“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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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?”
The instant Morgoth’s claw was out of the way, Túrin sprang. The world around him bled a thousand different colours, colours he had never seen and, had he been paying them a scrap of his attention, would not have believed existed. Like the string of a crossbow held too tight on the latch, he was not released but snapped. Never had he been so conscious of his every motion, the dormant power of his muscles and the deadly weight of the sword in his hand – and never had such things been so physically painful to bear.
Rage, to Túrin was not a red haze. It was colour, and noise, and power, and pain – and it was hate. Incomprehensible, irresistible hate.
That hate powered him forward at a dead sprint and hurled him as high as his muscles could fling him, madness-made-man intending to drive a sword (little more than a splinter, comparably) into any and every part of his nemesis.
The Vala, who sat cross-legged on the red hill just as Raza had, though now six times the height, swatted the offending mortal angrily as one might shoo off a biting fly.
Túrin’s greatsword left trickling wounds that glittered the brightest copper on Melkor’s thorny leg.
“Ouch–! You rude little tick! I’ve never met anyone so eager to die! Thank your father for the ill-fortune that makes you more amusing to keep alive!”
From where Túrin had fallen, Melkor plucked the irritating weapon and snapped it between thumb and finger. “Now what will you do? Something sensible, perhaps?”
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