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The sound of the gunshot crashed through the air. Loud enough to be felt, instantaneous in time as a single point in space, it clanged against the stone pillars, shivered through the air. A new sound, unheard before in Arda, it seemed to hang, a single note, unmusical, taking hostage the flow of time. So loud and so singular, it seemed to rip through the fabric of the world, the creation of a new age, the unmaking of innocence.
Fingolfin fell. His blood dripped red upon the white stone steps.
Feanor stared down at his hand as though it were not a part of himself. Feanor stared down at the gun as though it were not a part of himself. A shard of treelight flashed from the newforged metal and glanced against his eyes.
Red blood spread across white stone. Fingolfin lay still.
Horror permeated the air, the crowd. It was a thing not felt by individuals, but woven afresh into the fabric of the world, breathed in and out of lungs, contained within held breaths. The elves of Tirion were unmade, a transmutation of the fea from those who left death behind on another shore to those who held death within their hands, communicable at the twitch of a trigger finger. How many were armed? Feanor did not know, but the secrets of his forge were no true secrets, betrayed, betrayed on every side, he long has known this, and now within bright daylight--
Blood, hroa, an empty shell, crumpled oddly, wrong, spread slantwise across the sharp steps.
It took only a moment, less than a thought. Something so monumental ought not to be so simple, surely it should take a greater exertion of will to evict a living spirit from its rightful home.
The will, the thought, the effort, were invested long ago, he realized. It was in the invention, in the making, in the testing. Beneath the veneer of self-delusion that allowed him to remake the threads bridging life and death and call it a puzzle, call it creation, as though anything new was added by this instead of lost. It should take something monumental to cause this, death with a sound like the world cracking open, death in the space of a heart beat, and it did. It did, it was there, built up. Potential energy, like a stone dropped from a mountain peak, like a spring released from compression.
Fingolfin lay dead. There was no undoing it. No unknowing it. Potential energy. And all of Valinor was like steam pressurized in a sealed pot, explosion inevitable. Feanor was a firecracker, an inferno, but he did not bring the water to boil alone.
Fingolfin was dead. Death of passion, death premeditated. The half brother who never should have been was now no more. Dead because of Feanor. Well, he was not the first.
And so what of it? What of it. Life that should not have come to pass only here at all because Feanor burned too brightly, took too much. And so what? Feanor had continued to burn, to make to, to rage, and now Fingolfin lay dead. Fingolfin, who should never have been, who tried to take what was not his. And he had lost, of course he had, hadn’t Feanor taken what was his by right?
Dead, and growing colder. Soon bright blood would dull. Would the stain ever wash clean of the steps?
Horror, and a shift in the foundations of the world, and Feanor, mere elda, enough to cause the rift, no Vala’s slave. Horror, a breath, cumulative, held: the watching crowd.
Well. Feanor knew what to do with crowds.
He leapt up the steps lightly, and his shoes were not stained. He turned and spoke.