Note: just to make it painfully clear, I write Orodreth as the second-born son of Finarfin, not his grandson. So Angrod is not his father and Finrod and Aegnor are not his uncles.
Disclaimer: Tolkien owns the Silmarillion. The character development and Orodreth's profession are my idea as far as I know.
Pairings: none
Characters: Orodreth, Finrod, Argon, Fingolfin (mentions Morgoth, Aegnor, Fëanor, Celegorm, Finduilas and other random elves)
Warning: AU, possible OOC, relatively graphic descriptions of violence, some retching, political subterfuge, something almost like suicide but not quite, fight scenes are lame
Song: The Howling
Words: 2,349
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kill (verb): to deprive of life; to cause the death of; to put an end to; annihilate, destroy
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/kills?show=0&t=1367875931
Never would Artaresto forget his first sight of violent, cold-blooded murder.
People died from accidents. Occasionally a craftsman would severely burn himself or cut off a body part. Every now and again a building would catch alight and leave someone charred to death or suffocated from the smoke. Accidents happened, even in the golden realm of Valinor.
But this was no accident.
The sightless eyes gazing up at the sky void of the merciful stars, the bodies strewn about like discarded children's dolls, their limbs cut from the strings of the puppet-master in their heads. They were just shells, shells dipped in crimson with their entrails squeezed out onto the cobblestone and their brains leaking out from between white shards of skull, with gaping wounds bisecting them from throat to groin or spearing them straight through from back to front.
He was sick--violently, horribly sick, purging his trembling body of any food that it might dare to still be digesting until only slimy yellow bile came up to splatter into the water below. For the longest time, he did not dare move for fear of fainting dead away. His head spun and spun and spun in the dark.
Artaresto was a peaceful creature. Perhaps he could be nonchalant, even cold at times, but not detached from the world in truth. He was not heartless, and so many innocent lives lost, the terror and agony they must have experienced as they died from their vicious wounds, helplessly bleeding out over their homeland, missing limbs or with organs spilling between their slick fingers... He could not even imagine...
It was then that Artaresto knew that he hated the act of killing, and he despised those who would spill blood rather than seek peace through negotiation. For these lives had been wasted.
---
He was given a sword the very next day.
The young prince hardly dared touch the instrument of death, though his older brother was insistent. "For protection," Findaráto had assured him. "I would never ask you to harm anyone."
But could such a weapon be used for any other purpose but harming another life? Artaresto reached to his hip and touched the hilt, smoothing his fingers over cold metal shaped and designed to fit easily into the palm for easy, quick access. The chill traveled up his arm and down his spine in a bone-deep shudder, and he pulled his fingers away as if burned.
"Something bothers you, cousin."
It was Arakáno, the youngest of his uncle's children--a wild-spirited boy if he'd ever met one, perhaps more so even than Aikanáro, so named for his inner wildfire. Silver eyes blazed with shocking excitement and anticipation, as though they were setting out on some fairytale adventure rather than into exile for the foreseeable future. "I see not how it is any concern of yours," Artaresto replied acidly, suddenly annoyed.
"I meant no offense," Arakáno was quick to reassure him. "I only wanted to help. It never does well to let such depressing fancies fester and set in for a long draught of rain."
Odd. Artaresto wondered if his upset was truly that transparent. "I am not comfortable with a blade," he admitted softly, not wishing to attract too much attention with such an admission, especially considering the general blood-crazed consensus of Fëanáro's people where they lingered at the edges of Nolofinwë's loyal company, licking their chops as if waiting for the next taste of spilled blood to pour down their throats in the sacrilegious succor of burning thirst.
"Not comfortable?" The very idea seemed alien to the younger elf. "Do you not want to become a warrior, crush the Black Enemy and take revenge for our grandfather, cousin?"
No, I do not. He is dead; he does not desire revenge. Were he alive, he would not desire revenge. But he did not dare say such things aloud, not with Fëanáro as he was, half-mad from grief, fey beyond comparison. Even looking into his half-uncle's eyes would surely bring Artaresto into a nauseating swoon, for the power in their depths would crush his mild, cool spirit all too easily and unintentionally--or with all the intent of the calculated trajectory of an invisible blade.
"I want to be a healer," he whispered instead. "I want to save lives, not destroy them."
"A healer...?" Arakáno looked as though such a profession had never occurred to him. "Is that not woman's work, tending to gardens of herbs and wrapping the wounds of their battle-torn spouses? People will think you odd."
The words struck some primal, hot part of Artaresto that rarely surfaced, the red-hot rage that heated only under the pressure of great friction and conflict, becoming a brand to the flesh of the soul. How such ignorance and disregard for the lives of others infuriated and disgusted him to the core! "If killing is the only profession suitable to a man," Artaresto hissed, "I would prefer to be labeled a woman. At least then I could respect myself."
He stomped off into the dark to be alone and wished he could rip the sword from his hip and toss it into the writhing ocean waves, watch it glitter in the lamplight until the blade disappeared altogether, lost for all of time, rending him unarmed and untainted. But Findaráto's voice echoed in his head again, full of certainty and at the same time reluctance. "For protection."
The cold hand gripping the hilt pulled away. Artaresto left the blade at his hip and did not look at it again. Instead, he pretended it was not there, and eventually he forgot.
---
One did not live in Beleriand without being blooded.
In fact, Artaresto did not even enter the lands south of Angband without being blooded. Their feet had barely touched stone rather than ice and snow before the enemy was upon them. Never had Artaresto seen anything quite so monstrous as the servants of Morgoth with their blackened skin and their hunched, emaciated bodies and their twisted, misshapen faces.
The monsters did not hesitate to tear flesh from bone. They would do it with their bare, rotting teeth if they were disarmed.
And Artaresto had had no choice but to kill or die. It was he that stood between children and these merciless, soulless creatures, and if he had to choose again he would do the same over and over and over again.
But the stench of intestines spilling out of a slit belly and all over his boots still made him retch. Stubbornly, Artaresto swallowed whatever came up and tried not to think about it. There would be time to be ill later, when lives were not at stake. Now his blade--blackened with first blood--slashed and parried and slashed some more, controlled only by adrenaline-flushed instinct as it detached heads from shoulders and slit open torsos and rent bone and muscle bone from any limb that got in its path.
In the end, the flow had slowed and stopped, no more enemies coming forth, and Artaresto had trembled so violently his sword slipped from his grasp and clattered against the stone beneath his boots. No longer would his legs hold him upright, for they had disintegrated and bubbled into streams of water dissolving his flesh and bone. And if he sat in blood and who knew what other putrid substance, Artaresto could not be bothered to distinguish it from the flow of stomach acid and meager rations that came vehemently upwards and out of his mouth in throbbing, painful waves.
For how long he sat still afterwards, Artaresto could not say. All he could remember was the horror. He had taken a life--monsters though those slain might be--and they were dead. He had killed. His hands were soaked in blood.
"Nephew?" A hand rested upon his shoulder. "Artaresto, look at me."
Nolofinwë. He was smeared with blood, some of his clothes hanging at odd angles where they had been slit to reveal the mail beneath. The older elf knelt before him, grasping his hands tightly and halting their visible shaking, rubbing them between rough palms until they were warmed enough to thaw and tingle beneath the dirt-encrusted nails.
"You did well," the other elf reassured him, thinking it might soothe the broken soul fluttering like broken butterfly wings in his chest. Only it was not a reassurance, but a curse instead.
Who wanted to be accomplished at killing?
"Thank you," he whispered. And he did not mean it. Tears pricked at his eyes.
Nolofinwë pressed a chaste kiss to his forehead and embraced him into strong arms. Artaresto, exhausted and helpless to the comfort, bedded down in the offered chest and wept.
---
Many centuries later, it came to pass that Artaresto was given the crown of his brother's kingdom.
He had become a healer in the early years of the war spent mingling amongst the war-ravaged Sindar and Nandor. They called him a gentle creature of the gardens (a woman some whispered contemptuously, but Artaresto would only secretly smile at the words), and he spent his days in the healing houses devoted to stitching back together lacerated and bruised bodies, to mending up the wounds of hopeless cases and putting back the jagged shards of shattered lives as best he could manage with the glue of affection, comfort and the best care he could offer. And the healer loved what he did, loved the role he played in the Song.
Until the day he had to trade it for the cursed position of king, the day his beloved older brother failed to return from the cursed blinding darkness of Tol-in-Gaurhoth. Had Turkafinwë not been so utterly mad with jealousy and wickedness, Artaresto might have thrown the circlet of his stately position bodily at his cousin's thick head and told him to keep the damn thing or else bash it to slivers upon the rocks of the great caves.
They were at war, and he was no fool. He knew what kings did. They organized and kept their city running smoothly, and they protected their people by any means necessary. By killing their enemies.
By killing.
As a king, he was expected to hold war councils, to discuss the best way to trap and viciously filet hundreds upon hundreds upon thousands of the enemy soldiers, to discuss the best way in which to dispose of their rank, filthy bodies, to discuss the best course of action pertaining to the future problems and allies or opponents rising on the political scene--in some case to order assassination in the subterfuge of moonless nights.
Now it was not just killing for battle, for momentary protection. Now it was planned killing, each movement marked out on a map like a bizarre game of ruthless chess. But the pieces were men and orcs, and any decision made from his lips could send anyone--under his command or his enemy's--to their untimely deaths whilst he sat safe in his halls upon his gaudy throne sipping from warm, thick wine and listening to his councilors and advisors whine and bicker and whisper in his ears with those oily, self-serving voices.
But he would still not touch the sword that swung at his hip, demanded through ancient ceremony. It had lain in his palm only once, and he vowed it would see blood only in exceptional circumstances. For he despised the act of killing more bitterly now than ever before.
---
They called him a lame warrior, whispered that it was no ailment of the body that hindered him from practice, that kept him from striking back in an attack and shielding himself from any glancing blow. Artaresto knew that many of his warriors thought lowly of him, thought he was weak and helpless, that there was something mad growing in his mind, the result of too many toxic herbs and hours in white-washed rooms.
They did not understand that his strength was the ability to resist, to hold back the visceral urge that screamed to rend and tear and destroy, the primal fear that rattled the cage in the back of his mind demanding that he fight back. Those men whose lives were devoted to the art of killing did not understand that no healer would willingly act violently upon another living creature without paramount reason, not even ones as evil as Morgoth's servants. Blood was blood and violence was violence. Artaresto avoided physically slaying at all costs, for the sight of spilled guts and the smell of rotting flesh and iron blood on the battlefield (on his hands and his clothes and his sword) still made him ill for days after each skirmish.
When the time finally came and their game had reached its end, when they were beyond hope as their enemy closed in around them, Artaresto closed his eyes and prayed that Finduilas would be safe, that his people would flee his city while the last of their soldiers held the overwhelming tide of ravenous, repulsive servants of the Darkness at bay. He prayed and held perfectly still, allowing his guard to leap before him to defend his helpless form.
And when the guards fell, he raised his blade and fought. He fought until his body could fight no more, until he was blooded for his final time, alone and cornered. And then he closed his eyes and did not raise his hands in defense. He did not peek through his thick, pale eyelashes to see the rusted sword swinging towards his throat. Barely did he feel the pain as the sensation of his body disappeared and there were only thoughts.
Relief slammed down as a curtain shrouding the blindness of pain. For there would be no more killing, no more red and black painting his hands made for the sole purpose of healing and saving.
He would rather be known as a cowardly puppet king than as a cold-blooded murderer.
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This was rather longer than I had intended for it to be (as was "Health" when I first wrote that one). Let's just say that I find Orodreth to be a surprisingly fascinating character for reasons I don't even understand myself. I mean, I write Aegnor and Finrod every now and again (haven't even really touched Angrod because I've got no idea what to even do with him), but nothing like this really. I'm actually rather fond of this, even though I find the mindset to be rather creepy. I don't think like this at all in real life.
It fits relatively well with the song and at the same time doesn't. The Howling by Within Temptation is actually one of my favorites that they've done with just enough of their old style mixed with gothic mixed with rock to not sound too ensconced in either direction. In any case, I happen to rather like this song and will occasionally dance around like a maniac while listening to it if there's no one around to see me being diabolical.
Orodreth Emblem by ~MrInfo2012 on dA. Even if it isn't canon, it's pretty, so I'm adding it.
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