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Thus he came alone to Angband’s gates, and he sounded his horn,
and smote once more upon the brazen doors,
and challenged Morgoth to come forth to single combat.
And Morgoth came.
- The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien
There is beauty in destruction.
The crumbling down of night.
The shattering of glass and crystal.
The dying of light.
The slow death of a single flower, its lushest colors withering under flaky fragility, a fingertip’s touch away from fine, dusty powder.
There is a beauty in destruction such as it can be found nowhere else.
There was a thunder as of storms brewing underground and an avalanching quake rippling through the ink-swirling sky above the spearing Gates of Angband, smooth and nitid as a cruel bird’s beak.
Blacker than the darkest chasm he was. His mail, as though made of gloom itself, shaped around his fell vastness. Sleek as dragon scales, shining as a choking gap in a field of stars, gorging itself on their light and splendor.
Blackness and obscurity. Tenebrosity. Murk.
Shielding his disastrous face.
The ground shook as though from fits of fever and the hosts of Angband, creatures of darkness and malice, cowered behind the fortress’ walls. They were a tenebrous jungle falling silent at the devastating shadow slinking forth from its realm.
And Morgoth came.
Rage is a curious sentiment and it wrecked Fingolfin’s body, king of the Noldor, worse than the god’s footfall’s. Wrath shivered across his pallid skin like glazed fever.
Sweat beaded on his brow, his sword of immaculate silver, delicate as frost and sharp as a glacier, shaking in his slick palm.
For hours stretching as years Fingolfin had been yelling there like an angrily hammering insect twanging its silvery wings in wrath, hitting and hitting again the iron-bound bars of the cage of a black-streaked tiger, trying and shouting for its white-whittled teeth. The cry of a horn, strident and acute, fled through the iron gates and the stronghold underground like a bolt in flight.
Lord of slaves!
Craven fiend!
Craven!
Craven!
Craven!
His glittering hair grew hoarse in the flying winds and his fury-silvered voice whipped helplessly through the gripping storm.
And then, Morgoth came.
All of a sudden, Fingolfin nearly drew back, a shiver flickering across his rage-torn features.
Yet only nearly so.
It is written that, alone among the Valar, Morgoth knew fear.
And perhaps he does. Only not then.
Yet there the small elven king was, that man of haunted wrath who had been riding his valiant horse through streams of fire and gusts of flames across his waste-stricken land when he would not, could not, could not endure the obliteration of his people in this war like snapping twigs in a wildfire.
Yet there the small elven king was, that man of haunted wrath who had been riding his valiant horse through streams of fire and gusts of flames across his waste-stricken land when he would not, could not, could not endure the obliteration of his people in this war like snapping twigs in a wildfire.
He might be even venerated, if not for his valor but the magnitude of his crystal fury.
Admittedly, he was valiant.
This he shall be granted.
All at once, the wailing earth fell silent.
There was an intake, a bristling, as though of a great inhaling.
Of breaths held, minds strained.
And in that same held breath, the blinding blackness of the Hammer of the Underworld fell down like a dead star.
It was all Fingolfin could do and leap aside when lightning stroke. Beneath his trembling feet, the ground gaped openly, fire-melting beasts and blaze-hissing jaws snapping their fangs at him. What little of rock and earth had not yet been aflame broke up in cracking fits and rose, rose in head-spitting, torrent-torn conflagration.
Streams of fire.
That was how it had all begun.
Fall upon fall, Morgoth’s war-sworn weapon came for Fingolfin, again and again, swift as thunderbolts.
Oh, but Fingolfin was a quick one. Many thought or hoped Morgoth to be slow due to mountainousness, encumbered by the giant weapon that was Grond, his war-hammer. Now Fingolfin knew it was not true. His people had made their homes among mountains long enough to observe their ponderous movement.
That is why they thought all mountains to be the same.
Oh, but Fingolfin was a quick one, indeed. It was like sizzling rainfall, this attack, an onslaught of hail and wounded earth and new-born pits of sibilating fire.
Fingolfin, however, flitted around, a darting fish, silver scales flashing only for the briefest smile below rippling water, his blue shield and ice-glittering sword like crystal wings shimmering between his lashing long hair. (None other among the Children of Ilúvatar would have challenged the Dark Lord himself.
None other would have stood in his gaze longer than its breath.
Around him, columns of fire spiraled into the skies like creatures aflame. His skin shone with sweat and soot, grime from the flame-rivers and ash-weeping sky, yet still more it shook from the elves plight. For a moment, a ripple flitted across his relentless, rage-ravaged features. Did he think of fiery serpents, of Glaurung, Father of Dragons to have come in white-hot fire?
And darkness rushed.
All of a sudden – without warning – a gale of pain, a smarting tempest, roiled across the swirl-burning grounds like a race of thunder and lightning meeting. So horrifying a voice, all the heinous creatures underground and above wailed with pain from it. Even I well-nigh clasped my hands over my ache-bristling ears.
It was a sound, a roiling, coiling, tumbling, rumbling like naught else before / as had never been uttered before.
It rushed-washed Fingolfin from his feet all at once, his glossy-white horse tossing its eye-rolling head. It streaked away, away across the fire-flaming, choking land.
Fingolfin gasped, nonetheless, standing upright. There was a furious joy in his streaking breaths: Morgoth was wounded.
I grasped the rough stone beside me.
Fingolfin had done what no one else would have dreamed wildly.
The fury, that followed, was unheard of in all of Beliarand and Middle-Earth, in all of Arda, truly.
All restrain gone and lashed, Morgoth raged, Fingolfin raved. Over and over again, the grounds whimpered and the Orcs and Balrogs and their fell brethren howled when, beyond belief, six more wounds Fingolfin executed to inflict upon the terrible darkness while he was nearly killed with each strike.
And now, Morgoth laughed and cried of pain alike.
And then, of a sudden, the playful dance between beetle and lion was over.
The cat’s paw struck with a lazy, final flick of his tail.
A silver dash, Fingolfin leapt aside, coughing in splinters, then the crunch-screeching melody as of metal caressing rock.
Breath-stolen.
Drowning in his own yell, swept away by the tide of vast oceans, Fingolfin vanished.
Trapped between claws and teeth, buried beneath smiling Morgoth’s – though his helmet did not reveal him doing so and yet I knew he was – iron-twined foot.
Valiant as he was, Fingolfin could not escape further, neither far nor near.
Heaving groans, I could hear them from Fingolfin’s blood-broken ribs.
Far above, Morgoth’s wild laughter, a hailstorm.
Glary and dazing, pulsing through Fingolfin’s ears.
There was no way to escape from this hounding darkness.
In fierce, splintering, sapphire-splitting desperation, he thrusted his glittering sword, until, abruptly, a stream of void-torrid, pitch-parching, torment-ebony blood spilled forth and nearly drowned him – and coughing and spluttering, Fingolfin stabbed and stabbed and stabbed blindingly on.
And then, as unexpected as a bright bird chanting in a ruin of ashes, Morgoth, the iron stronghold of his mail broken, stepped back.
Perhaps he was blinded by his own pain.
Perhaps he had heard reinforcements galloping across crimson-marred lands.
Perhaps he felt tedium, bored by the fight quite suddenly.
I, however, was watching Fingolfin, how he stirred, drowned, his throat thick with poison, his broken bones crawling away.
Slowly, gradually, he labored, creeped, and slipped away into the smoke-wincing, fire-hitching night.
Deep below the cracked earth and cloven rocks, I knew the creatures of Morgoth’s court were still writhing.
I could almost see their pinched eyes and claw-clapped ears.
At long last, I stepped forth.
Speaking thoughtfully-
“A touch exaggerated and overdramatic, I think.”
“And here I kept thinking you enjoyed/were fond of a dash of drama, my lord.”
There it was, the redolent brightness of glowing coals.
In a golden single blink, an amber-tart raise of eyelashes and gleam of honey-spiced incessanty, his quicksilver face sheened where, not a heartbeat before, Morgoth had been.
Sinfully, a glinting flame dancing with mirth.
“The shrieks?”
“Ah,” It was not Morgoth who answered but he whom is called Sauron. Gold-gleam lips curving, the most redolent hint of mockery glistering in his silk-spun voice.
“Wondrous, where they not?”
Often I had wondered, in secret, whether he could do it, whether – if capable of such a devilish feat – he would dare it.
Now, I beheld my answer
“I took particular pains with these.” A flash, a keen blade of mischief. Watching me like a cat behind a mirroring window of glass. Bowing before me. “Your physical abilities are awe-inspiring indeed, my lord.”
I was thinking of colossal rocks, burying his flame-redolent ruby-hair beneath them.
“Admirable, indeed,” I spoke dryly.
My voice was the sound of those rocks, now, an abrasive highland’s trenchant avalanche
My lightning storm voice.
I could make air crackle and moan, water rigidify and break, earth bleed and cry.
“And the cause for your assumption being…?”
Another bow of his lovely shaped back, deeper and lower than the one before.
Ah, yes. A peacock might have bowed thus, opalescent emerald-neck and mesmerizingly radiant feathers of lapis lazuli and sapphires displaying.
“To spare my lord the exertion of meeting such a low creature and recreance to be rumored and most unbecoming lest my lord had indeed not come forth due to… more indispensable tasks at hand.”
“I would have come forth,” I answered, and he felt the air bite and mist even around him, awash with sudden and bitterly frozen frigidness, slivers of ice creeping deviously ashore.
“Of course, my lord.”
Behind Mairon’s comely neck, a wispy, startling dab of sunlight, soft as apricots, wafted through the eternal shadow-plumes above Angband, grazing his fair head, spearing each lustrous strand of hair into rays of carnelian vermillion and tangerine scarlet iridescence ablaze.
Not even I could have fathoemd if it was his doing or whether it was just the natural desire of all things fair and golden to leap forward to please him.
I could not have said, in that precise moment, what was mightier, my elemental wrath or my abyss-cloven adoration.
“What reason would you have to doubt me, lieutenant?”
Another bow, deeper, flickering gold, arching lips sly as pearls
“None, my lord.”
Ah, he knew me too well, indeed.
“An amusing comedy it was…,” I purr now, savoring each syllable, relishing, “…save for three grave flaws in your art.”
I hoped for a flicker in the crafty flame’s dance.
“I confess myself disenchanted. I have come to expect nothing but perfection from you, little flame…”
Finally, a flash of golden eyes.
Yet, no unevenness on the shimmering pearl revealed.
Ah.
I say, “It is nothing, my precious. Do not think of it any longer.”
There was a new smile kindled, alight with the embers of Mairon’s ravishingly-carved features, curiously bright.
He was not bowing anymore.
“Tell me, oh lord, where I erred.”
My voice’s melody played leisurely.
“First and foremost, I would never have allowed the small king to strike me.”
“Of course not,” agreed Mairon in his slyest voice. “I was thinking of the tale spun out of this. You could assume a limp if you like, my lord.”
“Secondly,” I continued musingly, observing him closely, the air around us crepitating with keen frost-fire, “a scratch by a mortal’s plaything could not have made me bleed thus, let alone –,“ I hid my ire well enough, “cry like the mortal himself.”
“No, indeed not,” he answered with his most mellifluous, most dulcet smile.
“And third and most grievous of all,” I said, my cold-pierced wrath mounting anew, “I would not have allowed the king of the Noldor to live. I should have killed him where he stood.”
“True,” Mairon’s lip curved. “My lord lacks subtlety still, alas.”
I well-nigh struck the side of his face just then, just to feel his pretty skin against my hand and see his lean neck turn sideways.
As though he had heard me, he moved his chin, ever so slightly, showing me the pulsating line of his neck.
His gold-glittering eyes flickered away swiftly, then back at me. Delicately, he dabbed the tips of his two fingers against his own cheek lightly, the opal gleam of his lips moving soundlessly. Ow.
The audacious little minx!
Oh, there existed no creature in this world more infuriating than he!
I was a thunderstorm in full view now, the high peaks of Thangorodrim shuddering with the quaking earth, and I knew Mairon was trembling now from the frost-bite of my ice-calling voice.
No, I could not veil myself as he.
“Is that so?”
“My lord, live Fingolfin will not. Not after he has returned to his people and graced every little elf with the poison I infused him with. When they start dying, he will find his cruel death as well.”
This vision, I confess, appealed to me more than I might tell him.
For a minute I considered Mairon, blaze-bright hair and black-twisting armor, and eyes of purest, highest fire.
My voice was one of earth quaking and mountains shuddering.
“I should punish you for your procacity and hubris.”
The flame in Mairon’s eyes danced along his flickering chuckle, glittering in the back of his throat like the faint incense of a desire-bejeweled sigh.
His quicksilver answer was coy as a blushing maiden and brazen as an edge-rimmed dagger.
“Why, then forth you shall come and do so, my lord.”
And, with a sweep of his fire-sworn hair, he was gone, not more than a distant spell of ember-lit darkness and a dash of wings in the sky, his whore's laughter trailing behind him like a deceitful flame upon the edge of night.
I watched his retreat till he was nothing more than a tiny scarlet gleam flickering upwards on the ruin of earth and sky.
And time moved on.
I find him in the arms of night.
Physical bodies succumb to weariness from time to time, even ours, his and mine, mine and his.
Mairon sleeps even less than I do, nonetheless, for too industrious, too ceaseless a creature he is, driven to fits of collapsing, faint-like otherwhile.
Tonight, however, I find his limbs covered by darkness, heated by my volcanoes, their voiceless breathing beyond the onyx-black underground chamber.
Perhaps his transformation into Morgoth, into me, or so I flatter myself, has depleted him more than he is willing to admit.
Within the folds of night, his petal-soft fingers reach for me.
My jaw. My lip. My eyebrows.
The bones, ridges below my cheeks.
The outer curve, slanting, lashes brushing, of my eye.
The trail, skull and skin, from my temple to my earlobe, a silent path.
My visage, face and features.
His breath, despite the liquid fire hither and yonder and his inner gold within, curls into small clouds upon his gold-dust blossom lips.
In the chillness brought on by my heels, his fingertips are like stars, trailing their far light upon my skin.
Then, his long-fingered hands leave my cheeks, bone and skin.
I think he sees something flash in my eye, or maybe he imagines it so.
When I look up again, his coal-glowing mouth and flame-blessed lips kiss hot warmth into my ice-ruled skin, my white knuckles, my ice-yielding hands embraced by his.
I tell him not of what I did.
Perhaps because he knows.
His lips still tingling on my hands, I reach for him and we press close, unclad and naked, his and mine, mine and his, close, close, close till ice pours into fire and flame envelops snows, and I have my revenge, his breathless shrieks and soft-bending voice my prize, in one way or another.
You see.
It took me scarcely more than the minutes counted off by my single hand to find the limping, wounded king.
I came upon Fingolfin not like the splitting smote of thunder nor the blinding sear of lightning but like a knife-stroke.
I showed myself to Fingolfin not in the iron armor of his fears. Bare of shield, bare of armor, without sable nor sword, I found him. He stumbled, astounded to behold me thus.
Had I still possessed the power to shape my own appearance like the flaring flame shapes itself, I might have shown him what only my brothers and sisters had sighted, a visage so fair and hair as gleaming, ensnaring each iris-violet, sun-saffron, lakelet-viridian, azure-blue ray from the first lights as brilliant snow I was, however, content to have him stare at me as I remain now. My eyes, one of frost-searing fire, one of blaze-blue ice.; my hair of starburst midnight, darker than the darkest, moonless, blackest pool, gashed into the night.
Ah. How easily they forget that it was who invented the first elements ever to be grant heat or cold, frostiness or ardor, that it was I who called forth all that fueled, the true mechanisms, the beginnings and ends of all that they Arda. In the first throes of Fingolfin’s puzzlement, he even may not have known who was standing, towering above him.
Yet, there was only one such being I could be and none other. Oh, how he winced, how he stared and stared, to behold glorious Melkor, so different and yet terrible, far more terrible than it is written.
I did not need my void-cast boots to bury him beneath me, and, indeed he drew my blood. It was like letting a drop of water slide down your wrist.
The few scattered drops parted his shouts easily.
I laughed like a child, then. I might assume a limp after all, perhaps.
It is written that the exceptional joy of creation was taken from me, that I am bereft of it for always and evermore till eternity.
At times, I am furious with it, even troubled – though I have never said so aloud except once – I ache, then, I am furious again.
I was not so furious now, pealing Fingolfin’s soft limbs apart.
There is beauty in destruction.
The dying of light.
The elegancy of a single drop of blood, euphoniously sanguine, the exultant red bursting upon impact.
The frantic gallop, the frenzied quickening of a rearing heart before its eternal arrest.
Beauty, and effusive joy, in all of these.
The muffled, emaciating cries of a waning man The holding, choking, coughing of breath. The tearing of flesh, ever so slowly, coming apart.
From far away, I heard Manwë’s eagles, Thorondor’s imperious wings rushing through the speeding air, come to save the dying king, to retrieve his broken body for burial before I defiled every ruined cell of it.
There was a boyish grin blooming inside my chest at the sound of their onrushing wings and wild beaks.
I thought, Let them come.
A flower Fingolfin was in my hands, petals falling easily, freed from their stem, and I laughed aloud with joy.
Crude, Mairon would have sighed, tauntingly golden. Uninventive. Uninspired. Unimaginative, my lord.
Such it may be written.
Ah, of course he would have been right to say so perhaps, yes. Even though I would never tell him so.
And such it may be written indeed.
But. You see.
I do not always care for what is written.
And.
You see.
Dying Fingolfin did try and hurt what is most precious to both Morgoth and Melkor.