Caranthir paints in the moonlight, though he does not paint the moonlight. It is too soft. His brushstrokes are rough, wide, and crooked. The paint rises above the canvas in heaps. He paints in color to distract from the gray of his life. He loves red and green, purple and yellow, orange and blue. He knows which colors complement each other but usually he lets them clash instead, mad or muddy like the bloody world. He creates new names for his various hues of catastrophe.
Sometimes it is not enough to spread the paint on with a brush. He wants to become more intimate with the colors. He loves the oily feel of the paint, the way it squishes between his fingers as he runs his hands over the rough canvas. He scrapes his nails down the board, making riverbeds and canyons in his beige and red mountain region. He shoves his fist against the painting and crushes a town. He paints over his father's eyes.
Maglor creeps down in the night and watches him.
"What are you doing, little brother?" he asks. Caranthir turns and sees him in the moonlight, loose nightclothes rippling off his slender frame. He wants to paint him, but he has not got the talent. Maglor requires delicacy.
"I thought of everyone, you would know," Caranthir says. "I am letting them out."
"And are they all so violent?"
"Yes, all of them violent and angry."
"Angry at what?"
"Everything. Aren't you angry, Kano?"
"Sometimes, and sometimes I am sad, regretful, even a little content."
"I could never be content, not here. Not anywhere in Middle-earth."
"But we are doomed to stay here forever now."
"Yes, and I never will be content." Caranthir turns back to the canvas. He is painting the fortress of Angband. He makes fire go up in it with his fingers. Flame and smoke undo the Master who created them, and Caranthir smiles.
"That looked like a good thought," Maglor says.
"The destruction of the enemy," says Caranthir. "But that will never happen."
"It may," says Maglor. "It may yet."
"Not for us."
"No, but for others, and we may still benefit from it."
"The Valar will not come. We are all forsaken and the disobedient." Caranthir swirls the red and yellow in with the black background until there is no longer flame, only darkness.
"What do you do with your paintings?" Maglor asks. "I never see them after the night."
"They are all the same painting," says Caranthir. "I paint over everything with black and start over."
"That sounds like a messy start for the next night, and we never get to see your work, only glimpses."
"I guess, but then again I don't paint anything really, just ugliness, and that's best left obscure and unseen."
"I don't know," says Maglor.
"Of course, it's true," says Caranthir. "I should know. I was always ugly and in the shadows."
"You're not ugly."
"Perhaps not relevantly to Dwarves and Orcs, but yes, I was hideous compared to you, compared to Maitimo before Morgoth painted him over. There is no sense is being pretty or painting pretty, everything just gets ruined anyhow."
Maglor stares at him in silence. He looks at the thickly crusted canvas. "When you're done," he says. "Can I have it?"
"Yeah," says Caranthir, "when I am done."
Maglor kisses his brother good night and goes to bed. Caranthir sets his brush down in a glass of water. Moonlight glistens off opaque black paint. It will be a murky red brown tomorrow.
Finis