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When Melkor emerges from sleep under a pour of kisses, he sluggishly groans in protest. Who dares awaken the beast? A low chuckle has him flutter his eyes open, still clouded with foggy dreams, to find the loveliest face in this wretched world hovering above his own.
“Mairon," he mumbles.
Light of my life.
With preternatural speed, he has him pinned on the mattress; Mairon, already fully clothed, Melkor still very nude above him. "Bold move, Lieutenant," he growls with a smirk. "Tremble, ye that disturb the Elder King's slumber..."
He does the voice. The cavernous, blood-curdling one he'd use to place a curse or command his armies, which he found some time after their first meeting to have a really interesting effect on Mairon. Sometimes it draws a laugh out of him. (Most times, it rouses him silly.)
But this time, before Melkor can voraciously assault his prey, his lover stays his ardours with a hand on his mouth.
“I am loath to tease you," he husks, not sounding very sincere, "but there is something you must see…” Melkor quirks an eyebrow. “It’s about our daughter.”
He tenses and briskly scrambles up to his feet. “Moriendë? What of her?!” His catastrophic mind brimming with catastrophic scenarios as he makes for the door, where his bathrobe is unceremoniously flung at his face.
“She's fine, and so are you, but the children need not see the whole of it," Mairon quips.
Grumbling, Melkor hastily covers his modesty, scouring the room for his most crucial attributes, (“Where did I leave my crown and my mace?, “Melkor, that’s not important…”), before Mairon leads him towards the children’s bedroom, and gently nudges for him to peer through the crack of the door.
He takes a cautious peek.
And his jaw slackens. “Did she…?”
“Yes.” An exulting smile creeps upon Mairon’s lips.
Their youngest, Moriendë, has seemingly shapeshifted for the very first time. A momentous confirmation for them that she, like her brother Locëran, has inherited Mairon's mastery of the art. Hers is currently a serpentine form, and no puny garden snake's by any means, but a young python's, big and strong enough to coil around her brother’s frame as she attempts to suffocate him in his sleep.
“Our baby girl,” Melkor whispers with affected awe. “Already trying to commit her first kill…”
“Right? Such a precocious child,” Mairon boasts with pride. And her little baby fangs haven’t even started to fall out, yet!
It had taken Locëran many years longer before they witnessed him transform into a feral werewolf. Vanishing into the moonlit mountains, he reappeared the following morn with a human arm in his sharped-toothed maw, and Melkor had the limb promptly embalmed, thinking Mairon could make use of it as a display for his many rings. It still stands on his vanity, right by the jewellery box - their son's first trophy for Mairon to admire when he combs his hair.
Melkor embraces him from behind, feeling swarmed by a gush of plenitude. “Would that I could capture this moment… I’m certain Fëanáro would’ve invented a device for it, and I could’ve stolen that.”
“Hm. We should’ve coerced him into our bidding when he was still alive,” Mairon regretfully murmurs. He presses a kiss on Melkor’s knuckles before approaching the bed of his son, who’s still smothered to bits by a spool of iridescent scales.
“Morning, my dark little sunshine,” Mairon coos, gently stroking the head of his reptilian daughter. She nuzzles against his palm in response. “Atar and I are so proud to see you develop those murderous urges. But kinslaying is a Noldo custom, not ours…”
She hisses in protest.
“Tut-tut.” His eyes blaze up, menacing but not void of fondness. “Release your brother, dearie. His face is turning blue.”
Locëran’s eyes are bulging, his tongue is sticking out, and were his face not initially a healthy ashen complexion to begin with, it would be drained of any flush. But finally! A precious lungful of air when his little sister loosens her grip, darting her forked tongue in frustration as he gasps for breath.
“Are you alright, darling?” Mairon brushes his hair – radiant, similar to his own – away from his matted forehead.
“No,” he rasps, kneading his sore throat.
He’ll be alright.
Moriendë slithers towards Melkor and curls up his frame like a sentient vine, snuggling around his shoulders to give him a good morning hug. “I was not really trying to kill him, Atar, I was only showing Atya I could…” she hisses in his ear.
Melkor chuckles and presses a kiss on the crown of her head. “Can you show Atar how you shapeshift?”
She nods and, gliding down his chest to let him catch her in his arms, morphs at once into her original form. Her name, Daughter of Darkness, fits her like a glove. Misty as the night is her hair, and dusky her complexion, but her placid loveliness, she did not inherit from Melkor. As a baby, she was already the most beautiful creature he’d ever laid his eyes on, born with a luscious mass of hair and claws as sharp as nails. Unfortunately, Mairon was not as enchanted as Melkor upon giving birth to her. The claws. He still has yet to change his mind about that third child he vetoed.
“Look, Atar, look!” When she's certain that Melkor's really looking, Moriendë spins her head on its axis in a full rotation. “Oot sdrawkcab kaeps nac I dnA!” Her voice a foreboding baritone, closer to Unkie Gothmog's than a toddler's.
“Woooow." Melkor's reverence is a bit magnified for the sake of encouragement, but hopefully, she won't detect it. "That was properly terrifying, Princess.”
No, but that was the cutest thing he's ever seen.
She does not smile - she never smiles - but he can tell she's pleased from the way all of her eyes light up (save for the ones she keeps in a jar).
Locëran, who has in the meantime recovered his breath, dramatically clutches at Mairon’s nightgown and cries, “I am never sleeping in the same room as her again! Atya, if you force me to, I will run away and take Ancalagon with me!”
“Absolutely not,” Melkor cuts in, “Ancalagon is mine. You can take Gostir.” (“Nobody is running away.”) “Right, no running away either,” he adds to Mairon’s remark.
“But fine,” concedes the latter, “I suppose it's time you got your own room. There might be an empty crypt left downstairs...”
Moriendë, still in her Atar’s arms, shoots her brother a superior glare. Weakling, she mouths at him when her fathers are conveniently not looking. Locëran glowers, easily provoked, but before he can come up with a riposte—
“You know what?” Melkor gently puts down Moriendë on the ground. “Since I rose early today, why don’t we all take a stroll down to the kingdoms of Men and sow mistrust in their corruptible hearts? What say you, children?”
“Sweet!” Locëran springs from his bed. “I love sowing mistrust in the hearts of Men!”
“Melkor, they were scheduled for their abstract metallurgy lesson this morning,” Mairon reminds him.
Abstract metallurgy? Locëran makes a face – distraught, appalled, betrayed. Moriendë remains typically inexpressive but she is no doubt flooded with similar anguish.
“That’s nothing we can’t postpone until evening. Or forever,” Melkor dismissively waves his hand.
“Fine. Spoil them.”
A small hand tugs at the hem of his bathrobe and he lowers his gaze.
“Can we also instil the seed of hubris in their fickle spirits, like you?”
Melkor ruffles Moriendë's hair in response. “Of course, my little darkling. Arda is no longer mine and your Atya's alone to subdue and usher into an age of ruin. It is yours too,” he declares to both of his children.
And he means every word. This is his purpose now: to nurture this life he created and watch it grow. He sees no rival in his spawn, but a better version of him, one who could become everything, aspire to anything, fare beyond his very shadow - isn't it the point? Melkor will never crush them with the same lesson Eru delivered him in the threshold of Time. No. All he can do, his children will do better.
Moriendë enfolds his trunk of a leg with her tiny arms. “You’re the best, Atar." And in that sinister voice from the netherworld, "Uoy evol I.”
And I, to the Void and back…
Melkor’s eyes meet Mairon’s then.
His beautiful Mairon, whose love he once denied himself out of fear. Fear of scorn, fear of abandon, fear of finding the meaning of his emptiness revealed to him, fear that something too real would atrophy his sense of self – but really, how foolish he was to dismiss it! How foolish he once was to wish for the seas to dry up, for the stars to unpin, for the earth to shatter apart and the trees to turn into stone, thinking he could relish in the beauty of it all by himself.
Had it not been for them, he would’ve been sentenced to die a forever-death without peace.
“Alright," he hears himself say, surprised to sound so responsible, "get dressed and then we're off to defile humanity."
Them, in unison: "Yes, Atar."
Master of the Fates of Arda, Lord of Darkness, Elder King. Of all the regal titles he has claimed for himself, none has ever made him feel like he owned the world as strongly as this one.
Manwë may rule over his puny empire of ants. But the Noldor left his realm to war against each other; and every day, blood fertilises the soil of Beleriand; and every day, Melkor wakes up in a bed still toasty from Mairon’s ghost, sometimes from hearing his children’s sweet cackles and shrieks as they dart across the hallways, and every day, he wins.
Their own little Empyrean. No sun without shadow. No bloom without decay. No oxygen without sulphur. But love seeps everywhere like spores, and he's happy to let it rotten his black heart a little more...