Mythmoot Mathoms by Dawn Felagund

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The Mystery of the Missing Medallion

This almost-not-a-ficlet was written for Indy, who asked for something about Maglor.

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Underneath the pile of clothes, dirt, and junk, there was a small, golden medallion that seemed to shine in importance. The only problem was that Macalaurë could not find it.

The room hadn't been cleaned in ages, that was the problem (that his mother, if asked, would surely be quick to point out). He'd been, of late, working on an audition piece in hopes of securing a highly coveted—and, therefore, very probably unattainable—position as the assistant of Alqualondë's premier virtuoso on the harp. In exchange for copying compositions, making a potent herbal tea to his very exacting specifications, and gathering up the belongings that he allegedly cast to all sides of him while in fits of inspiration, the master gave his assistant an hour-long lesson on the harp (precisely measured by clockwork and abandoned mid-song if necessary) each day. Macalaurë had finished the composition but declined to submit it. Or, as Tyelkormo helpfully put it, had wimped out.

The medallion, though: it was purchased for his father's begetting day tomorrow, made by one of the finest goldsmiths in Tirion, and was now lost. Macalaurë had no idea what his father would do with it—wear it? hang it in a window to glitter in the Treelight? melt it down and make one better?—but he hoped that Fëanáro would appreciate the workmanship, if nothing else, and the fact that fifty-some years of life with him had at least taught Macalaurë who the good goldsmiths were. (And the weeks of lessons Macalaurë had given to the goldsmith's hopelessly tone-deaf son in exchange for it.)

He raked his hand through his hair and looked around the room. There was a mountain of unwashed laundry tumbling down into foothills consisting of cast-off shoes. There was the old harp carried over from the Outer Lands that he'd wished to refinish, but hadn't even started, with its broken strings sproinging crazily here and there. There were some books of Nelyo's that had been cluttering the sitting room and that Macalaurë had carried up here to get out of the way for a visit from Vingarië and never carried back or, more sensibly, dumped where they belonged in Nelyo's room. And there was the familiar sprawl of his finished-but-not-sent composition, the vocal part fanned across his desk and the instrumentals in a series of neat piles orbiting the chair.

He'd searched it all with no luck. He sighed. He'd have to search it again. The medallion had to be in there somewhere. He went elbow-deep back into the mountain of dirty clothes and … bumped something. Cold. Hard. Metallic. But—he grasped it: Too big. He extracted the tuning fork from underneath a nightshirt that smelled like it might have been there a year.

A tuning fork? Why would he have a tuning fork in his dirty laundry pile? He spun around and checked: Yes, his own tuning fork was sitting in its usual place on the windowsill. This one was none that he'd seen before. It was scratched up in unfamiliar ways, like it had been abused in ways that (no matter what the state of his room implied) Macalaurë would never do to a piece of musical equipment. "Poor thing," he said and cupped it in his hand like a living, wounded creature before becoming distracted by the thought that, maybe, if he could figure out where it had come from, he could figure out where the medallion had gone.

He lifted it in front of his face and inspected the scratches. No clues there. It was simply an old and mishandled tuning fork. He sniffed it. It smelled of metal and … something else. He licked it. That was no help (and he had to then lick his sleeve to get the taste out of his mouth). But the smell: Two of his brothers smelled that way. And Fëanáro, but Fëanáro had long stopped visiting the room of his secondborn son.

Carnistir was in the forge, hammering out tines for a rake. He was no skilled craftsman, but he liked monotonous work noisy and unpleasant enough to let him take refuge in his thoughts. He quenched the tines in water and almost hit Macalaurë with them when he tossed them into the pile with the others. "You're in here." That probably should have been a question, but by the distance in his brother's eyes, Macalaurë knew he was lucky to get a response at all. clang clang clang clang clang Carnistir immediately began beating on another set of tines extracted from the hot coals.

"Do you know where this came from?" Macalaurë asked, holding aloft the tuning fork.

Carnistir didn't look at it. "No."

"It was in my room. It's not mine."

"I haven't been in your room in forever. In five weeks. And two days. Since I came to borrow that pen." clang clang clang clang clang

Which you never returned, Macalaurë thought but didn't say. He simply went to look for Curufinwë.

Curufinwë was doing something that required him to hunch and squint and employ, from the looks of things, just about every lamp in the workroom. He was biting his lips and not breathing. Macalaurë stood and waited and found himself holding his breath too; whatever his brother was doing was precise enough to inspire that. But he ran out of air before Curufinwë did.

"What Macalaurë."

"I found this in my room. Do you know where it came from?"

"Does it look like I can just spin around and look at random shit that you find in your room? Ulmo's water, it's a wonder you can find anything in there at all." He huffed.

Macalaurë hated that about his brother. He was the baby of the family (though growing up fast) and a parrot of everything his parents had to say negative to or about him. So of course they both adored him. "It's a tuning fork. I found it in my laundry pile and I can't find something else I'm looking for, so I'm hoping that if I can figure out where this came from, I can figure out where the other thing went. And it's not mine either."

"Well, I didn't think you'd ask me where your tuning fork came from. But yeah. Atar brought that home from him, so it must have come from him. All scratched up, looks to be about a thousand years old?"

"Yes! That's the one."

"Atar brought it home with him."

Atar? Fëanáro??

Macalaurë waited for his brother outside the forge, sitting on a section of log that hadn't yet been split into firewood for the forge. He turned the abused tuning fork in his hands. The smell made sense, but why would his father have been in his room? Why would he have left a tuning fork there, in the laundry pile?

"You're not going to like this, I feel like I should tell you that right away," Curufinwë said by way of greeting as he exited the forge. "Although you're no worse off than you were, so—" There was a bucket of water by the door. He dipped out a ladleful, drank half of it, and dumped the rest over his head.

"What are you talking about?"

"Atar brought that home. From Alqualondë."

"What was Fëaná—Atar—doing in Alqualondë?"

"That's what you're not going to like. He went to see that master, that master such-and-such, that you wimped out sending your composition to."

Macalaurë gritted his teeth. Damn Tyelkormo … "Why," he said in a voice that he forced into patience (because Curufinwë wasn't old enough yet to not whine to their mother if he perceived himself mistreated), "would Atar have gone to see him?"

"To take your composition. Yeah, you wimped out, but Atar apparently thought there was something to that thing you wrote, so he took it to Alqualondë for you. But it didn't end well. The master was in a foul humor, which put Atar in a foul humor, and they had a fight—"

"A fight! Like an argument fight or a fistfight?"

"More like an argument, maybe with some shoving. No fists, no bruises. Atar had had a copy made there, so he left it with the music teacher and took the tuning fork, I guess thinking maybe to hold it hostage until the master reviewed your composition, but he told me later that that was rather stupid; it shouldn't be difficult to obtain another tuning fork in Alqualondë of all places! Like finding hammers in Tirion, he said—"

Macalaurë cut him off. He didn't share Curufinwë's estimation of their father's comedic skill. "So nothing's come of it?" Hope and despair strove for dominance in his voice.

"Not that I've heard. He hasn't said anything. Ask him. Anyway, he probably dropped it while returning the original to your room. Oh and—" Curufinwë fished into his pocket. "He promised me his next commission if I sneaked this back into your room, but I might as well give it to you while you're here, just don't tell him." He extracted the gold medallion on a delicate gold chain it hadn't had before. "He said he was pleased that you knew to go to Master Maltatur. He was happy that all those years taught you something. Who knows! That music teacher seems crazy enough, so maybe he'll want his tuning fork back and to accept you as his student!"

Macalaurë lay in his bed later that night, watching Telperion's silver light play with the golden medallion that hung in his window for one more night before he gifted it to his father tomorrow. Beneath it, on the sill, two tuning forks lay side by side. It didn't end well, he heard Curufinwë saying, again and again. He tried to imagine it: His father and the music master, clashing with the same force as a wave pummeling a cliffside, his father getting louder and louder how he did (Macalaurë having oft been the victim of that) and the music master scattering things about himself how he supposedly did. The tuning fork clanging to the ground. His father stealing it, likely in a very obvious way that involved waving it about while using obscenities in creative ways. Making some kind of threat probably. "Bumping" the music master on the way out (the way he sometimes "accidentally" kicked the legs of chairs). It didn't end well. Returning the sheet music to Macalaurë's room. Carefully arranging it precisely how it had been (although he'd mixed up the flute and dulcimer parts; Macalaurë saw that now), catching sight of the medallion and admiring it too long, maybe just as surprised then by his son as Macalaurë was now by him. Footsteps on the stairs! Macalaurë laughing with Nelyo, back fresh from a ride; dropping the tuning fork in the clothes, no time to find it, just to dash for the door and realizing too late that the medallion was still in his hand, and telling the whole tale to Curufinwë, bribing him to erase all evidence of his foolish imposition.

It didn't end well. Or had it?

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Chapter End Notes

Maltatur means, literally, "gold mastery," continuing Tolkien's great tradition of giving characters overly literal names. It was invented with the always invaluable assistance of Darth Fingon's Quenya Name Generator.