Trick or Treat! 🎃
ask box trick-or-treat | read on AO3
The day that Finrod comes to Nerdanel’s workshop is wintry and windswept, and not even the light of Laurelin can lighten the dark seams of the clouds, laced with rains yet to fall. Finrod sweeps in the door like a leaf caught in the gale, and his hair whirls about him in a brief, golden tempest.
“I wish to learn to work with stone,” he says without preamble. “And I am told there is no better teacher than you.”
Nerdanel smiles, knowing. “My sons praise me because they do not follow my craft. Were they to, they might speak differently, for I ask much of my students—though no more than I would ask of myself.”
“Still I wish to learn,” Finrod says. “I am not easily dissuaded.”
“So I am told.”
A smile flickers over his face, then wanes. “Your husband—” Finrod begins, as if seizing the words from a storm. “He will not—”
Nerdanel arranges the tools of her craft on the table before her. “His choices are his, and mine are mine. I turn away none of the blood of Indis.”
Relief slips over him like the rain that has at last begun to fall, drumming in the streets outside.
“To choose a craft,” Nerdanel says, bidding him to sit before her, “is to choose a vessel for one’s fëa. It is both an outpouring and a collecting of that which spills out.” She points to her tools and names them—hammer, chisel, mallet, rasp, riffler, drill, and bow.
He lifts them, feeling the weight and shape of each. Nerdanel adjusts his grip, letting him learn the shapes they form beneath his touch. Then she sets before him a small block of marble and shows him how to use mallet, hammer, and chisel; rasp and riffler; and bow upon drill.
Finrod works slowly, learning what pressure to apply, what strokes to use. He is unhurried, careful. And Nerdanel’s wise heart, watching, sees its equal. But even so, the block splinters as he sets the drill to it and works the bow, and then splits neatly in two. He looks up at her with a rueful smile. “You do not dismiss your students for cleaving their work in two, I hope.”
Nerdanel clears the table. “I only dismiss those who pretend at their zeal for their craft. What I teach cannot be learned in a year, or even in ten years, and I shall not have my time be made a waste, when there are others whose zeal is true.
“But,” she says, “I have had few students blow through the doors of my workshop as if delivered by the winds of a gale, so eager are they to learn.”
Finrod hides his smile.
She sets before him another block of marble, and this one does not break. A small pillar takes shape beneath his hands, rough-hewn, with a coroneted crown of curling leaves.
“From Olwë’s mansion?” she asks.
“No,” he says and his brow furrows, but he says no more.
— — —
From then on, Finrod is a fixture in her workshop—as much a part of it as the slabs of marble waiting to be carved or the stools arranged around them. He is her most dutiful student, and her most apt. Sculptures bloom beneath his hands as if their figures were merely waiting for him to discover them. His sister, aligning her limbs to pierce the surface of the bay below. His brothers, spears poised in the shallows. A school of fish, flashing in a beam of light. A ship, slipping down the shell of a wave.
“Create for me,” Nerdanel says, when his works begin to crowd the walls of her workshop, “a work that displays all you have learned.”
For a time, he does not come to her workshop, but Nerdanel does not doubt; he has proven his desire to learn. And she herself has often roved over the mountain paths of Taniquetil and beneath the sea caves skirting the bay, seeking inspiration in the whirling winds and the tide’s treasures.
When Finrod returns, he settles himself upon his stool and simply looks at the block of marble she has chosen for him, reading the veins etched within as one might read the clouds for signs of a coming storm. And then, setting chisel to stone, he begins to sing.
For many months, Nerdanel’s workshop is filled with the song of chisels and hammers and Finrod’s voice, slipping beneath and between, calling, shaping, revealing. Feathers spill from beneath his fingers, and water pools at his feet. Swans stretch their necks, rising from the marble, from the water, beating their wings upon its glassy surface. Their eyes watch with animal intelligence; their feathers gleam with diamonds of water.
“Well done,” Nerdanel says. “Well done, indeed.”
He stays at her workshop, chiseling and singing and drawing forth life from stone, until Nerdanel can scarcely remember a day when her workshop was not filled with the song of chisels and hammers and stone shaping beneath song, and the ache in her heart—scarcely known before then—for a son who would take up her craft eases.
— — —
When the Darkness falls, it is not the lack of light with which to do her work that grieves Nerdanel most, but the absence of Finrod’s voice. She is used to silence in her home; she has had five years to become accustomed to it. But her workshop has been a place of music for too many years now. For too long, the ringing of hammer and chisel have been accompanied by the low, sonorous murmur of Finrod’s voice, shaping marble with touch and song.
Her workshop is hollow without it.
— — —
She hears from the returned of Nargothrond, of the many-mansioned fortress the Dwarves delved beneath the earth, hewing Finrod’s dreams from stone, and of the halls and walls that Finrod—Felagund—adorned with his touch and voice, singing life and strength and memory into stone—mighty pillars crowned with many coronets of stone leaves and carven tapestries of Alqualondë and Tirion and all that he once loved.
And her wanderer's heart wishes, just once, that she could set foot on the furthest shore and see what her tutelage has wrought.
— — —
When word comes of Finrod's death, she falls to her knees and weeps, just as she did for Amrod. When she is finished, she gathers cloths and rope and prepares the sculpture of the swans—the only piece he left with her, for the rest he gave away as gifts, before the Darkness—for travel. She cannot bring herself to take his first piece—the small, rough-hewn pillar that wrote a furrow in his brow—and leaves it in her workshop, as a memory.
Alqualondë gleams like a dawn pearl beneath the rising, gilding sun as Nerdanel drives her wagon up the winding, gleaming streets to Olwë’s mansion, listening to the wild, forlorn calls of the gulls, and she sees in the rose-stained waters of the harbor and the drifting ships at anchor the love for this city that Finrod sang into his works, crafting memories he could not keep.
Eärwen takes the sculpture from her in wordless grief, eyes brimming with words she cannot speak, and Nerdanel knows that this grief that they both now have tasted has redressed whatever wounds might have remained of the past, binding them up as sweetly and as bitterly as any poultice.
— — —
A knock sounds upon the door of her workshop, and Nerdanel, opening it, finds Finrod, hale and whole and smiling with all the light of Laurelin-that-was in his eyes.
“I saw the swans,” he says without preamble. “Thank you. They were a comfort to my parents.”
Nerdanel catches a bubble of laughter and tears with her hand, too overcome to speak, and draws him into an embrace, feeling in the warmth of him against her all the sons she cannot hold, then releases him.
He tilts his head in memory and walks as if stepping into a dream. “It is just as I remembered.”
“Though with fewer of your sculptures,” she says, finding words to speak at last, and then, remembering, brings forth the little pillar she has kept on a shelf, a memory of centuries ago, before she came to know the meaning of grief as well she knows the veins beneath her skin. “Perhaps I ought to have given it as well,” she says, “but I could not.”
Finrod turns it over in his hands, smiling. “It was not the best of my works.”
“No, but it was your first,” she says, “and therefore worth remembering.”
“I fear I could craft little better now. My hands have forgotten what they once knew.” A slip of a smile steals over his face. “But I am told there is no better teacher than you.”
