Emotions-- A series of vignettes by MisbehavingMaiar

Remembrance

Memory makes the past sweet and the present bitter; and as time wears on the memories of an immortal become all the more beautiful, and unbearable.

Aulë spoke slowly, voice like an echo in a fathomless cave: 

"All things crumble. All that once I wrought in early might has eroded. Even the changing sea outlasts stone in permanence.  High mountains lie as sand on  Ulmo's beaches. The kings of the folk I fathered perished in dragon-fire. The last of my pupils turned to the greed and darkness in his heart…" 

His craggy face is worn and smoothed as old limestone. 

"Within my works lay a seed of entropy that I could not perceive. Time ruins my heart with love for things past. But nothing, not even the trespasses of the Noldor, wounded me as you did, my maia... My Mairon." 

He said this with infinite sadness, but still he raised his hammer.

 Before Aulë stood a weak shadow, like ash held together in windless air. It rasped in a deep sandpaper voice, "You chained him. You broke him and bound him and left him to rot beyond the Door. If you love even the memory of what I was, you will let me see him. What harm could I do now, in this state?" 

Unmoving, the old Vala stood between his old pupil and the looming crack in the sky; a fissure that drew all light into itself and gave nothing back. 

"When I first crafted you I would not believe you capable of any harm… But you always find a way to hurt, even diminished as you are. Like him your poisons work mischief long after your sting." He held forth his weapon, weary but unshakable. "You will go no further, Sauron. You will see your master never again, unless it is at the end of Time when all things are unmade and we return to the thoughts of our Father." 

The Shadow, thus denied, hissed and lunged, spinning out fire like a wheel and notes of clear, sharp music that tore through the air-- but like his precarious flesh, the fire and music wavered, reaching Aulë as a curling sea-wave reaches the shore: a thin and harmless film. 

The mountainous god swung his great red hammer and drove the Shadow back, away from the crack in the sky and deep into the murk of a sulfurous mine, where he was lost to sight. 

Gradually, as time eroded the crater of Mordor and all the fields of battle grew over with new springs, the name of the Shadow was lost also to memory (though Aulë never forgot, and never shall). 

Chapter End Notes

This drabble was not technically from the same group as the others, but I thought it made a nice capstone to end this series with. 

This is not the permanent ending I choose to give Sauron in the Wesley!Verse, but for the sake of this arc, I've decided to go out with a distinctly Tolkienish note of bittersweet fatalism. ;) 

I hope this format wasn't too jarring, and that you got as much satisfaction from this series as I did from writing it.  

~Wes