Mairon sits on the bed and watches Tyelpë sleep. He’s curled up on one side, an arm thrown carelessly across Mairon’s lap, wisps of his unbound hair falling loose around his face. There are still smudges of make-up around his eyes, and half a smile drifting around his kiss-bitten lips. Even asleep, contentment and love radiate out of him, drifting up their newly-formed marriage bond Illuin’s light filters in through the window, illuminating Tyelpë’s sleeping face and glinting off the dagger Mairon holds in his hand. He should have done it last night. Should have done as soon as they arrived, breathless and glowing, from the ceremony downstairs. But Tyelpë had been kissing him from the moment they shut the door, laughingly coaxing him towards bed, and he hadn’t – hadn’t been able to. He’d justified it to himself on the grounds that it would hurt more, if their marriage bond were sealed. And the hurting was the point. Even now, he’s reluctant, spinning excuses that will let him live another hour, another day, another year alongside Telperinquar, their lives stretching out into static, blissful eternity. He has to do it now. Carefully, he rolls Tyelpë over onto his back. He’s still naked from their lovemaking, and it’s easy for Mairon to press the knife to the spot between his ribs that he’s identified as being most efficient. Tyelpë stirs slightly at the press of cold metal, and Mairon’s breath catches, some part of him screaming in desperate hope that he’ll wake up. But he doesn’t, and so Mairon has to act. He pushes the blade in with a single, smooth movement. It pierces Tyelpë’s heart. Their marriage bond lights up, a screaming note in the back of Mairon’s mind that there is something wrong, pain shuddering bright and horrible between them. Tyelpë’s eyes fly open and he draws in a horrible, shaking breath, but it’s too late. The connection between is taking on a grey, metallic flavour, pulling Tyelpë’s spirit away as the body that held the best and brightest of the eldar becomes a pile of meat. Everything breaks. There’s an ache in Mairon’s chest, a sucking void, as if the knife his slid into his own heart and not Tyelpë’s. The world tilts on its side, dark at the edges. Nothing feels real, the objects in the room reduced suddenly to constituent parts, carbon and oxygen and iron, bound together with the ordered tone that organises the universe, the thread of the Song. It’s louder than Mairon has ever heard it before, less harmonious, a horrifying cacophony of voices. It takes Mairon a long time to realise that the screaming is him. He can’t stop, the pain of the broken bond, of the burst of violence, of the knowledge that it was him too much to bear. He screams and screams, until the walls start to fall apart and people are starting to notice. He screams until his body gives out and his spirit bursts forth and he has nothing he can do but fly away, as far as possible from the horror of what he’s done. In their bed, Tyelpë’s red blood seeps slowly out, the first murder in Almaren marring its soft, white sheets.