Celedin hated this. Dathor could not give a damn about Celedin’s comfort.
Dathor did not bend Aerhril over every piece of furniture in Foxglove Peak, did not fuck her in every room after they rid the place of the orc army, but he was overly demonstrative, touching her constantly, taunting Celedin with it, and Celedin hated that, too, but eventually seemed to make grudging peace with it, especially after he grew overly interested in that maid Hafindel.
At some point, Dathor was contacted by his younger brother, the human one, the one who had killed his mother coming out of her, the one who might have been the son of his mother’s husband or possibly her husband’s favorite, theone Dathor’s stepfather had treated like a son. Who the child’s father was, Dathor would never know.
Dathor had killed them both, the husband and the favorite, drowned them and made it look like an accident, not that he would ever admit that out loud. He knew better than to confess to murder, ever, to anyone, not even Aerhril.
She was trustworthy, and he knew she would keep it a secret if he asked her to, but he would not do that to her. He wished to tell her because it would unburden him to admit it to someone, but this was no service to her, especially if he told her she could tell no one. Then, she held the burden, and she must bear it, and she had not committed the action. No, he kept that and bore it himself. It was his, not hers.
There was much in their relationship, he had come to see, that was a burden for her. He supposed some of that burden was what gave their love its raw power, the fact that taking him on caused her discomfort. She must bear a sense of humiliation, a sense of owning the fact, publicly, that she had lowered herself.
Sometimes, he hated her for that.
But it wasn’t her he hated, he knew. It was the world itself, the world that had made him into something burdensome.
Perhaps, there was something else in it, too, something deep and savage, right at the core of it. He was huge and she was small. There was an element of his being a burden every time he lay over her, every time he engulfed her delicate form with his burly one.
That ignited him in certain ways. Sometimes it made him feel helpless rage, and he could not say that he always handled that rage well. Sometimes it spilled out of him and onto her. He ruminated, sometimes, in the depths of the night or when a fierce storm raged outside the walls of Foxglove Peak, on that time he had become aware of the pleasure he felt seeing women in pain.
It disgusted him.
He wanted to burn it out of himself.
But it would not be seared away entirely. Some of it waswritten on the walls of his own soul. It wasn’t every woman, really. It was elf women.
There was a kinship there. They had something in common. They were both lesser in the eyes of the elf men. But they both had some element that raised them a bit—they were elves, he was a man—and this was what they both were.
When he watched elf women suffering, he saw himself suffering. When he made an elf woman suffer, he felt like he had risen to the level of an elf man.
The pleasure was shot full of twists of shame, bright red and pulsing, an agony that felt sweet in its own way.
Try as he might, he could not stop it from igniting within him, again and again, though he did what he could, when he noticed, to douse it away. He wanted to be better than that.
Sometimes, he was.
Other times, he succumbed to things that made him ashamed.
When his brother wrote a letter to him, Dathor was not certain he wanted to know the other man. Dathor had left the boy the heir to the land that their mother’s husband had owned, but Dathor’s brother—his name was Earil—had been a baby then, and the land had passed to someone else to hold until Earil came of age.
One way or the other, Dathor had killed Earil’s father, that was the thing. How could he claim brotherhood with someone when he’d done such a thing?
So, it was weeks before he decided to write back, but he did.
It never came to much more than that, really, letters. Earil wanted to know about their mother. He craved the stories of her that Dathor would write out in his long letters, grateful when he wrote back to know who she had been. The boy wanted to know where he came from, that was all.
You came from violence,Dathor wanted to write, but he didn’t.
Perhaps that was the way of it, in the end.
All of nature, even the pretty parts, had some element ofviolence to them.
Was his love for Aerhril beautiful precisely because of the way it moved them both, the violence they both felt pulsing beneath their ribs when they saw each other?
Or was it beautiful in spite of that?
Perhaps the distinction really didn’t matter.
It was love.
