Scenes from the Glass Parlour by Elleth

Chapter 1

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The dark prowls outside and presses against the windows of Indis' house like a living thing with a breath and heartbeat and claws, and holed up inside the glass parlour, Nerdanel and Indis sit stiff with fingers clenched around each other's hands. Indis' hands will be bruised from Nerdanel's crafter's grip after, in the soft flesh between thumb and index finger, and beneath the gold ring that she wears.

Indis' hands have grown soft, but she has a spear leaning against the side of the divan, made of wood from Cuiviénen.

"Let it come," she says, defiant. Nerdanel breathes more easily.

* * *

But the dark stretches on and on and on through space and time, like a spiderweb that catches the light before it spills very far from the windows. "Light never was a finite resource before," Nerdanel says. They are running out of ways to keep the fire going, slowly; the room is bare except for things that will not burn. The divan's wooden legs have gone into the fire long ago, and they feel, both of them, that it is imperative to keep the fire blazing. Nothing else will do against darkness of such power.

Nerdanel, heavy-hearted, suggests Indis' library.

* * *

Nerdanel would not have suggested it if there were no hope to it. They are holding on to slender threads of time and promise spinning under their fingers; the Valar are furnishing the last of the Trees to be lights of heaven and dispel the dark.

Indis would not have agreed if the words in those books were lost irrevocably and no copies existed, but even so she and Nerdanel sit and read them until their words hang heavy in the room even after the book has gone into the fire. Then, lips to lips in consolation, they recite again.

* * *

The stacks in Indis' library dwindle to a few, stretch them out as they might. Indis weeps sometimes at the losses, saying that they remind her of the losses of Míriel, and of Finwë, and the comfort in Nerdanel's steady presence through the dark is greater than even Nerdanel's esteem while there was light. Nerdanel does not counter, although she could, with the bitter arguments in Fëanáro's house, broken things and bleeding hands when one of them gathered up shards, and Indis' name stood between them like a wall.

Compared, the dark is not nothing. But it is no worse.

* * *

The ink makes for acrid smoke, and Nerdanel claims that is the cause of her weeping when the tidings come to her. Three more books burn, and the gold ring that sat inviolate on her finger. It is still there when she clears the ashes and lets them cool; it goes into one of the makeshift urns. Indis holds her, and curls her fingers through her hair against the betrayal and the bitterness that want out, and "Do you not love me more? Did you not leave him for me?"

She says instead: "I am your queen. Stop your weeping."

* * *

The coldness in that command makes Nerdanel stifle her tears. In the glass parlour with its fireplace and shuttered windows where they stay because they do not trust the dark, the air is heavy with smoke and the number of times it was breathed; fog sweats inside the windows, and Indis' voice is a winter breeze in her face she relishes and welcomes. Because other words abandon her, she begins reciting one of the books she burned, beginning with the rows of sarati offset against the then-new tengwar and tehtar in a voice that only Indis' command keeps from failing.

* * *

After, when Nerdanel dozes, worn-out and dry-lipped, in Indis' arms, it takes only so much to see the imaginary ink stains on her lips and tongue. Indis kisses them away one by one. Nerdanel stirs, and although her eyes do not open, her lips do; her legs shift apart and she pulls Indis' wrist down where she would be touched. Indis' fingers come away slick and Nerdanel's high flush is beautiful. Indis regrets then the years and distance between their first meeting and this. Their kisses were not chaste, before this, but they always found resolve to cease, before.

* * *

Before, before, before.

The books that Indis has preserved to the last are the tenets of Vanyarin and Noldorin life, birth-kin and chosen people: Hymns to the Valar flowing over the pages like honey, spear-fighting manuals that glitter like stars, science and art that shimmer like marble statues, and Laws and Customs that weigh down that book like rocks. They do not need those books, Nerdanel argues. All things in them are known by heart by many, they are creature comforts more than anything.

They are tenets of before. Indis argues to burn them, as a token if nothing more.

* * *

"Would you burn your crown, also, then?" Nerdanel asks. "For is that not just such a tenet?"

"That is my birthright," Indis says. "From further before, when we had no books, and different laws. Would that I could go back to that time."

"To Cuiviénen there is no returning," Nerdanel admonishes, but it comes with a sigh and lack of heart, for she knows before that there were no such strictures, when days were dark under the clouds from the north, and the nights bright with stars, when Indis fought and hunted with her spear, and loved as she would.

* * *

They compromise: to recite and burn the books, and pray that the Valar are finished with their work soon, for once the darks enters the glass parlour, they both fear the worst: desolation if not death under what has forever been tainted by the Dark Foe - even seeming clear, it still is a living, prowling thing to snare them as a spider would two luminous flies.

They speak of remaking and rebuilding, too, when this is done: All of Indis' books, more rich and beautiful, and changed to commemorate that Aman will be a new land and they new people.

* * *

The Laws and Customs burn to ashes last, and their minds are swirling with formulas, poetry and history and genealogy. When Nerdanel fixes the crown in Indis' hair and lays her down before the final fire, she describes the hue of her eyes, star-bright as Cuiviénen, and the colour of her skin as the ancient golden earth across the plains, the wide jut of her hips as the bay where they waited for passage, and as Indis shudders apart under her lips and tongue, Nerdanel murmurs of arrival in Aman, in the light.

And through the dark, the moon rises.