“What do you mean my parentage is ‘in dispute’?!” Lord Glorfindel laughed.
“You’re the only named member of your house,” Umbarto said, wagging his tail like a dog. He was a skin-changer. Currently, he was a fox with bluish-black fur and green eyes.
“Our house,” he said. This was his boy now. He didn’t need Maglor or any of those kin-slayers. He just needed him: his father! If it was easier for him to be a fox than a person, he could be a fox.
This boy was giving them an even worse fate than the Doom of Mandos: reading Reasons Eru Sucks, Ardan Elven Marriages are Garbage! Ardan Elven Sensibilities, and Ardan Dwarven Sensibilites; out loud, to Mandos!
He was right, specifying Ardan Elf was clue enough that this boy was something else. He wasn’t a cosmic horror, he just wasn’t from around here, on top of being raised atrociously.
And Glorfindel absolutely did not want him playing by Skyrim Dragon language-learning rules! Languages were hard to learn unless you grew up with them, and this boy definitely did not grow up around here. Apparently, he’d considered sending in a traumatized adult. He ultimately decided no, he was “doing what he did best and sending in a traumatized child”.
He was right, you cannot get all your parenting skills from a 400-year-old book. And of all the books to pick from, why would you pick the one where the father-god made his son die for the sins of the mortals he’d created? After being tortured for days on end and paraded through the streets, no less! And on top of that, use that book as justification for enslaving multiple groups of people? The literature of his world truly must’ve been lacking.
Umbarto was determined to contribute something to the world he’d grew up reading stories about as a child.
His boy had quite a few fates to defy, including Celebrimbor’s. Apparently, he was normally fated to die “bashed in by his own hammer in SA 1697 after being captured and tortured by the Dark Lord―with his corpse paraded afterward in battle as an intimidation tactic”.
This child ultimately knew that some truths needed to come pass. And he was correct, their family’s honor had already been lost anyway, what more could it possibly have to lose?
His pen-ultimate goal was to sail to Valinor in order to hero-worship Nerdanel: “a mom who wasn’t respected by her husband at all even though she was better than him at every turn, especially at coming up with names!” He even took her rejected names for her youngest sons.
Then later, he’d written: “Lady Galadriel will think I am absolutely absurd for even wasting a moment worrying about being ‘adopted out of wedlock’! Honestly! Ardan Elves may care about their reputations, but not to that degree!”
Correct, Ardan Elves did not care about their reputations to that degree.
This foxy boy was his! All he wanted was a loving family… Oh, he had a loving family now! And this loving family would never put him in charge of babysitting, politics, or numbers. He knew what he was good at: writing. All he had to do was be the funniest storyteller / essayist anyone in Arda had ever seen.
“The most important part of writing an essay is staying on topic,” he’d written in his essay titled: Principles of War. It started out with several legitimate points. But by point 7, he’d written: “I forgot what I was going to put here. Let’s put some cats here for now. Cats! Cats, cats, cats, cats, cats!”
“So have you remembered what you were going to put there?” Lord Glorfindel asked later.
“Nope,” Umbarto smiled. “In real warfare, you don’t always get the units you’re expecting.”
“That’s right,” Glorfindel nodded. “You don’t always get the units you’re expecting.”
“I’ll patch that in later.”
In a roundabout way, he’d concluded he was an Ardan Elf whether anybody liked it or not. Due to Ardan Elves’ immortality being based on their connection to this world, and as this world was the world he was the most connected to―he wasn’t even very well connected to the world he was trying to build. Imagine that! Being your own Eru and saying “No! I’m going on a vacation! I do still care about all of you, but I need to cool down. At least Fëanor and his kin-slaying brats had a goal in mind! You idiots went forth and conquered because you were bored!! You are not responsible enough to be here!!!”―he was an Ardan Elf, too.
He really did know quite a lot about this world. And many other worlds. Too many worlds. He needed to focus on this one. With ada! And ada would cuddle him all he liked.
He was really sweet. He was right. Arda didn’t need yet another warfare-crazed, treasure-obsessed child. It needed him! And Lord Glorfindel wanted him. Ada was a Balrog-slayer, Umbarto could ruin his reputation all he liked.
And he was correct, Fëanor did not deserve this boy. Kin-slaying aside, he was terrible at coming up with names! He’d named his second-to-last son “Last Finwë” when there was a latter-more child to name “Last Finwë”. And he’d named his second-oldest son “Commanding Finwë”.
“What did Fëanor want his son to command his father to do?” Umbarto had written in Reasons Eru Sucks. “Fëanor is a very silly boy. This is why Maglor’s better known by his mother-name. His mother is better at coming up with names. Nerdanel gave him the power to cleave gold! That’s an awesome power to have!”
He even knew that was not what that meant! This child was a very silly boy too.
“Besides,” Umbarto had written in his story: Shenanigans in Skyrim, speaking through the voice of his his angel, Shimmer, “as someone who has no blood of his, he’d never consider you family anyway.”
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