Sauron: Ugliness and Magnificence by Fernstrike

Chapter 1

The creation of the thing was both ugly and magnificent.

Ugly, crude, full of noise and mess. Rude and undefined alloys harvested from depths unknown and unchartered whipped through volcanic air. Ash stirred through the particles of simple gold, embedding themselves in the core of the thing. Fire and flame, from the depths of the earth beyond sight of life and light, burned in red hot currents and torrents around him as he brought the metal together in a ring, warping the unshapely and unrefined treasure of the earth into something better than it was. Better than it was - but not new. Not created. The thing needed life, needed a spark, needed a unifying soul to truly become something more than what it was. It was to manifest itself as that spirit within the thing, the boiling, bubbling gold of that ring.

It was the magnificence that came from he himself. He, with his hands wrapped around the solidifying mass, the perfect circle, endless and exquisite in its geometry. It burned his fingers, burned away the flesh he’d fashioned for himself, as crude as the metal that he’d warped and worked. It showed itself for what it was - better than what it came from, a thing with a life of its own, a thing beyond its origins. Now came the wonder. Now came the beauty. He drew it up out of himself - he who had stood before creation and watched it unfold, he who held creation in his blood, in the fire of the father that gave him being -

Anger spilled into the mix. This creation was his creation, beyond reach or touch of anything or anyone else. Even beyond his master. This was his and his alone, something spawned of himself, a creation independent of all others. Stubbornness followed the rage, and righteousness, and in that righteousness he bore his arrogance, and he revelled in it, he twisted it with all his skill until it gleamed across the surface of the band, the sheen unparalleled to anything a smith could have worked.

And in that arrogance, he found hatred, and his will to set his creation upon the world in such a way as to change it. For what was creation if not a mechanism in a forge, a tool that allowed life to be a certain way, to form itself into the shapes intended by the creator, the smith, to act out the will intended?

In the last moments, he squared his vision upon the thing, the sulphuric fumes turning it around within the shimmering mirages of steam wrought over the walls of the fiery mountain. And as it spun, he bored his will and intent into the surface of the thing, cutting the crude ugliness with exquisite magnificence, and it etched itself into the glimmering band in the most beautiful writing of the foulest tongue, one that only the fires that broke the bases of the world - fire that could create something from nothing - fire like the flame imperishable - could reveal. For the first time then, in all his eons amid all the elements and in times before such things even held their grip on the world, he grinned. Not only with the form he had made for himself, but with his very spirit, at his very core. In the gold and the writing he saw the contradiction of creation, as perfect as the ring of malice in his burned and blackened hand.