The Small and Secret Things by Dawn Felagund

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The House of Unexpected Light

This is one of those double-purpose series again. It is first--like all of the ficlets and series here so far--inspired in part by the word of the day. It is also a birthday gift for Anglachel in response to her request on HASA for a story about a building.

I've chosen Fëanor's house in Formenos. I will make a quick note on canon interpretation before offering the story. In the Felakverse that I use for my stories, Formenos did exist before Fëanor used it as a fortress for hiding his treasures. It began as a mining town that developed a reputation for serving as a safe haven for craftsmen with extraordinary talent and eccentric tendencies. Hence Fëanor's attraction to it. He spent summers here for many years before his exile from Tirion; hence his decision to live and store his treasures there during his banishment.

The note that Formenos was built after Fëanor's exile was made my Christopher Tolkien, and I don't consider it canon as I have never found writings from J.R.R. Tolkien backing it up. The word Formenos does mean "northern fortress," and that is the only--and rather flimsy, in my opinion--evidence behind CT's addition to the index that I have found.

So here are three drabbles and three double-drabbles about Fëanor's house in Formenos. Happy birthday, Anglachel!

I.

I began as earth and rock, and these remember the days before the Elves came. These remember the hooves of Nahar striking sparks upon them as Oromë chased his quarry. These remember the heavy boots of Aulë as he raised the hills, and these remember the tender hands of Yavanna making the wild things grow in a great green snarl, fed by Light.

These remember the first Elves and the houses they built of strong, black stone from my land. Formenos, the Noldor called it, a name that carried a shiver of unease they hadn't left behind, over the sea.

II.

When he came, he came alone but for his wife, who was red-haired and laughed a lot and held her swollen belly with two hands. He spread his arms wide and turned in the middle of me. "I will build us a home here, away from Tiron, away from the pressure and politics, away from--" She caught him and silenced his next words with a kiss.

They had to hasten back to Tirion, so imminent was she, but first he lifted great pieces of stone and marked the bounds of what I would become. He came not with architectural drawings, nor the tools for surveyance that his predecessors had brought. He measured with footlengths and placed his rocks on instinct alone. Hand in hand, he and his wife walked through me, and he named the rooms bound so far only in air and imagination.

"This is the parlor; here, the kitchen. This"--a kiss--"is Nelyafinwë's room."

He knew not--and she did not notice--how he'd cut his hands on the rocks that he'd placed. But I noticed. Throughout my confines, each path in my labyrinthine corridors was traced in his blood, soaked quickly--hungrily--into my earth.

III.

He brought his most trusted lords, and they built me with bare hands and crude tools alone, speaking little as they worked but sitting inside my walls at night--the sky their ceiling--drinking spirits stronger than wine that made their merriment lift as high as the heavens.

So from the first, I was filled with laughter.

He was long in building a roof. He lay at night with his wife and their year-old son between them, gazing at stars needle-sharp and brighter than those in Tirion.

"I would live like this forever," he said, "but for the coming rains."

IV.

The architects of Tirion scorned me. They liked not the illogical, winding hallways that might lead to nothing but a blank wall or stairs that dove out of sight into secret passages accessed by touching the correct stone or rooms tucked within rooms like hidden treasure. They liked not that I was built of the stone native to that land, that I hunched amid the hills, black like shadow congealed. They liked not the turrets that stabbed the sky with little regard for logic or beauty.

"All of those things are true," said Fëanáro to his father once. "But can they not see the beauty when, ascending the path and seeing the house like a blight in the valley beneath them, Nerdanel or maybe Nelyo open a curtain, and suddenly, light comes most unexpectedly from deepest darkness?"

From the beginning, I was a house of secrets, a house of unrestrained laughter, a house strong enough to bear even the temper of the notorious Fëanáro, a house of obsession with the blood of my creator beneath my foundation and pressed beneath my stones, a house with the audacity to have scarred his perfect hands.

I was a house of unexpected light.

V.

There is a Noldorin proverb that a house shall have a memory for each stone. Perhaps that is why Fëanáro--with the birth of each son--added to me. To make room for more memories.

Nelyo had his first kiss, Tyelkormo left to ride with Oromë, Macalaurë presented a ring to Vingarië here, in the courtyard. Curufinwë and his wife conceived their son. Carnistir met a girl called Taryindë. Ambarussa became enamored of the briar-tangled wilderness of my grounds.

But even scores of stones are finite. The end did come for me, for us.

My final memory: Finwë died here.

VI.

The tangle of my hallways might have saved him had he been less brave. Foolish. Many are my secrets, and the sons of Fëanáro had grown adept through the years at exploiting my hiding places. Would they have thought Finwë less courageous had he hidden beneath the stairs where Macalaurë fled his father's wrath over poor marks in mathematics? Or in the narrow space between rooms where Carnistir hid sweets?

Finwë tried to bar the Dark One from Fëanáro's door, and when he failed, the tumult of their battle laid my walls to ruin. In the labyrinth of hallways, he ran and the Dark One pursued. Their screams of rage and pain ran deep, to all my secret places. I quavered with each blow. The Dark One fell five times … but Finwë fell six.

The sparks from their swords were the only light in the darkness.

When the Dark One tore his sword from the barely-living body of the King, I was crumbling, and the sky was the ceiling once more. Only the stars were occluded behind the filth of Ungoliant. Darkness reigned.

And no one would want to live forever in the confines of what I have become.

Chapter End Notes

Today's Word:

quixotic kwik-SOT-ik, adjective:

  1. Caught up in the romance of noble deeds and the pursuit of unreachable goals; foolishly impractical especially in the pursuit of ideals.
  2. Capricious; impulsive; unpredictable.

Quixotic refers to the eccentric, generous idealism of Don Quixote, the hero of a satiric romance by Miguel de Cervantes.

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