'And how it draws one to itself! Have I not felt it? Even now my heart desires... to look across the wide seas of water and of time to Tirion the Fair, and perceive the unimaginable hand and mind of Fëanor at their work, while both the White Tree and the Golden were in flower!'

JRR Tolkien, 'The Two Towers'

.~.~.~.~.

1458

"Well, this is nice," Nolofinwë said fatuously, stretching out his legs beneath Fëanáro's dining-table. He withdrew them sharply when a foot connected with one of Tyelkormo's enormous hounds.

"It is, isn't it?" smiled Fëanáro.

"There is nothing more relaxing," his brother continued, slowly, "than a - nice - glass - I haven't got anything for you! - of wine after - dinner - There's a good boy..."

"Yes," Fëanáro murmured, "we are quite the convivial party, are we not?"

Nerdanel, who was sitting beside him, kicked him under the table. The only other person to notice this was Lalwen, who was kneeling on the floor, rubbing the stomach of another hound and murmuring endearments to it.

The rest of the convivial party, most of the sons of the house being currently on a visit to the house of Aulë and Yavanna, consisted of Anairë, Makalaurë and his wife Ambalindë. She was a tall, brown-haired, deep-voiced woman, musical and gentle and devoted to her husband, but not gifted with great intelligence or creativity. Her skills lay mainly in the field of tending small orphaned things and singing over the injured.

"Fëanáro has been doing wonderful things with crystals lately," Nerdanel said. "I hardly know how to describe what he has achieved. In fact... Káno, darling, I wonder if you could possibly go and fetch one of Father's new inventions?"

Makalaurë left the table, followed by his devoted spouse.

"Do you know," Nerdanel remarked to Anairë, "we hardly see anything of Curufinwë these Days? He is always visiting his grandmother in Lórien. If you ask me" - lowering her voice conspiratorially -, "it's love!"

"Love?"

"Yes, he's bound to have met some girl there-"

Here Makalaurë returned, carrying a large orb of dark crystal. Ambalindë flapped around him like an oversized moth, trying to help.

"Aha!" Nolofinwë erupted gratefully. "Here we have the latest fruit of genius, eh?"

"Yes indeed," Nerdanel said. "Put it down on the table, please, darling. That's right."

"What is it? A glass eye for a giant?"

"No. Please move your chair back. You should be sitting about three feet away."

"Going to explode, is it?"

Nerdanel sighed and looked at Fëanáro, who leaned towards Nolofinwë.

"You have to think of something," he said, adding beneath his breath, "if you can..."

Nerdanel kicked him again. Lalwen did not notice this time, because she had returned to the table to get a better look at the mysterious object.

"Think of something? What do you mean, think of something?"

"Yes, it can be quite difficult if you're not brought up to it."

"Concentrate on an object," Nerdanel muttered. "Something you know well."

"Why?"

"Just try it."

Nolofinwë stared into the shining black surface of the globe, trying to think of something to concentrate on.

"My goodness," he said, "isn't it amazing how the mind just empties at times like this?"

Ambalindë smiled sympathetically at him.

Suddenly it came to him: the sight that he knew best and loved most. Frantically he envisaged it, trying to ignore the distracting glint of Fëanáro's eyes on the other side of the table. And then, for a moment, it was before him in the surface of the crystal, a clear and perfect image.

He found himself looking away, to see if Anairë had crept up behind him, but she remained in her seat, two and a half feet nearer to the table. When he returned his attention to the globe, the vision of her face had disappeared.

"What on earth-?"

"The stone picks up from your mind what you want to see and shows it to you," Fëanáro said, rather smugly. "I call them palantíri."

"That's astonishing!" Nolofinwë cried, all too conscious, even as he spoke the words, of their hopeless banality. "However did you-?"

"That, I fear, must remain a craft secret."

Lalwen now insisted on testing the miraculous crystal. Nolofinwë, ejected from his chair, stood around awkwardly. It seemed bad manners to take hers.

"So you've made more of these things?" he said to Fëanáro at a wild venture.

"Indeed."

"And, er, are they just, ah, toys, or do you have any practical application in mind for them?"

"Is it possible that a dozen do not occur to you? If you must know," Fëanáro added, "I intend to use them to study the Middle-earth."

His tone of voice was curious, quite different to that of casual contempt which he usually reserved for his half-brother. The words cut through the air like a knife, having a peculiar effect on Nerdanel, who suddenly stiffened in her seat and fixed her eyes on the ceiling. Her strange heavy face became unusually grim. It was perfectly obvious to Lalwen and even to Anairë, a woman not known for her insight, that the conversation had entered the territory of some disagreement between husband and wife. Nolofinwë, however, was still wrapped in the state of morbid idiocy to which long doses of his half-brother's company were apt to reduce him.

Fëanáro was staring fixedly in his direction, causing his brain to dry up and cling to the back of his skull.

"The Middle-earth?" he said. "Why would you want to study that forsaken place?"

"A good question," Fëanáro replied. "It is, after all, only the cradle of our race."

"Before the grown one indulges in nostalgia for the cradle", Nerdanel cut in, "he would do well to ask whether he would have wished to remain there for all the Years that he has spent acquiring knowledge."

"Why must all wisdom flow from the Valar?"

"I suspect that you would be lost in the Middle-earth, husband. The knowledge that you love is not learned from babbling brooks. Indeed, all your craft comes of Aulë."

"Actually," Fëanáro said, "most of it comes from your father."

"And his from Aulë."

Anairë and Nolofinwë were by now paralysed with embarrassment and confusion, but Lalwen knelt forward, resting her elbows lightly on the brindled hound, turning her head from one speaker to another. This window into the domestic life of another's household was highly gratifying to her natural inquisitiveness. On one level, it was not difficult to see what they were talking about, but there was so clearly a second layer of meaning to all their words, a patina that they had acquired from being used over and over again. This dispute was one of the long-running sort.

Fëanáro and Nerdanel did not need to raise their voices to argue - Nerdanel in particular was almost murmuring - but Lalwen could feel the suppressed tension building. If it had not been for the presence of the guests, there would soon have been plates flying through the air.

"I think we had better go now," Nolofinwë said loudly. "Of course, we would love to stay all Day, but I have just remembered a most pressing appointment with my - er-"

"Secretary," Lalwen suggested.

"Why yes, with my secretary of course, how forgetful I am today!"

"I didn't know you had a secretary," Fëanáro remarked.

"Oh, didn't you? Well, of course I have only just got one," Nolofinwë extemporised, reminding himself to acquire a secretary immediately. "I found myself completely unable to deal with the burden of my correspondence."

"I'm not surprised."