“Well. I see someone’s turned his hand to Art Criticism.”
“I’m quite hurt, if you want me to be honest.”
“I do not want your honesty, I want your understanding that the next time I put a water jet into your face, it will not be a depiction of your face. As the mortals are fond of saying, no more mister nice terror.”
I give you a pleasant outing, fond memories, art, poetry, hair-clasps, and you repay me with violence. Hah. I see.
“Happy am I to let you wait, ignorant and cold, with your ass in the sod, Master of Fate."
The note, scrawled on dried skin, is delivered from the hand of a scrawny young waif with freckled skin and short-cropped hair the color of fox fur.
"I was bidden give this to you upon a red hill, Lord Turambar. I could not refuse,” they said, with something crooked in the tilt of their mouth.
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The strange creature flinched from the blade, throat convulsing with a swallow. But still they laughed—
“You would not recognize the truth if you looked it straight in the face! You would not see it, nor hear it, nor know its name, if you rolled on top of it in the night… Son of Húrin.” Raza curled their tongue against their teeth obscenely.
“Go on… ask me how I know of your straw-headed father… ask me how I came to carry a message from the Mighty Arising! Truth or no truth, you’ll not remember this come morning— that is a promise."
Red-gold eyes widened to round luminescent pools, and those who looked in their amber depths found themselves as caught in their reflection as an ant in sap, unable to blink or look away. The men who held the being who’d named itself “stranger” grew still as stone; all sound on the hilltop died, all color faded but the red of flowers and the red of Raza’s eyes.
"Why don’t you guess my name?"
There was no need to guess. Though his blood was ice and his veins, and the rest of him frozen with it, his mind was overtaken by a sudden terrible clarity.
He had known terror before. He had known hate. But those eyes burned through his every definition with the ease of a firestorm against a wax candle, searing and burning and obscenely licking its way into the very marrow of his soul as if intending to devour it. Every breath drove that horrible look deeper, and the deeper it went, the more difficult each breath became to draw.
Yet, by some fell stroke of luck, there was one on the hill who had not fallen into that horrible howling pit. One whose attention had rather been devoted to the one wielding the blade – in one instant the dire and deadly Lord of Bow and Helm, the next frozen to the point of living death by sheer terror.
Andróg’s pale eyes narrowed, and his hands locked around the hilt of his grim, grey axe. He sprang forward with a roar, teeth bared in true wolfish fashion, and swung the axe down hard toward Raza’s head.
A second of confusion whirled in which the facsimile creature darted between man to man, unable to keep them all spell-bound at once. It was the axe or Turin, and in the instant in which they had to decide, they chose the axe.
Raza– who was no longer Raza the message-bearer, but the author of it– twisted their ragged head around to avoid the stroke as well they could, shrieking in an awful, gut-wrenchingly human way as the blade sunk far into their collar bone. Such a scream– a child’s scream, or a fox’s scream, the kind that sends mothers out into their yards at night, sick with worry… but as the wound poured forth smoke and the axe that had split the flesh grew warped and red and white with heat, the scream died, swallowed whole and exhaled again as laughter, hoarse and echoing.
The cut was suddenly dwarfed by the size of the limb it marred– not a thin, bird-boned limb, but a tarnished gold pillar. Melkor shook off the small, stunned men that had laid hands on him, sending them tumbling far across the plateau.
"How disappointing. You’re every bit as dull as your father. I’d hoped for better sport…” The Vala cracked their neck and joints loudly, stretching out from the confining body they’d held. Dabbing the now small wound with one finger, Melkor winced, and glanced down at Androg. “You are a feisty one… why aren’t you one of mine? You’d be better rewarded in my service than here, scavenging for roots in winter."
Turning their eyes back to Turin, the Vala clucked their tongue and jabbed the point of one claw into the unlucky man’s chest. "After I went through all the trouble to make a body and come down to visit, you go and spoil my fun!” They sighed. “Well… the jig is up now. You invited me, and I’m here. What was it you wanted to try, Lord of Bandits?"
MisbehavingMaiar: Tumblr Archive 