Helcë etta Anga
Minas Morgul
(Private with Frost)
She chuckled softly, watching him dress. “You’ll be back,” she murmured, with a soupçon of command, and followed him from the room with her eyes. As the door to her chambers closed behind him, she completed her thought. “...if she doesn’t eat you alive.” Sombelenë had a fair amount of confidence in Frost’s ability to complete his task and return from Angmar in one piece, but it was no more or less than a trial. If he ran afoul of her former protegee and did not return... he wouldn’t have been worth her time anyway. Setting aside the writing desk, she swung her legs over the edge of the bed and arose, catching up a brief dressing gown of silken gold and wrapping it about herself as she crossed the room. Halting where Frost had stood before the wall, she spread her fingers and set them against the stone, where the faintest heat and trace of his still lingered. She inhaled and closed her eyes, and beheld the sense of tiny, skittering legs. A tendril chased them, overcame them, wrapped their host, and with a swift wringing motion, snuffed out its tiny scream. Satisfied, she opened her eyes and turned from the wall.
Sombelenë sidled back into the outer room of her chambers, legs long and bare beneath the dressing gown, and her hair tumbled about her face and down her back in soft waves, belying their habitual elegance. From across the room came a soft click, and the section of wall directly across from the portal to her bedroom shifted. With the faintest of creaks, another hidden door opened, and Swiltang emerged. If the level of danger in the room had been high in the moment after Sombelenë had displayed her power to Frost it was nothing to now; the ancient red boldog eyes burning from the lean, twisted orc’s face with a baleful malevolence, but Sombelenë merely smiled, and continued about the business of retrieving her garments. “Did you really have to subject me to that?” Swiltang hissed, one hand curling into fist as he strode to the center of the room, where a half-finisehd glass of wine stood abandoned next to the chaise. His hand released and caught it up roughly, pouring the fine liquid down his throat as Sombelenë laughed.
“You could have left at any time,” she jeered, tossing her discarded gown over the back of the tall chair her former guest had occupied, “Why, you could have stepped out of your hide the moment I began it. You would have ruined the mood I so carefully set, but you could have done it. Yet you chose to stay. And watch.” Sombelenë lifted her yellow eyes to meet his gaze in mockery. “You like to watch, don’t you Swiltang?” In two quick strides he had leapt across what remained of the room and, in an echo of her ravaging of Frost, slammed her back against the wall next to her door with a hand around her neck, forcing her back with his greater height and strength. But Sombelenë’s feet danced as she was pushed across the floor, and she laughed and laughed, her throat quivering with mirth beneath the clawed black fingers that wrapped it, and the glare of the orc who squeezed them, his free fist smashed into the wall above her head. “Jealousy? No, never from you. Deprivation? You could have joined us. He’s an adventurous soul, my new acquisition. But no, you prefer to keep your playthings to yourself.”
“You stink of him.” Swiltang snarled, his face a inches from Sombelenë’s. What little air remained between them scorched, tension enflaming the room around the oddly matched pair, orc and Avar. Her dressing gown had come open, and his eyes dropped to her naked flesh, taking in every swell and curve, until a slight ringing in his ears caused his gaze to snap up again. “None of that, witch. You know your tricks won’t- aah!” His sharp noise of pain came as her hand which unnoticed by him, had fisted itself in his hair, jerked sharply. “Witch,” Sombelenë growled, her fingers loosening slightly to rub the hank of his hair between them. It was a single long strip that grew from the center of Swiltang’s skull from forehead to nape and tailed down his back, alike in color and texture to that of a black horse, and her fingers gnarled in its depths. “elf, Avar, huonissë.. so many names you have for me, Swiltang. Did you hear the one my new pet devised?”
“Yes,” he spat, and her chuckle was husky.
“Are we not star-children together, my ghâshbúrz?" Swiltang burning eyes narrowed, never swerving from hers. This game they had played throughout the Ages was fraught with malice and violence, and only ever ended one way. The space between them shrank to a sliver, and it was a wonder the air did not combust. His deep and resonant voice, so unlike most of those who resembled him, and with whose race he was called, rasped as he repeated,
“You stink of him, Sombelenë.”
“Why don’t you do something about it then?” she whispered, her fingers tightening again in his hair. “May the Ice be cold,”
“And the Iron be cruel,” he rejoined.
Red and yellow eyes consumed one another, the space between them closed, and the door of the bedchamber ground shut behind them.
-Fin-