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Írissë calls him a zealot.
Dashing the forestial grime from their blades, stepping barefoot into the riotous confluence of waters, they make unhurried plans together as they refill their waterskins.
Oromë, astride Nahar and flanked by his hunting party, waits beyond the coniferous shadows. Sometimes Oromë plumes a faceless bright; metallic and earthly, its light demands the eyes downward. Sometimes Oromë wears instead a near-mimic of the Eldar, and Tyelkormo can gaze upon his fana, and perhaps Írissë could even touch him, just as their grandfather claimed his hands sought purchase when Oromë offered salvation back on the crepuscular continent –- perhaps there remains some vestige of danger they might grasp. Even here, even now, as easily as he touches at his own scalp when he feels a trickle of –-
“Come here, you ruin,” Írissë suddenly grimaces. Tyelkormo’s hair is sticky with blood, itching against his temple, but he grins and ducks his dissent away from Írissë’s outstretched hand.
“You’d thieve from me my reward?” Tyelkormo goads. So she springs forward and dunks him under the glacial water.
His temple bleeds again as he kneels before the Hunter to dress the boar that had sent him crashing, exhilarated, into the snap-slash of brambles. With the toes of his boots relishing the damp soil and his knife plunged into the belly of the beast, he looks up. He meets Oromë’s eyes.
To know death is a gift hallowed with the bloom of mud and panting breaths. The leaves shiver with hoofbeats; Írissë’s knives arc through the foliage to stake their claim; Oromë’s hunters wraithe within the verdure, firefly-silent.
Something concupiscent in the sting of sweat in abrasions, in the tenderness of a bruise, and how Tyelkormo presents all of himself unvarnished in the Hunter’s domain. Bleeding and gratified, Tyelkormo’s concentration splits into a grin to see Oromë seeing him.
Írissë claims they have both been exalted, that Oromë would invite their partaking in death – to confront it rather than sit occupied with death by dint of its absence in Valinor. No need to name those who nurse the hidden wound of loss alone, refusing to speak on the thing that choreographs their waking hours.
Írissë calls Tyelkormo a zealot.
Through a peal of laughter she wades through the hydrangea, impatient to see the sky above Oromë’s halls. They hurry to the staircase tower beside Oromë’s armory, where he had arrayed Tyelkormo in fur, had presented Írissë her birch bark quiver. When Tyelkormo slips an arm around her, she whirls back to tug on the vines Tyelkormo has plaited into his silver hair. She pays no mind to their thorns.
“My proud zealot,” she proclaims in laughter. “Such a mess you make of devotion.”
“Devotion is messy,” Tyelkormo says; to prove it, he throws his arms around her and his grime bleeds across to ruin her white silk. She pays no mind to the carnage.
Every Valmar rooftop, shaded with the drape of flowers and the colorful throb of insects, is crowded with divinity. A pastime of the small Maiar, the knee-high ones who use words sparingly and flee into the lees of smokebush or rafters, is to skywatch. They sprawl out, clawed feet uncurling and polished faces opalescent under Varda’s firmament. They wax and wane by her scintillations.
Tyelkormo counts the gaggle of them, clucking and murmuring among themselves, as he and Írissë outclimb the ivy clinging to the steps to alight on the white marble roof.
They muster simple words in woodwind voices.
“Arômêz’s one,” they call him. The epithet squares his shoulders.
“Arômêz’s one,” they identify Írissë. She sits beside them, slowly so as not to roust them.
“Varda’s ones,” they introduce themselves, kindred. The little feathered sails of their wings unfold to stretch a welcome.
The wisteria petals drift upon the dark waves of Írissë’s unbound hair when she does as the Maiar do, falling back against the rooftop with her arms outflung. Her gaze skyward: she is finding the most distant place from Aman and scouting it.
When Tyelkormo settles splay-legged beside her, she reaches over to thumb at two boar tusks fastened to his armlet.
“Do their ends frighten you at all?” she asks. “The ends of those creatures we cull.”
“Frighten! Not a whit.” But Írissë scrutinizes him like she would a dulled arrowhead. She pushes herself up on an elbow to get a better squint at him. Her skepticism prods him to continue: “I was chosen for this. Lord Oromë chose us for this.”
“I wonder why he did,” Írissë says.
She is still flushed from the rites performed; ribcage and sinew, she had worked with a ferocious reverence on a hart. When Oromë had smiled upon her, she had bowed her head under the weight of wonder.
She wonders why she was chosen, and, Because! Because! Tyelkormo could reply, because because is intuition and a hunter intuits. Because it is their gift to keep and they have been waiting for it for as long as Írissë has taken to vanishing into the forest and Tyelkormo has ignored the way his grandmother, a pastel portrait imposing at the fore of Fëanáro’s workshop, looks like him.
He doesn’t know why.
There is a thread he would pull loose, or pull himself along to its end, if it were not inextricable from his own person. A connate tangle. Because.
“Because.”
No: he tries it and it has no legs to make the leap to her.
“Because, he knows we would listen and readily answer his call.” Louche shrug to punctuate his reply.
“What is it about us that we have listened so closely? Why do we answer?”
“We are unafraid of messes.”
Írissë’s fingers catch the drift of Tyelkormo’s tangled hair and twist at a lock. But she is alert: aware of something wounded or wild out in the agrestal expanse -– and for its reveal to change her.
“My hands shook the first time,” she begins.
The little Maiar stir, maundering to perch in a line at the edge of the rooftop. Brief visitors, they admire Valmar’s clement autumn before it cedes back to spring: to the west, the rounded shapes of kine loiter at the city gates in their hasteless journey to Yavanna’s pastures. Just to the east, Oromë’s woods ripple an interminable canopy of gold and red.
Two Maiar cast final glances behind to see Tyelkormo and Írissë, observing them as they would another vanishing season.
“I partook in death, and as I did, I thought of my father and mother and my brothers. All of them with such soft hearts and gentle bearings.”
Tyelkormo snorts. “Hah,” he agrees, collusively angling himself closer to her. Alive to how keenly he wants to let her in on the secret: how his father constructs daggers from the carcanets he once treasured, how Atarinkë has lately crafted him a sword and it would dazzle her to see, and how none of Fëanáro’s sons spar tirelessly as he. But:
“I thought of Oromë’s tutelage, and how under his watch I will learn to be a fine warrior. I thought of Grandfather the king’s tales: those stories of our forebears in Valariandë, when darkness’ predation made warriors of them. And when my imagination placed my gentle family in that land, I feared for them. And I feared for myself.”
Tyelkormo curves toward Írissë, but Huan is already hopping over him to settle against her. Good boy, better than he.
Írissë grins when his long, soft fur tickles her cheek, but soon enough seeks Tyelkormo’s gaze above Huan’s alert ears. She watches him with intent, the same way Oromë looked at him when his silver hair soaked red.
Watching the stain like it bore a message.
“I imagined they would die.”
At the ledge, the Maiar orient themselves westward to the distant shard splintering up beyond the swell and crest of woods, mansions, orchards: Taniquetil.
Soundless, they one after another open their wings to the breeze and sail away toward the gloaming mountain. Írissë drags her gaze from Tyelkormo to see them off. Her fingers spread with a hope, before they clutch into Huan’s fur.
“I imagined they would die the way I have seen the beasts of His Woods die. And I alone, bearing this gift, would live forever.”
*
Celegorm never retreats into the undercroft of remembrance. Never steals back into the days when he had no one to miss.
Fëanor the Father is dead and Maedhros the Son has risen. Míriel has relinquished a future which now recoils from the exiled. Any fate is possible in Arda. And Celegorm has a kingdom to snare.
But he awakes with memories: colorful and buzzing, they dive at him. He could touch them, almost. Could almost strike them down with his blade. Diligent as the sun's daily descent, they find him:
Fëanáro honing his grief into a scepter to rally the gasping circle of Noldor. Írissë asking Nolofinwë what to call this compassionate wooden cradle Aulë had wrought for Finwë's broken body. The Teleri condemning Fëanáro's sons as zealots.
Tyelkormo wanting to touch her, even now. Even after he had boarded his boat and the spume of cold ocean stole the feeling from his fingers. He thought she might laugh to think of him fumbling for her, so far away from him.
“I am Oromë’s one,” Celegorm announces to the people of Nargothrond, because it was once true. Does it mean anything to them?
Does it matter?
He hunts alone, stalking into the murk with a blade fluent in Beleriand’s ugliness. A diverting pastime, dividing down his quarry into quick, immaculate slices. Until an aching restlessness possesses him and he forgoes weaponry altogether, crouching in the tall grass and -- a whoop, a lunge, a crash, as in defiance of his own limited body, he grapples down his prey.
Kill slung over his shoulder and his cheer armored, he makes a terrifying image approaching the portcullis. Terror does not repulse, he finds -- the Valar with their careful fana and lukewarm Quenya had it wrong. Terror is the currency of the continent. Salt to stags, Nargothrond’s heedful follow him with their eyes and then their feet.
He cards his sticky hand through his hair to take away its telltale color. Aredhel had stained him sometimes with her bloody hands, like this. She had smelled warm, like leather; like a good day.
They had laughed about sharing messes. They had dubbed it devotion.
*
He thinks he sees her, sometimes. A piscine glint of a white gown sweeping through Nargothrond's dusk; or persisting amid the yews. Ever at a distance.
He stalks into the rich, deep obscurity of shadow to hunt alone.
The Sindar mutter to themselves, what tutelage has bestowed upon him such brutality? A ruthlessness dredged up from some primeval place warps his fingers into claws and grants his tongue a taste for blood.
In a land forsaken by the old deities, who is to say Celegorm is not deified?
In such a land, who would dare tell him that Aredhel cannot be out there, living forever?
He thinks he sees her, sometimes.
And he thinks he would run to her now, and that together they would run to some vanishing corner of joy, and vanish together.
But instead he turns his face away.