The Malleable Metal of His Mind by Firerose

Disliking all limits and limitations, he bound himself to neither place nor master, though he learned much at the forge of Aulë. But of all the many places he frequented, he came most often and lingered longest in the Halls of Mandos, not to comfort the spirits of the departed, no, that was never his way, but to peruse the tapestries of Vairë, which transformed all that was and ever had been into webs of cunning threads whose patterns appealed to him above all the stars of Varda. He would trace each line – the smooth curves of the Elves, the punctuated paths of mortal Men, the ebb and flow of the elements themselves – till the malleable metal of his mind absorbed and assimilated them, understood, where the Weaver merely recorded, copied – and he thirsted ever to delve more deeply, to know more completely, to stamp his own patterns on infinity. And so when the call came to forsake Valinor he accepted, even though he must clothe himself in mortal seeming, limit himself to wise words and humble habits.

Man of craft, he deemed, would sound very well in the tongues of Middle-earth.

Inhabiting a body was a novel sensation, for the forms he had assumed before were transitory shells of his own making, to be taken or put aside at will, while this frame, this was a gift of Eru Himself. And at first he delighted in it: the sea breeze tangling his hair, the heady resinous scent clinging to the timber, the crinkly texture of his beard when splashed with salt spray – even the rub of rough woollen cloth against his skin, the sting of salt in his eyes, the unfamiliar sensations growing in his belly when this cockle-shell of an elven boat broached the open sea. All these he experienced for the first time, though wind and wood and water he knew, and so he discovered that knowing and living were distinct and as different from each other as thought and action, words and meaning – and he stored up that knowledge with all he learned that long first day.