He Will Lie in the Garden with Me

FULL TEXT

PART ONE: He Will Lie in the Garden with Me

CHAPTER ONE: Meeting a Man at a Party

--

Melkor hated the Sea, for he could not subdue it. It is said that in the making of Arda he endeavoured to draw Ossë to his allegiance, promising to him all the realm and power of Ulmo, if he would serve him. So it was that long ago there arose great tumults in the sea that wrought ruin to the lands. But Uinen, at the prayer of Aulë, restrained Ossë and brought him before Ulmo; and he was pardoned and returned to his allegiance, to which he has remained faithful. For the most part; for the delight in violence has never wholly departed from him, and at times he will rage in his wilfulness without any command from Ulmo his lord. Therefore those who dwell by the sea or go up in ships may love him, but they do not trust him.

Ainulindale

--

“Oh, just a little bit of color,” Ingo had said, with a smile on only one side of his face and the points of his teal-tipped nails already tapping towards the palette he had set conspicuously nearby on the desk. Tyelpe had said ‘Oh, fine,” not because he did not suspect Ingo had a more thorough design in mind, but because he doubted his own ability to stop him. They were now half an hour into Tyelpe being plastered with a ‘little bit of color’ and he truly could not stop him, because as in everything Ingo had a masterpiece vision of what to do with his face but approached the process lopsidedly, jumping like a junebug, a bit here and a bit there, the result being that if Tyelpe stopped him before he was fully finished the look would be so uneven even that he would be embarrassed to go out with it.

Thus he endured Ingo enhancing the whole of his face, neck, and ears with bursts and shades of coral and amber as strategic as an entire army being laid into line, and consented also to his well-plotted choices for rings and bracelets and earrings to match. Having thus far bravely endured the sort of assault that would make a lesser warrior fold like paper but reaching the limits of his own incredible patience, Tyelpe asked, “are you planning to present me to your grandfather as a consort, Ingo?”

Ingo chuckled, two puffs of pressurized air in his unsubtly glittering throat. “Of course not. The Good King Olwe has absolutely no such deviant tastes. The actions of any descendants reflect solely on the other side of their parentage, as we decided as a society several millennia ago. And for you such a position would represent rather a step down from your illustrious history.”

Tyelpe also responded with a brief, half-offended laugh. There were not that many people from whom he took jokes about his late husband (or so he chose to call him), but as in many categories Ingo topped the list.

They called each other ‘cousin’, now; it was close enough. Tyelpe had always felt Ingo was family and had enjoyed the long years of being allowed to act like it. He had always felt like Ingo was a good person as well, and the grace and kindness with which he had accepted the knowledge that Tyelpe had explored every possible thing a solid body can do with the evil spirit who had tortured both of them to death really confirmed that feeling. So, yes, he was allowed to crack wise about it.

“You’re right,” Tyelpe replied. “I highly doubt King Olwe can suddenly change his shape from ‘winsome and willowy’ to ‘an actual dragon’, so, no, not at all to my taste.”

Ingo lightly smacked him on the crown of his head and then meticulously fixed his hair. “Well, as much as we would both like that it would be otherwise, this get-together is really just an extended family gathering. No first-moon party on the terraces of Alqualonde, which I should never have taken you to.”

“Or you could have told me ahead of time that the traditional men’s garb for that celebration did not involve any clothing above the waist. Poor judgment on your part either way.”

“I was mostly thinking about how the traditional men’s garb for that celebration does not involve anything above the waist, so, it didn’t really occur to me,” Ingo admitted.

Ingo had put the whole population of Aman under siege until they accepted the fact that he was just as fond of his beautiful wife as he was of men. This had been both good for society overall and very funny at the time. Tyelpe tended to be a little less forward about his preferences, because, again, it was now public knowledge that his longest-lasting and most serious relationship had been with Sauron “The Necromancer” Gorthaur, with his only defense of that choice being that he just didn’t figure that part out.

Annatar’s deception had been in telling Tyelpe almost all the truth, explaining that he had been a thrall to Melkor before the great Enemy died and he was freed. Tyelpe had been too in love with him to dig into that dark and painful past until they were already ‘married’.

He had in fact been re-embodied still thinking he was married. Annatar had said they were married. He had had enough power to fake a marriage bond, fixing a rope around Tyelpe’s fea that tugged and tightened on him if he ever tried to resist him in anything.

It turned out that was not what marriage was ‘supposed to’ feel like, and also that he had not been married at all but cleverly tricked by a wily widower into thinking they were married, which ruined him for a real elven marriage of fea without him ever having actually had one in the first place. Sauron had left a blackened and burning mark on his fea that would similarly corrupt anyone who tried to tie themselves to him in spirit, though his body remained his own.

Upon being told this, Ingo had immediately and enthusiastically realized that this meant that, like him, Tyelpe could just have sex instead of being expected to permanently bond himself to the first partner he had (as he could not possibly expect anyone to bond to him) which in Ingo’s mind was all blessings and few drawbacks. (Ingo had himself, in the official view, been permanently marred by his legal and consensual marriage to an Edain, which made him incapable of experiencing the true and austere heights of the marriage of fea. On the list of people who really did not care about that was fair Amarie, who in this dire sentence had somehow managed to hear the word ‘threeways’ and had focused exclusively on that.)

Speaking of, the door suddenly received two quick, light raps, and receiving no protest Amarie let herself into the room. “Hello, hello!” she called, and balancing a bottle of mead in one arm and a glittering shawl made exclusively of woven gold beads in the other she tripped on stockinged feet into the room.

“Hello, love,” Ingo responded. He did not look away from his work, but his eyes crinkled with happiness at the sound of her voice.

“I have things just about together—I decided on a bottle of last year’s midsummer brew—last thing I have to pick is my shoes and I’ll figure it out—looks lovely, darling.” Upon reaching her husband (according to some and emphatically not so according to others) she left off rambling to give him a double air-kiss above his cheeks, so as not to ruin his makeup. She leaned into Tyelpe and he tilted up his face to her for her to do the same.

“You do as well, Arre,” he said, and closed his eyes again so Ingo could fuss with his eyelashes.

“Oh, I look fine; I look like I always do, I’ve been gorgeous for ages and it can be hard to keep up with that. Ingo, are you going to need to get anything else together?”

“No, love. I’m nearly done with Tyelpe, and after that I just need to button up all the way and we’ll be ready to go.”

“You do not have to button up all the way. No one expects that of you.”

“In this vest, I do. I’ll look atrocious otherwise.”

“You’ll look atrocious. I dare you to try,” she sighed, suffering, as always, by being afflicted with one of the most beautiful men existence had to offer. “When he’s done with you, Tyelpe, don’t let him futz around with rings and cufflinks and any of that. Tell him he looks fine and get him out the door.”

“Yes, Arre,” he said, and she left again, reciting her list of things to bring with her as she went.

“Is this a party about something?” Tyelpe asked, slightly concerned with how seriously Amarie was taking it.

“No, no, not at all. Just that she always gets tense about my grandfather’s parties.”

“Because he’s so… regal?”

“No, because he always holds them on the beach, and she hates wet sand. Absolutely will not let anyone know, though. Designs the entire evening around staying on a boardwalk and hoping no one notices. I told her it isn’t that big of a deal but she’s mortified about it.”

“What’s wrong with wet sand?”

“It’s a texture thing, I suppose.”

Tyelpe hummed. He was absolutely odd about textures himself, a fact he had accepted thousands of years ago when he was barely adolescent and heard his father behind him saying “Just standing there with your hands in the bucket of hot oil, are you,” in a tone that also conveyed ‘I am pretty bothered by you doing that’. As a case in point he was nearly sorry when Ingo finally finished up his makeup, because he had been enjoying the slight sting of the rasp of the brush on his face.

“There,” Ingo said, leaning back. “Now you look fetching in a way that should make some young gentlemen previously secure in their sexuality uncomfortable.”

“Is the goal to take the pressure of discomforting young men off of you, or just to give you some evening entertainment?” Tyelpe asked, opening his eyes.

Ingo was, himself, dressed like a delirious vision, the first sideways sight of a humming, buzzing spring day you might get if you were knocked out flat into a verdant field and were now waking up and wondering how you got there. “The goal is to have you looking and feeling your best,” Ingo responded, sincerely and confidently. “It’s likely to be a long, slow, and somewhat dull engagement, and half of what we’ll be doing is looking at each other.”

Tyelpe smiled and laughed a little. Ingo smiled back.

--

The way to the seaside quays was short, so they decided to walk. Arien slowly drifted low behind them as they passed sea glass storefronts and pearled fountains, glittering sea-shell wind chimes and laughter drifting down from fern-shaded terraces above their heads. It was a day in Alqualonde in which absolutely nothing was happening, and practically no one was even bothering to stand up except them.

Ingo had established his second life on the outskirts of Alqualonde and had spent the long years slowly, but surely, becoming more a member of his mother’s house than his father’s. That choice was not spite, nor was it politics. Ingo was still present in High King Finarfin’s court and close to his relations on the Noldorin side of his family. Tyelpe rather got the impression that Ingo regretted not being closer to his mother’s family in the first place. He had been raised in a flock with Nolofinwe’s sons in Tirion’s palace, and had seemingly chosen his Noldorin heritage and family once upon a time, but that was now very long ago. Many still did not truly consider the prodigal Olwean to be Teleri, but they were emphatically, factually wrong.

Tyelpe did not live with him, or anywhere in particular. He dwelled sometimes with his grandmother Nerdanel among the forges of Mahtan’s kin, and sometimes with his mother in Tirion. Sometimes he spent a few years in Lorien’s care or among the maiar in Valmar, who seemed to think of him as some sort of distant relative. And he did sometimes stay with various re-embodied relations and allies, preferring those who had felt, once, the sting of blade or lash, and in moments of silence could extend an understanding that encompassed the power of any speech to soothe him.

When Varda herself had pulled aside the curtains that shielded knowledge of fate from mortal minds to reveal to him there had not been a true marriage between him and Sauron, she also revealed with a great sense of apology that nothing would unmake the charred brand he had left on Tyelpe’s fea. The moment of fiery claiming, not the years of coupling beforehand with ‘Annatar’ but the moment in which Sauron had taken him, had altered him to even his base self, even his conception. Like the elves who had been stolen and their fea dissected to birth orcs, he was stuck this way now, a rock melted and reformed in volcanic hatred. Varda herself could not undo that, because she could not touch it. Instead he had to live with the amputated and cauterized glory-hand of Sauron clutched around his spirit forever, causing a sensation not quite explicable but best described as ‘chronic pain.’

Ingo tossed his head as a warm breeze rose from the waves to their faces. The wind-teased ends of his silken hair brushed Tyelpe’s face. He could hear the calls of greeting and laughter and singing ahead of them; he could smell the salt and the wine. Sandy stone roads crunched under his shoes and his earlobes were gently tugged by the wind whistling through his heavy gold earrings.

“There we are,” Ingo said, once nothing blocked their view of the gathering. A generous but comfortable number of King Olwe’s dearest were spread in circles around a court of sand. They chattered on the shoreline or on the wooden quays that stretched into the waves or even in the waves themselves, bare-legged and holding goblets of wine in their pearl-bedecked hands.

The company was mostly but not entirely Teleri, not that ‘Teleri’ was a word that meant one thing. What was once an easy dividing line between kin and kin really wasn’t any longer. There wasn’t any such thing as a Teleri gathering that did not involve many Sindar Teleri of various types anymore, and besides that those of mixed kin like Ingo were now common enough that one could not always tell exactly what ancient race a person came from by just looking at them.

Not so Tyelpe, who looked like Aule had announced ‘A Noldo!’ at some point in the distant past and in doing so accidentally generated one. That wouldn’t have been a problem even if everyone here didn’t absolutely know exactly who Tyelpe was, and they did. He was given the same cheerful welcome as everyone else arriving, as enthusiastically cheek-kissed by one of Ingo’s silver-haired mother-cousins as Ingo himself was. Amarie handed over the bottle of mead as a gift and they were all given glasses of sparkling white wine in return—bubbling, but more literally sparkling, as they were so packed with swirling seaweed-glitter that they were nearly a kind of soup. Ingo downed a glass in one go to make his mother-cousin laugh and was immediately gifted a second one, which he sipped more slowly.

The gathering was sedate but enjoyable, comfortable, family-like, more abundant with fond embraces and chuckles than dancing and raucous laughter. Still, as the sunset dissolved into a blissfully warm spring night, as lanterns were lit and beach-fires kindled, the laughter rose in pitch and enough half-drunken revelers picked up lute or pipe that something like a dance began.

In the course of the song and dance something began to happen that was quite common in seaside parties in Alqualonde, so common it was nearly expected; sea-maiar began to rise up from the ocean to dance. The Teleri had always had a special closeness with Ulmo’s many and far-ranging servants, who flowed down rivers and crossed the oceans from continent to continent, freely mingling with the firstborn they found on the shores. So much so, in fact, that many of the spirits who emerged from the waves that evening were called by name as they came.

They were not powerful maiar, or those with great names. Tyelpe would know if they were. These were lesser spirits, like Orome’s forest-maiar or Lorien’s quiet, soft-handed attendants. They clothed themselves like elves and, though their eyes were drifting water, their presence was not so great that the people on the shore were bowed over by them.

Still, Ingo caught Tyelpe staring, with his fist clutched tight around his glass. He wrapped himself around Tyelpe’s arm, and said into his ear, “You’ve been here an hour, cousin, and not even said hello to the host.” So Tyelpe let himself be dragged to King Olwe, focusing his eyes ahead and not on the slightly shimmering bodies of the immortals.

Nearly elven, he was thinking to himself, nearly alike to us in body, and with just a glance one might not be able to tell they’re not. But if any of you had felt one of them on the inside you would be on your knees begging right now.

When they reached Olwe, standing at the very edge of a dock that stretched in a half-moon curve into the silver sea, Tyelpe knelt before him. He did not have to bow to him, Olwe not being his king or even really his kinsman. But that truly ancient elf had over his years gathered a sense of gravitas to him like a cape, his always solemn personality now heavier with wisdom and old sorrow. In the way of very old Teleri his hair had become as long and silver as the rays of the moon and his face, though still beautiful, was a platinum setting around eyes that were like Tilion himself. Those eyes had seen the waters of Cuivienen; they looked like it.

Tyelpe kissed his hand. Olwe returned the gesture by helping him back to his feet and gently, briefly clutching his broader, rougher hand. “Welcome and well-met, son of Finwe,” Olwe politely referred to him. ‘Son’ was used loosely, but Teleri tended to be imprecise and fond with how they used terms of relation. He referred to Ingo just as fondly when he continued with “I see you are my dear son’s guest again. Or is it chaperone?”

“I could try, but I could not control him,” Tyelpe apologized. Ingo laughed at his ear.

“No; I know of few up to the task, and most have declined to do it,” Olwe said, and looking fondly at Ingo asked him, “Well, then, have you been behaving yourself?”

“Me? No,” Ingo replied brightly. “And you?”

Olwe laughed. The nerve it took to question the ancient king about his behavior was instinctual for Ingo. “I must be behaving well enough! No Great Power’s herald has been sent to argue with me over law and I recall no city-destroying disasters as commentary on my actions. I suppose I am still regarded overall well.”

What an understatement. Tyelpe would be surprised if anyone had found anything negative to say about Olwe in entire ages, other than perhaps ‘he is a bit old-fashioned.’ “Ingo has not received divine reprimands either, so I suppose things are as they should be.”

“If I had a strongly worded letter from Aule or Ulmo, asking me for explanation of my actions, I would hang it on my door-frame. Everyone would know,” Ingo promised them. “No, if that’s the standard I am being held to, then yes, I am a paragon.”

“Now, Ingo,” Olwe said lightly. “It’s bad form pointing out your special and divine commission from Lord Ulmo.”

“Is it?”

“If you keep bringing it up, everyone will want one for themselves.”

Ingo laughed. Olwe also laughed. The laughs were quite similar. Tyelpe, trying not to dwell on the fact that Ingo had in fact received a divine commission from the Lord of all Waters Himself to build a kingdom in His honor (whereas he had been hand-chosen by Melkor’s lieutenant to make the world worse for everyone for several millennia), cast his eyes over the sea.

In doing so, he saw something.

He wasn’t sure what it was, at first. There was a slightly unnatural swelling in the waves, like a surging tidal-wave, one that could strip the shores of trees and homes and lives, but it was too close, and too still. Something in Tyelpe’s heart shuddered to see it, but instead of saying something he found himself just staring at it, the black shape like a great whale that caused the very sea to rise on his back. He could not fully surround the scope of what that strange shape made him feel; it was much like seeing a thundercloud on the distant horizon, bearing down from the mountains, and knowing that its great destructive power would be upon him soon, but not yet, immense and crushing and indifferent.

Olwe, who had been in conversation with Ingo, suddenly interrupted himself to say, “What catches your eye, son of Finwe?”

Tyelpe turned his head to him, and as he looked at Olwe, Olwe looked out at the ocean. He raised his eyebrows and said, “Ah.” In the next moment, the earth shook and the ocean roared.

Scattered Teleri on the beach seemed to scream, but the crash of the ocean was louder than their voices. Frozen in place, Tyelpe watched as a great mass of saltwater surged forward and then rose, taller than towers, above where he stood with Ingo and Olwe. With its sudden rush came a deluge of salty brine dumped on the heads of everyone there, but still the main of the wave stood above them, half-solid, rushing like a whirlpool.

The body of the water split open with a smile; with searching, piercing, thunderstorm eyes. A great hand wiped away a wall of water and beneath it was the shape of a Power, a spirit, a maia of great force and ability. It did not dedicate itself to solid form but remained half ocean, with her creatures stuck and gasping in the violent swirl inside of him, but was halfway embodied as well, the form of a great man partially formed from the waves. Tyelpe watched, rapt, as one of the creatures stuck in his body lost the battle to live. Its corpse was wrenched into the divine disaster.

“What a splendid gathering, my old friend!” crashed the voice of the maia. “I hope I am not interrupting!”

“Not at all,” responded Olwe, composed and completely drenched. He wiped a wash of seawater from his face and put up a smile in its absence. “You are always welcome—in whatever form you choose to appear.”

The Maia’s booming laugh made seabirds for miles around suddenly take flight to escape. Their raucous calls echoed his incredible voice. “I can take a hint! Give me just a moment, then.”

Olwe closed his eyes again. Tyelpe almost followed suit, and it would have been wise. The great maia thundered down onto the docks and every pound of the tidal wave that had made up his body came with him, crashing down with a force that made the boardwalk shake and almost brought him to his knees. His eyes stung; once he blinked them clear, there was something person-shaped standing with them, between him and King Olwe, tall and well-built and radiating power and strength.

The sea-maia had wrapped himself in the body of an elf just as the lesser maiar had, but none could ever mistake him for one. The ocean under his bare feet lashed; his churning eyes and his shimmering flesh did not even pretend to be mortal. He wore robes of shining silver sand and a singular grin, the one that they wore when they were being greatly amused by mortals. Tyelpe knew. He had seen such a grin many times.

When the maia reached forward and gave Olwe a friendly kiss on the creek, Tyelpe watched the unflappable, ancient King flush and shudder.  He couldn’t help it, of course. That was what such attention felt like.

“Well met, old friend!” he laughed, now using a mouth to form those words but his divine voice unaltered. “I had been near the shore of Alqualonde and heard your music. I could not resist stopping by for a dance.”

“You will have to give the musicians a moment to collect themselves before they start again,” Olwe noted wryly.

The maia looked around him, and saw the incredibly wet, disoriented crowd around him, all the flames and fires doused and the elves stumbling round looking for their shoes and shawls and instruments and dates in the fresh wreckage. “Oh,” he said, “Apologies.”

Tyelpe was stunned to find that he had no idea who this was. He was a vassal of Ulmo, and he was a very powerful one. But he felt he had never seen him before; did he usually cleave to the shores of Middle-Earth? Why did his form have such destructive violence in it, wreckage that he should have not been able to keep inside his rushing spirit? Tyelpe’s throat was dry, and he found himself unable to speak.

Soaked, glitter dripping down his face, Ingo looked at the maia with charmed amusement that only someone who had truly seen it all could earn. “Lord Osse! Well-met to you as well, or at least thoroughly. Normally one cannot even pay for this kind of discomfort on Aman.”

“Truly, that is why I typically leave its shores be. Well-met, Finderato Ingoldo; and how have you been?”

Ingo knew this maia. Not well enough for him to place a divine kiss on his cheek like he had done to his grandfather, but still by name. Then again, Ingo knew the vassals of Ulmo better than was typically good for a mortal man. Osse; Tyelpe hunted for what he knew about him. Mostly that he was a friend of Teleri, because he had heard the maia’s name mentioned by them often enough. Had he not been the one to bring them to Aman in the elder days—or was it that he was the one who had tried to keep them away? Which was it? Anything that would have happened that long ago would have pitted him and Osse on separate sides; he flinched from diving that far into the past in his mind.

“Well, thank you! Safe, happy, not being torn apart by werewolves at all. The bar is low and I am comfortably above it.”

“I hear my dear grandson is behaving, which is all that one can ask for,” Olwe smiled, and absolutely stunning Tyelpe, he asked Osse, “and have you been behaving yourself, sea-Lord?”

Osse was not offended. He laughed; it shook the docks. “Perfectly! Well, and happily!”

Tyelpe, finding his voice for the first time since he had seen Osse gathering in the horizon, said, “And what had he done that you would question him?”

Everyone looked at Tyelpe, including Osse, whose storm-lashed immortal eyes seemed to unquiet him wherever they landed. Then, Olwe and Osse looked at each other, sharing an expression Tyelpe could only call ‘embarrassed.’

“Bright stars,” the king began, slightly flushed. “I suppose it really was that long ago that… well, that anyone even spoke about this sort of thing.”

“Well, of course it was very long ago, but I would frankly think it would be the first thing a person thought of when they heard my name! Is this not known among younger generations?” Osse asked, surprised.

“But all of that happened before we even awoke at Cuivienen! Before there even were elves!” King Olwe responded earnestly.

“Still!”

“Your fellow Powers would not be so minimizing or undermining to mutter about your ancient history around us children! They always seek to forgive when possible. No, I only know at all because I have been in conversation with great Ulmo—no, because you told me yourself, though it was so long ago that I had to think of it.”

“On the isle on which I bore you here. My heart, that’s so kind.  They really don’t speak of it?”

“Not at all. There isn’t any need to gossip about things that happened before the very rising of the sun and which were settled even then.”

“How kind,” said Osse, his gaze cast over the shore of Aman to the very mountains in her heart, his voice bubbling up from inside him like a cool undertow. “I do not know that I deserve that grace, but strive as always to be so deserving.”

“But I don’t know what we are speaking of either,” said Ingo, who was a man who particularly hated not knowing what was being spoken of. “What have we forgotten that was so important once?”

Osse shifted his gaze to Ingo, and for a few seconds fixed him in his eyes as a smith fixed a gem to be shaped. “You know me and recall me as a stalwart defender of your people and your lands, unleashing my power on your enemies and held back only when greater hands stayed me,” he told the one who to him was another Teleri prince. “But in the age before that, before any of the children of Iluvatar had awoken, I was infamous in the great battles that took place between the Good Powers and the Great Enemy as they vied for dominion over Arda. You see, in those distant times I had taken the side of the Enemy, and fought for Him, bearing all my powers against those who are now my allies. I had been seduced by Him in early days and remained his thrall until the good Uinen rescued me from Him and laid me straight again and returned me to Ulmo’s side. For long years I strove to correct my errant ways and become trustworthy again to those Good Ones, but still I have never quite leached the—touch—of the old Enemy from me. It is quite the compliment to learn that so many now do not even know of it. This surprises me,” he admitted, his voice threaded with a note of such desponded delicacy that Tyelpe felt his heart beat in his throat.

His face felt numb. He has seen in Osse’s oceanic body, as he spoke of distant days, a smoky thread of the darkness that felt as familiar as night.

Ingo was absolutely and visibly gobsmacked. (And flushed. Osse had a quite piercing stare.) “I had—I had no idea.”

“I never considered it my story to tell, exactly,” Olwe said, the back of one hand covering his faint embarrassment. “Nor did I really think of… well, that that was a story that would not disseminate naturally, considering how few people know it.”

“The secondborn are very distrustful of me,” Osse admitted sadly. “On account of some… bad habits I still have. Ah, the occasional… sunken ship and… well, whirlpools, tidal waves, I might eat their soft bodies sometimes, it’s—getting better is a process, you know,” he rambled. “So I can assure you that there are people who definitely still do not trust me, even if ten-thousand-year-old history is not presently in popular circulation.”

Had the rest of them heard that? Tyelpe felt like he couldn’t breathe. King Olwe still looked slightly embarrassed, and Ingo delicately put out. Tyelpe genuinely could not tell if they were being masterfully composed or if only he had detected that sudden, sharp surge of viciousness in Osse’s thrumming voice.

“I did not—affiliation with the Enemy always seemed—permanent?” Ingo continued.

“Oh, yes. Absolutely. Completely permanent. All the places He touched me are still there. But allegiance to the Good is also permanent, as both the land and the ocean are ever-existent no matter how much they vie with each other. I made a choice to favor one part of myself and stuck to it. Despite it being a constant and literally eternal battle to keep the sweet urge to destroy under control. That’s what we have wives for! Truly the plan of The One is good in all things.”

“How right you are,” said Ingo, clearly equally distressed and delighted. “Well, isn’t that—doesn’t that reflect poorly on those who didn’t bother to do that!”

“What, fight with their inherently corrupted nature for all eternity? I honestly can’t blame them.”

Tyelpe pulled in a breath, opened his mouth, and said, “Were they just not as good as you, do you think, or was it just that no one bothered to go get them?”

Osse turned his face and looked at him. His eyes dropped, fractionally, from his face to his throat, his chest. Tyelpe knew that Osse was not looking at his cold metal adornments or cloth shirt or even the mere flesh beneath it, but at things which laid deeper still. They found, could not have failed to find, the brand in his fea, the still-smoldering imprint of the press of Sauron’s thumb.

“Who are you,” said Osse.

Tyelpe cleared his throat. Then he reached forward and grasped Osse’s wrist. It was solid flesh, warm and tough; it was also ocean-water, which surged.

With complete confidence, Tyelpe said, “I am the first person who is going to dance with you this evening.” Then he turned and began to pull Osse away with him, completely certain that he could, and in fact he did.

--

Olwe watched the roughly embodied fury of the ocean be pulled away by a willful Noldo with some concern. He looked at his grandson, who was now standing statue-still with one hand delicately holding his glass of wine and the other planted across both eyes.

“Not good,” Olwe guessed.

“Not good,” Ingo repeated bleakly. Without uncovering his eyes, he lifted the glass to his lips, tilted his head back, and drained it.

--

The Teleri musicians had gathered themselves, stripped themselves of wet clothes (or not), and retrieved their instruments. A dancing song was playing, its parts scattered across the beach, a viola in one place, a tambourine in another, a flute down the strand. Tilion had risen above the waves, and Tyelpe pulled Osse to him boldly, so that one arm was wrapped around the maia’s back and their opposite hands were clasped together.

“I have been lied to,” rumbled the voice of the sea-spirit.

“Oh?” Tyelpe asked. He kept his spine straight, but beneath his skin he was quivering. He remembered. Not with his mind but with the palms of his hands, the tingling sparks on his skin, he remembered.

“I had been told that our kind married mortal-kind only once, when Yavanna’s handmaiden Melian espoused her consort.”

Tyelpe had gotten used to referring to his own as ‘mortals’ himself, even though most elves would not use that word. This was why, of course.

“Annatar and I were not married,” Tyelpe responded, low.

The scattered instruments found each other, and between them a song began. Tyelpe stepped backward, a half-step, then another, urging Osse to lead him.

Osse’s eyes flickered down for a moment. Checking his feet, perhaps making sure he still had some. Even the most well-controlled maia could occasionally have a difficult time keeping physical form… especially if made emotional. “Lord of Gifts. Did he call himself that?”

“It was the name of his disguise.”

“I don’t find that honest of him,” Osse commented, the lingering ghost of old discontent in his voice. “It has been many long years since I thought much about Sauron, but I could not forget that he never gave a gift without expecting favors in return.”

“But he did give gifts,” Tyelpe responded, for a second his fingers digging harder into Osse’s strong, solid hand, “and he wouldn’t see why he would necessarily have to include that other expectation in his name.”

“I tend to be the last to hear news,” Osse admitted, and was as skilled as the moon in slowly turning Tyelpe around in step. “I stay in the sea, and on the margins. I mind my duties and mind myself. I prefer to remain beneath the waves. I only heard about half of what he had been up to after I heard that he had died.”

Tyelpe heard in his voice that he could hardly believe it either. Died. “That same event saw me released from the Halls of Mandos. Namo’s wisdom was that we should not exist at once.”

“Fine wisdom! Or perhaps Namo could have come out of his cave and taken care of things, and then you would not have been so long in his hospitable house while Sauron had all the benefits of life. But no; as I said, I find all is for the better for everyone if I am not too knowledgeable about the things that happen or tempted to involve myself in them.”

“Would you have been tempted to involve yourself in Sauron’s doings if you had known about them?”

Tyelpe had already pulled Osse into an easy, uncomplicated slow-dance. The point, of course, was the conversation, and ensuring he was not interrupted while having it.

They were dancing quite close to the shoreline. When Osse turned Tyelpe around, the backs of his feet met the quivering waves.

“Tempted? I would have involved myself. Unless stopped. I know Sauron, and have come to blows with him before. I would not fear doing so again. I would believe that Melkor was earnestly seeking reform before I believed Sauron was. The reason he could not come back to Aman even in early days as Melkor’s spy was that I had already warned the Ainur that he was one and could not be altered.”

Then that was the reason Sauron had been banished to the east, and never set foot on Aman. “Even then, you thought he had no chance of changing.”

“Not he. Others, even others as corrupt, but not he. Do you disagree?”

Tyelpe made circles in the sand with his heels as they turned. His grip loosened, then tightened in Osse’s hand. “No.”

“No.” Osse’s fingers readjusted to grip that warm hand firmly.

“You were allies for a while, under Melkor,” sought Tyelpe. For a moment he looked up at his new partner but then flinched and looked back away. With the force of Osse’s spirit full at his front, his bottomless eyes were too much.

“Allies. No. We were both thralls to Melkor, but I cannot recall a time I worked to Sauron’s benefit or he to mine. I hated him, most of all when we were ‘allies’ and my hatred was unbridled. He thought we were in competition for Melkor’s attention and I disdained his posturing. I was not there for Melkor Himself as Sauron was. I was there to destroy.

“Once I was freed from thralldom I did pity Sauron, for being so dominated that he did not have his own will, but I still hated him as well, and do. If I had known he was playing master with elves—not even our own, but mere mortals—oh, I would have involved myself. In fact I shall ask some questions of those who sought not to mention it to me.”

“You must have known he was up to something.” Osse was fond of secondborn, after all (including their taste, apparently). A claim that he had not heard about Sauron in the previous age would be suspect. Tyelpe experimentally tightened his arm on Osse’s back and swallowed when he felt a thrill on his skin.

“War, murder, domination. What he’s always up to. I like to drown islands and break mountains; he likes to break delicate little bones. A jeweler at his desk. A painter of miniatures. I suppose I should have known more already,” he admitted, “but the hate that Sauron and his ilk makes me feel is too dangerous. It was always wise to stay away. Oh, it is always wise, isn’t it.”

Osse did not grip him or wrench him around when he spoke like that, but Tyelpe did feel the meat of his thumb pressing into his palm for a mere moment. He shuddered. “You and your kind are much like mortals in that,” Tyelpe told him. “I cannot tell you how many have told me what they would have done if they had been there… except that some had been there, or very close, and had not done much of anything.”

“Perhaps that is a universal weakness,” Osse sighed, a sigh that filled Tyelpe’s lungs with sea-breeze. “The wise regard the call to action with suspicion. How often did I sit astonished that my fellow Ainur did nothing when something had to be done? But I must obey when I am told to stay my hand, or else it is not me who suffers. I have seen that too oft to argue now.”

That, Tyelpe did understand. And he felt Osse out of all of them had the right to be anxious to act too hastily. Like himself, he actually had put his hand in and tried to alter doom and watched all his work turn evil. “It has been suggested to me—no one seems to have the nerve to say it aloud—that the reason Sauron could not espouse himself to me and had to fake it was that it would be infidelity.”

“So it would have been,” Osse replied. Perhaps instinctually, or perhaps not, in the course of dancing they had turned further into the sea, and now they were immersed halfway up their calves as they moved. It made it harder for Tyelpe to move, of course, but easier for Osse to move him. “Melkor and Sauron were wed, long ago. Not that they ever kept strictly to each other. Melkor wandered much and Sauron was always jealous of it, but they were wed. I could not believe at first that Melkor had willingly let himself be bonded, but it was so. I always wondered if it was accidental on His part, and Sauron tricked Him into marriage, which Melkor resented. I do not know.”

“Could he be tricked like that?”

“Ah; things were so new. Sometimes things that are obvious now were surprises then. I think it would have been possible, as Melkor may have not yet known what actions could marry Him even without His consent. It was He who first taught me the pleasures of the senses, and I would not have fallen for that trick if I had ever tried it before.”

“Melkor?” Tyelpe asked, his heart hammering. He could feel the water seeping up his legs; he could feel the heat and rush of the maia’s body, barely contained by his false flesh. “Melkor himself—taught you—”

He slid his ring-finger out of Osse’s grip, and pulled its tip slowly up the soft inside of one of Osse’s fingers.

“Yes,” Osse said, quietly. “The fact that I had not bothered much with a physical body before made it—quite—easy for Him to coerce me. But pleasure only brought me to the table to bargain. It was the promise of war that won me, war and power. He saw bloodlust in me, and in letting it free ensured it could never be fully locked away again.”

“Would it have never been set free without Him?” Tyelpe asked.

Osse looked at him (though Tyelpe struggled again to actually hold his eyes) with genuine consideration, and no offense. “I do not know. Many of the Ainur are fine warriors without any lust or hatred in them, like noble Eonwe or laughing Orome. And even brawling Tulkas has rage in him, yet everything he does bends toward Good. Not so I. Perhaps I could have been like that, brewing storms and surges in perfect harmony with the will of The One. But it is not so, and as I am I cannot imagine how I would make it so.”

What cruelty! Tyelpe struggled inside himself. Osse’s acts of evil had been done innumerable years ago; tens of thousands of years ago, on a world that had been fully reformed since. Ages of the sun has risen and fallen. For the lifetime of the world he had been allowed to struggle against himself, feeling the evil that Melkor had bred into him as deep as a thorn, forever. By Eru, if they so wanted him to be good, why would no one pluck it out?

He recalled Varda telling him, with great compassion and sorrow, that she could not soothe the sear that Sauron had left in him, because to touch it would be corrupting even for her, and he felt very angry.

They were nearly to their thighs in the ocean. Tyelpe stopped dancing.

“Your heart quickens,” Osse said to him, “and your fea burns.”

“For you,” Tyelpe said, still not looking at him.

“For me?”

“I can handle having had this done to me,” Tyelpe said to the black lapping waves, “having been marred by something so powerful, and pushed aside by great beings with greater concerns. Were I you, and had a fighting chance, I do not know how I would take such mistreatment.”

Osse unlatched his arm from Tyelpe’s back. He kept his left hand, and held it before him, loosely, as though Tyelpe were a lady and Osse were greeting him politely. “I thought when I looked into you and saw Sauron’s mark on you that he had been trying to make you into something he could keep,” he responded, not upset by Tyelpe’s claims, not disturbed. “He would have been trying to make you something iron-bodied, or orc-bodied, that he could keep with him to serve him. Something whose nature had changed so that you loved what he was and what he did. Did he fail, or did you best him?”

“Both,” Tyelpe told him, and mustering his courage looked him in the face. The unnatural depths of his eyes, as he had suspected they would, pulled at him like it was his will to jump. “I saw a chance to end my life and took it. That ruined his work.”

“And well done!” Osse complimented him. “You fought back against him when you had as much power as bait in a trap, and he the hunter. You bested a Power once; if you are so angry at them, why stop with one?”

Tyelpe stared at him, stunned. He could feel his cheeks bursting with heat and could not even reprimand himself. “Well—they’re not—evil,” he replied haltingly.

“That again. No, they’re not, and like always with family, we deal with them. I do not always and slavishly think they are right, though they are greater than me and on the whole Good. I think often on what the Good Powers could have done to make things better for everyone when they had the chance, but they didn’t. I have forgiven them. You do not have to, yourself. Were I in your position, I do not think I could manage.”

Tyelpe’s eyes burned. He did not want to cry. He very much did not want to cry at King Olwe’s event, and especially not when Osse might be blamed for it. Instead, he closed his eyes tightly. When he opened them again, and beheld the ocean-black eyes of Osse, he felt terribly sick and slightly in love. He asked, “But what of you? Don’t you still dream of evil deeds?”

“I do.”

“Don’t you still remember—Melkor, and what He was to you?”

“I do.”

“And your wife…”

“Yes?”

He asked, “How do you go back to anyone, or anything else, once you’ve had that?”

Osse breathed out again, his sea-breeze breath. Tyelpe, without meaning to, leaned up and in.

Osse said, and quietly, “There is no one like Melkor; even comparing him to his lieutenant, you do not know. There is nothing like crushing someone under your hand so that they burst, but there is nothing like the sea at calm, and nothing like a new-born whale coming trusting and curious to your side, and nothing at all like a beautiful blue morning over the city you did not destroy, though you wanted to so badly. All of the world has pleasures and there are some you can only have if you deny others. Even I cannot have everything.”

Tyelpe swallowed. His one hand, still held in Osse’s, he twisted slightly, and curled in his fingers.

“I would…” he said, and cleared his throat. It was dry. He could feel his heart hammering. He leaned in, just a little closer. “I want…”

He saw the knowledge of that he was fighting to say come into Osse’s eyes, like a great shadow passed over them, cast by a great serpent. Osse leaned, gently, carefully, away from him, and took a step back.

“I must return you to your kin, and your celebration,” Osse said, so kindly, and without any pity at all. “I would not be forgiven for keeping you.”

Tyelpe felt a brief and sharp moment of anger, but then asked himself how Ingo would react to seeing Tyelpe seized and pulled beneath the waves.

Ingo would grab a ship and a harpoon and not think twice about using them, that’s how.

He let out a sigh, and looked down, so that he was not in danger of looking into Osse’s face any longer. He might do something unwise. “Then let’s,” he said. “Ingo surely won’t forgive me if I don’t save a dance for him, or fair Amarie either.”

So he let Osse lead him back to the shoreline, a half-dance, in time with the tune but not in spirit. Tyelpe saw they were walking toward King Olwe and Ingo, who stood on the shore and appeared almost to be waiting for them. King Olwe reached out to Osse and took his hand without a flinch, saying, “I believe it is my turn!”

Osse smiled and let himself be led away. Tyelpe felt a back-glance, the maia looking over his shoulder at him, but did not turn to look himself. He was busy squaring off with Ingo, who was glaring at him, cross-armed, and Tyelpe was not going to be the first to break the challenging stare.

Once Olwe was out of earshot, Ingo said, “Tyelpe.”

“Ingo.”

Ingo said, “Don’t do that.”

Rulings like that were why Tyelpe had always felt that Ingo was a good king. He had his head on straight. He was probably right.

Tyelpe replied, “Then stop me.”

Ingo raised his eyebrows, and, after a moment of consideration, nodded. In response, with an air of conversational knowledge, merely dispensing an interesting fact, he said, “You are being just like your mother right now.”

This was, of course, potentially the most cutting thing Ingo could have said. He was absolutely right. Tyelpe said, “Well,” and then invited Ingo’s wife to dance.

Return to Navigation

CHAPTER 2: Many Quick Exits

 

Finding himself hungover, emotionally stripped, somewhat nauseous, exhausted, and in all ways completely useless the next morning, Tyelpe put himself as together as he could and schlepped the walk of a few city blocks to Gil-Galad’s beach house. The goal was to get away from Ingo without having to travel out of Alqualonde, which he felt he was not capable of at the moment.

Gil-Galad took him in, embraced him, kissed him on both cheeks, and then stripped him and dumped him into a warm bath. Tyelpe watched the final remnants of Ingo’s coral and amber makeup drift away from his skin on the surface of the slightly green water with disinterest.

Gil-Galad cheerfully dropped a basket of scented oils and soaps and brushes and combs next to him, sat down beside the bath, and asked, “what’s troubling you, cousin?”

“I am sick with love,” Tyelpe responded despondently.

“Oh! Yes, Ingo wrote to me about that already.”

“He wrote to you about that already?” Tyelpe grouched as he forced an entangled golden hair-pin out of his damp, salty hair.

“Yes. He declined to name the man in question—it was a man, right? Yes, of course—but he firmly advised me to tell you ‘no.’”

Tyelpe dropped the mass of his heavy, dark hair into the water with an unhappy splat. “Queer little bastard.”

“I will hear you out about it, of course,” Gil-Galad said with a grin.

--

Tyelpe stayed with Gil-Galad for two days, complaining extensively about everything he could think to complain about to a rotating cast of house-guests, friends, distant cousins, and absolutely entrenched partisans who would die again before saying anyone but Gil-Galad was their High King, all of which regularly came into and out of his house like a rainbow carousel. (Gil-Galad was patiently indulgent to the latter camp, though he often reminded them that Finarfin was, in fact, their High King. They appeared not to hear it.) Finally sober and hydrated, Tyelpe admitted he was being pathetic, got up, thanked Gil-Galad, embraced him again, and left for Tirion.

First, and because he would hear about it if he didn’t, he visited his mother. She was very glad to see him as always and as always barely stopped working to greet him. He knocked on the door, she shouted “Who is it?” from another room, he shouted back “Your son,” and she shouted “Well, get in.” Before he did, he noted that she had not attended to her mail-box in several days. He could see the bent corners of the letters crammed inside.

He turned the unlocked brass doorknob and entered the small, clean-but-cluttered townhome she kept for herself in the middle of a busy city street. He wound around half-constructed machines she was occasionally fixing and piles of books and newspapers and letters (not a speck of dust on them and meticulously organized and threatening to cut off even space to walk through the rooms) to find her in her main ‘study,’ which was a room mostly taken up with an enormous printing-press.

She sat within its iron arms, her hair bound in a scarf, her sleeves pinned up past her elbows, and her forearms kaleidoscopic with ink. A towering shelf behind it housed nearly a thousand glittering glass jars of every color of ink and paint and powder, and the wall to her side was deadly with tightly-packed bronze and silver frames and glass panes and screwdrivers and hammers and nails.

“Hello, my beautiful boy,” she said, her eyes still fixed on fitting blocks of ornately carved bespoke letters into a one-of-a-kind printing tray to print what was likely a single manuscript for some completely insane Vanyar poet in the mountains. “How good to see you.”

“You as well, mother,” he said, surreptitiously pushing an expertly balanced half-full bottle of sepia ink a little further back on the shelf that only barely kept it off of the floor.

“Would you press some ink-stones for an order while I work on this print?”

Tyelpe picked up a potted plant from the only otherwise available chair in the room and collapsed into it. “No, mother, I cannot work,” he said, holding the plant over his lap (there was nowhere to put it). “I have been consumed with love for a handsome man.”

“Oh?” she asked. “Is he a normal man, who you could bring over to visit me, and then have a normal relationship with?”

“No, mother, he is not,” Tyelpe replied.

“Mm-hm. Press the inkstones,” she said, and Tyelpe did.

--

Tyelpe stayed with his mother for about a week. That was about as long as he could stand doing it, considering (and he always inevitably came to this conclusion after a single day of staying with her even though he vociferously denied it to anyone else) that they were essentially the same person. He hadn’t loved trying to be his father’s conscience in her absence and now realized that the problem was that they were both equally shit at it. They both strongly expected everyone else to mind their own business as well as they did their own and were often stunned when other people had needs. Aside from working on her projects, they largely ignored each other. In a week flat they advanced the art of printing several years and then he had to leave for his sanity and hers, because if he had one more intimate family meal with her he was going to combust.

He left vividly recalling why he decided to follow his insane father across the ocean to fight a Vala rather than stay at home with his mother. She wouldn’t overthrow a kingdom, but she would make sure he knew about any single hair that slipped out of place in his updo the second that it did.

Every time.

He then decided to briefly visit his aunt Lalwen, taking his chances that her ‘secret’ girlfriend wouldn’t be in residence and resplendently naked on a fainting couch as Lalwen spent idle days painting and re-painting her body (no, not representing it on a canvas). For these reasons he felt his great-aunt might understand his position, and happily accepted her embraces (one he saw that she was clothed) and gifts of fresh fruit to eat and the pawning-off of various decorative objects she had decided she didn’t have a use for anymore.

Having happily gotten rid of her least favorite clock, Lalwen finally asked him, “and how are you, Tyelpe?”

He said, “I am glad you asked. I am dying of forbidden love for a beautiful, dangerous man.”

Lalwen replied, “Oh, yes; Finrod wrote to me about it, you met at one of Olwe’s parties, you demanded to be his first dance, and you embarrassed your cousin greatly. It all sounds very funny but he told me to tell you ‘no.’”

“Oh, the son of a bitch,” Tyelpe said, and Lalwen told him at length that he could not talk about sweet precious little Earwen that way, a woman who did not at all need the defense.

--

He stayed with Lalwen for a generally enjoyable evening and then got on his way after a spinach quiche and a pot of the strongest, blackest tea he had ever drunk in the morning. After that he visited what had quickly become his favorite and the most hospitable home in all of Aman, and that was the hill-house of Frodo Baggins.

Frodo dwelled in a hill just beside Tirion with his uncle, Bilbo, a slowly declining elderly hobbit who had chosen mortality but was really taking his time with it. Frodo was undecided about his own mortality, or else had decided not to discuss it. The gentlemanly halfling could be wily like that, sharp in a way that could befuddle age-worn, contemplative elves and which personally delighted Tyelpe. Because of some rather obvious things they had in common he and Frodo had become fast friends. Fearing that the younger hobbit would in the end choose his natural mortality just as Bilbo had, Tyelpe visited him as often as he could.

Frodo happily invited him into his lovely, odd, and remarkably round home. It turned out that Bilbo was working in his study and would not be interrupted, so instead Frodo set a table for two. He set two short glasses of lemon liquor and two cups of lavender tea in a spread with jam and sugar and cream. With those he brought out a plate of blackberry scones and another of fresh cut pears and another of smoked salmon, piled high with lemon slices and peppercorns. Tyelpe sat and watched the lace-covered table fill up, because he had not yet figured out any way to convince the hobbit to let him help with anything.

When Frodo finally sat down and made himself a cup of tea and a plate of food, Tyelpe followed suit. As he did so, he asked, “how’s you shoulder?”

“Hasn’t been too bad lately. Warm weather does well for it, I always suspected because I got in a cold chill. How’s that great awful morning-after-midsummer mess he left in your soul?”

Tyelpe smiled fondly as he drank his tea. “Burning, I hear.”

“Dreadful.”

“Still putting various sorts of wise immortals off of their breakfast when they see it.”

“Shame. Does it hurt any?”

“Hm. Not in the same way your shoulder hurts you. I do feel just about exhausted all of the time,” Tyelpe admitted, a fact he could usually hide by staying on the road and never being in any one person’s house for too long. He was perpetually tired from traveling and perpetually using that excuse. “It seems to be actually eating at me, but elven fea are not like the souls you have. The burning won’t wear me out.”

“Not all the way through, but you’re still lugging around a ball and chain all the time,” Frodo summarized quite evocatively. “If you’re going to be immortal, someone has got to sort that out.”

“I’ve been working on it,” Tyelpe said half-honestly. He was in the process of working on getting back to it. Being shut down by Varda herself had been somewhat demoralizing. “There are still options to explore. I did come here to talk through something with you, though.”

“Mm.” Frodo chewed through and swallowed a bit of smoked salmon. “Is this the business with the mysterious gentleman that Finrod Finarfinwean wrote about? I must say he made it all sound very questionable.”

“He even wrote to you? Powers help me,” Tyelpe complained, and reached for the little glass of lemon liquor.

“He does not seem like a prince to cross lightly.”

“I did not cross him, I challenged him.” Tyelpe knocked it back in one.

“Worse. Well, I’ve heard his side of the story, but I can’t help but feel like he left out a few choice details from the letter. How about I hear yours?”

Tyelpe had hidden the exact identity of the ‘man’ with the people he had spoken to so far (to Gil-Galad he had revealed that it was an Ainu but left out the details that would make it obvious which one), but with Frodo he was fully honest in his telling, down to who it was and what they had spoken about and what to Tyelpe the inescapable appeal of the shifty maia was.

“I have not banished him from my mind since,” he admitted, pushing his liquor-glass far away from him so that he could not unthinkingly pour another one. “He is like the call of the sea embodied; worse, it is as if he is some dream I had about my husband, in which he was better than he really was. An imagined version of him that could have worked out. The imprint of the same terrible Evil is in both of them, but where Sauron had rotted, Osse has grown fresh and green around the scars. He feels abysmally comfortable, and it is those dark abysses which are comfortable. That is where I used to sleep, and I haven’t slept well since I lost them. I cannot quite stop thinking about him; I almost do, and then the thought creeps back in: he’s beautiful. He seems so comfortable to slip into. It feels like I have always known him, but really, I have always had an idea of… where his presence might have been. Stars in each their constellations, am I making sense?”

“Yes,” Frodo said, leaned slightly back in his chair, contemplative. Then he stood. “Hang on, I’d like to start a pipe.”

“By all means,” Tyelpe said, and waited at the table as Frodo bustled around the rooms fetching a pipe and pipeweed and the sterling silver Noldorin pipe-lighter Celebrimbor himself had gifted him with after Frodo told him how enamored he was with the handy devices. He heard Bilbo shout something at him from the back, which turned into a brief, half-heard discussion. Frodo returned just as he was lighting the leaves and the first puffs of thick, fragrant smoke began curling off of their tips.

“Well, I can’t say I don’t understand,” he said, working through the pains in his weak joints to settle himself back into the chair. “What very few like to admit is that your husband was a fascinating, brilliant, and overall compelling individual. There were times I was completely engrossed in him too before I managed to wrench myself away. That is the type that pulls you back in even when you know you shouldn’t be tolerating it, which is your type completely.”

“I can’t deny it.”

“To be frank, it would be my opinion to leave this up to you. Lord Osse isn’t your late husband, though the resemblance isn’t superficial. You have your matrons around to help you out if things sour on you. This is hardly your first match and you know what you will or will not tolerate now. You still have a tendency to get in too deep too quickly, but you’re aware of it. And to be frank, though it is the echo of Sauron that made you notice him, Osse seems by your description to be much more than that. Not that I know him to judge him myself, mind. We both know Sauron had narrowed to a sliver of himself by the end of his life; this one is a full person, at least, and very thoughtful and  considerate. It might not even be a poor match, in isolation. But I cannot get myself around the fact that it is not in isolation, and he is already married.”

“I know.”

“There’s just no way around it,” Frodo shook his head. “Well, in the Shire, there would be a way or two around it, but things are a bit more strict around here. You can’t do anything without permission from his Lady wife, and…”

Tyelpe hummed and raised his eyebrows.

“Yes, that may be hard to get.”

“There is no way,” Tyelpe replied despondently. “The Lady Uinen has spent ages by his side, being his stalwart support and moral compass. Compared to that, what am I doing?”

“Well,” Frodo said, puffed his pipe once, and then handed it over to Tyelpe. “Well, I can’t think of any response to that question that I feel is polite to say.”

--

Tyelpe stayed with Frodo and Bilbo a handful of days, helping them with home repairs and re-shoeing their ponies, and then with the equivalent of three separate picnic boxes packed for him he wound his way out of Tirion altogether and up the mountain-road to the sprawling town of forges and workshops where the apprentices of Aule dwelled, and among them the great Mahtan and his daughter, Nerdanel.

Tyelpe was very close to his paternal grandmother and spent much of his time with her. If pressed, he would say he loved his mother best (he did, really), but he was most comfortable with Nerdanel. She kept eccentric hours and was usually alone, and in her house he was often alone as well, with the sounds of tin chimes and birds outside his only company. She also kept strictly enforced ‘silent hours,’ indicated by a small sign she kept on the front door of the house. These ‘silent hours’ were not regular hours but began whenever she wanted them to and could persist for days on end. If she had indicated it was a silent hour, she would not respond to any address, and would push someone out of her home if they had tried too hard to speak to her.

When he came to visit her, he would not address her verbally unless she did. There were times he let himself in, received no more than a nod from her, and that was all that was said or done for days. And then they would have one conversation long into the night, or she would ask him to sing (not that he was any good, but there was no one else to hear), or one of Tyelpe’s distant red-haired relatives on Mahtan’s side would come over with fresh-picked apples and news to chat over.

That meant that in Nerdanel’s house there were long periods in which he was not really doing or expected to do anything at all. If it took him two or three days to get real sleep, he had those days. If he could not think of anything at all to say, he did not have to. If he had to find a place to lock the door and gasp with the pain of burning inside him, he could.

When he finally made it to Nerdanel’s house, she was absent. She might’ve been out doing any number of things, so he helped himself to her store of way-bread and honey and settled himself into the guest-bed and slept.

He heard Nerdanel rustling around in the kitchen when he woke the next morning. It was likely she had just gotten in from whatever errand she was running overnight, as she was not much of a kitchen person. He got up and pulled his hair into a messy tail and sought her out to help her.

He did find her standing in the kitchen, eating plain bread, drinking water, and reading through her mail. Tyelpe began to prepare tea for her. She briefly clasped his shoulder as he walked by behind her.

Nerdanel drank very delicate, light brews when she drank tea at all. He timed the brewing carefully, then poured the whole little earthenware pot into two large mugs. He sat down at the small round table, and then set the other cup across from him, subtly encouraging her to actually sit down.

Eventually, she did. She picked up the cup, steaming hot, and drained half of it at once. She hummed. Tyelpe looked up at her.

She swallowed. “Your cousin Finrod wrote to say you were trying to ruin your life again.”

“Damn Ingo, I will finish the work my father started with him,” he snapped immediately, only meaning it a moment.

“Mm-hm. He said you want to take up with Osse the ship-sinker?”

“What, he told you who? He didn’t tell anyone else who.”

“Yes, he told me who. Tyelpe, I’m very fond of you.”

“Thank you. I’m fond of you also.”

“I don’t think you should have an extramarital affair with an embodied force of nature.”

Tyelpe hummed, and then tipped back his own cup and drank its steaming contents, feeling how the heat wafted up his soft throat. “But Nerdanel,” he said after he swallowed, “I really, really want to.”

Nerdanel smiled at her tea, a slow, fond smile. She looked up at Tyelpe and reached forward to tug slightly at the lobe of his right ear, at the big, golden earring that pierced it. “Curufinwe,” she called him.

Tyelpe closed his eyes, clenched his jaw, and took that devastating judgment without argument.

“Go forge something,” said Nerdanel, and finished her tea.

--

Tyelpe dutifully took himself to the house of Mahtan and to his forge and spent the next few weeks there, dutifully helping both his relatives and various apprentices at their projects, and slowly sliding into making something of his own once he got warmed up. Time smeared as he worked, days and nights into a warm, smoky glow; people came and went.

He told himself not to do it. He told himself to make something fine and practical. A printing-press, an iron table with matching chairs, a bronze teaset. He tried several times to make something nice and felt more aggravated with each attempt, because he wanted to make a sword.

After three weeks of increasingly frustrated self-denial, he made a sword. It was spectacular. He gave it to Mahtan and went to bed.

--

In the night in Mahtan’s house, Tyelpe was a mere few walls removed from the glow and heat of forge-fire, the smell of steel and smoke. The black heady perfume of the forge did not merely leak in through the thin slits between wall and window, it had permeated them ages ago. If he listened, sleepless, he could half-hear and half-feel the rhythmic pounding of hammer and anvil from where he laid in borrowed bed, like a slow, steady, reptilian heartbeat.

Sauron’s brand on his fea flared. Tyelpe twisted. He gripped the sheets in his fists. He slowly relaxed his hands, but another surge of pain had him curling in, making a circle around the burnt hole inside him.

He swore, quiet enough to keep his hate in the room. If there was one person he did not want to see him fighting this—well, there was no one he wanted to see him fighting this, but his venerable and ancient ancestor, who proudly displayed a sword that had ‘For Curufinwe Feanaro (should he come back)’ inscribed on its blade in his foyer (the sword was not intended as a gift) was very high on the list of people he did not want to see him like this.

He gripped his own skin and squeezed and remembered. It had taken Sauron a long time to find and catch him after he had finished the one ring and his true identity had been revealed. Tyelpe had hidden in dark places, houses abandoned for long centuries, fallen kingdoms, caves, dark rooms like this one, always borrowing, sometimes breaking in. But he had been found, and he had been claimed. The day Sauron claimed him was the boundary marker in his body, the place where a cataclysm had rocked the earth, where the soil beneath was living and lush and the soil above was blackened and fused. 

He privately regarded anyone who thought it was the sex that had marred him as functionally a child. He  had been having sex with Annatar for centuries. He had kissed Annatar’s cock and tasted his seed and played at his entrance and pinned him to his bed to ride him a thousand times and, it turned out, all as foreplay. When Sauron took him, fully revealed, he penetrated form and fea, and finding resistance gripped it and snapped it. He had the power to isolate the good sense and self-respect that caused Tyelpe to not want him and push it aside like undergarments. It had not been subtle; Tyelpe had felt him find the very wall within him, the concept of ‘violation’, and break it down. He had been taken like holy judgment, like a city toppled. It was not just one little thing or another he destroyed, but the firmament, which was left a crater.

Tyelpe had seen plenty of violated men, some who admitted it and many who didn’t, but most were not on fire. To his recollection, he did not start burning until he started agreeing. It was nearly impossible not to see things Sauron’s way once he filled his body and his mind; a world of mechanical perfection, a universe which was a forge, a heaven of silky smoke. No pain, no hunger or thirst, no permission or consent or argument. All things in divine order and anything on command. It was not when he fucked him but when he said ‘yes’ to him that Sauron smote his soul.

He regretted it later, but he had seen much regret in his life, and it did no rebuilding or restitution on its own. Finding the opportunity to kill himself had been his preemptive payback for the world he might have made with Sauron; he was left with the punishment for what he did to himself, in himself.

Fair enough.

He knew that he shouldn’t, but he imagined Osse as he sought to dull the pain. Strong hands to seize him, and cold water; he imagined being held underneath the waves as he held his breath. The pain drifting out of him and the fire dimming lower and lower. A cool kiss, parting his lips.

The pain slowly subsided, not to nothing, but to the low, manageable burn he usually lived with. He slept eventually, and left Mahtan’s house the next morning.

--

He took himself then away, away from the towns and cities, from most everything, to the wilderness. There was another relative he wanted to find, and she could be hard to track down.

His aunt Aredhel (while Ingo had become his cousin, Aredhel remained solidly his aunt, not that he could say why exactly) did have a permanent address but was not usually found there. She tended to be away. Nowhere in particular. Away. In the fields, in the forests, in the hills, hunting, camping, living.

Tyelpe found a hunting train and asked when they had seen her. Going that direction, a forest-maia gave him more precise instructions. He followed tracks and signs, contemplated what she was most likely to do, and eventually found her camped near a riverbank. Her untacked mare idled nearby, her bedroll laid on the ground absent a tent, her camp-fire crackled, and she herself stood above a hind she had hunted. Its legs were tied and its throat was slit and bled. She was stripped down to her waist and blood-splattered and working with a thin knife to cut the pelt from its flesh.

“Aunt Aredhel,” he shouted as he approached.

“Baby!” she said, smiling a gore-touched smile. “Help me get the skin off this thing.”

Tyelpe took off his own shirt and braced the weight of the deer so that his aunt could more easily strip it. She had done the messy part already, and the process was not altogether too visceral. Still; the fresh-kill was yet warm, and its wet sinews stuck to his hands, and his aunt hummed old marching tunes as she butchered it.

It had always been this way, once. The ghosts of those who should have been there with them seemed to press at his sides, for a moment, watching Aredhel through his eyes.

“I’ve been going around the country and being told by a great variety of incredibly wise, compassionate, and considerate people that I’m being an idiot right now,” Tyelpe opened conversation.

“Oh? What about?” Aredhel asked, her eyes on the slit of light between her knife and the skin of the deer.

“Well. There’s a man.”

“Oh, the man that Ingo wrote to me about?”

“Powers fucking damn it, how did he get a letter to you?”

“Birds, birds; he does bird things now, like the whole insufferable lot of them with their pearls and swan feathers and good morals. I read it, then it was kindling.”

“Well, what did he tell you?”

“Do you think I care what Ingo thinks? I had a laugh and now I’ve forgotten half of what he even said. What, you met a man he doesn’t think you should have, so forth, not sure why he thinks it’s his business.”

“Did he say anything about… who this is?”

“Maybe? I’ve forgotten. How about you tell me about it, since you clearly want to,” she said.

Tyelpe paused. “Well. Well, I was spending a few days with Ingo and Arre, and Ingo had been invited to an engagement of King Olwe’s. He asked if I wanted to go with and I said, well, why not. A dinner and dance on the seashore, what could go wrong?”

“If this story ends with you waxing poetic about a rosy-cheeked Teleri prince who has never even touched mold and me having to hear about it—”

“It does not. We went, everything was fine, just a gaggle of Ingo’s more silvery relatives on the beach, we were barely making noise. Then some of the sea-maiar started coming up on the beach to join.”

“Not unusual.”

“No, not at all. Ingo grabbed me so that I could say hello to the host, which I hadn’t done yet, so, it was about time I did, and I was being pleasant and incredibly normal around King Olwe, absolutely the most normal person you have ever seen, when I see something out on the ocean.”

“Ship? Serpent? Elwing drunk and buck naked?”

“Well, it turned out to be another maia.”

“Mm-hm.”

“The maia Osse, actually.”

Tyelpe watched the knowledge of exactly what he was about to say strike in Aredhel’s eyes like the flash of a drawn dagger.

“Mm-hm,” she said.

“You might—something I did not know, but it seems that King Olwe knew, was that Ulmo’s vassal Osse was once—seduced by the Enemy, and served him as a thrall and general for some time in the dark-days, before the awakening. I mean that he was literally a vassal of Melkor. It turns out that most of the Ainur have just not mentioned it because it’s just in the past. He got better, that is. He left Melkor and went back to his wife and he’s fixed now, it’s all fine, except that he is not fully fixed.”

“Uh-huh.”

Tyelpe was aware that she had seen the path ahead and was simply letting him tumble down it now. Despite that, he went on. “He lives still with the sting of the Enemy’s influence inside him,” he continued, “Which is always fighting with his greater good nature. It compels him to—do violence, on occasion, against the second-born of Middle Earth, who fear him as a treacherous spirit. He talked about. Uh. Crushing people. Sometimes. Just—I mean—with his hands—physically—he is incredibly strong. Obviously, yes, he’s a—spirit of incredible…

“Well, anyway, I asked him if he knew my late husband, the—well, I asked him to dance. He asked me who I was and I asked him to dance. I’m not sure I ever told him my name, actually. I asked him if he knew my late husband and not only did he—they were both involved with the Enemy at the same time. A—my husband saw it as a competition. In Osse’s words. Osse was the one who warned the Ainur to never trust my husband. He was rather—incensed—that he hadn’t been told about me. I get almost the feeling they were not letting Osse have it out with him because they were worried about the absolutely massive damage it would cause. When he showed up, he—um—nearly crushed everyone at the party. He poured a tidal wave on our heads and I think only half of everyone stayed standing. It was pulverizing, and it was just an accident. He’s a very good dancer. He has a wife. I may have asked—that is, I may have tried to ask him to—well, he did interrupt me before I could actually say it, and excused himself, which I should take as a rejection and be done with it. But I am not certain in my heart that he did want to reject me.”

Aredhel straightened up, her bloodied knife in one hand, and the other braced on her hip. “Tyelpe,” she said, “I have one question for you.”

“What is that?”

“Is he hot.”

“Is he—”

“Hot. Is he hot.”

“Does that—matter?”

“Curufin Celebrimbor, do you think I ruined my life for a mediocre man? I want to make it clear right now and for always that my bastard husband was hot. He was the hottest man I had ever seen. If I had been able to spend 48 blissful hours dehydrating him and then walk right back out and never see him again I would have done that and never mentioned him to anyone. But no, the sacred bonds of matrimony snapped onto my wrists the minute I was starting to enjoy myself. But now that I, just like you, am too tragically broken to be married again, I can do whatever I want and never spend a single second agonizing over whether having a bit of fun will ruin the rest of my life. There is only one question of any import and it is the only question at all worth asking: Is he hot?”

“Yes,” Tyelpe informed her. “He’s hot.”

Aredhel clenched the knife and pointed it at his chest. “Then do it!!” she nigh-demanded. “Get him! What’s going to happen, you’ll be double deflowered? That’s not real. Do it. Do it for me.”

Enormously relieved, Tyelpe reached forward and pulled his aunt into an embrace. She happily hugged him back, patting his hair, which got some blood in it. “Thank you, Aunt Aredhel,” he sighed. “I knew I could count on you.”

“You’re welcome, baby,” she said.

Return to Navigation

CHAPTER 3: Getting Him

 

Tyelpe had already removed his jewels, all of them, earrings, rings, hair-pins, bracelets and cuffs all left behind. He had fully unbound his hair, methodically unraveling the high, tight, secure braid that marked him as someone who still felt the fear he had earned in a life in exile. It laid at his back now, too thick and heavy to be much more than teased by the wind at the edges. He had removed most of his clothing and approached the shore with only a light robe.

Once his bare feet met the edge of the sea north of Alqualonde, its quays glittering miles below, Tyelpe lifted that robe from his shoulders and let it fall into the sand. He felt the warmth of the summer night on his bare skin, and the water shifting the sand under the soles of his feet. Tiny silver fish darted up and back, attracted to the heat of his body but not knowing what to do with him when they found him. Pale moon-fish floated a little further out in the waves, skeletal sea-coins shimmered half-buried, and the thin legs of crabs and sea insects caught facets of the moonlight and cut it into slivers as they scuttled. The sea itself did not sleep; its circulatory gasping and grumbling, the sound of it crawling up and down, rumbled across the entire horizon.

His heart pounded like it was on the anvil. The madness of what he was doing occurred to him underneath the steady hammering. If anything reminded him, even in a small way, of the terror and rapture that once filled him while he was pursuing Annatar, that was something that he should not do.

But nothing at all might happen, he reminded himself. There was nothing about what he was doing that would necessarily alert a maia. The ocean was wide, and he had not seen Osse since the party half a season ago. The ship-wrecker could be on the other side of Middle-Earth, or away in some ocean of night past the edge of the world. Tyelpe might very well immerse himself in the blood-warm sea and find nothing. He had once been able to summon Annatar with a simple thought, or a speeding heartbeat; the villain had tried to be subtle, but Tyelpe had tested it and learned definitely that Annatar could sense those things. His naked body in the ocean and his thumping heart were things that a maia of sufficient power could sense, but only if he wanted to. Otherwise, Tyelpe was as the fish, one of a thousand similar pulsing examples of predator and prey adrift in the same wave.

Tyelpe stepped forward, feeling the wet sand shift under his weight. (He liked the texture. He liked how it gave way to weight.) He took his time walking into the ocean, avoiding crushing any shells or little sea-flowers. The schools of silver fish parted for him, and soon his hair was picked up by the surface of the water, pulled and teased.

Tyelpe was more a fan of quick-running rivers and still lakes than salted, stinging ocean-water. He remembered Helevorn and Gelion, Bruinen and Anduin with the fondness of anything beautiful and lost forever. But he did like the ocean’s strength; he loved forces of nature, boiling volcanoes, towering thunderheads, the bellow of the lightning-strike. He remembered the great, hail-bearing storms of Beleriand, storms that punished. He liked the grumbling, threatening power of the ocean, how he could feel its currents testing at the integrity of his skin, the surety of his balance. He liked knowing he was standing against it, that it could and might test his limits at any moment. He liked knowing that he might not win that battle.

He usually felt content in the surety and safety of deathless Aman, but when he felt again nature’s restless uncertainty, it was as though he had just awakened from a long sleep and awakened hungry. The desire to dive into danger pre-dated his husband, the wars of his fathers, even his life in Beleriand; he could remember feeling the same pull on those very shores even as a child, breaking away from his mother’s gloved grip to rush at the sharp rocks and sucking waves. He had been pulled in too deep, for a second, by a low, cold current, and when wrenched back out by one of his uncles and finally ridding his eyes and ears of water he found the clarity and brightness of all things incredible.

The question was always, ‘why do you jump into things?’ ‘Why does he do that?’ The answer could not be put into words; he didn’t understand anyone who did not feel the impulse.

Finally the water grew deep enough that he was able to pick up his feet and swim, putting quick distance between himself and the shore. The surface was still sun-warmed and soft on his skin, even though it was very late at night.

He swam until he was far enough that getting back would not be easy. He floated, feeling how the warring whims of the ocean thought to pull him one way, and then another. He closed his eyes and slipped beneath. He felt the sting of salt when he looked around under the waves, and saw the blurry paths of sea-creatures making their midnight way. The rocky floor, he saw, was already far distant beneath him, dotted with strange forms of life.

He surfaced again, and leaned back his head so the water would run out of his ears. His hair floated like thick kelp around him.

He saw how bright the stars were over his head, like a jewelry-chest upended on black velvet. Varda’s work was set in stunning array, diamonds nearly without peer, their subtle gleams more miniscule than the finest sapphire facets.

He watched them for some time. He began to hear the subtle sounds of ocean-life, bubbles of breath that rose to the surface, creatures chirping and mumbling, testing the air and dropping back down. His anxious heart rate began to slow as minutes passed.

Perhaps that waiting lull had only happened so that it would spike into fear again when he felt something like fingers brush the sole of one foot.

Instinctually he wrenched it up. His skin tingled in the absence of the touch, and he felt that the water of the ocean was slowly, subtly turning, as though he were in the middle of what was not yet a whirlpool. He had not noticed that movement beginning.

He felt his heart beat in his throat. His ears strained for noise, and soon, he heard it: the very low, rumbling laughter that rose up from far below.

Tyelpe pulled in his breath.

“This is unusual,” came the voice of the ocean, through great smiling shark teeth. “The firstborn are not nocturnal creatures. I hardly ever see one out so late at night.”

It was him. Even though he had only heard his voice once, Tyelpe could not mistake it. It was strung through with a note of danger, a fishnet lace of blood in the water, faint and quiet and yet as great as distant thunder. The sound of a maia that might not mean you well could never be misheard after once heard.

“And certainly not alone.” His rumbling voice coming from a place slowly less and less distant beneath him. Tyelpe could not see anything in the dark water, though he strained his eyes, and yet it did approach. “Your kind usually travels in groups, pairs or flocks, enjoying each other’s company, or traveling alike, or having a midnight tryst; you’re social animals. Besides, don’t you know that it can be dangerous to go alone at night, even in the waters around the blessed realm?”

“I do,” Tyelpe replied, his voice breathy and high. “I know.”

“And…” Osse continued, and his presence brushed fully against Tyelpe, before and behind, embedded in the water around him. It was like a sheet of water drifting through his very fea, shifting everything it touched. His blood quickened. “Most unusual of all, I know your kind does not usually go out like that.”

There’s nothing to see, he realized. Osse was fully incorporeal; the ocean sliding on his skin was Osse, and he was the ocean.

“Like what?” Tyelpe gasped.

“Naked,” said Osse, and the ocean pressed on him.

Tyelpe squirmed against it. His body was already hot. The water did not move like water when he wriggled. It clung and caressed before falling away. “You are generally quite unwilling to go out with this, without your jewels and baubles, your silk and linen–especially with your hair down, like this,” Osse said, and something unseen tugged so roughly on Tyelpe’s loose hair that his head was pulled sharply back and his neck exposed to the air. “I can’t imagine why an elf would go out like this.”

“I—I—” Tyelpe couldn’t grasp his words. Water poured over him and his scalp tingled from his hair being pulled. (His hair, which he had let down with lustful thoughts, which still would make mother look sideways at him if it wasn’t bound tight.) He was as aroused as he was stunned, so quickly caught he could not have defended himself if he wanted to.

“Unless—unless, that is, you knew the sort of danger you were exposing yourself to, and wanted to indicate that you were willing to tangle with it.”

Tyelpe found his words. “Yes,” he gasped, squirming in the sudden, demanding press of hot water on his body. “Yes, I’m willing, yes.”

There came a noise from the ocean that built on itself, a stair stacked on a stair, coming higher and yet higher. It was the sound of laughter and it was the sound of disaster, roaring that could break the trunks of trees. On instinct Tyelpe took in a breath and in the next half-second felt the waters of the ocean squeezing, pulling on his legs.

In a thunderclap he was underwater, but not merely underwater. The water squeezed him like the embrace of a snake, and like the snake it came in coils, rubbing over him, his face, his legs, the soft skin under his ribs, his rising sex, his thighs and calves. He twisted like he was on a hook.

Through the shifting of the water he was suddenly able to perceive the face, titanic and moving, its restless eyes watching him squirm. Tyelpe was wrenched down, quickly, and far enough that the light of the moon grew distant and he gasped out the air in his lungs. His head rang and swerved like he had been hit; his heart thrummed hard.

“I have so many questions about how you sweet creatures were made,” Osse said consideringly, with false, lascivious sympathy. “I am told over and over again about what things hurt you and that you would never enjoy such things. The fact that so many of you enjoy those things anyway once they’re done to you makes me wonder about your actual making.”

Tyelpe felt a more deliberate, searching press pull up from the inside of his thighs and over his sex. He would have whined in response, if he could have; his lungs were emptied. A slow thrum of anxiety began to rise under his heartbeat, which did not slake his heat.

“I know that none of my very Good Lords actually understand you like I do. No, no need to be humble. They don’t. They have shown that they love but do not understand. I know what you want,” he bragged, and pressed on Tyelpe’s body with water that was not water, skin that was not skin. “The One knew that mere mortal bodies needed protection against the hurts that would happen to them, and you and I both know the firmest protection is learning to enjoy it.”

Melkor must have said something quite similar to both of them, Tyelpe realized, because he suddenly and clearly remembered Annatar saying something nearly identical and in a nearly identical situation. He had long been aware that the Great Enemy’s actions often guided his husband’s hands, even back when he thought that Annatar had been trying to get away from those vicious teachings and was only unwillingly following them. Whatever Melkor did to them both was worse than permanent, it was infectious, deadly as a plague and likewise imbued with the ability to spread.

Tyelpe could feel pain pressing from inside him. He needed to breathe. Osse rubbed down the front of his body, his tingling skin now laced with nerves lit awake. It felt incredible. His thighs twitched to latch on to him, but he couldn’t. An invisible hand pushing on his chest emptied him completely and his vision blurred.

“It never fails. The gift of perversion is imbued in each of you, dormant until you need it.”

You could die like this, he thought, for a second pleasurable and dull. He remembered being spread on a bed of torture and wondering if he would die with his thighs stretched open. He thought about dying in the ocean, drowned, to anyone’s knowledge, suffused with pleasure, and he felt—

Enraged. Furious. Furious that anyone and especially Osse thought he would take that. Snapped from near-sleep to full awareness, with a burst of angry strength and his uncanny ability to defy possibility he lashed forward and bit the storm-spirit. There should not have been anything he could break but he felt something snap under his teeth anyway. He could swear he tasted blood; it was all salt, in any case.

He could hear Osse yelping. The rush to the surface left him dizzy, and when his head broke the surface and he pulled in his first breath of air his head shook with pain. He gasped in and out; he could feel two solid hands on both of his arms, holding him up.

“Oh—did you—”

Realizing instantly that he now had a corporeal target, Tyelpe sucked in a breath and shouted, “I need to breathe, fucker!” Then he spat ocean-water onto Osse’s face, though he didn’t really mean to. He just had a lot of water to get out of him.

Osse was wearing his elven skin now, not that that meant he would be bothered by being spit on. Though Tyelpe’s swimming eyes he saw that he looked somewhat chagrined. (It looked almost as though he blinked the moisture away with clear under-eyelids.) “I meant to—well, never mind. I’ll fix it,” he said, and pulled Tyelpe toward him so that he could enfold his still-leaking lips in a kiss.

Still angry, Tyelpe growled in his throat at him. Being angry did in no way make him willing to break the kiss. Osse tilted his head to open Tyelpe’s mouth, and Tyelpe licked forward to explore him, the sharp teeth, the rough and pleasant texture of his tongue. (Annatar had been hot and slick like quenching-oil or lava.) When Osse breathed into his mouth Tyelpe shivered with pleasure; the rough, warm, salty sea-breath had deep within it a scent of death, which he had not been close enough before to notice.

Once Osse had Tyelpe’s mouth open, he put a hand under his chin (the hands on both arms remained) and tilted it upwards. Something tumbled from out of Osse’s mouth and into Tyelpe’s, and then down his throat before he could even try to reject it. It was small, and smooth, and slightly cold.

Tyelpe’s first assumption was that it was a pearl, and Osse did not clarify except with “And now you can breathe.”

Tyelpe swallowed. He felt something deep in his throat bob, but not sink. “You mean, underwater?”

“Yes. I had meant to bring you somewhere where you could anyway, but got—distracted. In either case just doing that in the first place would have been wise, but—well. Shall we, then?” he asked, using the thumb under Tyelpe’s chin to caress the soft skin of his throat. “Your choice.”

Osse had reliably kept it his choice thus far, though his powers of persuasion were keen. In retrospect Tyelpe felt himself flattered by the sharp attention to his pleasure that had made Osse forget about his vital integrity, and he also felt himself still aroused and now neglected. He wrapped one of his own arms low around Osse’s, his hand on the flat, wet, warm planes of his back, and looked him in the eyes.

Osse grinned, and gripped him hard again, and pulled him down.

Tyelpe still breathed in on instinct, but soon found that it was not necessary. The thing lodged in his throat, whatever it was, poured clear air into him without him needing to do anything. It was odd, and Tyelpe was a little distracted by the sensation of his lungs breathing on their own as Osse pulled him down, and down further.

The light disappeared behind him rapidly. Darkness unfolded ahead, and unfolded again. Schools of white fish and great black whales alike parted for Osse as he descended, unnumbered loyal ranks. The salt that should have stung Tyelpe’s eyes did not, the pressure that should have crushed him did not; with the beauty and effortlessness of a dream, the hands on his arms shifted into the embrace of water, Osse’s presence all around him, bearing him down to a far-away place on the floor of the ocean with what he thought was incredible speed.

Mountains rose around him, black mountains in the dark; their peaks crawled with creatures he thought not unlike orcs, with skin that was not made for light and limbs that quivered. They too passed for Osse, flinching away, and some of them lit like stars as they went in quivering, oscillating colors. Between those mountains there were valleys, black as the places between stars, and in one such valley was a great house, a fortress-palace which reminded him in its façade of very old ages indeed.

Osse pulled him through a great yawning portal—windows and doors were indistinguishable from each other—lined with fencing like teeth, and through hallways lined with great phosphorescent lights into a chamber. In that chamber was a bubble of air and light and weight just like the surface of Arda, and though its walls and ceiling were encrusted with coral and water-plants they pulsed and wriggled in the air unbothered. Osse pulled him inside and set him down onto a great pillowy surface, a thing as much like a ‘bed’ as he was used to as a bed of kelp and coral, and stood above him.

Osse was in that moment both a body the size of an elf and the enormously towering presence behind it. He loomed over Tyelpe, the size of the room and even beyond it, expanding fractally into the currents and tides that pressed on the undersea palace and lighter and lighter into the ocean above it. Tyelpe looked up at his immensity with awe and with heart-ache, remembering.

“I have been thinking about you, Curufinwe Tyelperinquar,” Osse said, his physical body approaching close to the edge of the pillowy, fleshy, yielding bed.

Tyelpe shuddered between his shoulders. He braced his arms on the bed, parting the soft, gentle tendrils that ringed on its surface. ( Anemone. That was what it was called. He had forgotten the word.) “You do know my name,” he commented, not betraying his excitement. “I realized after the fact that I never introduced myself.”

“It was very mysterious of you,” Osse complimented him, drawing close to the rim of the anemone. “But it did not take much questioning to learn both who you are and that there is no small number of my own who are aware you were espoused, though falsely, to our late enemy. I have had some discussions about that which… are ongoing.”

Tyelpe’s heart beat hard again, and whether it should or shouldn’t have, the arousal which had dimmed during the quick trip through cold waters flared again under his skin. “It sounds like I have been rather on your mind.”

Osse leaned over him, placing one hand on the surface of the bed, which parted under his fingers.

Tyelpe swallowed, intrigued and slightly disoriented by the faint and silent curve of menace in the loom of Osse’s body. He recalled something he should have recalled much earlier. “And what of Uinen? Have you had a discussion with her also?”

“Oh? We are wed, we often have discussions,” he responded with a smile.

Tyelpe raised his eyebrows.

“She’s in residence at the moment; would you like to ask her?” Osse challenged.

“Oh, no, absolutely not,” Tyelpe said quickly. He knew what that was an invitation for, because he had received similar invitations often enough. He wasn’t interested. Besides, Uinen was a maia of great ability herself. If she was so close nearby, she was not unaware of what was happening. He did not care at all about what had passed between man and wife here and long as he wasn’t ripped out of the window and bashed on the rocks by a furious sea-maia.

Osse laughed again. He put his other hand on the bed so that he framed Tyelpe, leaned over him. The position of power emboldened Tyelpe with lust; he tried to squirm subtly.

“Not the type to share yourself. No surprise,” he said, and laid one thigh down upon Tyelpe to press him down as he kissed him.

Tyelpe groaned and opened his mouth immediately. The snake-like, nearly rough texture that Osse had chosen for the inside of his mouth made him weak with pleasure. It did not quite hurt when he rubbed it with his tongue, nor the teeth with edges not as sharp as blades but too keen to be mortal. He reached up for Osse’s hair, and felt it dripping wet, shifting through his fingers with the impermanence of thought but sticking with the power of shame.

Osse possessed his mouth, filled its cavity. Tyelpe’s tongue tingled with the taste of salt. Osse’s body lowered gradually upon him as they kissed, laying weight on one limb, then another, shifting permissively when Tyelpe moved to loop one leg over and behind him to cinch him close. He felt with lascivious delight that Osse had made himself fully male, rather than declining to sex himself like Annatar often had. His manhood was full and warm, pressing like a fact to Tyelpe’s thigh and stomach as it rose and hardened.

He had often questioned how much Annatar liked the physical mechanics of sex (he had never had any question at all that he liked the mental dimension of it). Osse ran his hands, sometimes too many, along Tyelpe’s heavy body, his chest with its aroused nipples, his ribbed side, his straining neck. Tyelpe knew his body felt like a kind of death to him, like being encased in stone, but nonetheless that hardened case made Osse hot enough to rut, unhurriedly and indulgently rubbing their sexes together. Tyelpe sighed and twisted into it, raising his body up for Osse to rub himself on him. 

It did not in absence feel like as much of a compliment for a maia to desire him as it did again in person, when he could feel the power and presence bearing down on him. Osse did not have to do it his way. He could find his pleasure cracking open Tyelpe’s head and watching him squirm, or in internal, divine delights Tyelpe could not participate in.

It seemed that Osse very much enjoyed the physical himself. His rapturous descriptions of physical destruction could have perhaps alerted Tyelpe to that already. His hands clung so greedily to Tyelpe’s form as he pressed him that it nearly bruised him, and when Tyelpe followed a moment of instinct and dropped his head to bite Osse’s throat instead, he groaned and bucked. Tyelpe bit at the skin of his neck, his chin, his ear; he knew he did not have to be gentle with the false body and didn’t pay any attention to the force he used. He grasped the maia’s shoulders, feeling the muscle that mirrored his concentrated power.

Osse asked him, “What do you like?” Hearing the lust in his voice without the violence was itself an interesting flavor.

Tyelpe fastened his teeth on his salted skin again, and tried fate further by speaking with his thought instead of his mouth. I like quite a few things.

Speaking to Osse in osanwe did not disorient and dismay like approaching the boundaries of Annatar’s being once had, but it have a certain dizzy power. The lure of the edge, Tyelpe thought, like he was calling out on the edge of a seaside cliff, looking down, down.

Osse responded in the only way a maia could, both inside and outside. “I am certain, considering your tutor, you have plenty of experience. But what do you like?”

Bad form to bring him up, Tyelpe responded, always more likely to say something hasty in thought. The thigh which he had hooked around Osse’s calf inched higher as he bit up his neck. Unless the appeal to you is taking something that was Sauron’s. I would understand that.

“There’s some appeal—I did hate him—it’s not the appeal. But this is certainly not theft, unless you claim to still belong to him.”

Osse then laughed as he felt Tyelpe’s nails dig angrily into his back. “Then none of his guesswork and games. An honest answer—what do you want?”

Tyelpe lifted his body, on instinct, to cling a little closer. Now that he had heard someone else say that he was emulating Annatar’s tricks, he flinched away from being seen. Tricks like never responding to the spirit of the question when asked one but always picking at its garb instead, shifting subjects before any one could be addressed in full, encouraging bad behavior in others to enable his own, overdoing his overwhelming focus on his partner to avoid truly involving himself, playing sex instead of having it. Feeling Osse’s muscles shift under his palms, and the heavy heat of him between his thighs, Tyelpe considered dropping to his knees and taking him in his mouth. Giving and not taking. Refusing pleasure but pushing his partner into it, watching for his weakness.

Then it occurred to him that this may well be the only time he ever had Osse, and damn him if he wasn’t going all the way.

He dropped his weight back onto the anemone and felt its strange skin bend under his back. He looked up at Osse, at the sight of the deadly spirit in the heat of passion, and then opened his thighs wide. He watched as Osse’s body, a mere mirror of his gigantic presence, went taut with tension; his hands clenching on Tyelpe, his manhood twitching.

“Well, now that I’ve had someone who does not feel any fear beneath me, I’m not sure how I mistook anything else for desire.”

Tyelpe tensed though the sound of his voice. His mouth parted on instinct, and then he swallowed. “Except that you haven’t had him yet,” he responded roughly.

Two fists clenched to his forearms. “I have, and I haven’t—”

“I know you’re having five kinds of sex in the different dimensions of your divine body, but I also know that any of you that pretends my kind doesn’t go right through your head is lying,” Tyelpe informed him, sweat beginning to bead under his back where he arched off of the bed.

A hand covered Osse’s mouth for just a moment (the hands on Tyelpe’s body remained anchored). Tyelpe felt the atmosphere, the pressure of the air around him, stiffen and shift.

Tyelpe’s bluntness had shocked Osse, but more so his accuracy. He did know too much about maia. He knew far too much. (He wondered if Osse being kept away from the elves and Ainur of Aman was wiser for him, or for the Ainur, who looked much better without him.)

“Then as you will,” he said, and moved down his strong hands to grip Tyelpe’s thighs instead. He groaned and tested their firmness; absolute. He felt the untouched and aggravated heat between his legs and loved it, the denial, the tension. He could feel how his hair was tangling on the flesh of the creature beneath him. Come to think of it, he had heard something about sea anemones—but never mind, because a heavy hand was sliding between his leg, not to his sex to but to his hole.

“You don’t have to prepare me,” Tyelpe panted, because the maia could easily alter his shape and texture to suit as he entered him.

Osse responded with a shark-smile and the penetration of one finger, then two, into his hole, testing with greedy interest that clearly conveyed that he was doing what he liked. Tyelpe tried to part his thighs harder but found that Osse’s grip was firm; his legs were exactly as parted as he wanted them to be.

He whined. Osse laughed. He pressed his fingers inside him and moved, testing the limits of what his body could take. Tyelpe, unable to move, thrashed instead the knowledge that Osse was deciding exactly how large a sex could fit inside him. He clenched his teeth and laid the side of his head onto the soft creature that was his bed.

“Are you sure?” Osse asked, slightly mocking.

Tyelpe recalled Osse’s rapturous, lustful descriptions of cracking secondborn under his hands, of breaking islands, of popping soft bodies with his teeth. Oh yes. Yes. Yes. Please. I’ll beg you.

Calling off the cliffside that led to dark Osse in the waves, pinned unmovably open and waiting for the plunge, made him now as willing to jump or die trying just as he had not been earlier. Approaching the moment of being between life and death, completely free of his body or any care of what happened to it, proved irresistible. The past shrank, and he was as before willing to perish under the power that had caught him,or else break the world with him.

Osse pulled his hand out, or perhaps it dissolved, digested. Tyelpe bucked uselessly and shouted syllables in his mind as the body drew near to him, and pressed flush to his open hole.

“I don’t want begged,” Osse informed him, holding him on the very edge of the cliff. “I do like praise.”

Tyelpe breathed in, and then that breath was stuck in his throat like a stone when Osse pushed and entered him, filing him halfway with a sudden flood of heat. Tyelpe shouted. He felt how his head had rolled back on the bed when he felt his hair dragging across his face. After a pulse backwards, Osse pushed in again, deeper, and quickly, just as quick as he could take and on the edge of further.

“Yes,” Tyelpe said, “ Yes—”

His voice broke as Osse thrust in, fast, the wave that slammed against the shore. Tyelpe tried to flex with it and c ouldn’t. He was held fast. All he could do was shout, and he did. He was full, and then, after a lie of a withdrawal and another thrust forward, fuller yet. Tyelpe slammed against the allegorical surface of the water; his body stung with pain and his lungs were emptied. His sex burned with pleasure and he twisted under the pain, enraptured.

“Yes, yes,” he panted. He could hardly hear himself. He was aware in the half-moments of lull between thrusts, as the waves pulled back, that he was being completely overwhelmed, as disoriented as if he had just had his skull cracked by the broad side of a blade. His own full cock between his legs was immaterial; like a hot wound dealt in battle, he couldn’t afford to attend to it at the moment. Osse’s strong hands enfolded him, his thighs, his side, his chest, gripping the tangles of his hair, moving. Tyelpe bucked up at him when he rubbed the spot inside him. Osse’s cock pressed into his as far as it could go, as far as anything could go but thought, and pulled away, and pressed again.

The strange bed yielded behind him, grasped at his hair. He could not much think about what he was saying, and he said, “hit me.”

Osse didn’t. He squeezed his fist around Tyelpe’s thigh and another on his arm so hard that it hurt. Tyelpe squirmed; it wasn’t what he wanted and it was. “Hit me—”

Osse thrust fully into him instead, and a whine scrambled inside of Tyelpe’s throat. It hurt, but not badly. The burn of pain only excited the building spot of pleasure inside him.

“You’re thinking of the wrong one,” he teased. “Pay attention.”

“Keep going—”

“I will, until I’m finished, and however I want.”

That was what Tyelpe wanted. He tried to grip the bed but remembered it was alive when it teared and wriggled. Osse held him open and in place and fucked him and all Tyelpe could do was lean his head back and choke on air. Hurt me—hurt me—

“That’s sweet.” Even in his divine voice there was brittle strain.

“You want to hurt—”

Tyelpe’s begging was cut short by quick, aggressive thrusts. Every one ignited him. Osse was too close, like Tyelpe had pushed him to be; he could feel him creeping up to his fea, pressing, thumping at the door. He said nothing, hoping the invasion would happen against Osse’s better judgment. “You want to do it—you—”

“Don’t think you can trick me.”

Between thrusts, Tyelpe gasped, “But you want to—”

“You really had him—didn’t you? He was losing control around you. That explains everything. You can—You have a certain—the Powers must not know you can do this,” he growled, and laid a hand on Tyelpe’s mouth, fingers clutching the falling planes of the side of his face. Tyelpe dizzily closed his eyes, disoriented, thrilled. “Except you didn’t have it before he taught you.” Osse did not stop thrusting into him as he spoke, but he slowed, somewhat, pushing in and out with deliberate dragging indulgence. “He had to have realized he was making someone just as good at it as he was. He surely attributed it to his own skill. Idiot. We learned the same way. Maybe I’ll keep you here—maybe I’ll—”

Whatever his thought was, it was so dire that he suddenly cut it. Tyelpe could feel danger behind its ragged edge; as Osse pushed into his body so too the surge of his full presence crept closer and closer, and if it broke on him it would sweep his fea away like it was nothing. You’ll what, Tyelpe thought, and Osse clenched his hand around his face. Hard enough that it hurt. Tyelpe opened his mouth and pressed his tongue to his palm.

“I know exactly what you want—breaking, sinking, and destruction. Being naked in the thunderstorm and pounded by the wind and rain. It’s not bravado, because you don’t actually think you can stand up to it. No one would have this hunger if he wasn’t terrified. Will you feel certain you can handle the next beatdown after one more? Will you finally feel safe?”

Harder, Tyelpe begged. He responded in fragments— breaking—lashing—thunderstorms— the imagining and the reality of being pounded by the fury of nature and having the strength to enjoy it and come out unchanged and unafraid. Without the guilt that ruined it, and without the world burning down because of it.

“However you want—do you want—”

Tyelpe gripped him back, wrapped a shaking hand around one of Osse’s arms and squeezed, making eddies in the power under his skin. Osse did not realize the grip on his thighs had weakened; Tyelpe pushed to spread them further and his own bones stopped him. Naked—unafraid—power—

Osse moved faster again; a line of breaking was running through the great presence that was hung over the little room and his climax crawled threateningly close. Physical presence reduced maiar, and physical pleasure was nearly anathema. Tyelpe dug in his fingers and rasped when he breathed, in and out, fast. The edges of Osse grew ragged and they pressed on him, on the inside of him. He shrunk back, he felt the insistent swelling of his cock, red, throbbing.

“I shouldn’t—” Osse realized, voice thick as fog with desire.

You want to—

“Dangerous—you might—”

Like his fingers the edges of Osse’s divinity prodded at him, hungrily ran over his extremities. Tyelpe laid opened wide. His own arousal was becoming unignorable, the constant stab of pleasure in his hole making it throb desperately. Finish me—I’ll—

“It might—”

Hurt you?

Osse cracked open. The flood when it came was worse than tidal; it obliterated. Tyelpe lost his breath. His fea was scoured and stripped at the edges. His body orgasmed, first on the inside, where an immense body pressed him everywhere and everywhere the pressure was intense and hot and good, and then on the outside, spilling.

For a moment, he was on a shoreline. The shore was rocky, black, and rough. The sky above was dark and Varda’s stars were young and brilliant. The ocean was green, grumbling. This was Tol Eressea, home; where he kept the elves, the ones he loved, before they begged to leave him and go to the Good Powers.

He looked down at the black waves that lapped at his feet. Those were also home, murmuring, singing. In their endless depths he could shroud himself in darkness, and spread thin, and be nothing but himself, untouched.

He closed his eyes. He was on his back, still, in warm embrace. His body felt amazing. Perfect. There was no pain, his limbs were loose and warm. He felt throbs of pleasure in his sex, his stomach, and gentle, pleasant pain in his hips and his thighs. The sea-spirit was over him, it was on him, around him, only barely outside his skin. Like breath. His left hand twitched; he was still clutching his arm.

Slowly, he lowered it. He swept his storm-tossed hair all into one place, pulling it gently from the creature behind him. He recalled Osse as a person, separate from himself, and noted he laid somewhat on top of him and somewhat at his side.

Tyelpe felt incredible. Nothing hurt. Not yet, anyway.

Osse rustled. In feeling the great spirit moving, Tyelpe noted the boundary between them. Skin, and matter, and the wispy, loosened edges of his own fea, separate from the divine being. He opened his eyes and saw he was underwater. The black, thick waters of the deep ocean filled the room, which now bloomed with sea-flowers and coral. Osse’s orgasm had, among other things, brought the waters inside.

Tyelpe turned, reflexively, to kiss his face. It wasn’t easy. His strained joints fought through every twitch of the turn, but he managed.

Osse curled a hand, rough-hewn, around the back of Tyelpe’s shoulder as he kissed him. The sea-spirit was now noncommittally physical, shifting, equally corporeal and incorporeal. Tyelpe could touch him, but what he touched was like liquid. Osse gently guided Tyelpe to his back to lie back down, smoothing his hair behind him with the waves as he went. He ran soft hands down him, searching for pain, untying knots.

Tyelpe enjoyed the attention for a minute, feeling Osse’s hands dredge up dull pangs of pleasure in his relaxing body as they explored him. Then after a thought occurred to him, he slowly lifted his hand to Osse’s face, which solidified under his touch. He did the only thing he could do to check for pain himself, which was to look at him.

Osse looked elven, but not quite. A little Teleri, if Tyelpe were to pin him down. He had not made a face of pain. Tyelpe thought instead he recognized desire, even greed.

Had he not loved his favorites on the shore of Tol Eressea? Had some of them lied down with him? Where were they now, married properly and minding generations of grandchildren? All of that an age after he had forsworn his first lover, the cruel one. Trying to know a creature like Osse was an action of tantamount arrogance, and helping him a laughable impossibility. From the perspective of the Valar, surely, he had been given a thousand indulgences over the ages and wanted yet more. Yet Tyelpe found and troubled the urge to do something for him all the same.

Thou art a thing of beauty, thought Tyelpe, still lost on the shore, detritus, still bonelessly calm.

“A strange beauty,” Osse replied, slightly breathless. “And not one easy to cherish. I have had my appreciators, all with the tenacity and resilience to behold disasters and overlook them.”

How badly Tyelpe wanted to be the sort of Power that would withstand that devastation. Eru made the she-wolf to mate with the wolf, and blessed her that she might find him charming instead of hateful.

“More beautiful is thee, who should be set to a necklace, or mounted into coral and ossified, a statue; but thy impermanent charms are so because of their changing and turning, and I must restrain myself. You have the fortitude to resist me, which is more compelling than you can imagine.”

You can thank my husband for making me so.

“I have never thanked him for anything, and will not start now. I can’t imagine he did anything but put your natural beauties in a frame.”

You’re flattering me, but that’s not true. Are you going to tell me that you think such things don’t really change us?

Osse leaned in and kissed him. The kiss of a maia can be a powerful thing; Tyelpe felt the anemone under him shift, heal its scars, and grow. “Let his spirit lie, whatever it is now, and wherever it has been laid. He was ever jealous, and would be delighted to be discussed now.”

If only Tyelpe had any faith he would not come up again and again and again—Annatar’s self-obsession was self-reinforcing, with or without his presence. And yet Tyelpe did want to feed it, and pick at his scabs, and call him up again, over and over, as the miser the gold he will not spend. There will be time for it, he agreed, the litany of eternity. For now—you— he said, but broke off to kiss Osse again. With the weakness of his body, he felt he could barely lift his head, and the rest was up to the strength of the person above him.

After that kiss Osse grumbled, over-contented, and turned his face into the skin of Tyelpe’s neck. His broad hand clutching his other side, protective. “You have spoiled me enormously.”

I am sure that’s not my doing.

“Such indulgence is an act that would have me considered fallen were I not already considered so. You seem to give it lightly, but it is not received so. I cannot get enough of and sometimes cannot endure the stunning capacity of mortals to accept and absorb corruption without corrupting yourselves, to even derive good sustenance from it. You can take and digest things which should have no goodness in them and produce pleasure, contentment, connection, understanding, as though the detrivore were divine.”

And this from you? Tyelpe asked, flattered despite himself. 

“Yes, from me. I know what I am; I think you are more spectacular yet. You fall from grace and rise again with the ease of the kestrel. Sullying yourself becomes an act of purification with such mutating rapidity that the sullying is the act of purification. I cannot do that; I am not a being that can change myself. I am jealous. In fact I can be quite jealous, he admitted, looming over Tyelpe somewhat.

Tyelpe’s stomach twisted, but with intrigue. That’s a bad trait for an adulterous man.

“That’s not what I—As far as matters between Uinen and myself—”

Oh, never mind, I don’t care. I will let you get away with calling me a dirty thing, my Lord–

“Oh, you twisting—”

—Because I know how much you like that; you loved being a foul creature yourself and are still obsessed with that foulness, or you wouldn’t be such a mess today. Yes, I’ll talk to you like that now, will you stop me?

“Not at all—it’s quite—” Osse rubbed his face into Tyelpe’s neck, and kissed it. “—I prefer the bold over the beseeching. Always have.”

And though you claim to not— Tyelpe broke off when the worrying on his neck caused a slow, dull pang of pleasure to drip down his spine. —Hm. Not have the talents I have to transmute pain into pleasure, or tease cruelty into a kinder thing, that’s exactly what you do. 

“Oh, did you notice?” asked Osse, sounding smug.

Notice wh—

Tyelpe paused for a moment, and took stock of himself. His body, how enormously comfortable and content he still felt; his hair gathered behind him, the wafting water that picked at loose strands. He noted how drenched he was, like he was a house that had been flooded, and then he looked in the basement.

The fire was out.

The brand was still there, imprinted on him, black and dead. The earth was still scoured, but it was not burning , and the pain was gone. The pain was gone. He had been so wonderfully relaxed that he had not yet registered that he was not in pain.

He laid unmoving for a moment, stunned. Then he surged forward in the water to grasp Osse’s face and kiss him on the lips, hard enough to part them. Despite everything, the suddenness of the kiss made Osse gasp. The boundaries between them were still so thin that Tyelpe felt his delight.

Pulling back from Osse, though still clutching his face, Tyelpe said, in a voice that even he could hear was intense, “You have been more helpful to me than every other Ainur combined.”

“That’s—that’s definitely unfair to Namo.”

Tyelpe scoffed and conceded, “Fine, maybe not Namo. But barring the act of reforming my body — fuck, do you know what you’ve done? I can’t believe this.”

Osse sat above him, looking down with heady, undisguised admiration in his eyes. “ Must be good, then.”

“I can’t believe this,” Tyelpe repeated, swiftly becoming giddy. He dropped himself from Osse’s grip and thumped blissfully back into the anemone. “I haven’t not been in pain since he branded me. I can’t—I had just completely gotten used to it. How did I get used to it?”

“The fea itself is still half-dead,” Osse reluctantly added, looking over him with slit eyes. “The improvement is nothing to discredit, if I say so myself, but you are still wounded.”

“That’s not going to change,” Tyelpe said confidently. If tens of thousands of years hadn’t budged Melkor’s embedded sting in Osse, what did he expect for himself? At the moment, that didn’t matter in the least. The damned thing could keep him corrupted and corrupting, he didn’t hurt. “I’m not as scared of it spreading anymore. Ha, I never told anyone that Varda thought it might be able to spread. She wanted me to go back to the Halls every few years to rest and I wasn’t doing that. But if it’s not burning me up it can’t spread. It’ll just be a dead limb. Big deal. I had four dead limbs at one point. He kept severing the nerves—”

“Let me try again,” Osse said, lowering himself onto Tyelpe with a suddenness that made the action nearly a pounce. “Another time. I’m sure I could improve the work.”

“Again!” Tyelpe exclaimed, half physically pressed and half shocked. “I am not opposed, but—”

“Yes. Perhaps I should have warned you, but I wasn’t sure that it would work. I didn’t want to disappoint. A bit self-absorbed of me, I admit it. But now that I know I can alter his work—and suck that, ‘Annatar’—I have to see what else I can do. It can be improved—reduced—the edges fixed up—it’s not impossible I could remove it entirely—”

“No,” Tyelpe snapped, as suddenly as spitting.

Osse stopped his advance cold, his hand on Tyelpe’s chest, his face just above him. For a moment he deformed and was no more than water. He reformed again, but above Tyelpe, no longer touching him, expressionless and waiting. He had reacted to the single word with the rapidity of a trained dog.

Tyelpe was shaking, slightly. He wasn’t completely sure why. His own vehemence had taken him by surprise, exploding in him in the split second between ‘what else I can do’ and ‘it can be improved.’ When he tried to retrace what had made him suddenly furious, all he saw was tangled threads. Fear, five kinds of it, in a knot.

He took in the air from the pearl in his lungs, let them expand until the stretch was painful, and slowly breathed it out. Beneath the lids of closed eyes, he saw Annatar’s golden hands digging into his body, heedless and disrespectful and passionate, and the golden wedding-ring on his own hand. Still on his hand, though he had moved it off of the ring-finger and onto the thumb. It glittered above him as he briefly covered his eyes.

He breathed out, and in, and swallowed. He uncovered his eyes to look up at Osse above him, unmoving, patiently awaiting command.

“Come back down here,” Tyelpe said calmly. “It was just a… moment. I’m alright.”

Osse did, settling his great body down deliberately and gently. Tyelpe adjusted to settle back into him. Now that he was neither aroused nor blissful, the physical nearness had a different, more poignant savor, with its aspect of permittance and even acceptance tasting stronger than it had. “Wouldn’t you know it, the death by torture occasionally has me a touch emotional,” he said, mastering the tremble in his voice.

“I really should have warned you,” Osse apologized, more contrite than Tyelpe liked.

“I wasn’t… I was fine with it until I suddenly…”

“Yes?”

Tyelpe breathed again and asked himself how to say this. He could be frank and assume his company wouldn’t be offended, at least. “Annatar was not haphazard about his work,” he began, light, precise. “He would not do something if he could not do it perfectly. You put out the fire, which is very helpful, and it’s—it’s enough. That’s already enough. The mark itself cannot be taken away from me. There’s no way he did such a thing impermanently. He knew permanence. He was himself iron burnt black. You can’t return it to the way it was before.”

Osse asked, “Do you want it gone?”

Tyelpe said, “Oh.”

He opened his eyes and looked up to the shifting water, to the pit-scarred, swaying reef that made up the walls and ceiling of the living palace he had bedded in. Jellyfish polyps, coral, and veiny kelp brushed their fronds against each other. Little topaz and emerald fish curved and ducked around them, and came to the window, and faced with the blackness of the ocean outside their divine garden recoiled and swam back inside. He had never asked himself if he wanted Annatar’s mark gone. That was simply the thing he was supposed to want.

“I don’t know,” he admitted.

Osse lowered fully down next to him, and put his face to Tyelpe’s thick hair. “I’ll do as you ask when you make up your mind,” he said. “There’s no rush until then. If it truly doesn’t hurt you any more, then what is left is your possession, and what happens to it is your decision. A wedding ring is a heavy thing to carry, but can be worth the weight. Or might not be. But it is yours.”

Tyelpe reached out to it, to hold it, without the pain. Like a heavy, round, black stone, nearly too heavy to hold. Like steel armor, laid all over him, smothering protection. Like the weight of shame, and shame was something he had never, ever been willing to part with. He had seen how the unashamed acted.

He turned to Osse, without answers. He lifted a hand and traced the strong muscles of his arm. Not fixed, but real all the same, as the sword is not part of the body but the corpses you make with it are yours. “What do you want me around for, then?” he murmured. “It seems you can do me service, but I can offer you little. I have been assuming I was of interest to you because I am Sauron’s winsome widower, and you his triumphant foe.”

“That has certainly made you who you are,” Osse half-agreed. “No, you would not be so compelling to me without the shadow on your fea. But it is not the hand that put it there but the back that bears it. I was driven to distraction, knowing there was someone out there bearing the Enemy’s sting unaided. Were you not?”

Tyelpe gripped onto that arm, and pulled himself up to look at Osse, at the trenched abysses in his eyes, the pits that went down further than he could go. “Maddened, if I let myself think about it,” he responded. “You have existed since the beginning of things, and have been struck through with this pain for nearly as long. How can it be allowed? It makes me want to start clawing at someone.”

“It is not as bad as it seems to you, though the pain and the madness wax and wane. I have found where I fit in the Mind of the One, though it is a strange place. I can see how They meant me to be, and with each age I come closer to being that. It is not what I was, nor is it what the Enemy wants me to be, nor who I am yet. When the day comes that They call on me, when it is needed that the world be broken—but no; these things are out of time, and even I do not know the size of them.”

Tyelpe marveled at him, at his eyes. “Can I see it?” he asked.

“See what?”

“The sting. The darkness. Melkor, inside you.”

“I do not want to show you.”

“I can handle it.”

“I do not want to show you,” Osse repeated, with a slight emphasis.

“Oh,” Tyelpe said, understanding. “I shouldn’t—I’m sorry.”

“Think not on it.”

“Still,” Tyelpe murmured, and came in for a kiss, brief, stinging with salt. I can be quite the blunderer.

“Enchantingly so.”

Is there still any mystery to the shadow-touched elf who asked you to dance on the shore, or have you fully figured me out now?

“Don’t think anyone at all is as powerful as that, except only the One. I would not know you all through even if I had you again, and again, and again.”

Bold, and too bold as ever, Tyelpe asked, And would you like to?

“Yes.”

Tyelpe folded a hand behind his ear, and felt down his neck. As real, as textured at grottoes, tidepools. He found himself looking for a pulse, subconsciously, and he did find one, the seashell-rumble of waves.

Very near his face, peering into him, Osse spoke his mind with an undercurrent of warning. “Though we must talk about one thing about which I find myself too curious.”

Tyelpe smiled. And what is that?

“You were being taught how to coerce and even entrap Ainur. You know that I noticed. That is not a common skill, and you are uncommonly skilled.”

Knowing that it would be best for him to be either coy or contrite, Tyelpe instead had to bite his lip to stifle his smile. I don’t know if I was actively being taught so much as I watched and learned.

“Sauron realized, eventually, the mistake he made. He must have. You could have become something dangerous indeed, and I’m not convinced you didn’t.”

Tyelpe’s smile outdid his attempts to subdue it. He covered his grin with his hand but his quick burst of laughter trickled through his fingers as air-bubbles. Not just lustful and protective impulses, but he had even triggered an instinct of self-preservation! They could be so adorable, once he got them alone.

And we can talk about that, another time, he responded. Let me keep some of my intrigue.

Return to Navigation

CHAPTER 4: A Few People Who Need Told What's What

Varda descended.

A globe of stars hung around her, its firefly specks of light in perfect placement to reflect their position in the heavens. Within the sphere was a sphere of unmixed light, and in the unmixed light was Varda, and it was Varda; otherwise she was not visible.

She was very tangible. Tyelpe’s skin sparked all over with a sensation neither cold nor warm, the indefinable prickling of solar wind, a state of matter not usually felt by mortal skin. She came close, and the sphere of starlight enveloped Tyelpe so that he stood looking at the light inside. It nearly burned his eyes and yet to his eyes was not so bright.

She was like that. He planted his feet and smiled up at her, falsely beseeching. She could tell.

“Curufinwe Tyelperinquar,” she greeted him. “You are welcome here.”

Varda’s way of speaking was more lofty than Osse’s. He spoke in words, deliberately, rather like he was mortal, but Varda spoke in truths. They had to be translated into words when they broke the barrier between the air and his brain. His translations were approximate.

“Varda Elbereth!” He responded cheerfully. “Take a look at this!”

The star-Queen figured out what ‘this’ was swiftly. A comet traced across his fea. “Would you look at that,” she said, heavenly surprise conveyed with regal understatement.

“That’s right!!” Tyelpe replied, puffed up like a rooster. “Not on fire, and feeling fantastic!”

“Who did that?” she asked, expressing a curious disbelief that anyone could.

“Osse the Terrible did this, and he’s none the worse for it. He took a nap and was back at his business. I guess you have him around for a reason!”

Varda pulsed. Machinery within her heavenly light swirled and clicked, like an astrolabe suddenly adjusting to another age. (It was not machinery, but Tyelpe could not otherwise grasp what it was.) “This fits,” she replied. “Osse. I am glad.”

“Who would have thought!”

“It was beyond my sight.” Tyelpe genuinely had no idea if his sarcasm was lost on her or if she declined to reply below her dignity. “I see the healing is half-done.”

“It’s done for now. Speaking of healing half-done, seeing as healing me was beyond your sight, yet certainly was possible, it seems that it might not be unwise for someone might look into the possibility of healing Osse again, which has been undone for most of history? Seeing as maybe it hasn’t been completely impossible the entire time.”

Varda turned, and the heavens within her.

“Perhaps, if monumentally arranging the cosmos just isn’t possible at the moment, something could be done to make him a little less uncomfortable? You know? Something’s better than nothing? Sometimes we can accept half-measures if we can’t do full measures? You know? He’s suffering eternally and you could do something?”

“It seems I must look into it,” Varda serenely replied.

“Fantastic! And when can I ask for a progress report?”

“I see,” said Varda, and a much more exact conversation was had.

–

Dear Aunt Aredhel,

Tyelpe wrote,

Good morning and well wishes.

While, my esteemed aunt, I believe you never have doubted yourself, I write to you to express my sincere hope that you never do doubt yourself, or your advice, or your convictions, for any reason. Your opinion has been proven completely correct when that of practically everyone else I spoke to was in all ways equally incorrect. You have the greatest share of wisdom among your kin and it is a crying shame that any of them think otherwise (I won’t repeat what I have heard said about your faculties as it has been egregiously unfair). On the matter of the gentleman about whom I spoke to you, your advice was the most correct of anyone’s, in fact no one else was even close. I spent a wonderful day (or two, I’m uncertain) with him and I believe he has fixed me as a person. His wife is a gem.

I will speak more in person; the mail-runners read letters, and while some like to offer them extra details for their enjoyment, I am just not like that. (Mind your business.)

Yours,

Curufinwe Tyelperinquar, Dispossessed Miscreant, Nephew.

–

Dear Nephew,

Wrote Aredhel,

Well wishes and a happy and prosperous two in the morning to you, my darling spring buckling.

I have the pleasure of informing you that, as someone who has only made one mistake in my existence, no, I never have doubted myself. I cannot imagine what would make me do so either.

I am pleased to hear that your night (and day, and night) with the man in question went well! You’ll have to give me some more details on the proceedings whenever you find me or I find you. I hear you’re darkening Ingo’s doorstep again, so I’ll leave you to that good work for the time being.

To the mail-carrier who may or may not be reading my letters for intimate personal information, I bid you wait no longer—

Well, that was as much of the letter as is pertinent to this story.

–

Tyelpe could hear Ingo stretching himself out like a cat and relaxing with a sigh. He sunk into the warm white sand himself, letting it mold and crust around his form. Even through closed eyes the warm summer sunset behind him turned his vision blood-red and throbbing. The night had not yet touched Aman, but his black cloak was visible as if under a door in the far east.

Ingo was stripped down to shirt-sleeves and trousers, bare-footed and ponytailed, and Tyelpe wasn’t any more presentable than he was. A long ramble and long talk had ended with them on the shore, alone except for the flocks of seabirds, gulls and terns and murres and scattered standing storks and egrets, springing and settling around each other.

“That’s where it stands, then,” Ingo said, picking back up the conversation they had left waiting as they picked through black rocks and tidal pools to lie down on the shore together. “You’ll just be visiting an ancient spirit of destruction and chaos for a lay now and then.”

“That is where it stands.”

“Good for you.”

“You told me off for it.”

“And you sure told me.”

“You tried to muster all of Aman to stop me.”

“It seems I failed.”

“Could you be a little ingracious about it? I’d like to rub it in a little harder.”

Ingo laughed. “Alright, alright. Well. You sure showed me. I had no faith in you at all.”

“Eat shit, Ingoldo. Never try to tell me what I can or cannot do, ever again.”

“Curufinwe.”

Tyelpe tossed sand at him. Ingo retaliated, and the ensuing fight was undertaken with such laziness and stupidity that an enthusiastic sheep-dog would have outdone both of them. They settled back in eventually, laughing, a little closer to each other.

Tyelpe breathed out hot air, and opened his eyes. On the eastern horizon, the blue-blackness of night had rolled up the daylight just high enough that he could see the brightest eastern stars. “Oh, Ingo,” he said.

“Yes?”

“I’ve been thinking about rules.”

“Rules,” Ingo repeated with a tone of distaste.

“Don’t play pretend,” Tyelpe admonished him immediately. “You like to break rules the way Queen Indis likes to ‘be a little bad’ and have a glass of wine with lunch. You fit into society badly, but you do fit.”

“Oh, spheres. Heavens. Did I come out here to be insulted like this?” Ingo asked, as if he sincerely could not recall.

“You traverse boundaries, but not the serious ones.”

“I married a man.”

“You did. Out of love, and stayed faithful to him until he died. For a long time after that, even. Technically always, as you haven’t married again, exactly. I know you’d marry her if you could. You push your father to consider more open-minded and inclusive family laws, you argue for general tolerance and rehabilitative justice in court; you are a sort of dissident, but an approved one. I’m not trying to insult you—”

“You need to try a little harder!”

“—I’m really not, but there is a difference between the rebellious but good work you do and breaking rules. I’ll speak plainly; I remember living with the forsworn and dispossessed, working against the will of the Powers. I also remember casting aside the counsel of every one of my betters and throwing in my lot with Annatar. It is a different feeling to be truly moving against the turn of the world, counter to its melody. Wrong. Deep down you know, Ingo, that you’re doing good work, despite what is said about you. At least I hope you know you're doing good work. I’m not talking about being a dissenting voice in society, I am talking about being outside it. Breaking rules.”

“You are not outside society, Tyelpe. I take you to beach parties with the King of Alqualonde.”

“Yes, and no. Let me talk through this.”

“If you must.”

“When you break the rules—when you willfully and remorselessly do something your people do not accept in a way they do not accept—you have your reasons for doing it. Good reasons, or you wouldn’t do it at all. I had my reasons for leaving Gil-Galad’s kingdom, refusing his council, rejecting elven norms to adopt dwarven ones, and marrying Annatar even though the last of my kin told me in clear terms that it was him or them. I still chose him, and knowingly abandoned the rest.

“The truth is that rules and morals are connected, whether we like it or not. Sometimes the connections are tangled. Sometimes they’ve gotten out of place, and the moral that a rule should be connected to has drifted far. Still; monogamy is tangentially connected to honesty and fidelity, though not perfectly, and obedience to harmony. Without adherence to rules, you are instead relying on wisdom, being able to sort and understand moral action yourself. You are the arbiter and yours are the faculties used to divine truth and justice. When there is fault, it is yours.

“When you break a rule, you take off a piece of your armor, the clear and definite connection to moral action that you don’t have to question. If you take off the refusal to kill, and break the rule to not murder, then your skin is bare, unprotected by kin or law or Powers. It is up to you for the rest of your life to decide who to kill, and why, and when murder is moral, and how you go to sleep with what you’ve done at night.

“You lose your safety. It’s not the only thing you lose. It’s not usually the first thing people notice. Sometimes it creeps up. Sometimes it comes fast. You were told you had to marry a good woman, to uphold harmony among kin, hierarchy, inheritance, all that. When your father caught you kissing a man, he told you it would be your last day in his house if you did that again. That’s explicit. It’s not always that clear. But if you break the rules, you had better be ready to defend yourself. The one who made the rule for you may not fight you himself, but he won’t protect you from whoever wants to.

“I had always known this, in a way. I watched what happened to my kin after they forswore the Valar and their protection, a moral and eventually mortal freefall that ended with them all dead, but not before they wished they were. I survived and nonetheless, left to my own devices, I did the same. I had been told by everyone possible to not do what I did. I had been warned by holy Powers and my ancestors and my kin and any omen I would care to listen to, and I stripped myself of all my armor anyway and walked into that dark dungeon. In a way, I was unsurprised to find myself in the place where I would die.

“You can refuse the protection of the Valar and still survive. But it is its own punishment, like I was always told. You’re on your own. You’re deciding things for yourself. You’re protecting yourself. You’re telling yourself what deeds you can and cannot endure having committed and then living with them. The fact of the matter, Ingo, is ‘don’t cross the boundary between mortal body and immortal spirit’ is a damned line to cross, and I really should have learned from crossing it once. Or you would think that I would have.

“It turns out that I cannot stand it,” he continued, thinking just at that moment that he had found the heart of things and his conclusion. “What I mean, I think, is that I would rather be tortured than follow the rules. I have tried both and even attempting to be a law-abiding devote of the Valar is, in fact, worse than the threat of torture. I know exactly what I lose by taking this second life and throwing it back in Namo’s face with the gratitude of a child who got strawberry cake but wanted raspberry. I have seen and appreciated the life in which I am promised survival and prosperity and, with all my heart, I would rather fight a fucking orc naked instead. I will continue breaking incredibly serious rules and I will be regarded as the biggest idiot with two feet in the land of the living for it. I cannot and will not repent. I will be polite and I will not interrupt the lives of those who want to follow rules, but I can not and will not alter myself for their comfort. I will go unarmed and unprotected into a world of hurt again and my previous experience and wisdom may or may not be enough to prevent me from being tortured to death a second time.

“I cannot be a person who fits within the Valar’s rules, no matter what it costs me. I cannot marry a wife, I cannot keep to my own, I cannot contentedly accept what comes. I cannot and will not stop doing this shit. I would rather eat glass. I am here in the world for round two and I am going to fight.”

“Tyelpe,” Ingo said, enthusiastic and sincere, “I would fight the world for you. I love you so much.”

“Thank you. I love you too.”

“Fortunately, I don’t believe you will be tortured to death again,” Ingo continued. “There’s just a much lower chance of that happening with what we have in this age, on this continent. Much less torture overall.”

“I am still—the central mistake I made before was getting intimate with a force of nature, and incredibly, I have not stopped.”

“Tyelpe, I will not even permit the conceit that it was your fault. You did not make any mistake that should have led to being tortured to death. You did pick the wrong man, but you picked one who put the work of centuries into deceiving and isolating you and who still had to resort to brute force to control you in the end. You were tricked, and I know you want to feel like you had total control over it all, so I’m sorry to say this, but you just didn’t. You want it to be your fault but it wasn’t. You were let down.”

Tyelpe watched the breastplate of night lifting higher. In it was the sparkling sheen of folded steel, gleaming on each of its points. It was dark; all elvenkind had lived in that darkness, once, and loved it. It was not trackless to them, or frightening. The stars spoke poetry, gave directions, and whispered comfort. He suddenly wondered if the black thing inside him could be, instead of discarded, carved or shaped.

“Can’t I pick them,” he responded to Ingo, weakly.

“Tyelpe,” Ingo said softly. The cold, comforting breeze of night began to rise up to them from the sea. Ingo got onto his elbows, and looked at his cousin. “Do you know you’re safe with me?”

“Ingo.”

“Really. Do you know that I’d help you if it came to that?”

That question could take Tyelpe down a deep spiral staircase if he wasn’t careful, a descent into a very dark cavern of the past. He did not think Ingo could protect him from any danger, which Ingo seemed to think, or want to think. But he did not think that was what he meant.

“I know you’d try.”

“My hardest, as always,” Ingo sighed, and leaned up to watch the growing blackness before them. “I’d not let it come to that if I could help it.”

Tyelpe closed his eyes. “You tried very hard the first time, Ingo. It’s not your fault.”

For a while, Ingo did not respond. The sound of the high tide, nearly at their feet, replaced their voices, cresting near and sighing back.

“I think it will work,” Ingo finally said, something odd in his voice. “Something in the waves as I watch them.”

“The waves?”

“Back and forth. High tide and low tide. Seasons. I think it’ll work.”

“Are you hearing Ulmo, Ingo?” Tyelpe teased him.

“Not at the moment. No; I think there is a much slower ebb and flow, a much slower hour-hand turning. I think even we have not lived long enough to perceive it, except in glimpses. I could feel the edge of it, sometimes, but only when I was around mortal men. Most strongly among the briefest. Contrast, I suppose. There is an even slower turning, an even more gradual change. Slower than ages. Even the Valar struggle to perceive it, and wonder at how things are timed and come to pass. If all things are a wave, and there is a crest and an ebb, you are part of the ebbing of evil, and evil things being leached from the shore of the world. Water will pull on water, and shed weight will pull yet more down. But it will take the lifetime of stones, of mountains wearing down. That’s the time it takes. Every attempt to wrench out a shortcut has failed. Only surrender will finally resolve it.”

Tyelpe covered his eyes with one hand. “I hate foresight, Ingo.”

“I—” said Ingo, but his voice broke, and then the power that had momentarily inhabited him. Tyelpe heard him swallow. Then in another voice entirely, his usual voice, he said, “He comes, and I believe for thee.”

Tyelpe uncovered his eyes and looked. The water which had been sucked into the sea was gathering just off of the shore, a darkness that eclipsed the darkness of the rising night sky. Haloed by the fading glow of sunset, the waves rose and crashed into a sublime body, for a moment water, and then the form of a man. All manner of creatures scattered in terror, except the elves, who sat up in anticipation.

Osse approached, his feet on the crest of the sea. Tyelpe watched him gather the mist of the waves and make it a cloak around him, with the starlight caught in its threads. When he reached the shore Tyelpe rose to meet him, and held out both his hands to hold him.

END PART ONE

--

Original Notes:

She comes at the first scent of morning/Her feet on the crests of the sea
Til the cock of the sun cries his warning/She will lie in the garden with me.

The title is taken from Song of Mari by the late, great Gwydion Pendderwen. (The link is to a full album upload since I don’t have a convenient solitary link, but it’s the second to last song on his Songs for the Old Religion album). Song of Mari is sung from the viewpoint of a Goddess’ lover, who must meet with her in secret. It’s a great old melancholy song that doesn’t fit the text of this fic perfectly but so dead-on for the mood (or, uh, one of the three moods I have going on here) that I have had it stuck in my head for the entire process of writing this damn thing.

Return to Navigation

Go to Part Two!