(no subject)

[nerdanel_the_wise]

Nerdanel had not been to her father's home for years. She was aware that a few years had passed since she had last been here, but the home never changed. The sounds of the forge still rang as she walked through the house, nodding a quiet greeting to her mother. Her mother had always been a silent, meek woman, bearing only the daughter, but Mahtan never made her feel inadequate as a wife.

At least, not when Nerdanel could hear.

She slowly entered the forge, the heat welcomed on the chilly morning, and approached her father near his workbench.

"Atar," she greeted, forcing a smile to her face.

"Something wrong, is there, my dear?" Mahtan said, not even turning his head. "Let me finish this piece while the fires are just right, and then you tell me what happened." He knew his daughter very well, but work was work. Mahtan the smith had his priorities all in place.

Yes, he always had.

She located the old workbench she used, hoisting herself atop it while she watched him. "Nana looks well," she mentioned, putting off the news as long as she could.

"She looks just like she always does, which is nice enough," Mahtan chuckled, turning over the piece of metal he was working on, hitting it once with a very tiny hammer, and then dousing it in a small jar of liquid that gave off a very vile smell at the touch of the hot metal. He held it up to the light and nodded. "Very nice," he murmured. The thing he'd just made, though, looked rather twisted, dull, and incomprehensible to almost everybody else.

He put it down, and turned to look at his daughter. He closed his eyes, and looked again. "I wouldn't have thought the Lord Mandos would let Curufinwe out before the world was made again," he observed drily.

She swallowed. "He did not."

"Didn't the homecoming folks tell us that men's faculties dim with age?" Mahtan said, standing up straight and turning fully towards her. "We elves are not that weak and fragile; I still know what I see. So if it wasn't Curufinwe, which would be exceedingly odd but within bounds, then what happened to you?"

"Do you remember the little purplish man who expressed an interest in the forge? Well, he took me to another place, a different place. Time moves more slowly there than here. I have been there all this time." She smiled weakly. "I have met many new friends."

"And one of them very closely, huh?" Mahtan said. "Well, your marriage was formally dissolved. Not that there was much point to it so far, but if you found somebody new in the little purple gem-maker's home, then it's all for the best. Or was it the violet one himself?"

Nerdanel shook her head. "No. Asar-Suti has a partner he is with." Though it had crossed her mind that maybe... She stopped herself there. "I did not take another husband, though."

"Then how did you manage to get pregnant? Pollination?" Mahtan asked drily.

She flushed. Only her father could make her flush in shame. "I did this out of gratitude. The Lord Mandos returned Maglor to me. I gave him the child he desired."

Mahtan stared at his daughter, quite rudely. "The Lord Mandos. You are telling me that the Lord Mandos somehow made a child grow inside you? What an outrageous idea. I'd thought that after seven children, you'd know all about it; and now somebody in the home of the little purple fellow has successfully told you that, and you expect me to believe it?"

"Atar, I laid with the Lord Mandos. Once. And we only needed the once to ensure the child." She crossed her arms and glared at her father defiantly. As she normally did when they discussed her choices.

Mahtan sighed. "First Curufinwe, now this," he said. "My dear, you have a truly odd taste in men. What does the Lady Vaire say to all this?"

Nerdanel looked away from Mahtan. "She was displeased. The Lord Mandos did not tell her of his choice, and she discovered it when she found me in the library of Formenos while she was seeking him."

"How very clever of you," Mahtan said. "Alienate most elves by having the child of a Vala just like that, and then alienate at least one other Vala. Out of gratitude because the Lord Mandos returned Maglor. Whom he didn't have in the first place, last I heard. Nerdanel, really."

Mahtan shook his head with a deep sigh. "What will your mother say?" It was a rhetorical question - he knew she would say nothing, look mousy, sigh, and cry at night, in their bed. She'd done so when Nerdanel anounced her fifth pregnancy and her sixth; when she told about the separation, and about the divorce.

"While Maglor was not in his Halls, Mandos did have the power to bring him to me. The power to allow him into Aman. He gave me back my son, Atar, and all he wanted was a child of his own. I could not turn my heart from that, as much as I wanted to. It was not a hardship for me. I have had seven children already. An eighth would not be such a burden."

"Not a burden? After the Fiery Spirit, my dear Nerdanel had a mind to try something really icy instead? How did I ever manage to raise the one elf woman with the most bizarre drama in her life? I'm just a smith interested in smithy things, and you who have inherited so many talents go and meddle with Valar? I shall make my way through all of elvish history not quite comprehending why me."

It was an old complaint with him, one that Nerdanel had heard before.

She sighed and slipped off the bench. "We have decided that Feahelcë will be born in that other world, too." Nerdanel stared at her father. "It is too late for me to regret what I chose."

"Obviously," he said, shaking his head and chuckling; then he came over to embrace her. "Nerdanel will do what Nerdanel will do, and no king nor Vala nor parent has the power to stop her," he stated, fatalistically. "What shape did the Lady Vaire's displeasure take, then?"

"Cold anger and a threat that what had been done could be undone." Which seriously worried her. Though it had been only three weeks, it was still three weeks of knowing this spirit within her. "I believe she will speak with Mandos. Perhaps the Lord Manwë."

"So it will be Nerdanel, not Curufinwe for once, who has to go up before all the Valar in their might, to the Ring of Doom, and a bone of contention for two of them. Don't you ever think you'd have had an easier life if you'd just kept to your statues?" Mahtan sighed; he might disapprove, but he would still stand with his child against all the Powers that might object to her. And tell her off on exactly the same points in private, of course.

She refused to seem weak in front of him. "If they call me to the Ring, I will go, just as he did. But they cannot take my child from me. He is mine."

"Also, the Lord Mandos'; he was created at the Vala's request. If you were willing to give him to his father alive, then you might be required to give him to his father's lady so he shall never live," Mahtan argued, going for the worst case scenario. Things could only be better then.

"They could not do that," she growled. "They have never demanded a child's spirit back once it has been given."

"There was never a child whose spirit was half Vala," Mahtan argued. "Fight for the best, my dear, but prepare for the worst."

Nerdanel shook her head. "Because he is half Vala should be reason enough for them to not interfer. If it was not meant to be, Atar, it would not have happened in the first place."

"That is a very easy argument which cannot stand up in the face of all the pain that happens in this marred world - and even Aman is, in some ways, affected by the destruction wrought by the Black Foe. You know that best of all," Mahtan said. "Let us go in, though, and ask some tea from your mother; that calms upset nerves. At least mine are," he added with a rueful chuckle.

She nodded, hugging herself, her arms around her waist. "Tea sounds lovely," she said quietly, turning toward the house again.

It could have gone much worse.