Prompts:

Facets of Faramir: Writer

Poetic Forms: Sonnet

Scientific achievement: Pharmacy


Self-Medication

Over the years he devised many tricks to distract from the fact of imminent annihilation, the dream-brought knowledge that not even the virtuous survive the end of the world.

Music helped; fast finger-exercises transmuting conscious thought into muscle-memory. Words were better; ever-increasing mastery of complex tongues and forms. Meditations on the natural world. Rainbow sunsets to persuade him of a world beyond death.

One ash day, his strategies fall in ruins. Then she walks into the garden. If you live, he thinks, artless as a schoolboy, there is still life.

Self has limits - but beyond the self is infinite.