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Indis comes to him after, in the blind darkness of a world ended, the gilt edges of her once-proud flaxen mane shining ragged and unkempt in the dim light of guttering candles and distant stars, shorn to the scalp.
“Mean you to dissuade me?” Fëanáro's voice is hoarse, all his powers of elocution spent atop the summit of Túna. His blood thrums yet with the rapture of apostasy, the Oath he has sworn lingering on the tongue, the taste copper-bright; like blood. Finwë’s blood. Splattered across the stones of Formenos like so much wine carelessly spilled. He will pay, he will pay, they will all pay, vengeance will be mine, beats the frenzied war-drum of his heart, thundering in his ears, drowning out all else.
Indis smiles. A mirthless thing. Her eyes are hard and bright and dry – two jewels set into a bare, grinning skull. “Even Finwë could not sway you from a course you had set your mind to, Þerindion. I know better than to try. No, I come to bid you farewell.”
The callous ease with which his father’s name drips from her bloodless lips fans his rage – never doused, always smouldering – to incandescent new heights till he feels more fire than man. An immolation in motion. His lips curl into a bestial snarl, fangs bared and searching for a throat to sink into, slavering for the arterial spurt, for that innominate hunger to finally be slaked.
“Think you it folly then? Think you my mission doomed?”
His rage does not move her. It never has. She is marmoreal in the Elentari’s cold light; stone to his fire, something Nerdanel would carve from limestone and quartz, not flesh and blood and Living Flame. Perhaps that is the reason for their affinity, he finds himself thinking, and the thought brings with it a fresh flood of venom as he remembers the look on Nerdanel’s face as she watched him swear the oath alongside their sons—that mute, uncomprehending horror.
It is her, he thinks, maddened as a wounded dog, as he stares at the Vanya interloper, this serpent has turned my wife against me. All she touches, she rots.
“It matters not what I think,” Indis replies, as phlegmatic as her cursed son and twice as sly, but he barely hears her past the rushing in his ears. He feels himself a sword, sharpened; a storm barely constrained; seized by the insuperable urge to make this once-queen yield, to watch her bow in the face of his might.
“Hear me now,” he breathes out, trembling with the force of his conviction, the strength of his resolve – let a hundred armies break against his will, let the very tide fight him and lose. “Victory will be mine. The Moringotto will rue the day his foul chord rang into existence. I will drag him from his lair and pry my jewels out his blackened hand before cleaving his head from his neck. Finwë's blood shall be avenged, I have sworn it in the All-Father's name! I will lead the Noldor to glory and beyond – we shall live as lords of the light in Endórë, untrammelled by your craven gods, while you, cozened pets, atrophy to nothing!”
His chest is heaving by the time he finishes, his voice risen to a furious boom. In the deadened silence that follows, Indis studies him impassively, but there – on the lines of her face: movement. Detectable only because he has spent centuries making a careful study of Ñolofinwë's visage as it sits across from him in the council chambers. A smile, barely suppressed. Spiteful mockery blooming upon pallid features like a drop of ink in a clear pool.
The realization dawns slowly, in jerks and starts, a malfunctioning automaton – she does not believe he will succeed. Even now, confronted with the evidence of his zeal, his unflinching certitude, she thinks his mission vain.
"Is that so?" she murmurs, at last, into the taut silence.
"Aye," mouths he, "Aye. That is so, lady. And ye who doubt shall find yourselves made fools afore the eyes of history."
Indis tilts her head, a gesture almost predatory in nature, eyes aglow with the light of ancient stars, before suddenly, she is loping closer to him, her habitual grace, that dancer's ease, translated for a moment into something more leonine. A frisson of unease thrills down Fëanáro's spine. So mild and inoffensive she makes herself out to be, this tow-haired devil, that he forgets at times that she has seen the meres of Cuiviénen, that she too made the great and arduous march that claimed so many of their kindred's lives. His are not the only fangs here present.
Stopping before him, those jewel-bright eyes rove across his face, the weight of their regard a physical thing, dragging across his visage as though his father's widow were tracing a finger along the slope of his jaw, his cheeks, his temples. A false-mother and her gangrenous caress. Slowly, Indis shakes her head, as though her search revealed not what she hoped to find. When she speaks, her voice brims with a cruel pity. "Your father built you a playground, boy, and you think it the world."
He recoils from her, an animal flinch, but she keeps going, still with that terrible pity.
"It is a savage land out there, Þerindion, and you – you are not made for it. No...no, you will not last long. A hothouse flower, you are. Curdled cream. Endórë will eat you alive."
She leans closer – close enough that he can see the whites of her eyes, the burst veins crawling up her sclera, the glint of madness. "And I, for one, cannot wait for that day."
And with that, she takes his face in trembling hands and presses a dry kiss to his brow – not benediction, but blight. "Fare you well, Fëanáro," she lilts, a laugh crystallized in the clarion of her voice, and then, like the soughing wind, she is gone, leaving in her wake nothing but a frozen Fëanáro, the far-away stars, and the fading warmth of her touch.