Kit’s Stuff

Back in the time before, in the time of the Trees and their youth and their blissful innocence, Finrod’s mother had kept a three-legged snow-cat.

Snow-cats, of course, were not domestic animals and further, were not suited to confinement like the peafowl and kingly swans of Finarfin's aviary or even the placid camelids that Lalwen kept in landscaped paddocks behind her estate. But Eärwen had found this one with a paw trapped in the door of a hen coop - it had, of course, been in hot pursuit of Finarfin’s Warble Silkies - and the limb was so mangled and broken the beast had been unable to flee even once freed. And the paw had gone rancid and rotten and so Eärwen had given it poppy milk to drink and then done the amputation with the family’s best feast-day sword and sewn up the wound with golden thread and a silver needle (the house of Finarfin did nothing, not even mending, without flair.)

The cat took long to heal and when it did it was unsuitable to return to the wild, especially as it had grown prone to following around tall elf ladies in hopes they would give it chicken, and so she had consulted Lalwen and built a paddock of her own. The cat, not being a camelid, soon grew restless in the green enclosure and it would pace and yowl and try to chew its own leg or worse, when they came to look at it, on Eärwen’s children. 

So Eärwen consulted with her seamstresses and her sisters-in-law and at least one of Aulë’s artificers and she made woven ladders of hemp and hung vegetable marrows on the ends of string and created a sort of steeplechase of bridges and hammocks and blinds up trees. She also briefly introduced an automaton, commissioned from the very pleased artificer of Aulë, that looked like a sheep, made a noise like a furious duck, and moved like a drunken and very fast crab, but this overexcited the cat and caused it to chew its own whiskers off so she eventually removed it and left only the bridges and the ladders and the root vegetables.

And the cat made happy noises and chased shadows up ladders and lived to be 67 when it died in its sleep of dreaming too hard.

-

“Yes,” said Orodreth. “I remember.” And, “Finrod, I don’t understand why you’re telling me this.”

“You asked me - ”

Orodreth held up the piece of paper Edrahil had brought them, with the list of names and dates and a lot of gleeful punctuation. “I asked you why you were indulging them. Why you continued to let them plot clear insurrection and try to turn our people against us. Why you engage in those ridiculous sessions of doubletalk with the one and let the other bait you and pretend you don’t see he’s doing so. They are playing games with your kingdom, and you are sitting back and letting them do it!”

Beaten, bloodied, and bruised

Listless and weak

On their knees

Ripped to shreds

Begging for their life

(the valar doing the parent thing of taking away the toy away and sending both parties with no distinction to stand in the corner )

they have to cross the hexalacre together

good news ! the rest of the host of the noldor are not pissed off at the feanorians who didnt have the chance to abandon them , so unity !

It really doesn't help that none of the Fëanorians have sworn any fealty to Finarfin. They have, in fact, refused to swear fealty to Finarfin. Technically Formenos isn't part of Tirion and it's pretty far away, but this is very not reassuring if you are, say, someone who is very aware of how good the Fëanorians are at overthrowing kings and massacring cities.

(As far as the Fëanorians are concerned, the kingship by rights belongs to the House of Fëanor and only passed to Fingolfin and Fingon because Maedhros said so. Maedhros has said nothing about Finarfin inheriting, ergo, Finarfin isn't their king.)

He notices signs of habitation (impossible to miss the CITY that's sprung up around Formenos when there was barely a town there before), and that the keep itself has been repaired (no more massive broken doors or bloodstains on the parquet) but he wasn't expecting PEOPLE.

SO MANY PEOPLE. It's overwhelming. There he is in threadbare salt stiff clothes, thin as a rail and not a single bit of jewelry, and they're all so happy to see him. He's all but picked up by the crowd and gently deposited at the nearly empty head table. Tyelpe is maybe there and hands him a bread roll.

I’m sorry but that’s thinking way too small, hear me out:

We need to have Miss Piggy as Odysseus, and Kermit as Penelope.

Think about it… who’s the more fickle, prideful, warlike one in that relationship? Who is absolutely ready to go ham, at a moment’s notice?