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“Huan!” Celegorm cursed and ducked his head around branches whipping past his face. He knew better than to call out in the forest and to move so recklessly, but never had Huan disappeared so effectively or completely, and building anxiety wrenched sense from him. “Huan, you cursed mongrel, where are you?”
He called out several more times, first in Quenya, then in Sindarin, and one more time, in Dog.
There was no reply.
“Damn you, beast.” His bow snagged on a branch and he let it fall, impatient. “Huan, you whelp, by the Horn, where are you?”
A vine snagged him, and he swore again and whirled on it, cursing the forest that seemed unusually at odds with him. He hacked at the vine with his knife until it parted, so fast he almost cut himself, and then he hurled the knife away in utter frustration. It was a childish gesture and he knew it, but impatience and concern kept him from caring, and kept him distracted.
It was his distraction that nearly proved his end.
Celegorm had forgotten that he was in the thin outskirts of the wood, and that far flung patrols from Angband and feral cabals of Orcs alike sometimes hunted here – were he mounted, were he armed, were he with just one other warrior, it would have been different. It would have been routine, a thoughtless diversion. But he had been careless, and Huan wasn’t with him, and his bow lay behind him, his knife more than a stone’s throw away, and they were at his arms before he could lunge for it.
Twelve of them there were, rawboned and reeking stragglers who probably hadn’t seen Angband in a year, and it would have been laughable to meet them at his best – but he wasn’t at his best. To his shock, he tasted his own blood as one of them struck him across the face, and he reared back to kick out, but too many clawed hands were holding him back.
So this is how it ends.
It wouldn’t be so bad, if it weren’t so stupid. In a fight, hopelessly outnumbered…he had often thought it would be this way, though not so soon, not at this time. And, he thought, I was never supposed to die without Curvo.
He cursed himself seven times a fool, and with a mighty effort dragged himself free of the grasping hands, breaking fingers as he went. In the instant he was free, still hemmed in on all sides, he hurled himself at the nearest Orc, never weaponless so long as he had his hands and teeth. The creature fell back, throat gaping and bloody, and Celegorm spat flesh and let out a final roar.
“Tenn' Ambar-metta! Ai Aldaron, Araw, Arômêz!”
But as he launched himself at the snarling cluster of Orcs, a massive grey blur flew before him, knocking him back. Rolling to his feet, he seized a dropped Orcish spear and whirled to attack, but Huan already had three of the scouts down. As for the rest… Celegorm half stumbled, swallowing his shock. The rest of the party had been taken down, impaled and driven together like rabbits on a spit by a prodigious arrow, as long as the spear in his hand.
Celegorm heard nothing behind him, but then, he wouldn’t.
He turned, his foot bumping up against the dropped knife, and he bent and seized it, the ancient steel glinting briefly gold. He gripped the Orcish spear in one hand, the knife in the other, as Huan bayed joyfully and leapt past him to gambol at the feet of a vast, silent figure standing just in the shadow of the trees. At the figure’s side a monstrous longbow, at his waist a great horn.
It cannot be.
His very blood was shaking, but he held himself straight and tall, fingers slipping on the hilt of his knife. The ancient knife, the knife given him in the House of – He held the black spear before him instead.
Then came the voice, like rolling thunder, like a pack in full cry. “That is rather a less fine spear than the one I gave you.”
Hesitation was never an answer. “Less fine but better suited to me now, hey?” Celegorm laughed, because he could always laugh, and threw his head back. “Ho, Vala. If you are expecting me to kneel, you will be disappointed.”
“Ho, son of Fëanáro.” The figure pulled back his cowl so that his face was no longer in shadow. Oromë’s eyes shone golden in the dim light, but his wild, beautiful face was inscrutable. “Of the many things that could disappoint me, do you truly think that would be one? I know you have never fancied the role of supplicant, Tyelkormo.”
“It has been a long time since last we spoke.” Celegorm did not blink before that piercing bright gaze. “That is not what they call me, now.”
“I know what they call you.”
To hide the fact that his breath was tight in his chest and his fingers wanted to tremble, Celegorm jerked his head at the skewered Orcs. “So that was your work, then.”
“I was merely helping speed things along. I know you could have handled yourself.”
“Aye, I could have. I never sought your help.” The rage took him, so fast he felt nearly lightheaded with it, with the wild, hot flutter in the back of his head – madness, madness, your father’s madness – and he bared his teeth. “Why are you here? Why now?”
“I followed the sound of my name.”
Celegorm’s laugh rang out again, harsh and humorless. “I have called out your name before. I have entreated you in the darkness of the forest many a time – aye, I admit it – but only now you listen? Only now you come?”
“In the darkness of the forest you entreated me for swift arrows that found their mark, for unstumbling horses, for your spear to find its home. You asked my blessing for the hunt and burned the entrails in thanks. I heard you, each time.”
“You take credit then, do you?” Celegorm snarled. “Perhaps it is simply that I am a master at my work; I am a fine fletcher, and I breed strong fleet horses who do not stumble, and I never – never – miss my mark. You would take credit for all I do? You think I believe you have such power?”
“Whatever you believed, still you spoke to me as you fletched your arrows and shod your horse and let your spear fly.”
Celegorm ran his tongue over his teeth. “Bad habits die hard.”
“You do seem to illustrate that.”
“You are ever the same!” Celegorm threw his knife into the ground, furious. “I called out for you and you – ”
“What do you want, son of Fëanáro, ye dispossessed? Do you want to curse me for all the times you wished me present and I was elusive, or do you seek to prove to me my own impotence?”
“Both.” Celegorm spat at his feet. He knew it was a childish wish, but he wanted to hurl Oromë’s uselessness in his face – and at the same time he ached for all the long centuries between them. I missed you, I called for you, you stayed away. You could bear to be absent so long!
“I am here now.”
“Maybe.” Celegorm registered that Oromë had read his thoughts as easily as his lips, but caring suddenly felt like too much effort. “Are you here? Perhaps I am imagining it. I do that, sometimes. Perhaps I am mad. I am, sometimes.”
I am here.
Celegorm dropped to his knees after all, exhausted, weary with holding back. His eyes burned, and his laugh was little more than a rasp. He tugged at the laces binding leather to his wrist, the armguards falling away, and turned his forearm over. The sigil stood out dark against his skin.
“Here you be, and still I am yours. Ever marked by you, o Vala.” He had summoned enough scorn to make his words mocking, but his arm shook as he held it out. “Does it shame you to have one such as I bear your brand?”
Oromë bent before him, the force of his presence almost overwhelming. As he came close, Celegorm trembled, fearful despite himself. But Oromë simply stretched out a hand and ran gentle fingers over the mark on Celegorm’s skin. It was the first time they had touched in centuries, and Celegorm shuddered and laughed until his throat ached and tears ran down his face.
“I do not wish to speak of shame. There is much we have lost, thee and I,” said Oromë quietly.
Celegorm’s laugh cracked and broke. “Loss! There are those who would say I deserve it all and more. Perhaps it is justice that what I love, I lose. Himlad. My father. Umbarto. Irissë…” His face crumpled and he turned his head away, slamming an almost unconscious fist in to the earth. The guilt was never far beneath the surface, there. However little regret he felt over the sins of his life, the loss of Aredhel, whose fate he knew not but whose echoes came to him in dreams, always cut deepest. Our White Lady – no, to me she was nothing more nor less than my wild Ireth, well-loved and ferocious and warm, and gone, gone, if only I had found her!
“You have not lost all you love. You still have your brother.”
Celegorm shook his head, his hair falling over his face, his eyes bleak. “I will never lose my brother.”
Oromë gazed at him, through him. “You are tied so tightly to him that even Vairë could not unpick the threads that bind you.”
“Aye.” Celegorm was still now, his arm unmoving in Oromë’s loose grasp. He heard the implication in the Vala’s low voice, and did not deny it. His touch burned. “He is all I have left; he is my fate.”
“Your Oath is your fate.”
“It comes to the same thing.”
A great hand reached out and cradled Celegorm’s cheek. The last bulwarks of his pride – never as strong as that of his brothers anyway, what had he to be proud of? – crumbled at the touch. I remember this. He turned his face into Oromë’s hand, reached his own bloody fingers up to hold it close. He kissed it – not the back, never the back, he was never a supplicant, never – but the palm.
Oromë sighed, a sound like wind in the tops of the trees. “Ai, my renegade.”
Celegorm parted his lips against Oromë’s broad palm. “Why are you here, Huntsman?”
Oromë knelt before him, knees on either side of Celegorm’s, and cupped both hands around Celegorm’s face. He smiled, a beautiful, sad smile that snapped against Celegorm’s ribs. “I am here because I am weak and willful and wayward, and I have gone too long without seeing one who was once so dear to me.”
Celegorm wrapped his hands around Oromë’s wrists. “And what do you think, now that you see him? Do you know him still? Do you love him still?”
Oromë’s eyes were full of grief as his fingers caressed the back of Celegorm’s neck. “I knew my Tyelkormo, and loved him well. Celegorm I know not, and do not know how best to love him. Thou art changed, my wild one.”
Celegorm let out a bark of laughter to cover his pain. “You are not.”
“We are unchanging, by nature.” There was something like regret in Oromë’s voice, and Celegorm laughed on, tightening his hands around Oromë’s wrists, holding him fast.
“Disillusioned with your purpose, are you, o Great Rider?”
“Ones such as we should never be allowed to love,” said Oromë, and it was not quite an answer as he tilted Celegorm’s chin up.
It was such a familiar gesture that Celegorm burned, and closed his eyes so he could not see the golden ones fixed on him.
“I do not love, anymore,” he said, a lie and a wish. They call me the cruel, the merciless, the savage, the mad, and that is what I am…
“That is not all you are,” whispered Oromë, who did not care for the boundaries between thoughts and speech. “Not yet. Beneath it still there is my Tyelkormo, my hunter, my spirit; too swift, too fierce, too beautiful.” And when he laid his lips to Celegorm’s, Celegorm wept from the pain of it, but did not let him go.
He did not return for a week, and when he did, he was as a wildman, bloodied and streaked with dirt. He went to Curufin’s chambers before his own – not that his own rooms saw much use these days anyway. Curufin was at his worktable, and in the moment when he looked up and saw his brother there was such raw relief in his eyes that Celegorm exhaled a long breath of remorse. Then Curufin’s face drew into lines of fury, and he crossed the room in two strides and slammed Celegorm against a wall.
“Where the fuck have you been?” he snarled. “How dare you, how dare you vanish without a word, go off alone and unguarded, how dare you – ” leave me!
“Peace, Curvo,” said Celegorm, taking his brother by the shoulders. “Since when do I need a guard? I am fine.”
“I do not care that you are fine!” Curufin raged. “I would rather you weren’t, it is no less than you deserve, that would be the only excuse for – ” leaving me alone, not knowing where you are, livid with fear –
“Calm yourself. I am here now.”
“Do not tell me to calm myself!”
The wildness was still strung tight within him, and his brother’s anger flung itself up against his impatience and grief at being confined by walls again. It scratched like a fingernail against an exposed nerve. Celegorm threaded a hand into Curufin’s hair and jerked his brother up against him. “All my apologies for making you…distressed,” he said, his voice low but with a hint of danger, even as Curufin made a furious noise. “I shall not do it again. Now control yourself, brother.” His fingers dug briefly into Curufin’s hair before he released him. Bite him, savage him, rend –
He tightened his fingers against his palm and held still.
Curufin stared at him, and then his eyes dropped to Celegorm’s forearm. Too late, Celegorm could feel the flicker of his brother’s mind – so familiar that it took him overlong to recognize it as invasion – against his. Curufin’s lips thinned to a dangerous line and his pupils contracted. “Tell me it wasn’t.”
Seven nights by the river, in a tent made of skins, as Huan paced watchful without. Seven nights encircled by arms as vast as the forest, held close to a warm and beatless breast, seven nights possessed by the spirit he had so long thought to exorcise.
“It wasn’t.”
Youth and joy returned, but fleetingly. Pleasure there came, and with it, such pain… It had never burned his spirit so, before. In the light of the Trees, when he was young and whole and unsullied, a Vala’s touch filled him only with heat and wild abandon – now he had to fight the fearsome burn, the raw spark against his soul, the agony of being touched by one whose kind he had forsaken. Every caress was torment, every brush of lips ate into his very soul, and the rumble of the wild voice whispering his name shook him like a leaf in the wind.
It was worth every ache; every tremor; every searing moment.
“Liar. Him. Him. You still… One of Them… How could you – ”
“Enough, Curvo.”
“You fool.”
“Enough.”
Celegorm turned on his brother, baring his teeth in a snarl, and Curufin fell back, his eyes widening as Celegorm reached for his throat. But at the last minute Celegorm touched Curufin’s neck almost gently, stroking his fingers over Curufin’s jugular, watching it flutter as Curufin swallowed.
“Curvo,” said Celegorm, soft and loving and terrifying, “You have what you want. You have Nargothrond without its king; you have the certain doom of Felagund; you have followers who jump at the snap of your fingers. And you have me.” He dropped his gaze to Curufin’s mouth and touched his brother’s lips with one rough finger. “Let me have…let me have…” His voice went thin. “Seven nights,” he said, when he could speak again. “Seven nights I had, that shall not be repeated. Allow me one lapse; allow me this one frailty.”
“And if I do not wish to allow it?” demanded Curufin, his anger still simmering under Celegorm’s hands.
“Then,” said Celegorm, releasing Curufin so abruptly that Curufin stumbled, “you shall just have to learn to live with that disappointment.”
And he strode off to wash the dirt from his skin, even as the brand prickled and burned on his forearm and those who encountered him passing in the halls shrank back before his wild, bloody eyes.
I shall not see you again in these forests, nor anywhere in these lands.
This is farewell.
If you are lucky, I will be dead soon. He had said it with a ferocious smile, naked and wild astride Oromë’s hips, dragging his blade against the Vala’s breast and bending down to lap at the hot blood that spilled from it. Perhaps then we shall meet again.
Luck, said Oromë, unflinching, is no longer something thee nor I have the privilege of demanding. He stroked his hands through Celegorm’s hair, pulling him down and rolling him over, pressing him into the heavy furs and finding his way between Celegorm’s thighs without slowing or gentling his movements. Celegorm groaned to feel himself breached, his knife dropping from his hand as he brought his arms up to clutch at Oromë’s shoulders. Blood dripped, scarlet and gold, from the wound on Oromë’s breast, and then the long cut was gone, and Celegorm raised his fingers to his mouth to taste the ichor that still remained. Oromë bent low, nuzzled against his throat, bid him open and willing, praised him for his beauty, and dared him be loud, in a language of hound and hunt and hawk.
Do you remember?
Celegorm carved his answer into Oromë’s back, watched the wounds seal, then pressed his mouth reverently to Oromë’s shoulder and neck, traced Oromë’s jaw with his tongue, sought Oromë’s mouth, begged and offered and worshipped in the language of blood and submission and fight.
I remember everything, I remember you, I remember this, I remember nothing. Yes yes yes, Lord, please – don’t stop – damn you, damn everything –
Shhh.
Pain and pleasure blended excruciatingly, incandescently, and Celegorm knew that this was the closest thing he could feel to joy.
He couldn’t bear for it to end.
Don’t let me go, he had whispered on the brink of climax, his face buried in Oromë’s neck. End it, send me back, release me, let me begin again… He knew it was childish at best and treasonous at worst, he knew it was the utmost betrayal of everything they had fought and lived for. He knew, deep down, that quite apart from everything else, it would be futile. What awaited him on the far side of death was not the wild wood and a place at Oromë's side, but enduring darkness. And yet –
Please, he whispered, and wrapped Oromë’s hands around his neck. Give me this one last gift –
No. Oromë kissed him like punishment, like benediction.
Kill me, Celegorm begged, the frailty of his throat in Oromë's hands before Oromë pulled away. Why do you hesitate? You know I deserve it.
No. Oromë jerked his hips savagely close, and kissed him brutally soft, and Celegorm shuddered all over with the pain of it, and came.
It is not my fate to kill you. Oromë’s golden eyes held depthless sorrow, and he cradled Celegorm to his breast as Celegorm wept and cursed him. Forgive me for being unable to gift you that, hunter-mine. I can give you love, but not mercy.
In his cold rooms, he lit a fire and then scrubbed his arms until the skin was pink and raw. When he was done, he laid his knife to his whetstone until it was as sharp as mercy and silent as fate, and then sat naked by the fire, letting himself dry. When Curufin came silently in, a bowl in his hands, Celegorm did not turn him away.
He let his brother feed him, and then he let his brother lead him to bed, and when he slept at last, he dreamed of nothing, nothing at all, and the darkness was enough.