9.
winter, 470
Maitimo--
I hate your Oath. I do not pretend to feign surprise that you were capable of swearing it. I know you too well for that. But its legacy is cruel: forever binding us to the past, with all its wounds and anguishes, perpetuating with words what we might have conquered with time. And for what? The Silmarils, created things, fair indeed, but temporal. Jewels and a dead man's grief.
I want to love you, but another man comes between us: a Son of Fëanor, proud and rash, bent on vengeance. A man who has sworn his life away with words binding as the vows of our love, invoking curse, not blessing. When I reach out for you, it is this man whom I find, this living anachronism who masquerades as my beloved, and moves him to ill deeds.
Swear a new oath, one I can swear beside you. Other memory consumes your thoughts, I know: the cliffs of Thangorodrim like a purgatory of the mind, a place that neither of us shall ever truly leave. You, who suffered so excruciatingly, and I who beheld your dangling frame in anguish, who cut through sinew and bone to free you, and felt the pain I inflicted in the core of my own heart. If we are to war, let this be our rallying oath--to avenge you and all of us, and to ruin the prisons of the Enemy forever.
Beloved... I wonder what will come of all this--Doriath and the sons of Fëanor, you and I--and cannot find an answer.