Set in Stone by silmalope  

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Set in Stone

1.

Nerdanel has been working for three ages. She supposes she will go on working until the world ends.

In the beginning, when her atelier remained obstinately productive in the face of the Darkness, her people called it “fortitude.” But as the string of unbroken nights spun on, through vigils and lamentation, hostility and detente and glacial reconciliation, and she went on hauling stone and shaping clay by lamplight, they began to wonder if “eccentricity” was closer to the mark.

She was not exactly bereaved, but the general feeling was that she ought to be mourning. Her nebulous position as something like, but not quite, a queen dowager — of which the Noldor now had a bumper crop — engendered certain expectations. Of leadership. Of guidance. Of giving comfort to her shattered people. At the very least, of gracefully retiring from public view, whereupon it might be imagined that she was suffering nobly. 

But to carry on as though nothing had changed? That was difficult to digest.

Nerdanel did not care. She was too busy to care, which was rather the point.

In the face of such brazen persistence, little could be said. She was, after all, a mother-not-quite-bereft and a wife-not-quite-widowed, to whom a greater measure of pity and understanding was owed. And so in time, with reluctance, her people left her to her labors and moved on. 

The youngest prince Arafinwë took up his father’s crown and soothed over hostilities alongside Olwë’s daughter, and even the most restive of the Noldor who remained in the Blessed Realm were eventually conquered by their new king’s unfaltering mild calm. The Sun and Moon took their place in the sky, and decades stretched into centuries, and Nerdanel worked. 

2. 

In the early years she took commissions, held seminars, taught scores of apprentices. Her workshop had always been successful, but fueled by her fervor, it soon became a cradle of learning and discussion. She sculpted, educated, experimented wildly with new techniques. 

Such a pace, naturally, could not be maintained. Over time the ranks of her students thinned, as fewer and fewer children were born in Valinor. Her staff correspondingly dwindled to just a handful of assistants, and she began focusing her energies on larger sculptures, masterworks that required fine application of skill over years, even decades. 

At length, she looked up and realized she had become, like her father, something of a recluse. And like her father, she found she preferred it. 

3. 

The world moved in strange patterns, and Nerdanel observed them as if from a vast distance. 

The Silmaril that once sat on her dressing-table made its way back across the sea on the wings of a white bird, and the Valar placed it as a star in the sky. Her king and her people arrayed themselves in armor and plumed helmets and marched to war against the Enemy. This time, however, they returned victorious — and in greater numbers than they departed. There were among them some faces Nerdanel knew of old. 

But not many. 

When Arafinwë came to talk to her afterward, she advised him, not unkindly, not to bother. She knew already. She had known for some time.

“You are yet my sister-wed, though we have been long estranged,” he said, looking at her with the mournful eyes that had quelled a thousand Feänorean grievances. “Will you not rejoin us?”

“That bond was broken long ago,” she answered. “I am a craftswoman of Tirion of no high birth, save what standing I may claim through the skill of my father; and though I am your subject, my king, no debt is owed between us.”

He said no more, but pressed her hand briefly in his. She smiled at the son of Indis, who, when she first knew him, stood but to her hip and dared not to speak a word. While she had settled into her foundations, he had grown — and might do more growing yet. 

4. 

Hot summers were a novel addition to Valinor after the Darkening: one of many changes in temperature, weather and season churned up in the wake of the Sun. 

Nerdanel didn’t mind the heat. But like many older buildings, her atelier was designed for more temperate climes. The terrace faced west, providing a peerless view of the empty space where the Trees used to be. If only she had asked her architect to settle for a slightly less peerless view, and perhaps incorporate some east-facing archways, where a breeze from the coast might give her reprieve. 

Not that her architect would have listened. Ever had he consulted his own tastes in such matters.

More than once Nerdanel’s assistants had approached her with notions of remodeling, and of course, she had considered it. After so long, it was more than reasonable. Most buildings had long since adapted to the new circumstances. 

But there was never a good time for it. Either there were too many students and the disruption could not be borne; or there were too few, and it was not worth the bother. Or there were none, and she wanted to focus on her work without masons raising havoc in the back of her shop. 

And so the studio Fëanáro had built for her remained, like its mistress, stubbornly unchanging. 

5.

As an artist and a mother she had been a connoisseuse of imperfection, preserving every split lip and missing tooth of their childhood as if snaring flies in immortal amber. She never tired of committing her sons to marble; she was limited only by the challenge of persuading them to sit still long enough for a sketch. Turko, of course, was a lost cause from the beginning. And even Makalaurë, a great admirer of his own appearance, could not bring himself to understand her desire to set his flaws in stone.

It was only after the Darkening that her hands began to betray her. 

Again and again she bent to her labors, working feverishly to capture their faces before the slow decay of memory took them from her. She did not think she could bear to lose them twice. But fear made a poor muse. Under a troubled eye her work came out twisted — this one too handsome, smile insufficiently crooked; that one too young, face rounded with baby fat. 

Then came the day when she no longer dared to make the attempt. When she reached for her tools her heart misgave her, and she saw it as if in premonition: that each flawed trial would erode the next, until at last she lifted her chisel to see a stranger looking back. 

6.

The workshop is dark when Nerdanel arrives, which means that her assistants have not yet been in. She does not bother to light the lamps, leaving the hall cast in partial shadow; instead, she sits down to her work, relying on touch and memory as much as sight.

For today’s work — a self-portrait — she needs no model.

She works in clay, which is her material for impermanent things: modeling and mock-ups. She does not know if she will bother to glaze and fire it when she is finished. The air in the studio is warm and languid as she slicks her hands. It smells like springtime, earthy minerals and water and heat, and she feels the years that weigh on her gradually lighten. 

Lovingly she shapes the break in her nose, where she once fell from horseback — handling animals had never been her forté. Her eyebrows she faithfully sketches in their sparseness, likewise the chapped lips and sloped shoulders. With equal diligence she attends to the eyes, which must be keen; the dimple which rounds her cheek, the long lashes she gave to her sons.

There is a quiet knock at her door.

Broken from reverie, Nerdanel blinks once, twice. There is no reason for her assistants to knock, and she has no apprentices at the moment. Customers rarely trouble her. Not that she has forbidden it; it is only that they go out of their way to talk to her staff instead.

She rises and rinses her hands, then goes to the door.

The one who stands on her threshold is dark-haired and tall. He smells of the sea. But his face is not familiar to her — and after six millennia as a sculptor in Valinor, there are no faces she does not know. 

His jaw is gaunt, skin weather-beaten, eyes weary. There is no self-mocking smile, no familiar curve to the cheek, no sharp raised eyebrow or lazy tilt of the head by which she would know her son, always, even after thousands of years.

She cannot see clearly, half-blinded by the sunlight that shines in through the doorway, blinking away the heat that rises to her eyes. But she is an artist, and touch is her medium; she lifts her hands to cup that battered face. He feels frayed beneath her fingers, less-than-solid, but here.

"My Káno,” she says. “You came home.”

“Yes,” he says. 

His voice is not golden or strong; it is barely a rasp on the edge of hearing. But she knows it by heart. Of course she does — an artisan can never forget what she has made, for a part of her soul goes into the making. 

Chapter End Notes

I wrote this because I woke up in a cold sweat at 2 a.m. thinking about Nerdanel, and posted it because I need to get over my instinctive terror of sharing my writing online T.T. Please be kind; this is my first Silm fic.

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