Of Draugluin by Huinare

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Mando

Draugluin gets a taste of revenge and Mairon tests a new invention.

Note: All the more intense story warnings apply to this chapter.  I had no idea this rather grotesque interlude was going to happen when I first started this story.  If anyone finds themselves not wanting to finish reading the chapter but wants a cleaned-up summary of its plot, feel free to message me.

Other note: Chapter title is not a typo of Mandos, though that too is relevant in a tangential way.

Other other note: I seem to have had a birthday of late.  I decided that it was fitting to mark that occasion by giving a final scrubbing to this long-waiting-for-posting chapter.  This is normal birthday fare, I mean, right?

Mairon hung the lantern from a hook in the ceiling.  In the far corner of the cell, the shackled form of a small Maia squinted slowly at the sudden light.  Even now her face was hard to read, but her skin, which I remembered as middling, had gone very pale.  Mairon moved a few steps closer, the lantern behind him throwing his shadow over her. 

His tone was cool and musing like frost underfoot.  “I suppose you still won’t entertain courtesy enough to name yourself?  Well, I’m hardly surprised you would prefer to retain your token obscurity.  They say that rarely do the servants of Námo or Vairë come forth from their halls, as theirs is not to shape the world, only to receive and record that which passes within it.  They say as well that many from the Halls possess foresight, and perhaps that is why it is better for them to remain in those Halls, beyond the access of interested parties such as myself and my captain.  I understand you and Draugluin have already met, and not on the best of terms.”

The Maia’s eyes slid from Mairon to me, but still she didn’t twitch a muscle.

He continued, “You’ll find the circumstances of this your second meeting rather altered. You are for all intents and purposes as a chained mortal here.”

Still no response, and then Mairon left me alone with the captive.  I paused, not sure what to do now that I finally had one of the meddlers at my mercy. 

I had been instructed to avoid damaging the area around the steel collar on the captive’s neck.  That would at least keep me from acting rashly and tearing her throat out.  The collar was Mairon’s new invention, to keep an Ainu who wore it stuck in one form.  He’d said something about a technological and biological method being superior to sorcery, which was a drain on his powers and attention.

I paced in closer to the Maia, back and forth slowly, in a way that had set other captives shivering.  She kept following me only with her eyes and the rest of her didn’t move.  Her calm began to anger me. 

“I remember you had more to say when you were in the free air swinging that bloody blade around,” I finally said.

“What would you have me say?  I can see you’ve not forgotten my words then.  Do they bear repeating?” 

I wanted to get angrier, but this wasn’t even spoken insolently.  Taking up a confidence I didn’t really feel, I said, “You’re eventually going to tell us what you know of the counsel of the Valar, and the slavering Hound running around on our doorstep, and the Oromendili’s base of operations.  Maybe you don’t believe it now, but time and hunger and darkness will do their work, and there shall be worse things than those.  If it’s too big a step to speak of those things now, you could start by explaining what the Void a Maia of Námo is doing skulking around in Endórë.”

I got only silence and eyes that didn’t seem even to reflect the light.  I was out of ideas, so I sprang and stopped with my forepaws on either side of the Maia and my jaws practically under her chin.  She finally flinched back a bit, but hardly.  Maybe she thought that if I killed her she would be able to leave her body and escape the fortress.  Or maybe she didn’t fear pain or death of form, considering who her Vala was.  Mairon had said this one was particularly aloof and it wouldn’t do to get frustrated about it.  Think of it as a game, he’d suggested, but I wasn’t amused.

The prisoner wouldn’t know that I was forbidden from tearing her throat out, so I acted as if I was thinking about doing that, nosing along under her jawline and occasionally taking a light hold with my teeth.  She still hardly reacted, but the pulse against my muzzle quickened, a physical instinct of fear if nothing else.  To keep my jaws from snapping together over an artery, I suggested, “It’s not so pleasant, being constrained in one form, is it?”

“No,” she agreed calmly.

“If you don’t feel like talking, there’s that other matter still between us, what you and your friends did to my folk.  I’m afraid you’ll need to answer for both of them, since they flew like cravens and left you to your fate.  What help is there for you now?”

The prisoner’s eyes narrowed and a spark of lamplight came off them for a second, but then there was no more reaction.

It was common knowledge that an Ainu trapped in a body could take a lot more damage than a mortal in a similar body.  That thought encouraged me.  I sat back for a second and listened to the pent anger in my breathing, then leapt forward to release it onto the Maia who had blood and doom on her hands.  I came away with half a head’s worth of hair that trailed a slippery rag of scalp.  There was no scream or cry, but the captive slumped against the wall and gasped there with clenched teeth.  Blood painted over the pale bone above her eye and ear.

I thought my violence had dwindled after the whelps came along.  It must only have been asleep and dreaming of thorn bushes and battlements in the fog and the polish of the mahogany table.  A pitiless joy gripped me, that wanted nothing more or less than to change the Maia into a sludge of bone and meat.  It hardly mattered that the creature still did not beg or curse.  There were only quiet, profound whimperings.  I calmed at last and backed away with meat, and watched the twitch of bared muscle and the white of ribs poking through.  The Maia breathed in a faint rasping, aloof eyes somewhere behind a slick film of gore.

Mairon came in, blinked at the remainder of the captive, then looked over at me and winced politely.  “I didn’t ask you to eat it.”

He didn’t understand.  “You didn’t ask me not to.”

He nodded slowly and looked off into the middle distance where he sometimes went for patience.  “Draugluin, do refrain from eating the prisoner hereafter.  And from bringing her this close to dying.  Preliminary experiments demonstrated that they can heal themselves with the collar on, but I don’t imagine it’s possible past a certain point. “

I quickly finished eating the last bit of prisoner I’d been holding between my paws.  “Yet what if she does die?  I’ve seen you keep them here and make them re-embody when that happens.”

“I could let her die and force her remanifestation good as new, and then put the collar back on her, yes.  But I don’t wish for her to die yet.  I have my reasons.”

I watched Mairon crouch down by the hardly-conscious captive and lay one hand on her skull.  Very slowly, a bit of undamaged skin on her brow started to spread along its edges and up over the bone.  Although I’d known it lay within his power, it was strange to see the Right Hand of Melkor healing someone.  Mairon had a rag with him, and he dabbed blood from the Maia’s face and spoke something quietly.  I was confused by his kindness until I realized he was contrasting himself with my violence, to seem like a decent and safe person.  He had positioned himself so that the captive wouldn’t be able to see me if her eyes opened.  Soon she stirred a little and hissed in pain. 

“I don’t imagine this is what you expected when you came to Endórë,” Lord Mairon said in a consoling voice, still working.  “Why would Námo have sent you hither?  It seems cruel.”

The Maia must have been disoriented, or shocked out of her distance.  There was a mumble, “No.  Lord Oromë.”

“Surely a Maia can’t serve both Oromë and Námo.  That should be a strange fealty.”

“I do.”

“I’ve heard of Maiar apportioning their service, but never between two of such disparate nature.  How do you manage that?”

The answer sounded helpless, and painful, maybe owing to the captive’s general lack of skin.  “I am.”

“And who are you precisely?”

“Pallandë.”

So it went with Pallandë.  Mairon stopped in regularly with his sympathetic yet faintly threatening air, and he tried all sorts of topics to start the Maia talking about something.  I would visit with my anger.  My anger didn’t cool with the days, but crawled up from my marrow and romped with that joy of revenge and power.  My techniques got slower and more precise.  People don’t get used to pain as it becomes familiar.  They only dread it more.  But although Pallandë’s composure began to waver a bit, she never answered either of us with more than a few well-placed words.

“It seems I was mistaken to think you may have grown soft,” remarked Mairon in one of the high paved courtyards, in the wolf form he didn’t often wear anymore.

“Whatever else happens, I will not be soft on my enemies,” I answered, watching the stars duck in and out of the jostling clouds.

“Good.  This one isn’t yet sufficiently frightened.  Kill the body, any way you please that avoids damage to the carotid artery.”

Apparently this was part of Mairon’s experiment, because he came down to the cell to see what would happen.  The fact that he was there and that I was expected to do this deliberately made my anger abandon me.  I looked at Pallandë sitting in the corner.  Again she glanced between us with unreadable eyes.  I thought of my own body being killed and I felt cold. 

To get some motivation back, I gloated as best I could, “You and your folk might think that my people are dispensable, but you who prance around in the light of Aman are no different than those of us who walk in shadow here, when you slay.  If death is hateful when we do it, what of you and yours?”

“No cruelty was intended.  It was a skirmish.  You attacked, we sought to defend.  There was no time for delicacy,” said Pallandë, which was the most she’d said.

Seizing this cue for the most indelicate of deeds I had done in that cell, I came forward and pinned her against the floor and tore in below where her ribs met.  She tolerated this with the usual tooth-clenched hisses until I poked in far enough to meet entrails.  Then she tried to squirm away, which was the most fearful response we’d had from her, but I was holding her down and the chains wouldn’t have let her get far anyway.  Smells and textures accosted me and I pulled them away from their owner, remembering with vengeance my wolf in the thorn bush.  I pulled them half my body length out onto the floor and went back for more, happy now that the Maia kept trying uselessly to flee from me.  And yet I was afraid, knowing that if it could be done to her it could be done to me.  I reeled out reek and blood, feeling strange and removed, until there was none left.  The hollow creature kept mewling painfully until no more breath was drawn in.

There was the reddish light, like a thin liquid mist, the usual result of Maiar who were forced through the painful death of a form.  They always tried to turn to the west.  I thought this one surely would, being from Mandos, but nothing like that happened.

The light quivered and settled about the head and neck of its dead form.  There it stayed, silent and seething.  A chill came unannounced and rifled through my innards.

Mairon walked into my line of vision.  He looked down at Pallandë, the light and the corpse, with gleaming interest.

“Is this what you intended?” I said.

“Theorized.  There is a system of needles and tubes in the collar which diverts the bloodstream through a part of it, then returns it to the circulatory system.  This is why they can’t shift or discard a form when wearing it, because a part of the form’s very lifeblood, and therefore a part of their own being, has been placed beyond their influence.  I thought it might necessarily continue to retain part of the being, should the form be slain.  This may be useful to us.”

“How so?”

“Consider how traumatizing, even humiliating, it must be for a Maia from the Halls of Mandos to be unable to overcome her own death.  She may be more tractable hereafter.”  Mairon didn’t take his eyes from the confused light of Pallandë, and his voice grew quieter and very intent.  “Trauma renders people more honest.  I daresay she hardly knows who or what she is, and little beyond this compulsion to stay by the body.  A terrible experience, doubtless.  It’s only a shame she is too far gone to communicate now.  If a being is stripped even of any subconscious vestige of pretense, its rawness must be unsullied, like when we first emerged from the Void, yet more than that because back then there was nothing behind us but Void.”

I felt the fur rise along my neck and back.  “And she’d recover if you take the collar off?” I asked, partly to get Lord Mairon to stop staring at the reddish glow like a cat watching a fire.

He blinked and looked at me with narrowed eyes.  “Yes, the body would dissolve and she could resume an undamaged form.  But understanding the full range of this collar’s effects may have far-reaching ramifications, and the prisoner’s present experience is more likely to secure her compliance than anything else I can conceive of.  Thus, I prefer that she aide my studies by clinging to this body until such time as its grip on her spirit loosens.  I imagine a certain stage of decay shall need to be reached.“

I drew back a bit and struggled to hold down a snarl.

Mairon lifted his brows at me.  “I’ve not been blind to your obsession with causing this creature suffering.  Surely your stomach is not weak, and I can’t imagine you are moved to pity now?”

“No, sir.”  Yet still my fur bristled.

Mairon set a watch on the cell to see what would happen and when.  It was a task that none of us in his inner circle should have got, but he didn’t trust lesser servants with it.  Thuringwethil and the rest were at least able to disembody, but I was stuck with my nose and its keen sense of smell.  The process was hastened by a fire under a steaming cauldron in the cell, which made the place warm and humid.  My fur did me about as much good as my nose.

Soon I managed to beg off the duty, because of the heat and the smell.  “I’m a wolf, Lord Mairon, not a vulture.”  But I didn’t mention how I also hated the spirit flickering around the throat and head of the corpse.  It went abroad a little as time wore on, darting up and down the length of the body.  A couple times I’d had to run out of the cell and sit panting in the corridor for a long time. 

I was settling back into my old routine in the forest-courtyard when Mairon came and said that the experiment was done.  The Maia’s spirit had finally broken away from the carrion, which dissipated at once with its stench following more slowly, but she’d immediately been constrained again and compelled into her usual form.  At first I was uneasy visiting the cell, but that passed soon enough.  The prisoner still didn’t say anything useful, yet she reacted to my questioning with more noticeable fear and pain. 

Mairon came in once when I was gnawing one of her arms down to the bone, and he said in a pleasant tone, “You’ve found that not even the death of your present form shall deliver you.  Your resistance is weakening already, and we can do that to you as many times as need be.  But perhaps you know already what we’re going to do?”

Lord Mairon was intrigued by Pallandë’s association with Námo.  I had told him that I thought prophecies could do more harm than good and that I ought to know.

Pallandë looked at him with those calm eyes now weirdly haunted with dread and said, “I’ve told you before, Mairon, I cannot know things by choice or design, not though you threat a thousand deaths.  That which I perceive of the future is unbidden.”

“Then it would seem you’ve no control over anything now.”  Mairon fiddled with the chains, drawing out all their slack by securing them to hooks in the wall, until the captive was stuck with arms outspread.  Pallandë and I both watched, not knowing what was coming, as he went to the far corner and brought out a brand from a pile of items.  He opened the lantern that hung from the ceiling and lit it. 

Returning, he held the flame calmly to one of Pallandë’s hands until it caught.  I took a couple steps back from the light and reek.  The Maia twitched and tugged uselessly at the chains, gasping.

“I could singe your limbs down to the bone, one by one,” Lord Mairon said, conversational.  “Maybe we can melt your tongue out, too, since you don’t use it overmuch for talking around here.  Then we could see what might be done about various internal organs.  Sometime during this process, you’ll find yourself back in that place of horror you endured, not a living thing and not a dead thing and not even an Ainu really, exiled between the tangible world and the profound halls of your master.  You shall have no name and no will, no consciousness outside that of fear.”

He’d hinted that he had gotten the Maia to talk a bit about this experience when she first returned to herself terrified and disoriented, so his description must have been passable.  Pallandë did look very unhappy at the reminder. 

“We can play this out a thousand times if you’re so inclined,” Mairon continued.  “If you care nothing for yourself, at least be aware that the more obdurate you are now, the more punishing things shall be on any future Maiar in Angband.  This goes doubly for Curumo and Alatar.”

“Yet neither of them shall suffer harm from you in Angband,” said Pallandë as the fire ate away at her arm.

“A typical vague prophecy.  Perhaps more harm shall befall them outside of Angband.  Or, more likely you speak only in the meaningless bravado of the helpless.”  He cinched a chain a little tighter.  It clacked against bone as charred material fell away.  Pallandë winced and hissed and made no other answer.

Mairon and his torch moved to the other hand.  The captive tried instinctively to pull away, but fire and reek rose up again.  He sat down on his heels in front of her and stared at her face.  “We would like to know about this singularly noisome Hound, Pallandë.  Is this creature not a Maia?”

Pallandë’s brows twitched in a small way that I would have taken for physical pain, but Mairon’s sight always was more nuanced.  Nodding to himself, he said, “A Maia of Oromë, most likely.”  He began to list all the Maiar of Oromë he could think of, which was quite a few.  He reached the name of Huan, stopped, and smirked.  “And why is Huan running about in this mongrel guise?”

Pallandë’s eyes shot wide open.

Mairon grinned.  “Even you cannot maintain a bland expression forever under duress.  Huan’s name may as well have been etched under your eyes.  Your form begins to betray you, and thence your allies.”

He pressed this question of Huan until the captive was again near the edge of death, limbs singed away.  “We will kill you again, Pallandë, happily.  How can Huan be defeated?”

The Maia looked like she was also near the edge of panic.  Her eyes flicked toward me for a moment.  A strange look of resignation or relief came over her.  “Only the greatest werewolf to walk the earth shall ever defeat Huan.  This I saw.”

“Thank you.  Next time speak sooner and maybe you can avoid another round of this.”  Mairon suddenly had blade from somewhere, which he drove up into the captive’s heart.

Chapter End Notes

Pallandë: Those with particular esoteric knowledge might be struck by the name.  Yes, it is intended as the selfsame character with one different letter.  One might aptly fancy I’m conducting a thought experiment of sorts, particularly if one has read any of my Third Age material involving the character.

My notion of this Maia serving both Oromë and Námo is hybridized canon and personal fanon.  Pallando was in fact associated with the latter Vala at some earlier point in Tolkien’s conceptions (Unfinished Tales, "The Istari").

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