The Die Is Cast by Fuin  

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Fanwork Notes

For the prompt: cross the Rubicon Sirion (and some other water bodies); with a sprinkle of: caught between a (shiny) rock and a hard place, fiddle while Rome burns, draconian Fëanorian laws, rise from the ashes and Pyrrhic victory!

Fanwork Information

Summary:

Thus, he lingers in this doomed city for yet another year—until he wakes to alarm bells ringing wildly and to the stench of smoke rising from the reeds.

Celebrimbor, at the Havens of Sirion.

Major Characters: Celebrimbor, Amras

Major Relationships: Amras & Celebrimbor

Genre: Drama

Challenges: Allusive

Rating: Teens

Warnings: Character Death, Violence (Moderate)
Chapters: 2 Word Count: 2, 023
Posted on Updated on

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Table of Contents

This Doomed City
Kin No More

Comments on The Die Is Cast

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Oh my heart! Poor Celebrimbor has been caught between only awful choices ever since Alqualondë. You've touched on so many conundrums in his life that I've never fully considered before. No wonder he just wants to be a nobody, even when it means also denying his skill and just performing simple practical work.

And oh my poir already devastated heart! You've just gone and managed to make the third kinslaying so very much worse! His childhood playmate, his youngest uncle... 

Thank you, I'll be sobbing myself to sleep now (complementary)

What can I say, I just love all the tragedies and I also love to make them more tragic!

Thank you so much for reading! And ... you're welcome, I guess? 😇

</3

Poor Celebrimbor! However you write it, the Third Kinslaying has to be deeply painful for him. I usually imagine him as not able to raise a weapon against his (not-)kin, but I also like the harder-edged version here, with neither him nor his uncle able to draw back. There's a tragic inevitability about their final battle. The way it was the Silmaril's fall that distracted Amras enough for him not to kill Celebrimbor !! </3 And Amras reaching for his dying brother's hand instead of a weapon !! </3

This line was especially devastating:

“Well then,“ says Amras with a tired voice, “is there anything you would like me to tell my brother, who is not your father anymore, when I meet him in the Darkness?“

My thought process was something like this: he knew the consequences of the Oath, so if we assume that he went to the Havens at all, he basically had these three options: 1) fight against the Fëanorian forces and risk having to fight his uncles (though it might have been quite a coincidence that he ran into Amras at all here, if he wasn't especially looking for them), 2) do nothing and become (in my opinion) an accomplice of sorts or 3) fight for them, and he wouldn't do that, would he? So, there's really no good solution for him here, he probably should have just gone east where Galadriel went :( 

He also turned out a bit darker than I intended him to be, I planned to have him answer something half-way hopeful about forgiveness to the line you cited… but I feel like sometimes characters just don't do what I want them to do—and he didn't want to say anything to Curufin. 🥲

Thanks for reading! 💛