Tactile

Canon compliant (but not Silmarillion compliant).  Nerdanel knows the very first time she holds her youngest son of his tragic fate.  Quenya names used (Fëanor = Fëanáro, Amras = Umbarto).  This is all about that random non-canon branch off the plot in which Amras dies at Losgar, an event which has already been somewhat explored.  Therefore, you could connect this story to "Run" and its derivatives as well as "Waste", "Remorseful" and "Heavy".  One thing to clear up is the confusing nature of the piece.  It's experimental (and I'm half-lucid right now anyway LOL), so go with it.  Takes place in the Years of the Trees.

Disclaimer: I don't own the Silmarillion or any of Tolkien's other works (obviously)

Pairings: Fëanor x Nerdanel (but this isn't romantic)

Characters: Nerdanel, Amras, Fëanor (mentions all of the other brothers indirectly as well as the Valar and possibly Eru)

Warning: not quite canon compliant, precognition and visions, burning alive and drowning (in semi-explicit detail), possibly slight sexism

Song: Three on Three

Words: 1,645
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tactile (adjective): perceptible by touch; tangible; of, relating to, or being the sense of touch
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tactile

It was quite common knowledge amongst the Firstborn that mothers often experienced some manner of foresight the first time they held their infant child within the circle of their arms.  The precognitive itch was no myth, for it was all too familiar to Nerdanel--proud mother of five until the early hours of the morning.

Now proud mother of seven.

And each time she held one of her sons in her arms, she could clearly recall that feeling.  It was something special, beyond the realm of explanation, like brushing a dream-world.  She could not have explained it or described it to save her own life, though she had tried.  Fëanáro--being the stubborn ass she had fallen so helplessly in love with--thus scoffed at the "legend" revolving around the naming of children, despite the fact that the names often proved prophetically correct.  He did not like anything that could not be touched or explained through simple physics and deductive reasoning, and thus considered it all a massive coincidence.

Never had Nerdanel been able to explain her naming choices.  Not even to herself.

It was always a glimpse.  The flash of soft red curls hiding glowing eyes.  The whisper of a deep voice rolling over the land.  The quick temper writhing beneath a soft exterior.  The flush of freckled cheeks, scarlet on white.  The sight of her husband's gaze staring with piercing intensity.

But it was just that.  A glimpse.  Nothing tangible.  A swift ghost of the future come and gone in the blink of an eye, touching her irrevocably and lingering forever in the back of her thoughts, but still as water slipping through her cupped fingers.  It was not true foresight, but merely a push in the correct direction, and she imagined these passing moments were the hints and nudges of a Power beyond the realm of this world giving insight into newly born souls.

She had never heard of anything more than this brush with ephemeral otherworldliness.  Never heard of anything stronger.  Anything touchable and corporeal.

Until now.

She was an artist, and she knew touch like she knew air and water.  She knew the feeling of heat soaking into her palms.  Knew the tender warmth of Laurelin caressing her bare skin.  Knew the consistency of wet clay rubbing its soft edges into her hands.  She knew the difference between dreams and reality, but sought to make dreams into reality.

And she knew what she experienced when she held her seventh son was real.  Tactile.

From the very moment he was placed in her arms, it was as if another world overlapped the true timeline.  Darkness fell about her as a shroud, and before her eyes she saw him.

It was undeniably her youngest son, grown to adulthood.

And so like to his father he looked as he walked past her.  Perhaps he shared not the same color of hair or iris, but those eyes flashed bright in the strange, foreign blackness, insolent and determined with an indomitable will to succeed no matter the cost.  No diffidence was there to be found in his quick steps, in his insidious movements as he swept through the sleeping camp.

Nerdanel followed, feeling the rocks sharply against her bare feet and the cold wind splash across her face, carrying with it the scent of ocean salt and breaking waves.  Shivers rocketed through her body, pinching at her skin and tracing their cold fingers down her spine.

Something was wrong.  Very wrong.

She knew that even before her youngest son boarded the towering white ship alone, eyes tracing over the graceful sculpture of wood and gem carefully shaped into a swan, its jewel-eyes staring off into the dark.  And, though she had no idea what was happening, she could see in his eyes the fury and the horror and the fear, wished that she could wrap her arms about him and hold him to her breast.  Reaching out, she tried to grasp his silken hair...

Tried to trace a flawless cheek...

But he turned sharply away, and the acrid smell of burning wood and paint was sucked through her senses, stinging the inside of her nose and singing the inside of her throat.  Shocked, she snapped her head around to behind, and her eyes were blinded with the wall of flame rising from the dark water swirling below.

Dancing fire was licking its way upwards, eating the ivory feathers away with voracious greed.  Smoke nearly slapped her in the face, searing against her eyes, bringing hacking coughs up from her lungs when she breathed in the ashy heat and choked on its grating thickness.  Sucked the energy out of her limbs and left her slipping downwards to the floor, scrambling away without sight and without thought.

There was only orange and red and gold, everywhere flickering in and out of blackness.  She could taste his fear upon her tongue, feel the heat grow and grow until it was as a molten brand to her bare flesh.  Melting away whiteness.  Burning.

She was burning.

He was burning.

And screaming, ringing and ringing against her eardrums.  The pain of death was beyond anything she could imagine, and yet it was the sight of him, the charred, ragged patches spreading across his flesh, pealing it back, eating straight down to the bone and leaving it blackened, that brought her mind once more to the surface.

Again, she reached for him--in comfort or in delusion, she could not say--fingers just brushing the ashy remains and the licking tongues of fire before he fell back into darkness...

And then there was cold.  Like plunging into frigid water with a heavy weight chained to her ankle, pulling downwards until gray spread and spread and...

"Nerdanel?  Nárinya, are you well?"

And then it ended as brutally fast as it had begun, interchanging truth and fiction in a heartbeat.  She looked down expecting a corpse, but the child was sleeping so peacefully in her arms, cooing in his sleep and brushing tiny, perfect little fingers to her skin.  Beneath her touch, that little tuft of vibrant red hair felt exactly as she had seen in her nightmare, so very downy to her fingertips.

More tactile than she could have dreamed.  And more terrifyingly familiar.

"His name is Umbarto."

Her husband's eyes widened from where he stood watching as a sentinel over mother and child, and for once he was surprised into momentary shock at the scant few words.  Lips parted, but no voice at first came from within his throat, seemingly frozen into eerie silence.  After all, what father wanted such a name for his son--a name that boded ill fate for its owner?

"Surely you do not mean that..." he whispered.

But she did.  "I saw it," she whispered. "I saw him."

I saw him die.  Felt him die.

But she knew as soon as she spoke that it was the wrong thing to say to win over that logical mind. "You saw something," he commented, voice low and mocking, derisive with its disbelief. "You had a wild daydream resulting from fatigue--is that a reason to give your child such a disturbing mother-name?"

"It was not a daydream."  She knew it wasn't.  For how could such a frighteningly touchable false reality have come from her imagination?

Never before had it happened.

"You need to rest." Condescendingly, he leaned down and pressed a kiss to her forehead, but at the same time snatched the child away, holding the newborn with the ease of a seasoned father with just the tiniest undercurrent of unsettled anxiety. "Please, Nerdanel, get some sleep.  You must be exhausted."

I did not imagine this, she wanted to snarl.

All the same, she knew better than to argue and fight with her mate, for it was a battle that could not be won.  That same will and fire within her son in her vision was a reflection of that which she witnessed now in her husband's gaze.  Self-confidence bordering on arrogance, assurance in his own intellect and persistent determination to be correct if only to avoid creeping fear in dark uncertainty.  Valar forbid that she might be right and he might be proved incorrect!  That their son was doomed from his very birth!

But to try and convince this skeptic was not worth the effort.

When the time came, Nerdanel knew that she would know what she needed to do.  In her core, she knew it would come upon them as a shadow from the North, and its cold touch would bring her back to those moments in the lightless world of terror that haunted the recesses beyond her eyelids, the moment she first touched her youngest.  She would know...

But for now, she watched Fëanáro slip away with little Umbarto safely tucked into the crook of his powerful arm and bided her time, eyes fluttering into sleep.

Let him believe it was delusion.  But she knew different.  She had felt it, as real as the sheets beneath her trembling fingers and the sweaty strands of hair stuck to her face.  As real as the tears now tracking down her cheeks and leaving small wet circles upon her shift, hot dampness against her chilled flesh.

Her husband would fool himself, call it nothing--fall into the trap.  But she would never forget.  No matter how much she wished these tidings were untrue.  She believed.

Because she had touched that charred dust with her own fingers.  And it had been solid evidence of the undeniable truth.  That was no hallucination or nightmare.  No phantasmagoria.  Time had bent and overlapped and revealed.

It had warned.  But it was a warning that would go unheeded.  And that was, perhaps, the greater tragedy in the end.
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God, I'm so tired right now.  So if there are mistakes or holes in fluency, it's because I'm trying not to fall asleep as I sit here writing this.  Let's just say that I did not get a lot of sleep last night.  Anyway, I thought it would be fun to write a prompt like "Tactile"--which in of itself constitutes something corporeal--as defining something completely incorporeal.  It was fun, even though I'm not awake enough to truly appreciate it.

I don't mean to be mean to Fëanor, I really don't, but he seems like he'd be really condescending if he thinks he's right and everyone else is wrong.  He is supposed to be the genius, after all, right?  And I could easily see this issue as becoming the reason Nerdanel stays behind, possibly even reason enough for their marriage to--in part--break up.  But we'll see where this arc takes me.  I feel like I start a new one every other day, but this is attached to older pieces, so I don't know if you can call it a new arc.  Maybe it's part of "Vital" and "Puzzle".

The song is Three on Three from Pokémon the First Movie (composed by John Loeffler).  I was little when this movie first came out and remember going to see it and getting the cards.  I was rather obsessed with Pokémon when I was little (not nearly as obsessed as my sister is now LOL) and I loved this movie.  And I loved the music.  Made my parents get me the soundtrack and everything.  It's not the most elegantly composed piece ever (obviously), but it has sentiment attached, and the right amount of sweetness mixed with epic drama to be affixed to a piece with such ups and downs in setting.

Hopefully that was understandable.  Now, I am going to sleep.  Before I keel over and drool on my keyboard and forget to publish this until 8 AM tomorrow.