Work Text:
The dead were arranged in the gardens of Doriath, dragged out from the stone tomb of Menegroth and laid out over the trampled ground. Under the stampede of boots, snow and leafless shrubs had been churned together into a muddy swirl, dashed here and there with blood. The bodies left new tracks, and melted some of the snow around them until they cooled.
Amras thought he had helped with the dragging; his hands were scraped as though he had been pulling something heavy, and he remembered the echo of his boots as he went down into the caves, and out again, and down. But it was a grey and empty swath in his memory. He knelt now in the snow before the corpses of Celegorm, Caranthir, and Curufin, and he could not say for how long he had been there.
Maedhros and Maglor were there and gone again, faces drawn and tight with shock and pain. In the distance he heard Maedhros shouting, but no matter. All Doriath was gripped by a deathly silence, the air swallowing any stray syllable, the very trees and stone hushed in mourning, or horror. This land did not mourn for them, after all.
Amras reached out cautiously, as though the bodies might crumble before his eyes, or his hand pass through. But they were still solid, if cold. Curufin’s hair had come unbraided and Amras skimmed it lightly with his fingertips. Caranthir had taken a blow to the head: bruises bloomed over skin that could no longer feel it, and blood had left a frozen waterfall from his nose over lips and teeth. Celegorm looked the least peaceful of the three, and Amras’s hand lingered longest over his chest, where his armor was rent and skin, bone, muscle all pulverized from his throat down to his sternum. Whatever power had been in Dior son of Lúthien had spent itself brutally here.
His hands were empty and slack, blood under his nails. Amras took one hand and held it between his. For a moment he felt a surge of something like a scream, but it sputtered in his chest. His brother’s hand was cold.
Celegorm’s bracers were still tight around his forearms; Amras traced his fingers over the graven pattern of star, arrow, fang. The leather was hard and smooth, tooled by a careful hand, a keen eye. One thing in which Celegorm was not hasty: his leathercraft. He trusted no one else to make his gear and he took pride in its adornment. Once it had been a mark of status and devotion, given who had taught him, but in Beleriand he had made all new designs and symbols for himself. Amras remembered him after Fëanor had burned, bent over his work with swivel knife or beveler in hand, eyes narrow as he remade himself. At that time Celegorm had never been more wrathful or despairing, and it made his work more intricate and lovely. After Lúthien, his wrath was greater; after the Unnumbered Tears, his despair. And what little craft he still did was unlovely then, and it had not saved him here.
Still, Amras could not bear to see it go. At Losgar the ships had sunken like charred twists of bone in the bay; if anything remained of Amrod’s body it was the water’s claim. Amras unlaced the bracers and slipped them over Celegorm’s hands, and after a moment’s thought, fastened them on his own arms.
Next he unbuckled the finely tooled belt, settling it around his waist. It was too large; Amras had always been slighter, and he felt like hardly a wisp now, numb in the snow and the silent woods. If he were dead too, he doubted that it would feel any different.
The strap of Celegorm’s quiver had been damaged, but maybe not irreparably. Amras worked it free of the mess of flesh and considered it for a long moment. Nearly every arrow had been fired; Amras could make more. His brother’s quiver he could not remake, his brother’s handiwork, his brother’s remains.
Methodically Amras stripped off everything he wanted, still in his soundless, reverent daze. The cold bled the sensation from his hands, but still he knelt there, tracing the interlocking patterns on the tooled leather belt, the boots, the straps of his armor.
At some point he came aware that he was not alone. Maedhros and Maglor had returned again, and conversed in low voices; Amras barely heard them over the deafening silence.
They said nothing of Amras’s acquisitions. How could they? It was Celegorm who had taught Amras to hunt, given him his first bow, showed him how to tan leather and tool it, shot arrow after arrow with him in that frozen time after Amrod burned, when the world was dark and too terrible to live in. Celegorm had understood the impotence of words and promises and comfort, he had pressed weapons into Amras’s empty hands. He had understood why Amras vanished into Ossiriand, and how to find him there at need. No one else had truly known him the way Amrod had, but Celegorm had come the closest.
And now he was gone. Doriath had been nothing but poison to him, brought nothing but trouble and shame, and now it had struck the last blood. A hollow win for a hollowed country.
“What to do with them now…?” Maglor said. He made an uncertain gesture in the corpses’ direction. “We cannot take them with us.”
“Burn them.” Maedhros was toneless, almost inaudible. His face was stone. “As Atar went, so should they.”
“It will take a lot of wood.”
Maedhros made no reply. Amras stood with effort, his knees affronted to unbend. All of Celegorm’s things were light and finely made, but they weighed him down like a sodden cloak. Even taking a breath was a heavy thing. Lying in the snow his brother looked so strange, almost frail, almost naked.
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He wondered if they might burn like Fëanor had, from solid to cinders in only moments, defying any flame more power than that within himself. But Doriath was a cold and bitter place, resistant to fire, and Amras thought if they had simply left the bodies as they lay, sooner or later they would have resolved into solid stone, hard and permanent as statues.
The kindling caught with reluctance, and the wood yielded a grudging flame. It licked halfheartedly up the pyre, reaching for its victims with frightened and cringing leaps and then shying away.
They did not burn like Fëanor. It took a long time for them to burn at all, and all the while Amras stood in the chill air and waited. The sun dropped away and shadow stole through the woods, and the pyre burned brighter than the distant, tepid moon. Amras’s mouth was set in a hard line, his hands cold and clenched around the strap of his brother’s quiver. He thought he should feel something, some fury or vengeance or despair or even shame, even fear. Who knew where now his brothers’ spirits wandered, or were snared? But he felt only the cold, and the echoing silence.