A Spitting Image by oshun

Chapter 1

“She made images, some of the Valar in their forms visible, and many others of men and women of the Eldar, and these were so like that their friends, if they knew not her art, would speak to them; but many things she wrought also of her own thought in shapes strong and strange but beautiful.” --Morgoth's Ring, "The Later Quenta Silmarillion: Of Fëanor and the Unchaining of Melkor."

Nerdanel had worked hard while she was carrying their children--too hard he often thought. He sometimes discovered her pushing and pulling large blocks of stone or wood around. But after she had given birth and throughout the period of lactation, which had seemed never ending, with Carnistir in particular, she barely worked at all.

Their fourth son had been a difficult baby. She had taken to putting him to her breast as method of quieting him. He and Nelyo had also fallen into the habit of seeking her out while they were watching him and he began to whine or fuss and all but beg her to nurse him.

She fell asleep too early at night and there were times when Fëanáro actually felt as lonely and bereft as if she had truly left him. He longed for that carefree maid who had always been ready for an adventure, with her sharp, fierce intellect, and her joyful and hearty appetite for love-making. In those halcyon days, she could ride as hard and walk as long and far as he could.

But most of all he missed watching her work. She seemed to pour two years or more of her creative power into nurturing each of their sons to the exclusion of anything else. The only other things she seemed to enjoy crafting during those periods of their infancies and early childhoods were a series of endless, fiddling sketches and small paintings of their faces, and of their tiny hands and feet and their pearly perfect milk teeth. Eerily minute in detail, they manifested a hyperrealism that could be fascinating or repellant depending upon the beholder. ‘What kind of witchy magic is this?” a farmer in Formenos had asked when he saw one of them once. Fëanáro rather admired them in the beginning. And why would he not? They did, of course, reflect in exact miniature his own most beloved creations to that point.

There were hundreds of those pictures scattered around her work room, stuffed into cupboards, sideboards, and closets all around the house. He had found them with lists of supplies scrawled on their backs or perhaps someone’s first attempt at Tengwar in a childish hand.

He had framed many of the earliest ones she had made of Nelyo and Kanafinwë. He only kept one or two of his favorites of each of the younger boys. In later years, he had come to view them as an annoying distraction from her true work. She had clearly mastered the form to perfection, what more did she have to explore?

The night she refused to accompany them into exile in Formenos, as he had prepared to storm out of the house without her, chest aching with sorrow and rage and unshed tears burning his eyes, he yanked a worn bag out of a wardrobe in their bedroom and a small sketch of Carnistir as a toddler fluttered to the floor. It had seen better days. Its corners were dog-eared. It had a red wine stain ring on its back. There in glorious detail was the handsome face of little Carnistir, every eyelash perfect, the near invisible scar on his upper lip barely discernible. The pain was almost more than he could sustain. He stuffed it into his bag along with several pairs of socks and handful of smallclothes. How dare she do this to him--the mother of his children, his one and only love. He could only hope she would regret it and reconsider.