Work Text:
The blood has long dried by the time the letter reaches you, but you savor it nonetheless. With the tip of a penknife, you scrape a few fibers of paper onto a disk to slide beneath your microscope.
This is the closest you have ever been to Feanor’s blood.
It is a better prize than even Mairon’s last report, satisfying though it was with his accounting of Rumil’s fear, of the dwindling strength of the Mithrim rebels.
Send only a word if you wish him dead, his letter concluded, just above the flourished signature of his name, and yours was dictated swiftly in response:
Let him live until they arrive
You leave yourself, in a few month’s time. It is time to glory in Manwe’s folly, to write yourself across the very bones of this nation. There is much work to do.
Yet here you are, content for a time with blood and pulped wood and the knowledge that Feanor cannot protect his children’s honor as well as he looks after his own.
Looked after his own, at least—for the Feanor who dashed Rumil’s collar to the floor of your old study, his cheeks flushed and his eyes aflame, believed himself above such cruelties.
And now he has murdered and burned, and all in pursuit of riches.
If Maedhros’s young blood is preserved under your fingertips, the weight in your breast pocket represents something older, though still of new charm to you.
Setting aside your lenses, you lift the diamond and press its coolness against your lips. Oh, Finwe, Finwe. Did you know your son gave you his heart, when he put this in his hands?
How like Feanor to have a heart made of the hardest substance on earth, utterly transparent—
And dead and cold under your mouth.