Inedibles by Dawn Felagund  

Macalaurë waited for the hammerfalls to go silent before he took down the box. He'd been given it by his father for his last begetting day: a strategy game favored among the Noldorin intellectual elite. Nelyo had mastered it years before and played with a fluid ease among the daughters and sons of Tirion's scholars, swilling wine and flirting and pausing in his debates only long enough to inch a piece, seemingly without thought, toward victory.

Macalaurë attended as the harper, in the room but from afar, as though out to sea, watching the lights ashore, and indeed, he'd spend the day mastering a new song for the next gathering, playing until a harpstring snicked and lacerated his finger deep enough to bleed. So when Fëanáro's work ended, he lowered the game from the shelf and brushed the dust from it and brought it to his father, in hopes that it might welcome him past the musician's stage and into the communion of Tirion's elite.

He found Fëanáro still in the forge, wrapping a burned hand. His father's shoulders hunched around the wounded hand, his keen eyes dimmed, and Macalaurë trod silently enough to observe this before Fëanáro felt his presence and straightened.

Macalaurë offered the box, feeling stupid even as he did. "I wondered if you might teach me …"

Why did someone who composed pieces accessible to none but a few harpers that arose at Cuiviénen let his voice trail into uncertainty, mediocrity? He saw that question in his father's eyes. He straightened his shoulders. The box still dangled between them.

Fëanáro's gaze softened a bit. "Not today," he said. "I have this to finish. I will be at it until late."

Back in his room, Macalaurë reshelved the box. He bandaged his finger and returned to work.

Chapter End Notes

Macalaurë = Maglor
Nelyo = Maedhros
Fëanáro = Fëanor

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If the Tale of Tinúviel was the paean of moon-eyed romantics, the tale of Nerdanel was the national epic of ugly girls. The way everyone sat upright and smiling when Fëanor entered hand-in-hand with her, with her split ends and her freckles and her muscles. But when he took her home to bed oh! the panic in the parlor! the howling in the hall! Brilliant, bright-eyed, callipygian, keen-witted, fine-shaped, raven-haired, silver-tongued, High-Prince-of-the-Noldor Curu-fin-wë Fë-a-náro (his name stretched to a savor of a dozen words) wasted on her. Pushing coarse hair behind jug ears, ugly girls deliver the tale in triumph.

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Maglor had maintained an interest in the renderings of his people's history across the centuries. He was neither an expert nor connoisseur; he merely acquired artifacts at his convenience (not waiting in a line or anything like that), maybe by mail order or secondhand. He had a small collection that would be difficult to explain and likely dismissed as an old man's eccentricities—that is, if he was ever to age beyond the body of a middle-aged accountant (he would not).

When Rowena Morrill's calendar arrived and he paged to May, he said, "Oh," when he saw Lúthien: not an exclamation, just a bullet point in an ever-unspooling list that could be headed Well That's New. He certainly couldn't put it up in the office, though it might make him "righteous" enough (quote-unquote) to net an invitation to after-work drinks with the accountants who left one too many buttons undone (in his opinion, of course), revealing a furze of chest hair or parentheses of cleavage.

By now, Lúthien had stepped onto the stage of history in the roles of goddess and witch and damsel and temptress. This was just the latest iteration—and not the least-clad of them! She'd been carved onto the prows of ships, played by rouged men with melons in their bodices, and invoked in frantic Beltaine couplings. She could withstand being May's pin-up girl.

But he'd known her. Only in passing and, truly, mostly by reputation, but neither she nor her mother were to be trifled with: like wolf bitches, supple as the night, eyes afire with incinerating starlight, teeth not-unstained by blood. Even while his brothers lived, tales of her had been subdued to propriety—but it had not been benign magic that tamed even Curufin's hunger for the Silmaril to docility, that stripped Sauron to a naked fëa.

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Maglor was paid once in a small drawstring bag of gold coins given by a prince to the finest singer in the land. At home, he spread them on the table and moved the candle so light quavered across them.

Aulë's ichor, Curufin called gold: hard-won, precious, the stuff of gods. That it had been reduced to identical chips stamped with a misshapen face! (He could draw better!) It should grace crowns, hands, cup wine, or sing as harpsong.

But none remained to fashion it.

He curled upon a straw mattress and did not rise when the thieves took it.

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Tilion's job had become dull. Now that the assaults of Melkor and the threat of Ancalagon and, yes, the lusts for Arien were dissipated, he took his seat, long since molded to his posterior, and draped the reins across the well-worn crease of his hand and fell into muscle memory, twitching his wrists this way and that, uttering "git!" and "whooooa" without bothering to hear his own voice. He knew where eddies of wind would threaten the chariot and compensated flawlessly, so that an astronomer in his stone tower by the sea might set his telescope to the Moon's arc and always find Tilion's heavy-lidded face filling his viewfinder.

Steering the Moon gave a man a lot of time to think. And watch. He watched what transpired in Middle-earth. He saw many people die: heroes with swords that Tilion's arms-gone-frail probably could not lift, who spilled blood without a whisper of regret; he watched them beg for their lives at the points of swords or on the verges of cliffs. The tears of heroes contained the same salt as those of babes new-born.

He watched rich men who left their people to waste to dust by starvation's slow hand blubber when the relative mercy of a pitchfork pressed their own throats—their dying cries the same pitch as the orphans they'd made.

Tilion thought about this. He knew the prophecy. He would crash to the earth and die at the world's end. From his seat steering the Moon, he'd seen crashes of all sorts, in the progression of transit technology, and he knew the ugliness of limbs and heads and guts entangled with conveyance. Cantilevers and pistons and gears crushed flesh no matter what powered them, horse or steam or magic. He sometimes pondered his slender arms with his veins the color of the full-moon night and wondered what they would spill, when mangled, and how it would feel. How much would it hurt? He wondered if he'd scream and sob and beg like the people he watched from the seat of the Moon.

He reminded himself that people died quietly all the time, in dignity if not silence: the mothers blood-soaked in childbed, the grandfathers whose hourglass drained dry, the little children who caught disease like a cat catching butterflies. The butterflies, for that matter.

Tilion made up his mind that he would die like that, when the prophecy came to pass. He'd had millennia, after all, to live and steer the Moon that marked people's lives and watch what transpired. Under his light, loves were kindled. Peace forged, stronger than steel. Stories told that gave another gasp at life to the mothers and the grandfathers and the little children and the butterflies—and yes, the heroes and the rich men too. They were given dignity in the stories by those who remembered and loved them, despite their flaws. Tilion contemplated the bones of his hands, the blue-tinged nails that he clipped the night before he made new, palms damp with dew. He didn't want any of these small, precious things to fall to ruin, but no one did, he supposed, and yet all did. He would not be alone in going, when his time came.

The wind eddied and his wrists twitched and an astronomer showed her daughter the changeless face of the moon as he sank behind the mountains: another day closer to moonfall, but he'd be ready when the time came. Steering the Moon gave a man a lot of time to think.

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