1476

It was a longstanding joke between the queen of the Noldor and the king of the Vanyar that she had attained grandparent- and great-grandparenthood before him. Yet time moves even on Taniquetil, and Ingwion's son Ingimo had become a father on the third Day of the Year 1476. Ingwë had planned for little Meril an essecarmë of unsurpassed splendour. He had not succeeded actually in securing Manwë to hold the golden infant during the ceremony, but Ilmarien had proved a more than acceptable substitute. The Vanyar loved their princesses.

Findekáno had been whole-heartedly glad of the opportunity to get out of Tirion. Since Fëanáro's return from his latest wanderings, Findekáno had been forced to exercise a great deal of ingenuity in not encountering Maitimo in the street. It was not that Maitimo would be impolite to him if such a meeting did transpire: on the contrary, he was always extremely civil. They would often bow to each other.

Bow!

Findekáno had never been especially close to his siblings. They were all three of them so much younger and so much absorbed in their own lives, which touched his only at the edges. Artelda's life, for example, was in the freedom of the chase.

(He observed that her relationship with Tyelkormo was exactly the carefree companionship it had always been; those two were another sort of creature altogether, amoral and beyond political or familial affiliations.)

Turukáno had passed directly out of childhood and into marriage and the family life. It was as yet too early to know what Arakáno was going to be. Arakáno was a baby.

All Findekáno's fraternal feelings were bound up with Maitimo. He could not remember a time when he had not adored Maitimo, been ready to do anything for him. It had never occurred to him that the breach between Fëanáro and Nolofinwë could ever have any effect on their friendship. And now Maitimo had turned this freezing shield of politeness upon him!

.~.~.~.~.

Indis walked through the white halls of Ingwë like a lost child come home. Indeed, of all the many places that she had inhabited in her strange and wandering youth, Taniquetil was the one that had suited her best. The Mindon Eldaliéva was bound up in her mind with the sweet pain of her first love for Finwë; but those had been the Years in which she had been least herself. It was on Taniquetil that she had grown into her own soul.

Of course, Indis had come to Tirion only at the extreme end of a long childhood, mainly passed in the Middle-earth. But none of those shadowy stopping-places of the Great March could fairly be described as a home. As for Cuiviénen, well - let it suffice to say that her first even halfway clear memories of that land were of preparations to leave it.

Indis was just old enough to remember her uncle coming home to the land by the great lake, a stranger to her who had been born during his absence. Presumably it had been at the same time that she had first encountered Finwë; she could remember nothing of that meeting, apart from a strange, tall shape silhouetted against firelight in a shadowy clearing and a clear voice raised in fervent oration. She had always imagined this to be a memory of the historic assembly at which the three ambassador-kings had recounted their experiences in the West. Or perhaps it was a dream. Indis' memories of the Middle-earth were uniformly dream-like.