Delicacies by sallysavestheday

Spirit Games

Arafinwean musings from the Material World card. 5 perfect drabbles for a diagonal bingo. 

Finarfin’s children are bright sparks, all, at their conception, dancing and shimmering in the depths of his heart. Yet each is shadowed, cradled in opacity that speaks of strange, uncertain futures. Child after child after child after child.

As they grow, he waits, loving them, for the trick of fate or fortune that will overturn the cup of his happiness. He knows too well from his own youth the weight of expectations, the shapes of pain and sorrow that dance beside joy.

Four souls, born of his own yearning.

He loves them, spoils them, shields them. He loses them all.

Straw

Finrod loves haying: the sweet scent of the drying grasses, the rhythmic song of the haymakers, the slow trundle of the carts along the windrows as the forage is raked and piled high. He dances atop the ricks, trampling the straw and whistling as the oxen trudge their patient way to the barns.

Until he slips, and falls into the dusty pile, suddenly submerged. It is only a moment until he draws breath again, shivering, but he will swear ever after that it was there that he first heard cries of battle: struggling in the hay, that was the Fens.

Brick

Angrod’s palms are pink with dust; the hollows of his eyes stand out from his dirty face as he tugs his father’s hand, hurrying him down to the brickworks where he has been playing.

“Papa, come see!” He is serious, urgent; his usually hasty speech strangely weighted with the knowledge of a task well-done.

The tower he has built has the clean lines and stability so prized by the Noldor: it will outlast a weathering, stand firm against a storm.

Finarfin’s words of praise are strangely stiff within his mouth. The late light bathes Angrod’s thatch of hair in flame. 

Wool

The hunt is to be a pleasure trip, a milestone in maturity: riding out with elder cousins into what passes for the wilds of peaceful Aman. Aegnor watches the stag fall – its great head tossing in agony, its hooves tearing the grass – and asks when they may expect it to Return. Ever after, he refuses meat, unwilling to send another life beyond the circles of the world.

In Dorthonion, in love and already mourning Andreth, he raises sheep – for wool, alone. They are sweet, and wise, and shearing is as close to another life for them as he can come.

Leather

Little Artanis cannot abide a leather garment. It is like having another skin, Atar, she explains, to his bewilderment, and I already have too many of my own. Watching her grow, Finarfin remembers that aversion as she shape-shifts and adapts: to politics, to sport, to craft. With each mastery some new form of her emerges, striding forth from the split skin of the old.

They meet again in foundering Beleriand, he in a steel carapace, she in silk and linen and the finest, softest wool. Still, no leather. How many selves she has shed by then, he does not know.