#peredhels

They eat better than most. Their teeth have sharpened in Angband and they have learnt how to use them. They sing their nails sharper and harder until they can claw and rip and tear. Their fingers pop and twist and bend as they stalk the labyrinthine hallways. 

Angband’s uncanny architecture has no effect on them. They grow up running around the halls; guided by a scratching in the base of their skull that blurs and warps their vision until the corridors re-align and set themselves in front of them in a neat ordered fashion. They learn to hide in the shadows while they do this; other elves dislike the many eyes they have to open, and orcs are not like the Lieutenant and His Highness and treat them like all the others.

They try not to get angry anymore. The last time they did, Elrond was angry at an obstinate patient and in his rage he sang their joints out as their bones cracked to the marrow and blood flowed like an oil spill. Something inside him sang with the thrill of the kill, prey crushed in the maw of a predator.

The Lieutenant had clutched him close and stroked his hair as Elrond sobbed into his chest.

It wouldn't have happened in another life. In another life his first kill would have been a rabbit that he and his brother had hunted. Maedhros would have congratulated them and Maglor would have skinned and cooked it for them all. In another life they didn’t know they could be anything other than elves, didn't know how to properly sing.

In another world they didn’t know what the Lieutenant’s voice sounded like as he sang to them, didn’t know how to creep along the edges of the shadows, didn’t know the sound of their fingers and neck cracking as they shifted their bone structure.