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From his skin down into his bones, Mairon trembles.
“Tell me you are mine,” Melkor demands of him as he presses kisses to his neck, lips that turn to teeth that stop just shy of violence.
Again, Mairon trembles. He moans with the pain of it—bruises huge and livid down and around his throat, like a strangling—yet with pleasure also.
“I am yours,” he murmurs from where he is cradled to Melkor’s chest, splayed over his lap as he sits his dark throne; they are alone in Utumno's great hall within the stony belly of the mountain, looked on only by shadows skulking behind pillars and in corners and in the rafters high above where the braziers do not reach.
Another kiss, this time along the slope of his jaw, gentler than a feather. Lips trail up to his ear. On his naked hips—his clothes were shed some time ago, by his own hand at Melkor’s command—Melkor tightens his fingers, gripping deep into the meat of him.
“Make me believe it,” Melkor breathes, hot against the many gems adorning Mairon’s ear from lobe to pointed tip, “lieutenant.”
An order, then. Not that Mairon would treat even the faintest whisper of a wish from his lord as anything less than an order.
He straightens from their embrace, pretends that he is girt in silks with a blade strapped to his hip over the blossoming ache from Melkor’s kneading. Underneath him, beneath the robes that Melkor still wears, he feels the telltale hardness of desire.
“My lord,” he says, simply, sincerely, “as I swore to you on bended knee many years ago, before this selfsame throne, so I renew my pledge now: you have my service everlastingly. Your will guides me in all things. With loyalty I stand at your side, with such skill as I am given I take your dreams for my own and make them true, with—”
“Mairon.” Spoken sweetly, as though Melkor hid honey upon his tongue. “I know your vows well, and I know you know them too, for the things you have done in my name are being written into legend even as we speak. I did not ask you to recite them for me. I asked you to show me the truth of them.”
Mairon tilts his head, a frown curving his brows, appraising Melkor from his eyes blue as the heart of hottest flame, to his lips where the shadow of a smile lurks. His frown deepens. His ardour, for a moment, cools. This is a puzzle that his master has set him, and he does not know what shape he is expected to create.
“Happily I will show you, my lord,” he replies, “but I… I fear I do not quite understand…”
At that Melkor laughs, points his mouth at the ceiling and throws his mirth high into the air.
“Oh, sweetling,” he purrs, relinquishing Mairon’s hips to trail his palms up his sides, ticklish-soft. “Am I dissembling my meaning behind coy words? Very well, then. I shall speak plainly: what would you do to me—or have me do to you—to prove this everlasting devotion you profess, hmm?”
As he says this, his thumbs find Mairon’s nipples, stroke over them in a slow, teasing, fluttering motion. And Mairon jumps at the touch, arches into it, pleasure set twinkling in his stomach like a bright clutch of jewels. His lips part around a sigh. He looks into eyes blue like a cleansing—like a devastation—until he feels sensitive in a way that has little to do with the thumbs on his nipples; and he drops his gaze to the throne’s stone behind Melkor’s shoulder.
“Prove it in, oh… in the coupling of flesh?” he seeks to clarify, though he knows the answer already. Melkor did speak plainly: he wants to see all the dirty things in him, all the hungry things, things with claws and slavering jaws—what does Mairon want to do, to have done upon him?
Everything. Anything.
“Just so,” Melkor breathes to him. And then, once the silence thickens between them: “Little one, hey.”
The flicks back and forth over his nipples cease; fingers grasp his chin, gingerly lifting his face until Mairon cannot help but make eye contact. Blue to gold. The oceans and the skies and the cosmos gaze into him, find him racked with wanting like a fever.
“Rarely have I seen you hesitate so,” Melkor continues. “What troubles you?”
Mairon makes a noise, soft and a little sad. He gives a small shake of the head. Stop your questioning, he would like to say, if Melkor weren’t his sworn lord. He wants those endless blue eyes off him. He wants to slide off Melkor’s lap and put his clothes back on and go, away from these feelings inside him that have too many teeth.
But that is not all that he wants.
Where they are pressed together, he feels Melkor sigh from down into his belly. There is a certain curl to his lips that bespeaks a growing impatience.
“Here I am,” Melkor murmurs, tender as knives, “offering you aught that your heart desires—be it dark and twisted, or beastly with need, or sweet in the manner of young and trembling lovers—yet you would rebuff me?”
“No,” Mairon says instantly. He places his hands flat on Melkor’s chest, pale fingers glittering with rings fanned across midnight cloth; under his palm, a heart beats strong. “It is no rebuff, my lord, never, never. Your touch exalts me. Your offer humbles me.”
“Yes, yes,” Melkor growls, “your words pour silvered from your tongue, fairer than fair. But words that do not beget deeds are barren, Mairon, they are hollow. Worth less than nothing.”
That hurts, in a place deep as graves inside Mairon that he keeps hidden from the world. As he sits there struck dumb, Melkor unhands his chin and returns to holding him by the hips. He sighs again, digs his fingers into the flesh there, soft and already bruised.
“I have spoken to you churlishly,” he says after a moment more, and the kiss that he presses to Mairon’s lips is perfect as only a god could make it, long and delicate and tender: an apology, in the only way Melkor knows to offer such a thing.
Mairon squeezes his eyes shut—ignores the sudden, searing heat behind them—and he accepts that most sacred of kisses.
Once they part, he whispers, “Forgive me, my lord, please.” His heart feels soft and painful with rot. He is choking on putrescence. “You have told me your will, and I am failing to fulfill it.”
“Shh.” Another kiss, deeper than the last, and the hot and sinuous joining of their tongues unpicks a knot in Mairon’s mind and makes him forget his hurt and his cares and everything in Arda or outside of it that does not start and end with his master; their kiss breaks only when Melkor decides to pull away. “Do not misunderstand me,” he murmurs against Mairon’s prickling mouth. “Your words are fair, and I hold them close to my heart. However…”
Very suddenly, one bold hand slides round to his arse and then down, in, one fingertip rubbing against his most sensitive and secret of places. Mairon startles. Heat drenches him, pinkening his cheeks and throbbing between his legs. A moan gets caught on his teeth.
“However,” Melkor continues above his fussing, smiling wide and decadent, “I am a lord of ungentle things, my pretty one. I want so much more from you than words. And”—the fingertip becomes insistent in its stroking—“I daresay that you do also.”
The stroking transmutes into pushing. Melkor has no lubrication on his finger, so the slide in is dry and rough and raw, to the first knuckle only. It hurts, and like a spark to tinder, that hurt ignites such pleasure inside of Mairon that he cries out with it, drops his head upon Melkor’s shoulder and cants his hips back into the intrusion of his touch. The finger burrows deeper. Mairon pants, and mewls, and in his belly there is a bubbling and a boiling, and between their bodies his cock juts hard and proud.
He does, he does want more, with a greed that sweeps him up like a tornado he wants all that Melkor deigns to give him.
He remembers the first time that he confessed to his friends exactly whose bed he had tumbled into. Remembers the look that passed between them, from Gothmog to Thuringwethil, like something of onerous weight. Gothmog’s expression clouded over as Thuringwethil laid her hand upon his arm and asked, Are you not frightened?
He remembers how he grinned into their sombre faces. What cause have I for fright?
His touch is violence, Gothmog told him, Gothmog who was among the first to join their lord in the youth of his majesty when his Song rang clear across the barren wastes of Arda and cozened them to flames and to quakings. His love is wreckage.
Stone can withstand him, Thuringwethil added, her lightless eyes pinning him in place, so can the dirt under our feet and the sky above our heads, for none of these have flesh to maim or blood to shed. But you, Mairon—
Do not fret for me, please, he cut in, laughing. Flesh heals. Blood congeals. He will not break me. I will not let him.
Truth is, the breaking never frightened him.
Truth is, he watched Melkor crush into dust mountains he himself had built with others among Aulë’s apprentices when the world was in its infancy; and he watched him resurrect them broad and sharp and dizzying, titans compared to what had been there before. And within his chest his heart glowed very bright, and that day he learned the shape of a new emotion: yearning.
No, what frightens him lives inside his own self, coils there unseen and quiescent until with his touch or with his words Melkor draws it forth.
He rocks back into Melkor’s finger still inside him, takes it deeper, deeper, as far as it can go. He aches with it; he burns, the sensation in its dryness scraping across his nerves like flint against fire-steel.
And despite that pained feeling of toomuchtoomuch, he still wants his master, wants more of him, all of him crammed up inside till his body threatens to split along its seams.
This is what makes him wary and wraps him in silence when Melkor bids him to show and to prove the completeness of his devotion: not that his master might treat him ungently if given the opportunity, but that he himself would be too delirious with desire to recognise—or care—if he is about to be hurt beyond salvaging.
Sometimes he hardly knows himself around his mighty one.
“Greedy little whore,” Melkor croons in his ear, and desperately Mairon nods, twitching his hips against that one devastating finger. “Bliss looks sublime on you.”
Mairon whines into his shoulder, and there is a version of him who would be ashamed to see him thus—the version endowed with command over Utumno’s forges and foundries, and with oversight of most other procedures and protocols that keep it running—but that Mairon is very far away; here, right now, he knows only of his need.
And it is to this needy Mairon that Melkor speaks his next words: “I ask you again: what pleasures would you have of me? And I bid you speak freely, my loveliest one: I do not seek to mock, nor to censure. Desire will never be a sin under my roof.”
It is very gentle, the way that Mairon breaks. This is a secret that Melkor entrusts to him and him alone, not to Gothmog or Thuringwethil or any other soul bound to his service: breaking does not necessitate violence. It can be done gingerly. Lovingly.
Mairon hears Melkor’s words and inside him there is—a quaking. Something dies, something small and young and cowed by vastness, be it Arda made monstrous by his master’s divine will or his own feelings looming up inside him like nightmarish things with too many mouths and all of them with daggers for teeth. And in the wake of that tiny death, the lieutenant of He Who Arises in Might lives.
He lifts his head off Melkor’s shoulder and finds his lips, claims them, with his teeth he nips at them and with his tongue he seeks entry into the warm holiness of his mouth. Melkor grants it. He makes a noise that is soft and pleased—that Mairon stores in his mind for posterity—and he kisses him with the slow luxury of immortality.
“There you are,” Melkor breathes during a pause in their kissing. “Always you have been bold, little one, and always you have shone with it like gold glutted with gemstones. Do not diminish your glow with reticence or doubt or shame—don’t you dare.”
And Mairon does feel aglow. He feels as though his bones have been scoured clean of their marrow and instead are filled with rivulets of lapping flame. He feels as though he could light up the perpetual darkness amid the Ered Engrin like an earthbound star.
“As you command,” he purrs, grinding back against that single finger that is making a hot, dull ache radiate through his innards; and with a grin he adds, “You asked me what I wanted of you.”
The finger crooks. His inner walls give way beneath it, and sensation explodes in his gut.
“So I did,” Melkor replies even as Mairon moans, even as his hips rock, rock, rock, impaling him deep on that cunning finger. “Would you state your pleasure?”
“You.” It is said with power. It is said like a spell. For a heartbeat Melkor’s eyes flutter shut. The echoes of that one word seem to stick upon the air, shimmering gold.
The spell is broken by Melkor’s laughter, warmer than blood. “What part, sweetling? The whole would be rather unworkable.”
His finger crooks again, makes the breath stutter in Mairon’s lungs. And his hungry heart starts dreaming a hungry dream.
“Your fingers, my—oh—my lord.”
Melkor quirks an eyebrow at him. A smirk tugs at the corners of his mouth, eyes travelling the contours of his face: the dark blush obscuring the freckles on his cheeks, his lips wantonly parted, his eyes like bright, sharp things wrenched forth from the belly of the mountains.
“Two of them?” Melkor asks, temptation rolling in his voice. “Three?”
“All,” Mairon demands, “and the hand they are attached to.” He smiles through his flushed cheeks, offering Melkor his teeth. “Please.”
It is not a new concept to him, but it is a rare one and, thus far, one that he has kept very silent and very secret. In the deeps of night, ensconced in his bed, he has thought of it as his hand snuck between his thighs—what would it feel like, he has wondered? Would it hurt, the immense stretch? Would it shudder along every nerve, and ignite in his head like the beginning of the world? Would it make him feel owned, a stuffed piece of meat, his master’s creature, plaything, whore, bound to him in his soul and in his flesh?
The surprise rippling across Melkor’s face is the most beautiful thing in the wildness of Arda. “Oh,” he says, “oh,” as his free hand cups Mairon’s cheek and strokes over the slope of bone underneath. Eyes blue as the horizon at the end of everything look at him in wonder, then when the wonder runs out, they look at him with a certain glint, devious and calculated.
At last, the finger is withdrawn. With a tug and a drag, it pops out and leaves Mairon feeling too empty and too sensitive.
“On your feet, now,” Melkor instructs, nudging him off his lap.
Mairon goes where he is guided, on legs left a touch unsteady he stands and he awaits Melkor’s designs, and he watches. Openly he stares as his master rises from his throne, broad and tall as a mountain cloaked in shadow, and he so small standing before him wearing nothing but his jewels. Those flames sizzling through his bones flare bright and then brighter, hot and then hotter. He would follow his master anywhere. With the point of a dagger he would inscribe his commands on his very heart.
So it is that when Melkor extends a hand to him, Mairon takes it; and when Melkor starts to move and tugs him along, he trails obediently at his heels until they are stood together before the throne’s armrest.
“Wherefrom came such a fancy?” Melkor asks him, half-turning away from the throne to look him in the face, even as he breaks their handhold and reaches for the armrest, palm hovering an inch or so above it.
Teeth of stone loom there, cracked and interlaced and cutting. The throne in its entirety is made of stone, called up from the roots of the mountain by Melkor himself as his first deed in this keep when it was new. And there are sharpnesses in that stone dire enough to match the sharpnesses in him who sits upon it. They would skewer any flesh that strayed too close; if one were to lean over either of the toothed armrests, they would find themselves impaled through the guts and out beyond the spine.
“I could not say, my lord,” Mairon answers. “One day the image floated up from some dark drawer in my mind and there it suddenly was, full-fledged.”
His voice lacks its usual certainty. He’s distracted; his eyes keep being drawn to that hovering hand. Large, smooth-skinned, unadorned: a perfect hand, perfectly non-descript. But though Mairon cannot see it, he can sense the power churning just underneath its skin. He feels it in his stomach, at first, a fizzy, roiling sort of clenching. His nostrils burn, as though the air were acrid with smoke. The little hairs that adorn his flesh—at the nape of his neck, along his arms—all stand up shivering.
It starts with a grating, a guttural screech, like the agony of rocks. Before his eyes the arm of the throne morphs, flattens. Slowly, the teeth retract into their stony gums, until at last the surface of the armrest is left preternaturally level. No dents, no sharpnesses, no irregularities. Nothing but safe, blank stone.
Melkor wears a smile that is small and only for himself.
“My most audacious fancies have sprung at me full-formed from the dark nothingness of the mind,” he says. For a moment, memory steals him away, pulls him to a place where Mairon cannot follow; Melkor stands there still and silent, staring at his throne with that same smile on his lips, so soft and heartbreakingly lovely and more distant even than the stars.
Within Mairon’s ribcage, something with claws starts to scratch. He pushes in between Melkor and his memories, insinuates himself between his master’s body and the newly flattened armrest.
“Well, my lord,” he offers, bending at the waist, bending till his forearms brace against the seat of the throne and his hips drape over the armrest, exposed in every way that matters. “Fancies are given to us so we might make them actual.”
Melkor comes back to him, all at once, all his: one hand on his arse where the flesh is fullest, the other between his shoulder blades gently but inexorably pushing him downwards. Mairon follows that momentum, down, down, he folds his arms and pillows his head upon them. Perforce, his back arcs. The position is indecent, like seduction carved from prettiest marble and then given a flush of life. He knows what he must look like, feels it in the unforgiving arch of his hips, all curves and hardness throbbing between his legs, nothing left to the imagination.
From behind him comes an indrawn breath, a croon. “You are a dream.”
And the thing with claws within his chest settles down and starts to purr.
He feels himself being spread apart, one hand grabs him, exposes him utterly to the air of the hall cool as only the inside of a northerly mountain can be. His breath seems to come in solid chunks, blocking up his throat. Anticipation pounds in his head, in his veins, at the base of his stomach.
He hears the lubrication before he feels it, the pop of a vial being uncorked. It is tipped slick and viscous over him, chased by a finger of Melkor’s perfect hand, one single finger smoothing through the oil, over the twitchy skin of his entrance, down where it drips across his balls.
There is little he can see from his position splayed face-down into the throne, so he shuts his eyes. The darkness behind his eyelids is total and it is innervating. It amplifies sound, makes sensations grow enormous. Even so, the first push of that finger up inside of him is far mellower than before, made gentle by the oil, smooth and easy and all the way in. Through his blocked-up throat, he sighs brokenly, in so much need.
His sigh draws a chuckle from Melkor, long and low, seeming to cling to his nakedness. “This is hardly the stretch you crave, is it?”
No, in the shake of his head against the throne’s seat, no no no as his hips crush back into Melkor. Once, twice that finger thrusts into him, just a cursory probing; and then Melkor does start to stretch him, two fingers pulling at his entrance and sliding in, in, right into the core of him. Mairon’s belly shudders with arousal. He pants, and he wiggles, and as Melkor brushes over his prostate—with every push-pull of his fingers making sure to nudge it very lightly—he blinks his eyes open and clambers up onto his elbows, and as far as he is able he twists and to Melkor he says, “Please…”
As to what he is begging for, he is not sure that he knows. To be filled with three, four, five fingers, now and quickly and will Melkor stop his teasing; or perhaps he is asking for this lunacy of his to be abandoned and Melkor to knead his prostate in all of the clever ways that he knows till he sobs out his orgasm; or even for Melkor to grasp him by the hips and enter him, fuck him, holy flesh joined to his own and making him more than what he deserves to be.
Over his shoulder he looks into his master’s eyes—blue like metal at the first kiss of twilight—and he is lost. Words fail him. His thoughts scatter and scramble beyond hope of comprehension. He looks at Melkor in a daze. He looks at him with a crazed and clamorous heart.
The fingers inside him move. They stroke. They make every organ in him tremble.
Melkor holds his gaze, and he gifts him a smile slow and indulgent as torture.
“Have I made you beg already?” he asks, mocks, silk in his voice. “What will you do when I bury myself to the wrist inside you?”
Unceremoniously he crams in a third finger, twisting, pumping, loosening him up. Mairon cries out, bleeds the sound all over himself as that sensation hooks into him, and Melkor’s smile grows that little bit keener.
“Will you weep for me?” he continues. “Will you hold on to me and screw up your lovely eyes and cry with the momentousness of it like a maiden blooded for the first time? Or will you grit your teeth and endure, hmm? Will you let me ruin you, stretch you to the brim then stretch you past it and leave you gaped open to the world? Will you get on your knees after and bow your head before me and thank me for honouring you thus?”
Those eyes, they are on him still, glittering like sharp-cut gemstones. They see him, Mairon is sure of it, they fillet away flesh and see what lurks underneath, hunger like madness, like sin, like devastation.
Mairon drops his face back down to the seat of the throne. Against the chill stone his cheek seems to boil with fever. He has always wanted too much. So he has gleaned from others, Aulë gainsaying his ideas again and again and again, the other apprentices glancing at him askance as he spoke of his visions—meldings of metal and organic matter, the alloying of materials to attain extremes of hardness or sharpness or even never-before-seen properties like magnetism, the compounding of chemicals to see what novelties might happen, what wonders, what perils, what else what else what else—Utumno’s smiths scoffing at him when he was just another of their nameless number working too long and too meticulously, even Gothmog and Thuringwethil looking at him through tight, worried faces when he told them of Melkor and the delights they found in each other.
Be less, he has been told, and no, he has said back.
And then there is Melkor: his heart beating to the same hungry tune as Mairon’s own, not content to simply probe at the borders of what is possible but taking those borders and ripping them asunder. Melkor wants him to want more, for himself, for the works of his hands, for the world entire. So much more than he’s ever allowed himself to dream.
Will you weep for me, Melkor asked, or will you grit your teeth and endure? As those three fingers spear him open, heat and pressure and a silken, writhing feeling in his gut, Mairon says, “I will do whatever would please you most.”
For such an answer he is rewarded with a fourth finger: oil slicked over him again, a retreat until only Melkor’s fingertips are holding him open and then a pushing, a plumbing, the three inching back in alongside the fourth, and his flesh spreads hugely to receive them and it is not quite pleasure but not quite pain either.
“Oh, but I cannot choose,” Melkor laughs, “for everything you do pleases me,” and he says it so easily, as though such words didn’t have the power to grow hands and grip around Mairon’s soul and shake it into derangement.
To that, Mairon cannot think of a single silvered thing to say. Fortunate for him, then, that Melkor does not seem to expect a response.
Four fingers slide in; four fingers slither out. Mairon feels slack. His muscles have forgotten how to close back up, and in his heart there is a blood-thick, worshipful sort of gladness—this is what I am, what I was made to be: his, all the way through.
“You are ready,” Melkor declares from behind him.
The sliding and slithering stop. Yet more oil is drizzled over his entrance, a splash of cold against the fire in him. Mairon breathes, breathes, breathes, stomach tight, skin feeling unsettled as though tiny storms flickered under it. Quite suddenly, he realises that he has softened up, cock wilting between his thighs with his focus so fully claimed by the fingers picking him apart.
Then: movement again. There is such pressure against him, inside of him, such mountainous pressure that he might just burst with it. Melkor has all five fingers in, now, five, and the knuckles behind are crowding into him too, seeking to breach. Mairon whines, thin in his throat. Finally the pain has come, little flashes of it tingling up his spine.
“Hush, hush now, you’re all right,” Melkor soothes. “You can do this, I know you can.”
For a moment the hurting fades, Melkor stilling inside of him. His free hand taps him upon the small of his back.
“Put your wrists here for me.”
Mairon hums a note of acknowledgement. He uncurls his arms from beneath his head and twists them behind himself, wrists meeting at the base of his spine just as Melkor wished.
“Good boy.”
Mairon melts. As though he bore candlewax inside him and not bones or muscles, he slumps into the throne, dissolving into perfect laxness. Fingers caress over his crossed wrists, they curl, they encircle. They are loose upon him, holding him tenderly: more intimacy than restraint. Half of Melkor’s palm rests against his own upturned one. Mairon can just about brush his fingertips against the side of it, large and ever-cool like frost and sacrosanct as it is. In return, Melkor gives him a tiny squeeze.
The pressure returns. Redoubles. The thing that seeks to pummel its way inside of him is hardly recognisable as a hand, just a battering ram, blunt, brutal.
“Breathe,” Melkor commands of him, “you need to breathe, little one.”
The words come to him dampened, as if through fog. Breathing seems an absurdity. There is no room left in him for breath with Melkor’s hand nudging inside him, little by little by little, but though its advance is minuscule it is also relentless. Muscles that are already open are made to stretch again, more, wider, wider, and as they are worked agape they ache, they smart in the way of wounds, and Mairon cries out or thinks that he does or thinks that he should. Low in his belly a drumbeat has picked up, pain flickering into pleasure then foundering back into pain over and over again till they seem inseparably pulped together.
“Shh,” from behind him, lulling, “I’m nearly there, very nearly in past the widest point.”
Mairon growls. A grimace shatters over his face and he mushes it into the cold, hard stone of the throne. Spasmodically, his fingers clutch at the little of Melkor’s hand that he can reach. Melkor gives him another squeeze, a firmer one, holding him more securely. It anchors him, it soothes him; breaking is not such a frightful thing when the hands of a god are there to gather up the pieces and make them whole again.
“You’re about to give way for me,” Melkor murmurs, and there is triumph in his voice and something Mairon will tell himself sounded like love, later, once he is able to think again.
But now all he can do is feel, feel, feel: that immense pressure and then pop!—the knuckles burrow past his rim and he screams and screams loud and shrill and he lights up the air in gold as his power shakes loose, and from here it is all so very easy, the rest of the hand sliding in, sucked in by his greedy insides down to the wrist.
“Well done,” Melkor tells him, “oh, sweetling, you are so good for me, so brave.”
Mairon isn’t listening to him. He is so full, feels it pounding in his pelvis and stomach and chest, feels sure that Melkor could but stretch out one finger and stroke his beating heart. Air whines out through his teeth as he makes little ah-ah-ah noises. His skin feels hot and cold, cold and hot, clammy in the chill of the hall, yet drizzled over with sizzling specks of molten gold as his power continues to seep out of him.
“My lord…” he croaks, not because he has anything to say to him but because he—needs him. Needs his hands and his voice and his might to keep him together when it feels like his fána might just slough off him, unspool like so much thread.
“I am here.”
At the small of his back Melkor starts stroking his thumb over the thin, ecstatic flesh of his innermost wrist. Subtly, an alien power envelops him, black and heavy and so vast that it threatens to fracture the mind, but it brings none of that vastness to bear here: it covers him in the slenderest skein, stopping him from haemorrhaging gold. Cocooned inside of it, Mairon feels transported. He thinks: I would lay waste the world, if it meant I could have this forever.
“Shall we try some movement, hmm?” Melkor asks him, the words travelling strangely, seeming to come both from behind him and from right next to his ear, transmitted by some guile of Melkor’s through the magic blanketing him. “I will start gently, let you get used to it before I fuck my fist into you firm and slow and a little violent, how you always like taking cock.”
It is a good thing that Melkor’s power is upon him, pressing fána and ëala together so they cannot fragment; for such unholy words on those holy lips would otherwise have spelled his ruin.
True to his word, Melkor treats him with the utmost care. There is—something happening inside of him, a coiling, prodding motion that must be Melkor gathering his fingers into a fist. And then Melkor is thrusting, just the tiniest back-and-forth rocking of his hand. Obscenely stretched as Mairon is, even this comes as a detonation, setting fire to his belly, wrenching from his lips mewls and moans and a strangled curse or two. And as time wears on and his body grows accustomed to it—the fullness smoothing out into something sweeter, less bruising, that fire in his innards losing its scorch and licking at him pleasurably—he finds himself laughing. It starts quietly in his throat, gaining volume until it is drooling from him, clinging hot and sticky to his mouth and the throne beneath him and the air around him. He feels unreal. He feels divine. The entirety of Melkor’s godly hand is inside of him and it feels like apotheosis.
“It seems I have my answer,” Melkor says, words both distant and close, both imperious and intimate. “No maidenly tears for you, my admirable one. Only endurance. Only the desecration of pleasure. Good,” he adds, and the back-and-forth of his fist becomes a little bit harsher; “you are exquisite at all times, but most exceedingly so when you linger on that sweet, keen edge of breaking and you do it with a smile.”
And then Melkor does a new thing. His wrist curls, his whole fist tilts and rubs down down down, and Mairon chokes on his own breath. Caught under Melkor’s knuckles, his prostate is shrieking, exultantly. Everything in him, organs and bones and blood and thoughts and somewhere very deep the love that he holds for his master hidden like a fragile relic or an irreplaceable gemstone or a raging infection—everything seizes, shudders, heaves. Between his legs his cock weeps freely, beyond any control he could possibly exert it fouls the side of his master’s throne. There is a throbbing at the base of it, a wilderness of need, keeping time with Melkor’s rubbing inside of him. He’s still half-soft but that doesn’t seem to matter as his belly tightens and the blackness behind his closed eyes fizzes with white incandescence as though at the creation of the world.
He shatters. The body does what it must: it shakes, hips grating into the armrest, the clenching of his muscles making Melkor’s fist seem monstrous; his throat opens wide around a scream, one endless scream perhaps, or several repeating ones; and if the throne wasn’t defiled before then it certainly is now as his cock spurts its pleasure down the stony side of it, drip-drip until he feels wrung drier than dry.
It ends, or maybe it does not; he lives, or maybe he does not. He imagines this is what his shades must feel like, plucked out of the clutches of the grave by his necromantic arts, here yet not, present but not fully; for death is a jealous master, and once touched by its bony hand, none are suffered to return to the living unchanged. And death is but a paltry rival to the jealousy that rages inside of Melkor.
At length, the fist stirs. Tired nerves crackle, sore flesh shifts and parts: very slowly and very gently, Melkor withdraws from him, squelches his way free, and Mairon lets it happen with only a faint bleat of discomfort as the knuckles stretch him wide again, wide as he has ever been.
He drifts, then, caught over the arm of the throne, not yet ready to move and leave behind this sacred place, or this feeling of floating far and placidly like ghosts and like gods. His wrists are released. He gathers his arms to himself—gingerly, because they have stiffened up—and pillows his head upon them to cushion the unyielding hardness of the throne.
From behind comes the whisper of fabric, a soft rasp of skin stroking slick skin. One of Melkor’s hands grasps his arse, levers him apart so that nothing is hidden at all, not even that most intimate of places where he is slack and tender. In his mind Mairon sees those blue eyes that must be fixed unblinkingly on him, perfect blue eyes that sanctify even as they devour.
“Stay right where you are, little one, just for a moment longer,” Melkor says to him.
Of course, of course. Mairon signals his obedience with a grunt; does not have it in him to try anything more coherent.
It is only a moment, just as Melkor told him it would be. Through the mesh of magic still around him Mairon hears him shivery-close in his ears: his breathing growing shallower and more ragged, his tiny sighs and groans that he doesn’t quite manage to swallow back down as he nears completion. Private sounds that more often than not are drowned out, by Mairon’s own much louder noise-making, by the jostle of bodies, even the steady crackle of the fire in a bedchamber. They are a gift, a sacrament, and Mairon dredges up enough energy to smile.
And as he feels a wet and warm splash against his entrance, his smile widens.
Shortly after, Melkor unhands him, and then his power leaves him also, slowly dissipating into nothingness. At its loss a void seems to yawn open inside Mairon’s head, an empty, nauseating thing; but his master is here, here, his monstrous and tender hands guiding him to his feet, the infinite blue in his eyes arresting him, and Mairon is caught, he is saved.
He was a Maia among dozens, hundreds of other Maiar when he met the Vala for the very first time at the roots of the mountains where his research had taken him, where he was not supposed to be. He was an infinitesimal cog in an unambitious machine. He was inconsequential. Nothing, no one.
And look at him now: smith of legend, lieutenant of an empire, lover to a god titanic in his might and in his purpose.
Seed dribbles down the backs of his thighs and deep inside in his core there is a giant, blooming ache and his skin is still scaled with gold in patches where his fána ruptured, and he holds his head up high and grins into his master’s face, bright amid the throne room’s gloom.
“Thank you,” he says, and he says it honestly; “though I must beg your forgiveness, my lord: I shall not kneel for you, for I fear my legs would struggle to bear me back up, shaky as they are.”
Graciously Melkor inclines his head. “There is nothing to forgive. We have an unending eternity for you to kneel to me.”
His eyes flicker away from Mairon’s face to the throne beside which he stands. With a gesture he resurrects those great serrated teeth of stone upon the armrest. The dried streaks of Mairon’s pleasure he leaves just as they are, perhaps to be cleaned by the servants or perhaps to remain there forever, this most base part of him consecrated by the hallowed stone it adorns.
It is a pleasant thought, one which Mairon turns round and round in his mind like a particularly lovely gemstone. He carries it with him through the rest of the night, as he dresses, as Melkor douses the braziers in the hall, as together they ascend to their chambers, flitting through Utumno’s vastness easy as shadows.