Blessed are the Leave-takers by Isilme_among_the_stars  

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Blessed are the Leave-takers

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When Curufinwë Fëanáro, eldest son of the slain King, called on all to come to the high court of the late Finwë upon the summit of Túna, come the Noldor did. That the crown prince remained under the doom of banishment only piqued their curiosity further; the Noldor, ever nosy, were titillated to hear what the defiant rebel had to say. Therefore, a great multitude gathered swiftly upon the hill. Soon every stair and street that climbed toward that summit bustled; a sea of dark heads, hair and eyes shining in the ruddy torchlight, rippled and undulated like a newly matured beast breathing deep of the heady dark. Far down a crowded street, in what would perhaps have been the creature’s bowels should the monstrous thing have been a singular entity, stood an elven woman more ancient than the sores Melkor acquired about his backside when Tulkas dragged him back to Valinor bound hand and foot. 

“Speak up,” she cried, glaring furiously at the starless dark which disfigured the fair form of the prince above.

“Quiet, mother,” chided a rather meek looking elf beside her. He was not the finest example of a strapping Noldo lad, not by a long shot. 

“I can’t hear a thing!” the woman continued. She appeared rather put out and was clearly rapidly growing bored. “Let us go to the Vanya poetry recitation.”

“We can hear the Vanyar crying praises to Manwë and Varda anytime,” huffed her son. This was true, more or less; the Vanyar, had ceased their endless litany of religious utterings only twice in living memory. The first had been as they decamped from Tirion, when the pretty prince Ingwion, who had been leading the canticle, had turned his slender ankle on a stone and cursed it, causing a chorus of obscene language to ripple through their ranks. How his mother had laughed! The second had been only a short time ago, though it was difficult to reckon how long, without the trees. Even the pious golden-heads, most beloved of Manwë and Varda, filled with reverence and song, had shocked at the sudden darkening; every single song had stuttered to an awkward end at the moment Taniquetil blackened. They had taken the chorus back up shortly after, of course, in a vapid show of faith. Meanwhile, their dark-haired cousins, rather more productively, began to reason and plot their way toward a more tolerable situation under this new shadow. The crown prince was the greatest plotter among them, and his people were eager to hear how he planned to address their current misfortune. Well, most of them were.

“Oh, come on, Arambo,” the ancient woman groused.

“Will you be quiet!” a sturdier elf in the practical garb of a journeyman interrupted, looking over his shoulder in order to turn a rather frustrated glare upon the woman.

“Don’t stand on my foot!” his wife complained loudly. 

“I wasn’t standing on your foot! I only twisted my shoulders, see? I didn’t even move my feet,” he retorted, gesturing vaguely toward the stones of the paved street. His feet, not even to be seen through the throng and the dark, were pressed tightly in with many others.

Arambo sighed. The noise they insisted on raising only made it harder to hear the prince’s, presumably rousing, speech. This night promised to be long and frustrating.

“You were!” the journeyman’s wife insisted. “You stepped on it while you were talking to that impatient woman.”

“I wasn’t,” he rebutted, for the second time.

His wife, showing at least a spark of sense, seemed to realise that the argument would go no where. “Oh, just don’t step on it again,” she admonished, flapping her hands dismissively.

“Do you mind? I can’t hear a word the prince is saying!” complained an obviously young elf with a scandalously open-cut shirt. He was quite the impudent cockerel, Arambo judged. There was little evidence he possessed the status to justify such brazen self-assurance. 

The journeyman’s wife turned to him indignantly. With her eye-brows slanted severely, the harsh firelight cast angry shadows over her irate face. “Don’t you ‘do you mind’ me. I was addressing my husband.”

Sighing again, Arambo stood on his toes in the vain hope that elevating his ears a measly inch might free them sufficiently from the inane argument that the cockerel and the journeyman’s wife carried on. He would so like to hear the prince’s, surely surpassingly wise, words.

“Could you be quiet, please?” a dapper, tall noldo, clearly of the highborn, scholarly class asked, and though his words were politely mild, his eyes mirrored the frustration Arambo felt. Arambo took some small satisfaction in their shared suffering. “What was that?” the highborn scholar asked of the group as a whole, rather hopefully. 

“How should I know?” the cockerel answered. “I was too busy arguing with granite-foot, here.”

“I think it was: ‘we shall repair to the land of great beasts’,” called back a helpful elf from a few rows ahead.

“What’s so appealing about Oromë’s forests?” the scholar’s wife, who dripped with an obscene quantity of jewels, asked.

“Well, clearly the prince does not mean for us to settle there,
the scholar answered thoughtfully, “but thinks to replace the supply of foodstuffs provided by Yavannah’s crops, which shall surely fail in this absence of sustaining light.” He, like most of his class, once an explanation had entered their head, seemed absolutely sure that his interpretation was the correct one. 

“See, if you hadn’t been arguing over whose lower appendages landed where, you would have heard that, granite-foot,” the young man, obviously enjoying his central position in a circle of attention, no matter how small, taunted the journeyman again.

The journeyman clenched his fists angrily. “Ai, call me that one more time and your nose will meet the blunt end of my chisel.”

The young rake grinned insolently. “Better keep listening, the prince might have something to say about clumsy-footed stonemasons.”

“Leave him alone, would you,” Arambo pleaded, rolling his eyes. He tired of straining his ears, and wished, for the love of Eru, that they would, all of them, just shut up. 

“Oh, never crushed anyone’s toes yourself? Let he who is without misstep cast the first judgement.”

“Watch your feet!” shrieked the journeyman’s wife as he turned to face the cockerel with storm clouds coalescing about his brow.

“I wasn’t going to step on you!” the journeyman thundered, and, gesticulating at the insolent young man, went on, “I was going to learn him a lesson.” Fortunately, his chisel was not to be found on his person.

“Hear that?” the helpful elf from a few rows up called back. “The prince says say farewell to your pleasures.”

The scholar’s wife, who could have, quite easily, been carrying more gold on her person than the weight of the body it decorated, was clearly struggling to process this new piece of information. “Pleasures?”

“That’s easy for him to say,” sniggered the young man. “I hear he hasn’t had any pleasures since that lady wife of his refused to follow him to Formenos. Not one!”

“Oh,” the scholar’s be-jewelled wife flushed with embarrassment, redder than the rubies that hung at her throat. “Is that what the bondage part was about, then?”

“Bondage?” asked Arambo, confused. That particular sentence had escaped his hearing. In the periphery of his vision, the journeyman bristled against a restraining hand on his shoulder. Wanting for a satisfyingly weighty tool, he had balled his hands into fists. 

“You’re not going to ‘learn’ anybody,” his wife admonished. “Do you hear?”

“I will if he insinuates my clumsiness again. I am a fine craftsman! I have a reputation!”

“Quiet, ham-fist,” the young man dared.

The journeyman, turning a rather alarming shade of purple, unmistakable even in the poor light, shook off his wife’s calming hand. “Verily, I warned you. I shall pummel you, in truth. Severely!”

“Oh, it’s treasures! Say farewell to your treasures!” his wife crowed, rather pleased to have correctly discerned the muffled words that limped their way through the crowd like lame pigeons.

The scholar perked up. “Treasures! Of course! They should hamper the hunting awfully if we brought them.” His wife, fingering the carcinet bound about her neck, looked terribly downcast. 

Arambo, no longer contented merely to sigh, hid his face in his hands. For a people named for their wisdom, some Noldor could be remarkably dense. Clearly, he was doomed to hear little of use from the prince’s, surely magnificent, speech, tonight. “How about that Vanyar poetry, mother?”