Two elves that could not be more unalike to each other happen to be two of the most steadfast dwarf-friends alive. Having both made the feuds of their kindreds and families personal AND come to a genuine dislike of each other, they both readily agree to a contest meant to compare their skills in smithcraft to each other to prove who is the better smith. The contest is being hosted by a mutual friend; his secret goal is to get them to appreciate each other's work and by extension each other's person. He tasks them each with smithing a knife and then using each other's knife for a fortnight.
Naturally, they both curse the knives.
E for explicit, and that's sexuality, violence, elf racism, self-hatred, and a whole bunch of other little crunchy things.
Eol/Curufin, a non-canon but honestly underrated ship. While the two don't meet up in canon, the numerous ways in which they cross over each other in their character backgrounds and storylines is very fun to play with as a fanauthor.
On top of being a generally weird noncanon ship, I bring runelore into this for some reason and get really into theorizing about galvorn.
—
Original Note:
The recipient does not need a refresher, but if any other unknown reader would benefit from a quick look at some elements of First Age canon that are less often used in fic, here the are some elegant and finely crafted links to the Tolkien Gateway: Galvorn, Nogrod, and Telchar.
—
By the time of the Long Peace, the number of elves who were welcome to stay as guests in the mountainous halls of Nogrod could be counted on two hands. Most of that number were Avari, who shared land and much sentiment with the deep-delving dwarves.
Two who were not Avari were the great Sindar smith Eol, who had devised the making of galvorn, and the Noldor smith Curufin, whose talent in the smithing of swords was matched by few. Mastersmith Telchar was fond of both of them, and they both wore gifts that he had fashioned them.
Much to the amusement of the dwarves, these two honored guests despised each other. Both took the enmity of their respective kindreds personally, so they were at odds with each other from the start. The more time they spent in proximity to each other as Curufin studied dwarven letters and craft and Eol lived and worked in the halls, the more personal that enmity became. Present grievances honed historical and embitterment sharpened.
The dwarves found sport in their blatant mutual ire, as it made them much more fun to badger than most elves were. Very little friction between them could make sparks fly; in the mind of a dwarf, those were ideal conditions for good work.
It was the idea, initially, of a drunken apprentice to make them directly contest their skills at crafting. “I think they’d make the greatest works they had ever made if they were pit against each other,” he laughed, and nothing more would have been thought about it, but the idea was picked up down the table, and went around the hall, and around.
After bellowing with laughter at the thought, Telchar gathered the two of them up and proposed it to them at once: “A challenge of weapon-craft; the better-made weapon wins. Easy as that.”
“What weapon?” asked Eol.
“Swords?” asked Curufin, one ring-bedecked hand curled under his chin.
Eol glanced at him, but Curufin kept his gaze on Telchar. “I can make no lesser of a blade than you.”
“Ah,” Curufin mock-realized, rolling his eyes up at the cavern ceiling (an elven habit, as they often appealed to stars in their rhetoric), “I was being rude in suggesting a contest that would favor my skills. Perhaps, instead—”
“And how does it favor you?”
Curufin glanced finally at the pale elf; ‘pale’ an understatement, from fine hair to white cheeks to unlit irises, Eol was as white as a cave-creature all over. That death-like pallor settled on the thin and sharp features of his face like a glow around a candle flame. Beneath that glow he was not nearly so sickly as one of those creatures, thin and straight as Sindar were but hale and tough from hard training in Doriath that had served him well in a solitary life of subsistence.
Eol stared resolutely back at the Noldo, at the frame that took better to muscle than his own, the treelight-stained brown skin, the thick black locks in a tight braid. Despite being so often at work, the Noldorin smith vainly covered himself in gold and gems, on his fingers, his neck, pierced in his ears and nose; on his upper arm there was a scar from where one of his many bracelets caught a flare of fire and scorched the skin beneath.
It was not his only scar. He has some ragged scars from orc-blades, and a thin, fine scar on the left side of his face, from his temple to his chin, where an elven blade had cut him.
“I suggested my most favored weapon,” Curufin replied, “which was rude. Have you a counter-suggestion?”
“There is nothing wrong with your suggestion.”
“Here’s what’s wrong with it,” interrupted Telchar, his arms crossed in front of his chest, “I was going to tell you to make daggers, and I’m the one proposing this contest.”
“Sorry, Telchar,” they both said at once.
“You mushroom-eaters. My thought was that you would make knives or daggers, no more than two hands in length. The timing of the contest is only one day and one night, I don’t want you hammering away forever over a bet. Then, as is our custom, to decide which is better, you will wear each other’s blades for two weeks. At that point, you know your own work, now you know his, it should be clear who did better.”
That was a custom well-fit to Nogrod’s dwarves, who were overall honest, perhaps too much so. Curufin would well imagine that a pair of squabbling dwarves, forced to use each other’s tools for half a month, would at the end of it come together with an already-unanimous decision about whose was better. “My friend, these rules make sense for your people, but as for—his—”
“Mine,” Eol interrupted immediately. “I will be plain, he will never admit my work is better, even if he knows it.”
“I would be honest if it were the case,” Curufin defended himself. “But I know your pride will not permit it.”
Telchar shook his head. “If it comes to that, someone else will judge once the fortnight is up. You’re in our halls, try it our way.”
Curufin flipped one palm out in front of him in acquiescence. Similarly, Eol lifted his chin in a curt nod. “Who will be the judge, if it comes to it?”
“Me, fools. Presuming you can both trust me to be impartial.”
They did. Both were great admirers of Telchar’s work and of dwarven craftmanship in general. In both cases the admiration was completely genuine. That was why they were allowed to stay seasons in the city when most elves were allowed brief meetings at most.
As such, both men agreed to the rules and to let Telchar announce the contest and the date. They left separately, both brooding already, working ahead in their minds with sharp intent.
—
The contest was held on the day and night of the full moon, though that hardly mattered in the cavern city. For the elves, though, no matter how little they saw that moonlight still their blood reacted to it. The full moon would find them bost at their greatest power in crafting.
They met at dawn in the forge that Telchar and his guild used to craft the weapons of Nogrod’s armories. They were given tools that were in all ways equal, placed on opposite ends of the forge, such that it would be hard to distract each other from or indeed even see each other working. There was a ring of interested dwarves around both of them, placing bets on the outcome of the challenge and the works themselves. For dwarves betting was a rather neutral thing, a pastime, a bit of social currency they could laud over each other. Material wealth was not exchanged, but wisdom and insight were tested. That was how they thought of the contest, as an eventually fruitful exchange of knowledge.
Eol shut out their hawking and debating and moved his attention into his arms, his hands on the anvil. Curufin opened his ears to it, searching for threads in the web of words around him for clues, signs, tips about what the dwarves felt would be a success in this contest.
Telchar called for them to begin and they both picked up their hammers and set to work. Each had chosen two assistants among the dwarves to tend fires, fetch tools, brace and hold; each set immediately to opposite, echoing commands on either side of the room. ‘Hotter’, ‘cooler’; ‘hurry’, ‘steady’; ‘hold this’; ‘stay back.’ Eol had always had the ability and the need to focus absolutely everything in him into his work; even his spirit poured into his hands, into the tongs and hammer, the blade of the dagger as it formed, such that he was hardly aware of anything outside of himself and his work. Curufin, on the opposite wall, spread out like a net, aware, intensely aware, of every person around him, of the crackling of the fire, each spark as it popped and how rapidly it rose or fell, the team around him, each muscle in his body, each rivulet of steel as it poured and spread and hardened.
They worked all day and all night, with unbroken focus and equal resolve, though Eol’s gushed like a waterfall over the matter of the blade and Curufin’s crystallized around it like ice. Both were finished by the time the full moon was high but adjusting tiny details of design, exact angles, the sharpness of the edge. After Telchar did a final inspection, they exchanged the blades with each other, hand to hand.
“Two weeks,” Telchar reminded them. “Keep it on you while awake and by your side in the night, as if this dagger was your protection from the beasts of the enemy. In two weeks at this time you will have your answer about which one is better, the other or your own. Use it, if you like. Something that breaks with use surely does not deserve to win the contest—though I know you both know the difference between use and misuse of a blade. Well, my friends, I’ll see you both then.”
By the time of the Long Peace, the number of elves who were welcome to stay as guests in the mountainous halls of Nogrod could be counted on two hands. Most of that number were Avari, who shared land and much sentiment with the deep-delving dwarves.
Two who were not Avari were the great Sindar smith Eol, who had devised the making of galvorn, and the Noldor smith Curufin, whose talent in the smithing of swords was matched by few. Mastersmith Telchar was fond of both of them, and they both wore gifts that he had fashioned them.
Much to the amusement of the dwarves, these two honored guests despised each other. Both took the enmity of their respective kindreds personally, so they were at odds with each other from the start. The more time they spent in proximity to each other as Curufin studied dwarven letters and craft and Eol lived and worked in the halls, the more personal that enmity became. Present grievances honed historical and embitterment sharpened.
The dwarves found sport in their blatant mutual ire, as it made them much more fun to badger than most elves were. Very little friction between them could make sparks fly; in the mind of a dwarf, those were ideal conditions for good work.
It was the idea, initially, of a drunken apprentice to make them directly contest their skills at crafting. “I think they’d make the greatest works they had ever made if they were pit against each other,” he laughed, and nothing more would have been thought about it, but the idea was picked up down the table, and went around the hall, and around.
After bellowing with laughter at the thought, Telchar gathered the two of them up and proposed it to them at once: “A challenge of weapon-craft; the better-made weapon wins. Easy as that.”
“What weapon?” asked Eol.
“Swords?” asked Curufin, one ring-bedecked hand curled under his chin.
Eol glanced at him, but Curufin kept his gaze on Telchar. “I can make no lesser of a blade than you.”
“Ah,” Curufin mock-realized, rolling his eyes up at the cavern ceiling (an elven habit, as they often appealed to stars in their rhetoric), “I was being rude in suggesting a contest that would favor my skills. Perhaps, instead—”
“And how does it favor you?”
Curufin glanced finally at the pale elf; ‘pale’ an understatement, from fine hair to white cheeks to unlit irises, Eol was as white as a cave-creature all over. That death-like pallor settled on the thin and sharp features of his face like a glow around a candle flame. Beneath that glow he was not nearly so sickly as one of those creatures, thin and straight as Sindar were but hale and tough from hard training in Doriath that had served him well in a solitary life of subsistence.
Eol stared resolutely back at the Noldo, at the frame that took better to muscle than his own, the treelight-stained brown skin, the thick black locks in a tight braid. Despite being so often at work, the Noldorin smith vainly covered himself in gold and gems, on his fingers, his neck, pierced in his ears and nose; on his upper arm there was a scar from where one of his many bracelets caught a flare of fire and scorched the skin beneath.
It was not his only scar. He has some ragged scars from orc-blades, and a thin, fine scar on the left side of his face, from his temple to his chin, where an elven blade had cut him.
“I suggested my most favored weapon,” Curufin replied, “which was rude. Have you a counter-suggestion?”
“There is nothing wrong with your suggestion.”
“Here’s what’s wrong with it,” interrupted Telchar, his arms crossed in front of his chest, “I was going to tell you to make daggers, and I’m the one proposing this contest.”
“Sorry, Telchar,” they both said at once.
“You mushroom-eaters. My thought was that you would make knives or daggers, no more than two hands in length. The timing of the contest is only one day and one night, I don’t want you hammering away forever over a bet. Then, as is our custom, to decide which is better, you will wear each other’s blades for two weeks. At that point, you know your own work, now you know his, it should be clear who did better.”
That was a custom well-fit to Nogrod’s dwarves, who were overall honest, perhaps too much so. Curufin would well imagine that a pair of squabbling dwarves, forced to use each other’s tools for half a month, would at the end of it come together with an already-unanimous decision about whose was better. “My friend, these rules make sense for your people, but as for—his—”
“Mine,” Eol interrupted immediately. “I will be plain, he will never admit my work is better, even if he knows it.”
“I would be honest if it were the case,” Curufin defended himself. “But I know your pride will not permit it.”
Telchar shook his head. “If it comes to that, someone else will judge once the fortnight is up. You’re in our halls, try it our way.”
Curufin flipped one palm out in front of him in acquiescence. Similarly, Eol lifted his chin in a curt nod. “Who will be the judge, if it comes to it?”
“Me, fools. Presuming you can both trust me to be impartial.”
They did. Both were great admirers of Telchar’s work and of dwarven craftmanship in general. In both cases the admiration was completely genuine. That was why they were allowed to stay seasons in the city when most elves were allowed brief meetings at most.
As such, both men agreed to the rules and to let Telchar announce the contest and the date. They left separately, both brooding already, working ahead in their minds with sharp intent.
—
The contest was held on the day and night of the full moon, though that hardly mattered in the cavern city. For the elves, though, no matter how little they saw that moonlight still their blood reacted to it. The full moon would find them bost at their greatest power in crafting.
They met at dawn in the forge that Telchar and his guild used to craft the weapons of Nogrod’s armories. They were given tools that were in all ways equal, placed on opposite ends of the forge, such that it would be hard to distract each other from or indeed even see each other working. There was a ring of interested dwarves around both of them, placing bets on the outcome of the challenge and the works themselves. For dwarves betting was a rather neutral thing, a pastime, a bit of social currency they could laud over each other. Material wealth was not exchanged, but wisdom and insight were tested. That was how they thought of the contest, as an eventually fruitful exchange of knowledge.
Eol shut out their hawking and debating and moved his attention into his arms, his hands on the anvil. Curufin opened his ears to it, searching for threads in the web of words around him for clues, signs, tips about what the dwarves felt would be a success in this contest.
Telchar called for them to begin and they both picked up their hammers and set to work. Each had chosen two assistants among the dwarves to tend fires, fetch tools, brace and hold; each set immediately to opposite, echoing commands on either side of the room. ‘Hotter’, ‘cooler’; ‘hurry’, ‘steady’; ‘hold this’; ‘stay back.’ Eol had always had t
The dagger Curufin held in his hands had a strong, sturdy blade about a hand and a half long. It was beautifully balanced, able to stand on the tip of his finger whether balanced on hilt or blade or guard. It was not rich but made simple form and shape into elegance, a flow as natural as rock carved by water. There was little detailing, no stones, not even a carving of the smith’s name. Absolutely nothing comprised its utter symmetry and balance.
It was black, night-black, coal-black, pit-black; Eol had made Curufin a dagger of galvorn, hard as the winter and as cold, sharp as the wind, inescapably connected with the very smith that had first invented the alloy. What would he sign his name to it for? It shone like obsidian yet did not reflect what it saw, showing nothing but blackness no matter how it was turned.
Could such a thing be considered beautiful? Curufin would expect to see something with its shape and simplicity on the belt of a mean hunter, for skinning hides. The power of the galvorn seemed ill served by its form. Yes, its sting was surely deadly; any backstabbing done with the weapon would result in death every time. But Curufin couldn’t imagine doing anything but backstabbing with it. He felt that if he turned it on an orc, it would favor the orc.
It was as base and black-hearted as its creator. When Curufin latched it to his belt, he couldn’t shake the feeling that the hip it rested on was chilled by its proximity. Eol had made a sheath to go with it, of course, but it was also galvorn, a black hole stuck to Curufin’s red gown, featureless and unreflecting.
He’d give it its due. He’d hold it, he’d bear it, he’d test it. He would not be accused of not taking the contest or his opponent seriously, but that opponent was not going to win with this faceless blade.
—
The dagger Eol held in his hands was shining steel, dark and light grays banded together in slippery, scintillating lines. A subtle and artful curve arched from tip to edge of the piece. In length it was barely under the limit that Telchar had set for them, as such better designed for combat than practical use.
It was remarkable that it was not unwieldy, considering its size and gratuitous, unnecessary ornamentation. Bands of scrollwork and script, filled with gold, lined the edge of the hilt and the outside of the blade. Only one side was sharpened, but that was whisper-thin, curved so that it would cradle the neck of its victim just before it cleaved through. Somehow, the Noldo had found the time to embed a row of faceted garnets into the hilt, and even that did not throw off the balance of the finished work—much.
It could certainly be used. Eol couldn’t think of it as practical, because he couldn’t think of a use for it aside from killing. Not beasts, either; killing children of Iluvatar. He was to bear a kinslayer’s weapon for two weeks, made by one and for the purpose, and that was fourteen days too many to be holding such a thing.
The thing about it which gave him some pause, made him turn it around in his hands, was that it did something odd to the light it reflected. It caught fire-light and moon-light alike, and once it had some light in its possession it warped it, letting it back out only once transformed. It dispersed light, somewhat; it redirected it, somewhat; it split it into colors, somewhat. Eol could not tell if Curufin had plated or glossed the steel or if some other art had been employed for the effect. He had already noticed that what he saw in the flat of the blade did not perfectly reflect that which was actually behind him.
The sheath had even more and larger garnets, which were artfully arranged and absolutely begged a night-seeing orc to aim right at him. It didn’t fit where he would usually keep a knife on his belt, so after some thought he fashioned a brace for his left thigh and cinched it over his breeches.
He would still use it as directed. He would not lose this contest by being accused of not following the rules. Though he couldn’t imagine how this gaudy piece, glittering red, showing falsehoods, and murder-minded, could possibly win his opponent the prize he sought.
—
As bid, when Curufin laid down to bed that night, he laid the galvorn blade beside him on the bed. He put it between his neck and the rest of the room, as if he thought someone would creep into his bedroom with ill intent.
He had spent all day feeling like his hip was cold and heavy. He would wrap it into a sash tomorrow and wear it around his waist instead.
If he turned on his other side, and opened his eyes to the dagger in its sheath, it looked blacker than the night. Curufin slept without candle or lantern, and the caverns of Nogrod were dark indeed, yet the galvorn was even darker. He had hated Eol so deeply that it felt odd to even have the work of his hands beside him in his room. It still seemed to be ringing with the final hammer-blow, a low, resounding echo just below hearing, reverberating inside the ear.
Curufin had never struggled with sleeping, though he knew many who did after the trials they had endured. Yet that night he kept startling awake just as he was drifting to sleep. Each time he was sure he heard something, a rustle, a single syllable, a heartbeat. His eyes would open to see the dagger before him, even though he thought he had just turned to face the other direction.
—
Eol stayed up late, drinking and trading stories with friends. When he finally retired for his brief sleep before dawn, he removed the neck-biter and stared at it, disliking, before finally tucking it into a drawer.
He would dislike it as he pleased but he considered himself an honest man. The ornamentation, though not to his taste, was well-done. The bursts of garnets on its outside were excessive but well-balanced, spangles of red like blossoming poppies, artfully scattered. When sheath and blade were together the patterning on the sheath blended perfectly into the gold and garnet lining on the hilt. It was not actually gaudy, it was just impractical. It felt like the smith was bragging, drawing the eye to how gorgeous he could make the death-dealing tool without compromising its ability.
Eol put on bed-clothes and laid down, expecting to be quick to sleep after the drinking. But he recalled, after almost drifting off once, that he was supposed to sleep with the dagger. Damn it all, but he would, and he unsheathed it too, because Eol had never done anything halfway before and he would not now.
He placed it under the lantern on the nightstand by his bedside, easy to grasp. Uneasy, still drunk, Eol watched the steel drink in the flickering flame. Its distorted reflection of the bedroom above it stretched; within it, Eol saw things shimmering, wavering, which were not there in true vision.
How had the Noldorin smith done that? Eol couldn’t think of any art that made that effect.
He slept, but once, he woke up in the middle of the night, unexpectedly, his eyes on the dagger. In its blade it showed the image of a man standing in his room. He sat up, but his eyes saw no one. When he looked at the blade again he could still see the distortion, but it no longer looked like a man.
Eol’s skin prickled. His ghosts are in this tool, not his skill, he thought, and I doubt he even knows he let them in.
Fortunately, any ghost haunting the kinslayer would be a friendly spirit to Eol. He quieted his thoughts and laid down to sleep again.
—
Curufin took himself to the mountainside, looking for some use for his knife. The cliffs outside Nogrod were cut with freezing wind, echoing with its howling.
He found what he sought without much effort. The beasts of the Enemy had gotten bold, though the siege held in the north by his brave elder brothers kept the bulk of the army back. He did not find some enemy to test the blade on like he hoped, but instead its victim.
The doe had taken a very ill-advised road. Perhaps she had gone off of her intended path while running from whatever it was that had taken big mouthfuls of meat out of her back. That beast had left quite a lot of the doe to spoil, which could only bring trouble to Nogrod.
Curufin apologized to her, for the short, brutal life she had lived, and for what he was about to do. Then he brought Eol’s knife to bear, pulled on the head of the doe to bare her neck, and severed it.
The blade cut through so quickly and cleanly that for a moment Curufin didn’t even believe it. Muscle, tendon, and spine all parted way as if the keen edge had sweetly asked them to let him in and they had immediately acquiesced. He was so startled that he didn’t move quickly enough to avoid the single spurt of cold, sluggish blood falling onto his wrist.
He wiped it off and tested the blade a few more times; a cut to the flank, an attempt at skinning that went so well that it made him angry. Then he apologized again, piled her up, and made her a pyre for her quiet funeral.
He watched the sparks rise up to the sky with his arms crossed. He bounced the black blade in the air as he thought. It was good, and it would serve well in combat if one lost or snapped their blade. One could do, it seemed, some front-stabbing as well as back-stabbing with it. In fact he began to see many purposes for the small, light, slippery blade; cutting the ties or links of armor, slipping between plates to find skin beneath, pinning down clothes or even hands into wood or soft metals, which it could pierce as easily as earth, to stick an opponent into place. It could be a tool for combat, for daily use, menial tasks, glorious deeds, just about anything. Its simple form suggested nothing, because any suggestion would limit it.
Curufin supposed that the Sinda wasn’t called a master smith for no reason. It was fortunate that he knew his own blade was better, more beautiful, sharper, smoother, and imbued with a great magic that Eol would uncover eventually, because this one was good.
—
Eol asked a friend to help him test the neck-biter, to which the dwarf gladly agreed. He grumbled and made faces through the dwarves in the training-hall admiring the steel blade, impatiently waiting for the hubbub to abate so that he could get to the test.
“How do you want to do this, skinny?” asked his friend.
“Do everything you can think of to snap it,” he said, and continued through the laughter, “Send it flying, knock it out of my hand, dull it, pummel it. Do your utmost to ruin it. What war-blade can’t take an earnest attack?”
“Well, don’t blame me when I rough it up,” Eol’s friend bragged, but no such thing happened.
The dwarf cut right at it with his ax, slammed it, knocked it out of Eol’s hand, stomped it with his heel, in all ways treated it as roughly in combat as an orc or a thrall would. When Eol tried to attack with it, just once, by slashing at his hard armor, it slipped right off the metal, bit into his leathers, and cut him. Eol apologized profusely and ended the test.
He rarely made a mistake like that when only fighting to train. It was not him, it was the knife. It had seen an opening that Eol was blind to and insisted on pursuing it, like a hunting-dog who had tasted too much blood. This blade might be a friend in combat, but he would never use it in friendly play again.
Throughout all the abuse not one mark appeared on it. Not one of the garnets came out of place, not one chip or scuff. It balanced as beautifully as ever, its bright blade still sucked in the light and poured it back out in strange ways.
Eol was forced to admit that it was much more practical for use in battle than it looked. With its deftness and keenness it could be put to daily use too, though not against anything he wanted to keep intact. It was a relief that he knew his own blade was completely superior, more useful, keener, subtler, and imbued with a power that Curufin could not replicate, because this neck-biter was far too good.
—
For the first two nights of sleeping with the black blade, Curufin felt over and over like he could almost hear something, a sound close but undefinable. He was never fully sure he wasn’t hearing his own nervous blood.
On the third night, he could not deny he heard something. But what? It sounded like a restless shuffling, like a whisper, like there was an animal inside the wall. The more he hunted the room, the more distant it sounded; the longer he laid in bed, the closer it drew. He kept his eyes shut and concentrated, mapped the sounds in space until they drew closer together, became like mumbles, a conversation beyond the wall, but just at his ear, like—
His eyes opened again, fixed on the dagger.
It couldn’t be. He lifted himself onto his elbows. He stared down at the black sheath, a more concentrated darkness in the night, at the little crinkles its weight made on his bedsheets.
He stared, and as he stared, he heard a whisper, a single word: “Look.”
Curufin drew back. He lifted one hand above the blade, splaying his fingers like a shield. For a moment wavering, but then choosing caution over dignity, he asked aloud, “Did you speak?”
It did not move, it did not shimmer or glow. After a second of sound gathering close, like the dagger had to pull in all the air in the room to speak, Curufin heard again, “Look at me.”
The voice neither demanded nor pleaded. It suggested, calm but firm. (It spoke Sindarin, with a Doriathrim accent.) Curufin’s mind raced; was it possible? Could the skill of elven hands make metal that spoke? Had he been standing across the forge from a creation of a masterwork, completely unaware?
He would hate to think the dark elf had so much ability, nurtured in the woods and swamps of unlit Endor. What power had been moved to so inspire the works of such as Eol? Curufin briefly faced the fact that he knew very little about the man he had instinctually hated. “Speak again, if it is you who speaks,” Curufin asked. “Tell me your purpose.”
Again, it was like the air in the room was sucked into the little thing before a soft voice came back out. “Look at me. Touch my sharpness, feel it test your flesh.”
Had Eol poured so much of himself into it that it kept elven sense? Had that act been intentional, inspired, accidental? Did it have some intelligence, did it speak after thinking, or did it repeat words that had been placed as instruction inside it? “Why do you desire this? Will you cut me, if I feel your edge?”
“If you handle me wrong, I will,” it said, not teasing, not reluctant, only stating fact. “If you handle me right, I won’t.”
“I think I shall not,” Curufin decided. “Now that I know you speak, and you listen, I will not be so foolish as to let you taste as well. I don’t know what poison your maker imbued you with, but I want none of it.”
“You do,” it replied.
“And why do you think that?”
“I know that you do. I know you.”
Curufin was silenced for a second. Most grown men didn’t have the courage to speak to him that way. “I find that hard to believe. How would you know me so well, you thing?”
“You have borne me three days, ” it whispered, “and laid with me now three nights. All the while you have looked at me with such lust.”
Curufin drew his hand away from the blade.
“You are beautifully made,” he said. “You mistake appreciation for desire. Like I it or not I must admit your creator was talented. I…” He always admired a well-made blade. He wanted to stare at their edges as the light danced on them, run his fingers down their shafts. Saying so to this one felt like a mistake.
“Why not hold me, as you so desire to?”
“You lie in my bed because of an ill-sworn bet,” Curufin snapped. He clenched the fingers of his upraised hand together. “I have no desire for you at all, who are clearly as false and wily as your maker.”
It said, “You are lying. I have been drinking in the light of your eyes.”
“You are not supposed to know these things.”
“Do you cast that light on my maker too?”
“I absolutely do not, you throat-slitter,” Curufin hissed at it.
“That is a lie too. You watch him when he passes you by.”
“I would watch a stalking wolf in the hall too, and I assure you that I would want nothing to do with it. If you don’t silence yourself I will cast you away and forfeit this bet completely,” he threatened, and then, after a moment of perhaps risky inspiration, “and I don’t think you want that.”
The dagger said, “No.” After a pause, “Then sleep. I will be quiet.”
Quiet—but not asleep itself, Curufin knew now. He still braced himself on his hands, hovering above the knife, for a minute, and then felt insane as he slowly lowered himself down to sleep beside it.
He couldn’t sleep with this thing in his bed, could he?
But as his heart rate slowed, as his breathing evened, Curufin began to think other thoughts. What was it? How was this trick done? Did it know itself? Could he learn how? Could he wrest secrets from it as it wrested them from him?
—
Eol struggled to sleep, warm and impatient. He took off his clothes and lay naked on top of the covers; he closed his eyes and pretended there were tree-branches above him, owls, nightingales, crows. It did not help.
The dagger on his bedside glimmered in the lamplight, which he had purposefully set dimmer than he usually did. Every time he looked at it he felt ill, but he kept looking at it. He felt compelled to check if he could still see those other things in the blade, those distortions of the light, those wisps in the room, which were not there when he turned his head to see them straight on.
He thought he was finally getting to sleep, but then he realized he was back home in the forest. The dark boughs of birch trees shifted above him, the rustles and skitters of burrowers rose from the undergrowth.
He relaxed. He walked forward minded to walk to the river. He caught glimpses of the white stars between the leaves overhead, which sparkled and danced.
His dagger was on his thigh, his garnet-speckled Noldorin dagger. Otherwise he was naked. He rubbed a thumb over the hilt as he walked.
The surface of the river, when he arrived, was as still and black as obsidian. He saw himself in the water, naked and pale. Then he reached to his thigh and drew the glittering knife. He admired its light, its rivulets of silver; he reached into the river and grabbed his own face. Then he lowered the dagger to the water and used it to slice his throat. It was so smooth, so easy, so pleasant; he felt satisfaction wriggling inside him. Inside the river, he gushed forth blood. He felt it on his own neck, his face, but the pain was slight and sweet.
He pulled the dagger from the water. It was already washed clean, free of blood. He lifted the blade to his lips and kissed it, and pricked himself, on accident—
And lifted his head from the table, onto which, somehow, he had rolled in his sleep, and his face away from the glittering Noldorin dagger that had just been pressing into his mouth.
“What,” he hissed. He touched his face. It was not cut deep, but the stupid gems had pressed into the skin of his lips and snagged. No blood, but his tongue could find a warm slit.
He knew instinctively that something had been wrong about that dream and he did not usually doubt his instincts. Even in his dreams Eol had some control over himself, his thoughts and actions alike, and he could refuse the grim visions they put before him if he drew on himself and concentrated. In the dream he had just had, he had not thought at all. He had moved, and acted, without thinking or questioning, with the grace and serenity of being wormwood-drunk.
His eyes, which had been filmy, finally cleared and focused on the dagger beneath him.
Could it be? Charms and curses could be put on works such as this, and he had been suspicious of it from the start. He always blocked out the world around him while forging and, in this instance in particular, had been so completely focused on imbuing a certain additional power into the blade he had given Curufin that he may not have noticed if a curse had been wrought across the room. If there had been some dark intent hammered into it…
…Then he had eleven more days to deal with it, and that was not that many. He’d keep away from drink and spores and make himself sleep at regular times to avoid making it worse on himself. If he was lucky, this unusual evening had been brought onto him by his indulgences anyway.
He hoped he was lucky. If the Noldo had cast a curse strange and potent enough to creep into dreaming, Eol had no idea how he had done it, which meant it was a very fine blade, which would mean he had some thinking to do, and he would rather not do that thinking.
—
Though they had been purposefully avoiding each other, with mutual, unspoken consent, Eol and Curufin accidentally came to the same room at the same time the next day. The room was the dressing-room in front of a communal bath. Eol was leaving as Curufin opened the door to enter.
Eol had just finished dressing. In fact, his hands were both still on the leather strap that tied Curufin’s dagger to his thigh, pulling it tight. His damp hair, tied only in a tail, stuck to his back. He had used a clove-scented soap in the bath, or he must have, because its perfume drifted around him.
Curufin’s eyes snapped down to where Eol’s hand pulled the leather strap tight on his thigh, causing the fabric beneath to bunch and tighten around it before the buckle was cinched, the leather loosened, and the dagger subtly relaxed against his leg.
Eol’s hands paused as his eyes, nearly against his will, went to the place on Curufin’s waist where his galvorn dagger was tied tightly into a silk sash. That sash was wound three times around his waist, which pinched in a thinner dip than he had realized. His Noldorin frame took to muscle more than a Sindarin frame (though certainly less than that of a dwarf or man), but its hilly swells came with deep valleys as well.
There seemed to be a menace, now, in the copper-hued hands that pinched that sash and touched the tip of the dagger, an implicit threat they never had before. Eol did not know if those hands had woven some cruel curse into the knife he was forced to wear, but if they had, they were subtler, craftier, cleverer than he had imagined. He had not thought they were as capable of harm, or manipulation, as they truly were.
Curufin watched Eol’s smallest finger slip behind the hilt of the dagger and felt a knot of tension tie tight in his stomach. He had hated this bastard from the start, but that had been an entirely self-focused feeling. Now he thought about whether Eol hated him, and how much, and whether that was dangerous, and whether that was rather flattering. It was, in one way of looking at it, a very intense focus, coming from a very talented man.
Eol approached Curufin with three quick strides. Curufin did not move from the threshold. He slid one foot behind him to balance himself, let the hand hooked into his sash drift to the side as the other went behind the hilt of the dagger, palm open, so that it was a threat but not an immediate act of aggression.
Eol smacked one hand into the doorframe above Curufin’s head. Curufin did not flinch.
Curufin was a tall man, like his father. Eol was barely a finger-joint taller than him. When they glared at each other, they were nearly eye-to-eye.
Eol’s eyes returned, again, to the hand that stood rigid to keep itself from curling around the hilt of his dagger. “What, will you draw my own work on me?”
Cold, Curufin replied, “Your hands were on yours—mine—when I came here. It was only a reaction.”
“Then put it down and stand aside.”
There was no reason to block Eol’s exit. Obviously, Curufin didn’t want to be talking to him—come to think of it, he didn’t want to be doing any of this at all. He should have walked right into the room, tossed his head, and ignored him. What had he gotten so distracted about, Eol’s hands, the fabric on his thigh? What had compelled him to stand in place?
Loath to be the one to back down, equally unwilling to take this any farther when he wasn’t sure why he had started it, Curufin stepped back, once, then again. Eol huffed at him, then walked around him and stalked away.
Curufin waited a moment, looking over his shoulder, and then walked into the dressing room. He still needed that bath; he had been blowing off steam in the forge all day. But once he was alone in the room (it was an odd time of day for dwarves to bathe, as they typically preferred to get clean in the morning), for a minute all he did was stand by the wall, quieting his hammering heart.
What are you so worked up about? he asked himself, cross with the bodily reaction because he could not actively control it. It was only that now, in seeing Eol, he was more aware of what the man could do to him if he wanted to. He was confident he could match the shifty, crafty dark elf with more than enough ability of his own, but he still felt, in the pit of his stomach, menaced in a way he had not felt in a while.
Unbidden, the dagger whispered, “Just like that. How you were looking at him.”
Curufin slapped his hand over the sheath and clenched it. “Be quiet. I do not know how you have such an imagination when you are a knife.”
He had to take it off to bathe, of course, but he found himself unwilling to leave it in the dressing-room. He didn’t know what it would or wouldn’t do if he let it out of his sight, or if Eol might come back and take it just to make him lose the contest. He rested it beside him in the bath and tried not to look at it (and tried to still his restless body as well, which felt too raw when he touched it).
he ability and the need to focus absolutely everything in him into his work; even his spirit poured into his hands, into the tongs and hammer, the blade of the dagger as it formed, such that he was hardly aware of anything outside of himself and his work. Curufin, on the opposite wall, spread out like a net, aware, intensely aware, of every person around him, of the crackling of the fire, each spark as it popped and how rapidly it rose or fell, the team around him, each muscle in his body, each rivulet of steel as it poured and spread and hardened.
They worked all day and all night, with unbroken focus and equal resolve, though Eol’s gushed like a waterfall over the matter of the blade and Curufin’s crystallized around it like ice. Both were finished by the time the full moon was high but adjusting tiny details of design, exact angles, the sharpness of the edge. After Telchar did a final inspection, they exchanged the blades with each other, hand to hand.
“Two weeks,” Telchar reminded them. “Keep it on you while awake and by your side in the night, as if this dagger was your protection from the beasts of the enemy. In two weeks at this time you will have your answer about which one is better, the other or your own. Use it, if you like. Something that breaks with use surely does not deserve to win the contest—though I know you both know the difference between use and misuse of a blade. Well, my friends, I’ll see you both then.”
Eol had told himself all those things about keeping sober and sleeping at regular hours, but when he tried, he couldn’t sleep at all. As he looked at the blade of the dagger he saw phantoms in his room, becoming more and more distinct, looking like people he knew or had known, men who had died in the fight, his brothers-in-arms, his mother; victims of orcs or wargs, those who lost their groves and homes when the Noldor overtook Beleriand. They appeared, twisted, evaporated; sometimes the blade of the knife tried to open doors or windows in his walls, but he shut his palm over it before he could.
He closed his eyes and tried to sleep, but gave up after an hour of trying.
—
Curufin felt restless and too scattered for sleep. Certain thoughts surfaced in his mind when he was exhausted but could not rest; to be honest, he wanted to put his hands on himself, because he knew it would quiet his mind, but he would not be doing that while he had company in bed.
It was watching him. It was probably going to tell Eol everything it saw once he handed it back to him, or, at least, that’s what Curufin would use a talking dagger for if he had made one as a ‘gift’ for someone else. The one he had given Eol was supposed to disorient him and confuse his dreams, throw indiscriminate sensation and image at Eol and then repeat and refine anything that made his heart pick up speed, but it couldn’t report back.
That didn’t mean that Curufin had made an inferior work.
Curufin stayed awake and designed meticulous, gorgeous, complicated designs for weapons of war. Some he could make now if he went to the forge, some were possible but impractical, some were completely impossible, steel fantasies too heavy for reality. He didn’t sleep until well past dawn.
—
Eol was walking down a hall (that is, a road) on his way back home the first time he saw a person who wasn’t there.
He turned a corner, and in the far, distant dimness, he saw the form of a Noldor woman, tall and straight. He did not know her and he did not know why her image made his heart suddenly spark with fear. She clutched an arrow in both hands, held aloft before her like she would snap its shaft.
Eol lurched forward a step. He saw her hands tighten on the arrow. Then, trained to expect ambush, he turned to look behind him. There was nothing. When he looked forward again the image of the woman was gone.
He had not seen her face. He did not even know for sure that she was a woman, or a Noldo. Any other detail he had thought he saw quickly faded in memory, except that of two hands clutched around an arrow, and the sense in his gut that moving any closer to her would be a horrendous mistake, a threat not just to his body but to his spirit, to the person he was. This omen threatened a catalyst, a transformation into a new material entirely.
He called out, hunted the hall. There was no one there.
The image, not overtly threatening, remained with him. Thinking about it turned his stomach. Of course he suspected the weapon he bore, which bent and muddied light; was this strange vision another trick, or had altered perception let him see past that which usually obscured his sight and into something true?
—
Curufin went to the forge and exhausted himself. He didn’t make anything especially good, which he told the working dwarves before he left; “feel free to reuse any of the steel, I was only practicing.”
He had been asked before why he would specialize in steel when there were myriad substances more worth his talents. He had tried, in fact, to become more of a gem-smith or more of a silver-smith many times. He was a fine hand at working just about anything that could be put on an anvil. But when he let his hands work as they would, they wrapped around steel and made swords, spear-heads, breastplates and spiked gauntlets, chains, with the same fluidity and pleasure of an aimless walk in the woods, a slow-paced partner dance.
He stood on a dark road, holding up the galvorn blade in front of him, derisively and longingly admiring the dark strength of the metal. Dwarven lanterns were the only stars overhead, the groans of the mountain the only call.
Galvorn. He imagined bringing into the world a metal that the One had not provided, the Valar never formed, dredging substance out of sheer possibility.
“Look at me, look at me.”
“Hush,” admonished Curufin. His heart wasn’t in it. He did look, for a long time. He did test the edge with his thumb, not quite cutting himself.
He could surely replicate it, but he couldn’t have invented it. He knew that. His heart throbbed with discomforting envy. What did he himself make when the spark of genius lit his way? Was it ever something truly new, or just a fine version of a form already established?
“Look at me like that. Just like I told you. Those lustful eyes…”
“Where do you get such pride?” Curufin grumbled. “Right from your creator, I assume.”
“All swords think like this, though few speak.”
“You’re a knife,” Curufin informed it. “You’ve mistaken my feelings again. I won’t deny it, this is envy. But it certainly isn’t lust.”
“Envy is wanting.”
“Envy is hating.” Curufin finally put the dagger back in its sheath, though that would not necessarily silence it. “If your master was trying to make me envious of his skill and thus spur me to forfeit, that was short-sighted again. More and more what I want is the assurance he can never make another one of you. I needn’t become a kinslayer again to manage that; I imagine crushing his hands under the hammer and breaking his knuckles. Tell him that once he takes you back. If he wants me to prove good to my word, I will show him I always do what I swear.”
—
Eol thought to himself, No, you damned fool, don’t do it, and then he poured a whole jug of malt down his throat to the enthusiastic bellows of a ring of dwarves.
Most of that evening is not of interest to this tale, except to say that many hours later, he lurched back to his own bed, fell in, and slept clothed, dirty, and armed, fallen on top of the dagger that was tied onto his thigh.
In dreams, as ever, he was in the forest. In Doriath, in Nan Elmoth, in heaven; in the Forest, everywhere it grows. He was naked except for the dagger on his thigh, the glittering steel dagger that preceded his every step.
In the forest he came once more to the first time he watched orcs tear apart elves. But unlike before, he had the dagger; every one of them became hypnotized when they saw the blade and stood still as trees when he cut them down. Their bodies fell into the undergrowth and broke apart like rotting wood.
The blade was still unsullied and glistening when he finished with them all. The beautiful blade, unbending companion. Friends fell, lovers left. Sire and dam passed away, roofs fell, walls crumbled. All fled behind the walls of cities, under the rule of Kings, cowering in holes. Kinsmen let enemies inside the home, kissed the cheeks of killers; bond-brothers turned their backs on him. The blade never betrayed him. Sword and dagger and arrowhead had kept him alive when generations died around him, had defended him when all seemed lost, had gained for him all he had.
He lifted the hilt of the dagger to his lips and kissed it. He recalled, suddenly, vividly, the face of the one who had made it, a hardened, bloody-handed smith from across the sea. That was a man of the blade, that was a fire-forged warrior. He kissed it again; a sudden urge to slip the blade between his lips overtook him. He wanted to run the silky steel over his tongue, he wanted to see the glory-lit eyes of its creator brighten when it poked the back of his throat.
When he tried, he made some sort of mistake. Stabbing pain filled his head.
He woke as the throbs of a headache threatened to split his skull. The pain was so intense he couldn't open his eyes. His throat was dry as stone and his stomach turned. The heat between his legs had no business being there, but there it was.
—
Curufin took himself to the forge again, and then again; he disrespected night and day so much that he had to take himself to the timekeeping-vault, with its mechanisms that measured endlessly, to assure himself of how close he was to being done with the damned contest. There were five days still to go.
He had told himself that it wouldn’t be hurt anyway, then laid the Sindarin blade on the anvil and struck at it until he dented the hammer. He was right; the blade was unharmed. He could pick it up in his hand and feel the heat of sheer friction, of the hammer coming down again and again. It was humming, almost vibrating, like a creature.
Was it metal only? What had the smith put into the blade, into the creation of galvorn itself; how was it so hard, so sharp, so dark, how did it know what hand held it and what he wanted? Who was the man who made such a thing? What happened to him that he became someone who could? The essences of all things bright and beautiful had been collected and condensed into the Silmarils, like honey brewed in hive, distillation of the flowers of the fields. What matter was concentrated in galvorn?
He took it back to his bedroom and asked it what it was. It told him all.
It had come from the same black vault beyond the blue from whence came Ungoliant, a lightless rock struck from unknown, supremely distant vistas, worlds unlit. It had soared through the heavens and struck the body of Endor, bringing fire and darkness with it. The dwarves had taken it, loving the strange form and color of the stone, but Eol had uncovered the black metal from inside it and made it into the form it preferred, what it longed to be, forever cutting across the air and burying into bodies. The galvorn had loved Eol’s hands immediately, though ‘love’ was something it had to express windingly.
If Curufin hadn’t been forced to carry the stupid blade he would never have fallen into it like this. Its tale of darkness unending left him laying down on the ground, struck. He held it to his chest. He breathed uneasily as the galvorn named itself “invulnerable,” “unbreakable,” “able to snap the locks of the doors behind which the Valar hold mercy, able to unfasten the hinges of the grim gauntlets clenched around fate.”
In that sleepless night Curufin believed that it could, that it was the thorn that could pierce the hides of immortals. He kissed it, he asked what name to call it; it said, “Should you call me the son of Eol, or Eol himself?”
“Weapons usually have their own names,” Curufin told it, but what was it if not Eol himself? Motherless, it was the copy only of its father, and could have nothing he had not given it.
—
Eol watched a door appear in the wall behind him, but only in the flat of the blade.
The door opened, slowly, and out from behind it walked the figure of a woman, smiling, shining. Out from behind her came her husband, and though he could not hear what they said, Eol saw his parents once again.
He watched, and waited, and eventually those figures vanished. Others poured out from ever-widening doors; the wall became thin and stretched.
The Noldor smith worked with steel. Steel. Like the blades of men, the hinges of doors, the buckles of belts. Whatever had been poured into it, whatever power thinned the place between life and death, or perhaps just played on the wishes of a man who so sorely wished he could tear down that forbidding barrier and take its captives back out, had come only from the smith himself.
The portals took over the wall; there was nothing left behind him but darkness. Then, in the darkness, himself; armed and dressed all in galvorn, straight-backed, unscarred. He bore a blade dripping with blood, he was himself stained with it, and no one he loved was dead. He had fought his own when he knew they were wrong and won a land and people he could keep safe with strength.
Eol shut his eyes in a wince. But despite knowing better, he still hoped, when he opened them, to see that vision of himself, armed and armored, capable of anything. And as he had wished, there he was, but Eol saw on his own face an approving smirk, lustful eyes. He followed his own gaze and saw that they laid on the shoulders of another elf, crouched over the ground.
The elf he watched was the steel-smith, Curufin himself, clad in steel armor and wielding another face of the self-same dagger Eol held. That which he was crouched over was a woman, an elven woman, with silver hair running down her bare back. A Teler, a Falmar, sister of Eol’s kin from the far shore. Curufin had her by the back of her throat.
Eol watched (and Eol watched) as the Noldo readied his glinting blade in one hand. Curufin looked up, over his shoulder, waiting for Eol’s approval. The Eol in armor granted it with a tilt of his head, a slow, languid smile.
Curufin kept his eyes as he drove the blade into the woman’s back. They still gazed at each other as her spine arched and her mouth opened. But there was no blood, and Eol saw no pain in her eyes. As the blade dug in, Curufin’s fingers twisted on the hilt. He said, “Tell me how that feels.”
Eol laughed. Eol watched his own face shimmer in the blade, his own teeth show. “How what feels? It isn’t inside me.”
Curufin twisted the blade inside his victim. “The power.”
The Eol in armor bit his bottom lip. The Eol watching the knife felt his prick twitch in his breeches. Swiftly, he clenched his fist over the blade. The vision vanished, dropping Eol back into the shock of his empty, quiet room.
Eol plunged the blade into his bed, covering steel with softness, swearing, “Damnable thing.” When he turned his head around, he saw only the stone wall of Nogrod, unblemished. He felt the heat gnawing at his core. He felt the trembling of his hands.
This was, then, the blade of the kinslayer; the readiness to do anything. The man with that readiness would win. Eventually. Those who accepted their fate, who were not willing to wield the sword, would lose every time.
To be tempted into betraying one’s honor with promises of safety and security was weak but understandable. To be tempted thus but feel desire was abhorrent. Still he felt it, stirring desire, which promised not safety but control, and power over that which frightened him, offered by its own hand.
—
“Don’t,” Curufin gasped, but he didn’t mean it. The voice of the blade was low, smooth, compelling; it startled him when it spoke, but by the time it was finished, he was shifting restlessly, in need.
“Don’t be ashamed. You told me that envy is hate; show me that hatred now.”
Curufin squirmed, but held himself fast. He felt like he didn’t dare move his hand even though he hardened at the words. “Oh, stop it…”
“What did you see when you said my name? Or was it his name?”
“Oh, shut your—” Curufin lost his own train of thought as he stroked his own hand down his shaft. “—Maybe I saw—thrusting you into his chest, you damned device.”
“Why do you hate him so much?”
“Because he’s so—damn—good—good—you terrible thing, because he is so good at what he does, when I see him working I want to snap his fingers one after another. I hated him the moment I saw his shining black armor. I hated him the first time I saw him at the forge. He’s so good.”
“Maybe envy is desire, Curufin,” it said, and damn him if it wasn’t laughing at him. It laid above his head on the bed. He was on the floor, for reasons he won’t even bother explaining, his back pushed against the bed. His body under his waist was bare except for his hand on his prick.
“I want to watch his face as I stab him,” Curufin panted, running his hand on himself. The other tried to clench his own jaw, touch his own lips, though he kept wrenching it back away. “I’ve seen—plenty of stabbed men, I’ve done it myself, and—” he had no words for the unformed desire to do something like that, repeated intercourse of knife and body, except that his partner wouldn’t die after. It was an insane proposition, the sort of thing he kept to himself on the assumption no one else in the world thought things like that. “I want him to tell me everything he knows and I want…”
“What do you want, Curufin?”
Curufin’s prick jumped in his grasp at the low, steady voice. It was Eol’s voice. He told himself it wasn’t. It was. “I want to be better than him, and I want his legs open if I can’t manage that—” he felt a spike of fear in his heart at admitting it, but no one was here but him, and— “I don’t know what I want to do with him, thing, I just know that I want to do it badly.”
“Touch me,” it said, and Curufin screwed his eyes shut. He held his hand still. A picture formed and unformed and formed again in his head, one of being grabbed in the forge, slammed against an anvil. Eol looked like he was as strong and tough as an oak. Curufin imagined him standing between his own parted thighs and clenched his teeth.
“What do you really want, Curufin?”
“No—” Curufin could feel sweat gathering on his skin as he fought against the image of submission. He imagined a black dagger slipping between his thighs and his core throbbed with heat. “Oh yes—oh—”
“What do you—”
Curufin’s left hand shot up and clenched around the hilt of the dagger. Its voice stopped ringing, for a moment. He stroked himself, thighs clenching, close to the edge, but he didn’t want to fall off that edge, not now, when he wasn’t even sure what he was imagining, when he couldn’t grasp what he saw inside, when all things were murky, incomplete, unsatisfying.
Eol rumbled in his fingers. “Look at me.”
“Oh—no—”
“See me in his grasp—see me in his chest—see me as he pushes me between your legs—”
“Oh, I can’t—”
“Inside you—”
Curufin gasped, and jolted. He couldn’t resist, he couldn’t resist a moment more. His hand spasmed on himself. He clenched the knife. He only saw a second of Eol entering him, splitting open his thighs, coming inside, before he spilled over his hand.
—
Curufin pushed Eol until his back hit the tree. He was armed, armored, neck to toe; only the flesh of his face could be seen, the black braid falling over his shoulder. The gauntlet rimed over his right hand screeched as he gripped the garnet dagger.
Eol watched enraptured as Curufin kissed the blade, running the dangerous edge across his lips. Then he extended it to Eol’s face, and turned it, so he could kiss the same place.
He did. It was warm with the heat of Curufin’s lips. Curufin murmured encouragement, so Eol kissed it fully, seductively, like he hadn’t done in so long, not since he had left Doriath and occasional lovers behind.
No one had had his heart. He had refused to give it. He let frustrated half-lovers who knew that he could give them more take him to low peaks, good enough work for the job. He refused even the talk of being bound to someone, of giving anyone that kind of insurmountable power.
The blade allured him, called to his tongue, let him know when and how it would cut him. It could take his heart out, but there was no love and no danger.
Curufin leaned in and kissed on the other side of the blade. His armored body, his cold posture, were unyielding. Eol could read in his body the promise that he might enjoy himself and not be taken, not be owned, not be loved. There would be no house, no marriage bed, no walls that could crumble, no roof that would fall. They would take steel pleasure with each other and since it would be awful there would be nothing to regret and no loss when they were done, nothing to mourn when Curufin left or died.
He let the armored man push his naked body in the tree and grind and peirce him until he was squirming with desire. The cold metal did not feel back, the palms that gripped him hurt. Eol had no idea if Curufin felt pleasure and didn’t care. He rubbed himself helplessly against him and growled and cried out to die, then stained his steel armor with desire.
—
Eol had promised he wouldn’t say anything at all. Curufin made him promise three times. Then he had locked the door, made his bedroom as black as night, laid down, and put his hands on himself, and once he was mad with desire he pushed the dagger between his legs, where nothing had ever gone before.
It was good from the start, so good, because the intrusion was everything he thought of as wrong at once and it made him gasp for air like he was afraid for his life. But slowly the hilt grew warm, and slick with the sword-oil he kept dripping between his legs, and pushing it inside him filled him with so much lust that he couldn’t think of anything else. He forgot to even touch his cock. He came from the pleasure of rubbing the hilt inside himself, slowly, over and over, forcing it further, and further again, fanning the heat until it spilled over his whole body and left him melted like slag.
—
Eol watched his face in the knife as he came into his hand. It kept bending him, warping him. He was a lord, a king, a killer. He had everything he wanted and everything he hadn’t realized he wanted. He took those things with steel and he kept them the same way. He dressed them in galvorn, and they said they loved him.
He finished in his hand, threw the knife across the room, and cried for the first time in a hundred years. Then he washed, dressed, armed himself with his dagger, and took himself to find its wicked, cruel smith.
Curufin walked almost all of the way back to his rooms, his home, whatever he was supposed to call the cluster of walls given to him, one bulb in the massive root-system of Nogrod. But nearly there, he had to pause and lean against the coolness of one of a thousand nearly identical curving hallways. His head was swimming.
There Eol found him. First Curufin heard light, quick steps coming from a distance, then he felt an odd sensation, an uncanny duplicate presence, like seeing a portrait of a person hanging above them. Curufin looked up from his hands for only a moment before something shining and heavy was thrown at him.
When it hit the wall next to his head he realized it was his knife, the one he had forged for Eol. The dagger and sheath snapped apart and clattered to the ground at his feet. Curufin pushed off of the wall but had no time at all to do anything before Eol was upon him.
“You win,” Eol screamed as he threw it. Then, in Curufin’s face, “You win, you bastard, take it back and take your victory and take anything you want and then leave me alone.”
Curufin had been dizzy, sleepless, drifting in his thoughts, but this insane insult dredged up his readiness to fight. He squared his back and glared back. “What is this? Do you mock me?”
“Mock you!” For a second Eol was so insulted that he couldn’t think of anything to spit out but “ You mock me!”
“I’ve said nothing!”
“You have said enough in your work. You win, mastersmith, now leave me be.”
Curufin snatched the galvorn dagger, sheath and all, and pulled it out of his sash to brandish in Eol’s face. “I’ve won? I’ve won? You’ve made the masterwork of this age and you know it!”
Eol’s cheeks colored red in an instant. “The barest—I have made finer blades asleep—you know what you’ve done.”
“I? A blade that speaks—sings—argues—compels—the creation of life!— a child that is a weapon, a sword drawn out of the fea, like the very heart was brandished for battle!”
“Words! Spell-crafting!” In fury Eol seized Curufin’s shoulders. He shook him, not on purpose but unable to contain his trembling to himself. “Lies and dreams and false things! You draw up the dead as a mere trick! You fold doom and dreaming into steel! You will not tell me you haven’t won this contest.”
“I have not!” Curufin’s fingers curled around the hilt of the dagger, their pads clutching shut the sheath. “How dare you suggest I have? You know you are the finest smith alive, and if you don’t, then I despair that such works are made by an idiot!”
“Are you denying what you have done? The curse—the visions—the dreams—coming on me in my sleep—can you move through it, or are you inside it? How did you do it?”
“I forged a blade! You forged LIFE!”
“You forged death! You slayer of women, what are you wasting your time on? You could be overcoming the enemies of this land yourself! You could pour poison in their mouths! I have never seen a keener weapon, ever, and you made it in a night, you made it unthinking, you made it to spite me!”
Curufin’s right hand clutched the dagger; his left he buried as a claw between Eol’s neck and shoulder, intending to shove him away. It did not work. The grip on his shoulders was jostled, moved down to his upper arms, but did not release. “I won’t take this kind of insult! I won’t! Night-black galvorn, pit-deep galvorn—”
“Don’t you dare speak another word—”
“Is the finest, greatest invention since light was formed into the flesh of the silmarils—if you do not know if you don’t even deserve it!”
“Compare me to your father’s work! Compare me to your own and open your eyes!”
“You made a metal! You made a new metal and it is better than the rest of them! I am going to kill you!”
“Curses aren’t weapons! I don’t know how you did it! I couldn’t even figure out what it was the entire time! I will break your arms right here so you can’t do it again!” That grip tightened on Curufin’s upper arms. He tried to shove him off again and it availed him nothing. Instead he grasped Eol’s face and pushed it back.
His grip was on his cheek, one finger slipped into his snarling mouth. He felt Eol’s tongue on it when he snarled “You earn nothing by lying—”
“I am not lying! You are a fucking idiot! You are the finest smith alive and you will not win whatever gambit this is by pretending—”
Eol released one of Curufin’s shoulders and attempted to grab the galvorn knife. Instinctively Curufin wrenched it back and Eol followed. They struggled both to grasp it nearly face-to-face. Curufin felt that Eol intended to cast it away and would not permit it.
“Take it after my life!” he snarled, the challenge spoken almost into Eol’s cheek.
Eol ignored no challenges. Curufin was strong himself but did not quite have the strength to resist Eol shoving him backwards into the wall, one hand still on his arm and the other now on his neck. “You ruin me!” Eol shouted. “I now know I am common, truly as low as you and your—”
“Common!” Curufin’s rage overmastered his dignity. He grasped Eol’s hair instead of his face and pulled. “I have always been the lesser smith—always—now I do not know how far down the line I truly am—”
Eol won the dagger, ripping it out of Curufin’s hand, rings and nails scraping through his skin as he pulled it. Curufin had a hand free, then; pulling Eol’s head to one side by his hair, he smacked the other side, check and then ear. He knew how to fight better than that and he had forgotten everything about it. Eol’s hand was still on his neck but it was a brace, squeezing, nearly forgotten. Instead, the hand that held the dagger slowly steadied it. He pointed its blunt end at Curufin’s face.
“Son of dogs,” he hissed, as Curufin clawed at his neck and struggled. “I want you as low as your blood-stained forebears but will not lie about the craft. This pitiable dagger and its ash-black metal are the product of a man who is a wasteland. Stop touching it, not with your bright hands.”
“Give it back. If you don’t even understand what you’ve done, you don’t deserve it—”
“I will say the same! Excellent creature, your skill outdoes you. You cannot hold it, you—”
“Give it back,” demanded Curufin again, and reached both hands to it.
Merely reacting to Curufin lunging forward, Eol shoved him back. They clashed against the wall, hands above their shoulders. Curufin kicked at him; Eol shifted slightly to his side and clenched a hand around his arm so tightly Curufin could feel his blood rushing underneath. Eol was so close he could use a shoulder to pin him. Curufin could feel his heart under his chin. Trapped, he kept one hand desperately on the knife but shoved the other into Eol’s face again. His fingers plunged inside his teeth and slid down his tongue.
Eol choked. Curufin could feel the inside of his mouth convulse on his fingers. Eol let go of Curufin’s shoulder, grasped his wrist, ripped his hand away, and with the efficiency of a soldier used the same forward movement to shove his wetted lips onto Curufin’s own instead.
Curufin’s hand tightened on the galvorn dagger, on Eol’s fingers around it. The other snatched onto the back of his skull as compulsively as catching something thrown into the air. He opened his mouth immediately, thoughtlessly, nearly pulling Eol’s tongue inside.
It was like his thoughts, rushing a moment ago, were set ablaze; his skull filled with smoke. Eol kissed him roughly, close and pressing, pushing inside of him. His mouth had already been hot with fury when they had met each other, and now, it was melting into him. Curufin heard his own panting breaths dulled by Eol’s mouth. When he gripped Eol’s hair, which laid free on his back, Eol’s teeth opened on Curufin’s lips.
Eol had already had him pressed against the wall. Quickly, as quickly as dry pine catches fire, the pressure increased and then began to throb. Eol could not have been thinking about how his chest and his hips were rubbing into Curufin, persistent, in waves, or else he surely wouldn’t be so blunt about it. Curufin adjusted to fit him immediately when one of Eol’s thighs pushed on the middle of his body. Still, they both clutched the knife above their heads. When Curufin felt Eol’s firm, clever fingers move against him the little sensations shook down his arms and into his body.
Eol growled something against his lips, slurred. It was only a few syllables, and his accent was thick with lust. Curufin couldn’t decipher it. Then he bit around Curufin’s mouth, which popped right open for him again.
Even though this sudden delirium Curufin tried to pull down the hand that held the dagger but Eol wouldn’t let go of it. Eol moved to pull his hand back, then his head; Curufin pursued him, kissing the side of his face, his cheek, and then in a quick move wrenched the dagger away from Eol. It hit the wall above his head.
“You—” Both of Eol’s hands came back to him, quickly, and curled around his wrists. He slammed them both against the wall and a heartbeat later a heat that startled Curufin throbbed in his gut. He made a noise, complaining, beckoning, and saw a flash of lust in Eol’s eyes in response. He struggled against his captivity, but badly, as if his arms knew he had to but something deeper in his body fought to keep them down.
Eol advanced. For a second, he kept his face right before Curufin’s, but didn’t kiss him yet. His fingers curled in on his wrists. Curufin parted his lips and he came in again.
The heat of Eol’s breath in his mouth, the heat of his tongue, filled him with smoke again, liquid, soothing, obscuring. He felt like his face was melting in the warmth, shifting, but didn’t have a single thought about moving away. When Eol pressed his hips and his thigh into the middle of his body again, it found his boiling stomach, then, beneath, a greater heat. Curufin pressed back to the wall as Eol pushed his body against his hardening prick again, then again.
Curufin was baffled by how hard he was. He had felt the warmth growing and growing inside him, but it was everywhere, diffused through his body, like an entire forge creaking and sweating around the fire. He hadn’t felt his cock especially until Eol started purposefully stimulating it. And once it occurred to Curufin that Eol was arousing him on purpose, there was no other explanation, that simmering heat grew so hot it hurt. He gasped, then flinched his head away, trying to breathe. Eol bit the lobe of his ear instead, a drop of gold sliding over the ridges of his teeth, and Curufin nearly screamed in his throat.
He pushed himself into Eol’s thigh when the prickles from being bitten tripped down his body and into his prick. Eol groaned as he bit him again, but spoke into his skin, “Serpent and son of serpents— how have you done this to me?”
Curufin opened his mouth to respond, but suddenly, Eol released his wrists and grasped Curufin’s hips instead. With a jolt he rearranged the both of them so that he bore down on Curufin straight. When he pushed forward again, Curufin felt how thick, how hot he was, as hard as Curufin was or harder.
Curufin’s head fell back and hit the wall. This time, he heard his circlet banging on the stone and felt how it skewed in his hair. He had to clench his teeth over his tongue as Eol rutted on him again, and again, so that he didn’t moan. Eol kept advancing so quickly, so relentlessly, that Curufin couldn’t quite get his bearing, grasp his dignity, or get back the air that had fled his smoke-filled lungs. The hand that had no knife went again to the back of Eol’s head, for a moment, but then lower down, gripping his shoulder, his back, pulling on the soft of his shirt.
Through thrusts, and the pangs of pleasure that came right after them, Curufin gasped “you— did this—to me— ” indignant and clutching, growing so warm in his core that he could feel how sweat prickled on his back.
Eol was willing to be as angry as he was aroused, or perhaps he was more practiced at it. He pulled back sharply, took one hand off of Curufin’s hip, and so suddenly snatched the knife away from him that Curufin barely felt it. “And what did I do to you?” he asked.
Though angry, his voice was broken through with gasps, and as he spoke Curufin saw his lips were red.
Curufin looked, immediately, at the galvorn dagger in his hand, the flesh of his flesh in metal, that which had known him, and at Eol’s fingers curled around it. Even in this, the shape of his hand, how two clutched above and two below, a grasp so delicate one would have no idea how strong it was, his sheer expertise was displayed like a banner. Those were the hands of the maker, and the tool was perfectly fit to his grip.
“You’re so good,” Curufin said.
Eol spun and turned the dagger in a movement as quick and deliberate as a striking snake. Now his hand clutched the cross-guard, two fingers on each side of the pommel, so the hilt laid on Eol’s palm and the sheathed blade faced Curufin. There was an expression both of sheer anger and enchantment on his face as he drove it onwards and then placed the tip on Curufin’s lips.
Did Eol know it had already been inside there, deep inside? Could he guess? Curufin opened his mouth immediately and kept his eyes on Eol as he slid the blade down Curufin’s tongue.
When it was half-in, it was Eol who choked, not Curufin. Curufin could see how his eyes went white with lust. He pushed it in just a little farther and then pulled it back out, not all the way. Eol’s own mouth parted as he watched the black metal slide on the pink of Curufin’s tongue. The taste of it, not like other metals, almost ashy, filled his mouth.
Eol’s other hand went to the ties of his shirt on his chest. He pulled it and an undershirt from his body quite efficiently, considering one hand and his brain were occupied with pushing the galvorn dagger in and out of Curufin’s mouth. The rhythm was slow, but it was not steady; Curufin could feel his hand shaking, just slightly. For his part he let his tongue curl around the sheath, and his eyes close shut; the hand that had been in Eol’s shirt dug into the warm skin of his neck. When he pushed far into Curufin’s mouth his head tilted back and to the side and his circlet grew more askew.
Curufin had expected him to unlace his breeches next and was instead surprised by him suddenly pulling at the shoulder of Curufin’s tunic. That was not alright, this one was an original work from a gold-weaver in Tirion, preserved carefully through the years, and there was no fixing it if some brute tore it. He choked for a second because Eol pushed himself too close to the back of his throat; then he put his own hand on the hilt and shoved it backwards, which Eol let him do, before putting his hands to his own clothes and undressing himself.
He couldn’t stop Eol from helping him as he went. His hands followed behind, easing the fabric that fell off of his skin, heat chasing flame. When Curufin realized he felt both his hands, he looked down and saw Eol had stuck the wetted blade into his breeches to hold it. He saw Eol’s pupils widen, for a moment, as he looked down Curufin’s body, so obvious against the white irises, and then had his back smacked against the wall when he shoved him back and put his teeth on his neck.
Curufin wriggled and grasped, unbalanced. Eol growled at the inconvenience of it as his hands clutched on his stomach, over his sides, and his mouth bit at the bulge in Curufin’s throat. But Curufin thought he was potentially going to fall over and put his hand on his shoulder to shove Eol back.
Eol suddenly snapped at him to “Fuck off”, which was surely an impulse and not what he meant at all, because he then dug both hands into Curufin’s side and lifted him off of the ground.
Curufin went silent and stiff with the surprise and then felt very weak. No one had simply lifted him off of the ground since he was a child. Eol fixed his position, shoved him against the wall again, and then put one hand under Curufin’s right thigh to brace him. Curufin intuited the movement and did as he was bid, which was wrap his thighs around Eol’s hips, so that the weight of his body pinning him to a wall was what kept him off of the ground. It was after doing it that he felt embarrassed about it.
“Oh. Wait—” he complained, weakly, bracing one hand on Eol’s shoulder, distracted not completely by how he bit at his ear again. He watched Eol wind his free hand down to pull out the knife out of his breeches and started losing his willpower immediately. “That’s…”
“I can feel how hard you are,” Eol growled as a counterargument. With a flick of his thumb opened the subtle mechanism that kept the sheath on the knife. The sheath clattered to the ground at his feet and the knife turned in his grip.
Curufin could feel the inside of his mouth grow wet. He could also feel the heat pulsing in his stomach and his sex, which jumped against the inside of Eol’s hip. (That, too, he could surely feel.)
“You cannot put that back in—” Curufin’s voice cut off when the cold tip of the blade was pressed into his now-bare chest, to the space between his breasts. He froze, staring, as Eol slowly flattened it so that the blade rested on his chest, and then drug it slowly down his skin.
Curufin shuddered, but his eyes were stuck to the point. Watching the blade draw down his chest, then stomach, was hypnotizing. He flattened himself back, undecided, when it came near to his belt. His skin shuddered behind its path. He could not make up his mind to try to snatch it away.
Not until it tried to dip under the fabric. “You are not cutting those off.”
The sudden sharpness of his tone was the most lucidity he had shown the entire time. Eol froze, for a moment. He pressed the tip only a little down, past the hem, and into his flesh. “Don’t you have a hundred like them, oh prince of the Noldor?”
His voice was low, scratching. He sounded, now, nearly exactly like the knife. “In a dresser, in a palace across the ocean.” His gaze was still stuck to the black tip that stuck up out of Eol’s fist. “If you dare—”
Eol plunged it perhaps another inch down and its icy edge cut a thin line into Curufin’s skin. Close—far too close. Eol laughed at him as he jumped.
Curufin did not think at all as he closed one hand around Eol’s again and wrenched the knife away from him and up. It meant that he was the one that did the honor of damaging his clothing, but he had a purpose. He shoved at Eol’s face, hard enough that he badly unbalanced him. He was, after all, holding up a sizable man with his own weight. Eol rushed to find his balance; he was shocked to find when he did that he no longer had a knife in his hand.
Eol’s dead weight was still pressing Curufin to the wall. But Curufin had Eol’s moon-beam hair in one hand, clenched in a fist, and his galvorn dagger in the other, naked, which he held across Eol’s throat.
Voice calm, controlled, Curufin said “Take them off the right way.”
Eol looked at him through his disturbed hair with undisguised lust. Nor had he ever disguised his feelings—that hatred he had borne him since the day they met each other still stood behind the lust, urging it on. His tongue wetted his lower lip as he carefully, slowly reached down with one hand to unhook Curufin’s belt.
Curufin leaned back against the wall to watch. (His back felt a little damp now—he was bleeding on the wall, but he didn’t feel any pain. Only the throbbing of steady lust, not slackened, not fanned further, cycling and waiting.) He turned the knife slowly, so that he was only pressing the flat of the blade into Eol’s throat. He only had half-glimpses of Eol’s quick, clever fingers unhooking his belt, pulling it aside, and then undoing the buttons of his breeches.
It was surely the buttons he had meant to cut off, just to be a bastard. They were leafed in gold. Instead, he kept Curufin’s eyes, swallowing so that the hilt of the blade bobbed in his hand for a moment, as he undressed Curufin, pulling breeches and undergarments down his thighs at once. They could only go so far—his legs were still held on Eol’s hips—but he felt it when his prick jolted out.
Eol refused to look down, but Curufin still saw the flush on his cheeks increase. His odd coloration, paler than any elf Curufin had ever seen, of any kindred, gave everything away. Eol’s blatant lust, his anticipation of what came next, his confidence—
“—You’ve done this before,” Curufin realized.
Eol leaned into Curufin’s face, pressing his throat on the knife.
“You’ve let a man put his hands on you before.”
“And you’ve thought about it, but didn’t dare,” Eol informed him, voice like stone on stone. “Whatever that makes me, it makes you a coward.”
Curufin reflexively pressed the knife into Eol’s throat, hard enough that he flinched. It didn’t draw blood, but Curufin knew the pressure would bruise it. He slid it up a little so he would bruise a second spot the next time.
Curufin called Eol an explicit insult, in Quenya; the tone alone made him laugh.
“You might remember how ashamed it made you feel in the day,” Eol continued, “but you remember how good it felt at night.”
Curufin tightened his grip on Eol’s soft hair and bruised his neck again. Eol leaned in all the same, choking his throat closed, and then put his hand on Curufin’s sex.
Curufin’s grip tightened on the dagger but he pulled it away from Eol. His air rattled out of his throat. Unbidden, his hips bucked toward Eol’s hand, once sharply, then rolling. Eol’s teeth found his neck again, a spot he had already worried to tenderness earlier.
Curufin turned his head to cold stone and breathed heavily as Eol traced quick, deft fingers down his shaft and back up to roll around the head. It took a moment to collect himself, but he shakily, carefully moved the knife so that it was on the back of Eol’s neck, braced by two of Curufin’s shaking fingers.
“What do you want now,” Eol asked the skin of his throat.
“Keep going.”
Eol only grunted in response. Curufin flexed his hip, and his thighs, pressing into the touch. Eol’s hand went deep between his legs, where it was hot and damp, and the images of taking Eol inside of him came back to Curufin. He screwed his eyes shut for a moment; something, too, about how Eol both knew his way around a man and desired a male body again was compelling. He thought to tell him to get away when he slid his fingers behind his sex or between his thighs, but he only sighed instead.
But Eol did stop, and immediately, Curufin’s hand twitched. He turned the blade around so that the edge pointed into the back of Eol’s neck. “Keep—”
But he looked down and saw that Eol had drifted between his own legs, where it pulled loose laces out of their eyelets. With every pull, the bulge beneath shifted and reasserted itself. Curufin watched, his throat tight but his mouth open.
When Curufin dropped his sentence and only stared, Eol huffed a laugh at him. Soon, he had enough space to pull down his own pants and what was inside sprang out, engorged; absurdly red because of the pallor of his skin. Curufin could not himself define the noise that came out of him, a growl in his chest, a little like the air had been knocked out of him.
Eol laughed at him again, a little louder. Curufin really had half a mind to draw a deeper line into his back but Eol rolled his hips again, sliding their sexes together.
Curufin’s head fell backward and the air rushed out of his lungs. Eol thrust in again and Curufin’s hand clutched the back of his skull. In moments, despite himself, Curufin was nearly limp against him, rocking back after every thrust, cleaving his body as tightly to him as he could in every place.
The heat between their bodies was obscene, intense. They were soaked with sweat and lust, so the movements made their pricks rub against each other, beside each other, sticking to each other’s bodies and slipping. It was technically not sex, he thought, except that it certainly was. He was certain he had had sex before that was much less intimate. There was no space between them, except in moments, as promises. It was filled by skin, and filled again, a new, slightly different sensation with each grind. Eol’s prick dug into his stomach, pressing on the muscles beneath, leaving wet heat behind it when he moved again. The soft strength of Eol’s body, hard, trained muscle beneath yielding fat, felt like rubbing himself on silk.
Curufin started cursing, roughly; “fuck, fuck me, shit,” as the pleasure increased quickly, too quickly. He clutched the back of Eol’s head and ran his other hand down his back—the knife wobbled and then clattered to the floor, a final disarming. Then he scrabbled at Eol’s back with his nails.
Eol said something harsh in his ear. He called him a dirty something, or a filthy something, and Curufin panted “Oh, yes.” He could only press weakly to Eol’s body, with how he was held to the wall; Eol’s strength did the rest. He tried to open his thighs wider and couldn’t. Eol bit under Curufin’s ear and Curufin’s hips jumped and rutted, his stomach prickled with heat and he cried “Stop stop it not yet—”
But when Eol did, in fact, stop it, pulling away from Curufin’s neck and stilling his hips, Curufin clenched his nails into his back with fury. “Damn it— you—”
Eol laughed at him this time with his chest, loudly. He gripped Curufin fast to pull away from his body—though he shook with exertion as he did it—and returned his lips to a softer place below Curufin’s chin.
“No—don’t you dare—”
“Do you want to finish now or not?”
“Fuck, yes, yes—” Curufin’s complaints were bit off with a snarl as Eol dug his teeth in. The blood on his back, the bruises on his neck, a scar, maybe, below his waist—for a moment the fact that he would be sore past walking tomorrow was revelatory, ecstatic. Eol braced Curufin and then shoved against him and Curufin shouted. They rutted together, right on each other, and then slid off—the heat, the wet flesh, the hardness of Eol’s prick had him curling fingers into his hair and seizing his thighs around him. Curufin bucked and Eol groaned in response. Curufin rutted on him hard and fast, feeling as if he was losing himself, that he was dripping down from his head and chest and pooling between his thighs. He was so hot it was like he was melting down the sides of an anvil, he couldn’t stop his hips from moving, and he couldn’t make Eol move fast enough against him. He dropped a hand between their bodies to try to touch Eol’s cock, to place the tips of his fingers on its head, but even that was impossible with how tightly they were pressed together. He pulled it along his side instead, felt his ribs moving, the hot, loose muscles of his core.
Eol moaned and pushed himself against Curufin so firmly it pressed on his lungs. He rutted him again, with a grip like death on his hips; after a spasm, or two, Curufin felt the hot liquid pouring onto his stomach, onto his burning cock.
He gripped Eol back and said “yes” and “fuck” and “keep going—keep—” and then he cracked open. Hit by the hammer one time too many, riven right through. He poured out hot slag and went still.
It was as if his heart had stopped beating. For some time, there was nothing; then he took in a breath, and something else came with it.
The sensation was hard to put into words. He was outside himself, yes, but more than that. For a moment, he stretched beyond the room, out of the halls of Nogrod, past green hills and river valleys beyond, and he dwelled in the soothing shadow of higher, deeper, denser trees than he had ever seen. That dappled shade was like a caress on this skin. He felt in his heart a fear so overwhelming it was now stretched thin over everything, so that its chambers stretched it when they beat. He felt the way he had grown hard around it, he felt the rough, sore cracks in it, green, spring-green, where he could run fingers over the raw grief. And he heard the birds; he knew their tongues. Their song held a complexity the worshipful swans and doves of Aman had never. They sang resilience and patience around each other, in loops; verses their mother’s mother’s mother’s mother had first sung, and generations before her, singing about how her children’s children’s children’s children would endure. The song was merely suggestion, circulatory, while his bones held the truth of resilience; breaking and the exhaustion of mending and the pain that never went away.
Eol had always found that, no matter how brief an encounter, or how unloving, there was no escaping the intrusion of their spirit in the shaking moments afterward. He tried to pull back from a sensation that made him dizzy all over, but could not; the feeling of standing on a high cliff, higher than any he had ever seen, over light so bright all of the continent of Aman could be seen by the elven eye. Deep inside he aspired to that height, to be the cliff that rose over the world inside his heart, and he did not so dare without cause. That great height was attainable; that great being could be unfolded from within himself with patience, and work, the patience that eternity set indulgently before him. But he remembered this from a place of darkness that was like a prison cell, with a hunger in his stomach like dying.
For a minute, Curufin only ran a hand through Eol’s hair, mindlessly smoothing out the snarls he had made.
Finally, their breaths in and out uncoupled when Eol took in a heavy, deliberate gasp. Eol heaved himself backward, a hand pressing to Curufin’s chest. He fumbled himself back into his breeches and laced them only lazily. There was no disguising the amount of seed rubbed all over his stomach, dripping between his legs. Thoroughness would only look more obscene. He heard Curufin groan, weakly, as he pulled himself far away enough from him that he had to move his hips.
His thighs were so far apart they clicked when Eol moved. He blinked his eyes clear and saw that Curufin had bruises all over him, like spots of green rust on his copper skin, and that there was a patch of blood on the wall behind his back.
He would have to go to the woods and never come back if one of the dwarves saw that. They were in the road, for pity’s sake; why hadn’t he drug the man inside his home? It was visible from where they stood. He went through the work of helping Curufin slowly ease into standing on his own two legs, hearing him unstick from the wall as he went.
Curufin closed his eyes again. He was wet with sweat, and blood, and seed, and Eol’s bracing hands were pulling away from him. His hands went up to his head and found his princely circlet.
He straightened it. Then he ran his hands down the side of his head, smoothing down his hair. He found the clip that had been over the base of the braid and removed it, then the tie underneath. Quickly, efficiently, he straightened his braid and returned both. It was still frayed, but no worse than if he had been hard at work in the forge. Only then did he pull up his breeches and fasten them shut.
Eol watched him unspeaking. Then Curufin opened his eyes, which were still foggy, their treelight softened. They regarded each other in absolute silence for a few more breaths.
Eol knelt, first on one knee, then down. He lowered his eyes to the ground and found first the galvorn sheathe before him and then the knife behind him. He put them together, then stood. He held out his hand and offered the dagger to Curufin.
Curufin took the knife. He looked at it in his hand, then put it roughly into his belt. Then he, too, lowered himself to the floor and picked up both the knife and the sheath he had made for Eol. Just the same, he put them together, stood, and offered them to Eol, his face unreadable, his chin lifted.
Eol’s hand clasped around his once more as he accepted it. He put it back into its place again. Then he lifted his hand to point two fingers into Curufin’s face.
“You win,” Eol growled.
Curufin lifted his chin yet higher, as proud as a champion horse. He glared at Eol, the heel of one hand on his dagger.
“We’ll see about that,” he said. It was clearly a threat. Then he turned on his heel, not sparing Eol another word or glance, and stalked back home.
Eol leaned into the wall, a little, then a little more, as he watched Curufin walk away from him and disappear. His hand touched the patch of blood on the wall, and he recalled an early lesson in hunting, so early that it was hard to remember not knowing it: an animal bloodied but not killed had to be followed and finished, even if it took him all across the forest.
Anything else just wasn’t right.
He gripped the steel dagger in the soft of his palm. He breathed in, heavily, and out.
How to settle this? He had a few ideas, opposing; the only thing that he was certain of was that Curufin was insane if he thought he was getting this dagger back.
Not on his life.
—
Original Note:
The thorn is exceedingly sharp,
an evil thing for any knight to touch,
uncommonly severe on all who sit among them.
The title and all the chapter titles come from Ragnar’s (RIP) modern English translation of the Anglo-Saxon Rune Poem. If you’re interested in why I chose which runes I chose (in order, gebo, kenaz, naudhiz, and thurisaz), start with his brief explanation of rune poems themselves and his excellent explanation of rune meanings, which keeps things factual instead of conjectural. I used them as runes, not letters; GKNTh is not supposed to spell or signify anything. I did slightly alter some of the translations for effect, I admit. Ragnar was correct with his translation of ‘trouble’ but I just need naudhiz to be translated as ‘need’ for personal reasons.
Thorn/Thurisaz being the meaning of the title does have some extra weight, of course. It’s used as a magical rune in the Eddas more often than most runes, and it’s always baleful/harmful. Cross-reference Skirnir’s triple-thurisaz curse in Skirnismal (in which the rune is used as a final element that would bring a threatened curse into existence) for optional pondering.
And to acknowledge the elephant in the room, yes, that means the whole thing is named after the letter Thorn. We like to have fun here.
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