Tag: sure nuff

thelioninmybed:

There was only so much time one could devote to spite and recrimination.

Still, Maedhros had many things to hate and a lot of time to fill. He started with Morgoth, spent a day or a year thinking up invectives, and then moved onto his creatures. The spider that had swallowed up the light, and the balrogs that had torn his father open, strewn steaming, smoking guts across the ground. 

He cursed his father then, for failing and falling and leaving them to this. His brothers who had left him (though he’d surely curse them harder if they came). his brother for fleeing to his death, and their grandfather for waiting for his own. 

The Valar, who should have stopped Morgoth, stopped them, done anything but curse them and them send them on their way. 

When he started blaming his mother, and Olwë who might have done more to stop them, he knew that was too far. 

For a while, he hated the mountain, the shackle, the smog that hid the stars. But there wasn’t much satisfaction to be had in hating inanimate objects, and they were all Morgoth’s doing anyway. Maedhros tried hating him a little longer, but it was like chewing the dry bones of an old kill. 

Mostly, he hated himself, and that was fertile ground. He had failed his people and his family. He had stolen and murdered and betrayed. He had broken his mother’s sculpture of the colour green (done all in gold) when he was seventeen. She still thought it had been Huan, and would never know the truth. 

Even so, he ran out of things to hate about himself (nails curling in upon themselves, the lice and the stink and he’d always had ugly knees) eventually. 

Without hate to cling to, it was hard to cling to life. There were things he loved (too many of them the same) but he shied from those as he shied from touching the suppurating wounds around the manacle. All was grey, as smoke, as stone, and being ready to die was not the same as wanting death. 

He had been ready since the docks of Alqualondë, but now he welcomed it, if only it would come. 

It didn’t. Morgoth’s spells were strong as mountains, strong as shackles, and the Ainur had no mercy. 

What came, at last, was a sound, so faint and sweet. It might have been a harp.

Oh good, thought

Maedhros

with no small relief. Something new to loathe.