The Most Valuable Resource by herenortherenearnorfar

The Child in the Fortress

Read The Child in the Fortress

Melkor was rarely in a fair mood- his nature was given towards dissatisfaction- but he looked especially vexed now.

Mairon ran through a mental list of vexatious things, and quickly found his answer.

“I suppose the child’s family is unwilling to negotiate then?” he said.

“They consider him dead already,” Melkor grumbled. “And say they will mourn another family member fallen at Morgoth’s hand.”

It was an entirely predictable response- nothing Mairon had heard about Fëanor (Fëanáro in his native tongue) suggested that he or his kin were inclined to hesitation. Furthermore, the entire endeavor had cost them two weeks when they could have been mounting an attack on the ever growing encampment by Lake Mithrim. The Noldor were digging in, this was not the time to be playing with hostages.

He tried not to let his satisfaction show too much. For all his other strengths, his master did have a small weakness when it came to Fëanor. He had wanted a chance to gloat, to force the elf to come cowering before him, and hardheadedness had stolen that away. Some people just didn’t know how to give in when they were beaten.

“I’ll dispose of the boy then,” he told the Dark Lord, “Messily, perhaps put his head on a pole so his family can see when we attack them? Speaking of an attack on the Noldor-”

“No!” Melkor snapped. The Silmarils set in his crown seemed to glow brighter in response to the rising darkness of his anger, burning like the universe before shape or reason. “Keep Fëanor’s grandson in one piece. We might have need of him.”

This was the problem with being second in command. You were given ridiculous orders and expected to fulfill them. How was he supposed to preserve an Eldar child in the heart of Angband?

The few young elves they’d been able to capture (shockingly few, the Quendi preferring to smother their little ones themselves rather than see them taken by orcs) lasted scant days. Outside of the deep pits, in the slave camps where they could be doted on and protected by other thralls, they did a little better, but overall survival rates never got higher than 50%.

Dwarf children survived longer but not by much; lacking the ability to throw their souls out of their bodies at the first whim they curled in on themselves, becoming immovable little stones. And they were still so fragile . Weak muscles, thin skulls, little strength, desperate eyes and  high pitched keens for parents long gone. It grew tiresome. He’d told the orcs to stop bothering with child captives years ago- they were always searched for, even by the unaffiliated Moriquendi or Petty Dwarves, and never lasted long enough to be worth the trouble.

“He can’t stay in one of the good cells forever,” Mairon said, in his most reasonable voice. “Without starlight the precious things fade.”

“Figure it out,” Melkor ordered.

“And the attack, my lord?” It was hard to not be a nag, sometimes.

HIs master raised a hand to his forehead, ruined palm coming too close to the terrible light of the silmarils. “Give me a few hours. I require rest.”

You’re a Vala, you require a reminder of the power you hold, Mairon wanted to tell him, but he wasn’t a fool. His loyalty was buoyed by fear, he knew it well, and even now he felt the mixed terror and longing that always arose when Melkor deigned to look on him. It was best to acquiesce. “Of course, my lord.”

He went to deal with the child.

 

 

In a general effort to not have him die within hours, they’d put the boy in an abandoned closet rather than an actual cell. It was cleaner, better lit, and had less of a rodent problem than even the most generous of Angband’s other accommodations.

Nevertheless, it was easy to see that captivity had not been easy on the little fellow. His face was gaunt, he wore a blanket like a protective cloak, and he flinched when the door opened. There was a dark bloodstain on the knees and hem of his bright red leggings, half his silver buttons were missing, and someone had cut the eight pointed star off the front of his jacket, leaving a gaping hole the size of a fist above his heart.

Some of the fear slid off his face when he saw Mairon. Assuming a more pleasing form had been a good call then.

“Who are you?” he asked in Quenya- that strange language Melkor had brought back from across the sea, full of heavy vowels and excessively declined nouns.  

“Your father and grandfather aren’t coming for you,” Mairon told him rather than answer. If he crouched in front of the little mat the child sat on they were almost eye-to-eye.

It didn’t elicit the shock he expected. “They probably think I’m dead.” Small fingers tugged at the frayed edge of the blanket. “My mother is dead. So are all the others who were on our ship. They must have found the bodies.”

“And why would Morgoth’s mindless orcs spare a single elf brat?” Mairon finished the thought. “One of his cleverer beasts must have come back later and picked out the most useful corpse. It is an interesting thought.”

In truth, Fëanor’s grandson should have been dead. It was a miracle of a thousand chances that he sat alive in Angband. If one of the vampires hadn’t been with the hunting party that had stumbled on the ship that had wandered northward for reasons still beyond understanding, if that vampire hadn’t been able to recognize Fëanor’s sigil in the heat of battle, if the orcs hadn’t been able to listen for once, if the child hadn’t been so traumatized as to be tractable, if they hadn’t been able to spirit him away quickly, without too much of the usual arguing or in-fighting, all they would have would be a semi-useful corpse. It was a rather appealing alternative. Preserving a body tended to be much easier than keeping a living being alive.

“Who are you?” the boy repeated. “You are a Maia, aren’t you? You don’t look like the others who were corrupted.” His eyes, pewter grey, were sharper than they should be. There was a glint in them reminiscent of the Lamps, a light he had never seen before though he had watched many elves with eyes uncounted. “You look like one of Aulë’s people- you have the same heat shimmer around you.” There was a moment of consideration. “Are you Sauron the lost?”

He’d grown used to the names. Being Gorthaur the terrible dread had some advantages, after all. Sauron (a slight lisp at the beginning, a dental fricative more reminiscent of old Quendian leaking through) was tolerable. He could be foul and abominable if that was what this one wanted to see. It only offended his vanity a little. “You can call me that, I suppose. Are they truly naming me ‘the lost’ now in Aman?”

“Maybe only in the forges,” said Fëanor’s grandson with the supreme confidence of a infant discussing the complex interpersonal drama of the ancients. “A lot of them want you to come home.”

Feeling rather disquieted, Sauron shifted the subject. “And what is your name, young one?”

“My name is Telperinquar. Are you going to kill me?”

Telperinquar looked more inquisitive than concerned, but underneath the dizzy calm Sauron could feel the finest thread of fear, and another, equally thin note of anticipation. The mind of a child wasn’t hard to sense the shape of; all Sauron could feel from Telperinquar was adrenaline overlaying a sorrow too deep for such a young mind to even grapple with.

He smiled apologetically. “I’m afraid not.”

The sense of fear increased and the hands wrapped in the blanket tightened. “Are you going to torture me?”

“Of course not!” For one thing, he’d never been much good at torture. It was a needlessly destructive art, cruelty for the sake of cruelty. All you gained was blood and screams and there was so little complexity to it. It could be mastered easily, but to what end? He’d never had his lord’s talent for hammering away at broken things until they became something approximating useful again.

Besides, his loyal catspaws in the pits told him children did not do well with pain, and he was not not willing to test that thesis on such a precious subject.

Young Telperinquar pressed his lips together, all too obviously attempting not to look relieved. Sauron wanted to put him out of his misery on the spot. Such fragility couldn’t possibly prosper here. Weakness was a luxury afforded to those with power, and the creature in front of him had so little of it.

There was a 25% chance Melkor would remember Fëanor’s brat at some point, however, and Sauron was loathe to disappoint the rightful ruler of creation. He’d been having a difficult few millenia already.

“How did your boat end up on our shores?” Sauron demanded, hoping vaguely that there was an excuse there- some disownment, some clever elven plot, some reason why the brat was not truly what he seemed and therefore of no value.

Telperinquar’s eyes were baleful. “There was a storm.”

In truth, it was impossible for the presence of the child to be a trap- it was too implausible to be faked. That meant he had to deal with him.  “I don’t suppose you know anything about farming, do you?” he asked, thinking of the dark northern forests where Angband sourced most of its food. There were mushroom caves deep below mountains, and animal herds that nestled in hidden valleys. Most of them were run by orcs and goblins, but they were largely the defects and washouts, without much natural malice or taste for violence. Surely if he impressed on them the importance of keeping one elf hale and hearty, they could manage.

(He knew it was a flawed plan as soon as he conceived it. The wilds were full of places for the child to make an escape and freeze to death- not necessarily in that order.)

“I know how to weed a garden,” Telperinquar informed him, cautiously.

“Yes, that’s quite useless. What can you do, Noldo?”

For the first time since Sauron had entered the room, the child seemed to relax. His worried face uncreased and his shoulders dropped. “I know how to make and fire lost-wax casts, how to polish finished pieces, how to help with gem cutting even if I’m not allowed to do it alone yet, I’m learning granulation techniques in silver-”

Sauron held a hand up for silence. He’d heard enough.

Of course he was a smith. Fëanor’s grandson could be nothing else. He’d probably been swaddled in a leather apron and cut his teeth on a handpunch.

There were forges deep in the mountain, great smithies made producing weapons and armor on a massive scale. Their oppressive simmering heat felt like the center of the earth itself and the sound of hammers striking anvils could be heard through six feet of solid rock.

The smithing giants, while talented, were a rather insular bunch and Sauron did not trust that something as small and soft as an elf child could survive long in the depths of the earth.

It always came back to starlight, didn’t it?

Of course, there was a third option…

Swift as a viper, Sauron grabbed Telperinquar’s wrist. When he stood, the child had no choice but to stand with him, stumbling to his feet unsteadily.

“Come on.”

“You are going to kill me,” Telperinquar observed, sounding more curious than concerned. His pulse was beating faster against Sauron’s palm and tiny hairs on the back of his hand had stiffened. Even the division of his cells was frenetic, as if desperately trying to get a little bit more growing in before some unknown doom.

“Don’t be in such a hurry to return to Valinor, little one,” Sauron said, pulling him out of the room. The orc on guard stood to attention awkwardly. “You’ve only just arrived here. Did your family spite the Vala for nothing? Would you throw away their sacrifices so lightly? Tarry a while with us in the east, I must insist.”

That shut him up, finally, but the silence that ensued was full of short breaths as he struggled to keep up with Sauron’s longer stride.

Angband was tragically large and sprawling. In the years after Utumno creatures of great and small power had delved deep into the earth, adding new layers to Sauron’s original architectural concept. In many places the damage done by the Valar was still visible- in others it was roughly shored up. Work had been completed in a patchwork manner and then all at once when their master had returned. Architectural cohesion had died a slow death in rambling halls carved by clumsy hands or clumsier magic.

Some days he was tempted to collapse the whole place in on itself and start over again. Balrogs couldn’t be trusted to deliver proper rib vaults if their lives depended on it.

In between cavernous halls and overcrowded dungeons there were some concessions to practicality. There were cramped little room for the creatures who needed sleep, and offices for necessary bookkeeping. Melkor had absorbed a whole wing for his unknowable needs, and Sauron had what he liked to call a “study”.

It was better than calling it a storage room, which was what it actually functioned as. Between the constant clamor of the army and his own personal interests in the great forges he spent little time in there. Mostly it served to keep the odds, ends, and curios he picked up out of untrustworthy hands. Pretty bits of jewelry, armor made for someone twice his preferred size, a set of furs, trinkets from the ruins of Utumno, bones, interesting rocks, fine tapestries looted from the elves long ago- it was full of the useless and the fascinating. It had a lovely desk, however, along with a well stocked workbench and a little forge for the rare project he had that didn’t necessitate three assistants and a ton of molten steel.

Every now and then he’d use it to finish up paperwork, or indulge in some goldsmithing. No one touched it but him, and the peace and solidity of a certain refuge was worth the wasted space.

When they finally reached the door, Sauron opened it with a wave and pushed Telperinquar in before him. It was pitch black but that was quickly remedied, the covered torches on the wall blazed to life at a single word. Then he moved to his desk and started putting things away. All the sensitive documents he kept in his room- the records on the werewolf project, a few old maps and drafts, a thin book on necromancy written in blood that he had stolen from an absolute disappointment of a fallen spirit in the north, went on the highest possible shelf. He was confident that would serve as a deterrent. Telperinquar only came up to his chest and he’d chosen an unassuming form for this task to begin with.

Then he turned back to the prisoner, who was still frozen by the door, looking around with wide eyes.

“That forge is so small! Is it made of steel? How do you keep the steel from melting at higher temperatures? How is it vented?”

It was almost charming. It definitely made his job much easier.

Sauron pushed him towards the workbench and then floundered, looking for a project easy enough for a child to complete, but difficult enough to keep him occupied. Eventually he alighted on a basin of rough stones. The mines had orders to send him anything interesting they found, and he’d accumulated piles of loose gems over the years. (More over the past year, as their production precipitously had sped up after Melkor's return.) It was hard to find a use for most of them, unfortunately.

“Pull out the diamonds and put them in this basket here. Can you do that?”

The child blinked at him. “Do you have spinel? Usually I get spinel for that,” he said, so softly it was almost a whisper.

After some rummaging, Sauron managed to find a chunk of spinel. It might have been preferable to provide some sort of magnifying device as well- he seemed to remember elves being unable to discern crystalline patterns with their weak eyes- but he was sadly without a lens.

As he situated his charge, a faint presence brushed his being, carrying with it the promise of ice ages and volcanoes. Melkor was unsubtle in his summons, as in all other things.

Finally, it was time to move on the Noldor. After that, they could crush the Falathrim, finish off the Laiquendi, and turn to Doriath.

He shoved Telperinquar into the high backed chair and then, moving with great care so as not to break any bones, tied his left hand to it with his own bootlace. A pinch of power ensured the knot would stay and the rope would not break.

The matter of the child being settled, Sauron went to plan a war.

 

He returned 7 hours later, feeling quite satisfied with the way the world was unfolding. Melkor was back (plus or minus a few annoying gems) and there would be a great war and the world would be better for it- or tidier, certainly.

When he opened the door, he found Telperinquar almost exactly where he had left him, dozing fitfully in the chair. Without even realizing he’d ever had expectations, Sauron was disappointed. He’d hoped for better from Fëanor’s blood.

The gems were arranged in neat little piles on the workbench. He ran his hands over them thoughtfully and hummed, letting an echo of Song call out to their nature. They felt right- one or two beryls had been misclassified and he’d sorted several groups by color for no real reason, but it was a good attempt.

Next to the piles there was a copper bracelet. It hadn’t been there before.

Sauron turned it over in his hands. It was made of fine wire, the sort he kept around for its electrical conductivity in more biological experiments, woven together into a thick chain. He’d pulled out the drawplate to tighten it, and the ends were hammered, coiled, and filed.

Not wire, nor hammer, file, or draw plate should have been accessible to someone pinned to the chair. Sauron’s understanding of the physiology of ungrown elves was mostly conjecture based on observations of grown specimens, but he was very confident that their arms did not stretch three extra feet.

He kicked the chair over.

Telperinquar woke, flailing and frightened, and screamed for a while. When he’d finally quieted and sat perfectly still on the floor, Sauron nodded.

“Right it,” he ordered.

With some effort and maneuvering, the boy managed to get all six stone of hardwood and iron back onto its feet and drag to the table.

“I am old enough to move a chair,” he said, as if he could trace the path of Sauron’s thoughts. The idea was utterly loathsome. Elves were supposed to scream and cringe, and children were supposed to be… small, half-baked things, incapable of independent existence. He was fairly certain of that, based on tertiary observations and anecdotal data.

Rather than engage with the concept that he had been outsmarted any further, he held out the bracelet.

“I ran out of things to do,” Telperinquar told him, only flinching back a little. “You have a lot of wire.”

“Hmmm. What’s the technique?”

“It’s a six loop knit,” Bashfully, as if surrendering some terrible secret, he said, “Grandfather calls it Míriel’s Chain.” Whatever the relevance of that was, it was completely lost on Sauron. Bravely, young Telperinquar pressed on. “I could do more, if you want.”

Aside from one or two of the more upwardly mobile orc captains, there were few people in Angband likely to appreciate the artistry of a elven apprentice. It seemed a waste to put resources behind such an effort just to end up with a pile of jewelry he couldn’t pawn off on even the most tasteless of the Úmaiar.

It would keep the child occupied, however. In some regards this was synonymous with keeping him alive.

“I might find use for small works,” Sauron allowed, “Provided they don’t require flame or take up the time of others.”

For one small, fleeting moment the boy smiled. Then he said, “Does that mean I get to eat?”

Oh. Yes.

That was another thing elves needed, wasn’t it?

 

 

It took far too long to settle further matters for the child. Sauron prided himself on his control of the fortress and everything in it, for he had been its lord for many years in Melkor’s absence. At a moments notice he could have a dozen still beating hearts delivered to his feet.

That did not help acquire orcs who could be trusted around fragile things, however, and it certainly didn’t mean he knew where to find bedding.

In the end he fetched some of his own fur cloaks and threw them down in the corner, and simply told the orcs not to touch Telperinquar under any circumstances, even as they brought food, steel, and other physical necessities at reasonable intervals (uncertain of what exactly a reasonable interval was, he left this up to their judgement). Then he wrapped a steel rope from the work yards twice around the prisoner’s waist. This time he made sure to anchor it to something immovable.

The end arrangement quite pleased him. Given an impossible task, he had once again come up with an elegant solution. Telperinquar would subsist on starlight from the window and scraps of wire from the workyard, and eventually all his kin would be dead and the matter would be irrelevant.

Several days of battle strategies and bloody experiments later, a vampire cornered him outside of the dark hall where Melkor was really beginning to get back into his work with troll spines. The sound of tearing flesh and gibbering bled into the hallway.

“I have a message for you,” she said gleefully. She was called Thuringwethil by the Grey Elves, and she loved the name well.

“You have not gone to see the outlying troops or visited any of our thanes,” Sauron remarked crossly, “Nay, you have not left this fortress in a fortnight. I do not know what message you could have for me.”

Thuringwethil leaned against the wall, “Darling, this is freelance. An common goblin waylaid me in the hallway and said he needed to get news to you. I might have ripped his head off for the presumption but,” she shrugged, “he looked desperate and that always bodes well.”

“Speak now,” Sauron ordered.

“A prisoner of thine has not been eating,” she said, “Not for three days. I did wonder, now what sort of elf would be damaged by just three days without food?” Long claws tapped her chin thoughtfully, “But then I remembered rumors of thou wandering the halls with an Eldar brat trailing at thy heels.”

He hissed. It really wasn’t the time to be dealing with the tantrums of children, much less Thuringwethil’s antics. “You forget yourself.”

“I forget nothing, only ignore that which I will, honored Lieutenant.” There was a dangerous glint in her eyes. “I have never set eyes on one of their babes before. Might I meet the creature?”

It was as earnest as a request came from Thuringwethil.

He took a closer look at the shape she wore. It had the large ear of a bat, the wide blue eyes of a cat, and a jaw full of razor teeth. Dried blood was caked in the fur at her neck. It was lovely in its functionality, brutally efficient and far more deadly than any of Yavanna's creatures. Thuringwethil had made a patchwork out of nature and it was far more wondrous than the original rags.

The energy she had sunk into that form came at a price, however. She rarely changed anymore, unless it was to take a slightly more aerodynamic profile. Even then she was still… unsettling.

“No,” he said with some regret, “not like that. Now if you don’t mind, I must look after our maker’s Child.”

“Sing it a lullaby for me,” Thuringwethil japed, and then she was gone, disappeared into the shadows from whence she had come.

 

 

 

Before he entered the room, he smoothed over his physical manifestation one last time, dismissing blood stains and the general grime of work, dulling his canines and softening the glow of his eyes until he looked like a creature of dull flesh.

Then, moving slowly, as if approaching a mother wolf in her den, he opened the door.

Telperinquar was leaning out of the window, staring at the heavy dark clouds that had gravitated to the fortress since Melkor’s return (you had to say this about the Vala- he understood ambiance) as if straining to see the stars. He did not turn as Sauron entered.

There were almost a dozen rings on the workbench, each one different. A few, he noted, had small stones, roughly polished by hand. One of the wider bands, made of many braided strands hammered smooth, had been engraved with tiny lines, swirling patterns roaming over the surface. It was impressive, given that the boy was working without being the ability to anneal or solder.

“I begin to see why so many people are so enamoured with your grandfather,” he commented, moving to the window as well. The child was shaking, for some reason, and his face had the blotchy quality that he’d learned to associate with sobbing and begging for mercy.

Gently, making sure not to break any bones or crush any major blood vessels, he began to reel his charge away from the window and the sheer mountainside drop outside of it. He was still too securely fastened to the table leg to jump, but it was best to make sure. “Eat, drink,” he said, making an effort to be winning. The last meal the orcs had delivered still sat on the bench, untouched, as reported.

“I don’t want to,” Telperinquar said, voice thin. “I just want to go home.”

It had been years since Sauron had taken much interest in the captives of Angband, elven bodies and minds having given up most of secrets long ago. He recognized this air however, the sense of a fragile thing teetering on the edge. It was terribly frustrating how delicate embodied creatures could be. You sliced one vein too many or forced them to work for a few extra weeks without sleep and they winked out of existence.

“Going home via Námo’s halls will not solve your problems, young one. His hospitality is cold indeed.”

“My mother would be there,” the boy insisted stubbornly, “And great-grandfather Finwë and great-grandmother Míriel.”

Trust the brat to have more dead relatives than any decent immortal ought to.

“Eat your porridge,” he suggested, “Or I’ll pull your fingernails out with my teeth.”

Telperinquar stared at him eyes full of a determination as foolish as it was frightening, and for a moment he was almost worried he’d have to go through with it. Sauron pressed his mind, squeezing his soul in a brief stranglehold, and his resolve broke. That was one good thing about children- their moods were easy to shift.

“I want my mother,” he stated calmly as he picked up the spoon, and as Sauron withdrew from his mind he caught the thought, I will not cry , “I want my father.”

“Well, we don’t all get things we want, pet. Now if you finish that whole bowl-” he cast about for an enrichment activity that would fulfill the apparent physiological need for contact children had, without boring him out of his nicely formed skull, “I’ll show you how to acid etch some of that bronze scrap over there.” He had seen a handful of badly cast arrowheads on his way in- misshapen and socketless but with some promisingly smooth surfaces.

For some reason, that seemed to work. The boy ate quickly, while Sauron found his jars of ferric chloride on a shelf with several wolf skulls. They were dusty. It had been so long since he’d been able to work with inorganic materials. The strong acids he had used more recently, but not to nearly as interesting ends.

“I’m done,” the boy declared, arms crossed like Tulkas after battle. “If I can’t die, then teach me.”

Sauron smiled.

It was rather entertaining. Telperinquar learned quickly, and it was interesting to see the aesthetic tastes of the elves-over-the-sea up close. He was beginning to get a sense of the tastes of the Noldor, and knowledge of an enemy was not easily cast aside.

“What do you do with the solution afterwards?” Telperinquar asked, poking the low dish of acid and iron salt with a wooden spoon.

“I have some people I can feed it to,” Sauron said absently.

There was a thoughtful silence. “If you have lye I could neutralize it. That was the spill protocol at home for things like this.”

No one had told him children could be clever. It was a delightful thing to discover, as he watched a young mind dance from one possibility to the next, hungry for new information, quick to synthesize and accommodate and learn. How little those eyes had seen! Not since the Spring of Arda had Sauron felt so full of earnest curiosity, even if only by proxy.

The matter bore further exploration- he’d have to spend more time in the caves of the orc mothers. Most of the time he saw infants or wriggly toddlers, results of his efforts to make strong the armies of Angband. But an especially developmentally advanced and promising infant was not that much stronger or cleverer than the failed experiment next to it. Oh, there was an interesting element of animal learning to their unformed thoughts, but on the whole they were too needy and slow to be of any real interest.

Older children he had paid no mind. Perhaps he’d have to change that. Surely not all could be as clever as this one, but there was always potential in blank spaces.

As they slid the lumps of castaway bronze into the dish, there was a hesitant knock on the door. Sauron opened it with a gesture, “What do you want?”

“Apologies, my lord,” said one of the lesser orcs, already grovelling. “The troops… My lord said…”

Despite the gibbering, it was easy to understand the meaning of the message. The armies of Angband were finally ready to march. It had taken too long. The Noldor were not used to war, but they had made a fine mess of his continent in just a few weeks.

They would need him before they marched.

Sauron turned to Telperinquar. “Let the pieces sit suspended until a count of two thousand, then pull them out and treat them with bone ash. It’s on the third shelf. You can throw the acid out the window, if you want, or leave it somewhere unobtrusive.”

“Do I need to rinse them?” he asked.

“It would be wise. Ask the guards for water.” This was received with the same thoughtful nod. Of course, Telperinquar didn’t- couldn’t possibly- speak the bastard Sindarin of the orcs, but that ought to pose little enough trouble to any inventive soul. The challenge would keep him busy.

As Sauron stood and began to cross the room, a small hand grabbed at his robe with surprising swiftness. In any other case, such an offense would be dire, but he was inclined towards mercy. He’d simply kill the watching orc afterwards to make sure word didn’t get out.

“Will you come back?” There was no small measure of pleading folded into the question.

No one ever said he was not generous, at least not where he could hear them. “Perhaps,” he replied, and pulled away from the grasping fingers.

It would be nice to spend some more time on metal craft, he reflected, as he told the waiting hordes of orcs to take prisoners if possible and target the Fëanorian leadership in specific. He had plied his art in unwilling flesh for too long. Keeping an eye on the hostage would simply be an added benefit.

 

 

He asked to be given his reports in written form, so he could review them at his leisure.

It was, he had to admit, an indulgence. Paper was not easy to come by, and some of his underlings could barely hold a pen. He preferred a more personal briefing process, which also allowed for pointed questioning if necessary.

But Lord Melkor, who was all knowing and all powerful, had told him to keep Fëanor’s grandson alive. Even if the measure would be redundant very shortly, was obedience for the sake of obedience not worth a few sheets of birch bark?

He retired to his room, carrying enough work to last him a half hour, if he was lucky. The stack of paper, alchemical jars, and small cages teetered dangerously in the thin, weak arms of his almost-elven shape.

Inside it was quiet and still. One of the torches had guttered out, but even in darkness Sauron could see the workbench; scrubbed down, tidied, and reorganized. The results of Telperinquar’s labor (and his) were missing.

Mentally he cast about the room for the characteristic nasal pink hum of copper, a pure note from the Song of Songs, only barely tinged with the deep, mournful tones of tin. When he found it, he crossed the room and sank to the floor.

Telperinquar was asleep in the corner, curled in on himself. Cradled against his chest, just barely visible, were rings of copper and bronze castoff arrowheads.

Even fast asleep, his face was full of distress.

Instinctively, Sauron reached out to touch his dreaming mind, then hesitated.

Dreams had proved useful over the years. In the early days raiding the mind of sleeping prisoners had taught him their tongue and their ways, had showed him what shapes they would find least upsetting, what they most feared, what instincts lurked in the back of their minds waiting to be awakened. However, such a break-in was not without its costs. To tear information from the truly unwilling, even in the unconscious, weakened state they so often slipped into, ran the risk of breaking their minds entirely. Such sacrifices had to be made.

He had tried such a trick only once before with a child; a lost toddler from the edges of the coast. It had not been hard to get into such a weakly guarded mind, but once he was there the little brat had woken up shrieking and he found nothing but incoherent pleas and raw, dripping fear.

In an effort to pacify the tot, he’d pushed… perhaps too hard. The shrieking had stopped, among other things.

Telperinquar was older, he reminded himself, and obviously cleverer. Besides, he would be careful this time.

Gently, he pressed against the barriers that separated a single mind from the world. (How deceptively thin they were! And how strange, to be locked up in your own head all the time, not interacting with the rest of creation unless you willed it. He wanted to crack Telperinquar’s soul like an egg and show him the truth of the world; he also knew exactly how such an experiment would end.)

This spirit was guarded, but not guarded especially well. If he was very delicate and painstakingly slow he could work his way to a-

There!

The child tossed fitfully, and instinctively reached out for someone. Between breaths, between neurons firing, Sauron saw a weakness. He pressed his advantage, slipping in as Telperinquar muttered “Papa?”

-the sea is red with blood and you are holding the long skinning knife your uncle pressed on you earlier. Your father already left; left you never to come back. All around you are screams. A blur of silver stumbles into you, almost doubled over in pain, then solidifies into an elf with pale hair and bare feet covered with sand.You reach out to help him and he turns and looks at you with great-grandfather’s eyes, obscured with blood. You run and there are jewels and fire on the beach and mermaids in the water with vampire teeth gleaming silver-

Telperinquar woke up with a jolt, scrambling backward, mind already beginning to close back in on itself. Reluctantly, Sauron let himself be removed.

“What happened on a beach?” he asked, as Telperinquar’s heart settled back into a normal sinus rhythm. “At least some of that was fiction, but not all, I think.”

The child gathered back up the metalwork that fell as he flailed, and rubbed a coil of copper sullenly. “It was a nightmare. I don’t know if the Ainur have them, but they’re not usually real.”

It was a lie, he could tell. Still, he let it be. He had work to do. Out of courtesy for his guest, he rekindled the torches.

After a few minutes he heard Telperinquar get up as well, and retrieve the skein of copper wire. As Sauron read and wrote and practiced the small magics of reshaping on some test rats from the dungeons he sensed the work of a jeweller going on behind him.

He had forgotten what it was like to share a workspace. Not since Aulë’s forges-

It was a change.

 

 

 

He made a point to come back every half-day or so, even if it meant bringing some more of his more intensive work back with him. Young Telperinquar blanched at the bones and specimen jars at first, but relatively few were from elves and after a while his fear morphed into a general sense of curiosity.

“Why does it still move like that? Has the spirit not fully left the body?”

“No, but the body can be tricked into thinking the spirit is still with it. At the end of the day it’s only a small shock that keeps your limbs moving.”

“What about yours?”

“Insolent. But yes, mine as well.”

Telperinquar considered this. “If your essence left that veil, could it be affected the same way?”

“I would never be so discourteous as to leave a body lying around.” Sauron told him, and that was that. A few minutes later, however, he noticed Telperinquar shivering strangely.

“Is it cold?” he asked, with the same bemused curiosity they’d mutually agreed to approach everything with- at least when the child wasn’t sobbing, which was a lapse he was prepared to forgive. “Elves don’t usually feel such things, but we are very far north.”

“No,” Telperinquar bit his lip before adding, “I grew up in mountains like this in Formenos, I don’t mind it.”

“Then why do you shake?”

“I was pretending to be a body without a spirit, moving without thinking,” he responded, and the one he named Sauron laughed.

The range of experiments possible on his desk was limited, however, and by the second day Sauron found himself turning to another pet project- the Speech. The discovery of Fëanor’s tengwar had inspired him to return to his work with scripts. None of his efforts so far had borne fruit- even his own generals seemed to prefer Cirth- but that only meant he needed to spend more time on the details of his syllabary (he’d given up on the logographic approach centuries ago, when, despite his best efforts and quite a lot of blood, the orcs continued to invent symbols with which to insult each other’s mothers).

“Read this,” he ordered.

Dutifully, Telperinquar turned away from his chain mail links and squinted across the room at the slate. “I think I see some vowels in the middle,” he ventured, after a while. “And the long one at the end that looks like fish bones was in your name when you wrote it out earlier. E-E-UR?”

“Close,” Sauron said, pleased. “But I prefixed my name with a loose translation of your Quenya, hér .” And he had not written Sauron to begin with, but such quibbles were above such a small child. “I’m afraid the Speech is rather more rough in its honorifics,” he admitted, rueful.

“E-e-er, then,” Telperinquar said. “What is it supposed to say?”

“Your name, of course.” Sauron told it to him, watching as he winced at the sound. That was another problem with the Speech, something about it made Ilúvatar’s children so needlessly distraught. It was the intent, perhaps.

Still, Telperinquar made a game attempt to imitate it. “Kyelepēkwārē?”

“No, you’re too caught up in the similarities to old Quendian. I’ll admit I drew some inspiration, but the phonetics are very different. There’s some Sindarin in there as well, and some Valarin, though I doubt you’ve heard that, and little of the tongue of dwarves as it is spoken across the mountains-”

Telperinquar seemed to seize on one part of his explanation, to the exclusion of all else. “Sindarin- that’s what the things outside speak, isn’t it?”

“Unfortunately, yes. It’s a good common language, I’ll admit, useful for distant troops and dealing with prisoners, but I have been working to switch over those attending on Angband to a shared manner of speech that should be much more functional.” As he spoke he wrote, not looking at his work but quickly making the little corrections he deemed necessary to his script. A new line here, a simplification of form there.

“That sounds like a lot of work.”

“I can be patient. With my master back I do intend to start working on all my discarded projects.” There were so many of them- things that had been set aside so all would be perfect when Lord Melkor returned. Now he could feel the presence of the mighty again, sense the power that he held, and rest assured that all things were once again right with the world. All the orcs were united again under one banner! It was the perfect time to do some experimental linguistics.

At the mention of He Who Ruled All Things, Telperinquar bared his teeth. It was amazing, Sauron reflected, how so much anger could be contained in a soul that had not even seen a century. Most of it was learned, an echo of those who had raised him, but there was a seam of pure, undirected rage as well. He was not given to unnecessary metaphor but he had also been poured into this world, made of this place to dwell in this place. As a result, the supraphysical often took on aspects of the tangible to him.

Telperinquar’s anger felt like a line of fire, as sharp and hot as a Balrog’s whip.

“The Moring-” the boy began, but Sauron interrupted him.

“Think on whether you wish to finish that sentence, you who is born of Finwë’s house,” he advised, erasing the symbol for the hard uz sound, “And think closely.”

Defiant like the worst sort of hero, the child met his gaze and held it. It was no mean feat- far greater creatures of every stripe had trembled at the all seeing eyes of the Lieutenant of Angband. The wretched urchin’s mouth set with determination. “The Moringotto-”

Sauron was across the room in a decisecond, hands wrapping around Telperinquar’s shoulders and lifting him off the ground. There was so little there, just a little muscle over bones that would shatter with the slightest pressure. Even the collar bone would bend and snap so easily. The child was shaking again.

He calculated the cost vs. benefit of breaking a small, unimportant bone. Discipline was important, he knew that by now. On the other hand, the pain tolerance of children was very unreliable. He’d found the notes from the previous subjects. Some had survived well into a veritable vivisection, while others had flickered out the second someone raised a hand to them.

But how did you make a point to an embodied being if not through trials of the body? They were very straightforward animals, pain was what they understood best. Sauron had worked with less corporeal beings, of course. Perhaps it was time to utilize some of those management skills.

With a sigh, Sauron put Telperinquar down and crossed over to the workbench where rosettes of steel and complex chains were being formed from mail links. Quickly he realized that the multitude of boxes, drawers, and shelves would take far too long to move individually. He’d have to settle for simply making them inaccessible.

Strong metal cord held Telperinquar bound to the bench. When he’d first secured the makeshift chain, Sauron had melted together the knots tying the rope to the table leg. Rather than try to undo the mess of solidified steel he cut the cord further up and pulled it, and by extension the child attached to it, across the room. His writing desk was far more easily cleared than the work bench, and it was a simple matter to retie the makeshift chain and pick up his papers and slate.

Once he was absolutely sure he wasn’t about to do something rash, he ventured a glance at Telperinquar, who was still and stiff in the usual manner of frightened animals but also frowning.

“My project,” he said, so quietly Sauron’s physical ears didn’t even register it.

“A guest who insults his host must learn graciousness,” Sauron told him, “You can go back to the workbench when you’ve learned your lesson.”

Taking toys from a child wasn’t quite the same as denying host bodies to recalcitrant spirits, but the principle seemed to hold true. He’d have to try to apply the same ideas to other inferiors- the concept of ruling without violence was novel .

Absently, he patted Telperinquar’s head, a strategy that generally seemed to quiet him. “I’ll come back,” he said kindly. “Entertain yourself until then.”

The child had no reply.

 

 

Before he could return he was waylaid by news of the warfront. This was something of a cause for alarm. It had been three days since the troops had set out- the van and scouting parties would have reached the Noldor encampment but not the whole force. The battle would not be an easy one either. The camp was not yet full-wrought or put in defence, but the elves had made good progress in those wasted weeks of futile hostage negotiations.

“I’m sorry,” he said, as the message was relayed to him, “they’ve gone missing?”

Only some of them, he was assured. Specifically, the Fëanor containing portions of the elven host were nowhere to be found. It had taken the spies a while to notice the disappearance- all elves ultimately looked the same. But they were certain now that neither the king nor about half of his sons were with the larger Noldor host. In fact, it was entirely possible that they hadn’t been for a week or so.

Incompetence could only excuse so much.

“How many warriors would you say they have with them,” he asked, after a long pause to think about inventive execution tactics, “Just a rough estimate, mind.”

A fourth or so of the overall force, he was told.

He went to go find Lord Melkor.

To his surprise, the true Elder King laughed.

“Fëanor spoke bravely, but he could not sit still while his grandchild suffered. They will be coming for us, the long way- through the mountains.”

This was an alarming development. Angband had the troops to survive a direct assault, certainly. What Sauron was uncertain they could handle was a covert operation. His shock troops had not been bred for intelligence, and there were tunnels deep in Iron Mountains. The mines alone were extensive and, since Melkor’s reascent, increasingly run by the labor of thralls captured in recent battle who would be all too eager to see the Noldor as liberators.

“Well,” he said, slowly, letting the physicality of noise press down on both of them. They did not talk as much mind to mind anymore- a side effect of the power Melkor seemed to have invested in this incarnation. “I suppose we’ll need to tell the army to turn around, my lord.”

His liege’s smile turned strange. “Do we not have the power to crush the elven encampment first, my lieutenant?”

Sauron ran some numbers and ransacked the mind of the messenger, just to make sure his intelligence was as thorough as possible. “We might- though they have broken the siege on Círdan and he rides to their aid. But such a battle would take many days and I would prefer not to fight the Noldor in two places at once.”

Overly cautious, Melkor mused, letting Sauron feel the weight of his great thoughts. Combined with the glaring light of the Silmarils it was almost too much to bear.

You have impressed on me the threat posed by this elf of Aman, my lord. He must be defeated in all absoluteness.

“Let it be done then,” Melkor commanded. As Sauron bowed, he added thoughtfully, “The child, does he still live?”

“Yes, my lord, as you commanded,” Sauron said, reproachfully.

“If Fëanor faces us on the battlefield proper, bring his grandson out and show him what happens when he rejects fair terms,” then, because Melkor is dark but not of a subtle nature he adds, “Make it bloody.”

Sauron’s heart, designed to his own specifications and generally well behaved, seemed to spasm in his chest. “Of course,” he said and made a polite, respectful exit.

He did not want to do it. It would be of benefit tactically, of course, but also such a waste . So much effort spent just for things to end in blood? He would not countenance it.

The Fëanorian host would have to be waylaid in the mountains. It was the most sensible option- orcs climbed like mountain goats and all the hidden passes and little valleys of the impenetrable Iron Mountains were known to Sauron’s eyes. There were many places to dispose of even a large host. If the message to change course reached the armies of Angband quickly enough they would be able to make good time across Ard-Galen and then up into the ranges.

Sauron did not run- that would have been undignified- but he did move quickly to find a flier swift of wing and strong of mind. There were arrangements to be made.

 

 

After orders had been given, armories double checked, and the mines shuttered, he found himself wandering back to the child’s room. A few weeks ago he would have gone to the great forges or the deep laboratories where wicked things stirred again in their cocoons, but Telperinquar was a more pressing project. Children were very time sensitive, he’d discovered.

Inside he found a sea of self-similar shapes, roughly sketched in chalk. Telperinquar had clearly found a stash in the writing desk and considered this well within the bounds of entertainment. Dust filled the air.

They were good approximations given the limitations of the material and the maker. There was a set of triangles within triangles, down to the sixth level, arcing across one length of wall and only wobbling and little bit where the stone curved and jutted out. A similar, smaller, set in pentagons had been done next to it. On the floor Telperinquar knelt, carefully rendering a fractal made of squares, each with two smaller squares stacked on top. The smaller squares touched corners at a 90 degree angle, then contacted their parent square at 45 degrees. The result was a pleasing curve of increasingly small polygons, stretching out like branches. Already some of the squares were beginning to overlap, creating a dense canopy at the higher levels.

Sauron lifted up his hem, more out of concern for the drawing than his robes (chalk with its flat midrange notes was easy to manipulate) and crossed the room. Telperinquar remained engrossed in his mathematical study- or so it seemed. There was a tension in his shoulders that suggested studied ignorance rather than obliviousness.

“Tell me about your family,” Sauron ordered as he pulled the coke bin from under the miniature forge and opened up the tuyere to the wild winds of Thangorodrim. This high up he barely even needed a bellows.

Telperinquar quailed, and Sauron had reassess his demands. “I’m not looking for intelligence, little one, nor any treasured secrets. Just tell me a story.” He turned back to the forge. It was just barely bigger than an elf’s head, and most of that space would be taken up by the burning coke.

Goldwork then. His jewelry was growing tiresome.

“My mother showed me how to do these,” Telperinquar said suddenly. “She liked doing conceptual pieces- structures without a purpose, or jewelry with so many sharp edges you could barely wear it.”

Sauron nodded and lit the forge fire, then went to find some bullion.

“Once or twice she made shapes so big, with so much silver, that I thought my uncle was going to shout at her for being wasteful. But they were always beautiful and everyone loved to see them.” A sudden image of a spiraling curve made of thousands of tiny lengths of silver, each the exact same size, joining in neat, seamless corners, filled his mind. It glittered in the bright blue light of its surroundings and towered over the viewer. It looked like a wave about to crash down, or a monster ready to strike. Sauron realized whose memory he was seeing and glanced at Telperinquar who was staring at him intently. This image was not stolen, he was being shown it.

“It is pretty,” he said, because he had to say something.

This sufficed. Telperinquar lowered his gaze and continued; “Before we left she was teaching me granulation and repoussage.” Telperinquar launched into a speech about patterns made with granules and hammered points, spirals down bowls and vases that looked like the unfurling of a flower or the spread of frost. It was marginally interesting, enough to keep Sauron’s attention as he fanned the flames and constructed a design concept out of formless ideas.

She was the best .” Telperinquar finished triumphantly. He’d moved on from his tree to set of squares within squares, but was now running out of reachable floorspace. “Even grandfather and father never trained with the smiths of Alqualondë. Once when I was small she took me down to the ocean to meet her old teacher. Grandfather was furious until she showed him the new soldering fluxes they’d been using. She wasn’t afraid of him, even when he was mad.” The steady stream of words was speeding up a little. “When it- it happened at Alqualondë I thought she would be angry, but she wasn’t. Not like other people. I want to be like that someday- and be able to be hurt without hurting other people.”

Despite what he had said, there had been some ulterior motive to the sudden interest in Fëanor’s kin. He wanted a better sense of what he was facing. Even on the margins of a semi-coherent story told by his own grandson, Fëanor’s nature shown through. He was loved which meant that he was feared.

“Was your grandfather angry?” Sauron asked, gently probing for more information.

Telperinquar shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe. My mother put us on a different ship, and then the ship wrecked, and now she’s- she’s-”

There was a choked sound behind Sauron, which he strove to ignore as he sketched the schematic for a spiraling ring and pressed a quarter of a gold ingot into a crucible. It was important to let the Quendi have these sorts of emotions about dead relatives on their own terms. They were so rude when you offered solutions.

“Your monsters took my jewelry,” the child said, after a long while. “She made it for me,”

“Yes, they rather do that,” Sauron apologized without truly admitting culpability. “Absolutely no manners, the beasts.”

For a long while the only thing that spoke was the bellows and the hammer as Sauron worked gold into long strips, annealing as he went.

In full time the whisper of chalk on stone quieted and Telperinquar had a question. “Can I be let go from my bonds now? I’ve run out of room to draw.”

“Do you make penance for your crimes against my lord?” Sauron asked, pausing in his work.

Telperinquar fidgeted. “I don’t regret calling him names, for he is dark and he is my enemy. I’m sorry you got mad at me though.”

This struck Sauron as a perfectly acceptable apology. It did, after all, contain the word ‘sorry’ and Telperinquar’s spirit felt contrite. It was not the same as begging and screaming for mercy, but he’d take it.  

He whistled a bar of Song. The chain snapped.

He wasn’t surprised when the child came to help him with his work rather than going back to marring his floor. The extra pair of hands (clever hands, hands that learned quickly) did not go amiss. And when Telperinquar stared at the molten metal with what could only be described as awe… well, he was not above being won over by flattery.

 

 

 

Fëanor’s face and Fëanor’s form sat poorly on him.

It was a good rendition though. Even just from the snippets of memory Melkor had shared (bits and pieces, images of gems shining, the sound of a new language, sharp elven faces full of a golden light) he was certain he’d gotten it right. Even the eyes, silver and piercing, had fallen into place. He’d found that the trick was to think of the Lamps in all their blazing glory and let the memory of them suffuse his new face.

All the lights were darkened now, but in this carefully shaped facsimile they seemed to burn again. Sauron did not like it at all.

The halls were, for once, empty. Everyone was already celebrating their victory- questionable as it had, they had won at the end.

(Perhaps Fëanor had beaten back their army singlehanded, and perhaps he had charged ahead alone into the dark tunnels under the mountain, and perhaps his fire had lit up even the bowels of the earth until the Balrogs came upon him and he was at last felled in great winding dark. Perhaps their armies had quavered and the Fëanorians had been able to manage a dignified retreat.

What mattered was that Fëanor was dead. Quite dead. His spies had been very clear on that.)

But the duties of a lieutenant never ceased and even now, at the moment of their triumph, there was still organizing to do. Careful cruelties to engineer, food to deliver to those of their troops who had actually survived the battle and subsequent disciplinings, stranger luxuries still for the Úmaiar under his command (some of them had started drinking blood like the vampires- a harmless habit but a nevertheless disconcerting one). Now, with all that tucked away and sorted, he put on his fey, Fëanorian face, and went to fetch the last component of the revelries.

He opened the door of his workspace without bothering to knock.

“And then Oromë goes “Aaargh!” and thunder shakes the-” Telperinquar dropped the pieces of scrap metal he had been doing… something with, and turned, smiling without looking. “Lord Sauron! The jailors left and I-” The smile froze in place and gave way to a sort of hope.

“Grandfather?” he croaked. Then he swept his eyes over Sauron again, taking in his clothes and the way he stood, the half-smile on his lips. “No. No.”

“He’s dead,” Sauron told him, wishing to get the difficult part over with as soon as possible. “Now, I suggest for the next hour or so you stay close to me and remain as quiet as possible.”

“No, no, no!” The child was wailing now, the sort of high pitched wail that made Sauron want to shake him until his brain was jostled into silence. Instead he grabbed him firmly by the shoulders, fingers digging into flesh, and raised his voice.

“Do not attract unnecessary attention. Do not wander off. Do not eat anything.” Elves did not poison easily, but Sauron had a vague sense, perhaps stolen from someone else’s mind, that it was still a bad idea to let children have alcohol or raw meat.

Still Telperinquar struggled, never quite striking out at him but certainly trying to break free of his grasp.

Sauron snarled, and was rewarded by a look of absolute terror and a shout for a dead mother. He decided to change tactics.

“Your father still lives.”

Telperinquar stilled. This was promising. Sauron continued apace. “I will tell you more if you do as I say. Is that to your liking, Curufinwë’s son?”

Slowly, with tears in his eyes (which matched so closely the eyes that Sauron now wore), Telperinquar nodded.

“Right.” Sauron straightened, and then lifted Telperinquar up and balanced him on his hip like a basket of coal. In truth the child was probably too old to be carried easily- his long legs had nowhere to go and his arms curled uncertainly around Sauron’s neck- but seemed more graceful than slinging him over a shoulder. More… grandfatherly.

A pantomime Lord Melkor desired- and a pantomime he would have. Even Sauron understood the value of appearances, of aiming one final, psychological blow at the enemy.

“There, there,” he said absently, as they walked down the halls and the child shook in his arms. “It’ll all be over soon.”

 

 

Melkor’s hall was full to bursting and all eyes were on Sauron the moment he walked in the door.

The jeering was predictable but muted- they knew who he was and what he could do to them. Far more gratifying was the stomping, which picked up and travelled across the room until it was a surge of noise, arms and legs communicating a glee mere laughs or cheers could not capture.

Telperinquar buried his face in Sauron’s shoulder.

As the noise died away, Melkor laughed and gestured Sauron towards him. “A pretty piece of show.”

“I work only to please you, my lord.” He could not quite bow, given his burden, but he managed a pleasing bob.

Melkor’s gaze turned towards the child. “Does he know?” he asked with a genial curiosity, using the same tone in which he spoke of fell beasts or the breeding of great war weasels.

At that Telperinquar lifted his head a little. This was a balancing act, an infant on one end of the scales and an ageless deity of unimaginable power on the other. Sauron kept his tone light to prevent an unwise slip in temper from either of them.

“Of our victory? News of such things spreads.” The child was definitely looking up now, but his eyes had fixed not on Melkor but on a point just above him. Three points, in fact. Sauron’s chest (which was Fëanor’s chest) burned. He could almost forget about the damned Silmarils when he didn’t have to see them, but then they’d be there again, their terrible light filling his vision.

Swiftly he turned so he did not have to look at them, and faced the hall at large.

“Let us proclaim our victory again!” he said, imbuing his voice with just enough power to make it carry, “One of the Quendi came from across the sea seeking to challenge our master. Now he is ashes and his resting place will be the ever blowing winds.” He could feel Telperinquar still craning to stare at the gems, and though he had remained silent words were fluttering in his throat unspoken. Sauron dug his fingers into the child’s leg and took a few steps forward. “Seven sons, had Fëanor the bold! Now they are all that remains of him. Even his grandchild- his only grandchild- has fallen under the shadow of Melkor the great, master of the fates of Arda!”

The cheer that rose up was enough to swallow Telperinquar’s thin voice as his temper finally broke and he protested, “I am not !” But Sauron heard, and so did Melkor who curled a lip.

For a moment Sauron was terribly, illogically afraid, not for himself but for the precious thing in his arms. Then Melkor flinched, one of his great headaches coming on again, and the moment passed.

“My charge,” Sauron said slowly, under the wave of rejoicing, “is overtired. I will take him from this place.”

“Will Fëanor not join the festivities?” asked the High-captain of Angband, who Sauron sometimes considered a friend.

“Haven’t you heard?” he replied, mirthlessly, “Fëanor is dead.”

Laughter rung down from on high.

 

 

“Hush, hush,” Sauron said, patting Telperinquar’s head steadily. He had put him down and cast off Fëanor’s likeness as soon as he’d deemed them a safe distance from Melkor’s hall, but the child had clung him all the same. Even now, in the relative safety of the workroom, he remained firmly attached and bawling.

“I want my mother!” he said through tears.

“I could turn into her,” Sauron offered, but knew instantly that this was wrong. The hands fisted in his robes tightened and the spasmodic sobs intensified. The more upset he seemed to get, the more he hung onto Sauron.

Imprisonment did such strange things to elves.

In this case, Sauron was inclined to cater to the silly demands for affection, in the name of science. So he calmed his mind and sat still on the floor as Telperinquar cried himself into a snot-covered stupor. The poor thing hadn’t even bothered to ask about his father. Sauron wouldn’t have told him, not given his outburst, but it was vexing to see someone so easily let information slip away. He expected better of Telperinquar, who was intelligent despite his manifold weaknesses.

After two hours, the child’s labored breathing grew softer, tenseness slipping out of his form. Sauron finished combing through Telperinquar’s unkempt hair with his fingers and absently brushed a few strands away from his face.

He ought to get up, ought to find something useful to do with himself. Instead he went looking for ghosts.

Many houseless spirits haunted Angband, and their numbers had only grown since Melkor had taken back up the war. More prisoners meant more deaths, and more deaths meant more inevitable instances where spirits got confused and couldn’t find their way back to Mandos.

Sauron didn’t go out of his way to trap souls- he had a good supply of them already- but he certainly didn’t mind the lost ghosts that torment and death inevitably resulted in. There were so many uses for them.

Children seemed especially prone to becoming houseless spirits. Perhaps it was their lack of self-control, or their slim understanding of the afterlife, fear of the unknown, or even just their desire to stay close to home and safety that kept them from following Námo’s call. Their souls were so meager that even Sauron couldn’t find many purposes for them. They hungered not for a spouse’s love or the taste of food and water, but for their parents’ arms and warmth and safety. They could barely overrule the mind of a gnat. There was simply no working with that.

Still, he knew the shape of the handful of little souls who wandered the halls. He even knew their… not names, their names had not followed them into this place, but their ages and stories, for he had gone back over the sparse records kept of Angband’s younger prisoners in recent days.

Now, with Telperinquar still sleeping next to him, he thought he knew how to call them. Softly, so as not to wake the boy, he sung a song of warmth, strong encircling arms, soft blankets, milk, shelter. He set it to the tune of a lullabye he had heard in the deep caves of the orcs and let it reel the wandering spirits in.

After his research he could almost pick them apart. Here was Avari boy, almost adolescent , and there was a speck of energy so small it could only be baby, found in Laiquendi settlement, died a day after arrival, unkn. causes . They coiled around him, seeking some quality lost in life, held in the sway of the song.

“I offer you what you desire,” he told them, “A respite from the cold.” A houseless ghost darted forward, not at him but Telperinquar. He cast it back quickly. “No, not him.”

You can’t give us anything else , one of the larger, older souls whispered in an Avarin dialect from over the mountains, one long lost to time. We don’t, we can’t, we do not have the strength.

Please? This voice was thin to the point of reediness, and petulant besides.

“I’ll find some goblin weak enough even for you,” Sauron told them soothingly, making his words simple and his manner plain. “A nice house for whoever helps me answer some questions, yes?”

I don’t know anything! came the panicked answer from one side, and it was tinged with remembered pain.

We’ve forgotten , said the oldest, more sensibly. You took everything from us. Child slim fingers, cold as ice, touched the back of Sauron’s hand. Even after he brushed the wraith away his rings held the cold.

I want my dad, whimpered another. As if in response to the inaudible, Sindarin plea, Telperinquar shifted in his sleep.

Sauron tried to regain control of the conversation. “Yes, that is rather what I asked you here to talk about. I’m afraid I don’t fully understand your… ways. What does a child need to thrive?” Belatedly, he realized this might be a bit too highbrow for the chattering child-wraiths before him, so he added, “What killed you?”

All at once he was assailed with images, senses, memories of dark places and heartsickness.

Blood.

Wanting to go home.

Broken bones.

I want my father!

I don’t want to be here. I want to leave this place. It hurts so much.

They told him little he didn’t already know- and he still didn’t know how to stop it. The killing sorrow of elves, the endless fragility of children, their need for something he couldn’t quite fabricate. Oh, he’d done well enough; with constant supervision and careful watching Telperinquar had lasted several whole weeks. Yet at any turn he could collapse back in on himself, into that place of tears and hopelessness that spelled certain death. Sauron would not be able to watch him day and night for the decades it would take him to reach a moderately more stable state. But he wasn’t willing to let him fade either. There was potential there, if he could salvage it.

Some part of him wondered what potential had been in the dead children before him. What might they have become if they had not been unlucky enough to fall under his care?

“What could save him?” he asked, tilting his head towards Telperinquar “What would keep him alive?”

Nothing , came the answer from the Avari child, swift and brutal. He’ll die here. It’s terrible here. There is no kindness or love, nothing but the pressing darkness. Look, you can barely see the stars anymore.

I want my father!

Let us have him now. He’s already one of us.

Let him go home, Cruel One.

Please, I want to go home!

It wasn’t the answer Sauron wanted, so he banished the lot of them. The room was quieter without the cacophony of high not-voices and the chill began to dissipate.

Telperinquar stirred. “I want-”

“Yes, I know, your father. Go back to sleep and I’ll let you do some actual soldering as a reward tomorrow.”

“I want to work with silver,” Telperinquar told him, as his eyes drifted shut again.

“Easily enough arranged.”

When the child was unconscious again, Sauron, went to his desk, and started assembling a plan. The quiet, steady sound of breathing played in the background. For the time being, Telperinquar was alive.

Sauron, who was not used to losing challenges, even ones he set himself, was quite resolved it would stay that way.

 

 

“My only concern with your plan, glorious as it is, my lord, is that the Fëanorian will not rise to the bait.”

“I know the sons of Fëanor, for I knew their sire. The boy will come at our offer, even if he comes with his whole army behind him.”

Slowly, slowly. Divided as Melkor’s attentions had been lately, it still did not do to underestimate him. He was still mighty- just perhaps the tiniest bit diminished.

“It may be so. Still, I would suggest we hedge our bets. A good-faith gift would ensure he falls entirely into our trap.”

“A what?” Lord Melkor was mighty, Sauron reminded himself, for all that he was… fallible.

“A gesture of goodwill. The child, would, I think, work very well.”

“I would not hand away a pawn for nothing.”

Sauron shrugged. “Think of it as trading up. The eldest will be sturdier by far than his nephew. Certainly there is more entertainment to be found in a proud son of the house than there is in a mewling babe.”

Melkor considered this. “Have it done. I do hope that our young king lives up to your expectations."

“If he doesn’t,” Sauron said, trying to be merry and barely managing jovial under the cold light of the Silmarils, “I’m sure alterations can be made.”

As he bowed his lord caught his face. “Make sure all goes according to plan, Excellent One. My wrath is as great as my regard.” His eyes were still piercing, still overwhelming. Under his gaze Sauron felt stripped bare, all his mean machinations and small, weak mercies laid bare.

“I- of course.” I spared the boy , he thought, I wanted to see what he might become.

Perhaps Melkor truly was weakened, for he did not see that fault on his lieutenant’s face or cast him aside for it. Selfishly, Sauron was glad.

 

 

 

Telperinquar did not object to being wrapped in a warm cloak (cut down to his size) or led through the halls of Angband, but when Sauron told him that he was being sent to his father and uncles a panic overtook him.

It wasn’t the expected reaction.

“Calm down,” Sauron hissed, and stepped into an alcove away from the prying eyes that always walked the halls. Telperinquar, wrapped around his arm like it was driftwood in a shipwreck, had no choice but to follow. “Speak clearly- no, don’t wipe your nose on that. What is your objection to being sent to your only remaining family?”

“I can’t!” Telperinquar wailed, “My mother wanted us to go home! I wasn’t supposed to be here!"

“Explain or keep your peace, young one.”

After a few moments, Telperinquar was composed enough to speak. “My mother’s temper turned at Alqualondë-” He’d have to discover what Alqualondë actually was, one of these days, “She wanted to go home. I think she and father got into a fight, because she took me on another boat and told him not to push his luck. She was still unhappy though, and she was good at talking, and she got our boat to turn around.” Telperinquar fiddled with his buttons, well made and silver. There were tears in his eyes. “They said Ulmo turned against us, because when we tried to sail back to Valinor there was a great storm. And she told them- she told them-”

“Yes,” Sauron prompted, for children sometimes needed encouragement in these things, he had learned.

“She said, ‘We’ll go home by Mandos then,’” There was a hint of pride in Telperinquar’s words. “Only the boat people got scared and turned around again and we washed up high north and then the orcs killed everyone but me.”

It did explain how Fëanor’s youngest house member had ended up so far from home.

“She didn’t want me to be here,” Telperinquar said anxiously. “It would be better if I could go home.”

“Is that why you were so eager to die when we first met?” Sauron couldn’t keep the amusement out of his voice. “I do not think that was what your mother had in mind.”

“She didn’t want me to be here,” the child insisted, stubbornly. “This place is cursed. It killed my mother and my grandfather. I won’t watch it kill everyone else too. If I stay here you’ll kill me eventually but if I see my father again he’ll love me and take care of me,” his voice broke, “And I won’t ever see mother again!”

“Oh, you precious thing,” Sauron patted his hair absently and tried to ignore the fair assessment of his long-term caregiving abilities. “Do not hurry so to die. I have been told it is hard on children of your kind. Besides, this place is not so cruel as that.”

Telperinquar regarded this statement with some disbelief.

“It is not!” Sauron insisted. “After all, you have made such beautiful things here. The rings,” that drew out a smile, “and such lovely chains. The rough gemstones you polished are a fraction of what this land has to offer. There are fine metals beneath the mountains of Taur-nu-Fuin, and seams of rubies as big as your fist deep in the Ered Luin. There are smiths among the dwarves- who you have not even met yet!- whose work rivals that of your own grandfather. This land has not been kind to you, but you could make wonders here yet.”

“I do not want to be here,” the child insisted, “Besides, you work for the Enemy. You lie.”

“I do not lie in this,” Sauron promised him, “You could make this place a greater one. In Mandos you would be a ghost. As one well acquainted with the dead, let me tell you that they do not have the power that the living do.” This part of childrearing he had gotten rather good at. You said nice things in a gentle enough tone and then smiled like you meant it. Children needed honey.

“I want to go home.”

“Make this place home then. Make it fairer than Valinor ever was. Make great works. If your mother is half the craftswoman you have made her out to be, she will not begrudge you such a project.”

Telperinquar did not smile, but he did not pull away as Sauron took his hand and began walking once more. He gave no thanks or word of goodbye as he was sent away- but Sauron was used to working with orcs and such ungratefulness came as no surprise.

It was such a shame, he thought as he watched the party leave, that children didn’t come in more durable varieties. They could be rather charming creatures. Of course he did have access to orc children, and he had heard some very promising things about the Secondborn who were yet to come…

Sauron was not easily satisfied, for it was not in his nature. Even now his mind thrummed with possibilities for longitudinal experiments and further research. In a few decades he might even have reason to revisit Telperinquar. He had a sense, however vague, that the boy might turn into something exceptional.

 

 

 

 

 

“Careful, it might be a trap,” Uncle Macalaurë warned, but his father barrelled forwards despite the entreaties and swept Telperinquar up in his arms.

“I thought you were dead,” he whispered, “Tyelperinquar, I thought I had lost you.”

“Give the child some space,” Uncle Tyelkormo advised, voice low, “He’s been held captive by the Enemy. Círdan’s people say returned prisoners are sometimes different.”

“If you mean to insinuate that my child has somehow been corrupted within the few days-” Father started angrily.

“Calm down, calm down. I only meant that he might be a bit-”

“I’m fine,” Telperinquar said, and the voices fell silent. He didn’t feel fine- there were bruises on his shoulders where Lord Sauron had grasped him too tightly, he was cold, he was hungry. But Grandfather was dead and he could see the burns on his father’s hands, and on his uncles’ as well. He wasn’t going to complain.

A long way away Uncle Maitimo was negotiating with the Moringotto’s messenger. Words were being exchanged. Telperinquar couldn’t quite understand them.

“My perfect boy,” his father said, so softly it seemed he might break. Telperinquar hugged him and tried to forget about little rooms full of jeweler’s files and tiny hammers, about soothing voices full of lies, and being held in the arms of his dead grandfather. He tried to forget how bright the Silmarils had been.

Make this place your home. The copper wire bracelet, pushed up his arm under his sleeve, felt heavy and warm.

“I want some food,” he said, “And then can I see the forge? I missed it.”

His father held him and cried.