Copper by darthfingon

Chapter 1

Read Chapter 1

News of the far eastern lands reached us in Valinor even before the end of the war when the Exiles returned.  Maiar can travel with the sparkle of light across the sea's foaming waves, and whisper secrets from the Gates of the Sun to the end of the Earth.  And Maiar love to gossip, especially about their own kind.  That was how we learned of Thauzon's treachery, followed by repentance, followed by more treachery, and of Melyanna's choice to wed Elwë Thingollo, lost brother of Olwë of Alqualondë.  Melyanna, the Maiar said in their jealousy-thickened voices, so preferred the company of her Elven lover that she deigned to bear him a child of her own unnatural flesh.

The child's name was Lúthien, and of Lúthien, we heard much: as fair as the light of the stars, as graceful as the wind in the grass.  The story of a half-divine princess across the sea so charmed the hearts of poets that songs of her exotic mystery rang from Eldos to Valmar across the Blessed Realm.  Light followed her where she danced and sprang from her eyes.  Flowers grew and twined themselves in her hair, which was gold or silver or black depending on who sang the song.  She could be carried up by birds to sit among the stars, and her word of command bade wild animals to sing with fair voices and play the harp.

Of these stories, I can say with certainty that none is true.  I know because I am as half-divine as she, and I have no such fantastic magic about me.

Here is the grim truth: not all Maiar are kind and benevolent as Melyanna.  Some are chaotic, and some are cruel.  Look no further than foul Thauzon, who abandoned his master to sit at the feet of Melko, our greatest enemy and traitor.  There are Maiar of Námo whose love it is to spread grief and despair among those they touch, Maiar of Vána who revel in idleness and neglected duty, and Maiar of Aulë who find joy to see things destroyed, only so that they must be remade.

I do not know which one of them was my father.  I believe him, though, to be a Maia of Oromë, who did what he did for the challenge of conquest and nothing more.

The story of my birth, as best I can guess it (as no-one save my Maiarin sire will know the full truth), begins like this.  My mother was a famed beauty of the sort that inspires star-headed minstrels to compose love ballads of dubious worth.  She was the only daughter of a minor lord in Ingwë's court and received, I am told, nigh unto one hundred marriage proposals from besotted suitors, some of whom lived as far as Tol Eressëa.  She settled on my Elven father (or, I should say, the one I called Father), who is a man entirely nondescript in all regards but one: his vast coffers.  Father is somewhat of a cousin to the King and holds all the wealth associated therewith.  When Mother could have had her pick of the most dazzling and brilliant young lords in Arda, she chose a gold-drenched dullard.

He proved to be a viciously jealous gold-drenched dullard.  Having won the prize of the most beautiful woman west of the Great Sea, Father set about ensuring that she remained a prize for him alone.  She was forbidden to show herself to any man. Even her brother, when he called for an audience, was forced to speak to her as she sat behind a screen.  No other was permitted to so much as hear her voice.  And so the minstrels sang on, and the legend grew, transforming the tale of a beautiful maiden into that of a lonely wife, swathed in secrecy, locked behind the high fences of a jealous lord's palace.  Many times Father's guards caught some hapless young fellows hiding in the trees that grew along the garden's back wall, hoping to catch sight of Mother.  He always raged to the King and demanded their insolent eyes be put out, but the King, who is possessed of reason and honour, merely ordered a fine for trespassing.

We always desire most dearly that which we cannot have, either out of envy or greed or simply the thrill of seeking the forbidden.  Maiar are no exception.  Exactly what the Maia did remains unknown to all but him, but a small clue exists in that Mother swore by Manwë's grace, even until her last days, that she was innocent and had been with no man but her husband.  I know the truth when I hear it; she did not lie.  Thus I believe that the Maia came to her enchanted in Father's form, and she had no reason to refuse him.

His name is Bheðišarûr.  This shred of information is all I have, and it was given me, unwillingly at best, by another Maia whose name I never cared to ask.  That one I call only the Red Maia.

~

The Red Maia has haunted me for as long as I can recall.  He is my first memory.  When I was hardly a year old, I awoke one night to a dull red light seeping beneath the door to my nursery.  It was nothing more than light, flowing and rippling as if stirred by a breeze, but it struck such a terror in the very heart of me that I could not move.  I knew what it was even then.  I remember having convinced myself that it had come for me, to take me before Makar and spill my blood as a sacrifice in his charnel pit.  All night, I lay paralysed in my bed, too terrified to so much as twitch my hand or cry out for my nurse.  Even long after the light had faded and gone, I dared not move.

I told Mother in the morning, babbling a choppy mess of words in incomplete child-speak to warn her of the Maia of Makar that prowled the house.  Of all parts of this ordeal, what I remember best is the look of unsettled horror on her face as she asked where I had heard of such things.  I tried to tell her that I had not heard, only seen, but could not make her understand.  That afternoon, my two elder brothers were punished soundly for filling my head with dark tales.

Over the following years, the red light continued to visit our house, always after my family had gone to bed and my window was shuttered dark against the silver comfort of Tyelperion.  Most often it glowed dull and distant, but on a time grew heavy and close until I could feel its presence just outside the nursery, filling my head with a low hissing sound and the air with the faint odour of rock salt, cold and metallic.  Not a once did it enter, though, until I was nearly seven.

It appeared so suddenly that I woke to a dense swirl of shapeless red light coming through my door.  Not through the doorway, as a solid thing might come, but through the wooden door itself.  I was lying on my front with my face half hidden in the pillow, but still I saw through one eye a great red mass, a pulsing, disembodied heart, dripping and spattering light like blood.  How it was possible, I could not then say, but I saw terror when I looked at this thing.  I saw fear and cowardice and loathing, as if emotions were colours or shapes; as if the visceral reactions churning in my stomach had been projected onto this horrific form and amplified back to me tenfold.

I could not move.  I could only lie there as I was, waiting for it to notice me.  And that it did, but not immediately.

It had come into my nursery that first time, I now believe, not in purpose to terrify a child but simply out of boredom or curiosity.  Having achieved access to the house, it had nothing better to do than look in every room and see what chaos it could make.  Maiar of Makar love chaos above all else.  It had expected to find a child therein.  It had not expected to find a child who knew it for what it was.

I saw the face only after it noticed me.  The face, I am certain, was a matter of my imagination impressed upon its spirit, again my own thoughts reflected back to me.  At the centre of the light, the face of blood-thick red was that of a man.  His eyes held mine, my heart pounded with the noise of a thunderstorm, and neither of us moved.

You see me, child?

I felt the words rather than heard them; they blossomed through my head, hissing and spitting and spreading like a dark red stain, and I could not help but try to shrink away from their bite.

The face changed to that of a dog, deforming itself grotesquely as its snout grew long and fangs stretched from teeth.

What do you see?

I was too terrified to answer.   I squeezed my eyes shut, but somehow the image stayed with me, refusing to be so easily dismissed.  The dog's head shook, faster than any earthly thing can move, and became a pig, then shook again into a spider, and again into a series of nightmare creations too abominable to describe.

"Red," I whispered.  All I could see was hideous, misshapen red.

Open your eyes.

I obeyed.  I opened my eyes, and saw the mass of light vibrating.  It shook all over, as the dog-head had done, and settled piece by piece in jerky movements into the shape of a body, tall and slender with close-cropped tawny hair.  It was an Elvish body, as solid and tangible as my own or my mother's, but all around it continued to glow with a dull red light.

"And you see me now?"  This time he spoke aloud, with the voice of a man.

Nodding my head, I gave the scarcest of answers.

"What do you see?  What colour am I?"

He flared a burning gold, filling all corners of the nursery brighter and brighter like he were Laurelin embodied, until his power threatened to blind me.  I lifted my hand against it to shield my eyes.  There was no need to answer his question; he saw that I saw, saw that my eyes filled with his light, and for a moment I believe he was as afraid as I.  What I witnessed last that night was his startled expression.  The gold faded into red once again, and then, as quickly as he had come, he disappeared through the wall and out into the night air.

I looked at the wall, later, when I felt brave enough.  There was no mark: nothing at all to suggest he had ever been, save the lingering smell of rock salt.

~

He did not return for nearly a year.  In his absence, I was tormented by nightmares in which a red light enveloped my bed, choking and smothering me to the sound of a distant gong.  I dreamed he took my eyes and wrapped them carefully in squares of cloth, putting them in a box that he carried under his arm.  Around him, the souls of the dead gathered to watch through gaping, bloody sockets where their own eyes had been.  I did not want to think of what was in the box.

When he did return, he came through the door and settled at once into his Elvish fana.  "Come," he said, offering me his hand.

Fear had turned my body to ice.  I could not take it.

Undeterred, he lifted me under the arms and carried me easily out of the nursery.  His body was not only solid, it was strong, but cold like wood.  His cool skin felt like leather against my own, not like any living thing.  He had no heartbeat, and he did not breathe.  No muscles tensed and moved beneath his skin with the effort of carrying me down the stairs to Father's counting room.  He was like a statue animated: in the most basic way, he looked like an Elf, but the illusion of life existed on the surface only.

He stood me before the ornamental copper sword that hung beside the counting room door.  Crusted with jewels on the hilt and engraved with poetic verse on the blade, it was useless as a weapon but served well enough as a decorative piece.  I had always found it fascinating, for its beauty and the threat it represented both.

"Touch it," ordered the Maia.

I clenched my hands together.  Touching that sword was one thing Father had forbidden in specific.  It was too valuable and too dangerous for childish hands.

"Your father will not know," the Maia said, as if he had seen the cause of my hesitation plainly.  He likely had.  "Touch only the metal, with one finger.  Just a small touch."

Wincing, I reached up to it.  The Maia frightened me far more than the possibility of Father's wrath.  I paused, hand hovering over the blade, and forced myself into grazing the metal with the tip of one finger.

It stung me.  The copper blade shot a jolt of fire into my finger as if it had been searing hot.  Gasping, I drew back and clutched my hand to my chest.  The skin throbbed, but when I ventured to look, it was neither damaged nor even reddened.   I stared up at the Maia, squeezing my stinging finger into my fist, scrambling for the courage to ask him what had happened and if it had been a trick of his magic.

"No," he answered, hearing my thoughts.  "That was not my doing.  The copper burns us all."

I did not know what he meant by that: us all.  The words passed through my ears unheeded, though he must have set them as bait for me to ask.  I was too young to understand, and too afraid of him to think much beyond my fear.  I shuddered, and slowly tried to inch away from him.

"What frightens you so?" he asked.  "Am I terrifying to behold?"

Yes, I thought.  My head filled with images from the nightmares: red light, my eyes wrapped in cloth, the ghastly box, and the bleeding faces of the dead.

"Ah," he said.  "So you have seen it.  Yes, that is my duty: to take the eyes or hands or hearts of those who challenge my master and are doomed to lose.  But worry not, little brother: that will not be your fate.  Unless, of course, you are foolish enough to wager with Makar."

His words did nothing to allay my fears.  If anything, they served to heighten my terror, as then I knew what he was and that the horrors I had seen were no harmless ghosts of imagination.  Everything I had dreamed grew more vivid in my mind, and the dreams were swarmed with new visions of Makar's bloody conquests.

He must have enjoyed frightening me.  "Shall I show you something worse?" he asked with a terrible smile.

I shook my head, only willing him to disappear, but he knelt down before me and placed his hands on my shoulders, holding me in place.  He closed his eyes, and when he opened them nothing but empty sockets returned my gaze.  My blood ran as cold as death.  Again his eyelids closed, then opened to reveal snarling teeth and fangs like the mouths of vicious dogs.  He opened his mouth to reveal one single eye, vast and staring.  Wider and wider his mouth grew, stretching hideously and beyond the limit of any natural creature, until clusters of smaller eyes appeared around the edges of his lips.  He tilted his head to the side.  Still his mouth grew, and the small eyes began spilling to the floor, bloody from where they had been cut from the faces of Makar's challengers.  He twisted his head all the way until he stared at me, upside-down through a mouth overflowing with eyes, while a pair of snarling dog maws gnashed their fangs below.

I sank to my knees, dizzy and sick at the sight of it, and remember nothing else.  I awoke beneath the copper sword in Laurelin's light.  The Red Maia and his eyes had gone.

~

I learned to fear copper because of him.  I tried again, some days later when Laurelin's brightness streamed through the windows and I had nothing to fear of the shuttered dark, to see if the sword still hurt my skin.  It did.  The reaction was none of his magic; every piece of copper I touched felt like the sting of a bee.  The sword, a pitcher to hold flowers, a servant's cloak-pin, the bottom of a cooking pot, and a coin on Father's table all nipped my curious hand with pain.  It was years before I learned why: copper repels the spirits of the Ainur.  The Maiarin half of my blood would not suffer its touch.  My Elven half afforded me some protection, sparing me the blazing agony that the metal inflicts on true Ainur, but even so its muted burn was enough to keep me at a distance.

Fëanáro should have known this.  Had he locked his Silmarilli in a vault of copper, Melko would have been unable to reach them, and the history of the world would have unfolded very differently.  Perhaps Melko would have tried to steal them by cunning rather than might, and the Trees would have lived.  Were that the case, I might have grown to adulthood without ever seeing any other Maia than my red tormentor, and Mother might not have died.

It was Eönwë who betrayed my nature to Father.  I was twenty-one years old, and Valinor panicked in darkness at the destruction of the Trees.  In those first hours of the long night, no-one knew what might happen.  The world we had loved had shattered, bleeding out of the torn hearts of Laurelin and Tyelperion to disappear into the ghastly, insatiable jaws of Ungoliantë.  The light had gone.  For all we knew, the earth might be next, and the air, and we could all die in an instant.  To contain the terror, Ingwë had ordered all the lords of Taniquetil to his palace so that we lucky few might cower in the safe embrace of the Valar.  And so my family went.  It was a mark of Father's terror that he allowed Mother to leave the house and appear in person before the King's court, albeit wearing a heavy veil to hide her face.

I had not spoken to the Red Maia since the night of his teeth-filled eyes and eye-filled mouth, but he had not stopped visiting me.  In between nightmares, he would on a time appear simply to turn himself into some horrific shape and revel in the heady drug of my fear.  I saw him cut off his own hands, peel away his skin by slow inches, and open his belly to let his entrails spill onto the floor with a sickening, slithering sound.  I am certain he enjoyed having an audience.  The other Maiar would have cared nothing for his show, but he was always guaranteed the desired reaction from me.  More often than not he succeeded in making me faint from fright.

To that day, he was the only Maia I had ever encountered, and thus his torments were all I knew to expect.  One might be able to guess my reaction, then, to arrive at Ingwë's dark palace, filled with the noise of weeping and wailing of Elves who thought themselves about to die, only to be confronted by dozens of Maiar endeavouring to keep order and herd us into place.   Eönwë was at the fore of it, shining pale blue against the starlit mountain.  He wore the fana of an Elf, as did they all, but the blue aura emanated from him all the same.  Though he could hide his eerie light from Elven eyes, he could not from mine.  I saw him at once and knew what he was.  I saw all of them.

It took Father, my two brothers, and three other men to hold me down.  They told me afterward I screamed like one being burned alive, and that I fought like a wild animal for biting the arms and scratching at the eyes of anyone who tried to take hold of me.  I kicked and flailed and broke one man's tooth, sustaining no small injuries myself as they wrestled me to the ground and held me in place to keep me from fleeing in terror.  But I remember none of that.  My eyes had filled with the light of the Maiar come to surround me, and panic let me see nothing else.  All I recall is hundreds of colours of light, and all of them as great a threat as the red one who visited me.

In the end, a Maia wearing the fana of a woman glowing yellow was able to calm me.  She knelt at my side as I howled and struggled to be free, and laid a hand over my heart.  Immediately, a feeling of peace and comfort rushed through my blood to fill the entirety of my body out to the very tips of my fingers and toes.  I lay still.

"Shh," she whispered to me as she stroked my hair.  "There, my boy.  Quiet now.  You have nothing to fear.  You are at the palace of Ingwë the King; this is a safe place.   No-one will harm you."

Her touch had taken away my panic and the greater part of my fear, but yet I still could not bring myself to wholly trust her.  "Who are you?" I asked.

She smiled kindly.  "My name is Eranyë.  What is your name?"

I felt her hesitance when she spoke; that was not the entire truth.  "That is an Elvish name.  What are you truly called?"

Pulling away from me, her smile fell.  "What do you mean?"

"You are not an Elf.  Maiar.  You are all Maiar.  I can see it.  Yellow and blue and orange and violet..."

Her fana shimmered and she disappeared; I heard the gasps of unease from Father and Mother and the men who held me.  She became an orb of yellow light invisible to Elven sight.   What they would have seen was an empty space where a woman had been only a moment earlier; what I saw was the yellow orb rising over my body and flying to Eönwë's side.  I tracked her movement and turned my head to watch as she passed.  When she shuddered back into her Elf-like shape, my eyes were locked on hers.  She and Eönwë wore identical expressions of disbelief.

"Whose child is this?" Eönwë asked softly.  He scanned the gathered crowd until his gaze came to rest on Mother.  "He is your son?"  He could see it somehow in her spirit, this tie to me.

"Yes," she answered, voice trembling.

"Where is his father?"

Father stood, wiping his hands on his robe, and nodded to Eönwë.  "Here."

For a dreadfully long time, Eönwë only stared. 

~

It is important to understand that, of all the Ainur, the gift of compassion was given by Eru Ilúvatar to Nienna and her companions alone.  The others may play at it, and some may even halfway succeed in understanding compassion as a theory, but most often this particular facet of Elven emotion remains alien and unreachable.  They do not understand what it is to feel the pain of another as one's own, and it would never occur to them to withhold some devastating piece of truth in order to avert heartbreak.  They do not understand why the truth might cause misery.

Eönwë, Maia of Manwë, has no share in Nienna's gift.  And so it was that he stood before Father, before a half-dozen lords of Ingwë's court, and announced in his sweet voice that I could not possibly be Father's child.  He spoke with a sense of accomplishment, as if he had just solved a great mystery too complex for weak Elven minds to comprehend, and smiled a satisfied smile.  I believe he expected us to stand in awe of his wisdom when he told us all I was half Maia.  He expected we would accept the news as a relief: a final, definitive answer to the question of what had been so different about me all those years.

Only I accepted the news with relief.  The thought that filled my head as Eönwë spoke was not one of horror, but of sudden clarity: Yes, that makes sense... I am half Maia.  It did not much pain me to learn that Father in no way deserved that title from me.  He and I had never been close; I was Mother's boy.  I think I had always known, in some way, that nothing bound me to him.

Father and Mother, needless to say, found nothing but grief in this revelation.

~

Mother died within the year.  She did not live to see the rising of the moon.

Where Father's mind turned to cold fury after that night at the palace, she lived only in sorrow.  His rage turned on her, but she, too burdened with shame, could not fight back.  She withdrew into silence and let the grief consume her.  Slowly, it sapped away her will to live and ultimately her life.

I knew when she died.  I felt her spirit leave the house, and ran to her bedroom with a vise-grip of anguish on my heart, knowing what I would find.  Her body looked sad and broken in the dim candlelight.  Her beautiful face had taken on a grey pallor; her glassy, unseeing eyes were shot red with blood and shadowed by dark circles; her golden hair was streaked with white.  I had seen her but seldom since Eönwë's fateful announcement, as she was loath to be near the child who was living evidence of her shame, and the change was shocking.  She hardly resembled the bright, loving mother I had known.

I still needed her.   I needed her comfort.  She had been the only person in the world I loved without question, and I was not ready to lose that.  She had pushed me away at the end of her life, but she could not in death, and so I lay down on the bed next to her lifeless body and buried my face in her shoulder.  It still had the same familiar smell.  Her skin was still warm, as if she were only asleep.  I lay curled against her, weeping and praying to the Lord of Mandos with every last speck of my soul, begging him to send her back to me.  She did not return.  Her body grew cold.

My brothers found me when they came to bring her supper some hours later.  They pulled me off the bed, shouting curses and hitting me until I fell to the floor, naming me foul, filthy, and ghoulish for thinking to lie down with the dead.  They called for Father, who in turn called for servants to come and take her body away.  He did not weep at her death: I saw in him only anger, and the greatest part thereof directed at me.  He afforded me only one glance.  One hateful glance shot to pierce me through like an arrow, and that was all.  I was alone.

~

It is a terrible thing, lonely and fraught with pain, to be bound to a household unwanted.  Father would have gladly abandoned me, were he permitted, but as society would have reviled him for such an action he suffered me to stay.  His reputation, however tarnished by Eönwë's words and Mother's death, was still dear to him.  It outweighed his hatred of me.  So I stayed, being then only twenty-two years old and having no other choice.  He gave me the basic necessities of food and shelter, but outside of those, in his eyes, I did not exist.

This antipathy did not stop me from trying to win his love.  In Mother's absence I needed someone to fill the void and I naïvely assumed that the fault he found in me lay somehow in my behaviour.  If I were a better son, attentive and reverential, he would warm to me.  I brought him tea while he sat in his counting room working at the endless task of managing his fortune.  I strove to help him in any way I could, offering to fetch this or carry that or perform some menial task, though he always declined.  When my brothers fought and ignored his orders, I would take his side and dutifully agree to whatever it was they saw fit to refuse.  None of it made a shred of difference.  I remained as welcome as a rat in the wall, and in the end stopped trying.

I had two small consolations during this time.  The first was that the Red Maia stayed away for several years.  In that wild period of darkness before the rising of the moon, I am certain he had no time for one wretched child when there was so much chaos to be conducted elsewhere.  It pleased me to tell myself that Eönwë or one of the others had caught him and ordered him punished for his misdeeds, but more likely than not he had moved on to greater and more interesting targets while the opportunity lasted.  The nightmares continued, but at least he was gone.

The second consolation was that because Father cared so little for what I did, I was allowed an extraordinary amount of freedom.  As he was most content when I was nowhere to be found, I was able to leave the house whenever I liked, for as long as I liked, on any whim at all.  If I remained absent for days at a time, sleeping among the trees, so much the better.  His interests would have been well served had I frozen to death on the snowy mountainside or been eaten by a pard. 

Most often I went to the palace.  It was a two-hour walk up the roads of Taniquetil from Father's house, but the journey gave me something to do and the destination was well worth the effort.  While the rest of the world lay in darkness under the stars, Ingwë's palace shone with the constant brilliance of silver lanterns to banish fear and welcome any who still held hope.  It was a comforting place, with fine sights to interest a child: lords in their extravagant clothing, glossy horses pulling well ornamented carriages, soldiers, merchants, beggars, doom-sayers, and innumerable pet cats.  There were always good things to eat once I made the acquaintance of the cooks, and endless things to do.  I could walk down to the barracks of the palace guard and sit on their courtyard wall to watch their drills and practise-fighting.  Often I went to the library, where I learned, to my pleasure, that as the son of a lord I was afforded the right of reading whatever scrolls and folios I wished, though the stodgy archivist never failed to make it painfully clear that were it a matter of his choosing, I would have been out on my backside.  I read whatever I could find, and a good many things that were beyond my ability and understanding.  The archivist quickly came to exasperation when I asked a constant stream of questions on the meanings of large words or the exact location of a foreign place.  But as Father saw no reason to supply me with a tutor, it needed be I coped with what I had.
 
I maintain that the archivist was not as stodgy as he liked to appear.  On a time I would fall asleep in the middle of the library floor, and would awaken on a comfortable pillow with a cape tucked around me as a blanket.  And as I grew bigger over the years, able to lift heavy stacks of paper and reach the highest shelves, he stooped to admit that he did not mind my presence so much, and came to regard me as somewhat of an informal assistant.  He was a better father to me than any in those days, feigned sternness or not.
 
And there were Maiar at the palace, always present though seldom in visible form.  I could see their lights flitting down the corridors and through the walls.  Eönwë was nearly always there, glowing his unmistakable pale blue, and others in every colour one might imagine.  If I pretended I could not see them, they did not recognise me and paid me no mind, which suited me well.  When they mistook me for any common Elf they grew careless in their gossip, speaking to each other in their strange manner that Elves cannot hear.
 
There is a reason why Valarin speech sounds coarse and unpleasant to Elvish ears.  If I were to speak in the Valarin tongue to an Elvish audience, they would hear only unfamiliar sounds and unknown words.  It would be at worst confusing.  But when Ainur use their voices it is purely for the joy of creating sound; they do not communicate thusly.  The actual exchange of ideas is ever done from mind to mind.  When Elves overhear Maiar speaking aloud amongst themselves, they unfortunately also overhear the transferred thoughts, which in their minds are received as fragmented cacophony.  The thoughts of the Ainur, loud and singularly focused, are not well received in Elvish heads.  Likewise, I have been told that Elvish thoughts to the Ainur come across as very quiet, muffled, and contradictory, as if their minds are secretively muttering a dozen things at once.
 
What I receive from Valarin speech is an echo of that cacophony, but my Maiarin half is better equipped to 'hear' the unvoiced component of their conversations.  I can also 'hear' what they do not say aloud, when they freely send thoughts out as the mental equivalent to a shout in a crowded room.  The first time I encountered those thoughts, I did not know what they were.  I walked through the palace doors to see a swirl of unclad Maiar, and immediately my head filled with sound: loud scratching, humming, hissing, and buzzing, like a forest full of insects.  It took several minutes before I finally recognised the noise; I had heard its like before.  The Red Maia had hissed when he 'spoke' to me.  The sound in Ingwë's palace was much louder, coming from dozens of sources, and each 'voice' was distinct from the next in a small way, but I knew them then without a doubt to be Maiarin thoughts.  If I set myself to concentrate, I could descry their meaning.
 
This is a skill at which I have become progressively more adept over the years.  Now I can hear them almost as clearly as they hear each other.  Then, however, sifting through the interfering noise to pluck out one string of thought took all of my concentration, and I reckon it equivalent to trying to identify the harmony of a single viol when a dozen musicians play at once.  Oddly, I found Eönwë to be the easiest to follow.  His voice was like the drum of their bizarre music: distinctive and constant.  Perhaps, as Herald of Manwë, his thoughts are no less sonorous than his speech.  Whatever the case, I found it least taxing to listen to him, until I grew skilled enough to identify others.  It is my good fortune that he spoke a great deal, and that all important news flowed through him.
 
From Eönwë, I learned of many things both grand and trivial: that Manwë grieved for the fallen Noldor, that King Fëanáro had been slain by the allies of Melko, that Prince Nolofinwë was leading his people across the Grinding Ice at the top of the world, that Ingwë wished to organise a party for his youngest granddaughter's eleventh birthday, and that Melyanna and Elwë Thingollo had quarrelled over a new chair.  I learned of the moon.  In the time immediately preceding its rise, this event dominated their conversation, and they spoke of it with unchecked wonder.  I thought them overawed in their obsession until I watched Ithil's first ascendance with my own eyes.  Only then did I understand that they had revealed but half of the glory of this new vessel of light.

The lords of Taniquetil had gathered at the palace for the occasion.  The Valar, through Ingwë, had told us little, saying only that they had created some manner of new light to replace the lost trees.  I knew more than most by virtue of my ability to overhear the Maiar, but still I stood among the Elves to watch the spectacle.  An air of excitement gripped us all.  We looked all around us, at the mountain and the land below and the stars above, unsure of what to expect, when a silver gleam began to grow on the far western horizon.  Slowly, the great white circle of the moon rose into the sky to bathe all the earth in shining, silver light: the legacy of Tyelperion.  It was more than words can describe to see that light after years of darkness; my heart leapt in my chest at the sight of it, pounding with elation and the bliss of hope.  I felt the love of the Valar radiate through my body at this majestic gift.  Not a few of those standing near me fell to their knees and wept for joy.  Melko's long night had been conquered.

What I thought then, and again at the rising of the sun, was one single wish: Would that Mother were here to see!  I missed her all the more acutely for that I could not share with her my happiness.

~

Learning the strange powers that my Maiarin half afforded me came quickly once I knew what I was.  The ability to detect thoughts amid buzzing noise was not the only thing I could do.

At first, I had no clue as to what might be possible, and so was forced to start slowly.  I began with what abilities I knew the other Maiar held.  The one called Eranyë had quelled my fear with only a touch, and this is what I tried first.  I practised on the cats at Ingwë's palace, trying to settle the most timid and skittish kittens so that they might trust me.  It worked only after I realised that I had misunderstood what Eranyë had done: she had not taken away my fear, but instead filled me with a sense of peace.  I could not eliminate feelings, but I could instil something new through a transfer of thought.  So, with a touch to a kitten's head I was able to make it relaxed enough to curl up purring in my lap, or tired enough to fall asleep where it stood, or so confused that it stumbled in circles meowling.  But simple-minded kittens were easy.  When I tried the confusion tactic on my brothers, I quickly discovered that influence over Elven minds requires a great deal more skill, and earned a good few bruises to seal the lesson.

There are spiritual abilities of this nature known among the Eldar.  The most renowned of healers have been said to possess the ability to calm their patients and alleviate pain with no more than a touch.  Some Elves are more attuned to the Ainur and can see their unclad forms after a fashion.  There are Elves who can sense spirits or ghosts, and those who can speak commands as Eönwë does, and several who prophesy.  Some can tell truth from lies as easily as black from white, and similarly, some can read moods and feeling and even at times thoughts.  Some might easily befriend animals, or have an extraordinary, innate skill in craftsmanship or art beyond that which can be learned.  Scholars call these abilities the Mystics and much has been written of them, though no-one has yet discovered why they occur in certain individuals and why they are so randomly given.  No Elf that I have ever met is gifted with more than one Mystic, and though they might believe otherwise, it is a blessing not to be so entwined with the invisible world of the Ainur.

Every known Elven Mystic lies within my ability, with one notable exception: I have no vision of the future.  This, the most common, is unknown to me.  I am not grieved for its absence.  To see ghosts and spirits is trouble enough.

Of the other more extravagant skills commonly known to Maiar, being the ability to change shape, exist purely in the spiritual realm, or manipulate matter remotely, I have none.  Everything is ruled by my Elven body and its limits: I cannot even so much as will my hair to grow faster, thought I have lately heard tales in which Lúthien did exactly this.  Either she was more accomplished than I in the discipline of transmogrification, or the bards liberally embroidered history for the purpose of entertainment.  I am inclined to believe the latter.

~

I can always sense the Red Maia before I see him.  I can feel his spirit approaching.  This was the skill I practised most: feeling the presence of those around me, until I could count precisely the number of people in a room without looking.  When it comes to Elves, I cannot tell one from the next by their spirits alone, but I can tell Elf from Maia.  I quickly learned to sense the exact moment when the population of Father's house of a night changed from seventeen Elves to seventeen Elves and one other.  The Red Maia always appeared in my bedroom but a heartbeat later.

The first night he returned after the rising of the moon, he was angrier than I had ever seen him before.  From his ranting I gathered that one of his other chaotic ventures had gone awry, and he sought in me an easy outlet for his rage.  Not content only to terrify me as he had done before, he spat abuse and spoke of the most horrible things I could imagine.  He told me that Mother languished in Mandos, unable to seek redemption or forgiveness.  He said she would never return, and that it was no less than she deserved.  What he told me of Father's hatred for me I already knew, but the words still cut like a knife to hear them spoken aloud.  It is one thing to know you are unwanted; it is worse to hear such sentiments spoken by another in confirmation.

He came infrequently after that, no more than once every year or two, but the torments grew progressively fouler.  At last, as I had been dreading, they turned to violence.  As he raged and hissed about my bedroom, filling my head with the noise of vile thoughts and my eyes with nightmarish disfigurement and mutilation, he suddenly stopped, howled with fury, and whipped around to strike me hard across the face with his fist.  I fell back, too shocked to cry out.  My cheek and eye throbbed from the blow.

"I should kill you now!" he said.  As he spoke he held up his hands, and long, blackened talons slowly grew where his fingernails had been.  "I will tear out your heart and take it back as a sweet delicacy for my master."

That was a lie.  Even as I lay shaking beneath the sharp edge of his claws, the hollowness of his threat rang in my ears.  He could not kill me.  Somehow, in whatever way he was chained in servitude to Makar, his free will was limited.  His twisted code of honour would not permit him to murder an innocent.

Yet I dared not speak.  He could not kill me, but the road between pain and death is a long one.

"No, I will not kill you," he said at length.  "There is no sport in that."

He lifted his hand to his face, extending one vicious claw, and hooked the point of it in his lower eyelid.  Slowly he pulled until the skin tore, rending a gash in his face straight down to his jaw.  He did the same to the other side, and the blood ran in matching streaks like Nienna's tears, dripping onto his chest.  The burning taste of bile rose in my throat.  I squeezed my eyes shut and refused to look.  A moment later, I felt the pinprick tips of five claws on my brow.

The touch was too much to bear. I screamed with all my voice, not caring who woke and who came running in the dark of the night. The Red Maia's hand did not move to pierce my skin, but nor did it pull away.  I listened desperately for any sound, and a moment later heard it: a door opened down the corridor, footsteps drew nearer, and then the voice of one of the housekeepers called out to ask what had happened.

"Now that was foolish," the Maia growled.  He stepped back and faded into a cloud of red light, melting out through the window as the housekeeper burst in through the door.

She found me shaking uncontrollably and drenched in sweat, with a bruise already rising on my cheek and no good explanation for how it had come to be.

~

I was thirty-four years old on that night.  At thirty-four, among the Minyar, one is counted as a man.  At thirty-four, I was considered old enough to take an apprenticeship, seek a formal education among the King's scholars, or otherwise choose the course of my own future.  At thirty-four, I was old enough to defend myself.

I left Father's house the next morning swearing by Manwë's grace that I would never again allow myself to be so abused.  I knew that the next time the Red Maia came, he would be even angrier than before, and not easily driven away by the presence of a mere housekeeper.  And if I did not put an end to it, he would keep returning, time after time.  I would never be free.  I needed a defence, but equally I needed to fight, and to fight, I needed a weapon potent enough to challenge something vastly more powerful than I could ever hope to be.  Of what that weapon was, I had a small idea.

Whatever one has need to find, it can certainly be had in Valmar, the City of the Gods.  That was where I went, sleeping among the trees and in ditches along the way.  I had with me a moderate purse I had stolen from Father's coffers (being certain he would never miss what few coins I took) and nothing else.  In hindsight, a map would have availed me well, as within an hour of arriving in the city I was hopelessly lost in the winding maze of its twelve thousand streets.  I spent my first day there tripping over small children, jumping out of the way of rumbling bullock carts, and being shouted at for moving too slowly and blocking the never-ending flow of people.  Truly, I had never seen so many people in all of my life.  Even the greatest of festival days at the palace had nothing compared to the crowds of Valmar, and I fair panicked at the massive crush of them sweeping me along like I were no more than a pebble.  I spent the night in a public garden, as secluded as I might be among the sparse few trees, and still felt as if I could drown for lack of open air with all the walls and bodies and noise that surrounded me.  I am and always will be a lover of the peace and solitary silence of Taniquetil.

In the morning, I felt brave enough to ask directions of a fellow near my age, and so I at last found my way to a street full of craftsmen's shops and, therein, what I sought.  The metalsmith's workshop stood separate from its neighbouring buildings on all sides, surrounded by alleys, and I learned why the moment I stepped inside.  The walls were blackened with smoke and shoddily repaired.  The blazing white furnace had clearly caused the building to catch fire more than once, and it was a matter of safety that it should stand alone to help prevent those shops adjacent from being engulfed when another fire inevitably began.

The master metalsmith himself ran a good business, employing his two sons and three grandsons to help with the demands of his patrons.  I spoke with one of the sons.  I described what I needed, and he sketched a rough likeness on a slate for my approval.  His skill in his trade was evident; the sketch matched precisely what I had in mind.  It would not be a difficult project, he assured me.  If I wished to pay a fee for haste, which I did, he would have it finished by the supper hour on the following day.

What I liked best about the master smith's son was the way he spoke to me, formal and respectful, as if I were a valued lord and not merely some silly boy scarce come to manhood with a whim to carry a weapon.  If he saw aught strange about my high-born manners ill matched to clothes filthy from nights spent sleeping outside, he kept his comments to himself.  He did not ask if I had stolen the purse, though his eyebrows rose high to see its contents as I searched for silver coins to pay the requested half of his price up front.

Some years later, I learned the exact worth of the money I had stolen from Father, and blushed not a little at what others might have seen in me as exceptional greed.

I spent that night at an inn, having come to discover that I was in possession of a far greater fortune than I had guessed, and passed the next day eating every kind of food I could buy and watching a troupe of acrobats perform in a market square.  Once the sun began to set, I returned to the metalsmith's shop.  My commission, as promised, was complete.

It was not so much a blade as a rod, as long as my arm and the width of my finger, like a long and slender truncheon.  It had a small cross-guard, like a sword, and a rounded pommel, both of crucible steel.  The grip was wrapped in leather.

"If my lord would care to try its weight..." said the metalsmith, and he gestured to an empty corner of the shop.  Happily, I gave the rod a small swing, flipping my wrist.  It sliced the air with a sound like a diving hawk.  I swung harder, spinning full around in wide slashes before I brought it up abruptly before my face.  It gleamed red in the fading sunlight streaming in through the window behind me.

Carefully, I lifted a finger to tap the bright metal.  The satisfying sting of pure copper jolted through my skin.

It was perfect.

~

I knew the Red Maia would not stay away for long.  After his last forced and hasty departure, he would not wait the usual span of a year or more before returning.  It was possible that he had gone back to my bedroom to find me during those days I spent in the city, in which case he would be all the more furious for meeting with an empty bed.  I spent three more nights resting peacefully at the inn before undertaking the long walk home to face my fate.

He came the very night I returned.  I did not doubt that he had spent days watching the house and awaiting my arrival.  I sensed him from afar, riddled with impatience as he coursed along the garden walls in wait for the household to retire for the night.  He must not have known I had become so attuned to the feeling of his presence, or he would have stayed farther off.  Surprise was his favoured tactic.  When he did at last come to my bedroom, he fair flew like the wind up through the floor, hoping to catch me unprepared.

I was not unprepared.  I lay in bed with my body taut as a harp-string beneath the covers.  My right hand gripped the copper rod, its leather-wrapped handle turning sticky with nervous sweat.  My left arm I had planted firmly on the mattress, ready to push me up the moment he appeared.

As the first hint of red boiled up through the carpet, I jerked myself into a sitting position.  I was kneeling when the whole of his glowing spirit assembled at the bedside, and by the time he had summoned all the particles of his fana into a solid being, I had already lifted the rod to strike.  I brought it down with all the force my arm could give me.  It hit true, smashing into the curve between his shoulder and his neck.

For the briefest fraction of a second, his eyes and mouth went wide with shock.  But it was a fraction of a second only.  Immediately, his fana evaporated, and the red mass of light drew back.  I could hear his confusion ringing and hissing in my head:

What what what what happened what is that what what what...

I gave him no time to think.  Again the rod whipped the air.  No unclad Maia can pass through copper, and nor can copper pass through that which is in every other way as insubstantial as vapour; the rod struck a spirit that felt as solid as the rock of the mountain.  The impact jarred me to the bone.  I lashed out again, and again, each time beating him back farther, until I was out of bed and fighting like a soldier with a sword on a battlefield, as if my life depended on it.

All the while a horrible noise filled my head, grating and pounding and screeching like the twist of metal.  I heard in it distant voices, terrible voices, that wailed in agony and babbled hateful curses.  The harder I fought, the louder and more sickening the noise grew.  My head rattled from it.  The sound squirmed and lurched behind my eyes, stabbing my mind with nauseating fingers of pain.  I forced myself to fight on.  The rushing pulse of my own blood filled my ears, but it was not enough to drown out the howling, clanging, crashing noise.

I realised, in that moment, that this was the sound of Maiarin pain: the dissonance of a disembodied scream.  He screamed for the torture of copper's burn.

That knowledge made the noise easier to bear.

He could have disappeared, melting back through the floor as he had come, but either pride or some other deadly flaw compelled him to fight.  Writhing tendrils reached out toward me, but at a mere tap from the copper rod they snapped back, twisting in on themselves with a sound like the crackle of firewood.  He needed only touch me, I knew, to fill me with confusion or the dire need for sleep.  I could not let that happen.  I had no choice but to fight until he surrendered.  How long that would take, I did not know, but already my arms weakened from the exertion of battle.  It had become a contest of his tolerance for pain against my stamina.  And he was a Maia of Makar, the lord of suffering, and I was but a skinny youth with a copper stick.

I stumbled, and his grasping tendrils came within an inch of my leg.  I beat him back, driving him toward the corner of the room, but what ground I won I could not hold.  So we duelled, back and forth, each gaining and ceding inches on the other but progressing none.  His unearthly noise echoed in my head like a pounding drum, and my arm felt weighted with lead.  I would fight until he surrendered, or I would fight until I dropped from exhaustion.  There was no other choice.  If I lay down my weapon, his claws would be at my throat before I drew a breath. 

And then, washing through my mind, came a word of command:

Stop.

It was the Red Maia.  The word held every trick of tone and sincerity that decorated Eönwë's voice, and I think his magic would have succeeded in commanding me to stop, had I not been so accustomed to hearing Eönwë speak.  I hit him again and twice more, to ensure he knew his command had not worked, before stepping back to watch him with a wary eye.  I kept the rod held ready between us.

His fana fell together again, though not as precisely as usual; it took more time and seemingly more effort to assemble.  He looked undamaged but for the rhythmic shaking that wracked his shoulders and limbs.

"Stop," he repeated aloud, holding up one trembling hand.

"Why should I?" I asked.

"Because we are both too weak to continue."  He spoke plainly, and he spoke the truth.  I was weak.  I gasped for breath, and my arm ached even to hold the copper rod at the level of my chest.  I only hoped his weakness was as crippling as mine.

I stared at him, trying to find any final resolution, but saw nothing.  Many emotions played on his face: hatred, fury, uncertainty, fear.  None of them told me how we should now progress from this impasse.  I wanted to kill him, but that was not an option.  Instead, for the time being, I would settle for seeing the back of him.

"Leave," I told him.

"Why should I?" he said with a crooked grin, spitting my words back at me.

"Because you lost," I said.  "You begged me to stop, which means you surrendered.  By honour, you challenged me to this duel, and you lost.  Go back to Makar and tell him how you were beaten!" 

It was a guess on my part; I knew nothing of the Challenge of Makar and its rules.  I could only guess and hope that the Red Maia's oath of servitude had bound him to a code of honour in battle.

His face fell into a dangerous scowl.  I had guessed correctly.  "I did not challenge you..." he began, but I interrupted.

"It was no challenge that you appeared in my bedroom when you thought me asleep, in purpose to harm me?  That you waited outside by the garden wall all day for the chance?"

For that, he had no answer.

I lowered the copper rod.  "Take me to Makar."

He stared at me with a gaping, incredulous mouth, and stammered, "Why?!"

"Makar can judge our fight.  I will tell him what you did, and what I did, and let him decide who was right or wrong, and who lost or won.  He is the Vala of Battle and will judge fairly, will he not?"

"There is no need to trouble him with petty quarrels," the Red Maia said quickly.  "My master is too great for such mundane affairs.  I will leave, as you wish, if you withdraw your request to see him"

So the Red Maia was also honour-bound to take me to his master, should I demand it.  This I considered, standing before Makar himself and pleading my case, but I did not know how I would be received.  Makar might bid us duel again, for which I had no strength, or I might be compelled to try some further aspect of the Challenge.  One day, I thought, I would do that, to end this terror once and for all, but on that night I only wished the Red Maia gone.

"Leave, then," I told him.

Stiffly, he bowed to me.  I could see in the way his arms hung, awkward at his side, that the lingering fire of copper still pained him.  I was glad of it.

"You know this is not over," he said as his fana dissolved into red light and he faded out through the wall, leaving only his tell-tale odour of rock salt.

It was not over.  I sank to the bed and let my shoulders drop.  He would return, and I would need to fight him again.

I would need new weapons.  And armour and defences and other tricks.