Our Share of Night to Bear by Elleth

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Chapter II: Endurance

In Mahtan's house, Nerdanel and her sister attempt to cope with their losses.

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No one had come to disturb Nerdanel while she had been working.

Deep in concentration, she was not sure how much time had passed while her chisels turned and turned across the surface of the marble. Only the dark continued to press relentlessly against her window as though it sought entry. She ignored it, in favour of Niënna’s face taking shape underneath her veils of stone, fitting thin copper pipes left over from commissioned fountain ornaments inside the hollows of the small statue, fashioning the ornate headdress, carving a hidden hollow for water into the top of the statue’s plinth that the pipes would dip into. When she finally exchanged her finest tools for a piece of sanding paper, unclenched her fingers and straightened momentarily, something in Nerdanel’s back popped, and a wave of vertigo washed through her. Her lips and tongue were parched, the skin of her face itched with stone dust. Her head was throbbing and swam with the sudden movement.

Nerdanel steadied herself on the edge of her workbench, sighed, and shook her head to clear it.

She had been crafting too long. Summoning herself back out of immersion always came with its aches and pains especially when she had foregone rest on an intricate project such as this, but exhilaration had always made it bearable. She had trusted her craft and the joy of creation, but now - her studio still looked like the site of a slaughter, with Fëanáro’s bust the casualty, and his remnants mingling with the chips and flakes off Niënna’s marble block. Her statue, perhaps a cubit high, sat hollowed-out and unpolished on the workbench before Nerdanel, awaiting still finishing touches and the water she would need to weep. The fire, which she had neglected to stoke, was dying, and casting little more than a meagre, hopeless glow into the grey shadows of the room. And outside the windows where a breathtaking vista should stretch westward awash in gold and silver light, was the darkness lurking, and a chill was radiating out of it.

And still, interminably, the rain splattered down.

Nerdanel tried not to think of her youngest sister, who was out leading the remaining Yavannildi to harvest what grains might still be salvaged from the dark. The ride to her parents’ estate had been harrowing enough; she did not want to think what it must be like in the fields. The dark had been so pervasive that some vast, boundless thing might have swallowed the world. Terror had driven her, so much that when the summons came for Yavandilmë, Nerdanel had nearly refused to let her go outside, and relented only at her father’s stern command.

The sandpaper she had still been clenching in her hand fell back onto the table. She wanted her family around her, not a statue whose only commiseration would be contrived through trickery, and which had given her none of the relief she had expected. Nonetheless she poured water into the plinth from a pitcher by her bed, and set Niënna upon it, both hiding and tightly sealing the mechanism. Then she turned her back on her studio.

By the time she was entering the kitchen, she was rubbing at her eyes. Stone dust from her apron made them water and the room blurred, but it was doused in warm light, candles glinting halos off the windows and the burnished copper of the pots on the walls. A bowl of infused athëa sat on the table and spread the fragrance of applewood and warm honey that mingled pleasantly with the scent of her mother’s cooking herbs strung up above the hearth to dry.

Most importantly, the room was not empty. Rainissë, who was in the middle of it all, was sitting at the table with bent back and slumped shoulders, her head sunken onto the massive tabletop and her red hair fanned around her. She was sound asleep.

A sandglass sat by her hand, running nearly empty.

Nerdanel joined her sister at the table, turning her back to the dark outside the windows that hid orchard and vegetable garden. She counted under her breath while the final grains of sand slipped through the neck of the glass into the lower portion.

She turned it. The sand began to trickle again, and she breathed easier.

“Rainë,” she said softly, and touched her sister’s shoulder. “You fell asleep.”

Her sister’s arm shot out. Nerdanel barely evaded and caught it by the wrist. Rainissë startled awake with a cry, twisted herself loose and was on her feet before she was fully awake. Only then she halted, and her eyes focused on Nerdanel. She sat down again with a sigh, her hands flat on the table.

“Did I miss a lot of time?”

“None at all, I just turned the glass,” Nerdanel answered softly. “They have not yet started tolling the hour again?”

“Nothing while I was awake. Neither in the village, nor Valmar. How would they know what the hour is?”

“It feels as though it ought to be near the Mingling, but of course we cannot be sure,” Nerdanel said, squeezing Rainissë’s hand. Her sister, usually vivid and indomitable, had become a shadow of herself, and the splutter of her words that couldn’t come fast enough, usually, had been pared down to the barest necessities. She pulled her hand away from under Nerdanel’s, hugging it close around herself.

“Don’t touch me. I know the fault is not yours, but - you were the one who brought him into this family. I cannot. Not right now.”

They had had that argument many times, a broken and abortive chain of accusations that led them nowhere. “Yes,” Nerdanel said, and sighed. “Yes. But he has brought too much strife into our family for us to continue it, has he not? Please stop this, Rainë.”

When her sister jerked her head away and did not answer, Nerdanel rose from the springy chair that had been trampled under years of bouncing feet chasing around the table - her brother’s and her sisters’ and her own, and those of her brother’s children. Her sons had come knowing their wildness would be allowed here when at the palace it had only merited frowns from Finwë. Here Fëanáro and Mahtan themselves had sometimes joined the hunt with her, provoking a cacophony of shrieks and laughter that she sorely missed.

“Where is everyone?” she said to break the silence that hung between them, but it seemed she had underestimated her sister’s anger. Rainissë turned accusing, turned red-rimmed eyes on Nerdanel before huddling in on herself again.

“You know where Lavassúr went. He’s with your husband. Mother is looking after Isimë because I’d rather not burst into tears having to explain to my daughter why her father left us - at least… not yet. Pelórë has been asleep since after she came here, or at least she refused to leave her room. Martúro is in the other wing with his family, I think. Yavandilmë is still in the fields. The apprentices went home. And there is no talking to Father. He went to the forge.”

“He is not working,” Nerdanel said to push past the sting of the words, puzzled that her father of all people would choose to sit idle, but there had been no sounds from the forge, nor light spilling from its windows onto the lawn. Mahtan was happiest when he could put his hands to work on one of his many crafts. “There has been no noise.”

“Don’t pretend you are surprised at that, Nerdanel! I am not half as wise as you, and still I think I see more clearly! Don’t you think he’s bitter over what happened? Don’t you think he feels betrayed? And don’t you think he fears for us now that widowhood is in our future? Lord Aulë - ”

“- has done nothing to hinder us but giving Father his advice. Had we wished to set forth…”

“We are glass-blowers, Nerdanel, and Lavassúr was no more talented than I! What use would we have in the fight against Moringotto other than to swell the ranks of those that will bash themselves to pieces fighting a Vala in all but name? Perhaps Lord Aulë should have done more! Perhaps they all should have! Moringotto cast them into darkness once before and yet now that we depend on them, the Valar are not moving a single finger!”

The thoughts rang unpleasantly familiar to Nerdanel’s own, and she thought with a pang of Niënna’s statue sitting in her craft room. She pushed them away. “Then why,” she asked instead, quietly against her sister’s tirade, and sat again, “did you remain here, as idle as we all?”

Instead of snapping back immediately, the anger seemed to begin bleeding out of Rainissë after that question. She sat wordless for a moment, as though composing herself for more words. Nerdanel’s hand itched to touch her shoulder, rub her back, but knowing her sister often disliked touch, she held herself back.

Sadly and in a low voice, Rainissë answered:

"Because I know which of the two is the greater folly. While you are still trying to support Fëanáro, aren't you? To absolve him and hold him not guilty of the rebellion. Why do you keep holding on to this man, Nerdanel? I have seen you happiest in the years after you left him; why do you keep clinging to him? You left him. I wish you had never invited him to begin with, or that Father had never taught him to make swords... I wish Moringotto had slain him rather than the King, I wish you had never born his sons. Why did you not go with him?"

Nerdanel fought the impulse to rise and leave, struggled to shut away the hurt that bloomed up sharp-edged inside her. She was glad that Rainissë had not witnessed her at the gates of Tirion, how Fëanáro had been looming over her armoured and tall and imperious. And yet, underneath the mire of anger and hurt that had swallowed the man she loved and turned the clarity of his fire into something stinking and impure, he was telling her that he loved her still, loved her as much as he hated her choices.

Were you a true wife, as you had been until Aulë cozened you, you would keep all of them, for you would come with us.

Any notion she might have had of following him to convince him to turn homeward, and more than that, convince her sons, had turned her hope to ashes seeing their closed faces, brushing against their closed minds, apart from Umbarto’s that gaped afraid and wide-open…

“Perhaps I tried, she snapped, again blinking against tears. “And perhaps I stayed where I thought my help would be welcome, trying to understand why it all happened,” Nerdanel said, momentarily training her gaze away from her sister into empty air. “I do not know, not even knowing that Moringotho’s -Moringotto’s - hands moved the pieces… I do not know how all we built, how Aman itself could fall into Darkness so fast.”

“You are still trying to understand him? Then I have nothing more to say to you.” Rainissë unclenched her hands, both balled into fists on the table before her, and even in the flickering candlelight Nerdanel recognized smudges of blood oozing where her sister's fingernails had broken her skin.

“Let me see that, Rainë, please.”

“Dont.” She jerked her hand away from Nerdanel’s touch. “Please leave me alone, Nerdanel, I... I cannot in good conscience be in your presence now. Nor call you sister.”

Rainissë had - had always had - a tendency to lash out in ways that hurt when she was upset or afraid, but knowing that she did not truly mean it did nothing at all to soften the blow of her words. If Rainissë rejected any further attempt at understanding or explanation, as Fëanáro himself had, Nerdanel did not know what to say to her. More than any physical blow, it sucked what remaining breath and strength she had from her, and Nerdanel felt herself sag deeper into her chair.

“Is there anything that I am able to do to make -” Nerdanel began, hating how close to tears she sounded, but caught herself, reconsidering before she turned back to Rainissë against better instinct. “No, there is no way I can make amends. But there is one thing,” she added, “two things I would like to show you. I would like you to have one of them. Afterwards, decide what you mean to think about me and about us, and I will abide by it.”

Without looking back to see whether her sister was following, she rose and left the kitchen for the workshop wing of the house. Nerdanel paused at the door to her studio, listening for her sister’s light steps behind her. Nothing.

The room had grown cold and dark. She set to clearing out the warm ashes from the fireplace and rebuilding the fire, which had guttered out completely. Distress made her fingers shake so much that only the third strike with the fire steel caused the tinder to catch, and it took her longer still to coax the flames high and bright. When they were finally burning, Nerdanel retrieved the small effigy and kneeling set it on the floor before her, close enough to the fire for the heat to filter into the marble. In the flickers of the fire, the edges she had not smoothed away stood out in stark shadows, giving the whole figure a shifting, half-alive appearance.

“What did you mean to show me?”

Nerdanel jumped.

She had no longer expected Rainissë to follow at all, nor to come so quietly. After a brief look to see that she wore shoes, she gestured for her sister to step into the room. Debris from Fëanáro’s smashed bust still littered the ground, and the bust itself sat on the table where Nerdanel had left it, staring, still, with the surprised expression in what was left of its face.

“That is the first thing,” she said, gesturing at the cracks webbing over the marble. “Even trying to understand him… words cannot do justice how I feel about him now, but faced with him, this is what I could not help doing.”

“I...,” Rainissë stammered, moving closer and digging her fingers into the gouge over Fëanáro’s cheek that Nerdanel’s hammer had torn, “I wondered what you were doing. Mother and I heard noises from your room, and sometimes I… forget how much you rely on your art as… this.”

Rainissë wrapped her arms around herself and rocked back on her heels, still regarding the bust. In the light from the fireplace, Nerdanel could see her teeth glint where they dug into her lower lip, her sister’s typical contrite behaviour even though she would need time to admit it aloud.

“Yes,” Nerdanel said softly, lowering her gaze. “Thank you. I try to understand. I do not approve.”

She looked up when she heard Rainissë crunch over the splinters of marble from Fëanáro’s bust, and could have sworn she was grinding her heels in. She seemed to have discovered Nerdanel’s most recent work, and came to kneel by her sister. Nerdanel shifted aside to give her space, but just then Rainissë seemed not to mind.

Uncaring for the heat, Rainissë reached out and touched it, and even over the crackling of the fire Nerdanel could hear her sister’s sharp intake of breath, could hear the clacking of the fine teardrop-shaped pearls of smoky quartz that formed Niënna’s crown and cascaded down her back, as Rainissë ran her fingers over them and the near-translucent marble veil that covered the statue’s face, clinging to the stone skin beneath as though it were wet with tears.

Rainissë’s voice caught. “Niënna? She looks like…”

“Endurance in Hope... at least for now. I would like you to have her. Perhaps she will be a comfort to you, if you set her near a fire.”

“I wondered,” said Rainissë, “and it… doesn’t make it hurt any less, but they are doing what they are meant to do, are they not? And if we were not doing what is our task…”

“... then we would not be here.” Nerdanel said. “I try to remember it. It is such a simple idea, and far too hard to live by. I do not like to think that we are so caught up in the fate of the world, but… why else would we be here if not the purpose behind our lives?”

“I think… there is more than only one. Don’t keep Niënna hidden here. The people in the city may need some reminding of their own.”

“You think I should go back to Tirion?” Nerdanel asked, surprised by the suggestion. “I will not effect much there… it must be nearly empty now, with as many people in the streets and preparing to go as there were when I was on my road home. Barely anybody will have remained. Even Arafinwë of all of them was leaving.” She shook her head. “And I do not trust her tears will send the message they need. Qualmë-Tári is not who they need reminding of. And if any of Fëanáro’s supporters remained… I do not like the thought.”

“Qualmë-Tári? Nerdanel, what -”

“Wait,” Nerdanel said, and her word was punctuated by a sharp hiss. Neither of them had paid Niënna any attention. Now, in little volume at first, but swiftly growing into fat drops, tears began to roll from beneath the creases of Niënna’s veil, down into the fire where they extinguished the cinders closest to its edge.

Rainissë looked at her strangely from the side, and Nerdanel held still under her sister’s gaze as though pinned by it.

“No, I think that’s precisely what they need reminding of. Fëanáro may have gone and taken whom we love, but he will not win out when his fire founders. They may come to their senses and turn back. Or find healing… another way,” Rainissë said and slipped an arm around Nerdanel’s middle, drawing her close. “And we will be here, and endure that, too.”

“Yes,” Nerdanel said dully. “I hope so.”

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Chapter End Notes

Nerdanel's Niënna statue is based on an invention by Heron of Alexandria, ancient Greek polymath who (among many other inventions) also created weeping statues allegedly used in ceremonies with burnt offerings. The air in the sealed chamber will heat near the fire, and pressure will force the water upward through the ducts, making it look like the statue is weeping.

Were you a true wife, as you had been until Aulë cozened you, you would keep all of them, for you would come with us. A slightly altered line from the Legend of the Fate of Amrod.

Qualmë-Tári: One of the names of Niënna as per the early conceptions in the Lost Tales. It translates to Mistress of Death.