Sharp Things in the Way by Dawn Felagund

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Sharp Things in the Way

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~4740 YV. Doriath.
It was usually the way, in Daeron's experience, that determination to avoid that single sharp thing in the way of an otherwise smooth journey resulted in a disastrous collision.

"Let me row," Lúthien insisted. They were at the age where the few years she had on him were the difference between the lithe strength of a young adult and the knobby-limbed clumsiness of mid-adolescence. They were also at the age where his internalization of certain notions of how transactions between men and women should unfold obligated him to grasp the oar tighter. She let out an abrupt sigh. "Come now. Everyone knows that I am better at the oar than you."

She was. Naturally athletic, she was better at the oar—and at climbing, and at sport, and at running, and at swimming—than most anyone their age, including most of the boys. Dance tutors came daily now to Menegroth, but trying to redirect her interests into more appropriate feminine directions was like trying to reroute a river with a handful of stones flung at its surface.

But Daeron insisted, "I am more than capable," unable to keep the prickly note from his voice, and Lúthien then seemed to apprehend what was at work here. "No one will think less of you, Daeron. You have a lot of talents that I can't even imagine. I'll get us there faster is all. And there's Nassarn…"

A picnic lunch sat in the canoe between them. It was one of the first nice days of spring, and the creek was just beginning to run fast—fast enough that he wouldn't have to do much besides steer the canoe (and therefore needn't dread becoming winded in front of her) but not so fast that even Daeron couldn't steer them clear of Nassarn, a notorious pointed rock that poked just above the surface of the water about halfway to the picnic grounds upon a soft beach where the creek met the Esgalduin. It was known for tearing the bottoms out of canoes attended by inattentive rowers, but Daeron was not inattentive. From the time he pushed them free from the pebbly bank and into the current of the creek, he thought of it. He imagined himself skillfully avoiding it with such ease that, once it was safely behind them, Lúthien would remark on his skill and he would get to say casually, "Oh, I hadn't even really noticed it. Well, it's behind us now."

Lúthien was talking about a game of handball played the evening prior. Daeron knew next to nothing about handball, which excused him from doing much besides making attentive noises and thinking about Nassarn. He imagined the current slipping easily around it, the canoe poised easily atop the water. He imagined paddling wide around it, which would let the current pull just hard enough to let Nassarn slip by noticeably to their right. Within touching distance. He imagined the strong, confident strokes that would accomplish that. He watched it pass in his imagination again and again.

The canoe rounded a bend, and there it was. "He tried to grab the ball," Lúthien was saying, "and I spun just so—those dancing lessons are paying off after all!—and—don't forget Nassarn!"

"I haven't."

He was edging closer to the bank already. He could see the starlight on the water making two bows of silver light as the water flowed around Nassarn. The current would do the work of taking him around it. The nose of the canoe slid around to point at Nassarn. He pulled harder on his left to straighten up parallel to the bank again.

"Daeron. Nassarn."

"I know. I'm going around it."

But he wasn't. The nose of the canoe had eased around to point again at the rock. The current was increasing, and the canoe dropped off a shelf of water then. He pulled hard to the left. The canoe straightened again. He gave two extra pulls on the oar to be sure. "Just think," he said to Lúthien, trying to hide the tension in his voice, "of the dancing lessons as a chance to be able to dance to my—"

"Nassarn!"

As Daeron pulled hard on the oar and poised the words on his lips to tell her that they were safely past, he heard Nassarn bite into the bottom of the canoe. It sliced the length of the canoe, the wood prickling up along the tear in splinters, like the hackles lifting on a frightened animal.

That was the usual way of such things, Daeron came to learn.

~oOo~

20 FA. Ivrin. Mereth Aderthad.
Daeron had made up his mind to avoid Maglor, the Fëanorian bard, at the Mereth Aderthad. Thingol had expressed a keen interest that Daeron should see the newcomers and learn what he could of them. Daeron took that command literally. Seeing them didn't require direct interaction and, in any case, there were many more of them than just Maglor: six or seven or something like that. (Daeron knew that there were seven of them in total—he was a loremaster and it was his business to known such details—but feigning vagueness on this particular point seemed to simultaneously emphasize his lack of notice of their presence in his king's lands and their ridiculous and excessive number—Elves were not hounds and were not supposed to be whelped in litters, as it seemed to him the Fëanorions by their number and their purported bearing had been.) If anything, he'd speak to one of the others. The oldest was supposed to have some bearing of diplomacy, as was the short one who was a metalsmith. The golden-haired third was insipid and the youngest two useless. The middle one was touchy and strange and to be avoided. Or so he'd heard.

Daeron and Mablung were among the last to arrive at Ivrin; Thingol had kept recalling them from their preparations to depart with additional and trifling instructions, and then the Teiglin had been running high with the spring snowmelt and the crossing had been difficult. As they approached Ivrin, Daeron could see the cluster of white tents sprung up from the ground at the base of the green mountain like mushrooms after a rain. A colored banner wriggled from the top of each. The two servants Thingol had allotted them hurried ahead so that the two lone emissaries of Doriath could at least enjoy the dignity of arriving to prepared lodgings rather than wallowing back and forth across the muddy festival grounds in the hours it took to raise and provision the tents, pretending to be more interested in renewing acquaintance with long-forgotten Green-elves and Sindar from the outlands than having a meal and a hot bath after their journey.

As they climbed the short rise to the festival grounds, Daeron saw the blue and black of Thingol's winged moon ascend to the top of the tent he would share with Mablung and begin snapping on the wind.

High King Fingolfin's tent was centermost, massive, and impossible to avoid when approaching the festival grounds by way of the road. The grounds churned with action as servants rushed back and forth with trunks and piles of towels and jugs of wine and mallets for resettling tent spikes that had begun to list in the muddy ground. In front of the High King's tent was a cluster of Elves who, by their idleness, must have been important. Daeron would just as soon have ducked into the scurry of servants and retreated to his tent for the time being. He did not present a picture of dignity—sweaty and wet, his hair undoubtedly frazzled by the damp, and his boots muddy—but Mablung was already headed in that direction and he could hardly abscond now only to reappear later, inviting more questions than would his inappropriate appearance. (Mablung, being Thingol's captain, was naturally permitted a greater degree of disarray—indeed, it seemed to enhance his authenticity—but the King's loremaster, as bearer of the history of the realm, should present himself with grandeur befitting the eminence of what that history evinced.)

Mablung steered them in the direction of Denethor's two nephews, thus avoiding formal introductions as the nephews began to introduce Daeron and Mablung to others standing nearby. The group was large and diverse, but attention seemed to stray always in the direction of the Noldorin king's tent and the two Elves who stood nearest the entranceway. One was red-haired, his missing hand hidden in his deep sleeves, talking attentively to a minor lord from the Sindarin outlands, while the other, shorter and with dark brown hair, listened attentively, nodding periodically. His fingers fidgeted with his sleeves, his hair, the edge of his tunic.

Daeron didn't expect that the arrival of two more Sindar—even if Sindar of Doriath and not the lusterless and drab-dressed Sindar of the outlands—would warrant the notice of the Noldorin princes, and indeed, Maedhros was deep in a conversation that didn't falter. But Maglor's eyes flicked in their direction, then settled on Daeron contemplatively. He was a Noldorin prince of Finwë's famed and resplendent court in Tirion, where personal carriage was as fabricated as the over-bright gemstones at their fingers and throats. Daeron waited for the snub and fixed his own gaze into a stare that would rival anything Maglor could direct at him (he hoped). But Maglor inclined his head, ever so slightly but lingering perhaps a moment longer than mere politeness dictated. Daeron bobbed his head back and let his gaze flick away first. From behind him, someone called his name, and he used this as an excuse to slip behind the larger and sheltering form of Mablung, where he could see Maglor no more.

~oOo~

Daeron remained determined to avoid Maglor. It appeared (this from a Sindarin lord from southern Himlad) that the two eldest sons of Fëanor were the only ones in attendance. No matter, Daeron thought; he would call on Maedhros at a time when the brother was likely to be out.

There were many musical performances scheduled throughout the week of the feast, yet no one saw fit to inform him of any but Maglor's. Mablung mentioned it first, as each emerged from his respective room inside the large tent they shared, refreshed and dressed for the first night's supper. "Maglor is to play afterward," Mablung said.

By the third day, when he was informed of Maglor's he-didn't-even-know-what-number performance (fifth—he did know) by the earnest young son of one of the outland lords, he snapped childishly, "So?" and the boy backed away, stammering and doubtlessly thinking that what he'd been told about peevish artists was true. Daeron retreated to his tent and paced around the narrow canvas confines of his room for a few moments before seizing a small guitar and banging out a few snarling chords. Then he stood up and found the lord's son again.

"My apologies for my earlier impertinence," he said in that way that he liked to think was masterfully cool and detached. "You see, I will also be playing tonight. Let the Noldor attend Maglor's performance; I hope you will assist in rallying the Sindar to attend mine."

Bright-eyed with the joy of having an aim to pursue, the boy dashed off.

That night, on his way to the side of the grounds where he would be performing, he passed within earreach of Maglor's performance. He drew near enough only to observe the audience, which he noted—with a good deal of satisfaction—to be primarily Noldor. They all had ornate wooden camp chairs arranged in a polite half-moon around the singer crabbed over his harp so that the wood trembled a mere hair's breadth from his temple. Daeron eased a bit closer. The Noldor kept no campfire but caged their light within black iron braziers; the firelight gave a rosy crimson gleam to the sweat that dampened Maglor's face despite the chill spring air. His eyes were closed and his lips parted as though with passion. His hands twisted into shapes that defied the latitude of his bones, moving with impossible speed and reach. He wrested some complexity from the harp strings that did something slippery to Daeron's innards that he hadn't felt in a while, since he'd last heard Lúthien sing with abandon. He was carrying a book, and he dropped it so that he could stoop down and take his time, fumbling for it in the low light and divesting it of dust, and hope that Maglor might do that complex thing again where Daeron could observe his hands in the scrap of space between the chairs.

The song ended then with a chord that the audience allowed to taper into silence, during which Daeron felt very conspicuous, crouched on the ground with the book clutched firmly in his hands. Maglor lifted his head and blinked. Daeron knew that feeling: of the world swimming back into view, of faces emerging from the welter of sounds and emotions, of consciousness of one's self and deportment slowly lowering itself from whatever lofty place it had fled to hide. Maglor smoothed his tunic and reached down for a goblet beside his chair. His glance fell on Daeron.

Daeron stood quickly and loudly brushed the book a final few times with his hand, a sound that seemed to release the applause from Maglor's audience, before pivoting sharply and heading to his own performance.

He was vindicated, however, when he ended a song later that night and saw Maglor trying to inconspicuously pass a message to one of the Noldor that had wandered into the fringes of Daeron's audience. He was whispering to the lord but watching Daeron's hands, and Maglor—the son of a high king and once a regent himself—was no messenger.

~oOo~

Daeron saw Maglor coming down the hill toward the Noldorin king's tent. All the Noldor tended to look the same to Daeron—the same black hair in the same needlessly complicated braids, the same chalk-white complexions, the same broad builds and muscled arms beneath brocaded robes, the same pale gray eyes—yet Maglor resolved himself from even the most homogenous group of them. His hair was brown rather than black, but otherwise, he was wholly ordinary: gray-eyed, of medium height and build, and preferring embroidered tunics and silver ornament; there was no explanation for his singularity in Daeron's sight. Furthermore, he seemed omnipresent, and Daeron's stomach churned at the thought that Maglor might think that Daeron's constant appearances weren't mere accident.

Maglor was coming now, on the fringes of but not part of a mixed group of Sindar and Noldor who appeared to be having a spirited but good-natured debate. Daeron determined to avoid him. The largest crowd always gathered in front of King Fingolfin's tent. Were he able to control his movements so that he passed Maglor there, then he could become safely lost in the crowd and with many shoulders between Maglor's and his own. Daeron was nearer to the Noldorin king's tent and the safety of the crowd, but there was a mountain laurel growing between two of the tents and just beginning to unfurl its blossoms. Daeron paused to lift one between his fingers and admire its delicate coloration. He could see Maglor out of the corner of his eye. When the time was right, Daeron stepped back onto the path and let himself be propelled to the outer edge of the crowd gathered before King Fingolfin's tent. Maglor would pass close to the tent itself, certainly, where he could exchange greetings with his kinsmen waiting outside. Daeron waited to watch his rival slip safely past.

But the king's herald emerged from the tent then and called a name, and a group of Sindar dislodged themselves from the crowd and began to move toward the entrance of the tent for their audience with the king. Daeron, unbeknownst to him—fixated as he was upon Maglor—had stepped into their midst and was now propelled along with them toward the tent. Maglor had paused in the path outside the entrance, smiling at something his cousin Fingon was saying to him. He was twisting a braid between two fingers. He was oblivious. Daeron should be able to slip right past. He sidestepped from the group of Sindar heading for the tent. He was going to pass right behind Maglor's back, noticed perhaps by Fingon but not by Maglor himself. He was almost free. And his foot caught on a stone in the path, and his shoulder crashed into Maglor's back.

Maglor turned.

They'd yet to be so close, and Daeron could see the small lines of care beneath the other's eyes, eyes that had seen the Light of the Trees and known the deathless bliss of Valinor, had looked upon a dying father and steeled themselves to forsake a captive brother. Maglor's hands seemed to catch his as though to keep him from falling—but was he falling? Those hands were rougher than he expected, hardened with musician's calluses, yes, as were Daeron's, but with the calluses of the sword as well. Daeron's own hands had closed on Maglor's wrists—was he falling? The heavy fabric was rough; the flesh beneath yielding.

There was a tent next to the king's where his supplies were kept. They were in it. "That thing, how do you do it?" The words were in the air; they were on Daeron's tongue and in his ears; the voice that spoke them was his own and not; it was his and also deeper than his; it was like he could speak in chords now and evoke something with his voice grander than that allotted to meager beings of flesh easily marred.

Maglor laughed at their simultaneous outburst. "I am glad we have run into each other, at last. Now that thing you do …"

~oOo~

The wine bottles lined up between their chairs marked the time better than the flaring and receding light in the seams of the tent that would have marked the days, had either of them bothered to count. Daeron's neck felt as though it might be permanently cricked for bending over the books of musical notation that Maglor had showed him, as though he might walk with a stoop now, like some of the smiths that had worked too long in the forge.

"I don't know. It just came to me," Maglor was saying. "It just seemed a natural extension of my father's Tengwar. If he could put our voices into shapes upon the page, then why could I not likewise represent our music? I am surprised, actually," he said, standing to stretch his back, "that you did not devise something similar. You did devise the Cirth, after all."

Devise. Not exactly. Daeron smiled sadly. He'd been sitting in the woods on an autumn afternoon, idly playing at his harp and supposedly practicing the piece he was to play for Lúthien's Meth-e-Laer performance. The traditional Meth-e-Laer dance was elaborate and difficult and usually learned over the course of centuries by those who performed it, first in small roles in the company, then in progressively more important roles as allegorical characters with solos. Lúthien, though, had been selected at the tender age of one hundred and two years to dance in not only a lead role but in the role as Spring, the maiden whose dance must simultaneously acknowledge her decline in the approach of winter while instilling hope for her return. It was a difficult dance even for Lúthien, and her usual cheer had been somewhat diminished lately, her eyes tired from the constant practices and seemingly endless critique from the legion of dance instructors who assembled to pass comment on this most important of dances. "One tells me to point my foot because it lends grace to the role, then the next time I do the dance, another tells me to keep my foot flat because it looks more earthy," she complained to Daeron. She was rubbing her foot. A blister had bubbled up there a few days ago and burst and was swathed in bandage bearing a tiny rosette of blood.

He closed his eyes at the sight and added a new flourish to the song: Spring, her very flesh riven, bearing flowers at her demise. Unexpected tears stung his eyes; he squeezed them shut tighter.

Something unexpected happened then: Arms circled his shoulders; a forehead pressed between his shoulder blades. Neither Daeron nor Lúthien were demonstrative people. They poured their emotions into their art. But she embraced him now, and Daeron felt his hand lift to clasp hers. "I am so glad you are playing my music," she whispered. "Without you, I would be lost—"

Her voice broke on lost, as though she knew the unwisdom of such an acknowledgment. She was the daughter of a goddess and a king; she was a paragon among the musicians and dancers of a people thus gifted; she stood fearless in all of these roles, at ease in her power and her beauty. She clutched Daeron harder. His hands abandoned his harp to hold both of hers. It thumped over onto a hillock of moss.

The day of the Meth-e-Laer grew closer. Daeron left Menegroth for the wood often in those days, huddled beneath a tree and to play amidst the colored leaves swirling earthward, to capture in the music the last vibrant days before winter silenced all beneath snow and leaden sky.

Devised. He thought again of Maglor's choice of words for the making of the Cirth. It had been nothing like that. The Meth-e-Laer had been two days away when the Cirth had descended upon him in the way that an owl drops upon something small and hidden—it thought—in the safety of innocent-green grass. Daeron was paused, unwisely, his hands growing numb, beneath a tree with crimson leaves loosing themselves upon an icy wind, one by one, leaving the branches they clothed revealed: naked angles scratched against the sky. He stared and wondered who had arranged them thus; what was the meaning of the shapes between them, the reason for their intersecting where they did? Forms and patterns seemed to resolve themselves from the scrawl of black on gray, and in that moment, that their arrangement was deliberate seemed unquestionable, and his heart beat faster. The complexity, he knew with sudden certainty, was too great for a small mind like his, but could not the idea be replicated? Numb fingers found a twig and a hasty hand swept the earth clear of leaves. He made shapes in the dirt. He knew not what they meant, but the very idea of them filled him with an awe alike to that he imagined might come at one's first sight of the sea.

This thing was greater than the Meth-e-Laer, greater than Lúthien, and worst of all, greater than him. He could not withstand it. On the day of the Meth-e-Laer, he arrived late and bedraggled. She was dressed already, with two thin worry-lines etched in her forehead that did not entirely smooth away at his arrival. He hurried to tune and she kicked and stretched her legs to keep them warm. Both glanced often at the other, but neither of them spoke. When she was called forth to the clearing, he followed and he played as he'd promised but could rediscover none of the wonder he'd felt at the autumn's last gasp of beauty against encroaching death; his brain was a crosshatch of symbols that matched with words sliced into sounds bare as the branches of the trees that arched over the heads of the crowd—naked, elemental things beginning to make sense to him—that he dared not look upon.

He played without fault but she knew. After the dance, she was absorbed into an excited crowd, all hastening to praise her, to earn one of her flawless smiles. She let herself be gulped into the crowd, deliberately avoiding his gaze. He watched at distance and left the feast that followed early, so that cutting lines into the earth might alleviate the itch in his mind that this idea had brought. When he returned from the forest uncounted days later, filthy and reeking and the Cirth assembled in his thought, he found a withered bouquet of flowers at his doorstep, that she'd left in wordless thanks.

Without you, I would be lost. But she hadn't been lost. That time marked the start of her ascendancy just as it marked the start of his downfall.

As the river breaks to give way to a stubborn rock, so they parted, suddenly irreconcilably different and neither sure how that had happened but unable to transcend what lay between them.

His mind returned to the present: the Mereth Aderthad, a tent, Maglor. His chin had fallen to his chest. "They weren't exactly devised," he said. "They … just came upon me. I didn't court them; I didn't even want them."

"I understand how that is," Maglor said, and Daeron was about to snap that, no, certainly, he did not; born of a people who prized invention for the sake of invention, he'd certainly been celebrated for his musical notation, but something in his tone stopped Daeron, and he remembered the precise predilections of those Noldor. Maybe Maglor did know something about it.

"I lost much for their sake," he said, "and gained little."

"Not if you believe that lovely things become art only when seasoned with sadness."

He thought of Lúthien's dance for the Meth-e-Laer. None had been able to occupy the role of Spring since Lúthien had first danced it. Her grace was paramount yet tinged with a loss, though she'd had no occasion to know such an emotion. Although Daeron sometimes wondered, had the Cirth not come to him then (or at all) … but surely, no. He'd never been so important to her, certainly. Such was a hope kept deep within, where it could be sliced free only with the force of swords.

~oOo~

The last night of the Mereth Aderthad, he and Maglor sat up until the stars dipped towards morning, a skin of something sharp-tasting and addling, procured from an Avar, on the grass between them. They sat on the hillside, watching the fires in the camp go dim and then dark, listening to the spring song of the frogs at Ivrin overwhelm the murmur of voices. The burning drink permitted honesty with the promise of minimal regret come morning, and in a rare lull in the conversation between them, Daeron admitted, "I have learned much from you."

"And I from you," Maglor answered. "I can scarcely wait to play for my people, to add your progressions and flourishes to my repertoire. Now, perhaps, my songs will not just speak of nostalgia for what we left behind but also of what we hope to do in this new land. In your songs, I hear the lashing of the trees upon a brisk wind; I smell the cold creeks and hear the murmur of their waters; I feel the sun on my face and hear the drone of bees. I remember why we came." He ended his poetic flight with an abrupt hiccup.

Daeron had no such hopes. Introducing the Noldorin styles to his music would likely produce the same reaction as had his Cirth: disapproving silence followed by stern proscription from Thingol: Such a thing is unnatural. It is not the way of our people. To place something in these letters of yours is to take it from the Music and freeze it as you would have it, not as it is, or as it may become. It is not the way of the Sindar; it is not the way of our people.

As though the purported "way of the Sindar" had been sung into the Music: a fixed thing with no room for evolution or new wisdom. The liquor he'd drank burned the back of his throat.

Maglor took a swig from the skin and lay back on the grass. Though nothing had been said, both seemed suddenly cognizant of the difficulties their adoption of the others' techniques might pose, the questions it might raise. "We cannot concern ourselves with that, Daeron," he said, and Daeron felt a jolt as he remembered that my name was being spoken with familiarity—and slurred with the effects of liquor shared among friends—by not only a Fëanorian but the one Fëanorian with whom he'd sworn not to associate. Thingol had instructed him to learn of the newcomers, but Daeron doubted this is what he'd had in mind. "We must remember our larger place: We are the inheritors of a tradition and a gift that formed Eä itself. Our words shape the sentiments that color the memories of the past and rouse the hearts and minds of our people that will propel them into their futures. We shape so much of our people's reality, and may that reality include peace and friendship between Sinda and Noldo! It will if we allow it and let ourselves never be disillusioned and led to believe that what we do is trite. Nay, as what we sing becomes story and then history, what we make can outlast even iron, even stone."

~oOo~

507 FA. Just beyond Amon Ereb.
Even iron. Even stone.

Daeron awoke with a start.

It was snowing again and slowly erasing the trail of footprints that led to the rocky overhang under which he huddled against the cold and damp. Let it, he thought. Let it fill in all memories of me. Long had his songs faded from the world and, with the Fëanorian attack on Doriath, the memories that would have recalled—maybe even cherished?—them were gone too. Maglor had been wrong. His creations—his songs, his poems—could not outlast even the ruined stones of Menegroth and certainly not the iron blades of the Fëanorians. "If you think about sounds," Lúthien had told him once, "they fade quieter and quieter, into silence. Or do they? I like to think that the notes of our songs, our words persist forever, if only one had hearing keen enough to detect them." That was before her first Meth-e-Laer, before the crisscross of black branches webbed his thought, before the Cirth, before he'd ruined what might have been between them.

As it was, he'd returned from the Mereth Aderthad and received precisely the rejection he expected: from Thingol, from his people, from her. One after the other. All that he had grown to regard as important was willed away by the only people who mattered to him. He wrote his first song for Lúthien after the techniques he'd learned from Maglor were officially disallowed in music played within the bounds of Doriath. Her father and his people loved it. Lúthien, it seemed, was only driven further away.

And with each step away from him that she took, the more intense the emotions in the songs he wrote for her, until he wrung tears from the most stalwart listeners and she danced in faraway glades where she didn't have to hear.

Don't believe that what we do is trite.

Our words shape the sentiments that color the memories of the past and rouse the hearts and minds of our people that will propel them into their futures.

He had done neither. Lacking the courage to do something as simple as utilizing a Noldorin ornamentation just one upon a single song, presenting in even the most meager form the possibility of peace between all of the Quendi of Beleriand, he had made a career of lamenting his broken heart. That his tongue had lain idle for years now did not seem much of a loss.

From the direction of Amon Ereb came the suggestion of music. He crept near enough sometimes to descry the flickering light behind the windows of Caranthir's old fortress but stopped shy of hearing the conversations of the guards on the walls in voices that still hadn't been fully divested of their Quenyan accents. The falling snow, the steady wind, the league or so of distance to the fortress twisted and marred the song, yet there was no mistaking who played it.

And in that moment, the wind died and the snow lulled, and a passage carried across the open plain almost unimpeded: a progression Daeron remembered playing at a fireside long ago and looking up to see Maglor son of Fëanor trying to pass himself off as a messenger. When he felt his heart soften toward his rival and his mind open to the heretofore impossibility of acquaintanceship.

It was the hopeful start of a song of a length and complexity that it would span many nights in the playing had not sharp, ugly things gotten in the way.

Daeron had broken his harp and only unvoiced breath passed now out over his tongue and he came no more among his—among any—people. But there was a sharp stone to be found beneath the snow and a flat place on the wall beneath the overhang, suitable for carving. He started there and, as the Fëanorians marched off and left Amon Ereb deserted once more, moved next to the stones at the base of its walls. He told the tale that might have inspired hope, had it been told.

Eventually, the sea claimed it.