Mairon doesn’t know what jealousy is (he’s also jealous as fuck)
Listen, sometimes you know someone inside out, but that does not mean you can communicate with them. No way in hell Angband
Mairon had never particularly cared who Melkor invited into his bed. More than that — even the mere thought of physical coupling had always struck him as vaguely repulsive. But then, many of Melkor’s ideas were beyond his understanding.
No sooner had the Elves awakened at Cuiviénen than Melkor began studying them — first as an observer, then as their captor and lord. Before long, he discovered that they reproduced as animals did: something the Ainur had believed impossible for higher beings.
That was when Melkor first conceived the desire to create a being of his own flesh and blood. Some of the Maia in his service were privy to that ambition. Each of them grew proud, imagining herself favored by the Dark Lord, falling into a kind of foolish, euphoric delirium.
But then, once Melkor discovered that no woman could conceive by him, why did he still take them into his bed? Why did he subject himself to such a strange, ridiculous procedure?
Mairon knows now. He finds himself consumed by the same euphoric delirium he once observed with disgusted bewilderment. He marvels at how astonishingly, how exquisitely the bond between spirits pulses when carried through the bond between bodies. And never — never — would Mairon have imagined that an act so utilitarian, so clinical, seemingly fit only for reproduction... Oh, in Melkor’s own name —
Between men. Why? Why is it so extraordinary, so magnificent?
He cannot compare it to being with a woman. Yet a sharp, painful suspicion settles somewhere deep inside him. It must be... more natural? Surely Melkor likes it better that way — for centuries, only women have been summoned to his bed.
Are they still? The longer he dwells on the thought, the keener it grows, until it cuts like a blade.
In Angband, not even a fly can pass unnoticed by Mairon. He knows the maze of Melkor’s chambers by heart — every servant permitted to enter them, every object within, every material, every scent.
He would recognize another’s scent from a mile away. From a league away. No matter how many days had passed before he himself entered those rooms.
It is the distance that drives him to madness. While he is away, he cannot know whether someone else has taken his place beside Melkor. There is that strange, lingering ache — elusive, almost phantom-like. However carefully he searches, he cannot locate it within his perfectly functional body.
Ah... is this body pleasing to Melkor? Can it give him everything he wants? Mairon thinks of his Lord’s former lovers — of their eyes, their hair, their skin.
Mairon laughs at himself, cruelly and without mercy. And yet, more than anything in the world, he wants to come back.
“To do what?” he wonders. “Guard him like a hound?”
He would never presume to claim any right over Melkor, remembering what became of every woman who imagined herself special.
Yet he rages. He kills with an impatience foreign to his nature, as though determined to destroy everything that stands between him and Melkor.
Then, unexpectedly, a letter arrives. The handwriting is sharp and angry, as though the ink itself were demanding, in an arrogant, petulant voice, that the Lieutenant present himself in Angband for a personal report. Immediately.
