Back to Middle-earth Month 2010 Stories by Dawn Felagund

Idle Pleasure

Fëanor in exile in Formenos, on diligence and futility. A double-drabble.

Challenge: They say music soothes the savage beast. Or does it? Write a story surrounding the idea of music and music-making as something that does not calm and soothe but, rather, energizes or antagonizes.

In Tirion, music was never an idle pleasure for my son. He composed, he performed, he strove constantly to exceed his own exceptional abilities.

In Formenos, I fill the air with noise; I compose, I perform, I strive strive strive.

While my son languishes, and music becomes an idle pleasure.

No lock, no door, naught can bar it; it seeps like a somnolent fume into all corners of my life, no matter that I hammer and I temper and I master the most obstinate of metals, my son--the most gifted, the most like me--lies upon his back in the grass with the stars in his eyes and sustains a note upon a flute.

I fling the hammer through the window. The glass shouts as it is broken. I topple my work--the swords, the shields, the bold-formed statuary--and they scream against each other as they fall. The hammer is lost in the grass, no less to me lost than grasped in hand.

The note sustains, unspools like a roll of paper not worth marring with the banalities of this history.

I crouch beneath my worktable, blow upon frozen fingers, tremble like flightless, songless bird in a cage.