every dirge fades to silence by Fernstrike

every dirge fades to silence

Read every dirge fades to silence

i. praeludium

---

The wind blows readily and relentlessly in a world still settling into its new shapes, stirring up ash and sand and catching the flying foam from a sea not yet concluded its tempests. It snaps the flaps of Eönwë's tent against the supporting poles as he looks at the latest intelligence of remnant forces from Angband. They're overthrown in their entirety, and yet, like the red setting sun slanting through a gap in the canvas to his right, refuse to be swallowed by the great water stretching westward. Not without shedding a little more blood, at any rate. Stragglers. Scavengers. Saboteurs. All of them more or less nameless to him, where indeed they have been named. He has not yet found the one he is looking for.

It takes some time, but in the end, it finds him.

A particularly powerful gust brings a shred of scent into the tent - a memory of pitch and brimstone. He feels the vibration behind him and around him - the hollow, keening frequency of a very particular Song sunk into a being . He has not felt it in a long time. It is not resident among any of the Children, or the spirits of the land, or any Ainu yet living in Valinor. It is a tune so cold it burns the bone-like structures within his fana, making his teeth ache as they resonate with the memory, and he holds back an exhausted sigh.

"I suppose I have no need to ask how you got past the garrison without raising the alarm,” he says at last. Eönwë turns, and there he is. He’s a shard of amber, a lick of flame. Though it has been months since Angband fell to ruin, to caved-in halls and shattered towers, the one he once thought of as friend - as brother - looks like he has just crawled out of the pit. His golden hair is still a matted, hastily tied back mess. His leg is still mangled, held together by a makeshift splint. His eyes shine like coals set in a mask of mud and caked blood. Eönwë’s heart sinks. “Mairon," he names him.

It looks for half a second as if the other Maia smiles. Then, the ground trembles, rocked by one of the many aftershocks that have been plaguing this land since the continent cracked and broke. It is too much for Mairon, who stumbles and lands on his hands and knees. He coughs several times, clutching at his ribcage, eventually hacking a clot of red-gold blood into the fine geometric weavings of the Valinorean floor rugs. Eönwë almost goes to him - but forty years of war, and thousands of years of regret, stop him. Mairon notices. Mairon smiles the bitterest of smiles.

"You do not call me the Abhorred,” he says at last, looking up with eyes dense with tears and anger, “and yet your thoughts are plain in your actions."

Battle rage rises within him again as if it never left. Eönwë starts forward. "That is not fair. Don't you put that on me."

"Should I not? For so long you didn't let the fear of the Children cloud your vision and yet now, even amidst your mercy, you do." His smile slips. “What has become of you?”

“Me?” Eönwë would laugh if he wasn’t ready to take up his sword again. He’s halted inches from his once-friend’s face. Mairon’s eyes have changed. The fires around them are dimmed. And inside, unnervingly, Eönwë sees nothing. The slit pupils are doorways opening onto a void, and it is not immediately clear if it is what Mairon sees, or what he looks for, or what lies within him. 

“Why are you here?" Eönwë almost whispers. It is easier than asking, What are you now?

It takes a few moments for Mairon to reply, but when he does, he has never sounded so tired. "Because I am done.” His voice is like a rod scraping through dry earth, finding no water, making no mark. “Arda is done with him, and I am also."

Eönwë does not dare to hope. Should not. And yet, he cannot stop his tongue. "Definitively?"

The question hangs between them like a puff of smoke, but is met only with silence.

ii. paean

---

All is quiet. He did not expect it to be so quiet. Not quiet in the sense that there is no activity - even from his makeshift quarters in the bowels of ruined Angband, he can hear delving. They are still repairing the damage here, deep, deep underground, the only place it is safe to do so. Orders are shouted in the distance. Metal grates on metal somewhere in another part of the cavern system. But there is a calming order to it. 

All this time he has been without his lord, waiting in emptiness, waiting in unknowing, but he has done exactly what he’d left Almaren for. Since Utumno fell, since he had first been forced to flee, he had been the heart of their cause.

You have to survive me, his master had ordered, and there had been no other choice, for Utumno had been his lord's keep. All his making. All his work. Whatever Mairon wanted to survive, it had to go with him, had to live through him. And so he had fled. He had no other choice.

He’d shaped the survivors in his image. He had divided the governance of the remnant dark forces between himself and the Valaraukar. He had crafted a chain of command. He had raised enchantments around the stronghold complex to hide them all. He had long ago designed these vaults to sustain them, filled with things that grew in darkness equally for work and to be devoured, and even as he waits alone, shrouded in his own shadows, they still do. Everything functions as it should. Nothing is wasted. Nothing is overlooked. When he first came here, it was a mess. How he loves his lord, but it was a mess. He seems to be the only one ever concerned with such messes.

He leans back against the cold stone wall of his chambers, letting the false sense of silence engulf him. 

***

When he first arrives, his blood is hot from his flight from ruined Almaren and the hasty departure after touching base at Utumno. His heart is heavy with what he’s left behind and bewildered at the reshaping of the land. Through the strange alchemy of the mind, it causes him to almost immediately go off on a rant about this new fortress that he is seeing for the first time.

“I cannot believe how much you didn't consider the seismic load of this structure,” he seethes, pacing back and forth from their vantage point in the half-constructed throne room, glaring down into the unroofed pits, out at the great piles of slag and rubble that were beginning to look like mountains. “And still you insist upon volcanoes. Did you even do a survey of the terrain before you started excavating? And what are those? Are they supposed to be the load bearing walls for the first tower? Perfectly designed if you want it to fall down.” 

He continues on like this for some time, Melkor leaning against the obsidian shard that will one day become the throne. He’s practically glowing from the luminescent residue of the Lamps settled on his armour and in his ink-black hair, which has taken on and warped the light until it is now iridescent as an oil slick. Mairon had taken longer than intended to leave the fractured dregs of what was once Almaren, and had not had the chance to linger with his lord in Utumno before coming here to begin much-needed work on the new fortress to the south. But Melkor had waited then, and he waits now for Mairon to join him. It won’t be long. Both of them know it. 

Great spans of time have already passed since Melkor’s first forays into the blessed lands, since he’d first reached through the deep chambers in Aulë’s vast, winding, easily accessed halls, seeking out Maiar who would listen. Mairon had always listened, from the start - he was too curious not to. He was, however, equally too rude not to rebuff what he heard at every turn. As far as he knew it, he’d been the only one who’d demanded to be convinced properly. Perhaps that was what had made his allegiance such a prize in Melkor's eyes.

That challenge had stood through their long whispered debates in caverns beneath the earth, in the cold forges at night, on the threshold of Utumno. It had stood the first time Melkor had reached out with his Will, not brushing up against Mairon’s spirit with the ideas of acceptance and harmony as his former master once had, but with dissatisfaction and discord and the inevitable possibility of the two combined. It had stood when he had channeled that Will into his physical form, making Mairon’s blood race and his mind roil in a way that only his headiest of creations had ever been able to do, through stolen and flushed moments where too often they had nearly been caught. It had stood when he had first taken Mairon into his arms, and then finally into his chamber. And the challenge stands even now, in unfinished Angband, with the Valar and Aulë and Eönwë far behind him, severed as with a sharp knife, though the shreds of the cut cords refuse to peel away from him completely.

Mairon suddenly feels cold at the conclusion of his litany, and half expects a reprimand. But it takes him less than a moment to recognise that the coldness is from Melkor coming close to him very suddenly, drawing them together wordlessly and pressing a kiss to his lips. Hip to hip, chest to chest, he freezes. In the anger and confusion and exhilaration of the moment, he feels a shard of regret, that this violent, impetuous Ainu, and this ridiculous fortress, and this rabble of a workforce and army are what he left Almaren for - and it threatens to ruin him. And Mairon, as is his way, only leans deeper into the kiss, welcoming his lord’s tongue into his mouth, shoving aside any illusions of what had been, fully embracing what is, deciding for himself what he shall be allowed to feel joy or sorrow over. He cannot allow the Valar to guilt him into mollified acceptance even now, when he is no longer under their rule. No - in their thrall.

He had learned long ago that this kind of intimate contact between Ainur is more than just contact. Between Maiar, it is a thrilling play between internal melodies. A kiss from a Vala, on the other hand, is something else entirely. It is nothing short of harmonisation between every single strand of Song between both beings, creating something all of its own. If the former is pleasure, the latter is power. And Mairon, in his fear and his desire, caves to it entirely, allowing it to eradicate the lingering shreds of guilt like a great and comforting shadow swallowing the last of the burning light. 

When Melkor finally pulls away he has probably never worn an expression so smug. Mairon is slightly stunned, even a little dazed, and not just a little indignant at that look. Oh, but it is good...and it is for me.

“You have missed the best thing about all this, my lieutenant,” his master says, voice low and rough with his own pride.

The new title still warms Mairon, and he scowls to hide it, cocking an eyebrow. “What is that, pray?”

“I am not going to stop you changing any of it.” He nods to the great fortress being built around them. “Whatever you’ve been told, the great Music is something mutable. That is the nature of Song. And what can be bettered should be bettered, and what does not serve should be destroyed. I am adept at the latter. It is all I have done to usurp the false dominion of symmetry and silence that the others have imposed upon this world. As for the former - my designs will need your steadying hand before the end, if we are ever to reshape this world in an image all our own.”

Mairon does not doubt that this may not be meant as self-reflection. He does not doubt that his lord is falsifying his true, destructive will for Arda's fate, choosing to play to his new lieutenant’s desires and his fear of never attaining them to reinforce his fealty.

Mairon does not care.

Because that was the real catch of where he had been before, after all. That had been the problem with Almaren, with the other Valar and Maiar. They were so convinced of their Theme and their place in it. Raw materials didn’t need to be hewn or cut, for they were perfect from the beginning. They needed only to be coaxed in shapes without changing themselves, to be built in comfortable forms and comfortable manners, unchallenged, unimproved. The Will with which they were made at the Beginning was to be enough. 

It has never been enough for Mairon, and he wonders how he ever stomached it for all those seemingly endless lamplit years. Even if Melkor's goal is to corrupt all that the Valar have sown, if it means new strength and possibilities to implement order, then Mairon will be a willing party to it.

As they descend, as Melkor shows him the rest of the grand complex and Mairon begins to make mental notes of exactly what they’re going to be changing, he begins to realise something about those first moments in Angband.

His master could have silenced him. He could have found another way to assure Mairon’s integration into his plan. A less gentle way. A less giving way. He is more certain than ever that Melkor wasn’t letting him speak out of good humour, or patience, or disinterest in the hopes the old worries would air themselves and be done with. He’d let him speak because he knew the departure had been wrenching. He knew it took strength to leave what one knew in pursuit of what one desired. And he knew Mairon needed to see the future here before he could truly shed the skin of the past.

At least, this is what Mairon tells himself, as he is brought before the small host of Valaraukar presently stationed at this keep. He forces the guilty, hidden part of his soul to acknowledge that his new lord knows some kindnesses. For a long while, it remains silent.

***

Suddenly, it is not all quiet, and Mairon is tugged out of his memories. The wind whispering from high above them picks up and careens through the caverns. The great black stone walls of Angband’s vaults judder, resonant with a discordant cry, a mighty shriek that funnels its way into Mairon’s bones and catches his mind in a vice of sudden, sharp fear and hope, echoing through every chamber. He races up, and up, and up, to the westward window of the ruined entrance hall. He looks out into the perpetual gloaming, where the endless clouds that block out the stars are tinted a subtle orange from the few fires in open pits that he dares allow. He sees nothing, but he knows. 

He doesn’t need to summon the Valaraukar. They’re already charging into the hall when he turns around. They do not speak; these centuries beneath the earth have long since created a shorthand between them, one based on mutual loathing and disgruntled cooperation. They exchange only looks and a nod in the direction of the mighty cry before the Valaraukar run out into the night, whips cracking at their sides. And Mairon, as always, mans the fortress, keeping it strong on his own shoulders.

He forces himself not to race forward when at last they return. Melkor wears the brightest, boldest, most triumphant smile on his face - and on his brow, between fingers hastily twining bars of metal into place through sheer force of Will, sit three impossibly bright stones. Mairon knows, instinctively, his master is wearing a very well constructed mask. Melkor stops, a whirlwind of strange, foreign Music about him, and Mairon doesn't quite know what to do.

It has been so long. Neither of them will acknowledge it yet. And neither of them know what to say in the meantime. At last, in silence, Melkor holds out one of his hands. The palm is burned, blackened, and Mairon must school the shock from his face. Whatever caused the injury, he ought to have mended his fana by now.

He realises that Melkor, and the Valaraukar, are waiting for him, and sinks to one knee. On Melkor's right pointer finger is a signet ring of red jasper and gold, the only dash of colour upon him. Mairon can feel the atonal residue of the Valaraukar lingering around the metal and stone, the aural dregs of their recently reaffirmed fealty. Beneath it all, however, is a trace melody - barely detectable, yet still vibrating in the hull of the adornment. Mairon's Song. He wonders briefly if the other fallen Maiar ever picked up on it; whether they realised who this unrefined, early attempt at Song-into-substance had once belonged to. 

Melkor had stolen it from his work station in Almaren, either as a provocation or an invitation - Mairon could never settle on which - in days now far off and half-forgotten. He had never found a way to take it back, and with the continued march of time, progressively lost the will to.

He doesn't break eye contact as he touches his lips briefly to the red stone, and rises before the Valaraukar can make more unseemly expressions from behind their master's back. 

“The enchantments you placed around the land are strong,” Melkor comments. 

Mairon doesn’t respond. He does not respond to praise so easily anymore, and especially not in front of the Valaraukar. He nods to Melkor's crown. "What have you done?"

There is a murmur of sound from amongst the Valaraukar. Laughter. Unease pricks at Mairon. 

“Exactly what I said I would,” Melkor says at last, having let the lack of an answer slide, and his voice sounds different from Mairon’s memories. Darker. Rougher. Something about it makes him think of the Children. 

And while Melkor doesn't specify precisely what damage he’s enacted, the images are clear in his mind, and the minds of the Valaraukar, unmasked for Mairon to see - plummeting boughs and lights flickering out, felled trees, a felled elf, and the three jewels. And straightaway, Mairon’s mind goes where it must - how rash, how ridiculous, surely there will be retaliation, our fortress is in ruins, our armies are in tatters, our old alliances are frayed and broken, our underground supply lines can only serve so many -

“Show me what remains of my citadel,” Melkor says, and Mairon knows that he knows what is coming. He wants to see the shape of things now because, surely, he will leave Mairon in charge of the war once again, when the dust has settled and the elves, or the Valar, or whoever is coming, are resolved to vengeance.

So Mairon wastes no time, giving a cursory guide of the surface and his enchantments, and then bringing his master below, to the thousand and one pits. When they are certain that all is well, the Valaraukar eventually peel off. Only Gothmog remains with them, a walking cluster of black and red fire towering over both of them. He eyes Mairon with an unfriendly leer that Mairon refuses to be afraid of. Yes, his lord is back now - but he vows that his hard won command in Angband will only be emboldened by favour, not derived from it. He shall insist upon this storyline, no matter how many subordinates he has to put on the rack for it. He loves his lord - but he has also made this place his own. They will continue to know it.

“I had the throne brought here,” he says, as they enter a smaller cavern in the southern end of the complex that Mairon has been using as his place of work and rest. 

“Sentimental,” Gothmog remarks.

Mairon throws him a burning look. “It’s good to know you’d have your lord sit on a pile of rubble upon his return. ”

Melkor smiles at the exchange, but it is an empty expression. Mairon doesn't know quite how to react. Melkor had always been smooth with words. That was his manner. It has changed. And that, above all, annoys him. He had gotten used to being wholly in control of his faculties in the past years. It had been necessary for command, for order, for control. Yet on top of putting him on edge by virtue of his presence alone, this change in his lord is throwing him off even more.

“Since you’ve neither lashed out at us nor retired, I'm going to assume you're disappointed but not completely dissatisfied,” Mairon says, his tone testy but careful. "What would you have us begin with?"

“The years have been long,” Melkor says at last, the look in his eyes vanishing as he fixates upon his lieutenant. "You are to give me a full account before we start rebuilding the surface structures and reasserting our dominance. I want numbers, I want facts, I want risks."

Yet again bewildered, Mairon reaches out his thought. First, and very obviously, he picks up the myriad darting thoughts of a small, apprehensive gathering of dark creatures beyond the doorway, eager for a sight of their returned master. Then, as he draws his mind back towards his lord and seeks the hidden paths known only to them, what he sees has him almost blushing. Melkor is thinking of rather different structures than the kind made from stone and metal. So - the Melkor from before is still in there, even in this small way. In the way that desires Mairon and knows him. Surely that, of all things, is enough for now. He feels the physical bonds of his fana throb unbidden with desire, and hopes both his and his master’s minds are appropriately shielded from the vying Valarauko still in the room.

Melkor turns. “Leave us. And disperse the crowd.” 

For a moment, it looks as if Gothmog is going to wait for a reason. As if he’s forgotten it’s not Mairon’s Will he is battling anymore, but his true lord’s direct orders. At last, however, he nods, sending a crude parting image into Mairon’s mind before he departs that leaves the Maia more than a little keen to one day cave the beast’s head in, making him regret ever conjuring a vision of Mairon in such a...position.

The door closes, tendrils of smoke curling up from under it for several moments until Gothmog finally moves off. 

“You do not look as you once did,” Mairon says, still quiet. Melkor turns his icy blue gaze on him, but Mairon doesn’t flinch. He takes in the ashen pallor, the dark hair bereft of iridescence, the eyes that retain their exhilarating wildness yet seem to drift in and out of focus - sometimes watching him with appraisal; sometimes searching for something, something that isn’t Mairon.

"You do not speak as you once did." Mairon cocks his head, and his master goes on. “You have always been blunt, but in this short time your every word has been laced with antagonism.”

Mairon snorts, and goes to lock the door. “That is what comes from having to work with Valaraukar for centuries. They only understand one thing.” The bolt gives a heavy thunk as he turns the key. “I’ve come to learn that when the need arises, your preferred manners of attaining dominance must play alongside the ones I typically favour.”

Enough of this, he thinks. He looks up to see his master’s eyes upon him, dark and desirous in agreement. He bares the image in his mind nakedly. For all his blushing, Mairon does not feel nearly as embarrassed as he once might have.

He is the first to move forward, shedding his outer robe as he goes and relishing the bite of the cold on his bare arms as he throws himself at Melkor, intent on fulfilling exactly what he’d seen in his master’s vision. If Melkor is astray, if his thoughts are in disarray, if words come less easily and smoothly from him now, so be it. They will come together this way. At least it will be something.

Their reunion is swift, and violent, and needed. His lord tastes almost the same - all ash and ice and salt - but there is something else. The sweetness of sap, he realises - splatters not yet cleaned away in his haste to flee. It is foul. It is a reminder of the distance. He realises he hasn’t truly acknowledged what a cavernous part of him had been removed when his master had been gone, and the thought scares him. It scares him that he could ever lose himself like that, that he could become unhinged as he is now with the knowledge that that space can now be filled in once more. So, because he is Mairon, he moves purposefully and with more urgency than Melkor, bent on taking him rather than being taken, insofar as he can. As if he knows, Melkor digs his claws in, stilling Mairon’s frantic writhing, claiming his mouth for his own, until Mairon cannot prevent himself uttering a moan, answered by a satisfied sound low in Melkor’s throat. 

“Damn you,” Mairon hisses against Melkor’s mouth, their breath misting in the icy air. His fingers tangle in Melkor’s hair, badly knotted from his labours.

“Don’t you start too,” says Melkor, his voice edging towards a laugh, to Mairon’s surprise, and yet it sounds more like a memory than something of the moment. 

Mairon claws at the buckles of his armour, and it is so ruined that it comes off with little effort in a great clattering heap, followed by his shredded clothes. Mairon looks him over, his entire body heating like a forge in anticipation - and for the first time in the long ages since their parting, he almost feels good and glad. Each violent kiss, every flick of the tongue, every scrape of teeth on the hot, sensitive flesh of his ear and his neck, every second of contact sends a concordant shiver through his fana and his spirit, making it reverberate at a frequency that nearly blinds and deafens him. He realises that for all his distance, Melkor has missed this, also. He can feel him letting him in, letting their Music mingle together.

He senses an unusual melody as Melkor’s fingers work off his long, prim tunic, fussing about the laces - some new line in the Song that travels through the touch of his hands. Mairon only cares about it for a moment, however, for he is then cursing the ridiculous clothes he is wearing, tearing the fabric himself, determined to eradicate every space between every mote of matter between them, to bring their Songs into a great and thrumming unison. He turns Mairon around and sets those hands to roving all along his touch-starved body, pressing into the soft places of his flesh, finding their homes at his throat, the small of his back, between his legs, and the sonorous sensations nearly unwind him.

"There," Melkor all but growls against the nape of his neck as his fingers work to prepare Mairon, even if they both know they are far too frantic to do so properly.

For his part, Mairon's voice has turned into a barely contained whine, hips moving in a familiar motion, grinding back against his master's touch, wanting more, more, more - "Yes, y- yes -"

He tastes the metal tang of his own blood as it drips from his nose into his open, panting mouth - an uncontrollable response of his fana to the aural pressure. As always, Melkor licks it away.

The great obsidian throne is still well-formed and resplendent, covered in furs and crowned in ice, unmelted in these deep, quiet places beneath the world. They waste no time to fall back upon it, a cluster of limbs and flame and shadow. Mairon doesn’t wait. He cannot. He forbids himself from acknowledging the pain as he takes Melkor into him, all the way and all at once, not stopping to look for oil, allowing the discomfort to manifest only as a harsh cry that escapes him, soothed away by wordless praise from his master. He leans into it, takes it, and soon enough it ebbs as their Songs begin to harmonise, and he feels only full, complete again, satisfaction building within him, along with defiance against the thought that such a feeling should render him weak. How could it? He wonders for a moment - and these moments grow shorter every time - how other Ainur could ever sacrifice the marriage between the primordial mingling of spirit and the unique pleasures of embodiment, over some false belief that the former, alone, is enlightened union. Not when this is so complete.

As they move in a rhythm that he almost cannot believe they both still remember, he cannot contain the painful pleasure, not within his embodied form - for the truth remains that a Vala is something else entirely. At last his voice escapes him. Not speech or song as the Children would know it - and certainly not Song as the other self-righteous Ainur across the sea would know it. It is their Song, saying each other’s names as prayers, where every gasp and cry and moan, every curse in disbelief and defiance, all the mess and the noise, the skin and the sweat, complements and darts between the vibrations of their higher spirits, creating the incredible discord from which possibility can and must be shaped. There can be no order without chaos. And indeed, the Song begins to order itself, the discordant notes arranging until they become something greater than unison. And he knows, as Melkor murmurs his name back to him, as he shifts and hits a place inside Mairon that sends sparks across his flesh and the landscapes of his mind, as he feels every muscle seize in ecstasy, as his vision blanks and they each reach their peak and collapse shaking against each other - he knows that this is why the two of them are inevitable. Their partnership is everything the Valar believe it couldn’t be and wish it wouldn’t be. 

He does not now feel very much consciously, for he is comprised entirely of feeling. He is aware that his ears have become filled with blood, also, and he is blinking it from his eyes. He wipes at them gingerly, the vessels - having burst from the incredible frequencies and vibrations - still remaining tender. A small price to pay for the pleasure. He breathes deeply in and out, content for the first time in a long time. Dimly, he wonders if the incredible energy they have just amassed would have been enough to awaken the dormant volcanoes that have, over time, become so tied to him, and in part to his master. The thought amuses him. They will do so soon regardless, he supposes.

As his earthly sight comes back to him, Melkor tracing the clawed tips of his fingers across Mairon’s back, he looks down. On the dais, the gleaming stone reflects back three points of light. Melkor had not removed his makeshift crown, and in his pining and devotion, it had taken Mairon this long to notice.

He listens carefully. They have a Song of their own. And he can feel them vying for dominance in Melkor’s great internal polyphony. He recognises at last that it is their echoes he felt, and continues to feel, in his master’s hands as they rove across his warm skin. He thinks he understands, and it worries him.

“Tell me,” me whispers, lips brushing hot and swollen against Melkor’s shoulder.

“Tell you what?” His voice is a deep, comforting rumble in his chest, muted to Mairon's hearing, and Mairon closes his eyes.

“Tell me about them.”

The request hangs in the air, still hot and shimmering from their passion, still singing with the echoes of their lust and longing. But Melkor stays utterly silent. 

iii. threnody

---

It is a miracle he makes it down to the deepest vault at all. 

When Ancalagon had fallen, the impact had created an unfathomable tumult of debris, metal and stone shattering, projectiles shooting off more deadly than arrows, killing nearly as many of the enemy horde as their own number. That had not stopped them. Even now he can hear them making their way within, crawling over the crumbling fortress, already crying out victory. 

For his part, he’d already been badly done in from meeting Eönwë on the battlefield, a fight he is sure he only escaped thanks to one of the last rampaging Valaraukar interrupting. With those injuries, he’d been able to make it below ground in time to take shelter, but not so swiftly as to avoid a collapsing parapet of sharp iron. 

He stumbles down the stairs with no energy left to mend his ruined fana, much of the left side of his body shattered and pierced more than it had been since the duel. He is all but dragging his left leg, hobbling and tumbling and using the rails for purchase. 

The damned rails were your idea, he thinks with bitter humour as he leaves the upper levels behind him. Imagine how many people would have already fallen to their deaths in this place without them. 

Yet another of the many subtle and unacknowledged changes that he, and he alone, had made for their shared benefit. I’m not going to stop you changing any of it, those had been the old, charming words. Yet so often it was only when their Wills united that he was able to effect any such ideas at all. It is indeed a miracle that the Angband Mairon built - not in the might of his lords's metal and stone, but in soldiers and supplies and subtlety and sorcery - survived until now, and only to be destroyed so spectacularly. 

Down in the vaults, he is reminded of the silence in Angband at the beginning of this Age. A distant clamour, a haunting memory of action. And here, something like peace. Melkor is seated in what was once a grain vault for their armies, surrounded by a skeleton of a bodyguard. Grond lies at his feet. His crown, the Iron Crown forged shortly after his return as a proper house for those wretched jewels, rests heavy on his brow. 

“Get to the upper levels,” Mairon commands the bodyguard. “Now!”

They obey without hesitation. This is what it has come to. The thought burns him. It makes him cold all over. They listen more readily to him than their true master. The thought thrills him. The thought kills him.

“You have to leave,” he gasps, struggling to get his shallow breathing under control. Melkor is only silent, so he goes on, his anger - no, his frustration - no, his despair, building with every word. “That great shuddering and turmoil? That was Ancalagon falling. He is dead. All three towers are destroyed. We have completely lost the field. I do not know if even a single Valarauko survived.” He points up the hall, gritting his teeth and swallowing blood. “The hosts of Valinor are inside the fortress. My lord, you have to make your exit now and you are running out of time. The hidden tunnels I constructed -”

“I am resolved to stay,” he says at last, his voice a scrape across the air. That is it. And Mairon has been arguing for so many years that he does not know how to argue against that anymore. He had thought he understood Melkor - knew him, even, after all this time. Since Almaren. Through the war. But now, looking at this sunken, cowering figure, he realises he doesn’t know him at all. His lord has been so bent on his contempt for any creation that is not his own that he has not just brought the wolves to their door, but ushered them, howling, inside.

He thinks of the cursed Silmarils and the Adan they lured to his door all those years ago, to slain Thuringwethil, perhaps the only other creature in these lands of darkness he had ever cared for.

He thinks of the Valaraukar who he despised, of cursed Gothmog, and how even in his hatred he could hardly stomach watching them perish taking Melkor's prizes, and now writhing and breaking under swarms of light.

He thinks of the dragons that he had helped his lord raise, those terrible and wonderful creatures that had borne the same ferocity and zeal of his wolves but with greater cunning, who had crawled mewling atop him in their infancy for all the rings and cuffs and piercings he would wear, cursed with a love of all that glittered, and who now lay in bloody tatters with claws curled and jaws dripping their own blood on the battlefield.

And now their backs are pressed up against the wall as everything they - no, Mairon - has built and loved falls to ruin around them. But he refuses to be hit by anymore debris. 

“Come with me,” he pleads, one final, desperate attempt, playing on the oft unspoken thing between them. What are they to each other? Even now, he does not know. But perhaps something, still - something that can reach past his despondency, his paranoia, his single-minded instinct. He tries to send it as a wave of sound, a frequency that might resonate in Melkor’s skin and spirit - but what Mairon feels is only the ultimate discord within his lord, ever more unhinged as the years have passed. All the strands are not now in a magnificent intermingling of independent melodies, but scattered, staccato, unpleasant nodes, firing and shooting off into darkness, fizzling out to nothing. It is chaos without form, without end, without purpose or possibility. It is simply devolution. Only a tiny thread of his original Song remains. Mairon detects it, muted and meek, as Melkor breaks the silence.

"You are afraid."

"Of course I'm afraid," Mairon despairs, shocked at himself that even now, he would dare show this weakness before Melkor. But only ever Melkor. "You are too, even if you will not admit it."

He looks up, eyes flat and glassy. “No. I am not. Yet I never quite thought we could lose all of it.”

"You never did, no,” says Mairon. “And I am sorry.” For a moment, he means it. But that memory of Song has been enough to awaken such anger within him at everything he thought his lord was, that he knows, in the end, his words are just an illusion. It’s the illusion he’s been clinging to since Almaren. 

Melkor sees right through it, and the great discord drowns out his original Song completely. "You are not," he says. 

Marion inhales - cringing as his broken ribs dig into his lungs - and exhales. His cheeks are damp, his heart is heavy, and he can feel his exhausted spirit rising in a tumultuous, tremulous threnody. If all is lost, then he does not care anymore. He releases it entirely. 

"No,” he growls. “No, I am not. I am not, because you got what was coming to you. I am not, because you ruined what we could have made great. I am not sorry, because your promise to me was that I would never be sorry again. To that I hold. You changed me.”

And his lord finally looks at him. In the past five centuries, Mairon has increasingly looked upon his lord with fear, anger, even anxiety - but this is the first time, he thinks, that his immediate emotion is contempt. For the look he receives is patronising, and bitter, and forsaken. As if, at the admission that he too allowed himself to be mutable, that he let a change happen and then stopped it, tried to control it, tried to make something better of it, is disappointing. Melkor is disappointed in him. And the one thing he cannot stand is shame.

“I do not lay these bonds upon you,” Melkor says, in a voice that is barely a voice. “To them I am lost. But you - even now you are still fair in a way that they can understand. You remember your favoured ways of gaining control. I suggest you revert to them.”

“That is what you would have me do?” he spits, confounded. “Lay down my sword and sue for clemency? Scuttle into the shadows until they drag me into the light? I will not soil my name like that.”

“You do not own your name,” Melkor says, and his voice is all at once a rising peak of jagged rock, his eyes so like brilliant white gems that Mairon wants to curse them, for that strange, empty light has been in them since the felling of the Trees. It is the shards of crystalised mania that never plagued his lord in Almaren. Mairon could never have competed with the Silmarils, he knows that now, and that understanding burns him without ever having had the need to touch them. 

Melkor goes on, unheeding of his lieutenant’s distress, his voice growing in strength and condemnation.

“But for me, you would only ever be Sauron and Gorthaur until the end of Arda,” he says, not caring for the way Mairon’s jaw tenses, the way his eyes water, the abject hate that begins to fill him and turn his own Song to chaos. “But for me, you would have become a thing of madness in pursuit of your desires. You remain Admirable only because I will it so. And if I want you to be free of duty to me now, it is because I know you will never be free of me.” 

If the bones of his hand were not all nearly broken already, he thinks that he may have, in that moment, and for the first time, actually struck Melkor. For his presumptuousness. For his use of those hated names. For his blatant hypocrisy. And because he is Mairon, he does the next best thing, and says it with his eyes. He says it with his mind. He allows that ruinous path to lead him into the same darkness as his master, reflected back into himself.

"You’re wrong," he whispers, and it hits him then, how deeply the blame rests upon Melkor’s shoulders. It hits him, how strange it was, how foolish it was, how wasteful it was to believe he had ever really loved and been loved. 

“You’re wrong,” he says, forcing an unfound strength into his voice, “and I hate you for it.” He staggers forward, left leg dragging from the chunks of shrapnel cutting into flesh and muscle. He collapses against the throne, forcing himself up by the arm rest. He is convincing both of them, now. "Do you hear me? I hate you. You have given me nothing. You have brought us nothing."

But his master does not regard him, at least not with his eyes. He stares straight ahead, to the cavernous way leading to the surface, towards the dim sounds of collapsing roofs, Orcish screeches, and Elvish and Valarin battle cries getting steadily louder. Slowly, he removes the jasper signet ring and holds it out to Mairon. It hovers between them, an unspoken reality. Mairon knows exactly what he’s doing. 

How dare he. How dare he.

“You are to take this -”

“No."

“You are to find whoever remains -”

“I said no.”

Suddenly his master lashes out with such blind and powerful Will that Mairon is forced to his knees before the throne, swallowing a cry of pain. The Will finds its way into his sinews like threads of iron, suffocating him, bending him. In that moment, Mairon is filled with such a horrific sense of plying betrayal.

"Stop it," he hisses, but for all his arts, for all his accumulated strength, he cannot resist the pressure of the Vala on his being. His blood begins to drip from his nose as he is forced to take the ring from Melkor’s fingers and slip it on one of his own. 

He feels it then. He understands it then. That’s why the enemy deem him the bane of the world. That is why even now his power is so diminished. Because even in this, one of the first things that Mairon ever made, in bright Almaren when the World was new, even when he was still an offshoot of his Creator’s thought and a vassal to a lesser god - even in this he feels him. And he realises, that from the very beginning to the very end, he will never be free of him.

“This is the symbol of my power,” Melkor says, as if relishing Mairon’s horror. “Use it to draw power to you. Build up what needs to be strong. Unmake what needs to be broken. You will be my final word for this wretched world.”

Not your final word, he thinks defiantly, my own. But his vocal cords feel frozen. He is beyond his own Will now. And such guilt as he has not felt since he left Almaren swallows him, so that he lets himself be made to rise and turn not of his own accord. He is not afforded the autonomy to decide how to place his feet as he marches out, swallowing down cries of pain as shards of bone and metal shift inside him, but he suffers it. Then, as if it is the final spearing pain to remind him exactly how much he gave, and gave up, to be seen and known, Melkor echoes his own thoughts back to him.

This is what you really want, he hears the voiceless words. You want them to believe you never had a choice. And I, too, resent you for that.

It is enough to move the defiance in him one last time, forcing himself to speak, pushing his own Will up against his masters until his vision turns red from the bursting vessels as he marches out, and down, towards the hidden tunnels. “Know this. I am not crawling back to the Valar. I am marching away from you.”

He stumbles on his ruined leg. The truth hangs between them like an unstruck chord. It is never struck. Soon, Angband is silenced for good.

iv. recapitulation

---

Definitively?

Mairon does not know how to answer that. It is impossible to answer that, especially to Eönwë.

“As much as can be in the World as it is,” he says. Save him, but he does not want to be alike to Melkor, does not want his lord's fate to be his own, does not want to keep walking this path. His heart hurts more than his body. He is frightened. He is very, very tired. 

Eönwë hesitates, and shakes his head, rueful and resigned. "This decision is not mine to make."

Mairon keeps his eyes on the floor, on the rug he has ruined, swallowing down his fury, swallowing down that cold hand of base fear that steals up his spine.

"If you could issue some...if you granted some form of amnesty -"

"It is not in my power, Mairon," Eönwë says firmly, and Mairon is forced to look at him. He is sorrowful. Regretful, even. But there is not an ounce of forgiveness in his gaze. It is not in his power. It is also not in his will. That becomes abundantly clear. And Mairon’s despondency warps into a stirring amalgam of defiance and outrage, such that he barely hears Eönwë speak of surrendering before the Valar, of taking their judgement, of serving a punishment and returning, one day, to their society.

"Even now you are not forgotten in the Halls of Aulë," Eönwë concludes. "I do not know what mercy they will show. But they will give you a second chance when you have accounted for and atoned for what you've done."

"You would have me be humiliated before my peers, and then walk among them once more?" Mairon all but whispers.

Eönwë sighs. Unlike Mairon, he always knew when to back down from a fruitless argument. Perhaps that is why he never turned his back on the Valar. 

He turns his back on Mairon instead, returning to his papers that flutter in the cool, damp breeze.

"Elect whatever road you will," he says, and it is in the fluent, grave, efficient voice of the most assured commander in Eä. "If you come with me, I will do what I can that justice for Arda and her inhabitants does not turn into revenge against you. If you do not, then you will number among those creatures I am bent on removing from these lands, and if I or any of my kin are tasked to hunt you down, I will neither relent nor obstruct such action."

It is so cold. So mechanical. So Eönwë. He knows exactly who he is and what he is doing. It is aggravating.

Mairon looks down to the signet ring on his finger, a last vestige of what he was.

Even now you are not forgotten in the Halls of Aulë.

This piece of him that Melkor took, and turned into the symbol of his power, then gave back expecting that the meaning he had put into it would remain - what was that if not an affirmation that even if Mairon surrendered, even if he stood trial, even if he was released, he would still not truly be the real Mairon that had once walked those halls? 

This thing belonged to that time. To both his lords. To all his history, and not to the inevitable future of a World in the thrall of Time’s relentless passage.

And because he is Mairon, he refuses this. As long as his name is pledged to that ring, it is not his. So he will melt it down. He will devolve the purpose prescribed him by both masters and remake it in his image. No discord for the sake of discord. It will serve his ends of possibility and perfection, order and control. He will make his own union of Music, all on his own.

But even then, the wretched words return to him.

You will never be free of me.

Curse him - but it is what he would have wanted. And if Mairon had always asked to be properly convinced, he had never, in the end, ever said no. 

He supposed there was no point in starting now, whatever his defiance of the reasons for his ends, and the means of getting there. Not if it meant the erosion of every tiny step forward, every miniscule thing he’d held on to in the face of everything he’d let go of to be with - no, because of - Melkor. He supposed he would have to change, and pursue what had been asked of him in light of no other recourse - but it would be on his own terms. Not those of Melkor. Nor Eönwë. And certainly not the Valar. 

So Mairon says nothing, and leaves the tent in silence.