10. The Earth is My Witness
The public works thing was not bound to be permanent: that was made certain to me from the get go. Besides, I had the other days which I was able to spend in the company of Elrond, his family and friends, or practicing music, or studying. Each of these pastimes was enlightening in its own way.
When I was learning the history of Aman as it passed in my absence, one thought was never far from my consciousness: how much the Firstborn and the Followers were really alike, despite the insistence of many Elves that Men were so vastly beneath the Eldar in all regards.
It always struck me as odd that every major country on Earth had a period of national madness that would result in violent breakups, civil wars, religious or political purges, major invasions of everything, or at least ideological mayhem. Take France for example; it was the epitome of beautiful and quaint in the late 20th century, but just two hundred years prior - not that long for someone like myself - it was the terror of Europe (and beyond), going through a bloody revolution and wholesale executions, then winding up trying to conquer the world, and it stopped not for the lack of the drive to pillage and plunder, but because it collided - hard - against an obstinate nation of Russia... That would, a century later, go through a very similar phase (even lampshaded widely as such) - and, too, almost come to complete ruin in due time. Then, Germany... just please, don't get me started.
While I would not quite compare my father to a certain corporal - and not just because I was hopelessly biased on the issue - I still found grim parallels between the bouts of statewide violent insanity found throughout human history, and the aftermath of the Oath of Fëanor. Until I heard Elrond tell me of the whole story from this side of the Belegaer - and read a few history books on the matter - I never realized just how low the events of Y.T. 1495 had brought the Ñoldor society in Aman. In fact, it was a hair's breadth from collapsing altogether - and if we had been dealing with a tableau of human states, lacking the overwatch by the Valar, I suspect that the nation would have fallen apart outright, leaving the neighbors to pick up and absorb the pieces... and not entirely out of a vulture's greedy desire to feast on the carcass of a self-destructed principality. No, they would've been obliged to take in and integrate the remaining Ñoldor out of pity, lest they all starve to death or cut each other down amid the ruins of their civilization, fighting for breadcrumbs.
Of course we, the Fëanorings, paid little heed to such trivialities. We were absorbed in marching to war against the newly minted Black Enemy, blinded by the vengeful rage against the one who has murdered our king and stolen the nation's most precious treasure. Up to ninety percent of all men - and a disproportionately smaller part of women - were gone, leaving the others (again, mostly wives, mothers and sisters) without any regard for their future, to fend for themselves. And all of that amid the darkness that lasted for months and led to the crop failure that very nearly caused mass famine! But I distinctly remembered that we cared not about that. The Oath, the military campaign, the desire to overrun Angband and nail Moringotto to its gates - these were the only things that mattered to us. Fools from the first to the last, we were. Dangerous, murderously deranged fools.
And who has saved the remaining former subjects of Finwë? Women, of course.
In the chaos left behind by the men's departure, it was they who started picking up the pieces. While the next in the line for the crown, princess Findis, had been refusing to take the throne officially, she and a few other prominent women - including my mother, as well as Finwë's second wife Indis (who had a special place on my father's personal hate list, being - in his warped perception, of course - the brainless, opportunistic harlot who had fucked her way to the top and usurped Míriel's place), Ñolofinwë's and Arafinwë's spouses, formed a council that filled the vacuum of power. They kept the society from falling apart - including by assigning, and sometimes taking up labor duties - until at least Arafinwë and the remnants of his host returned to prop them up. While it was no more than a quarter of the number of those who departed, their arrival still allowed the Ñoldor to reorganize and rebuild at least a pale semblance of old life.
It was not easy, by any means, especially since from then onward, not many - not many at all - of those departed ever returned as anything other than the metaphorical bodybags. Worse still, those remaining behind felt every death of their once-beloved, the first of which didn't really take all that long (even if our own casualties at Alqualondë were not taken into the tally) - the accounts started appearing even before Arafinwë's return. Worst of all, up until much, much later the deceased members of the Middle-Earth expedition were not allowed to return to life, which further eroded the strength of my people. Not to mention the fact that with husbands and wives separated by the sea, the blood, the animosity, the veil of death, so few children were born, in stark reversal of the situation of a scant year before the Darkening.
They said that after Arafinwë returned from his quixotic foray (in support of the brother who barely ever gave him the time of day, ironically), his wife Eärwen - herself the de-facto Queen of her ancestral people, the Teleri of Alqualondë area, and a terror in her own right - gave him not one, but two black eyes and so many bruises that he was forced to wear only the most unrevealing clothes for weeks. I suspected that a few years must have passed before he was allowed anywhere near her bedroom, too. How many more clubs, rolling pins and frying pans wielded by once-gentle female hands found their male targets all across the Ñoldorin realm in those chaotic days, nobody would count. That was not conducive to population regrowth, either.
Women's empowerment must have been the only positive result born out of those miserable times, I thought. As I learned with no small degree of amusement (and deeply lodged bitter regret - about the cause, not the phenomenon), those events also led to the Valar acknowledging - belatedly and reluctantly - the societal fact of romantic relationships between females. It was kind of inevitable with so many men being gone - and not just, not primarily because the nissi would be seeking pleasures on their own, far from it, as we are not nearly as strongly driven by these desires as the Edain are. The real reason was that a great many women have renounced their marriages - out of contempt for husbands (mostly still-living) who would just up and leave them for the fickle, as they saw it, matters of Oath and war. Inevitably they would turn to each other for comfort and support in those dire and trying times, and from there...
Surprisingly (or not), the number of men who would follow in those footsteps could have been counted on the fingers of one hand, I heard. And sweet Eru the Allfather, NO, Maitimo and Findekáno were NOT among those - Maitimo's life unfolded before my eyes (barring the unfortunate periods like one when he was incarcerated in Angband), and the two were really "just what it said on the tin": cousins, very good friends and battle comrades. Dunno why the sordid rumours about them were so persistent, and who started them: it could have been Moringotto, or even Thingol who hated us Fëanorings with a passion (not without justification, of course). I certainly implied nothing like that when retelling the story to one of my fellows in arms on the Western front...
All of that (and more) was coursing through my brain as I was mentally composing - with utmost discretion - letters to my mother and wife. After all, they were among those who got the shortest straws in this debacle. That cursed day, Nerdanel lost her entire marriage-family - despite her pleas to my father, asking to leave at least one of her sons with her - and it was then that she had actually become a widow, it dawned upon me, not when the Balrogs blasted Fëanáro's physical body apart only a short while later. How much thought has he given to her feelings as he stormed out of the house and led his followers - that is, all of us - unto ice and flame, damnation and death? None whatsoever, I surmised. How much compassion have I spared for her - or for my own wife, especially taking into account the fact that we haven't really been married for all that long by the time of the Darkening? Not a whole lot more, whichever way one might slice it.
Yet my own wife – Calawen – has not, as Elrond reported cautiously, disowned me, or entered another marriage (to either a man or a woman), following a career path instead. That was a reason for a "moderate" degree of hope that we could, after all, have been reconciled. By Eru, I absolutely could not screw up here. I had just one chance - at most - to mend fences with both her and my mother.
My pen hovered over the paper as I was unsure of how to even start, how to address either of them. "Dearest" would not cut it - I had proven, through my selfish actions, that something else altogether was "dearest", as in "the most valuable", to me. "Beloved" would also be far from what I could hope to be acceptable; one does not leave their beloved behind in such a fashion. "Esteemed" would have been way too formal; it was how Eönwë was addressing the Teleri sailors in the memorable standoff outside Tol Eressëa. "Respected"... what in Moringotto's pits!.. I threw down the pen in dismay.
And then, I felt the whirl of notes, like a small spinning vortex of withered leaves - or snow, or both - the winds sometimes kick up during late autumn, rising within my soul. It was followed shortly by the first tentative words - not of a formal letter, of course, but of a new song, quickly shaping into a lament for everything I've willingly (if not entirely consciously) left behind and thrown to the crows. My frustration was, again, giving birth to the music, and suddenly I knew how to address the two most important women in my life, and what to say to them.
For hours thereafter, my pen was busy, skipping back and forth between clean sheets of paper and my worn old notation pad, like a weaver's shuttle. When I inscribed the last dot, I was somehow sure that even they would be satisfied.
Note: the chapter name is from a song by The Gathering (from Nighttime Birds album, 1997)
Author's remark: for a long time, Maglor's wife remained nameless in this story, but I ended up asking the fabulous Silmarillion Writers' Guild community for help. The user Cuarthol suggested this name, from "cala" meaning "light" (found also in Calaciriya), and "wen" being a female suffix and generally meaning "woman".
On to the reviews that came in the interim...
Toraach, Maglor's thoughts about paradoxes in the universe are actually one of the ideas that (vastly) predated this story. As always, I'm stuffing my stories (this and the Inked Artemis I released last month are prime examples) with all kinds of ideas I pick from somewhere, or want to explore.
DroidePlane, now that's an interesting idea. A couple chapters from now, Maglor will finally assemble his first proper band on this side of the divide. :) However, I still need to dedicate some time (and paragraphs) to his existence in the new realm, which is far from done. However, large parts of describing his definitive concert are already written, and have been since forever. Again, I have a stumbling block of an unfinished part in the middle, which frankly is frustrating...
