The setting of pyres by Angamaite

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Y.T., Tirion

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Perhaps it happened in the auditorium.

Lectures on cognitive semantics -- some arguing in favour, some against the implications of contextual lexical meaning -- had gained popularity in recent times, especially among the Tirion-born youth that argued that linguistic drift has created such a rift between the Song that permeates the material world and the institution of spoken language as for modern Quenya to be a language of cultural context rather than truisms tied to the fabric of reality. It has become commonplace for them to be hosted in the blue-vaulted hall now, which would have been an unthinkable feat for a linguistic field this niche even two yéni ago had the lecture not been held by Curufinwë Fëanáro himself, but the spectators came, and the blue-vaulted hall’s seats were quickly filled long before the lecture began.

It is afternoon, late summer. Laurelin’s light has barely started to wane. The cypresses on university grounds cast softly swaying shadows through the tall windows as a breeze tugs at the peaks of their crowns, but the sky behind them is all clear, all blue and golden.

Alcarohtar speaks beautifully from his spot on the stage, and his voice carries to every gilded star on the complicated lattice of arches that tower overhead. In the fractured beams of coloured light that stream in through the rosettes atop the tall windows, precisely engineered to illuminate the stage, every miniature gemstone sewn onto the velvet of his sleeves gleams like a falling star -- swarms of them, emerald-green, diamond-yellow, topaz-blue, spark to life in a single gesture only to be extinguished a mere second later. The blue-vaulted hall does not make it easy for a speaker to also become a spectacle, it is not hard to become swallowed by the expanse of space and painted glass, but those who succeed at such an undertaking will no doubt leave a deep imprint in hundreds of minds; the packed rows hang onto the scholar’s every word, and several wax tablets and sticks of charcoal lie abandoned in the hands of students that have long since stopped taking notes.

The faculty’s lodge is very quiet. Lótë Sorontur has bought a sheet of questions small enough to slip easily under the breast of his houppelande, but his eyes, too, are transfixed, two bright shards of adamant silvered from beneath gleaming in lamp-light. The rest sit, some more still than others, all too courteous to speak a whisper out loud and interrupt the orator that weaves his speech through the swaying play of lights as though it were a tapestry woven of words and reflections.

And then it ends -- Alcarohtar puts his notes down and steps aside, silence falls, the students begin to stir as they slowly rise from their academic delirium. The stained-glass rosettes cast only flat, still images upon the dais.

Curufinwë Fëanáro rises from his seat in the faculty lodge, only the second to approach the staircase that leads downstairs while the questions begin, and happens to throw a glance over his richly embroidered shoulder in glancing search of his fifth-born son, who has recently taken an interest in semantics and ought to have been sitting in the third row of the main audience section, when he sees a face he has never seen before in his life.

Their eyes meet.

 

Perhaps it happened in the outer courtyard.

It is well known that Tirion is a city of white marble. Reflecting Treelight, its walls gleam for miles away in either direction; any traveller ascending the Calacirya can see it days before coming within sight of its gates, that shining jewel of elvenkind, sitting in the throng of snowcapped mountains like a baroque pearl. But Tirion is only white from the outside.

Diamond, not pearl, from within it is a city of unnumbered colours. Pennants flutter from near every house and entryway -- tapestries of elaborate compositions dyed with every imaginable natural and synthetic pigment that has ever been devised in the history of the world drift carelessly in the wind like flocks of exotic fowl -- and their shadows cast a new lattice against the coloured tiles whenever the föhn blows from the Pelóri with particular vigour. Where there are not banners, there are painted facades; where there are columns instead, there is pink and green marble beside the white, stained glass and mosaic tile, statues in polished bronze and statues in coloured stone, lanterns in every underpass, brass on every railing, shards of gemstones and coloured porcelain at the bottom of every fountain. Even the roof-tiles are arrayed in bright patterns.

Upon the winding ascent towards the peak of Túna, the kaleidoscope spins, but never halts in the slightest -- brilliant showcase-window of a hundred hundred skilled hands, the packed streets of the lower circles only make way for boulevards fringed with endless colonnades that cast their trellised shadows against the clean-swept marble as the pale glimmer of the Tower of the King fills an increasingly large portion of the sky.

And when the changing of the lights comes, a brand new myriad of hues emerges out of the silver glow. For it is also said that Tirion never truly sleeps, and this is true not only of the gatehouse guards who direct the flow of traffic through the city’s rising levels, but of its guildsmen and scholars and the ordinary folk as well; it would be truly hard to find a street in which all windows are shuttered at any hour of the day. The market stands only change hands. If one gazebo folds and disappears, another quickly takes its place, drawing in a new surge of curious onlookers that after all this time still flock to novelty like reef-fish.

Yet, despite how busy it always is, Tirion is -- remarkably -- easy to be alone in.

For those who know the city more intimately than the palms of their hands, slipping from crowd to crowd without being found is not hard. This is even true of royalty; more than others, perhaps. The mantle of plain clothes is never a perfect guarantee of an uninterrupted passage when curious masses abound in every direction.

Not today, although the outer courtyard just ahead of the curving colonnades of the royal palace is always teeming with people at Mingling, but often. Today, however, the King’s court takes audience with those from outside the city, and many new faces gather around in awe, eager to take in as much spectacle as time allows. Some of them have never been to Tirion before -- those are the ones with the childishly wide eyes that cluster around the bronzes, stunned by the scale of it all -- while others, the ones with pointing fingers, know only the Tirion of an earlier time that now exists in memory alone. The midday light bounces off the wingtips of golden eagles and the fingers of golden kings, glittering in jets of fountain-water under the wide expanse of the sky. For a few hours, the marble skin of the statues that glisten from the spray looks almost like living flesh.

It suits the city. The mastery achieved by the hands of the few exists for the eyes of all, though they could spare themselves the noise and the throwing of coins and cabochons into the fountains, Valar know it damages the drains; Tirion is no statue, though it houses many, but a beating heart, as needful of coursing blood as a body. Heavens would weep if the works of ages were to know no other love but that of their makers, and marble takes poorly to rain.

A laughing gaggle of students, for whom the route around the King’s palace is only a minor detour, puts a pause to their attempts to bribe good fortune with a coin-flip over the shoulder when they are passed by a silver horse.

No mount nor carriage may enter the upper circles without explicit permission save for the King’s own, and those of the King’s court and kin, and they come rarely, most often in loping pairs or small processions. There is no other between the arches and the column-works right now -- this proud beast which carries its great sloping head high, though it is nearly unarrayed save for a headband studded with garnet stars, approaches the palace at a leisurely jog by its lonesome.

One of the students begins to raise his hand, but the rider’s face and collar have already passed out of sight before it comes level with his chest.

Curufinwë Fëanáro is not too concerned with formalities, regardless. Those who’ve come from beyond Tirion’s white walls are not so familiar with his face nor the manner of his dress as to raise a salvo of salutations at once, though whispers arise; already has he passed the fountain’s white marbles and strides for the great square beyond in a long, straight line until someone stumbles ahead of his mount, forcing him to pause, when he sees a face alike to no Elda he has ever laid eyes upon.

Their eyes meet.

 

Perhaps it happened in the palace gardens.

The oleanders are in season. Their clustered blooms garland the branches so heavily that in Telperion’s silver glow, they almost look like snow; their smell is so sweet that it completely drowns out the salty tinge that blows in on the easterlies.

The cypresses in the distance barely shiver, though the overhanging clusters of wisteria leaves that shadow the palace’s many colonnades sway in the wake of every fleet-footed guest with voluminous sleeves. The sky is so very clear that one can almost see the stars through their soft grey shadows -- it is now, when the earth is richest with a desperate yearning for relief and a new youth alike, that the heady scent of thousands of flowers seems to fill the yawning silence most strongly as though they were all begging for adoration, saying, love us, love us before the autumn takes us all! And the salty breeze strokes through their leaves with a kindly hand, rippling the lavender as the laurels turn once grey, once silver, and once the deepest blue of the wine-dark sea, and it carries their voices along the white ribbons of passages until the air is all alive with their song.

No dew has settled yet. The cicadas and the thrushes both call into the silver-light without demanding an answer.

Beyond the brightly lit windows, the festivities go on unperturbed. They will go on until Mingling, too -- this will be the last time before the coming of fall, and there is plenty of wine to spare before the rains come. Guests wander sometimes, of course, those eager to escape the noise and the lights as much as those looking to sate more of their hunger for novelty on the fragrant air; there are as many balconies as there are hidden nooks in which two embraced bodies easily become nothing but silhouettes painted in black brush against a canvas of the deepest Tirion lake, but there are few voices that would raise a complaint even if they were to recognise the brocaded slippers discarded in the caspia, and the cooler air makes it easier to digest the alcohol.

What few still wander the paths despite this, perhaps heading east to catch a view of all of Tirion’s lights painted beneath the backdrop of a slowly darkening sky, are easy to avoid.

Curufinwë Fëanáro slips away easily in spite of all his finery, through a side door onto a darkened terrace. In ten paces, he’s made it out of sight; in fifteen, and a gentle vault over a low railing that even a man in court garb could manage, out of earshot. Soft grass cushions his footfalls here, rather than polished stone. Save for the tinkle of jewels as his collar scrapes against the golden leaves of paradise cascading from the sleeveheads, he moves as though the citrus-trees had woven the silence for him and him alone.

He is not, of course, entirely wrong.

Finwë’s royal gardens only seem to be a perfectly faithful reproduction of wild, verdant nature to one caught deep within their folds. A careful look from above reveals a completely different reality, in which every shape and outline is carefully designed to fit a pattern that can only be perceived by removing oneself from it -- but to experience it to the fullest, the viewer must step into the painting and maintain his oversight at once, and only then will all the hidden grottoes and shortcuts reveal themselves as though they had always been in plain view. To those who’ve allowed themselves to know it, and to the singing thrushes and the salty breeze, the labyrinth is not a labyrinth at all.

Cicadas flee in his wake as he passes through a long pergola curtained with leaves that opens deep in the shade of an olive grove, leaves like little silver streamers fluttering overhead, skittering away as fast as their shivering stained-glass wings will let them. Where the branches part, the sky explodes in an expanse of pale light dotted with the faintest pinpricks of real stars. The reflected glow of Telperion glitters on every inch of his body from circlet to shoe in that instant, but he is not a fixture of the painting for long before another canopy blots out the light, only as long as it takes for the heart to squeeze.

He hasn’t gone far, but it’s hard to hear the festivities through the greenery now.

Halfway past a pool that shimmers mithril-keen where the water droplets from an artificial waterfall strike its surface and shatter against it in endless waves, he stops under the old laurels that have been planted here while Tirion had been only the King’s Tower and a few pale halls upon the hill-top to find out what has pricked his ear when he sees a man that has never had a likeness in this world before, and never will.

Their eyes meet.

 

He stands still, smiling, but looking into his eyes is like gazing into the hearths of the earth itself, that stranger.

Stranger. In every sense of the word -- unfamiliar, out of place, antithetical to the tenets of the known world, for molten silver of the kind that coats the rear side of a mirror should scorch, yet when he stares into it in these eyes, it is colder than the empty space between the stars -- he is a stranger, and yet Fëanáro has known him from the moment he had refused to turn his glance aside. The inexorable touch of power in a Song so ancient, it frays the edges of the world, cannot be mistaken for anything.

He does not look away. He does not even think of it.

This one note had been sung at the dawn of the world and knotted itself into every fate there has ever been, a law, preordained, with the same inevitability as the downward collision-course of a dropped glass seconds before it shatters, and it rings, and rings, and rings, until everything else has been pushed to the periphery of being.

He does not look away, because he knows the leaden dread that has been dogging him for so long now must come to a head, or else break, and now it has been laid bare to the bone.

In wild elation, the lustre of this house of light has lent itself to a lightning-flash that bursts through its own name, and as in the dawn of ages when man was not yet bound up in the theoretical that binds itself so tightly to the physical -- not a tight bundle of nerves, muscle, viscera and bone, of sparks wound through fragile flesh in a world of neatly arranged definitions like the grid of stars on the ceiling of the lecture hall -- but a flare of unbidden fëa, it illuminates everything that eyes could not have seen. Life is always most tightly knit with the spirit in deadly urgency; everything is ephemeral and nothing is promised, but only when one is forced to know his doom does every little pleasure borrow a little of the heart-blood’s hotness, only then do the lights and colours have such a sheen that the passage of time seems to melt from their contours and demand they be given new names, as all new things do.

And he knows, in that instant, that he is staring doom in the face. He knows it by the ringing note of discord that has been spun like a silver thread through every unanswered question to converge in a length of a mere few yards between one pair of shining eyes and another, but he also knows it by the way his world has undressed from the garment of unessential accidents and unfurled in truth. It is a scorching flame that has been set, but the burn finds an eager welcome -- better the blaze of hatred that he knows to be true than a superficial sentiment!  

He could not outrun it if he tried. But he is Fëanáro Curufinwë, and he never would have run.

 

The stranger, who is not truly a stranger, for he knows him not by face but heart to be Melkor, is the first to blink. It is a gesture of concession, nothing natural about it -- a minuscule stagger in the motion betrays him when he moves more like porcelain than warm flesh -- commanded by purpose.

“It is no small surprise to find you here,” he says, voice perfectly level.

He has veiled his form at once thinly yet ostentatiously well, but there is something obscene about the manner,  born from intent rather than ignorance. No matter how well-proportioned his facsimile of Eldarin features is, Fëanáro cannot find it beautiful.

The prince, for a change, does not bother to conceal even the small derisive snort that creeps into his crisp tone. “No small surprise? We are not acquainted.”

Melkor’s perfect smile twitches without revealing his teeth, but he stares back with hawkish eyes. Unperturbed by the breeze that rifles through his hair, worn loose and bare of ornament rather than in the Noldorin fashion, he tilts his head.

“I believe we will be, soon enough.”

“...So say many others.” The reply he receives is cold.

“Ought they not desire to be?” One of the Vala’s alabaster hands draws a subtle, but telling arch in the direction of the pond that encompasses all of Tirion between forefinger and thumb, from every furtive firefly in the shady groves to the King himself. “You are a singularly remarkable mind to be acquainted with.”

Someone else will have to forgive him for this mistake, if anyone should, that he paid too little heed to the crown prince’s hands in their tense and atypical stillness, nor the way the corners of his lips have drawn in. He does not yet know that Fëanáro’s sharp tongue is, in fact, not silver, but mithril. Silver doesn’t hold an edge.

“Spare me -- flattery is not a currency with which you may beseech my favour.”

But Melkor laughs, even as he composes himself in a split second. His teeth are pointed, after all.

“Oh, you must have no shortage of it, don’t you? We all desire that which we possess least of in life, after all.”

“Would you happen to know something about it?”

“If I did, what would you ask?”

How crisp the air about them is, fragrant with everything that clings on to the last vestiges of full and blooming life in late summer, greedy to spend itself with happiness the more urgently it ebbs away. How sharp, in the breath that leaves his lungs when he begins to laugh himself. It is not a kind sound.

“From you? Nothing!”

 

And he turns on his heel, and in an instant and a flash of brocades the colour of a night like Eldamar has never seen, he is gone.

 

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Chapter End Notes

Thanks to @allllllllthethings on Ao3 for beta-reading and assistance with editing.

[1] Alcarohtar is a reference to Ludwig Wittgenstein, Austrian philosopher and mathematician known among other things for his work on the philosophy of language. The name Alcarohtar is a translation of the given name Ludwig, 'famous warrior'.
[2] Föhn - a type of wind specific to the dry side of mountainous regions.

Previously posted on Ao3.