because @melestasflight tagged me to share some (thank you kindly), I am posting a piece of Knives, aka the story about the murder of the princes of Doriath. also tagging @balrogballs @polutrope @tobermoriansass @starshadeemilyart
The man that takes them to the woods has a knife, and it is long and dark and wicked sharp.
His gauntlets sting where he pinches them by the nape, the black steel is ever hungry for more blood to slick its joints; his hands are cold, his eyes are hard, his steps give no pause to the stumbling feet of children or the winter’s chill seeping through their gold-silk hose. He walks without looking down, and his fingers never once loosen.
The blackbirds are singing.
The man pushes them over the frozen bed of a creek. His hobnailed boots leave no footprints. It is almost night, and his knife gleams balefully in a colour that has no name in the languages of Beleriand, no equal in the frozen setpieces of midwinter -- neither where the steel glides noiselessly through the air, nor where elven blood seems to still live on its hilt cherry-red without drying, without dying, without becoming mere memory -- and no pause for the fact they have not yet lived through seven winters apiece and their ada said they were yet too young to hold swords of their own, and thus carried none save the kitchen knife which Eluréd had hidden in his shirt while they waited with bated breath in the pitch-black pantry and which did not save them.
The snow seems almost too bright in the dark; the white falcon on the man’s chest glitters, shadow-eyed and silver and silent, brightly but not like a star because stars gleam with grace and no matter its skill, the hand of the raptor’s maker knew nothing of such tender virtue.
They walk. The trees loom overhead, black and white and grey and strangely quiet. The man’s hand chills like death. They walk until there is no more blood on the ground, and then some.
“Where--” Elurín’s voice cracks like a whip before it breaks, tearing through the silence. He clears his throat. “Where are we going?”
He does not expect the man to answer, or even to notice -- he has been quiet until now -- yet, before the echo of his voice has been swallowed up by the snow, he feels a glance burrow into the back of his head so cruelly that he cannot help but flinch. It is itself a knife (Eluréd’s hand around his tightens, but he, too, is shivering), long and dark and wicked; the man’s eyes are green, but not like spring, they’re green like venom.
The blackbirds are singing.
“Why does it matter?” he asks. “You’re not going to come back.”
dailybridgerton
romaincrisis
2087
dededos
