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A heat stirs in him, and Celegorm fantasizes about the boy-king.
He wonders about Eluchíl, in the days leading up to the attack. He looks like her, Curvo had stated – spat, really. He is the spitting image of that Moriquende whore. And he said – can you believe the gall? He said—
“Other two are there in the same place.” Celegorm imagines it: a boy with Lúthien’s face, her brilliant eyes, her perfect brow, speaking the words. “If your hearts be bold enough.”
Is it his mother’s fire or his father’s temerity that he speaks with? Perhaps it is both. The thought makes Celegorm groan. His eyes slip closed; his fingers curl about the hilt of his knife.
For all he may talk big, for all the Laiquendi and the Sindeldi and even the banished Noldor that have flocked to him in the years since he took his grandfather’s throne, the boy-king is a sapling. Green as the budding of new grass in spring, a newborn fawn tottering through its first steps upon spindly limbs. Celegorm wonders how he will tremble with a sticky blade held in his soft clean hands. Will he whimper as Celegorm presses him into the stones of Menegroth, as he gropes and throttles him until he stops shaking? Will tears fall? Will he sob the way his mother never did, high and plaintive, when Celegorm instructs his servants to hold him down, to keep him pinned?
Or no—no. Celegorm’s mind drifts elsewhere. Perhaps he will sever the tendons in the boy-king’s arms and legs instead, let him splay untouched and unobstructed and helpless. He wonders if Eluchíl will glare and shout, in the manner of his mother; wonders if his slim feet will thump and kick in vain. Wonders how that cheeky mouth will stretch and squeal, when Celegorm draws his blade slow and deep across that dainty throat.
Celegorm’s blood surges. He shudders, his breath coming sharp and fast.
Eluchíl, oh, Eluchíl is his. He is Celegorm’s compensation, his just due for how Lúthien shamed him those long years ago. Others may watch, or even partake, but in the end, he is his; Eluchíl is his. Celegorm will ruin him.
He falls back on the sheets, gasping as he releases himself. When, he wonders, was the last time he felt so warm?
~
When he first lays eyes on Eluchíl, Celegorm forgets, for a moment, what they agreed to come for. His breath catches; he must stop, and he must stare. Beauty—beauty is a weapon of many, but he has never seen it as lethal a blade as it is now, with Eluchíl as its wielder. Lush and fragrant, this child-king who cannot possibly be in full bloom: a child-king, in every sense of the word. Not yet mature but saddled with the entire weight of Doriath and the legacy of Lúthien and Beren and Elu Thingol on his shoulders; Celegorm would almost pity him.
Though of course he does not. He cannot. How could he pity the magnificent being that stands, so proud and so straight, and looks into his eyes with all the world’s fury and not a trace of its fear?
The Fair. Celegorm has heard it. Fair, Eluchíl has been named, fair beyond compare – but fair is a grain on a seashore, a drop in an ocean. If such a thing can be confined in a word so trite as beauty, then there is no mercy, no compromise, in it. There is nothing accommodating, nothing easy to behold, in the spread of his features as he rips his blade from a soldier’s abdomen, a savage light in huge eyes that curl upward like flower petals at the corners. He is lovelier than a blossom, more striking than blood in snow, and the sheer breadth of it—
Celegorm would call it venom.
The boy-king wears little armor. The hour and the immediacy of their invasion, no doubt. His blue robes, fastened loose about an enticingly narrow waist, are splattered red; bodies bearing the eight-pointed star crowd at his feet, the blood and mire about them a testament to their undignified end. He could flee, the path opened to him, but he hovers around a group of Iathrim – children and long-crippled and freshly maimed, who huddle together with tears and despair in their eyes – and Celegorm can taste his determination like salt, like smoke. The kingdom crumbles all around him, Menegroth suffocates in blood and ash, and his thought is to save as many as he can. As if the one, or ten, or fifty lives that he can salvage mean anything.
A waste, Celegorm thinks, though he is endeared still. (Such pureness, goodness – it has its way of touching him.) A waste, that you limit yourself so. The world does not do the same for you. But what concern is that of his? Now that he has seen Eluchíl, especially now that he has seen Eluchíl, he knows he will never leave without seeing him brought low, pillaged and stripped bare. No longer can he be satisfied with the boy-king as a commiseration, no longer does he want merely his terror and his pain. No – he wants to see, and to be seen. Blade in hand, he moves in.
Eluchíl surprises him. His hands are slim but not soft, and nor does he tremble. His blows come steady, sure, his movements deft, his footwork light and easy over the stone floors. Somewhere in their battle he draws Celegorm away from his soldiers, away from the fleeing Iathrim, but Celegorm could not pay heed to that if he tried. Never has he been attuned to the Song; not even in all his years with Oromë did he care for it. But now—now, now he thinks he feels it all around him, a ferocious cacophony that makes his head spin in exhilaration. And Eluchíl, at the center of that cacophony – the center of Celegorm’s world, comprising the axis on which he turns.
The king’s blade cuts into his face, right above the cheek. Not terribly deep, though blood aplenty runs from the wound – but Celegorm finds himself startled still. Eluchíl drew first blood. Were this a certain sort of spar, it would be his victory. Somehow, even with everything, Celegorm did not expect such.
He smiles so hard it aches.
They exchange words. Eluchíl calls him some things: trash, and pig, among others. Celegorm receives – and wears – them all easily. But it is not the words, not really, that he hangs onto in the bitter wake of their parting. (A shame, that. He would never have let Eluchíl go if he could help it, but his own servants came between them, heedless of Celegorm’s commands otherwise. He contemplates killing them for it but it is not the time. In the chaos Eluchíl slipped away, no doubt returning to his earnest, futile quest to preserve as many of his people as he can, casting behind him one vicious glance that makes Celegorm’s flesh throb.) It is not the words he savors as he lopes deeper into the striking halls of Menegroth, almost slipping on the red that splatters in his wake, and it is not the words that Celegorm turns over in his head as he sticks his knife through the jugular of some blubbering young Iathrim – noisy, he thinks, with a half-formed notion of annoyance. A swift kill is best.
No, it is not the words. What he cannot forget is the look in Eluchíl’s eyes, the tone of his voice. Such eyes, such a voice – and the disdain in them, the revulsion. Those eyes look upon Celegorm as the vilest creature in the world; that voice judges him a thing baser than the dirt that scrapes the bottom of their boots, and Celegorm hungers. There is a hunger in his heart that he frets over how to ever soothe. Much as he imagines it – bringing Eluchíl low and lower, coaxing him to tattered pieces, rending all his pride, all his faith, all his dignity – these fantasies are insufficient, a maddening tease; a flicker before the blaze which the boy-king’s magnificence warrants.
Celegorm wonders. When he holds Eluchíl down, violates and defiles him until that sublime face is left rotted in despair, will that be enough? Will that sate him?
~
When they reunite, Celegorm is with two of his brothers, and the boy-king has lost his weapon. They hover around him, they three, each of them closing in from one side. And Eluchíl has only a useless hilt with a stunted shard of metal now, only a broken sword that draws the boundary between his smooth supple flesh and their grasping hands – but when he regards them it is with those same eyes, eyes that are bright with derision. His lip curls in a sneer, as if their very presence offends him. As if they are scampering rodents, interrupting the swooping hawk’s repose.
Celegorm’s breaths come shallow. That contemptuous gaze runs over him; his heart quivers.
The thought comes that he should tell his brothers to step aside, to leave the boy-king to him. When they were young, Moryo and Curvo would dash amok about the grounds of their family’s manor, forever hounding him as they went, close in age as they are and simplest to approach as he must have seemed. Celegorm shared much with them then, the little brats, and still does now, but this—when it comes to this, he finds himself increasingly unwilling. He detests the notion of Eluchíl’s writhing going to any other eyes, or of his wailing being heard by any other ears. It hurts to picture; an unpleasant hurt, empty and cold, not like the sweet pure throb of agony that the boy-king draws forth. No, Celegorm thinks, wondering for a way to get rid of his brothers, no. Eluchíl must be his. It will be he who holds this child-king down, he who sullies him forever, and no other.
But for all that he is known as the rash one among the sons of Fëanáro (an unfair reputation, in Celegorm’s opinion; unlike others, he never thought treating with Morikotto would lead to anything but ill), this time Curufinwë and Morifinwë outpace him to words. In matters such as these they have been the hastiest risers always, and so too are they now – they hurry to lambaste Eluchíl, to dispirit and berate him. Really, to make him see as they see. This endeavor of theirs has ever seemed to Celegorm to lack any point or purpose, but for his brothers it has solidified as some ritual of, not utmost, but considerable, importance, so he intervenes not. And for the moment he is content to not speak; content to admire in silence the graceful curve of Eluchíl’s slender neck, the soft fullness of his sensuous mouth.
How inviting the frantic pulse of that neck under his hands would be. How those lips would spread, and moan out in the cool air, as Celegorm drives his blade, hilt-deep and then deeper still, into that soft young body. Eluchíl, sprawled across the stone, tears in those caustic eyes, blood mingling with the blood of others which already smears him. Celegorm’s heart flutters afresh to picture it.
In his preoccupation, he heeds the conversation – one-sided as it is, for Eluchíl says nothing – only in fragments. Still, they are enough for him to grasp its essence. And even if they were not, he could guess, for as much as his brothers love to talk about it he has already heard it all before. Curvo foregrounds their birthright, their title to the Silmaril. After him Moryo declares how he almost admires the breadth of Eluchíl’s daring. Then they come together, and they speak of heedlessness and arrogance and the rejected opportunity to avoid unnecessary bloodshed. They are princes of the Noldor, they say, and Eluchíl, a half-mortal child of dark elves.
Well, that part is true. Celegorm makes no comment still, but he does bare his teeth at the king.
Eluchíl laughs at them.
He laughs, so fullhearted, so lively, that Celegorm finds himself awestruck. Morifinwë’s face colors red, and Curufinwë looks on the verge of bursting into flames as strong as the ones their father did in his last moments. But Celegorm cannot refrain from smiling. He only desists from joining the laughter – and what laughter that is! – because if he did not, his brothers’ humiliation would be complete. They would gripe about it until his ears dropped off.
Eluchíl has no qualms, though.
Pathetic, he concludes of them, still with traces of laughter in his bright eyes, pathetic, and weak to boot.
Celegorm’s chest heaves as heat flushes through him. Moryo colors further. Curvo almost looks confused, if confusion could be so infuriated. Then he explodes.
“We will rip you apart,” he shouts, spittle flying from his lips, a declaration so fervently made that Celegorm worries for his wellbeing. “We will take your body for a banner and we will parade it before your Moriquendi lot. They will realize that their faith in you was misplaced. They will see how unfit you are. They will understand how foolish they were to raise you as king!”
Again Eluchíl bursts into laughter. He seems to find Curufinwë terribly entertaining, because he keels forward some, one hand coming down merrily against his thigh. And he laughs, and keeps laughing, and it is such a sound that Celegorm remains rooted to the spot, butterflies flitting on their downy wings through his ribs and heart and stomach until he chokes on them. He is not paralyzed – he could move, if he so desired, spring forth and seize Eluchíl by those birdlike wrists – but. But.
That laughter. That laugh, the summer and the spring, the roaring water and the jagged stone within. He might kill anyone who tries to cut it short.
Apparently, unconsciously, his brothers feel alike, for they do not try to move either. Are they starved too? They as well? Celegorm’s fingers twitch over the hilt of his blade. Or is it simple shock?
Eluchíl, regaining himself albeit with obvious effort, straightens back to his full height. He is taller than both Moryo and Curvo – Celegorm blinks as he realizes this – and his eyes are very large and very luminous, shifting shades of brilliant gold that shimmer in the candlelight. They were not gold before, Celegorm thinks. Before they were grey—or was it green?
“Faenorion.” Smooth as silk, that voice. Smooth and pleasantly conversational. The amusement in it is easy in manner, relaxed, like a warm reassurance. “You did not come to me thinking to ever leave, did you?”
Oh.
Celegorm wants him. The hunger which has been ripped into his heart roars. He wants Eluchíl, this marvel, this impudent insolent child-king, as he never believed possible to want anything. To start, he thinks, yes, Eluchíl, Eluchíl, Eluchíl at his feet, Eluchíl’s hands pushing against him, Eluchíl’s body underneath his. But that would not be enough. There must be more. He also wants—he wants—
Pathetic, Eluchíl called him. Pathetic, and weak to boot. That, perhaps. Yes—that.
Ah, how shall he tell his brothers to retreat? Celegorm ponders this. Should he breach the topic, well—more than like they will not even listen. They will look at him like he is some madman, and aloud question his sanity, and they will make further fools of themselves in front of the boy-king. What to do? What to do then?
He never resolves this conundrum, because Eluchíl – who has no shield, no weapon, who has barely any armor – lunges. At them. It catches Celegorm so wholly off guard that were it not for simple habit, he would have stood still and gaped. As he is, he raises his blade, and his brothers raise theirs, and battle erupts. (Somewhere, beneath conscious thought, he finds that the ease with which Eluchíl turns to violence charms him deeply.)
The three of them do wound him. The boy-king is skilled, and lightning-swift, but he could not possibly defend against all their blades, upon him from many sides at once. They wound him: deep slashes to his limbs and his face, blades to his arms and abdomen and chest. But Eluchíl’s eyes are fire. His teeth gleam. There—is something unnatural about it, how relentless he is; he evades, and what he cannot evade he takes, and what he takes he shrugs off. Celegorm’s sword punctures his shoulder, spears out his back. He barely blinks.
Something has happened, Celegorm thinks in a rush. The king was not like this before. Before he held a sword, before he bothered to meet Celegorm’s blade blow for blow, not like now—
He sees disbelief rise, then crest, then crest further, on his brothers’ faces as they strike and strike again and Eluchíl coolly grows more vicious. Celegorm narrowly avoids his next assault, heart a dizzy pound in his chest, but still that glancing blow of the king’s hands fractures the rock face behind him. A screech like metal on stone fills his ears; bits of chipped rock pelt against his cheek. The force behind them draws blood.
It draws blood. The blood leaks down his face, along his jaw. Celegorm’s breath comes in pants.
He has not seen his brothers lose composure in battle since Alqualondë. Curvo’s sides heave, his body trembling from exertion. Moryo favors his left arm, the right mangled at his side. His eyes are wide and wild, panicked; Celegorm thinks of a doe caught in a hunting trap, encircled by spears, foam at the mouth – animal-fear, not to be contained or concealed. His brothers do not understand how the boy-king still moves. They do not understand why he does not fall.
And, to be fair, neither does Celegorm. But it hardly matters. When Eluchíl comes, he meets him with joy. Genuine joy, he realizes, and the shock of that almost halts him in his tracks.
This is what he has searched for. All these long years, so dull, so barren – he knew not what he sought, nor barely that he sought anything at all. He knew not—but now it is here. Now he has found it. Now it is before him.
And he could not have dared hope for anything better.
Moryo and Curvo, bloody and gasping, stumble backward in retreat. Celegorm is loath to follow them, but he does; the onslaught of teeth and claws is like a storm, and he doubts he will survive to witness it longer if he remains so close. Eluchíl does not make their withdrawal easy. He pursues, bears ferociously down on them like his greatest delight would be to grind the three of them down to bloody paste within the depths of his earthen fortress.
Perhaps it would be. Celegorm’s spine tingles at the thought. Not the usual thrill of battle, no; this is fuller, pierces deeper. What is it that Eluchíl wishes for them – for him? What pain, what hurt, upon his body and his spirit, is promised in the lust of those slender hands?
Some distance away, Curufinwë – he must have noticed an opening – charges the king anew. He is swift, closes the gap in a blink to strike, but Eluchíl evades the brunt of the attack, in such a way that he is positioned precisely in the gaps of Curufinwë’s defenses. And even as Morifinwë darts forward to assist their brother, the king’s hand lashes out, faster than Celegorm can follow, and batters Curvo on the side of his head. His helmet crumples under the blow – the screech of warping metal cracking the air – and he goes sprawling.
Celegorm hears Moryo shout Curufinwë’s name, but it comes from far away. He knows that at that speed, Curvo’s neck could snap, but that knowledge is distant too. What moves him, instead, is his blood, surging in hot demand: demand that he reciprocate, that he make enticement, that he answer Eluchíl’s fire with fire of his own.
His spear is as air in his hand as he takes aim. Throwing it is near an afterthought, an extension of initial use. The spear makes a gleaming arc in the flickering candlelight of the hall, and Celegorm – accustomed to its wielding, his first spear was thrown in the House of Oromë, under the instruction of the senior devotees – discerns, a fraction of the way into its flight, how the weapon poises for its target. Impeccable, the path of it. Eluchíl will be skewered.
Eluchíl should have been skewered. The spear’s polished head should have lanced his unarmored chest, perforated his ribcage, impaled him on its shaft. It should have dripped red down to the ground as it hovered there, part-in-him, part-out. It should have – but the boy-king raises his bloodstained hand and simply swats it aside. The spear breaks against the pale hooks that extend from his fingertips, and splinters of oak and fragments of steel rain to the ground around him.
“You little wretch,” Eluchíl laughs. His eyes linger contemptuously on Celegorm before they move to Morifinwë, running to Curvo’s side. Still laughing, he sidesteps the furious swing that Moryo directs at him, the motion animal in its neatness, its utter ease. “What is wrong? Sons of Faenor, you bore me!”
The red spills freely from his wounds and from between his sweet lips. The ground around his feet turns mottled with blood. Yet his proud voice rings out throughout the cavern, a composite of entangled pitches that makes the stone all around them vibrate, makes Celegorm tremble to his core.
And he would have made reply. They have exchanged no words, he and Eluchíl, to each other and for each other only, since their first contest now many hours ago. He would change that. But letters, words, speech—from his father it is his silver tongue that Celegorm inherited most, and yet, and yet, and yet. All speech falls flat before it takes full form in his mouth. He does not have the words. He could search until the breaking of the world for words to express this ardor, and he would not find them.
And as he meets Eluchíl’s eyes – so callous, so disdainful – he ceases to try. This is enough. No, no, this is good. For his newfound life, for the returned summertime of his heart, this – the rush of heat in his veins, the still-fresh roar of Music beyond his ears, the hot blood that runs from their bodies and mingles together over the rock – is much better.
It was he and his brothers who walked into their own ends. Like swine to the slaughter house, simpleminded and stupid. Moryo and Curvo would be angry to admit this, and indeed they never will, but there is no ignominy in the truth. What can they possibly do? How are they to respond adequately, when their foe is the dark damp earth that rises to entomb them, a swirl of vacuum and empty space and starlight bracing the fabric of the world? No – they cannot win. They cannot escape, either, for Eluchíl would not permit their preservation. But they can have this. This endowment, this blessing, to bear the brunt of this ruinous wrath from so close – that. That must not be wasted.
It will not last long.
Curufinwë begins to stir, still splayed out on the ground where he fell. He was fortunate, then – his neck did not break – but his helmet is gone, blood pooling next to his head. Moryo hovers near his prone body, teeth bared in an expression caught between belligerence and terror, but then Eluchíl barrels into him and the strength and momentum of it sends Moryo backward. He collides with the stone wall behind, his struggles like the thoughtless spasms of a cornered beast, and from that unwieldy angle manages to drive his sword partly into the flesh below Eluchíl’s rib.
It may well have been a twig, for all the reaction Eluchíl shows. In an instant his fingers are around Morifinwë’s wrist, and he squeezes. Bones snap; Moryo’s face blanches. His mouth opens – to shout or to curse, perhaps – but the boy-king’s other hand seizes his throat and whatever sound he would have made is strangled to death before it begins. Celegorm arrives then – lodges his dagger into Eluchíl’s flank – but Eluchíl whirls on him, and the interlinking rings of mail across his chest turn out to have all the use of paper.
It is, Celegorm finds, a profoundly bizarre sensation: nails sliding through the membrane and tissue of his abdomen. All of it sat comfortably, within and bound by, the limits of his skin for so long, so to have something touch—
But it is hard to dwell on that. The nails, cool hard thrusts of dumbfounding agony, advance further; he feels the path they tear, deft and quick, into him. They invade him so deeply that that path ends buried somewhere in the cavity between his ribs. Something inside him has burst—when exactly, what exactly, he cannot say—thick and wet, indescribably hot.
Eluchíl’s breath tickles his chin. His eyes hold Celegorm’s – red-within-red, the irises and sclera blotted over in a crimson that would make the freshest blood look drab. The upward tilt of his lips is nearly imperceptible. Nearly.
Celegorm’s body does something odd. It lurches. One moment he is upright, Eluchíl’s fingers within him; the next, Eluchíl is gone and Celegorm is half on the ground, bracing himself by a palm on the stone. Flat, grey, before his eyes – but no, no, not just that. His chest tingles strangely. There is blood running – between his fingers, under his nails, in his clothes and his armor, flooding all around him. He breathes, but his lungs are heavy, the air is not enough. When has he ever been unable to breathe enough?
It takes all of Celegorm’s strength to raise his head. Slow, and so frustrating, when he wants to see. Bile bubbles at the back of his throat – not bile, he corrects himself. Too warm, too salty. But he wants to see. He wants it. He wants it desperately, in that way, to that extent, and the weight of his own need sits novel and fascinating in his breast. For a moment the world slows, anchored by that pressing desire, and he finds himself touched with a quiet clarity. Tremulous, the twang of a single string in the stillness.
He wagers, then, that Morifinwë will be first.
It is surreal to see his brother crumple. Truly crumple, a successive folding of joint over muscle over joint which ends in an ungainly sprawl across the ground. Celegorm blinks at the body. He does not think he has ever seen a skull caved inward before; not from such a position, certainly not from so close, and certainly not like that. Like a boiled apple beaten against a wall. Morifinwë would have loathed that comparison.
The arm propping him up buckles. Celegorm’s nose smarts; he tastes stone and blood. The stench of copper smothers him. He coughs – it comes out damp – and for several moments struggles to find his breath, fingers scrabbling against the hard rock. Nearby someone is fighting – shouting, then howling, then suddenly silent, but all Celegorm can see is the stone and the blood. Strands of pale hair flutter, mocking, at the edges of his vision.
When he looks up at last, he does see Curufinwë’s face. Level with his own, wooden, the chin forming a slanted incline with the ground. One grey eye stares past Celegorm. The other is gone, a dark hollow gushing red in its place.
Celegorm stares back, dumb with surprise a second time. It happened so fast.
Certain shades of red go well with his brother. This is not one of them. Too dull, too close to brown or black, to do anything for his pale skin. Certainly Curvo would never go forth bearing such a mismatch, vain as he is. Celegorm wonders, fleetingly, if that is the reason the sight of the body makes his flesh crawl. But then it dawns on him: Curufinwë fell on his back. Not his stomach, nor even his side. That angle… his neck was not broken. It was his head that was pulled from his shoulders.
Celegorm’s next breath comes hushed. What air it acquires wobbles inside him. His eyes move from Curvo’s face as Eluchíl steps over the loose head, the silk of his grey slipper making ripples in the puddle of Curvo’s blood. The boy-king’s sides heave with each breath. His feet fall unsteadily, one in front of the other. More than once he almost stumbles, a picturesque dribble of red oozing from his wounds. But his eyes, fixed on Celegorm, are clear and sharp. His eyes reflect his intent, knife-edged and violent.
The stone beneath Celegorm’s palms grows hot. He has half a mind to run: a base instinct that overwhelms higher function, thrashing, cowering inside him at the sudden awareness of an impending end. This—he thought he lost this. He thought it was gone from him forever.
No, he realizes. No, it was gone. It was gone. Feeling had grown dull. Even pain had become bland. It was gone until he found Eluchíl and his heart bloomed anew.
Somehow he fights his way onto his back, elbows trembling from exertion beneath him, before his command of his hröa fails and he feels the futility. His lungs are full and bloated, his limbs wrested out from his control. The hollow opened in his chest, the red and purple and streaks of white within, stares at him. Celegorm stares back for a moment, tries to breathe, and watches something inside there tense. Oh.
Lightheaded, he looks up again. The rest of the hall has been swallowed in Eluchíl’s shadow. Hair, deep twilight loosed from its ties in the disarray, twists around the king’s face. His eyes never stray from Celegorm as he exhales—happily, almost, like a sigh of delight – and Celegorm sees the bone-white teeth curving down the hollow of that shapely mouth.
They both know Eluchíl has no need to lay another hand on him. Celegorm is dying already, and the only meaning in anything more would be a swifter end, cleaner and less drawn out. And perhaps it is what the boy-king’s mother showed: her pity, the disgust and weariness and sorrow on her face that had made Celegorm want to claw her eyes out. It could be Lúthien’s mercy, returned to him through her son. But he does not believe it. When he looks at Eluchíl, what he sees is eager and familiar and certainly not mercy but a predator’s impulse, the tantalizing instinct to finish wounded prey. This is a hunt. Eluchíl wants an end to it. Eluchíl is the hunter, and Celegorm is—
Noisy. His body feels so hot. And he must be noisy – wheezing and coughing, every breath cracking wetly in his ravaged lungs. A swift kill is best. His hands, which held so steady all these years, are damp from sweat, and he is deaf – deaf with fear, deaf with desire. What expression is he making now? He can only imagine.
He can only imagine, but it must communicate something, because Eluchíl’s eyes linger around his face. He stares down at Celegorm, blinks once, and then, slowly, a realization seems to come over him. Celegorm sees it flower before his eyes: the fresh splatter of color, a new shade flickering to vibrant life on the canvas of the king’s lovely face. Horror. Horror – and then a fearful sort of revulsion.
A weakness.
And perhaps Celegorm should be disappointed. Perhaps it should be as the dissipation of a dream, that Eluchíl would possess weakness. He had looked at Celegorm and his brothers as he would a bug beneath his heel, as he would filth worth less than the vermin that scuttle between the cracks in the earth. He had been so untouchable, then. Now he falters. Now, he is touched with sudden infirmity, a delicate crack in a once-impenetrable fortress. The thrill of chasing the impossible – of wanting the unfeasible – wanes.
But Celegorm’s heart beats faster.
If anything—if anything, he is only further captivated. If anything, the dream only deepens. That vulnerability, it is so very becoming, and Eluchíl all the more beautiful for it: weakness in tandem with strength, the fragility alongside the violence. And the way that that, too, rapidly gives way to a flush of rage, to an anger and a contempt two and threefold that of anything previous – that, too. How he fights. How resolute he is!
Eluchíl, Celegorm suspects abruptly, cannot be real. Such a creature cannot be real.
But that unreal creature continues to advance. A final, wavering step, and then he is upon him, his shadow cast across Celegorm’s body. His eyes, red, terrible and beautiful, burn with fury, his expression revolted. Does he think Celegorm’s feelings shallow? Does he believe that he mocks, or that he is moved by simple lust?
No, Celegorm wants to tell him. If only he could. No, it is not like that, it is not what you think. He wants to clasp that willowy hand in his; touch it to his forehead, bring it to his lips. You are no mere fancy. You are my… to me, you are—
Eluchíl kneels at his side, an uncanny feline grace that leaves Celegorm breathless. His slender leg brushes Celegorm’s hip; one svelte palm presses flat against the stone beneath them. The other hand reaches out, and Celegorm sees the blood, his brothers’ and his own, seeping down its warm bare skin. He might have laughed; the mangled organs in his body clench and unclench painfully. This would be a first. Laughter aplenty he has had all his life, but laughter of awe – never that.
Not until now. Not until Eluchíl.
And he is surprised when those long fingers press around his throat. He should not be, but he is – ah, their strength! They crush the siphon of his windpipe, nails a cruel sting in his flesh, Eluchíl’s face so near his. The king fills his vision, the pain is excruciating, and Celegorm—Celegorm feels something like contentment. Not quite it – too bright, sitting too feverish inside his heart, to be contentment – but something like it. To have an end in this way, with Eluchíl’s hands at his throat, Eluchíl’s body moving with his…
His eyes slip shut, not by choice. He hears himself trying to gasp, and how it fails miserably. It sounds less like breathing. More like retching.
Then, suddenly, the pressure abates. Celegorm’s eyes fly open, blood and spittle wet at the corners of his mouth, and draws in a frantic breath. No air comes. His throat makes a high whistling sound. Before he can think to understand why, fingers are in his hair – twisting, fisting, yanking against his scalp in a fury. His head is wrenched back and he finds himself gawking at the cavernous roof above, a soft black expanse sequined by shimmers of silver and white. Winking softly, like stars in the night sky.
There is a mouth, soft and warm, against his flesh. And Eluchíl – that shining child-king, fairer than all the world’s bloom – sinks his teeth into Celegorm’s throat.
Celegorm’s scream is soundless.
His body, against his will, thrashes and jerks, fighting instinctively to stop the intrusion. His hands rise to Eluchíl’s shoulders, clawing at the bloodstained fabric; his feet kick and thump uselessly. The resistance, however futile, seems to annoy Eluchíl. He snarls – straight into Celegorm, straight into the veins that split open at the touch of his teeth – and shoves him fully down onto the stone beneath them; one hand in his hair, the other pressed over his ruined breast, mouth hot at his throat. Celegorm, gazing glassy-eyed up at the ceiling, feels himself convulse. He feels the tears, in his eyes, trailing down his face, and his body is one massive ache. He cannot breathe. His mouth gapes and stretches but can make no sound. He cannot breathe – more than with the fingers, he is choking, he cannot breathe—
Of their own accord, his quivering hands fist in Eluchíl’s hair. Lush strands, matted with sweat and blood, tangle across his fingers, but the pain is so much, the pain is too much, and he pulls and twists at those strands as he struggles to bear it. Stop, he pleads, even as he trembles with ecstasy, stop, stop. Still no sound comes. His ears are ringing, eyes screwed shut, mouth gone slack.
When Eluchíl moves to release him at last, something inside Celegorm, hazy and over-blissed, mourns. The column of his throat, where teeth slide from his flesh, throbs with the breadth of the impending loss. He should like to keep the boy-king here – inside him, the lines of their bodies pressing together until they blur – but when Eluchíl wraps fingers around his wrists, shoves his hands away so that they fall limply at his sides, he has no strength left to resist. He only lies on the frigid stone, shivering from sensations he cannot name, and Eluchíl withdraws from him entirely.
Mist clings to the king’s fine robe as he rises. Wisps of it curl against him, silvery phantoms next to the blood that stains his maw, drips thick and heavy onto Celegorm’s face. And so much blood – to remain there even when the pink tongue flicks out, lapping some of it away.
It never occurs to Celegorm to avert his gaze. Even if it had, he could not have done it. But the king—his eyes are elsewhere already; the prey before him forgotten, already. Irrelevant now, in the wake of a completed hunt.
Don’t go, Celegorm wants to say. He would not have Eluchíl go. He would bask in his ferocity and his spite, his frailty and fearless abandon. He would have him forever, all of him, from this moment until the end of time. But he cannot speak. So many things he would like to tell the boy-king, and he cannot speak. He wants to reach out, but all he manages is an aborted thrash. Red bubbles between his lips.
Eluchíl ignores the feeble motions. His pitiless gaze surveys the hall; Morifinwë with his skull gaping, Curufinwë with his head pulled free of his body. And Celegorm, gurgling at his feet, convulsing and twitching as the throes of death take him.
The boy-king closes his eyes. He lifts his chin slightly and takes a deep breath; Celegorm hears the whisper of it in the dead silence. He raises a hand, wipes at his mouth, smearing red across his chin, along his jaw.
When he opens his eyes, he smiles.
There is no despair to speak of in that smile. There is no despair in his demeanor, nor in the line of his shoulders, nor in the set of that incomparably beautiful face. No pain, no anguish, anything but. His smile is bright with satisfaction, rich with triumph. Like a young orchid tree, come to full blossom.
Even now, Celegorm realizes, and he would have laughed his wonder aloud if his throat could make such motions. Even now Eluchíl looks into the world with eyes that see no end. No – eyes that, even seeing the end, see no cause to bow. Clear, shining eyes, which find no reason to despair.
It is the passion of new growth, the fierce confidence of a child born into a world that rests at the tips of his fingers. The flower bud that unfurls in a new spring, naïve to decay, ignorant of winter, unaware that all things are laid low in the end. This boy-king understands nothing. He understands nothing.
And yet, Celegorm loves him even more.
He wonders what Eluchíl’s smile looks like. Not the vicious half-sneer he wears now, well-pleased and cruelly beautiful, nor the one from when he laughed at the three of them, breathtaking in the way of a burning wreckage. Not that. Truly smiling.
Celegorm tries, but he cannot envision it. Still, it must be dazzling, Eluchíl’s smile. Buoyant like sunlight, innocent and exuberant and as carelessly joyous as a laughing child. And though Celegorm does not know that side of him, already he loves it. Already, dearly, from the bottom of his heart.
He must see him again. If they can meet once more, if the two of them are bodied anew in the west, Celegorm will seek him out. He will reach him and he will see, for his own, what such a marvelous thing as Eluchíl’s smile is. And if not, if not—
Well. Well. No use in dwelling on such bleak prospects. Something will bend. Celegorm will find him.
He awaits it eagerly as he dies.