From good to bad by Aprilertuile

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Melkor at the gate

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For two long years they stayed there with little to no interactions with their kin.

It had led them to explosive arguments, Tyelkormo hadn’t thought it was possible to equal the arguments that Curufinwë and Fëanáro had during Curufinwë’s teenage years but somehow they still had collectively managed. 

It was Makalaurë’s music. 

It was Nerdanel’s absence.

It was Curufinwë and Fëanáro’s diverging views on a matter of forging pursuits. 

It was his own view of the valar and relation to Oromë. 

Cleaning was also a source of regular argument, with Huan who was shedding and carrying things inside to play. 

Letters were an all too usual source of howling dispute and horror thrown at one another’s faces. 

Tyelkormo was longing to leave Formenos again to ride with Oromë’s hunters. His presence here did nothing to help. Indeed, it seems that every day he and his father argued, just because he didn’t believe the Valar were just out to destroy this family while his father was convinced of it.

Or because Tyelkormo treated Huan as a dear friend gifted by Oromë, another friend.

He loved his father, he did. But Illuvatar be witness, the elf could beat a dead donkey in matters of stubbornness and paranoia. 

Tyelkormo clearly wasn’t the only one deserving of a name that warned of his quick temper, his father was far more deserving of it!

Tyelkormo was in his room, windows opened, Huan longing on the bed the big nuisance, when the sound of his father’s voice attracted his attention: “Get thee gone from my gate, thou jail-crow of Mandos!” followed swiftly by the heavy sound of the entrance door closing. 

He closed his own window and went to the living-room where he knew he’d find at least two of his siblings and Finwë. 

His father was there before he arrived, face red of anger, while everyone else seemed curious as to what raised his ire this time around. 

“Melkor was here.” Tyelkormo said from the door. 

“He wanted the Silmarils. Offered my freedom. Just a trick. Again.”

“What happened?”

“I closed the door on him. That Vala of Might and Failure deserved it.” Fëanáro snorted dismissively. 

Finwë looked pale at the first mention of Melkor, but he was starting to look worryingly so to Tyelkormo’s eyes. 

Finwë wrote a message in haste, to send to Manwë against the dismissive protestations of Fëanáro. 

“Don’t you see the danger?! Haven’t you realised yet that this isn’t a game?!” Finwë finally snapped at him. 

Tyelkormo just looked as his father left the room, furious, probably going to gaze at the Silmarils again. He shook his head.

His father’s obsession with his own creations needed to stop. Once upon a time his father would have been the first to devise a plan to protect the fortress against Melkor… 

“Tyelkormo, Tyelkormo, can you call a bird? We need to send this message as quickly as possible.”

“I can but…”

“An elf will go too, but a bird might be quicker.”

“I’ll have a bird for you.”

Not like it was hard, he had his hunting birds available already. He just needed to convince one to bear a message instead of hunting. 

The bird left, and didn’t come back. 

Soon they received word from that Oromë and Tulkas were gone after Melkor… 

And it was Tyelkormo’s turn to worry. 

Oromë wouldn’t take his elven hunters with him, not on such hunts against such a foe, but his Maiar, certainly yes. 

Would they all come back unscathed? Would Oromë come back safely even? Melkor was a formidable foe. Some of the maiar of Oromë still bore marks of their previous fights with Melkor, marks that their shape shifting abilities never hid. Marks that he only saw because they let him see admittedly but still…

That night, after receiving the news, instead of listening to how this hunt was bound to fail because all Valar were terrible at what they did, from his own father, who didn’t see the hypocrisy of his words seeing he had himself apprenticed with Aulë and was pretty happy with what he had learnt there in the first place, Tyelkormo slipped outside the fortress and walked to the nearby poor woods. 

He closed his eyes, leaning against a tree, and then walked to where he had left a hastily built shrine to Oromë, within the woods. A very familiar sight to him, comforting if perhaps useless. 

He took a look behind him at the imposing fortress of Formenos, and then stopped at the shrine to Oromë he had made some times ago.

It wasn't a grand permanent shrine, but it was his and practical. 

He stayed there a while, thinking of the Hunt. 

He didn't pray. He rarely did. And he'd rather not distract Oromë anyway seeing he'd be the one to receive it in the first place. 

But he needed to think and he felt better outside by the Shrine, than inside hearing how all valar and maiar were useless and helpless and a plague on society set against their family. 

To Mandos with his father’s prejudices. They were different, certainly, but Oromë and his maiar were first and foremost his friends. 

It took long days, but Tyelkormo ended up finding his bird at his window with a letter at its leg : the hunt was over, and had failed.

Melkor seemed to have gone toward Araman, and to have hidden well. 

To Tyelkormo it seemed that Melkor somehow managed to organise himself well. It would be impressive if it wasn’t so threatening to them all. 

If only Manwë had not freed his cursed brother…