All Hues and Honeys by Dawn Felagund

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Cracked

Námo explains death to a young Fëanor. A double drabble for Jubilee instadrabbling, for the prompt from Leonard Cohen's "Anthem": "There is a crack, a crack in everything / That's how the light gets in."


Námo receded from the little boy to whom he'd just explained death and the particular death of his mother.

Fëanáro felt something radiating from him, the way the heat from a forge stirs the air to madness and sick-making heat. But the forge burns at its heart. Fëanáro—he sent it all out. Inside him was still: a songbird when the hawk goes hunting.

Námo's eyes watched and measured. Fëanáro stared back. The pressure in the room squeezed him smaller. The death-god's eyes were poison green. Poison. An old word, lost, conjuring the stink of swamps and carcasses. Of blood, crazing black away from a wound. Of pounding fever and ennervated, leaden limbs.

The room? It surely could not take what burned off of him. Námo's eyes became a green smudge, like a thumb run across ink. The hawk, sudden shadow; the songbird clenched its wings. The rot-green gaze waited, assessed.

Fëanáro was sick upon the floor.

The hawk was sated. A crack ran down the wall of the room, gasping a puff of plaster.

Námo was behind him now. A cadaver-cool hand upon his neck. "Child," he crooned. "There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in."


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