Queer identity and queer romance, the politics of living in a paradise that doesn't want people like you, the confluence of mad science and cultic ritual, Sea Monsters, and especially as many variants of god-fucking, monster-fucking, and moster-god-fucking I can think of (well, almost as many).
EXPLICIT sexuality, mature themes.
Main ship and romantic storyline, Celebrimbor/Osse. Other important romantic relationships are (past, abusive) Celebrimbor/Sauron, Osse/Uinen, (past) Osse/Olwe. Imporant friendships are Celebrimbor&Finrod, Celebrimbor&Gil-Galad, Celebrimbor&Elrond. A rather important 'other' relationship between Celebrimbor and Maeglin/Lomion.
Absolutely left-field ships, polyamory, obsessive hyperfocus on the subtle repressions of queer identity in otherwise tolerate societies, really just hypercube-level mad science, an incidentally suspiciously good depiction of bipolar depression, and when I say monsterfucking, I mean monsterfucking.
Part Two: Belated Realizations
PART TWO: Belated Realizations
CHAPTER ONE: Of Olwe, King of Alqualonde
It was difficult to walk the streets of Alqualonde without thinking of Alqualonde. Not impossible, though. One could easily think not of the streets but of the white stones that paved them, not of the doors but of the carven white plaster lintels above them, hung with sea-glass and shells that chimed in the wind, and not of the quays looping into the ocean but the hanging glass oil-lamps that lit them up every night. Once Tyelpe surmounted the very gentle incline that walked him to the terraces of Olwe’s humble, ancient palace, however, and gained a view of the whole seaside city spread below him, and the equally populous city of boats bobbing on the waves beside her, it was nearly impossible to not think of Alqualonde.
What made it especially strange to him was that no one looked at him twice. A distant relative of Ingo’s opened one of the palace’s humble side doors to his heavy knocks and welcomed him warmly. She told him to take his boots off in the little entrance just outside the kitchen and poured him a glass of finger lime water from an ice-box as they walked through. Everyone he passed on his way through the pillared open-air hallways greeted him politely. Some even bowed. When he finally found the man he had walked through all of Alqualonde for, King Olwe himself, he smiled and stood up from his chair to greet him.
As he always did when he met with a king of anyone but the Noldor, Tyelpe knelt down and bowed his head. Olwe put a hand under his arm and lifted him up to his feet.
Then he kissed him on both cheeks, and that was unusual. Tyelpe had seen him do that to many before, but not to him. Befuddled, distracted by jasmine perfume, immediately on alert for royal schemes, Tyelpe accepted the kisses but neglected to return them.
Tyelpe had come to Olwe’s house because Olwe himself had invited him, with pearl-shining stationary delivered to Ingo’s doorstep. Ingo had offered to go with Tyelpe, and so had Amarie, but Tyelpe pointed out that his was the only name on the invitation. That seemed, at least to him, intentional. So he had waited until evening and gone himself, and now here he was, being led by the ancient king out to a balcony that overlooked the shifting sea, the two of them pointedly without company.
Tyelpe knew and did not know why Olwe had summoned him, why after summoning him he stood in silence watching the darkening horizon instead of speaking to him. The subject that needed to be discussed was plain: Osse. But what about him?
Olwe finally looked at him, with his moonlight eyes; in fact they were more in their shine like Telperion who bore him than the moon himself. An unhappy expression came across his face, and he said, “Forgive me for even saying so, but there are moments that you look so much like your forebear.”
Tyelpe did think that was an ill start to a conversation. He felt the contrary urge to ask which one, but thought he knew which one this ancient elf meant. “The blood is thinner than that, surely. I have always thought I favored my mother in looks.”
“I suppose you do. In temperament, also; I remember my daughter saying after first meeting her, ‘I found her in all ways agreeable, and yet I cannot help but feel that she never agreed with me.’”
Tyelpe stifled some laughter in his throat as he imagined, on some dusty, forgotten day, graceful Earwen meeting Tyelpe’s steel-spined mother. To this day she had very little to do with her myriad regal in-laws, that must have been a rare occurrence. She preferred yet her own, and her friends in Formenos. “She’s a perfectionist,” he summarized, “prohibitively so. Something we have in common is an inability to ignore flaws once noticed, or inconsistencies, or observations, or. Anything.” That was why he had gotten joking accusations of having ‘married his mother’ in marrying a similar perfectionist, until they stopped being funny.
“There are few strangers after ten thousand years, but there are, thankfully, those who continue to surprise me. I have come to very much enjoy receiving those who have returned from the Halls and seeing the changes in them. I learn to see farther; my view of distant horizons clarifies. You are odd in your ways to me also, son of Finwe, though it is a sort of oddness I have seen many times now and yet cannot grasp.”
“What do you mean?”
“In the fea of some there blossoms a strange plant, native to the far shore, and exotic to me. Though I was born there too, the land that I remember is as unreal now as a dream recalled. I relearn that now haze-shrouded continent and its history through such flora. It feeds on blood, I think, and needs the soil of the battlefield to take root at all. Its flower is a drive to self-destruction that I will never fully understand, nor do I think I could without having flourished in the same clime.”
“You mean that you think I find some perverse joy in things that pose danger to me,” Tyelpe realized. He had known some who fitted Olwe’s poetic description, hardened by battle and always seeking something that could puncture that iron skin that they had grown to endure it. “I agree, I do. Do you think that one was supposed to be healed?”
“If it wasn’t, then I suppose not,” Olwe laughed, quite congenially. “You see, I can recognize it, but I don’t know that I’ll ever understand how it feels. Except, perhaps, in one thing, which is my affection for the Ship-sinker.”
What a name to call him.
Not that it was a name he hadn't earned. Osse had told him in quite clear terms why the second-born feared him. They both watched the docks below, and the ships that lifted up and settled low with the waves.
“He does not pose a danger to you,” Tyelpe said, one of many things he could say.
“No, and I never thought he did. He was a friend to my people, and to me, even in the days before we reached Aman. Osse and Uinen both dwelled with us in Falas as we debated whether to journey across the sea, and Osse bore us there, and anchored us, and was ever with us, whether we went or we remained.”
Tyelpe recalled that Olwe had known about Osse’s dark history already, though even Ingo had not. The relationship of elven king and prodigal spirit was older than his grandfather . “And still is. I can’t think of anything he’s done to harm your people, or why he would now.”
“No. What a strange creature he is; some have every reason to fear him, and some none. I do not think I could describe him fully or, anymore, at all—a blessing, as ages pass and I understand more and more. You, son of Finwe; do you not fear him?”
Tyelpe paused. There was something in Olwe’s tone that he didn’t quite—and then he did.
He knew his Noldolante better than this. “Oh, you—” he said, and feeling like he was falling down a staircase with every word, said, “You did once ask Osse to kill my entire family after the battle in which they massacred the people of Alqualonde.”
Olwe tilted his head from side to side and found what he thought was the important correction. “During,” he said, and looked down and away. “In the battle. In hopes that it would end. Osse was kept from intervening. But I did ask.”
“I had forgotten,” Tyelpe marveled. That tragedy just did not weigh on his mind; there were others worse and more recent. Alqualonde herself hardly remembered it. She now lacked none of her people who had died that day and had not for millenia. There was no stain, not on her streets or piers. Statues and commemorations stood in Tirion, not Alqualonde, where such reminders belonged. “It must have—someone must have overheard you asking him, because it went into the damned song.”
“Screaming it out, rather. I’m sure the entire city heard. Osse told me he would have drowned every one of you, but when he is told to stay, he stays.”
Tyelpe had been collecting odd language such as that— when told to stay, he stays. He was interested in the way people spoke about Osse, as something as divine as he was animal. A dog. Osse reacting like a trained creature when he heard the word ‘no’ had stuck with him. “I have to say it’s hard to remember exactly. That’s—”
“It is. And you must have been very young, I think.”
Tyelpe scoffed, lightly. He was not of the opinion that that absolved him. He had attacked Alqualonde; he had defended Sirion. He let people form their own opinions about him, and Olwe was fully capable of making an informed opinion. “And he would have, he absolutely would have, I know he would have. Oh, Uinen did —the things you can forget. She did sink a few.”
“Y—es—With Osse, I think the opinion is that he has to be held back, or else he might lose control and do something unwarranted, which probably isn’t unfair—”
“It’s not. He might. But we figure if Uinen sinks a few ships, they must have deserved it. Am I supposed to argue that? I won’t.”
Olwe hummed. He turned around, so that he was facing Tyelpe and his back was to the harbor. The evening wind picked up his silver hair and lifted it behind him. Olwe looked at Tyelpe with eyes that made him lose his train of thought, they were so luminous and so knowing. “I’m not asking for an argument at all, or your guilt, or any other recompense. As little as it might be thought I do not even think about such things much. When one lives ten thousand years, one can be either ten thousand years old or only a day old, and I have chosen today. You have made the other choice, and that can come with some difficulties. I thought that it might matter, to you, that these things happened, that Osse had been asked to kill you and had nearly done so. That I did this, specifically.”
Tyelpe’s life could have ended there. Wasn’t that interesting, he thought, fluttering vacantly, like a moth, around Olwe’s silverness, momentarily lost.
In his opinion, every time he hadn’t died before he became the Lord of Eregion was a lost opportunity. It was a fact that there were those whose early demise would have improved the world, and anyone who denied that him having had an earlier death would have improved Middle-Earth for everyone else was engaging in moral cowardice. This fact and a few others organized around each other, and he said, “You think I am hunting my death with Osse.”
“I’m glad to see it hadn’t really occurred to you.”
“It had occurred to me, but that was because of some inevitable comparisons to my late husband, who did kill me. I wasn’t thinking of history as ancient as that.”
“Oh—that does make sense. Osse and Sauron…”
“Had a history about as old as the rocks and the waters themselves. No, I am not chasing some self-destructive impulse with Osse,” Tyelpe said, all the while not certain he was fully telling the truth. He did think it was more complicated than that, that impulses to be hurt, punished, and corrected had become tangled as twine around his base impulses; they were base impulses themselves. But he also did not see why that buried truth had to be available to Olwe, or really to anyone. “I promise it was all much less cerebral than that, and the facts do not at all make me look good.”
Olwe laughed under his breath, brief and gentle. “I don’t find anything wrong with that either. I know the reputation I have for being old-fashioned, but the sense of scale is off; I am yet more old-fashioned than that. I still sometimes think I am at the shore of Cuivienen and family lines are not even made yet, and certainly not rules about eternal partnership. Or… some ideas about hierarchy and rulership that we take for granted now.”
Like the amorphous shape of the jellyfish, ever-shifting, the context of this conversation reformed again in Tyelpe’s mind. “Oh,” he said, and got slightly flustered, despite himself. The truly ancient King leaned back a little on the railing of the balcony; his slight smile was knowing indeed, his pose so casual he could have been a young sailor leaning over the sea. “You—”
Olwe raised his eyebrows slightly.
Ah. Well. “—are you still having sex with him?” asked Tyelpe, figuring that was the most important detail to know. He would probably have to adjust everything in his life if he was in fact having sex with the same person as Olwe, King of Alqualonde.
Olwe laughed again, but softly. “No. Not even then, not since before we set foot on Tol Eressea. I was surprised by marriage. Back then, I truly thought I was not going to be consumed by my wife as so many seemed to be. But I was, and she and I became one, and I could not think of having anyone else, not even ones I had loved well before. I still can’t. But he remembers; I know that he remembers. I wasn’t nearly his only one and he still remembers all of us.”
He does, and it sometimes makes me unreasonably upset with all of you, even though it is hardly my place to defend a maia from heartache, Tyelpe admitted, not out loud. It was for that reason that he was determined that even if he found himself tied to a mortal partner some day, that man was dealing with Osse. “Fondly. Yes. But I have to—and didn’t you know about his history, and who he was, at that time? You made it sound as though he told you himself.”
“He did—trying to be polite, I think—the whole thing began because of a misunderstanding, actually,” he admitted, putting one ring-bedecked hand on his face as if he were embarrassed. Tyelpe was not convinced he was. “I had to put the pieces together myself, but what happened was that a maiden of my people had caught his eye, but she wasn’t interested. So she thought to set a task to dissuade him, and told him to go first to the prince. Obviously she meant he should ask me, and I would have realized the maiden was trying to put him off if he had done so, but Osse misunderstood that. Willfully misunderstood that, I think. To him it sounded like a brilliant idea.”
Of course it had. Tyelpe was sure Olwe had been a stunning young prince to Osse’s eyes, bravely and forlornly awaiting a king and brother who would never return. The thought of Thingol, however, made further musing distasteful to him. “He wouldn't mention you, or anyone. I hear about his wife, whether I like to or not, and that’s it. Or, well, the other one, as well—you know—but other than that.”
“Yes, I do know,” Olwe said, and instead of finding anything at all to say about Melkor Himself he simply made a little, disapproving hum, as though the only thing he thought to judge was Osse’s rather unrefined palate. “Well, I’m certainly not trying to keep him from you. Gracious, no. That would be an example of not acting my age. I admit the whole thing has been on my mind, a little. I just wanted to talk it over.”
“Not just your mind.”
“I imagine not.”
“I’ve had more than one person ask me if this is some complicated scheme to die in the stupidest way possible, including my own mother, so I’m not offended. Believe it or not I am not trying to die again. In fact I have slowly opened up to the idea that I may be doing something that isn’t horrible, contrary to the opinion of nearly everyone else.”
Olwe threw back his head and laughed. “Don’t listen to all that,” he said merrily. “Sweet children. It’s only harmful if you are harming someone. If everyone is having fun, then it’s just some fun. Oh, for a bit of common sense.”
“Oh, well. Well, thank goodness you said that, I couldn’t agree more,” exclaimed Tyelpe, enormously relieved. They had a more casual conversation following that remark, perhaps a touch too casual, in fact, as they had to break it off when one of Olwe’s grandchildren, overhearing them as she walked by, became so startled by what she heard that she dropped a glass and broke it.
Original Notes:
Published Silmarillion Quote of the Chapter:
Thus at last the Teleri were overcome, and a great part of their mariners that dwelt in Alqualondë were wickedly slain... And Olwë called upon Ossë, but he came not, for it was not permitted by the Valar that the flight of the Noldor should be hindered by force. But Uinen wept for the mariners of the Teleri; and the sea rose in wrath against the slayers, so that many of the ships were wrecked and those in them drowned. Of the Kinslaying at Alqualondë more is told in that lament which is named Noldolantë, the Fall of the Noldor, that Maglor made ere he was lost.
CHAPTER TWO: Of Manwe, King of Arda
--
Osse’s body was, by its nature, a reflection. Like light cast through a pin-hole, it was not a perfect representation of the spirit himself, missing certain untouchable dimensions of the real thing, but nonetheless it conveyed the essentials of it. The appearance changed based his state, as the color of the sundering sea was gray under growling storms and green when lush with summer life and blue and still under a white winter sky. An elf-like body was as equally Osse as a rush of warm water or the monstrous, titanic, destructive form he took in war.
Being as the body was reflective of the true being, even the physical, mortal-sized body did not feel to Osse like Tyelpe’s body did to him. It was new-made and strung with raw nerves, unmixed, a pure essence all through; any part was equally sensitive, equally pleasurable as he deemed it so. So any penetration was penetration, no matter through which constructed orifice, and the penetration of Osse’s mouth, lined with double rows of glistening selachid teeth, just as much an act of possession as it would be anywhere else on his body. It was a perhaps shallow rumination on that fact that inspired Tyelpe to fill it with seed before collapsing gradually backward onto the warm sand of the shore, his fist around Osse’s wrist.
He took several minutes to recover his breath as ocean water licked his lower legs and the maia perched upon him played with his extremities.
Osse could not be described as submissive, but he was a fan of mutuality, and would freely give back whatever he had been given. Tyelpe only had to be willing to offer himself whatever he wanted, a situation he understood instinctually. It was freeing, in fact, both simple to understand and yet nearly illuminating after a lifetime or two of relationships being structured exclusively in hierarchy.
Tyelpe lifted his loose-feeling hand up to Osse’s hair and pulled his fingers through a braid, which dispersed as easily as it had formed. It floated like kelp, impermanent. So too had been the shark teeth, a mere threat display which both was and wasn’t. They couldbe real, if Tyelpe asked for them to be. Osse would scour him for desires, triumphant as a hunting hound when he found one, ready for anything if Tyelpe but wished it.
In an ideally pleasant but realistically odd reversal of his last life, Osse seemed to be as aroused by generating consent for something as he was by the act itself, whereas Annatar had been as aroused if not more by trespassing and violation than by anything he could physically do. Osse liked permission, and liked it more the more transgressive the act was. In essence, Osse was always asking the question, ‘you like that?’and he liked to hear ‘yes’, and loudly. Tyelpe found that sweet.
“Lover,” Tyelpe said, “Olwe sends his regards.”
“Does he,”Osse rumbled.
“I had an illuminating conversation with him a few days ago.”
A laugh coursed slowly, lazily through Osse, from place to place. “I’m certain it was.”
“Don’t be coy. I’m going to be running regularly into Teleri who say ‘oh, you too?’ for the next century, I’m sure, so you can at least be up front about it.”
“I’m not trying to hide anything! I decided long ago that when it comes to mortals, how they handle me in their own society is up to them. Acknowledge me or not, keep me a secret or don’t. Olwe wouldn’t stand up and announce it to the winds, but he’s not shy, either. It was so long ago it’s hardly ever relevant anyway.”
“It is now. When were you going to bring up that you once were going to kill me on his behest?”
“Was I?”
“Yes, you great fool; which line of Curufinwe do you think was present at the kinslaying of Alqualonde?”
“Oh! Are you that old? I thought you were born in the First Age.”
“What—are you serious?”
“It's hard to tell your age if you don’t have any tree-light in your eyes. Anyway, I never even broke the surface of the sea. Ulmo held me down.”
Tyelpe was sure that was what it took. “Well, yes, I was there, and with a sword drawn. I thought you knew and had left it in the past,” he said, straining his abdominal muscles to sit up and look evenly at Osse. “Those are your—people, I suppose.”
“And not yours? Don’t worry yourself about it. Your deeds since have supplanted that.”
In every sense, they had. What he had been and done for Annatar was of much more importance. “Isn’t it interesting that you might have killed me then, and then who knows what would have happened?”
“Might have? I would have extinguished the lot of you. You didn’t stand a chance. Don’t doubt that. But that would have been such a change to the music that I could not say what would have happened myself. No, it was never to be, and we’re better off for it. I think something very bad would have happened to me; Melkor still lived then, and I was as bent to Him as I ever was, only kept away from Him.”
Wonders never ceased, and neither did belated realizations. Dim and unpleasant memories of the darkness of Arda, the surging waves of un-light, the harrowing race after he broke out from his mother’s locked-up house to re-join his father’s exiled people instead and found himself in Alqualonde, the sound of drawing his sword; all suddenly slid into place inside their fittings in a much larger picture. It was as though some attending spirit roughly unfurled the timeline of the world in front of him and pointed impatiently to a date he should have noted much earlier. “Well, Powers’ sake, you were obviously right there the entire time while Melkor was faking His rehabilitation in Aman. After He had revealed His true colors and was hiding in some fucking hole in the ground and no one could find Him, too. What the fuck were you doing?”
Osse laughed loudly. “How you describe Him! Like an octopus! Did you ever see Melkor, lover?”
“As Himself?No. I saw His false face as He walked around Aman, doing His damned worst to seduce my grandfather—very weird, enough said about that already. And I suppose I saw Him from afar in the end, in the War of Wrath. But face-to-face, personally, in His full glory, no. Somehow I seemed to never be present for such events.”
“Not that they were common, after a time. Octopus-like indeed; a King of the depths, but only if He could avoid the light of day, and how quickly He hurried out once seen. Really He was His finest self during the elder days, before the elves’ awakening. Evil, yes, but bold. Anything after his first imprisonment saw Him less and less Himself with the years.
“After He was set free… no, I did not believe His lies about how He had repented and changed His ways. As you know, I had been the one to spill His secrets after defecting, and I had told the Good Powers which of my own were spies, what faces I had seen in Melkor’s camp, who I thought might yet be reformed and who never. Even then I thought it was possible that Melkor might be able to alter His ways, or at least that Manwe and Varda might be able to effect that change, but when I asked Ulmo to tell me all things He had done and said after being released from bondage, I knew He had not changed in truth. I cannot tell you for certain what a changed Melkor might have been like, but I knew what Ulmo described was not it.”
“And what did he describe?”
Osse thought for a second. He noted a crab crawling on the shoreline, and watched it. “Still fair-spoken. Still proud and dignified. Not someone upon whom the weight of his actions had crashed. One is not upright after such devastation.”
Well. That made sense. “But if you had been—they knew that you knew Him. Why didn’t they trust your word for it when you said Melkor hadn’t really changed?”
Osse tilted his head, his eyes still watching the little crab. “They did listen,” he said. “Ulmo never believed that Melkor had improved either, and my suspicions emboldened his. Many argued against Manwe’s decision on the matter, and nor was Manwe a fool himself. He wanted to try. Manwe did not believe that his brother was fully healed yet, as he would phrase it, but he thought that he could be. I was infuriated at the time, but looking back I wonder if it wasn’t still the best choice. And what if Melkor had been judged and cast into darkness, while none were certain if He could have been changed or not? I had, after all, and who would Manwe be after he made that choice?”
Tyelpe understood, whether he liked it or not. This was quite the tough choice that Manwe had refused to make, but it wasn’t like he hadn’t seen tough calls made which had borne just as many ripe consequences anyway. “Sure, but what about all the… crimes?”
“There weren’t as many then. You have the benefit of hindsight now. Most of the people He had hurt before then were… well, us.”
“You.”
“And the Moriquendi, but if I recall He managed to shuffle a lot of the blame onto Sauron, who was still on the other continent and still actively doing those crimes at the time. He choked out false apologies for the rest.”
“What were you doing, then, while Melkor had the range of all of Aman and everyone on it?”
Osse rippled, in the same way an elf might rapidly blink their eyes in aggravation. That aggravation, rather than being contained to his person, made waves in the sand as it poured off of him.
Tyelpe raised his eyebrows and hummed. Osse fixed his physical body and focused.
“I cannot even describe how maddening the situation was. Manwe knew better than anyone else what He had done to me and wisely decided that He and I should not meet. Very well. He said that He was barred from being wherever I was, but what that meant in practice was that I was barred from being wherever He was. Which was Valmar, at first. And then Tirion. And then Alqualonde. And then the land west of the mountains. And then the entire blessed continent.”
“Hm. That sounds…”
“A little like punishing me for His actions? Yes it does. I agreed to it at the time because I was still unstable, and unhappy with myself, and I accepted punishment as it came. What was most important to me was that He stayed away from me, and I would do what it took to accomplish that. I remained on Tol Eressea, or in the ocean. I begged that He not be allowed on Tol Eressea; when Ulmo asked what I would have said in council for me that was all I asked for, every time. Uinen locked me in if that was what it took.”
“And why would it take that?”
“Sometimes you convince yourself that it’s time to go fight your former lover and master anyway, and your wife has to convince you that it is not. I was miserable with the need to confront Him; the only thing that would have been worse was actually seeing Him. I was nearly as furious as terrified. I wasn’t—I never was healed, not fully. That He made me His vassal could not be changed. He was in me then as He is still in me now. If I had confronted Him alone, there is a very strong possibility that He could have just wrenched me back to Him. Even if He didn’t, I genuinely cannot tell you what I would have done. No, I had to be kept away.
“And of course, once the time finally came for us to confront Him, he could not be found. Octopus. I’m still vexed that I never got to throw something heavy at him.”
“Terrible,” Tyelpe emphasized, in the moment just devastated that Osse had never once had the joy of passing a boulder through Melkor’s head. He had at least gotten to physically fight Annatar himself while he was being dragged to the torture chamber he would die in. “Still, it’s…”
“Yes?”
Tyelpe struggled with his words. “It doesn’t sit right with me,” he said. “Any of it. I think I would sound like a maniac if I tried to pick out which lines that I thought weren't square to the wall. All of the—I mean I shouldn’t analyze the actions of Manwe, King of Arda, but if you incentivise me at all I will anyway.”
Osse laughed. He returned his gaze to Tyelpe, and a hand, too, on his cheek and then his shoulder. “Don’t. I know that no one handled the situation perfectly. This has not sat unaddressed. We have spoken it through, Manwe and Ulmo and Aule and I. There is no unaddressed wrong now.”
Tyelpe breathed in slowly, and let it out slowly. He closed his eyes, focused, and then blew up anyway. “Lightless fucking pricks there isn’t! What do you mean?? You still have Melkor inside you! How do you still have Melkor inside you? How can that state of affairs continue for ten thousand years?? Unaddressed wrongs—”
Tyelpe’s ranting was eventually choked off by Osse’s laughter growing louder and louder. Tyelpe crossed his arms, unamused. “I’m sorry! But that’s just not necessary. It’s kind, but there’s no need. Nothing’s wrong. Really.”
Like fuck nothing was wrong. He did not at all accept Osse’s insistence that he was as healed as he could be and there was nothing else to be done. He knew how people who fancied themselves to be ‘pure’ thought, and he suspected it was just as bad with someone who hadbeen pure for his entire existence. He thought it much more likely that Manwe couldn’t even think of how to heal the sort of ill that Osse suffered and everyone had obediently taken his word for it. The fact that Osse had adapted to live with the revenant sting of the Great Enemy riven through his body didn’t mean it was fine that it was happening, but he also knew that there was nothing he could do about it at the moment.
“I will leave it alone,” Tyelpe grumbled, “for now.”
–
No longer likely to climb the stairs of lofty royal palaces just for a word with their throne-bound lords, Ososai instead lifted himself onto the far shore of Aman, up from the stygian waters of night and just far enough that his wet feet were cushioned by carpet moss and soft ferns instead of sand, and called for Manawenuz to come to him, a gull’s cry that resounded through the land.
Manawenuz came, a rush of wind that rustled the leaves of the trees without dropping one. Then a silver-toed foot tapped the slightest green blade of grass on the ground, and then the form of a man, tall and straight, stood before him. With a second step he came toward Ososai, and embraced him.
Ososai held the moment. He might be half-stuck with physical sensations, but he had turned out that way for a reason. When he let Manawenuz pull back the great king observed him, rapid and precise as a boning knife, checking his person so thoroughly that only deep familiarity could brace it.
Manawenuz saw nothing wrong, of course, so he asked him, “Why do you call me, brother?”
Ososai reached up to hold his face; there was not much to hold, even with Manawenuz visible. Still he felt him between his fingers. “To test your reaction time. Excellent job. Keep it up.”
Manawenuz shook his head at him, fondly. “I know that’s not true.”
Manawenuz did not say things like ‘that’s a lie.’ He said ‘that is not true.’ He did not say ‘this is your fault,’ he said ‘this has become your responsibility.’ He did not say ‘you’re wrong,’ he said ‘you are not right.’ In the absence of goodness he marked not the present evil but the goodness that was not there, as though it were still visible to him.
Ososai said, “Dark days have been on my mind again. I just wanted to see you.”
Manawenuz smiled. He then dissipated his form, taking to the air instead and enfolding Ososai as a warm mist. “Then that is well. I will heed that call any time.”
“And more rapidly than once you did.”
“I, too, can learn; it is a good trait.”
“Perhaps dark days are on my mind because I have not been careful in shunning them,” Ososai admitted, losing the edge of his own form as he leaned into the spirit and Manawenuz. “My lover is hungry for knowledge about the past, and I find myself becoming just as hungry when I let myself think about the food.”
Manawenuz knew he meant Celebrimbor by ‘my lover’. They had spoken on it already, but more importantly, how Ososai thought about him was unignorable. (And he may have come whining to Manawenuz after Ulluboz told him that he would not even entertain the idea of him taking up Sauron’s remarkably cursed widower, let alone discuss contingencies for if he did.)
“You fear his questioning is inviting ill thoughts into your mind. Yet all that I see in you is that he has stimulated your better faculties, your bent to protection, and healing, and compassion,”Manawenuz said to him.
“As I was sure you would. Yet there is another thing, too; whether we would excise it or not, we share a crooked instinct that points backwards, to the evil we have forsworn. I fear we whet each other’s worst desires,”he admitted, cutting to the point.
Manawenuz would not be able to see it, as always, but he might see the way around it. “What is unspoken becomes unthought of, and what unthought of cannot be anticipated. Perhaps, as it so often seems to be, the best way to handle it is to grasp it.”
“You’re not worried. I’m telling you to be worried.”
“Of course.”
Ososai changed his form to one of teeth and shifting, specifically so that he could snap at Manawenuz. It was in play, which was how Manawenuz took it, buffeting him back with a breeze. “You inveterate optimist. What if I do something bad?”
“Come talk to me.”
“I’m talking to you now.”
Catching his tone of voice, Manawenuz formed out of the wind, and held the face of Ososai’s sharp-toothed form. “What have you done, then?”
Ososai leaned into the two lovely cold hands on his monstrous face and grumbled. “Nothing. I haven’t done anything. Unless you count a lot of physical intercourse. Which I have done. And perhaps making up pretend scenarios where I kill a lot of people. Which is normal.”
“All of those things are normal with you.”
Ososai snapped at one of his hands. Manawenuz smiled. “Since you are worried about these things, then you already know what you should and shouldn’t do. Trust yourself. Think not about the few mistakes but the many years of learning that have come out of them. You do know better now.”
Ososai’s eldarin face came out of the teeth of the monster; he wore its skin like a selkie. “I do not always feel better.”
“Do you do better?”
It was so typical a response from Manawenuz that Ososai responded with a huffing sigh, and Manawenuz let him get away with it. “Celebrimbor thinks that you and your wife do not do well by me as my sovereigns, and grumbles against you. This also worries me.”
“Do you tell him otherwise?”
“I do, but…” and Ososai hesitated, because the truth was a rare truth, and because of that he was not even sure it was the truth. “...I am anxious to explain it thoroughly, or let him see more. I would have to explain why you do not help me, by his definition of help, and I… would… keep that.”
Only a glancing look at each other recalled and communicated a long history, a thousand years of incredible trials and incredible errors in the time after Ososai was rescued from Belekoroz. His wife and Ulluboz had done the first and the worst of the work while he was unstable, but Ulloboz had in his wisdom quickly discovered the most true and the worst of the issues: Belekoroz had changed Ososai.
To be changed was impossible for ainur; it wasn’t possible until Belekoroz started doing it. He had directed Ososai as the wind directed the wind-vane, as the magnet, and thus redirected Ososai could not adjust his own course. He was bound to the truth that a maia could not be altered, though Belekoroz had proven Himself equally unbound.
Ulluboz could not change it either. What had been made into a sword in Ososai, he could not now make into anything else, though he could forge the very forms of mortals. He realized that there was only one thing that could be done: to have Ososai redirected again, and fix the magnet to another pole. That could be done; the tool could be used instead of reforged. Ulluboz would not do it himself, because to do so would make him his master as Belekoroz had been his master, and doing so would mean that Ososai could never choose to follow his command again, and instead would be compelled to. He could never be a friend or confidant to him again, but only a master.
Instead he gave Ososai to Manawenuz. He was King of All; if someone had to be Ossosai’s master, he was the only good option.
And so Ososai was given to and dwelled with Manawenuz for some time, in a now-unused house on the northwestern shore, overlooking the night, as Manawenuz did nothing and said little. After many long years, Manawenuz came to the conclusion that he agreed with Ulluboz: the only way to change Ososai’s orientation to Belekoroz would be to reorient him to someone else, and make them his master. There was nothing else that unmarred hands could do, or that a spirit which did not change could do on its own.
Having come to that conclusion, Manawenuz chose to do nothing. He knew that leaving Belekoroz’s work inside Ososai would make him suffer terribly, and he did not like it, but the only other option was inconceivable. It was not to be done.
Ososai was incensed for a while after being told that nothing would change, but now, he wouldn’t even wish for anything else. The pain decreased enormously after Belekoroz was banished, and now after the ages of having come to knowManawenuz he shivered at the thought of what might have been if he had been reformed to call him his master. His spirit called for Belekoroz, relentlessly; but the wealth of other songs and cries that had reestablished themselves in his heart along with it were louder.
A yet more beautiful thing flourished, which he thought nearly worth the rest of it, and stunning in how unexpected it was. Often when Manawenuz looked at Ososai, as he did now, he could see the work of Belekoroz and in it see Belekoroz himself, the brother he had loved better than was wise. The shadow left inside Ososai was now all that was left of Him. Ososai stood still, and let him look.
Manawenuz kissed him; Ososai accepted it. With boundaries shed between them he felt completely whole, even against the knowledge that he was not. Belekoroz inside him felt like him, and no one else. More than the fear and more than the rage there was a completeness, an unbroken circle of being, things twined around each other until the boundaries between them vanished. He could not change, but he could remember, and sometimes things further back than the pain, than the temptation and corruption, further back even than the ground beneath him, and such remembrances were unlike anything, and all things shrunk beneath them.
“There is nothing to be afraid of,” Manawenuz promised him. “The mistakes I have made will not be repeated. If you need help shouldering what you have been left with, I am always ready to help.”
“Enough about me,” Ososai said bluntly. “Celebrimbor is quick to anger, and strange, and both his nature and its corruption bothers our own; he will anger a Vala eventually. He’s among us too often for that to be avoided. I want to know that you are ready to protect him, not me; that when that day comes he will be treated like an elf, like someone under our protection. Not ignored, or exiled somewhere to manage it himself, or told he should have handled it better.”
Manawenuz closed his eyes, and began thin, for a second, with sadness. “You have my word,” he said, “that I will act as you ask myself, and bid as their lord anyone who doesn’t to do so.”
It was as much as Manawenuz could do. Ososai would always long, no matter how much time had elapsed since he had one, for a ruler who would makehis subjects do what He wanted. But Ososai recognized the gift of what Manawenuz offered as even more than that; it was absolutely everything he could do, and no effort spared. Everything a good spirit could give him in the world they both lived in, where evil dared and goodness begged.
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Original Note:
Publishing Silmarillion Quote of the Chapter:
Then Manwë granted him pardon; but the Valar would not yet suffer him to depart beyond their sight and vigilance, and he was constrained to dwell within the gates of Valmar. But fair-seeming were all the words and deeds of Melkor in that time, and both the Valar and the Eldar had profit from his aid and counsel, if they sought it; and therefore in a while he was given leave to go freely about the land, and it seemed to Manwë that the evil of Melkor was cured. For Manwë was free from evil and could not comprehend it, and he knew that in the beginning, in the thought of Ilúvatar, Melkor had been even as he; and he saw not to the depths of Melkor’s heart, and did not perceive that all love had departed from him for ever. But Ulmo was not deceived, and Tulkas clenched his hands whenever he saw Melkor his foe go by; for if Tulkas is slow to wrath he is slow also to forget. But they obeyed the judgement of Manwë; for those who will defend authority against rebellion must not themselves rebel.
Is Tulkas slow to wrath?... anyway, holy shitballs, I cannot tell y’all how firmly I disagree with that last sentence. When Osse said that he forgave the Valar in the last fic, it was that kind of thing he was forgiving, and I think that’s very big of him. I… I just… I think I can’t even start.
Anyway. Tolkien Original Valarin language names: Ososai = Osse, Manawenuz = Manwe, Ulluboz = Ulmo. Uinen doesn’t have one so I tried to awkwardly avoid naming her. Melkor has like "a billion canon names but he does not have a canon Valarin name. I saw another fan back-translate it as Belekoroz and decided that would do for this scene.
I am being VERY particular with names here; it’s not just what people are called, but who is calling them that. I wanted to keep this strictly in Brimby’s POV but there was no way that scene with Manwe would happen in front of him and it begged to be written, so I broke a rule or two there.
Name Aside: Chris Tolkien says in The Etymologies that the origin of Osse/Ososai’s name is a word root meaning ‘terror’ or ‘dread’, which is why I sometimes have people call him The Terror. HOWEVER if this is so I find this VERY compelling, because that implies him having another name before he was called ‘Osse’, but we don’t know what that was. Aradalambion translates it as ‘foaming’ or ‘spurting’ (lol) instead, which would be the better translation if Ososai is his original name. If it isn’t though, that’s fascinating. Does he choose to go by the new name he earned in Melkor’s service forever, just like Sauron is permanently Sauron? Did he defect so early that he didn’t really have a spoken name before? If there was a previous name, what was it, and why does no one use it? Maybe only other ainur use it and it has never been recorded. An explanation that squares the circle, I think, was that it was a pun all along; Ososai means ‘foaming’ or something similar in Valarin but the Quenya transliteration sounds just like a word for ‘terror.’ That would be fun. Anyway, do whatever you like with that information.
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CHAPTER THREE: Of Thingol, King of Doriath
Hurrying on pattering feet, which solidified as she ran, Uinen made herself firm to enfold Melian in an embrace. “Helloooo!” she called, kissing her on both cheeks, and then again, and on the forehead until Melian gigglingly stopped her, pushing her back with one soft, plump hand.
“Stop! Oh, I just can’t take you!” she laughed, twining her fingers around Uinen’s kisses.
“I can’t help it! You look like a dream! Like a whale! I could just eat you up,” Uinen sighed.
That was nearly a threat, if one wanted to be dreary about it. Melian was bound to physical form, which was why she put such effort into brightly-dyed clothing and scents on her skin and coordinated jewels and the permanent waves of her hair. If she had to have it, she was going to be proud of it. But also, Uinen could and would eat whales. The comparison was complimentary. She loved whales. The fact remained that she could eat her up, not that she would do that.
“Oh no, stop, stop! How will I explain the nips and tooth-marks?”
Uinen considered saying something she could not possibly say, and sighed instead, “Tell your husband that Osse the Terrible took a chunk out of you.”
“Oh, you pair of sharks. No, I will not tell him anything of the sort, and you will stop fretting my manicure.”
“At once,” Uinen smiled, and reaching forward took the parasol from her other hand. “And let me shield your skin while I’m at it.”
“Oh, thank you. You don’t have to — ”
“Nonsense. You only have two arms, it’s the least I can do. Now,” she said, and also opened the little silver gate for Melian so they could wander out of Varda’s palace and into the terraced gardens to walk.
“Gorgeous,” Melian sighed as they stepped into a full bank of sun’s light, its rays embellishing the frills of the roses and the curves of her dark skin with equal radiance.
Uinen wondered what Arien’s touch felt like when you were bound to a feeling body. For her, the soothing sensation was an option. “It’s been a lovely season. I find my husband out sunning among the seals or the sea-elves.”
“And do they know he is not one of them?”
“The seals are too canny, but the elves…”
They both chuckled. “I just can’t help teasing them sometimes,” Melian admitted. “They so want to be polite and deferent that it can be hard to resist.”
“What a confession from Melian, handmaiden of Yavanna, known for her somewhat unusual elf appreci—”
“Oh,” Melian scoffed, and lightly slapped Uinen’s arm. “Don’t be a hypocrite. I won’t take that sass from her, I certainly won’t take it from you. They are not wide-eyed babes who can’t think for themselves, as some more precious Ainur would have one thinking. Some are older than—”
“You are preaching to the converted, beautiful. You and I are both here because of elf-consort headaches right now.”
“Yes,” Melian sighed, “though I have to say that we would all have an easier time talking over it if we could just put archaic judgements about a mutually beneficial relationship in the archaic past. The snipping and hissing I deal with on account of something completely unrelated—”
“Is it unrelated?—Oh, don’t look at me like that!” Uinen begged when Melian glared up at her. “My love, the only reason your relationship works so well is because you and your husband are just sloppily smitten with each other, and especially you with him, and if that weren’t the case—”
“But it is, and slag-fire to the rest,”Melian grumbled moodily. Uinen watched her push one slightly disobedient pearled pin back into her subtly rebelling hair, which inspired in her wondering thoughts about bodies which the spirit could not fully control.“One known trouble-maker mishandles an elf with a crush in the Second Age, and all of a sudden it becomes something people can throw at me and my husband now, like we have anything to do with it.”
“It was your husband who started it!”
“He did not! It was your husband’s little boyfriend who snapped at him.”
“He looked at him.”
“If you had seen such a look it would have even scorched you! Elu and I were doing absolutely nothing that wasn’t our business to do, sitting in chairs drinking tea, visiting my brother-in-law in his house in Alqualonde, and I don’t think anyone had done anything but compliment the sunlight on the waves in hours. Then ‘Tyelpe’ wanders into Olwe’s house as-you-please, barely enters the room, and looks at Elu like he’s excrement. Of course Elu asked him what the problem was, and of course he was a little snappish about it.”
“Osse said he lunged at Tyelpe.”
“Was Osse there? He was not. Celebrimbor was being obviously aggressive. Elu only stood up. There are such a thing as wordless signals, my beauty, and just because Elu said something and Celebrimbor didn’t—”
“All Tyelpe did was walk into a room, see someone, and walk right back out. It was your husband who leaned out a window to yell at him.”
“He was—seeing a guest and then walking right back out of the house is still considered rude. That was always considered rude. That has not stopped being rude.”
“It’s certainly something to shout insults at the receding back of someone who did absolutely nothing to you, and loudly enough that half of the city hears you.”
“Oh, but he didn’t do that because of any social slight, or anything Celebrimbor did or didn’t do,” Melian said, suddenly becoming fretful, with one gloved hand on her mouth, “I haven’t wanted to make his public, my love, sine Elu is a little embarrassed about it, but…”
“Yes?”
“Well, it seems as if—how to say this? It seems as if I have stumbled on another strange ‘side effect.’”
By which she meant, like his height and his spirit-halo and his uncanny senses, another something that had shifted in Elu Thingol as a result of his marriage to Melian. But what would be shifting in him after so much time and so much effort from Namo to align his body and his nature? “Yes?”
“Well, he was terribly embarrassed afterwards. He said he could not account for his sudden rage. He simply detested Celebrimbor on sight. They don’t even know each other, you know. Never ran into each other before, never had any reason to. I don’t think they’ve more than glanced at each other. But the moment they were in proximity, he had a reaction he could barely contain.”
That was so eerily close to what Osse had related to her about Tyelpe’s own account of the event that Uinen’s interest was piqued. Tyelperinquar had said he had had ‘the reaction of an animal.’ Instinct unadulterated. He could not account for the intensity of the emotions based on their mutual lack of history. “So he seemed to not even know why Tyelpe got him into such a state.”
“He did and he didn’t. Like I said, even he thought his reaction was inordinate. But he did explain what he was reacting to, in a manner of speaking.”
“Oh?”
“Well, of course my brother-in-law was a little vexed about the debacle happening in his house, so they quarreled after Tyelpe left and before worried elves started banging on Olwe’s door. The normal, oh, ‘what Age do you think it is,’ ‘do you just let anyone in your house,’ ‘what kind of hospitality is that,’ until Olwe accused him of being unfair to the sons of Finwe, and of course you know that Olwe and Finwe had been very close. And my husband, at this point, he was still so incensed that he was practically spitting disconnected nouns. But when Olwe asked said he was being unfair because he was a son of Finwe, my husband responded, and these are his words as he spoke them, ‘That is not a Finwe, that is a Sauron.’”
Uinen took the time to physically smack herself on the forehead. “What do I even use my mind for?” she asked, rhetorically. “Oh, silly girl! Of course he doesn’t care a whit whether someone is bedfellows with my husband or not.”
“Heavens, I doubt Elu even knows about that. I haven’t brought it up.”
“Only I—anyone else would not be able to tell he has Osse’s scent on him, I can only tell because I’m so close. Obviously everyone else smells the absolute stench of Sauron. I’m so completely used to it, I don’t even smell Melkor on Osse anymore.”
“I don’t know how you can get used to it! You darling, it blinds the nose! It’s overwhelming! Like rotting dead! The elf feels so much like Sauron that if you stay around him too long you start imagining he’s there.”
“Yes, yes, I know—it’s because he enthralled him, gauche—”
“Some won’t even make a face around him so he can’t see the face they make.”
“I’ve just gotten used to that kind of thing. ‘Oh, his spirit has been twisted to bear Sauron’s mark, oh, ho huh.’ We can sense it but can temper our reactions, most elves can’t quite sense it the same, or if they can it’s not nearly so strong to them, but your Elu both can sense it with our perception and will react like an elf. Oh, how dim of me. What do we do?”
“Well, for my Elu, absolutely nothing. I have not enthralled, enslaved, or otherwise bent his will. We have a connection. That is not something malign or unnatural. Neither is reacting poorly to Sauron malign or unnatural. Now that I know this can happen we’ll talk about it as husband and wife, but other than that, I think the onus for this one is one Mr. Uinen.”
Uinen chuckled. “He had a very similar response, unfortunately. ‘What did he do wrong? What was he supposed to do differently?’ I don’t fully disagree with him, in that Tyelpe did in fact handle an unexpected and unpleasant situation… decently well. Rudely, but not worse than rude. Knowing what it was that he actually reacted to, though…”
What to do indeed? Uinen’s thoughts eddied. Melian bent to observe a hydrangea in bloom, its vibrant blue flushing on her cheeks. Osse had assured her he was fully aware of the large and actively malignant stain on Tyelpe’s fea, and said that he had already done what the elf would permit him to do. But what, then, was to be done about an elf that hosted something so dangerous in his spirit, and would not have it removed?
But was it dangerous, or was it merely offensive? Depending on which one was true—but her husband’s malady was both offensive and dangerous, and the decision of what was right to do with him had been clearly and confidently declared. It was right to do nothing without his consent and without due respect of his dignity, and that if no change could be made without the use of force, then no change would be made.
If Tyelpe had actually harmed Elu, that would be one thing. He hadn’t. Nor had he harmed Osse. The echo presence of Sauron was alarming, but she could not let an illusion cause her to lose sight of the truth: it was not him. He was not there.
The only thing that remained to worry her, then, was not that Elu had reacted with furor to sensing the lingering scent of Sauron in Tyelpe. It was that Tyelpe had reacted with disgust to sensing the presence of Melian in Elu. There was some complication yet, some unclear detail of their position between elf and maia, or more specifically as being elves touched by maiar, that made them a problem to each other when they did not have these problems with any other kind of being. Melian would not hear it, but that meant that there was something else altered in Elu Thingol, but it had not been noticed until the far-flung age when there was finally someone enough like him to notice it.
For now, and until she was sure of them, Uinen kept these worries in her heart. She returned her focus to Melian, who had both of her hands cupped around a honey bee, exploring the curves of her palm. Uinen softened.
“That is enough of husbands, of men and their follies,” she said. Melian looked to her, and the drone drifted away from her hands. Uinen reached forward to take one again, and twined her fingers with Melian’s. “Let us speak instead of things that concern just us ladies.”
“No; my spirit is unsettled now,” Melian admitted, and Uinen could see the trouble in her eyes. “Let me return to my husband instead, I feel the need to be back with him.”
“It is my fault for making the conversation sour.”
“No, not at all.”
“But I will do as you wish,” said Uinen, and she did walk her back to the door, and into the halls of Ilmarin, where they parted. Then Uinen stood, watching her leave, and then watching nothing in particular.
Even as her own husband approached, forming behind her and putting his arms around her shoulders, she ignored him until he spoke.
“She will flirt with you, dearest love,” He sang, “but she isn’t going to do anything else.”
“OH,” Uinen snarled, and turned around to whack her mocking husband on his chest and face a few five or ten times. Osse laughed out loud at her as she vented her frustration on him, including giving his nose a solid whack. “You perverse old dolphin! You’re lucky you did not find me in an ill mood.”
“I found you in some mood, certainly.”
“I can’t believe you don’t get enough from your little favorite. Your entire pod of elves, for that matter. Don’t play coy, take me home. But one word about Melian and I’ll eat you.”
And so they bowed out of the engagement early and the evening meal entirely, but would anyone really be surprised? As she let her husband grasp her wrist and pull her away, and down, Uinen reflected grumpily that it was not what he did, really, that bothered her. It was that he was so much better at it than she was.
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Original Note:
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Published Silmarillion Quote of the Chapter:
Then an enchantment fell on him, and he stood still; and afar off beyond the voices of the lómelindi he heard the voice of Melian, and it filled all his heart with wonder and desire. He forgot then utterly all his people and all the purposes of his mind, and following the birds under the shadow of the trees he passed deep into Nan Elmoth and was lost. But he came at last to a glade open to the stars, and there Melian stood; and out of the darkness he looked at her, and the light of Aman was in her face.
Ladies. Is it gay to enjoy the sunlight?
anyway so obviously there is a good reason why this chapter is so sapphic. The reason is, I wanted to write that. Everyone go have a beautiful day today.
CHAPTER FOUR: Of Aule, Lord of Smiths
As always, Osse returned Tyelpe to the shore not far from Alqualonde, so that he could return to society easily if he liked. But Tyelpe looked south to its cheerful pearl-iridescence on the tips of the waves and decided he was not in the mood. For Tirion neither, nor the wandering maze of Sindar settlements to the temperate south, nor even really for Frodo’s keen politeness. The unpleasantness surrounding Thingol (clearly the most unfortunate being alive) was still in the back of his throat and he felt the need to take his time getting anywhere where he might be asked questions at all.
He now understood how wolves felt about territory and, unfortunately, that comparison was probably apt. Even seeing the consort-king, who in theory should have been very similar to his pleasant brother, filled Tyelpe with a sort of instinctual detestation usually only evoked by corpses. Elu Thingol was like a mass of shuffling fungus, threaded through with his doting wife’s ten-thousand spores, and everyone else was fine with that. In seeing him Tyelpe had been suffused equally with the pity that drove a veterinarian to euthanize a broken horse and the disgust of a house-keeper who had just seen the filthiest kitchen he had ever seen and was torn between soap and fire as his tools for fixing the situation. He did want him in any room that he was already in, and his skin crawled when he thought of friends or family speaking to him, those shifting cilia reaching for them.
It was eerie, because elves did not… feel like that. Tyelpe wondered whether that feeling, though felt faintly, had been a quiet influence on the actions of Thingol’s many enemies. He tried to avoid wondering about himself.
He wove a wide path around the north, where settlements were sparse. Except for Formenos, which loomed forebodingly at his left hand.
He had visited Formenos in this life, once or twice. He had heard it was a bastion of people who still called themselves exiles and kept more or less to the customs they had in Endor, and it was. He had to avoid it, because that was the sort of person who kept trying to sneak a crown on him when he wasn’t watching. It wasn’t all of the city, but some of them dearly and sincerely wanted a scion of King Feanaro, as they called him; for what, they did not specify.
It could have been worse. Some lived there only because they had preferred life abroad and wanted to at least live in a place that looked like the sunken Beleriand they remembered. The city as it was now little resembled the Formenous that Tyelpe remembered that he could barely think of it as the same place. It felt almost like a replica of the old fortress built by someone who had not lived the reality but admired the ideal, even though it stood on the same spot and so too stood its original walls, inside of a second and third ring since built.
He walked an even wider ring around it, and at length saw the forges of Mahtan’s people, which controversy felt uncomfortably unchanged. These too he circumvented to reach his grandmother’s house, which was vacant when he let himself in.
It remained vacant for a week, and then two.
That was not that unusual for Nerdanel, who came and went as she pleased (and got distracted chipping two-ton fossils out of distant cliffsides as she pleased), but what was unusual was that Tyelpe found himself growing bored. Nerdanel’s empty house had been a safe haven for him, a place he could freely luxuriate in the pain that he elsewhere pretended not to feel. Now that the pain was gone—mostly—its shades sometimes came in and out of him like passion-visions, leaving the world briefly altered and uncanny—he had enough energy and resilience to find himself slowly aggravated with sitting around and doing nothing. He was not sure yet that he liked the feeling, because when he started getting restless, he started thinking about making things, and that was not necessarily good for society.
He reasoned with himself that choosing to go make something and betting on it not being in essence a plague was better than waiting until he felt compelled to make something and then just having to deal with whatever came out, whether he inherently had faith that he would make something normal or not (he didn’t). As such, he went out and took the short walk to Mahtan’s forges.
While it was always called ‘The Forges’, Mahtan’s settlement was a complete town of houses and shops and baths and gardens, built not rigidly square as people often expected but flowing around the natural wealth of bubbling hot springs whose irresistible promised of easy, reliable power had drawn the Noldor there in the first place. The forges themselves stood one on side so that their smoke was carried out and away by the wind, and the town opposite stayed clean and the quick water running through it diamond-clear. All buildings were stone, quarried there, such that like a dwarven town it looked as though the crust had heaved it up from below in one thunderous birth (in fact, it was Mahtan’s Forges that came to Tyelpe’s mind when he first behind a city of dwarves). The occasional, unpredictable blasts of superheated liquid kept those buildings clear of the frills that festooned any other city in Tirion, and the walls gleamed wet and smooth.
It being the absolute edge of dawn, the town was, of course, wide awake and bustling. Tyelpe was located immediately by a small gaggle of distant, red-haired relatives. He was attacked on sight, which was why despite everything he found this side of the family frankly preferable to everyone else (no insult meant to his perfectly decent cousins on his mother’s side). He threw one of Nerdanel’s brother’s grandchildren into a geyser and in return was invited to breakfast.
All throughout the fine meal of potatoes and mushrooms and black coffee he found himself feeling that there was something just slightly strange in the air, and he discovered both what that was and why his grandmother hadn’t visited her home in weeks when he then went with them to the forges and found them glowing preternaturally. That meant that Aule was in residence, as he was on occasion, enjoying the company of his most favored Noldor.
That was fine, of course, but when Tyelpe entered Mahtan’s own forge and felt the tingling charge in the air he reflexively winced. He was getting a little tired of Great Powers. Osse’s purposefully disarming charms and deliberate physicality were as comforting as they were meant to be, but his superiors, even the ones that clad themselves in skin, did not have the same practiced ability to dissemble. They were always just a little too much, and now, as often enough, they were a little too much at him.
So too was Aule, clad in what Tyelpe assumed was his second-favored form (after that of a dwarf), which was that of a tall, well-built, red-maned Noldor. He stood with Nerdanel and Mahtan as they inspected something of miniscule size, held in the tongs in Aule’s hands and lit by his own light.
A gem. Tyelpe saw it, and immediately thought that he could probably make it better, or at least more tastefully. Then he looked at Aule, whose inwardly lit eyes were looking at him, and he resigned himself to his fate.
“Hello, Curufinwe,” said Nerdanel.
“Hello, Nerdanel,” said Tyelpe.
“You’re just in time, kid,” said Mahtan, who was born on the shores of Cuivienen and was his grandmother’s father and was yet a few millenia older than him, so Tyelpe really did have to take that sort of language from him. “We’re trying to decide if this one is any good.”
Tyelpe reluctantly approached, his eyes fixed on the tiny yellow gem. It looked like a diamond, but it had to be hand-fashioned. Natural gems had divisions in them and often minute flaws that craft-gems simply did not have, and this one was as much thought as mineral. To know how to talk about it, he asked, “whose is it?”
“Don’t let that color your judgment,” Mahtan asked, which likely meant Mahtan himself had made it. He wasn’t much of a gem-smith, compared to his other talents, but it wasn’t like he was bad at it.
Well, fine. Tyelpe could be honest. “It’s not very luminous, but that looks like a design choice,” he started. He got the sense it was supposed to be modest, which was in fashion again. “I can tell it doesn’t have any abilities precisely, but that it could be used as a conductor for ability. I’m not saying that making something a power-conductor without particular limits on what it conducts is a poor skill, you have to know what you’re doing to make it at all, but not limiting what kind of power it conducts whatsoever is asking for a private audience with Uncle Finarfin as he asks you delicate questions about whether you considered what it could be used for. If you mean the cut, yeah, it’s great. Perfect. But I’ll tell you what, essentially, if I weren’t asked I wouldn’t say anything about that stone in particular. It’s fine.”
Mahtan laughed, his head leaning back and his wrinkled eyes squeezing shut. “I told you, ‘Lord of Smiths.’ It’s just not your talent.”
Oh, for fuck’s sake. Tyelpe weighed the advantages and disadvantages of just leaving and going to a different town entirely, but instead said “then with all due respect, Lord Aule, you could make something much, much better by not fussing with tongs and hammers at all and just making it.”
“I surely could,” Aule replied, his voice nearly the timbre of a mere mortal speaking, but not quite. (All his many fellows merely served, time and again, to reinforce Tyelpe’s wonderment at how good Annatar had been in fully disguising himself as mortal. Stars, he was good. None of them, and that meant none, had so complete an ability to falsify form, voice, and spirit. The fact that no one was as good at disguise as Annatar did not in fact make Tyelpe feel more comfortable around his peers. Everywhere, under every stone, there were reminders that Sauron and his erstwhile master were better, more clever, more powerful than their opponents, who had ever been hesitant to even try to defeat them.) “I am not necessarily trying to make the greatest thing, but enjoying making. Your point is taken about the broadness of its abilities.”
Well, knowing it was him, what else could he do? It was the easiest thing for Aule to make something that was everything, and a monumental effort to make something narrow in scope. “And it stands; my Uncle Finarfin would question you too if he found cause and you wouldn’t like it either.”
“He has, in fact.”
“There you have it. So,” he said, and was on the cusp of finding a clever and polite way to get out of this conversation, but Nerdanel got in first. “Would you grab a size six clasp for me, baby,” she said, and he said, “of course,” and before he knew it he was completely stuck in the situation, which meant there was nothing at all he could do or say that wouldn’t have been completely rude when Aule asked for a quick word in private. He summoned every reserve of patience he had and consented.
–
Smoke drifted away in layers. Iron-heavy forge-smoke clung low, hesitant, brushing on the red stones of the exposed earth as it passed. Wood-smoke wandered higher and faster, slipping on Tyelpe’s face, leaving perfumed wisps of hardwood and pine, diverse weights burnt for diverse purposes. Above it was water-steam, white at its crest and ashen gray below where it had been grabbed and dirtied by plumes of smoke. The wind took them all away, for the most part, but when it shifted directions on Manwe’s whim, fanning its feathers, they drifted into Tyelpe’s eyes.
He did not blink it all away. Some pains get dull after thousands of years, especially in comparison. Neither did Aule, looking politely away from his reluctant partner in conversation, though his situation was different.
Like the dwarves he had fathered, the Forge-Lord was not one for small talk. “I like not the news I have heard from Ulmo lately.”
Push-back! Tyelpe found himself relieved. No one had really gone for his throat yet (aside from Thingol, who did not count), and anymore he had no patience with waiting when he knew an assault was coming. “I can’t imagine you do. What’s your specific complaint?”
“Specific? If you wish. It is not right for mortal and immortal to lie together, because of the difference in ability between them. It was not Eru’s intention for the world They made.”
“I would argue it was, or else the line of half-elves was an accident, and it sure doesn’t seem like it was.”
“The mingling of men and elves is not the same.”
“Well, granted. It isn’t. But the same line comes from Queen Melian.”
“So it does. And while good things came of it, I maintain as I always have that that wasn’t right either. We can enjoy the trees that have fruited without planting more.”
There was an echo of something quite old in what he was saying, but whatever resonance Tyelpe was supposed to hear, he didn’t. “I am a quite planted tree already,” Tyelpe argued. He found himself a little anxious to be speaking so, but not badly; nothing changed the fact that not even Aule was frightening compared to what he had seen. “Osse is not doing any damage to me that Sauron didn’t already. In fact I trust him to handle me properly more than most of you, because he better understands both his actions and their consequences. He knows what he means when he talks about mistreatment, and he knows both how it is done and how it is not.”
Aule looked at him, and said, “Think you I know not?” and with only a quick glance at his burning eyes Tyelpe managed to tie together a few diverse threads of knowledge that had been hanging in his head for quite a while.
He knew, of course, that it was Aule who had bid Uinen to bring Osse back; Osse himself had told him, and Tyelpe had thought that odd in the moment but not asked him anything about it. Why Aule, and not Ulmo, who should have had more cause to care that the Terror be brought back to good instead of left to wallow? And of course Tyelpe never fully forgot that Sauron had been a follower of Aule before he was stolen early by Melkor. The fact was hardly ever relevant but never failed to sit in the back of his head, like a thorn, imbuing literally every single conversation about the divine patron of the Noldor with a slight prick.
It occurred to him that, considering all of the private information he was privy to and the position he currently found himself in, he was potentially the Blessed Land’s biggest idiot for not realizing sooner that Aule plotting Osse’s rescue had been his test run for rescuing Mairon. The smith wouldn’t have cast such an important project without making a mold first.
But what had Osse told Aule, the moment he started spilling turncoat secrets? That Sauron could never be saved. ‘You’d have better luck with Melkor Himself,’ he had told him. By the Heavens, they had tried that too.
Tyelpe found Sauron’s erstwhile master uncomfortable; how did Aule find Tyelpe? He would rather impale himself than ask. “Fine, fine; no, I don’t forget for a second that you are older, wiser, and fundamentally better than me. I have your complaint heard and your warning heeded. You are probably right and you have always been right, you don’t need to worry about that. If you genuinely think we’re doing something wrong, talk to Manwe, who has authority over both of us. Why even talk to the frail thing that does not even have the ability to stand up to his partner?”
“That is not how I think of you.”
“‘You,’ elves, or ‘you,’ me?”
“I mean both.”
Tyelpe felt a prickle crawl up his spine, as though many eyes were on him. “Then I will demonstrate my ability to do so: Good day, Aule. I can handle my own affairs. Mind yours or bring it up with an actual authority instead of whispering at the margins.”
He left, aware that he had made his dumbest decision of at least the week, if not the year. Aule did not try to hold him. He felt himself almost disappointed, because Powers knew what he could do to him if he did. That would be Aule arresting his free movement, and both the law and most of Aule’s peers were on Tyelpe’s side if he dared do that.
But he didn’t. He took Tyelpe’s dismissal as the end of the conversation, and Tyelpe knew that he watched him leave, but he said no more.
No longer in the mood to forge anything, he told Nerdanel he would meet her at her house later and retired there immediately. He entered the silent house, assured himself that it was completely empty, and then picked up exactly one piece of furniture and threw it against the wall hard enough to smash it.
It broke into several small parts. With that, he had a project to do, which was fixing the thing he had broken, and he felt much better in doing so.
--
Original Note:
--
Published Silmarillion Quotes of the Chapter:
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.
And,
"…a great smith named Mahtan, among those of the Noldor most dear to Aulë…"
Question of the chapter (and the last month of my life): How am I /supposed/ to interpret Aule being the one who asked for Osse to be rescued?
CHAPTER FIVE: Of Elrond, Housekeeper
Original Note:
--
The Wise Reader may note as they read that wedding rings are not canon to the Silm, and yet I have put them in here. I… I know. Yeah.
--
“You what,” said Gil.
Tyelpe sighed expressively, and pushed his wine away so he could not drink any more. “I told Aule to mind his own business or take it up with Manwe if he felt so strongly about it. Listen, it isn’t his business. I don’t care to plumb the depths of whatever complicated attachments he has to my current and former partners. I have been slowly but surely coming to the opinion that it is just not my responsibility to handle ancient ainur grievances and I will not be doing it.”
“That sounds like a good, albeit absurd, boundary to—Elrond, stop cleaning.”
“Why should I,” said Elrond, deliberately straightening the tchotchkes which sat on the endtable onto which Gil had just placed his glass of wine.
Elrond (who stood not for pet-names) had always had a sharp organizational mind, and it appeared that over the extra age or two he had endured that that tidiness had become compulsory for both him and everyone around him. Even though they now sat comfortably in Gil’s second (or third, or fourth) residence (built and thrust upon him by yet another legion of off-puttingly loyal followers), nestled under the boughs of the southerly beech forest where many of the Endor-born had chosen to build their homes, the very leaves seemed to jolt and rearrange their patterns when Elrond glared at them.
Tyelpe sometimes thought that it was so enormously unfair that he had not been able to waste centuries idling in Elrond’s Imladris that he might just die again. Then again, he would have to be a fundamentally different person who had different decision-making capabilities altogether to have survived that long, and as he had made clear, that was never happening.
“It’s just a personal request, really,” Gil said, watching the intrepid peredhel rearrange a shelf of glass figures simply by tapping all of them once in such exact spots that they now all flawlessly faced the same direction. The actions made Vilya, which he still wore humbly unacknowledged on his left hand, softly gleam. Celebrian’s wedding-ring and gifts from both his birth- and law-parents took obvious preference. “I won’t be able to handle sitting still and not doing anything if you don’t stop helping.”
“Very well,” Elrond responded, and took a few quick steps to Gil’s bookshelf, where he pulled one book off of the shelf and casually opened its pages.
He was absolutely not giving up that easily. He had never given up helping before and he wasn’t going to now. Both Gil and Tyelpe looked at him, and then each other, and wordlessly decided to let it play out. “...That sounds like a good boundary to draw,” Gil continued, not quite watching Elrond but not fully looking away. “You consented to one relationship, not a dozen in-laws’ worth of unsolicited grievances. You haven’t—”
“Exactly. If I had married someone, then alright, I’m joining his family. But I didn’t. I am having an ethically destitute extramarital affair on purpose.”
“It’s not ethically destitute, Tyelpe.”
“Let me dream.”
“You did marry Annatar,” Elrond reminded him, sliding that book back into a slightly different place and picking up another one. Gil’s eyes narrowed in suspicion. “If we’re judging your familial responsibilities based on marital history, you may yet have a few.”
“And I am effectively separated, and would have been able to get a real divorce even if there had been a real marriage. Pusiant of the decision to officially divorce—”
“You are still wearing his wedding-ring,” Elrond noted, his eyes sliding over the flipping pages of the book he held.
‘Ah,” Tyelpe said.
His hand tightened on itself. He could feel the unmarked band of gold digging into his fingertips.
Time had worn the ancient ornament soft. It was an odd miracle that he had it now at all. Someone who had no idea what it was but who had felt its strangeness had brought it to Elrond many ages ago, and Elrond, who knew what it was on sight, had kept it. Holding onto it so long that he could actually give it back to Tyelpe had been an act uncategorized. Was it kindness, duty, spite of the enemy, fear that he might have some purpose for it?
Whatever drove him, Elrond had certainly not expected Tyelpe to put it back on. Tyelpe had re-sized it for his thumb, and it now had absolutely no ornamentation to indicate what it really was. It looked like an ancient heirloom, its dedication long worn off. There was not a proper aura of power but a certain shine on it that made one think there was something special about it. However, the reason Elrond knew what it was was because he had seen it on Tyelpe’s hand when he was still married. He had not attended the wedding—it had been sparsely attended indeed—but they had kept up friendship for a while afterwards under Elrond’s one request that Tyelpe was not to bring Annatar into his presence or talk about him except in passing. That had worked, until Annatar had so completely dominated Tyelpe that he could no longer fulfill even that request. The space in his heart once used for friendship had been eaten away.
He was sure that no one had been more vexed by Tyelpe’s entire slow spiral into first spiritual and then physical death than Elrond, whose role in life (other than house-keeping) was issuing unheeded warnings. It had been his official position for some time: bring Gil’s message, return with a disappointing response. Repeat. Tyelpe had been a prime offender for quite a few centuries.
He often imagined the conversations they must have had about him, at first hopeful and strategic, then slowly, surely shortened over time and repeated disappointment into a few succinct phrases: “Hasn’t changed,” “As bad as always,” “Still won’t listen.”
The silence had stretched. Tyelpe had not come up with anything to say at all.
“Even so, you’re right that you’re not beholden to any of them, and Aule’s opinion is that of an outsider. You don’t have to take his advice. You should keep in mind that he is Aule, one of the Valar,” Gil reminded Tyelpe.
“Oh, I had forgotten. Yes, I’m aware this is an enemy I should not make.”
“That is… not exactly what I meant. I meant that Valar may love us, but they often struggle to understand us. If you worry him, you’re likely to get a number of concerned check-ups, likely by proxy, that will drive you insane.”
Tyelpe clutched his hand on the endtable to keep himself from reaching for the wine again.
Ironically, it was Gil who made him stop drinking so much, in the period of time post-War of Wrath and pre-Eregion when Tyelpe had lived in Gil’s kingdom and depended on him for basic emotional stability. Gil had patiently and neutrally persisted in pointing out Tyelpe’s bad habits until he became self-conscious enough to put manual controls on them, which had been an equally brilliant and aggravating strategy. After he left Gil’s kingdom and through centuries of things getting steadily and sometimes unbearably worse, Tyelpe had still been able to depend on that sturdy foundation and had never gotten as… sodden as he had been at the end of the First Age. “If he wants to bring out the absolute worst in me, that will be a great tactic.”
Gil smiled. “On their scale of time, you were re-embodied yesterday, and Sauron’s death feels nearly as recent. There may be no road around that well-meant concern. Elrond, that looks rather like you’re cleaning.”
“I am not. I will leave them as dusty as you prefer them. I am merely categorizing them.”
“Categorizing.”
“Yes. You have medical interfiled with botanical, and I don’t think I should be expected to stand for that. If you want them to stop, I can ask them to stop,” he said to Tyelpe.
“What, the Valar?”
“Yes.”
Could he? Would they listen to him? Elrond certainly seemed confident that they would. They might. “No, I’d rather fight my own battles. I’ve made something of a point out of that, and—”
Gil covered his forehead and groaned simultaneously with Elrond snapping his book shut and sighing. “Have you,” Elrond complained.
“As a reminder, you can pick those battles. You do not have to fight all of them,” Gil added.
“Oh. Fine,” said Tyelpe, and picked up the nearest and sharpest thing he could find (a pen made of a white feather) and pointed it at Gil. “I’ll take back-hands about fighting too many battles from Elrond, but not from you. How many leagues of elves and men did you lead into battle against the same enemy? Were you ever heard saying, ‘let’s not,’ or, ‘perhaps we will wait for tomorrow?’ Was it not you who I saw put your own self on the front line every single time, and often with captains and brothers at arms begging you to ‘get off of that horse or So Help Me?’”
“I fought very literal battles. You chose every kind you could, and especially any that could be fought from the comforts of home. I can see by your smiling this doesn’t offend you; I wouldn’t have said it if I thought it would. I know you want to argue, Tyelpe, and normally I would be amenable to suiting you—”
“Who says I want to argue?”
"—but I am genuinely worried.”
“Oh, no.”
“I know you well enough. This is weighing on your mind. You want to bicker about it because you need to talk it over, but you won’t ask to just talk.”
“Oh, have at you,” Tyelpe said, brandishing the pen.
“What bothers you about it?”
Tyelpe sighed. He leaned back, and after a flourish pricked the nib of the pen to his own wrist, just light enough to sting. “A sense of guilt is creeping up on me.”
“Guilt?”
“It isn’t focused. It’s not about one thing. It may be more like fear, really. I feel like I did something wrong and the punishment is sneaking up on me.”
“What would you be punished for?”
“Oh—being mouthy? Being promiscuous? Arguing someone who outranks me? The sort of thing that would usually get me a good smack on the cheek.”
“So, you’re expecting punishment for actions that you used to be punished for.”
“When you say it like that, I sound like an idiot.”
“I don’t think you are. You’re the same kind of fish out of water as a man traveling in a foreign kingdom, but for you, that kingdom is fairness. You might not remember, but you acted a lot like this when you lived with me. The way we do things doesn’t make sense to you, and it’s exhausting.”
“ ‘When I lived with you’, do you mean when I was a subject in the kingdom that you ruled, you shining opal? No, I remember living with you clearly. Bleeding-hearted regal bastard took the second bottle away from me every night and wouldn’t give me a stiff slap in return for anything I did.”
“Then, yes, we remember the same thing.”
“I’m being facetious, I know I am. Of course I remember all the good that you did for me. And I think you’re being generous. If I were to compare your kingdom and this one, yours was better.”
“Ty—”
“Shut your mouth. I suppose they have you beat for ‘fair, beautiful,’ but if we are even to evoke Fairness’ name then we must say that no one has ever matched you for ‘fair, equal.’ Not then, not now. You were too good to me, which is why I left.”
“You left because some of my people couldn't get over your heritage, which I have not forgotten.”
“Eh. They weren’t wrong. No, really, I left because I kept seeing the ores that were coming out of the Hithaeglir, and I couldn’t take not getting my hands on them myself anymore. Everything else was immaterial.”
“That I believe.”
“That red gold, like fire—the river-bright mithril—Powers help me. Oh, I just realized something.”
“Good?”
“You’re worried because you saw me end my last life by being utterly destroyed by my maia partner, and then, upon return, I acquired another maia partner immediately.”
Gil opened his mouth, and then closed it. He set down his wine so that he could put both of his hands on his face, and then he sighed a very long, very low sigh.
“I think I should apologize?” Tyelpe guessed.
“Well, Tyelpe,” interrupted Elrond, using some subtle skill to slide a cut-crystal decanter onto a shelf far above his head, “the last time I saw you in your last life, or part of you, it was actually nailed to a pole and being held over his head.”
“Mm-hm. That’s the part I don’t remember.”
“Because you were dead.”
“You don’t sound worried, Elrond.”
“Because I’m not.”
“Elrond has it under control,” Gil said to the palms of his hands, half fact and half prayer.
“Does he?” Tyelpe asked Elrond.
“I think I do,” he said, opening up an old vellum tome and turning through its few rough pages with precision. “I took some time to double-check the facts—the ainur have legal precedents, in their own way, in that if a choice has been made regarding justice or punishment in the past they will not go back on the precedent. They may adjust details for emergent situations, but they consider fully reversing a decision equivalent to countering the divine score. It’s been established that they do not kill their own, largely because they believe it is not possible for them, but now that we’ve established the ability of mortals to kill maiar once sufficient conditions are met (no Vala has ever been killed and so I set them aside), and that it is permissible to allow this in some circumstances, sufficiently similar circumstances would permit it be done again. To become so doomed, the maia would have to greatly diminish themselves first, by their own will, referencing the examples of both Curusir and Sauron. Gothmog too, come to think of it. The sort of diminishment brought on by acting against their decreed nature is what is crucial, but becoming too connected to material objects or bodies concurrently further dooms them and enables doomsmen. (My conclusions are also informed by the example of Greatest Grandmother Melian, who I am told is in the unusual situation of being doom-able but not doomed, meaning the ‘contrary actions’ aspect is more fatal than the ‘physical attachment’ aspect.) Osse has both a known ‘physical embodiment’ issue and an ‘unnatural acts’ issue. He is unusually powerful (potentially still possessing ill-won power? I bet you know) but hasn’t been foolish enough to put half his being into any physical items. With reference to Curusir, that isn’t always a dealbreaker. Full absorption into physical form will do when paired with unnatural action, and I am presuming that any act that would require me to kill him would simultaneously reduce him enough that it would be possible.
“Besides, we still have Frodo, and I am fully confident in his ability to make it happen if I can’t figure it out myself; oh, and because Osse is wed, and his wife is considered to be his guardian, we do have legal avenues we can take before resorting to murder. But murder is possible. I’ve thought it through.”
“Oh,” said Tyelpe.
Having not moved from his position of prayer through the entire explanation, Gil repeated, “Elrond has it under control.”
“To—just to be clear,” Tyelpe said, watching Elrond scan through the contents of another weighty book practically without looking at the pages, “you aren’t currently trying to murder him?”
“No! No,” he said, clearly surprised Tyelpe would think so. “But I thought it polite to inform you that he has less leeway than the last one.”
–
On the following morning after he had said his goodbyes to Gil, Tyelpe was stopped again by Elrond, who had been outside speaking to Erestor. Elrond put that conversation on hold and came over to embrace Tyelpe and bid him farewell. But then as he drew back he caught Tyelpe’s eye, and stopped.
“What is it?” Tyelpe asked.
Elrond hummed.
“Don’t make me worry about this until the next time I see you.”
“Well. I was thinking, through the night, about the part of Sauron that is left in you.”
“It’s not really him,” Tyelpe responded reflexively. “Or else it would have died when he did.”
“No, it could not be. But as anyone who has grieved knows, while a reminder of someone is not really them, it is something. Those with keen enough senses can see it in you.”
“Yes. You could, and Frodo, and it seems Melian’s awful man can as well, and ainur fuss about it, because it is objectionable to them.”
“And you explained that Osse offered to attempt to remove or alter that thing, but you are torn on the matter.”
“...I have to be,” Tyelpe said, “It’s part of me. And—Elrond, what can I say? I thought I was married. I really did.”
“I know. No, I thought of something else, and I wondered if I should say anything about it at all; I thought it had surely occurred to you already, and it would be tactless of me to bring it up, but then I thought it might not have.”
“Well, what is it?”
“Only that I spent millenia fighting Sauron, and came to know him well, whether I would or not, and I was your friend for long years, and I know you even better. I would know if there was cause to doubt you, and there is no cause. But the more I thought the more I was worried that I would not be the only one to whom this possibility had occurred, and it may occur to others who have fewer reliable facts than I have.”
“Well, what, Elrond?”
“That there was never anyone who could disguise themself better than Sauron could, and with such skill that only the most sensitive could mark the true, foul nature inside of him. That he evaded certain death time and again, and as we know should not have been able to die completely, and only did die because of his own folly. That because you have the scent of Sauron about you and are one he knew well, in fact one that he had hollowed out for his purposes, that you could be the sharpest, finest, and most clever disguise he had ever shaped, and not truly Celebrimbor at all. That is to say, if I were not someone who knew you so well, I might think you were Sauron.”
Tyelpe stared at him.
He had the oddest thought. It was not a thought he thought he would ever have again, considering. It was, Would he do that? For a moment, the sheer cruelty of such a theoretical deception took Tyelpe’s breath away.
Of course, the stupidity of even having that thought settled into him in another second. Parade his body around in front of his family and those who had loved him, half for convenience and half for the joy of making them miserable when they realized they had been tricked? Of course he would do that. He already had.
It would occur to others, though he wasn’t surprised it had occurred to Elrond first—or had others only been avoiding him as they nursed their suspicions? He hadn’t seen Galadriel in some time, largely because he avoided her; had the situation escaped her lofty notice, or had she been mulling over her next move? What Thingol had said to Olwe—how Aule had regarded him when no one else could see him. How would he even prove that he was not Sauron? What had he done that the skin-shedding serpent wouldn’t?
Elrond put a hand on Tyelpe’s cheek. “Celebrimbor,” he said.
“Yes,” Tyelpe responded, stupidly. He could feel his own breath on his lips.
“Breathe.”
“I’m not him,” Tyelpe said, weakly.
“I know,” Elrond said. “I have never doubted you. Breathe. Again.”
Tyelpe was nearly outdone by the urge to wrench himself away from Elrond’s hands. He would have surely rejected anyone else. The urge to not be touched was as strong as the urge to not be touched kindly. But it was Elrond, and Tyelpe made himself swallow through galvanizing anger, and then hideous embarrassment, and finally, the urge to cry. Through it all a wheel in his head keep turning relentlessly, asking him what his plan was, how he would face that accusation when it inevitably came, how he would prove he wasn’t Sauron, what evidence he would provide; would it be more convincing to be firm and certain, or stunned, or temperamental or weeping? He did know what a victim of this particular, unprecedented crime was supposed to look like, or what he needed to do to convincingly look like that victim. He couldn’t get away with feigned innocence now that it had been brought up to him; he needed the right argument. What did he have that even Sauron could not imitate? What buried, untouched goodness, what unmarred personhood? Could he endure dredging it up and vomiting it out for a court of accusers to scrutinize? Did he have a choice?
“I’m sorry for upsetting you,” said Elrond.
Tyelpe stifled anger again and sighed. “No. Stop…”
“I am. That was tactless.”
“You can afford to be tactful to people who will return the favor.”
“I wish you knew the war was over, cousin.”
Like many things he liked to hear, Tyelpe wished that Elrond would not call him ‘cousin.’ Elrond came very close to being the nearest kin that Tyelpe had alive in the light, if he took without resistance the claim that his family had been family, and had been family to Elrond. There were many things he had reconciled and resolved with thousands of years to think about them, but Elrond was too much. Being gifted Elrond as family was the same amount of monumentally unfair as being tortured to death by someone he trusted, but on the other side.
“Oh, this can’t happen to you twice,” Tyelpe said.
“What can’t happen?”
“I have no idea what I’ll do once everyone is my enemy again. Once it all crashes around my head and I have to—make sure the kingdom doesn’t fall apart because of my disastrous decisions, or the whole world, I know from experience that you will still be trying to help me, and the last thing I want—”
That was as far as he could go, because Elrond pulled him into a tight embrace. Tyelpe held still and without breathing for as long as he could. Perhaps completely on instinct, with the same compulsion as crying, Elrond began an attempt to heal him.
Because Tyelpe was corrupted by a force greater than Elrond, that healing couldn’t really do anything. Only it slowed his breathing, and soothed his stinging eyes and his tightening throat, and stilled his racing heart, and seized the turning wheel of excuses and demands in a firm grip and made it stop turning. He found when he pulled away from his cousin that he did not feel like crying, or explaining himself, or being unkind, or even like turning away anymore.
Tyelpe tried to formulate some reason why Elrond should not have done that for him, but he couldn’t even make it to that hateful place. He suddenly lost the way. He wondered, though without fully putting the feeling into words, why he almost exclusively did things that made him feel worse than this.
Elrond reached up with one hand, and smoothed the tangles he had made in Tyelpe’s hair when he embraced him. Vilya, whose only function was to preserve good things and protect them against slow exhaustion, hummed on his finger as it tapped Tyelpe’s skull.
The person who had made Vilya had known compassion so intimately he had been able to fix it to a focal-point, and make it immortal. Like a prisoner in a pit, Tyelpe could just hear him insisting that he was still here.
“Let’s go down the road, a little, and visit Galadriel,” said Elrond. “She asked me about you, and I wasn’t sure what to say.”
“Alright,” Tyelpe said. “Do you think she’ll be mad at me? I haven’t seen her since I started all this, and at this point, I honestly don’t think I could take it.”
“She’ll be delighted to see you’re not dead. The rest, you have to understand, is a joke. She hasn’t been serious in a thousand years.”
Saying so, Elrond began to lead Tyelpe through the forest, which though gentler than the forests of Middle-Earth, and brighter, with more light between the leaves, and overshadowed by the power of the ainur that dwelled in that land, was nonetheless still enchanted by the fair ones that dwelled there, imbued with their powers to charm, delight, and heal, compelling the weary traveler to rest.
--
Original Note:
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Published Silmarillion Quotes of the Chapter:
In the beginning of Arda Melkor seduced [Sauron] to his allegiance, and he became the greatest and most trusted of the servants of the Enemy, and the most perilous, for he could assume many forms, and for long if he willed he could still appear noble and beautiful, so as to deceive all but the most wary.
...Only to Lindon he did not come, for Gil-Galad and Elrond doubted him and his fair-seeming, and though they knew not who in truth he was they would not admit him to that land.
I realized when writing this chapter that, because of conceits I had already written into this piece (‘Tyelpe mentally refers to people he has certain familiarity with by personal nicknames but refers to everyone else formally, even in his own mind’) (and also, ‘even the theoretically impartial narration is warped by Tyelpe’s all-distorting POV’) both Gil-Galad and Elrond should be referred to by nicknames in the narrative. This presented two opposite problems, which was that Gil has The Most canon names and Elrond has 1 (one). I made a tumblr post about my problem which spiraled rapidly out of control. In the end, I rejected many good and beautiful ideas for personal reasons, and did what I wanted instead.
In the end I thought it felt most natural to clip Gil-Galad’s name down to Gil, just a simple, standard, Sindar nickname that sounds like something a close friend would call him (please ignore that he’s called Gil-Galad in the last fic I had not thought through my own writing conceits yet at the time), and let Elrond remain Elrond. If a man who has outlived everyone and accomplished more good than the rest of them combined is /that/ resistant to garnering any epesse, then I will follow suit. The more I thought about it, the more charmingly humble it was. Elrond is Elrond to everyone, whether they are King of All Elves or Bilbo Baggins of the Shire. Try to give him a fancy title and he will just freeze you out until you stop. He’s just a housekeeper, you know. And if you push him, he’ll keep your house too.
CHAPTER SIX: Of Sauron, Ruler (Part One)
Feeling like both the biggest maniac and most pathetic man the world had ever seen, Tyelpe wrote down a few words on a small slip of paper. They were:
People who will probably help you if you cock it up that badly again:
-Ingo
-Elrond
-Aunt Galadriel
-Your mother?
-The King of Alqualonde, apparently.
There were potentially a couple more names he could write, but he’d eat a live hedgehog before he involved any of them. As it stood, the list was now a comprehensive account of all the people he could endure knowing he had whored his way into apocalyptic disaster again in service of preventing excess collateral.
“Great,” he said, nodded, and then burned it immediately. He would not be able to face someone seeing such a note and live, which was why it had to be burnt, but he remembered something if he wrote it down once.
Then, with relieved finality, he shoved the formal clothes that he might have worn to the dinner he half-agreed to attend with his mother back into a trunk, pulled out basic travel clothes instead, and took himself to the seashore.
–
“Oh. No. No,” Tyelpe said, tying his robe back around his chest. “I have been very explicit about this. No wives, lady-friends, or female acquaintances. Not even watching. No.”
Uinen rested her head onto her open palms and raised her eyebrows at the elf beneath her. She lay prone in the waves and as tall as the highest of them, the size of a beached whale on the shore. “Oh, hush. He’s busy, so he sent me to fetch you. But you can just wait right here if you prefer.”
“And what is he busy with?”
“He is conversing with Ulmo.”
“Ah. How long will that take?”
“Depending on how it goes, either a few more hours or several days of taking breaks to cool down. Or even being put in the trench so that he’s forced to cool down. It all comes down to whether or not he throws something.”
Tyelpe pinched the bridge of his nose and slowly breathed out. This was the appeal, he stubbornly reminded himself. He’s volatile and dangerous and you don’t know what he’ll do next. That’s sexy. You like that. “Well, what am I supposed to do while I’m waiting for him?”
“Whatever you care to do in a ten-thousand-year-old palatial complex at the bottom of the sea. Drink tea and eat cake. Paw through the treasures of ages. Talk to the octopuses. It’s up to you.”
“I’m certain I cannot speak to octopuses. That has to be something you lot can do, not me.”
“No, most octopuses have learned Quenya, and they’ve always been capable of osanwe.”
“What?”
“Are you going or not?”
Tyelpe admitted to himself that he came here for a reason, and if thwarted, he was likely to just act like a bastard to everyone else he tried to interact with. “I’m going,” he grumbled.
So Uinen took him down. The journey was rougher than it was when Osse did it, and took longer, as she got distracted riding the chill currents of the deep ocean, playing with eager pods of dolphins and twining sea-ferns around her fingers. (After Osse had implanted him with something that allowed him to breathe while in the ocean, that thing simply remained, making him effectively amphibious. Tyelpe had not brought up the matter to anyone.) Upon reaching the palace, Uinen deposited him in the coral-lined, phosphorescent hallway outside of the garden-rooms he usually met Osse in, and then told him to have fun, do whatever he liked, and mind he not leave the building unattended, because he would die instantly.
Standing alone in the hallway, Tyelpe noticed a rumbling noise. It was as if rocks far beneath his feet were shifting, but not as slowly as they would, grinding on each other. He realized after a minute that the harrowing noise that he was just able to hear was Osse and Ulmo arguing, far beneath his feet in some suboceanic chamber, and in their own tongue. He decided to make a little more noise so that he could not hear that. He had learned enough Valarin to make everyone uncomfortable anyway, and tried his best not to let any of it slip.
The first order of business was to get into the dressing-room (unlocked, nothing ever was) and become janglier, as enough jangling would make it hard to hear anything but himself.
The palace’s primary residents could make their own clothing out of mere thought (if they wanted to), but their general fondness for Teleri meant they had gathered a quite impressive store of fine robes and jewelry, especially jewelry, which was less likely to dissolve in seawater. He knew most had been gifts and were often re-gifted, given to someone’s descendant three thousand years later as a coming-of-age present or wedding gift. Tyelpe figured he was not nearly the only person to open a very literal treasure-chest of baubles while bored in the abyssal palace and dress himself as he saw fit, but unlike many of the others, he fully intended to keep the stuff.
He could not help himself. His eyes filled up with the shine of metal when he opened the chest, and all his worst habits tussled and ran amok as he ran the treasures of ages past over his open palms. It never looked the same when he left the palace, because its lighting of rainbow bioluminescence could make simple nickel and glass into sparkling prisms, let alone what it did to silver, gold, platinum, diamonds, pearls, obsidian. He rarely found a piece of remarkable craftsmanship, but while underwater their beauty was incomparable.
He pulled out his amber stud earrings and replaced them with great discs of coral and gold hung with drops of gold that jingled gently as he went, even underwater. Then he took a collar that did not quite match the earrings but had the same gold and a pleasing geometric design of sliver-thin semiprecious stones inlaid together. He left his robe on but covered it over with an intricate harness of gold that draped over his shoulders, his arms, and his chest in a dozen different strands (which quite reminded him of the sort of sleek and suggestive body-jewelry that elves of Alqualonde wore in their spring celebrations, and he now knew a lot more about the freak who was planning those). Such things had surely been brought here on, with, or for some sea-elf who had enjoyed Tyelpe’s lover in ages past, and now they were going to be his, and he was going to take them with the sheer heedless glee of a bandit tearing through a house just abandoned when its owner fled from war, and damn who had had them before or what they felt about them.
He had said they weren’t good habits.
When he finally stood up, he was so jangly that it was, in fact, harder to hear what was going on beneath his feet. The utterly strange atmosphere of the palace was such that although he was in a water-filled room he was pressed down by gravity, feet on the floor and floating only heavily. He had been told that it was all about being very deep underwater, and how the nature of the place was that it was little a bubble of air underneath the waves, but not literal air, and he had found it all interesting until he realized there was no mechanism or secret to the building itself, it was just physics-defying maiar abilities again. Then he did not care.
He wandered the ways of the palace, through halls that were indistinct between primordial, titanic architecture and undersea cavern, some favoring one, some the other, straight lines curving and disintegrating and making themselves straight again as he drifted through stalactites and found himself in a ballroom or an armory, greened bronze polearms reefed over.
If Osse or Uinen even thought of those empty rooms, they would suddenly shake off their age and become clear and shining again. The palace was theirs, though Ulmo came frequently, and guests both mortal and divine were brought in and out. A lesser maia, white-fleshed and dark-eyed, whom Tyelpe practically did not sense until he was upon them, gave him some strange undersea fruit to eat without him asking. Its juice poured around his face when he split its skin. Time passed; he became distracted in a room built to house a very large, spiral-shaped shell, with thousands of tiny fractal curves and compartments he found hypnotizing.
He did talk to the octopuses. He did not like it at all. Every time they said anything he felt the urge to go think quietly about things for a few hours, and their osanwe felt wet.
At length he found himself lounging on an imitation chaise made of coral, finding himself getting closer and yet closer to dangerously bored. That ailment was cured when, suddenly, the entire wall to his left dropped out of existence so Ulmo, King of the Oceans, could walk through it.
Tyelpe jolted, then sat frozen, gripping that chaise’s bone-like arm. Ulmo strode forward a few powerful steps, a presence indistinct between surge of water and massive man-like form, and then he noted Osse’s loosely-dressed guest on the couch.
Ulmo looked at Tyelpe. Tyelpe looked at Ulmo. Tyelpe became very aware that he was lounging with one leg propped up, wearing exclusively silk and prodigious gold jewelry, with his hair loose and drifting in the water behind him.
“Well, why not,” Ulmo finally said, his exhausted annoyance weighing down the room. “We may as well, it’s not like we adhere to any other promises about what we would or would not do to mortals anymore.”
“Well,” said Tyelpe, but Ulmo was already leaving, surging through the room like a storm that came from nowhere and pounded on the roof.
Ulmo crossed the vast room in mere seconds, and another wall which used to exist begged pardon and ceased to exist so he could leave. Just at the threshold, he turned again to the elf and said, “If he does anything to you, lifts even a finger against you, that is the boundary of my grace. I’ll put him in a trench for an age and see if that does anything.” He left, and walls and states of matter and concepts of privacy rearranged behind him.
“Eugh,” Tyelpe said, to the empty room.
Nothing happened for a while after that. Tyelpe tried to settle back down, but couldn’t still a nervous tremor inside. He was torn between the absolute conviction that they had been arguing about him and an equal conviction that he was not nearly so important as that and they had bigger issues to argue about. He was not even sure which conviction was the sensible one. He told himself once a minute to not stress about Ulmo’s palpable frustration, but it was a heady pressure. He jittered like the jingling gold at his chest. Every minute in which Osse did not emerge from the subterranean chamber in which he was secluded made Tyelpe ask himself again what his real fury was like.
He had spent centuries sighing that Annatar was a bitch when he was angry, only to discover that he had no idea what he was like when he was really angry. He possessed, or so he was told, a brilliant brain that now sharply and promptly made the connections to the fact that he kept being told that Osse in his fury was a terror like none other and that he had not yet seen that for himself.
Tyelpe would be crushed immediately if he left the palace himself. He needed one of them to take him out. What had Elrond said, physical form and anathematic actions? Should he be prepared with a homicide plan, just in case? Was he an idiot for not having one already? Why did he date people he needed homicide plans for?
Like he was suddenly on a page, merely black and white, all things were suddenly in stark contrast, Tyelpe was faced with the list of clear signs he had been given before his husband killed him that that would happen and which only an idiot (like him) would have ignored. The friends and the family he had lost all issued individual warnings, some several, before they stopped trying to contact him or he acted badly enough that they had to distance themselves. A whole group of his followers had walked out of Eregion in protest together and never came back. Narvi even told him to watch out for himself before he passed on. Annatar himself had said to him a dozen different things that each in isolation could have justified ending a relationship. Former suppliers stopped delivering to him. He had known how powerful, how alluring, how dangerous the rings were as he had been making them, but had pushed on, because he really, really wanted to make those rings.
His last few months with Osse did not perfectly parallel that downward progression. They were not exactly perpendicular either.
How do I get out of here? he thought but, of course, he couldn’t. He would have to ask one of them to take him. He stood up, walked to a pantry where he knew a stock of rice-wine was kept, opened a bottle and put it to his mouth.
The first drink he took without thinking of anything specific. The second one he took telling himself that whatever did or didn’t happen, it would be better if he wasn’t having a fit for it. The third he took thinking that he would need a rational, mellow head. Then the next, that he could probably salvage this and have a nice evening if he calmed down. Then, that he had successfully hidden fits and panics and rages from his mother, his grandmother, his king (every one), and every person he called friend or cousin skillfully a hundred times to avoid ruining a nice day and embarrassing himself, and he was fucked if he wasn’t going to act like the class act he was in front of Osse, because Osse would have to comfort him if he was having a fit, and he was not having that.
He noted the quite impressive amount of rice-wine he had managed to drink without the aid of air. He thought about Gil, saluted him in absentia, then capped the bottle and returned it to place. He could track his own thoughts now; that was enough.
He returned himself to the coral-rooms and sat himself down in an armchair. Gently drunk, he watched the fish swim in and out of the coral, winding around each other.
The problem, he realized, was that he was not in pain anymore. When he had been in constant pain, he hadn’t had the energy to have all these emotions. The memory of the pain was fresh enough that he still did not regret the exchange, but the day might come.
But then, at length, the water around him began to change.
First came the warmth, like a summer wind, but slow. Second came absence, as eels and hagfish winding above his head took refuge in crevasses and caves. Third came the faint, tingling taste of iron, like something large had just been gutted nearby.
Tyelpe closed his eyes and leaned back.
He always felt uncomfortable in conversation with those who had faced exile and then turned back and returned, or those who had never died, never left, never saw death, the eternal pacifists, those who had subsisted ten thousand years on fruits and grains. They made him feel unreal, like he badly misrecalled a world that really wasn’t what he thought it was. The world was lovely, and he had done the things he had done for no reason.
Then fate chose to split someone’s skin and spill blood, as it could on occasion even in Aman, and its sharp scent cut that discomfort away. It reminded him every time that he too was real, with his awful, real memories. He was seeing something real when he saw the bones and blood under people’s arms and faces, and fought back the swordflash visions of them splitting open.
Real. Real. Blood-scented Osse approached him, and the fish hid away in their coral homes. He smoothed back his hair, detangled some of the teasing the water had done to him, and began to hum a song, so the Terror would know where he was. “Buried under my feet is a man I did meet; he sullied my name, so I put him to sleep…”
He sang, and the water grew warmer, and the walls breathed out and widened. He thought Osse was under him, and climbing higher. “Buried under the hill is a fellow I killed; I opened his throat, for he looked at me ill…”
The rainbow phosphorescence around him shimmed, and then dimmed. All of it was attached to living creatures, and they had their own opinions about where to shine it.
When Osse was present, even like this, especially like this, he wasn’t afraid of him. Fear sprang up in his absence, as he tried to make sense of him and what they had, when he was forced to explain it. When present, and not needing explanation, all of that sank back away.
His hair drifted across his mouth in a current which had grown strong and slick, and he sang, “Hidden under my bed is a woman I wed; she was too hard to please, harder still now she’s dead…”
The water moved restlessly around him. The presence was unmistakable but, when he opened his eyes, invisible. He heard:
“‘Deep down under the sea, a crew of twenty-three; those who see them now know from my banners to flee.’ Where did you hear that one?”
Tyelpe stood up from the chair and looked around him at the reef like a forest gone quiet. Nothing moved. “I don’t remember, now. Where are you?”
“Ah. Your pardon,” he said, and was behind him.
Tyelpe turned around. Osse was wearing his Teleri skin, and it was quite well-done, like a suit he had perfectly pressed and buttoned up. Not that anyone except an idiot would think this was just an elf (no one was as good at disguise as Annatar), but without prior knowledge, they may not know what it really was. The skin itself was dressed too, and richly, in Ulmo’s blue.
“There he is!” Tyelpe said, heart hammering. “I have been wandering your palace alone and unprotected for hours; anyone could have chanced across me while you paid no heed.”
“I knew you were here,” Osse replied, his watching eyes not silver or blue like they should have been but abyss-black, reflecting the trench-depths outside his windows. “I knew as soon as you arrived, and I knew it when Ulmo disturbed you as well. You were not unprotected.”
The knowledge—confirmation, really—that Osse had felt his panic and had not come until it was finished brought mixed emotions. It was what he wanted, mostly, but it was also embarrassing, and did remind him of his husband, who had made it clear that he could always feel what his body was feeling. “I heard you arguing with him! What about, I wonder?”
Osse smiled, and said, “Fishing.”
“Fishing.”
Osse leaned forward and put his hands on the chair which now stood between them. He curled his fingers onto it, one at a time, enjoying the individual flexes and stretches in the physical, powerful hands. “Fishing rights are a very involved matter.”
“I thought your kind wasn’t supposed to lie.”
Snapping that bait like a catfish, Osse replied, “There are a lot of things we aren’t supposed to do.”
“What were you really talking about?”
Osse left one hand on the back of that chair, but stepped to the side, so there wasn’t a physical barrier between the two of them anymore. “A crew of twenty-three, buried under the sea. Do you really want to hear about it? Then again, you might.”
Tyelpe hesitated. Osse reminded him less in the moment of Annatar, too clever to give the game away, than a seasoned war-time lord, issuing real threats with a smile. “Did you really?”
“Do you want to hear about it?”
“Second-born?” Tyelpe asked.
“Raiders sailing against a ship full of the faithful, fervently praying.”
He was serious.
“Not quite twenty-three, like the song says. A spare crew of thirteen on a light ship. I left one. I always do. I let him see me, and then drove him back to shore. It’s not like I don’t know that they have lives, families, and a home to return to as well, a chance to improve and desires for good and honest feelings they have stifled to endure their mean lives. But sometimes, watching my own not defend their faithful becomes too much for me.”
“Who were they praying to, on that ship you saved?”
“Manwe, King of Arda.”
“Did they cheer to see you destroy the raiders?”
“Why, yes. Most of them. Except there was a young boy, who cried. Though, he was crying already.”
“Children often shriek when you pull them away from danger.”
“Don’t fool yourself,” Osse chided him. “The same amount of power and my hand pushing another way could have knocked the ships far apart but left everyone alive.”
“That’s true,” realized Tyelpe. “Why not do that?”
“I did not even think of it. I thought about destroying them first and did not think again.”
“I—you know, I often go around pretending to ask permission to do something, but I know exactly what it is I am going to do whether anyone likes it or not,” Tyelpe confessed suddenly, not fully knowing why. “Nor do I think there is any chance of anyone changing my mind. I tortured Gil for years in Lindon crying about how no one would really accept me in his kingdom when I knew full well that all I wanted to do was go where they were digging up all those mithril ores. I hardly even know why I did all that. Then once I was there, I played my father at my aunt Galadriel until she couldn’t handle me anymore and left, and all of that was before I even met my husband. The work I put into ceasing contact with anyone who told me to get away from him I did while always thinking ‘I’ve lost everyone in my life more than once and frankly, I end up in a better place every time.’ Half the time I think I only get so exhausted speaking to people because I’m play-acting being a good person the entire time.”
Osse hummed, softly, a smile on his lips. He reached forward, and cupped Tyelpe’s chin. “It’s not exactly the same thing.”
“Well, I wouldn’t survive doing all that, and you do.”
Osse laughed. The power of the laugh belied the little body it emanated from. “You must be starving, walking around these empty halls!” he cackled. “Let’s get you to a room with air, so you can eat and drink.”
“Oh, fine, set the mood and then just drop it,” Tyelpe complained, but he did feel a little relieved. More time was more distance from his panic and more time to shove down his thoughts. “Lead on. Wine me as much as you like, I consent preemptively to whatever you do once I get into a state.”
“I think that is one of the things you do that is concerning,” Osse said, hypocritically, and he did lead on.
--
Original Notes:
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So tell all who await that our temper is great / Those who don’t heed the word cast their hand to the fate…
Men I’ve Known and Killed / The Longest Johns
We’re not doing Silm quotes now. Y’all know about Sauron. Next chapter is the one that's really about him. This one is setting the stage.
CHAPTER SEVEN: Of Sauron, Ruler (Part Two)
Fish, cold and glistening, its raw flesh slit thin; kelp and seaweed in bitter beds, mixed with something sour and dark; mussels and scallops, roe and urchin, crabs and cockles and oysters laid in glimmering rows on plates of ice like a jewel-box; Celebrimbor was fed exactly what he expected to be fed at Osse’s table, but it was all more delicious than it had any right to be, suffused with the brine of the deep. The wine was necessarily from the land above, but it was also delicious, white as bone, dry as death. Tyelpe was solidly drunk by the time banter had become flirting, and still drained his cup when Osse took his hand and encouraged him to stand.
They walked down a great barnacle-encrusted hall and Tyelpe thought that his favorite thing about being drunk was being able to think about things normally. Especially the sort of things he usually couldn’t think about without trouble, like his husband.
He had loved his husband. He had known how many people didn’t like him even at the time and he had scoffed at them. Most of them had no idea what it was like to be under someone’s thumb like Annatar had been under Morgoth’s, what it did to a person. Tyelpe could be his real self with Annatar, no matter how petty or nasty that self was in the moment. If he told Annatar about something that haunted him, some sharp-edged memory of splitting a throat open with his sword, of being humiliated by his father in public when it was all going to shit in Nargothrond, of leaning on everything he had been taught about isolating people and making sure he was left lordly and alone in Sirion, Annatar could simply respond with a wry ‘And I used to eat people like you, so, let’s keep it in perspective.’ Nothing alarmed him, nothing frightened him. Tyelpe could say any awful thing that had gotten into his head and it wouldn’t drive Annatar away. Nothing would.
He would never have left him if it hadn’t turned out he was Sauron, but he was, and wasn’t that just the pits. He had verbally and sincerely agreed to lie down under him again after he knew who he was and after he had drug him beaten and bleeding past enemy lines, and only regretted it when he fully realized what an awful person that made him, and that any thought that he was trying to help him or save him was now a lie, because what was actually going to happen was that he was going to agree himself into becoming Sauron’s lieutenant, and soon. In killing himself he had chosen saving himself over love, and nothing made that feel good, not even it being objectively the right choice and a good thing to do.
You never think it’s going to be the last time you lie down with the man you love. Tyelpe could still remember the feeling of his hands, his tongue, his hair brushing his shoulder as it fell from his braids; he could hear his voice sultry, overwhelmed, genuine. He could remember the incomparable feeling, headier and harder to banish than even lust, that someone who had been through so much hurt really trusted him.
He felt briefly but fiercely grateful, as he crossed the threshold into a room of soft coral that could endure as much destruction as the two of them rolling around on top of them could cause, and as Osse’s warm fingers pressed onto both of his shoulders, that he did not love him. He had never been gifted such intensity and passion before without the towering expectation of love in return, and he could not make that return now. He loved one man. He had been married to Annatar, and damn if Annatar had not been married to him. In drunken pleasure he was certain that he would not love again and not just content but happy with the fact. He could not explain now, and would not understand again once he was long gone from this room, why the not-love he shared with Osse was so poignant, soothing, and correct, why its absence of tenderness and callous lack of responsibility to each other could not have been a better salve to him, except that it was everything that had been wrenched from him, over and over, with the stunned protestation that he was better than that.
Tyelpe leaned in, and Osse turned to kiss him. Wearing the skin of a Teleri as he was, he felt uncannily almost-elven, just a little too cool, just a little too rough, his texture sometimes shifting as he pressed in close. This tongue came to Tyelpe’s teeth, and behind, subtly and slyly changing shape as he decided to press further, explore further into Tyelpe’s mouth. (He figured that Osse must keep that gentle swelling more subtle still with partners who didn’t enjoy it.) Tyelpe heard himself groan, the sound half-stuck around the muscle in his mouth.
Osse’s palms slid down his arms, and clutched at his back. Where he moved Tyelpe’s skin was disturbed, the nerves underneath knowing that the touch and the power behind it did not match up. That tingling did not ignite him yet; it drifted, on the river of wine, seeping warmth into him gently, slowly. He reached up to grab at the base of Osse’s skull, false, solid, tangible, curved just right, but the skin over it was too malleable, letting him press into him just a little too far. He rubbed his thumb on the curve and thought pleasant, foolish, drunken thoughts about suddenly clenching hard and snapping it.
It wouldn’t hurt him.
Osse laughed in his throat as Tyelpe’s groaned. He held fast against Tyelpe’s weight as he pushed heedlessly onto him. The false body was small, but he was playing when he let Tyelpe’s hands push him backward.
Osse liked to let him do things. He was a dominator, and there was no way to mistake that. But like a hunter with the grace to let prey that wasn’t worth their skill run free unscathed, or the thief that knew to wait all night at the crossroads unmoving for the best mark, Osse knew that waiting for the right moment to strike was what mattered, and that the right moment never came fast. Tyelpe knew Osse’s tricks intimately and in advance; it took some work to scare him. Atmosphere, intent, and patience. Tyelpe played as well, and not poorly, kept his will iron-hard and stayed removed and cold when necessary. The more he made Osse work, the deeper he delved into his bag of tricks to unearth the good stuff, the things he could have only learned from the Master Himself.
But you yielded for Him, you bent over for Him; you must have, Tyelpe thought, not knowing if Osse plucked the teasing thought from him or not. Osse let Tyelpe lower him onto the coral bed, and climb onto him. Even while pretending to be in charge, Tyelpe’s lower body folded onto him in a way that was receiving, open, subconsciously. “Take that off,” he said out loud.
One of Osse’s hands touched the sleeve of his tunic. Tyelpe said, “Not that.”
Osse paused. His eyes cycled through a few changes of state, gleaming silver, green, black, white as realities wavered over them. Always a heavyweight, curiosity won. “What’s wrong with it?” he asked. “Too?...”
Tyelpe filled in the blank with “Normal. You look like you’re trying to blend in. You’re not a master of disguise, but you practically look mortal.”
“Your standards for disguise are too high,” Osse reminded him, completely correct. “What do you want, then?”
Visions followed each other in Tyelpe’s mind. Men, monsters. Annatar’s lie had been that he was a dragon. He needed to have been something that knew Sauron well to excuse how much he knew about his fortresses and his war effort; he had to be something powerful to explain his abilities, but he couldn’t have been something Tyelpe or his kin had once fought. He had claimed to be an escaped dragon and even shown Tyelpe his ‘true’ form, massive, black, shimmering like obsidian, forge-hot, and iron-scarlet and thick. “Oh, surprise me,” he said, voice airy, not convincingly casual.
Osse kept one laugh in his throat, and then let two out in barks. “Surprise me,” he cackled, and then burst open like the bloated corpse of a whale.
For a moment he was a thick, ink-black nightmare, wrapped around Tyelpe’s thighs, clawing in his hair, pressed thick and black to his ears, his eyes.
He snapped back into place beneath him, now like a man, burly-chested, hairy, heavy between his legs. “Surprise me,” he laughed. “Surprised enough?”
“TURN BACK,” Tyelpe snapped, immediate, unthinking, dropped from casually aroused to so aggressively determined to have him he was going to act terribly if he couldn’t.
“Ah — turn — ”
“BACK. RIGHT NOW. THAT. AGAIN,” he demanded, sitting open over his hips, quivering, digging his frozen, clutching fingers into nothing.
“The — ”
“WHAT IS NOT CLEAR,” Tyelpe enunciated, sounding so much like his father that he was able to dedicate just a little of his brain to being glad that Osse did not know that.
Osse was silent, sprawled under him, forced to use those eyes for their intended purpose of understanding what was in front of him. “You incredible slut,” he said to him.
Tyelpe whined.
“I want you to know that I last used that form to fight my own kind.”
“Oh fuck,” Tyelpe said, more hot than wine could cool. “Oh, yes.”
“In fact, that is its only purpose. I can’t imagine how I could use — eh, you know I’m lying.”
Tyelpe made a half-noise of frustration that was cut off abruptly when something grabbed both his legs and clenched on. Something was tough, muscular, like arms, but indistinct in form; it shifted too fast for his eyes to decide exactly what they were looking at.
Osse billowed, and expanded, like a snapped, fallen sail twisting and unfolding in the waves. He did not suddenly burst into monstrous form like the last time. Strange, twisting, cephalopod protrusions poured out of unpredictable places, slick and wet. His face did not malform but developed an uncanny intensity, too bright, too large, its proportions unfixed.
Tyelpe was fond of snakes, unbothered by wolves, and left spiders to their business in his home (as he likes flies less). It was not often when seeing something made his body recoil, bypassing logic. Osse’s face made his stomach knot and pull on itself, and when a searching, handless limb found and clung to his back, above his hip, he gasped in his throat.
He grit his teeth, because as much as he felt like his skin was suddenly crawling on his bones, he was not going to let Osse think he couldn’t handle this. A form meant to fight ainur—a visage that, like eye-spots on bird’s wings, had evolved to look that way because that is what its enemies were afraid of. He was not losing the opportunity to see that. Osse, the monster, was one of the last echoes left of that which made Valar afraid.
Still, he gasped and wriggled when he felt more tentacles—limbs—protrusions grab at his arms, some black as ink, some pale as corpses, or with their colors oscillating like the mimic octopus. Something awful was happening in Osse’s eyes. He did not pull back as Tyelpe squirmed at his touch, surely because his cock kept jumping between his legs. He could remember Annatar’s body unfurling into coils and scales, and the heat of forge-fire pouring out of his unnaturally widening maw.
Though tentacles sprang from unpredictable places, there was still a pattern in the transformation, a practical, efficient logic to the body that began to pulse and bulge out of Osse’s human skin. It was as designed for battle as a war-ship or a spear, lean, practical, long and tapered, with the coiling limbs bunched in practical places, hidden beneath fins and protrusions that could cover them up if need be. The face did not dissolve into eyeless, abyssal visage but suddenly split into two, and three, and repeated along the length of his underbelly; not human-like anymore, but staring all the same.
The slow transformation, unlike the rapid one, was terrible. It was like watching the hands of the re-shaper stretch and twist him. Tangled limbs gripped him with firm, relentless suckers, some barbed like a vampire squid, which threatened his skin but did not pierce it. The sight and the rapid multiplication of clutching arms on his thighs, his arms, his back, and soon, creeping up his stomach from between his thighs, swiftly became surreal, like he was having a nightmare.
One of those strange nightmares, which was terrifying but dimly, waiting and planting seeds to disturb not the slumbering but the waking mind. He was still drunk; he felt now like he had been bled, too, and was taking in everything he saw with dizzy, unresisting acceptance. He multiplies and multiples again, Tyelpe thought, as black arms split into red arms, tenfold, bloody and thin and wavering in the water, as eyes widened and multiplied, and took on colors he could quite name, like a truly furious storm over the sea.
It does look like a dragon, he realized. The resemblance is not perfect, but not accidental either. Both forms are meant to resemble something else. The outside was still night-black but as it divided it became white and red in its inside layers, in veiny stripes, in great blood swatches, resembling as much a cut fish wriggling on the butcher’s block as it resembled writing worms exposed to light or as it resembled the exposed underbelly of a pale man aroused.
An arm wound around his waist and squeezed. Tyelpe gasped, “Speak to me,” because he suddenly found himself afraid of what had happened to the mind inside of it all.
“You’re doing so well, beautiful,” came the sweet, unkind voice of the same spirit he had been talking to all along.
Osse’s body was a reflection; what was here now was as much Osse as a spray of water, as a robe-shrouded elf.
Tyelpe closed his eyes, not to block it out, but because he was suddenly so dizzy. His breath rasped. A tentacle wrapped firmly around his waist, looped like the coils of a snake. As it moved it pressed into his muscles, his ribs, one at a time, pushing and constricting his skin. When some strange protrusion of Osse’s body tightened around his thighs, testing, he groaned behind his teeth. Osse was refusing to touch his sex, or his hole, sliding around them to reach his stomach or his black, crawling up his body, deliberately without providing relief.
He opened his eyes again and watched that slow creep up his skin, black and white flesh crawling higher, less deliberately lascivious and more like he was sinking into the slowly expanding maw of a snake. In it was a prick of comforting familiarity; Osse loved to tease, even to the point of willful denial, until the moment he struck.
Tyelpe’s open legs were now on either side of a strong, sinewy, massive body, as close to reptile as it was cetacean or cephalopod. There was not a perfect comparison to anything, really. Half the natural predators of marred Arda could claim a convincing kinship to it. There was, in the rich banding, the patterns that shrunk to pinstripes or expanded to sails, just a hint of the hypnotically flamboyant, like lionfish, like cobras. Tyelpe’s eyes swam as he looked at it.
“You cannot possibly like what you see,” Osse laughed, crawling closer to his exposed breasts.
“No,” Tyelpe admitted immediately. It was obviously beautiful, but even in the curve of its striations it compelled him to flee, not to mention the—horrible—eyes. “But—”
His eyes squeezed shut and he hissed when something that had odd, wispy protrusions brushed right past his chest, where he had anticipated the touch, and clutched blindly to his neck instead, crawling as if searching. “Oh yes, yes, yes—”
“But you like what you feel? You’re so sweet. Always looking past the visage into the heart.”
Tyelpe opened his eyes to look at the thing beneath him again, its slippery muscles flexing as it explored him, and hardened. The hideousness was so much that he twitched every time he looked at it, so instinctively repulsed that his heart raced. He thought of the urge to pick up shining molten metal, or to slip a finger on the edge of a sword, and other such intense shortcuts to bodily shock. Pure-hearted, he thought, his throat failing him as Osse’s limb enclosed it, but did not squeeze. He tilted up his chin and clarified, like a princess.
Osse laughed. The strange limb crawled under his chin, and back. “Ah, perhaps you can break my curse. Is that what you want to hear?”
“No,” Tyelpe replied, immediate, definite.
“That’s right. No, you don’t,” he laughed, and clenched Tyelpe’s cock.
Tyelpe made an awful noise, rough, tumbling out of his throat, and buckled forward—as much as the hundred grips on his body would allow. The wet, rolling squeeze on his cock was not quite like anything he had felt before, dead-center between distressing and glorious. The pressure was not quite right, not quite firm, and within seconds he was thrusting into it, confused and chasing. He heard Osse laughing at him and bit his lip.
“Oh, was that bothering you, little princeling?” Osse teased. “Some terrible creature must have done that to you. Does that feel better?”
“Oh, yes,” gasped Tyelpe, and swallowed. He preferred to drag things out—he felt like he had accomplished something when he delayed his own pleasure, held out and pushed his partner to go harder—but the strange wet grasp on his cock was so weird that he couldn’t help his hedonistic hyperfocus on it. He struggled for decorum and slipped with every single slither and twist on the length. What were they to Osse—sensitive fingertips, soft raw sex organs, or the firmness of the arm? His satisfaction built as fast as a fire climbing up dry pine, from his thighs to his stomach to his throat, and he couldn’t even tell Osse to hold on, to not finish him so fast. “Yes,” he gasped, “oh—“
“Look at me.”
Tyelpe flinched and twitched when he looked at the writhing, undulating thing beneath him. His own swollen cock appeared and disappeared under the grasp of the slick black tentacles. He was still being firmly held down on top of it, its twisted flesh curled so thickly around his legs and waist he could barely see himself.
He opened his mouth and could hear himself panting, strange and wavering underwater. Osse rumbled, “Some wicked creature made you feel this way, you poor, pure-hearted thing; made you want to touch—“
Tyelpe tilted his neck up, choked through the squeezing limb, and thrust forward into Osse’s grip, and again. His back and thighs squeezed tight as his cock spasmed in Osse’s grip. “FUCK—“
His voice stopped abruptly. A stab of pleasure gripped him again. White seed, in thin lines, suddenly appeared in the sticky gaps between gripping tentacles. He panted harshly and thrust one more time. The arms squeezed him tight, wringing with every spasm. Tyelpe was stuck in place, his orgasm being almost drunk into the swelling, bubbling creature underneath him.
“Oh, I wasn’t sure you’d like that,” came the voice of Osse from within the monster, amused, still thick with lust.
Tyelpe cleared his sticking throat. He could taste himself in the water, as well as whatever slick it was that the monster exuded. “I like it when you get—a little—coercive,” he grumbled after some hesitation. (He hadn’t used the ‘r’ word much yet and wasn’t sure this was the situation to start saying it.) “I don’t think I’m some innocent princeling. Don’t want to be either. Ah, fuck,” he grumbled, as another squeeze wrung a darkly delicious aftershock out of him.
Osse did not show any indication that he was changing his form again. The grasping limbs around his body loosened, but enough to slither and squeeze, rub over Tyelpe’s now-sensitive skin. That included a slowly, slyly climbing tentacle that slipped between his legs and behind his sex, drawing shivers out of the untouched skin.
“Oh, you are not done,” Tyelpe said, wavering.
“Neither are you, if I can get you fast enough,” Osse laughed. He was right. Tyelpe could get going again if he was only given half a minute of downtime between starting and stopping. (He was burdened with the knowledge that that was a family trait, but at least he knew it wasn’t just him.) It pressed to his hole, slick and warm, like a blood-soaked hand, and Tyelpe wriggled.
His eyes had now quite cleared of his lust and his heartbeat had not fully slowed to normal, but already his vision of the sea monster was shifting. That muscular, quivering flesh, lined with blood, banded with black, the thousand subdivided arms made his stomach tighten with anxiety. Those awful eyes, in rows, had expanded, and the thickness of their undivided attention on him made him flinch even as its flesh penetrated the surface of his hole. He tried, instinctively, to twist away, and just as instinctively the monster pulled him back down—then hesitated.
A pair of thick tentacles curled around his back, like arms. Osse held still, aside from the water shifting his fleshy tresses, and he listened, but Tyelpe clenched his teeth and refused to say anything.
Osse held him fast as the swelling flesh underneath him stretched, and hardened. It was not inside him yet, but neither was it outside him, half-penetrating, thick and dull. Tyelpe closed his eyes and focused on the slick, warm feeling, so close to the pangs of pleasure still throbbing dully in his cock. He flexed his thighs, pushing against the bonds that held him. The push over his hole repeated, slowly. Just as the monster had said, the heat began to build around his entrance, and seeped inside.
“There you go. Does that feel good, little princeling?”
“Are we still doing that?” Tyelpe asked, eyes still shut and voice light.
“Ah, should I switch to something else?”
“Well—maybe—hm. You could emphasize the scary monster instead of the innocent prince. That’s what’s special about the situation and all.”
“Then keep your eyes open,” he laughed. “Here I am. The self-same ship-breaker who has dragged thousands down, never to rise again. The island-sinker, the coast-crusher whose rage toppled castles on the coast, the hand that dragged all of Numenor down. You now look upon the skin not worn since I sought to teach the Lords of the Valar fear.”
Tyelpe was about to gasp, and all the air instead rushed out of him in a screech as the Terror suddenly penetrated him. His thighs jolted so hard that he wrenched the tentacles that bound him.
The—phallus that Osse had made was so slick with some strange oil that he could get away with it, and Tyelpe’s pleasure-weakened flesh was yielding. Still, the sudden penetration sent a stab of pain and discomfort through his spine, and he squirmed. It was thick at the base but keenly tapered, solid, roughly textured, clearly not meant to writhe and wriggle like much of the rest of his body. He could tell it wasn’t all the way inside of him, either. It had clearly been made far too large to actually fit.
His twitches away were completely arrested by the bonds around him. It slid halfway back out, and he felt himself rapidly adjusting to fit it. Not all of it—he couldn’t see it past the inky darkness holding him but even so he could tell there was no way—but to ensure that what it found when it plunged in again was a body ready to accept it.
It came, and moved him. It wasn’t pleasurable yet, but already the fading twinges from his orgasm were being aroused again by the new stimulation. He closed his eyes and kept them shut to focus on the feeling of shifting around to take it in right, fixing himself so that it would feel good, given time and repetition.
“Did you make that just for— me,” he asked shakily, interrupted by it thrusting in far enough to strike a spark against the fire-starter deep inside him.
“I certainly didn’t need one on this form before. Just for your mind’s eye, it does not look like something that should go in an elf.”
“H—neither do swords, and I’m a known appreciator—”
“Right there?” Osse teased, as Tyelpe’s speech suddenly cut off.
“You already know where—”
“I’m trying to make sure your delicate little elven body can take it,” said he, with a smooth self-effacement that was charming with his usual guises but could not sand the edges of this one. It now rang hollow with mockery; the monster revealed, repeating his little lies from before, just to point out their falseness. The more Osse remained exactly who he had been before, the more the way he was now superimposed itself on those other faces.
“It’s rare I’m called delicate anymore—” Tyelpe grumbled through slow thrusts. Slow, but enveloping, dragging, each time pulling him down onto as much as he could fit, and yet more. The heat inside him was kindled, but still low, slow to catch after being so recently extinguished. Osse still had his sex in coiled grasp, but was too canny to overdo its stimulation.
“Any body is delicate if you have a big enough weapon.”
A thrill of lust shot through Tyelpe’s stomach at that boldly disgusting line. Freaky serpentine body and mass destruction nothing, it was base, petty, profane things like that which sent other ainur scattering away from Osse, afraid to claim him and even more afraid to relate to him. They seemed as a whole certain that they couldn’t be so mundane. What happened if they were? Did the chains holding up the world to the divine snap, send it plummeting downward? Or, like the now-immolated line of Noldorin royalty, did they simply stop being kings? “Yes. Keep going.”
“Pretty little thing! Do you not care that that weapon is attached to a monster, as long as it pleasures you?”
“Oh, I care that it’s attached to a monster,” Tyelpe groaned, arching his back. “Oh—harder—”
Osse went slower, because he was a cunt. The sticking drag of his phallus over Tyelpe’s awakened sex made him squirm on it. “Of course you like that better. You can’t even be excited by your own any more, can you? You want this.”
“Oh, yes. Fuck—I’m completely broken, I can’t even—” he whined at the cock crested him and stuck inside him, tiny movements agitating but not fulfilling his lust. “Move—move—can’t even look at my own kind— move—”
“Demanding! Sauron’s slut was certainly remade in his fashion.”
Tyelpe barked out a “fuck” that came from his chest and tried to move himself on Osse’s phallus, but he was held too fast. He couldn’t even twitch. He managed to briefly wonder if Osse was a fucking liar when he claimed resolutely that he and Sauron had never been personally involved, perfectly chaste with each other while fucking the same Master.
“For all that, you can’t follow a simple command.”
Tyelpe made a questioning noise, broken through.
“Look at me.”
He struggled. He felt so full that he was not sure he could stand sight. His ears could see the sick, wet rustling of the creature without his eyes, and he could practically taste his sticky, slimy flesh in the water. Still he did as commanded and slowly opened his eyes.
Something was looking back at him. Those terrible eyes, which ran down the inside of his body, had all been eye-spots, fake. He knew that now because he was looking at a set which did see, more terrible than all the others, gazing back at him. He knew immediately and with the certainty of dreaming that those were the eyes of the Black Enemy, the King of all the world, embedded inside Osse, and they were fully open, watching him.
The monster moved within him, pulling back and then striking. Tyelpe rattled, a noise belonging to the precious brief moment between terror and death. With the voice that had always been His, He spoke: “That’s better. Isn’t that better, pretty one?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Do you want it harder?”
“Yes. Yes,” he said, entranced, feeling a tentacle tease his lower lip, feeling the heat of his body flare. Those eyes were tunnels, black and then white and then black, not rings but passageways, deeper than the ocean. The call to the cliffside he had always felt had been leading him to this cliffside, and temptations to this temptation. Finding it came with unmixed relief.
He thrust into Tyelpe’s body, which bent like hot, soft iron. Tyelpe opened his mouth, but did not make a sound; He crept inside. “I know that’s what you want. Beautiful—” He said, and thrust in hard enough that His voice broke off. Tyelpe breathed raggedly, bubbles around the tentacle slipping into his mouth. “You were remade for me, weren’t you?”
Tyelpe moaned. The phallus slid into him, out of him, each movement raw pleasure. Because Osse had fixed his body for the ocean he didn’t need to breathe, so he did not even try. He said, “Fit to take Me. Beautiful. I hope that idiot died lusting after you, and kicking himself for losing you, or else he wasn’t appreciating his work.”
Tyelpe could not respond. He was on the monster like a glove on a hand. It felt good and it felt like he was dying. The relentless heartbeat strokes had him oven-hot, close to a second orgasm.
“Just made to take this—beautiful—depraved and stunning—like you—”
Suddenly, Osse made a noise, sharp, rattling, uncanny; vulnerable. His thrusting stuttered, halted and then became jerky, but did not stop. Tyelpe managed to look down; those eyes were gone, covered again by eye-spots, falseness. The beast, reddened, wriggled.
He could not say a question, but the form of a question, inside his mind, reverberated inside the water. Almost as if shocked, almost as if he had managed to be surprised out of fully thinking through his word, Osse said, “Sauron was not making a trap for ‘some’ maia, he was making a trap for me.”
Pleasure burned through Tyelpe’s body. A weak, unthinking thrust made his stomach clench.
“And I fell for it so hard that if he had been waiting behind you, I would be dazed and dragged behind Enemy lines by now. You—”
Tyelpe spasmed with something that could not quite escape his mouth as a laugh. The limb which had been questing inside of it fell out.
“Did you know?” asked Osse, looming close. The limbs around Tyelpe’s body both loosened at tightened, as if arms were pulling away but possessive fingers were gripping in.
Tyelpe knew only one thing at the moment, which was sheer, delirious relief. With the purchase to move he fixed himself on Osse’s cock, rolling his hips, tilting his head back. Osse groaned in response; caught by pleasure, so close to physical orgasm, the maia was less than himself. He too was briefly lost for words as Tyelpe squeezed himself around his swollen phallus.
He gripped Tyelpe fast, and in a single, surreal, dream-like moment, the monster was gone, and a man as strong as steel was wrapped around him, arms clutching him with the powerlessness of envy and desire. He fucked him roughly, lovingly, and called him beautiful and said that Tyelpe was not going anywhere, was never getting away from him now, and on his cock and his words both Tyelpe died, suddenly, brilliantly, with echoing hammer-blows of pleasure inside of his body, explosive and then softer, and softer yet.
He closed his eyes and panted. There was a rough hand in his hair. There was wet, thick seed between his legs. He was conscious of being laid down onto a soft animal, coral, bound to this place and incapable of moving, and of words being spoken into his hair, woven around its strands.
He felt with absolute ecstasy the joy that had been the fully boundless and anarchic relationship of the Enemy and his husband, echoing between himself and Osse like an age-old aftershock. It was still inside him, repeating itself, suffused with the joy of its true nature. He understood with divine clarity how it was worth it, and why it was that the very world should move aside for their love, be ripped up and crushed and remade, re-fit as their palace, bent to their pleasure.
That feeling felt very good, until it didn’t. Then it felt very bad. Osse felt his mood dropping like a stone, and clutched him. Despite everything, Tyelpe curled into it.
Osse swore, despondent, disappointed, and quite like an upset elf when the first tear leaked out of Tyelpe’s eye and disappeared into the ocean. Upon feeling it himself, Tyelpe suddenly sat up, said “No, damn it,” and roughly covered his eyes.
“I shouldn’t have done that,” Osse sighed, no fire, nearly paternal. “I knew I was pushing too far.”
“No, that is not it,” Tyelpe complained, holding his sudden tears back with the heels of his hands.
“I know what does and doesn’t go too far. ‘Face and grasp it’, fine advice for someone with impulse control — ”
“It is not you.”
“What is it, then?”
“Just about everything except you.”
“That sounds — improbable, given — ”
“This is not happening because of you. Stop it,” he said to himself, fighting against the tightness of his throat, the sudden sensation of sinking in his stomach which fought against the pangs of pleasure still holding, but weakening, in his gut.
“Why is it happening?”
Tyelpe struggled, and struggled some more, and said, “Elrond thinks I’m Sauron,” in a voice he frankly hated.
“What?”
“No he doesn’t,” Tyelpe corrected himself. “No, he doesn’t. He doesn’t think that. He thinks I resemble Sauron so much that someone is going to think I am Sauron eventually. Everyone is watching me and waiting for a mistake. Someone is going to realize I’m—think that I’m Sauron and act accordingly. Eventually. Aule already thinks so.”
“Aule??” asked Osse.
“The way he looked at me. The way—”
“When did he—when did this happen?”
“Of course I can’t have a moment’s peace, of course I have some—it’s been ages but there’s no getting away from being from a family that’s so special even Valar like them, one of their shining fucking faces everywhere I try to go, perfect and pure and fixed on me like an arrow. I could tell he saw Sauron in me, and I don’t even know if he’s wrong. Now I just have to wait for the hammer to come down, and what am I supposed to do?”
“That will not — ”
“How am I supposed to stop him? Suddenly be good? Suddenly be—someone—beneath his gaze? Every time I try to be good and unimportant and humble and kind I can keep it up for maybe fifteen minutes maximum because then I want something. I want to eat the world. I do not want to be good. It’s not even about trying to be good, I’m so immediately and impulsively contrary to it that I honestly think I was made wrong. It is not about remaking; there are so many people in this world and the one chosen by Sauron to become his personal whore is the person who was logically chosen for that. King Thingol started snapping like a dog when he saw me, and everyone knows he’s right, but you actually are all going to try to nice someone out of being evil again when you know you should just put me back. You have learned better at this point and you know where this is going so why do you not just solve the problem and put me back?”
Osse kissed the crown of his head. He smoothed back his hair.
“You’re comforting me,” Tyelpe noticed bleakly.
“I’m sorry.”
“I had a machine-like system in place to assure that did not happen.”
“You’d prefer I was in monstrous aspect all of the time,” Osse whispered over his head, not bitter. “But I would not prefer that.”
Tyelpe swore softly and let his head tip forward, into one of his hands. He sat, numbly, for a minute, as a few tears leaked out of his eyes, unheeded. Osse stayed behind him, drifting; sometimes arms, sometimes waves, always enfolding him. Tyelpe was still not sure he wanted him there, but he thought he would have the kind of breakdown that necessitated years of recovery if he left.
Some minutes passed like that, bent over.
He was oddly reminded of Gil. He had never been in love with Gil, but he would struggle to put his feelings for him in simple words. Gil would have dropped everything to help Tyelpe, at any time, if he had only asked for it. Tyelpe had thought that he would do the same for him, until he disappointed himself on that account. He trusted Gil, which took a long time to get used to. Elrond had tried to keep convincing Tyelpe to leave Annatar even after it was far too late, but Tyelpe had made sure Gil couldn’t contact him again long before then. If there was anyone in the world that he wanted to still respect him, it was Gil. Even if it meant hiding the truth from him.
“Can you… hide it,” he said, staring forward, one eye open through his split fingers.
“Hide it?”
“My ring.”
“Your…”
“I mean the wedding-ring,” he interrupted, “the black one. In my fea. Can you disguise it, or make it hard to see?”
Osse thought, for a while. The coral and sea-plants around them shifted, and the phosphorescence along the walls lit some and hid others as they drifted. “It will never be hard for an ainu to see. It is quite distinct. But for most elven senses…”
“That’s a start.”
“Maybe even… ah, no. An even better idea,” he mused. The body behind Tyelpe shifted; instead of a man, he was now in the very loose embrace of a great sea-snake. But it was, undeniably, not a sea-monster. It was a snake, smooth, banded, unusually large, but as animal as one of the pythons in Ingo’s always-growing collection. It had a superficial resemblance to the greater creature, as a stuffed bear resembles an ice-bear. “I hadn’t thought about doing things this way, but it may be an idea.”
“What is it?” Tyelpe uncovered his eyes. He figured they were still a little reddened, which was embarrassing, but the tears of course were already dissolved into the sea.
“What you visualize as an object stuck in your fea looks very different to us. It’s not gathered in one place, but all over you. I see why you visualize a ring-shape, though; it has a certain circulation. ‘Covering’ it would require covering all of you. ‘Disguising’ it would be like slathering plaster on rot. I would have to renew it constantly, and with even a little crack it would look more suspicious, not less, to ainur eyes. Recall that clever disguise will seem suspect in this case.”
“It will.”
Osse swam around him, deftly avoiding touching him, except along the small of his back, where his arm had rested. Perhaps because he had just been so upset, Tyelpe found himself more charmed than he thought he should, and smiled at the expanding, silky frills as they passed him by. “Nor will I try to match subtlety to subtlety, knowing whose work it is that I am seeking to improve. I think, instead, I will do something I was always a better hand at, and which he found cheap, stupid, and rather beneath me.”
“And what’s that?”
Without a missed moment, Osse shifted into a smiling man again, and had Tyelpe’s hand in his own. He kissed it, and winked. “Distraction.”
“Oh, no.”
“I’m serious.”
“You mean ‘destruction.’”
“Ha. I don’t.” Osse shifted again from a man to a porpoise, spinning, turning around as he swam. “Cheap tricks! Something to catch the eye! Something that sparkles, something that shines! You might notice a significant difference if it just isn’t the thing that people see first.”
“Huh,” Tyelpe said, trying not to be won so easily, and failing. “You mean that you’ll do something so flashy that it draws the eye away. But you have to be proposing altering my fea yourself.”
“Not at all. I said I wouldn’t, and I won’t. I am proposing something more like adorning it. I’m serious: something shiny. Eye-catching. They will see Sauron’s rot underneath, but not first, and perhaps not as clearly, if they are dazzled enough.”
“What, costume jewelry? A mess of sequins?”
Osse stopped behind him, now with gentle hands on his shoulders. “No,” he smiled; “to your kin, for the few who have the eyes to see it, it will be an obscuring light. To mine—well, what’s most important is that they will immediately ‘sense’ me when they see you. If you consent to that. How it will look—
“...Yes?”
“To be less abstract, it’ll look like I’ve put a big, gaudy, sparkling collar on you,” said Osse, not quite apologetically.
“...Will it,” Tyelpe hesitated, “Be—I suppose—tacky?”
“Incredibly.”
“The sort of thing you look at, and think, ‘Oh, Stars, they’re so gross. Why would anyone go out wearing that.’”
“I think that will be how it comes off.”
“Like you locked a collar on me and I went out like that.”
“With my name on it. In little diamonds.”
“You’re so smart. You’re brilliant. Put it on.”
Osse settled in behind him. Tyelpe could not see, but did feel him shifting again; he could not see anything of him at all, now, so he supposed that Osse had just dissolved his body entirely, and was now going without. “You should not feel this at all,” he said, and began.
Because of that, Tyelpe was not sure if the odd, under-skin tingling he started to feel was only anxiety or if some shadowed system inside him was trying to understand Osse’s motions in his fea in the only way it could. He kept waiting for pain, so keenly that he now could not ignore the feeling of the heavy, blackened mark in his fea, but though he felt its weight he did not feel anything else. “What are you doing?” he asked anxiously.
“What am I… hm,” Osse grumbled. The voice came not from any direction but placed directly in his mind. It was technically no different from regular osanwe, but Tyelpe still shifted uncomfortably.
Osse sounded less reluctant to say and more uncertain how to phrase it. “I have to just take on faith all of the things you say about things being ‘in’ fea or fea having ‘parts’ that can be manipulated,” Tyelpe pressed. “I can’t confirm or try to replicate what you’ve done, but I’d at least like to know what it all is.”
“No, you should know a little more about it at this point. I haven’t been trying to be coy about it, it’s just that words don’t wrap around the subject well. To start, separating an elven being into ‘hroa’ and ‘fea’ is a conceptual pleasantry. There is no physical place in the elven body that is meaningfully separate from its spirit. With the experiences you have had, you have to have been approaching that conclusion already.”
“I have been. It seemed a little… bold? I wasn’t sure how to square that with the experience of being just a fea in Mandos either.”
“Were you all of yourself?”
“Well. I wasn’t.”
“You noticed that most of your emotions were gone, and the ones you had were blunted terribly. Those things depend on blood and nerves to have their literal feeling. Even those among my own, those who avoid embodiment are less likely to understand or entertain an emotional argument.
“I’m getting away from the point. The central truth here is that elven fea and hroa are tightly attached things, and in some points of the being virtually indistinct. When separated, the parts are much less than the sum. For that reason, working with fear is fleshier and nervier than many would like to handle, or can handle.”
“Having seen Elu Thingol, I think I, unfortunately, agree.”
Osse laughed, short and sharp. “That’s the finest example we have. With the way some talk about it you would think he would be more spiritual and less physical than other elves, but really, the spirit and body are better grown into each other. It’s the extra connections that imbue the body with more spirit-like abilities. I know this sounds counterintuitive, considering that you are talking to a spirit-based being with a completely optional body, but for the moment I ask you to just accept that our natures are different enough to explain the discrepancy.”
“That is evident,” said Tyelpe, who over years had also come to terms with the fact that there was a good reason why they used completely different words for elven fea and ainur eala. They were so fundamentally different that the similarities were like between the gingko and the pine; completely superficial.
He would have to ask Osse more about what, then, it meant that his eala was marred. If there was no comparison in the substance, there might be little comparison in the wound. For now, he said, “So, when Varda said that my disfigurement couldn’t be touched, it was literally to do with the physicality of touching it.”
“Yes and no. The fact that it is so ingrown means that it will be uniquely dangerous to get it out of you through normal means. Sorry in advance for saying this, but it is not dissimilar to the work he did with orcs, and when we try to undo that, their bodies dissolve.”
“Dissolve.”
“Like a dandelion puff. His work is thorough, and malicious; one mistake can have drastic consequences for the tightly connected hroa.”
“I told—I literally told you that. I was the one who told you that.”
“You did. But as it is now, I think your ‘ring’ could be… untangled somewhat from your hroa, especially in certain places, even without a complete removal. The damned thing about elven fea is how symbolic you all are; it can be simultaneously a physical malady, a spiritual attachment, or, spontaneously, an object which can be picked up and moved around. In the right head-space you might make an idiot out of all of us by just picking it up and setting it down elsewhere, which I could never do.”
Tyelpe suddenly understood exactly what he meant. If he concentrated, he could turn the curse—which normally curled all through him—into a heavy black stone. He did it all the time. There were times, even, that he thought he ‘touched’ it. But that never lasted—rather, he had never tried to maintain that sensation for a long time. It made him feel guilty, because he had to cradle it while he did it. “So…”
“What Varda meant about her personally not being able to do it is that its complex dual nature is treacherous for undivided ainur. An ainu who gets too absorbed in the physical can become trapped there. Melian and Melkor are both examples, but do not tell her I compared them. Your fea/hroa duality could peirce our unity.”
“It could drag you down into physicality.”
“That’s one concern. A marred ainu cannot be unmarred; Sauron must have been delighted to learn that a method for manipulating one elf could work for others, because you have no assurance of the same with ainur. Our eala were each made in individual fashion by the One, and they resemble each other very little. What works to change one would not work for any others, and the same for healing. So if the worst possible thing happened, that is, Sauron’s curse getting tangled into Varda as she attempted to remove it from you, we wouldn’t just be able to fix her up. It would become an unrecognizable form within her, fit to her, and none would have the knowledge to remove it. Varda would be worse for eternity and have a worse eternity, and none of the rest of us get out of what that means either.
“...But I…” said Osse, and did not finish his sentence. His hands re-materialized, on either side of Tyelpe’s face. When he tilted his head just slightly, one held his cheek.
Tyelpe could feel him behind him. He understood. But Osse was already marred, already facing that dark eternity with his chin up. He would grasp that unknown and unknowable danger with both hands and pull if Tyelpe only asked.
Neither of them had ever said why he would do such a thing, but why would they have to? He did not need Osse’s motivations explained to him. He could not fail to understand them. He would never let someone live like he did if it was in his power to stop it.
“Have you already finished?” Tyelpe asked.
“I told you you wouldn’t feel it.”
“I don’t.” It was uncanny, in fact. He tried, but he still didn't feel like he had been altered at all, not even the slightest cut in his skin. “That’s how this sort of thing goes if you are not actively trying to torture the subject, then?”
“Can you believe it? It’s there, now, but you really shouldn’t ever feel it. It’s… loose, I suppose I would say. Around everything. It might feel a little silky, I suppose?”
“You said it was collar-like. I was envisioning a collar.”
“You can envision whatever you like.”
“Fine. Well,” he said, and prickled on by a somewhat unreasonable anxiety, stood up off of the coral bed and turned around. No pain. He truly didn’t feel anything at all. Then, “You didn’t actually get around to explaining what you were doing to me.”
“I suppose I didn’t. I got lost on the way there.”
“But I have figured it out, I think.”
“Oh?”
“You didn’t do anything at all to me. You put some of your own eala around me, didn’t you?”
Osse smiled, first just a twitch, and then wide. “And that’s why you can’t feel it.”
“That has to be obscene.”
“I told you it would come off as tacky.”
“Does it hurt you?”
“Not with the amount I used.”
“Is it attached to me?”
“Loosely. Braided in, would be a better metaphor.”
“You’re mixing those metaphors something terrible.”
“I am a fallen and accursed spirit. Lower your expectations.”
Tyelpe laughed. “You are too sweet. You’re making me anxious that I have to stop being such an asshole about all of this.”
“You don’t.”
“No?”
“I feel very strongly that it is not your responsibility to be kind to me, or to be anything in particular. Well, of course there are things I won’t stand for, as you know I have my limits for what I can or cannot endure, but if you have to play-act to maintain a relationship with me, that won’t do.”
“Because you can’t stand false men.”
“Because there are things I have to do to maintain the person I am and the relationships I have, and one thing I cannot do is control.”
“And what if I prefer to play-act?”
“Then that is a different thing, and transparently what you do prefer, anyway.”
Tyelpe stood in front of Osse. He had an uneven visage, dissimilar to itself, not distinctly man or elf or something else, though it was a person. Tyelpe slowly became afraid that he was looking at Osse, which he was not sure he should be able to do. Nor was he sure he should be able to feel what he imagined was like a silky shawl around his shoulders, drifting in the water, which had been politely called a ‘collar’ so that he might feel more comfortable with it. Cold restriction, rather than a gentle kindness.
“Oh,” said Tyelpe, “do we have to have an actual conversation?”
Osse shimmered, the phosphorescence around him caught on his ripples. “I think you need to rest.”
“Oh, do I.”
“You’re exhausted,” Osse informed him, and come to think of it, he was. The alcohol and aftershocks were both draining out of him, and his body was becoming more aware that it had just been worked extensively. “I think you need to rest. Then, if you still want to, we will.”
“I—stars. Yes. I’m exhausted,” Tyelpe agreed, suddenly feeling every second of his evening at once.
“Come over here. Rest a while. I won’t go anywhere.”
Tyelpe hesitated. Then he took off his robe, now stained and tangled, and let it drift into the water. He unclipped all the jewelry from his body, and let it float away to where it would. He walked over to the bed of coral, faintly breathing in their tidepool of light at the bottom of the sea.
He climbed onto Osse, and kissed him. Then he settled down and in, Osse shifting to bear him as he laid.
Osse was right about yet another thing; he did need to rest. It took barely any time at all to drift off to sleep. But still, one more fear, rising above the others, tried to prick his heart to keep him awake. It was those terrible eyes. The eyes that, nonsensically, for no reason, and despite him never having actually seen them before, he had been convinced in the moment were the eyes of Morgoth.
You think such awful things, he thought to himself, uneasy. That fear like a current at his feet tried to pull at him; all the same, he fell asleep.
--
Original Notes:
--
Carry it up to the highest mountain / Take it down to the bottom of the sea
Hold it in my arms like a baby / Carry it a million miles from me
Watch it grow and learn all over / Everything I forgot and forgave
See it turn around and scare you / Maybe you don’t know it this way
Where can I hide this in my heart? Where can I hide from you?
Where can I hide this in my heart? Where can I hide from you?
Where Can I Hide From You / Perry and the Poor Boys
CHAPTER EIGHT: An Actual Conversation
“You first,” said Tyelpe.
They sat in a bubble of genuine air on a terrace of Osse’s undersea palace, looking over the dark world of the abyss. On the table between them were the trappings of breakfast. There was food and plates and cutlery for Tyelpe, and one cup for each of them, full of something that Tyelpe did not know and could not identify. It was black. Cephalopods and cetaceans wandered, slow, brushing the boundaries. Tiny sparks lit the darkness and meandered, undersea fireflies, pallid, thin, some round and bulbous, some long and winding, some small and mani-limbed. ‘The Ocean’, as Tyelpe had always thought of it, certainly resembled proud and booming-voiced Ulmo. But this ocean, black as night, deeper than any cavern, and so cold, and so slow, endless, serene, relaxed and comfortable and blissfully predatory, full of mindless creatures which took mindlessly into themselves—that Ocean looked across the table from him with a smile.
“Any time,” he said. “Then. First: do you expect to be doing this forever, or temporarily?”
“Forever,” Tyelpe responded, not waiting a second. “I’m not getting married to an elf, I’m not even attracted to them any more. Even if I find myself in a long-term arrangement with someone else, I’m not getting rid of you. It’s sheer stubbornness. I’m outdoing your exes.”
“That’s flattering, and worrying.”
“I feel like I have heard that incredibly specific compliment before. What are we drinking, by the way?”
“Is that your question?”
“No. Scratch that. Forget it completely. First question: Genuinely, am I an aggravation to you? Am I just a hanger-on, or like a child?”
“No. The difference in our abilities never stops being present, but don’t think that I enjoy that any less than you do. You’ll be judged differently for liking being less powerful than your partners than I will be for liking being more powerful than my partners, but I’m used to that. In reality, and despite what my fellow ainur might say, elves are not children or like children. I could do a fair bit of damage to you if I wanted, yes, and I have abilities that you don’t, but how does that make you less of a person than me in any way that matters? I have been completely honest this whole time about being just driven to distraction by you. Of course that is complicated by my long history with your ex, but you are also a damn distracting person all on your own.”
“Charmed.”
“Second: are you in love with your ex-husband?”
“Oh, you motherfucker. Choke on a dick.”
“Answer or leave.”
“The rules for this conversation that I set up myself,” Tyelpe grimly observed.
“Ha ha.”
Tyelpe took a drink of whatever it was, resting thickly at the bottom of a silver goblet. It didn’t taste of anything. In fact, it made his mouth a little numb. He swallowed, and said, “Yes. Of course I am. I thought that was embarrassingly obvious. It should be carved on my forehead. Of course I remember what he did to me. Of course I spent so much time hating him, and fiercely. Of course I fought against him once I knew who he was.
“When he ran off to make his ring, you know, I didn’t know why he had left or what had happened. My husband disappeared for years without a word. I was already mad as a cat by the time he first put it on and I felt what had happened. I was going to burn down the forges and salt the fields so he couldn’t have them. I was ready to tear it all up first so he wouldn’t have the chance to. But by that time—well. I had gone to just horrible lengths to make sure that no one would help me, aside from the followers I had left by then, mostly the ones who had been just as seduced by him. Even so, when I showed up at Gil’s doorstep to give him one of the rings…”
Tyelpe broke off for a second to laugh, and had to continue laughing through his next few sentences. “I still had to break myself out of his castle to leave again! He was frantic. I had honestly gone in expecting him to throw me right back out. I didn’t even think he’d accept the ring from me, I just knew he was the best choice, so I had to try. But when he saw me—I mean, he was beside himself. He put me in his own room and started raising an army.
“I never have asked him what he did after he realized I had run off again, I still don’t have the nerve. It seems pointless. Am I supposed to ask him about every single time I hurt him? I do wish I remembered the conversation we had when I was convincing him to take Vilya a little better; if I hadn’t had to be there and be me for it, I think it would be the funniest conversation I had ever seen.”
“I am glad that the most highly acclaimed Noldorin King who ever lived managed to be decent to you when you specifically came to him asking for help, but you’re pretty far from the topic.”
“So what if I am. Well, what I mean to say is, I spent years waiting for him, and then a nightmare of a decade fighting him literally to the last stone of Ost-in Edhil, and then, once he had me, and I mean in chains, I took him back. What else do you—”
“You what?”
“Have I not mentioned that?”
“No.”
“Well—”
“What, exactly, do you mean by that?”
“Well, exactly what I mean by that is—this is hard to explain.” Tyelpe took a drink compulsively, even though it was not alcohol in his glass and, potentially, was not a drink in his glass. “What I am saying is that I consented to sex.”
“Did you?”
Tyelpe froze.
“That’s a second question,” he said. “Actually, it’s been quite a few questions, which I didn’t notice.”
“Hm. I got pulled into the flow of conversation myself,” Osse admitted. “May I make an observation?”
“You’re pushing it.”
“You have previously described that situation as ‘being dragged bleeding and screaming to a torture chamber,’ and that doesn’t sound like a situation conducive to actual consent.”
“Any proper Vala would sear you blind for that. I bet you don’t dare do this shit around Namo. You just asked the question again without phrasing it as a question. You old bastard, you should not be getting away with this. It should not be possible for you to get away with this.”
“Yet here I am. Don’t answer it, then.”
Tyelpe glared at him, with feeling. He took in a long breath, and let it out. “I meant it when I said ‘yes’. Then I realized that having done that should come with a death sentence, which by guile and skill I managed to carry out. Second question, Terror. Why are you still Melkor’s vassal? Why has this state of affairs been allowed to continue?”
Osse hummed. He said, “I did not want to tell you this.”
“Answer or leave,” Tyelpe replied. “I know you’re saving whatever question you want to ask me most for last.”
“Yes, you’ve got me, you little prick. There are a few reasons. You recall that I told you that Ainu can’t be fundamentally altered, but that Melkor figured out how to do it anyway.”
“It bends the brain, but I am forced to humor the concept.”
“I suggest you do. I am the being that the One intended me to be; I have come to the conclusion that my present state was Their intention. I do not yet fully know why, though I have my theories. One reason why I have not been altered is that only a few Vala could even attempt it, and they are uniformly unwilling, for their own and various reasons. The chief among those is the consensus that I would have to be readjusted to be someone else’s vassal, and none of them are willing to take that responsibility on.”
“But you’re Ulmo’s vassal.”
“Ah. That’s a failure of language. I am Ulmo’s vassal. The word we should be using for what I am to Melkor is ‘slave’, though I understand why no one wants to. These two things are not the same thing at all. Melkor reformed me to be beholden to him, whereas I was naturally Ulmo’s assistant to begin with. I would be forced to obey whoever reclaimed me as their slave. Neither enacting nor accepting that transfer is something a spirit of Good can do.”
“Well.” Tyelpe paused. “Well. No.”
“Therefore—”
“But how do you know that’s the only thing that can be done? Why couldn’t they—I mean, has anyone tried to adjust it slightly? Pointed it at nowhere? Dulled the point a bit?”
“These sound like questions.”
“Look who’s paying attention now!”
“This is magnificently hard to explain. To you, a small change is just a small change. To us, a change is a change, size is irrelevant. The act is what the act is, and only the One or Melkor could perform it. To redirect me would not be a change proper, but even that is so morally barren no one can attempt it.”
“I hate the lot of you. So, gentle adjustments in the material circumstances of your world, and in how your peers treat you, do not count as small changes? But tweaking anything connected to your actual eala—oh, damn your black heart, it does make sense.”
“Ha.”
“Fine. Alterations to your being are not done among your people, and I’m gross for asking. Your form is of course impermanent and immaterial, so there is nothing to absorb the spiritual damage. There is no healing mechanism because you were created to not change. It’s logical, though I would question the ethics if it were my position.”
“The other reason the ‘state of affairs’ has not been altered is my own refusal to let it be. Perhaps I was interested at first. Perhaps I initially assumed that me being reverted back to what I was before I became The Terror would be best for everyone else, and was, at length, encouraged by someone to ask myself if it was what I wanted.”
Tyelpe looked at him for a few seconds, waiting. “But you don’t.”
“What can I say? I settled in.”
“You got used to it.”
“Maybe that is the best way to say it. But I feel it is more true to say that I became convinced that this is me. Not an aberration, but the plan. There was meant to be storms, and sunken ships, and an abyss. It seems almost as if they were there from the start. Are you ready for my third question?”
“It sounds as if you are done answering my second.”
“I am.”
“Then ask,” Tyelpe said, but he knew exactly what Osse was going to ask him, and he had been resisting all the while the urge to focus on his carefully-constructed answer to the question ‘to what end was Sauron teaching you to entrap his fellow maiar?’ Or perhaps it would be the more pointed phrasing, ‘Were you being trained to entrap me?’ Or even, ‘Were you once and are you still capable,’ so forth. Tyelpe had given up that time to prepare to allow himself to really listen to Osse, which, whether he was aware of that or not, was an incredible gift. That was a question that needed a very well-constructed answer.
“Why do you refuse to give up Sauron’s curse?” Osse asked.
Tyelpe paused.
They had agreed to three uncomfortable questions each. Osse had really given up the chance to ask?... He really shouldn’t have. That was a serious question. The answer could have incredible consequences, depending on what it was.
“That’s sweet of you,” Tyelpe noted.
“Is it?”
“Well, I would rather stab my hand than answer, but I note the absence of knives on the table.”
“We can stop now.”
They could not. He was asking Osse his third question. “Well, because I am in love with him. Because it’s completely safe to be in love with him now that he’s dead, isn’t it? Because I had to fight everyone in my life, in fact give up everyone else in my life, in order to have him. In reality I am aware that this happened because he was trying to isolate me, but I cut ties with everyone except my followers in Eregion, and quite a few of them too, because everyone else couldn’t stand him. I ruined my life for that man, and now I can’t even have him. Honestly, I am offended and betrayed.”
Osse laughed at him. There could not have been a better response; any gentleness at all would have had Tyelpe snapping and snarling. As it was, he sank back in his seat with a glower on his face and creeping relief in his heart. “Laugh all you like. I did give up everyone else to keep him, and realizing I had lost him was terrible. I honestly think that’s the core of it. I gave up so much, and I’m not giving up this.
“I do think I deserve it, too. All of that absolute drivel. I feel bad about how I hurt people, and think I should be in pain. We don’t really talk about it anymore, but it is hard to forget if you are a kinslayer. It’s back there somewhere, I mean. Like there’s still carbon in steel. Primitive but extant. But the alloy that has subsumed it now is a worse and greater thing still, which is the scorching slag I poured on all the world, knowing deep down that something was wrong with Annatar and my relationship with him and still making the rings for him. Maybe because for as long as I have it in me, I will always have a good excuse for driving people away if I have to. If I drive away my family again, I can always depend on the curse to give me reasons why I act like this.
“I’m not sure how I would take it being gone,” he said, suddenly switching topics as another bothersome idea occurred to him. “I did all of this—this exhausting work to distance myself from that history, and my direct ancestors, and try to be more of an average person. This was entirely me copying Gil, as I was jealous of his results, that is, followers that actually loved him. If the chains are loosed and I am no longer suffering the consequences of my incredibly stupid actions—well, first of all, that’s not fair, because there are still innocents who are. Second, it occurs to me that without the drama I am an average Noldorin smith, I think I may still be too vain to take that.”
Osse said, “I think you will not be average, no matter what.”
“Well,” said Tyelpe, and clenched and unclenched his hand around his drink. “It’s odd that that doesn’t make me feel any better.”
“It’s a characteristic of mortal problems, I think, that they’re multifaceted. No one cause, no one reason, no single solution. That is one reason you get so tangled. There will always be something else to consider. You may never puzzle it all the way out. Some day, and perhaps long before you think you could possibly be prepared, you will suddenly make the choice, and won’t look back.”
“Is that prophecy?”
“In the same way that observing that Tillion will probably rise again tonight is prophecy.”
“I hate prophecy.”
“In your case, I don’t blame you.”
“I’ve got one more question.”
“Then ask it.”
Tyelpe had white-knuckled his way through this conversation because there was something he did have to ask, no matter what. He didn’t really want to, but he did have to. He knew himself well enough. It wasn’t bothering him yet, but if he didn’t get an answer, the wondering would grow in him like pressure in a flaw and crack him open.
“Was that Melkor?” he asked.
Osse didn’t move, for a second.
“Last night,” Tyelpe clarified, and in speaking felt that his pulse had picked up in his throat. “Was that Melkor, inside…”
He was afraid.
Osse said—well, he said ‘Oh, doesn’t that just beat all,’ essentially, but he said it in Valarin. Tyelpe was not supposed to understand. It wasn’t much, just a brief moment of frustration, but keen enough that he switched to his native tongue in hopes that Tyelpe did not catch it.
I wonder what question he anticipated, Tyelpe thought, and what it was if it wasn’t that. Because Osse clearly hadn’t expected that question, and he wasn’t happy to be asked. He hid it very well, after a moment of smoothing over his visage, but no one and that meant no one hid like Annatar did. Tyelpe could tell.
Calmly, to all appearances just as he had been moments before, Osse said, “Here is where the nature of ainur actually becomes a very handy thing.”
Tyelpe’s stomach twisted.
That was the beginning of a long response. An explanation. The first step to bracing him for the answer.
“Our beings are portals,” he said, “And our domains are our bodies. The highest are, oddly, the easiest to understand. Where there is Ocean, there is Ulmo, and anywhere in the ocean he can be summoned, and a message spoken to any shoreline could reach him. Any part of the ocean is a door he can walk through to come into physical being, and any part of it is him, in a real way. He would stop existing without it, but, crucially, it would not stop existing without him.
“I was very much counting on this fact for a while. The ocean as physical fact outlasts Ulmo. That is not just because I or Uinen or any one of our peers could take his place, in theory, if he suddenly was defeated and imprisoned, for instance. It is because the physical world was made without us, by Eru Themself, and does not require our existence to exist. If every single ainur tied to the ocean were gone, Arda would yet have an ocean, but there would be no Power in the ocean, and it would lash or rage or crest without mind, bound only to the laws of matter. It does not need us. We shaped its current boundaries, we strive to improve it, but it would go on without.
“Similarly, evil does not need Belekoroz. Now, there’s no way you haven’t heard his name in Valarin before.”
“I have, Ososai,” Tyelpe responded, completely in Valarin, chin in his hand, looking Osse in the eyes.
Osse did not respond in words at all. For a moment his form grew pale, as if he considered snapping it back into his eala and dissipating. After a moment, he held firm, and expressionless. He said, “I really hate your ex-husband.” As always, he spoke in Sindarin himself.
“He was a gloater. He told me quite a few things once he was sure I wasn’t getting away again.”
Another thing, Tyelpe thought. If I give up Annatar’s curse, and then only keep his blessings, the knowledge of his tongue and his people, and how to work and confuse and manipulate them, then what does that make me? Without the weight pulling me down, will I forget not to reach too high?
“You don’t have a full grasp of the language?”
“I didn’t have the time for that. I’ve put a lot together by working with what I did learn. Back-translation, root words, that sort of thing. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to sleep with his damned curse keeping me awake.”
“Might have actually been an easier explanation if you did. Well, to continue where I was,” he said, though neither his tone nor his casual lean were exactly the same now, “Evil does still exist without Belekoroz. He does still exist as well, but is incapable of materializing in this world. Some believe He is locked in some unformed jail; some believe He sits with The One now, and takes His punishment in the form of re-teaching. This has never been revealed to us for certain. We know that we sent Him, but where He went was Their choice.
“Whether evil existed before Belekoroz is a matter of debate, and your argument hinges on whether you want to say evil always existed in Eru or not. Personally, I don’t have an explanation for myself if it didn’t, but I wouldn’t advise you to take that stance in most conversations.
“In any case, it exists after Him, in the actions of any with the capacity to do His work. You, me, men, elves, orcs, any creature with enough thought in its head to make a selfish choice. But Belekoroz, as He once was, cannot take these evil actions as opportunities to manifest, though He once could. This is why I and my kind are warned so stringently against getting too physical. We can start separating ‘parts’ of ourselves as you are separated, and become ‘stuck’ to one or the other. Melian, as you know, is ‘stuck’ to a physical form, and I am similarly, though not bound to one or the other, existing in a permanent state of partial division. The division is less between body and soul and more as if between two facets, who might like to separate, but I will not permit the separation.
“Belekoroz, like Melian, became stuck to the physical, unable to change his shape, heal his wounds, or travel freely. He could not use acts of evil as a door as Ulluboz uses waters as a door, and that is still true. Belekoroz, the Mighty Uprising, the Vala, cannot enter this world. He cannot shape or form this world or use evil to His purposes any longer.
“Nor can Morgoth, the Black Enemy. That was a person; your kin knew him, your husband loved him, if you will permit the use of ‘love’. He has a history, he is remembered for what he did, but he is dead.
“But His legacy lives on, does it not? It still inspires. Some live up to His fame or follow His example in wresting power for themselves. More importantly, and as you know it is much more important, some that He hurt directly still live on.
“Bauglir, the Constrainer, the Terrible; that is alive. His cult was able to draw power from it. His followers still fed on it ages past his disappearance. That still exists, embedded in our world, sufficient to itself without Him. Is that Melkor? Was it always Melkor? Is it still now?”
Tyelpe stared at him. Osse stared back.
“You are answering my question,” Tyelpe said, “With ‘yes’ or ‘no.’”
“Say it again.”
“Was that Melkor?”
“Were you Celebrimbor?”
“Answer the question.”
“Or Tyelpe, or Tyelperinquar? Or Curufinwe? Or…”
“You’re doing this on purpose now,” Tyelpe said, and he didn’t mean ‘arguing.’ He meant, ‘You don’t usually do this. You usually bend over backwards to let people forget that you are an ancient and malicious spirit of destruction. You’re scaring me.’
“That was Ososai,” he responded, “‘Foam’, ‘The Terror’. Ososai is a thing which is liquid, and re-forms, and seeps, and dissolves and subsumes. If you want to make sure you have picked all the evil from me, and are content on what measure of it is Bauglir Terrible and what is not, you will have more work than if you want to measure the salt, and you will be in this Abyss forever.”
Tyelpe had withstood torture. He said, “Yes or no.”
“No,” said Osse. “That was Ososai.”
Tyelpe sat, and looked.
Annatar had had a perfect disguise. Endlessly searching it for cracks had changed Tyelpe’s eyes. He could see hesitation or fear on anyone, no matter how they tried to hide it, though he could not always understand its root.
He knew that the most terrible part of torture was that it made another torturer.
Some people broke completely, their minds liquified. Survivors were burdened by the thing which would, once the pain faded and the panics slowed, become heavier than anything else: they knew how to torture someone now. Everything done to him made him aware of how it was done, watching every friend or foe for the signs that they were about to attack him, observing under his thought his opportunities for committing the same hurts to others, sneering at anyone who gave him too many openings. Watching Elrond be so vulnerable to attacks, after he had suffered so many, hurt him. Watching healed Sindar now live free and unguarded and unafraid of what might happen to them scared him. Seeing fully fulfilled Elu Thingol, a spirit-body bared fully open for a spouse who would never hurt him, made him feel sick. He was so keenly aware of how they could be tortured that he could hardly see anything else.
It was in that moment that that punishing curse, which weighed unrelentingly on his fea, unfolded into a gift. The training no one should have endured sharpened his eyes and let him see through almost-perfect Osse like he had been suddenly stripped naked. Ososai, called the Terror, so incapable of separating himself from the one who had hurt him that he had eaten Him.
Tyelpe had known intimately the torturer that Melkor had broken; here in glory remained the one who had endured. For all his stunning existence through the ages, reforming the world itself in rage against the evil that had marred him, fixing things that even the greatest Good let stay broken, and declaring himself fit and whole when all else called him vile, that triumph had been called a tragedy, and mourned. Here he was still, unflinching, the torturer Melkor had made chained within his own being, and all this time he kept him beneath with strength unfathomable and his head held high with pride unshaken.
Tyelpe stood, and Osse remained seated, looking up at him. Tyelpe leaned across the table and kissed him, softly.
“Osse,” he said on his lips.
Osse returned his kiss, just as soft, and said, in a voice that wrapped him all around, “Tyelpe.”
–
“Stop,” Tyelpe laughed, as Osse nipped at his ear.
“Why should I?”
“If you want me to go back to shore in any fit state to be dealing with other elves, you can’t have me riled up.”
“You could stay another few days.”
“It’s almost the solstice. I promised Ingo I would go to the family party with him. If I don’t go, he’ll—”
“Act anything at all like his forebears? Alright, I understand.”
Osse became a winding eel, and wove through Tyelpe’s every step, chattering, grinning. They walked through the halls of the undersea palace on their way out, brushing sunfish and flounders out of their way.
“Well, I could talk to her,” Osse was saying, as they broke into the large coral garden that overlooked the abyss, “Despite what you say your mother sounds like a perfectly congenial woman—”
“Oh, absolutely not—”
“AUGH,” said an unexpected person.
That person was the lady Uinen, who had been up to her own affair in the coral gardens, a butterfly fish kissing her fingers. The fish darted, Tyelpe jumped, and Osse snapped into a form that stood on its own two legs instead of twisting around his lover’s.
“Sorry to interrupt you, love!” he said cheerfully, without a hint of shame. “I was just about to bring Tyelpe back—”
“Back, to the shore?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Well, you can’t possibly —”
“Can’t possibly what?”
Uinen gestured accusatorily at Tyelpe, who stood still and silent. “You cannot possibly be thinking of taking him back like that!”
“Like what?”
“You know what I mean!”
“Oh,” Osse said, tilting his head from side to side and, though Tyelpe did not see exactly how he did it, with a single lazy finger he indicated the thread of his eala that was tied around Tyelpe’s fea, and made it shimmer. “Oh, like this?”
Uinen gasped, scandalized, but unable to be properly stunned by her husband any more. “You absolute dolphin,” she said to him. To Tyelpe, “Don’t let him take you out like that.”
“Oh? Why not? No one will see.”
“None of your own will see that you have him soaked all over you, but I suspect that my husband did not properly inform you about how this would look to our kind.”
“He said it would be tacky.”
“Tacky. Well, I won’t say anything less classy than that, but I will tell you that if I looked like that, I would clean up before I called on anyone that I wanted to be able to look me in the eyes in the future.”
Tyelpe turned to Osse, and said, “She makes it sound obscene.”
Osse looked at Tyelpe and said, “She tends to overreact.”
Predictably, that did not go well for him. Tyelpe fondly watched Osse get in trouble with his wife and give her back nearly twice the trouble for it. He would take Tyelpe back up eventually, to the world warmed by the sun; some would see the difference in him once he got there, some would not. Some would not be fooled by the shine, the glamor, the obscenity. Some were too keen. But just enough people would have their eyes blinded. Just enough people wouldn’t smell the rot in him now as he passed them by.
He didn’t care what people thought about him, usually, as long as they weren’t trying to harm him. But he would keep Sauron’s curse from as many people’s notice as possible.
No one deserved that.
He felt the weight of the wedding-ring inside him and knew that no one deserved that. He imagined the sort of person who would seize it and fling it away, so that it never hurt anyone again.
He didn’t think he could be that person. He could barely see him. The image of his face was thin and misty, bearing an expression he no longer understood. His back was straight, his arms strong; his skilled hands could take love and compassion and perseverance and twist them into jewels that could be worn on thin fingers, with his only thought to give them away to those he cherished the most.
But he was real, and if Tyelpe really concentrated, he could feel him, like bones that sat cold at the very bottom of a deep, dark well.
--
Original Notes:
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Silm Quote of The Story, If We’re Being Real:
Among those of [Morgoth's] servants that have names the greatest was that spirit whom the Eldar called Sauron, or Gorthaur the Cruel. In his beginning he was of the Maiar of Aulë, and he remained mighty in the lore of that people. In all the deeds of Melkor the Morgoth upon Arda, in his vast works and in the deceits of his cunning, Sauron had a part, and was only less evil than his master in that for long he served another and not himself.
Love to you all and Persist.