makes up his eyes turned its flashing green belly to me.

I laughed. He grinned.

“You are beginning to understand, aren’t you?”

Don’t you have other charges here? Why do you devote yourself solely to me?

“Ah, you exaggerate your importance, Fëanáro, as always. I barely spend any time at all with you. No more than any of the others. Right at this very moment, I am consoling fourteen slain Teleri and two Noldor who’d been lost at sea and three Avari arrived from the Outer Lands; I am watching your mother work and holding my wife and trying not to laugh at Oromë’s jokes at counsel, lest I betray my dignity. You forget, Fëanáro, that I am not a creature bound to flesh—or even to a single place and time—as you are. This place is indeed what you make it, Fëanáro, and I am yours to summon, just as anything else.”

There was an ache deep inside of me, in a place beyond pain, an exhaustion that cannot be bound inside the limited vessel of a body. I made a sound that feels like sighing, only is it a sound? The gray robes of Námo rippled with it.

Then go away. I do not want you here. I do not need you here.

“If either of those were true, Fëanáro, then I would not be here.”

I would not have said it if it were not true.

Námo’s laughter was like the grating of metal on metal. I wanted to stop my ears only I had no ears and no hands with which to stop them if I did—and the sound didn’t even really exist, did it?

“If your time here has shown you anything, I would think it would be that you are exceptionally good at lying to yourself.”

In defiance and disgust, I fled into the darkness that hung in the corners of the Halls. Other spirits whisked through mine, and I caught snatches of thoughts, mostly wondering about loved ones. Time ached, a weight upon me, and I thought for the first time since my arrival here of my sons. My sons, taken by me to the Outer Lands and left alone. Cold seared through me. One day, I knew suddenly, it would be their spirits oozing through mine; I would feel them within me, in a place as secret as the center of a flame, as I had in the year before they were born. Only then, they had been innocent: as pure as the white light of the Trees. I wondered what resentment, hatred, pain I would feel within them now, what scars upon their fëar once cradled so tenderly against my own.

Walls manifested behind my back and I hid there in the topmost corner of the Halls, in the darkness where I could not be seen, where my despair would be secret from all, like the spiders who used to weave secret nests in the corners of my sons’ bedrooms in Formenos and Nerdanel or I would have to tear them down with a broom before they would agree to sleep.

The darkness parted, and Námo stood before me, leaning on a broom.

This is ridiculous, I said. I felt wrung out, as I used to feel on the rare occasions when grief or frustration had driven me to the verge of tears. Námo swept me with the broom, and the feeling went away.

“Why are you upset?” he asked as the broom whisked over me. Obediently, my thoughts conjured a feeling of straw scratching skin. “You should be consoled, Fëanáro, by the amount of control you maintain over your existence here. Isn’t that what you have always wanted? Your independence; your freedom to create? This is a place without walls, yet you have contrived walls against which to hide. This is a place without darkness, yet you linger in shadow. Was it not your aim to defy possibility? Put light into stone? ‘Nothing undone is impossible?’ Isn’t that what you told your children, when you felt that they could not meet your expectations? You have all of the control and freedom that you could want here, and yet you despair. For what reason?”

For what reason? It was a question that I asked myself.

I didn’t need a tapestry to remember climbing back aboard the ship. Nelyo had finished quashing the flames on the other ship and had leapt back aboard ours; he stood with his brothers and they watched me—all of them, men enough to swear themselves into the Everlasting Darkness—with eyes luminous and gleaming in the lamplit darkness, wide and frightened.

And I: what did I tell them to do?

“The ships are taking on water,” I said. “We need to get all of the people and all of the cargo onto the beach.”

In my mind, the treachery came into sharper focus. Nelyo nodded, oblivious, and began herding his brothers toward a rope ladder tossed over the side and down to the beach. The twins were jabbering in bright, false voices. Tyelkormo’s golden hair caught the last shred of lamplight as he disappeared over the side; he was brashly hushing them, claiming a pain in his head, sketching it at his temple with flighty fingers. Carnistir looked back at me and smirked, and I felt as though my thoughts were being spelled in ink upon the deck for all of their clarity. His eyes were dark in the starlit blackness with sparks of light kindling at their centers.

The loremasters would commit to parchment many things but none of the mundane difficulty of moving from one land to another, a realm of light to one of darkness. We hadn’t enough lamps to dispel the gloom, and Elves fell upon the rocks and healers had to be spared to stitch the wounds and set the broken bones of the clumsy. Most of the children cried constantly. We all developed a dull ache behind our eyes—straining into the impenetrable blackness—that made me wonder if my skull was shrinking upon my brain. I touched my eyes as though expecting to find dampness there, thoughts leaked upon my face and running down my chin. We were exhausted, hungry. Cold. Lonely. Frightened. All of us.

Ships that had been loaded in haste, by bodies still strong from the light and nourishment of Aman and driven by adrenaline and fear, now needed to be unloaded. Only our numbers were almost halved. Only crying children needed the consolation of their mothers and too many wrists and ankles had been broken upon the rocks. Many sat on the beach, unable to help, earning the resentful glances of those left to shoulder their duties. I and my sons took on the same duties, most vigorous of all. In the disgruntled mutterings of my people, I heard a whisper of treachery.

Nelyo had gathered to him those of our numbers most competent in engineering. Indeed, before my eldest had gone into the service of my father, he had been highly regarded in such matters himself. At the side of one of the ships he stood. His hands slashed shapes against the white, splintering wood. They were conjuring a solution, and I paused to hear him assuaging the fears of the others with all of the polished poise for which his grandfather had prized him, deigning that the strongest of us would take turns diving beneath to secure new boards atop the old and seal the leaks. Already, he was gathering others to his service, to cut wood, gesturing at the treeline behind the beach. “It is too dark,” someone whined, and Nelyo said, “Stone lamps,” (for they were not then called “Fëanorian”; that would follow my death and the gradual cessation of their production). “Stone lamps will hold their light, even underwater. We can even affix safety masks from the forge to our faces, to afford clearer vision.”

“They will leak,” another protested, and Nelyo’s answer was spilling forth before the other had even finished speaking. “We will seal them with rubber.” Grinning, proud of the ease with which he had overcome the other, more like me than he knew. In the hot, treacherous core of my thoughts, I wondered what that meant for me.

More trunks and treasures thumped onto the beach. I wondered if I should stop my son—who seemed more alive than he had in years—and wondered also why that thought came to me. I rubbed at my aching head and strolled down the beach. Curufinwë had taken over my duties, designating Elves to help with the unloading, prodding those lying upon the beach that were least in need of repose to lend what strength they could manage.

Amid the shouts and commands and screaming children, my own thoughts were lost: a speck amid a busy painting. Beyond the circle of lamplight, I strode, listening to the crunch of rocks grow louder beneath my boots. The ruckus behind me was diminishing into nothingness. Eru be praised.

The thought of our first autumn in exile in Formenos came unbidden upon me. The starlings had come that year, a surprise to us, the spoiled princes of Tirion who had always before returned home with the first frost. They had come in great clouds and settled on the fields, picking over what few leavings remained from the harvest. They had risen in swarms against the sky, blocking the light, even the stars. At night, they circled the fields, crying restlessly, and the stars winked and disappeared between their bodies invisible against the dark sky until the horizon appeared to be twinkling with the barest specks of light. With such noise, it was impossible to work. Miserable, for days, we sat in the house and stopped our ears. “This is every autumn?” we questioned the lords of Formenos. “How do you bear it?” For they went to their workshops and forges like any other day, shaking brooms to scare birds from their path. They laughed at us, at the nausea that rose within our bellies at such relentless, ugly noise.

I walked along the dark beach and stopped my ears, as I had done that autumn. But the endless crackling screams were inside my head and would not be shut. I thought of my people on the opposite shore. My people for —though they allied themselves with my half-brothers—I was their king. I thought of every harsh word to pass between Nolofinwë and me. I felt his hand, warm upon my shoulder, at the moment he had sworn his allegiance and the Trees had gone out. I heard his sharp words counseling my father against me. I saw even Arafinwë’s innocent gaze turned to mistrust with Nolofinwë at his shoulder. “I just—Fëanáro, I do not like what is happening to our people. The swords—” “Oh, do not pretend that he has not cozened you into saying this!” “He has not, Fëanáro. Brother. You know that always you have had my love. My respect. I could never do what you—” “I am beyond your slick sycophancy, Arafinwë! Get gone from my sight!” “Fëanáro—” “Gone!” A scream. Madness. Nolofinwë’s lips twisted into a smirk.

But surely the treachery I was contemplating—surely it was beyond even me. And surely even they—even Nolofinwë—did not deserve it.

I stood on the darkened beach and stared out at water as thick and comfortless as ink. Even here, it seemed, the hysterical voices of my people reached me, though I was well beyond their torchlight and left alone in the company of my thoughts.

I found myself again in front of the tapestries, having breezed by those marking happier times to stand before the ones of twisting, leaping flames. I burned at the sight, memory of them.

“Your mother nearly exhausted her supply of red thread in weaving them,” Námo said from beside me. I no longer had to look to see him manifest into a shape like a man. I no longer believed that it was that simple, that he was a being of bone as I had once been, who could be evaded and escaped. Deceived.

My mother. The weaver. She whom was spoken of only in hushed voices, full at once of reverence and fear. By the time my first memories were taking malleable shape in my thoughts, she was gone. And so from rumor and overheard conversation and pure wishful thinking, I wove my own images of her, constructed memories that kept with the tales that my peers would tell of their own mothers. I did not even know what she looked like, but I memorized my father’s face and spent hours staring into the mirror at my own, studying each feature that seemed not to belong to him, constructing her from the balance. I became good at listening at doors, through ventilation ducts, and sifting her name from otherwise tiresome adult conversations. Míriel Þerindë. My ears pressed to the wooden door, breath held in hopes of stilling my panicked heart.

In all of my hours of dreaming of her, though, I’d never thought of the fact that she had never known me. Staring into the tapestry she’d woven, I met my own ruthless gaze and thought that a mother who had known me would have never stitched her son in that way, never taken such time on the ruthless fire in his eyes.

And Nelyo: pathetic and almost pious, begging of me with clasped hands not to loosen the flaming arrow into the limp white sails of our ship. I rippled with laughter. Anyone who knew Nelyo knew that he was far from pathetic and even further from pious.

I’d returned down the beach to find that my sons had done a commendable job in my absence. Even the despair was less palpable now that most of the people had something with which to busy their hands. A Noldo is always comforted by something in his hands that he can break and shape to please his will.

Nelyo, naturally, had assumed command, even over Curufinwë, who was scowling at his elder brother with the resentment of one rudely displaced from a favorite chair and onto the floor. But of course, the people loved Nelyo. He’d been one of the King’s councilors—and one of the most beloved—when I had been exiled to Formenos. “To trust a trouble into the hands of your son,” a woman had once told me in the streets of Tirion, “is to see it vanquished, as if my magic.” Clapping her hands together as if the sound between them was the sound of my son committing magic; the emptiness left as the result. As if in confiding their problems to my son, he took them and made them his own, never to worry them again. I had never possessed the selflessness for such pursuits.

When I’d been exiled to Formenos, Nelyo was the last of my sons to send word that he would accompany me and his brothers to the north, and his message came along with my father’s, as though he’d been awaiting Finwë’s decision before making his own. So slovenly, I thought, for one who was ever aware of how his actions appeared, how even a small misstep could have grave repercussions. I’d never thought Nelyo—the brilliant councilor, ambassador, politician—would be so foolish as to reveal to me that, had my father and his liege remained in Tirion, he would have remained also.

Since then, I have loved—but never fully trusted—my eldest son.

For a long while, I stood back and watched the scene on the beach. Nelyo was showing three women—each of them married but their husbands left behind to follow Arafinwë back to the city—how to tie knots strong enough to moor the boats firmly to the beach. “They might drift away,” he explained, “and be lost in the night, sunk before we can repair them.” They watched him with avid eyes, rimmed in red, bright within. He said something too quiet for me to hear, and one of them laughed, an unexpected burst of music that caused heads to turn. His bright smile flashed, and he moved on to the next task, and the woman secured the moorings as though they were protecting the fates of something far more valuable that a few waterlogged boats.

Curufinwë was overseeing the men who had gone to cut wood for the repairs to the ships that Nelyo was proposing. Tyelperinquar was perched on his hip and screaming; Curufinwë bounced him dutifully, but his eyes were as hard and cold as ice, and his mouth was twisted like he’d taken a swallow of lemon juice. He was pointing at the men and saying little, bursts of noise erupted from his throat that made the men scowl and Tyelperinquar scream harder.

“Curufinwë,” I said, “what are you doing?”

“What your eldest has instructed me to do, which is to arrange these boards in such a fashion that they can be easily retrieved when the time comes to repair the bellies of the ships.”

“Come with me,” I said, “if you can spare a moment.”

To the ships we went, wading knee-deep into the water to inspect the damage that Nelyo had proclaimed insignificant enough to fix. “I am not sure,” I told Curufinwë, “if these ships can even be salvaged.”

Between the two of us, we found the worst of the damage and, from it, spun awful tales of ships improperly repaired and taking on water at mid-ocean, foundering, with ourselves and our forsaken kinsmen aboard. His eyes grew wide and frightened. “We are not seamen, Atar!” he said, clutching Tyelperinquar closer to his chest. “And never have our energies been put to such use. The Teleri were taught by Ossë and then given leave to practice their skills in the safety of rivers and harbors, but we seek to overcome the open ocean!”

“The way I see it,” I said, “those Noldor who will be most valuable in this land are already here, and to risk their lives to bring the others oversea will ensure the failure of our mission against Moringotto. We were the ones who secured the use of the ships”—already, so diplomatic in our wording! so adamant in our belief that we had only taken what was our due!—“not them. We were the ones who faced great peril in doing so. And so we should be granted first use and are fully within our rights to deem our sacrifice unworthy of the meager return of bringing the others over the sea. We must remember in this that our first priority is not the liberation of our people—though we both desire this for the whole of our people, including Nolofinwë’s folk, I know—but the defeat of Moringotto, which we shall not accomplish with diminished numbers.”

Curufinwë nodded vigorously as I spoke. The people were likewise not hard to convince, and the whisper of treachery was drowned by our very logical arguments.

Except for Nelyo: he—my eldest son and heir—fought against me, at first using the slick arguments as he’d been taught by years in my father’s court, eventually devolving into hysteria, shouting at me and slipping on the sloped beach, cutting his hands upon the sharp rocks. The others looked away from the spectacle of their favorite lord and certainly the most dignified screaming at his father with tears in his voice. My other sons were eager to comply, and as we dipped arrows in oil and aimed at the sails that would easily catch flame, Nelyo strode away down the beach, wiping his cheeks with his bloodied hands.

In the roar of the flames, the whisper of treachery grew louder, and the ponderous bellies of the clouds overhead grew crimson with our betrayal. But it wasn’t betrayal. It was what we had to do to survive, and I do not think that you’ll find a single account written that night that says otherwise.

Except, perhaps, my son’s.

Our accounts remembered ancient and frivolous betrayals as we sat awake in the nights that followed, huddled in small, tight groups close around the campfires, holding our trembling hands to them, eager to prove that we were still creatures enamored of light and warmth. We had punished treachery with treachery, I realized eventually, as fruitless as punishing murder with murder. We had brought the crimes against us full-circle, and now they caught us like a whirlpool, and fight as we might, we would not escape. We remembered our kinsmen left behind on the opposite shore only in the accusations we made of them. The good times were necessarily forgotten.

For there had been good times. The tapestries drifted in front of me, moving as though on a carousel before my eyes, catching my spirit in their strands and infusing me with flickers of remembered joy. There were marriages and births when I had been glad to share my half-brothers’ happiness. Even before that, there were hunts and excursions and competitions where we realized that would we be bereft a brother, also would we be bereft an opponent and the opportunity to snuggle close to our father in the moments afterward and be reassured of our superiority.

We moved inland, away from the black husks that remained of the ships, and we stopped speaking of it. In tight clusters—men on the outside and women and children within—hands on the hilts of our swords and eyes keen upon the shadows, we journeyed across the land in the darkness, lanterns held high, singular in our purposes. Or so we said.

But like using flames to douse a fire, our treachery against those left behind awakened more of the same, and it followed us even on these shores, hiding out of sight in the darkness. And the way that shadows will shift and convince one wary that there is something malevolent within—something that is indeed of no greater substance than strands of darkness—so we gazed upon even those dearest to us with greater scrutiny, tense and defensive and waited for the shifting shadows to manifest into our darkest fears.

In the height of rebellion, it is easy to forget the little details that will later form the bulk of one’s concerns. The night that I’d stood on the steps of the palace in Tirion—or had it been day? all hours were the same without the Trees and equally forbidding—I’d wooed almost the whole of my recalcitrant people with my words, like ravens flocking to silver. Or—in my more melodramatic moments—like sharks to blood. The words seemed to come from beyond me; there was a pressure in my chest and then in my throat and then words coming forth from my mouth that amazed even my ears. I was an eloquent speaker, yes, but these words? These words would make a cataract run backward, from lake to stream. In my more daring moments in the days that followed, I would question whether perhaps Eru Ilúvatar himself had spoken through me, if my quest—my very existence—was indeed ordained by something beyond even the Valar.

Those honeyed words spun a spell that spoke of lands free with the music of running rivers, starlight winking bright upon dark waters, trees dripping with flowers and carpets of grass as cool as silk. I spoke of the realms we would build beyond even the imaginings of the Valar, building these paradises in the minds of my listeners with the same ease as a child clever with blocks. But most of all, I spoke of purpose, for we were not a purposeless people yet had been made so by the cozy lifestyle afforded us by the Valar, where our purpose concerned trinkets made for their amusement. Where we were even procured for their amusement in the same way that we brought home caged canaries or hound pups for the delight of our children.

But, I said, we were purposeful people, and with the murder of our king, our purpose had been revealed to us. The Valar would do nothing to stop the stain of evil of Moringotto from spreading to the farthest green corners of Arda. We would. We would seek vengeance and prove ourselves more than the buffoons of the Powers.

My words moved more than just my people: They moved me, stirred the licking fires in my heart to burn even hotter. Steadfast and determined, we marched from the city with little upon our backs: neither food nor water nor provisions for comfort. In a quest ordained by the Maker himself, stopping to discuss proper footwear and the rationing of foods that would no longer be abundant in the darkness seemed a bit anticlimactic. I dared not tally, pushing my people ever forward on the impetus of my words. Along the way, some turned away, but I lamented them in the same way that a beast mourns the dropping of a tick that had been feeding upon its flesh: a lessening of a burden, the loss of only parasites who did not understand our purpose. Of this, I spoke loudly as we walked, assuaging tired feet with renewed vigor. Silencing complaints that rippled among us: of hunger, exhaustion, lack of sleep. To Alqualondë, we walked. Up the coast, we walked and rowed. Over the sea, past the maelstrom that Ossë inflicted upon us. Across the Outer Lands with their soup-thick shadows and constant scrim of clouds across the sky, we marched until the bottoms wore out of our boots and our sleepy eyes were heavy as lead in their sockets.

Eventually, we had to stop.

The lake was like a smear of oil in the darkness. I halted our people upon a hill and held forth my lantern as though that would be enough to illuminate the land spread beneath us, but the lake would not even catch a spark of light. Clouds cloaked the stars, made the land shadowy and forbidding, the lake even more so.

“This,” I said, “is where we shall stop. I feel that it is right.”

But I felt no such thing. I felt the same hunger and weariness as everyone else, the same growing doubt churning in my stomach, burning like bile at the back of my throat. We didn’t stop because it was ordained that we should reside byLakeMithrim, as it would come to be called. Indeed, in short time, my people would move on to more suitable lands, though I would not live to see it. We stopped because we had to stop, because even our hardy people were wearied and hungry, and we had not brought enough food.

When I had spun my vision of the Outer Lands to my people—words as deft as fingers putting in place a stitch, a glimmer into a tapestry—I did not mention the endless darkness. I did not mention the beasts that howled in the hills at night and kept awake our children—and ourselves, if we were being honest. I did not mention that we would leave behind most of our tools and so would root in the dirt like animals, with hands and sticks, and fight over the few hammers and spades that had been brought along. I did not mention the blisters and splinters and sprains—or the unfamiliar herbs that all smelled strange to our healers, that made each in turn shake her head. I know not what to do with this, my lord. I did not mention that we were creatures of light trying to hunt in the darkness, nor did I tell of what it felt like to be hungry: not the sort of hunger that draws one, sniffing, to the kitchen at suppertime but the sort of hunger that made us taste even bitter bark and leaves in hope of sustenance, that made our bowels run with burning pain, that made the sight of the hot blood of our slain prey fill our mouths with saliva and our thoughts with a dark, primitive longing.

For caged beasts are oppressed and coddled in equal measure, and we’d no sooner encountered a problem in Valinor and been given or taught a solution. Here, we fought over the answers. Curufinwë would have taken his fists to Nelyo’s face if Macalaurë and Tyelkormo had not caught both their arms in time. They’d fought over the building of a bridge: so simple an implement to eliminate such a silly obstacle as a deep creekbed that was posing a risk to scrabble on a daily basis. Yet we needed water and the herbs that lay in the forest beyond; we needed a bridge. In Valinor, there were books and treatises and long councils devoted to such debates. Here, we became as desperate and ruthless as beasts, no longer with the luxury of eternity to devote to debate.

We raised tiny houses and slept inside them in great numbers. They were drafty and the roofs leaked. There was no sand to make glass and so we had no windows, and even the watery starlight was lost to us.

All the while, treachery slithered among us in the darkness.

I watched Nelyo one day, whittling a doorknob from a block of wood. Nelyo had taken a fall in the darkness the other day and turned his ankle; he’d been ordered by the healer to take two full days off of it. Of course, Nelyo would never be content in idleness. “If I cannot use my leg, then I shall use my hands,” he’d said and set immediately to work whittling tools and fixtures from scraps of wood left from building the houses. I watched him that day, leaning his back against the tree, a fire-lantern hissing by his side. His hair was a tangled mess down his back; only Tyelkormo had thought to bring a comb, and my sons fought over it every night. Nelyo, naturally, let his brothers use it first and usually fell asleep before his turn came. Naturally. It had been years since he’d last worked with his hands, and the knife slipped on occasion and nicked his skin. His hands were red with tiny cuts.

I watched him working—making nothing for himself but another comb for his brothers, a doorknob for one of the women forsaken by her husband, a wooden trowel for one of the healers—and doubted him. Mistrusted him, if I am being completely honest.

In the halls of Mandos, I would face a tapestry of that moment: Nelyo in the delicate orange lamplight, smoothing with his knife a wooden ball for Tyelperinquar. Me: in the shadows. Watching. Mistrusting.

I remembered his outburst on the day we’d burned the ships. Better that we had risked all of our lives to return for those who had never had a kind word or helpful deed for any of us? His face twisting, his voice ragged with rage and frustration; Nelyo, who had never been less than collected, whose poise was unshakeable, screaming at me with the same senselessness as a child in the midst of a tantrum. Though even as a child, he’d never succumbed to the temptation of such behavior. I believed that I had seen a secret part of him that would one day betray me.

Then, watching him whittle—wasting hours of productive day while my sons toiled, excavating stones from the riverbed behind me—I couldn’t not see it. “Perhaps you should have been a son of Nolofinwë,” I’d whispered, but Nelyo was humming by then—a tune brought from Valinor—under his breath, and did not hear me.

That night, he had gifts for each of us. For me, he’d made a wooden mallet. “I know that you want your good steel hammer,” he’d said, “but until we can find an iron mine, I figured that it is good, strong wood and will serve you well.”

It was good strong wood. I tested it in the palm of my hand and made my sons laugh nervously. They were softened towards Nelyo again, forming a little half-circle around me, huddled close to him. His arm was draped over Macalaurë’s shoulder, who was reverently fingering the wooden flute that Nelyo had carved him—it was slightly out of tune, but it was better than nothing and would give us music at night. I tested the mallet again. For a moment, I imagined the long, beautiful fingers of my eldest son’s right hand beneath it as it smote my palm. The thought made me sick and something else: something I will not admit even as I stare into the tapestry of that moment and feel it anew, tangible as a pinch delivered deep inside my thoughts.

It was a good mallet, made from a single piece of sturdy wood so that the handle would not break free of the head. It would serve me well. But I fed it into the fire that night, when my sons were asleep on the floor behind me, watching until the hot center of the flame had reduced it to unrecognizable ash.

“Why did you do that?” The question teased me out of my memories, out from between the shadowy strands of the tapestry that sketched a close-walled room, a whipping fire, and me: a shadow crouched and dropping a perfectly constructed mallet into the circle of stones.

Why?

Because as surely as I was thinking harm against him—my own child, my heir, once my favorite son, the light of whose eyes I believed more precious than that of the Two Trees—surely he was thinking harm against me. Autumn was coming. The trees were losing their leaves in whispering droves—all the better to conceal the whispers that he shared with his brothers, that spoke of leaving our doomed little village by the lake and returning to the shore to sail back for the people of Nolofinwë. I imagined the sound that mallet would make, cracking against my skull. I imagined awaking with a headache and an empty village, for if my words could lead my people forth from paradise to live in fear and darkness, then what could Nelyo’s do? Surely convince them to risk death—such a mild penalty—to rescue their friends of old from the cages of the Valar.

I mistrusted my own children. When I heard them laugh and did not know the reason, my neck prickled as it had done before under the gaze of Moringotto. I barely slept for listening for whispers or concealed footfalls.

“You have always constructed a world around yourself that is different from what is, that is what you make of it,” Námo said. I whirled around with defenses seething in my thoughts, but he was not there. There was a tapestry of my sons, clustered around me to hear their instructions in the morning, their eyes sleepy but keen upon me, almost reverent. No breeze stirred it. I was alone, and the more I thought on it, the more the voice I’d heard sounded like mine.

The day I died. TheBattle-under-Stars. I did not want to face it, not so soon. The pain of death was still upon me, or the memory of it anyway. It was just yesterday. Just last century. Just last year. A mere moment ago.

I did not know, but it was too soon.

But the halls of Mandos had diminished around me with the same cruelty as a naughty child’s fist closing upon a fly, trapping it. Better to tear the wings from it when the little creature tired. I tried to leave the Hall of Tapestries, but it spiraled ever inward upon itself, trapping me closer. My spirit—without the bonds of a body—bloated the fill the space. I willed myself back amid the grapes and roses but gazed only upon tapestries. Tapestries stretching beyond infinity, long as the years of Arda. The strands of my spirit wove themselves amid them, amid the recollections of fire and blood and smoke and death. They became part of my spirit. My spirit became part of them. But that was the way, wasn’t it? A mark upon history, and history’s mark upon me. They were above me, below me, all around me, stiff and unmoving as in death. And I had no eyes to close. I had to see.

The Orcs had come suddenly, but of course, we were prepared. Nelyo and Tyelkormo had organized training with both blade and bow, even for the women. Curufinwë and Carnistir had found deposits of ore in the hills, and we had weapons again, however crude. This they did without me, for I was crippled in my paranoia, working alone in my makeshift forge, always with my back to the wall, always with a blade at my side.

The histories say that victory was easily won for us. We had superior knowledge and techniques for working with alloys, and our blades were strong and perfectly balanced. We approached battle plans with the same detached coolness as we’d once approached mathematical equations and problems in engineering. But no matter the preparations and wisdom brought to battle, war is never easy. Many were left widows or orphans that day. For the first time, we had to devise methods for dealing with burials. Awkward funerary customs began to evolve. We learned the hard way about the nature of decay and its effects on the water supply. On us. We grew used to a stench in the air.

I saw one of my children wounded for the first time: Carnistir, ambushed by Orcs and his forearm sliced open. I’d been fighting back to back with one of my lords, and I left him to save my son, to drive the beasts from him. “Atar,” he said, “I am fine.” Carnistir had always been ambidextrous, and he’d switched his blade to his left hand with ease and pulled away from me, cutting away the remnants of the enemy. With naught but corpses around him, he was tying off his wound, racing off to fight elsewhere. Behind me, with a scream and a blade through his gut, the lord alongisde whom I’d been fighting was slain.

After the battle was over, a frenzy remained upon the people. They raced about, turning over bodies and wailing over the faces they wiped clean of mud. They defiled further the Orcs we’d killed. Some spoke of vengeance, of pursuit.

Like a magnet gathering stray bits of iron, Nelyo brought them control again, gathering around him with red-rimmed eyes and war-lined faces turned to his. He’d been as beautiful as a beacon in armor still with a bit of luster that made him appear as one of the silver stars tumbled from the firmament.

“Pursuit,” he said, “is futile. We have won, and now we must return to our wives and children and comfort our friends and those who have lost. We have shown our strength and will now live in peace, but we should not dare Moringotto so close to his own lands. We know not what secrets he keeps, the mightiest of the Ainur, buried beneath the mountains.”

I had led them here, but he kept them, my eldest son who had once betrayed me in thought, next betrayed me in voice, and now met my eyes over a sea of heads turned in his direction, and I feared that he was about to betray me in deed.

My voice rang like a rock tumbling down the side of a mountain. “I think that we should pursue.”

With a ripple, the faces turned to me, and I saw in their eyes: He already had betrayed me. The kingship was mine in title only; by the mistrust and condescension in the eyes of my people, I saw that I no longer truly possessed it. Nelyo did.

“Atar,” he said in his patient voice, his armor gleaming dully at me, “we have won.”

“The Silmarils,” I said, “still lie in the hands of the enemy, and is that not why we have come here?”

“Is it?” Nelyo asked, and I realized that I was in direct contradiction of what I’d said on the steps of Tirion: of pursuing freedom and purpose. Could those things be confined into something as tangible—albeit wondrous—as a Silmaril? Faces turned from me. The people were shifting on their feet. They wanted to collect our dead and go home, to begin the long process of mourning and the even longer process of rebuilding our fallen society. Nelyo’s brothers were gathering around him, speaking in hushed, quickened voices. Like a pesky insect, I’d been brushed aside and forgotten.

Next, I was alone excepting for my rapid, panting breaths and the crunch of stone beneath my feet, running north. Need I relive this? My own death? I stood before the tapestries. I recognized my mother’s work, her careful stitches so fine that even the offal splattered upon my armor shone like it was still wet. She was subtle: The three peaks in the distance were as dark as the night sky and so rarely seen, but a thin sheen of starlight had settled upon them. I remember noticing that, pausing, pondering. The clouds overhead were disintegrating, and the starlight was glazing the land. I almost stopped but for the thought of Light lost: Light held in the undeserving hands of Moringotto.

“In loving detail” we say of artists who cherish and know their subjects with such intimacy that the details speak of life beyond paints or threads or molded metal. In loving detail, my mother had woven the tapestries of my death. As she must have done during the year before I was born—memorizing the growing swell of her belly, treasuring each of my smallest movements—so she did for my death. Only my death took not a year but a few minutes. I wonder if she begrudged me that: a year of such tenderness, such consideration, many hours of labor, and all of it wiped away in a matter of minutes.

The whips of the Valaraukor cracked the air and tore open my flesh. Strangely, it didn’t hurt as the tapestry said it should. At the sight of my wounds, I felt a tightening inside me that would have been a wince had I a body to devote to such tiny luxuries, but then, my body was numb, all crackling energy. I had bled very little because most were cauterized almost instantaneously. The whips were of flame hot enough to slice through my armor; the air smelled of cooked blood.

But I had fought. I had fought and almost won; I had taken down one of the Valaraukor and was making progress on the second when two more arrived, and my left arm was hewn down to the bone. Still I fought, and the thought had come to me—a raw impulse along nerves unfiltered by decorum or propriety—that I was doing a heroic thing. And staring into the tapestry of that final moment before I heard a shout behind me and my sons arrived, I realized that this was perhaps the last truth that I had known. And it had been true; the tapestries did not deny it.

And—I died.

“What did you learn from this, Curufinwë?” Aulë used to ask me, especially when I made grievous mistakes that ruined my projects and left me staring frustrated at the mess lying between my two treacherous hands that had not done my mind’s bidding, eyes blinking and mind already denying the sting of tears. He’d believed that there was more to learn from mistakes than successes, and I’d proclaimed him a fool—in my secret thoughts and later to Nerdanel, who kept my secrets even as her mouth hardened to a disapproving line—though mainly because I liked success more than failure. I created success from all sorts of materials including—I saw now—the fabric of deception.

How to unravel a life of mistakes? There came a point of every project, said Aulë—the nadir, he called it—when it was futile to continue. It took less effort to begin again than to remedy all that had been done wrong. “You must learn to know the nadir,” he said, “and trust in it. Trust in your judgment. Know that you now possess the knowledge to begin again and be successful.”

Only, in life, there was no beginning again. Even as time had eluded me here in the halls of Mandos, I was suddenly aware of it: a dull trudging feeling like a heartbeat at rest or feet crossing banal territory to engage in some unexciting task. I wondered not for the first time what year it was, what day. What time. I wondered what each of my children was doing in that exact moment. What my wife was doing. I imagined her boiling rice in a kitchen in Alqualondë and scooping it onto a plate and eating it alone. I felt sad at that and did not know why.

“What did you learn from this, Fëanáro?” That was not Aulë but Námo. He was beside me again in his gray robes build of ash and smoke, the color of grief, his glass-green eyes as bright as the marbles that my sons would send rolling across the flagstones, dazzling in Laurelin’s light.

We walked together, Námo and I, through the rose garden that he’d once said my mother had constructed to calm the restive spirits of the newly arrived. Was that still me? I still felt restive, though in the same anxious way as an animal seeking to escape a flame. Only the flame was not mine to escape; it was bound tight to me, like a skin. Only the garden was different now. No longer were there voluptuous, velvety blooms but rather buds still shut tightly like eyes, with just a peek, a promise of color between their lids. The rosebushes obstructed the path before us and behind us but tore apart to let us pass: the chitinous sound of thorns scraping each other as they parted, reminding me of iguana claws on the patio in Tirion when I flipped open the lamp each night.

But this place, I suppose, is what I make of it.

Do you want me to admit that I am a fool? To rescind my pride? I will do neither.

Námo’s lips didn’t quite smile but pinched together tighter, reminding me of how Nelyo used to laugh when he knew it was improper to do so. How I used to love to coax mirth from him in those times, no matter how impolite, just to see his eyes light with his smile. His eyes that were silver, lit by his first sight of Telperion upon the water, holding the lost Light of the Trees in the same way as had my Silmarils.

But when was the last time that I caught Nelyo’s face in my hand—any of my children’s faces—and looked into that light? Before the Darkening, I feared.

I thought again on his last words to me. What were his last words to me? Had I even seen the light in his eyes?

I am afraid, Atar. Afraid to be King without you. I thought that I wanted it, that I would do better by our people than you have. But I see now that I still lack so much, and that we’ll never be whole without you. I have not your courage. I would have turned away, and the Valaraukor would have come to Mithrim, to our people—

But for you. You have died for our people. Would I have the courage for that? I do not know.

This is my fault, but I will not fail our people again.

“History is different for every person,” said Námo. We had stopped. Some of the rosebuds were opening, only instead of blooms, there were butter-yellow moths unfurling their damp wings and taking tentative flight. “Just as a person looks different whether you stand to his front or rear or side, so history is different for each of us. Nelyo blames himself. You blame yourself. Are either of you to blame? Actually no. In Arda Marred, all is imperfect, and all wrongdoing is attributed to Melkor. Have you not wondered, Fëanáro, why you were not cast into the Everlasting Darkness? Because every last dark detail of your fate—even your Oath—was wrought long ago. Had Melkor been content with Arda as we made it, I would have nothing to tend in these halls but these roses and moths.

“You will heal here in spirit and arise anew to remedy that which is wrong. We shall all play a role in the world’s undoing, and so shall we all play a role in its remaking.”

The moths were dancing around me; I could see them on all sides, dashing themselves hungrily against me. They also had thoughts, and I felt them as thoughts of unbridled joy and wondered when had been the last time that sight of me had inspired joy in anyone. Even a butter-colored moth.

What will be my role? I asked, but Námo didn’t answer me. Not directly.

“Do you know what the other spirits see when they see you here, Fëanáro?” he asked, and without waiting for me to answer as the moths brushed me with their ghost-pale wings, fluttering with senseless joy that I had lost long ago, he answered himself:

“Light.”

Her back was to me, and intent upon her work, she did not sense my approach. I have learned to sense other spirits in my time here—time that I cannot measure in years or hours but that stretches and folds and rises like bread dough—learned to look for the faint brush of color like paint diluted in a wash of water: violet, green, blue. My mother, though, had a shape like a body. Her dark hair fell unbound in waves down her back; her fingers were pale and agile, quick as bees darting between flowers. Yet I saw her spirit as well: bright white, like the hot center of steel fresh from the furnace, raw and beautiful.

I might have called to her but for the tapestries, slipping to a floor I’d conjured in my thoughts: a blue shade of marble that I’d always adored, found only in northern Aman. The tapestries were piled high around her, and even as I watched, other bright spirits were whisking them away, to hang them in the halls and make them into history.

One caught my eye and I went to it. The bobbins and threads hissed between my mother’s fingers as she worked, oblivious of me.

They say your heart can break, and I have always hated that saying. Macalaurë—always the poet—was fond of it, of “broken hearts” in his laments or even those that mixed the figurative with the more bodily: “My heart torn from my chest,” he sang once, and I stood up in the middle of the song and shouted for him to stop. “Hearts don’t break!” I said. “They are not made of porcelain!” I’d dropped a bowl from the table at my side onto the floor to demonstrate. Only later did I realize that Macalaurë had made the bowl too; it was one of the few of his awkward crafts of which he was not so ashamed that he refused me to display it. “And if your heart tore from your chest—why, you would not be sitting here now!”

Here, in the halls of Mandos, I have no heart to break. Yet it did. And I suddenly understand what Macalaurë had meant, why his face hadn’t become stricken as had been his wont in those days but instead turned dark and defiant, and he’d argued with me in front of his mother and brothers and proclaimed me a naïve fool.

Me! I’d been shocked at the time, and he’d been punished for a week for his insolence.

The tapestry beneath my fingers was off my beautiful Maitimo tied to a table in one of Moringotto’s dungeons, his flesh flayed raw and burned. He’d vomited from the pain. He’d held it in his mouth and thought to end his agony by drowning himself. Only he’d turned his head at the last moment and spat it onto the floor.

I will not fail our people again.

Beneath that was a tapestry of Carnistir trying to show Maitimo how to fight with a sword in his left hand. Tyelkormo and Curufinwë cast forth as traitors from their cousin's halls. Telvo holding Pityo’s body as he died and oblivious to the shadow of the enemy behind him and his own life so close to ending. Macalaurë trying to soothe the burn on his palm with saltwater and weeping, endlessly weeping, into the sea.

The servants of Námo were coming and taking them one by one, and I understood that history was happening. Time trudged onward, marked by tapestries. The tapestry of Maitimo was taken from my hands and whisked away, and I would have wished for such torment upon my own body if I knew it would free my son.

But I knew that he would survive. The other tapestries spoke of that. For a while, anyway, until the flames beneath my mother’s fingers took shape and returned him to where he had come: from fire to fire.

The tapestry was whipped from her finger and into the pile beside me even as she was beginning another.

Holding him in my arms by the river on the day he was born, I had envisioned no ending for my beautiful son Maitimo—certainly not one like this. I had envisioned an ending for none of them, and if I had known—

Mother? I called. Perhaps she had seen it; perhaps that was why she was here.

Hush, Fëanáro, she said with the practiced brusqueness of the mother she’d never had the chance to be. Just watch.

Beneath her hands, a new tapestry was taking shape. I used to read to you, she said, even when you were an infant, before the weariness took me to Irmo and the foresight brought me here. I read to you of the Ainulindalë, and I believed that you heard—and understood—me. Your eyes, they were so bright on mine. And I would read to you again and again of one part, to hold it true in your heart, to trust none among our people, nor the Valar—for deceit, as you have learned, is part of all of us—but to trust just this one thing:

“ ‘And thou shalt see that no theme may be played that hath not its uttermost source in me, nor can any alter the music in my despite. For he that attempteth this shall prove but mine instrument in the devising of things more wonderful, which he himself hath not imagined.’

So said Eru, who made us all and guides my hands now as I record the history of our people.”

Beneath her hands, a new form was taking shape of three lights and three destinies—earth, sea, and sky—subject to be coveted by none, even the greatest of the Ainur, and I saw that all the dark things that I had done and that had been done against me had led to this, to the safekeeping of the Light that would heal the world.

Do you see, my son?

This one was set aside, for it would be hung at the world’s breaking, and that was still a long time away. Or maybe it was not. Time is funny here. But I sat at her side and rested. And waited. Waited for my children to arrive, one by one. Waited for fate to be realized, bit by bit. Waited for the call that I had been born to hear, for the world’s breaking and remaking, in which we would all play a part, even me, even the Fallen: I would be raised up beside the greatest of my creations. I would again kindle Light.

Beneath the hands I conjured for myself—hands that had held my children and loved my wife and brought wonder to the world—the tapestries said as much.