tagged by the lovely @ecofutural to share a bit of what's percolating in my dread kitchen, so have another soupçon of the túrin/gurthang nargothrond absolutionfucking and eroticized suicidality. sometimes grief looks like existential bdsm with the cursed sword that belonged to your dead teacher-lover and that by chance you used to kill him 🙂↕️ dropping this casually onto the desks of @tobermoriansass, @starshadeemilyart, @antlered-vixen, @balrogballs, @angamaite-der-ritter, @gaydhros, @ulmondil, and @outofangband if you feel so inclined!
“I would chasten thy flesh. Desirest thou not due penalty, and pardon after? Thy debt is writ in blood, and thou shouldst be washed clean in it. I would taste of thy claret as I tasted Beleg my master’s.”
His hand seized in the coverlet. “You mean to kill me.”
“Take thy life? No, though perhaps thou wouldst like it so. But I would exorcise thee of thy sapless grief. I know thy mind, Túrin—dost thou not wish to feel as he felt, even to the last stroke? I shall not give it thee, but I may cut thee prettily meanwhile, and punish thee for thy faults, since thy comrades will not. Dost thou not want for it?”
In the quiet room be found that he could hear his own breath, coming faster than was its wont. He had feared trial from Orodreth, and had not received it—but were there not other justices than those that sat enthroned in seats of state? Blood would take its due; it was only right. Out of a fear that seemed primeval he spoke of Beleg to no one, yet death stalked him through his days, and at night came to him in dreams, and blew its cold airs over his body so that he tossed and sweated as from fever. Slow or sudden he could think of nothing more replete with dread than that ripping out of life, and equally he could not not think of it, nor banish from his thought the sly questions: what did it feel like? What did one think as the blade flashed out, the sickness festered, the heart stuttered in its rhythm and jerked to a stop? And if what lay beyond was terrible, was not it a like terror to live, and to watch one’s friend die, and to kill the one beloved and suffer no penalty, because in the universe there was no order, and no law-book into which a cosmic hand inscribed transgression? Better to do it quickly, and so perish, than to wander without direction in this waste of vast and irremediable sorrow, where nothing grew but crookedly. At Ivrin, in the searing depths of his madness, for a moment the curtain had been twitched aside, and he had heard again the dear voice—but he would not hear it again. And to put his body in place of the dead, to feel what he had felt, the last touches the wretched world had laid upon him, would it not be a kind of union on this headland of despair? He yearned for the touch of his hand as men for the sun in the long nights of winter. Beleg’s death, belonging to him alone, was surely his to use as he saw fit.
“I do,” he said, and curled his palm to the grip of the sword, which, being only itself, evinced no palpable reply.
