The Name of the Fire by Kios  

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Chapter 4

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There was nothing. 

Now there is something. 

Fëanor cannot explain how he knows, only that the knowledge is there. Beyond the boundaries of his fëa, there is a faint yet peculiar difference. Almost like a ripple. He half-expects it to be another trick from his mind, but he cannot shake off the odd sense that Void is now no longer empty…That something lies there, disturbing the stillness. 

A presence, where only absence should be. 

He reaches out. It feels surreal—almost painful—directing his attention externally after so long of having it weaponised internally; like stretching an atrophied muscle. 

But the motion dies almost as soon as he makes it; he should have expected that. Undiscouraged, Fëanor tries again. 

He thinks he can sense something: a faint hum, a slight undulation. He reaches farther, believing he can touch it. Yet his hand closes upon emptiness; there is nothing to grasp, nothing to see.

He is beginning to think he was mistaken, when it suddenly shifts, as if detecting his presence.  

Then it disappears.

Fëanor falters, stunned— 

It reappears just as quickly, before he can even process its vanishing act. 

It is far closer, he realises. 

Close enough that Fëanor, for the first time in ages, can feel the intensely familiar push and pull of a boundary interacting with his own. 

He forgets to be wary. With the fervent reverence of a man dying of thirst finding water at last, he presses himself tightly against…against…

Blank shock overtakes him.

…A spirit. 

He is pressing against a spirit. 

Being. 

Soul.

Here.

Hope blooms, like a gasp of fresh air in a stagnant tomb. 

Fëanor extends his thought over, eagerly probing, searching.

He finds nothing. Not a whisper of thought, nor a shadow of memory. It is like staring into an endless black pool. 

The hope withers, transforming into unease.

“Who are you?” He asks. 

The soul does not respond. His words fall through it like light through a prism. Each letter gets reflected, extended, stretched. 

Green and blue and red and white.

“A-a-are who who you? Ra-a-a.” 

The syllables bend and arch and fall apart; disintegrating into tenors torn from their context, accents ripped from their history, sound reduced from the mould of living voice. All meaning dissipates, and the skin beneath is laid bare:

Trepidation. Confusion. Intrigue.

Fëanor’s own feelings rebound at him, pulled apart and squashed back together again, spearing through his mind with painful alienness—

He reels back, snatching the ósanwë away like a hand from a nettle. 

“What in Valar’s name was that?” He yells. 

Silence is his only answer. 

“Is this thy version of a joke? Answer me!” 

Fëanor thrusts out spectral hands with the intention of giving a hard shake; but of course they pass through. There is no essence to push against, just a faint discordance that tells him something is still there.

The soul, unafraid, does not resist him. It simply meets him where he tries to throttle it. Ósanwë reopens once more—Fëanor does not know how. All of his anger passes through like sparks falling into deep water. 

It does not react, except to absorb the shards of his vitriol and examine them the way a child would explore something new. He watches, perplexed, as none of the expected backlash happens. There is no retaliation, nor flinching away, nor any attempt to appease. It is as if Fëanor’s aggression was forgotten the moment it had passed through—

Or rather, as if the soul never understood the gesture was aggressive in the first place. 

Bitterness courses through a well-worn path. Fëanor has the familiar impulse to sneer. 

“Art thou even animate? Or just imbecilic? How fitting. All my rightful possessions have been robbed, my own mind has turned against me, and now I must happen upon mindless things that infest this wretched darkness.” He makes as if to push the soul away. “Get thee gone!” 

But as he utters the words, something probes the edges of his fëa, seeking entrance. It is like a touch, and yet not. He can feel invisible fingers gently playing, can feel a foreign contour aligning with one of his own, can feel the sharp shards of his earlier anger being offered to him in a different shape. 

Fëanor finds himself utterly at a loss. He stares, frozen, unable to decide how to express a reaction. 

For it is not just the impossible and horrible desecration it has made of his frustration, presented now as carefully as if it were a delicate blossom, that he cannot fathom. 

It is the intimacy. It has violated all he thought he knew about the rules of mind-to-mind communication. It has crossed into his own fëa without needing sanwe-latya; entering an private space meant only for those who had communed with Fëanor for ages—his wife, his father, his sons. 

It is a violation Fëanor has never dreamed of before, a threat he never thought he would ever face.

He strikes back at everything at once. 

“What is this?” He demands sharply. “What are you?”

The words are denuded again. 

Flower, flower, fëa, son. 

Fëanor has the bizarre and irrational sense of being stripped naked against his own will. 

Indignity stings, hot and bright. 

And for one fraying moment, Fëanor thinks he might burn again. But he does not. He can only watch, helplessly, as another of his precious possessions is taken, destroyed, and then given back to him as carefully as the last two times—like it was a flower. A gift. 

He sneers, ignoring how the close bitterness feels unusually hollow. 

“Thou art fouler than Morgoth, and more false than he! At least when he stole from me the pain of it was mine own. But you! Unnatural thing. How darest thou rob a robbed man, twist what thou hast taken and then trespass into his mind to hand it back like an offering? Is this a joke to thee? A trick…Thou…”

Even as he speaks, withered things come back to him, undoing his tirade and disrupting the rhythm of his words until he can no longer hold on to what he wants to say—

 

Morgoth’s name bleeds into shadow and hate and lies and fury—

 

The nouns are pressed upon until cracked open— 

 

Light is uncovered, love is unburied, and the Silmarils are suddenly there, bright and pure and clear—

 

He thought he has lost their light to the blur—

Impulsively he grabs at them, trying to box them in now that they are bright again—

But they cut him—

 

Sharp light bares flashing steel and red smoke and hard faces that rush by and—

 

He recognises them all yet—

 

Their names escape him, leaving a kaleidoscope of traits and beliefs and false pretences—

 

He attempts to return to the Silmarils but they are lost to—

 

Voices that crush against each other, arguing and accusing and—

 

He knows what they are saying but the meaning is not there and that hole hurts—

 

Fëanor shakes himself out of the torrent. He is left reeling. 

Not for the first time, he wishes he could incinerate the soul.

“Úvanimo I name thee; an ill-natured thing! For thou art wretched and wrong!”

He severs the connection. 

It is a painful act, stinging in the way all intimate ósanwë couplings sting when cut off harshly; like tearing out one’s cuticles.

But at least he has gotten rid of Úvanimo—

Or so he believes, for a stretch of stillness. Then a line meets his fëa, once, twice, thrice, the thing prodding for entry again, and he realises that severing his thought from it is not an ending. 

For the thing lingers upon the sphere of his presence, and will not go. 

Yet Fëanor is stubborn. He endures the incessant prodding, locking himself within the bars of his own mind again to ensure no accidental connection. And, since he cannot physically turn away from it, he fixates upon the motion of his worn thoughts, forcing them to move around the ever-growing blur so that he can be carried away by them.

He wonders how long he can bear himself, before making the mistake of reaching out again.