Alternate Routes - Nerdanel Raises Harry

by solitarybird

Summary:

A collection of alternate, extra and deleted scenes from my fic 'Nerdanel Raises Harry'.

You look at the shattered mirror that lies, in glittering pieces on the steps which lead up to the unmistakable doors of the Halls of Mandos.

Within the multitude reflections of the shards you see glimpses of visions, things that were, things that will be and things that could have been.

Notes:

This will not be updated regularly it's just a place for me to dump any scenes for 'Nerandel Raises Harry' that either got deleted, are extra thoughts or AU's that won't leave me be.

I hope that you enjoy them.

Chapter 1: Alternate Universe - Ch9 - Finrod POV

 

Something falls onto his shoulder and he glances at it, expecting to find a fallen leaf or a flower petal sitting there innocently instead there is a rolled up piece of paper tied to a taut piece of string. Finrod's eyes follow  the whole line of the string upwards until he notices the fishing rod poking out of the upper floor window of the house he's sheltering by.

The suspicious part of his brain is very worried that this is a weird attempt to trap him but today is a weird enough day already and he decides to risk getting kidnapped. Hopefully he never has to tell his father about this particular act of recklessness. 

He doesn't cope well when Finrod's injured. 

So, better not get injured then.

He reached to unroll the piece of paper , slipping it free from the string which bound it. Inside is a small letter written in a shaky child's hand. 

 

 

Mr Prince Finrod,
Please help my Atar.
Itamo

 

 

Wrapped within the paper was a flat sided carpenter's pencil. Finrod couldnt help but  smile as he wrote his reply on the unused side of it. 

 

 

Hello Itamo,
I'm here to help Princess Nerandel. Is your Atar in the Guildhall now? If he is don't worry I'm sure the Princess is keeping him safe till the King comes and stops everyone from fighting. 
Finrod

 

 

He re-rolled the paper around the pencil before tying it back up and tugging on the string it was suspended from. 

A little face appeared over the window ledge before the line was rapidly reeled back in. 

Whilst Finrod waited to see if there was a further reply he kept his eyes firmly on the gathered guards. They seemed infinitely more interested in what his grandmother was saying up at the front of the crowd that in keeping an eye out for any resistance. 

No doubt they thought that their show of excessive force has scared away any of the dissenting people. Finrod known the Feanorians better though. He knows that they're just marshalling their forces, just making plans and biding their time. Feanorians either act entirely on impulse or they spend two hundred years planning to annihilate you and everyone that's ever helped you. 

His reply comes swiftly and the letters are just a little hard to read, kind of mushed together in an endearing sort of way. He can't help but smile. 

 

 

Prince Finrod,
Nana said not to let anyone in the house because it's dangerous. Atar is Giuldmesster he's inside with the Princess and the baby I can show you how to get inside.
Itamo

 

 

It turns out that the guild master has his own private entrance to the Smith's Guildhall via a tunnel that starts in his back garden and ends somewhere near his office inside his place of work.

Finrod is glad to know that everyone inside has access to an escape route that is an alternative to having to push their way out through the front door.

The Owls gather in the street with the force they've managed to gather. Something that Finrod is extremely grateful for. He hadn't been looking forward to the potential of sneaking down a tunnel alone and surprising an unknown number of stressed out Feanorians who might take his presence as an aggressive act. With them he had someone they would trust to vouch for him. 

The kid waves from one of the downstairs windows pulling faces at the two soldiers that have volunteered to guard the house and tunnel. The last thing they need is the elfling getting hurt for helping them or the Palace Guards discovering the tunnel and charging down after them in the dark. 

Finrod takes a deep breath and plunges into the dark. 

Notes:

Itamo - Man who sparkles

Originally Chapter nine was supposed to have a more... violent aspect to it with Finrod and the Owls making it into this secret tunnel and greeting the Feanorians sheltering in the Guildhall before Indis broke down the doors. Then Arafinwe would come to their aid with a group of loyal mounted soldiers.

I shelved it though despite it's appeal because the idea of the Palace Guards being mostly incompetent was too funny to me and I thought that the original made the tone of the story a little darker than I wanted.

Chapter 2: Deleted Scene - Ch9 - Finrod POV

Finrod has memorised every street in the city since his return. Nightmare plagued sleep means that he spends a considerable amount of the time he should be sleeping wandering Tirion in the dark. Still the Fëanorian sector is the fastest growing and filled as it is with craftspeople of every kind houses spring up are pulled down and remade with an almost frightening speed. Sometimes entire streets disappear and are reformed in entirely different shapes.

The rest of Tirion struggles to keep up with the frenzy of it all, looks down on their inability to sit still with something for longer than a year and sees the shifting street patterns and mismatching architectural styles as a stain on Tirion a city of geometrical marble. 

Finrod likes coming here because it's the only part of the city that truly feels alive and not some quiet graveyard full of old bones. 

The streets are unusually quiet, empty of their food stalls and bickering neighbours. No parent's are shouting at elflings to stop playing ball in the road and equally noticeably absent are the sounds of hundreds of looms and hammers being worked. 

Silent and empty at least until they chance upon some of the Palace Guards sitting around a small fountain. Between them sits an elfling can't be more than ten or twelve years old. She's crying as they try to treat a headwound that's bleeding pretty badly. Even from this far away, it's clear to see the guards themselves are young, likely not even fully finished their basic training. 

They're doing a pretty decent job at keeping her still enough so that they can apply pressure on the wound but she's obviously scared. 

One of the Owls elbows another and asks, "Isn't that your baby cousin?" There's a shocked gasp of breath in response. 

"She is!"

"They look like they're halfway descent kids." Finrod says. "Let's go ask them about your cousin and what's going on." If things go wrong, there's more of them than the two Palace Guards and they have all fought in more battles. 

So they risk it.

And...

The risk pays off. They are new recruits with even less training than Finrod had thought which only makes their first aid skills all the more impressive. 

"Why are you out here all alone little dove?" The little girl's cousin asks, picking her up and taking over the medical treatment.

"Nawtee swolldjures took her ah-way. I felled ober. Ow!"

The Palace Guards cringe as the attention turns from the crying elfling to them. 

"The Queen Dowager gave orders to round up the Fëanorians and the former thralls and take them to the square." The leftmost guard says as his companion washes the blood from his hands into the fountain. The red stain slowly dissipates in the water as the words he's just said slowly filter their way into Finrod's brain.

Various members of the Owls are audibly growling.

Finrod pushes through his horror and asks, "And you all just followed them without thinking? Do you want to become kinslayers yourselves?"

"No! Not all of us did. We... ran away from out unit. I-I know that's grounds for dismissal but it's not right! Some of the others are trying to hide people or get back to the palace and get the Princesses or the Queen to come and try to stop this!" The kid (Finrod's going to call him a kid because... well he's on the edge of bursting into tears) holds hands with the other guard and they bow their heads. 

Instead of sending them to the disciplined or ripping their blue sash from their arms Finrod clasps them both on opposite shoulders. "You've just learned one of the hardest lessons a soldier has to learn tonight. Sometimes your commander is bat shit crazy and you have to be strong enough to defy the evil they would have you do."

Several of the Fëanorians nod solemnly around him. 

Notes:

A/n: Not everyone is happy about nor willing to blindly follow Indis' orders. I may have sacrificed that nuance a little when I removed this scene from the main story but it refused to fit in with the rest of chapter 9.

Chapter 3: Deleted Scene - Ch8 - Finrod POV

Notes:

So much Finrod POV because his thoughts are so interesting to me.

In Aman one of Finrod's favourite family activities had been hunting. Going on hunting trips had been one of the only times when the wider family get together and he got to see all of his cousins.

Now the hunt is filled with empty spaces. 

He turns his head expecting to see the white of Aredhel's clothing fluttering in the wind or the barks of Celegorm's hounds. But they're gone. Finrod feels their absence even more acutely than that of his siblings. His heart longs for their easy companionship as Aredhel and Celegorm have always understood him the best of any of his kin.

The High King, his father longs for Fingolfin in public... but Fëanor is still even now his oldest brother. He still yearns for his approval. Still wonders if the things that have been said and done between them can somehow be undone. 

Or if not undone then reforged. 

They are brothers by blood. Fëanor may have insisted that they were half brothers in truth yet they were just as much brothers as any others ever were. The degree of blood ties they shared wouldn't have mattered in the slightest had the marriage have taken place in Middle Earth.

If Finrod's grandparents had stayed and Miriel had come to the same unhappy end or even a new one given the dangers there, things would have been different.

In Beleriand, death was everywhere an unmistakeable fact an ever present spectre and for many inevitable. The opposite of Aman where death had become a distant memory no more real than a nightmare. Only becoming real when someone was returned from Mandos' Halls. 

Monogamy in the east was a luxury considered best practice rather than the law. 

Elflings needed at least two parents supporting the growth of their fëa that was an unfortunate fact of life. Without that support, they would simply wither and die.

Finrod had seen it happen once on the journey across the ice. It was an agonising fate that he wouldn't wish upon anyone. Among the Noldor in the east this had led to extensive and sometimes rather convoluted fostering networks. Among the Moriquendi it had caused them to come up with a different solution. 

In a land where losing your life partner was a likely thing to happen, having more than one was a sensible solution that considerably lowered the mortality rate of your children. 

Without this change to social norms considerably more elflings would have died.

Getting used to this prevailing cultural norm among their sundered kin had taken some time. Many of the Noldor had found it difficult to adjust despite the love they had for Finwë and acceptance of his second marriage. 

Notes:

A little look on maybe why Finrod's sexual escapades might be considered shameful in Tirion. My head canon for the Moriquendi is that they're very open to having multiple lovers due to the threat of being killed being so much more real to them. If elven children need at least two primary care givers to nurture their fëa then threat of losing your spouse also becomes the threat of losing any/all of your children.

Families in Beleriand are smaller which means smaller extended families to begin with. It would make sense to weave together what remains of everyone's family to protect the elflings and thus the invention of this new type of family structure helped them to survive. Probably not practiced as much in Doriath after the Girdle but before and after and among communities not protected by it.

I imagine that seeing this dynamic was truly very shocking to the Noldor even if most of them had eventually accepted the High King's second marriage.

Aman is truly in for a shock when the Moriquendi start being returned.

Meanwhile: Namo and his maiar panicking because they have no idea what to do with all these fëa that claim they're married to one another and refusing to be reborn without maintaining their bond to everyone else in their group.

'Guess if we just pretend they don't exist we don't actually have to do anything about this.' - some maia I guess.

Reincarnation for the Moriquendi is just permanently shelved because they're too complicated to understand and letting them go free in Aman is going to cause... a level of havoc that hasn't been seen since Feanor.

Chapter 4: Extra - Unknown Ch - Maiar POV

Scene: Halls of Mandos, First Age (Specific date unknown) 

 

Time within the Halls of Mandos distend in odd ways. A thousand years may pass for a fëa residing here and yet to them it might feel like a day. Technically Namo and his Maiar are also extended the same benefit of time dilation but on days like this, it doesn't help. Souls pour into the receiving room all the same. 

All most of them are able to do is scream. Very few are capable of speech anymore intelligible than that but what words they can gather are chilling. A failed uprising brutally crushed by the one once called Mairon. Named Sauron now he serves only Melkor now.  

Someone rushes to inform their own Lord as fëa just keep coming. The room is filled with noise to the point that many maiar are forced to turn off their external sense of hearing in order to be able to function. The distress of the souls leeches from them into their own fana otherwise. 

Becoming so affected by them does not help the maiar to care for them appropriately. They know that now. This is not the first time something like this has happened. It's common after battles in Endorë for the souls to pour in like this. For them to scream and cry and beg to go back but it doesn't make witnessing it any easier. 

This job never gets any easier despite them knowing better now what to do to help the fëa of the firstborn. The more of them that die, the more they must care for and yet their own number has not grown since they left Eru's side to come here.

Namo arrives with further reinforcements, most noticeably Nienna and a large number of her own maiar who provide emotional support to the newly arrived. In time things slowly fall under some semblance of control. 

It's easy to see in retrospect why on a day like this they missed the arrival of something unusual in Lord Namo's halls. How it managed to somehow bypass the extensive sign-in documentation process and wandered the halls for some time before being discovered was understandable among the chaos. 

When Hereweald's fëa was finally noticed, it was entirely by accident. 

One of the Avari had been complaining about there being a distracting glittering light shining in at his window for a while. A maia had been sent to check to make sure that the simulated day/night light sources weren't malfunctioning only to find something genuinely terrifying. 

Getting the Avari fëa out of the room, getting them a new room and calling in back up without entirely freaking out and scaring them was probably one of the greatest feats this particular maia had ever done. Putting them in a 'better' room had really contributed to making them less aggravated which had helped a lot. 

They bring in someone more experienced with anomalies who blanches and escalates the situation to someone more senior who takes one look at the floating mass of glittering shards and promptly does the same. It's not long before Lord Namo is standing in the room himself. 

Even Namo is speechless when he sees the fëa, for it is a fëa, or at least what is left of one. A dispersing cloud of shattered glass and dreams held together only by memories. 

Telling that it's a soul in the first place is... difficult. Though there seems to be enough of it here that there is in fact a whole fëa should they manage to somehow gather it all back together it's broken into pieces so small that they are hard to see even for the eyes of the Ainur. 

There is a filter that all souls must pass before entering the receiving room in the Halls of Mandos. It's set up so that only the souls of the firstborn can enter this side of the complex. It is possible that this is a particularly stubborn soul from one of the other sentient beings of Arda that has somehow gotten through and been damaged by the process. 

Yet, the more that they study it, the more elven it seems. 

Elven and something else. 

Something foreign. 

Something unknown. 

For centuries they watch the fëa as it slowly tries to piece itself back together like an explosion in reverse. Coalescing at a glacial speed that only makes it more unusual. 

They have seen many damaged fëa here before. Melkor and the Úmaiar have done much damage with their evil doings but this is the worst they've seen so far. Something damaged past the point of healing even here but yet it heals. None dare try to intervene to help it lest every effort it has made so far disintegrates, leaving it as dust once more. 

Still they study it and wait.

And then, there is another day when the souls of the dead pour into the room meant to receive them so thickly, so distressed that Halls almost cease to function. A great battle has taken place one that means all maiar staffing Mandos need help deal with the overwhelm, even those set to keep watch on Hereweald. 

It's a day when anyone could have walked into that room without being seen and where anything could have left unnoticed. 

When they return, Hereweald is no longer there. 

Notes:

I feel like the Halls of Mandos have to be chronically understaffed by the time that the second age rolls around. Even if they are turning over fëa to be reborn, a lot of elves died in the first age not to mention before that.

If Finrod was the first to be reborn then what about all those that died to the dark hunter? They are going to have a really hard time if they're released into 2nd/3rd age Valinor with the massive changes in culture. It's giving neanderthal frozen in ice, thawed out and then trying to assimilate into 21st century city life.

Anyway that's something I think a lot about. Why was Finrod first?

Chapter 5: Extra - Unknown - Article

Summary:

Article for a Valimar Food and Lifestyle Magazine

Notes:

Excuse for me to talk about Fëanorian food.

 

The cuisine of the Noldor is differentiated from that of the Vanyar and Teleri in one distinct way. It's spiciness. Though it's specifically the Fëanorian dishes that leave you wondering where you left your tongue and if it's possible to expire from overestimating your spice tolerance alone. 

Anyone who has spent time down in the Fëanorian District in Tirion can tell you about the vast array of soups and stews available to you from just as many eateries and street sellers. Equally as prevalent are the roasted root vegetables dipped in fiery sauces, offered in paper cups or tiny grass woven baskets. Either taken home to be enjoyed, or in the case of the baskets returned to the seller for a free coupon that can be used as partial payment of your next purchase. 

I can't be the only one with a wallet full of coupons I have no idea who they belong to, or how to get back there even if I do. The Fëanorian Sector is a rabbit warren of narrow twisting pathways that occasionally break out into small squares, usually crammed with elaborate fountains or large sculptures that do little other than make the space feel cramped. Navigating your way through them can be exhausting, especially without a guide. 

And yet... I still keep that brick of unused coupons in my bag, on the off chance that I ever do find myself there and happen upon 'The Twisted Wire' or 'Iron Tap Bar and Grill' once more. The Twisted Wire sells a delicious potato soup served with slices of ham, cheese or thin lentil crisps depending on the buyers preferences. Where, the Iron Tap carries an incredibly diverse and obscure number of alcohols. If you can think of a food, they will grill it to perfection and serve it to you paired with one of their signature inhouse spicy sauces. Made on site, for the uninitiated, anything above a level two sauce will leave you humbled. 

Humbled, filled with self reflection and looking for the nearest toilet.

But gastrointestinal distress aside, Fëanorian style restaurants are more likely to have vegetarian and vegan options that your standard Tirion Noldor eateries. I have spent many years searching the Fëanorian Sector for new and emerging purveyors of food and have yet to find anywhere that didn't have at least one meat and or dairy free option. 

Which is good to know if you're bringing a Telerin friend out with you. 

What is rare though, are desserts. Almost no-one offers dessert. Those places that do, usually only serve what amounts to a handful of seasonal berries in a small bowl. These dishes are labelled on the menu as 'Sindar' or 'Silvan' style though how representative they are as to actual cuisine of the Silvan and Sindar is unknown. 

Very few commercial entities within Aman feature Avarin dishes though with the increase of Returned in recent years it's highly likely that when our Avari cousins are finally among their number that will quickly change. 

The spice though is an omnipresent aspect of Fëanorian cuisine. It's hard to pinpoint the moment that it began to diverge so distinctly from the standard Noldorin fare but as with all things Fëanorian we have to look to Fëanor himself for an explanation. 

The former Crown Prince was known for his ability to eat dishes that were more than half chilli oil. We can only guess that his son's inherited similar traits from their father.

However it progressed to the intensity of what we see today is obscured by time and--

 

 

(The bottom of the article is heavily edited in a steady hand.)

 

Prince Fëanor was especially fond of spicy food, so too were his wife and sons. Through interactions with them as friends, work colleagues and travel during the many campaigns whilst in Endorë such dishes were popularised. 

But the spiciness wasn't just about flavour. Most of the spices and preparation methods common with this cuisine have the primary function of aiding in the preservation of the food itself.

Anyone that had had to live primarily on Sindarin lembas bread whatever herbs can be foraged and salted meat can easily extoll the joy that comes from having food that actually tastes of something. 

Salted meat very quickly becomes a chore to eat. 

The more heavily spiced vegan and vegetarian options are primarily dishes created by and popular among the former Thralls such dishes are quickly made easily divided among many and often utilise ingredients unusual to those elves who have never lived outside of the borders of Aman. 

They however are considered delicacies within the bounds of the Fëanorian sector. Nostalgia for a time long gone, the shared camaraderie that comes from the horror of Melkor's evil or simply lingering food based trauma. 

I think one thing that the Eldar oof Aman need to know, need to really understand if we are ever to be able to safely and successfully integrate our people is that if your food is spicy enough you wont even know that it's rotten and the fact that you're even wondering why you'd ever need to know that is a privilege too many Fëanorian's don't have. 

Even less among former Thralls. Morgoth was not known for his five star dining experiences.

You can't complain about intense flavours unless you've been put in the position of starving or eating orc prepared mystery meat. Meat that could well be your horse, human, orc or the flesh of another elf. 

In such settings spicy food means elf made food.

Elf made food means safe food.

Safe food is spicy. 

Even now there are former Thralls who can't eat food that isn't spicy because such thoughts are so ingrained for survival. 

 

(The rest of the article is hidden under a large stamp imprint of the words 'UNAPPROVED FOR PRINTING' in red ink.)

Series this work belongs to:

• Part 2 of Nerdanel Raises Harry Universe