Imprisonment by Elsane

Chapter 1

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This time, when they dragged him out of his cell, they went up. It was orcs this time, big ones, and they took great glee in the familiar orcish sport of tripping and shoving him as they went. Maedhros, long weary of this game, stumbled on impassively between them. But up, up was new, and at the foot of a rough and ill-lit stairway he looked up and wondered, with a creeping sense of dread, what it meant. Bats, he thought; bats, or spiders.

Two flights of stairs further, the orcs thrust him out onto a walkway high above the great gate of Angband. He staggered, as they had wanted, and caught himself on the battlement; and there he clung, between two vast black spikes, staring, wild for the view, for the glimpse of a wider world that was some distant kin to freedom.

The air in his face was not clean. It was acrid, and the wind, when it came, carried an uglier reek; but it was still wind, and Maedhros took a deep and shaking breath. The sky was buried in fog. South, south toward Mithrim where his brothers surely still held their court, a road led for a little way before vanishing in the grim and starless murk.

“You appreciate the view? That is well,” said Morgoth, behind him.

Morgoth’s voice, once he was no longer trying to be charming, was monstrous, heard with bones as much as with ears. Maedhros had heard it five times now, each worse than the last.

He turned, slowly. "It would be fairer by starlight.“

Morgoth stood upon the rampart before him, yet at the same time he was a towering shadow, a darker nexus in the dark fog, taller than the ramparts and terrible. The Silmarils gleamed in his crown, and cast his face into a darker shadow where only the glittering cruelty of his eyes was clear.

He looked down at Maedhros, wordless; and Maedhros saw, in that moment, that all the brutality of the past years had been nothing more than idle amusement for Morgoth, and now his true purpose was to begin.

They had brought him from his cell unshackled; and it was a long way down from the ramparts.

He hesitated for a moment too long.

“I think not,” Morgoth said, amused.

With one vast black hand he reached out and picked Maedhros up. Maedhros cried out; the heat of Morgoth’s hand was terrible, not burning, but wrong, like a fever.

Morgoth, vast as the twisted mountains, lifted him to the high peak of Thangorodrim. He pinned Maedhros against the mountainside with one hand, and with the other spun a thread of metal from the face of the rock. Maedhros struggled to see, but could catch only glimpses. It moved like molten iron, but the light glinting off the surface was cool, like steel but darker. Morgoth bent it around his wrist; it was still hot with the sick heat of Morgoth’s hand. Then Morgoth let go. The serene light of the Silmarils shone down around them.

“Nothing of elven hand or mind can free you,” Morgoth said, “for this band was forged by forces past your reckoning, and is beyond your power to break or bend.”

He was to be a trophy, then, staked out as a victory banner in Morgoth’s foul war against his father. It would not be an easy death, but all in all it would be a clean one, and he had despaired of far worse. But Morgoth went on, “You shall not die of hunger, nor thirst, nor shall the bite of winter kill you, though you will starve, and shrivel, and beg the wind for surcease.”

He touched Maedhros’ forehead with his forefinger, and Maedhros’ whole body flinched. The shackle bit into the bones of his wrist.

Morgoth’s smile was cruel, and the satisfaction in it was terrible. "Indeed your father was a master. Skilfully he wrought your fate, and gladly you chose it. Do you demand your inheritance of me, little king? Behold: here it is!“

In Morgoth’s mouth everything turned ugly. Yet it was true: Maedhros’ bonds were unbreakable by elven hand or will, and death would not release him.

"The Silmarils burn you,” he said, with the thin fierce anger of desperation. "So shall the sons of Fëanor!“

Morgoth laughed, and the cliffs around them splintered the sound into an echoing chorus of mockery.

He leaned in very close. "Long shall your father’s handiwork continue to delight me.” He ran a single blackened finger down Maedhros’ cheek, and was gone.

Maedhros swallowed down panic; took one deep breath; another. He tipped his head back against the rock.

The Silmarils had driven back the reeking fogs; the skies were clear above him. He had lost count of the years since he had last seen the free sky. The stars! Luminous, and fair, and living, as if the sky itself were breathing light; they struck him like an arrow to the chest, like a mallet to a gong.

“Elbereth – !” he cried out in anguish, but he had no words to ask her; he had cut himself off from all of them.

Long shall your father’s handiwork continue to delight me.

Morgoth lies, he reminded himself – Morgoth lies!

His shoulder was already burning. The stars wheeled steadily, remotely, through the circles of the sky as the hours crept on, and between the stars the darkness was very black, and infinite.