Chapter Text
It may not always seem this way – especially when times are dark and glimmers of hope shine scarce and faint – but a certain power is embedded within the very fabric of Eä, a power ceaselessly striving for balance between the elements of which it consists. It flickers inside the Secret Fire of Arda, the memory of a world once brimming with the pulse of raw creation and its perfect, unmarred symmetry.
Though that world has long been lost, the Flame remains, and with it its urge for balance. Most often, it manifests in ways that remain unfathomable to those that it may or may not affect. On some occasions, however, it takes on the flickering form of fate: gracious and full of miracle to some, heavy with doom for others, but always finding its way with the quiet determination of inevitability. Light-footed as it is, the intricately crafted turns of fate’s workings usually only become wholly apparent in hindsight. What seems like an end may become more than that; the beginning of a new life sometimes interwoven with the thread of another’s past.
Occasionally, this one thread hides within the larger scene that is woven by Vairë in the Halls of Mandos. A warrior plunging into an abyss, smothered by fire and darkness. A city, once white and radiant in the sun, now blackened and burning. Ruin, flight and despair. But life will wind its way even in the darkest of times, and sometimes the breaking of something can make way for something new – for, if one cares to look, beauty can be found even in the light reflecting off of scattered shards.
What is a song but true creation out of ruin, each note born from the passing of its predecessor?
When Celebrimbor, Lord and master jewel-smith of Eregion, crafted three of his greatest works, he had no need of assistance, neither from Annatar, who had taught him the craft, nor from any other of the Gwaith-i-Mírdain, his people. Each strike of his hammer, each drag of his saw, even the smallest motion of sanding or polishing the metal and stone was executed with perfect precision and ambition for beauty. He did not need auxiliary hands or counsel or tongues that chanted the words for him. In those hours of creation, his body itself became his most significant tool, hands, eyes, ears and speech all working at the same time to achieve singular greatness.
But what he could not do was to create and draw consummate beauty solely out of his own self. Just as the light of the Two Trees had been what had made the Silmarils truly immense in their perfection, Celebrimbor sought to capture more than craftsmanship and magic words in his creations. What he needed, then, to forge the Ring of Fire was – song.
And so it came that Nóruil, youngest and only remaining member of the former House of the Fountain, witnessed the making of Narya and gifted to it her music.
For three days and nights she played her flute in Celebrimbor’s forge, the sound rising and falling together with the flickering of the fire in the furnace. Now it whispered like glowing embers, now it roared like a wildfire, and just like Celebrimbor’s hands it never ceased. Only when the metal of the instrument became so hot that it nearly burned her fingers – not from the heat of the room or the playing itself, but from the immensity of the deed they were undertaking – she laid it down for a while and used her voice instead, and when the words would start cracking in her hoarse throat, she picked up the flute again. It was dance and strife with the fire at once, Nóruil soon realised. She had to sweet-talk it at first, coaxing it into going higher and burning brighter. But if it grew too strong, its heat almost menacing, she would reply with her own battle song, a cool and sharp melody that felt to her as though it ran through her blood and was imprinted onto her bones, a cry of former glory.
The day of Nóruil’s birth in a long bygone age and a world not yet half-drowned also marked the day that saw the downfall of what might have been her home. She would only know it from the stories of her youth, tales about the glory of Gondolin and its valiant defenders. Her longing for this place was a borrowed one, but in her heart, the hymns reminiscing about Gondolin’s splendour shared a melody with her yearning for a life and family she had never truly known.
But that was not the only fate decreed to her by the Valar or by those still more unfathomable forces. For sometimes, two lives coincide in such a way that an invisible bond is formed and will continue to persevere from that moment on, though it may take centuries to become apparent.
One moment of shared breath: one last ash-filled inhale, stuttering, shallow.
And far above that abyss, a new-born’s cry for life, the first gasp of air in a place nearly bereft of all its former life.
Just one fraction in the universe, but one that aligned seamlessly.
Though she could not quite grasp it in her mind, all this was told in Nóruil’s song. In that way it became a mournful tune, yet full of hope. Through melodies and words, it spoke of the fall of the white city, of what it had been and what it never could be again. Gondolin, to her, meant grieving for a father she had never known, and saying goodbye to a mother whose grief had never fully left her since, slowly fraying her mind and body. But it also meant a possibility: Ruin was where she came from, having been born and nearly immediately fallen to death again within it, but it was not where she was heading. The sacrifices that had been made at Gondolin’s last hours would be in vain if they had brought nothing but mourning to the survivors’ hearts. Thus, ultimately, her song sang of resistance, of kindling a flame of hope even in the darkest time. This was what Celebrimbor then wove into his ring, and its essence became reflected in the fire of the ruby that he set in it.
In some moments, Nóruil felt that the battle was raging not only between her and the forge’s fires, but almost more so within her own self. It was as though, if her heart would grow too hot with passion and rage, her mind would attempt to encompass it in cool, clear water. Yet whenever this in its own spirit threatened to paralyse her with whispers of the past, the heat would be kindled again – fire and water rising and dwindling in her soul as in an everlasting dance. It reminded her of the dreams she had known ever since childhood. She would awake from them in the middle of the night in a terror, her head swimming with images of fire and shadow and the never-ending sensation of falling deeper, deeper into darkness until it felt like she was engulfed by a cold and vast ocean and her lungs were filled with water. For a long time, she had suspected those dreams were an echo of her father’s death in the fountain, battling the Lord of Balrogs, and perhaps in some part they were. But this did not explain the glimmer of golden hair flashing before her eyes in those dreams, the hand stretching towards her but finding nothing to grasp no matter how fast she ran towards it, and then she was someone else, someone who was falling again. Always falling.
For those dreams, and for the songs that her heart was full of no matter how many centuries had passed, Nóruil knew that some part of herself would always be entwined with the fall of Gondolin, the day of her birth. Still, she was determined to carve – or rather, to forge a future for herself in Eregion. She would try and build something new and all hers from those old sounds and images.
When the making of the ring was finished, embers expiring and music dwindling, Celebrimbor held up the ring as if for a final inspection, meeting Nóruil’s gaze across the forge. She approached him to behold it, only hesitantly accepting it when he dropped it into her palm, still warm.
“Narya,” he declared. “Your namesake. For like you, it is born from fire, and it shall grant its bearer the ability to resist the heat of its eviller forms.”
For a while, she turned it in her fingers, marvelling at its perfection. She thought she could still sense a faint echo of her song within it, music translated into a rippling power. Finally, she offered Narya back to Celebrimbor, but he shook his head and closed her fingers around it instead. His hand was uncharacteristically calloused for an elf – his badge of honour as a master-smith.
“As you are akin to each other, I shall put my trust in you to wear it and to keep it safe. It is better for no one else to know of its existence; it will be invisible on your finger.”
“I shall wear it?” Nóruil opened her palm again, staring at the stone and the bright flame it contained in disbelief. “Why would you not keep it? It is your work, and certainly among your greatest yet – I have never seen anything quite like it.”
Celebrimbor’s mouth twitched into a smile. He almost looked mischievous in a way that, until then, had been unfamiliar to Nóruil. In this moment it was not just his skill for which it was easy to believe that he was indeed the grandson of Fëanor. Like her, he was the last of his house, though his legacy came with greater fame and a more terrible gloom.
“But there is something like it.” Still smiling, Celebrimbor shifted in a way that let the remaining fires in the forge catch the light in something on his hand – something Nóruil had not noticed before. It seemed akin to Narya in the pulse of its power, but its light was as radiant as a star, a cool silvery-white. “There may come a time when Narya’s powers are sorely needed, and along will come someone to wield it. Rest assured, that is not what I am asking of you – but simply to wear and to protect it until that time comes. You are each worthy of another, and it will set my mind at ease to only bear one of them myself.”
There were so many questions Nóruil wanted to ask, but she could sense that the more she enquired, the less she would understand of Celebrimbor’s words. However little she could make a connection between her birth within the flames that devoured Gondolin and the calming warmth of Narya in her palm, she recognised that she was being entrusted with something of grave importance. Was this not what she had followed the Gwaith-i-Mírdain to Eregion for – a task? The notion that her existence on Middle-earth could come to be more than flight and indifference?
“I swear to you,” Nóruil heard herself say as she took the ring and slid it onto her left index finger. A sudden warmth rippled through her, a heightened awareness of the power she could feel before, but otherwise, nothing felt much different. “I will keep it safe, and I will tell none of its existence. It shall not fall into the wrong hands.”
He nodded somewhat grimly, the smile gone from his lips now, but there was a firm appreciation in his voice. “Good. Trust no one not to covet it for themselves, and never give it into the hands of anyone who demands it with no right to their claim. We must learn from the Silmarils – even a lesser work such as this might spark greed and jealousy. I trust that you will not fall to it; but consider that not everyone is so disposed.”
Feeling the weight of the honour he bestowed on her, Nóruil stood straight and held her head high. Still, she could not help but to press on. “I pray that I will prove worthy of your trust. And yet – what would give you that thought? Why me?”
The fire threw strange shadows on Celebrimbor’s features, making him look both very old and very young at the same time. How much grief had he witnessed in his lifespan? How many gruesome decisions had he been forced to make, how many times had he felt disappointed in the disastrous choices his kin and the people closest to him had succumbed to?
“Because you have no interest in power, Nóruil. I sense it in your heart and I know it from your life, for you have only ever suffered from those who chased after it. You know its evils. And much like Narya …”
His gaze trailed to where she wore it on her hand. She realised that at least to his eyes, it was not hidden. She might bear it and keep it safe, but forever it would remain his creation.
“There is more to you than one might guess at first glance, and your true fate is yet to be revealed.”