The Forging of the Ring by Uvatha the Horseman

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March 25 – The Forging (Morning)

Sauron commits to going ahead with the Forging.

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March 25 (Morning) The Forging

Mairon was up before first light. Today was the day.

There was little conversation around the campfire. He didn't feel like talking, so no one else spoke. He still hadn't decided which design to use, the lower risk of the original or the efficiency of the new one.

He could conduct another dry run today on the new design, and then review it some more. Was he being prudent, or just finding new reasons to put it off? He'd never been a coward, and he wasn't going to start now.

It was time to get ready. He studied his hands. The nails were long and filed to a point; they would get in the way. With a pang of regret, he unfolded the small knife he used to sharpen quills and cut his nails short.

Then he tied his hair back as tightly as he could with a leather thong. The lock that caught fire yesterday came loose and hung in his eyes. It was likely his hair would catch fire again today, and he didn't want any distractions.

Mairon called out, "Sirrah, come here."

The servant came over. Mairon gave him the folding knife, then pulled out the leather cord and shook his hair loose.

"Cut my hair."

He looked straight ahead and sat as still as he could. There was tension and a sawing motion, and a lock of brown hair fell to the ground. When the boy finished, Mairon touched the side of his head. He'd always worn his hair long. The short uneven clumps didn't feel like they were his.

His Chief Assistant came over to talk to him, looking at a script.

"I've asked everyone to … What happened to you?"

"It's bad, isn't it?"

"It's, well ... it's pretty awful." agreed his Assistant.

Mairon got to his feet.

"Assemble in the Sammath Naur. We are about to begin."

He steeled his resolve and made the volcano rumble. Tremors shook the ground beneath their feet, and off in the distance, a boulder bounced down the side of the mountain.

They entered the chamber. The scroll with the procedures lay unrolled on a work table, its edges held down with weighted leather bags. A scribe stood beside it, ready to call out the steps and strike them off as they were completed.

The tools needed for each step were laid out on trays. Every tool had a backup, stored where it would be easy to find. A helper read from a list to confirm that everything was where it should be.

What he was trying to do would require all the skill as he had. His mouth was dry, he wasn't sure he knew what he was doing.

Before they got started, Mairon wanted a moment alone. He stepped outside. He wanted to pray for help, or protection, or … he wasn't sure what.

Ilúvatar[1], please let today be successful.

But that was just another way of saying, You made me one of the greatest among the Maiar, but it isn't enough. I want more. He tried again.

I ask for your blessing, even though I know I do not deserve it.

He blinked hard, then wiped his eyes on his sleeve and went back inside.

The roar of the volcano must have drowned out the crunch of his boots on the gravel, because he entered the chamber unnoticed. Someone was saying,

"... time sequence ... procedures ... Sauron ..."

He recoiled, stung. Sauron meant foul or putrid in Sindarin. It was what the Elves had called him in the First Age. He thought he'd left the name behind forever when Melkor's realm was overthrown.

He was about to come down hard on the speaker, but as he listened more closely, he didn't hear any criticism or disrespect in the man's voice. His helper just sounded excited about what was happening today, that was all.

His people were supposed to call him Tar-Mairon[2], his given name, or Zigur, which meant Wizard in Black Speech. But since Tar-Mairon was Quenya for Admirable Lord, they may have thought it was a title he'd assigned to himself. Perhaps they thought Sauron[3] was his real name.

"Places, everyone," he said in a calm voice.

He still didn't know which of the two designs he was going to build. He'd listed the pros and cons of each yesterday, but found they were evenly matched.

He had to decide. He took out a coin. The dragon favored the original design, the Iron Crown, the new design he drew up yesterday.

He tossed the coin in the air and stepped back, iron rang against stone. He knelt down to look. The image of Ancalagon the Black stared back at him.

The coin toss favored the original design. His gut twisted, this felt so wrong. He looked up at the circle of faces.

"I will make the new design," he said.

The scribe rolled up the scroll on the worktable and replaced it with the new one. An aide collected scripts from each of the participants and gave them new ones.

He walked toward the Crack of Doom. The magma was visible far below, through the fissure that cleaved the floor.

"Let us begin," he said.

He ordered the fire to be lit in the charcoal forge. Until the ring became a magical object, it would be worked at ordinary temperatures through ordinary means.

He took out a small ingot from a pouch in his belt and set it on the workbench. It was a gold-iron alloy, matte and grey-white in color. He placed it in a miniature vise and sawed off one end, not quite half of the ingot, and placed it in a crucible.

As an afterthought, he shaved off a few more grey-white curls and added them to the initial chunk. Satisfied, he placed the crucible in the fire, while a helper loosened the ingot and dropped it in a box of leftover parts.

As the alloy melted, he sang an enchantment over the crucible. The words were in Black Speech in honor of Melkor, who devised a modified form of Valarin[4] for his creatures to speak.

When the alloy was completely liquid, he poured it into a mold. He tapped the sides; air bubbles rose to the surface and pocked the silvery surface. It took over an hour for the metal to harden, When it did, he quenched the mold and broke the two halves apart. The casting inside was bright gold. The first enchantment had taken.

The gold circle, even though it was a magical object at this point, wasn't a ring yet, it was just a rough casting. Its surface had the grainy texture of the inside of the mold, and the channel where the gold had been poured needed to be cut off.

He heated the piece in the charcoal fire. At this point it could still be worked at ordinary temperatures. When the piece glowed red, he pulled it out and used a chisel to remove the spur of metal left over from casting, then quenched it in the slake barrel. Steam rose around the tongs. When he pulled it out, the scar was still visible. He filed it off, and then put the piece back in the fire to smooth its surface.

He now had a plain gold ring. Each of the sixteen Great Rings had been made with gemstones and ornamentation, but they had been made for the Elves. He was only a visitor in the material world, his tastes were plain.

He sang the second spell over the ring. From now on, he couldn't do the work in a traditional forge, ordinary temperatures were useless. As a test, he put the ring back in the charcoal fire for several minutes. The fire didn't even warm it.

The outside was finished, now he had to shape the inside. The real work was about to begin.

He placed the ring one pan of a jeweler's scale. A helper loaded the other pan with tiny brass weights until it balanced level. It was important to know exactly how much the ring weighed. His own power had weight[5], not much, but enough to measure. If the transfer was successful, the Ring would weight more afterwards.

He prepared himself to go into the heat. He drank as much water as he could hold, and then pulled on the hood and gloves. He walked up to the anvil at the edge of the crack and raised the magma almost to the floor of the chamber. The others withdrew, driven back by the high temperatures.

He placed the ring on a tool shaped like a hook and submerged it in the molten rock. When he judged the metal to be soft, he pulled it out and laid it on the anvil. He cast layer after layer of enchantments to create the internal structures of the Ring.

A number of components made up those internal structures, and each one magnified one of his native Maia abilities. There might be a way to magnify all of them at once, but if there was, he had never discovered it. The most important components were Influence and Structure, but others, including Languages, Shape Shifting, Storms, and Landforms, also found a place in his design.

He left out one component he would have liked to keep. The module called War would have been possible to build, but at great cost, and it never would have worked very well. The Ring magnified Maia abilities. Waging war against the Elves was not a native Maia ability.

Constructing the modules inside the softened metal was difficult. He couldn't see what he was doing; he had to go by what he saw in his mind's eye. And when they were finished, arranging them inside the Ring turned out to be harder than he expected. When he first considered how to bind the Great Rings to an object, he thought the object would be something large, like a dagger. He had no idea how to fit the parts into something smaller; however, he had to make an object he could carry all times that he wouldn't put down by accident.

He managed to make all the components inside the Ring. He teased the last one into the correct orientation, but made the previous one slip out of alignment. He had to go back and fix that one. When everything was where it was supposed to be, he locked them in place. He gave it a gentle tap with the hammer to be sure that nothing inside was going to move.

He couldn't feel his tools very well through the heavy gloves, so he couldn't tell how hard he was hitting. The blow went wide and struck the tongs by mistake. He thought he saw something fly toward the edge. There was a small yellow hole in the grey scum that covered the surface of the magma, an arm's reach away.

He looked on the anvil to see if the ring was still there, but the hood had slipped and he couldn't see through the eye slits. He felt around for a place to put down the hammer, and used both hands to straighten the hood. The small circle of gold wasn't there.

He needed to calm down. None of his own power was in it yet, and there was enough left of the alloy to make another. All he lost was a few hours of hard work. He considered what to do. Start over, and repeat everything he did this morning. Try to get as far as he got on the first try, then break in late afternoon. Start again in the morning.

Then he saw a gleam of gold on the floor. The ring was leaning against one of the sandbags. He bent down and picked it up.

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Chapter End Notes

[1] Ilúvatar (God) is equally protective of all the angels, including fallen ones like Sauron.

[2] Lord Mairon

[3] "Neither does he use his right name, nor permit it to be spelt or spoken" said Aragorn about the S on the Uruk-Hai helmets. The Two Towers

[4] the language of the Valar

[5] with apologies to Albert Einstein for using his idea about light having weight (theory of general relativity, where the weight of light is computed from e = mc2)