It was Russandol's room. His brother had left him seated at the edge of the great bed, as his mother's voice had rang out from the garden, calling the older child out into the light of Laurelin; and he remained alone, short legs dangling above the ground, letting his gaze wander about the white-bleached walls.

It was a clean, proper room, likened to the one every child in Tirion would have; but for the fact that if you looked at them more closely, every piece of furniture was a work of art. Careful chiselling had adorned with sculptures the brass frame of the bed, an artful knife run intricate designs upon the wardrobe's doors, the window-panes; someone had found delight in gilding the backrest of the chairs, and even the half-empty inkwell on the desk had been the result of skilful craft. For the moment, light like shafts of molten gold streamed in from the open windows, bursting into the room with all the fragrances of spring in their breast; and the careless babbles of rivers and birds.

He drew his knees up against his chest and hugged them close.

He stared at it, thin eyebrows drawing into a slight frown. It was not very beautiful. The handle was not smooth and polished, but marked with several protubating lines, repellent in their regularity. The shape in itself lacked an elegance, and rather resembled that of a frying pan, whichever way he tilted his head to look at it; a thin, rectangular neck of elongated proportions prolonged by an obese body. Even the cords were not of the same breadth; the first threadlike, so fragile that it appeared prone to snapping whenever ones hands were to brush against it, and the last, obscene and discordant in its corpulence, too heavy, it seemed, to yield anything but an arduous groan to the coaxing fingers.

But Russandol had brought forth from it simple music, the clean lullaby that mother sang to him before the goodnight kiss. The child looked at it, and felt that its fantastic form could not be fit for such a kind of music, the fanciful shape as bizarre as the song was modest. Yet he could not bring his eyes away from it, from this mysterious thing which Russandol had tamed with a caress, and knew that it was never meant as tame; in itself, its misshapen body told of the songs it was meant to sing, the terrible echoes it was meant to rouse.

Russandol, having noticed his younger sibling's uncanny attraction to the object, had carelessly picked it up -he had felt no terror then for his brother- and strummed some of the strings, and told him that soon father would make one for him, too; for him to play and amuse himself with.

But this was not a toy, he thought.

This was a monster, a monster of grotesque beauty; a voice not meant for music that you would play, but a music that would play you.

Warily, he trusted a cautious hand towards the strange work of absurd art, fingers suddenly, too soon, coming into contact with the ochre wood, and of its own accord his fist was clenched around its handle, around its neck; as spellbound, rapt, ensnared, unable to loosen his grip, he watched and felt his hand closed around the lifeless -and yet? - wood in a deadly hold, as if to strangle and to kill.

The strings responded to his touch, faintly vibrating under his fingertips; and softly they sang out, to him, and they said, "Yes, we are alive."




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