#elenwe

houndsofvalinor-art:

Turgon, Elenwë. The Helcaraxë.

12 x 8" watercolor, salt, sepia ink, masking fluid, gouache

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lintamande:

(act i.)

act ii.

They ventured out, in that first month, only a few hundred yards onto the Ice. People were going to die – Findekáno knew it, Nolofinwë knew it, the host now dug in on the shores of Araman knew it very well. But no one has died yet, and in a way it paralyzed them, waiting for it. They inched along the sheer ice faces and rolled logs across to test where it can bear the weight and were painstakingly, excruciatingly, careful. 

Climbing the ice was not in fact particularly difficult – not as difficult as Findekáno had imagined it, certainly. They had broken down the wagons into thick ice picks. You lit a fire at the bottom of a cliff and left the ice picks in it, to absorb the heat, so later they would slide like butter into their positions on the cliff. You stood there and held them, heat eating its way through your mittens and hand, and waited for the ice to freeze again around your new addition. And then you climbed down, grabbed another, climbed up, did it again. They were testing the best pick shapes and the best distances; the cliffs on the lip of Araman were studded with climbing holds, and with climbers.

“At this rate -” Findekáno said to his father -

“It would take us ten Years,” his father said grimly. “We won’t proceed at this rate, we learn more every day.”

Keep reading

The hearing was held in the sleek glass amphitheater everyone called Nolmë, in the remodeled left wing of the palace. When he heard that the location had been set, Father harrumphed.  

“Where would you have held it?” I said. The conversation was near to treason but wasn’t everything, these days?

“Aroranto,” said Father, of course. Aroranto was built in soft white marble and accented in sandstone; it had to be resurfaced every few centuries. It was the first permanent gathering space we’d built in Valinor; the palace itself had sprung up around it. The Trees were visible from the lip of Aroranto’s stage. Twice a day they cast the whole space in dazzling white light. Aroranto was a good place to hold a hearing in which the King would reaffirm his commitment to our homeland.

Nolmë was a good place for the King to yield more ground to the malcontents who wanted to leave it.

We arrived early. Father wanted to talk to the King before the hearing began. Findo disapproved – I could read it in his movements, graceless and malcontent. Findo wasn’t sure he wanted Father to persuade the King. Findo didn’t know which side he was on.

I envied him that – not the indecision, but the space he had to express it. If I declared myself for departure from Valinor it’d be the buzz for a week, of course. Nolofinwë’s youngest son jumps ship for one bound to the Outer Lands, the billings would crow. The ones that favored Fëánaro would phrase the headline a little differently: “Another one of Finwë’s grandchildren comes out in favor of departure”, it would read. They avoided using my father’s name whenever possible.

Father would never forgive me. Mother would cry.

But it wouldn’t really matter.

Findo mattered, and so he walked his tightrope of indecision amidst the most intense crosswinds that this tranquil continent could muster, and I envied him. Resented him, for being visibly troubled and hesitant here where we needed a united front, but envied him. 

Turvo was here too, of course, and his wife, and their daughter.  No indecision there, and if I was reading the quirks in Elenwë’s expression correctly, no patience for Findekáno’s.  I tried to read Turvo’s face and gave up; he was staring at his daughter with unqualified adoration. She skipped down the steps, beaming, watching with fascination as her reflection skittered across the polished floor. The King waved at her, and she waved back.

Point to the House of Nolofinwë, I thought.

 “You look dead on your feet, and the politicians haven’t even started sucking the air out of the room yet,” Turvo said, and hugged me, and then lifted up Itarillë to toss into Findo’s arms. She shrieked as if in terror; Findo pretended he’d barely caught her, marveled at how heavy she was and how much she’d grown, and then tossed her back. The perfect image of an adoring family.

Not that it was fake, exactly.

I shook my head. Not that it was fake at all.  

The King smiled at us again. Father caught his eye and descended to go speak to him.

Second point to the House of Nolofinwë, I thought. Of course, the opposition wasn’t even in the room yet.

“She’s our excuse to leave when the hearing gets tedious,” Elenwë said, sitting down next to me. “I have strictly instructed her to cry and be fussy when she gets tired, and to refuse to be calmed.”

“Should I arrange a friend to come dashing in with an urgent message if Laurelin starts waning and we’re still stuck here?” I said. I was sure I’d find it so by the end of the day, but at the moment it was hard to imagine the hearing would be tedious.

“Once we’re out we’ll send for you,” she said. 

“Not for Findo, though,” said Turvo, settling next to her. “You make your bed, you’d better lie in it.” 

“Are you sure you trust me in here alone?” Findo asked him, affecting an air of gravity which was thoroughly ruined by Itaril swinging from his braids. “One seductive glance from across the aisle and I’ll surely renounce you all.”

“’Rissë’s coming later, I’ll tell her to keep an eye on you.”

“All that means is that it’ll take two seductive glances from across the aisle.”

“They don’t make eye contact with us anymore anyway,” Turvo said, abruptly no longer joking. “They’re not giving you credit, you know, for trying.” Findo’s shoulders stiffened. Itarillë caught the shift in mood and allowed herself to be deposited on the floor. 

Point to the House of Fëanáro, I thought, and tugged bitterly at the threads coming loose on my sleeves. They’d struck the blow in absentia, but then, wasn’t that how they’d dealt most of their damage all along? 

The amphitheater was filling up. Father was speaking passionately to the King. He wasn’t making much effort to keep his voice down, but over the noise of the crowd I couldn’t hear him. People swept in through the doors. Some of them looked fiery and impassioned, some of them looked tense and on edge, some of them had clearly come to enjoy the show. 

“The problem,” Irissë’d said to me a few months ago, “is that the Ñoldor don’t have any problems, and we love drama and get bored and invent ourselves some.” 

“You’d think we could have invented some that hurt a little less,” I’d said. 

“You can’t let it get to you. It’s – well, it’s well worth getting mad at them, it’s not worth stayingmad at them, right? Get drunk enough to slap someone in the face while only causing a mild scandal, then call it even.”

But irreverent flippancy was Irissë’s own tightrope, and I couldn’t walk that one either. 

 Findo sat down next to me with an unhappy smile on his lips. I wondered if he’d be happier across the aisle.

“Must be nice not to care,” I muttered.

“You’re misreading me.”

“You’re treating this like it’s a - a debating clubinstead of a verdict on whether we’ll make decisions by rallying mobs to our side. It doesn’t matter how you feel about emigration, you should realize -”

“Arakáno, I agree with you.”

“Then why the hell are you so hesitant-”

“What’s Ata doing?” 

“Convincing the King that calls to dissolve the state and leave the continent are not the hijinks of an endearing freethinker, they’re treason,” I said. “Presumably.”

“Losing argument. If Fëanáro started calling to exile us all to Valimar Grandfather’d still say ‘it’s a destructive way of expressing legitimate frustrations, and I don’t want to respond in a way that delegitimizes them’.”

I looked at him, startled. Findekáno still sympathized with our cousins, at least outwardly. He’d attended the dramatic rally in King’s Square that had finally prompted Finwë to call this hearing. “Fëanáro wouldn’t do that,” I said.  I sounded unpersuasive because I was unpersuaded. Fëanáro wouldn’t do that unless it occurred to him while he was feeling threatened, in which case he definitely would.

“Fëanárois doing that. Or his supporters are, and they’re not acting alone - which is itself what makes me uneasy, really. I’ve never known Fëanáro to actually play the game, and now he is.  And those are his chosen stakes – he wants us out of Tirion. The last few months have been a steady drumbeat of that from their side – they’ve been saying the strife is the natural consequence of having the Ñoldor ruled by people who aren’t. That Father’s a Vanya, and the King might as well be, and that we’re growing more confident in our ability to keep those rowdy Noldor in line, less need for pretenses…” 

Elenwë, on my other side, raised one eyebrow just an inch. 

“Yes,” Findo said to her.

My lips were numb. “You didn’t mention this because –“

“I got the sense you haven’t made up your mind about emigration yet, and I didn’t want you to make a call like that out of a sense you needed to prove -” 

“Iam a Noldo.” 

“I know.”

“More than them-”

“I know.” 

“The selfish fucking –” 

“Not here,” both my brothers and my sister-in-law said at once, quellingly.

I bit my tongue.

“So the question is,” Findo continued, “what is Ata doing? He could have talked to Finwë last night, why here, why now? Because this is exactly what Fëanáro is afraid of, exactly the story he’s convinced his followers of, and –”

The hush rippled down from the top of the stairs. Even children fell silent. Itarillë, who’d been silent anyway, fell very still. The King looked up. My father did not. Fëanáro walked in. He’d come to the hearing in armor, elegant but unmistakably not ceremonial. He was carrying a sword. The disconcerting energy that always hovered around him felt menacing, here.

Father hadn’t stopped talking. He’d raised his voice, if anything. In the sudden silence of Fëanáro’s entrance it echoed loud and clear. “King and father,” he said, and he’d chosen to dress in robes that nearly matched Finwë’s, today, why hadn’t I noticed that, “wilt thou not restrain the pride of our brother, Curufinwë, who is called the Spirit of Fire, all too truly? By what right does he speak for all our people, as if he were King?” 

The room was utterly frozen. I could imagine what I’d see if I could turn my head to catch Findekáno’s face, but my eyes were glued to the dias in front of me, to my father as he bowed and took his own father’s hand, as he straightened to stare intently into the King’s eyes. “Thou it was who long ago spoke before the Quendi, bidding them accept the summons of the Valar to Aman. Thou it was that led the Noldor upon the long road through the perils of Middle-earth to the light of Eldamar. If thou dost not now repent of it, two sons at least thou hast to honour thy words.”

A thousand people inhaled at once. Findekáno’s hands went white and bloodless. Elenwë’s’ tightened around her daughter. 

And Fëanáro drew his sword.

(act i.)

(act ii.)

Three people had died so far. The first had fallen in a climbing accident on the south face into an ugly crevice three hundred meters deep. They’d tried a rescue. They’d tried for two weeks, even after she’d stopped screaming. The second and third had been on a scouting trip that had been caught in a terrible storm. The rest of the scouting group had not even realized they were missing members until they stumbled, blinded and dying, into camp. Arakáno had been on that trip. He had not laughed since, and worked twice as hard. 

Three people had died so far and they kept going, kept scouting, kept hunting, kept digging. It felt wrong. Death felt like the sort of thing that should drag the stars to a halt in the sky. A life – a whole person, all those memories and fickle preferences and inside jokes and daring dreams – how could the world march on, after that? At least Finwë’s death had accompanied the end of the world. Every death ought to. 

I’ve killed people, Findekáno reminded himself. He did not do so very often because there was work to do and the thought always left him numb again, inside and out, in a way that the cold never could.

The work marched on. They got swifter, more experienced, more confident. Araman’s mists still howled around their tents, still choked them, still shifted to reveal only a black and nightmarish landscape of jagged glaciers. But they knew the glaciers, now, and were not afraid of them. The work marched on. Fear and grief and anger had been unwelcome guests, but now they were constant companions and sometimes almost friends.

And there was progress. Through whatever kind of magic that kind of thing required, there were fish in the seas, and seals. As many as there’d been before the Darkening, even. You could drill a hole through the ice, or melt one, and catch them with a few hours’ patience and some rapidly-growing expertise. At last they had a source of food that could be expected to be reliable even once they’d left Araman behind. It was enough they would not starve, if not enough they would not be hungry.

Ulmo was rapidly becoming Findekáno’s favorite Vala; he seemed to be the only one doing his job. Though the Pelóri were still inching upwards, and perhaps that was what occupied the rest of them. It was too optimistic, perhaps, to imagine that the Valar were making a deliberate effort not to let them starve out here, but certainly Ulmo, who had every reason to hate him, was not withholding the fruits of his realm.

“We’re not the only ones who have need of it,” Angaráto said, when Findekáno expressed this. They were at the first ice camp, three days’ travel north and west of Araman, dug into the cliffs themselves, smug and cozy and satisfactory as a waystation for the host. The plan was to establish fifty of these, stretching across the ice like jewels on a necklace on Endorë’s breast.

“You think they’d have the nerve to fish?” he said to Angaráto, hanging up his cloak. Carefully, so it would dry instead of freezing.

“No,” his cousin said, his tone going brittle, as if he hadn’t been the one who’d brought up them.

“Me neither.” Findekáno sat down and started rebraiding his hair so he could pluck the ice crystals out of it.

“They’re not the only ones on that shore,” Angaráto said, and Findekáno suddenly grasped why he’d been annoyed a moment earlier – he hadn’t been thinking of the house of Fëanáro after all, he’d sincerely resented being reminded of them - “Elwe’s ruling a thriving kingdom among those who were left behind, Ossë said –”

“He did? Recently?”

“No, this was decades ago. They’re not speaking to us now.”

“But you think Elwe and the rest of his people are still all right.”

“If we get there in time.”

“My father intends to announce a departure from Araman in two weeks, once the third camp is finished.”

“I know.”

“We can’t help anyone when we arrive there if we lose half our host on the way.”

“I’ve communicated to your father that I have no objections to his intended departure date.”

Findekáno tied off his hair, though it was only half-braided. “Angaráto, I know I have said this before, but – I regret it very deeply, ever day, and I will more when I have time to come to terms with it –”

“I know,” he said, “and you want the same things as I do, from here forward. Which means we can work together, which is what matters.”

Nod. Pause. “You think Ulmo and Ossë and Uinen are keeping the seas alive for our sundered kin?”

“They’ve been doing it for thousands of years. And – if it is for us, well – I have sometimes thought - the seas were calm, the night the other host departed.”

“I remember,” Findekáno said.

“They want us on the other shore. They want us in the fight. Not for our sakes, I don’t think, but that’s fine, because that’s not why I’m fighting.”

“Me neither.” But he headed out, a minute later, because under his cousin’s eyes the fish tasted like ash.

The camp was vast – it had to be – and three hundred figures flitted around it, testing embankments and moving supplies and packing down drifts of snow that were ten meters high. The winds were picking up, but not in the way that threatened a storm.

Under happier circumstances he would have delighted in this; it would have been a challenge perfectly suited to his strengths, to his skills, to his daring. The light of Aman burned in their veins. No incarnate creature had ever been better suited to this. But under happier circumstances there would have been no pressure to reach the other side as quickly as possible, no innocents dragged in his wake and ready to pay for his mistakes…

He spent the whole of his shift off, and the next three, hacking his way through a difficult section of ice, making the path wide enough that broad supply sledges could pass through unimpeded. It always helped with the moping. Irissë said that she liked to imagine hammering the spikes into a smug, honorless Fëanorian face. But for Findekáno half the appeal was that when he was in motion he was warm, inside and out, body and soul, which was the closest that he came to forgetting them. It was snowing harder, flakes melting on his face and then refreezing on his collar. He looked bearded like Aulë. He worked faster.

When the messengers appeared at the peak of a snowy hilltop he knew it was ugly news, simply because there was no good report imaginable – what, Finwë had returned from the Halls and marched out into exile to join them? The Valar had sent a herald to say “all is forgiven, never mind about that enduring doom that will blot out the futures and turn to ruin the achievements even of your grandchildren and their grandchildren”? News was always trouble, here. He felt the warmth bleed out of his limbs.

“Avalanche,” Irissë said, when she reached him. Her eyes were dark and hard, as if the tears had frozen in them. “Twenty. Findekáno –”

“Injured,” he said, not a question but a correction, as if he had the power to somehow change the message she’d brought, “tell me twenty injured –”

She didn’t answer. She clawed the fast-falling snow off her face and then he could see the story even before she recovered enough to draw breath for it.

Araman. The nightmare into which they’d carved a camp out of sheer stubbornness. The scouring winds now barely touched the camps, insulated as they were by the snow. The fog was pierced at regular intervals by lampstones. Supplies were piled up for transport, sledges were hammered into shape on the scoured ice plains, and crab-traps dragged sustenance from the waves that lashed the rocky shorelines.

And behind their camp, the Pelóri were slowly growing taller. Was that the reason? Irissë didn’t know, and from the snapshots crashing down on him Findekáno certainly couldn’t even formulate a guess. They had camped at the edge of the ice and the edge of the water and the edge of Aman, and today the mountains had begun to rumble. They had not seen it coming, not among the fogs and whirling snowflakes, but they’d heard it, and families had called their children back to the tents, back to safety. The roar had grown louder. More terrible than the sounds the dying Trees had made. More terrible than the thunder that had accompanied Melkor as he fled the land. More terrible than the way the world had twisted and shaken in the throes of Melkor and the gods.
Twenty dead. Hundreds injured, dozens trapped still –

- he took off back for camp, at a run –

By the time they arrived it was forty-one dead. Elves could go without breath a long time, but not quite that long.  The ones still trapped and alive had gotten lucky, such as it was, the tons of snow borne down on them leaving them with a pocket of air. They were sending their location while everyone frantically hacked the snow aside. Layers and layers of it, and each one had pummelled the snow beneath it into a densely packed nightmare. They were not going to be in time. They were not nearly going to be in time.

He drew up short, his chest being wrenched open in one direction by oxygen deprivation and in the other direction by searing emotional pain, and some fraction of his mind marvelled at the scale of it, wider than any river he’d seen, the unimaginable force and power –

He doubled over, coughing, eyes stinging, calculating how much farther the diggers had to go before there was any hope of unearthing survivors. He felt the insides of his mouth freeze as he coughed. He straightened up, again, and willed his lungs back to attention, willed his breathing steadier. He looked up at the mountains. And he sang.

(Creation was woven out of song; what better than song to alter it?)

Lighter, he told the snow, like cloud fluff, like fog, like marshmellow desserts puffed carefully over a fire back in Alqualondë-it-aches-to-think-about.  Light like fog, part for us like water in a stream, quickly, quickly, let us out, let us go, let us live…

The people around him joined in. The people digging joined in. The whole host joined in, until the sound surrounded them all, and the diggers threw snow aside like golden hay back in Valinor in the years-it-hurts-to-think-about, and still they were not in time.

Fifty four.

An hour after the last Elf stopped calling they stopped digging, stopped singing, stood dazed and exhausted and breathless and weeping at the edges of the sea of snow. Findekáno looked up at the yawning blackness where the Pelóri blotted out the stars and found himself not just lost for words but lost for thoughts, so far beyond grief that he could no longer recognize it.

Someone pulled him inside. The warmth burned his skin, burned so badly. He tried to push them away; his movements were slow and clumsy. He tried to claw his burning skin off. Someone restrained him. There was a bed, and he thought, briefly and vaguely, that it was absurd to imagine he could sleep while he was burning like this, and then his eyes fell shut of their own accord and he was far too exhausted to lift them.

When he woke the tent had twice as many people as usual.

Right, some of the other ones had been crushed in the avalanche.

He wiggled his toes experimentally. Two or three of them still responded to instructions. He stood up. He took a deep breath. It hurt, badly. Everything hurt. He remembered thinking yesterday that some had been physical pain and some psychological, but now it seemed terribly strange to separate them. Everything he endured had been inflicted on him deliberately by someone he’d once trusted; everything he endured his people were enduring, people who trusted him; every pain could be felt a hundred thousandfold and that wouldn’t be enough to capture what it meant, what it was, what had been done -

Outside the tent people were singing.

He needed to get to work. He dressed, slowly and unsteadily, instructing his joints on their proper functioning as they proved themselves deficient. People rolled aside for him, bleary-eyed, and he pushed apart the fabrics and then the additional fabrics at the door, and then he was looking out on cold and starlit Araman again.

Turukáno turned his head. “We’re leaving now. Worried it’ll happen again –”
“Could happen on the road”, Findekáno said, scanning for people who were doing something laborious and hurrying in their direction.
“Yup.”
“We lose anyone else in the night?”
“Three.”

“I wish I had stayed out of it in Alqualondë,” Findekáno said. It was only half-true – he was too numb inside to feel anything, ‘wish’ implied an intensity he could not quite summon to the surface, but the substance was right. He would, now, have left them to die. At least it would have been quick.

They left as soon as everything could be prepared. The third camp wasn’t done yet, but the unknown was less terrifying than the looming mountains that could at any moment shift in some microscopic way that tons of cascading down to swallow the shoreline alive. They left as planned, three-abreast and with the sledges, scouting groups circling out ahead to reach the campsites and complete them and ensure that there’d be food when the exhausted camp arrived. It was heartening, actually, to be moving. In Araman the memory of suffocation, the last thoughts sent by the last dying Elves, was too close. Only once it was out of sight could they hope to feel anything else.

They marched. They sang. They moved with Elven grace and grim determination. They climbed the cliffs and they weaved through fields of ice and rock and by the time they reached the first camp Findekáno almost felt warm.

His father found him as the host filed past him into camp. Nolofinwë looked – older, thousands of years older, millions of years older. It was an odd thing to think, Findekáno realized even as he thought it, because Elves did not visibly age. But whatever the difference was between an adolescent and an adult, that was the difference between his father a week ago and his father now. He had the reassuringly steady air about him that the Valar always strived for, and such a palpable grief that Nienna would have seemed comparatively sunny. “King,” Findekáno said.

“The camp is well-designed.”

“Thank you.”

“You set a poor example for our people and your brothers when you work yourself to the point of catatonia and need be guided off to bed.”

“I’m sorry.” He doesn’t say ‘I’ll do better.’

His father notices, of course, and raises an eyebrow.

“It’s torture, sitting still.”

“I insist anyway.”

Findekáno swallows. “All right. Are you – are people –“

“Two dead children had parents who decided to turn back in the hopes that Mandos, despite the words spoken against us, will see fit to restore them to life someday. The father of one we lost found it increasingly painful to move or speak or think, and remained in Araman to die of grief.”

Nod.

“Everyone else is moving forwards. At this point they will no longer be able to expect an easier route back than forwards, and I have apprised them of this; they are confident that ahead lies the hopes of our people.”

“That answers my second question –“

“I made the decision to guide my people on this road in the expectation of losses more grievous still, and I grieved these horrors when I chose them. I am fine. You?”

“As long as we win the war. Then it’ll all be worth it.”

“…I suppose that’s a safe enough thing to stake your sanity to.”

Findekáno half-grinned. “Yes, that’s what I thought.” Not because they were certain to win, but because if they lost it was not as if his sanity would matter for much longer.

“Are you going to rest?”

“Surely the point of your scolding, your grace, was that I should rest when tired, not that I should rest whenever a cozy tent presented itself?”

“As I think I said quite clearly, you should rest whenever it would serve our people to see you resting. What you need actually has very little to do with it.”

“Yes, your grace.”

“You should occasionally address me as ‘Father’, you know, lest I forget.”

“If it were just my father telling me to rest more I’d ignore him,” Findekáno says, “your grace.”

“I don’t think I ever told you how often I said variations on that to my father.”

Findekáno half-grinned again. He couldn’t get past half-grin, actually, the relevant muscles were too stiff. “No, you didn’t. Perhaps all sons of kings come to it independently.”

“All the ones with any inclination to respect either their father or their sovereign, at least.”

“What are you going to say to Fëanáro when –“

“I do not know. It will likely be unwise for us to meet face-to-face.”

“I’ve been worrying, idly, that they’ll try a more forthright method of murder when the indirect one succeeds only incompletely.”

“I have worried about that also,” Nolofinwë said. “I think it more in character for my brother to pretend he never wronged us; doubling down on murder would admit it was murder in the first place.”

“Can even he lie to himself about what he’s done –“

“Of course he can.”

He went to their family’s tent. Itarillë was sitting on the floor, feet soaking in lukewarm water, singing the tengwar to herself. She looked up when he walked in. “Finno!”

“Itarillë!” he said, copying her tone because it was easier to echo warmth and enthusiasm than to find it inside himself. “I have been ordered to rest, but perhaps my father merely wanted me on babysitting duty.”

“I don’t need babysitting,” she said, wiggling her toes. “’m not a baby. I’m twenty. It’s a good thing the Darkening happened when it did because Mommy and Daddy were going to try for a little sister for me and then there’d be a baby and then the baby wouldn’t know anything but cold.”

And your parents would have stayed in Tirion, he didn’t correct her, and maybe that would have been better, I would have missed you terribly but you’d have been safe, and steadied by Valinor’s slow pace, the war over before you were grown.

He sat down. “I didn’t know that!”

Splash splash. “It was a secret. I don’t think it’s still a secret, though, because it’s not true anymore.”

“Well, no. The Eldar do not bear children in wartime.”

“Why not?”

“Children should have peace and safety, and we have all of the Ages of Arda and should bear them into the time that gives them the best hope of peace and safety.”

“And warmth.”

“Yes, and warmth.”

“That means it might be Ages before I get my baby sister, though, and I’ll just be a grownup to her.”

“It might be Ages,” he agreed, “but I was grown up when Irissë was born and when Arakáno was born and I do not think I am just a grownup to them.”

Frown. “Okay. …they won’t remember the Trees.”

“They won’t.”

“They won’t remember being safe and happy.”

Findekáno peeled off wet socks. “By the time your mother and father are ready to have them, we will all be safe and happy again.”

“Mmmm,” Itarillë said. “Will you sing to me?”

“Yeah, of course.”

She was asleep by the time her parents came back. Both of them looked at her and then at Findekáno, and Elenwë smiled slightly.

“She’s been having a hard time getting to sleep,” Elenwë murmured.

Findekáno clasped and unclasped his hands. “Haven’t we all.”

“You like to think you can shield them.”

“I – don’t get the sense she’s very shielded.”

Turukáno made a vaguely despairing noise.

“She’s a smart kid,” Findekáno added, in case that softened the observation any.

“Which means she will very cleverly pick up on things no child should ever have to deal with,” Turukáno said. “Damn them.”

“They are,” Findekáno said. “Damned, I mean. Very thoroughly – problem is, so are we –“

They sat in silence, listened to the howling winds.

Further on the ice was breaking up, the ground unstable. Why the ice was breaking up was beyond Findekáno’s reckoning, it being far below freezing, but they were learning to recognize the signs. The floes here bobbed on the water, independent and eager to prove it by striking out on their own. They’d have to route around. Farther north, where there was solider ground but no food to be found. They were running through their supplies too fast. He’d mostly stopped eating. Itarillë’s soft grey eyes were too big in her face.

“If you’d known,” he said to Elenwë in the tent one day –

“I wasn’t under any illusions,” she murmured, her fingers anxiously massaging her sleeping daughter’s frostbitten feet.

“Everyone keeps saying that,” Findekáno said. “I guess I am the only one who was under any illusions.”

“I think the Ñoldor have an unusually short collective memory,” she offered. “We grew up hearing about the first war-“

“So did we –“

“ – differently. Turukáno told me - ghost stories to scare children around a fire, racing around in the palace cellars imagining that the world was dark, chase games of Elves and orcs – the way we told it was that we were hopelessly and utterly outmatched, and that a god toyed with us to exactly the degree that pleased him until other gods decided to stop him, a story on a scale where we were ants, leaves in the wind, never characters –“

Findekáno pinched his own fingertips. He couldn’t feel them anymore, hadn’t for months. “Then why come?”

“It’s the right thing to do.”

“Is it?”

“Yes, of course. Why are you doing it?”

“I’m not afraid of anything,” Findekáno said, “but I also don’t have children.”

“I have a daughter with all the ages of Arda ahead of her and I desire that she be safe and happy but I desire also that she believe that she matters.”

“You just said – in your stories, no one mattered, we were hopelessly outclassed –“

“And that is truer than the Ñoldor realize,” Elenwë said, “but less true than the Vanyar think it, and in neither direction is there really any affordance for error.”

“Ah.”

“We are hopelessly outclassed and it is going to be terrible on a scale we cannot fathom and failure will be worse than we can comprehend and we are leaves on the wind and we still matter.”

He nodded, numbly.

“Anyway,” she said, “I married a Noldo, I chose to believe your version of the legends.”

“I don’t think it works that way.”

“Sure it does. Stories aren’t – beliefs, they’re frames. If you can’t both feel like you matter and properly fathom the gods – and it doesn’t look like you can – I want her to believe she can be a hero.”

“But it’s either true or it isn’t.”

Thin smile. “You know, I think mothers get foresight because without it we’d never have the courage to let our children step outside. “

“…she comes out okay?”

“She comes out okay.”

He exhaled.

“And she matters.” Elenwë said firmly, and her hands traced the scars on her daughter’s feet.

“I don’t suppose you happen to know about the rest of us.”

“ – I would have told you.”

“Would you have? Even if it was terrible?”

“Oh, it will be terrible,” she said, “but that’s not foresight, that’s just – obvious.”

“If I hadn’t – helped, at Alqualondë –“

“Then maybe we’d have the help of the Valar and we’d have crossed safely and no families would be sundered and Turukáno’s best friend wouldn’t feel vaguely sick at the sight of him. You wanted to matter, right?”

“…not like that.”

“I did not think so.”

He could not think of anything to say.

“Or,” she went on, “maybe we’d have stood there and watched them all die, for the crime of being too desperate to stop the greatest evil the world will ever know, for the crime of being discourteous in their desperation, and then the Valar would have doomed us anyway, for it is not obvious to me that they cared primarily about how much blood was spilled, and it was too late for it to be none. And there’d be no one on the other shore, and no better prospects of reaching it.”

He bit his lip.

“I don’t know,” she said. “That is all the absolution I can offer you.”

“I wasn’t looking for absolution.“

“Well,” she said, “do hold on to it anyway, you might need it someday.”

They marched. They ate. They slept. Sometimes anger at the other host, at the Valar, at the Enemy, at the callousness with which promise after promise had been betrayed, flared up and made the tents feel unbearably warm and confining, and he hacked his way through the ice instead. More often it was impossible to care, all the promises so distant he could not remember ever having believed them.

When he imagined it now, reaching the other side, he – couldn’t. There were lots of people on the other side, hopefully, fighting the Enemy; some of them looked like people he’d once known. He was vaguely aware that this was a better revenge than the ones he’d planned when he’d wanted revenge, but the thought stirred no feelings at all.

It was so cold.

One day they failed to skirt the unstable ice by enough.

Even in the wind the sharp crack carried, and he turned around and blinked away the stinging cold and ordered people rerouted and ordered a head count and ordered supplies reshuffled so as to put less pressure on the ice in other places where it had seemed similarly – and apparently falsely – safe. People were screaming but that was all the more reason to give instructions instead of rushing in to join them.

He was numb. He was so numb. He headed in to witness the results of the calamity and felt himself grow number still.

Itarillë, Elenwë had said, came out okay. She was uninjured, now, wrapped in a dozen dry blankets while someone frantically toweled her hair dry before it froze that way.

There were no such promises for the rest of them.

They’d torn off Elenwë’s clothes because the wet fabric wasn’t helping. They’d broken her ribs trying to get her heart beating again. Her hair had frozen, thin wispy white icicles, and even at the roots it wasn’t melting.

Findekáno came to a halt and closed his eyes, as if the world didn’t have to be this way until he noticed it, as if he could stave it off for as long as there was a strand of uncertainty to cling to. Elves could survive a lot. Elves could survive worse than –

Someone took his hand. Guided him somewhere else. He did not resist them.  As always, warmth burned. It managed to do this without chasing away the numbness.

“Are you,” he said to Turukáno much much later – it seemed like years – “are you going to be okay.”

“No.”

“Ever?”

“No.”

“Is there anything I can do –“

“Ask the King.”

“I meant for you, not for our people.”

“There is nothing you can do for me.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“Are you.”

Oh, Findekáno could still hurt. He’d wondered. That had hurt. “Yes.”

“Mmm.”

Findekáno couldn’t think how to say it but it seemed worse not to - “I should have –“

“Yeah. You should have chosen our family, then I’d still have one.”

“Inconveniently none of the things I was choosing were labelled,” he muttered, quietly enough his brother didn’t need to acknowledge it –

“Oh, fuck yourself, Finno, yes, they were. Us, and them, Fëanáro was so fond of the distinction he painted it onto every move that anybody ever made. They did you a favor, when they stopped trailing in front of you the hope that you could earn their respect, because otherwise you would have kept right on chasing it.”

“ – I’m sorry.”

“You’ve said. I don’t forgive you and I don’t know if I still love you.”

“Elenwë –“

“Elenwë was a better fucking person than you or I will ever be and if you liked having her around you should have saved her.”

He nodded. He stood. He headed out to go speak to the King.

Itarillë was curled up in a pile of blankets, crying, rearranging the blankets every few minutes so the ones damp with tears didn’t make her too cold.

They took a day. And they marched on.

(act i.)

act ii.

They ventured out, in that first month, only a few hundred yards onto the Ice. People were going to die – Findekáno knew it, Nolofinwë knew it, the host now dug in on the shores of Araman knew it very well. But no one has died yet, and in a way it paralyzed them, waiting for it. They inched along the sheer ice faces and rolled logs across to test where it can bear the weight and were painstakingly, excruciatingly, careful. 

Climbing the ice was not in fact particularly difficult – not as difficult as Findekáno had imagined it, certainly. They had broken down the wagons into thick ice picks. You lit a fire at the bottom of a cliff and left the ice picks in it, to absorb the heat, so later they would slide like butter into their positions on the cliff. You stood there and held them, heat eating its way through your mittens and hand, and waited for the ice to freeze again around your new addition. And then you climbed down, grabbed another, climbed up, did it again. They were testing the best pick shapes and the best distances; the cliffs on the lip of Araman were studded with climbing holds, and with climbers.

“At this rate -” Findekáno said to his father -

“It would take us ten Years,” his father said grimly. “We won’t proceed at this rate, we learn more every day.”

They did, but every day they also were hungrier. Scouting for food had proved more difficult than scouting for safe paths through the northern wasteland. They had clawed the fungi off the rocks and tried eating it; it was not filling. There were animals in the north, of course, but most of them were dying themselves. Perhaps Melkor’s passage through this land poisoned it. Perhaps they depended, in some delicate way, on Aman’s light and the creatures it supported. 

There was still no light. When he had a spare moment between testing hazardous climbs and authorizing new scouting trips and dragging back inadequate food to the encampment, he wondered at that. The Valar may have taken a few years, but they’d stirred at last from Taniquetil to send a herald to scold the Ñoldor for leaving, and they’d stirred themselves in proper force after Alqualondë. He’d have thought that, once they reached the end of their paralyzed grief, they’d put the light first. Most of the animals would die. Most of the Elves would eventually starve. Was Yavanna currently engaged in personally supporting the growth of every plant on the continent? Was she capable of that? Could Varda throw some new stars up into the sky?

He got an answer – well, a partial answer – toward the end of the first month, after a crack in the ice had swallowed a log and a supply pack. Miraculously no one had been injured. Their luck had to break, soon, and that knowledge itself was weighing on them. 

“Even if we had the supplies we couldn’t make it across with no losses,” Irissë greeted him, unsmiling, when he reached the tent.

The tent had been improved. They were Ñoldor; they’d done that first. They’d dug their quarters into the rocky soil of Araman, slow and painstaking work, four feet down for every tent. The earth itself now insulated them against the winds. From a distance the little city looked like a row of rabbit warrens. It had been lovely for morale. It would be impossible once they started moving. 

“No,” he said to Irissë, climbing down into the tent, which now had a horrifically muddied outer room and a lavish inner room where they all slept. Before the betrayal Turvo and Elenwë and Itarillë had slept in their own tent, Findekáno with Irissë and Arakáno, and Nolofinwë alone once their mother had turned back. Now it seemed a little silly, all the effort to maintain the old customs. If the tent was too small for them all, it was a good thing; it meant it was always warm.

“And in practice, what’ll kill us is the hunger,” she continued.

“Can hunger kill us?” It wasn’t a question he’d ever had cause to consider before.

“Makes it easier to freeze to death, makes it harder to hold on to a difficult climb – the things we’re doing out there on the cliffs right now? we won’t be strong enough by the far side of this thing-”

He hadn’t really thought about that. They were going to such lengths to make the sheer parts climbable even for a moderately-sized child, or even with a large bundle on your back; today they’d tried carrying each other up it. It had worked, until the ice in that one place had snapped.

“So – have a team go ahead, map the whole Ice before we’re too hungry to do the work that will make it safe?” 

“No,” she said. “They wouldn’t come back.”

It was a caution he’d never seen in Irissë. In truth he’d expected that they’d both favor such a strategy, that they’d argue it to Turukáno with his inbuilt caution and to their father with his deeply-seated sense of duty and to Lalwen who had seemingly decided to be the advocate for Nolofinwë’s happiness and peace of mind, Nolofinwë himself being far too busy to let himself consider that. If there was anything reckless enough to divide even him and Irissë, it was usually her on the side favoring it.

“I think we could make it,” Findekáno said, “in three months, with a team of ten. The faster you go the less you have to carry. And we would scarcely rest; we stay warm while we’re moving. You and I could go three months without stopping.”

“There’s something you need to see,” she said. “But after you rest, you’re frozen through and by all account that was a close one, that accident today.”

“I don’t need to rest. I’m not really very cold.” 

“And the accident?” she said mildly, but she’d already begun pulling on her coat and gloves and hat and muffler.

“It was close. We were lucky, but I don’t feel lucky. That’s hardly a reason to rest, though.” 

“This is about an hours’ walk,” she said, “there are guide stones but I still don’t think it’s wise to take it at a run. You’ll see why.”

“You could just tell me.” 

“We found the path Melkor took, leaving.”

“Oh,” he said. “Yes, I do want to see that.”

It was scorched. Not with fire - Findekáno leaned down to touch it and drew up a hand stinging with something that was certainly not ash. But scorched all the same; the ice had been melted through and the rock crushed and crumbled, a wide and ugly trail bludgeoning its way through the land. He stepped, cautiously, into it; in a moment he was knee-deep in some ugly kind of dust and mire, and it dragged at his ankles as he walked. “Melkor and the thing that accompanied him through Valinor,” he said, because you didn’t need Irissë’s talent for tracking to notice the other set of tracks, deep and razor-like and dangerous. 

“Yes,” she said. “You should get out of there; presumably at some point their paths crossed, and if you step into one of her footprints you will slice yourself into ribbons.” 

“A shame,” Findekáno said, “it would have saved us much time if we could have taken this path and been sure of our footing. What does this have to do with sending a small group out in front?”

“We scouted five hours’ out,” she said, “along this, considering the possibility of  doing exactly that. It ends. In a fight, or I’m no hunter at all.”

“Melkor and his monster fought?”

“The ground is flattened for a mile around,” she said, “and all like this, only the mire rises higher and her footprints, if you like to call them that, are everywhere. It’s a foul, foul, dangerous place – you can feel it. Dark like the darkness, not like out here, and the air makes you sick to breathe, and everywhere those razor-sharp crevices, the marks she leaves in the ground - ”

Findekáno whistled. “No injuries?”

“I’m good at my job,” Irissë said tightly.

“Me too,” he said. “Sooner or later it’s not going to be enough.” 

“There were other tracks,” she said.

 “Animals? If there’s anything that can survive up here, I want to learn from it and then eat it.”

“Not animals.” 

He stepped out of the mire; it was starting to make him nervous, the way it tugged like a rushing stream at his ankles even while it was easy to see that it wasn’t moving at all.

 “Endórë used to be crawling with Moringotto’s monsters,” he said cautiously. 

“I think it still is.”

They walked back. Irissë seemed to be wavering over whether or not to say something. He wondered at that for a while – she wasn’t known for reticence – until he guessed what it must be. “Oromë told Tyelcormo something, and he told you?”

She started. “Yes. How – ” 

He didn’t answer that.

“Right,” she said after a while. “We can trade revenge fantasies once it’s all underway, at the moment I’ve been too busy to develop them beyond the obvious –”

“That being?”

“I will slap him, and he will laugh, and then I will choke the air from his lungs until he stops laughing, and then I will let go and walk away and tell him I hope he dies a very painful death because otherwise I’ll rejoice at the news of his loss and I don’t really want to.”

“Oh,” Findekáno said. 

“You?”

They were walking more briskly. The question at once made him want to go frozen in his tracks like a startled deer, or else to break into a run. Like a smarter startled deer. “Maitimo’ll apologize,” he said after a minute, “that’s the difference.”

“No,” she said, “that’s not a difference at all, you can’t imagine you’ll –”

“Of course I won’t forgive him.” He paused. “I’ll thank him, for making it so easy to do what I should have done so long ago. And I’ll ask when he decided – not that there’s any possible answer -  there’s a saying, you know: when someone shows you who they really are, believe them. We’ll say our bit and then I’ll never speak to him again, though I think I’ll weep no matter how he dies. But he will ask for forgiveness, and there’s nothing satisfying about beating someone bloody when they let you because they’re desperately hoping it’ll cancel out everything else they’ve done to you –”

“Yes, there is,” she said, “Tyelco certainly won’t apologize but he’ll let me, too, how did you think I was planning to overpower him?” 

He hadn’t actually given that much thought. Irissë struck him as a much stronger person than Tyelcormo in every possible respect, enough so that it was hard to remember he’d probably win an arm-wrestling match with her and could certainly prevent her from strangling him. 

“You were saying,” he said, “something Oromë said –”

“Some of the Maiar sided with Melkor,” she said, “in the first war, not just lesser ones, ones who had once been great, and the greatest of those became terrible demons of Melkor’s who lit their very essence afire and lashed out with the sharpness that exists at the edges of two worlds, and they were called the Valaraukar, and in the fall of Utumno they vanished.”

 “Vanished? As in –”

She shrugged.

“But you think they’re out there?”

“Oromë always hunted for them, never found one. Of –” she kicked a rock, and cursed, - “of all the things to hate him for, you know, I keep thinking that if he’d asked Oromë for aid in departing he’d have been given it, and then we’d all be there with no one dead and a Vala on our side –”

“I never thought of that,” Findekáno said. And then, loath to give his cousins any credit but equally loath to think there had been a way out, and they’d all collectively missed it - “Manwë would probably have refused to permit it. He said the Valar would offer us no aid in departing. They can’t just defy him on that, it’s not in their nature.”

She shrugged again. They could see the rise behind which the tents were buried, now. 

“How do you kill a Valarauca?” Findekáno murmured.

“You think I’m an expert?” 

“I think you’re not, yet.”

She smiled at him, then, a real and startled smile. He realized that his family felt closer than it had before the betrayal. They appreciated each other more. They complemented each other marvellously. They worked and rested and debated and planned like they’d been born to this. “I don’t think anyone is born to rule,” Finwë’d told Findekáno, once, when he’d been young and captivated by political philosophy mostly because Maitimo had been. “But I do believe some are born to lead.” A family of kings, they’d turned out to be, when the repeated twists of tragedy had tossed the crown to their house. Wasn’t that something? If the Feanorians had cut the line a little faster, if they’d been this unified in purpose and this constructive in their grief sooner, perhaps his mother wouldn’t have turned back –

- but no, that had mostly been because of what Findekáno himself had done, and even knowing that the damned ships were lost now forever and the damned cousins had casually left them all to die, Findekáno could not quite imagine standing at the docks of Alqualondë with an army and waiting to see how many hits it took for Maitimo to die. 

“They owed me their lives,” he said out loud, thoughtfully.

Irissë was walking faster now. “I wouldn’t have thought that a favor you ever wanted to call in,” she said, “even before.”

“No. But I also don’t know if I want to take it back.”

She snorted. “I’d have shot Fëanáro from the walls of Tirion the day he arrived with his host, if I’d known –”

“No,” he said, “you wouldn’t have, you’re not –”

 “Artanis would have,” she said tightly, “and I’m a better shot and would actually have understood what it meant, what I was doing, what I’d become, so it would have been better for it to be me. And I’m not what, exactly?” 

There wasn’t even a word for it. For an Elf who would raise arms against other Elves – who needed a word for that? Even the Ñoldor, who gloried in inventing words to encompass every possible shade of meaning, had never dreamed up that one. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“Hmm?”

“For damning us all, for saving their lives, for killing innocent people, for – we’re never going to see Mother again, you know –”

“Findekáno,” she said, “get us across the Ice.”

Turukáno was back in the tent, Itarillë sleeping in his lap, trying carefully to ease her off onto the mat so he could stand and join them. “Findaráto thinks there is a storm coming,” he said.

Findekáno had not even known the two of them were on speaking terms again. For the walk up the coast they certainly hadn’t been. “Great,” he said, “exactly what we need.”

“Yes,” Elenwë said, “it is, and hopefully this is an unusually bad one. Better to experience it now, see what the worst is that this place can throw at us –”

“Yeah,” Findekáno sighed, “you’re right, fair enough. Irissë, want to tell them what you found?” 

She peeled off her clothes as she explained. The assembled faces went graver and graver. Itarillë was, Findekáno realized, obviously not sleeping at all, just pretending; she’d been doing a convincing imitation, but now her hands were clutching at her father’s robes more tightly than they ever did in sleep.

Elenwë said, “The Valar say that the lesser Maiar who sided with Melkor would have found – did find – that cutting themselves away from Eru’s world and its gifts cut them away, also, from their own capacity for beauty and for creation. In the end they’d be stuck in one form. Injuring and killing them would then be straightforward, if not simple.”

 Turukáno said, “we can’t take armor.”

“No,” Nolofinwë said, “we can’t; the weight would be as much as everything else we might carry combined, and Finno’s people were trying, today, to ensure that one healthy Elf could carry another up even the worst cliff faces –”

“That worked,” Findekáno said –

“But with armor it’d be impossible,” his father said. “I don’t think it’s such a terrible loss; the force of a blow from a Maia would kill you no matter how much steel interceded. Don’t get hit.”

 “Ata,” Turukáno muttered rather pointedly, looking down at Itarillë. 

“Itarillë,” said their father with a laugh, “is obviously sleeping. I can tell she is sleeping because her eyes are very still – not flickering while she tries to stop herself from laughing, no, not at all –”

At this her eyes did flicker, of course.

“I can tell,” Nolofinwë continued, “because her breathing is very still and even, and she is certainly not holding her breath, trying not to giggle –” 

Itarillë went bright red.

“Should we let you sleep, dear?” he asked.

 “You should look at your King while he’s talking to you,” said Elenwë gently, and her eyes popped guiltily open.

“Tomorrow’s going to be a storm,” the King said gravely to his granddaughter, “and we will all be trapped in here becoming sick of each other. In the meantime would you like to come outside and look at the stars while the clouds of the storm steal in to hide them from us?”

She scrambled to her feet and was the first of them fully dressed. Outside their people were occupied in securing everything and tying it down for the winds.  Already rather few of the stars were visible. Nolofinwë picked Itarillë up and set her on his shoulders. “Valinor was newly created,” he told her, “and the Valar still rejoicing in its joys, when the time came for the Eldar to awaken in Endórë. And Varda imagined the world they’d look out on, and realized that it would be strange and alien to them, and in her wisdom she did something great and wonderful. She did not come to meet us on the shores; she did not try to raise the great pillars of the world once again. She put the light of creation itself in the sky, beyond where Melkor could reach it, beyond all fear and hope and invention, and when the Eldar awoke it was the first thing we saw, and we rejoiced in it.

We are the people of the stars, and when we falter they will hold their course, and when we are lost we can find our way by the lights of the Valacirca. Endórë is not dark. It is lit by a gift so far beyond Melkor’s power that he can only dig his way into the earth and resent it. And we are not forsaken; the first and greatest gift of Eru to our people was the land, and we go now to reclaim it. And the first and greatest gift of the Valar was the stars, and they will always guide us. Ai, Varda Elentári!”

“The stars are going,” said Itarillë, warily. 

“The stars remain; the clouds are coming,” said her grandfather, “and they will leave, and the stars will still be there. The Valar have said that they will not hear or heed our prayers, but I would have us say them anyway; we speak so the remembrance of these things remains in our own hearts.”

“And maybe someday –” said Itarillë – 

“And maybe someday they’ll listen, too,” he said with a laugh. 

The storm did not take long to move in fully, but Itarillë fell asleep before then.

“She’s going to hear and see worse things,” Ñolofinwë said to Turukáno once she had. “I would rather arm her to face them than hide her from them.”

“She’s twenty,” he snapped.

“I would understand if you decided to stay –”

“No,” Elenwë said. “Our forefathers were born beside Cuivienen and it did not leave them shattered; we are a flexible people.”

 “I’m not sure we could, either,” Turukáno said. “That’s the other thing Findaráto had to say. The Pelóri are getting taller. ”

“That can’t be,” Findekáno said. 

“He is very confident.”

“How could he even tell, in the dark?”

“The stars,” said Ñolofinwë seriously. “That’s what I was trying to see, tonight, but the storm confounded it - ” 

“They said they would fence Valinor against us,” Lalwen muttered.

“So even if they do find the means to restore light to Valinor,” Findekáno said, “and even if we’re still here, we may not know of it. I’d been looking, hoping they came up with something – for all those who remain behind –”

“They will,” said Ñolofinwë firmly. 

“You, ah, never used to be so much their champion,” Arakáno muttered wryly.

“I would not have any of your proceed forward because you feel that you have no choice.”

“Oh, would you stopthat?” Irissë said. “It is understood that we can go back. Mother went back. You offer every day. It is growing unbearable. We chose. We chose to follow you, Finwë Ñolofinwë.”

“We will follow you to the very gates of the Enemy’s stronghold,” said Turukáno, “And if you turn back we will follow you there, too.”

“I wouldn’t,” said Findekáno. “I’m crossing.”

Their father was observing them with an odd expression.

“I told Findaráto that it brought me joy to know the Valar concerned at least for the safety of their subjects,” Turukáno said, “and that despite their words I still hope our valor in Endorë can redeem the griefs that leave us outside their mountains and their protection. And that even if that is not possible there are people there who need us.” 

“I’m very pleased that you two are speaking again,” said his father. 

“I denounced you rather forcefully,” Turukáno said, raising an eyebrow at Findekáno. 

“That’s good,” Findekáno said, “someone ought to, and even now that it was all for nothing I’ve struggled to summon the fervor, myself.”

The winds howled above them.

“You children should sleep,” said his father, though they were not tired, and not children, and though he made no particular effort to shut them out as he traded thoughts with Lalwen over a ragged map of the Ice.

No particular effort until one question, tossed onto the board of considerations they were toying with. And by then Findekáno was attuned to them both, and paying full attention.

You were watching the two of them earlier, looking troubled, Lalwen prodded.

I always told myself, Ñolofinwë said, that were my sons ever truly at odds, if real griefs ever lay between them, if I ever doubted whether one of them would follow me at uttermost need, then I would understand my father’s decisions, just as I never understood his love for us until I was a father myself. 

Ah.

And this is a terrible horror that will sit on Findekáno’s shoulders for the rest of time.

And?

I do not understand the decisions that my father made.

A long pause. Findekáno realized he was playing Itarillë’s game, pretending to rest, and tried for a second to really rest. It was impossible. 

He would not have wanted me to take up this crown, you know, not even now.

 Then fuck him, Lalwen’s thoughts lashed across the room rather vehemently, tempered only slightly by the grief that was so clearly at their heart. He was no Vala. Sometimes he was just plain wrong.

Sometimestheyare, said Ñolofinwë’s thoughts, not in words but with memories of the Máhanaxar and of darkened Tirion and of heralds and of doom.

Good thing you have a good head on your shoulders, she said, and can do the sensible thing anyway. Certainly no one else ever would. 

You?

I think I know how reckless you would have to be, she said, before I turned away from following you anywhere. 

Oh?

A thought-laugh, a blur of tangled childhood memories, a blur of more recent ones, dark and fraught and painful, a bitter serenity. You would probably have to light a fleet of ships on fire.

It was a strange emotion that thrummed in the room at that. Findekáno recognized it only because he had been perhaps dwelling on Maitimo too much, this last month. They are mourning a brother, Findekáno thought, and hated Fëanáro all the more intensely, after that.