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One.
You used to play in Míriel Þerindë’s garden when you were children, Nelyafinwë, you, Tyelkormo, and Carnister. You would pretend that you were warriors in Endórë, sparse stories and droll histories spun like glass into hours-long games, the pond behind the rosebushes for lake Cuiviénen. Tyelkormo lobbied for the roll of Oromë nearly every time, and with his height Nelyafinwë was a good monster, moss about his shoulders but never in his hair. You would sneak into the maze of a library after the shutters were closed against Telperion for the night, and pretend the whole world was still dark, racing through the aisles and hiding behind the columns, some of you elves and some orcs.
“Does that hurt?” you ask, a bowl of soup between your hands, the clack of spoon against teeth clinging to your ears.
“Which?” Nelyafinwë replies. When his tattered ears tic forward like that it usually means a good mood, so he’s trying to be funny, you think, which is. Good.
“Closing your mouth.” He’s developed a slight but noticeable muzzle since you last saw him, but still, you can’t see fangs like those fitting comfortably in an elven mouth.
“No…”
“Oh, good,” you say lightly, and you feed him more soup.
When you were older yet, you would sit around a waning fireplace after you should have been asleep and tell each other ghastly stories, weird shadows flickering on your skin. The strangeness of Outer Lands was what appealed to you then. You’d twist tales about the Quendi stolen by Melkor and made into orcs, the creatures he sent to dog them in the night. The elves he bent to his will and released, back to their settlements, to wreak havoc in the night from within. Carnister and yourself were the chief tellers. His stories were surprisingly creative. What he could do best, was always find a reasonable doubt, a plausible example--a kernel of truth to be expounded upon and used as evidence to the lie. Atarinkë slept with your parents for a month after the one about the nís who stole children’s brains as they slept, and why not? Earwigs can do it.
“I have to ask,” you say. “You know I have to ask.”
“Do you?” Nelyafinwë replies, not as clearly as he once might have for the obstructions in his mouth and the serration in his upper lip. You’re beginning to think the hoarseness will be a constant. “We all only have one allegiance. We swore to it twice. It brooks no other.”
“But he didn’t even try?” you press.
“He did try, but not more than the once and not with success. Moringotto had no need to take hold of me. There was nothing I knew I hid well enough to call for it. He had no intention of releasing me back to you.”
“He did leave you on the mountain,” you reason.
“He didn’t know anyone would come,” he says, a matter of course. You try not to think about it too long.
“Wouldn’t he? Supposedly he has a share in the gifts of all his brethren, Mandos being included.”
Nelyafinwë blinks. You have a point, you know you have. Atarinkë’s been making it for days. “I didn’t,” he says flatly. Normally you can’t tell if he means to snarl when he speaks, or if it’s just the way his lips move, but now you’re surprised you don’t hear a growl.
“You attacked the nurse.”
“I was—disoriented—and she recovered perfectly well, and I apologized— “
“I know, I was there, she accepted very gracefully,” you reply.
“Then?”
You sigh, and you lean forward earnestly, before you remember that that is too near. “Nelyo, there is nothing I could possibly want more than to just know this, for this to be over for you, you know that— “
“Do I?”
“What does that mean?” You sound more hurt than you thought you would—you are hurt. You both might know this needs to be discussed, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t…fraught.
Nelyafinwë might look apologetic. You really can’t read him anymore. It might not be the ruined features to blame after all; it might just be that he no longer makes expressions. “You do know,” he says, his thin chest rising and falling with the effort to speak. This is the most animated he’s yet been in a conversation. “I’m telling you.”
You used to be able to look at his face and tell what he thought. You used to be closer to Nelyafinwë than anyone. You went through a phase where you had so many inside jokes and shared memories no one could follow your conversations. It never really went away. Everything you didn’t learn from your mother and father you learned from him, your magnificent, multitalented older brother, who spoke circles around seasoned statesmen, got lost for hours in court with your grandfather, kept your brothers from killing themselves and each other. It was he who helped you with your first hopelessly trite poems, and had parts in all your drawing-room plays. When you were still young enough to run about without shoes he sang counting songs with you in the grass. He made the earrings you’ve worn since your coming-of-age, he listened to you soliloquize for hours about the first girl you fancied, he held your hair back after your first drink. Nelyafinwë was a fixture for nearly all your firsts. He was always present, excelling at everything he touched, including you.
“I am sorry I left you with this.”
“What? No; no, you didn’t leave me with anything,” you say, shaking your head, distracted by the sheaf of papers dedicated to sheaves of grain, funnily enough. You’ve been delegating most of your paperwork to Carnister so you could sit by Nelyafinwë, and he’s finally mutinied, so you brought this agricultural report with you. You look up—and Nelyafinwë’s watching you, the way he always does when he wants you to say something, brows quirked and head to one side. It’s so very familiar, except the eyebrow he’s trying to move won’t go up for the ropey scar bisecting it and his eyes reflect the lamplight like mirrors—and he still hasn’t gained back any weight, it’s beginning to worry you; he still looks like one of your mother’s sculptures, contoured to frightening extremes.
You smile.
“You’re not the only one who can herd them, you know.”
It’s the sameness that bothers you, you think—you can’t comprehend how someone so alien could still be so like someone you knew so well. You can’t stop thinking about what he’s seen to make him need to defend himself upon first waking. Findekáno’s called you a coward and heinous for not touching him, but while the healers dress his back and Atarinkë fiddles with the brace on his shoulder he’s the one propping him up against his chest, your invalid still being too weak to sit up on his own. But you, monarch, observing from the corner, can see Nelyafinwë’s face over your cousin’s shoulder, can see how much he dislikes and distrusts, how his ears press back and his eyes roll to track every movement about him and every touch against him, and you can’t stop thinking why. Instead of sleeping you keep imagining what could have created scars so numerous and so creative. The healers’ going hypothesis is that no shoulder could have been damaged so from mere suspension, and he must have been dropped from a height, and the absurdity is that from the way Nelyafinwë talks Thangorodrim was what happened after.
But more, you keep thinking about how the chunk he took from the arm of the healers’ apprentice he took with his teeth. It’s the difference that unnerves you, you think—you could forgive the maiming, how could you not, you can understand that he has seen things he cannot unsee. You wouldn’t expect him to come through the hells of iron unscathed, but the gulf between unscathed and no longer Quendi is as large as any you can think of. He snarls and he growls and he can see you in the dark; his fundamental nature has been changed, but you wonder sometimes if that phrasing is too passive—you think sometimes Nelyafinwë absorbed Angband instead of experienced it.
You keep thinking, and you can’t stop, and you can’t look at him without it.
Two.
You like him better this way.
You think he’s more honest this way.
If you had to find an illustration for crossing the Helcaraxë, you would choose your father—a slow-burning seethe stoked to sustainability, glaring eastward. Or Turgon, who would have loved a lynching but settled for a civil war. Or yourself, the last leg of your march with a nagging dread through the half-bond neither you nor Maedhros ever took to fruition, which you ignored because you were angry. You were angry since you realized your sword rusted because you forgot to clean the blood off it at the Swanhaven, and angry again when you saw the cause of it burning across the ocean, all for nothing, a glow that waxed and then waned and then died. You didn’t expect it. You expected to have the chance to tear into Maedhros for goading you into killing under false pretenses and then refusing to be found, especially when you knew he knew you fought because of him. Instead, like your father and his, you had years to rehearse and no victim to listen.
The only reason you went after him, then, might have been that you needed a difference between being angry and being cruel. But then you never did have a reason why, beyond never thinking up a reason why not. All you know for sure is that historically, one asks Oromë for truer aim, and Nienna for mercy. It's amnesty that's Manwë's.
So even if you never really—forgive Maedhros, you’re evenly matched for grievances the next time you meet, and you do take his hand. It’s more than the rest of your host manages to give, or take. So you come up to Himring maybe every fifty years. You stay for too little time, go away with your braids stiff with ashy air and hard water, and in between you fall asleep to him tonguing at the wounds you get going with him on his sorties.
You like it better this way.
Maybe what you should have done was help him, since he propositioned you when he was still sitting up on sheer willpower, going on about the durability of the earth-bound spirit. You suppose you should have fashioned yourself into a haven, should have filled up the cracks in him with gold filigree, kissed all the scars and told him you wouldn’t hurt him and waited till he believed you to touch him, instead of giving him a knife and letting him prove it himself. It might have been more decent.
It might have made a difference in the outcome.
But if you were decent you would have kept to Aman, and so you still like him better this way. A colosseum dedicated to violence. When you lick at the silver-pink welts matted over his skin like unkempt fur, you do it because they’re all proof he’s survived, deadlier than any of you, a talisman on the blade-edge of glory. Maedhros fights like one possessed, like death can’t touch him, and by all rights it should come for him more fervently but he wins.
You would have followed him, when you brought him back. You would have called Maedhros your King, and he would have led you to a bloody, brutal vengeance. You would have done a lot of things if it wasn’t for the taking and breaking of the swan ships, if the only revenge your people wanted was against Morgoth. But, you also would have called Maedhros insane when you brought him back, so maybe you’re mixing your metaphors. And Himring, if you like, is only wasted to the North, with its steel-blue fields and high, cold sun. For all his hissing about choice as he pushes you all the way inside him with his heels on your ass, and the notches he leaves on your collar with his teeth, he’s the same damn person. He never finished making the leap. For the best, you suppose.
But progression is progression in you dispossessed, and you like Maedhros better this way. You’ll never tell him—your martyr, your walking regret. But you do.
Three.
You don’t remember how long it took for them to put you in the dark with a thrall. A rat of a nér, skin pulled over bones and more dirt than hair, matted down his neck. You couldn’t have guessed what color it used to be. You couldn’t have told what color his eyes were, but they reflected the corridor light like mirrors when they opened the door to throw him in. That is all you know about him. He wasn’t the first person you’d killed—you can’t even say he was the first murder you’d committed, as poorly armed as Olwë’s people were, and he wasn’t the first you took apart, that was later, but he was the first something.
You’ll look back on this.
One of the things you minded most about Angband, besides the bugs that went in through the nailbeds, and the thing that chittered behind the wall, and the dark and the dank and the drums and how it was carefully ordered but allowed to run amok with howling and screaming to fit the mood of the place—one of the things you minded most about Angband was the way you would shine with the light of the Trees. Never enough to light a room, but enough to light you, so that they could see you but you couldn’t see them. And so it was with the thrall, when you were put in the dark with him and told that neither of you would eat until one of you killed the other.
You’ll look back on this.
You had no intention, of course; you were Quendi, you were Amanyar, you didn’t need food to live and you certainly wouldn’t kill the poor Moriquende to get it, because that was your impression of him. You wouldn’t find an adversary where there was a victim, benevolent king that you were. You had no intention. He was in mortal terror, all bent in a cower when they opened the door to throw him in. But that was with them, and they weren’t there anymore. You were. And he could see you, but you couldn’t see him.
You’ll look back on this. On the drums. Tight military staccato and deep, booming bass; they never stopped but they never started, even though in your memories sometimes they’re there and sometimes they aren’t.
You think you heard him move, but then you also know you saw him move, froglike with his too-long feet and extra seamed-up joints. You were in the dark. But anyway, you still moved, and used what you had. Your mouth and your hands. His were sharper, but you were stronger; where your skin bruised, his bones broke.
You'll look back on this. Up close your glow was enough to see the Moriquende by, and he had just two knees and only two elbows.
He tried to put his thumbs in your eyes, but you bit down on one and he only succeeded in scratching the eye you couldn’t see out of afterwards. You hit his head against a peak on the floor until you dislodged him, and then you choked him and then you killed him. And then you threw up. Closer to him than was respectful.
You’ll look back on him. There were still sharper hands and mouths than yours then, but the problem was there were always bones more brittle and just as afraid, and he wasn’t your last.
He wasn’t your first either, but he was something, and you felt guilty. You were guilty, you were guilty, you were guilty you were guilty, and looking back you remember the drums so well you can think to them, if you feel like it.
Angband was many things, but wasteful was not one of them, and so the food you were promised was before you, its blood already in your teeth. You didn’t take it. Not him. Not yet. It took time before your teeth were good for it anyway.
You'll look back on this. On this beginning of yours, and with pity. And maybe you lost it to the satisfaction of holding your own, but the problem is that the pity you felt for him was in the moment you killed him.
Four.
And there are people, your people, who feel pity for those creatures that you fight, but they don’t know they did it to themselves.