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It is not to Nienna’s house that one goes for healing. That is Estë’s domain and her dwelling is busy with comings and goings. Behind the trailing drapery that divides one room from another in Nienna’s house, there is peace, but it is a sorrowful peace. The Maiar who serve her are subdued, and for the most part, they do not disturb their mistress’s guests.

The Lord of the Valar had come there not to heal, but to reflect. Though his meditation was occasionally troubled by colors and flashes and bangs from outside.

“Better that one had gone to serve Aulë,” one of the Maiar remarked as Manwë looked up. “He’s trying to recreate the light of the Trees, rather than accept their loss and grieve it. I’ll tell him to stop if he’s bothering you.”

“No need, no need,” Manwë said, more irritated by the explanation than by the noise. He gestured for the talkative Maia to move along. Then he floated out his mind, cloud-like, towards the mystic yearning of the Vanyar, the confused mourning of the Teleri, and the strangely amputated remains of the Ñoldor in Tirion. He could hear the prayers the city offered under its still-new, returned king.

He could not hear the ones who had left. Not even the echo of your lamentation shall pass over the mountains. So Mandos had spoken, and all things came to him eventually. Nothing escaped his fatal pull.

Mandos was standing in for Manwe while he meditated, a steward’s steward. Sometimes Manwë thought idly that Mandos in his stern wisdom might have been a better ruler, and he wondered if Mandos ever thought so as well. Though whether the other Valar, never mind the children of Ilúvatar, would have abided so grim and unbending a king was another question. While much had been lost and little left unchanged by recent events, Eru must have made Manwë king for a reason.

But after the Doom, it bothered him to reach out to the revolted Ñoldor and hear nothing. Surely Mandos’s power did not extend that far? He could not cut his fellow Valar off from their subjects.    

Yet not a whisper had been heard of them, not even when the larger part dared the Helcaraxë. A wall of silence had fallen, which even the dying in their agony could not cross.

Still Manwë came regularly to Nienna’s house, to listen through that wall. And today he was rewarded. Reaching across the distance from Beleriand to Valinor, faint but clear, a prayer rose up from one of the rebels. Manwë’s whole being sang, feeling some of the joy he had taken in the music that built the world, a joy muted since the Darkening but not gone. They were not cut off forever, these misguided Firstborn who had left a harbor red with the blood spilt in their haste to leave. He could still hear them, or at least one of them.

What he heard chilled his rejoicing. And he could not respond recklessly. He would take counsel on this matter.

“I have called you both here to advise me. As you know, my decisions have not always turned out well.”

Mandos did nothing so commonplace as sighing, but he made sure his liege felt a ripple of his frustration. If a black hole could ripple. “If you are still tearing yourself apart over how Melkor’s release ended, you were right the first time.”

"Right? You did not agree with my decision to release him. You were silent.”

Nienna, who had not been silent, covered her face with her veil. She had aided Melkor’s efforts that once, and only that once. But what need was there of a second time, with such tragic results?

Within his bright flare, Mandos grew darker and denser than usual. “I do not say you were right to believe your brother was now free of the evil he had done. I say you were right that if you had not released him as you promised, you would indeed have taken a step down his path. Do not regret the evil consequences, when otherwise there would have been still greater evil.”

“To mourn is not always to regret,” Nienna’s soft voice carried nonetheless.

“You are both wise even among the Valar,” Manwë said, “and so it is that I ask your counsel. This is the prayer of Fingon, Fingolfin’s son, which has reached me from Beleriand: ‘O King to whom all birds are dear, speed now this feathered shaft, and recall some pity for the Noldor in their need!’”

Silence followed. Manwe wondered if they’d understood the thunderbolt he’d just hurled. “He wishes for the skill and strength to slay his dearest friend, who lies in unending torment across a chasm he cannot cross. He wishes the kill to be clean.”

There was another silence as each of them weighed the dreadful thought, broken only by another explosion from outside the house.

“Why do you not consult Eru rather than us?” Mandos asked finally. “Why are you in Nienna’s household, and not on the mountain of Taniquetil?”

Manwë puffed at this, not a storm-cloud warning but the natural expansion as water rises through the endless sky. “I do not need to reach the mountain to ask anything of Eru. He is always there. And rather mysterious this time. He said I knew what to do, and would do it.”

“Yet you don’t.” Mandos said. “I don’t know how you heard this prayer. I know you suspected me of trying to stop it, but I only stated a fact, as I thought. The prayers of these murderers would not reach us. I don’t know how this one did.”

“I think,” Nienna said cautiously, “that they haven’t tried to pray, since hearing your Doom. We haven’t heard their cries because they’ve stifled them themselves. How can their lamentations reach us if they do not utter them? Fingon must be very desperate, to pray when he believes he won’t be heard.”

Manwë found that thought more disturbing than if the prayers had somehow been swept into the infinite vortex of Mandos. The distance was more than physical.

“So you think Manwë should answer this prayer? Guide the arrow to give Fingon’s friend a swift death?” Even swaying back and forth, form indistinct, Mandos had a certain immutable solidity. “They wanted to be free of us. Why should we not leave them free?”

The wrath of Nienna is slow to kindle, but it is aroused particularly by cruelty. Wet with weeping, she still burned. “You would not let Fingon be responsible for still the still greater suffering of his friend, should the arrow fail to kill?”

“I would not ‘let’ anything. I would not act at all. Fingon may do as he will.”

Nienna nodded, but did not agree. “He does not ask any mercy for himself. He does not ask for a miracle. He only asks for a swift death for another. And he has reached out to us, which none of the others have.”

Manwë did not regret asking them, despite the clash that was fast developing. They had made something about this prayer clear to him.

“This is the valor of despair, not hope,” he said.

The others turned to him, surprised by his intervention, but eager to hear his words.

“One of you wishes me to allow the revolted Ñoldor to make their way in the world alone, as they once wished, and let the consequences be what they may. It is, after all, their doom. The other wishes for me to show pity, but that pity is death itself. I will not be the cold and distant ruler who is appealed to only for this most terrible of mercies. There is another way.”

“You don’t mean…”

“…to rescue him?”

The overlapping voices for once accorded.

“That is no mercy at all,” Mandos said. “For this Maedhros whom Fingon seeks to rescue has bound himself with a fearsome oath, and perhaps he will be the downfall of his own. He has sworn that neither love nor law will restrain him, and his will is steadfast. Should he live free, with that will only strengthened by his long torment, I fear the end he will make for himself and others.”

Manwë turned to Nienna, but she shook her head, and he heard the slight music of tears falling like raindrops.

“Mandos speaks with foreknowledge,” she added. “He is right that it would be no mercy.”

Manwë could not deny the force of their words. But neither of them felt the quickening of hope he did now. Perhaps this was why Ilúvatar had chosen him, and not Mandos with all his deep knowledge of law and consequence, or Nienna with her reverent insight into grief, the painful mystery of life in Arda. Perhaps they knew too much to make this leap in the dark.

“Our foresight is not immutable,” Manwë said. “If even Melkor’s marring of the music shall be brought to good, if even a bloody and ill-conceived rebellion shall bring forth deeds of song, how much more the gift given freely, the offering of hope?”

Light flared outside, a rainbow of all shades, but quickly went out and was followed by a few squeals, as if the Maia outside had suffered a minor burn. Not the most dignified accompaniment, but it fit well enough with what Manwë had just said about the music, and he thought it would be hypocritical to tell Nienna to rein in the Maia who was causing all this.

Mandos, having no such compunctions, called outside sarcastically, “Have you brought the Trees to life again, or are you still tinkering?”

Nienna said, “Denial is a part of grief, as well.” She turned to Manwë. “Do not show pity because you think it must surely bring forth good. Or you will come to grief, and perhaps not choose the path of mercy again.”

Mandos darkened and brightened in agreement. “Even the wisest cannot tell whether they have averted doom or hastened it.”

And they were both very wise. That was why Manwë had asked them. But he felt again the joy he had felt at the beginning of the world, when his brother was yet his brother, and the music was young. “The ruler I wish to be, the ruler I believe Eru desires me to be, would do this. I will not turn from this path or regret it, come what may.”

Nienna’s veil fluttered over her face again, though what expression she hid, no one ever knew. Mandos rippled once more, this time with amusement. The law of the universe was laughing. “Do not make any hasty vows, whatever soft spot you may have once had for Fëanor.” Then the strange laughter ended. “I believe you, my king.”

Manwë himself felt a strange buoyancy, floating in the blue. Whether striations of white or a thunderbearing nimbus approached did not matter. He was prepared for whatever came.

"I shall send the Eagles. Let that Maia outside dispatch my message. It will give this house a little peace, and perhaps heal him a little of our great loss to be the instrument of rescue to others."

Nienna, composed again, revealed herself. “Olorín!” she called, and when the Maia appeared with unusual promptness, asked, “Have you been listening to us this whole time? Was all this invention a ruse?”

The eavesdropping Olorín had heard everything.

Mandos loomed over the rogue Maia, who sent off sparks of panic until he saw Manwë and Nienna struggling to suppress their amusement. And the echoing voice of a collapsed star, even in jest, had the force of doom.

“Perhaps you will have learned something, then, from your king.”