All That Was Not Lost to the Fire by Isilme_among_the_stars  

Ammë played a game with me when I was small.

“Goodbye Maitimo!” she would cheerfully say and bring her hands in front her face.

My mouth was a little, round ‘o’ as I waited, eyes as big as saucers fixed on her freckled fingers. Her smile grew behind them as she hid, and when she burst forth suddenly, I fell back in rapturous laughter.

“Again,” I cried, breathless, “Again!”

She always obliged.

I thought to try it when Makalaurë was born. I waited patiently until he could sit all on his own. But when I hid my face… he screamed.

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My father has a tiny box, more precious to him than anything in the world. Not the sort you would expect, being neither ostentatious nor particularly skillful. It is crafted from wood of trees that knew only starlight, and inlaid with linen woven from flax nourished by the Sea of Helcar. Like father, it is a rarity. They are the only things in the world borne of both his mother and father’s hands. He suffers none to touch it, not even mother. When he caught me stroking the fabric with small fingers, I thought he would rage. Instead, he cried.

Found in the bottom of a chest in Formenos, tucked inside a letter addressed to him from his mother, is a small piece of parchment with lettering in Maitimo’s child-like lettering. Scrawled on the reverse side, faint graphite markings read:

“Do not forget, your father once allowed you to see his unguarded tears. Grief and fear sharpened to anger are terrible things. Do not make the same mistake yourself. Perhaps he may be softened once more, but not by my hand. Take care Maitimo.”

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My sons were born in vivid hues, each a different colour to their soul.

Tyelkormo as golden as sun drenched wheat fields.

Carnistir, the deepest forest green.

Atarinkë is the light that catches in the corners of steel, by turns iridescent and flickering white.

Colour, Ambarussa share, but not shade. Both are umber, one raw and earthy, the other burnt and ruddy like Mahogany heartwood.

My eldest are blue. Makalaurë is deepest velvety indigo shot through with gold. Rich as laughter, inky as night.

But Maitimo? He is soft and warm as the morning sky. The most beautiful cornflower blue.

She came to me in the night. In her hand she bore promises in three twists of thread.

One golden. One deep green. One silver-grey.

Eyes full of regret, she said, “I could not hold them when they were small. I promise you I will hold them now.”

Without a word I accepted them. I should have thanked her, one mother to another, who loved and nourished the children I could no longer reach with my care.

“Until they are once more in your arms,” she explained, leaving the lightest touch of a caress on my skin in maternal solidarity.

I trembled when she brought the sixth to me. I told her, “This cannot be!”

Her eyes this time were wells of pain, and I knew in my heart she felt the same. The sorrow that came when I held that last hue! What had become of my cornflower blue?

The thread in my hand white-bleached, not like snow. Like bone.

Hand over my hand, her hope sustaining mine, she opened the yarn to reveal the inside.

“Look,” she said.

And there, nestled in the little twist’s heart, the slightest streak remained of my morning sky.

Oh, my cornflower blue.  

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These lights were born, like us, long years ago across the sea. Like us, they have not survived exile unchanged.

I have not counted the years I spent in the dark, whipped into unwilling servitude for want of ores to feed Morgoth’s endlessly ravenous war machine. But I have measured my hope against the lamp’s glow and begged it to never fade.

Liberty is a strange cloak to put on after so long spent stitching the pattern of independence secretly into the lining of thralldom, unseen yet unforgotten. Slave’s habits remain woven into the fabric of the freedom I wear.

Light spills from my scarred hands. A blue, crystalline mist that illuminates every pit and spot of rust in the tarnished chain. Still, it shines. This gift from the craftsman turned cruel, the fearless turned fey, a beacon that saved my sanity from the darkness he led me into.

A dozen such lamps remain among the once-thralls. On the night his eldest reclaim the tree-light jewels, rumour of the ruin forged of those once valiant men diffuses in horrified whispers. Dark truths are told by the light spilling from symbols of their nobility, refusing to be dimmed.

Still, they shine.

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“So much is crafted from death,” Celegorm says, tossing a strip of bone in my direction, “waste not.”

This, he learned from Oromë: carving utility from macabre vestiges like me.

The shaping stone pressed into my palm to quell a skeptical glare leaves no room for refusal.

“What do you want?” I concede.

“A trade,” he proposes, “a needle for a one-handed tool.”

I start scraping. My still-weak hand shakes less when it is done.

Celegorm threads it and fashions a leather case for the tiny flute carved with the sun before handing it over.

“Bring it when we hunt.”

Chapter End Notes

For those curious, this is the kind of flute that I was imagining Celegorm to have made, the likes of which may have been used for the purposes of hunting birds in ancient times:
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/article276324076.html

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You drag me up the mountainside and all I can think is: I don’t fucking want to be here, Fingon!

“You should have left me behind,” I say.

“In Mithrim?”

I don’t respond because the answer isn’t that.

“Come on,” you say, so damned patiently, and cajole me onward.

You’re blathering about the colour of ice and I doubt you’ve realised you’re not talking about ice at all, but wonder.

I don’t know what you see in me, honestly. Yet I know, in this moment, I am as beloved and delightful to you as the lights dancing before our eyes. 

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I dreamed of you, standing hale and whole. Your eyes turned to the north and in them shone a fierce light. It was a promise, that dream.

Sometimes, at night, I hear you muttering the mountain’s death wish anew in the shadows, though seldom now dare voice it to my face. Yet, even in bleak moments you reach for life. I have seen you profess (most fervently mind you) a desire to fade, and in the next moment savagely tear through bread with your teeth. ‘Mandos take me’ you say with one breath, and the next take up your pen to struggle through a pageful of shaky tengwar, clucking in frustration that they come not smoothly as they used (yet you do not give up!).

Can’t you see? You never stop reaching.

Will it or not, life buried talons deep in your soul. And cousin, you were made to soar.

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