tagged to share a soupçon of WIP delight by winsome friends @starshadeemilyart and @ecofutural, so have a little soon-to-be-dropped eärnur torture labyrinth long paragraphs mayhem. baby's first time loop, everybody cheer! floating this gently in the direction of @angamaite-der-ritter, @tobermoriansass, @seaemberthesecond, @balrogballs, @ulmondil, @antlered-vixen, @annarobots, and @gaydhros should you like :-)
There was no sound to presage the blows, for there was no one who flogged him, no hand in that room of dead air wrapped round the stem of the whip which did not fall and slice apart his yielding flesh with the ease of paring a ripe fruit. Only the slight twitch of the fingers in the pelt of the warg—but he could not see it, that trifling spasmodic movement; how did he know the way in which each delicate joint curled beneath the skin and drew the digits in no pattern of arcane learning, but only the merest languid flicker upon the beast it caressed? He saw nothing but the dark stone of the floor and the bursting stars of white pain when he closed his eyes, seaming across the field of his inner eyelids in jags of spiking force. For desertion, for insubordination, he had ordered soldiers brought to the post and whipped: but they had been punished standing, like men. He had watched it only because he had to, to tell them once they’d bled that they were forgiven. He had not liked to put himself in the way of heaving chests and sweat that trickled down sides filthy with dust and blood. He could not move his tongue from the roof of his mouth, but could hear, in the vast static silence of his agony, the Witch-King murmuring to his pets, or issuing orders to attendants that came and went around him in a mellow low voice like the notes of viols. Evidently it took little effort to rend Eärnur to the very endings of his nerves. Pain had him in its unrelenting grip, abating without ever ceasing fully, so that he would grow a little used to it, or think himself to have gained back some of the mastery he had spent his life in cultivating, and then be dashed once more against the rocks as the agony rose again to the quivering vibrato that silenced thought and turned his breath to stabs between his ribs. He could feel the brush and weight of things walking by him: he lay unnoticed and entirely without importance, less than the slavering beasts with their yellow eyes and fangs, and he tried in vain to make some sound, to press from his lips some word of unconquerable defiance that was choked before it breathed by the iron bonds of the spell.
On a sudden he could move again, though within the limits of his fetters, and the pain was only the memory of pain, like the shifting print of some bright thing on the eyelid. Slowly he lowered his stiffened neck until his forehead rested on the cold floor. He smelled the stone, and the damp darkness of caves, and his own breath, which was stale and foul as if from long thirst, and he did not attempt to raise himself, though he could perceive the attention of his tormentor turning infinitesimally to face him, and to surround him in a heavy press like the fall of a velvet drape. Through that false and serous calm he felt the lithe body on the bed rearranging itself, swinging its legs which were smooth and hairless as a boy’s, then the warm plumb of the bare feet on his back, their flat and hardened soles. Without violence he was borne down further into the floor, chest and belly flat to the pavers, groveling like a supplicant, like a worm. He had made no one do him such obeisance, nor had ever performed it; to the Allfather alone he had gone on bended knee, though he had bowed his forehead to the ground. But this was no reverence, only the tyrant’s joy of enforcement, and in the wreaking of his will made manifest and clean. Between his lips he tasted grit.
