In the Town Called Acceptance by Dawn Felagund

In the Town Called Acceptance

Read In the Town Called Acceptance

Tyelkormo!

That was the sound of awakening, in my youth, when mornings still meant possibility and my excitement was enough to rouse me like a punch delivered to the inside of my skull. The thrill of anticipation squeezed the breath from my lungs and sent me flying from the bed and running for my armoire without even noticing the nip of cold floorboards against sleepy-warm skin, pulling on my breeches and boots as I ran, likely to discover at a later hour that the pinch in my toes meant that I’d put them on the wrong feet.

~oOo~

Tyelkormo.

That is the sound of awakening, and I squeeze my eyes shut tighter as though I can likewise press my brain into submission. My thoughts have been busy all night, twisting into strange dreams and awakening me at times in the same breathless panic as though my head was being held underwater.

Tyelkormo!

This time, the words are followed by a strong hand grasping my shoulder, and unless I have truly gone mad, this means that the voice occurs outside of my mind. I stretch my eyes open a sliver, and he comes into fuzzy focus: Atar, a whip of a shadow against the morning light pouring through drapes he’s already torn open, his work clothes fastened fastidiously and a smile upon his face that tells me that he would never understand my reluctance.

And so I do not speak of it.

I push weight like a sleeping hound off of my chest and feel my face twist itself into a grin. Teeth bared top and bottom, I must look like a fool but he ruffles my hair and is deceived. Pride flares in my chest--who is the fool now?--but it is answered only by despair. Yes, who is the fool, feigning a love he no longer feels? For what?

I used to crouch in the grass and wait to catch rainbow-winged butterflies using only my hands--swift yet gentle enough not to break their tissue-thin wings--and most times, they would dart out of my grasp, becoming iridescent shadows, out of reach. I would sit in the grass and watch them, my despair trumped by joy at their dancing flight. For I knew my limits and knew that no matter how high I leaped, they were beyond my reach.

Now, I am not sure. And so I despair.

I reach for my father’s hand, a ghost of his touch still warm upon my rumpled hair, but it is too late. With the click of a door shutting upon me, he is gone.

~oOo~

I used to think that the forge in the morning was a beautiful place. With the small square windows unshuttered, bars of light crisscrossed the room in a golden latticework. I used to dance amid them, never quite able to believe that my body was able to slip through them, for they looked as molten gold--and they grew stronger as the day passed, as though Laurelin was also slow in awaking, stretching her arms to the sky--and I my arms in joyful abandonment as I danced and riled the dust motes into a fury.

“Tyelkormo. Do not dance in the forge. It is not safe.”

My father fancied himself the freest of Elves in Aman--he still does--but I learned quickly that the forge was not a place of freedom. The forge was a place of careful organization--a place for everything and everything in its place, I learned to mutter my first week there--and rigid rules. They were posted by the door, on a tattered piece of paper grown sooty and nearly illegible. RULES OF THE FORGE. My father’s handwriting is whimsical and beautiful, but this was neither. He expected to be understood.

On my third day there, I was made to copy the rules five times for--in my folly--I’d claimed my inability to read the paper tacked alongside the door had been my reason for not following the rules carefully delineated upon it. In truth, I’d believed myself immune to the regulations that guided the lives of my father’s other students. I was his favorite son, after all.

I still believed that then.

The five copies of the rules were tacked above each workstation as a “reminder” to me and a badge of shame, for my letters were crooked and imperfect next to my father’s. The original RULES OF THE FORGE were left alongside the door, for my father knew right well that they were still legible. One only had to possess the will to read them.

Freedom in the forge, my father lectured, came not of the body but of the mind. The body must be disciplined and restrained, for safety was of utmost importance. “What sort of work will you do,” he’d asked, laughing, “in absence of a hand?” The golden bars of light in which I’d danced now seemed to draw my focus to the hazards pinned upon the walls--a place for everything and everything in its place--the shears strong enough to cut steel--or flesh--and the sledges with flat faces hungry to taste little Elven fingers. Coals burned with malice in the furnaces, and I awoke with a scream buried in my throat one night, for I’d been dancing in the forge when my foot had caught a loose floorboard and toppled me face-first into the furnace. When I’d arisen, my face had been the same white color as the steel I saw Atar withdrawing from it, my features erased as surely as they were erased from the metal, ripe for pounding into the shape of Atar’s choosing.

~oOo~

I was walking down the hall once, past Macalaurë’s bedroom, and I heard sobbing coming from within, the kind that comes from deep within one’s chest in great spasms. I’ve since sobbed like that myself, but then, I knew not what it meant, and I crouched with my ear against the door to listen, full of curiosity and horror.

I thought little of my brother Macalaurë. When I thought about him, I felt almost surprised to discover love for him like a warm glow inside of me, akin to the not entirely unpleasant feeling of having a swallow of hot cocoa that has not fully cooled. Yet I thought little of him.

Mostly, he locked himself away in his music room with a chair against the doorknob so that even if I rattled it in an attempt to gain entry, I was estranged from him. If I called out in my persistence, his watery reply came: “Go away! Not now!” Yet I could not bear to hate him, despite his rejection of me.

At night sometimes, after supper, Macalaurë would play for us the songs that I heard coming muffled from within his music room. He’d sit at the front of the family parlor and we’d form a loose arc around him--even Atar--and listen in reverent silence. I believe that I learned to name my emotions based on Macalaurë’s songs, for--according to Atar, anyway--I had trouble as a young child putting abstract thoughts into words. “You learned every name for every species of moth to bump around our lanterns at night, but you could not name what made you cry when one came too close to the flame,” Atar teased me. Safe in his arms, I could laugh with him.

But emotions were not moths. Each species of moth bore a slightly different set of markings, a minor differentiation in shape and color. An eyespot on one and feathered antennae on the other. Moths were easily put to words but emotions: Emotions never seemed to bear the same set of markings. Just when I thought I had an understanding of pain, there came something new, something unnamed, and my eyes flooded with tears. How could a scraped knee and a broken heart both be called pain? And if pain is signified by tears, then what of papercuts that bleed but do not bring tears; what of the tears on Atar’s face when little Carnistir was born?

“What do you feel?” Nelyo was always asking me, Nelyo who sought such precision in language and was bothered that I would not--for he refused to understand the alternative of could not--name sadness, joy, and guilt. I was curled in his arms, having interrupted him in conversation with Macalaurë. I was small--only two years old--and had caught a beesting to the palm when I’d tried to bring him a fat, fuzzy bumblebee as a gift. When it had stung me, my hands had clapped together, killing it. What did I feel?

I named Macalaurë’s songs: one for the ache in my palm, another for the regret that I’d come to him with tears on my face and no gift in my hands, and yet another for the guilt that a life that had existed five minutes earlier still would but for me. Nelyo sat in startled silence, and it was Macalaurë who understood and laughed. “Yes, little one, of course!” he said, and he played the songs that I had named on the small harp that always seemed at his side.

But when he was finished, I realized that there was one more: a sort of bitter joy, of justice exacted against one who had hurt me. There was a song for that too, and I named it.

More than ten years later, crouching with my ear against his door, I could think of no song to do justice for the sobs that tore from Macalaurë’s chest, raw and unrestrained, for his pain was so great that it drowned his shame, and he hadn’t even the pride to bury his agony into his pillow.

I was surprised to hear my mother’s voice on the other side of the door. “Do not cry, Macalaurë, for he loves you. You are his son, his blood, and he loves you.”

Macalaurë answered in a voice sodden with tears. “I do not want his love. I want his acceptance.”

~oOo~

For a long time, I thought that Acceptance was a town in Aman, maybe in the north, in the high hills where small, quick Noldor ripped the metals from the earth that my father would later shape into beautiful things. I don’t know what gave me that idea, but for many years, I would skip around the gardens and fields to the rhythm of my father’s hammer falling in the forge, singing beneath my breath, “I’m going to Acceptance! I’m going to Acceptance!”

When I learned to read, I begged maps of my father with the intention of plotting imaginary journeys on them that would later be undertaken in the gardens and snaking trails around our home. The maps of Aman were surprisingly empty, with whole sections un-drawn-upon, and much of what was on them had been filled in by my father. When I exclaimed over this, he remarked bitterly that Aman had killed the curiosity of most Elves.

Really, I wanted the maps because I wanted to find Acceptance on them. I was certain that it must be there, amid the specks that denoted “Settlements”--as they were called in the Legend--but despite the hundred or so Settlements on the map, not one was called Acceptance.

Perhaps, though, it was too small for the map or had yet to be noted. So I imagined where it might be, in the areas drawn in but not yet given names by my father, whose curiosity could not be quenched by anything, even a land as broad and bountiful as Aman. Perhaps it lay at the bottom of the steep valley cutting between two mountains, and I would have to crawl upon hands and knees to reach it, shredding the skin of both on the sharp rocks. Or maybe it circled the top of the tall mountain that Atar had labeled “Pinnacle,” a crown upon a hairless head, and I would be dizzy and giddy upon reaching it, the air thin in my lungs.

I wondered what sorts of Elves lived in Acceptance. I imagined a festival thrown in my honor, the esteemed explorer from Valinor Beyond the Mountains--as I liked to call Valinor in my garden “expeditions,” since it sounded so much more prestigious--that lasted for three days and during which all of my favorite foods and drinks manifested upon the table and I would sleep in a roofless house--for it never rains in Acceptance--beneath a scattering of stars.

Daily, I scoured the map, wondering if it had appeared while I’d slept that night: Acceptance. But then, one day, a thought occurred to me: Maybe it was not on the map because Atar had not found it yet himself.

~oOo~

I make it a point, even now when I am “old enough to know better,” to always knock at the door of Macalaurë’s music room when I pass. I am beyond trying the knob, for since Carnistir was born, Macalaurë never forgets to bar it with a straight-backed chair. Besides, I don’t really want entry anyway.

Macalaurë is sullen these days, spending all of his time either locked in his music room or in Nelyo’s bedroom, where we are forbidden to enter when Nelyo ties a red scarf on the door.

When Macalaurë is inside, the red scarf is always on the door.

Today, coming in from the forge for a midday meal, I take an unnecessary detour to take me past Macalaurë’s music room. Always, I creep up to the door on silent feet; always, I pause for a moment to hear what he plays. Lately, I do not like his songs as much. They have changed with his mood, but while his mood has become simpler--always sullen and slightly suffocating like a gray woolen blanket--his songs have evolved into a bizarre sort of complexity that I cannot understand. Just when I think that I have grasped the emotion of the music, just when I have stirred my heart to that which falls like droplets of water from his deft fingers, the music changes to something discordant and incompatible. Sorrow is peppered with joy, like he has found hilarity in some tragedy; anything joyful he plays shimmers with guilt, as though he is not deserving of songs built purely of happiness alone.

Today, I pause and listen. It is one of his usual songs, only this one is even more complex and--dare I say--senseless than usual, as though he has given up constructing a coherent theme and simply plays bits of whatever comes to mind, stringing them together at random. I listen for a moment, disgusted, then raise my fist to knock.

Macalaurë and I barely speak these days. He speaks only to Nelyo and our mother, disappearing for weeks sometimes to stay with our grandfather and visit his betrothed when she comes to Tirion. In the north, in Formenos, where the stars pierce the feeble light of early morning and evening, Atar used to point out to us the stars that moved and never lay in the same place for two nights in a row: not stars, he said, but planets. Macalaurë and I are planets set in opposite orbits from each other, rarely occupying the same sky at the same time and too distant to notice or care.

I knock hard enough upon the door to hurt my knuckles, and with a jangle of startled fingers upon the harpstrings, the song stops. Already, I am running down the hall, for Macalaurë’s answer is always the same--“Go away! Not now!” as though there will be a “later”--and I do not need to hear it to know it; I do not have to subject myself to being turned away again. Instead, I make it into a prank. I find reason to laugh loud enough to drown his words as I pound down the hall in my moment of happiness.

~oOo~

There is a project on which I am working in the forge, something difficult beyond anything I have attempted before, and I seem to know--Atar has not said, but I know anyway--that this project carries a special weight. It is the quill that will be used to write my destiny, I think sometimes, in my more poetic moments, making laughter at my own melodrama erupt from the turmoil of emotions that that thought brings.

The project is a jeweled dagger: a blade made of Atar’s strongest, most flexible alloy; a hilt made of gold entwined with silver--an image of the Mingled Light of the Trees--and shaped to cup and protect the hand.

This project is supposed to free my mind, to open me to creativity like an endless meadow filled with butterflies and flowers. This is how it was explained to me by Atar, when he first described the project to me. By the eager grin on his face, I knew that his creativity had been whetted, but he was giving the project to me to both design and forge. Even the gemstones--a delicate craft usually undertaken by Atar alone of our family--would be mine to create in any shape and hue suiting my designs.

A month ago, we asked Atar what he wanted in the way of gifts for his begetting day, since it was only a little over a month away. He made the usual requests of books from Nelyo and extracted kisses from little Carnistir, who would probably make an ugly painting that Atar would exclaim over and hang above his desk beside those from years past. From Macalaurë, he asked--as he always does--for a song. Usually, he asks for songs about strange things: about sugar-candy or mockingbirds or muddy boots making tracks across the floor. I remember being small and having Macalaurë laugh at these requests, then sequestering himself for a month to perfect his gift before standing with a flourish to present it at the feast held in Atar’s honor in Tirion.

This time, when Macalaurë muttered, “What about?” Atar didn’t think hard about it, as he had in years past, twisting his face into a parody of great deliberation. “A song about me,” he answered, in a quick, confident voice and excused himself in the same breath.

Of me, he asked for nothing, so I chased him down the hall. I am tall for my age, but two of my strides fill each of us, so I ran and caught him at last by the front door, panting and asking, “Atar, what of me? What do you want from me?”

“Tyelkormo, I know that your dagger has occupied all of your time and thought,” he answered. “When it is finished, you can give it to me. That will be the perfect gift.” He kissed my hair, and I knew that he’d seen this as a merciful request.

He didn’t imagine the grief that it would cause, the twisted and ugly dagger that shames me to contemplate as representative of my worth to him, as a gift for the only one I love above all else.

The blade I forged three times until I began to fear Atar’s wrath for wasting a valuable alloy more than I feared his disappointment that the blade was crooked. I’d had a design for the hilt in my mind: silver and gold entwined, the butt of the handle forming the base of a tree trunk and the branches rising a twining to cup the wielder’s hand. Along the trunk, I would array small stones of every color. But the result looked nothing like the sketch I’d made--which was itself less impressive than my already unimpressive imagining--and the stones I’d made would not fit their settings, but one: a blue stone that by luck alone happened to slip in the setting I’d reserved for a green stone. But I was not one to debate providence.

His begetting day: only a week away now.

This afternoon is the time when Atar listens to Nelyo recite his lessons, and so I work alone, for even the apprentices have been excused for a day of rest. I contemplate the dagger. My brain feels rather like the sponge that Atar once professed it should be--absorbing even that which is thought to be of little consequence but might be of value later--only it is a sponge that has been dumped over with more water than it can hold, and the remainder is running in murky rivulets out of it. My head aches.

If mornings paint the forge as somehow beautiful, then afternoons in the forge are misery. Heat festers inside so small a space, throbbing like a heart swollen with hot blood. Light is leaking from the day; Laurelin’s beams--once sharp-edged and proud as blades--are disintegrating into dusk. I reach overhead and open the lamp above the worktable, bathing the tabletop is a searing white light.

The dagger is hideous.

I hurl it across the room with a shriek of frustration. Amid the angry clatter of metal against the wooden floorboards, I hear a faint popping sound, and something bright rolls across the floor to lie at my feet: the blue stone from the hilt, the only of one hundred stones to fit into the crooked settings that I’d made. Even providence has taken back its meager blessing.

I leave the light burning and my ruined destiny lying in the dust beneath a worktable. On the blue stone, I tread, and I hear the faint pop of it breaking beneath my boot.

~oOo~

I find myself in the hallway leading to Macalaurë’s music room, staring at a row of open doors and one closed, one tempting me to knock and pour prankish mirth atop the rage and frustration and fear and disappointment that stews in my gut, pretending that these things never existed.

But I am too weary to make silent my footsteps, and the enigmatic music that Macalaurë plays stops before I even reach the door.

I lift my fist and knock, not hard enough to hurt this time; my knuckles sting with the memory of my earlier revelry.

The door opens.

~oOo~

He pours me a cup of tea from the iron kettle that hangs over the fire. “I stole it from the kitchens,” he says, when I fixed it with a puzzled stare. “No one noticed.”

He even keeps biscuits inside of his piano bench where the sheet music should go. He laughs at my wonder of this and says that the music is all in his head, so what is the point? “I prefer biscuits,” he says and gives me three, taking none for himself.

“I am going to play my music. But you are welcome to stay for as long as you’d like.”

Somewhere between now and a time past, a time featuring a brother still a child like me, whom I used to frighten with crickets beneath his pillows and who sang with a voice so high and beautiful that it seemed to spread a web of cracks across my heart like shattering crystal, the brother I seemed never to know but nonetheless love has grown into a man. His sullenness, I see, is less that than a new stoicism, as though he has taken the emotions once quick to flash in his eyes and twist his face and sucked them back inside and allows them to show now only in his music. I remember the time I overheard him crying in his room with our mother, and I know that he cries like that no more.

I nibble at my biscuits and sip my tea that is bitter and strong but settles my seething stomach, and I think about my dagger, lying ruined upon the floor. I will never be what my father wants me to be. The thought comes as hard as a blow to the face, but yet it does not hurt like I think it should. I wonder at that.

The music unfolding beneath Macalaurë’s fingers is the same bizarre song that I heard earlier, when I was still able to console and deny my fears with pranks, and suddenly I understand it. As suddenly as I once understood emotions by listening to his songs, I know that this is the song he has written for Atar’s begetting day, that the confluence of strange emotions is Atar and how Macalaurë--his second-born son who believes himself a disappointment--sees him.

The song is mournful now and overlaid with jewel-bright notes of joy, and I remember a time not long past where I came upon my father and Macalaurë in the kitchen, and Atar slipped his arm around Macalaurë’s shoulders and whispered to him a joke, and Macalaurë exploded into laughter, his own arm snaking tentatively around Atar as well. They held each other a bit longer than the moment dictated, for amid their laughter was the realization that Macalaurë would have chosen a different father and, yes, Atar probably also would have asked for a different son.

I laugh, but the laughter bubbles from deep in my throat, the place where sobs are born, and Macalaurë’s fingers pause upon the strings, leaving an incongruously joyful note to ring out over a somber chord. “What is funny?” he asks--his brow furrowing--but he is smiling also, like he already knows.

“I used to think that Acceptance was a place. A town. Maybe in the north somewhere. And I used to always want to find it, and I would look for it on every map that I could put my hands on.”

Perhaps remembering my obsession with maps, Macalaurë laughs with an abandonment that I have not heard in a while. Since the day in the kitchen with Atar, perhaps. “A town called Acceptance?” he asks. “I wonder what nature of place that would be.”

“I always imagined that they would throw a festival in my honor,” I said, “for finding it and adding them to the maps. And they’d serve all of my favorite foods, and no one would be able to quell their joy to sleep for three straight days.”

“See, I thought it would be a town with no Elves at all,” Macalaurë replies. I stare at the ceiling and think of this; his fingers are already busy forming a new set of chords and, soon, a melody is trickling like water atop it.

In the Town called Acceptance
In a place of feasts
Where all hopes lie,
And like the beasts,
Even the Immortal shall die,
In the Town called Acceptance.

Our shared laughter outlives the last chord, dying upon his fingers. Upon the blank white ceiling, I see the empty places on my father’s maps and I wonder: What lies there?