"The Tapestries"--The Last Chapters
Since I've forgotten to post "The Tapestries" for two weeks now, then I am posting the last three chapters all at once. They're not long, but for a story of only twenty-six pages, posting this thing seems to be dragging on forever. And clearly, posting two multi-chapter stories at the same time is a bit beyond me.
I do thank all of you who have read--and especially commented--on this odd little story. I apologize for being so spotty in sharing it.
The Tapestries
~9~
The day I died. The Battle-under-Stars. I did not want to face it, not so soon. The pain of death was still upon me, or the memory of it anyway. It was just yesterday. Just last century. Just last year. A mere moment ago.
I did not know, but it was too soon.
But the Halls of Mandos had diminished around me with the same cruelty as a naughty child’s fist closing upon a fly, trapping it. Better to tear the wings from it when the little creature tired. I tried to leave the Hall of Tapestries, but it spiraled ever inward upon itself, trapping me closer. My spirit-without the bonds of a body-bloated the fill the space. The strands of my spirit wove themselves amid the tapestries, amid the recollections of fire and blood and smoke and death. They became part of my spirit. My spirit became part of them. But that was the way, wasn’t it? A mark upon history, and history’s mark upon me. They were above me, below me, all around me, stiff and unmoving as in death. And I had no eyes to close. I had to see.
The Orcs had come suddenly, but of course, we’d been prepared. Nelyo and Tyelkormo had organized training with both blade and bow, even for the women. Curufinwë and Carnistir had found deposits of ore in the hills, and we had weapons again, however crude. This they did without me, for I was crippled in my paranoia, working alone in my makeshift forge, always with my back to the wall, always with a blade at my side.
The histories say that victory was easily won for us. We had superior knowledge and techniques for purifying metals and mixing alloys, and our blades were strong and perfectly balanced. We approached battle plans with the same detached coolness as we’d once approached mathematical equations and problems in architecture. But no matter the preparations and wisdom brought to battle, war is never easy. Many were left widows or orphans that day. For the first time, we had to devise methods for dealing with burials. Awkward funerary customs were constructed. We learned the hard way about the nature of decay and its effects on the water supply. On us. We grew used to a stench in the air and the feel of flies crawling upon our skin.
I saw one of my children wounded for the first time: Carnistir, ambushed by Orcs and his forearm sliced open. I’d been fighting back to back with one of my lords, and I left him to save my son, to drive the beasts from him. “Atar,” he said, “I am fine.” Carnistir had always been ambidextrous, and he switched his blade to his left hand with ease and pulled away from me, cutting away the remnants of the enemy. With naught but corpses around him, he was tying off his wound, racing off to fight elsewhere. Behind me, with a scream and a blade through his gut, the lord alongside whom I’d been fighting was slain.
After the battle was over, frenzy remained upon the people. They raced about, turning over bodies and wailing over the faces they wiped clean of mud. They defiled further the Orcs we’d killed. Some spoke of vengeance, of pursuit.
Like a magnet gathering stray bits of iron, Nelyo brought them control again, gathering around him with red-rimmed eyes and war-lined faces turned to his. He’d been as beautiful as a beacon in armor still with a bit of luster that made him appear as one of the silver stars tumbled from the firmament.
“Pursuit,” he said, “is futile. We have won, and now we must return to our wives and children and comfort our friends and those who have lost. We have shown our strength and will now live in peace, but we should not dare Moringotto so close to his own lands. We know not what secrets he keeps, the mightiest of the Ainur, buried beneath the mountains.”
I had led them here, but he kept them, my eldest son who had once betrayed me in thought, next betrayed me in voice, and now met my eyes over a sea of heads turned in his direction, and I feared that he was about to betray me in deed.
My voice rang like a rock tumbling down the side of a mountain. “I think that we should pursue.”
With a ripple, the faces turned to me, and I saw in their eyes: He already had betrayed me. The kingship was mine in title only; by the mistrust and condescension in the eyes of my people, I saw that I no longer truly possessed it. Nelyo did.
“Atar,” he said in his patient voice, his armor gleaming dully at me, “we have won.”
“The Silmarils,” I said, “still lie in the hands of the enemy, and is that not why we have come here?”
“Is it?” Nelyo asked, and I realized that I was in direct contradiction of what I’d said on the steps of Tirion: of pursuing freedom and purpose. Could those things be confined into something as tangible-albeit wondrous-as a Silmaril? Faces turned from me. The people were shifting on their feet. They wanted to collect our dead and go home, to begin the long process of mourning and the even longer process of rebuilding our fallen society. Nelyo’s brothers were gathering around him, speaking in hushed, quickened voices. Like a pesky insect, I’d been brushed aside and forgotten.
Next, I was alone excepting for my rapid, panting breaths and the crunch of stone beneath my feet, running north. Need I relive this? My own death? I stood before the tapestries. I recognized my mother’s work, her careful stitches so fine that even the offal splattered upon my arm shone like it was still wet. She was subtle: The three peaks in the distance were as dark as the night sky and so rarely seen, but a thin sheen of starlight had settled upon them. I remember noticing that, pausing, pondering. The clouds overhead were disintegrating, and the starlight was glazing the land. I almost stopped but for the thought of Light lost: Light held in the undeserving hands of Moringotto.
“In loving detail” we say of artists who cherish and know their subjects with such intimacy that the details speak of life beyond paints or threads or molded metal. In loving detail, my mother had woven the tapestries of my death. As she must have done during the year before I was born-memorizing the growing swell of her belly, treasuring each of my smallest movements-so she did for my death. Only my death took not a year but a few minutes. I wonder if she begrudged me that: a year of such tenderness, such consideration, many hours of labor, and her own great sacrifice-all of it negated in a matter of minutes.
The whips of the Valaraukor had cracked the air and tore open my flesh. Strangely, it hadn’t hurt as the tapestry said it should. At the sight of my wounds, I felt a tightening inside me that would have been a wince had I a body to devote to such tiny luxuries, but then, my body had been numb, all crackling energy. I had bled very little because most were cauterized almost instantaneously. The whips were of flame hot enough to slice through my armor; the air smelled of cooked blood.
But I had fought. I had fought and almost won; I had taken down one of the Valaraukor and was making progress on the second when two more arrived, and my left arm was hewn down to the bone. Still I fought, and the thought had come to me-a raw impulse along nerves unfiltered by decorum or propriety-that I was doing a heroic thing. And staring into the tapestry of that final moment before I heard a shout behind me and my sons arrived, I realized that this was perhaps the last truth that I had known. And it had been true; the tapestries did not deny it.
And-I died.
~10~
“What did you learn from this, Curufinwë?” Aulë used to ask me, especially when I made grievous mistakes that ruined my projects and left me staring frustrated at the mess lying between my two treacherous hands that had not done my mind’s bidding, eyes blinking and mind already denying the sting of tears. He’d believed that there was more to learn from mistakes than successes, and I’d proclaimed him a fool-in my secret thoughts and later to Nerdanel, who kept my secrets even as her mouth hardened to a disapproving line-though mainly because I liked success more than failure. I created success from all sorts of materials including-I saw now-the fabric of deception.
How to unravel a life of mistakes? There came a point of every project, said Aulë-the nadir, he called it-when it was futile to continue. It took less effort to begin again than to remedy all that had been done wrong. “You must learn to know the nadir,” he said, “and trust in it. Trust in your judgment. Hammering endlessly upon failure makes it no less so. Know that you now possess the knowledge to begin again and be successful.”
Only, in life, there was no beginning again. Even as time had eluded me here in the Halls of Mandos, I was suddenly aware of it: a dull trudging feeling like a heartbeat at rest or feet crossing banal territory to engage in some unexciting task. I wondered not for the first time what year it was, what day. What time. I wondered what each of my children was doing in that exact moment. What my wife was doing. I imagined her boiling rice in a kitchen in Alqualondë and scooping it onto a plate and eating it alone. I felt sad at that and did not know why.
“What did you learn from this, Fëanáro?” That was not Aulë but Námo. He was beside me again in his gray robes built of ash and smoke, his glass-green eyes as bright as the marbles that my sons would send rolling across the flagstones, dazzling in Laurelin’s light.
We walked together, Námo and I, through the rose garden that he’d once said my mother had constructed to calm the restive spirits of the newly arrived. Was that still me? I still felt restive, though in the same anxious way as an animal seeking to escape a flame. Only the flame was not mine to escape; it was bound tight to me, like a skin. Only the garden was different now. No longer were there voluptuous, velvety blooms but rather buds still shut tightly like eyes, with just a peek, a promise of color between their lids. The rosebushes obstructed the path before us and behind us but tore apart to let us pass: the chitinous sound of thorns scraping each other as they parted, reminding me of iguana claws on the patio in Tirion when I flipped open the lamp each night.
But this place, I suppose, is what I make of it.
Do you want me to admit that I am a fool? To rescind my pride? I will do neither.
Námo’s lips didn’t quite smile but pinched together tighter, reminding me of how Nelyo used to laugh when he knew it was improper to do so. How I used to love to coax mirth from him in those times, no matter how impolite, just to see his eyes light with his smile. His eyes that were silver, lit by his first sight of Telperion upon the water, holding the lost Light of the Trees in the same way as had my Silmarils.
But when was the last time that I’d caught Nelyo’s face in my hand-any of my children’s faces-and looked into that light? Before the Darkening, I feared.
I thought again on his last words to me. What were his last words to me? Had I even seen the light in his eyes?
I am afraid, Atar. Afraid to be King without you. I thought that I wanted it, that I would do better by our people than you have. But I see now that I still lack so much, and that we’ll never be whole without you. I have not your courage. I would have turned away, and the Valaraukor would have come to Mithrim, to our people-
But for you. You have died for our people. Would I have the courage for that? I do not know.
This is my fault, but I will not fail our people again.
“History is different for every person,” said Námo. We had stopped. Some of the rosebuds were opening, only instead of blooms, there were butter-yellow moths unfurling their damp wings and taking tentative flight. “Just as a person looks different whether you stand to his front or rear or side, so history is different for each of us. Nelyo blames himself. You blame yourself. Are either of you to blame? Actually not. In Arda Marred, all is imperfect, and all wrongdoing is attributed to Melkor. Have you not wondered, Fëanáro, why you were not cast into the Everlasting Darkness? Because every last dark detail of your fate-even your Oath-was wrought long ago. Had Melkor been content with Arda as we made it, I would have nothing to tend in these Halls but these roses and moths.
“You will heal here in spirit and arise anew to remedy that which is wrong. We shall all play a role in the world’s undoing, and so shall we all play a role in its remaking.”
The moths were dancing around me; I could see them on all sides, dashing themselves hungrily against me. What will be my role? I asked, but Námo didn’t answer me. Not directly.
“Do you know what the other spirits see when they see you here, Fëanáro?” he asked, and without waiting for me to answer as the moths brushed me with their ghost-pale wings, fluttering with senseless joy that I had lost long ago, he answered himself:
“Light.”
~11~
Her back was to me, and intent upon her work, she did not sense my approach. I have learned to sense other spirits in my time here-time that I cannot measure in years or hours but that stretches and folds and rises like bread dough-learned to look for the faint brush of color like paint diluted in a wash of water: violet, green, blue. My mother, though, had a shape like a body. Her dark hair fell unbound in waves down her back; her fingers were pale and agile, quick as bees darting between flowers. Yet I saw her spirit as well: bright white, like the hot center of steel fresh from the furnace, raw and beautiful.
I might have called to her but for the tapestries. They were piled high around her, and even as I watched, other bright spirits were whisking them away, to hang them in the halls and make them history.
One caught my eye and I went to it. The bobbins and threads hissed between my mother’s fingers and she worked, oblivious of me.
They say your heart can break, and I have always hated that saying. Macalaurë-always the poet-was fond of it, of “broken hearts” in his laments or even those that mixed the figurative with the more bodily: “My heart torn from my chest,” he’d sang once, and I’d stood up in the middle of the song and shouted for him to stop. “Hearts don’t break!” I’d said. “They are not made of porcelain!” I’d dropped a bowl from the table at my side onto the floor to demonstrate. Only later had I realized that Macalaurë had made the bowl too; it had been one of the few of his awkward crafts of which he was not so ashamed that he’d refused me to display it. “And if your heart tore from your chest-why, you would not be sitting here now!”
Here, in the Halls of Mandos, I have no heart to break. Yet it did. And I suddenly understand what Macalaurë had meant, why his face hadn’t become stricken as had been his wont in those days but instead turned dark and defiant, and he’d argued with me in front of his mother and brothers and proclaimed me a naïve fool.
Me! I’d been shocked at the time, and he’d been punished for a week.
The tapestry beneath my fingers was of my beautiful Maitimo tied to a table in one of Moringotto’s dungeons, his flesh flayed raw and burned. He’d vomited from the pain. He’d held it in his mouth and thought to end his agony by drowning himself. Only he’d turned his head at the last moment and spat it onto the floor.
I will not fail our people again.
Beneath that was a tapestry of Carnistir trying to show Maitimo how to fight with a sword in his left hand. Tyelkormo and Curufinwë cast forth as traitors from their cousin’s halls. Telvo holding Pityo’s body as he died and oblivious to the shadow of the enemy behind him and his own life so close to ending. Macalaurë trying to soothe the burn on his palm with saltwater and weeping, endlessly weeping, into the sea.
The servants of Námo were coming and taking them one by one, and I understood that history was happening. The tapestry of Maitimo was taken from my hands and whisked away, and I would have wished for such torment upon my own body if I knew it would free my son.
But I knew that he would survive. The other tapestries spoke of that. For a while, anyway, until the flames beneath my fingers took shape and returned him to where he had come: from fire to fire.
The tapestry was whipping from her hands and into the pile beside me even as she was beginning another.
Holding him in my arms by the river on the day he was born, I had envisioned no ending for my beautiful son Maitimo-certainly not one like this. I had envisioned an ending for none of them, and if I had known-
Mother? I called. Perhaps she had seen it; perhaps that was why she was here, why she had chosen to die.
Hush, Fëanáro, she said with the practiced brusqueness of the mother she’d never had the chance to be. Just watch.
Beneath her hands, a new tapestry was taking shape. I used to read to you, she said, even when you were an infant, before the weariness took me to Irmo and the foresight brought me here. I read to you of Ainulindalë, and I believed that you heard-and understood-me. Your eyes, they were so bright on mine. And I would read to you again and again of one part, to hold it true in your heart, to trust none among our people, nor the Valar-for deceit, as you have learned, is part of all of us-but to trust just this one thing:
“And thou shalt see that no theme may be played that hath not its uttermost source in me, nor can any alter the music in my despite. For he that attempteth this shall prove but mine instrument in the devising of things more wonderful, which he himself hath not imagined.”
Beneath her hands, a new form was taking shape of three lights and three destinies-earth, sea, and sky-subject to be coveted by none, even the greatest of the Ainur, and I saw that all the dark things that I had done and that had been done against me had led to this, to the safekeeping of the Light that would heal the world.
Do you see, my son?
This one was set aside, for it would be hung at the world’s breaking, and that was still a long time away. Or maybe it was not. Time is funny here. But I sat at her side and rested. And waited. Waited for my children to arrive, one by one. Waited for fate to be realized, bit by bit. Waited for the call that I had been born to hear, for the world’s breaking and remaking, in which we would all play a part, even me, even the Fallen: I would be raised up beside the greatest of my creations. I would again kindle Light.
A Note on Obscure Canon: The ending of this story was inspired by the Second Prophecy of Mandos, as given in The Shaping of Middle-earth:
Thereafter shall the Silmarils be recovered out of sea and earth and air; for Earendil shall descend and yield up that flame that he hath had in keeping. Then Fëanor shall bear the Three and yield their fire to rekindle the Two Trees, and a great light shall come forth; and the Mountains of Valinor shall be levelled, so that the light goes out over all the world. In that light the Gods will again grow young, and the Elves awake and all their dead arise, and the purpose of Iluvatar be fulfilled concerning them.
I've always been partial to this ending, as it seems to keep with the notion in Ainulindalë that all actions--even the dark deeds of Fëanor and his sons--fulfill Eru's purposes in the end.
As for not-so-obscure canon, Miriel's quote, of course, comes from "The Ainunlindale."
I do thank all of you who have read--and especially commented--on this odd little story. I apologize for being so spotty in sharing it.
The Tapestries
~9~
The day I died. The Battle-under-Stars. I did not want to face it, not so soon. The pain of death was still upon me, or the memory of it anyway. It was just yesterday. Just last century. Just last year. A mere moment ago.
I did not know, but it was too soon.
But the Halls of Mandos had diminished around me with the same cruelty as a naughty child’s fist closing upon a fly, trapping it. Better to tear the wings from it when the little creature tired. I tried to leave the Hall of Tapestries, but it spiraled ever inward upon itself, trapping me closer. My spirit-without the bonds of a body-bloated the fill the space. The strands of my spirit wove themselves amid the tapestries, amid the recollections of fire and blood and smoke and death. They became part of my spirit. My spirit became part of them. But that was the way, wasn’t it? A mark upon history, and history’s mark upon me. They were above me, below me, all around me, stiff and unmoving as in death. And I had no eyes to close. I had to see.
The Orcs had come suddenly, but of course, we’d been prepared. Nelyo and Tyelkormo had organized training with both blade and bow, even for the women. Curufinwë and Carnistir had found deposits of ore in the hills, and we had weapons again, however crude. This they did without me, for I was crippled in my paranoia, working alone in my makeshift forge, always with my back to the wall, always with a blade at my side.
The histories say that victory was easily won for us. We had superior knowledge and techniques for purifying metals and mixing alloys, and our blades were strong and perfectly balanced. We approached battle plans with the same detached coolness as we’d once approached mathematical equations and problems in architecture. But no matter the preparations and wisdom brought to battle, war is never easy. Many were left widows or orphans that day. For the first time, we had to devise methods for dealing with burials. Awkward funerary customs were constructed. We learned the hard way about the nature of decay and its effects on the water supply. On us. We grew used to a stench in the air and the feel of flies crawling upon our skin.
I saw one of my children wounded for the first time: Carnistir, ambushed by Orcs and his forearm sliced open. I’d been fighting back to back with one of my lords, and I left him to save my son, to drive the beasts from him. “Atar,” he said, “I am fine.” Carnistir had always been ambidextrous, and he switched his blade to his left hand with ease and pulled away from me, cutting away the remnants of the enemy. With naught but corpses around him, he was tying off his wound, racing off to fight elsewhere. Behind me, with a scream and a blade through his gut, the lord alongside whom I’d been fighting was slain.
After the battle was over, frenzy remained upon the people. They raced about, turning over bodies and wailing over the faces they wiped clean of mud. They defiled further the Orcs we’d killed. Some spoke of vengeance, of pursuit.
Like a magnet gathering stray bits of iron, Nelyo brought them control again, gathering around him with red-rimmed eyes and war-lined faces turned to his. He’d been as beautiful as a beacon in armor still with a bit of luster that made him appear as one of the silver stars tumbled from the firmament.
“Pursuit,” he said, “is futile. We have won, and now we must return to our wives and children and comfort our friends and those who have lost. We have shown our strength and will now live in peace, but we should not dare Moringotto so close to his own lands. We know not what secrets he keeps, the mightiest of the Ainur, buried beneath the mountains.”
I had led them here, but he kept them, my eldest son who had once betrayed me in thought, next betrayed me in voice, and now met my eyes over a sea of heads turned in his direction, and I feared that he was about to betray me in deed.
My voice rang like a rock tumbling down the side of a mountain. “I think that we should pursue.”
With a ripple, the faces turned to me, and I saw in their eyes: He already had betrayed me. The kingship was mine in title only; by the mistrust and condescension in the eyes of my people, I saw that I no longer truly possessed it. Nelyo did.
“Atar,” he said in his patient voice, his armor gleaming dully at me, “we have won.”
“The Silmarils,” I said, “still lie in the hands of the enemy, and is that not why we have come here?”
“Is it?” Nelyo asked, and I realized that I was in direct contradiction of what I’d said on the steps of Tirion: of pursuing freedom and purpose. Could those things be confined into something as tangible-albeit wondrous-as a Silmaril? Faces turned from me. The people were shifting on their feet. They wanted to collect our dead and go home, to begin the long process of mourning and the even longer process of rebuilding our fallen society. Nelyo’s brothers were gathering around him, speaking in hushed, quickened voices. Like a pesky insect, I’d been brushed aside and forgotten.
Next, I was alone excepting for my rapid, panting breaths and the crunch of stone beneath my feet, running north. Need I relive this? My own death? I stood before the tapestries. I recognized my mother’s work, her careful stitches so fine that even the offal splattered upon my arm shone like it was still wet. She was subtle: The three peaks in the distance were as dark as the night sky and so rarely seen, but a thin sheen of starlight had settled upon them. I remember noticing that, pausing, pondering. The clouds overhead were disintegrating, and the starlight was glazing the land. I almost stopped but for the thought of Light lost: Light held in the undeserving hands of Moringotto.
“In loving detail” we say of artists who cherish and know their subjects with such intimacy that the details speak of life beyond paints or threads or molded metal. In loving detail, my mother had woven the tapestries of my death. As she must have done during the year before I was born-memorizing the growing swell of her belly, treasuring each of my smallest movements-so she did for my death. Only my death took not a year but a few minutes. I wonder if she begrudged me that: a year of such tenderness, such consideration, many hours of labor, and her own great sacrifice-all of it negated in a matter of minutes.
The whips of the Valaraukor had cracked the air and tore open my flesh. Strangely, it hadn’t hurt as the tapestry said it should. At the sight of my wounds, I felt a tightening inside me that would have been a wince had I a body to devote to such tiny luxuries, but then, my body had been numb, all crackling energy. I had bled very little because most were cauterized almost instantaneously. The whips were of flame hot enough to slice through my armor; the air smelled of cooked blood.
But I had fought. I had fought and almost won; I had taken down one of the Valaraukor and was making progress on the second when two more arrived, and my left arm was hewn down to the bone. Still I fought, and the thought had come to me-a raw impulse along nerves unfiltered by decorum or propriety-that I was doing a heroic thing. And staring into the tapestry of that final moment before I heard a shout behind me and my sons arrived, I realized that this was perhaps the last truth that I had known. And it had been true; the tapestries did not deny it.
And-I died.
~10~
“What did you learn from this, Curufinwë?” Aulë used to ask me, especially when I made grievous mistakes that ruined my projects and left me staring frustrated at the mess lying between my two treacherous hands that had not done my mind’s bidding, eyes blinking and mind already denying the sting of tears. He’d believed that there was more to learn from mistakes than successes, and I’d proclaimed him a fool-in my secret thoughts and later to Nerdanel, who kept my secrets even as her mouth hardened to a disapproving line-though mainly because I liked success more than failure. I created success from all sorts of materials including-I saw now-the fabric of deception.
How to unravel a life of mistakes? There came a point of every project, said Aulë-the nadir, he called it-when it was futile to continue. It took less effort to begin again than to remedy all that had been done wrong. “You must learn to know the nadir,” he said, “and trust in it. Trust in your judgment. Hammering endlessly upon failure makes it no less so. Know that you now possess the knowledge to begin again and be successful.”
Only, in life, there was no beginning again. Even as time had eluded me here in the Halls of Mandos, I was suddenly aware of it: a dull trudging feeling like a heartbeat at rest or feet crossing banal territory to engage in some unexciting task. I wondered not for the first time what year it was, what day. What time. I wondered what each of my children was doing in that exact moment. What my wife was doing. I imagined her boiling rice in a kitchen in Alqualondë and scooping it onto a plate and eating it alone. I felt sad at that and did not know why.
“What did you learn from this, Fëanáro?” That was not Aulë but Námo. He was beside me again in his gray robes built of ash and smoke, his glass-green eyes as bright as the marbles that my sons would send rolling across the flagstones, dazzling in Laurelin’s light.
We walked together, Námo and I, through the rose garden that he’d once said my mother had constructed to calm the restive spirits of the newly arrived. Was that still me? I still felt restive, though in the same anxious way as an animal seeking to escape a flame. Only the flame was not mine to escape; it was bound tight to me, like a skin. Only the garden was different now. No longer were there voluptuous, velvety blooms but rather buds still shut tightly like eyes, with just a peek, a promise of color between their lids. The rosebushes obstructed the path before us and behind us but tore apart to let us pass: the chitinous sound of thorns scraping each other as they parted, reminding me of iguana claws on the patio in Tirion when I flipped open the lamp each night.
But this place, I suppose, is what I make of it.
Do you want me to admit that I am a fool? To rescind my pride? I will do neither.
Námo’s lips didn’t quite smile but pinched together tighter, reminding me of how Nelyo used to laugh when he knew it was improper to do so. How I used to love to coax mirth from him in those times, no matter how impolite, just to see his eyes light with his smile. His eyes that were silver, lit by his first sight of Telperion upon the water, holding the lost Light of the Trees in the same way as had my Silmarils.
But when was the last time that I’d caught Nelyo’s face in my hand-any of my children’s faces-and looked into that light? Before the Darkening, I feared.
I thought again on his last words to me. What were his last words to me? Had I even seen the light in his eyes?
I am afraid, Atar. Afraid to be King without you. I thought that I wanted it, that I would do better by our people than you have. But I see now that I still lack so much, and that we’ll never be whole without you. I have not your courage. I would have turned away, and the Valaraukor would have come to Mithrim, to our people-
But for you. You have died for our people. Would I have the courage for that? I do not know.
This is my fault, but I will not fail our people again.
“History is different for every person,” said Námo. We had stopped. Some of the rosebuds were opening, only instead of blooms, there were butter-yellow moths unfurling their damp wings and taking tentative flight. “Just as a person looks different whether you stand to his front or rear or side, so history is different for each of us. Nelyo blames himself. You blame yourself. Are either of you to blame? Actually not. In Arda Marred, all is imperfect, and all wrongdoing is attributed to Melkor. Have you not wondered, Fëanáro, why you were not cast into the Everlasting Darkness? Because every last dark detail of your fate-even your Oath-was wrought long ago. Had Melkor been content with Arda as we made it, I would have nothing to tend in these Halls but these roses and moths.
“You will heal here in spirit and arise anew to remedy that which is wrong. We shall all play a role in the world’s undoing, and so shall we all play a role in its remaking.”
The moths were dancing around me; I could see them on all sides, dashing themselves hungrily against me. What will be my role? I asked, but Námo didn’t answer me. Not directly.
“Do you know what the other spirits see when they see you here, Fëanáro?” he asked, and without waiting for me to answer as the moths brushed me with their ghost-pale wings, fluttering with senseless joy that I had lost long ago, he answered himself:
“Light.”
~11~
Her back was to me, and intent upon her work, she did not sense my approach. I have learned to sense other spirits in my time here-time that I cannot measure in years or hours but that stretches and folds and rises like bread dough-learned to look for the faint brush of color like paint diluted in a wash of water: violet, green, blue. My mother, though, had a shape like a body. Her dark hair fell unbound in waves down her back; her fingers were pale and agile, quick as bees darting between flowers. Yet I saw her spirit as well: bright white, like the hot center of steel fresh from the furnace, raw and beautiful.
I might have called to her but for the tapestries. They were piled high around her, and even as I watched, other bright spirits were whisking them away, to hang them in the halls and make them history.
One caught my eye and I went to it. The bobbins and threads hissed between my mother’s fingers and she worked, oblivious of me.
They say your heart can break, and I have always hated that saying. Macalaurë-always the poet-was fond of it, of “broken hearts” in his laments or even those that mixed the figurative with the more bodily: “My heart torn from my chest,” he’d sang once, and I’d stood up in the middle of the song and shouted for him to stop. “Hearts don’t break!” I’d said. “They are not made of porcelain!” I’d dropped a bowl from the table at my side onto the floor to demonstrate. Only later had I realized that Macalaurë had made the bowl too; it had been one of the few of his awkward crafts of which he was not so ashamed that he’d refused me to display it. “And if your heart tore from your chest-why, you would not be sitting here now!”
Here, in the Halls of Mandos, I have no heart to break. Yet it did. And I suddenly understand what Macalaurë had meant, why his face hadn’t become stricken as had been his wont in those days but instead turned dark and defiant, and he’d argued with me in front of his mother and brothers and proclaimed me a naïve fool.
Me! I’d been shocked at the time, and he’d been punished for a week.
The tapestry beneath my fingers was of my beautiful Maitimo tied to a table in one of Moringotto’s dungeons, his flesh flayed raw and burned. He’d vomited from the pain. He’d held it in his mouth and thought to end his agony by drowning himself. Only he’d turned his head at the last moment and spat it onto the floor.
I will not fail our people again.
Beneath that was a tapestry of Carnistir trying to show Maitimo how to fight with a sword in his left hand. Tyelkormo and Curufinwë cast forth as traitors from their cousin’s halls. Telvo holding Pityo’s body as he died and oblivious to the shadow of the enemy behind him and his own life so close to ending. Macalaurë trying to soothe the burn on his palm with saltwater and weeping, endlessly weeping, into the sea.
The servants of Námo were coming and taking them one by one, and I understood that history was happening. The tapestry of Maitimo was taken from my hands and whisked away, and I would have wished for such torment upon my own body if I knew it would free my son.
But I knew that he would survive. The other tapestries spoke of that. For a while, anyway, until the flames beneath my fingers took shape and returned him to where he had come: from fire to fire.
The tapestry was whipping from her hands and into the pile beside me even as she was beginning another.
Holding him in my arms by the river on the day he was born, I had envisioned no ending for my beautiful son Maitimo-certainly not one like this. I had envisioned an ending for none of them, and if I had known-
Mother? I called. Perhaps she had seen it; perhaps that was why she was here, why she had chosen to die.
Hush, Fëanáro, she said with the practiced brusqueness of the mother she’d never had the chance to be. Just watch.
Beneath her hands, a new tapestry was taking shape. I used to read to you, she said, even when you were an infant, before the weariness took me to Irmo and the foresight brought me here. I read to you of Ainulindalë, and I believed that you heard-and understood-me. Your eyes, they were so bright on mine. And I would read to you again and again of one part, to hold it true in your heart, to trust none among our people, nor the Valar-for deceit, as you have learned, is part of all of us-but to trust just this one thing:
“And thou shalt see that no theme may be played that hath not its uttermost source in me, nor can any alter the music in my despite. For he that attempteth this shall prove but mine instrument in the devising of things more wonderful, which he himself hath not imagined.”
Beneath her hands, a new form was taking shape of three lights and three destinies-earth, sea, and sky-subject to be coveted by none, even the greatest of the Ainur, and I saw that all the dark things that I had done and that had been done against me had led to this, to the safekeeping of the Light that would heal the world.
Do you see, my son?
This one was set aside, for it would be hung at the world’s breaking, and that was still a long time away. Or maybe it was not. Time is funny here. But I sat at her side and rested. And waited. Waited for my children to arrive, one by one. Waited for fate to be realized, bit by bit. Waited for the call that I had been born to hear, for the world’s breaking and remaking, in which we would all play a part, even me, even the Fallen: I would be raised up beside the greatest of my creations. I would again kindle Light.
A Note on Obscure Canon: The ending of this story was inspired by the Second Prophecy of Mandos, as given in The Shaping of Middle-earth:
Thereafter shall the Silmarils be recovered out of sea and earth and air; for Earendil shall descend and yield up that flame that he hath had in keeping. Then Fëanor shall bear the Three and yield their fire to rekindle the Two Trees, and a great light shall come forth; and the Mountains of Valinor shall be levelled, so that the light goes out over all the world. In that light the Gods will again grow young, and the Elves awake and all their dead arise, and the purpose of Iluvatar be fulfilled concerning them.
I've always been partial to this ending, as it seems to keep with the notion in Ainulindalë that all actions--even the dark deeds of Fëanor and his sons--fulfill Eru's purposes in the end.
As for not-so-obscure canon, Miriel's quote, of course, comes from "The Ainunlindale."