"He is not coming home."

The Quenya words fell softly into the quietude of the morning. The long colonnade overlooked the street, and there she turned, gazing down the empty way for a tall figure, clad in red, with dark hair limp from the forge's heat and eyes fiery with purpose. So often she had seen him so, coming home.

But he was not coming home anymore. Her husband rested in the halls of Mandos – if such a spirit as his could ever rest.

She thought of him wistfully now, not with anger, for the time that lay between had softened the fierce passions that rent her soul when Fëanáro chose his jewels over the lives of his kindred. Yet even then she had longed for his return, and wept that night in Mahtan's house, listening in vain for his returning footsteps. Such a strangely quick, vibrant stride he had, and she would know it in a heartbeat.

She had not heard it for a hundred Years of the Sun.

She thought of him in the days when he had looked at her and her alone, and the nights of spinning under the stars by the light of Telperion, and his sudden, low laugh that was the sweeter for how seldom it came. As often as not, it was that Fëanáro that she wished back again – and not the one that had left her; the one who laughed no longer, who was ice without and inferno within, and whose hands were restless unless they held his shining jewels. Her longing shamed her, for the first Fëanáro was long, long gone, and she knew she could not have brought him back.

At times, though her stern repudiation of his choices never wavered, she wondered whether she should have remained by his side. She had grieved the harder at his death to know that she had not been with him in the end; and she should not have left her sons without a mother.

"Maitimo, Makalaurë." She named them softly aloud, in the same way as she had spoken earlier: a reminder of the things that are. "Tyelkormo. Carnistir. Atarinkë." Her voice dropped. "Ambarussa."

Where were they now?

She shut her eyes and saw them all for an instant, a wish-picture so vivid it might have been memory or vision. Her eldest son kneeling with the half-grown twins clambering over his knees and shoulders, Tyelko's face split in a wild grin, the dark brothers in the middle of a half-serious spar of words, and her gold-cleaver with one hand on his harpstrings and the other seeking to separate the quarrel. Not so had they left her. Not so would they return.

Do all our kind dwell so in the past? Perhaps we have the more time to dwell in it. Would that we might leave it behind forever.

She held back her bitterness, but it was not easy against the lonely rent in her heart.

Nerdanel turned her head, listening – listening for footsteps. But they did not come, and the russet-haired Elda turned and left the balcony.