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In the beginning we sang. Or so the story goes - having woken from one darkness into another, we beheld the vast sky and the still waters, and we knew that the world was for us and we were for the world, and we sang. Ask any Elda of the journey, and they will tell you the same thing.
Perhaps we got the idea from birds.
Either way, we learned by singing that our fëar ran with hidden power, the same way we learned by grasping at thorns that our hröar ran with blood. Indeed, back then, Song and speech were thought no more separate in origin or purpose than the body's own paired hands.
For when we sang, the lake stirred, the beasts paused, the spindles spun more steadily, and the skin of those who had grasped the thorns began to weave back together. And when we spoke, our minds were made known in the clear air to each other. And that was magic.
In that new-made time, Mahtan my grandfather harnessed fire. He had learned to rub his hands for warmth - like this - and found the same warmth when he dragged two pieces of wood together. So he kept at it until the wood darkened and exhaled smoke - he was the first to know its smell. Carefully he offered it shavings of bark and dry grasses, and watched them come alight, and then curl into ash.
By the time he called forth the first flame, half the Noldor had gathered to him. They saw each other's faces lit red, and their eyes throwing back the same light, the way they used to on the dim far shore. They saw their shadows thrash and sway like branches caught up in a wind.
One by one, they made the acquaintance of this new thing, feeding it twigs and scraps of thread and exclaiming in awe when they were snatched away. They learned, too, that it could hurt them.
But even still, they loved it. They agreed that they had found a new relative of Song.
And so they brought it back to the center of their camp, piece by piece, every Quendë bearing a branch. They made a path of lights like stars themselves.
Now, that part of the tale, my grandfather used to repeat to me when I fought with my brothers. I wonder if he didn't use it on my father too - imagine that! But I know that first fire, the one they carried together so symbolically, went out. Someone threw water on it to see what would happen. Mahtan's wife told me that.
We know now that fire is not an extension of our own power, but rather a process of nature apart from us. We have seen trees blown to cinders by lightning and spoken with Aulë himself about it. And yet I have also seen many strange and beautiful things myself, and I understand why our ancestors thought fire and Song akin.
My father, first of our name, once thought they might still be.
...Hold this, won't you? Good, yes. Anyhow, he thought they might still be. He would requisition unfortunate sheep from the ranchers south of Valimar and drag them home to have them butchered just outside in the yard.
Yes, in the yard outside his workshop! And many indeed whispered, shallow as they were, calling it unseemly and fey and all that. For myself, I was very young and did not care to see, but I remember him trying his best to engage our Turko in the anatomical sciences. Crouched there like a well-fed wolf, he would turn and ask him what he thought of backwards toes and multiple stomachs, and Turko - he said, "They do interest me, yes, but more so while they yet live."
Oh - hand me back the file now - there.
For Father's part, it was the bones he was after, as fresh as he could get them. He thought to capture and refine whatever essence animates a living creature, freed from use but not yet decomposed back into the soil and air.
The stench of those rooms while he tested the process! There were caustic liquids and broken retorts and black stains that never faded. But he was right in the end. Out of his reassigned furnace came the foulest, most beguiling stuff, which glowed a lovely green in the dark, and which, when left to itself, caught fire for no good reason at all.
A good measure of paper and fabric and hair sacrificed itself to knowledge for that project.
Back then the doors to the workshop stood ajar sometimes, and we would all stand and watch, unless we were busy trying to put out fires. Especially me.
Once he called me inside. "Stand back," he said, as I say to you when I'm casting or quenching, and together we counted the seconds until one of his samples caught alight. He told me how it needed to draw breath from the air just like us. "We ourselves are flames," he said. I did not understand yet.
The smoke stung my eyes, and I felt as my grandfather's companions must have felt, watching light born out of nothing for the first time.
Then my mother came to extract me, and she ruffled my hair and called me well-named, and ordered me to wash up before supper, with a rather pointed look at Father.
...No, we did not. He set that fire-essence aside eventually, and not only because it seemed to hate us. He realized that he had no need to extract it as matter after all (if it really was what it seemed, at least, but that's another story). He turned to even more exciting ventures.
Why, it was the making of tools, of course, but no ordinary tools. Did I tell you that power runs, like blood, like water? My grandfather shaped vessels from red river clay, and used them to move little bits of the lake. And likewise, my father and his fellows turned to the stable patterns of crystals, which had already shown so much promise with light.
How much water do you think you have in your body, in all? How much can you carry in your hands on your own?
It is not very much. You could do many things with it, yes - brew tea, scrub a flagstone, germinate a seed. But think of rivers. Think of rainstorms. The difficulty lies in gathering it, holding it, but we have more water in the world than we have words to describe.
Enough to fill the oceans. Enough to rearrange the mountains.
We stand now at the edge of knowledge and the beginning of possibility. We are Noldor, after all!
...Yes you will, yonya, someday. I haven't a doubt in the world that you will.