Chapter Text
There is blood spilled across the snow. It foams in drifts of white made scarlet; it seeps through ice, fills footsteps, poisons the sleeping earth. There is so much blood that it is beginning to melt where it pools at its thickest, and all the thaw (and there is no lack of it in the cold midwinter), only seems to turn it darker instead of diluting to vermilion as the laws of the world dictate it ought, and the sky is overdrawn with clouds that promise only more snowfall come night.
But the werewolf’s bleeding carrion is warm, steaming, with the remnants of a harsh life pooling at the bottom of its veins. It is warmer still on the inside when the knives cut into it, partitioning skin from flesh and muscle from muscle until their inevitable collision with the pelvic bone, then resurfacing for an instant to split the hide along the stomach and the sternum in a steady line. Mist rises around the new hands and new knives that emerge to aid with the skinning, a hot and pungent stink in the frigid air. And it bleeds, too fresh for the blood to have fully settled, almost as though weeping in death where it could not have wept while living -- but no one weeps by its side.
There are things that live and walk the earth only to be devoured, and things that only find their absolution from the need to eat by becoming someone else’s prey.
The other blades nick and dive, peeling skin away from slivers of pale fat and almost black meat while the first, the one with mithril wire wound around its grip, dives to separate the stinking guts from the pelvic canal and crack the bone in half with a peal like thunder, carving through the abdominal wall with the surety of a hundred hundred corpses unmade, butchery coming to it as easily as though the knife itself was a dancer. And though the underbellies of clouds are dark, the mesentery and the coils of intestines still glisten with that glow that only the living and the freshly dead whose blood has not yet pooled possess, starlight-that-was in a lake of black viscera.
All is withdrawn, clean, methodical, flawless.
The master of the hunt scoops out the offal and the stomach and throws them to the baying hounds. They cast themselves upon it before the meat hits the ground.
While the lean grey and brindle bodies mill through the bloody snow to wet their tongues with something rich and bitter, he slices through the diaphragm, peeling apart the muscles of the chest to get at the sternum. Bone and skin don’t seem all that different when they’re both coloured scarlet, only that one wields the messer that hacks the ribs away from the breastbone, and one yields beneath it; one must always yield, in Valariandë of the bright snow, of the cold night, of the merciless war that chips away at everything else that ever has been. It is the wolf that yields now. It has not always been; its guts are foul and heavy.
Still, the hounds rip into them eagerly.
Their lives are short here -- he tears the windpipe out of the werewolf’s throat, loose cartilage dangling in his hand where the spear has punctured it -- no royal decree has yet stopped them from tearing into fouled meat -- the ribcage cracks like an old tree splintering in the storm as it is split in twain, and he peels the lung aside to reveal the red, red heart.
“You should eat the heart, now that you’re king,” Tyelkormo says, teeth bared, as he offers it to Findaráto on the tips of his fingers. He sounds almost flippant. The flesh steams and glistens almost like a living thing.
But Narrostoron’s king does not kneel -- though all the fey eyes of the Fëanárian huntsmen with their hawks and hounds and cruel mouths are turned towards him -- and he refuses the knife that would cut through the superior vena cava, the pulmonary veins and the aorta which alone remain not yet severed.
“I will not,” he does not bloody his hands further.
The hunter’s hand grips the heart tight, tight enough to bruise if it were still living. The heartsblood trickles down his scarred arms and drips into the snow just before it could reach his shirt’s fine white sleeves.
“Will you not do the sacrifice?”
In the empty air between them, the knife gleams colder than the ice.
“Not of tainted flesh.”
In the snow, the blood has not yet dried on the carven bone idols whose eyes, teeth and antlers it slakes.
“Not too tainted to deny an offering,” His mouth curls, but his eyes are a falcon’s unblinking stare.
“Tainted enough.” The king denies both hunter and quarry with pursed lips, “And I am neither blessed by the Huntsman, nor so greedy as to claim another’s catch.”
“Scorn it, if you will, though you may in turn be scorned,” says the Huntsman, and sinks his teeth in.
The heart is no less rich to choking when he bites into it on his lonesome, black and crimson blood gushing through the corners of his mouth as the coronary arteries tear, and sweet as rot -- but he does not look at the fibres of muscle and slick connective tissue even while his teeth rend through both, inch by inch, laborious, to the yapping of wolfhounds and falcons’ cry. He looks Findaráto in the eye instead.
All the world seems to spin on the axis between them for that minute of ripping flesh, constrained to the red snow upon the heath, the cutting of the hide, the canines in the heart-wall, and the king's golden head that is nothing like any of them in their midst. All their oaths and all their dead on five feet of frozen earth.
He says nothing.
He does not partake of the wolf-flesh, he offers neither blessing nor scorn. His eyes are bluer than the sky has been in months.
He does not ask whether the blood is sweeter than their own; Tyelkormo knows he will not.
The huntsmen tear the offal to pieces among themselves as they did at the dawn of the world, and if the distant burn of divinity within it tastes only of coals and putrefaction, still they all swallow. Such is the way of the sword.