As Lalwen thought later, it seemed significant, 'just her luck', that the time of her greatest joy should be the moment when the light began to drain out of the world. At the time, of course, she did not think anything. One does not think at the moment of catastrophe. She was simply swept up into a general panic of flight, borne along in a tide of Eldarin flesh. And then she was outside and on the western slopes of Taniquetil. Looking down.
Darkness was not a phenomenon with which Lalwen was familiar. She had been nurtured and supported from before birth by a gentle amniotic fluid of soft light; so supported that she had sometimes forgotten its very presence. Once, as a child, she had accompanied Fëanáro and Nerdanel on one of their excursions into the twilight of northern Eldamar and hated it.
The Darkness that filled the plain of Valinor was not of that order. It was more like a pool of ink.
.~.~.~.~.
Indis turned up her face to look at the stars. She was standing among the other former festival-goers on the edge of the Ring of Doom. It was dark, but not with the Darkness that had so terrified poor Lalwen. That unclean thing had been carried off by the winds of Manwë. This was the simple starlit darkness of Cuiviénen, scarcely less terrifying to her children, but familiar, oh so familiar, to Indis herself. It was like falling back into a mother's arms. A child can never get away from her mother.
Findekáno was the first to connect the sound of running feet with his cousins. He would have recognised Maitimo's footfall anywhere. Even here beyond the end of the world he knew it; but Indis did not recognise the nine elves until the throng had parted before them and they stood in the Mahanaxar.
"Blood and darkness!" Maitimo cried out to Manwë. "Finwë the king is slain, and the Silmarils are gone!"
Indis felt the strangest urge to burst out laughing! For this was the most patent nonsense in the world. Finwë could not be slain; not while his wife and children lived. Did they not draw life from him alone?
Lalwen had burst into the most indescribably desperate sobs. Indis would have reached out, to comfort her child, only her limbs were no longer her own, had been possessed by a dreadful lightness. She must not inhale too deeply, for fear of flying away.
Ah, but it was possible after all, was it not?
And then Ingië's white dress and her warm body were there and Indis had tumbled somehow against the other woman and was weeping confusedly into that white and ghostly shoulder. No child can escape her mother.
