Chapter Text
The naked spirit, clothed not in fabric nor in flesh, passed through the high square threshold with its lintel of blocky grey stone and descended a blocky grey stair to stand, with a shocking newness, upon a place of free air. It had been years, or centuries, or aeons, since last the spirit had tasted air which was not enclosed in walls, which was not freighted with dust and sorrow and regret and tears. This air seemed to the spirit to smell of salt also, but a smell both ranker and purer than tears. After a moment, the spirit understood it as the scent of the sea.
Before the spirit’s bare feet spread a broad pavement, impossible in its dimensions. It seemed to fill the entire world, to reach out to a horizon invisible in the distance, to both bend and lay flat at once. It was, the spirit saw, pieced together with many pavers of some pale stone, cunningly fitted together without mortar nor binding. Without warning, without reason, the perspective changed and the spirit saw suddenly that the pavers were not stone but bone, all yellow and cream and rotting grey, and the joins where they sat together were ropy living sutures like those between the plates of a skull.
The pieces or pavers or plates of bone were laid out in patterns which dazzled at the eye and confused it, dizzying in a way which enthralled and enticed with promises of revelation and yet also made finding the meaning therein impossible; but that meaning existed, the spirit was certain of it. Perhaps from above, it could be seen entire. Perhaps by a mind larger or greater, it could be understood in its whole.
The spirit stepped forward from the base of the stair, impelled by some knowledge beyond knowing. Behind, the great empty rectangle of doorway gaped like an empty jaw, black and dark and painful in its hollowness, seeming to suck at the eye, should anything mortal have chanced to see it. Few things did. Few things living came to this place. This was not a place for them, nor ever had been.
Naked and not shivering, the spirit, whose name was beginning to return with each step taken away from that black gateway, paused just at the place where the shadow of the building behind lay in a sharp black line upon the bone pavers. It was a demarcation plain and straight and ruled, a threshold itself. Shadow here, and there… light. Death behind, and before….
Ten paces from the line of shadow, there lay a small bundle upon the pale pavement.
Immaterial eyes fixed upon this thing and watched it, the significance of the bundle unclear. My name. I can nearly recall it… The spirit stepped forth into the light. One pace. Two. Five. Eight paces, and it began. Out from the shadow of the Halls, the memories returned, the spirit sinking to kneel upon the impossible, eye-defying pavement bending its way across a flat place, beneath stars.
The spirit was naked no longer. Flesh began to clothe that nakedness, to weave itself in the memory of a self long shed in a land far distant from this one, flesh which once had fought and striven and bled and loved and suffered and died and then, at last, been burned into fragrant ash and carried into the air as smoke. In the image of that flesh was this one carved anew from the substance of the world’s creation, alike in every detail to the one lost; for it had been created from the memory of the spirit, which was perfect and full.
He was naked no longer, and purely spirit no more; he was now, again, spirit-in-flesh, and he was a thinking and remembering mind which was formed of the intersection thereof. He was a man, one never meant to be reborn thus. His fate, his weird, his doom… had been eternally to exist in the web-hung halls from which he had been so summarily expelled.
Blinking eyes of flesh, he lifted his gaze to find that the pavement had changed. No longer was it an impossible plane which defied all laws, immutable, of existence and of matter. It was now merely a terrace paved in pale stones which fitted together with great cunning, but it was a cunning which seemed to his eye mortal and material. He could see now also that the pavement ended, forty of his paces away, in a wide and gracious stair that met with a track, perfectly normal in all respects, wending off into a mountain-smudged distance. He knew where he was, and what lay in that distance.
A wind rose up, smelling again of the sea, and his skin pebbled. He was naked still, he realized, but it was a nakedness now only of the body and not of the spirit. Looking down, he gazed at the bundle two steps before his kneeling figure. It was clothing. Clothing which he recalled, nearly as well as he now recalled his own name, as well as he had recalled his own flesh. It had been his, once. Burnt umber and reds like rust or old blood, leather and silk and ‘broidery. A knife lay beside the pile, and atop it… his eyes fixed upon the thing sitting there.
A ring of gold, simple and unadorned. No jewel sat upon it, no incising of pattern or ornament. It shone dully with the oiled, rubbed lustre of long use, of long wear. It was his wedding-band, which should have melted into the flames with his first flesh, in a land far from here. He had worn it, when he’d died, beneath the gauntlet which had clothed his fist. That it rested here now before him told the man everything he had needed to know. It told him why he had been given flesh once again, given life. For what purpose, and by what exception or exemption, by what holy rule. By their own laws was he married; and so by their own laws, he could not, an he willed it be otherwise, be kept from the other half of his soul for all of eternity’s passing.
And o! How he willed it be otherwise!
The man dressed quickly, clothing his flesh as he had clothed his spirit. His heart was hot in his chest and he remembered breath, he remembered sensation. Silk slid across scarred skin and his hair tangled in the roughness of gold ‘broidery until he caught it back in a tie at his nape. His hair, long and black as a spill of calligraphy ink from his father’s pen. Black as his grandfather's, and as the name he had at last recalled.
Morifinwë Carnistir Fëanárion, fourthborn son of Fëanáro, slid the golden ring into its accustomed place upon his finger and did not look back in anger or regret at the Gaoler’s Hall as he descended the final stair, going out from that place to seek once again the woman he loved.