A/N: Good luck with this text, honestly, because it's not quite easy to grasp... I hope it still will be enjoyable, though!

Also, thank you for your support and your appreciation! : ) I'll try my best to answer everyone as soon as possible, on this story and on others; but this event being a bit, well, dense with the new prompts coming up day after day, I may be a bit late at times. For example today, when I have 5 assignments and a conference paper to finish.

II.

Kanafinwë

'Finwë the strong-voiced' his father had called him; yet his music lacked drums and beats and harsh rhytms and pompous shifts of style; and little power did it hold for Fëanáro.

Yet he was a maker, too, if not so loud, or not so eager. Father, it seemed, wanted to possess, and rule, and his makings were all created to mirror his might, to express his thought, to fulfill – exceed - his expectations, to demonstrate his skill.

Fëanáro did sing, occasionally, but he had ever been the loudest voice in the smithy's choir, the anchor and the gist, the richest tone and the deepest note; and in a thousand different voices he sang, through his tools and steel and molten gold; and these were only there to grace his voice.

The second prince had a different muse, a more capricious one. (Something sublime, while uncanny; something feather-light and at the same time rock-heavy).

The muse would sometimes play with his hands, run lithely down the strings of his harp, then disappear in the puff of his catching breath. At other times, it would sit on his chest at night, a pressing, suffocating weight; and he would suffer, and no note, no instrument could bring him solace; for the song of the muse came from within, and was not made for earthly ears.

In either way, music would not be ruled, nor made, and he had never been an artist; merely a recipient, a tool, an empty bail.

The wind blew through him, and for a time, it made sound.*

Makalaurë

Ammë did not name him Cleaver of Gold because he was an evil thing.** She left that task for others, who called him many other things; but not evil, never evil (which he maybe was, after all).

Little solace did that name bring him, for the cleaver was a craftsman, and a craftsman was something he was not.

(Not in the eyes of Atar, at least; and those days, Atar's eyes encompassed the whole world, and maybe the Void beyond).

(All his hands could make was music, and rude gestures when he thought Atar would not see).

Yet the names mothers give are anchors, and stigmas, and with time, they come back; and for gold he would look in the decayed swamps of the Enemy's lies, forgetting that (unlike many things) gold has two names.

Maglor

If the fourth Finwë ever had a strong voice, it died with the ships, the Trees, the shadows of regret, and the crown with pale jewels that was made of the finest, lightest silver, yet lay so heavily upon his brows. And he would take his second name and cut out what seemed superfluous or laden with poetry; for in music, it seemed, there was no more poetry than in gold-cleaving.

(In music, there was fury and distorted speech and contorted sounds; and all colours had a black taint).

The Bard

Many called him a bard, for that was what he seemed to be. A lean, silent figure, clad in black or blue, or black-and-blue, occasionally silver; faint colouring on an empty shell. His harp was golden, as if carved out of his own restless fëa, of his past and his foggy future; and its sound was sweet, and sorrowful, for it sang of all the perils behind, and the ones that did not yet come to pass.

The Landlord

One day, he found that he had no more voice to shout and no more gold to cleave. A lord, he still was, somewhere under the layers of dirt and denial, and the land he was lord of still existed; but Ulmo had claimed it with his tangly fingers and made it his dominion.

So he did the only thing he could do, the only thing he ever did in his life; he walked and sang, and walked and sang, and walked and sang, until the golden voice became rusty, the strings thinned and the words blurred into one irregularly pulsating beat, gradually devoured by the heightening tide on a horizon of fading.

Author's Notes

* an allusion to Tom Stoppard's 'Rosencrantz and Guildernstern Are Dead' (one of my favourite plays), in an allegory of death: "Dying is not romantic, and death is not a game which will soon be over. Death is (...) the absence of presence, nothing more - the endless time of never coming back; a gap you can't see, and when the wind blows through it, it makes no sound..."

** this part needs a little explanation: Elves discern the word for the colour and the material of gold. They consider that the material of gold has been besmirched by Morgoth, because he desired it and poured part of his malevolent power in it. Most etimologies refer to Maglor's name as containing the word for the colour of gold (therefore, the benevolent word), but I think this – at least in a dramatic and narrative sense – could be argued. [ half a page of notes on semantics and articulatory phonetics have been aggressively cut out of here ].