Never Met a Fore Before by viv

"This is delicious," cooed the Second Elf-Father. What was he calling himself these days? Finwe, was it? Enel refrained from rolling his eyes.

"Indeed?" he muttered mildly. Finwe, after all, needed little urging to fall into one of his (usually over-wordy) gales of wonderment. This particular urging took the form of a substance concocted by some berry-picking, golden-haired, of-the-first-fourteen scout. Pompous pretty-boys all, but occasionally they had their uses.

"Oh, yes. It is like ... like..." Stumped. The Elf-Father of the Second Fifty-Six was linguistically stumped. Again. But it made no difference, thought Enel. When there was no word, inevitably one of these barking wordcrafters would make one up. Already his head felt so stuffed full of words that only a sliver of the actual Beauty of Creation could wriggle in.

"Like what?" prodded Enel, because he wasn't having nearly as awful a westward walk as he probably deserved.

Finwe screwed up his glowing gorgeous face and pondered. He even put one long elegant finger to his chin in a pose to show how very much he pondered. And he stood, still and lovely in the starlight, and continued to ponder most magnificently. Enel filched his brother's cup and knocked back the draught. Fascinating: the stuff was, in point of fact, delicious. Unusually so. A trifle hard and tart on the tip of the tongue, but sparkling down the throat. Rather reminded one of ...

"... starlit foam at the bottom of a waterfall," mused Enel.

Finwe's startling silver eyes opened so wide Enel worried for their perch in his luxuriously tressed skull.

"That is it exactly! Brilliant! How did you... what I mean to say is, what made you imagine...?"

"Metaphor," Enel said, squeezing another drop from the skin, this time depositing it right on his tongue. Made it from wild grapes, had they? He wondered how many of his vast seventy-four he could set to picking berries. Bother this westward exploration, anyway. He licked the dribble from his bottom lip appreciatively. "It's called a metaphor."

And thus, within mere hours, did the Quendi invent both booze and the rhetorical trope.

Fin.

Chapter End Notes

Enel = the Third Father, so Elwe

Number designations for the three houses of the original 144 Quendi (fourteen = Vanyar, fifty-six = Noldor, seventy-four = Teler/Lindar) taken from the Cuivienyarna, pp. 420 and on, The War of the Jewels

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