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It happened, as so many realizations do, at the changing of the lights. Feanor watched his small son who had fallen asleep with frustrated tears over yet another failed project. He looked at his beautiful, beautiful, intelligent child and realized the boy would never amount to anything.
Others had whispered it already. Those who were jealous of Feanor’s greatness, those who were simply spiteful. The son does not take after the father, they said. Can one so unskilled even be of the Noldor? Feanor had scorned them. His son was yet young. He had not yet found his true craft. One day he would create works that would surpass all save perhaps his father’s. One day he would be renowned from one end of Valinor to the other. But some people simply did not have the skill of making, and his son, Feanor realized, was one of these.
Feanor shrugged a little to himself, and as he gently gathered his wonderful, perfect little son into his arms, thought of all the sharp insults with which he would counter anyone who might dare to call his son a disgrace.
In after days Feanor eagerly taught his eldest child all the boy might wish to learn. And Maitimo Nelyafinwe was sharp of mind and grew skilled in the understanding of numbers and in games of strategy and in all the lore of the past told to him by his father and grandfather; and never was there a father more proud than Feanor. But in a world without kinslayings, where elves valued only beauty and things made by skillful hands and artistic minds, in a world that had no need for valiant warriors or brilliant strategists or strong leaders, in a world without oaths of fire and tragedy, he would never have amounted to anything.