Work Text:
Reclamation
The Eldar left now, in Endorë, Sing not like they of yore.
The lady Artanis of Lothlórien Sings still, for to protect her Realm and to enchant it, but loss, grief, and the scraping flow of time leave her diminished. The Lord of Imladris, too, owns talent; yet keeps it quiet as summer's sough, sparingly used. And ayond the well-mapped lands, into the ancient East where live still the Refusers, some do Sing weavings strange and subtle, but ne’er these catch the baring light of day.
Those comen in the First Age, freshly from Aman – when victory against the ravages of death seemed not wholly impossible – Sang differently.
Tales will tell that Findecáno Sang, to find Maitimo. So it goes; a heart-friend thrice lost – to the friction tween their Houses, to the cruelty of Ice and distance, to the Moricotto’s hand – found anew in lilting joy.
The story, when thusly told, misunderstands. It imagines a simpler kind of singing, a call and a response, echoing through the mountains for to thread reunion.
Findecáno’s deed was— other.
“Surrender him, warped, malicious land,” hissed Findecáno. Wreathed in the strumming of his harp, his power galloped ov’er the crags and cliffs, making battle with the Marring. Notes clashed and shivered by the slopes.
“I feel him. I feel the pulse of him webbed through the Music. I know you hold him hereclose, wicked realm of Iron. Return him!”
It had been a wild gambit, his quest. Alone, fleet-footed, keeping to shadow, slipping right into the arms of the Moricotto’s power, to steal from him his grimmest prize. And yet, could he have not? The Ñoldor, bursting with bitterness and violence, had been but breaths away from meting such onto each other. Without stitches of valour to pull the wound a little closed, without a deed to teach them shame again, they would spill kinsblood long afore the Dark Foe cleave them.
Besides, shrivelled and fanged though such place was, still in his heart remained a place for Maitimo. There ever would be.
Upon finding him, howbeit – when the treacherous, winding mountainsides surrendered to his seeking-Song and spat him out – he discovered him enchained. Hanging skeletal, wild in the eyes, he swayed there, in the winds and in the treacly wrongness. Though he had answered to the Song, themes of the Foe were thick about him; not merely wrapped as suffocating vines, but plunging, even, right into his Music, and hewing there dire wounds for to make nest.
Nelyafinwë was— maimed; and in manner Finno had not hitherto witnessed.
“Kill me”.
The physical chains he could defeat. A limb was steep cost, but not unbearable. Findecáno’s blade had bitten into many limbs across the Helcaraxë: rotting legs and blackened hands, storm-tattered ears and putrefying cocks. He was little afeared of obstacles he could just hack through. He bore calm that sick crunch of splinters.
“Kill me.”
The fëa, howbeit—
He did tear Nelyafinwë free. Yet as he held the ruined Ñoldo o’er his knees, astride the Eagle Lord, the horror of what it was he had recovered seized him raw, and he nigh tossed the wreckage of once-Nelyo down, into the dizzying abyss below.
Bring not such bad seed to your garden, Finno. This thing - ploughed ayont mending, un-personed - it is not he. A carcass, at best. At worst, a vector of infection.
Indeed, though he had been wrenched free, where the Moricotto’s Song had penetrated Nelyo, hungry and defiling, now lay a smattering of gaping holes that showed no signs of closing. Shaking and pale, the Fëanárion bled his personhood across the Music. Each wing-flap jolted him, and emptied him out further.
How gutted mote an Elda be by such gangrene, afore he is made Orc?
How much of him mote be stolen, and he should still recover?
But Findecáno had lost too much already, and rage seared off his wisdom.
In horror and in heedless, insolent defiance, Findecáno Sang anew. Whither had burrowed the rot, he buried his own themes instead, pushing fiercely agin the Dark. Arrogant, gorged in Valarin Light and the bright-hot triumph of his uncrossable crossing, he trespassed the great verboten and dug his power into a soul, stuffing the tither wounds with Song.
“I take him from you, Marring. I claim him back.
"Where planted you your flag, I place mine own."
Arien crossed manytimes the firmament, fore Findecáno truly grasped what he had done.
So Nelyafinwë bent the knee, abdicant. Finwë’s crown shone still like a blessing of Aman, silver-gold, deceptively sacral in his hand.
A diplomatic accomplishment. A reconciliation.
Findecáno felt nauseous.
Am I who orchestrates this? he agonised. Was he imagining that unnatural pliancy in Nelyafinwë’s face, where the Fëanárion’s flinty power seemed neutered, now, and sandpaper-flayed? Was it madness, to fear that his wishes might begin to spill into the world, and Nelyo would softly, silently bend to them, as rosemary in the sirocco?
“The Foe shall not be let to rend us. Whatever lies atween us all, what plaints and hurts, still our purpose shall take precedence, and we shall bide by loyalty and love. Let our rifts be at an end. Let our courage unite us. The Ñoldor stand agin the shadow, and neither fear nor baulk,” rolled out his father’s words. Ñolofinwë – Fingolfin, now – edelweiss-bright and firm and gentle, took the crown. It looked well, upon his head.
In Nelyo’s own mien moved nary a feeling.
Had he been persuaded? Was he merely posturing? Was it the raw practicalities of rulership? A concession nominal only? Was it for sake of peace? For to repay his rescue? There was a time Findecáno would have been able to tell; if not all, then a glimpse, at the least, of what thoughts moved him. Today, piercing into Nelyo’s eyes gained him naught but a quicksilver mirror, the shine returning to him his own form. The only thing Findecáno recognised in Nelyo's violent vacancy, was Findecáno.
I crafted a ghoul.
They could ne’er become lovers, now.
Findecáno would not know to tell. What gave Nelyafinwë willingly? What was result of Findecáno’s own will, incubated like a parasite? The shape of an innominate, irrepressible power would join them in the bedding, sucking out the marrow of their agency. It would rape them both.
They could barely again be friends, for all the love lay atween them. (And the relief, and the yearning, and the memory of a pubescent Finno awed to stillness by Nelyo’s recitations and—)
All other feelings were palled by a macabre gratitude, glazed of eye, waxen-white and degrading; not a cure, but a different hue of rot. When Findecáno breathed close-by, Nelyafinwë turned something lesser than himself. Flame curled into thralldom. His fortitude and power did still overflow, yet something else in him dimmed, and left him a disembowelled fish posing as East-King, gagging on gilded ribbons.
“It is good, there be some distance.”
“Indeed,” the Fëanárion spoke, voice forever hoarse from torture. “And the March needs be guarded, and the Gap, and the passages therenear. The Oath, besides, is a briary and cruel force at times, and it should not live near your father, and the heart politick of our people.” For all what had transpired, Nelyafinwë remained a formidable warlord, after all.
They had not spoken of it before, and they would ne’er thence. That day, though – under a bulbous, ugly sunset that overspilled its redness gauchely – something wailed in Findecáno. He reached, grabbed Nelyafinwë’s wrist.
“I did not know what it would do to you.” It came out strangled, like a thing crawlen out its cairn.
Nelyafinwë stared, impassive.
“I owe you all.”
Findecáno pulled back his hand.
He avoided him, thereon.
Good man though he was, Findecáno was not free of resentment. The Ice had roughened more than the once-soft padding of his fingers, and had left within him bites of lasting wrath. Debts grossly unpaid muttered their nagging in him. More frighteningly still, he was not free of desire, either. In the mire of cold and stony nights, in loneliness, in grief, in longing, stricken by savage need and vim unspent, he battled the fantasies of pulling at his own Song, feeling out its hooks in Maitimo. Discovering, perhaps, how deep his power went. If whispered he that Nelyafinwë should take him to bed, offer him meat and pleasure, would he comply? Would he stare with this hard, blank gaze, this ossified expression, handsome and ruined and dangerous and remote, as he would biddably undress the younger man—
Eru forfend, twisted Findecáno's lip and writhed his whitened hands.
Eru keep me decent.
So then— blessed be the distance, and holy be the war.
He had a million thoughts, as he lay dying. They lasted a split instant only – a brain half-crushed a’ready in its shattered skull, a body trampled – and yet so flashed the final flickers of his spirit that a myriad trails opened to him all at once, excruciation and transcendence entwined. His mind flew wide as an unfurling banner.
Father. Mother. Brother. Sister.
Lord Manwë, might you one day absolve me?
Beleriand, did I fail you? A poor excuse, made I, for a King - but I tried, beloved land, sweet switchgrass, wild fern.
Aftercomers, transient and hardy and vibrant with vigour unyielding, I pray you find to eke a living in this place.
And you. Haply you shall be free now, Nelyo.
Veritably free.
Alack, such mercy figured not in their allotted eucatastrophy.
When perished the Song of Findecáno and receded he, at last, from the ruined crevices of Nelyafinwë’s being, its place was taken by a worse yet inhabitant: nothing at all.
The Song had kept Nelyafinwë from dying, but its absence did not to death return him. Instead, he forged ahead, stripped barren anew, threadbare of soul and porous. So then a body of exquisite brutality and Oath-bound purpose slashed through the fate of Arda, with little fetter to keep him from careening into a Doom too-long foretold, and slaying hundreds in his path.
What use letters of friendship and stern demand? More eloquent yet croon the blades.
What use wept pleas to spare the twins? Toss them down the thirsty rocks, alongside their spiteful, cursed mother.
Macalaurë's cries rang distant, barely familiar at all.
What use?
The Eldar are careful, these days, when they Sing.
And Celebrimbor, Lord of Imladris, would not his offspring wander too far off into the yonder wilds. He knows what crawls therein. If Macalaurë might have drowned himself in protest and in guilt, and effaced himself into the arms of Ulmo, Nelyafinwë knows no guilt, and is a man effaced a'ready. The fiend trawls the peaks and slays the Orcish raiders, would butcher no less gladly all else it might encounter, and no recognition would flash behind its white-void glare. It bumbles on, knowing only that the Light chars its twisted hand, and, mayhap, that it seeks a half-forgotten Song, and calls, and calls, and calls.
And never gets an answer.