The Name of the Fire by Kios  

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Chapter 6

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In the bottomless silence, there is grief, new and old. 

Frayed and aching threads hang dead from his elbows, the only memory left of what once was there. No amount of will or despair can bring them back. Fëanor’s spirit performs a hollow but compulsory imitation of screaming for a long time.

For even the knowledge of the verb itself has no essence anymore. 

He cannot bear it. He cannot bear it. 

Unmeaning weighs heavier than imperfection, heavier than death, heavier than himself—

Or what is left of himself. The crux of his spirit is no more. The tight hold he has always clung to loosens—as ‘hold’ no longer is. 

Without it, Fëanor’s will crumbles.  

Perspective shifts—if it could even be called that, for perspective is a fragile thing now. He looks at the ruins of all of his structures that once stood tall and proud; and under the barrenness of unmeaning they fade and change bearings, until he no longer knows what they were for. 

Long-standing accusations shift, like a landscape changing. Wrongs once laid entirely upon the shoulders of others refuse to stay put, sliding back towards their source. Old justifications that he had rehearsed so often they had become indistinguishable from truth—they drove me to it; my sons will fulfil; Fëanor does what Fëanor says—cease to feel inevitable…

The pain of the Oath becomes a pain he struggles to see the point of bearing. Its purpose, once so clear and unshakeable, is now littered with countless holes that throb for the shape of sense that had filled them.

Vaguely, he is aware that something fundamental within himself has changed…

But that is old news. Many fundamental things have been taken away from him already. What difference is another? 

He wishes could just…step away from it all. Away from the necrotic blur. Away from the noise. 

Yet he does not want the silence either.

His entire self is one mighty burden…

Fëanor begins to understand that there is nothing waiting for him except more of this: Void and oblivion and endless pain.

And Úv—

Fëanor wrestles his thought away from it, before the mere act of thinking its name can open connection. 

But it is a tiring thing. Every time his elbows ache for the parts that are not there is a time he is reminded of it; and every time more and more effort is needed to quell the natural turn of his thought towards it. 

Every hard-won success only serves to make him feel empty. Pointless. 

He feels the need to compare himself to the past, to the vague assemblage of broken memory and narrow experience that has lost all order and sense. 

Old fragments surface from the blur, missing their hands and the arrogance the Lord of Lights would have disregarded them with:

Keen, open eyes watch. Eager—two eager things—explore and rejoice in m—

M—?

Others happy—

Didn’t he once love being helpful? Didn’t he always hate being useless? 

The questions breed countless others. Doubts and regrets and failures(so many failures, he did not realise there were so many)gather, until, inevitably, they all lead to one simple yet devastating question. 

Why?

There is no answer. 

Not from himself. Nor from Void. Nor from—from—

Overcome with despair, disorder, grief, he weeps. 

For an age, and a moment, and an eternity. 

The pain grows beyond endurance. 

Enough, he begs. Make it stop…

“Po-o-otsss…K-k-kaaa—”

The noise screeches like a fork against plates, distorted pain shaking Fëanor out of his cold dream.

He does not remember letting any thought stray towards Úvanimo.

Yet it is here, again, tracing his boundaries and carefully absorbing transmitted grief like it is not killing Fëanor from the inside—

It follows the tracks of the threads hanging from his elbows. Slowly, delicately. As if it was not the one responsible for them, as if they were not the ruins of something indispensable, as if every line was new and it did not remember the disaster of their last interaction…

Words spill forth in a rush, almost without his permission.  

‘I am sorry.’

Fëanor is not entirely sure what he is sorry for; but he has to do something, has to try to shake off the crushing weight, has to find some way to dispel the strange and nameless brittleness filling him. 

Úvanimo receives and looks. Under its thorough scrutiny the apology is unable to hide behind haste, and dwindles into something small and exposed and so very, very ugly.

Guilt thickens, 

Biting, burning, 

Strangling, smoldering.

Freak, liar, evil thing,

Now innocent like—

Everyone but himself. 

The arrow of blame pierces—

Nothing but itself. 

Úvanimo, such a cruel name—

A clear mirror into his own hatred. 

Crack-crack—

There goes fear!

Crack-crack-crack-crack—

There goes denial! Avoidance! Deflection—

As Fëanor beholds yet another naked exposition of his own mind’s dull, banal machinations, he feels so tremendously drained. 

The old habit of reaction surfaces, but he finds himself too tired to follow the pattern of it. He knows what lies at the end of that path; and he does not want to suffer another collapse simply for the sake of maintaining resistance anymore. 

His anger is gone, like blood absent from a vein. A hollow shell clenches around nothing—his mind’s last futile attempts to carry out the familiar response. 

“I…I…”

It falls away unfinished.