Archive of Our Own ^beta

The rooftop is cold beneath my feet, and I am counting bones again.

Not real bones yet, though they will come soon enough, piled at the gates and burned in pyres or left to sink into the mud where they fell. These are older bones, memory-bones, the remains of all the times I have stood upon dizzying heights and convinced myself I could see farther than I am permitted to see. 

Than I —

Than a king is permitted to see. 

I practice the words here, so, because I cannot speak so below. The eulogy must be perfect when I deliver it, when I, if I deliver it, and perfection requires rehearsal. It requires this private space where I can stumble over the truth without witnesses, and I can toss to the wind the bloodier parts of my brother's death I am not ready to spit at the ground.

Were I not a king. Were I not a king. Were I not a king.

But I am a king twice over or once over, depending on which title you believe carries weight. King of Gondolin, certainly, my hidden city folded into the mountains, a secret kept from history itself if we had our way. High King of the Noldor, now, by the hand of succession and slaughter. The first I chose; the second chose me. Or so I would like to think. So I would like to say atop the ramparts, your eulogy turning into my coronation speech. Fingon wore the second title like a cloak he'd been handed and decided to keep warm, I wear it now like a shroud someone threw over my face while I was trying to breathe. 

There is a difference between a king who rules a city and a king who inherits a catastrophe. Gondolin exists because I willed it into being, because I believed that withdrawal could be a form of resistance, that preservation could be its own kind of war because I, I, I, I, I built my city with the arrogance of someone who thought he could curate which parts of the Noldorin project to keep and which to leave bleeding in the mud of Beleriand. I chose the high towers and the white stone, the craft and the beauty. I love my brother. I hate him. I love my father. I hate him. I scatter their bones. You. You scatter their bones at my feet. You scatter their bones at my feet, because I did not turn to you.  

I never wanted this crown. I want to be clear about this, in this rehearsal that no one will hear but you and I. I did not covet my brother's throne. I coveted the way he could look at a battle and see not its inevitable failure but the margin by which we might delay that failure, might buy another year, another season, another day for someone, somewhere, to survive. But the throne itself? That was always a weight for his neck, and I was content to let such a neck bear it.

The last time Turgon saw his brother alive, Fingon was laughing.

This seemed impossible later, reconstructing the moment from rooftops where eulogies were practiced in private. But it was true. The Nirnaeth Arnoediad, of all battles, of every battle there ever was and every war they have ever lost, and the High King threw back his head and laughed, and his brother wanted to strike him to the dust for it. They had broken through the first line of Morgoth's forces. The line was holding, impossibly, and for one blindingly stupid moment, it seemed as though they might actually do it. Turgon's host from Gondolin had joined with Fingon's forces, and they were magnificent. They were everything the songs said they could be when the songs forgot to count the cost.

"Brother!" Fingon called across the blood-churned field, and his face was bright with some battle-madness or war-grace that made him look like the young, remarkable teenager who had climbed the towers of Tirion with his brother centuries ago.

"We're winning," Fingon said, and Turgon couldn't tell if his brother believed it or if he was trying to make Turgon believe it. Turgon should have known better. Turgon did know better. But he let himself smile back anyway and pretend that this moment of respite was something more than a moment, that the tide wasn't already turning against them even as they celebrated its turning, that the tide had turned the moment the ships had burned. 

This is what I should say in the eulogy: that Fingon was patient with me in ways that primed him for kingship. That when I was young and stupid and certain that I understood the world better than my father, he never dismissed my certainty and just waited for me to realise how little certainty could carry you when the ground beneath your feet turned to mire. 

"Someone should survive this, I suppose," he told me, the night before I took my people into the mountains. "If it's you, little brother, then at least I'll know our song will continue somewhere. That someone will remember we were more than this."

More than what? I should have asked. More than killers? More than the architects of our own exile? But I didn't ask, because I was afraid he would answer honestly, and his honesty devastated me more than his silences.

Later, when the tide had turned and the field was chaos and the carefully coordinated front was fragmenting into desperate clusters like blowflies upon a rotting corpse, the brothers found each other again. It was Fingon who found Turgon. And it was Fingon's armour that was rent. There was blood, not his own, mostly, not then, but some of it was, and the academic distinction had been all either of them could think about. There was a line of blood under Fingon’s upper lip. They fought back-to-back for a span of time that could not be measured. Minutes? Hours? Battle-time made moments infinite and eternities instantaneous. There was a point where Fingon slipped on mulch, horse-shite, and Turgon laughed for six thousand years until Fingon looked up, shite-faced, laughing harder than him, for another six thousand years. 

Between sword strokes, Turgon watched his brother's sharp and deliberate breathing, each exhale forced through gritted teeth like he was purging something toxic from his lungs. The High King didn't fight so much as devour the act of fighting, consuming the violence around him in great hungry gulps. Three orcs fell in the space it took most warriors to raise their guard. Four moves and Fingon had cleared a radius, his blade singing its way through the air with a certainty that looked almost careless if I didn’t know just how many centuries he spent feigning such carelessness. Then he turned, and for a heartbeat Turgon saw the exhaustion arc across his brother's face like a star burning out.

"Turgon," Fingon said, and he was not laughing now. "You must retreat."

"We retreat together," Turgon said, and he meant it. In that moment, he meant it with every fibre of his being.

"No," Fingon said, gentle and final. He didn’t say Beleriand needs you, or your family needs you or Arda needs you. He parried a blow meant for Turgon's skull, drove his blade up through an orc's jaw. "I need to buy you time to get them out."

"You are the king—"

"Please, brother." And it was the please that broke Turgon, because Fingon didn't ask. Fingon commanded, suggested, made pronouncements that made you feel it was you who made the terribly bright decision. But he didn't plead. "Please. Let me do this one thing for you. Let me hold this door open.” 

“I won’t forget this,” Turgon said, and felt outstandingly stupid the minute he said it, because how on earth might him forgetting such a thing even be a remote possibility? He’d never been the best at elocution when he was very young, had to practice all the words in his head over and over again before he could say them without stammering, and it had never truly mattered because he was the spare. But Fingon knew what he meant, because he never needed to be eloquent with his brother, because they had been children together and had spent three months once developing an entire language based primarily on squeaks and grunts that they used into adulthood until their father put his foot down, and no word between them was ever wasted. 

“You better not,” said Fingon, and squeaked, and it was a terrible set of last words, not the words of a king but the words of a brash older brother who knew everything, or at least knew enough to tell his brother what to do. “You better not forget it. I’d suggest writing it down.” 

And then he laughed amidst the mire, for another ten thousand years. 

Were I not a king. 

Were I not a king, were I not a king. 

Were I not a king, and the wounds to my heart not the wounds of a people, I might have the ability to understand my brother's death in a country we had no true place to die in, in a war that should have ended centuries ago. I would say it plainly and it would be enough. I would say something like, we must turn back, or we never should have come, or we were not born into exile and we do not have to die there. Something desperate and inadequate and embarrassingly earnest, because I am the High King’s little brother and I embarrassed him from the moment I was old enough to cling to his tunic and waddle around behind him, squawking for his attention. For him to look to me, yes, his face thundering bright with feckless hope, like he had on the morning when he told me what to tell them, when I wasn't listening because I was already standing on a rooftop years ago, eagle-spun wind upon my face, counting the bones left behind at my feet.

That's the image I return to, again and again in this ill-fated rehearsal. Neither battlefield nor blood nor the moment when I turned my back and led my people away from my brother's last stand, but that earlier rooftop, that stranger wind, that remarkable version of myself who convinced himself he understood what sacrifice meant because he could count the bones at his feet and tally the remains of other people's choices.

I was arrogant, then, the Turgon of three days ago. I'm arrogant now, but it's the arrogance of the survivor, which is the most corrosive kind. The arrogance that says: I lived, therefore I have chosen correctly. Therefore my arrival, my strategy, my withdrawal was justified. Therefore my brother's death, while tragic, was somehow necessary for the survival of his people, no matter how dispossessed. No, not dispossessed. Can I use such a word? Do I have such a right? Am I his people? No. No, I am his brother.

There will be some scribe or the other that points out the absurdity of standing within Gondolin's gleaming walls and calling myself dispossessed. I know this. Those whose lands we carved, the mortal tribes we barely acknowledged as we marched, they would laugh at the notion that Turgon suffers exile. 

We revel in it. I revel in it. I do. I will. Fingon, did you? Do you? Must we?

It has been three days. 

I never expected the dead to be so punctual in their visitations. But my brother Fingon returns to me every night, in the plural now, accompanied by a multitude whose names I cannot pronounce. He brings lines of soldiers with him. They speak in old languages and strange dialects and dead tongues in turn, refusing in their way to be legible to those of us fated to live on. Fingon's voice is now somewhere in that polyphony. It is no longer distinguishable, no longer mine to separate from this collective he has been joined to in death.

Have I not carried forward the very exile I claim to mourn? The answer sits in my throat like a stone: I am the one who stayed and the one who abandoned, the threshold and both rooms. This inheritance, written into my blood, this ancestral pattern repeating. How to speak my own name with clear eyes and steady hands. I, who build my sanctuary and hoard the memory of Valinor like a treasure while using its loss to justify these walls? The keeper of what was stolen and the one who keeps stealing it, hoarding light while the world outside grows dark.

If I could, I would reach past this land and towards the sea, searching for some old version of my Fingon, who exists outside the story of the Noldor in Beleriand, who can be mourned in isolation from all our other ghosts and all whom we helped make into ghosts. But my brother Fingon no longer exists in isolation. Dirges in war must be orchestral or silent: there is no in-between. Death was his reward, but not his alone.

War dirges must be orchestral or silent: there is no in-between. Perhaps we should indeed be silent. The other ghosts alongside him in the collective will remember not what we claimed we were doing or wanted to do but what we actually did, for dirges for the dead are the domain of the living. But here is what I've learned, in the three days since the Nirnaeth: there is no meaningful difference between King of Gondolin and High King of the Noldor, because both titles are euphemisms for the same essential failure. We rule over people who exist only because they haven't yet been slaughtered. 

But Fingon, how can I face my daughter now?

How can I tell my Idril, who will soon stand here before me, of this new component to the concentration of ghosts already in her blood? That the rain which falls on her will now always sound like the rain on the night of the Nirnaeth, that she has inherited now not only her uncle's absence but the whole shrouded procession of the anonymous unmourned who trail behind him?

How can I convince her once more that despite all this—the dreams thick with dying and the spectral fingers reaching for her in the ice-edged dark—there is still something wondrous in Beleriand that refuses to die even as we all try our best to kill it? This terrifying capacity to hope-without-sense, to look in the mirror and find a mirage, like as it is to a flooding well in a desert storm.

But is it truly hope? Where is the line between hope and ambition? Who is allowed ambition, and who must be content with hope? Heirs, spares. King, country, countrymen. You, Fingon, walked that line better than any of us, your hope always so feckless and necessary, that deliberate self-delusion you engaged in because without it you would sink into the mire, banners beaten into your blood. Like when you said you must retreat and knew then that there was nothing more to be done.

Once I believed the world was made of clear divisions of the righteous and the corrupt, the homeland and the exile, the savior and the destroyer. Standing here now, practicing words I may never speak aloud, I find those certainties crumbling like old parchment. The work of understanding what we have done here, what Fingon died trying to do, requires abandoning that comfortably discerning spirit. To accept the truth: my brother was noble and deluded, visionary and blind, worth mourning and worth questioning. 

Might ambition cloaked in hope redeem High King Fingon even after the exile? Yes, I think so, though that isn't saying very much. A man remains redeemable only insofar as the violence he hasn't yet committed is vaster than the violence he's perfected. We are but immortal after all, both slain and unslain, and so there are no bounds to the bloodshed we may yet wreak. And so, we are the most redeemable of the kindreds.

So here, then, is what remains: this small and futile hope-clad-ambition of Turgon of Gondolin, High King of the Noldor. That eventually, the rain will stop and the ground will dry. That my Idril, and her children after her, will not drown in an inheritance of unnumbered tears never theirs to shed. That even as the ground grows hotter and more unforgiving beneath our accursed race of stubborn stargazers, my brother's face as he hears my trumpeting host, thundering bright with feckless hope, will linger in that threshold between what we are and what we were meant to be and what we failed to become, holding the right door open for the right person to walk through one day.