By Love Annealed by sallysavestheday

By Love Annealed

Read By Love Annealed

Celebrimbor’s only meeting with their saviors from Valinor does not go well.

Finarfin shines in his royal panoply, fresh and keen and hungering for a fight. The glory of the West gilds him in a way that the Exiled House of Fëanor has never known: he shimmers with righteousness, with the air of the Valar’s grace. Born in the Hither Lands, Celebrimbor finds him blinding and alluring all at once.

But Finarfin blanches when the chief of Celebrimbor’s scouts steps forward to deliver her report. Sorokendë’s ravaged face and blue glass eye alert him, suddenly, to the realities of war. His frantic glance tracks the scars, the wounds, the missing limbs and ears and teeth among the captains of the Host of Beleriand. Celebrimbor can feel Finarfin’s horror before the King’s mind snaps closed; he hears the panicked wondering: Are these Elves, or Orcs?

Celebrimbor has no patience with those who prize perfection in Eldarin flesh. If he has learned anything as a child of Beleriand, it is that outward shapes mean little. All fair things can be bent, with enough pressure. Form and function do not always align.

Sorokendë’s eye is his own work, carefully dappled and shaded in layers of dark and light. It is beautiful, but she wears it only rarely, preferring the defiance of the empty socket on the battlefield, relishing the grim humor of the depths behind the lids. Don’t think you can cheat me, she has grinned at him more than once, squinting over a heated game of cards. I see you, Silverhand. I see you.

It was Sorokendë who taught him, long ago in Himlad, that grief and loss can be layered with joy, throwing snowballs in the wintry yard with him after his mother died, tossing him headfirst into the drifts, tickling him until his breath gave out with laughter, rather than tears. When Curufin rebuked her, she folded her eye into the next snowball, catching his father smartly in the chest. Even mourning Curufin could not remain stern, then, as the ball exploded and the bright iris goggled up from where it had fallen, blue against the cushioning white.

But there is no such determined insouciance in the Host of the West. Is this the Valar’s love? Celebrimbor wonders, watching Finarfin recoil.

He remembers Curufin tinkering with the fine components of Maedhros’ prosthesis, fitting and shaping his uncle’s brace for maximum function and comfort, then meticulously recording the processes to be shared, used, adapted as needed by others in similar states. He turns over in his mind all the eyes they crafted together; the inserts of teeth made to measure; the wheeled chairs and pulley systems and tools for grasping and opening and eating and writing that flowed from his father’s mind and hands to the infirmaries and workshops of Hithlum, Dorthonion, Nevrast, Eglarest, Belegost. Celebrimbor most often thinks of his father with fury, after Nargothrond and Doriath, but now he recalls how those same hands would warm and wrap his shoulders and elbows and wrists when his joints ached, his father’s touch tender yet pragmatic: easing and accommodating without pity or shame.

Love is not always glorious. Sometimes it is rough, pained yet relentless. Visible only in a candle guttering over a battered workbench, late into the night.

Let Gil-galad manage these judgmental innocents from Valinor. Celebrimbor will not labor for their sanctimony, for their gossamer pride in their beauty and grace.

He holds to that vow at the War’s end, when a wiser and wearier Finarfin offers pardon and passage West. Celebrimbor turns his back on the Sea, on the easy perfection of Aman. He will take the harder road, forging a way in the world with those who cannot or will not choose simplicity, holding himself accountable for his family’s complex legacy, tilting the balance from darkness toward light.

Sorokendë follows him as she ever has, scarred and wry and proud. She makes her way from town to town on Celembrimbor’s behalf, teasing the children with her false eye and tallying the War’s lingering woes with her real one, noting the gaps and distortions where suffering persists. What she sees with her mingled vision of promise and pain shapes Ost-in-Edhil’s plans for making, helps tailor its crafts. Celebrimbor will forge no weapons in his new city. He will claim only half his inheritance: the making of tools of opportunity, of healing, of peace.

Love drives the work in Eregion, but the Noldor’s old faults cannot be eternally outrun. The brilliant Mírdain, too, are drawn to perfection, in craft if not in form. Clothed in beauty, Annatar’s poisonous aspiration weaves its way through the workrooms and shivers cracks into the city’s foundations. Where trust crumbles, craft fails, or bends away from light. When the One Ring is revealed, all their work of healing and mending and growing ends.

It is Sorokendë who takes the minutes of the guild meeting where surrender is debated. When the argument turns heated she silently pulls her eye from her belt pouch and slips it into her mouth, distracting the disputants before desperation turns the corner to pain. Even through his furious tears, Celebrimbor finds himself laughing at the absurdity of the bright iris between her teeth as she grins up at him. We still have each other, he reminds himself. Sorokendë twitches her empty socket in a consolatory wink: I see you, Silverhand. I see you.

Snow is falling when Sauron’s forces take the city. Sorokendë waits with Celebrimbor on the ramp to the great guildhall, wearing the eye he made for her: in tribute, in solidarity. As the blow that ends her falls, she glares into it, laughing, blue flaring fierce against the white.

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Chapter End Notes

My uncle had a glass eye that he would pop into his mouth at inopportune moments, disruptively. His was an enormously joyful spirit of love.

Sorokendë is from Chestnut_pod’s Elvish name list, meaning (painfully) Eagle-sighted Woman.

And it's always an interesting exercise to write Curufin with some less-villainous depth. Building on ultramarine, I like to think of Himlad and then Eregion as centers of innovation in assistive devices and accessibility, and Ost-in-Edhil as truly inclusive and diverse.