Animal Skins by Ilye

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White Hart

I subscribe to the fanon that Celegorm the Fair is actually albino – I feel it goes a long way towards explaining the genetics in the family.

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Join me in the forge, Curufinwë had said. A statement innocent enough, reminiscent of the elder days when Curufinwë had wanted to inspect damaged weapons after a hunt and strive for their improvement.

It didn’t occur to him until he had prowled inside the forge that it might have been a bad idea, when a firelit silhouette wielding tongs turned to face him. Something kicked blindly inside him and he scrambled into the anvil, knocked ironwork clattering, and Deer awoke.

He’d never liked being Deer. Deer was most use in the sprawling plains or the woods. Deer needed space to run and leap and blend and hide. Deer was no help in small confined spaces or the dark because Deer had prey instincts and felt terror and froze. Deer’s heart fluttered in his mouth and Deer’s stomach turned over and over and Deer’s muscles quivered just standing still and– and–

Deer panicked. Deer ran.

Deer’s instincts carried him far, fleet-hooved. Inside an Elven encampment it was loud and busy and full of people and noises and weapons and hounds and he just had to get away . He flashed white out of the camp and into the fields beyond where he blended with the silvered long-grass. It whipped at his fetlocks as he dashed through it, catching and scratching and whispering things. The wind brought him no scent of his herd and so he ran more, ran through the fear and the memories of bad things and into the open freedom until finally, finally , he stopped, far enough away for safety, and slept.

He came back to himself at the fringes of a wood, curled into a shallow hollow in the ground like a fawn. His antlers were gone and he was alone and there was still no hint of his herd.

He hated being Deer.

The grass waved gently in the breeze above him, pale against the grey sky. The trees susurrated behind him – and a short way off, he heard footsteps .

He braced, ready to bolt again. The footsteps paused, and Irissë said loudly and deliberately,

“My goodness. Whatever you are today, it certainly blunders around.”

He tightened his lip over his teeth. The grass swished again, then parted to reveal Irissë’s concerned expression. He didn’t look at her. The outstretch of her hand made him jump. She stopped moving.

“Prey animal.”

He nodded, head dropped and eyeing her sidelong. Irissë hummed soothingly.

"That's all right." She held out her hands, palms open. “Friend, see?”

He stared at her for a few quick breaths. He knew she spoke the truth. There was something in her posture that exuded warmth and kindness. She felt almost maternal.

With a sigh, he knuckled himself upright. Irissë settled onto her knees in the grass before him and looked him up and down.

“You're bleeding.” She gestured to where his right forelimb was buckled in its brace across his belly.

Oh. Was he? He looked down. There was a red bloom on the thick linen bandage swathing his stump. Must have been where he banged himself on his way out of the forge. Adrenaline had anaesthetised it thus far, but with the sight of the blood came a dull throb that he knew would soon blossom into a delicious, stinging ache.

“Will you let me look at it?”

He thought for a moment. She was no threat. He licked his lips and let his breath out on a sigh, so that his posture slackened. She took it as the acceptance it was meant to be and shifted closer, slowly and without making eye contact.

“I’ll need to take your brace off, all right?”

He nodded and dropped his head to let her. The first brush of her fingers tickled and made the skin twitch like shaking off a fly. Irissë smoothed her hand over his good shoulder, reassuring, before she undid the buckles and unwrapped the padding between leather and living hide.

He watched her with a detached kind of interest as she dabbed lightly at the amputation site with the edge of the bandage. He’d grown almost used to having just three limbs; regaining the fourth, however impotent, was alien and it didn’t feel like it was part of him. There was no urgency to her movements, so he drew his limb back and cradled it in his hand to examine it. The wound didn’t seem to be bleeding any longer, and it looked clean. He dropped his head and sniffed it. It smelt clean. Just to be sure he licked at it a few times – then caught himself.

Deer didn't do that – Deer must be sleeping again. But Wolf also slept, and Prey-Bird, and Bear and Boar and Hare who he'd been at times in the Pit. Prey-Bird had been plucked of his feathers, Wolf skinned for his pelt and Deer’s antlers shed and stolen. He wore none of their skins any more. He was naked.

“I was Deer.”

“Was?” She said it with a gentle kind of curiosity in her voice; not pressing, but encouraging. He flicked his eyes sideways to acknowledge her astuteness. She pursed her lips. “But not any more?”

He looked up again, and this time met Irissë’s patient eyes. He shook his head. She smiled at him – she was the only one who did that, these days.

“So what are you now, Tyelko?”

He frowned, thoughtful. Animals were designed to survive. They fought for it, right up to the last. He'd seen it many times, in the frenzied kicks of a hart brought down by his hounds and a speared boar's furious squeals that only drained away with the last of its blood.

You will not have me, they'd all said, as he approached with his knife to end it. I am not yours! You will not have me!

He'd repeated those same words, over and over, through strangled cries and snarls and laughter. And when the pain grew too much to bear, he’d let his animal instincts take over in the dark, in the depths of Angband's pit. He’d slipped on the skins of the animals he fought with; ran with; spoke with. The long teeth in the night were much easier to handle when they were his own.

He tightened his one remaining palm around his mutilated forearm. The scars there would never smooth out. Some he’d put there himself, but the rest were made deliberately, or during a scuffle he would inevitably lose – etched there, whipped there, burned there, always without his permission. He had never minded the honour of battle scars, but to have one’s camouflage removed against one’s will…

Fury bubbled up, scalding the back of his throat. His eyes slammed shut. Like biting insects, his fingernails nipped into the underside of his forearm, anchoring against the roar of pain beyond his control and his shrieking laughter in the face of it, urging it on, taking the reins into his own hands again.

It was suffocating – in his animal skins he never had to dwell on the injustice of it all. But none of those fitted him now. The skin he wore was no longer the pristine white of a gull’s breast. It was marked, scored, mutilated beyond recognition; it had belonged to somebody else. Now he needed a new skin of his own. His eyes lit upon a patch to the inside of one elbow where black streaked beneath his own pale skin. Similar patterns marked his knees. He’d earned them right at the start of his captivity, when he’d refused to kneel to Moringotto. A blow to the back of the head had sent him sprawling across the throne-room floor, scoring his flesh and embedding ash just beneath the surface. It was painless enough now that it had healed, but it was still there twelve years later and showed no signs of fading soon.

He lifted his arm up before his face and examined his skin in the daylight for the first time. Yes, they had modified his camouflage, but wounds could be reopened and scars could be remade. And Irissë still awaited an answer.

What are you now?

“I don’t know what I am, yet,” he murmured, then looked up with a grin that felt too wide, too bright for his face. “I might even be something you’ve never heard of before.”

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Chapter End Notes

Random animal fact: White deer, or white stags/harts, are important in many cultures’ mythologies. The Celts believed that a white hart is a messengers from the otherworld and would appear when one was transgressing a taboo. According to Arthurian legend, white harts have a perennial ability to evade capture, and pursuit of one represents mankind's spiritual quest. It also signalled that the time was nigh for the knights of the kingdom to pursue a quest.

This may or may not be a hint about where I’m taking the Silmaril plotline. I suggest you don’t read too much into it (unless you want to!)