Curumo, slices of vice. by Chiara Cadrich

The many-coloured

TA 2872, Isengard...

Dark clouds were rolling around the top of the great black granite tower, intermittently lighting a tripod in the center of a vast empty room.

The white wizard carefully pulled the golden black silk scarf, revealing a dark glass sphere.

With his scrolls in hand, Saruman scanned the inert stone for minutes. Finally he decided and began crafty and cautious passes with his skillful hand, above the dark ball.

Slowly, he explored its surface. Laboriously, he cautiously probed reactions to the solicitations of his expert fingers. Gently, the white wizard, sensitive follower of Aulë, managed to orientate the stone around its invisible axis, which alone would allow access to its secrets.

But the stone remained silent and void, as impenetrable as the darkness of a bottomless pit.

Tirelessly, the white wizard repeated his rituals and silent injunctions, like a craftsman forging and tempering his blade over a hundred times. The stone resisted him - sometimes a kind of frank and serene opposition to an unmasked usurper, sometimes a deaf refusal, irrational and full of dread.

But hours succeeded to hours, exhausting the scrolls’ resources and Saruman’s perseverance. Finally, without realizing it, the white wizard, out of patience, summoned of a word of power:

- "Edro!"

Then a flame shot at the heart of the stone, tiny and distant, yet sharp and strong as a beacon in a cloudless night.

The white wizard sketched a triumphant grin. But immediately, a heavy yoke surrounded him, as if the walls, columns and clouds around Isengard had known his burst and now fixed their attention on the stone.

Saruman had yet experienced this alert presence, this intense concentration... but where?

He raised his voice again, the ultimate power of his, ordering the stone to bend to his will.

So it was done.

The stone told him space, the near and the far, the small and the great, the swift and the patient.

The stone told him time, the proven and the possible, the forgotten and the probable, the unthinkable and the imminent.

The stone told him Knowledge and Power, it revealed the possibilities of Will, but it could not tell him anything about Duty.

For proud Saruman refused to glimpse the humility of Duty.

The stone taught him Absence – the dwindling of the elves, the remoteness of the Undying Lands, the dulling of principles, the power vacuum, the extinction of scruples.

Finally the stone made him know Presence - the omnipresence, vindictive and exclusive thirsty domination of one eye, glowing and lidless eye, swelling in his mind to submerge him.

Saruman yelled a word of secrecy and withdrew from the stone.

Shaken and gasping, he gathered his wits. He had recognized this alert presence, this intense concentration: Mairon, his old rival, stronger and more determined than ever... but still unable of finesse, all power and will.

Now he was sure: he alone could defeat this odious presence. It was his destiny. Confident in his cunning and his arcanes, he would probe the stone again, but this time, he would have geared up... with a ring, maybe?[1]

.oOo.

NOTES

[1] Indeed, Saruman will forge his own ring, he will reveal to Gandalf while tempting to rally him.