Journeys of Vása by Dawn Felagund

I. Eclipse

Tilion, steersman of the Moon, considers his love for Arien of the Sun and her corruption by Melkor.

Please note! There is canonical rape mentioned in this vignette. It is not graphic, but I caution readers who are sensitive to this sort of material.

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But Tilion went with uncertain pace, as yet he goes, and was still drawn towards Arien, as he shall ever be.
"Of the Sun and Moon and the Hiding of Valinor"

I. Eclipse

When first did I know thee?

~oOo~

It is the nature of all thinking beings to ponder their origins. I am neither wise, nor a loremaster, but this I learned of my betters while still in youth, if the early days of my kind can be called that. I am an act of creation; a dream; an inspiration. I am not a being of flesh so much as a being of thought, a series of connections made in the mind of Eru Ilúvatar and brought into being with an explosion of stars.

So began she, and so I suppose that I knew her from the first, that awareness of my own existence was concurrent with awareness of hers. And need I say it? That I loved her?

For if I was the deliberate construction of an artist awakened, then she was the senseless and phantasmagoric stuff of dreams, that which makes little rational sense yet the memory of which sets one's heart racing. One cannot stare too long at light without the purity and beauty of that entity slowly eroding sight of all else until one sees only light, even when gazing upon darkest shadows. Yet no matter his joy, still, he is blind.

Thusly, I stared too long, too hard upon her--my Arien--in the early days of the Music, when our fates were decided in harmonies that sparkled amid the stars. An incarnate upon Arda, I saw none but her, though I gazed long at other objects of beauty and sought to love them: the star-frosted leaves of the deep forest; the sheen of Telperion upon a lake like someone had scattered a handful of diamonds thereupon, and one ambitious could set his feet upon the water and collect them.

I traveled in the company of Oromë by advisement of Irmo Lórien, who perhaps knew the pain of sorrow that one such as Arien--I knew--should be forever unobtainable to one such as me. That company was a joyful one, enamored of the heady sweetness of mead drank in profusion around leaping campfires. That company brought me laughter, yes, but never the perfect abandonment of joy, for centuries had passed, and I had not seen her, though prudent inquiry brought me word that she served the Vala Vána Tuivána, and she tended Laurelin.

At times, I needed solitude to think on her, for she brought forth emotions as raw as her beauty, and to the wide lakes of northern Aman, I added the salt of my tears. And it was in such a place--a being wrapped in shadow beneath the heavy boughs of the trees--that I first saw her, for she too sought escape from the rigors of her company, the endless routines of our endless days upon Arda. Mayhap, we should not have come forth but should have lived forever in the thoughts of our Father, in the dark spaces between the stars.

This thought would torment me, in the ages to come.

As I was a follower of Oromë, she became my quarry, and I sought disguise in the shadows to pursue her. As few of us did since the arrival of the Eldar, she dared to walk unclothed, wearing not the shape of the Eldar but raw and elemental, as she'd been conceived in the dreams of Eru Ilúvatar, a note in the Music synonymous with mine.

With arrow nocked, I imagined myself the guardian of her footfalls, and I watched the way that her Light cast the leaves in gold, the way that living things bowed toward her as though in reverence. I am the Guardian of Arien. I am the Guardian, then, of all that lives, for she serves and inspires Life, wherever she treads.

Yet in the tangled dark of northern Aman, far from Valinor and even the Light of the Trees, forbidden secrets lie. There was one whom she met in that forest, one whose heart she sought as I sought hers. One who was terrible in his beauty, a searing power that could express itself in no incarnate form; one who had been a screaming keening across the Music, all ears turned to him: Melkor.

Oh, but the fair words he wove for her, attesting to his affection and her beauty, and the glory of their combined Light was too much for one such as I to bear. In a ring of trees they sat, and I at the periphery, and their radiance filled the clearing but made long the shadows of the trees, until they were a single bright spot in a ring of darkness.

With my eyes pressed shut against the assault against them, I huddled in the thick blackness of the shadows, arrow still nocked but both hands trembling and threatening to send it sailing into the trees. How I would come to hate myself for my cowardice, for I could have faced them, even if I was blinded forevermore; I could have loosed that arrow at a deserving target, and saved my Arien.

His words were fair, and he spoke of plighting their troth, and she in her enthusiasm answered of vows spoken before Manwë and Varda, but this he refused, and his voice became angry. Nay, he wanted to espouse her now, in the darkness with only the stars--and Eru Ilúvatar--to bear witness, to eschew propriety and tradition and custom that would give unto his brother (so he thought) power undeserved.

"He will forbid it, inebriated with power and beloved of my keeping station as his thrall," said Melkor, "and he will force us to part, and it will be akin to having my heart torn from my chest, to forsake you." His syrupy pleas invoking clichés without truth, for he has no heart: none of us do.

And so she was not convinced, and she resisted, and in that darkness forest far from the earreach of all save me--the craven recreant cowering in the shadows--he forced her to wedlock. She made not a sound but I sat nonetheless with both hands clasped to my ears, bow and arrow discarded upon the ground, and the flare of fire that she became as she fought to resist him singed my hair, and never again would it grow, marking my shame, leaving my flesh pallid and gray, that of one who keeps to the shadows and fears the Light. When at last I stumbled into the clearing, many days had passed, and the trees had been withered by the onslaught, and there Oromë found me after the passage of many years, in a ring of flowers and grasses sprung up from the char, watered by my tears.

It was an act of both pity and shame of me--and these proclivities except at their fanatical extremes are versions of the same--that the Valar trusted me to guide the vessel Rána across the firmament. I wept with gratitude for their mercy in allowing me to be unbound from this imperfect world, to soar instead against a backdrop of unclouded stars, to occupy the place near to my origin, where once, she was sung into existence beside me, and she was still free, and pure.

I am lonely here, and I do not pretend otherwise. From my new vantage point, I gaze upon the dark fur of forest at the northernmost parts of Aman, and I imagine that I can hear the laughter of Oromë's company again and taste the mead, but simple joys such as those are lost for me, if in fact they ever existed.

And soon, she will join me.

My Arien, as the Music portended: my beloved and my foil, in opposing orbit from me, yet I will strive against the bindings that hold me to Rána; I will struggle until I nearly falter from weariness, and I face her full on as I could not before. I face her with courage, without fear of blindness, for though I may be blinded, what else will I need but memory of the face of my love?

But she has been forever tainted by Melkor, and she burns. She hurts all that she touches, without meaning it. Her nurturance edges always on cruelty, and many she has goaded to grow, only to wither and burn in the end. Yet this time, I will not be dissuaded. This time, I will come to her as I should have before until our paths overlap high in the sky. She burns me, hurts me, but I care not. I love her.

And beneath us, the world marks our passage from the shadows as a corona of light and, at its core, a heart of darkness, and momentarily, I spare them from her. We are beautiful, I think. We are beautiful in our love, but they know it not. For to look upon us, they would be blinded.

She is rising now, my love: a rim of fire, pushing free of the horizon.

II. Innocence Reclaimed

Mahtan on the creation of the Sun and the revelations of the new light.

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But the flower and the fruit Yavanna gave to Aulë, and Manwë hallowed them, and Aulë and his people made vessels to hold them and preserve their radiance.
"Of the Sun and Moon and the Hiding of Valinor"

II. Innocence Reclaimed

I don't think that, in hundreds of years of service, I have ever heard the Aulendili fall into such utter silence. Restive hands lie flat upon the balcony railing; busy eyes content themselves with staring at the featureless horizon. I wonder if all are tormented, as am I, by endless thoughts turning and unspooling and forming themselves anew into dark designs. I wonder if their hearts are as peaceful as their faces. Mine is not.

My palms sweat ceaselessly and so I force them to lie motionless upon the railing lest I betray my unease in damp hand-shaped patches left upon the stone. Perhaps that is why we are so calm on a sudden, I think, and I cover the bark of laughter as a cough.

"Blessings," someone replies mildly.

"And gratitude," I answer.

The recent weeks have been busy beyond compare, even for the Aulendili, for whom rest and reprieve are unfamiliar concepts. Usually, though, we are free to follow our inspiration wherever it may lead, and our efforts are rarely guided and never come under order. Yet this time, Aulë gathered us all, and the forges were silent and the fires allowed to cool. Darkness huddled in the corners and cast frightening shadows from tools designed to facilitate acts of creation. Suddenly, though, Creation seemed to walk hand in hand with Destruction, and those swaying shears might have cut tin or cut flesh; the hammers might bend metal to our will or break bones that resisted it. These are the thoughts of a people that have succumbed to kinslaying.

We stood silent as we do now when Aulë told us of his idea. Mostly silent: Noldor have busy hands and busier tongues, says the proverb, and there is truth in that. Two lamps, Aulë said, I seek to build, and immediately, one spoke up: Have we not tried that already? With Ormal and Illuin? and I winced at the pride in that, so Noldorin. We have tried nothing. Ormal and Illuin fell long before our people awoke; neither the triumph nor failure of their creation has anything to do with us.

Not like Ormal and Illuin, answered Aulë, for these new lamps will be held aloft in the firmament by naught save air.

There was a sniffle of laughter. Impossible! we loved to cry to the most outlandish suggestions made by our peers. Many times, behind Fëanáro's back, we made such proclamations, when he claimed to hold the secret to putting light in stone, for example. But I'd never been able to join fully in the laughter, for I had believed what he said: that nothing undone was impossible. Many times, he'd proven this, collecting impossibilities the way that some might pearls or colored bits of glass: the death of Míriel Þerindë, the seven sons, the Silmarils. What happened at Alqualondë. The myriad impossibilities, first cradled in our hands, then staining them, scarring them.

He would walk among us, deserving of the honor of Aulendil, certainly, but unwilling to take it, becoming the object of scorn and awe as a result. For Fëanáro saw no honor in servitude, only in creation for the sake of creation, no matter the consequences.

He would not have laughed at the idea of two vessels of Light traversing the sky. He would have set his hands and mind to the task without a word.

Aulë did convince us, eventually. I found that I needed more convincing than usual; the time between my first contact with the precocious Fëanáro--a letter received inquiring about my techniques for making cobalt alloys--and my loss of hope in him (that was long in coming; even after first rumor of the kinslaying, I maintained a delusion of his innocence: nothing undone is impossible!), I seem to have developed a sort of skepticism. Finally, I sometimes think. I convinced myself that my skepticism of Aulë's claims was more of the same; by his patience with us and our endless questioning, ever edged with a note of mockery, I suspect that he understood our need for doubt after centuries of too much trust.

Now, we wait. We wait for reason to trust again, to give in to the comforts of faith. We hope--wordlessly, privately, each of us--that with the return of Light, maybe we will also return to a time of innocence when the word of a Vala was the most solid proof that we needed to prove that vessels so heavy that twenty strong horses were required to move them will not only be set alight but will be borne upon the air light as smoke.

The first, Rána, has already gone. Like a silver balloon, he has crossed the sky above us seven times, and we watched in wonder. But it is Vása whom we now await, the one that--Aulë says--will dispel the shadows for hours of each day and return Valinor to Light and splendor.

Innocence reclaimed, I would whisper as I worked on my share of the vessel.

But we have grown accustomed to the dark. No longer do we stub our feet on furniture and hesitate upon the paths. I have become used to working by lamplight; reading by candle flame. This comfort in the dark, I realize suddenly, belies our intention to return to innocence. Originally creatures of the dark, we found Light. When Light was banished, we found that we quickly adapted again to shadow, like the Light was unnecessary in the first place.

I am suddenly afraid to see what we have become, in the shadows of our own making.

But it is too late now. The Pelori are vicious points fringed in gentle light, and it is increasing. Long shadows spill across the land. And there it is: a vessel of fire borne upon the air as light as a breeze, as Aulë portended.

I glance at the faces around me: wife and daughters, friends beloved across the centuries. My mentor, Aulë, akin to a father to me when my own father had chosen to remain in the treacherous dark of the Outer Lands. It has been so long since I last saw their faces in the light.

But the familiar countenances free of shadow and care are gone. Nerdanel's eyes are haunted, with dark shadows beneath. Aulë's face betrays no joy at all but rather dread: accomplishment precedes failure. Vása is not even once across the sky, and already, he is awaiting her fall.

And I know then, in the secret darkness of my heart: This light is different. The Trees are dead. Our innocence is gone.

And it shall never be reclaimed.

III. Bureaucracy

Fingolfin tells a young loremaster of crossing the Ice and the first sunrise.

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But as the host of Fingolfin marched into Mithrim the Sun rose flaming in the West; and Fingolfin unfurled his blue and silver banners, and blew his horns, and flowers sprang beneath his marching feet, and the ages of the stars were ended.
"Of the Return of the Noldor"

III. Bureaucracy

He is an earnest-faced youth, reminiscent of my son Findekáno when he was still innocent and young, and enamored of knowledge for the simple sake of knowing it. The meeting was arranged by Findekáno, who seeks ever to assuage his brother Turukáno as a convoluted means (I suspect) of earning forgiveness for Nelyafinwë. The lad is a student of lore under Turukáno's esteemed tutelage; his name is Pengolodh.

He bows to me, very proper, though he is hasty in getting to work and does not spend much time on pleasantries. Findekáno has likely told him that I have little time to spare; it is a late-winter morning of short, dark days, and I suspect that Pengolodh will be dismissed before noon. He has not much time at all. "I am compiling remembrances and lore about the crossing of the Helcaraxë," he says, taking a proffered seat and licking the tip of his quill. "I am interested in your recollections, my lord." He is tall; his eyes are vivid and gray. I think of Curufinwë in his youth, with the brilliance but not the madness.

"The Helcaraxë," I muse. "That is a broad subject to cross in a single meeting." Arafinwë, I think, would have been amused by my pun. Curufinwë would have rolled his eyes.

Pengolodh lets slip a sniffle of laughter before clearing his throat to cover it. Loremasters are dignified and not prone to laughter. Doubtlessly, he thinks this, and I imagine that he will berate himself for his faux pas later. "Perhaps, my lord, we shall begin with what means you took to assure the survival of your people?"

I nod. "That is a reasonable place to begin, certainly." I pause. His quill hovers above the parchment; his eyebrows are knit and almost a single entity. Inside his leather shoe, I can see his toe tapping, and I think again of Findekáno, who in his youth so often bore my wrath for his impertinence. Turukáno had the poise and patience that his brother lacked. This lad must be brilliant indeed, I find myself thinking, for Turukáno to bear his peccadilloes long enough to serve as his tutor. Or--with a smile--maybe that is why Findekáno favors him.

I relieve his anticipation and begin to speak. "I survived the Helcaraxë," I say, "because always have I been extraordinarily good at bureaucratic tedium."

He chuckles but--as I noted earlier--he is very proper and quickly realizes his blunder, though this one will not be so easily disguised behind a cough. His eyebrow lifts. "Bureaucracy … my lord?"

"Bureaucracy, Pengolodh," I answer, and I think that this is a lesson that he will not learn from the elegantly wrought lore of Rúmil and Elemmirë--certainly not Curufinwë--as I explain, "Note this: at the heart of every Noldorin drama is bureaucracy."

~oOo~

I mean it half as a joke--Arafinwë would be proud; Curufinwë would be shocked (though he would hide it well)--but there is truth in it too. I possessed not my eldest brother's skilled hands and swift wit, nor did I possess my younger brother's easy affability and effortless cheer. I used to think often that Arafinwë and Curufinwë were a delight to my father, while I was useful. They were the intricate paintings gazed upon with love and the wine sweet upon the tongue; I was the straight-backed chair necessary for prolonged and comfortable enjoyment of both.

There was honor to be had--in theory--in being chosen as my father's chief counselor (whilst pretending that I did not know that Curufinwë had been offered it first), but the reality was that it was a sustained misery punctuated by occasional dilemmas and triumphs, the latter of which could never be fully enjoyed against a backdrop of all else gone awry or outright wrong. Nonetheless. This, I explain to young and earnest Pengolodh, was the Helcaraxë. At any given moment, it was difficult to pinpoint any complaint that was decidedly grievous in nature versus merely irksome. It was very cold, of course, and windy, and the snow tended to blow in our eyes, and once or twice, my nostrils froze shut before I learned to keep my face buried in my muffler. But the Eldar are hardy--the Noldor hardier yet--and Turukáno had seen before our departure from Tirion that everyone brought furs and blankets since we could not anticipate the climate of the Outer Lands. Being dark, certainly (we thought), it would also be cold. We were hungry too, but we had coimas in considerable quantities, and while rather unsatisfactory gustatorily, it gave us energy enough to move a fair distance each day across the Ice. Then, of course, there were the emotional travails: the resentment felt towards those who had brought too much or not enough; the grief of those who had left loved ones behind; the tendency toward unrelenting despair after weeks of cold and dark upon a featureless, forbidding landscape.

"And that is where bureaucracy proved useful," I explain to Pengolodh, "in providing a distraction. With enough distraction, there is no room for despair." I watch his quill scratch my words into Tengwar.

Each person had an appointed role. Some distributed food while others took a headcount at various pre-determined points during the march. Others took excess furs and blankets and saw them given where they would be useful. Still others yet were responsible for pitching rugged tents, others yet for taking them down, and still more others for maintaining record of whose turn it was to use them. We had a few healers who were assigned to care for the frailest and most despondent among us, with the goal of making them at least able to be useful. Distracted.

Of course, there were dilemmas along the way. The ice broke beneath our feet once. Elenwë was lost, as were others.

We kept marching. We kept ourselves fed and sheltered and warm and cared for; we kept to our routine and did not stop, even for grief. Some cried in the night. I appointed a few to tear our unused summer robes into handkerchiefs and see them distributed because frozen tears often led quickly to frostbite, and our healers' efforts were spread thin as it was without asking them to tend afflictions brought on by lack of care.

I explain all of this to Pengolodh, who has stopped writing and regards me with his mouth open a little. When he sees me watching him, he clicks it quickly shut and begins scribbling again in haste, although I have the feeling that he does what Arafinwë used to do when wishing to look busy at lessons while really lost in completely unrelated thought and simply writing his name over and over and over again.

At last, he sets down his quill. "That sounds bleak," he says.

"It was," I agree. "But there again was a lesson learned during the interminable councils of my father's court, or endless engagements with stacks of ledgers, or ceaseless debate about seemingly meaningless minutia: That the bleakness--even the agony--is worthwhile in the end. That we believe that our slow march has a destination. 'A candle in the window,' we used to say in Tirion, meaning that one can withstand a long journey by thinking of the house at the end of his road, and the candle in the window. And, of course, all that stands behind it."

"Or we say that the Sun will rise again," says Pengolodh with a small smile.

"Indeed," I say, "the Sun rose for the first time as we stepped off from the Ice. That was what we walked toward: new light, new beginnings. New hope."

"A candle in the window," says Pengolodh wistfully.

"And all that stands behind it: that Light trumps Darkness. That the Valar failed us, yes, but learned the error of their ways and gave light to our road. Saved our kin from this dark land from life lived forever in the shadows. That Noldorin hands need not grip swords and be stained by blood but can also give light and beauty to the world. That forgiveness is ours to have."

Pengolodh taps his quill against his lips and thinks on what I have said. He is young; he has never known a day without a sunrise, and I can see by the dreamy distance in his eyes that he imagines himself beside me upon the Ice, standing in a throng of my silent followers as we watch the new light arc slowly over us. Silver ice is ablaze with reflected fire. We lower our hoods and shuffle off our cloaks and bask in warmth of a sort that we have long forgotten. Beneath our feet, the ice recedes, and flowers unfurl from the barren earth.

"The first sunrise," Pengolodh muses. "What sight it must have been." He finds my gaze with startled eyes still so full of youth. "And what an undertaking as well! Imagine the bureaucracy it must have taken to accomplish that!"

And we laugh together, loudly, until a startled Findekáno appears to make sure that everything is well. Even then, all of my pride and poise cannot banish the levity from my voice. But then, why should I allow it to? Why else have we come here, if not to laugh freely?

Outside, the noon Sun sits high in the sky, doing her slow work on melting the icicles outside my window.

---

Chapter End Notes

The following are translations of the Quenya names used in this story (in order of appearance): Findekáno: Fingon Turukáno: Turgon Nelyafinwë: Maedhros Curufinwë: Fëanor Arafinwë: Finarfin

Author's Notes

Just what it sounds like: notes and references for the more obscure canon that inspired this piece.

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Author's Notes

Since I use a bit of canon more obscure than that found in The Silmarillion, then I will provide the passages that have inspired these vignettes for those who are interested. For "Eclipse," I was largely inspired by the fragments found in Myths Transformed, from the HoMe, volume 10. Near the end of his life, J.R.R. Tolkien became dissatisfied with the idea that the technologically advanced Eldar should succumb to the "primitive" mythology of a flat Earth, while also noting some of the scientific problems with his early versions of the Tale of the Sun and Moon. (For example, during the interim between the fall of the Lamps and the rising of the Sun, nothing would have grown in Middle-earth, yet life still existed and, presumably, the Elves and other kelvar still needed to eat.) As such, he began undertaking an overhaul of his mythology that was never finished and that Christopher Tolkien did not include in the published Silmarillion, although it was certainly his father's final word on the subject.

The idea that Melkor "ravished"--raped and corrupted--Arien, the Maia who drove the Sun, first emerged in Myths Transformed:

But the Sun is feminine; and it is better that the Vala should be Aren, a maiden whom Melkor endeavoured to make his spouse (or ravished); she went up in a flame of wrath and anguish and her spirit was released from Ea, but Melkor was blackened and burned, and his form was thereafter dark, and he took to darkness.

Since none of the ideas of the Sun and Moon mythology seem to have ever achieved final form, I hope I will be pardoned for shamelessly blending the concepts from Myths Transformed with those from The Silmarillion.

In "Innocence Reclaimed," the concept of the Aulendili comes from the essay "The Shibboleth of Fëanor," found in HoMe 12. Aulendil (> Aulendur) is defined here as,

'Servant of Aulë': sc. one who was devoted to that Vala. It was applied especially to those persons, or families, among the Noldor who actually entered Aulë's service, and who in return received instruction from him.

Mahtan is identified here as "an Aulendil." Now would the Aulendili have been responsible for crafting the vessels of the Sun and the Moon? Canonically, this is never stated outright; however, I think it’s a logical connection that can be made.