#3sf25

@three-sentence-ficathon | AO3

A stranger will come to your city, bearing gifts of gems and jewelry such as the Noldor have not seen since the days of the Trees, and you will welcome him. You will trust him. You will revere him.

He will be teacher, master, lord. He will be comrade, friend, companion. He will draw forth greatness from you like a sculptor draws forth flesh and bone from cold stone. He will teach you the secret arts of the Valar, and you will think, I have been honored indeed.

Your cousin will come to you, her eyes clear and grave and piercing, and she will say, He is not as he seems. You will pay no heed to her words.

You will become distrustful of any who speak against him, and you will bar your cousin from the guildhouse and rebuff her warnings. She is jealous, you will think, jealous of what I have attained and she has again found barred from her.

At his bidding, you will cast her out of the city, and she will look at you with her clear, grave, piercing eyes—her brother’s eyes—and say, Thou hast become thy father truly.

At his side, you will create your greatest work. He will tell you so. He will name you as great a smith as Fëanor, and you will drink down the lie as a newborn child blindly drinks its mother’s milk.

He will leave, and you will ache. And then you will see, with the dart of deepest pain, whom you have truly placed your trust in.

And you will go to your cousin and say, I was wrong. I did not see. And she will look upon you with her eyes that see too much, that have always seen the heart of you, and she will take the ring you give her.

He will come with armies, and he will cast down all that you have built. And you will stand in defiance of him and be brought to your knees and taken in chains to his pits of torment.

He will taunt you and torment you, and you will bear it silently, wondering how you could have been so blind. At last you will buckle beneath the pain and reveal the names of the lesser rings, for they can afford to be lost.

He will grasp your chin sharply, fingers flashing with the rings you crafted together, and he will hiss of the ruin you have brought upon the Eldar and name you a traitor to your kin, a kinslayer as surely as your father and uncles, for the ruin he will bring down upon the Eldar in vengeance for your disobedience. But you will remember Nenya, gleaming like starlight upon your cousin’s finger, and Narya and Vilya safely in Lindon, and you will hold your mouth fast.

He will blind you, and you will hear his voice out of the darkness and pain, cruel and cold and merciless, and you will see what you could not before. He will flog and flay you, and you will utter no cry, for he has already pierced you more deeply than the tongue of any lash can.

And you will think, head hung low and body torn and tattered, This is my greatest work, to defy that which I have welcomed.

You will die, and he will pierce you with many arrows, and say, Behold the mighty smith of the Noldor. And he will hang your body upon a spear and bear your corpse as a banner into battle, and your kinsmen will flee before the ruined sight of you.

You will wake in Aman, and you will think, This is far more than I deserve.

And when your cousin comes on the wings of an ending age, her long watch upon your ancient enemy at last ended, you will kneel before her and say, Forgive me.

@three-sentence-ficathon | AO3

The growling ceases and claws click out of the cell, splashing faintly through the pools of blood that congeal upon the floor and sting Finrod’s nose with the tang of iron, and then the whispers begin: “I am here,” come the voices of his companions—Beren, Edrahil, Darthoron, Sadron—“I am here,” a promise of life in the midst of death.

It is Astordil, then, who lies amidst the blood, and Finrod feels it in his soul—another of his company gone, fled from these pits of terror— home, his heart says, once these bloodstained walls were home—to the Halls of Mandos, where soon they shall all find themselves, waiting for penance, as if this were not penance enough.

@three-sentence-ficathon | AO3

Faramir points to the maps of old and traces with his finger the old, bloated borders of the kingdom, sustained by a tithe of too much blood, Gondorian and foe alike, and he reads from history books of the excesses of the kings of old, grown rich from conquest and yet spreading their kingdom thinner than the gauzy silks of the south, always seeking for more, grasping at it even as it slipped from their fingers, so like to the vanity that brought the end of the Sea-kings of old. “It begins with borders,” he says, his eyes grey and grave as he regards Boromir. The eyes of the Sea-kings, the eyes of the conquerors. Yes, he and Faramir ought to know.

Faramir points to the recent census—the numbers so much smaller than that of Gondor at its height, their people culled by the long years of war. “Shall we ask our people to spill yet more blood—and upon fields far from home?” he asks of Boromir.

He leads Boromir through the treasury, pointing to the emptied coffers, so recently poured out upon the war in Umbar, and he lists the names of the fiefs and towns in debt to the crown, still struggling to heave off the weight of the years of war. “Shall we ask our people to give yet more, to empty their purses for the acquiring of lands they shall never see?” he asks.

He takes Boromir through the wing of the citadel given to the hostages of Harad, the princes that while their days in the court of Minas Tirith, forgetting the faces of their fathers and mothers, their brothers and their sisters, whittling away the edges of themselves that speak of Harad until they become something more Gondorian. “Shall we fill our halls with the princes of foreign lands?” he asks.

“Wars ought only to be waged to defend,” Faramir says, and Boromir understands: There is nothing to be defended but the hope of regaining past glory.