When you smile, it’s that moment of stillness just before the sun rises and the world seems to hold its breath, that hushed quiet before the birds offer their greeting. When you smile, soft rain kisses the earth, sea birds call tales of the deep, spring blooms lift their heads to the warmth. When you smile, the whole world pauses to smile with you, knowing the pleasure that comes from being at one with all nature.

You do not smile for me, though. How I wish you did. How I wish something of the way your eyes light and your face warms was meant for me, but I am an irrelevance, my presence bypassed by your gaze. Despite my high birth – a prince, my lady, I am a prince, I want to shout some days – I fear in your eyes I will ever be a mere craftsman tainted by my grandfather’s machinations. Not his politics; you would never be so crass as to tar me with that brush, you know how and where I was raised. Just – I make things. As he made things.

And you see no poetry in me, no adventure, no flash, no glory. And my hair is not star-silver.

But I can create things, beautiful things, powerful things. And create I have. Not world-shaping as were the Silmarils, the product of my grandfather’s final great making, but artifacts of power and wonder nonetheless. In the absence of he whose eyes have watched and whose elegant fingers have touched and prodded and ordered every other innovation in these last years, I have made something uniquely my own. Three rings, objects of great beauty and even greater cunning, all but sentient in their potency.

Air, fire and water, making and rending, holding and shaping; Nenya will most meetly grace your perfect hand. Then perhaps I will be something more than an artisan in your eyes, the tiresome cousin always tongue-tied in your presence. Then perhaps I, too, will know your smile.

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