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Gríma called the Wormtongue does not remember the dreams of his youth. Silly things they must have been down there, familial. Obsessed with belonging. Famished. The follies of a desperate child. Whatever sad little dreams he must have had then were moulded by the Father’s hand, by the village, the stench of goat shit. Not good enough. Not worthy of him. Not his own. Except it may be in one way: for even then Gríma knew he held an outstanding control over the winding paths of his sleeping mind.
He always knew when he was dreaming. And he always made his dreams give him their love.
He did not obey the night. Young Gríma escaped Father and village and goat stench. Escaped stones aimed at his head. He travelled. He started chewing clove and mint. He dressed better and slept worse on the road and worse and worse still, barely dreamt at all, but awake he saw coasts and forests and horses and maidens and swords and gemstones and cities, beheld the King of the Land, and the King’s ear, the King’s strong and thick-veined hands. Proof of hard work, in a King! Ears too patient for a Lord, too eager. That well groomed beard around a wide mouth. In any other man but Gríma, those sights would have satisfied. Laying cock out in the King’s bed would have seemed an impossible dream to any other goat herder’s dark weak little yappy halfbreed son from the outer reaches of the Riddermark.
But Gríma dreamed his worth. He understood that a place at the King’s side was merely befitting one so clever as he.
And he knows too that he is far more than just clever. He is magnificent. He is devious. He is scheming and worried and awful and good. He is more than all of them. He’s owed so much more.
He wants more.
He will never be happy.
Gríma’s bed now is soft downy feathers, a gift by the King. So unlike the straw of his childhood or the soil of his pilgrimage. The King gave Gríma the bed for his service, his cock, the room, the food the clothes the guards. The name.
But Gríma once son of Gálmód now jealously called the Wormtongue as he kneels by his Master is still just a common man. He advises the King, he fucks the King, he orders around Lords and Dukes in the King’s name, he lives better than most of his betters, but the King will not raise him up. He’ll never be seen for what he is owed. He’ll always be a servant of men worse than he. Bowing to dull ingrates who cannot see the future at all. The blind dreams of that younger Gríma, first climbing into his King’s bed, have curdled and bear pain.
And the King hasn’t asked for him. The King hasn’t asked him to bed in years. The King stopped asking for him a long time before Gríma took his King’s strength, and even the spells did not make his thick-veined hands take hold of Gríma’s waist again.
Gríma’s dreams, now, are just reminders of what the King chooses to deny him.
This dream now is about Éowyn. Éowyn daughter of Éomund niece to the King is a harsh pretty woman that reminds Gríma of the King in his youth. A hellion with Théoden’s face from back when it held a sweetness and a wit to match. Like the King, she can command a crowd with her eyes alone, but unlike the King, she’s just a girl however much she chafes at the confines of her station. Unhappy with her lot as Gríma is with his. Soon she’ll marry a dunce and make him the King’s kin, when Gríma went on his back and his knees and his arms and will never be family to Théoden.
Dreams are just reminders of what the King chooses to deny him. He serves dull ingrates who cannot see what the future brings. Dreams are thorns. And Gríma will meet them with like.
If Théoden had titled him, Gríma would have taken Éowyn’s hand in marriage. No other path made sense. It is Gríma who rules the country in the shadow behind Théoden, so give him a path to the throne. It is Gríma who’s closest to wife Théoden has— so marry him into the family! Don’t let him languish shut-out! that unloved child still unclaimed by all the people he has!
Dreams are thorns. He’ll meet them with like.
He’ll take her now.
Éowyn hurries out of the Hall of Kings and it’s just a flick of Gríma’s lucid mind to make her enter a laundry room instead of the hallway she turned into. Poor Éowyn tumbles over a tub, splashes her white gown up to the thigh. It plasters to her flesh. She casts her head around, locks flicking to and fro, but the room is deserted. There are no staffs to use as weapons. He’s learned that lesson.
“My Lady,” says Gríma soothing and patient. The King once valued his soft tongue, at court and in other matters. He vanishes into the dark and rises above his station. He is among the powerful, disdainful: all he does can be called due revenge. The last door disappears.
Éowyn bares her teeth before her face settles into a smile. There were older dreams when Gríma sculpted her compliant, even happy to feel his touch, but he found an empty doll alarming.
There were times when he gave her the luststruck mind of the young King, but that withered his cock with loss.
Let her fight him. Let her succumb. Let her scream.
She does. Of course she does. They’re in his dream. “Leave me alone, snake!”
“Oh but you are alone. There is no one left here but the darkness, none but bitter death,” says Gríma. He knows bitter death. He’s still bitter that he wasn’t there to gloat at his father’s, and the King’s slow poisoning seems too harsh a price to pay for protection against the wars to come.
He stalks around the young woman. “I’ll show you how your uncle made use of me,” then makes that unsaid again. Just this once he won’t be for Théoden. He’ll creep out the shadow like the water that has crept up the fibres of her dress towards her belt.
Predictably she says nothing. She has no solutions for him. She is so much like Théoden, unheeding his fears. She looks so much like him. Théoden is dying.
Gríma rucks up his robe, pushes down his underpants to free his sprightly prick, braies-belt still holding up his chausses. No loose fabric tangling his legs were she to run.
Her expression sours further. She thought him impotent, perhaps. Thought that he may prattle on but he’d never dare to lay a clammy hand on a royal personage. He lets the truth leak into her mind, that he’s not only laid his hand on the King but worked a fist up inside him. It amused him then, the aptness of the gesture. Here he was, hand inside his puppet King. How was he to know he’d come away with nothing but shit, flecking him up to the wrist. (How was he to know that his puppet King didn’t want him?)
The detour to the past angers him, and anger pushes aside his reservations. (No matter how often he does this, that first awe for royals remains instinct. Her imagined mockery rings true. He crawls on the floor.) She’s caught in this dream with him as penned goats are with the wolf; caught out here with him just the same. If the King had seen fit to make Gríma a Lord, he would have taken her. Their son would be king with a few lucky accidents. Their son wouldn’t loathe his father, would shower him in riches, and anyway, Théoden would be dead by then. Gríma would be content with his replacement.
Gríma imagines the King now just behind the door watching his niece’s wet robe tear like gossamer. Her fists beat his face. Her thighs are strong pushed together this time. He finds he enjoys his fingers like degenerate claws between her legs scratching up blood and then he says,
“Our son will look like Théoden,” he says. No black hair. None of his blemishes.
She startles. Her resolve breeches.
One leg forced in-between hers, and then the hard work begins. But Gríma remembers the hard work and hate he thought he escaped when he left his father. He remembers how to wake dreams. He slides down and down, knees in water, cock flopping face to her tight virgin royal cunt. The Royal Court don’t know how rightly they called him with that name. Théoden always loved his tongue the most.
The curls between her legs sway like milfoil in the bathwater. Grima’s own short hairs grow in sparse, but hers are lush like Theoden’s in his prime. Back in those halcyon days he was always finding them stuck to the roof of his mouth, or swallowing them at dinner, sometimes days after. The rims of the bath keep her legs from falling open as the tip of this tongue skims her seam. She is wet for him, yes. Though it cannot be said for sure whether it is the attentive squirming of his tongue or the bathwater, Grima thrives under cover of ambiguity. His plump-cheeked cream-fed niece of Théoden, too prissy to suffer his touch, is wet. For him. He always knew she would be.
He does service at her feet until her cunt is basted. He wouldn’t enjoy a hole in drought. Théoden put it in dry the first time and Gríma had to pretend he liked the King’s sharp stabbing rod in his burning arse. The pretense paid out. Gríma every day thereafter forced butter up his rear as morning routine. Even now, decades after Théoden’s seen fit to fuck him, and years since Gríma fucked Théoden.
Down here he doesn’t have to look at her sobbing face. Perhaps clove and mint do chafe her. Perhaps Éowyn knows what she is owed. A true husband. A true fucking. None of the many kinds that Gríma gave Théoden or that Gríma’s tongue gave the niece will seal the bondage of family. None have. Only an heir will seal it. It’s time to put, as he’s heard some courtiers mock, the ‘other worm’ to use.
He stands, making sure to crowd her against the bathtub every second.
He puts it in.
Crouches a little to thrust up into her then stands tall, hips moving straight. He’s already fucked Théoden standing up, and as he did then, he fucks Éowyn with all the dedicated skill of years as a concubine. Her opening grasps at him, pulses. Her eyes are wide. He rocks his hips. Another bend and crouch and her pale legs of their own free will hop onto his thighs. It is important. She likes it. She likes it. The clove shards grinds back onto his cock. She’s moving. She likes it. Likes him, if only in this way. It’s important.
Her hands around his throat now, squeezing, but is it fear? Is it still fear really? And Gríma’s been choked every day in this palace that hates him for being Théoden’s bitch but in a way that is wrong.
She chokes him. He’s learnt to like it just like she is learning to like his prick. It’s important she likes it, this wretch goatherd despised by his father now pushing deeper into her royal hole and deeper, deeper.
Before she met him, she was pure. Before she met him, she didn’t know pleasure.
For pleasure it is, there deep in her guts.
Their son who will look like Théoden travels up and up and up into her hot ecstatic womb as she trembles from pleasure and her long blonde hair is white.
Her hair is white.
The white dress spread over Gríma’s legs is no longer embroidered with signets of the Riddermark but arcane signs of Wizardry. Saruman holds Gríma’s penis in his sharp tower with an air of bored contempt. Pulls him onto his lap. Enveloped. Eaten. Deep in a dream chamber but no control nothing nothing Gríma can’t change it and it’s not like he hasn’t imagined fucking Saruman he has imagined everyone touching his dick but it’s—
Not like this. Gríma is stuck on the floor while all the goats watch his beating.
Gríma is stuck in the village where everyone loathes him.
He is stuck.
Stuck.
Cock beneath Saruman’s robes and in that wide cock hole is wriggling wriggling wriggling. Fingers. Not fingers. Fear. Lust. Gríma is stuck helpless in plain air just as surely as poor Éowyn stuck against that washery wall. His legs are wet with piss.
Saruman grasps him ever deeper.
“Leave me alone—” a token shout like Éowyn as Gríma bucks in ecstasy, but forced thick and angry up his airway something…
He retches. He gargles. He thrills. He looks. He loves. He loves. He spurts. He spills.
He crests his peak and spills and spills and spills.
His mouth a tube a rope a mouthpiece in fact and quickly they spill.
He tastes each seed each maggot as they empty out. Feels them as they eat.
White fat worms spill out his gape down his robes soiling him soiling him and he would weep but with what air. He would come again but with what seed.
His hips are thrusting. He’s orgasming. The castle is crumbling.
No not his tongue don’t take it he can’t live without his tongue can’t bespell Théoden can’t serve he will be ruined for all the world. He’s pisspot and milksop and pigslop and bloodsuckling turd as he has stored up all his life from Father and village and kingdom and lady and wizard and himself. His pockets overflow like his mouth. He is snotface and crybaby and bastard bastard bastard and runt and shitstain and wart and worm and toadeater and mistake and mutt and snake and dunderhead and worm and pus and scrawny and gobshite and and sonofawhore sonofabitch sonofaslut and donkey and weak and stupid and creeper and faggot and lickspittle and toad and cockalorum and bastard and leech and coward and silly and pathetic and witch and worm and pissbreath and scum and twat and weasel and scared and vermin vermin vermin and zitface and milklivered and oaf and whore and whoreson and whore and thief and wankstain and mongrel and worm and fartsmeller and mistake and ogre and maggot and crybaby and bellend and toenail and stupid and mollycoddle and dullard and louse and cumbucket and slop and smellfeast and pansy and parasite and pillock and nobody and fruity and rat and puke and scared and feetlicks and pinhead and scared and whiny and degenerate and cuck and worm and useless and jizzstain and pissbrain and asskisser and scared and maggot maggot maggot and clumsy and filth and scared and lowlife and dim and ugly and arsebreathed and scared and dirtmuncher and knobnose and weed and thorn and rot and baby and disgrace and scared and scared and scared.
Each word, a maggot.
Each word, a bite on his tongue.
Endless. Endless.
Forever him.
Gríma awakes guarding his face. His tongue. His tongue. It’s the one thing he cannot live without. Théoden called him Wormtongue. Will he lose even this? Will he— but Théoden-King did not make him nor rule him nor love him. The tongue is not Théoden’s but a tool. A tool.
With fingers he digs deep into his lonely mouth, probing pushing fucking every cranny every inch of throat he can. He used to gag at this depth but that was long ago when he was a goatherd still. He can lower himself now daily with ease.
He was not made for his place at the King’s side he was made for goates and hate and muck muck muck but he chose and he changed and he was home for years before his home spat him out or he outgrew it. Knuckles almost past his teeth. His hands have always been slender. His fingers are long.
When he pulls out, he finds the tongue eagerly licking his fingers.
It was just a dream. A fluke. His value remains.
Just a dream. Every night he dreams. Every night, and again. It means nothing at all.
For being depraved is far better than being weak. Being crass is better than being hopelessly and hopelessly and hopelessly in love with a King who’d have discarded Gríma long ago were it not for the Wizard’s magic. Being unwanted is fine until cast out.
He has lived for fifty years. He is not a child. He will not be helpless again.
Gríma called the Wormtongue will not remember his dreams.