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“Brother.”
The dark figure turned towards her, eyes glowing a hazy white. Nienna pulled back the hood of her grey cloak revealing her long hair, which much like her brother’s eyes shone with the dimmed silver light of stars.
“It is a disquieting sight to see you here, sister of mine,” he replied, his deep voice echoing softly off the walls of his cavernous hall.
“How so, when I so often visit your halls, brother?” A small, knowing smile played on her lips. “Why does is displease you to see me, Námo?”
“It is not you, sister,” he conceded, “but the request you have come here to make which troubles me greatly.”
Nienna’s eyes wandered over the tapestries lining the the slate grey walls of his hall, the histories of the world woven and hung on display, and said absently, “it cannot trouble you more than when I spoke on behalf of Melkor.”
At her words, the darkness of the cavernous hall seemed to grow twofold, climbing up the carved rock walls and engulfing the vast space; a lesser being would have cowered, but Nienna was too much like her brother to be moved by such a display.
“Since you know why I have come, should I save us time and forgo pleading the case of my subject? Or do you only know my purpose, and not the full extent of her plea?”
Námo hummed, a deep timbre that sent small tremors through the ground beneath her feet. Her brother made no other protest, and so Nienna approached the dais of his throne, and sat down by his feet on the smooth obsidian steps.
“Was it not here that Lúthien sat, singing her song unmatched in its grief?” Nienna looked up at him; Námo averted her gaze, letting the hood of his pitch black cloak fall over his eyes, and he seemed almost to disappear into the darkness of the hall. “I have been moved similarly by the tears of another.”
“Their grief cannot be compared.”
“No, it cannot. Yet while the daughter of Melian’s anguish remains the greatest ever known east of Alatairë, this one’s is the greatest I have ever felt in our Realm.”
Though she kept her gaze on him as she spoke, Námo refused still to look at her, and so Nienna placed a hand on his knee and from her fingers to his mind flowed the pain she spoke of.
The image of Nerdanel the Wise reduced to a sobbing heap at Nienna’s own feet, her coppery tresses in stark contrast to the bone white stone of her halls west of the West.
Nerdanel, who through her sobs had beseeched her, “lady of pity, healer of hurts, Nienna… For ages I have borne it, the pain of each of my children’s deaths, chipping away at my heart and my spirit as I would chip away at stone. They are all gone now; nothing remains of my heart.”
Nerdanel, looking up at Nienna, eyes overflowing with tears that spilled down her freckled cheeks, pleading, “my lady, have pity on me. Speak to your brother on my behalf, so that I might look upon my sons but once more. Only once.”
Námo whipped his head around and howling winds swept through the room as he did. Where she sat at his feet, Nienna too felt the sting of tears forming in her eyes.
“I knew what you would ask ere even you did, sister; forget not that I know all things that shall be, save those which Eru Ilúvatar still may change,” he said, and again the walls shook at the sound of his voice. “And forget not that I myself foretold the Doom of the House of Fëanor.”
At his words, Nienna’s expression turned suddenly defiant. “Yet this one deserves not to be punished for the acts of her husband, for she did not follow him. Why then should her lament fall upon deaf ears?”
She was met with utter silence; no low rumbling, no quaking of the foundations, no light from his eyes.
“I would have you tell me, brother, if my request was rejected ere I ever sought you in your Halls.”
Silence again.
“Námo.”
“Once,” he murmured, and something flickered in his eyes when he finally he held her gaze. “Only once.”
*
Nienna wrapped her in a grey cloak much like her own; she made certain to pull the hood well over her head, to hide the red curls that framed her subject’s pale face.
Under the cover of starlight and the light of Ithil, as Tilion steered the silver orb across the firmament, Nienna let her form grow and cast herself around Nerdanel, shielding her from the cold night air as they crossed northwards towards the Halls of Waiting. She felt the maelstrom of emotion radiating from her; hope and anticipation appearing as small slivers of light in the ever-present darkness of grief that had engulfed her heart.
Nerdanel had become but a shell of her former self; an elf who had born not just seven sons, but who had brought into Arda seven Fëa who burned with the fire of their father even as they grew in her belly. It was a feat of mother’s love that no other of the Noldor would ever again match, nor would any of them match her despair.
*
Nienna led her to a descending staircase, and left Nerdanel to journey into the depths of the halls and its great cavernous underground alone, walking under the high ceilings and towering pillars carved of anthracite and obsidian.
Fëanáro was sent to her first, a reunion she had neither asked for nor expected. Unforeseen too was the way her heart began to race at the sight of him; after all those ages, her heart still turned to him as if of its own will, no matter how dark it had become. Their reunion was silent. Fëanáro was too proud to speak, and she had long ago swallowed all the words she wished she had said to him. Those words had been for the husband who had journeyed with her across the Realm, who had chosen her against the judgement of others - not the one who had abandoned her there.
What a cruel trick of Mandos, she thought. Perhaps he had wished to remind her that the Eldar were ever at his mercy.
Of her sons it was the Ambarussa who first appeared, and they appeared together. It did not surprise her that they did. Though it was said that the fëar spent their time in solitary in the Halls of Mandos, the twins had proven inseparable, as she had always know they would be. They approached her cautiously at first, but after a few hesitant steps they leapt towards her, throwing themselves into her arms. Mother, mother, they wept, heads burying in each of the crooks of her neck as if they were still children.
Atarinkë - no, Curufinwë, she had to remind herself, for he had always preferred his father-name over his amilessë - came behind them, his shoulders squared and head held high. Oh, how he was ever the image of his father, his expression grave and grim. Yet there was a glint in his eyes that belied his stoic demeanor, and when he took her hand she could feel how he gripped her like a lifeline. Following his younger brother closely was Tyelcormo, and even there in the Halls of Mandos his hair shone, fairest of all her children. He stood hovering near Curufinwë, a hand on his shoulder. They had died together, constant companions, she had sensed as much; always so similar, and in the few ways that they differed they had complimented each other, striking a balance between them until the very end.
After them came Carnistir, who seemed unmoved by her presence. Nerdanel had always tried to see past his hot blood and temper, tried to justify his actions as simply misguided passions, void of malice and arrogance. Now she could no longer ignore it.
Long ago her sons had closed their thoughts to her, consciously or by way of the distance that had come between them; Nerdanel therefor knew little of what had come to pass in the East. As she looked upon them, she saw in their faces all of their deeds and misdeeds, all the victories and all the terrors they had wrought, and it shook her to her core.
Maitimo lurked long in the shadows until he came before her at last, and at the sight of him she gasped, the sharp sound ringing through the caverns. Tall he was still, and strong, yet he seemed but a shell of himself. His right arm ended abruptly at the wrist, his left hand was burned, and his face, oh, his beautiful face.
“Maitimo, Maitimo, my firstborn,” she wept, cradling his cheeks in her hands, fingers splayed against the scars there. “What was done to you?”
He could not muster an answer, eyes downcast. For a second his defenses fell, his mind opened, and Nerdanel recoiled at the images that passed from him to her.
She gazed at all of them, gathered before her as they had not been in years unnumbered. And though the presence of Fëanor dismayed her, it was not enough to undo the heartbreak and joy of reunion. For a long time she simply beheld them, unable to find any words to say, and the darkness in her heart began to retreat, like waves pulling back from the shore. Then she looked over them once more, and felt at long last that something was wrong.
“Where is Makalaurë? My dears, where is your brother?”
There was no response; each in turn their gaze shifted away from her, unable to face her questioning eyes. Panic gripped her. She took a step towards Maitimo again, he who was so much the image of her in appearance, and took his left hand in hers, willing him to look at her. Even as he towered over her, he seemed to shrink from the weight of his conscience.
“Maitimo, where is your brother… Tell me, for now my heart knows you were last with him.”
“Amya…” he whispered, and she saw then that tears had begun to stream down his face. “Amya, he has not yet come.”
Nerdanel could not contain the anguished sob that racked through her body. How could she not have known? Even when their minds had first closed to her, she had always been able to feel their heartbeats in her own, she had felt their life force in her bones. Then one after another they had been extinguished, and her grief had swallowed what still of their spirits lingered within her. Had the darkness been so encompassing that she had no longer been able to see her second son was still living? No, no, it could not be. It could not be true.
She dropped Maitimo’s hand, and turned towards her husband. Always she had been the one to temper his fire, working him as her father had worked his forge. She was the water that cooled the burning steel, and always it had been at the cost of her own emotions, suppressed to appear ever patient in the face of her husband’s quick temper. But as she looked upon him then, an anger flared in her the likes of which she had never felt before; for all the grief and doom he had brought upon them.
“You left him.”
Her accusation went unanswered.
“How could you leave him?” she cried, grabbing at Fëanáro in a way that surely none before her had ever dared, shaking him. “How could you let him be left behind? How could you!”
Fëanáro would not look at her, even as she cried in anguish, “meldanya, our son, our son… How could you leave our Makalaurë all alone in the East?”
Collapsing at his feet, she wailed without cease. Standing beside their father, all six of her sons wept then openly.
*
“You knew.”
Nienna looked up at the looming figure of her brother as he rose from his throne, black cloak billowing about him.
“As I said, I know all, sister.”
“Then you know also that rather than relieve her you have doomed her. Soon she will join you, untimely sundered from her hröa as Míriel Serindë before her.”
Námo looked down at her.
“No,” he said simply. “That will not be her path.”