Work Text:
The chamber is unlit.
By design or neglect, the chamber’s darkness gulps the candlelight limning the rock-cut cave complex. The carven figures, serene Manwë curling stone fingers to invite the clouds to dance, arched apertures coursing with birds roosting in Yavanna's fruit-laden trees, dwindle. The painted murals animated by wriggling torchlight – of Vána’s train of flowers like a slow river, of Oromë striking up terrible Light, a lightning spindling many-fingered in the likeness of Telperion – divide down into rudimentary figures.
And then they halt altogether, as if abandoned by their artists in hasty deference to the atavistic night.
On the heights of Taniquetil, the Vanyar with their heads covered habitually against the disorienting glare of the Light are awed by the rare blackness inside the Mountain: they’ve named this chamber the Ear of the One.
The cradle of a room, deepest in the limestone system, sits proudly deprived: the dark, gluttonous, leaps to lick the Light from Amanyar eyes. The ringing silence, which interrupts the runnels of water chittering their way through stone, halts any questions.
Who there would listen, if he could ask?
Makalaurë cheats himself of guessing. To dwell now would have him with an oud at his hip and the evening settled cross-legged on the stage for composition, forgetting vanity to steal obvious glances under the proscenium curtains, his eyes seeking out the vaulted passageway that slopes down to the dark’s mastery.
In his half-assembled seafoam robes, he meanders barefoot down the buzzing corridor, turning the impression over in his mind with a fascination as for a prism, or a rhyme.
In the next deep chamber, a Vanya flautist emerges from behind the maze of folding screens hiding performers. Their naked arms stretch and curl above bamboo and painted panels as they wrestle on their costumes.
“Disrupt the veil between performer and audience too soon and you’ll stumble over your lines,” the flautist chides him as he oils his wood flute, a Valimar superstition that Makalaurë smiles away. “Who are you looking to see?”
“Maitimo,” he answers, sincerely enough, “though it is as I feared: he has tarried at the foothills to avoid the reception. He holds no special fondness for the dim.”
“No: too tall. Hits his head in Taniquetil’s systems,” Atarinkë corrects around the nail held between his teeth; he neatly hammers one of Fëanáro’s shimmering crystal lamps to the lip of a shelf laden with offerings of fragrance and costume jewelry.
“Perhaps I shall sing out a ditty and lure him here into my parlor,” Makalaurë schemes aloud. “After all, in a space so hallowed to the devout, what shall a song be, but bewinged? What can forbid the notes from whisking beyond this stone cradle to join the peal of Valimar’s bells?”
“The stone,” says Atarinkë, “being limestone. Limestone is porous. Porous means soundproof.”
Makalaurë sits with Curufinwë’s assessment before he raises his chin. “I was soliloquizing.”
Curufinwë does not ask questions; rather he charges after his suppositions with the same alacrity as their father. He makes a lecture hall of the dressing room, stepping stool as his stage. To the intrigued Vanyar performers, he descants, “The lamplight is designed for subtlety: the blue glows softly enough to go without a shade even during performances. The crystals themselves will wake or sleep in response to touch. Look here.”
Curufinwë runs his fingers along the broadleaf shapes, each hand-cut by Fëanáro over his morning coffee. As Curufinwë’s fingertips stroke along the glassy pieces, in each an answering interior blue flame flickers alive.
The technology is an altruistic offering to the Vanyar creatives. Or perhaps a tell of defiance: upon the dizzying heights of Taniquetil, still only Fëanáro’s light can pierce the depths of the caves.
“A tasteful innovation for a sacred space,” admires one Vanya actor, before launching into a deep stretch. “Not so brazen as the latest light-crafts Prince Fëanáro has been concocting. Or so we have heard tell from the Maiar, upon the Mountain’s slopes.” Her hair slips to hide a disapproving stare as she holds her feet.
Makalaurë hums, a soft pluvial tune to stir the lights into scintillation and dispel the entomological buzz of irritation among a few of the Vanyar. He pins pearls into his braid; at a height closer to Varda’s work than he has dared perform before, he fashions himself after her firmament: winks of light moting through the deep-sea dark.
“Well. Take your comfort in what they say of imitation,” Curufinwë dismisses with the sneer of a protective son.
The performer raises her eyebrows in skepticism, but it is Maitimo who laughs outright. He ducks into the dressing room in his familiar resplendence, gold and green: to Makalaurë’s eyes a kingfisher mis-migrated to the Mountain. A benediction.
At Curufinwë's curious scowl, Makalaurë interprets Maitimo: “I believe Father’s polymathy screeches to a halt before flattery.”
Maitimo convinces Makalaurë to decamp the dressing room for the lower chamber within Taniquetil. To investigate, he says. It is not Maitimo’s negotiation acumen, but the hope scrawled across his face, that tips Makalaurë into Maitimo’s will.
“I have makeup to apply and an appointment with my vocal tutor to keep,” Makalaurë reminds Maitimo. “I cannot indulge for as long as you might.” A hand clasps his costume’s overcoat closed in performative reluctance.
“Shh,” Maitimo says.
They pause in a vestibule where two choralists gossip together to evade the ebb of stagehands, well-wishers, and performers; when the passageways resonate with an attentive stillness Makalaurë has come to identify with the holy mountain, they hurry onward.
“Vocal training,” wonders Maitimo as they slip through a painted hall primed for worship – consecrated for Aulë, Makalaurë surmises when his light footsteps percuss up the rib vaulting and clamor a raucous petition to the ceiling. “You? What do you still need with a tutor?”
“Join our sessions; the finest orator can find value in tutoring.” Makalaurë primly sizes Maitimo up. He is slouching. “Practicing dynamics and good posture might behoove you.”
Maitimo snorts. “Here I thought I’d fled pedantry for a while, out of Tirion’s sights. Seems I brought it along with me.”
“And,” continues Makalaurë, unapologetic and lonely, “I would appreciate your company.”
“I’m tone deaf.”
“You are not tone deaf, Nelyo; you simply do not apply yourself.”
The complicated Telerin footwork comes effortlessly now, after Makalaurë has asked Maitimo so often to practice with him. (It is in vogue in Alqualondë, Makalaurë insists. He would know.) Along the immaculate sloping stone they dance, hand-in-hand, downward to their gentle act of rebellion. The musical scuff-tap-scuff-tap-tap of their feet skipping across the floor brings Makalaurë to a little fit of laughter that banishes, for the passageway’s next bend at least, the gloom mantling the stones.
Beyond Valimar's dazzling gates, the Vanyar keep holy grounds every few paces. Irmo’s votaries seek dappled light within walled gardens for their dreaming; Ulmo’s devotees, parched for his waters so many leaps above the sea, gather in the Mingling at the city’s ornate fountains, where they dance their worship.
But the music of well-trod joy shushes to a murmur at such a depth in the deep Mountain -- and at last plunges into cold silence.
Their pace slows near concaving stone steps down to where the darkness grips the walls. Their descent delivers them into a brume that colonizes even the glint of earrings, and a shadow that tears away the ceiling and transports them to a universal --
Nighttime, their grandfather Finwë had named it, the antidote or antagonist to Valinor’s illimitable noon: picture yourself a pearl, and imagine the shell of the world that cradles you suddenly snaps shut on its hinge. That is the endless evening of the East.
Inside the chamber, Maitimo’s winsome smile vanishes until he is but two faint lights blinking through the clotted black: a rare constellation.
Alien to the dark, Makalaurë could be suspended in an abyss of unstoppered ink, a leak sprung from himself and filling the chamber as a cistern: the possibility of words a tide to take him. And not a single one of which he can divine.
He draws in a breath, struck abruptly with the apprehension of drowning in something he cannot see; his soft gasp becomes a refrain, again, again, again.
A hand in front of himself, fingers splayed against nothing, he dares a hum as he warily steps through the space. A single, wordless note steeps the dark in Makalaurë’s hue, but dissipates; another, in a lighter tone, sweetens the trenchant nighttime. The stone absorbs his song –- in the ensuing silence that peals as headily as Valimar’s bells, he listens for it to respond in kind.
“Anything could be in here,” Maitimo realizes then. The Quenya is so sudden and so foreign to the chamber that Makalaurë nearly jumps to hear it. “Everything could be in here.”
“Or only us, alone,” Makalaurë conspires. "Now which is worse?”
He sings a low, lulling tune and shapes his landscape: his braided hair stirs with the atmosphere the sound builds, the night his rapt audience. His lips scarcely move through the notes, but unseen, he explores what speech may belong here, in a place out of time.
He finds no Quenya word that could make its home here.
“The dark is nearly material.” Maitimo is only the sound of suspicion in Makalaurë’s ear. “And -- weighty. Full.” Maitimo’s strong hands grapple against the chamber’s smooth walls while he weighs what he has just uttered. “It’s an entombment.”
“No, Nelyo –- do you hear it? Listen, it is fluvial, and as famished for stories as we are.” Makalaurë’s voice learns to float upon the deep silence, his tone melodious but with a pitched intent he does not bother to hide. Just like Father when he’s alighted upon some great hypothesis, Maitimo might be ready to remark, though any clue in the quirk of his lips or wry raise of his brow is dissolved into the well of darkness. “We have arrived at the banks of a wide nothing, a nothing having happened -– yet.”
“ -– Cuiviénen,” Maitimo says then.
Makalaurë smiles at the trick of his eyes that could be Maitimo. “As if we are emerging unbegotten: melody before words,” he murmurs. “Knowing naught but to sing, and to reach for each other; to find a home.”
His voice lifts to star their nescient landscape, and in singing he adorns the chamber with a tide, and tide with a rhythm.
A shuck and shuffle to his right cuts in on his song: Maitimo rubs at his arms with a firstborn’s responsible unease. He has his questions — opponent of the unresponsive nighttime, he refuses to sit and have song with it. “And now, I say we find a candle or lamp that may light –- “
Makalaurë does reach for Maitimo then: he flings his arms around Maitimo to stop him. The attempt is foiled by pitch black: he bats at Maitimo’s unbound hair and scuffs at his arm, artless. “Let the mystery live, Nelyo!” he protests.
“Easy,” Maitimo snickers, fumbling to steady, “hey – easy -– “
He catches Makalaurë as if to dance him out of the cave, but those sweeping acoustics still siren to Makalaurë, a song for his song.
“No!” Makalaurë chirps. He hops out of reach before Maitimo can snare him again, and presses himself up against the safety of the limestone wall.
Only the wall is furred. And it moves.
He recoils backward.
Maitimo barks a laugh and seizes him decisively as he stumbles. “Yes,” he counters with an arm slinging around Makalaurë, as strong as a recommendation comes. He dutifully sails them both through the drowsy yawn of the aperture. “But later," he magnanimously negotiates, "lest your waiting public run riot above us.”
A quick and littoral stage makeup: a dab of bright coral on the lips and dulse’s dramatic passion-red to his cheeks. Alqualondëan enough a style for an operetta performed upon a mountain. A circlet wrought with silver filigree, and then his character archetype is in flesh appeared, jittery and jubilant.
On the other side of the curtains’ heft, the audience glows faintly, abyssal fish schooling about the blue lamps Curufinwë has arranged along the chamber.
The unseen runnels funneling through stone make an accompaniment to the players’ voices, which lift with the curtains.
Among them, Makalaurë’s song with an assiduous power indexes the auditorium’s acoustics. Here the audience’s murmurs and stifled laughter stoking the players; rear orchestra, the smatter of hands, of silk against linen and carven stone: lovers leant against each other; overhead, the whorled ceiling gathering the polyphony into a rich resonance.
His song trills an arc to follow the gastropodian curve of the auditorium. It sweeps upon breaks and divot of rock, finding his audience: he seeks not to tear with a raptor’s dive, but to swan.
Buoyed by the next eruption of laughter, beatific, he makes quick work of his audience’s stiff bonds of propriety. He ornaments his rhythm to allure; he cradles the ear and the eye in the smiling bridge of breath between notes.
He cannot partake in the abandon –- he dons the mask, he affects the gesture, he conjures the notes to persuade. He indulges his audience into the vast, open moment: and the moment is marked for reckless indulgence.
With a crescendo, he casts his starry net. In draws their attention: all his.
Triumphant, he tosses himself back upon the center-stage bed.
He lets his head tip back as he claims mastery, the clink of mother-of-pearl and gold upon his collarbones a crisp punctuation. At the bidding of his lover, Meldo, the dubious hero of every Vanyarin cautionary tale, he warbles his delight to wild strings, Oh, yes! Oh, oh, yes! Oh -–
([A brisk knock at the bedchamber door.]
[Meldo, golden hair mussed and Vanyarin robes disheveled, scrambles from between Makalaurë’s knees. Makalaurë, in a panic, dives into the grand bed and throws the bedclothes over himself.]
Meldo, tremulous: Who goes…?! Who is it? Who raps upon the door of the blameless, the pious, the exemplar of Laws and Customs kept–?!
[Enter Aulë, montane in raiment of rock and gem, and scowling. He waits on the other side of the door, brandishing two massive jewels like a threat.]
Aulë, joy undetectable: Gifts for the blessedly wedded!
Meldo: Hah! It seems all that forge smoke has dimmed our dear Vala’s faculties: for I kept my tongue too busy, far too busy to invoke His name!)
Maitimo is laughing from – stage right? The bedclothes covetously cocooning Makalaurë save him from the satisfaction of knowing before curtain call.
(Makalaurë, a lamentation sung beneath sheets: Ah woe, ah wedded!
Meldo: Say not!
Makalaurë: In my admiration of your industrious tongue, admiration I professed! … And in my admiration, I may have invoked the One’s name once.
[A beat.]
Or twice.
[A beat.]
Or thrice, or –- )
Shouts of laughter.
Nearly visible still through the whirl of blocking, the bedding’s furl and ruck, and through the fingers of the contrite hand he passes over his face as he bargains with an assembly of Aulë, Yavanna, and a fuming Tulkas, is the waiting cave.
The cave that moves under his touch, that asks for the power in his song, and offers a story in return.
In the cavern they call backstage, Makalaurë removes his makeup. He becomes any other Noldo again: an even, heavy-lashed stare, an expressive mouth shaped for poetry, and a mess of curls into which his fingers fly in their effort to tame; with the brisk intent of a preening bird, he arranges and rearranges until he has combed and clipped himself into a look serviceable for a minstrel.
He could be any beautiful Noldo listing through the subterranean blue and shrugging on his wide-sleeved coat, until he opens his mouth.
He turns to appreciate Fëanaro’s lamp draping along the shelf. Its hue revises the story painted upon cavern wall: a bucolic landscape abound with orchards and their burst blossoms, now sunken beneath the Belegaer currents. He appreciates it until it makes a paradox of him: grateful for the light, he hastily takes up his oud and makes to escape its color.
He ties his oud to his back with a sash and departs to the fête that sprawls through the auditorium and out from the cave mouth, into the blinding brilliance of Taniquetil’s foothills. He joins the pleasant din rilling through the passageways and casting voracious shadows upon the walls, receiving his embraces amid the sermon of breezes whistling through the upper chambers.
In the grand auditorium, he is toasted and sips his fill of mirúvorë; he leads the revelers in a Valimar folk song.
The fragrance of resin confounds even as it pleases, before -– myrrh, Makalaurë discerns with a flutter of apprehension, knowing whose votaries daub themselves with it.
Behind him, the wall moves, furred. The fur ripples, a rebuke of any living beast's movement.
And then the fur hones into one booted step: staccato against the stone, a cloven-hoofed sound. A frisson up Makalaurë’s center; an approach.
The Valar who promenade Valimar’s gleaming streets keep their raiments meticulously constructed. Not so Melkor. The rampike of Melkor’s fana twists before it straightens tall, taller. The fur blurs down into a cloak, sprouts into a collar of glossy feathers.
Makalaurë has stolen a glance and met Melkor’s eyes, the black sclera. Recognition.
Restive as is a son of Fëanáro’s wont, chary of the Valar as their father has raised them to be, he does not bow his head to Melkor: with a gaze limned with his father’s pride, he smiles.
Makalaurë averts his gaze when Melkor smiles right back; he accepts another glass of mirúvorë proffered to him and settles against the stone slab of a table with an affected indifference, leg crossed over the other; he sips slowly as Melkor passes, untouchable, through the crowd to reach him.
“I had wondered if it was a Vala in our midst,” Makalaurë reflects with a voice trained neutral, his eyes falling from Melkor to follow the slide of his finger along his glass’ rim. “Although I felt a living thing, I heard no breathing.”
“A charming performance, Kanafinwë,” Melkor says, his own sound a many-throated vibration: felt before heard.
Makalaurë lifts his head and intently seeks out what he can of Melkor. “You know my name.”
He cannot witness the Vala in his entirety. Melkor is an incomplete collection of fractals; his portions of a being emerge from ineffability into stark relief only for as long as Melkor wills them, The stoic brow to serve a glance; the heavy hand to gesture -- or a smile to command.
But where Makalaurë’s eyes fail, the air hoards Melkor’s voice: four syllables intimated to him in the eerie cadence of divinity.
“I have ever been Fëanáro’s ‘second son’ to you; merely one of his brood,” Makalaurë points out with an easy toss of his hair, bold against his own intuition’s warning. “I had presumed you would not care to learn my name, in fact.”
“Elfling, to thy first naming under the glare of Dāhan-igwiš-telgūn I bore witness.”
Makalaurë loves words. He loves his father who loves words.
Curufinwë is giving another lamp tutorial to some golden-haired children, basking in notice of his father’s works and tapping his foot in an incessant, gratified rhythm. Maitimo has discovered Findekáno, and together they duck their heads with collusive smiles, heedless of who they bump into in their maundering toward a platter of rosewater cakes.
None but him alive to Melkor’s presence here. This knowledge, bridling under his sternum, is his alone to hold.
Makalaurë’s surprise inspires no elaboration from Melkor; he might be teasing Makalaurë, or warning him away. But the declaration yokes Makalaurë: Melkor’s accent pronouncing a primeval word. The unexpected language calls him to chase even as it —
Makalaurë touches at a temple. It aches. Oh, he enjoys, he thinks. He thinks he enjoys it for its novelty.
Eyes unwisely brightening, he slowly echoes, “Under the glare of — “
Melkor regards him. “Taniquetil. ‘Dāhan-igwiš-telgūn.’”
Makalaurë passes a palm against his head. He forsakes some of his grace to smile through a mumble: sounding through the syllables.
— They clog and then burst with a berry’s mess in his mouth, devouring him right back for his daring to taste.
He endeavors to try again. Again. A flush at his neck tells of his embarrassment. The word eludes him -- Makalaurë fair of song, fairest of speech.
Melkor corrects his fumbling: the Vala enunciates again the unearthly soar and swallow of vowels, the wind-hiss sibilation.
Makalaurë reconstructs the sounds imperfectly, handling their parts, parting them, until they unfurl from incongruous to lyrical. A headache prods at the base of his skull for his audacity. And he is —
“Thou'rt pleased,” Melkor observes.
“It is a profound speech,” Makalaurë reasons. “And one which carries stories. Would that I could mimic your inflections as fluently, I might glimpse those stories yet.”
“Thy forebears recoiled at first sound of Arǭmēz’s tongue,” Melkor replies, the next moribund word drifting from his lips like a lure. “Confounding was Valarin to a feral people.”
Makalaurë frowns, but he sidesteps the slight against his kin to reach for it: “Lord Oromë?”
“Arǭmēz.”
Makalaurë smiles and whispers the name. The shapes of sound elude him; he takes a steadying breath and tries again, cosseting the word into a tune. His eyes sting then; with his lips bitten, he halts. He wonders if his father has ever been so waylaid in his study of the language of divinity, or if the gratification of a word uncovered and mastered is balm enough.
“Yet their scion now collects Valarin fragments as a magpie its shining trinkets.”
They are unnoticed -- by all but Melkor’s votaries, who keep an easy distance in black finery powerful as shadows; his and Melkor's loneliness in a sea of lips smiling or pursed to kiss stokes his drive: he does not want the speech leaving him just yet.
“My father speaks Valarin,” curiosity compels Makalaurë to confess.
Melkor’s eyes nictate.
“He speaks Valarin, that is, as well as any under Dāhan-igwis — “ (Melkor corrects his fumbling again. A frisson. Makalaure finds himself looking forward to the next mistake.) “ — could hope to manage; these are words that wilt, rather than root, in our mouths.”
Melkor’s eyes nictate: and they gleam. “For what reason,” he requests.
“For his love of words. He loves words as dearly as I do,” Makalaurë answers simply. He shifts his weight, one-two, against the stone table, and then volunteers, “He will not share what he has uncovered with even the Lambengolmor. For rightly we are sundered from the Valar’s dominion over language arts, he says; and he would not see us regress as a people into their hold.”
Corseted by his kin’s carousing, he affords himself a measure of recklessness, and raises his gaze to meet Melkor’s handsome face, and finds it is eyeless now. Giving nothing away.
Only minutely rattled, he is goaded forth, “But he speaks aloud in his lonely hours, when he is at his forge with his remarkable crafts: a broken, eerie music. He speaks Valarin to his craftwork alone, as if he may create a thing that responds to him in kind.”
“Knowest thou his works?”
“I try,” he murmurs, his string-callused fingers flexing about the neck of his oud, “to understand him. If I listen devoutly, I might yet.”
Melkor stands before him, a bellow of terrible stillness.
This, he can offer: “I understand that my father loves words.”
“A trait his second son shares with him.”
Of course. A tilt of Makalaurë’s head in concession. “His excellence with words guides my own. Though,” he appends with a measure of pride, “our people knew melodies before words.”
Melkor remembers.
He raises his oud: with his eagle’s quill, up he strums the scale, and then down, browsing for the chords to accompany the rudimentary tongue of divinity. Arǭmēz, he hums under the spill of notes, Dāhan-igwiš-telgūn, sounding out the mystery.
Maitimo and Findekáno’s attention has alighted upon him over the bob and sway of gleaming heads, roused from their private intrigue by the first chords. They swim the flood towards the unlikely island Makalaurë has made for Melkor to stake first claim.
“The syllables are confronting to my ears,” he admits. He smiles even as he touches at the nape of his neck where a chill persists. “To my ears, wounded.”
“Thy kin’s curtained sleep of unknowing was rent asunder with Arǭmēz’s utterance of the First Language.”
“And so,” he begins, slowly, “suppose if I were one feral, wandering afield in the starlit eastern dark, melodies before words — and suppose if it were not Lord Arǭ — Aromez,” imperfect, “who found me, but you…”
He glances up to Melkor, waiting for his intercession.
Melkor gives him no Valarin name.
He instead unhurriedly consumes the performer before him, until even a son of Fëanáro raised skeptical of the Valar cannot abide it: Makalaurë focuses on an improvisation upon the strings to hide in the notes.
Melkor gives him no name. He asks instead, “Wouldst thou wish it?”
“For you,” he asks, “over Lord Oromë?”
He struggles against himself for the correct reply. He intuits Melkor’s amusement. It blurs the Vala’s edges into murk; Makalaurë blinks to recapture them. “I cannot say,” he says.
“Craft up a story for me, songbird.” Interest roils in his voice as he inclines forward, a stone with secrets to impart, a stone with razor teeth and soft fur.
His eyes are stinging to behold the Vala’s horrible splendor. Makalaurë twists a lock of his hair around his finger, gaze flitting to where Maitimo and Findekáno have been waylaid by some friendly faces. “In Valariandë’s arcane night, half-wild in a land indecipherable to all but the indecipherable Valar, I think — your arrival would awe-strike me. Perhaps the pith of the soul I am now, hungry from birth for answers, would understand,” he pauses, “that you may hold answers for me.”
The crescent of Melkor’s smile. Lure.
“Yet looming so empyrean and terrible as you do, Lord Melkor, darker than black as you manifest now to my eyes, were we to meet in place and time so distant — I would fear you. I would flee from you.”
“In vain.”
Makalaurë prudently takes his hand from his hair, calling upon the comforting simplicity of his earliest lessons: stop fidgeting, sit up straight, erase the trouble from your face. “Ha,” he replies evenly. “So then, it is your hand to guide me. Where would you guide me?”
“Far from thy cage.”
A chance for which Fëanáro would leap. An opportunity for which Maitimo, fearsome in his resolve, would would dash. All his brothers, raised discontent and sharp as spires.
A story to tell, a song to sing.
All they ever wanted.
“Did the Valar hold naming ceremonies, in the world’s nativity?” The question hangs unaddressed in the air, leaving Makalaurë toying with the oud’s pegbox. Given to ambition, his father’s son, he strives in a voice suasive, “In the bygone age, did ritual couch the pronouncement of your Valarin name?”
But Melkor has gone.
The Vala's fana fractures down until he could be an overlooked Anyone in the crowd, innocuous beyond notice. Maitimo and Findekáno, rosy with laughter, emerge from the fold of merrymakers; their strong hands find Makalaurë’s shoulders. They invite him out to Valimar’s center to keep the merriment afloat.
Makalaurë scans the throngs from his perch, searching for sign of Melkor.
He laughs at a joke Maitimo mutters to him.
He sneaks a sip of mirúvorë.
He plays an encore for his public then, his joy for the art seeking theirs.
And then he searches for Melkor again.
Lonely within the Ear of the One, Makalaurë tunes the darkness. With one soft note, and another raised, he seduces the sound into travel. His unseeing eyes blink their extraordinary blinks.
He sings, and his song stirs the currents, upward, fluttering — to flatten.
Water soaks up to his knees. The runnels have lost their way without the Trees to conduct them. By neglect or design, they are emptying into this chamber now, transforming it into an inky cistern. It had frightened him to dip suddenly into the pool as he tore blind and headlong into the chamber; the thin note of his cry still rings high as a bell in the towering ceiling.
Singing still, he unties the stringed crystal lights he had braided into his hair to ward off the universal dark: his father’s lights.
He has never spoken of it with Fëanáro. He has never asked Fëanáro, Fëanáro lonely as he, if he could foresee doom: trickling to a tide, tide rollicking to a wave, a wave swifting them out to sea and across it, to unknown shores.
He winds the lamp, its sharp blades of blueing light biting into his skin, around his knuckles; palm; knuckles. Hand thrust out before himself, bearing his father's blue as an amulet, he casts his hand about, searching for his audience. He finds a creeping solitude; scratches scoring the lifeless walls.
Cuiviénen, Maitimo had said.
Had they cried out, at Cuiviénen? Errant, stricken with melody and a hunger for knowing, had they cried for the gods to hear them?
And if he were to cry out? If he were to invoke the remote Valar now in the tongue of divinity, who would find him?
-- He knows who. The only one who has listened to him. The one who has heard Fëanáro, and Finwë.
He shivers under a pall of fear, holding himself against the abject.
Squares his shoulders.
He stammers a word in imperfect Valarin, Dāhan-i, Dāhan-ig; sluggish the syllables snake away. Dāhan-igwis, and like a light, like the Lights, it snuffs him out. He halts, bright wind knocked from his lungs. In the dark, he curls to hold his aching head in his hands.
He loves words. He loves his father who loves words.
He hums an improvisation to command the room, and leans into another invocation. Falters. “Arǭm,” he tries, singing up to the wailing spike of a word only to fall. The suspended speech clamors, inchoate. Arom, flung outward with a frond’s powerlessness, Arom, Ar.
He halts, rendered speechless for his own failure. His voice sinks into the water.
Makalaurë’s voice. This is the voice he uses to sway, to save.
His voice clenched now in his throat like a fist.
This is the fist grasping the lights until they bleed his soft palm while he wades the inky water. The water casting reflections in the shades of a wet bruise on the walls. On the walls, his own waving-warped reflection: the only face in the room. The room devoid.
No deliverance coming.
He sings until his timbre goes tinny in his own ears. He sings until his heated grief has him angry, made reckless in the intent to keep the ear of the One who is not listening, to perform until he hurts.
Any son of Fëanáro is bound and ruled by passion: scion of the fervent suffering, destined too to suffer.
And Makalaurë hurts.
He feels his way through the cragged walls snarling at his fingers, the shallow water churning underfoot as the cave smugly drinks its fill.
Ascending the concave steps and surging through the flooded halls, he is spat out upon the foothills.
A touch at his shoulders, and an arm ensnaring him. Arms sailing him close. Maitimo knows Makalaurë by song.
“Káno,” he says, dusty as Makalaurë from the hard ride to Taniquetil and still as shaken, as bloodied, as he had been dropped to his knees and dragging Finwë’s broken body into an embrace.
“Father,” Makalaurë begins. He wipes at his eyes, their punishing sting.
Fëanáro is a wilted stalk by the copse of gloomy olive trees, wobbling as Carnistir and Curufinwë hold him up and whisper to him. “Father cannot stand,” Makalaurë says dumbly, the hitch in his voice a betrayal. He cannot cry yet.
“He does not want us seeing him. He’d rather be buried away somewhere else, but — we cannot. I cannot let him.” Maitimo makes a fruitless gesture with fingers, his knuckles bumping against Makalaurë’s. The Dark has scathed away his Tirion polish, revealing a martial immediacy. Nowhere to put it to use, he affixes his hand to his blade’s pommel and only says, “He would rather be alone, and I cannot grant him that.”
Loneliness is our shared teacher, Makalaurë might defy the choke of night to utter.
Instead his voice gentles and coaxes Fëanáro with a song. (“Listen,” he urges, singing; “Do you remember,” and singing; “In Cuiviénen sweet ran the waters under unclouded stars,” singing; “Listen, Father, listen,” he beseeches Fëanáro).
He sings like something too alive: notes breaking under strain.
Fëanáro looks at Makalaurë until his son comes into focus. He clutches Makalaurë, having wanted to die. Frightened of it.
After the howling from the cities wither into a sleepless dawn (so Tyelkormo says, conferring with the restive beasts darting through the wood), finally Makalaurë swaddles himself in his cloak and hides his face where the serge can wick away his tears.
In this hour, Fëanáro dips his dead torch into the wild slink and wave of their bonfire. He stares hard into the mist veiling vantage ground. Upon this road to the coast, leagues from Tirion yet, he has done his thinking.
“We shall journey light,” he says, “but bring with you your swords.” His eyes illume with a glow alien to the extinguished Treelights. Fëanáro has never needed their beacons: he is his own. What he needs now, famished with grief, are words.
When the bonfire whisks hither-thither in the winds, Makalaurë captures the its attention with a song, and sings it to calm.
Fëanáro, encircled by his sons, regards Makalaurë. He watches Makalaurë sing, and some fire in him too flickers. For a perilous moment, Fëanáro seems tearful; Makalaurë pitches close to take his hand and watches Fëanáro begin to straighten at last. “The deeds that we do shall be the matter of song,” he tells his second son.
And the deeds, prescribed by a promise. “An oath,” Fëanáro says to Makalaurë, understanding that Makalaurë understands: they two have work to do.
At the fire, Makalaurë thinks of words.
He thinks of his father, who loves words, and whom he could lose now; how grief can steal loves, trample them under finality’s weight into strange shapes.
He thinks of his brothers.
He loves his father. He thinks of what he would do for his father, who was born with everything so that he may end holding nothing.
He draws back his cloak from his neck and lets it fall, one more easy loss. His back curled at first against the chill, he blinks: two stars wondering at the ancient dark.
He thinks of himself only a voice, living on.
He imagines a land that can be good to his father.
He thinks of Creation in his throat.
He opens his voice and speaks.