All Hues and Honeys by Dawn Felagund

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The Neologist

Pengolodh on language and history at three points in Gondolin's history. Three perfect drabbles for Jubilee instradrabbling, for the prompt (from the It Comes in Threes challenge): rock, paper, scissors.


Rock: The Journey

The journey from Nevrast to Gondolin was long arduous, made more so by the knapsack stuffed laden with books his parents made him insisted he bring. Pengolodh amused himself by thinking of words—like arduous, like laden, like insist—that seemed fat with meaning that conveyed his misery. He imagined someday whirling their pedantry, swordlike, back upon them in the histories he would write, casting them in a role of injustice.

He walked trudged schlepped (he coined that one and was rather proud of it) up yet another hill and then—

The Hidden Rock.

All words fell from him, for only words crafted of crystal could describe Gondolin.

Paper: Gondolin

Pengolodh had a room in the library with a view that invited the imagination to gallop across the valley.

Right up to the rock. Pengolodh's gaze always fetched up against the base of the mountain, then scrabbled up its sides (that awed him as a boy to where he felt he could prop his eyes open and not see enough), and sailed off into the blue—

—and right back to Gondolin's library, with the same furniture, same books, same view.

Once, he imagined in his writings songs and swords, clamoring, beyond the mountains, but he disciplined his imagination to silence.

Scissors: Sirion

Calluses from centuries of holding a pen meant the scissors did not blister Pengolodh's hands. His precise nature meant the bandages were always cut even and straight.

He concentrated on precision because his imagination, no matter how fervently he beckoned, would not return him to the pristine, dull days of Gondolin, and history came not as song but as moans and screams.

The bandages, as soon as they were ready, were whisked into the hospital tent. Those that came out, by the armful, were dyed red.

The scissors whispered as they cut, but what they said? He could not remember.


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