Elenwë :)

squirrelwrangler:

Elenwë recognizes the other student when he enters the library and makes a beeline to the books for engineering, pulling out several on applying geometry to the construction of buildings. It is hard not to, when he is someone she has known all her life. The boy, for all he is taller than any man Elenwë is familiar with, struggles to lift a tome of mathematics for use in masonry from a shelf without bringing the entire row down with him, too tightly packed are the books. It is a new author than the book from yesterday, Elenwë observes. For the last few days she has watched him come to this corner of the library, hunting answers to his latest project.

Elenwë studies the use of numbers, the new calculations and new symbols created by Rúmil and the monks outside Valmar who have devoted themselves to Vairë. She enjoys mathematics free of examples involving the measure and weight of loads or accounting, the beauty of how seamlessly they fit without a stonemason in sight. There is a purity in numbers that is closer to the Songs of the Valar than any elven voice. Her family approves of her interest in mathematics once she expressed it as her exploration of art and truth, and has pooled money to support her ability to study under the best lore-masters in Tirion. Next season, her father promises, she can go to the monastery of the recording of history and learn beauty and knowledge from the source. Her family disapproves of spending all their time in Tirion, least they forget what it is to be of the Vanyar. The Noldor value that which they can physically sense, to claim knowledge and beauty by using it to create something which they can show off as fruit of their labor and genius. Elenwë tires of this.

Though she does admit, as the boy brings over his book and a pad of parchment scribbled dark with calculations for the best angles for a new buttress, there is a benefit to practical needs of numbers.

The boy is the second son of Prince Nolofinwë, who is married to the daughter of her father’s employer. Elenwë is only a year older than Prince Turukáno, and they grew up together and thus are comfortable around each other. The prince is very amicable, delighting in meeting new friends and skilled in giving them ease. When Elenwë waited in the scriptorium as her parents worked on the page illuminations and bond the books for the numerous Noldor nobles of Tirion, Turukáno was the one to gleefully approach the golden-haired scribes and question them about their craft and their accents. He brought Elenwë sweets as they watched her cousins stretch the vellum on framework and mix ink for letters. Elenwë’s family has been in partnership with the family of the princess, Anairë, since before the Teleri arrived, and so are often teased that they are more Noldor than Vanyar, if not for their hair. Turukáno liked to learn from the Vanyar scribes, more so than Elenwë who found the work tedious and the smells irritating, so this interest in masonry takes her by surprise. He was the only one of his siblings to visit the workshop, to question the Vanyar about their work and desire to understand why certain words and concepts were held as beautiful, why an illustration was added to a certain page, and why they only stayed a few decades before they transferred back home claiming to miss the mountains. Elenwë knows that confused the boy most, for Tirion was in a valley of the Pelóri, surrounded by mountains. The air was wrong, they told him, so Turukáno declared they should move the workshops to the top of a tower.

“You like the air here?” he says to her, and Elenwë, eyes lingering over a funicular polygon, belatedly realizes this is a question. When she looks up to meet his eyes, she realizes what his true and pure question is.

…

This started off as head-canons about anairë and elenwë here and turgon here (and kazaera’s delightful mathematician Elenwë – sorry I can’t give you any actual numbers as I never got beyond introductory trig and mostly focused on physics) and became a Turgon proposes indirectly to Elenwë fic.

So basically you got the long-form of this.

I’m sorry, I’ll write something with her and no Turgon or Idril eventually.