the fire's toll

Nerdanel drops the bowl she’s holding. It breaks on contact with the floor in a sudden, complete shattering into shards.
There is a boy sitting in her kitchen, with his knees drawn up to his chest and his arms wrapped around them. He turns his head at the sound. The line of his cheek is achingly familiar. “Mother?”
-
The first son of Nerdanel returns from Mandos.

Notes:

dust off the idols
give them something to eat

(See the end of the work for more notes.)

Work Text:

Nerdanel drops the bowl she’s holding. It breaks on contact with the floor in a sudden, complete shattering into shards.

There is a boy sitting in her kitchen, with his knees drawn up to his chest and his arms wrapped around them. He turns his head at the sound. The line of his cheek is achingly familiar. “Mother?”

“No,” Nerdanel says. She takes one step towards him. Stops.

It hurts.

“Mother, you’re bleeding,” the boy says. He gets to his feet.

She makes a warding-off gesture – come no closer, or perhaps begone, wraith of my imagination. He keeps moving towards her with an easy grace she remembers.

She has gone mad. She’s spent too many years hearing their distant laughter. She’s spent too many years hearing faint strains of song that disappear when she stops what she’s doing to listen closely. She has spent too many years –

“Don’t move,” says the boy. He goes to his knees before her on the floor of her small kitchen. He begins picking up pieces of porcelain from around her feet and gathering them carefully in the broken curve of the bowl, white and yellow and blue and green fragments.

One cuts into his finger. A bead of blood appears, swelling into a perfect sphere like a berry. He puts his finger in his mouth.

Take the others, but leave me the twins, she’d begged Fëanor. The others were old enough to own their choices, ill-made as they might be; the twins were still too young. They were only bright leaves swept along by a greater current.

His head is bent before her. The pale part in his hair is as familiar to her as her own hands, the way it curls left at the back of his head. Amras’s part had curved right. There is blood on the pieces he’s collecting, red stains from his fingers and red stains from her cut feet.

When he looks up, there’s blood on his mouth. There’s blood on all her sons, thick smudges of it which blur their faces in her dreams.

“Stay there,” Amrod says, and gets to his feet. Then there is a small chinking sound, the sound of the dish and its pieces being placed on the stone surface of the bench. Then – “Mother,” Amrod says. “Mother, won’t you look at me?”

If Nerdanel meets his eyes, he’ll vanish. If she reaches out for him, she’ll find only air.

“Tell me that you know me, at least.”

Others might have confused her youngest sons, but Nerdanel never did. How could she? Even if their souls had not been distinct as different notes in a song, Amrod had worn from birth a bright-dark halo of a doom she hadn’t understood in peaceful Aman before the Fall.

“Mama,” says her youngest, and holds his bloodstained hands out to her.

She begins to weep.

Amrod is wearing grey, the same colour as his eyes. They gave clothes to him in the Halls, before they opened the doors. He has been dead, her youngest, and now he is alive again.

They are all dead.

“Are they?” he says vaguely. “They weren’t, when I died.”

“So I hear,” says Nerdanel. But she has heard so many things.

“I don’t really remember what it was like in Mandos,” Amrod says. “I don’t know if they were there or not.”

“They told me none of you would be.”

They swore the Oath. They damned themselves to darkness, and beyond darkness. And no Vala would say if her dead were held in Mandos or not.

“Well, I was,” says Amrod. He frowns. He has a young face, fresh and soft. There are still child-curves hiding in his cheeks. It is the face she saw when she last saw him. “I think I was, anyway! I don’t remember much, between – dying, and then standing before Námo. That was a shock. The last we saw of him, he was simply furious – die you may, and die you will, and no pity will be given to you, and so forth – but he wasn’t anymore when I saw him. Just rather sad, and weary, and sorry.”

His eyes are very bright and not at all weary. He has a cup of tea before him. She made it for him, moving around her kitchen like a sleepwalker, trailing blood. Lemon balm and lavender, jasmine and rose petals. Sleep in a cup.

It’s dark outside.

Amrod is very curious about the moon.

“How strange!” he says. He can’t seem to stop dividing his gaze between her face and the window. Occasionally he glances around the room like he’s taking it in, all the little touches that have made Nerdanel’s house and atelier in the hills hers, the silent shape of her separate life. “It’s so near – so much closer than the stars! And so bright – but so marred! Look at the marks on it! A flower of Telperion? That’s a rather lovely thought.”

Nerdanel can’t imagine him walking out of Mandos into the grey lands and making for her house in the hills like a homing pigeon. He was a hunter once. He ran wild around Formenos once, and he could do so again, but under a strange sun and moon, alone, reeling –

“How did you know to come here?”

“A Maia of Námo,” Amrod says. “Or Vairë? She spoke to me too, you know, after her lord was done with his grave speeches, and clothed me. I should have felt embarrassed about standing naked as a needle in front of the Judge of the Dead, not to mention the Weaver of Time, and I will later, I’m sure, but at the time I barely felt I had a body at all; or I felt it, but it didn’t feel yet like mine. I wasn’t settled inside it, I think, not all the way; or I was, but I was still learning it. Every sound echoed in my ears like the roar of the sea, and my own heartbeat was like a drum. I had to will every breath I drew! It was all I could do to follow what he was saying.

“I could barely suffer the touch of cloth when Vairë put it on me. It was her handmaiden who told me where to go. A grey woman. She was sitting at one of the looms whenVairë called her, and she looked at me for a long time, and then she took my face in my hands and kissed me on the brow. And suddenly I knew where you were, and where to find you! And – well, I walked. And here I am.”

“Here you are,” Nerdanel repeats. She can almost believe it. She’s touched him now. Held him in her arms, felt his body as slender as a young tree and as solid as one, kissed his hair. He’s here.

Still young, still bright, still apparently as unconscious of the Doom he called down on himself as he had been of the shadow on his brow since birth.

That shadow seems to envelop him now, like a thick cloud passing before the moon; like the grey cloth that covers him from throat to wrists to feet. A gift from the Weaver? She doubts it.

“I thought you’d be gladder to see me,” says her dead-alive son, frowning.

The word is so far beyond anything she feels.

She makes a bed up for him in the little room off her atelier. It’s the only place there’s any space. She lives alone, and suffers few to come to her. Letters from Tirion are to be sent to her father’s house, and her father sees that what she needs to know is brought to her, and what she doesn’t is suppressed. Her father’s house is her closest neighbour, and still a half-day’s journey away.

She isn’t always alone. She’s taken apprentices over the years, and it’s in their room that she puts Amrod now. Teaching is what she owes to her work, and to herself. It may be unbearable at times to have someone else in her space, but those students who have come to her over the centuries have passed first through a process of refining that fits them for her company. They must be very dedicated to the art in the first place to be willing to give up their lives for years, to give up their families, to give up their friends, and to take such a lonely apprenticeship. They must love art before everything. They must be truly driven, and truly skilled.

They must know to hold their tongues on the subject of her dead family.

Nerdanel does not test that quality herself. She does not take everyone who asks: but even a fraction of a fraction, over the centuries, slowly adds up, flakes of gold in river-water separated from sediment.Her former students are a chain of gold, a series of links of pure metal which lead one onto the next. Future students are first examined and vouched for by former, who are often the ones now to send students to her in the first place.

Only once has someone slipped the net: a woman with a gift for soapstone, for creating soft and living surfaces under her hands, a woman who thought in curves and undulations rather than lines and distinct shapes. A survivor of Beleriand who had passed over the Sea after Eönwë offered the Exiles their pardons, and who wanted answers for the lives Nerdanel’s sons had lived after they had left her: for the lives they had taken.

She has never had any answers.

In the morning Amrod is still there.

“I’m hungry,” says her son, in a tone of wonder. “What a strange feeling!”

He didn’t eat on the journey east to her, he tells her. He saw creatures everywhere – birds, of course, both the ones you’d expect to find, and a very officious hawk or two that he suspects came from the Mountain – and hares, and red deer; squirrels and hedgehogs and even a pine marten. Several foxes with their kits. But hunting didn’t even cross his mind. Nor did eating any of the berries or grasses or plants he saw on his way; not so much as a mint leaf!

“Now I know I’m alive again,” he says, when his empty stomach growls as she sets before him a bowl of porridge, blandly milky and drizzled with honey – she is treating his rebirth like an illness, his death as only a time of sickness – and finishes every bit like it’s the finest and most flavoursome of foodstuffs. He licks the spoon and then the bowl like the child he was when he went away.

Like the child he still is.

No, she’s being partial. A mother. The twins weren’t quite of age when they left her, but they were still older than their father had been when she married him, something Fëanor pointed out in their last fight. Well, he had been too young when she married him, she had told him in return. She would have done better to make him wait; perhaps then he would have learned the patience he never had!

Perhaps she should never have married him at all.

You would undo all our children, then!

No, she had told him. But I might as well have done so, for you are surely undoing them all as we speak.

You confuse our children choosing to leave you with their destruction; such is your conceit!

Conceit! she had cried. You would speak to me of conceit, who for your own drew steel on your brother, and refused the light of the Trees to the Valar and to us all?

He had looked at her like she was a stranger, the cold fire in his eyes so different from the way he had once looked at her. He had seemed like a stranger to her, too, an intimate one. You understood, once, what it meant to make things, and the sacredness of that creation; or you seemed to. I thought I had a true partner and friend in my wife; a peer.

You did, until you ceased to treat me as one.

I did, until you fell under too far the sway of Aulë. You put the Valar ahead of me, and your father ahead of your family.

Should I have put you before everything, heedless of reason?

Yes! he had shouted, and he had still been a fey, frightening stranger; but also, for a moment, the young man she had fallen in love with, a hurt and damaged boy with his stormy eyes. Yes! No one else ever has – but I thought you might!

They had said worse things even than that before they parted.

Leave me the youngest children, at least —

If you want them, come, and keep them all! If you don’t – if you leave me – you leave them all, and that choice is your own, my lady.

I am not your mother, she had hurled at him. And worst of all: You may take them all, but you will not keep them. One at least will never set foot on Middle-earth.

Something had been speaking through her, and not for the first time. When she was a child in her father’s house, Lord Námo had touched her on the brow when he came with Lord Aulë on one of his visits. His fingertip had been a spot of cold between her eyes.

You are no mother at all, Fëanor had said, colder still, to speak such an evil omen of your young. How eaten up by the Valar are thou, who was my wife, and is no longer!

Was that the formal end of her marriage? Was her soul unbound from his? She had never put it to the test, never asked the Valar to give judgement, or gone to the learned in the courts of Tirion who had begun to rule on such matters after the Exile. It didn’t matter. Fëanor left her in word, and in deed, and finally in death. He had gone, perhaps, beyond the world, further and more profoundly than his mother ever had. She was not a wife any longer; and she was no longer a mother.

“What is there to do here?” asks her son, when he’s finished eating. He has already admired all the porcelain in her kitchen; the bright, patterned, priceless pieces of art a student of hers painted for her once, turning his peerless hand to things as humble as bowls and plates. Another student had carved the marble salt-cellars, the mortars and pestles, the heaviest bowls; had left them covered with vines and flowers. An apprentice who preferred wood had practised on everything to hand: on the beams in the walls and on the ceiling, the edge of the table, wooden spoons, the settle. There is scarcely an inch of space outside the atelier itself unbedizened.

The wall of the kitchen is an experiment in fresco by a student who mastered polychromatic sculpture. Her hearth in the parlour is set with thousands of small fragments of stone in a beautiful pattern by an apprentice who wanted to marry sculpture with mosaic. Even the hangings in her bedroom were woven for her as a gift from a student who liked to work in the evenings on anything but her work, to keep her hands busy and flexible for working with wet clay in the mornings.

“I work,” says Nerdanel. It’s not all she does, though when she has an apprentice she spends more time in the atelier than she does when she’s alone. “I tend the gardens. I feed the hens. I answer my correspondence. I am working on a monograph. Your grandfather sends a messenger, once a week.”

“It sounds wonderful,” says Amrod. He seems to mean it. “Show me the gardens! Let me help.”

They don’t talk about anything of substance. Nerdanel is too raw. Amrod is too vague, his concentration dipping in and out. Sometimes he pauses for a moment that becomes an hour, distracted by the sun or the passing flight of a butterfly or the shape of his own new hands. They work together, side by side: in the kitchen gardens, in the herb-garden, in the orchard, and among the flowers. They tend the bees. They work in the stillroom. She sets him to hunting hidden eggs every morning, and he’s a quick learner. Her favourite hen pecks him in outrage. The cuts on her feet begin to heal.

The twins were never interested in art or craft once they were half-grown and beyond finger-painting or smashing clay about. Fëanor had still made them learn the basics of smithing – blacksmithing, and white; jewellery work – and Nerdanel had taught them draughtsmanship, but when they reached the age of serious study it was clear that their interests lay elsewhere. They were not meant for quiet contemplation and the demanding perfection of the work of art: they were fiercely alive, her youngest, and happiest outside, riding and shooting and hunting, travelling with their brothers or friends or quite alone. She had liked travelling, too, when she was young. She had not seen the point of caging them when they preferred to run wild, and neither had Fëanor.

Amrod is quieter without Amras.

Neither of them say his name.

“I’d like to learn,” he says, and though she suspects it’s only to fill his time, Nerdanel takes him on as though he’s her newest apprentice. None of them have ever come to her so new. They have all been passionate apostles, even the most contained and detached of them, or the most apparently heedless; devoted to the flame, able to spend days in the mental space of devoted making, some masters already in their own right with decades or even centuries of training behind them before they came to sit at her feet.

Amrod is rather clumsy at first. He smudges ink and charcoal under his moving fist when he draws. He favours the left hand; Amras always favoured the right. Nerdanel has heard that her eldest son lost a hand before he died. She restricts Amrod to pencil.

He has no real feeling for stone – uncommon in the Noldor – though he’s a little better with clay. Wire-work bores him, and metal-work makes him feel like he’s back in the forge, something which makes him shudder exaggeratedly.

“But you weren’t in the forge that often,” she says.

“I was, though,” he says, and a cloud crosses his face. “Later. At Formenos, after the first Exile. Father thought we should focus; and he thought we needed more weapons, and that we needed to be able to make our own. To his standards, of course!”

Fëanor had agreed with her that when their children grew old enough to express themselves, they would not force any of them into unnatural patterns or ill-fitting moulds: they would let them each grow as they would, and husband whatever skills they would, and leave them free to follow them whatever they were. Their first-born had preferred words and politics to the work of his hands. Their second-born had been born for music. Their third had gone to serve with Oromë himself.

It’s centuries too late to feel newly betrayed. Fëanor had set their sons to sweatwork in a forcing-house of a forge, turning out instruments of death. That should not be news to her. The rumours had always said so.

She never believed that one; but there have been so many rumours.

“It’s well done,” she says, of her son’s first, ill-balanced bowl.

“A very obvious falsehood,” Amrod says. “You’re only saying so because you’re my mother.”

“I am,” says Nerdanel.

She finds herself weeping often. She has not cried since the first year. She has been stone for a very long time, a stone woman among stone high in the stony hills.

Amrod doesn’t seem to know what to do when she cries. He pats her on the shoulder. He makes her tea, the same herbal tisane she makes for him. He knows where she keeps the dry herbs now, and how to tend the living ones. He hovers.

He hasn’t cried yet.

Is it wrong of her to wish that he would?

“I was naked in front of Lord Námo and Vairë the Weaver,” he says to her one evening, as though the fact has finally hit him with its full, delayed horror. His dreamy days with the bees and the chickens and the flower-beds and working in water-colours at one end of her great atelier have kept him soft and blurry, but now certain things seem to be beginning to filter through for him.

“And your grandmother.”

“My – what?”

“The woman in grey,” Nerdanel says while he’s still spluttering, choking on the air. She can’t help laughing at the face he makes. “The woman who kissed you. I suspect that was Míriel Therindë.”

“She died!”

“So did you.”

“I – true,” says Amrod. “But she swore to stay dead, and I never did any such thing!”

He swore worse things. The words want to be said, but Nerdanel keeps them behind her teeth. “Your grandfather released her from her promise. In the Halls they came to some sort of arrangement. No one can have two living wives: but if Finwë himself remains dead, the Valar say, there’s nothing to stop Miriel walking the world again if she wishes. If he does, she can go.”

“She never wanted to walk again. She said so!”

“She changed her mind,” says Nerdanel. “Never is a very long time.”

“Poor Father,” says Amrod. He glances at her sideways, under his lashes. She keeps her eyes on the fire.

She thought she would never see her children again.

She will never speak to Fëanor again.

Her own father’s messenger comes on the sixth day. Alyacarmë has known her since she was young. He knew her before she was married, and he knew Fëanor in his youth, during his apprenticeship to Mahtan.

He dismounts smoothly, untying the bags of supplies and letters from his saddle. She watches him from the window, and sees the moment that he realises that the person working in Nerdanel’s garden is not she.

He doesn’t go for a knife. No one does in Valinor. Such arming is forbidden now to anyone who doesn’t hunt, and those who wish to do so must gain Lord Oromë’s blessing first, and pass his test: though it would surprise Nerdanel if that test were anything more onerous than meeting his eyes and bearing the weight of his gaze.

It used to be common to wear a belt-knife, to use it for everything from eating to handiwork. Fëanor had been terrible at that. He always bristled with tools, hanging from his belt or secreted about his person in sleeves and pockets and goodness-knows-where. It had made, sometimes, for uncomfortable and even dangerous embraces. Celegorm had on occasion absentmindedly used his eating-knife as a hoof-pick.

There was a new trend in dedicated eating-knifes after the Great Exile: for pretty things with smooth, decorated handles and barely-edged blades which came out with the dinner-plates, and disappeared with them, too.

Alyacarmë is unarmed, but he still stiffens to attention. His sharp eyes find Nerdanel watching in the window, and some of his alarm dissipates, but not all.

It had been Alyacarmë who found Nerdanel alone with the soapstone-sculptor. The girl’s eyes had been glassy with tears, her pale face blotchy with rage and grief, and Nerdanel –

Nerdanel had been stone.

Stone was softer than people who didn’t work closely with it supposed. Even hard stone had secret veins of quartz or feldspar. Basalt was full of flaws: you only had to know where to strike, and it shattered like glass. Stone bent and changed under the slow pressure of forever; stone could be carved by the wind, and pitted and softened by the sea.

Alyacarmë comes to the door rather than rushing to the garden. Amrod looks up at the sound of his approach, shading his eyes with his hand. He is only a boy in simple grey garb and his mother’s borrowed hat, tied around his head with one of her scarves. His bright, betraying hair is hidden by shadow, as are the angled Finwion brows and straight nose, Nerdanel’s discreet mouth and small chin. He has her red-brown eyelashes.

Maedhros’s eyelashes had been startlingly black, like a watercolour finished by an ink pen, making starbursts out of his pale irises.

“You have a guest,” says Alyacarmë, a statement which is really a question. He means there is an intruder. Should I truss him up and tie him over my saddle?

“My son has come to stay with me,” Nerdanel says. She has not said the words my son in three Ages. They roll around like a smooth stone in her mouth. She says it again, for the pleasure of it. “He’s back from Mandos. My son.”

“Steady,” Alyacarmë says. He takes her by the shoulders and looks hard at her. “I am very glad for you,” he says, and seems to mean it.

“Of course I should like to see Grandpa Mahtan again,” Amrod says.

Nerdanel stiffens. Both her son and her visitor notice.

“—But I don’t see that there’s any hurry about it?”

“There isn’t,” says Alyacarmë, “as long as it is not bruited abroad that you’ve returned. As long as the news stays closely held. But should it get out –”

“I should write my father,” Nerdanel says. She should have already. She writes once a week. But Amrod had arrived the day after the last messenger, and instead of writing her letter, she has only looked at her son, and looked at her son, and looked, and now she has nothing to send.

“Lady Nerdanel, do you not think the king should be told as well?”

“The king?” says Amrod. He has been slipping back and forth between soft suspension in the moment and more focused periods, the latter increasing as the distance from his time in the Halls of the Dead increases.

His grey eyes are very clear now.

All her sons had been grey-eyed. Caranthir’s had been the grey-black of a cloud swollen with rain –

“King Finarfin,” says her father’s messenger.

“King Finarfin –”

“Amrod,” Nerdanel says in her forgotten mother-voice, or one of them; the sudden, scolding tone that she once used a dozen times a day. She had had seven sons. She had had to use it often.

“But Finarfin,” says her youngest. His face does something very odd. “Finarfin!”

“Who else was left?”

“All of them!” Amrod says. “Fingolfin! Finno and Turno! Even Finrod – you can’t tell me that he doesn’t think he can do a better job than his father; he thinks he can do a better job than anyone! And since when did Finarfin ever want the throne?”

Both Nerdanel and Alycarmë stare at him.

“What?”

“What,” says her son, her baby, her last-born.

“They followed you,” says Alyacarmë. He is better at giving this news than Nerdanel would be. She has lost her voice again.

There were years in which she spoke to no one but whoever her father sent, once a week. Years in which she had no apprentice; years of silence. Sometimes she would sing to the bees. Sometimes she didn’t speak at all, to anyone, for the space of a century.

“But Father–” Amrod has gone a strange colour. “Father – Father burned the boats.”

He pants a little to say it. There’s sweat on his upper lip.

“He did,” says Alyacarmë. “Or so we have heard. But Fingolfin and his people followed anyway.”

“How?”

“They walked across the Helcaraxë. It is said it took them nearly a year, and that many of them died on the way. Still they arrived in Middle-earth. Save Finarfin, the others of the house of Finwë all made their way into Exile.”

“How Father must have hated that,” says Amrod. He’s still pale, but the uncanny grey is leaving his face. “Fingolfin, following him? Fingolfin, coming after him rather than staying home to take the throne? He would never have expected that.”

“Your father never knew,” said Alyacarmë. “So I understand. So the Returned Exiles have said. He was dead before Fingolfin arrived.”

“Dead,” Amrod. His pupils alter noticeably. “Dead?”

“I told you that already,” Nerdanel says. Amrod has been doing this, though: he learns something from her, and then he forgets it, like a hat he’s put down somewhere and now can’t find. He’s been getting better at remembering every day. They only spoke of death on the first day. “They’re all dead.”

“Father, and – all of them? Maedhros? Amras?”

“Not Lord Maglor,” Alyacarmë says. “Or so it is said. Your mother, I think, believes otherwise.”

“They’re all dead,” Nerdanel says. Her mouth knows the shape of it well.

“Then – Father was there less than a year,” Amrod says wildly, “if he was dead before Fingolfin came. What a waste! What a – what a hideous, hideous waste.” He starts to laugh. “Oh, of course it was! How like Father. To break everything, and not even have the decency to live through the clean-up.”

No one says anything for a long time. Amrod keeps laughing, horribly.

Finally he stops.

“Finarfin is king here,” Alyacarmë says. “Fingolfin became king there.” He studies Amrod, looks at Nerdanel and seems to settle something in his mind. “That is enough news for now, my lord.”

“Oh, no,” says Amrod. “No, no! Don’t stop on my account. I want to know. I want to know what happened after I died! Was there any point to it at all?”

Nerdanel gets to her feet. She cannot think about what his ignorance means. She cannot hear the stories again. “I must work,” she says. “Tell him what you will. I am working. I must work.”

When she returns, hours later, Alyacarmë is sitting alone by the dead fire. Amrod is gone.

“What did you tell him?”

“Only the more solid rumours,” he says. “You know them all, Lady Nerdanel. Every piece of news I have ever brought you which has not since been gainsaid or disproven: and what is mostly considered fact now, as the dead come back, as the last Exiles and Grey-elves sail. I told him what is known of his father’s death, and of his brothers, and of the Lord Maglor. I told him what is known of the Silmarils and their fate, and what is known of the fall of Melkor.”

“What else?”

He makes a pained gesture. “Is that not enough? He was sick when he heard of Doriath and of Sirion. It seems that that rumour is true, after all: that he died swiftly, and long before the others.”

Nerdanel has never believed that rumour. She never believed that Fëanor could or would do such a thing, however strange he became to her. However far he travelled, however dark he grew, however he might be in his grief and loss.

He’d loved their sons so immediately, so fiercely, with the hunger of a starving man; like a miser who had been holding hot coins in his hands too long, desperate to spend them at last. No one had ever wanted to be a father more than her young husband had longed to be one. No one had ever been more amazed and delighted by each and every moment of their children’s life and growth. She had known that about Fëanor, to whom she had cleaved her soul and given her body: she knew that about him if she had ever known anything at all.

He loved their sons. He would not give them up, even to her.

There had been no news for a long time after they left. She had lived alone then, too: but she had come down from her peak from time to time to dwell for periods in her father’s house. She had received visitors there from her husband’s family. Indis had come to sit with her. Nerdanel had laid her aching head in her lap. That had been the first year, when she still cried. The hands of Indis had been cool and calming on her temples. They had always been friends.

Anairë had come, and held her hands, and wept. They had never been close. Loyalty to their husbands had kept them apart, as had her travel, and her work: but Anairë also knew what it was to be left behind by husband and children both, to come home to an empty house, to listen vainly at night for the breathing of those who never would return.

Anairë knew what it felt like to know that it had been neither wise or right to go; and yet still to long, sometimes, that she had. Anairë had heard the news of what the Exiles had done before they vanished into that silence which would persist for centuries: she had had a son at Alqualondë who had fought innocents unjustly and slain them, too.

Nerdanel spent centuries trying to understand Alqualondë and failing. To understand was not to forgive: it was only to put a shape on the world, to contain what had seemed uncontainable, to tame what was wild. It was a way to make sense of chaos, to reckon with horror. If you could make something into a story, you could grasp it. It didn’t matter how terrible the story itself was. You had still disciplined multifarious and unreckonable reality into narrative, and narrative was a chain of events that held together, one golden link at a time, a rope out of the darkness.

Alqualonde came to her as a story in which a mad king demanded from the Teleri what he had no right to, in horrifying echo of the question he himself had been asked before the Ezellohar. Her husband, who had reared in purest pain from the thought of yielding up his master-works to the Valar, wresting the master-works of others from them? Oh, he had done it: that had not been rumour. But how he could have done it she could not understand. How he could have killed to do it had been harder still to comprehend.

Her sons were dark and fell in that story, barely people, not individuals at all. Only the sons of Fëanor, a matched set of dangerous knives in the dark, obedient to his will.

Where were the sons of Nerdanel in that tale?

Ëarwen did not come. Nerdanel did not expect her to.

No other news came out of the darkness. Not for year upon year upon year, until strange children came flying across the Sundering Seas carrying one of the cursed Silmarils.

Nerdanel had begun to gather her life around her during those long centuries of silence, to create a shape for her days. She had given herself to her work with her full heart and her full mind as she had not managed to since the day a young, brooding prince had come from Tirion to learn from her father.

She had not been happy. But she had not yet turned to stone.

The strangers that came over the Sea with the Silmaril had said some of her sons were dead.

Caranthir, and Curufin, and Celegorm, all dead for certain. Somewhere in her father’s house, or perhaps Formenos, there still existed the captured shapes of their pudgy infant hands in clay and cast in bronze. She hadn’t drawn or sculpted them since Alqualondë, but she had done so very often once.

Somewhere there existed forever a young Celegorm, sprawled out in the grass, his chin in his hands, his grey eyes shining half-slits against the brightness of Telperion. Her wild son with his tigerish grace, wearing Oromë’s blessing like a crown.

Caranthir, her sulky princeling, her scowling youth, with his strong and intense emotions and his inability to unlock them. She had looked forward to the man he might become once he did. She had caught in stone something of the wild purity in him, the locked-room treasure of his soul.

Curufin: she had worked so hard to capture him as himself, not as only the younger Fëanor of her memories, his mirror. She had tried to give back to him the things that made him unique. He had had trouble seeing himself that way, her quiet child with his sleek dark hair and his eager father-worship. Their son who understood, like them, what it was like to think in abstractions and shapes, in metal and stone, in lines and in curves: who could see beyond surfaces into the hidden structures of the world, who so greedily took in all the skill and craft they had to teach him, the apprentice they had secretly desired come at last. He had married too young, like his father. He had become a father too young, like Fëanor. He had stopped learning from her, and turned only to Fëanor, who had already begun to turn from her too.

The news came in the form of a story about dark strangers, a story about a kingdom called Doriath, the soft sibilance of the name the kind of sound her husband would have once applauded – how had the House of Fëanor ever become such a personal form of death to Olwë and Elwë’s line?

They came for the Silmaril in that tale. The sons of Fëanor, black shadows following a dead one on his fall into darkness. They slaughtered. And they died – three of them.

Then, inexorable as time, they came again, falling upon a place which was only a name to her. Sirion, where the remaining Exiled had also flown, and where their victims of Doriath had fled.

That was another story peopled by those terrifying creatures, the sons of Fëanor. Dark Elves, ruined Elves, blights and banes, each and every one.

Survivors said that one of her sons had died at Sirion. No, two had. No, only one. Well, it was the twins, or at least one of them: who could ever tell them apart?

None of the story-tellers could.

Amras and Amrod, two parts of a single thought, two names uttered almost in the same breath. Curled together close as kittens in their babyhood and inseparable as they grew. She had cut their hair out of their eyes with her silver scissors when they were small and prone to tangles, leaving them huge-eyed under heavy fringes of bronze hair. She had watched even heedless Celegorm slow and soften for them, pausing his swift stride to let them follow, teaching them how to walk soundlessly in the woods and how to call the birds down into their hands as he did.

They had been meant to join Oromë’s hunt, when they were of age: but they never came of age in Valinor. They were gone beforehand. She had thought they came of age together on that far shore, but the story said –

The other story –

Nerdanel hadn’t known what to feel about the news of Fëanor’s death. He had been gone so long already. He had hurt her badly before he went.

He had been so badly hurt himself.

He had been younger than Mahtan’s apprentices usually were. Her father preferred them to be seasoned first, to come to him for finishing. But Prince Fëanor was a prodigy with all of his late mother’s fineness of hand and attention to detail. His own father had been known for his skill in building, for his ability to bring into solid shape the arches and towers and domes of his imagination.

Fëanor, they said, was good at everything, terrifyingly good, too much so to be natural –

Those stories had made it as far as the house of Mahtan. His mother had given him her talent, left it to him entirely, like a present. No, he’d taken it, the infant Fëanor, drawing it from her as he grew in her belly, leaving her lifeless and used up.

He’d had Caranthir’s sulkiness and Curufin’s eagerness and sleek black hair, many-coloured in the light like a slick of oil. Maedhros’s startling grey eyes and thick black lashes; Maglor’s perfect modulation of tone, the leashed power of his voice, if not quite its golden loveliness of song. He had had Celegorm’s catlike grace and sense of wildness: and, sometimes, the easy joy of the twins in the things around them.

And he had had a quality none of her children had had: the sense of being wounded, of being lost, of being less than secure in his place in the world.

Nerdanel hadn’t loved him at once. That was for stories. They had told a story like that, about his father, coming down the Mountain to see Indis singing. Nerdanel had only been interested in him, the way everyone else was. After that, when he had been no longer a novelty, he had been only her father’s newest and youngest apprentice, out of sight and out of mind.

She had been spending more and more time in her workshop. Those had been good years. She had been young and still imperfect in her art, but she had been able to feel herself getting better, closer, even if the image in her head still seemed hopelessly out of reach. She had begun winning praise which meant everything to her and still nothing, because she still wasn’t meeting her own standards yet, falling short of her own vision and intentions. She was still shooting at the stars and falling back to earth as surely as stone.

She had been getting better at aiming.

Fëanor was learning, too: everything her father had to teach him. He crackled with eagerness. He smelled of the forge, that mix of metal and smoke that was home to her, that meant work from her earliest days. He wore his shining hair bound tightly back from his head, and a scarred leather apron over plain garb laced tight to his wrists, and battered knee-boots. He had been a far cry from the prince in silk and jewels who had first arrived from Tirion.

“You should see his work,” her father had said. “Lord Aulë himself is impressed.”

She hadn’t loved him until his third year at her father’s feet, when he had come to her to learn about stone. Surely his father had taught him the basics?

“Building,” Finwë’s son had said dismissively.

Nerdanel had taught him something of what she knew about it, her sense for shape within stone, for cleavage and for weakness, for veins of crystal and silica, for grain and foliation and metamorphosis. He had less interest in slowly unravelling the hidden forms within it than she had: he was interested in making it take a shape, in grinding and sawing and faceting.

They had travelled the quiet and half-lit places of Aman together, finding new sources for their work, new sites for quarrying, secret pockets of ore. Their work had been closer then than it became later, when they were first learning from each other. She had started carving in jade and in gems, in making miniature versions of what she would write large in limestone and marble, in basalt and granite. He had still left some things uncut, some jewels to stay cabochons and others to follow their own shape, only interfering enough to allow them to more brightly catch and hold the light.

He would become so very interested in light.

They had been young when they married. They hadn’t gone through the long-year of betrothal, the cooling-off period lovers were meant to take like steel laid aside before its final casting: they hadn’t gone through the rituals or the ceremonies. She was barely of age, and he wasn’t, quite. They hadn’t informed their parents. Nerdanel hadn’t yet met his father, or his father’s wife, or his small half-siblings. A mistake, perhaps.

They wed in the way Elves had, once, at Cuiviénen: quite alone, out in the wild, with no one to witness but themselves. They had made promises to each other, and to Ilúvatar. They had lain down together under the wheeling stars and neither of them had been capable, then, of imagining a future in which they thought each other less brilliant, less fascinating, less perfect; in which they loved each other less, or in which they parted forever.

“Where is Amrod?”

“Asleep,” said her father’s man, who had known her as a child and a young woman, and known Fëanor as an apprentice, and their children in turn. There are patches of dampness splotching the breast of his tunic, as though he had held a weeping child there. “He was – unwell, Lady Nerdanel. Several times. I gave him a sleeping-draught and put him to bed. Forgive the intrusion into your stillroom.”

“You did right,” she says.

Lemon balm, lavender, verbena: a charm that could not have worked against such distress. She keeps poppy in several forms. She keeps the blue and black seeds, and also the milk, and a tincture made from them both with miruvórë. She used it to sleep herself, in the years after Eärendil and his Maia-wife brought the Silmaril home, the first and only people to have returned then from that far shore.

Amrod has curled on his side to sleep, like a dormouse. When she bends over him with the lamp, the light wakes the buried reds in his bronze hair, the sparkle of wetness on his eyelashes. His eyelids are swollen, blue- and red-veined.

He is more familiar, less surreal in his sleep. She sits on his bed and brushes the hair back from his forehead. It’s warm, but not over-hot against the back of her wrist. This is her child. This is not his childhood bedchamber, but if she closes her eyes, she can pretend.

He is easier to take in while he’s like this; easier to look at. It seems almost possible that he’s here, that she is touching him. She’s been sleepwalking through her days since he came, afraid to wake up. She has let each day unfold like a flower and not dared breathe too loudly lest she disturb the sleepy clouds of pollen.

She is glad that there are tears in his eyelashes.

She sits by his bedside a long time, stroking his hair.

Amrod sleeps for nearly a day. Alyacarmë is gone when he finally wakes, returned to her father, who should know. Her mother should know. Nerdanel will not think of the politics, but someone should be thinking of them. Someone should tell Anairë, whose son had done murder at Alqualondë too, that the deed need not doom him forever: that he might walk again, since Amrod has.

Someone should tell the king.

When Amrod wakes up, it’s the afternoon of the next day. His face is still slightly swollen. His eyes are red, bright, present. He says nothing.

“You should eat,” says Nerdanel.

“Should I?”

“You must eat.”

“But this is not my body,” says Amrod. “My body was burned. Father burned me.”

“It is the body Lord Námo gave you,” Nerdanel says. “It is whole, and healthy, and well-made. You should take care of it.”

“It’s not the body you bore,” he says.“Though I am surely still the son you named Ill-fated!”

He says it like everything that came after was written when Nerdanel held her infant of an hour’s existence and called Death into the room with them.

It is unfair. Is it untrue?

Nerdanel has always known that names are binding, that words matter. They shape reality, and reality shapes them, the two twining closer and closer together until there is nothing keeping them apart: and then fraying, sometimes, when language’s net can no longer keep safe the objects it holds.

She had named her first child with such pride. She had put him in the imagined inventory of her works: Maitimo, Time of the Trees, ivory and copper.

“You should eat,” she says.

—

She makes porridge. Thinks about doing something with the new-laid eggs; thinks about how often Amrod threw up the contents of his stomach before he fell into drugged slumber, and so thinks better of it. Porridge is settling.

The bowls she serves it in are plain, simply glazed. She made them herself. There is something calming about throwing clay, about the denseness of it in her hands as she works out the trapped air, rolling it forward and back again and again. It is more satisfying than bread dough, more resistant. It asks more of her. There is something satisfying too about the wheel, about the way the clay responds to her hands, to her fingertips and palms, to the pressed edge or end of a tool. It is malleable, but not infinitely forgiving. Work it too far, and the clay will collapse. Work it too long, and it will be good for nothing until it’s rested and worked out again.

She always works in clay before she works in stone. She makes maquettes before she commits herself to full-scale models, before she raises her hand to stone. Clay becomes bodies under her hands.

The firing of ceramics is a wonderful thing, a humble alchemy that fixes soft thought in stone. Dull glazes become ecstatic colour. Air becomes incandescent, explosive.

Bodies become clay in the earth. Bodies one had made, had loved, had touched.

Amrod eats. Not with the relish of his first breakfast after his return, with that innocent carnal joy. He eats mechanically, his eyes on the grain of the wooden table in her kitchen. The surface is scored with half-finished designs, with looping chains of flowers and geometric patterns. Some of it was done with the point of a knife, the sharp end of an awl. There are darker bits of decoration, where an apprentice experimented with the dark lines and delicate dappling of pyrogravure. That was centuries ago. It can’t still smell like burning, but he traces his fingertip over it, his brow furrowed and his nostrils slightly flared.

“Alyacarmë has gone to tell your grandfather,” she says.

Amrod nods. “He told me – about Father. About Amras. And the others.”

“Yes.”

“I don’t know how any of it could have happened,” he bursts out, pushing his bowl away. “I can’t think how they did it; if I hadn’t died, I should have done just the same as they, I know I should have – but I can’t think how! I can’t understand it! But Amras did it – and if he could have, I know I would have, too. But I was already sick of it. I can’t imagine – going on; going on and on, doing worse and worse –”

Once Amrod starts talking, it’s hard to stop him.

“I didn’t want to go to Formenos with Father. Oh, I chose to go! I chose it; but I didn’t want to.”

“You all chose it,” Nerdanel says. Sometimes she thinks that that was the last moment her children could have unstitched their fates from Fëanor’s. She should have fought hardest for them then, not later. That was when the cold spot on her brow should have warned her.

“Not because we loved you less,” Amrod says. “He needed us more. You both loved us, we knew that; but you could manage, Mother. Father couldn’t.”

Nerdanel had needed them, too. And they had had a right to their own lives, free of Fëanor and herself, of what their parents wanted from them. But she knows what Amrod means. She always had the same feeling: that Fëanor was missing something, something necessary, and that without it he was an unhealed wound, bleeding out, forever searching for what would make him whole.

She had hoped to give it when she married him, to wrap him in herself and make him safe. It hadn’t worked. She had thought, when we have children, and each child had filled him with happiness, but none of them had made him whole, either. By the fifth babe, she’d given up expecting that anything would ever be enough.

That searching, that restlessness, had helped push him to great heights – hand driven him always onwards, from one project to another, from one field to another, to works of such greatness that the Valar themselves admired them –

“I know,” Nerdanel says, and watches something in Amrod smooth out, some long-held fretted worry. “I know why you felt you had to.”

“It wasn’t truly unbearable,” he says. “Formenos, during the exile. It was boring, and awful, and I spent more time in the forge and doing sword-drill than I ever wanted to; but it was still home. The others were there. Grandpa Finwë was sad a lot, but it made Father happy, that he’d chosen him, that he’d come north with him. Sometimes there were terrible fights, but Amras and I spent our time in the woods, whenever we could.” He swallows. “I missed you.”

“And I you.”

She wonders at herself a little. The years of the first exile had felt like agony at the time. She had torn her fate from Fëanor’s, and it had hurt, badly: but it had set her feet on the path she would take up into the hills, into the flame of her own creation, away from his. She had missed her children. It had felt then like the worst time in her life, those twelve years that the Valar had decreed Fëanor must stay away from Tirion; it had felt impossibly long.

Twelve entire years without her children!

But their return had felt inevitable. Twelve years, and then they would be back. Resentful, perhaps, that she had chosen not to go into exile with their father, but they had all of time in which to heal such griefs. Like stones cast in the air, eventually they would fall to earth. That was the way Arda worked. Or it had been.

“Grandpa,” says Amrod, and his face screws up. “We left him. The darkness came, and we ran! Father had gone to the Máhanaxar, and we were all waiting to hear what would happen. I was hoping he would make it up with Uncle Fingolfin and we’d all get to come home. Maedhros was worried that he wouldn’t. Maglor wouldn’t stop playing the most annoying song as we waited – I wanted to murder him –”

He breaks off, flinching at his own words.

“Understandable,” says Nerdanel. No one could be more irritating on purpose than Maglor when he wanted to be, jangling nerves and setting teeth on edge.

“Well!” Amrod says. “We were already all wound up. And then the darkness came down, like a blanket, and the sky disappeared, and the house at Formenos filled up with it like smoke. I could hear the others – I had Amras by the hand – but I couldn’t see a thing. It was horrible. It wasn’t just that it went dark. It was that all the light in the world went away; all the joy. It was blacker than the spaces between the stars, and doom fell with it. I felt something coming. Or I thought I did. I’m not sure, now, whether it was the darkness itself that made me feel that way, or whether we really did sense the Enemy and the Spider drawing nearer.”

She remembers the unlight. There are no words to describe it, although in the long centuries since the poets have tried. It must have been worse at Formenos, already only dimly lit, so alone and so far from anyone else.

“We ran,” says Amrod bleakly. “We ran, and Grandpa didn’t, and when the Morgoth came with the Unweaver, he was all alone. We found his body afterwards.

“He was on the ground,” her son says. His eyes have dropped. He looked straight at her when he was telling her why he went with Fëanor. Now he’s looking at the dappling of burn-spots on the table top again. “The light came back – as much light as there ever was at Formenos. He was on the ground and his belly was open. It wasn’t a clean cut, either. It was – ragged. His guts were out. Celegorm tried to put them back in, but it didn’t help.”

“I grieved for him,” Nerdanel says. “I grieved for your father’s loss.”

“Father!” says Amrod wonderingly. “Father! When we found him in Tirion, he was wild. He was – angry isn’t the word, or sad, or anything like it. He was anguished, he was a storm of feeling, and I was afraid of him. I was afraid for him.”

When Amrod comes, at last, to the Oath, he winces, like now he’s come to the hard part. As though there isn’t worse to come. “We wrote it together, you know. Quickly, before the speech. Father had some ideas, and Curufin, Maedhros, Celegorm – Maglor was the one to give it a shape, to make it work. He took all our thoughts and made them scan.”

Of course he did. Her bright boy. Weaving words and Doom together, with the touch for song that had led her to call him gold-cleaver at his birth, sensing then how mountains would move for the sound of his voice, how the seas would cry with it, how his song would shape and reshape the world.

Neither law, nor love, nor league of swords,

dread nor danger, not Doom itself…

It was an older style of poetry now, and less used than rhyming verse. She wasn’t sure whether it was because of the Oath or because of simple fashion. Words had never been Nerdanel’s craft. But they had been Maglor’s, and Maedhros’s. Of course Maglor had been the one to write those lines, to insist upon three heavy alliterative stresses in each, tightening the Oath into a silken web of unlight. Hideth, hoardeth, or in hand taketh… Death will we deal him, ere Day’s ending… Woe unto world’s end, our word hear thou…

Had he put in Eru Allfather merely to make its repeated er sounds fit with ever? Had he known what he was working as he wrote it, linking vow remember with the consonants of Manwe and Varda, or had he done it simply for the sounds?

“Father was very good, you know,” Amrod says clinically. “When he was speaking to the crowd. I didn’t want to go to Middle-earth – I never did – but the way he spoke of it! The deeds we would do, the wrongs we would right, the strange lands and joys we would know! The freedom. It pulled at me. I would have sworn the Oath anyway – I couldn’t not have – but it was like a binding had fallen on us all, or a door opened. We wanted to go through it.

“It faded, of course; I was already regretting it by the time we were marching up to Araman and I’d had time to realise what it would mean, going. Leaving Tirion forever – leaving you –”

Nerdanel wants to believe it, that even one of her sons looked back at the Mindon Eldaliéva as they marched away and thought of her. She wants to believe it badly.

She says nothing.

“It was a horrible march,” says Amrod into the pause she doesn’t fill. He sounds reminiscent now, not flat, the way he did when he was talking about Finwë’s death.

She must remember to comfort him at some point, when it won’t break the fragile thread of his story. She must tell him that it wasn’t his fault that they left him, nor his brothers’ fault; that they had all been born into eternal light, so of course they ran at the coming of the darkness. Finwë had been born in Middle-earth under the stars, and he had already known it. It wasn’t the same.

“I got blisters! Father wouldn’t stop long enough to rest or to gather anything, or to hunt. We had what we had, and that had to be enough. And everything was so black. We didn’t have enough ever-lights. Whenever I looked back over my shoulder, I saw the neat cold circles of blue light, and then they began to be swallowed up by the red and gold of torches burning, more and more of them the further to the rear I looked. We were burning wood for light! Only imagine! And then when we got to the top of Araman, nothing would do for Father but to march back down again.”

There is a lot compressed there that he’s not saying. Whatever he felt as they reached the furthest point of Aman, the furthest from home he must have ever come.

Whatever he felt as they stared out into the shapeless horizon, knowing that somewhere across the water was Middle-earth, and that it was beyond their grasp.

What had Fëanor thought, coming to a stop when the land gave out, and turned to ice?

Nerdanel has always wondered. She has always thought that that moment must have been important. For Fëanor to have looked across to Middle-earth where the Morgoth had fled, longing to follow, to work out his grief and loss on his black hide. To look across the ice to where his Silmarils had gone. To feel, as he had surely felt, propelled by his losses, by the bleeding edges of his torn soul, and the surety if he could only get them back – those works into which he had put part of himself – only bring he which had killed his father to justice – it would be enough to requite his agony –

It wouldn’t have been. Nothing had ever been enough. But she thinks that that must have had something to do with why, thwarted, anguished, Fëanor had then wheeled his host about under the stars and headed for Alqualondë.

Amrod’s too tired to speak any more, he says. His throat is quite raw!

She makes tea. Lemon balm, lavender, verbena. “And honey, for your throat.”

“Thank you,” Amrod says. He stirs it with a spoon, turning its golden surface into a sucking void of motion. “I don’t know if I can talk about what happened next.”

“Alqualondë.”

At the name, he jolts so hard that tea spills over his knuckles.

He is distressed by the spill, hands shaking. He apologises as she cleans the table, blots at his hands, makes a worse mess of it.

“Amrod,” Nerdanel says. He jitters to a stop. “You won’t shock me. You must remember that I have heard the stories. That I have known about what happened there for longer than you ever lived.”

“Mother –”

“I would like to know how it happened for you, if you are ready to speak of it: but you need not yet.”

“Mama,” Amrod says, and puts his hands over his face. He is crying behind them, she thinks.

He cries for some time.

“Your tea is going cold.”

“Mama,” says her son, a third time, wet and awful. “Mama, how can you bear – how can I bear – how can you even speak to me?”

It’s a good question. If one of her sons had turned back from Alqualondë and come straight home to her, bloody-handed – if all of them had – Nerdanel doesn’t know what she would have done. Would she have closed the door in their faces? Would she have let them in, and cried herself hoarse upbraiding them?

Perhaps.

Several Ages have passed since.

“I haven’t been able to speak to you,” she says. There is water in her voice too. She doesn’t know how it got in. “You’ve been gone so long, and I loved you so much.”

Grief denied and shut up, red-hot anger and agony cooled to cold stone, and now cleaved apart.

She spent so long being flayed from one direction and then another, caught between the pendulum swing of mourning for her own losses and the other side of it, the horror at who her children had become and what they had done.

When she had heard they were dead, all but perhaps Maglor, she had drained the bitterest dregs at the bottom of the cup. She had felt, mixed up with everything else, relief that her sons would go on to wreak no greater harm.

Amrod asks, tearfully, “Did you stop?”

“Stop what?”

“Loving us,” says her son.

There’s still a softness to the shape of his face. Amras lived centuries longer than Amrod did. He must have lived to wear the adult face Amrod never quite grew into. Amras is the ghost at her table, looking at her through Amrod’s wet eyes. Amras, who lived through it all, almost to the end.

Amrod went but a little into the darkness. Amrod is here right now, wracked with guilt and need. She could tell him, no, I never stopped, or perhaps, I don’t know, but as soon as you walked into my house, I loved you once more, if I had ever ceased to.

Could she say the same to Amras? To Celegorm and Curufin, Caranthir? To Maglor, the son she had declared dead, because that let her draw a line under her past, let her say they are done, they are gone, close the wound, and work on in the ashes?

What would she say to Maedhros, who had taken the damaged body she had made once and walked it straight into the burning heart of the earth rather than live a moment longer?

She had thought that the hearth of her sorrow had gone cold as time turned over and over and over again, as one great year flowed into the next. Thousands of years passed. The stars moved apart, very slightly. The white ash had surely become as harmless as sand. She had surely gone beyond feeling anything, even guilt.

“No,” Nerdanel admits, to Amrod and to Amras, the other-self haunting him now the way Doom had done from his birth.

To Celegorm tensed in the grass, ready to spring, on worthy or perhaps unworthy prey; to Maglor composing Doom and glory both on his harp, and to Curufin holding his infant child, too young for fatherhood but refusing to be counselled otherwise, to be baulked in his will, not ever. To Caranthir who had grown into lordship and himself somewhere she hadn’t been able to watch, and then grown past them into nightmare. To Maedhros, ruined and ruiner.

“I did not stop.”

Finally they speak of Alqualondë.

Amrod holds her hands through it. He cries all through the telling. So does she. It feels like an ancient sea-wall has buckled and the water burst through to its ancient path, the more powerful for being so long thwarted.

“I think I killed him — No, I’m certain I did. I know I wounded many. It wasn’t even a fair fight until we started securing the boats. We had swords, and they didn’t! They only had knives and spears and fishhooks. But once we were fighting them on the ships, and not the shore – the boats started heaving up and down and side to side, Uinen or Ulmo lashing us, furious. There was a Teler with a spear. I kept falling over every time I tried to duck or to lunge at him, slipping everywhere. I got him in the gut, and he started bleeding all over the deck.

“It wasn’t like killing an animal,” says her hunter son. “It was horrible. I was sick. I was sick all the way: while we were casting out to sea and sawing away the ropes, and when we were sailing back up the coast to Araman. That’s when Curufin’s wife died. One of the ships went down, the sea was so mad and wild; and more people were swept right off the others and drowned. Amras lashed himself and me to a bolt in the deck.

“You’d think we’d have taken the warning then,” he adds, his face puckering. “We were dying before we even left. And then when we got back to Araman Námo came, and he said — well, you know.”

Slain ye may be, and slain ye shall be: by weapon and by torment and by grief; and your houseless spirits shall come then to Mandos.

There long shall ye abide and yearn for your bodies, and find little pity though all whom ye have slain should entreat for you.

And yet, after three Ages, even Námo had been moved by their grief and their yearning. Or perhaps he had merely grown tired of his own anger? He had allowed her youngest son to live again, even though Amrod had pressed on into darkness in the face of his warning.

“Father wasn’t swayed by it at all,” Amrod says. “Or anyone else, really. That’s when Finarfin left, but the others didn’t go with him. Even Orodreth, and you know what a dilly-dallyer he is! I wanted to turn back too, at least as much as I wanted to go on. But how could I?

“And then —”

The tea is cold, and likely bitter, but he picks up his cup and holds it against his mouth as though he needs to hide it for a moment.

“Your father cast off from Araman and left Fingolfin and all his host there in the dark,” Nerdanel says .

“That,” says Amrod. He nods. “I never thought they’d try to go over the ice. Father can’t have, either. He thought we were — leaving behind the extra weight. The faint hearts. They weren’t that,” he admits. “Not if they followed us into Middle-earth — over the ice. I can’t even imagine. Father looked at the ice and he wouldn’t do it.”

He says it as though Fëanor is still the yardstick of achievement against which all things must be measured, the greatest of the Noldor ever born.

“Did you know?”

“That Father didn’t mean to go back for them? Not when we left, but I wasn’t surprised. Maedhros was. He wasn’t sick at all. We’d barely dropped anchor before he was offering eagerly to take charge of sailing back for the rest. I think he thought Father would delegate that to him while he oversaw setting up our first camp. They were still fighting about it when I went back to the boat.”

“You went back,” Nerdanel says. She is careful not to make it a question.

“I was tired,” Amrod says, like he’s apologising, excusing another weakness. “I’d retched my throat raw. Everything was horrible and strange and loud. People were crying over the ones who drowned and the ones who were cut down in the fighting, or over their own wounds, or over what they’d done. Father was shouting at Maedhros – and Maedhros was shouting at Father! I didn’t want to be there. In the camp, or in earshot. In Middle-earth at all.”

He breathes out shakily, like that’s the thing he’s been afraid to say out loud.

It’s been helping him, somehow, to speak about it. He hasn’t gone vague at all since he began. He’s been sharp: suffering, angry, sorry by turns, himself. The things he is laying out for her on the carved, burned, and coloured surface of her kitchen table are not beautiful. But they’re real, not stories. They’re what her son saw, what he thought, what he felt. They’re a flickering succession of images that lets her see her children again for the first time since they walked away from her into the darkness: her children, not the Sons of Fëanor.

After so many centuries of wondering, she can trust this story. The window will close in a moment – she knows it – but to have walked with them just a few steps further –

“What was it like? Middle-earth?”

“I never saw anything much of it,” Amrod says. “I was only there a few hours. It felt – different. I’d never realised before that I could feel the Valar when we were in Aman. A background hum, a faint noise just at the edge of hearing, like bees in the garden when you’ve been out there for hours. I didn’t realise it until I couldn’t feel them at all in Middle-earth. The night felt empty. The stars were brighter; or was it darker there? Were they both stronger, the bright and the dark? It felt like it. It was dark, and dangerous, and star-lit.

“I don’t know if what I felt was real or only my own dread, but it was like I’d lived all my life inside a glass dome and suddenly the glass had lifted and the wind had come in. Father felt it too, I think, and he was – alight with it – but all I wanted to do was to go back inside the jar!

“I went back to the ship,” said her son, and he was looking at the sooty marks of pyrogravure on the table again, at the black dappling that became a bird in flight when you moved away and saw it from a distance and the dots came together into form. “Away from all the shouting and the sobbing. It felt safer than staying on the shore with the wrongness lurking out there. Father and Maedhros were still fighting and I thought — I thought Maedhros would either argue him down into sense, or that Maedhros would leave Father fuming and turn back for the others himself. I was going to be ready. I was going to help. I thought, when we landed again in Araman –”

He traces the burnt arch of the bird’s wing.

“I was going to stay,” Amrod whispers. “I was going to sail back myself, if Maedhros wouldn’t. I wanted to go home. I knew it would be awful. That I’d have to face what I’d done. But still it seemed to me, in the dark, looking up at the stars, that going back was less terrible than going on.”

Nerdanel wants to get up and take him in her arms, but pain lances her in place, and it’s Amrod in the end who shoves his chair back with a horrible sound, Amrod who rises and comes to her, sinking to his knees at her side and hiding his face against her leg.

She grips his shoulder tightly, smoothes her hand down his back. Strokes her youngest child’s hair while he sobs into her lap like a very small boy. It feels better than sitting together at the table. She can hold him. He can be held. He does not have to look at her.

Nerdanel does not have to look at him while he tells her how he died.

“The ship was on fire when I woke up,” Amrod mutters. His voice is threadbare. “There were flames everywhere. I thought – it was the Morgoth, the doom I’d felt. Then I heard Amras – I know it was Amras – he was screaming. He was screaming my name. I stood up on the deck – I looked down at the beach – and Father was standing down there with a torch in his hand. When he saw me his whole face changed. That’s when I knew he’d done it. He’d set the fire, to shut Maedhros up and stop him going back alone, but — he didn’t mean to. He didn’t mean to do it. He didn’t know I was there.”

“He meant to burn the ships.”

“Oh, I’m not excusing him,” says Amrod. He gives one of those horrible laughs, like he’d laughed at word of Fëanor’s death, a laugh without a pinch of joy, a laugh like a burst of blackness. “He burned me alive! He saw me, and all the angry wild triumph went out of his face at once, and then he was screaming too.

I wanted to jump, but the sails were on fire, and fire was running along the floor and the sides of the ship. There was light everywhere again, but it was the wrong kind, red and yellow and flickering. I’ve always thought Father had an affinity for fire, didn’t you? It answered to him. He wanted the ships to burn, so they did, like tinder. So fast! I was screaming – Amras was running along the beach, and Father had dropped his torch in the sand and was running towards me, too — I saw him – and then I could smell my hair burning, and the deck under me was going —”

He stops.

The story stops.

That’s the end.

Nerdanel ends up on the floor too, holding him in her arms, rocking him back and forth. He’s solid in them, flesh and bone, soul as well as form. She can feel the winged spread of his shoulder-blades, the planes of his back, the beating of his heart against hers. Here, on her kitchen floor, not on a strange shore choking on smoke, screaming.

They rock together for a long time.

“I can’t breathe,” Amrod complains at last into her hair. “Mama, I missed you so much, but if you squeeze me even a moment longer, I’ll die.”

“Don’t joke about death,” Nerdanel says, in her mother-voice. Curufin, don’t talk to your brother like that. Celegorm, boots off the table, please! “It isn’t funny.”

The rejected bowl of porridge is still sitting at one end of the table, gone thick and cold. Outside the sun is somehow shining like nothing has happened in this room, gentler and softer and less grand than Laurelin: like the world hasn’t wrenched out of its place, shifting forwards out of stasis.

They spend a quiet afternoon. They weed the flower-beds, and the vegetable patch, and take cuttings for the still-room. The grapes she’s been growing are still immature, tiny hard beads of pale jadeite hanging in clusters. The bees seem happy.

Amrod finds six eggs, one of them the blue-green colour of a duck’s egg.

“I think we should let her hatch it. See what happens. If it goes quack quack, I’ll claim it, and it will be the first of my herds in these lands.”

He’s fallen back into the light, easy, social manner he had when he first appeared in her kitchen, a solid ghost with a hollow centre. It is camouflage. Nerdanel understands that now. It is a confection, delicate castellations of concealing white foam, and under it lies depthless black water.

“There aren’t any bodies of water anywhere near here,” she says, but she’s laughing too, just a little. “And it won’t count if you teach it to quack, Amrod.”

While he’s protesting that he would never do anything quite so under-handed, they leave the blue-green egg where the hen had hidden it.

Inside, there’s work to do. Busy hands make for a quiet mind. Nerdanel has always refused to have servants around her here. She never wanted more time: time has been her enemy since the day the Trees died. Time has hung on her, Time has thickened around her, Time has stretched ahead her like a dark road, with the only torch-bursts of brightness it could offer her her apprentices, her work.

Time is moving again.

Amrod has questions of his own.

How long has it been is one of them. Alyacarmë told him Three Ages, but what that means in terms of time – in Years – needs to be explained to him in archaic terms, translated into the old measurements of the Years of the Trees. He’s shocked by the answer. It takes him a few days to assimilate it, and over those days Nerdanel hears him muttering “seven thousand years,” under his breath in rising tones of incredulity, as though by saying it over and over he’ll somehow come to terms with it.

She could tell him that it doesn’t work that way, but that’s something he can only learn for himself.

He wants a list of the dead. When Nerdanel hesitates, he gets upset. “It’s not like you can tell me anything worse than Alyacarmë did!”

He cries again when she tells him what she’s heard. Finrod torn apart; Aegnor, Angrod and Edhellos in flames. Fingon and Argon dead on the field, Turgon in his towers, Elenwë on the ice. Aredhel, at her husband’s hand. Orodreth. Fingolfin under the Morgoth’s foot. Celebrimbor.

“It was very long ago, Amrod. They’ve been dead a long time. And some of them are alive again, just as you are. More of the dead come back every century, like a tide coming in centuries after it went out.”

“And I’m part of that, am I?” asks Amrod, dashing tears off his face with the back of his wrist like an angry boy. “Just one more wave, when I really deserve—”

“Only Lord Námo can say what you deserve, and he has.”

That has been a bitter truth for so long, but there’s a sweetness to it now.

“But he hasn’t!” says Amrod. He’s angrier more often since they talked, up and down, laughing one minute and weeping the next. “He didn’t say anything to me! He only looked at me – on and on, that way he has, you know; like a drill-bit boring away. And then he just nodded and said damply, ‘Welcome home, Lord Amrod,” like I’d been away on a pleasure-jaunt.

“My head was full of fog, and I couldn’t think. I didn’t even thank him! I didn’t get down on my knees! I keep seeing the face of the Teler I killed, and I don’t even know his name –”

She can’t keep telling him that it was long ago, that it doesn’t matter any more. Of course it still matters. Námo can open doors that have been shut, but he can’t undo what has been. It will always have happened.

But many centuries have passed and they walk again, the slain Teleri of Alqualondë. They came back first of all through the doors of Mandos, singing.

It takes a time to explain the Ban on the Returned and the sailed; the delicate mechanisms of their separate spheres which keep them separate, hold Alqualondë at a distance from Tirion and Avállonë at a distance from either. Of the new settlements in the north, stretching into once-bare, once-forsaken Araman, where her sons had once marched in darkness.

“Nowhere blood was shed?”

“Nowhere someone whose blood you shed, or those who loved them, might see you,” says Nerdanel.

“But that’s only Alqualondë, isn’t it?”

It’s more complicated for the House of Fëanor. It always has been. Their collateral victims of the House of Fëanor are everywhere in Valinor: in Tirion as in Alqualondë. In Avállonë and spread across Eressëa. Up the coast and down. Noldor as well as Teler, Sindar, and Nandor.

“Is that why you live up here?”

“I live here by my own choice,” Nerdanel says. “Though perhaps one of the reasons for doing so was to avoid giving pain, as much as I sought to avoid new pain myself.”

“I would give pain?” Amrod asks, but he’s already answering his own question. “No — My face would give pain. People would look at me and see Amras. It would hurt people to see me. Because Amras hurt more people after I was gone. They all did.”

“Yes.”

He nods, hard-faced, jaw tight. Then,

“Do you think he went a little like Father? All unfinished, all torn at the edges, bleeding and strange?”

She doesn’t know.

When Nerdanel took Amrod on as an apprentice, it was meant primarily as a distraction, as a way to keep him busy and close. He needs that now. And his focus has improved. He can pay attention for longer spans, and there is more for him to do than grunt-work, grinding pigments and cleaning clay and making charcoal, basic drawing exercises.

“Where do you get your stone?” Amrod asks. He was still half-asleep when he started working in the atelier, before Alyacarmë came. He hadn’t asked. Now he’s rubbing his fingers over the craggy basalt face of one large rock as though listening for its voice, seeking to learn the precise nature of its grain. “Is it brought here?”

“The marble is,” Nerdanel says. “There’s a good quarry on the coast of Eldamar, below Tirion. The old site that was further east was emptied out centuries ago. I have friends who check the quality of the stone for me; friends I write to if I want something particular who are happy to act as my agents in the matter.”

“Friends?”

“Former students, mostly.”

“That’s nice,” Amrod says. He seems to mean it. “So it all comes up here?”

“Mostly. Sometimes I leave word for your grandfather and journey up into Araman or into the Pelóri to see if I can find useful veins or deposits. If it’s worth the effort, when I return I pull together a team and manage the extraction and hauling. The rock you’re touching came from a site near the Hyanmentir.”

“It’s safe to go so far south now?” Amrod asks. “I like that! I should like to see it. May I come? Next time?”

She would like that.

Finally, Nerdanel has to ask.

“Do you feel him?”

“Amras?” Amrod asks. He’s been delicately limning an earlier drawing of his with watered-down paint, pale glazings of blue and purple and grey. His fingertips are stained with colour. “No. Nothing.”

That’s how it’s been for her, all these years. Her connections to her sons and her husband, as alive and vital to her spirit as the veins and arteries pulsing her blood through her body: dead. Vanished as though they never were.

“Do you miss it?”

“Yes,” he says. He adds another layer of colour, deepening a pale misty blue into something more dangerous. “And no. I’m not – bleeding, though I feel like I should be. I feel sealed off, somehow. Like where we joined has been – cauterised. Is it like that for you?

It had been. The bonds had stretched across space and time, and dwindled into nothing. She had not felt them sever. She had not known when her sons or her husband died; not to the moment, not for certain. She had not been able to tell whether their souls were still caught in the mesh of Arda, or if they had been spun out into Outer Darkness and infinite nothing, into the spaces far beyond the stars. Since the Doom was pronounced they have been both dead and alive to her: lost but the profundity of her loss still unclear.

“I can feel you now. I didn’t, at first. When you came. I wasn’t certain what I was feeling, later. But now I’m sure. You are alive, and I can feel you, stronger and stronger.”

Amrod’s brush pauses. “Are you glad?”

Glad: inadequate word.

She has been caught in the same suspension as her children, dead and alive at the same time, and neither. And now she can be almost sure that they have not been unmade; that Lord Námo yet holds them safe.

He may yet yield up the rest; but even if he never does, she has that comfort. And now Nerdanel knows that, however difficult it may be, however long it may take, the doors of her heart will open to them, if and when they come back from Mandos, one by one or together.

“I shouldn’t think he ever would,” Amrod says, like he doesn’t want her to get her hopes up. “They went further than me. They lived longer. They did worse.”

Never is a very long time.

Stone changes. It weathers. It alters, crystallises, transforms. Crumbles to sand, is pressed into stone once more, crumbles again. Melts, hardens, melts once more.

As long as Arda endures, it will change.

Amrod spends his next few days in the atelier, working with clay, sketching, painting. His bowls are getting better all the time. He has the balance right, their walls no longer hideously thick or dangerously thin. The rims are even, the clay carefully trimmed and shaped and given form. But he focuses on painting, on his washes of pale and dark. He has an eye for colour that doesn’t come from her. A touch for delicate transitions, different from her clear sharp lines.

He shudders when she suggests he make himself a dagger from scratch, or from one of her kitchen-knives; a bow and arrows, a set of snares, a net?

No.

“But you loved to hunt! You loved it so dearly, I thought it your craft as much as Celegorm’s.”

She is getting better at saying their names out loud.

“I don’t think I can bear it,” Amrod says. “I still like being outside; I like gathering things, and tending the gardens. I like watching things grow! But I don’t think I could bear to kill anything again. I couldn’t join Oromë’s hunt now, even if he allowed it — and he never would.”

They mend the bowl she dropped when he appeared in her kitchen. It is nearly two weeks since it happened. Alyacarmë will be coming again in a few days, bringing the weekly letter from her father. Mahtan will have much to say this week.

Perhaps he will come himself, with her mother: come to see Amrod born again into the world. Perhaps there’s already word coming with Alyacarmë all the way from the King in Tirion, from Indis in Valimar, from Anairë mother of Fingon. Connections Nerdanel once had and let die, thrumming again with life and news and blood. Worlds opening up, complications and politics and feeling and family.

The gold is a soft and pleasant metal to work with, endlessly ductile. It turns into powder easily.

“I hate forge-work,” Amrod complains half-heartedly. He’s good at it, his hands steady and sure. This was his idea. Nerdanel watches, but she lets him work it out himself, his brows drawn together and his lower lip caught between his teeth.

It is so precisely Fëanor's very expression that for a moment, it’s like his ghost is wearing their youngest son’s softer face. He’s standing there before her as she loved him most, his mind wholly bent upon his work.

So much time has passed since she last saw him in the flesh; since their argument in Tirion in the darkness. Since the unforgivable things they said, her in her loss and fear and he in his outrage and dangerous grief.

She has a new last image of him now, a borrowed one: Fëanor standing on the shores of that strange land, a torch in his hand and a dozen beached ships aflame. She can imagine his horror as Amrod fell through the deck into the burning belly of the boat.

Feels it, for a moment. Feels for Fëanor: for the wounded boy she married and the bitter and brilliant thwarted man. For the partner in craft he had been, her other self: her husband, the father of her children, hers in body and in soul.

Nerdanel has never been able to quite believe the story that came to her of his death. It did not make sense. But now she can see Fëanor on the beach, she understands why he went so ardently towards his doom, like a falling star burning its way across the skies in an inevitable arc that could only end in disaster: why he ran so eagerly into Death’s arms.

Something cracks in her.

"Mama?" Amrod asks.

"Nothing," Nerdanel says. The sun is still shining through the great windows of her atelier.

Amrod looks at her for a long moment, and then he shrugs and turns back to his work. He has pieced all the shards of bright-painted pottery back together and bound them surely and carefully back into realignment, making whole what had seemed forever sundered. As she watches, his brush feathers gold shavings over the cracks, the powder sticking and binding to the wet lacquer seams.

It is a different bowl. And it is not.

—

Nerdanel Mahtaniel: A Retrospective (Mid Third Age)

To attempt anything like a complete, accurate, or even descriptive catalogue of Nerdanel Mahtaniel’s work is a task beyond the scope of this exhibition, or this catalogue. What we have brought together here is necessarily incomplete, full of gaps and silences: to contemplate the work of Mahtaniel is to grapple with both scarcity and abundance. The work of Mahtaniel in the Time of the Trees was more readily accessible than her work in later Ages, but this accessibility was itself problematic, for reasons that will be discussed below (see Damages to public artworks featuring Fëanor and his kin). It was in this period that Mahtaniel undertook many commissions both public and private, and while many of these works remain in private hands, others have granted permission for exhibition.

In more recent times (Ages One through Three), Mahtaniel has exercised much tighter control over her art. Certain major works are available to us only through description or reproduction, and what we do have from this later period is regrettably a small sample of the artist’s total output. While many of Mahtaniel’s works in this period are rumoured to have been destroyed by the artist’s own hand, more are reputed to be held in the halls of Mahtan and may eventually come to public view, rendering this catalogue obsolete.

Mahtaniel’s work is often read through a strictly biographical lens. This is a common temptation with any artist who deals with such intimate subject matter, but Mahtaniel’s connections to such historical figures as Fëanor, High King of the Noldor (see first exile of, rebellion of, second exile of, Oath of, death of), Maedhros Left-Hand (once High King of the Noldor, later Lord of Himring, Notorious Bane of Beleriand), Celegorm the Fair (Lord of Himlad, see crimes (against Lúthien of Doriath; against Dior of Doriath; against Elúred and Elúrin of Doriath (his men)), and Amrod Ill-Fated have encouraged scholars to read her work for clues to these inscrutable figures rather than as works of art in their own right.

Mahtaniel’s stature demands that we engage with her work on a more serious level than the merely personal, and we intend to offer a recuperative reading, focusing on the material and artistic rather than on engaging in imagined and overdetermined psychological detective work…

Lady of Stars

Time of the Trees. Granite with notable quartz inclusions.

Yavanna in Tree Form

Time of the Trees. Limewood.

Aule / Aulendur

Time of the Trees. Marble, polished and unpolished.

Representative portraiture rather than the more idealised Valarin forms of Mahtaniel’s early work. It is clear here that both Mahtan Aulendur and Aulë were modelled from life; both the similarities and fundamental differences between the two are made clear by the …

The Lovers

Time of the Trees. Polished marble.

An early example of what would become a recurring theme in Mahtaniel’s work. It has been read as representative of Mahtaniel and her husband, Fëanor Finwion, and dates to the early years of their marriage, but this identification is far from solid. The indistinct, obscured faces contrast with the delicate rendering of anatomical detail that Mahtaniel would later move away from, suggesting that the intention was more universal….

The Dancer

Dance Study

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman

Two Heads

Fëanor

Indis

Memorial

The Laughing Woman

The Sleeper

The Child

The Body

Boy with Fox Cub

The Children

His Hands

The Youth

The Singer

The Music

Tiger in the Grass

Feanor II

Curvo

The Youth II

The Stag

The Young Father

Ruined: Head of a King

The Mirror / The Twins

The Kneeling Woman

Fëanor III

Weeping Woman

The Lovers II (maquette)

A Form In Wax (maquette)

Bather I

Hand

Bathers I

Bathers II

Youth (GROUP)

The Lovers, III

Night

Day

The Flame Imperishable

—

Umrod Nerdanelion: A First Showing (Early Fourth Age)

[Water colour]

Notes:

This fic has been converted for free using AOYeet.
Title & epigraph from The Mountain Goats' song Elijah, as I am a lo-fi indie kid now & forever.
Thanks to warrioreowynofrohan for being alpha-reader for the first half, which I threw at her in March in the same shape (stuck) it had been since July; she helped me figure out how it had to end. Thanks also to asongofvalinor on twitter for the bowl. ♥ I decided to be hasty and not wait for a beta, so all errors VERY much mine.
Tumblr link here; twitter link here. Come & say hello!

I've been writing this so long, I'm hideously nervous about it D:

Actions

Kudos

Rivaoftheshore, Sidesteps35, tigrislilium, Riagara, Fencer13, EatsBooks, Whiticatipus, Iamadeofmemories, Selkie_Llian, WalpurgisAk, whimsicalblues, Banmosi, chevalric, arelas, AllieLemur, DSabre3, Pandicornsforever, Arctostauvi, boyhounds, Azaikit, mywingsareonwheels, L_ejla, readingtomcat, sscarlilss, orwuahl, TempestOfTuesday, vaguewinds, railloki, Scoliosisqueen, Taxfrauddotcom, arabmorgan, Thinwhitedutchess, greensalamiomelet627, Sognante, Tenillypo, haladin, Green_Leopard, blue_and_new, Jinjoo88, PandakaiLoove, SuperIceLight, Kobalos, Figgies, AmyBenson, jetsam, Ermingarden, Phoenix_Sunny, powwoW, probablyaceok, annaterpillar, and 345 more users as well as 118 guests left kudos on this work!

Archive of Our Own^beta

Actions

Work Header

the fire's toll

arriviste

Summary:

Notes:

Work Text:

Notes:

Actions

Kudos

Comments

Footer

About the Archive

Contact Us

Development