Stars, hide your fires by Lyra, Independence1776, , Fernstrike, , Raiyana

Chapter 4: Let not light see

he broken pieces of once-weaponry - the crafting was exquisite, still, despite only fragments of the original weapon remaining - had been gifted to her father’s father's mother's mother by Khalebrimbur, as a token of appreciation for the help she had provided in the bespelling of the stone that had become the Doors.

They spoke to her, as they had that distant ancestress, or so Fjelarún thought; if the ancestral augur had not found the jagged edges and shattered pieces intriguing, why had she passed them to her descendants for generations?
A faint voice, whispers on the cusp of hearing, and only if she focused on them, meditated over the scattering of broken twisted metal and scorched black wood.

And yet the pieces were insistent, imparting a feeling of flame to her, though they would not reveal their purpose.

Not harmful, yet not quite friendly, either, and Fjelarún spent many nights trying to glean scraps of imagery from the twisted - blade? It could have been, though she couldn't tell for certain - pieces of metal.

It was metal, surely, of the kind they called star-kindled, and the few marks that were still discernible made her fairly certain it had been forged in the First Age, well before the destruction of Belegost. The wood, she had learned, grew in the farthest southern reaches of the realms of Men, where they called it hbny; the Library contained only a single piece, dark as night and polished to a high gloss, which had been given to a long-dead King by an equally long-dead Orocarnul King.

Of course, the wood would have to have grown in the Land Under Sea back then, though it did not recall an origin unlike pieces of other woods she had touched from Nogrod, which had remembered their creator’s hand.

Perhaps the wood was too broken to hold a remembrance?

Eyeing the dark wood, Fjelarún sighed. The pieces of wood drew the light, becoming small pieces of darkness made solid, but the silvery-grey metal could hold a shine so bright it nearly hurt the eye.

Once, it must have been a truly magnificent creation.

"You were beautiful, weren't you?" she murmured, moving one piece to the other side of her work mat. "But why do you feel like fire?"

Her brother teased her about speaking with her work, but the ancient pieces weren't work to her, not really, even if she had a standing note from the Head Curator that she ought to hurry up and determine the provenue of the fragments so they could be displayed properly.

Except Fjela didn't really want to part with the fragments at all.

They felt like hers, in a way, ever since she'd first seen them in her grandfather's workroom, carefully laid out on a piece of blue velvet.

Her very own mystery. Her friends.

Fire crackles and roars.

"Burnt, yes," she muttered, turning a shard of metal over in her hand; one side showed a nearly pristine corner of an etched decoration, while the other remained as blackened as it had always been. "But you were never scared of fire... You welcomed it? It was... yes, there is purpose here, isn't there, my sweet?"

"I'm fairly certain you're losing your marbles, sister-mine," Gunnar chuckled from the doorway.

"If you understood its need to be heard, you'd be as intrigued as I am," Fjelarún snapped. "It's like it was made for something... something it never truly got to do, and the echoes of that purpose linger in the metal. I wish I knew the name of the maker."

"Some Elf, I imagine - but their records of those days are woefully incomplete," Gunnar shrugged. A historian by heart and trade, he often lamented the Elven propensity for not writing down accurate accounts; Gunnar's favourite rant was on the fallibility of Elven memories.

"So I have heard," Fjelarún replied drily, rubbing her thumb over the engraving in the metal as she tried to picture it as part of a whole. "There are Dwarven influences in these markings, however," she added, picking up a different fragment of metal and turning it to catch the worn lines in the light. "Not enough I would call it collaboration, perhaps - I feel no dwarven hand in this; Crafts from those days usually know the hands that made them."

"Not many Elves worked with our kindred in the First Age..." Almost despite himself - they'd gone over this before - Gunnar leaned in, one finger hovering over what might have once been a rune. "You're nearly limited to the ranks of Noldor, I imagine; the crafts made for the Bloody King were either entirely in the Belegost style, or made to mimic Elven foibles."

"Yet if it had been forged by the hand of his father, surely Khalebrimbur would have known its making - and not gifted it to our people." Looking at the two pieces, Fjelarún frowned.

An image of dark scales gleaming wetly beneath a dim sun floated across her mind, disappearing into mists as soon as she tried to hold on to it.