Chapter Text
The quendu stands on the shore, his long, stringy dark locks matted into knots, brittle and unwashed, in rags—once the finest silks and brocades now moth-ridden and black with filth. Icy seawater seeps through the holes in the soles of his shoes, but he does not flinch, his gaze fixed upon a rock far out to sea, unblinking, as he grips a fishing rod in his left hand, his right dangling limp at his side.
Every so often, the quendu’s line stutters and jerks with the promise of a fresh catch, but he does not react, his mind cast far out into the fog.
The quendu does not know where he is or how long he has stood here. All he knows is that he is nameless—that he did not and does not deserve his name—and that he is alone. He must have known once, but the longer he breathes, the less he can recall of the before, his yesteryears and yesterdays equally lost to him.
Breathing hurts more often than not anymore, each swallow of the cold, biting air of his exile a dagger to the chest. This is normal. This is fine.
Some days, the sea sings to him its sweet, cloying siren song: come, come, come to me, o child, abandon your salted earth, abandon your suffering, and i will swallow you whole, and it will end, i swear to you that it will, at last, end…!
Except that it won’t.
Eventually, the quendu, all skin and bone and sharp-angles, will surrender as he always does, turning his back on the sea, and, feet dragging against the sand, make the trek back up the cliffside to his ramshackle hut with its rotting, thatch roof, and sink into his threadbare cot.
The quendu’s habits have not changed in the last thousand years or so, after all. Why should they change in the next?
Then, through the fog, a nís with hair black as ebony, skin as white as snow, and lips as blue as ice, shivering and barefoot, shrouded in a shimmering slate gossamer a picture of the night sky and clinging tightly to an austere, gray-black fur. She shields her eyes with a forearm.
The quendu’s gaze snaps sideways, his reverie shattered, a soft gasp escaping his lips.
“Haruni?” he breathes.
No, the quendu realizes, a nér—a Noldo, even.
The Noldo stumbles, ankle catching on a beached clump of kelp, and crumples to his knees, then his belly, with a sharp cry.
The fishing rod slips from the quendu’s fingers and he runs to the fallen Noldo’s side. He slows as he approaches, shoulders lax and hands loose at his sides, palms facing outward, but the Noldo is not looking at the quendu.
The Noldo’s shoulders quake, and he shrinks into himself, limbs contorted, his tears dripping onto the cold, hard sand below.
The quendu bends forward, gently tapping the Noldo’s shoulder, and the Noldo jerks back, craning his head upward at an odd angle, squinting at the quendu.
The Noldo’s feet are blistered and bloody, and his face—the specter of Ñolofinwë in his brow and nose and jaw—dark with bruises.
The quendu’s lungs sink into his stomach. He had hoped…Well, it doesn’t matter what he had hoped, he supposes.
The quendu extends his left hand, on its side, his thumb upright and other fingers pressed together, their tips leading the crest of a wave-like motion—hello/welcome/hi—before offering the nér a hand up. The nér’s gaze wavers as he stares past the quendu, but after a beat, he accepts it, struggling to his feet, teetering for a breath, then sinking into the quendu’s side, fingers sinking into his ratty tunic, seeking any vestige of warmth, of life.
The quendu huffs, guiding the nér up the cliffside to his hut, through the front door, to his hearth and offering up a threadbare quilt, his only quilt.
The nér, lips trembling, murmurs a soft, nearly inaudible, “Thank you,” in Sindarin, the quendu realizes with a start, a very strange Sindarin.
The quendu clears his throat, rough with disuse, and replies in the staccato of one long accustomed to silence, “What. You—called?”
The quendu’s Sindarin is strange, too. It is the Sindarin of the North, of those unaccustomed to Endórë’s foreign tongues, its ways and manners.
The nér pauses and replies in a stilted, overly academic but nonetheless passable Quenya, “Lómion,” and pauses again, “Lómion…ah, Sérendil.” He shifts, lips curling, and mouths the latter name several times to himself, as if disbelieving. “You?”
The quendu averts his eyes.
“I…I am,” he stammers, and then, his lips curling, he raises his index finger to his brow and sweeps it forward into an open hand, palm down and fingers spread, flicking it, as if casting off water. Lómion squints at the quendu, brows furrowing, and the quendu, his throat constricting and lips dry, repeats the motion, slower, to make his point.
“Ah, alessë?” Lómion asks. “I do not see well and know little mátengwië. If you make lengi at me, I need you near and the gesture to be slow and clear. I will not be able to read your face.”
The quendu curls his left hand into a fist, a single knock his only affirmation.
“That one, I know,” Lómion laughs lightly. Then, lips pressing thin, he continues, wry, “I can’t say that I ever understood that particular custom, but then again, I was never a very good Noldo. Would it be rude to name you?”
The quendu jerks back from Lómion and shakes his fist at him once, a hard and sharp motion.
“Apologies,” Lómion replies, holding out his palms, arms wide, placating, “I won’t offer again.”
“To be alessë—” The quendu coughs harshly once, twice, grimacing with heavy breaths, and raises a hand to massage his throat, briefly flashing the other palm at Lómion, who waits. “My choice. Name, don’t deserve…”
“You gave it away, then,” Lómion hums, “and would I be correct to suppose the one you gave it to hasn’t been reimbodied yet?”
The quendu glowers at Lómion.
“Don’t. Deserve,” he repeats, crouching down to stoke the hearth.
“Among the Sindar,” Lómion starts, “your eneth is not yours to give. Names are not among things which can be given or gifted, even. They are only earned.”
Lómion shifts, shivering, and clutches the ratty quilt tight as he inches closer to the flames.
“You are born the child of your father, and in the act of being born, earn his name, but your father only names you when you have earned it—have demonstrated the character of your fëa—and so onnar often go nameless for many years in their youth.”
The quendu recoils.
Lómion laughs. “It is not so strange, is it? The name is the self. There is no separation of the act of naming from the act of being. There is no taking or giving away of names to be had, and a name once earned can never be discarded or set aside. We—” Lómion pauses, smile tightening into something sharp, like broken glass. “They have epessë, like…us, but no kilmessë. If you desire a new name—” He grins, sharkish. “—you must earn it.”
“No amilessë?” The quendu asks, settling down beside Lómion.
“No,” Lómion replies, sighing. “Sindar nísi may suggest names to their husbands, but the neri have the final say.”
The quendu scrunches his face, shaking his head ever so slightly, and slowly raises a hand into a point off to the side, and mouthing, “Strange!” at the thawing nér. Then, he pauses before pointing at Lómion and then repeating the gesture.
Lómion snorts.
The quendu pats his leg with a sigh and then brings his palm, finger splayed, to his chest, pointedly eyeing Lómion’s ankle, and Lómion acquiesces, offering the quendu his injured leg.
The quendu pokes and prods the swollen joint.
Lómion grimaces but does not cry out.
The quendu hums, reaching over to drag a plain purse, its leather torn and discolored, from beneath his cot, and tenderly withdraws a bundle of cloth from within it, cradling it in his palm. He carefully unknots the bundle to reveal various dried herbs and leaves and flowers, as well as a few small, glass jars and ampules, some filled with thick, gritty pastes and others with thin, effervescent fluids. He selects an oil from the lot and rubs it into his palms before kneading it into Lómion’s ankle with his thumbs.
Lómion’s flesh tingles, numb, and he slumps back, flat against the packed dirt floor, eyelids flickering shut with a hum on his lips.
The quendu wipes his hands on a rag, stowing away the medicaments and tucking the bag back in its place beneath his cot.
Then, the quendu begins to hum a lullaby, fingers instinctively reaching over to card through Lómion’s hair before he catches himself and rips his hand back, averting his eyes from the nér’s youthful features, his cheeks flush and round—and a youth, Lómion is.
Though he likely hasn’t been a child in several decades, or perhaps even a century, Lómion is so very young in the terms of their people—much too young to have spent time in the Halls.
And yet, Lómion wears the distinctive, wispy shroud of the recently re-embodied. How the nér found himself so far north of Tirion in this state, the quendu does not understand, unless…unless, of course, Lómion is as welcome in the white city as he is, which is absurd.
Surely the folk of Tirion would not turn away one so young and in need?
The quendu swallows dryly.
And yet.
The quendu quietly draws himself to his feet and, without a single word, slips out of the shack to recover his fishing rod from the sands below. He’s got another mouth to feed now, and the fish aren’t going to catch themselves.
— ✸ — ✸ — ✸ — ✸ — ✸ — ✸ — ✸ —
The front door slams open, rattling the walls of the hut, and the quendu stalks inside, jaw clenched and shoulders shaking, and gripping the fishing rod in his fist.
Lómion glances up at the quendu from where he sits beside the fire, loosely weaving beachgrass into a basket, leaving regular, even gaps in the weave.
“No luck again?” he inquires, brows raised.
The quendu doesn’t reply, lips curling into a snarl, and he hurls the fishing rod to the floor, stomping over to the hearth and kicking over an empty, iron pot, which rolls into the far corner.
Lómion sighs.
It has been two days, and the quendu has brought home only a few, meager sardines in that time. Lómion has been able to walk, a little, but not far from the hut, and he most certainly cannot make the descent to the beach alone.
“When is the next low tide?” Lómion asks.
The quendu pauses and turns to stare at Lómion, blinking blankly at him.
Lómion repeats the question, and the quendu raises a palm, the back of his hand facing his guest, and wags his fingers inward once, twice before lowering his arm, horizontally, and bringing it back up through the air before him.
Lómion hums and says, “Alright, so here’s what we’re going to do. Tomorrow morning, when the tides change just before dawn, you are going to head down to the tidepools to harvest seaweed and bring back as much as you reasonably can, and I’ll rinse and strain—” He gestures to the basket he’s working on. “—and dry it. Then, you’ll head back down with a bucket and gather whatever you can that looks edible—clams, crabs, sea urchins, mussels, snails—whatever you can find, so that we have something to get us through the next few days.”
The quendu slumps down beside the fire, eyes wide. It hadn’t even occurred to him to gather food rather than to hunt it.
“Now, fishing clearly isn’t working for you,” Lómion starts, and the quendu bristles but settles at the sight of Lómion’s deadpan stare. “In the long term, what would help?”
The quendu considers the question. Then, he reaches out and offers Lómion his right hand, the flesh of his palm and his fingers thick and red with old, angry burn scars.
Lómion squints at the hand, tilting his head at an odd angle, but does not flinch. Instead, thumbing his jaw, he replies, “Perhaps an arm or waist mount so that you don’t have to hold the rod…a basic reel to help you bring in your catches, and an artificial lure? So you don’t have to gather bait or repeatedly bait the hook.”
Lómion looks to quendu, and the quendu stares back, eyes even wider.
“That’s going to be a long term project, though,” Lómion continues, when the quendu does not reply, “and we need something to make this easier for you in the interim.”
The quendu curls his left hand into a fist, as if gripping a bar, and rattles it.
“For the fish?” Lómion replies, and the quendu inclines his head. “In truth, I’m not much of a weaver, and I lived inland all my life, but I’ll see what I can come up with.”
The quendu startles, face scrunching, and tilts his head. He raises a palm flat, down, fingers pointed out, and slowly sweeps it outward horizontally from his chest in a smooth, steady motion, then slices it vertically through the air—sharp and pointed—before turning its back to Lómion, fingers pointed to the earth below, and flicking it outward as if in dismissal.
“I’m sorry,” Lómion replies, his voice light and quizzical. “I don’t know that first one.”
The quendu points out, in the direction of the sea, and then rubs his thumb against his other fingers. He repeats the motion, slower, a few times until Lómion gets the point.
“No,” Lómion replies, voice tightening. “No, I wasn’t—I hadn’t seen the sea before…before you. I—” He pauses, struggling with himself. Then, teeth grinding, Lómion bites out, lips curled into a snarl, “It wasn’t permitted.”
The quendu has no words, and so he offers Lómion his hand.
Lómion stares at the hand, swallowing dryly, and then, tentatively, like a wary foal about to bolt, reaches out to cradle it in his own.
— ✸ — ✸ — ✸ — ✸ — ✸ — ✸ — ✸ —
The front door slams open, rattling the walls of the hut, and the quendu struts inside, shoulders back and chin up, with a bucketful of shellfish in hand. Lómion glances up from where he sits beside the fire, rinsing seaweed. The quendu sets the bucket down, a smug grin on his lips, and lifts from deep within it the long, stringy body of an octopus.
Lómion barks out a laugh, eyes sparkling.
“Oh, excellent!”
In reply, the quendu preens, and Lómion throws his head back and laughs a joyous laugh which rings like bells, leaving the quendu speechless and unable to look away.
There’s something ethereal about Lómion, above and beyond the elegance typical of the Quendelië, that captures the quendu, entices him to covet the nér…
The quendu brushes off his stupor, eyes sharp and calculating as they dissect Lómion’s silhouette. That Voice, there’s potential there.
That night, they eat boiled octopus over wide, flat kelp noodles, hand-rolled and hand-cut and a little misshapen. It tastes like breathing again.
— ✸ — ✸ — ✸ — ✸ — ✸ — ✸ — ✸ —
Life goes on.
Lómion recovers slowly but surely and, after much back and forth with the quendu, designs him a fish trap. The first day the quendu puts it to use, Lómion is unsurprised when the front door slams open, rattling the walls of the hut, and the quendu drags inside a basket filled to the brim with asphyxiating fish, eyes wide and breaths quick.
“Fish,” the quendu stammers, wiggling his hand back and forth through the air in front of him. “Fish, fish, fish!”
“What are you panicking about?” Lómion deadpans, not even looking up from that morning’s haul of seaweed. “The ocean is right there. Go collect water and set it on the fire to boil. We’ll use salt to preserve your catch. Whatever we can’t dry or salt, we’ll cook.”
The quendu nods frantically, scrambling back out of the shack with as many driftwood buckets as he can carry.
Other times, when the quendu can’t bring himself to rise from his cot and face the sun and the sea, his limbs limp and unresponsive and his mind thick with fog, Lómion only strays from his bedside to gather what he must to feed them that day.
On days like this, the quendu watches as Lómion putters around the hut, tanning fish leather, all soft and thick and sturdy and waterproof, spinning thread and dyeing it, carving needles, and sewing hooded cloaks for the two of them—lining them with the gray-black fur that had been granted him upon his departure from the Halls—and washing and patching the quendu’s clothes and repairing the quendu’s shoes. He had even unraveled the golden embroidery from the quendu’s tunic, carefully collecting the brassy metal thread, and spent a day stitching fish into the cuffs and hems and breasts of the quendu’s cloak.
“Not weaver? Not tailor?” The quendu asked, once.
“No,” Lómion replied. “This, I learned the hard way.”
Lómion is no master of thread—that much is clear in every bungled stitch and pricked finger—but he is patient, doing and undoing until the job has, at last, been done well.
Lómion weaves them hats, wide-brimmed, with leather chin strips, snug—a shelter against the rain, which keep the quendu’s hands free in harsh weather—and when that job has been well done, he begins to dig deep, deeper into the earth, until he strikes clay, and shapes bricks of clay and beach sand and wood ash.
Lómion stacks the unfired bricks into a rough kiln and then fires another set within it for three days and three nights until they are sturdy and solid. Afterwards, he deconstructs the kiln, building a new one from freshly mixed bricks, and firing those that formed the walls of the last.
Lómion does not explain his purpose in doing this, but by now, the quendu trusts that he will have a plan and does not ask questions anymore.
And brick by brick, Lómion builds the quendu a house, laying the foundation a little further inland, back from the cliff’s edge, sanding driftwood and framing out a single-story house, long and narrow, with a proper fireplace and a wrap-around porch overlooking the water. He weaves wattle and mixes daub. He sands long planks of driftwood down into clapboard to shelter the exterior walls from the biting, salty wind off the ocean below.
The quendu helps when he can and watches when he cannot.
“I. want. make. brick,” the quendu chokes out one day, pointing at Lómion’s diminishing pile of them. Lómion pauses, glancing up from where he is preparing to lay the foundations of a latrine, and wipes the sweat from his brow.
“By all means,” he replies. “I’ll need at least thirty more to cobble together a proper furnace. Do you understand from watching, or do you need me to explain?”
“No, I understand,” the quendu replies, gaze firm.
Lómion inclines his head and returns to digging, leaving the quendu to it. When Lómion checks in on the quendu later that afternoon, he draws back, brows raised, at the mountain of bricks before him. He blinks once, twice, and then turns to the quendu.
“This is…” Lómion settles on, “a lot of bricks.”
The quendu grins.
“Making stairs for,” the quendu explains, pointing his index finger downward. “Make easier.”
Lómion opens his mouth to reply but thinks better of it and, instead, scrunches his face and raises a palm flat, his fingers pointed out, and slowly sweeps it outward horizontally from his chest in a smooth, steady motion.
“Yes, but two,” the quendu corrects. “Two, hard for me.”
Lómion repeats the motion but with both of his hands.
“Good,” the quendu says.
“I don’t know that I would have gone with brick,” Lómion hums, “because they’ll be slippery often, and they’re prone to gathering algae and moss.”
The quendu’s face falls.
“So, what we’re going to do,” Lómion continues, bending over to select a stick from among the brush, “is score the edge of the upright side of the bricks.”
The quendu perks up.
Lómion whittles the end of the stick to a point and then selects an unfired brick, cutting a crosshatch pattern, no more than a quarter of an inch deep at most, into the clay along a horizontal edge. “Then,” he says, pressing the scored edge into the pile of beach sand they have been using to mix the bricks, “you press the edge in sand, and when it is fired, it will have enough texture to grip.”
And so, the quendu sets to work, hatching the bricks with unique, geometric patterns and the flourishing swirls of tengwar.
— ✸ — ✸ — ✸ — ✸ — ✸ — ✸ — ✸ —
The stairs are finished long before Lómion has a chance to start on the furnace proper, and once that is done, he sews himself an apron and gloves and chisels himself a set of roughly-hewn stone tools, a temporary measure.
The next problem, which follows soon thereafter, is that of sourcing metal. Lómion takes to gathering the iron scraps and rusty nails that wash up on the shore, but with that, he can do very little. His gaze drifts to a small, iron frying pan drying off to the side—the quendu’s, though it is put to use only occasionally—set off to the side.
“Where is the nearest river?”
The quendu looks up from the pot of saltwater bubbling over the fire and blinks once, twice. Then, he raises a palm to his head and outward further up the coastline from the shack, before, with two fingers, making a wiggling back and forth gesture, as if flowing, and says, “Celuþírë.”
It takes Lómion a few tries before he manages the river’s name, the quendu patiently coaxing an þ out of the nér. It is perhaps ironic, though unsurprising, that each day Lómion has come to sound more and more like the quendu when he speaks and has lost much of that stilted, scholarly quality to his Quenya, slurring his words in all the right places.
On occasion, Lómion will pronounce a word as it is written, rather than as it should be. The quendu will stop and patiently repeat the word and its sign back to Lómion until the nér can sufficiently articulate both.
“Celuþírë,” Lómion says at last, eyes alight, and then, collecting the frying pan, rises to his feet and simply adds, “I’ll be back.”
When Lómion returns, it is with a pan full of black sand—iron, he explains to the bewildered quendu, a grin plain on his lips—and as soon as it dries, he sets to melting it down and pounding out nail after nail, which he uses to roof the cabin and the outhouse with wooden shakes and affix gutters to the roof’s edge and shutters to the windows.
And so it is that the two, after a season of hard labor, have a roof over their heads just in time for Quellë’s first, punishing rain.
The quendu had taken delight in ferrying their meager belongings over to their new home and carving leaves and vines and florals into the doors and the windowsills and the shutters and the support beams and every spare inch of wood that he can, mixing paints from rock and bone and sand and bugs and anything else he could get his hands on that wasn’t better served in the cooking pot. The paint job isn’t good, not with his right hand as it is and his left unpracticed, nor is painting a craft he has much familiarity with, but he did it himself, and this is his home now.
Their home, the quendu corrects, because with all that Lómion has done for him since they met on the beach, it is as much his, too.
Meanwhile, Lómion deconstructed the shack, salvaging what wood that he could from the structure. When they burn the first piece of firewood taken from it, the quendu bursts into song.
They realize only when the rain comes that they’d not had the foresight to roof the forge, and so it lies fallow for a season, Lómion turning his attention back to patching what needs patching and spinning thread and weaving lengths of linen from it and sewing trivets and potholders and towels and gloves and scarves and socks and blankets, or otherwise, gathering firewood.
By the first snowfall, Lómion has stuffed two thin but soft mattresses and pillows, one for each of them, and thereafter, it is he who favors his bed, laid out beside the fire and ill-inspired to move from it, wincing and shielding his eyes each time circumstance forces him out into the snow. His moods are mercurial. Occasionally, he is struck with a sudden bout of excitement which drives him from his rest for an hour or two to fixate on one project or another.
By the fire, the quendu sings of Moringotto’s many, many deceits; the exile of Curufinwë Fëanáro north to what would become Formenos, a marvel of engineering rock-cut into the mountainside; the theft of the Silmarils and the slaughter of Finwë Ñoldóran at Moringotto’s hand; the aftermath, the funeral, the grief at the loss of a much beloved father, grandfather, and king; Fëanáro’s coronation, his speech to the Noldor of Tirion, and that final, damning Oath of his and his sons’ that had doomed them all; the series of accidents that was the kin-slaying at Alqualondë, a heist gone so very wrong; and then, the Noldor’s exile and grueling voyage across the sea in pursuit of the traitorous maia that had started it all…
“Melkor,” Lómion interjects, once, fingers clenched into a blanket.
The quendu pauses, mid recitation, to turn and look at Lómion.
Lómion isn’t looking back at him, his eyes fogged and fixed beyond this reality. The quendu flinches, recognizing that expression.
“He used to insist,” Lómion continues on, his voice light and dreamlike, “on being called Melkor—despised it when anyone called him Moringotto or Morgoth…and wasn’t above taking it out on us, so of course, we called him that as much as we could.”
The quendu’s lungs tighten.
“He took you?” The quendu asks, his voice soft and on the verge of cracking.
Lómion replies only with a single knock of his fist in the quendu’s direction.
The quendu inhales sharply.
“I hate him,” Lómion murmurs, voice soft and mournful, a single tear tracing a path down his cheek. Then, he hiccups out, “It was all my fault,” before letting out a muffled, aching sob.
This time, the quendu does not ask for permission or resist his impulses. Lómion blinks, and the quendu is knelt beside him, pulling the nér into a warm, tight, all-encompassing hug, running his fingers through his cousin’s hair—because Lómion is clearly blood in one capacity or another—propriety be damned, and humming a soothing lullaby into his ear.
Lómion leans into the touch, fingers digging into the quendu’s back and cries and cries and cries into his shoulder, soaking his shirt with a storm of tears and snot, until Lómion’s eyes are inflamed and itchy and dry and flickering shut, the nér’s limbs heavy with exhaustion. When Lómion sinks at last into sleep, the quendu hums until the nér’s shaky, fleeting breaths even out. Only then, holding the nér tightly against his chest, does the quendu let out a low sigh.
In the morning, he will ask.