Work Text:
That Which Remained
Being an account of Finarfin son of Finwë, third king of the Noldor in Aman, in the age of the renewed world, when at last a reckoning came due between him and the memory of his father's house
The wine was from the hills of Valimar, and it was very old — older, some said, than the grief of the Noldor, which would make it old indeed, and patient. It sat darkly in the crystal, and Finarfin who was called Arafinwë, fairest of the sons of Finwë, and who had not lately troubled himself with wine of any quantity, poured his third glass of it in the space of an evening with the careful attention of a man performing a ritual he had not meant to begin.
Finrod watched him from the carved chair to his left and said nothing. He had learned, in his second life as in his first, the wisdom of silence in his father's presence.
The great throne room of Tirion was empty save for the two of them. The servants had been dismissed. The torches burned low, and the silver lanterns that had hung in this hall since the age of the Two Trees — since before the grief, before the darkness, before everything — cast their quiet light upon the tapestries where the history of the Noldor was told in golden thread that no longer seemed quite so triumphant as it had in the making.
"And you are certain," said Finarfin at last, "that it is he."
It was not truly a question. But Finrod answered it as one.
"I stood within the Siege of Angband for nigh on four hundred years, Father." His voice was easy, almost conversational — the voice of a scholar discussing a text he has long since memorized. Only those who knew him well would have heard the weight beneath. "I have been to council with the sons of Fëanor more times than I care to reckon. I know Maglor's hands upon a harp. I know the particular angle at which he holds his head when he sings — a habit he has had since his youth, I think, though I knew him only as a lord of war." He paused. "There is no other in all the circles of the world who could be he. Forgive me, Father — I do not mean to turn my own unrest upon you. But you sent me to be your eyes, and I will not deceive them. It is Maglor Fëanorion. Sick in soul as in body. Though the body mends."
Finarfin received this the way a patient man receives a diagnosis he has already made for himself. He did not flinch. He took a sip of his wine.
"In soul," he said. The word sat in the room without adornment.
"The air of Aman works on him, and Elrond's love, which is — more powerful a medicine than one might expect, from a man who has learned medicine from grief." Finrod considered his next words carefully, for he was his mother's son as well as his father's, and the Teleri blood in him inclined always to speak true and suffer for it rather than speak false and avoid the suffering. "But the road of the soul is long, Father. I cannot say where it leads, nor whether —"
"Whether he will mend."
"Whether any of them could have mended, given time. We shall not know, now, of most of them." He said it quietly. "But Maglor has time."
Silence returned. From somewhere far below the hill, the evening song of Tirion drifted upward — faint, beautiful, the voices of the Noldor who remained, who had always remained, rising in the ancient harmonies their grandparents had devised in the age when the world was young and the Trees still burned. It was a sound that had been the comfort of Finarfin's long kingship. Tonight he could not quite hear it as comfort.
Arafinwë.
The voice came, as it had come with increasing frequency these past weeks, from that place within him where the dead take up residence in those who love them and refuse to be evicted. It had his father's cadence: that precise, affectionate authority that Finwë had turned upon all his children, though his children had not all received it in equal measure — which was perhaps the root of more trouble than anyone had ever wished to admit.
Arafinwë. Do not look away from this.
"I am not looking away," Finarfin said aloud, very quietly.
Finrod glanced at him but was too well-bred to ask.
And Finarfin did not explain, for there was nothing to explain that his son did not already know. He had told Eärwen, in the long watches of several sleepless nights this past month, that his father's voice had returned to him. She had held his hand in the dark, and she had not been surprised. Eärwen of the Teleri was seldom surprised by grief taking unusual shapes.
It is Fëanor's son, came the voice of Finwë within him. The last of them. Is he not also mine?
There were those among the Noldor who believed that Finarfin had always been the lucky one: the one who turned back, the one who was pardoned, the one who did not burn beneath Morgoth's malice or freeze upon the Grinding Ice or watch his children fall one by one into darkness. They were not wrong, precisely. And yet Finarfin thought, in his most honest hours — and the wine was making this an honest hour — that they had perhaps underestimated the particular anguish of the one who is left to govern the grief.
He had been two hundred and sixty-five years old when his father was killed. This was not youth, by any reckoning save that of eternity, and perhaps not even by that one. He had been married for two centuries. His sons and daughter had all been born and grown to a fullness of power that made the word grown feel laughably inadequate. He was a king's son and had been raised as one, trained in the slow, patient craft of governance by a father who understood, better than most, that the Noldor were a people who required ruling with the head as much as the heart.
And yet.
When he thought of those days — the Darkening, the speech of Fëanor in the great square at Tirion, the ringing words and the torchlight and the faces of his people alight with a passion that was not wisdom — he did not feel the aged Elf he was. He felt something younger and more frightened than a king's son had any right to be.
He had known. That was perhaps the worst of it. He had known, even as he argued for calm, even as he raised his voice against the tide of Fëanor's rhetoric, that he was not going to prevail. Fëanor in those moments was something more than a lord or a craftsman or even a prince. He was the living flame of the Noldor's own nature turned back upon them, and it was very difficult to refuse your own nature when it was speaking to you in that voice. Finarfin had tried. He remembered trying. He remembered the precise futility of it: the way his words reached the edges of the crowd and dissolved like rain into hot stone. He had argued for patience. He had argued for reason. He had even — and this he had never told anyone, because it shamed him even now — felt, underneath all his opposition, the faintest stir of something that was not entirely argument. Something that was almost, in its deepest root, agreement. The dark has come. The jewels are stolen. Our father is dead.
Their father was dead.
Fëanor had announced it there, in that firelit square, with his own particular genius for turning grief into fuel. He had not wept. Finarfin had not known, until that moment, that it was possible to receive the news of a father's death and not weep. He himself had wept. He had stood in the crowd and wept openly, which was unusual for a lord of the Noldor, and he had not cared. Fingolfin — standing three paces to his right, still as stone in the torchlight — had not wept either, but Fingolfin wore grief differently: he compressed it into the set of his jaw and the precision of his posture, and you could see it there if you knew where to look, which Finarfin did. He had spent a great many years looking for his brother in crowds.
He always loved you less, said a voice in his memory that was not his father's. His mother Indis, who had not said it in those words — who had never said it aloud, not once in all her careful, gracious years — but who had communicated it in the way she arranged his education, the way she had ensured he had not only his father's attention but his tutors' and his mentors' and the court's. As though she knew that Finwë's love, magnificent as it was, poured itself first into Fëanor until the cup was near-full, and what remained was distributed in smaller portions among the children of his second house.
This was uncharitable. This was, in Finarfin's considered view, also essentially true, and he had spent enough years as a king to know that essential truths did not become less essential for being uncharitable. His father had loved him. He did not doubt it. But Finwë had loved Fëanor the way a man loves the proof of himself — totally, structurally, in a way that made everything else in the world a context for that central fact. His love for his younger children was real and warm and genuine. It was simply not the same thing.
Fëanor had known it. The tragedy was that Fëanor had known it and had been made, by that knowledge, precisely the creature he became.
He feared you, Eärwen had said to him once, long ago, in the private hours. All four of you. He feared that you would show your father that a child could be made of something other than fire, and he would love that something other more than Feanorian fire.
Finarfin had not believed it then. He was beginning to understand it now.
He had marched. That was the fact that he did not dwell upon in public, and that he had never quite escaped in private. He had marched with the host of the Noldor under the darkness that had swallowed the world, with the stars strange and cold overhead and the grief of his father's death walking beside him like a companion he had not invited. He had argued against it. He had tried, once more and uselessly, to counsel patience and reason and the mercy of the Valar. And then — as the Noldor swept forward and his own sons went with them, and his daughter Galadriel, her eyes bright with a light that he had not fully understood, went with them — he had gone too. One does not watch one's children march into the unknown while standing with one's hands clasped.
He had not been at Alqualondë when it happened. That was what he had told himself for a long time, in those precise terms, as though precision of blame were the same thing as innocence. Fëanor's host had gone ahead, as Fëanor's host always went ahead, because to follow Fëanor was to always be arriving after the fact. By the time Finarfin and his people reached the harbor of the Swanhaven, the battle — the slaughter — was done.
He had seen it. He had walked through the harbor in the dark and he had seen what had been done to the Teleri there. His wife's kindred. The people of Olwë her father, who had sat at their wedding feast and laughed with a warmth that the Noldor, brilliant and proud, sometimes forgot was a thing to be cultivated rather than expected. Finarfin had seen the dark water and the fallen and the swan-ships lashed to the quays with ropes that were not their own, and he had understood, in the way that certain understanding lands in the body before it reaches the mind, exactly what he had walked into.
He had also understood that he was still, at that moment, walking forward.
That was the thing he could not forgive himself with any completeness, even now: that he had seen Alqualondë and continued north. Not for long. Not beyond Araman, where at last the herald of Mandos had spoken from the darkness above the cliffs, and the Doom had rolled across them like a tide: blood ye shall render blood, and beyond Aman ye shall dwell in Death's shadow. He had turned back there. He had turned back and retraced every step through that harbor, past the evidence of what the House of Fëanor had made of the world's peace, and had not looked away from it, because he did not deserve to look away.
And he had come home. And Eärwen had been waiting, because Eärwen had not marched — had refused, and was much wiser for that alone than her husband turned out to be. He had held her, and she had held him, and neither of them had said anything useful, because there was nothing useful to say. Her father Olwë's people had been slaughtered. His father Finwë had been slain. His children,her children,their children were marching across the ice.
The Valar had pardoned him. He had not, entirely, pardoned himself.
But he was still there. He had been there ever since.
The truth was this: Finarfin could not look upon Maglor because he did not trust what he would say.
There was the kingly part of him — the part that had governed through dark ages, that had separated the personal from the necessary as cleanly as a blade separates meat from bone, that had in the War of Wrath walked beneath the white banners of Valinor into battle against Morgoth's legions with something resembling calm — and that part could manage it. Could speak the measured words. Could extend the considered mercy that the situation called for.
But there was the other part.
The part that had stood in the harbor of Alqualondë in the darkness and seen what the sons of Fëanor had made of the world. That part of him had never entirely accepted that any of them were owed mercy. That part remembered the long silence of the First Age, the centuries of governing a diminished people while the reports came in from Middle-earth, slow and terrible: Angrod fallen. Aegnor fallen. Finrod gone to his death in a wolf's throat in some sunless dungeon, honoring an oath to a mortal man because that was who he was. Galadriel — Galadriel alive and ruling and brilliantly herself, but ruling in a world darkened by the very Oath that had set all of this in motion.
And yet Maglor had not lit the pyres at Losgar. That had been Fëanor's hand, Fëanor's order. But Maglor had been there, and he had sung — it was said — while the entire fleet of the Teleri burned on the shore, and he had marched back to his father's side, and that was the last Finarfin knew of him until he was standing outside a cottage in Elrond's lands looking at a face he recognised.
That was what Finrod had reported: that Maglor did not know he was being watched. That he had been sitting in the early morning light with his hands in his lap, doing nothing in particular, simply existing in the way of someone who has only recently remembered that existence is something that happens to them.
And yet.
Finarfin thought of Elrond. Of Elwing. Of the thoroughly documented, unmistakable fact that Maglor had taken two small children into the wilderness and raised them with what every account agreed to call love, when he might have slain them or left them to die and no one would have known the difference. And Finarfin could not make this into a story with a clear verdict. The Maglor who stood silent on the shore while the ships of the Teleri burned and the Maglor who held young Elrond's and Elros's hands through the long dark of the First Age were the same person. This was not a paradox. This was the most ordinary and devastating fact about persons in general, and Finarfin was too old a king to pretend otherwise.
He is blood of my blood, said Finwë's voice within him. Persistent. Gentle. With the particular quality of a parent who does not let go.
Father, Finarfin answered, in the private interior where such conversations take place, I know. I have always known. That has never been questioned,the least by me out of all elves.
And beneath that voice, quieter, colder, more precise — the voice of Fingolfin, who had crossed the Helcaraxë with an army behind him and a brother's betrayal ahead, and who had at the last ridden alone to Morgoth's gates because he would not let the Enemy think he had broken the spirit of the Noldor:
Well. Here at last is one of them,alive. What will you do with him, little brother?
Finarfin, third king of the Noldor in Aman, rubbed a hand across his eyes.
He was very tired. He had been very tired for a very long time. Governing the grief of a people, he had found, was an occupation that filled every hour and rewarded diligence with more grief to govern. The Noldor who remained in Aman were not a cheerful people. They were proud, and gifted, and capable of great warmth in the private hours — he had seen it in the homes of his people, in the songs they sang for one another at evening, in the ferocious love they bore their children. But there was always the shadow. There was always the knowledge of what had been lost and why.
He had managed it. He had held councils and rendered judgments and spoken the words of comfort that could be spoken and held his peace about the ones that couldn't. He had received the survivors when they came home — those who came — from Beleriand that was swallowed by the sea, from the forests and the hidden valleys. He had received them one by one and tried to be equal to what they brought him. He had led the Noldor of Valinor in the War of Wrath, beneath white banners in the great host of the West, and had felt for the first time what it was to act rather than to wait. He had done this after long ages of waiting. He understood, now, why Fingolfin had ridden out alone to face Morgoth. Not because it was wise — it was not wise — but because there comes a point at which the grief of inaction becomes more unbearable than any action's cost.
He had won his war, at least. Or rather: Eönwë and the host of Valinor had won it, and Finarfin had led his contingent with as much skill as he had in him, and the victory was real even if Beleriand was drowned to achieve it. He had come home. And he had gone back to governing.
And it had cost him. Not as it had cost Fingolfin, whose body Thorondor had carried to a mountain cairn and whose spirit Finarfin understood — from the particular character of the voice he heard sometimes in the quiet hours — had not yet fully come to peace. Not as it had cost Fëanor, who had burned from within at the last, whose body had turned to ash on the slopes of Ered Wethrin, and of whom the record of the Noldor said simply: neither has his spirit left the halls of Mandos. Not that manner of destruction.
But it had cost him in the way that staying costs: quietly, daily, in the long inventory of a man who has chosen to remain when everything around him has been given over to departure.
"You are thinking of your brothes," Finrod said.
He had waited a long time for his father to return from wherever he had gone, and had passed the time in his own thinking, which had not been comfortable.
"I am thinking of many things." Finarfin looked at him, and something in the quality of his gaze made Finrod sit straighter without deciding to. There was still, and probably always would be, a particular authority in his father's eyes: not domination — Finarfin had never managed by domination, which was Fëanor's preferred instrument — but something quieter and in its way harder to resist. "You were thinking of your own brothers."
Finrod received this directly, as the reborn receive difficult facts. "Among others."
There had been three brothers. There was now, of the sons of Finarfin, one: Finrod himself, called Felagund, returned from the Halls of Mandos after a death that had been — he said this to no one who might mistake it for pride, though it was simply true — honorable. Angrod and Aegnor had not come back. They remained in the dark, and Finarfin did not speak of this often, because the people who occupy the empty chairs at every table are the ones about whom there is least to say.
"Of Aegnor more than Angrod, of late," Finrod said. "Since I have been in Elrond's halls. There were mortals often in his halls in Middle Earth,I hsve been told, — companions,allies,friends,the heroes of the Fellowship themselves and their children,and children of the Ring-bearers' people, friends of Mithrandir's wandering. The mortals move differently from us. They are always so—"
"Urgent," said Finarfin.
"Urgent. Yes." He paused. "Aegnor loved one of them. Andreth Saelind of the house of Bëor. He would not wed her because of what hung over us — what we all felt as a kind of weather — the Doom, the weight of the Oath's consequences. She died as they die, and I knew of his love, and I spoke with her of it, years after. She told me things about love and mortality and what it costs to choose a boundary before you reach it." He looked at his hands. "I think of him when I remember the mortas of Middle Earth. He is still in the dark. And I am here. And I do not always know what to do with that."
"He will come out in time," Finarfin said. "They are not abandoned in Mandos, Finrod. Not those who did not choose the dark of their own will."
"I know it." A pause that held more than its own words. "I think I know it."
"And Maglor?" said Finarfin, very quietly.
Finrod looked at his father for a moment, measuring the question. Then: "I do not know what Maglor deserves. I do not think that judgment is mine to make, or yours, or anyone's living — it belongs to Manwë and Mandos and Eru, and they are keeping their own counsel." He looked up. "But I will say this, since you called upon me to speak truth: the Maglor I saw in Elrond's house is not the Maglor who was at Alqualondë. Whatever fire was in him — whatever of his father's fire he inherited and spent in the long horrible expenditure of the First Age — it is gone. He is spent. Like a forge that has been burning for a thousand years with no rest, and has gone cold." He searched a moment. "What remains is tender. Raw, the way a wound is when the infection has finally gone and what is left is only the slow work of healing."
"Tender," said Finarfin.
"Yes."
"Your uncle Fëanor was never tender. Not once in his life."
"No." Finrod smiled slightly, briefly, sadly. "I think that may be the mercy in the end. For Maglor, I mean. That the fire he inherited was not quite complete."
After Finrod had embraced him and taken his leave — moving through the quiet halls of the palace with that effortless, shining grace that still made the servants pause to look, no matter how many years had healed the memory of his absence — Finarfin remained alone in the throne room.
He thought of Tirion as it had been. He thought of his father in this very hall, receiving emissaries with a patience and dignity that had taken Finarfin decades of his own kingship to properly appreciate. He thought of Fëanor, who had moved through these rooms like a fire through a field: brilliant, consuming, leaving the air permanently changed after he had passed through it. He thought of the Fëanorian workshops that had stood in the craftsmen's quarter of the city — the great forges, the galleries of half-finished masterworks, the glass vessels in which Fëanor had worked experiments that even the Valar acknowledged were without precedent. All of that had been sealed when he left for Formenos and then for the shore. Sealed and kept. Finarfin, in one of his first administrative acts as the new king of a diminished city, had ordered it preserved.
Not out of sentimentality — or not entirely. But because to disperse it had seemed, in those early days, to be making a judgment he was not yet prepared to make. A verdict on a case that was not yet closed.
That had been a very long time ago.
And there it still stood: the wealth of Fëanor that had not gone to Formenos, not gone to the shore, not traveled with him into Middle-earth's darkness. Furniture of surpassing craft. Tools that no other hand in Aman could now replicate. An archive of Fëanor's own writing — his letters, his technical notes, his linguistic work, his observations on the light of the Trees before he had found better vessels for it. Books. Maps. Small objects whose provenance his steward had catalogued with careful uncertainty. A carved horse of pale wood, found in a chest and labeled: childhood plaything, origin unknown, pre-exile.
All this time, Finarfin had been keeping it for no one.
He rose and walked to the window. Tirion lay below him in the evening light: white towers amber at their edges, streets carrying the sound of song. His people. His diminished, enduring, still-beautiful people, who had learned — as Finarfin himself had learned — that the world can be loved even when it has used you badly.
He said, to the room, to the voices that lived in him whether he invited them or not:
"All right."
It was not elegant. It was not kingly. It was honest, and Finarfin had always, in the end, been honest.
He did not summon Eärwen and his children until the following evening, when the light lay long and golden across the family rooms — nothing formal, no throne and no great hall. Simply the rooms where Finarfin had always preferred to be when he was not performing the function of a king. There was a long table. There was supper, which no one ate very much of, because the particular quality of intention in their father's face had made them all quietly attentive.
Eärwen sat at his right hand and watched him with her silver eyes and said nothing. She had been waiting for this, in the way she waited for things: without either hurrying him or letting him forget.
Galadriel sat across from her father and was very still, which in Galadriel indicated not peace but deep attention — she who had seen more of the world than any of them and had chosen, at the last, to come home.
Finrod sat beside her, and his expression was one of careful, considered neutrality, which meant he had expected something of the kind and was waiting to learn whether he had expected correctly.
Finarfin looked at them: his wife of the Teleri, his golden son who had died and returned, his daughter who was a chapter of history unto herself. He thought briefly of the two who were not here. He always thought of them. That was parenthood: the permanent presence of absent ones at every table, the chairs that must be set in the heart even when the hands cannot set them at the board.
"You know," he said, "that there are vaults in the craftsmen's quarter. The old Fëanorian workshops. I had them to be kept sealed in the first age of my governance and they have been so ever since."
No one spoke.
"There is considerable wealth there." He said it precisely. "Not merely in value, though the value is considerable. In artistry. In history. In the accumulated work of a very great craftsman who put his genius to many things before he put it to his ruin." He paused. "Some of it is irreplaceable. There are things in those rooms that have no equivalent anywhere in Aman or beyond it — and beyond it, now, means very little, for the lands where such things might once have been found again are under the sea."
"Father," Galadriel said quietly — not an objection, simply a presence in the word.
"I have decided," Finarfin said, "to send all of it to Lord Elrond."
The room received this. Outside, a wind moved through the flowering trees of the garden.
"All of it?" said Finrod.
"Everything in those vaults. Everything that was not taken to Formenos by its rightful owner. Every piece of furniture, every tool, every written page — I no longer wish to keep what is not mine now that the new owner has arrived in Valinor." He looked at his hands on the table. They were very steady. "Tomorrow I will give orders to my steward and to the keepers of the vaults, that everything is to be carefully packed and sent by carriages to Lord Elrond's lands. To the household where Maglor Fëanorion now resides."
Eärwen took his hand beneath the table. Her grip was warm and firm and said, in the language they had built together over long centuries: I have been waiting for you to arrive here. I am glad you have.
"He is not pardoned," Galadriel said, carefully. Not an objection. The naming of a fact that must be named before the conversation can move past it.
"He is not pardoned," Finarfin agreed. "This is not pardon. It is —" He considered it. "It is an accounting. These things are his by birth, by inheritance, whether or not they are his by desert. They have been in my keeping because there was no other keeping for them. There is now." He looked at his daughter, at those bright and measuring eyes that had looked upon the end of the Second Age and still found the patience to look upon this. "I am not saying Maglor Fëanorion deserves them. I am saying that they are his father's, and his father's father was mine, and I am —" he let the word fall without apology — "tired. I am tired of them and the the keeping of these things is much more weary for me than just than the giving."
Galadriel held his gaze for a moment. Something moved in her face too private and complex to name. Then she nodded, once, precisely.
"Send them," said Finrod softly. "Yes. Send them."
Finarfin looked at his wife.
Eärwen — Eärwen whose father Olwë had been lord of Alqualondë, whose people had been the first to learn what the Oath of Fëanor meant when acted upon, who had stood in Tirion in the dark and not marched because she could not march beside those people, not then, and had held Finarfin when he came back alone — Eärwen met his eyes and said:
"You have waited long enough, my love. Go and give the order."
And in his mind, for the first time in a long time, the voice of Finwë was quiet.