The Tapestries by Dawn Felagund

Chapter 2

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.