elf-and-iron:
“Father, all the Arts have their patron but this one.”
Oropher raised an eyebrow at his son, and a shadow creased his smile. “Do you not give your thanks to Aulë when the wire bends true, and mere metal becomes a song in the hand?”
“Of course,” said Thranduil, but he was a perceptive boy, and he saw the shape of something he was not being told.
~
The boy, bending wire into spiraling baubles, became a youth; the youth began to learn the arts of fire, and mere baubles became gleaming jewels, more suitable for wear than for dangling to adorn a window’s arch. He wore them in deliberate contrast to stark and elegant Oropher, and when he ran and danced with the other youth of Nivrim, often the chime of metal on metal accompanied him.
Still, the thought did not leave his mind that all other Arts had a patron; that all other patrons had a shrine, be it Aulë’s grotto tucked away beneath the roots of the greatest oak, or the open, living structure of intertwined trees dedicated to Elbereth herself. Aulë was the master of all crafts, yes – but in his shrine were the loom and the brush, the chisel and the potter’s wheel. The forge was conspicuous by its absence.
Still he could not find the answer; still the shape of something hidden teased at his mind. Asking bore no fruit, for the elder Elves merely frowned and asked why he wanted to know; pushing for an answer received only his mother’s gentle remonstrance, and an overheard argument wherein she wanted to tell him… whatever it was… and Oropher did not. “He is still too young,” Thranduil heard, and he clenched his teeth and crept away silently through the branches. He did not hear “I do not want to burden him yet,” nor did he hear “Our little wild thing will fly to the forbidden, so best we do not forbid.”
None the less, he was drawn to the vacuum, and in a surge of great feeling he ran. Down the boughs, into the carved and ornate cave that served his family as home, flying like the deer before the hounds. He took up his tools, and took a great breath, and ran again.
Past his own room, half sheltered in stone and half shaded by great trees, and out into the forest, to a place he and few others knew, he darted. It was a quiet limestone hollow, its entrance a low arch crowded by unshaped roots and hidden beneath an exuberant spray of flowering canes. A hollow in the trunk above let in light, filtered by leaves.
Inside was a low bench, crafted of twisted wood and carefully planed and polished. He swept aside the few bits of wire that adorned it.
What did a shrine need? Open space – the oak wood had that aplenty, and this little chamber had some of its own. Quiet seclusion – that was here also. And something to direct the mind, to focus the thoughts. To guide the work.
Thranduil knew not what he was focusing on, save that he felt keenly the lack of something to which to dedicate himself. Yet, he had a thought, and in careful secrecy he assembled it.
A ceramic tray, blackened from the fire below and glossed irregular white with flux above; a hammer, a delicate thing with a handle of silvery wood; a pair of copper tongs, impeccably clean, but their tips rainbowed with heat. Last, a single unburnt rod of charcoal, still showing the texture of the bare wood it had once been.
At last the youth arranged the tools upon the tray, blew out a breath he hadn’t realized he held, and sat back.
He contemplated his work for a short time, smiled, and took out a hair-fine wire, and a tiny glittering stone to spin upon it, to craft an earring. This was no place for hot work, not yet- but it could be, and perhaps it would.
In all innocence, he sat and worked his project, in contemplation of his new shrine to the Maia of the Forge.
It began like an itch, something tickling up the spine.
There was little to do in the darkness of the keep but wait, patient as a stone, for scouts and messengers to bring tidings from afield. The sensation burned brighter in the absence of distraction.
The throneroom was cold; the castle empty of servants to tend and maintain it. The marshland air lay heavy and damp, and the wet crept up every wall and grew on every tapestry. Wolves gnawed at bones in the courtyard while orcs patrolled he halls.
With a sudden intake of breath, Thû was filled with a sudden longing for heat, for the ringing of metal. Cold ashes swirled in the dead fireplace, and he ached to set it ablaze. What was it that had snuck into his brain like a gadfly? And why did his exile to this wet, chilly island feel so especially unbearable today?
The smithy here was pitiful; a peasant’s excuse for an anvil rusted unused in the abandoned court. Who stoked the fires in the Great Forge at Angband, now that he was gone? Was his workplace, too, gathering dust? Abandoned since his dubious “promotion”?
Unbidden, his heart recalled the rush of ignition, the oxygen-devouring inferno, the shimmer of convection and the white heat of molten ore. He remembered his forge– not at the heart of Thangorodrim, nor even Utumno, but farther back in the reach of his past; a place he’d tried to forget, the memories interlocked with the sight of familiar red hands, rough as sandstone, guiding him, offering support and direction.
Thû closed his eyes, growling with a shake of his head that sent stray guard wolves cowering. Behind his eyes, he sought the source of this irritation, isolated it to a single point. And as he focused upon it, it grew; like a knock at the door, like a stranger calling his name.
He was not accustomed to being the recipient of prayer. He was not like Ossë, to whom the Falathrim built shrines, who sailors praised and offered supplication. Nor was he Melian, whose name was thanked day and night by those she sheltered, lending her strength. He was The Cruel, The Abhorrent; loved by none save those as removed from the Valar’s light as himself, and that had been the nature of his existence since before the first elf opened their eyes to see the stars.
That was perhaps why the feeling took him by surprise, why the faint brush of acknowledgement against the walls of his spirit eluded naming.
But whatever it was, it had a child’s voice. And it came from just beyond the border of Melian’s Girdle, on the edge between forest and fen.
It was a long, long way from Tol Sirion as men might travel. But for a spirit unclad, it was a short journey, and in a grove shaped by water and stone and root, he found the source of his peculiar, gentle torment.
He moved without shape, without sound, and watched the oak-dark fall of hair over delicate shoulders stooped in concentration, observed the silverwood hammer, the tongs, the tools of his trade set into a hastily made shrine, built with both impudence and sincerity. And the little nut-brown prince, all fawn-limbs and intense eyes, whose nimble fingers bent jewelry out of spider silk wire, attentive yet carefree.
Curiosity moved him more powerfully than caution or cunning.
“Boy,” he asked, moving the air with thought rather than sound, “what are you doing? Why do you build to me, whose name you do not even know?”
It started with a breath of heat, barely felt – the sensation unexpected, and thus worrisome. Then, a voice – real and deep, and unlinked to any presence that should lend it such weight.
On the wire, the gem stopped its dance and glittered in a brief backward arc. Swift brown fingers caught it before it could tumble free, just as quickly set the silver web to rights. Thranduil glanced about, half off his bench before he was satisfied that nobody else had entered the little grotto.
Nobody, that is, that he could see. The back of his neck prickled. Why did he build to – then –
He was torn between laughter and flinging himself to the ground in fear; between fleeing at top speed and dancing his sudden delight. It was real, whatever else it was. It had worked.
Then, a perilous thought: it worked, yes; but he was no priest, nor son of a priestess. The forms of address were
foreign to him, and the risk of offending this mystery seemed suddenly
very high. He palmed the half-completed earring, careful to conceal without damaging it, equally careful not to think that Something capable of speaking without a mouth may also be able to see without eyes.
Truth would be the only possible recourse. “I saw no shrines for the metalworker.” Had his voice sounded so reedy, when he was begging his parents for information? Or was it comparison that made him sound a piping bird next to the terrible unsourced sound?
“And I thought – I didn’t expect – “ he floundered to a stop, glancing about for anything to address.
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