The Sandglass Runs by Dawn Felagund, NelyafinweFeanorion

I hate family therapy.

I hate family therapy more than any other part of reembodied life. More than my job. Certainly more than individual therapy, as intolerable as that also is. Even more than the occasional guilt-induced lunch Uncle Arafinwë invites me to and my mother and Nelyo force me to attend. I thought I was mostly rid of it—family therapy that is—because I've been reembodied second longest of my dead family, and I think they've largely given up on me by this point. I don't think it's because I've made progress. I refused to go to any therapy for a long while, and when they tried to force the issue by using language with a vaguely threatening connotation, I remember yelling, "What are you going to do, shove me back in the grave? I didn't even have a damn grave!" Instead, they reembodied Nelyo, and I got swept into attending his family therapy because my loyalty to him, it seems, is in the germ of my being, and I didn't want to make trouble for him, even when it became clear that the focus was more me than him, which I think was a shortcoming on their part. Nelyo hasn’t turned out exactly well-adjusted, post-reembodiment. He wouldn't have suffered if they'd let me be and lavished their attentions upon him instead, who probably would have used it and maybe wouldn't look so pale and exhausted now.

I hate family therapy. I'm sitting in it now. I received the letter the other day. Letters used to come on parchment the color of tea with cream; they used to dance with calligraphy and kindle with gold leaf; they used to have wax seals that it was satisfying to break and come via messengers on fast, panting ponies; they were, in other words, special. Letters come now on white paper and in white paper envelopes, sealed with spit and delivered by postal address and a mail carrier who plods through the same route each day. This one wasn't even written to me. It was a form letter—another efficiency developed by ambitious Noldor for my uncle's republic—which I knew because they'd written in my name by hand, in blue ink, and spelled it wrong: Carnister. Thus, insult was added to injury.

Now that I’m here, though, the form letter makes grudging sense. I like efficiency, perhaps more than I like beauty even, and they weren't kidding when they said "family therapy"—the whole family—the whole family that is alive anyway—is here. That much calligraphy would have taken hours. There's my mother and Uncle Arafinwë and Aunt Eärwen, who forsook their various quasipolitical reparative projects to be here. Aunt Anairë, who took a day away from the House of Scholars to be here. Nelyo, off for the day from teaching (and sighing over how long it took to make sub plans) and Findekáno, who is maybe the only one of us not missing something important, come to think of it. Findaráto, away from his burgeoning political career in the suburbs at the Calcirya. Even Amarië is here, and she is doing an important performance art piece, although she's very much still at the wild-waving-around-and-shouting-while-holding-a-drink-in-a-bar stage of the creative process. Even Artanis and her husband what's-his-name are here! Over from Tol Eressëa, where they own the island's largest resort and planned living community. Scheduling surf lessons and balancing swimming pool chemicals are enough of an undertaking, apparently, that even intellectual and martial giants such as themselves can rarely get away. And me. I had to take the day off of work, which is no great loss for my job or for me, but I'd rather be there than here for sure. We are sitting in a big circle with my (our?) therapist between Arafinwë and Amarië. Her spiral notebook is open on her knees; multiple pens and pencils spear through her bun. "Should we start with introductions?" she says.

"Um," I remark, and Nelyo—who is sitting next to me on one side—pokes my foot with his toe right as our mother, who is on my other side, lays a hand on my arm.

So we pass around a talking piece—a glittery stone that my father would have thought too garish and puerile for an infant's toy—and introduce ourselves to each other, we who have gone to war together, gone on holiday together, eaten together, slept together, fought together, fucked together, seen each other naked, seen each other born, in some cases, for the love of Eru (this is why I can't stand this shit). "Carnistir," I grunt when it's my turn, "or maybe it's Carnister now," and, when encouraged to answer a question from the card she passed around to each of us, follow up with, "Pass."

I hate family therapy, but I have mastered using their own rules and loopholes to make the experience as unbearable for them as it is for me, at least.

Uncle Arafinwë speaks the longest, answering the question, "What treasured memory is awakened by the faces you see here to support you?" to wax sentimental about watching our family grow in the years before the Darkening and watching it grow again, gesturing expansively as he speaks. Never mind the small point that many of us assembled here had to die in order to favor him with such a joyfully symbolic experience: Here we are. At last, he shuts up, and the therapist continues.

"I have asked you here today on behalf of the Department of Judgment.” (This is what Arafinwë's government has renamed Námo's halls.) “I am most pleased—most pleased, truly—to be the one to announce that another of your family has been selected for reembodiment." Her face gleams with enthusiasm. I almost feel sorry for the lack of reaction she draws from us.

"Whom," my Aunt Anairë says at last, "should we expect?" and Findaráto—who also aspires to a seat in the Noldorin Congress and has cleaved to her like a tick to a dog—follows with, "And when?"

The therapist's smile wilts a little. "Unfortunately, that is not information that is shared with me."

"Oh hell," says Findekáno, and now it is his turn to be nudged by Nelyo. "Why do you do this, then? Call us all here for what amounts to nothing?" He sneaks a glance at me. We are unofficially allied as the most pointless of the reembodied Noldor and the most flagrantly difficult to manage.

"I don't like to think it's for nothing," says the therapist. "After all—"

Artanis and her husband are already gathering their bags.

"How does everyone feel," the therapist is trying to rescue her session, "about the news that you are about to gain another number? Arafinwë? How—"

"Do we even know which household he—she—they are coming from?" Anairë asks in a voice carefully constructed to be pleasant.

"Of if it is a he or a she or a they?" says Artanis at last in that voice deep and subtly threatening as the sea.

Arafinwë, who was winding up into another speech, is left open-mouthed, cut off by his female relatives.

"Unfortunately, I don't—" and the word unfortunately isn't even all the way out of the therapist's mouth before Artanis and her husband (Celeborn! the man's name is Celeborn!) are rising and beginning to converse with each other about the capacity of an excursion trip out to see dolphins and whether they should increase the thread count in the sheets they use in the villas.

"You should," Findekáno tells Artanis. "Nelyo buys those cheap sheets, and they're dreadfully itchy." He's standing as well, stretching to pop his back. Nelyo is checking the time and muttering about time to grade papers since he already hired the substitute teacher for the day, and our mother is asking if he can spare an hour to get lunch, and Anairë is standing and checking her planner to see if she can make the appropriations vote scheduled for later this morning, and that is the tipping point that makes everyone else stand except Arafinwë, whose lips are still parted and ready to give a speech.

"How about you, Carnistir?" my mother asks. "Would you like to do lunch?"

The therapist, to her credit, has accepted that she has lost the room. I think sometimes about how she is a government employee, like me, except that she answers to Arafinwë's government and Námo Mandos/the Valar, and that makes me feel a little sorry for her. I never believed, however, that her commitment to this job is as unenthusiastic as mine until now, watching her eyes dart toward the door as she considers whether our exodus is foregone enough that she can also head out for an early lunch. Well, maybe not as unenthusiastic, but she clearly doesn't have the personal commitment to this work that I'd always assumed when I was the subject of her particular and regular torment.

As though she can sense me thinking about her, her eyes catch mine, and something like recognition sparks there. "Carnistir! I'd like to see you privately for a moment before you leave."

“Fuck,” I say loudly enough that Artanis’s husband gives me the kind of look you’d give a hibernating bear that has just stirred in its sleep.

My mother and Nelyo suddenly become sluggish and excessively deliberate in gathering their belongings to leave. They are hoping to be invited too, both anticipating that I will cause a row if left alone, but the therapist pointedly avoids their questioning looks, fixing her stare on me, until they leave. “We’ll meet you outside,” says my mother pointedly, as though drawing attention to their presence might elicit the invitation they want. It doesn’t.

“I won’t keep him long!” my therapist calls. We both watch them leave. "We are beginning a new program at Lord Námo's entreaty," she begins.

"Bugger!" is my reply. I seem to be always selected for their attention.

"It is not a therapy program," she says. "It is a mentorship." She waits for my questions, but I won't give her the satisfaction. "You will be paired with this reembodied relative to offer guidance and support."

I laugh.

I don't know that she's ever heard me laugh. She looks startled. But it seems the only reaction that such a statement deserves. I'm barely functional in this body. I have a job, but I hate it and do the minimum to get by. I invent things at home that I never share or want to share. I play horrible, discordant music with Amarië that she views as part of a radical aesthetic, but I just like fiddling with wires and making noise. My mother invites me to dinner every week or two; Nelyo less, but he does invite me; I might as well not exist to the rest of my family except when Arafinwë gets a guilt pang and buys me lunch. I have refused most of the counseling and programs offered me by both the Valar and my uncle's government, even when told they were requirements; they haven't shoved me back in the grave yet. And even though I was dead for the better part of four ages between this life and my prior existence, this existence has really become a continuation of my first embodiment, and by design. No one outside my immediate family really liked me then, and none (Amarië aside) seem to really like me now. And this is because I cultivate the reputation of being dark and weird and unpleasant. I see it as a fence. (I told this to Nelyo once when he complained that I should make more of a point to be friends with Findekáno and I was a little in my cups and so susceptible to embroidering my thoughts with metaphor.) A fence is something that any farmer will be careful to mend and maintain because it keeps his livestock in but also keeps the interlopers out. This is my fence.

I am no way prepared to guide another soul through a new chance at life when I've plopped myself down on the road and already given up. Even if I was, there is nothing that could interest me less.

Intuiting my objections, the therapist goes on. "You were chosen, according to the Department of Judgment, because your particular proclivities align with those of the reembodied fëa." And I laugh again.

No one aligns with me.

They used to release feär from Mandos and let them stagger through Námo's creepy forest until they found their way or died and returned to the Halls. I don't know that the latter ever happened, but having made that journey myself, it is hard to fathom that it never did. Perhaps that's why they installed the metro system between Ostonúmë and the Halls: because rehousing a body is no small investment of time and energy and straight-up horror, and it's a shame if it expires a week later because, after all the test-tube flesh and haunted-house contrivances, it can't find water in a forest constructed of curls of ash.

A letter arrived the other day—plain white paper in a plain white envelope delivered at the usual time—utterly unspecial—and told me that I’d be expected at the halls of Mandos today and to take the metro from Ostonúmë. I had no idea what a metro was—have no idea until I descend a flight of stone steps under a bright blue M that was helpfully pointed out by a village resident. They have cashed in on the flow of reembodied Elves here in Ostonúmë: the streets are lined with clothing shops, therapist's offices, taxi stands, and information kiosks a lot like the one where I work in the Tirion Public Building except that the people seated behind them look like they actually want to help and even call to passersby in the street. I don't think I've called to anyone besides my wife, maybe to ask her if she can bring in a couple of those fresh cookies with her when she comes to bed. I don't generally entice others to associate with me. And they charge money, which I’m not allowed to do. (Not even allowed to have one of those tip jars that seem to have flourished everywhere else.)

At first, the metro is unimpressive: a pair of parallel tracks a lot like what Curufinwë and I used to build and use to race wooden horses fitted upon them. There is a humid, slightly unpleasant underground smell. A pair of Elves stand at either end of the platform where I assume we wait for whatever device will come along the tracks—I imagine it is going to resemble the wooden horses of my youth—and don't seem interested in interacting. That much about this "metro" I like.

But when the train arrives, I must admit that I stop short for several seconds. It comes like a gale through the trees, silver and sleek as a wave before it tumbles to the shore. I stop short for several more seconds, watching the other Elves to see what I must do. Doors slide silently open and expel several Elves; I recognize one wearing the grayish silk garments given to the newly embodied, attended by two chestnut-haired young women who can’t suppress their smiles.

That stops me short too. I do not think of Taryindë often and think of our daughters even less but these two young women and the obvious adoration of the man I assume to be their father—well, it's useless to go on. Findekáno once likened Námo's decisionmaking to flying a kite in a storm: predicting where the kite would crash—who would emerge next from his Halls—involves a welter of wind and rain that tosses in no discernible pattern. My mother said once that one must live as though the one most wanted would follow Míriel's fate, and she would know better than any. Taryindë was still in the Halls when I left, and our daughters had neither entered nor—I discovered once reemobodied—taken ship from the Outer Lands at the end of the Third Age. I expect to never see any of them again. I tell myself this firmly every day.

I certainly don't expect to see them today.

I don't.

But if there was a—

No.

I don't.

The passengers of the metro having disembarked, the two other Elves on the platform hasten forward, and I realize I should follow, so I proceed to the nearest open door. QUIET CAR, announces a sign over the door in paint the color of organ meat. The seats inside are the gray of falling rain and have a fungal squishiness to them. Clearly, the substitution of the metro for the long walk from Mandos has reduced the risk but not the ghoulishness. I am alone in the car.

The doors slide shut, and the metro whispers along its tracks. When we left Valinor in the vanguard with my father, we expected we were taking all the significant talent with us. We imagined leaving Valinor bereft, languishing in its past glories that the Valar would have to fight to keep from the decays of time. We didn't consider the Noldor born after we left, as curious, clever, and ambitious as our people had ever been. One of those ambitious youths had designed this metro. I wish I had thought of it first. It slips into the earth—I feel my ears pop—and misty red lanterns occasionally flash past on walls of dark gray stone. I wonder about its design instead of wondering whom I've been selected to meet. I wonder how it is powered. I can feel the speed of it, a feeling like my stomach is being pressed into my spine.

And then it eases to a stop.

The hazy red lanterns flash by slower and slower, and the pressure of speed against my solar plexus lessens. The complete cessation of motion is too slight to be detected; I know we've stopped only because the doors slide open again.

Námo's servants await in a small huddled herd on the platform. I remember them—their gray raiment, their sexless faces drawn with sorrow, their constructed smiles—from my own reembodiment years earlier. They cheer at our arrival, but their cheers are unsmiling and their pumping arms do not lift above elbow-level. Three do smile and come silently forth, one for each passenger, if the mere baring of teeth can be counted a smile. (Having used it myself many times, I do count it as such.) There are no words, no inquiries. They know instantly the contents of our minds.

One takes my arm with hands dry and powdery as cheap paper. We are walking down a brick-lined corridor; posters adorn the walls every few steps, advertising services for newly embodied feär. I recognize Arafinwë’s hand in that. The Elves depicted in lifelike detail are all in smiling crowds with the pomp and majesty of our previous monarchial system replaced by the sharing and laughing and conspicuous collaboration of Arafinwë’s republic. I am thinking that, were I not being escorted by a Maia of Námo, this corridor would be a perfect place for street art, and I am wondering if it is possible to access it without an escort and planning to tell Amarië about it to see if she knows an artist who is interested—she will find some profound political meaning in it; I will just enjoy breaking the rules right under Námo’s nose—and

We’re no longer in it. The corridor I mean. I don’t perceive it happening, but the bricks are gone, the posters, the tile floor beneath our feet. I am not that long reembodied; I should recall that space and time do not operate under the same constraints here as the rest of the world, Námo having abstained from the part of the song where those particular laws of physics were sung into being (or so the wisdom claims), but these laws are such an unthinking part of our world that it startles me nonetheless. The corridor around us is plush and gray. When I resided here, I felt like I was being slowly digested inside the ashen intestines of Námo himself. My inability to rid myself of such thoughts while I was here—and not because Námo didn’t do his best, and not because I didn’t want that “best” to cease as quickly and thoroughly as possible—is why I do not understand how I came to be reembodied second of my vast, dead family, second only after Findaráto, for the love of Aulë.

To our right, a door has relaxed open. A passage might be more accurate; it reminds me of a sphincter. I don’t want to go into it, but then I’m through it and in the room beyond, which—thank the Wise—actually looks like a room, with sterile white walls and tight, precise corners. There is a cot in the middle of the room. I recognize it, having been awakened upon one myself not that long ago, my throat the same bleeding ruin it was when I died as Námo worked to repair it. (I’m certain he awakened me early on purpose and took his time mending the wound while my new nervous system received its introduction to pain and terror.) I realize that my heart is pounding. There is no evidence of such bloody work this time. Námo was kinder to the figure on the cot than he was to me.

(I want to reiterate that I never expected Taryindë. When I met her in the Halls—she died protecting my unconscious body in the Nirnaeth Arnoediad—there was a shadow about her, and she would flee when I tried to touch her. Her body was never recovered. I’d hoped for a swift death for her. I never believed, though, that even the hope of joining me in a new life would rid her faster of that shadow. That would have been what Curufinwë liked to scornfully call a “fool’s hope.” I never indulged it.)

The figure on the cot is golden-haired. His back is turned to me, his body clad in the gray silk garments they put on new bodies to protect their new skin, which is tender-almost-raw for the first few days after reembodiment. He could be any one of my cousins.

A Maia manifests from the far wall. He/She (It?) holds out a hand to the figure on the cot. When the figure doesn’t move, she/he/it crooks fingers in a beckoning motion. The figure pushes at the cot with his palms, then cries out wordlessly; the pressure hurts as though applied to a new wound. I remember this. The Maiar holds out both of its hands, and the figure rises on the strength of his legs alone, trembling like a newborn colt.

He turns.

Artaher.

He is no more pleased to see me than I am him. No one was here when I woke up, nor Nelyo, nor Findekáno. Arafinwë apparently attended Findaráto’s reembodiment; given that Findaráto was the first of our family to be rehoused and the Valar regard him as especially exalted; nonetheless, forcing a father to watch the repair and reanimation of his son’s body that was mangled by werewolves seems the opposite of a privilege; perhaps it was intended as a statement on Arafinwë’s political experimentation? No matter—I am a father myself, and even for Námo, that “honor” seemed especially cruel. It seems, in any case, that Arafinwë did not merit a second invitation. I’m still not sure why I did.

I feel Artaher reach for my mind, but that is one lesson I was grateful to learn from Námo, and my thoughts and emotions are no longer as available as a bowl of fruit left out on the counter with the choice pieces ripe for the taking. I click my thoughts closed. “Not anymore,” I snap, and Artaher flinches, and so within seconds, our relationship has picked off right where it left off.

And then we’re sitting on the metro again, in the QUIET CAR again, although I’ve realized this time that every car is marked as the QUIET CAR, and I am using that as a pretense to not have to talk to my cousin. I can sense his discomfort—both the physical discomfort of his new, raw skin and the emotional discomfort that I, of all people, was the one sent to fetch him, and he is left to spend his first uncomfortable moments facing what his father, at least, insists is one of his greatest regrets of his previous life.

Chapter End Notes

With thanks to Archon Bun for the name Ostonúmë.

“It is one of his greatest regrets, what was done to you. I know it is.”

Arafinwë was eating a salad piled high with fruit and almonds, and fastidiously poking at the array of toppings with his fork gave him ample pretense to avoid looking into my eyes. I was fine with that; I was eating a slab of roast venison, and concentrating on sawing at it with a knife gave me a pretense to avoid looking into his. But when he pronounced this, he abandoned trying to spear a blueberry to look up into my face.

I hate the blue eyes in the Arafinwion line. My brother Tyelkormo had blue eyes, but his were dark and guileless whereas the Arafinwions? They were pale and piercing and beautiful and terrible. You know how when, on an overcast day, the clouds break just enough to let a beam of light spear the sea? They were that color. It was hard to look away.

I was enduring one of what I’d come to term Arafinwë’s “guilty lunches.” Once a year or so, Arafinwë insisted on inviting me out to lunch at one of the mediocre restaurants he loved, where he’d pour out his regrets where I was concerned. It seemed, upon receiving news of the Outer Lands as history brought back after the War of Wrath, he viewed certain events involving me and his sons as something for which he was partly to blame. And he was. These lunches were not an opportunity, in my mind, to offer consolation much less forgiveness; they were a chance to order the best, most expensive thing on the menu (often not very great, even if expensive) and enjoy my free lunch while trying not to relive much of what he was self-flagellating over.

This particular lunch had been about Artaher. Mad with pride at its democratic experiment, the historiographical establishment in Tirion had decided that Artaher was the Arafinwion most like his father and a hallowed innocent somehow swept up in the exile and journey east. Otherwise, he’d have been a republican and revolutionary, right alongside his father. Pictures of him in the history texts tended to show him loose-haired and soft-eyed, beatifically unsmiling with a suggestion of suffering in the lines of his mouth. Those who hadn’t come east tended to drop those of us who had into one of two bins: the rabble-rousers and the passengers. The rabble-rousers included all of us (Fëanáro’s sons), Findekáno, and Írissë. The passengers were Nolofinwë, Turukáno, and all of Arafinwë’s children—they all wanted something concrete in the Outer Lands but had maintained certain ethical lines they refused to cross (whereas, I suppose, the rest of us danced across them with impunity). Artaher, though, was his own category, and historians couldn’t seem to agree whether he’d been simply passive in coming along with the rest of us or if his attendance was to be read as an act of resistance. No matter where they came down, though, they all saw him as soft and pliant—essentially harmless.

My memories of him were more complicated.

I wasn’t born with many gifts, but I was exceptional in mindspeak. It came from my grandfather Finwë, skipped my father entirely (whose perception of other’s thoughts and feelings could be summed up as “blissfully ignorant”), and then pooled entirely in me, out of all seven sons, the way that rainwater will collect at the lowest point in a plain. None of my brothers had it. Just me. I suppose, lacking all other gifts, something had to arise. “Nature abhors a vacuum”—I remember that from Nelyo’s science lessons when I was still a boy. Even in lightless, rocky crags, lichen flourishes. Among an exceptionally gifted and storied people, I was that vacuum—at best mediocre at both scholarship and forgework—and so the mindspeak flourished within me. I never thought of it as anything but a curse.

Arafinwë is a case in this point also. Likewise painfully mediocre when compared to his two elder brothers, he received the entirety of the “gift” of mindspeak from Finwë, and he passed it on to all of his children in some measure.

That meant that, among the grandchildren, I had it, and Arafinwë’s children had it. No one ever bothered to tell me what it was. I assumed that everyone experienced other people the way I did: as a roar of color and texture that scintillated and prickled and furred with their emotions. I did not assume myself abnormal; it was much later that I realized the depth of my deviance. But my mind was wide open to it all the time. When people were at peace, it wasn’t bad—I remember sleeping in Nelyo’s arms, awash in his blue, cool like silk—but when others suffered even minutely, it was like having my eyes taped open and being forced to look at wounds. As my family disintegrated, the wounds deepened and festered. I was powerless to look away.

Arafinwë, naturally, taught his children better than my parents did. To be clear, I don’t blame Fëanáro and Nerdanel; they knew I was strange but had no notion why. Perhaps Finwë could have helped me, but he’d entangled himself too thoroughly in his own bad choices to spare much time for any of the grandchildren. At times, he would reach out and soothe me, but he never taught me to control it or—blood of Varda—shut the fucking thing off. Arafinwë’s children, though, not only controlled it but mastered it like any art, under their father’s tutelage.

And what I didn’t know? Until it was too late? That I wasn’t just receiving the emotions of others; I was broadcasting my own—and most of my deepest, most intimate thoughts—as though through a megaphone, to anyone who cared to listen. The thoughts of a young, troubled boy weren’t of much interest to my grandfather and Arafinwë and other adults who could have heard them if they’d chosen, but to my cousins? It was like I left my diary open on the kitchen table each night and invited them to read of me.

Findaráto couldn’t have cared less. Though younger than me by four years, as a firstborn son, he was coaxed and cultivated in all that he did. By the time we were adolescents, I already had the sense that his station was above mine, as a fourth-born son and an unpromising, unusual one at that. And he was the hope of the three Eldarin kindreds: the brilliant convergence of the three rays of each kindred, like the heart of a star; a sickening metaphor, but if you’d seen how people went doe-eyed at the mere mention of his name, you’d know it necessary sentimentalism. Though younger than me, he felt older—and inaccessible. Artanis was too young, at first, and later glommed so thoroughly onto Írissë that I wasn’t worth her attention either. But my middle cousins?

My middle cousins.

Artaher, Angaráto, and Aikanáro.

They were cruel to me.

As insipid and sentimental and stupid as Arafinwë can be, to his credit, he has never shied from empathy and the truth that empathy can reveal. When word reached him of the conflicts between me and his sons—a groundless conflict I’d initiated, as the histories were careful to note, for there was no reason for me to hate the sons of Arafinwë—he didn’t take them at their word that such incidents were entirely unprovoked, and I suppose he has had four ages since to look back on the social dynamics of our adolescence and young adulthood, conducted largely out of sight but surely not entirely unobserved, and eventually, he came to his own conclusions.

“In retrospect, I see that I should have done more to teach you.” He always led off with this. “To control it. Fëanáro had no way to know—even Nerdanel. Her gifts are differently oriented.”

Arafinwë has stewed on this for four ages. My stay in Mandos was agony and indignity, but if I came away with one thing of value, it was the teachings that none would give me in my youth. I kept my mind closed now. But made an exception, once, at one of our lunches so that I could perceive the depth of his guilt. If only he’d taught me, maybe? Maybe I wouldn’t have become Caranthir the dark.

I let my mind snick shut.

“I know they were not always kind to you.” They were never kind to me, but I left it alone. “Angaráto, Aikanáro … I accept their role in what happened … after.” He munched contemplatively on a bite of lettuce; I could hear his teeth crunching and disciplined my face not to look disgusted. He swallowed. “But Artaher … he had his own … struggles. Maybe you know? My father insisted you were the most perceptive of all of them. Artaher was next. He was tenderhearted; he wanted to belong. He followed where he never should have gone.”

And then the killing stroke: “It is one of his greatest regrets, what was done to you. I know it is.”

Which brings me to now.

I don’t have to worry much about what my mentoring duties of Artaher will look like because, as soon as we arrive in Ostonúmë, we are met by an entourage of his family—Arafinwë and Eärwen and Findaráto—and they pet and console him and ask little mewling questions for the entirety of the interminable carriage ride back to Tirion. I decide I don’t care. Námo himself could insist that I must mentor this flop but that doesn’t mean that I will. I’ve violated nearly every rule they set forth for me when I had my own turn sitting, trembling and afraid, the touch of mere air on my new skin like passing my arm too low over a gout of steam, on the cot in Námo’s halls, naked except for a silken shroud. In that moment, I’d been certain of my obedience; I hadn’t factored on how absurd this new world would be.

I stare out the window and try to ignore the hushed meep-meep-meep of conversation that reminds me of infants and crèches. Actually, I could never dignify myself to even talk to my daughters in that way when they were small. Valinor used to be mostly empty beyond its few glittering cities and Aman certainly was. The Valar used to make maps that conveniently faded at the boundaries of their authority, even though there were people and villages in those hinterlands. But Valinor is empty no more. Even Aman can no longer go unmapped. Every road brings a march of shops and houses that thicken as we approach a village. Villages used to convene upon the main road with spur roads off it like branches on a tree; these roads would quite literally fade into the forest or prairie at their ends. Villages now are senseless clots of roadways and shopping blocks and one-way streets and apartments and pedestrian boardwalks and traffic control; the roads bend and buckle back into each other—nothing simply ends here—so that there is a constant flow of new carriages trying to join the existing stream. Every one now is outfitted with absurd little rubber horns ostensibly intended to signal other carriages but usually used to rebuke those who slide into a gap not quite large enough that forces the driver to pull up short on the reins.

wa-HONK

Artaher flinches, and I feel a flash of pity for him. Back when I was reembodied, when the Eldarin people were still unprepared for such an eventuality, before it became an industry, the servants of Námo escorted you a certain distance into his forest and then let you find the rest of the way yourself. This was far from pleasant or ideal. They are not suitable companions for any of the Quendi, and their pantomimes of our behavior had the opposite of the intended effect, but they were quiet and liked things colorless and dim, and when every nerve in your body feels like it is waving exposed in the wind, even their creepiness became tolerable if it gave a little peace.

Aunt Eärwen has raised her hand to Artaher’s shoulder. She means to comfort him, but he is inclining away from it because it hurts, and she seems oblivious. Another carriage cuts in front of us. wa-HONK and Artaher flinches again, and she sets her hand more firmly upon him till he is nearly tipped over, and even with my mind pressed shut to his thoughts, his distress is coming off him in red waves the way an open, red-hot oven will shimmer the air in front of it. I look back out the window, but my stomach is turning, remembering the first night I was bidden to sleep in my new body, when I couldn’t figure out how to lay down upon a body that felt scalded, and even when I wept, the tears hurt my face.

“Don’t touch him!” I realize I have blurted out. “His skin is new. It hurts. Leave him be!”

Aunt Eärwen’s eyes go wide, and her hand jerks back, the fingers curling upon themselves like a questing creature suddenly startled by a predator.

I whip around to face Findaráto. “Have you prepared them with nothing? You remember what this is like! Who cares about your dumb campaign, this is your brother.” And I turn to Arafinwë. “And you should too. This is not the first son you’ve seen returned.”

“It wasn’t that bad for me,” says Findaráto in a voice infuriatingly free of defensiveness but brimming with wounded innocence.

“Of course it wasn’t,” I snip and go back to my window. wa-HONK. Another interloper is easing in front of us from a carriage park, waving listlessly at our driver’s horn. I lunge forward to the window that separates us from the driver and shout through the glass, “For fuck’s sake, stop honking!”

Arafinwë should be used to profanity; he’s my father’s half-brother after all. His lips are parted like he knows he should say something but can’t quite muster the words. He’s had a dozen uneventful, tranquil lunches with me where I barely say a word and “Caranthir the dark” is but a construct for him to perform his guilt upon. Until now, I was a character in history, and his ability to empathize with me wasn’t much different than bringing a controversial, countertextual reading of an antagonist to a meeting of a book club. It wasn’t much different than his stupid republic, enacted only because he had the authority to make it so; there was no uprising, no marshaling under torches, no risk, no rebellion. He is seeing me differently now.

“Pengolodh was right,” I quip as I return to my seat.

Now the carriage ride is quiet, and awkwardly so. My aunt and uncle, I sense, have had the realization akin to a person walking across a frozen pond and, halfway across, discovering the ice is thinner than they knew. Findaráto has a maddening expression that conveys equal parts disappointment and practiced nonjudgment. Only Artaher is looking at me.

I’ve never liked meeting people’s eyes. When I was younger, it made the torrent of emotions seem even stronger; now that I can close my mind to them, I find that looking at someone’s eyes still allows a trickle, an intimation of what I have shut out. I do not realize that Artaher is looking at me when I let my eyes pass over him, and the complexity of what I see in his eyes before I swiftly look down at my own knees is more than I can parse without opening my mind to him.

I have never seen much of my cousin. When we were young, he traveled in a pack with his brothers Angaráto and Aikanáro and my brothers Tyelkormo and Curufinwë. My brothers were not always kind to me but neither was I always kind to them, and our antagonism was the opportunistic kind typical of siblings close in age, part of a large family, and ever jockeying to be noticed. My brothers’ unkindness was but a thread in a larger weft where they’d tease me over something one of our cousins had siphoned from my thoughts in the afternoon and, by evening, would come to my room for consolation during one of our parents’ increasingly vicious fights. Angaráto and Aikanáro stood forth in my mind as the ringleaders; I felt them ever at the perimeter of my mind, like coyotes looking for a break in a fence; they had their choice of victims and consistently chose me. And Artaher—he was there. I remember him there. But in my memory, he stood at the back, his face partially obscured by hair he tended to wear unbound. He prowled against my mind too, but he never had to search for an opening; he simply took it.

I batten down my mind as Námo instructed me. I tuck away the tendrils of my thoughts and draw in my emotions, almost like an inhalation, breathing in scent and smoke, and then I close my mind upon it. It is a feeling like gritting your teeth. Thus armed, I raise my eyes to his and stare back until he is the one to look away.

Artanis and her husband apparently sailed back at the start of the Fourth Age to Tol Eressëa and didn’t waste much time before setting up the island’s largest and most renowned all-inclusive resort. I don’t know much beyond that because—typical of Doriathrim behind their magical fence, squatting in opulence with their own kind while everyone without grows their callouses—they haven’t been exactly forthcoming with invitations to those of us outside their immediate family. Not that I’d want to go anyway; I get the occasional brochure among my junk mail, and the place looks entirely too … chummy, like you can’t sit on the beach with a whiskey without at least a dozen people trying to put oil on your back or holding your hand till you frolic in the surf or lobbing a frisbee over your head. I like the water quite a bit—I swam in the Helevorn every day it was free of ice—and might like to go, but not if I’m going to be forced to lay facedown and naked with just a towel across my butt while a Telerin masseuse lines my back with hot rocks.

I have happily commenced my plan of not doing anything to “mentor” Artaher. I’m back to work at the information kiosk in the Tirion Public Building that used to be Arafinwë’s palace before he unkinged himself. It’s a new fiscal year, so it’s a particularly busy time as new documents replace the old, and instead of sitting on my rotating chair and watching for people to come in through the front door while hoping not to be startled—visibly at least—by someone walking up from behind me, I am replacing old pages in my reference ledgers with new. Some lesser inventor from the Noldor who remained behind made a device that, with a couple workings of a foot pedal, minces paper into tiny squares where it can be repurposed as confetti; thus, Arafinwë’s government is funded at least in part by the festival industry that buys confetti from us by the bag. My union has negotiated an hour of paid leave for every bag of confetti that I produce, so I’ve been quite contentedly chopping up old papers all day. At night, I go home and fix crackers and soup for supper and play my lightning-guitar or tinker with a palantír that is disk-shaped and small enough to fit in your pocket. Right now, it is distorting people’s faces in comical but wholly unacceptable ways, but it will send messages. Sometimes, Amarië and I play in one of the more squalid clubs on the shadowy side of the city, me on the guitar and her screaming her poetry over the heads of the crashing crowd. I receive a chipper “Appointment Reminder!” card each week about therapy; I put it into the confetti maker to lend the next bag a little color.

And then I get one of those dull, white, soulless envelopes in the mail. It’s been almost two weeks since I left Artaher with his parents, and I expect I’m about to be chastised for failing to forsake my evenings to make sure he’s grasping democratic principles and to help him fill out job applications and to forewarn him that when he’s summoned to a healer to check that his new body is functioning as it should, he will be poked in some very weird places.

Instead, there is a colorful flier for Artanis’s resort, folded so that it fits in the envelope, and a ticket for a passage by ship to Tol Eressëa, departing in two days.

The next day, I put the flier into the confetti machine without having opened it, where it becomes tiny festive squares decorated with smiles and frisbees and naked, pedicured feet. I have no intention of going and am working earnestly on turning the orange-tabbed section of the blue ledger into my third bag for the day when my supervisor comes over to take my place so that I can “write directions for my coverage for the next week.”

My foot quickens on the pedal, seemingly against my will. “Coverage? I don’t have any leave left.” Amarië is always after me to use my full union benefits, and I don’t argue. It’s not like I like it here—I didn’t exactly like making hoes and grill plates in my father’s forge either—but it has become surprisingly comfortable in the way that my father’s forge, with its leaping flames and caustic chemicals, was once comfortable as well. Still, I’d rather be home.

“This came from way on high,” my supervisor tells me, and when I don’t look impressed, elaborates, “Lord Námo high. You’re to be given a week off, paid and covered. And before you argue about the confetti,” he quickly adds, “you’ve been averaging two bags a day, so you’ll earn two hours leave each day as well.”

I gesture at the bag by my feet. “This is my third bag, and it’s almost full.”

“Three bags, then.”

And that’s when I realize the order is indeed from on high on high. One difference I’ve noted between Tirion of old and democratic Tirion of today is that everything seems suddenly more valuable. We used to be lavished with whatever we desired: the best of food and wines, luxuriant clothing and resplendent jewels, every whim and fancy actualized with just a word. Now, nothing is lavished; it is parted with, the same despondent language that one used to use when taking leave from a loved one. Amarië would tell me that what was once lavished in fact came from the majority of people who lived in the lower streets and whose lives haven’t changed much (or have changed for the better), and today’s frugality is a symptom of equality. Regardless, every iota matters now as it never did before. If they are willing to part with three hours of leave a day, this is serious.

I still don’t plan on going. I’ve walked home, turning over an idea for my pocket palantír in my mind and looking forward to an uninterrupted week to work on it, when I realize that the little shack I built for myself behind my mother’s house has a rental cart tied in front of it, and the horse—a sturdy palomino—is cropping the grass I never both to clip.

Nelyo is in my shack, holding up one of my shirts by either shoulder and grimacing, while my mother assembles a neat stack of trousers in a travel trunk. He doesn’t greet me when I enter but announces, “Carnistir, this is hideous.”

I grab it from his hands. It has armpit stains and a streak of oil down the front. “That’s a work shirt!”

“I should hope not,” he replies.

“Not the Public Building!” I jab my finger toward the second room in my cottage where I keep a workshop. “That! That work!”

“Thank goodness.”

“Why the hell are you here, going through my clothes?”

My mother ignores my outburst at my brother. “Little love, do you have anything suitable for the coast?” I always wish I could be irritated with her persistence in calling me “little love,” which she’s done since I was actually little. I’m thousands of years old, with two daughters, once a lord of my own lands, and in my second body—yet it unmans me every time. “Not really,” I say, deflated. “I’m not planning on going to the coast,” even as I know I’m going to the fucking coast.

Nelyo eyes me up and then says to our mother, “Findekáno is close to his size and has too many clothes. I’ll pack some extras of his.”

“I’m not wearing Findekáno’s clothes!”

Two days later, I am standing on a dock on Tol Eressëa wearing Findekáno’s T-shirt—red with a crowing rooster that says LORD OF BIRDS—being hugged by Artanis for the first time since we were kids, with my family milling behind me and Artaher at my side.

My cousin is still wearing Nenya, and I can’t help but wonder if some dregs of whatever power Tyelperinquar put into the ring is still at work because the Glittering Sands Resort and Spa has an ubiquitous shine of artificiality that belies being constantly battered by wind-driven sand and saltwater. The ring glitters on her hand as she gestures at a pair of palm trees bending to perfectly frame the sea for patrons of the juice bar and then beyond to where a pleasing arc of reef makes the emerald-blue sea calm enough, in her words, “for children to frolic and bathe while their parents nap in one of our fully serviced open-air villas.” We are being given a grand tour slick with the same marketing lingo from her brochures. Every now and then, her husband pipes up and restates something she said in less lustrous terms.

“The sea is really calm there,” he says. “Because of the reef. Which also has a lot of pretty fish.”

“I have scheduled you an outing on the reef,” says Artanis, “with our best snorkeling guide.” Her voice has always been low, almost manlike, but like all of Arafinwë’s children, seems to always brim near to laughter.

All of Arafinwë’s children except Artaher. Artaher is like the riddle where you’re told not to think of elephants, and so naturally, all you can think about is elephants. I was—am—determined not to render him the assistance to which I’ve been assigned, and so naturally, all I notice is him. His hair is completely unbound, falling arrow-straight to the middle of his back. The Arafinwions except Aikanáro always had fair, almost flyaway hair, and the breeze off the sea keeps blowing it into his mouth. He’s always tucking it behind his ears. His cream-colored tunic is old-fashioned and looks out of place over cargo shorts, but someone had the good sense to give him a shark-tooth necklace and a pair of sandals, which makes him look remarkably like the Teleri who work the docks and peddle drinks on the beach. He says almost nothing. Actually, he says nothing; he says even less than me. (Because I have said one thing. When we were getting off the boat and the smell of the day’s catch hit us, Findekáno—behind me on the gangplank—said, “Whew! Carnistir farted!” and I retorted, “You farted!” but that’s been the extent of what I’ve said today. Artaher manages to be more taciturn than even that.)

Artanis leads us down to the beach, where a row of lounge chairs illustrates to me the full absurdity of all of us being present here. If I’d brought my pocket palantír, I could have tested it to communicate with the person at the other end of the row of chairs from me. We take up half the beach, just our ridiculous family. Even Findaráto has taken a few days off from campaigning. The Noldorin Congress is in recess and the schools are on summer holiday, so the next most inaccessible relatives—Anairë and Nelyo—are here as well. Only Amarië didn’t come. When I asked, she shrugged and reminded me that, since she doesn’t believe in marriage anymore, even though she lives with Findaráto and “enthusiastically shares his bed” (her words—I’m long over her but would still rather not know about it), she’s technically not family, nor is she fully certain that the Tol Eressëan workers at my cousin’s resort aren’t being exploited to provide Noldorin landlubbers with a “fantastical escape divorced from the rigors inherent in our new democratic system.” She’s my best—my only—friend, and I wanted her there for my sake, but our friendship has no allowance for sentimentality and I didn’t know how to say this and maintain my dignity, so I growled, “Fuck that shit,” and she got excited and read a draft of a poem about the evils of escapism to me, and then I went home to a trunk full of Findekáno’s shirts and left the next day.

I grab the chair on the end and immediately slide it away from everyone else. Artaher goes to the other end, but when Eärwen realizes where I’ve settled, she offers the chair next to me: “Honey, why don’t you take this one next to your cousin?” Nelyo and Findekáno end up separated, which my brother doesn’t seem to mind but Findekáno protests, so there is another reshuffling, and once everyone’s settled, we’re one chair short, and Artanis’s husband is left standing. “Oh, I completely forgot to have one set up for you!” Artanis says, and it’s a few minutes before one of the beachboys drags one down the sand for him. “Well I was supposed to take that group out to the reef but they never showed up,” he offers by way of apology for her mistake. She’s explaining to Anairë about how they refine saltwater to do the laundry in, to sustain the limited water resources on the island.

A beaming server begins bringing cocktails. “Oh, I think you’re mistaken, we didn’t—” my mother begins, but the woman cuts her off with the plunk of a glass and, “I know everyone’s favorites. Trust me,” and a wink.

“Trust her!” Artanis agrees with a deep chortle.

The server brings me a whiskey neat. I sip it: It’s from the distillery on a frigid, damp island off the coast of Araman. I decide to trust her.

Next to me, Artaher ends up with a glass of miruvórë so golden that it might be distilled sunlight. Findekáno has already taken off his shirt and has been given something bright blue and in a big bowl, which he has halfway finished. Two more gulps and he’s done, whooping down to the sea and, once waist-deep, diving in. Findaráto hesitates for only a moment before jogging down to join him. Anairë and Eärwen go arm-in-arm, deep in conversation. Arafinwë waits for my mother and Nelyo to slather each other’s backs with sunblock before the three of them walk down together. Artanis shouts at a beachboy who’s setting up an umbrella wrong and takes off down the beach, leaving her husband to stare after her with uncertainty plain on his face as to whether he should follow her or join her family. He finally walks down to stand at the water’s edge.

I sip my whiskey. “You should get in. The water looks delectable.” I borrowed that word from Artanis on the grand tour; she’d used it to describe the complimentary breakfast.

Artaher turns to face me. He has not undressed or even removed his sandals. His golden hair fans against the dark green cushion of the chair. There is something in that motion—in the turning from one’s back to curl on one’s side—that feels uncomfortably intimate. His new skin is pale and unmarked by so much as a blemish. “You’re the swimmer. Not me.”

I have schooled myself out of humiliation, or so I thought. I used to wear my embarrassment as plainly as, apparently, I broadcast my emotions, going red in the face and my tongue—already a useless slug much of the time—feeling as though it had swelled to fill my mouth. Námo schooled me out of that too—but don’t feel soft emotions for him. He did so by humiliating me, frequently and thoroughly, to where shame became as a limb overused past the point of exhaustion, until it’s gone senseless and limp. Or I thought he had. But when Artaher mentioned swimming, I felt the familiar sensation of my stomach bottoming out, the way I remember feeling when jumping off cliffs with my father and brothers. The flush started in my chest, over my sternum, and heated my neck like a tree catching fire. He couldn’t have known I was a swimmer. I swam in Helevorn, long after he’d exited my life for his own small realm on the other side of Beleriand. No one knew that I swam in the lake except my daughters and Taryindë, because I dove off the rocks outside my house and no one dwelled in my house—no servants, no councilors—just my family. My eldest daughter would watch me sometimes from the rocky beach; she was apt to worry.

This remark about the swimming, it was like a pinprick after a sword gash, but this is how it began, back then, with the little observations that no one could have known but me. “Carnistir, I’m sorry you were released by your calligraphy tutor, that’s a shame.” Angaráto: one night when our parents were drinking wine and discussing court politics in Arafinwë’s sitting room, and we middle cousins had nabbed a bottle of cooking sherry from the kitchen and were passing it around under one of Arafinwë’s topiary abortions. And Tyelkormo, wide-eyed and guileless, “You were released from calligraphy? What did you do? Does Atar know?”

No one knew because I hadn’t told anyone.

I realize I’ve also flopped over on my side to face him. “Stop this shit now,” I hiss. “Not again.”

His eyes were two wide panes of blue in his face, his confusion and unease plain even with my mind clamped shut. “Carnistir, I—”

“No. You think I don’t remember? What you and your brothers used to do? Listen in on my thoughts and then weave them into conversation with others like I’d trusted you with my confidences? I knew no better, and you took my pathetic ignorance and made it into your joke.”

“Carnistir, I—”

“Don’t even start, you little mottled mushroom fucker.”

My brothers used to enjoy my insults; they would rile me up just to bring them on, and their laughter—bright with their love, their love for me, no matter how strange and sour and worthless I was in every other way—would bathe me cool and clean like the waters of Helevorn many years later, when our laughter came less easily.

Artaher’s reaction was different. The bridge of his nose flamed pink, and his glass-bright eyes narrowed with anger.

“Listen! Stop interrupting me!”

His own voice had been reduced to a hiss. Beyond us, our family played in the sea.

“I know perfectly well what happened! But I meant nothing by it. Taryindë told me, in Mandos.”

I used to read my messages each morning in my study overlooking the lake. The terror, the hate, the bloodshed, the malice—from Morgoth and from us. Plans from my brother for a war machine; a debate over how long it takes to starve a company of Orcs; the chemical construction of poisons. Images assailed me from Valinor: leaping from a cliff, my stomach bottoming out, with Tyelko whooping behind me. My father scolding me in the forge and Curufinwë squeezing my hand under the worktable. Losing my virginity to Taryindë in my childhood bed and later sobbing my terror to Nelyo that she might have fallen pregnant. Macalaurë making rude limericks about me and me throwing a handful of peas at him right as our mother came in, and I got in trouble and he didn’t. The twins, tiny and still damp from birth, being placed in my arms, and my father saying, “Relax, they won’t break.” In my study overlooking the lake, I crumpled the messages in my fist like, by crushing them, I could break apart the shells that spoke and looked like my brothers and free what was lost but surely still there? Every day, I left those messages on my desk for Taryindë to use to start the fire in our bedroom later that night. The door to my study opened directly onto the path that led down to the rocks. I would discard my boots under my desk, but the rest of my clothes came off as I strode to the rocks’ end. The lake plummeted away there, its bottom out of reach of all save, perhaps, the Telerin pearl divers, but we’d left them slain on their shores. Naked, I dove in. The water closed, dark and cold, upon me with the force of a blow: Tyelkormo’s fist to my temple when I shouted, “We cannot go to save him!”

You’re the swimmer. Not me.

This water, when it closes upon me, is as warm as my bath and flat as a mirror, thanks to Artanis’s fucking reef. I plunge into it, and that old motion is still there, as though I’ve never changed bodies, of pulling myself through the water. There is a slight current, but I fight it out past the reef, where the waves begin to break over me so that I choke and sputter with most breaths. I pull and pull until my arms ache, and my family is small on the shore behind me.

My arms are trembling when I pull myself up on the dock. I collapse into a wet heap for several long moments, enjoying the solidity of land beneath me, until I realize that my head still thinks I’m in the water and is reeling with the motion of the waves. It is twilight, a cornflower sky stained pink in the west, where I know Námo’s servants are enacting a discordant farewell song to Arien and listlessly capering out their delight at the coming dark. Eärendil is drawing nigh to the moon, almost full, in the east. The light of both cast a shimmering road upon the sea.

My, aren’t I poetic tonight.

Artanis informed us earlier that we had dinner reservations at the finest of the several restaurants on the resort. I can hear music—not the jolly, percussive sounds of the Tol Eressëan Teleri but violins and harps—music made for Noldorin tourists—and the clink of crystal and silver, and the hush of voices. There is a muted golden glow of candlelight spilling from windows open to the sea. After my swim, I’m ravenous, but I’d sooner eat one of the fish just recently keeping me company than join my family in there. It’s just as well. She probably forgot to include her husband in the reservation; he can have my seat.

I haul myself to my feet. It’s been a long time and a different body since I swam so far, but I remember the staggering walk of my first steps ashore. My daughter used to meet me on the rocks and catch my arm so I wouldn’t fall back in, which did happen a few times. No one is here to see me now so I weave with—

I stop. I was mistaken. Someone is here.

Artaher. He’s pulled up a chair on the dock and is drinking another glass of miruvórë. Actually, judging by the fumes about him, he never stopped. I imagine the smiling beach server bringing him glass after glass after glass. “I know everyone’s favorites! Yours is to get blind drunk! Trust me!”

I stand in front of him, shirtless and dripping, my feet set apart to keep me from staggering. “What.”

“I wanted to apologize about earlier. I know what my brothers and I did to you when we were younger—”

“And what you perpetuate with your little sycophant Pengolodh, who thinks I chose to hate you with the same lack of consideration I’d use to choose a hat.” I want to stay angry with him; I want to rouse him into an argument.

“Pengolodh was Turukáno’s sycophant.”

“And your brother’s by extension.”

“Yes, but Findaráto had nothing to do with this, and his good graces didn’t extend to me. Pengolodh wasn’t exactly kind to me either, from what I hear.”

“Well, you did have the most successfully concealed kingdom after Gondolin and choose to announce it by building a fucking bridge to your front door.”

He breathes deep. His eyes flutter closed. I recognize the gesture from therapy: He is counting to ten. I tap my toe along. When he reaches ten, he says, “The bridge was—not now. That’s not what I came here to say. I came to say—what we did to you—that was all Angaráto and Aikanáro. And your brothers. And … me. I accept my role in it.”

“Don’t bring my brothers into it. They laughed at your jokes but if they’d known what you were doing—”

“Well, I’m sorry for what was done then, more than you’d know, and it certainly wasn’t my intention to make you think I was doing it again now.”

“Why were you talking to my wife?”

“In Mandos?” He laughs. Drunk and less inhibited, he sounds a lot like Findaráto without inspiring the sense that one should be tiptoeing around him while simultaneously groveling and finding oneself wanting. “Because she cornered me one day and unleashed the full force of her wrath upon me, for how I treated you. For the damage I caused to our people and then allowed the Doom of Mandos to be blamed instead of taking responsibility. I see why she rode into battle with you. I wouldn’t want to meet her with a sword.”

Taryindë. She would do something like that, yes. Briefly, her image flits across my thoughts, in her dark violet cloak, feet wide apart, a bright sword in her hand, standing over the dark heap that was me. It’s no memory—I was unconscious after a fall from my slain horse—but how I know, somehow, it must have been. The lacuna between that moment and when I woke, groggy and sore, and knew she was gone, I allow to stand, unexamined. She was the only one who knew, fully anyway, about what happened with my cousins. Nelyo knew bits and pieces, and all of my brothers would have remembered my humiliation but would have had no idea how Arafinwë’s sons discovered I was in love with Amarië to set me up to propose to her. After my confrontation with Angaráto about Doriath, I started to tell Nelyo, but frustrated by me already, he cut me off. “Do you realize how foolish it sounds, Carnistir, to claim you’re disrupting the peace between Eldarin nations because you’re still sore over a childhood prank? You need to move on,” and I never came close to confessing it again.

“I’m sorry I’m not her.” I start at Artaher’s voice, barely audible and hesitant. “I know—I know you came to the Halls, thinking she was being released. I can’t imagine your disappointment to find me instead.” He tips back the last of his miruvórë and tosses the glass into the sea. It sparkles once, twice before it becomes just another glitter of moonlight on the waves. He reaches beneath his chair. “Here. I brought this for you.” It is a bottle of the whiskey from Araman.

“You steal booze now?”

“I’ve always stolen booze. It was my contribution to the—” He stops. He was about to bring them up again: his brothers and mine, the five of them inseparable and somehow, even though I was right in their midst, they never considered me. “My father used to think it was Aikanáro.”

I uncork the bottle and take a drink straight from it.

He rises and sways on his feet without the excuse of having swam in the sea for the past several hours. “Won’t you sit?”

“Don’t be stupid,” I tell him. “I’ll feel ridiculous with you sitting at my feet like you’re my grandson listening to me creak on and on about the Years of the Trees, and I don’t want you standing and looming over me either. It’s creepy.” We both end up sitting on the edge of the dock with our feet dangling toward the water. I couple tips of the bottle, and it matters far less that it’s Artaher I pass it to. He’s more of a stoic about it than I expected; he doesn’t even wince when he swigs it. “I didn’t think it was Taryindë,” I say. “I’m supposed to be your mentor. That’s why they sent me.”

“Mentor?”

“Don’t ask me. We’re supposed to be ‘aligned.’ That’s what my therapist says. I think it’s probably a creative continuation of Námo’s punishment—excuse me, rehabilitation—of us both because I can’t think of a single thing you and I have in common.”

The bottle comes back to me. I hold it up to the moon and watch the light quaver in its depths like a silver coin. I salute the Silmaril and drink long.

“I think we have a lot in common.”

I wipe my mouth on the back of my hand. “Bullshit.”

On an empty stomach within an exhausted body, intoxication is swift. Artaher is—confiding in me?—it seems? I hear his voice going zurb zurb zurb off to my right, but what he’s saying doesn’t make any sense. Sickness. He speaks of sickness, a word I learned from Haleth when her healers brought out people on litters from behind the stockade. The sick, she said. I could never read the thoughts of Mortals, not like I could Elves—else the treachery of Ulfang would never have happened—but I sensed a miasma, a distortion about them. I learned from her about this sickness that would take her people from time to time. They all fell to it from time to time, some worse than others. Some—many—most?—died from it.

I shove the bottle into his chest and force myself to focus. He interrupts himself to gulp from it and shoves it back at me. “—I’d be sick with it, with the future, paralyzed by what I saw. It was like being told to cross a meadow, and you know there is one trap in the meadow, but it is hidden in the grass. You will never find it. And every step you take, you worry if that is the single small action that will touch off the mechanism and set the thing into motion that will snap your leg in two. Only imagine that the trap sentences someone you love, or your whole family, or your whole people to an awful death. I couldn’t get out of bed. That the fate of others should depend on someone as stupid and pitiful as—”

I let his voice fade back into zurb zurb zurb. My bones suddenly felt as soft as warm wax. I sag against him.

Briefly, the zurb zurb stops. An arm slips up my back and around my shoulder.

When I fell from my horse at the Nirnaeth, unconsciousness was not instantaneous. Darkness closed upon the edges of my vision; I tried to wave it away like one might banish a cloud of blackflies. My horse was screaming as it died. My hand stretched up against a bone-bright sky.

Unconsciousness presses at the edges of my vision now. I drink again and dare it to come nearer. The hand rubs my back; another takes the bottle from my hand as I raise it again. A new set of memories emerges. Touching. Being touched. I haven’t been touched since returning to this body. My mother and brother have hugged me, perfunctorily, like they fear they might hurt me. They used to cradle me with abandon. For a long while, I was the smallest one. And Tyelko would press against me on cold nights.

And Taryindë: a hayrick in autumn, the festival muffled in the village behind us, a flask of nabbed spirits passing between us. “Keep close,” spoken under a pretense of keeping her warm. Her arm around my back, under my tunic; my arms both around her, kissing, the flask dropped and forgotten; we’d kissed before, we’d practiced on each other, but this was different. Her hand on the inside of my thigh and my hand on the ties to her tunic—

“—no, you are drunk—”

I wake up the next morning in a bed that isn’t my own, with a dry mouth and a pounding headache. Spears of sunlight are jabbing through the window and into my eyes. A breeze pushes in the gossamer curtains and the sounds of seagulls screaming for rights to the guts and scales from yesterday’s catch.

My heart clenches in a panic—where am I? whose bed is this?—that just as quickly subsides. I’m at Artanis’s resort. That’s why I’m not bundled into my own windowless shack back home outside of Tirion. There’s a painting of a ship, sails plump with wind, on the wall and a conch shell on the table: standard fare for these kinds of places, I know, without ever having been to another such place but here. I roll away from the stabbing sunlight and press my pillow over my ears to shut out—or at least muffle—the sounds of the gulls.

It wouldn’t be the first time I awoke in a strange bed, though it’d be a first for this body, which is as virginal as new-fallen snow. As a young man, experimenting with Taryindë had awakened my body (and hers), and then she went off to the south for her apprenticeship, and we gave each other permission to sate our urges with others. “If we return to each other, we’ll know,” I remember her saying to me. Neither of us had yet pronounced the word love to the other. But in those long years, the Calarnómë—the labyrinthine streets of Tirion that lay in the shadow of Túna—became a place of refuge for me in a progression much like last night: exhaustion, alcohol, sex, and awakening to wonder what my lover would look like when I rolled over.

I remember being told that the urge would diminish as I aged, but it never did for Taryindë and me, even once we knew our second daughter would be our last child. We used to laugh at our own insatiability and took it as a sign of the same vein of perversion that drove us into exile in the first place. But I have no interest in sex now. My lack of desire is a relief; to romp about as I’d once done feels exhausting now. I am pleased, then, that the unfamiliar and nondescript bedroom in which I have just awakened is solely due to my cousin’s dull, kitschy taste in decorating for tourists and not because the obliteration brought on by last night’s drinking led me to a questionable choice, considering my family are in the rooms around me, and a return to bodily needs and a separation from Taryindë far more durable than an apprenticeship.

I roll over, away from the light, and my nose bumps someone’s shoulder and there is blowsy golden hair, blue eyes, skin already browning—without burning, without freckling—from just a day’s exposure to the sun.

The next half-hour is illustrative, and I perform the full range of emotions for which I am renowned.

He brought me up last night because (he alleges) I could not walk on my own. Lacking the key to my room and not wishing to reveal my inebriation to my family, he put me to bed on the sofa in the closet that Artanis claims is a sitting room.

I did not stay there long before entering the bedroom and getting into bed with him.

I kissed him, on the dock and in the bed. He did not initiate, though he reciprocated.

(“I did not know you liked boys too. It was always the girls who talked about you in the Calarnómë.” He sounded like a fucking schoolboy. I told him as much.)

He had touched my thigh and chest. No more! He swore to it. (“I wanted to. But you were drunk—I didn’t. I swear to it.”) I touched him thoroughly. That’s how he put it, and I didn’t ask him to elaborate. I bit him where his shoulder met his neck. He showed me the mark.

“I think you could have made different choices,” I say when he is finished, and even though it is my voice, it might be my therapist, or Uncle Arafinwë, or Lord Námo. I laugh. I expect him to, but he doesn’t ask me why.

At last he says, “I didn’t want to.”

I suppose I am guilty of assuming my cousin was sexless. Sure, he has a daughter—Finduilas—so he must have copulated with his Sindarin wife at least once, but if you’d asked me, I would have estimated it had been only once.

Angaráto and Aikanáro performed their sexuality, at least when they were with us cousins, in their vocal lusts for certain women and boastful prattle, always trying to one-up each other and my brothers Tyelko and Curufinwë, but Artaher never made boasts or claims or seemed even to notice women beyond what was required to laugh at his brothers’ jokes. He was always modest, even a little pious, his clothing a season behind or just slightly awkwardly fitted like he didn’t care to be noticed much less admired.

I suppose at least drunken me notices him, though. During the complimentary breakfast buffet, Arafinwë makes excuses for Artaher and his “illness” (that word again! no one bothers to make or require excuses from me) that kept him from dinner with the family the night before. I have to excuse myself because the thought of correcting Arafinwë—no, Uncle, you are wrong; your son was gone because he was drinking whiskey and engaging in heavy petting with me on your daughter’s boat dock—in front of everyone makes me feel like all the blood in the upper half of my body has plunked down into my cock and balls, so I flee to the water closet.

Artanis has a schedule of activities at each of our places, printed on pale blue linen cardstock. BREAKFAST in the TIDEPOOL BUFFET is followed by SNORKELING (via the SPRING TIDE) out on her blasted reef. Artanis is long-limbed and golden in a pair of white shorts and one of the bikini-style bathing costumes debuted by the Teleri that have caused such consternation among the Noldor and the Vanyar. She leads us through an introduction to the fish we will observe on the reef, each illustrated by a brightly painted card. My mother comes to me with the sunblock. “You burned, all on your shoulders yesterday,” she whispers and makes me take my shirt off so that she can smear sunblock all over my shoulders and back. I cross my arms over my chest and refuse to look in Artaher’s direction, sneaking looks at my shoulders instead. She is right. My freckles have surfaced on my shoulders and upper arms; even the stupid sunburn couldn’t be regular, giving me hope it might smooth to coffee-and-cream worthy of any Arafinwion, but instead is splotched. I have no doubt that it will settle looking something like a piebald horse.

We are loading the boat, Artanis offering a helpful hand to each of her landlubber relatives as we step from dock to boat. The boat, called the Spring Tide, looks awful small for all of us. Her husband is driving; he is shirtless and as white as me, minus the freckles and sunburn. We all scramble for seats on the tiny boat with all the grace of crabs in the pot; I manage to finagle Findekáno between Artaher and me; he smells of the mimosa bar in the Tidepool Buffet and will be unnecessarily loud but—

“Artaher!” Case in point, he is already shouting at our cousin, who is right next to him. “Switch with me so I can switch with your father and get next to Nelyo!”

Which is how I end up on a lurching boat with my thigh pressed against Artaher’s. It is hard to decide which of us is more studiously avoiding the gaze of the other. His time in the sun yesterday didn’t leave him speckled and splotched, and he is tan as a Teler, which makes the blue in his eyes—what the fuck am I even saying? Practical Noldor all, we’ve tied back our hair to keep it out of the wind, except for him. The wind lifts it away from his face and neck and—

Artanis is struggling to find a place to store a stack of towels. “I’ll take them!” and I hold them in my lap, and she raises an eyebrow at me in genuine surprise and says, “Why, how kind of you, Carnistir!”

Artanis is explaining about personal flotation devices—only Arafinwë puts one on—and how to use the equipment. The boat hits a swell and lists, and Artaher grabs my knee to keep his balance. “Sorry!” he hisses and yanks his hand back.

—touched the inside of your thigh and then I realized you were—

I clutch my towels and press my knees together.

I swear with that brainless Sinda at the wheel the boat takes twice as long to reach the reef as I did swimming to it yesterday. In that time, Artaher’s shoulder jostles mine and, when we crest another wave, his knees fly open to keep his balance, and the whole length of his thigh—nearly bared by his bathing costume, as is mine—is warm and firm against mine. The golden hair on his legs is heavier than I expect. It would tickle against my hand if— I concentrate on clutching my towels.

Finally, we arrive at the reef and Artanis’s husband anchors the boat. “Please stay seated until—”

“Carnistir?” My mother looks at me in worry. I’m standing, holding the stack of towels carefully in front of my groin.

“I’m … going to swim back. I have no interest in fish.”

Whatever they might have to say about me isn’t for me to know. I dive into the water and relish the feeling of grabbing and pulling against the water, pummeling the sea with my feet, till the ache in my balls subsides and I wash ashore and take the towel proffered me by a beachboy and marshal my best Sindarin to ask, “Do you know where I’d go to schedule passage back to Alqualondë?”

There is a tavern in the Calarnómë—well, tavern is a bit dignified—that is literally a cave. Or, more an indentation in the rock. It is accessible only by ladder, which isn’t so bad when arriving but can make leaving difficult once you’ve tossed back a few. The appeal of the place is the trickle of cool water down the back wall, the perfect temperature to pour over sugar cubes and into absinthe.

Since becoming a revolutionary, Amarië has taken to drinking absinthe to inspire her poetry. I suspect she likes the edginess it lends her fair, blatantly Vanyarin mien. I know she comes here at least once a week for a few glasses and settles onto a stone ledge that serves as a natural bench to write. Absinthe reminds me of the licorice candy that Curufinwë used to beg for as a child and that our father kept in the house in sickening profusion, but I nurse a glass and wait.

I am dreadfully fucking confused. I’m like a jigsaw puzzle with all the pieces there but locked together in nonsensical and ill-fitting ways. An Arafinwion! And Artaher at that—himself such an easy target of my disdain because he was so soft-seeming and dull where his brothers were red-dyed heroes. I don’t know what to think: of him, of me, of us. Of the constellation of others that have suffered me over the ages, Amarië the Silmaril among them. If my confusion requires proof, just look at that metaphor about the jigsaw puzzle—hell, the one about the constellations—and imagine that coming out of my mouth under more stable circumstances.

On the third night, Amarië comes. Her hair—cropped to ear-length—is held back with a scrap of cloth that was once part of the uniforms worn by the palace chamber maids. I remember her telling me that a friend of hers was repurposing old palace uniforms into headscarves to show recognition of the many unnamed laborers who sustained our monarchial system for five ages. One of her boots is untied. She wears a man’s trousers—too large and with a hole in the knee—and what she told me once is called a tanktop and leaves her shoulders and arms bare. A couple people call to her when she enters, but she doesn’t stop to talk and settles into her place, three seats down from me, and begins to write without even noticing I’m there.

Well, I didn’t expect this. I shift and cough, hoping she’ll look up to see me, but she is intent on her writing, pausing only to thank the server who brings her absinthe. I’m keenly aware that my ability to draw her notice has an expiration time. The longer I wait, the more awkward I feel, and eventually it will be simply weird that I sat so long and so near her and didn’t call her name, so I gin up my courage and whisper, “Amarië!”

She doesn’t hear.

More of hiss: “Amarië!”

Nothing.

I am gathering my things to leave when a woman seated on the floor in front of her nudges her knee and says, “Amarië? That guy is trying to get your attention.”

And then there is the delight and surprise that I expected, conducted as always at arm’s length. Amarië is careful never to touch much less hug me. I see her casually touch the arms and wrists of people all the time, and she greets her other friends with a hug, but with me, it is only words. Parting is sometimes awkward when everyone else is hugging and she is hugging everyone else and some people are even hugging me, and we just smile extra hard at each other and sometimes she bobs her head and gives me a little wave to say goodbye.

Her joy does last long before her brow furrows and she says, “Wait, aren’t you supposed to—”

“Be in Tol Eressëa, yeah. I left early.”

I believe I have made abundantly clear by this point that I do not ascribe to Fifth Age Tirion’s conviction that every problem can be solved by talking it out. Actually, I am not a proponent of talking about difficult things at all. If I must talk, I would rather my conversations be confined to inquiries that bob in a clear question-answer-question-answer exchange like a child’s touchball game. This is why I do not like therapy. “Talk about how you felt when—” and the act of talking brings the painful problem to the fore when the long ages of my life—most of them spent in the halls of Mandos—had largely subdued my memories to where I didn’t really think of my former problems at all. “Wounds heal best when allowed to be touched by the air,” my therapist quipped once at me when I was being resistant (defiant, she said) to sharing.

“Open wounds breed maggots” was my reply.

I have never desired to wallow in what happened with my cousins. My brother Nelyo—so often conscripted as the arbiter of family squabbles—might disagree, but I would contend that my reactions to my cousins aren’t much different than the reaction of a hand, once burned, that flinches away faster from a fire than a hand unscarred. But now that Arafinwions are emerging from Mandos like fleas off a dog, the bandage is off the wound. And Artaher—I don’t know what to think of Artaher, of the mingling of my ancient shame; of Taryindë standing, feet spread wide, over me at the Nirnaeth; of Artaher’s insistence that we share much in common; of my daughter, waiting on the rocks for me to swim home; of Artaher bringing me to his bed but refusing to make love to me even when I clawed for it.

After that night, my body is awake again. It aches at night. But I’m not sure what exactly I crave.

Therapists have read too many cheap novels and seen too many amateur theatrical productions, where conflicts simmer and build and are resolved in a flight of impassioned, eloquent speech, only to wither like the rose that—having put its full power into a bloom—dies on the vine. Conflicts don’t end that way, not in reality. Yet I want to say something to Amarië. It’s like the first stitch in closing whatever ripped open so long ago between Artaher and me. Instead, I say, “It wasn’t a good fit for me,” and realizing I was probably confusing, add, “The trip.”

“I assumed that. I didn’t think it would be. Although I respect her independence and accomplishments as a woman in a patriarchal setting, Artanis has a colonial mindset.”

The words colonial mindset usually touch off long rants from Amarië, but almost as though she knows I’ve come here to say something important—which isn’t a difficult inference to make since she knows I don’t like absinthe—she backs away from her usual diatribe. She chews her lip and stares pointedly at me. I try to dig deeper. Ulmo’s water, this is hard, like making progressively deeper cuts to remove something lodged in yourself. “You are my best friend,” I say.

Don’t think that this confession was lovely or heartfelt or anything but mumbled and followed by a dash of absinthe down my throat. Nonetheless her eyebrows quirk in surprise, and she says, “That’s lovely to know, Carnistir; you are also dear to me.”

“I know I’m not your best friend. It’s fine. You’re really my only friend.”

I’m losing the courage to cut. The pleasant shine of surprise on her face fades a bit. I knock back the rest of the drink. Manwë’s wind, it tastes awful, like my brother’s spoiled candy. But the gesture is one of courage. I take a deep breath, plunk my glass down, and say what I’ve come to say.

“That thing that happened when we were younger.”

She looks confused. She pauses, and I know she is riffling through memories like pictures in an album. “You mean—”

“Yeah. That.”

“When—?”

“Yes.”

A lopsided smile, meant to be reassuring; a hand reaching out but stopping shy of touching me. An act: I know her. She’s a performance artist; with a shrug of her shoulders and a scrinch of her nose, she becomes someone else, someone softer and reassuring. “I didn’t think much of it. It was just—”

“I made you a ring. I had it in my pocket that night, that night you chose Findaráto.” I wince. That sounds wrong, like I’m placing the blame upon her. “I don’t mean it that way, like you should have chosen me or even knew I was an opt—”

Wink. Scrinch. Smile. “I know. It’s fine.”

I am becoming frustrated. I don’t want her to act out sweet nonchalance. I want to stab deep enough to finally bring this out of me. “But I had a ring,” I insist. “I don’t still have it or anything. It was also really ugly. I pounded out plow blades. I had no real skill in the forge. I threw it in the river. But they convinced me that …”

When the veneer falls away, I expect any number of reactions from her. I expect her to be gently pitying, or knowing Amarië, incensed on my behalf. I expect her to organize a letter-writing campaign to stop the release of further Arafinwions until full reparations are made. I expect her to author an alternate history of the First Age, exposing just how many disasters originated not with the Oath and the Kinslaying but with Artaher, Angaráto, and Aikanáro siphoning off my adoring thoughts of Amarië and feeding them back to me as hope. Hope that hammered out an ugly ring and a stammering, stupid proposal. I don’t expect her to be angry.

But she is. “For the love of the stars, Carnistir, what a foolish grudge to hold onto.” She’s not just annoyed; she’s not acting anymore either; she’s really angry. Her eyebrows knit together in the middle, and it makes her face look small and pinched. This is different from the anger she stages when she reads her poems or when we perform our songs together; she glows with that anger. On the stage, she is always a construction of beauty. She is not glowing now, or beautiful. “Are you going to tell me that your life with Taryindë was a consolation prize? Your daughters? An inferior choice to going into exile without me? You think that loving me and going to Endor without me made Findaráto’s life better than yours? You truly believe that Findaráto’s life was better than yours?”

Of course it was. He was—he is—Findaráto, the promise of the three kindreds of the Eldar, exalted from the moment of his birth: a scholar and an artisan and an orator and a peaceweaver and a king. He was apart from all of us; even Nelyo sometimes slipped into his shadow. And I had not even a glimmer of any of those things. My confusion that she would wonder at her own lover’s blatant superiority gives me pause, but at least I try, “I suppose. I mean—”

“Nargothrond, living in a cave, in a doomed kingdom made in imitation of what he’d lost, alone, was preferable to your lands, your lake, your wife and daughters? The way I see it? You were spared. All those years you lived free under the open sky in a prosperous realm, improving the lives of those who lived around you, doing exactly what you’d gone there to do. I don’t believe in violent action, but there is something to be said for pursuing and confronting Morgoth after what he did to your family, and whether you were successful or not, that’s what you did. And we won’t even discuss your death compared to Findaráto’s because it’s not something I can think about, much less am ready to talk about.” She opens her notebook upon her knees. “I came here to write. I mean to. Now leave me be.” And she gives me a final sidelong glare just to make sure I’m absolutely certain how she feels about me before assaulting the page with angry scratches.

I leave without saying goodbye.

I go home and don’t even change my clothes before storming into my workshop. It’s a good shirt but who cares. I pick up my pocket palantír, but the work perfecting it is delicate, the kind of work best done after a day when I’ve been harangued in my kiosk all day and need to disappear inside my own thoughts for a while. Not when confusion and lust and injury vie with each other in a shouting match in my brain. That calls for hammering things. I used to beat the hell out of farm tools after enduring the subtle unkindness of Aikanáro, Angaráto, and yes, Artaher. Artaher, whose contours I was too drunk to remember, so my imagination fills in the blanks: the way his fingers lace with mine to slide my hand away, even as he clasps me to him. I am experimenting with a washing tub that launders clothes by being rolled down a hill and returned to its place using a pulley system. It’s a dull project, not even a great idea, but the shower of noise it makes as I bang it into shape is stronger than the memory (or imagining?) of wispy blond hair and sea-blue eyes. I bang and bang until I’m certain my mother will come out and beg me to stop. She doesn’t, and the stupid contraption is finished by the time I’ve banished him from my mind.

I never thought I’d be happy to return to my pointless, irritating job, but I am. I even get in a little early, helped by the fact that I didn’t really sleep last night. My substitute left the ledgers a mess, so I get to huff about that when my supervisor comes to see me first thing and make a big production of laying out the pages around my kiosk in small piles so that whenever a customer comes up, I also get to pull myself away from that work with visible reluctance. I receive four apologies as a result. Then a coworker comes up and asks me how I enjoyed my vacation, and I take pleasure in telling her that it was terrible and those resorts are insipid and will ideally all go out of business, knowing full well that she always chooses to take her vacation days at Tol Eressëan resorts and, in fact, has visited enough that she wrote an article for the Tirion Community Bulletin comparing them (and chose Artanis’s as the best). I enjoy her crestfallen look as she turns away.

Lunchtime arrives, and I leave the ledger pages arranged around my kiosk, take my lunch sack, and walk out to the fountain where I always sit to eat. Small boxes have become the trendy way for Tirion workers to transport their bread and cheese and small vial of wine. The boxes have an image painted on and latch with sometimes-elaborate mechanisms. Among the monarchists, there is scorn for this: that democracy and unionization have produced a workforce that needs contrivances to keeps its hands occupied. On my way out, I see three of them, one illustrating a favorite scene from the Great Journey, another with the Valar as kittens, and a third spangled with the stars of my father’s house. If I had the motivation, I might make a living constructing these boxes and could quit my government job. My lunch sack is made of an old forge-work tunic that I stitched together roughly into a bag; my sewing skills are considerably inferior to my forgework but it keeps my cheese off the flagstones.

I make it halfway to the fountain before I realize that Artaher is waiting there for me. At lunchtime, food carts amass in the square to capture the coin of hungry government workers, and he has two paper cups of soup from one of the nicer carts sitting beside him on the fountain. He is rising. Damn me, I hesitate for a moment. He is splendid: tanned from the week at the seaside, his golden hair free to spill over his shoulders, his blue eyes already brightening into a smile—a shy one, but genuine—like he is truly glad to see me. As I draw closer, he holds up one of the cups. “I bought you a soup? I hope that’s okay.” Some sloshes over the side and burns his hand. “Ouch!”

“Balls, Artaher, be careful.” I extricate the soup from his hand and resist checking on the hand. “It’s nice of you. The guy makes good soup.”

He is sucking at the burned spot on his hand and looking at my lunch sack. “I didn’t realize you would have brought your lunch.”

Unthinking, I say, “Don’t worry about it. We’ll have the soup and share what I brought,” before remembering that my sandwich today consists of lettuce and hot sauce because it’s what was on-hand this morning. He brightens immediately, and I can’t easily walk it back. “I mean, if you like what I brought …”

“Oh, I’m not picky!” One half of the sandwich has a tiny bloom of blue mold beginning on the bread. I take that half for myself, hand the other half to him, and pick the mold spot off when he’s not looking. He bites into the sandwich, which requires a little gnawing because the bread’s a bit stale, and says around the first bite, “It’s good!” (It’s not. It’s terrible.) Then, “Whoa! It’s hot!”

“I’m sorry. I should have warned—”

“No, it reminds me of eating with my Telerin grandfather.” He is devouring the sandwich with so much enthusiasm that I worry that he might actually like it. “The Teleri put chilis in everything.”

I set my sandwich half aside and taste the soup. It actually is good. If Artaher is pretending to like the sandwich that it took me twenty seconds to make this morning, then I have to pretend to like the soup less than I do. I notice that he is wearing small gold hoops in his ears and has adorned his wrists with beads, both typical of the Teleri. He can’t seem to decide if he wants to eat or talk, so he’ll take a bite, say a word, then hold up a finger till he finishes chewing. Which is fine because it means I don’t have to talk much.

“We just got back this morning. I came here right away,” he manages at last. “I … want to apologize, Carnistir—not just for everything in the past but for the trip to … or how I acted on the trip. I clearly made you uncomfortable. I’m sorry. I wish you’d stayed—”

I want to tell him that it wasn’t him so much as it was the discomfort inherent in having a raging erection on his sister’s boat while in a bathing costume and in the company of our entire living family, but there’s no delicate way to put that, and bringing up my genitals doesn’t seem advisable. But he’s chomped another bite of sandwich, leaving it my turn to speak. “It’s fine,” I say, but he’s nowhere near finished—blast that stale bread! and me for not buying fresh! takes so fucking long to chew—so I add, “I forgive you,” even though I’m not sure that’s entirely true. After five ages of nursing this grievance, it doesn’t seem like three words and a cup of soup should solve it.

He doesn’t seem convinced either. “Really?”

I shrug. “Sure,” then remembering Amarië add, “It’s been five ages.”

He contemplates that. “I suppose it has. But … Carnistir? I really like you. And I know you don’t think we have anything in common, and I know I wouldn’t have been your choice to mentor—”

“To be fair, I wouldn’t have chosen anyone to mentor.”

“Well, maybe, but … well, I’m glad you’re my mentor. I know you don’t want to do it, but maybe we could spend some time together sometimes? You don’t have to mentor me. Maybe we could become—or at least act like—friends?”

Friends. The confusion of my body, of the [constructed] memory of Taryindë standing over my unconscious form, of his hand on my thigh and my hand on his— Friends. Friends.

Do you know those toys with a small crank that play a song and then eject a plush animal? The twins loved those, and I turned that crank for them until the music sighed and sagged with the worn machinery inside. Once ejected, the animal required being shoved back inside; I did that a lot too. My lust I likewise gather. I crush it in my hands. I shove it back inside the body—the container—made for me to execute this next epoch of my life.

And that’s how I became friends with Artaher.

(One Year Later. Or Thereabouts)

Arafinwë throws the absolutely most interminably boring, unbearable parties in the history of Eä. Nelyo would argue with me that Eä doesn’t have a history because history requires writing and blah blah blah, but whatever. My point is that Arafinwë’s parties are awful.

I wouldn’t have even considered coming except 1) my mother and Nelyo tag-teamed to force the issue and 2) I have two friends in the history of Eä, and they are both supposed to be here. To a loner like myself, the opportunity to finally perform the virtue of loyalty toward a friend (not a father, not a brother) is irresistible. The occasion is Findaráto’s election to the House of Scholars for the district right outside the Calcirya. Not like it was a surprise; he’s been leading in the polls for months, since his challenger decided to disappear halfway through the last Congressional session to sail on a wine cruise along the Avatharian isles. And Findaráto’s Telerin constituency like both his Telerin blood and his lack of participation in the first kinslaying. And his Noldorin constituency like both his bona fides in scholarship and craft and his participation in the exile.

Findaráto’s election was no surprise, but my appearance at his party is. The eyebrows popping up when I walk in look like a legion of inchworms humping down a branch, and it seems to me that the crowd—because, naturally, Findaráto draws a crowd—takes on a susurrating undertone—something you hear until you listen for it—as they whisper about me. Or maybe they don’t. I don’t hear it when I listen for it. Once upon a time, I would have known for certain: their thoughts would have plagued around me with the impertinence of poking fingers, prodding at me until I couldn’t take it and fled ignominiously. Not any longer. My mind is clenched closed, unable to be pried open by even the most insistent of fingers. I walk through the crowd—I’ll admit I hold my head just a little high—and people melt away from me as I pass.

My triumph is short-lived, however. Prodding emotions or not, the place is noisy, and close, and hot. There are people everywhere whom I do not know and have no interest in knowing. This one wears too much scent and smells like a beaver’s ass; this one seems oblivious to his elbow nudging into my back as he gestures. I step forward to scan the crowd; here comes the elbow again. That one over there laughs like a hungry donkey; that one there has a hat that looks like a squirrel’s nest, so awful that I cannot look away and sincerely question the judgment of the brain underneath it. This experience embodies the terrible thing about friendship, I have learned. This is why, I have convinced myself, I did not have friends when I was younger, just my brothers and lovers. Friendship confers obligation.

I find Amarië quickly, in the receiving line beside Findaráto. Like it or not—wife or not—Amarië has been thrust into the role of a political wife. She is clearly miserable, and I join the sluggish river of people waiting for a handshake, wanting to make some cutting remark that will make her smile, but when I am five people away, I still haven’t thought of anything, so I slip out of the line. It will only make her more miserable if she is forced to watch me offer insincere congratulations to my cousin.

I might have avoided this party if it was just Amarië I had to answer to—she is never one for niceties for niceties’ sake—but there is Artaher too, and he will expect me at his father’s party in honor of his brother. I look for him next. “That little fucker,” I mumble under my breath while squeezing between two clusters of people deep in conversation and apparently oblivious of my need to pass through. One of them gives me a startled look. Artaher should be easy to find, one of the few golden heads among all the silver and black, but I see my uncle, my cousin Findaráto—no Artaher.

Believe me when I tell you that I didn’t intend this to happen. Certainly not my attendance at this party but even more so the bigger accident of my friendship with Artaher. That lunch a year ago, when he expressed that he wanted to be my friend, I nodded (I didn’t accept, not with words) because I assumed it was what he was supposed to say and what I was supposed to do, and then we’d fade back to our separate existences. But he worked at it—at our friendship—and at me. No one has ever pursued me before. Taryindë and I were a force of habit that we eventually formalized into marriage—a loving, passionate marriage, yes, but no one even proposed it, and neither of us had to work for the other—and the only other people who cared about me were family and therefore obligated to do so. But Artaher? He brought me things, he asked me to go places with him, he remembered my preferences and complaints and shaped his own behavior around them. And I found myself telling him things: about my wife and daughters, my father, the exile, the war; about death; about my mind I could never shut and the fury of constant thoughts and emotions of others, of what he and his brothers had done to me.

It was all the things I imagine my therapist wished I would say to her instead of spending our hour each week answering in monosyllables while playing myself in Connect 4.

“Ulmo’s water, get me a drink and out of here.” Amarië’s voice at my elbow startles me. I grab two drinks from a passing tray—I doubt they were intended for me to take—as she pulls me by the arm outside, letting the door shut on the roar of the party.

One of the drinks is pink and frothy, and one is whiskey. I try to give her the pink, frothy one, but she says, “Fuck you. You know I don’t drink that shit,” and downs the whiskey in one shot, even licking the remnants from the ice. I sip at the pink frothy thing. It’s actually not that bad.

“I only have a minute,” she says. “I got away because I told him I had to pee.”

“Take five and tell him you were wrong and you actually had to poop.”

She laughs uproariously. “This is why I grabbed you, Carnistir, even though there’s several dozen Congressfolk in there whose ear I would love to have for a minute … or five!” She leans against the wall and presses the cold, empty glass to her forehead.

“You’re not his wife,” I say. “Do you have to stand with him?”

“I’m afraid,” she answered, “that I have to stand with him. Wife or not, there are some expectations that, if left unmet, a relationship won’t weather.”

“I’m leaving then if I don’t have you to talk to. And Artaher isn’t here, I guess.”

Amarië gives me a strange look. She has encouraged our friendship, Artaher and me. When I feel disappointed with myself for succumbing so easily to a sympathetic ear and gifts of soup, I convince myself that most of my friendship with Artaher is actually Amarië’s doing, and she’s good at getting people to do things. Look at this republic. She even got Uncle Arafinwë off his ass. But anyway, when I told her about Artaher and his wanting to be friends, she said, “Well, you are a lot alike,” and when I became annoyed with her—that is exactly what Artaher said, and it might be the stupidest idea I’ve heard—she dismissed me with simply, “Really??”

Now, she is giving me a similarly quizzical look. “He’s definitely not here, Carnistir.”

“Okay? Was I supposed to know that?”

She stares at me and starts to laugh but cuts it off so that it sounds more like a cough. “Really??”

“Stop that. I hate it, when I ask a question and you just say, ‘Really??’ and don’t actually answer.”

“Varda’s sprinkles, Carnistir, I would have assumed you’d be the first to know.”

“Why? I didn’t even want to be his friend. You’re the one who made me.”

“Fuck off. You adore him, and you know it. I had nothing to do with it. You’ve actually come to peace with something in your life. Isn’t it nice? Not just wallowing forever in your own misery? But everything considered—”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

After a long pause during which her mouth hangs open just slightly, she replies, “Artaher is ill, Carnistir. He’s having one of his attacks.”

“Attacks?”

Watching her face is like when you pull out a brick from a child’s block tower and watch it lean, then crumple. For a moment, I think it will hold, and then slack-faced dismay makes her almost ugly. “Go up to his room,” she says finally, plucking the remnants of the pink frothy drink from my hand. “Just go.”

I’ve never actually been up to Artaher’s room or even in the upstairs of Arafinwë’s house at all. The stairs are covered in a dingy, pale purple carpet that muffles my footsteps. The walls to either side are crowded with portraits of Arafinwë’s children and a progression of their childhood artwork: a museum to the life they left behind. Artanis is first, young and lovely, unknowing of her future as one of the Wise, the bearer of Nenya, and an Eressëan resort magnate. Aikanáro and Angaráto smile out as young men from a canvas with the audacious faces of bullies and heroes. I glower at them. Next is Artaher, done in watercolors, soft-haired and dreamy-eyed even then. I try to harden myself against him too, but something inside me has become pliable and goes soft under the weight of—what exactly?

“I do love you, you stupid son of an ass,” I mumble and then stomp up the rest of the stairs and past Findaráto’s portrait without even glancing at it.

There is only one door closed, and I assume it is his, so I take the liberty to open it and periscope my head inside just in case I’m wrong. I’m not. He is lying on his side with his back to the door, but he turns when he hears the door open. Eyes squinched and bleary with sleep, it takes him a moment to register my face, giving me time to look at his. He looks awful, his face gray like congealed porridge, his cheeks pinched by weariness—nothing like the lovely young man whose portrait hangs in the stairway.

When he sees me, though, he transforms. He brightens and sits up. He is clearly wearing only a nightshirt and, realizing the amount of thigh he has bared, quickly yanks the blanket back around his waist. “I didn’t come up here to see your bare ass,” I snark at him, and he laughs, and I hear myself laughing too.

“Carnistir, I didn’t expect—” The words are subsumed by his smile.

I’m not sure where to sit. The chair by the bed reminds me of visiting an invalid—of my brother after Thangorodrim, of dying soldiers, of Haleth in her last days—but the bed— I can’t sit on the bed.

I sit on the floor.

“You,” I said, “left me down there.” I jab my finger into the putrid purple carpet that must cover all the upstairs floors. I realize that I am performing myself—my irritation, my temper—to make him laugh and cover the fact that I have no idea what to say. This has never been expected of me: polite concessions to the needs of others. I am reeling with confusion, and irritation is a much more pleasant and predictable feeling. “Do you know how loud and how many people are down there?”

“I do, actually. I can hear quite a bit from up here. I … wanted to come down, Carnistir. But—”

With that, a chasm yawns between us. I realize that, after a year of seeing him nearly every day, I know very little about him. There were Mortals, the Haladin, who dwelled for a time in my lands, and I am familiar with the concept of sickness from them, but he is no Mortal. I keep my mind pressed shut now, but in my prior life, I had felt his Elven feä against mine many times—and listen to me! He was born before the Mortals even arose, for the love of Varda, and our kind is not subject to sickness. Yet as his initial joy at seeing me subsides, he is withering like a blossom at summer’s end, his color fading and his strength waning till he must lie down again, though facing me this time and the performance of a smile on his lips.

I don’t know how to ask until I hear myself say, “What is this with you.”

“You should know better than anyone.”

I feel anger kindle in my chest. It is not a mimicry this time. “Everyone keeps saying that. You keep saying that, that we are alike, and we could not be more different.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever known anyone more like me than you are.”

Losing control is one thing. Being watched while losing control is unbearable. The heat in my face floods in so fast that I feel it as pressure; my body quivers. There goes Carnistir, flouncing again! I don’t remember which of his brothers it was—it wasn’t him—but I left as swiftly and noisily as I could so as not to hear them laughing behind me. I push against the floor to stand. His hand shoots out; stretching, he can brush me with his fingertips. “No! Carnistir …”

I stay.

“What happens with you,” he goes on, “when you know what others feel? And cannot shut it down? Something a lot like that happens to me too.”

“I do control it, though. Now, anyway. Námo taught me; he would not have released me if my mind was not all but nailed shut to the likes of you. You did enough damage the first time, and I suspect he is not eager to see me again.”

“I thought he taught me too,” Artaher says. His voice is thin and reedy, and I realize he is trying not to weep.

“So what do you see? People as colors? Textures? Do you pour out your secrets to anyone tuned in to listen?”

“It is not quite the same with me. I—” He pauses to consider his next words. “I … move through time? I see into the past, and into the future. And like you, it’s not anything I’ve ever been able to control, so Námo taught me to shut it out altogether. But I— Well, it reopened. I saw things.”

“Things,” I say. “What things?”

He shakes his head against the pillow, even as he begins to speak. He never tells me what he saw. But the party below quiets and then dies, and he tells me many things I might have learned in the past year if I’d ever thought to ask.

Our grandfather once told Artaher’s father that two of his grandchildren had received exceptional gifts of the mind—not wisdom or scholarship or diplomacy or anything useful. One of those grandchildren was me. The other was Artaher.

Artaher whipsaws through time the way that a skilled dancer achieves movement in the aerial dimension mostly inaccessible to the rest of us. Others in our family received the occasional glimpse of the future—even I had, on a few unsettling occasions—but it was not as vivid or sustained as it was for Artaher. Even our grandfather—himself gifted in the same ways as me and Artaher—did not enjoy such clarity of vision.

I say “enjoy” ironically. With tears brimming in his eyes, Artaher described nothing enjoyable about his supposed gift. Seeing the future paralyzed him. “It’s like standing at a height. You imagine that if you hold still, you won’t fall.” Except that the stillness itself brought about what he’d seen. “And then I thought, if I’d acted differently, the future would be different.”

I realize something. “You told me about this. That night, on the dock …” and he smiles at me wanly, sadly: “Carnistir, I told you about this many times.”

He went mad with it. Those weren’t the words he used, but I’m a Fëanárion: I know madness when I hear of it. It gnawed at him, his knowledge of the future that others crowned as wisdom. He could think of nothing else. Everything, literally, came back to it, a constant, dizzying inward circling. It was like how children will press their foreheads to a pole and turn, turn, turn, then try to walk. He staggered through life. At times, the dizziness would subside, and he was functional, normal then. His years at Tol Sirion were unremarkable, almost distinguished. He was a generous, wise lord to his people and liegeman to his brother. He ruled with kindness and care and a genuine love for his people. But when the attacks set upon him, he was useless, confined to his bed for days, terrified that so much as a wayward breath would set off a cascade of events with unthinkable consequences.

He married a lady of Doriath, the sister to Artanis’s husband Celeborn. It began as a political match, orchestrated by the Arafinwion bookends of Findaráto and Artanis, but they experienced an ardor for each other that matched nothing either had ever experienced. Artaher had had lovers before (I’ll admit, this surprised me) but had never wished to marry until he met her, and then it seemed there’d never been another choice. For many years, they lived in happiness, dividing their time between Menegroth and Nargothrond. When their daughter, Finduilas, was a small child, he had his first vision concerning them, his family. If he sent his wife away, she would be spared. In dream after dream, he came to understand: There was no future where Finduilas was spared.

He tried to make the arrangement innocuous, but his wife was hurt. They hadn’t spent a day apart since their marriage. Yet what could he tell her? That Finduilas would be speared to a tree and made to watch as her mother was tortured to death?

He sent her away. He was cold, unkind, for perhaps the first time in his life.

He saw Angaráto and Aikanáro slain as the flame-engulfed lands behind them closed in. He watched the deaths of Findaráto’s ten companions, one by one, followed by his brother’s fight with the wolf and slow, seeping death from his wounds while Beren paced around him and tried to muster the courage to administer a coup de grâce to the most storied of the Eldar.

He saw Túrin ride to his gates. He saw himself stand firm against building the bridge that the historians had decided showed him weak. He saw Nargothrond linger beyond its fall, only to be incinerated by Morgoth’s dragons and Valaraukar, Finduilas huddled, trembling with terror, in his arms as the flames advanced until they were caught and burned alive.

He allowed the bridge. The end came sooner, and quicker, for both of them.

“There were people who lived if I waited for the second attack. I let them die so that I didn’t have to burn with my daughter.”

Darkness has long fallen and the streetlamps gone out. He is but a speaking silhouette in the bed. I hear his parents come up the stairs; they are talking in soft, pleased tones about the success of the party and their pride toward Findaráto. No one was—is—ever proud of Artaher. I know how it feels. No one is ever proud of me either.

They pause outside his door. I imagine their ears pressed to the wood. We say nothing and hold our breaths in the dark until, with a creaking of the floorboards, they move on.

I reach out my hand. It’s dark; I have no destination in mind. Maybe his hand—but it comes down on his face instead, on his nose to be exact. I correct to his cheek, his ear, his hair. “What did you see tonight?” I ask, but he shakes his head.

“It is my fault,” he says. “I let it in. I wanted to know …”

“Wanted to know what?”

“There is something I have wished to do for a while now. A brave thing—at least, it feels brave to me. I … wanted to know what the outcome would be because as much as I wanted the one thing? The alternative was unthinkable. So I wasn’t brave after all. I opened the part of my mind that Námo helped me to seal, and I let it in …”

His hand rises to clasp mine.

“What was the brave thing?”

I don’t know why I am whispering. Maybe, I tell myself, because Arafinwë and Eärwen are now right down the hall, and I don’t want them to know I’m still here? To come knocking and find me?

“I was,” he says, and he is whispering too, “going to ask you to come to bed with me.”

I do not answer. I do not need to. He has looked; he has seen my answer.

I used to be known in the Calarnómë as an excellent lover. I suppose it is one thing that I approached with true Noldorin diligence: I could not shut my mind to the emotions of others, and it was a rare glimpse of joy to bring connection and pleasure to another person amid the usual onslaught of disappointment and weariness that is the background noise of life. I studied the arts of love—it’s not hard to find texts in the library if one is willing to brave the dust and dark—and attended to the reactions of my lovers, and my reputation grew accordingly. Now, however, I no longer perceive the emotions of others; I am trusting experience borne of long practice.

Artaher’s hand trembles a little as he lights the lamp. I am generally unlovely. My hair is not soft and easily tamed into braids; my eyebrows tend to meet in the middle; I am freckled and flushed, and my skin darkens with exposure to sunlight but never consistently. My visits to the Calarnómë, however, convinced me that I am best viewed in the light of a bedside lamp. I unbutton my shirt and let it slide from me. It is cheap cotton but I behave like it’s silk. My body, I see, is white where my arms are brown, but even though I sit behind a kiosk all day now, my shape isn’t bad, and I haven’t gone soft in the ways of some of the Noldor, once smiths and stone cutters and now sedentary.

I expect to take the lead. I generally undress slowly and let my lover watch, then undress him and kiss what I uncover, but Artaher surprises me: He sets down the flint and grabs me around the waist. He kisses my belly, lower and lower, until I cannot get my breeches untied fast enough.

That is how I end up beneath him with a pillow pressed to my face to keep from moaning loud enough to be overheard by his parents dressing for bed just down the hall. With my mind closed, I experience nothing of what he sees and feels. I am left adrift in nothing but my own pleasure.

Since the drunken night on the pier—the last time we almost did this—I have ruthlessly shoved this part of myself back into hiding. I have gone to the Calarnómë with Amarië—I go at least once a week—but I pass the houses of pleasure or the taverns where I know others go to seek lovers. I play my music, have a drink, and walk home in the dark, my lightning-guitar heavy in my hands, letting the damp and the long, trudging walk suppress any longing I might have felt.

But Artaher—I realize that, just as I received an iota of his gift, he must have received an iota of mine. He is responding to what he perceives of me, taking me to the brink and then drawing back until it is so unbearable that I am almost angry with it, and I flip him onto his back and crush him beneath me—so slender and golden and lovely. He kisses me long to slow me down until I realize what he is doing and growl, “Fuck you, Artaher,” and he responds with simply: “Please?”

I wonder what it would be to open my mind to his while his is open to mine. Taryindë had no gifts in mindspeak; I perceived her—and made love to her accordingly—but what she knew of me was only what I manufactured to be seen and heard. The raw stuff churning behind it, she had no idea unless I chose to reveal it. And I didn’t always. It brought a strange sort of satisfaction to orgasm without her even knowing. But Artaher—

I keep my mind shut. I am inside him; he is losing control as I had done just moments before, and I needn’t touch his mind to use his cries, the way he clutches at me, the way his head lolls back, to guide him to completion.

At some point, he eases from beneath me and leaves me face down, sprawled diagonally across the bed. I doze beside him with him pressed to the length of my body. I think my heartbeat might never come down. He rises from the bed once to set the lock on the bedroom door. He pulls a sheet across me; kisses my neck and shoulder.

I open my mind, just a crack.

He sleeps, snoring lightly. We have shifted to sharing the space more evenly, my arm around his waist and his back to my belly. Under his eyelids, his eyes rove ceaselessly across some strange dreamscape. The urge to know it becomes nearly as unbearable as our need to couple had been.

He has always been pale: a blue like indigo dye dripped once, twice, three times into a vase of water. I used to dismiss him as weak, watery: a person of little substance. I see now that, through such delicate coloring, much passed of the past and future that was unpinned to the present moment. Memories and prophecies shimmer in his mind like fish that could not survive in rock, nor air, but dart and glint in the water of his thoughts. There is one, larger than the others, an answer to a question asked.

It eludes my grasp. I try to close upon it and come up empty, immersed in the watery blue of his feä, time and again. The sense of him is somnolent, and I feel myself drifting to sleep, his coloring just a haze now upon my thoughts and what moves within him—

And then, with one last grasping clutch at the water, I have it.

The question is me. I see myself in his thoughts—my ugly eyebrows, my freckles and moles, my splotchy complexion, my untamable hair—only these imperfections are endearing to him. They inspire kisses and contemplations. I nearly pull away in mortification. His memories of me are generally—to my mind—unpleasant. I am snarking in most of them and, more than I would have reckoned myself, drunk and blathering on about myself while ignoring him. I might as well have been talking to a stone, but—mortified as I find myself again—he doesn’t see it that way. He drinks in every detail of me that way a child might pass a finger around the traces left of a favorite dish. And he is grateful. My face burns, and I’m sure he would have been enamored by the degree of my splotchiness. He is grateful that, after all that happened, I return day after day to be his friend.

But he has wanted more than that. I’d known, in our youth, that he and his brothers and mine had known about my trips to the Calarnómë. They’d had a certain fascination with me that they dared not express. Mockery was easier on the heart than envy. But he’d dwelled on those rumors in a way that none of the others had, for he saw more of me than they did. He let his imagination follow me along those dark streets, through those narrow doorways, and between those cool sheets. He imagined himself as the one I touched and permitted to touch me in turn.

He’d wanted me. Then and now, his desire for me surviving the brutal scouring of Námo to flourish again in his new form, as though that desire was threaded through his feä and not merely an imaginative byproduct. And finding himself still desirous of me, he stretched into the future to discover what would happen if he asked: Would I be horrified? Demeaned? Disgusted? Would his proposition end the friendship that he cherished for how it glanced his desires? How it let him listen to and look upon me nearly every day? Suddenly, immersed in his thoughts, the question he’d asked is a roar. Time begins to tumble toward the future. Even viewed within his mind, the sensation is sickening, like seasickness to one accustomed to the moveless earth. Will he want me?  I see flickers of us together—as friends, as lovers—I see, I hear

will he

will he want

want

want me

me

me?

And then sometime distant but clear, as though seen through a telescope, there is a moment when he watches me waiting in Ostonúmë, on the metro platform. I am eager and stupid, turning to grin at him—I’ve tweezed my eyebrows (somewhat unevenly) and have on a purple shirt that I suppose I will think looks nice—and my clammed-tight mind is oblivious to his heart crumbling inside him even as he smiles at me and touches my back and lets me—bids me to—go—

Taryindë rushes from the metro and into my arms.

I arise with a gasp.

That moment: it rushes toward us. When I leave with her in my arms and forget to look if he follows. But now? Now it is my arm around him, it is millions of moments left to click past before that moment comes and he no longer feels me warm at his back. The first night he goes to sleep alone, like the first night after he banished his wife and lay awake in the room beside his daughter’s chambers, feeling their deaths rushing upon them. The platform, the train, my smile, our parting: It comes like comet. I am vertiginous with the onslaught of time, never before perceived, considered. He chose this, me. He chose his eventual broken heart.

There is a moment left like a playing card fallen during the shuffle: another pier but in Avathar this time. I am sitting, bagged over and weary from my swim, and his arm circles me and keeps me from falling. He kisses a mole on my shoulder, so soft that I don’t feel it.

We are seesawing through time: the past and the future and his imaginings of me like the ball tethered to a child’s paddle toy and vacillating wildly. I yank free of his mind before I am sick with it. He sleeps on. I should join him; I can’t. I remember suddenly a dumb game we played as children, where we’d take one of my father’s sandglasses and tipped it and tried to hold our breath till the sand ran out. The swimmer, I was good at it. Even to the most sensitive ears, the plink of each grain was inaudible, but then you had a puddle, a pile, and then the last diminishing trickle and it was filled without being able to point to the moment when it happened.

It is happening now: the seconds plinking inaudibly.

I clutch him and wish I’d never seen. Wish I’d persisted in thinking we were opposites instead of so pitiably alike. The future comes at me, one grain at a time. Taryindë! She will return to me! But my joy is muted now, the way a mist will dull and dim a landscape and yet remain lovely.

The sandglass runs.