Of Draugluin by Huinare

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Angband

Wherein Draugluin finds himself rather bound by an agreement.

Mairon brought me to a laboratory of some kind, well nigh at a level with the deepest pits.  I first saw stone tables and papers filed into narrow slots in the wall, and then metal tools and devices that I didn’t understand except to be worried by them.  Mairon insisted none were to harm me, “but we need to be sure you hold very still.”  We, he said, and I saw the dread shadow of Melkor waiting silently.  This thing Mairon had tried to explain to me must truly be difficult and terrible, if it needed both of them.  Everyone knew Lord Melkor was the most powerful being in Eä, though he didn’t really show it unless he was provoked to.  Usually he went around awing or terrifying by his mere presence, saying and doing little.  If he hadn’t been there I might have hesitated more before hopping up on the table, but I did not want to try his patience.

I settled down on the marble as directed, on my belly.  The iron that clamped over my legs, above the feet and elbows, made me bristle in spite of myself.  I uttered something between a growl and a whimper.  Mairon patted my head and neck and spoke gently, and I was too afraid to mind that he was treating me like a poor stupid animal in front of Melkor.

The “integration process,” I think that’s what Mairon called it, seemed like they did it mote by mote and that it would never cease.  It hurt physically, although they never touched me with anything more than their words and minds, but that was the least part of the hurt.  I’m sure Mairon could speak philosophy about it for a long time, what it means to bind an immortal spirit to a mortal form.  Yet he is not the one who knows what it means, and I who know have not the mind to give it words.  I can say I pleaded like a coward much of the time and even tried to take back the commitment I’d made midway through.  Mairon always kept a level tone and would say things like, “You speak only in a heightened emotional state, not in your own sound mind, thus I cannot heed what you ask of me now.” 

At the end of it, Melkor removed the irons, looked for a small time into my eyes with his own eyes like embers in shadow, commended me to Mairon’s care, and left.  I refused to move for a long time because I did not want to feel the weight of my doom.  Lord Mairon puttered around the laboratory rearranging papers and coaxing me patiently.  When I was convinced to stand up, the dreadful sense of permanence panicked me.  I tried like an idiot to flee from the wolf form.

“Mind my papers,” Mairon said with a bit of narrow-eyed, brow-raised annoyance.  I felt so helpless that this was enough to send me cowering into a corner.  He tidied a stack I’d set sliding off a counter and spoke mildly again.  “You’ll become accustomed to it.  We leave for Angband when you’re able to comport yourself.  We can hunt on the journey back.”

Hunting was indeed the only thing that saved me from despair in the early days at Angband.  Only then did this form seem a choice rather than a prison.  Mairon left me to come and go as I pleased for a time, installing special catches which responded to my will on the doors I used most.  He gave me honors and responsibilities and his folk treated me with regard, as he’d promised.  Sometimes he went out hunting with me.  Sometimes at meals he seated me at his right hand, on an armless chair with a brass platter on the long table under my nose.  Even so, it rankled my pride to dine in such a form with the rest roughly human-shaped.

Mairon gave me a year to settle in, which is not so long a time to the deathless.  Then he got the second phase of his experiment underway.  This is humiliating to recall, as it was to do.  I’d be lying if I said the form didn’t respond to female of its kind, but my mind was not in it.  The whole thing felt perverse and I was glad it didn’t last long.  Just ten litters, he said, enough to have variety in the stock.  The ten she-wolves he’d captured and half-tamed all were pregnant within the same year.

I knew it was useless but I dared ask, “My lord, now that the litters are in the growing, have I not done what was required?  Might there be some way to release me from this form?”

“I thought you loved no form better, Draugluin.”

Mairon’s speech ever laid traps.  I thought about it for a while and answered, “Of course, but that doesn’t mean I love no form else.  Would you be content to have your powers and experiences bound by one shape?”

“That’s a dreary outlook on it, my friend.  Think rather that this shape, being so near to your spirit, enhances the best of your abilities and offers the experiences that are best to you.”

I didn’t dare say he hadn’t answered my question.  Nor was I clever enough to debate him.  So I said, taken as I still was sometimes with horror and despair, and whining a little, “There is no way to undo it?”

Lord Mairon was not in wolf guise when we had this talk in his high-walled courtyard that looked upon only mountain stone and mist and cloud.  He was in that human form which appeared very lordly.  “No.  As I told you before you agreed to it, the only way to imbue a species of animal with self-awareness is to inject an individual with self-awareness into the stock.  Since self-awareness belongs not to the animals but to the Ainur, this could only be done via an Ainu.  Since an Ainu cannot breed with an animal, it was needful to effectively make an Ainu become an animal.  You are very much bound up with that form, irrevocably, as it had to be in order for the breeding to work.  Your spirit inhabits its very cells.  It’s no longer a mere raiment that might be cast aside.”

I stared at the flagstones passing under my paws as we walked.  Mairon saw my sorrow, stopped, and sat on a stone bench to look me in the face.  “I am most grateful, you know, for your sacrifice.  If I ever seem otherwise, it is because I am often absorbed in the demands of my work, which are many and heavy.  What you have undertaken requires a dedication and a courage that few possess.”

I wanted to say that having no choice was not being dedicated, and that courage and cowardice looked much the same when there was nothing but a prison.  But that would have been admitting too much weakness, and he would have found cleverer words to drown mine anyway.

The whelps distracted me from my despair when they came.  Mairon concocted a warm broth of meat stock, milk, and water, and he took the whelps from their mothers as soon as they could hold their heads up enough to lap this up from a saucer.  One of the lower courtyards had been left unpaved and treed, a little walled forest.  Here we raised up the new wolves, that Lord Mairon called nauri.  They made me glad when the words we taught them began to spill from them, because they were like me, they had words but they were bound in a form of four legs and bloodied fangs.  Mairon wanted them to have a violence in their purpose, and so from a very young age they were brought live animals to toy with before eating.  He especially liked to give them birds, which were beloved of both Manwë and Yavanna.  As the Nauri grew in stature and ferocity and might, and as they also grew in speech, they took down larger creatures.  At Mairon’s request, Lord Melkor sent one of the captured Eruhíni, which showed how deep in the Dark Lord’s counsel Mairon and his project were.  The Eruhíni were rarely taken from their quiet inlet, since Melkor wanted to leave most of them to breed and multiply in a place they preferred, the better to provide more slaves or victims later.

The half-grown whelps then asked me why the Eruhín had spoken before it died, for none of the others had.

It was hard to explain.  “Lord Mairon has told you that Eru is our foe, and thus so are those that the accursed Valar in the west name the children of Eru’s creation.  Eru or the Valar gave them speech, yet that means nothing to us, unless that we slay them with less pity and more pleasure.”

“But what happens to their words when they die?” insisted the cleverest among them, following me among the fir trunks with their questions.

“I don’t know.”

“Fie, Draugluin, you must know.  What happens to their words?”

I was uneasy and impatient, so I said the first thing that came into my mind.  “As their bodies go back into the earth and become other bodies, well then, so their words go into the air and become other words.”

“So perhaps that one’s words are mine now?” piped up one of the Nauri. 

“I wouldn’t think so.  They are from the light.  You are from the darkness.”

I never had ready answers.  Mairon was always better with such things, making up stories as easily as a spider constructing its web.  For him the Nauri had unquestioning respect, but along with that a distance.  With me they were affectionate when we weren’t training.  I supposed their ceaseless questions were a fair trade for their company.

When the whelps had come to full age, Lord Mairon brought in a new prey.  This was one of the Maiar, though a weaker one since he was easily able to hold it bound to its physical form.  He had just captured it on the western shores of Endórë, so it was probably one of Yavanna’s or maybe Vána’s.  Oromë’s Maiar would have been too alert and martial to be caught.  I remembered the old wars of Melkor upon the Valar, and how they had been horrified when they found that we could and would hurt their people, as I watched the Nauri run it down and slay it.  Mairon told them to take their time and let everyone, for there were nearly sixty of them, get a strike in.  The Maia tried to escape when its form finally gave out, a white-red globe of hazy light.  That was what usually happened if their form died in great pain.  It was rumored that, in their confusion or madness, they were drawn back to the halls of Mandos.  There Námo recalled them to themselves.  But Mairon stayed the Maia’s flight with a gesture and a small smile.  He would probably find a way to make it take a shape again, and put it to work on the ever-deeper delving of Angband. 

The Nauri had questions about that also, of course.  “What was that glow that came out of it after it died?  Was that its words?”

“No and yes.  That was an Ainu.  It does not really die, though it can be held in a form that dies.  Its spirit was trying to return to the far shining country in the west.”

“Draugluin, you are more like the Ainur than the Eruhíni.  You have no whiff of death, nor does anyone else in Angband who speaks with words.  Yet what of us?  We are like the Ainur, and like the Eruhíni, and yet even like the animals that speak nothing.”

The Nauri were uneasy when one of the eldest spoke this, and a deep unhappiness stole upon me.  “Ask Lord Mairon.  He is greater, he can explain these things better.”

Not long after, Mairon looked sidelong at me in the stone courtyard among the clouds.  He didn’t take a wolf form so often anymore, and his face was high above mine as we paced about.  “Why do you always refer them to me?  You are their sire, and you are best equipped to answer their concerns, Draugluin.”

“I have not your cleverness, sir,” I answered.

“Indeed.  Well, since you had not the heart or presence of mind to apprise them of their mortality, I made a tale for them.  When they die, their essence–their words, if you will–shall encounter a great wolf, Ancamanar, spiritual in nature.  This being, if they answer its judgments or demands with courage and integrity, shall usher them into the beyond-life, whatever that may be.”

“But, isn’t that–”

“A lie?”  Mairon smirked a little regretfully.  “Of course.  But call it, instead, a myth, for it was meant to lighten their hearts.  After all, their burden is great.  They perceive their own death lying in wait, and that awareness is heavy for such an exquisitely self-aware creature.  It would be cruel to tell them that there is nothing else.  In any case, we’ve no empirical knowledge of the ultimate fate of mortals.”

He was very intelligent and very wise.  If he did not know the fate of mortals, surely no one did.

Chapter End Notes


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