Alive at the Wake by herenortherenearnorfar

Ringless

This fic has been on my mind for a while. Divine Marriages (And Divorces) actually sprung out of brainstorming for this story. I've been planning to write this almost as long as I've been in the Silm fandom and now that it's written I'm a bit at a loss.

Hope you enjoy it?

Read Ringless

He was fuming. Resistance had been expected; Celebrimbor was stubborn— an idealistic fool with a brilliant mind. The lying was a surprise and an upsetting one. In spite of the… unpleasantness between them, these new brazen falsehoods seemed like intentional nettles. 

Wasn’t it below the dignity of a lofty Eldarin lord to speak so roughly? He’d held no illusions about the true nature of the weak incarnates who named him Sauron but he expected better from his one time friend. 

Patience was a necessity, of course, and you got nowhere without persistence. It had only been a few weeks. There were dozens of avenues of persuasion left to explore. 

Feeling generous, he turned back to Celebrimbor’s limp form. The elf was still conscious, unresponsive but awake. The thrumming of his closed off mind tickled at the edge of the Admirable one’s perception. 

With a thousand open eyes, the lord of the vast east stepped forward and crouched so he could look up into Celebrimbor’s blood streaked face. Slightly unfocused grey eyes quickly turned away but Annatar wasn’t going to let Celebrimbor escape so easily. He forced his prisoner to look back at him, pressing his will over weak flesh with delightful ease. 

“Celebrimbor.”

“Annatar, please. Let’s get this over with.”

That was another frustrating thing, the tormentor reflected. There was no depth to Celebrimbor’s protests, no clever turns of phrase or daring plans. No matter how many concussions Sauron patched up he remained dull. There was a tarnish to his silvery cast. 

Perhaps their time apart had made him clumsy. No matter, that could be remedied with time and cooperation. Annatar had plenty of the former, all he had to do now was obtain the latter. 

“Celebrimbor,” he breathed again and watched his captive’s face until he spotted a hint of annoyance. Good, they were both growing tired of this farce. “I want to have an end to it as well. Just tell me where the rings are.”

The Nine had been easy enough to retrieve once he was in the city. No matter how cunning the Gwaith-i-Mirdain were, he was smarter. All he’d had to do was survey the treasure halls, torture the meagre prisoners they’d managed to make off with, and then tear a few buildings down brick by brick. The location of the Seven was guessable— they’d been made with dwarven collaboration and always intended for the dwarves— and he’d have confirmation shortly. It was the Three that still troubled his mind. They were an unknown quantity. The texture of their power was too slick for his liking. He needed them under his control.

With some effort, Celebrimbor lifted his head just enough to suggest defiance. His eyes were sad. “I’ve already told you. We destroyed them.” 

Sauron hit him. Not hard enough to make Celebrimbor’s head snap back or his cheekbone crack— brain damage was an ever pressing concern— but hard enough to satisfy the rage boiling inside of him. How dare he! How petty could he be? Didn’t he know how selfish and futile his lies were? 

He was being more than stubborn, he was being stupid . Ill-advised heroism was excusable, the world was full of exalted bravado and bold corpses. Celebrimbor was too much of his own people to entirely avoid their characteristic foibles. 

Foolishness like this, however, was out of character. Surely he knew, as his friend did, that no object of power could be unmade so easily. 

The Great Eye was never unaware of the One these days. It was more himself than he was. It burned on his hand like a never cooling brand, the constant feedback loop of power from the two parts of his spirit creating a yellow-hot heat against which his words glowed even brighter. Beautiful, so beautiful, like the first Flame after the Thought. 

Celebrimbor’s work was not the same as his— it could never be the same for Celebrimbor was limited by his paltry reserve of spirit and the weakness of his body. But the Three had shone like starlight in his mind, for that one moment amid the fires of the Great Mountain, and in their threefold gleam he’d seen a little of Celebrimbor’s spark. 

This, then, they shared. 

So why was Celebrimbor being so recalcitrant?

Perhaps it was a threat. He had seen the One, in memory and in person now, and he wanted his enemy to know he knew his weakness. Perhaps it was merely elven stubbornness. Or maybe, maybe, it was a cry for mercy, his way of pleading clemency for this last work of his heart. 

That at least made sense. The Most Precious closed his fist, the One pressing against his palm, a palm pressing against his self. It wouldn’t work, but it made sense. 

Celebrimbor’s head was once more slumped, his breathing slow and comparatively steady. He was getting good at stealing recovery time in the sparse seconds his captor was distracted. 

Annatar ran a slow hand over Celebrimbor’s skull, pressing the bruises and checking for new fractures. Though still awake, Celebrimbor didn’t bother to open his eyes.

Next Annatar checked the torso, making sure there were no major broken ribs Celebrimbor could try to puncture a lung with, no pressing cardiac concerns. The guards outside were terrified of the prisoner, despite all efforts to make them see sense, and made for poor nursemaids. 

Once he was satisfied that his captive wouldn’t abruptly die or manage to kill himself over the next hour, he patted Celebrimbor’s head again. 

“Right. We’re going to try a different tactic. Maybe you’ll be able to tell the truth with some added incentive.”

 

The incentive did almost nothing. 

Celebrimbor sobbed and babbled and in the end still told the same story. The Seven he gave up quickly enough— necromantic threats against the spiritual integrity of his remaining coworkers tended to have that effect— but he remained stalwart on the subject of the Three. They were destroyed he claimed, gone and lost forever. 

Barely holding in check a half dozen screaming shades (the silly things wanted to cross the ocean, as if there was anything interesting over there) Sauron felt the last of his patience snap. 

“Even now you spite me!” He had half a mind to rip apart the tormented elf ghosts, to leave them wandering this broken city for the rest of their days. But they were strong— all the craftsmen of the Mirdain had been steel-willed— and it took more effort than he cared to expend to subvert the true will of a single soul. 

The unbreakable sanctity of choice; how the wise vaunted it. At the moment Sauron wanted to crush it out of every thinking creature. Their defiance was so frustrating. Why couldn’t they just do as he said?

Unable to totally destroy the houseless spirits he instead returned them to their cages. No one bent to another’s design without some measure of choosing, but all creatures alive or dead could be trapped.

Celebrimbor watched, his face as pained as the misty visages of the former torture victims that now drifted away. 

“They will languish forever unless you tell the truth,” Annatar warned, feeling vicious. “The Three, Celebrimbor, dear one.” The last kick of cruel sweetness was unnecessary, it served only to soothe Sauron’s anger. He had tried honeyed words in earnest the first few days and they had found no purchase. Celebrimbor refused to be reminded of what they had shared. 

“They’re gone,” he was crying now but his expression remained the same, soft and sad and hurting. “They’re gone, I don’t know how to convince you… Annatar, if you ever felt anything for the people here, let them go.”

“Why won’t you tell the truth?” Humans tear at their hair sometimes when they are feeling especially tormented by… whatever bothers humans. The Terrible All-Seeing had never felt the urge quite so strongly before. 

Celebrimbor ground his teeth. Then he lunged forward. 

Ordering him unbound had seemed like a good idea. Too long restrained was bad for the circulation, pressure sores were more insidious and more difficult to manage than any calculated injury caused by thought out torture, and there was something delicious about allowing him to watch helplessly as his late friends fought to escape their necromantic bonds. Sauron had considered him quite helpless. Three compound fractures between both legs, significant bloodloss, a half flayed calf, and numerous other, smaller injuries should have made him unable to stand. Nevertheless, he stumbled to his feet… and immediately toppled forward in front of his captor. Not that much of a miscalculation then. 

Annatar helpfully sat on the floor so they were closer to eye level. Ever persistent, Celebrimbor reached out to him. 

No, he was more than reaching out. Minds were fickle, wispy, and hard to read when ensconced in a body, but Celebrimbor’s was opening up. The veil of privacy, which no man, elf, or Vala could penetrate, had fallen away, leaving only a willing soul bared to Sauron’s lidless inner eye. 

This was an unexpected delight. It was common for an untrained creature of flesh, not knowing the boundaries of their self or the fact that they could turn any comer away at the door (a metaphor the sages of the Mirdain had been so fond of), to fall apart in Sauron’s presence. He had put time and effort into being overwhelming and was much assisted by his own innate nature. 

However, Celebrimbor was not a human unused to conversing in the manner of the Maker. He was more accustomed to language than thought but he was still of old elven blood, born on the Shores of glowing Valinor, raised in the halls of great kings. He would not be caught off guard. 

If he let Sauron in, he did it of his own will. 

This should have been a victory. It did not feel like one. 

“Let me show you,” Celebrimbor hissed, blood leaking out of his mouth, and Annatar was suddenly alarmed. 

The moment he passed the boundary of Celebrimbor’s mind he was caught up in a wash of purposeful memory. This was not an idle reminiscing, absently transmitted to a guest. Nor was it a clumsy message wrapped in the common tongue; for most minds were infected by words in this day and age. It was a memory of moments, overlaid with such a sense of dolor that it might have driven a weaker being to tears. 

 

and…

Galadriel insisted on accompanying you to the slope of Fanuidhol, where Nain, Narvi's youngest nephew, and his apprentices had built the fires high and laid out a black iron anvil and a set of tools. 

“You are certain we are far enough away from the city, lad?” the dwarf greeted him. 

You eyed the miles between them and the nearest dwarf settlement. There was nothing but loose stone and moss for acres. “Yes. Are you sure we aren’t above any mine shafts?”

“Only abandoned tunnels for half a mile.” Nain’s beard was turning silver, age finally overtaking him. 

“Right. Your dwarves should leave now then.” The sudden parting from an old friend, the last remaining relative of his ancient partner, was bitter. 

and

You gave Galadriel one last smile. 

“You should go as well.”

Her hair was flying everywhere in the brisk wind. “I will not,” she said, around a face full of gold and silver strands. “You do not have to face this alone.”

“I don’t want you to watch me die.” Old Cloudyhead was ringed with storm clouds and the air promised rain in the far future. Against the grey sky the makeshift forge fire billowed pale smoke. 

She narrowed her eyes. “You don’t have to do this. We can find another way.”

It was tempting, so tempting. In your breast pocket the three rings sang for freedom, for beauty, for a chance to prove their worth. They could be marvelous. You made them to be marvelous. 

and

They were marvelous sitting on the anvil, gleaming gold and mithril, sapphire and diamond and ruby. So lovely. But not as lovely as the ring Annatar made, which burned like a band of fire against your eyelids every time you tried to sleep. 

These creations had been turned against you and they could never be the same. 

and

The Silmarils were wondrous. As a child you would sneak into the treasure house and stare at them for hours, trying to figure out how light could be emitted yet never run out. But when the world sunk into darkness and all certainties were erased, a small, selfish part of you that just wanted the world back to normal wondered why Grandfather couldn’t give them up. Surely no beauty could be worth home and hearth and family?

You held your tongue, for the sake of family pride (you were proud of your family) but never gave up the private belief that you would have given everyone back their light. 

and

It hurt to take them apart, bit by bit, piece by piece. Every few minutes you had to stop, catch your breath, and harden your heart. 

First the annealing, to soften and make flexible. The deep heat settling in your bones and beginning to boil marrow. Next, the removal of stone. Every diamond and corundum levered out. Shattered against the anvil in quick, surgical strikes that sent pain splitting up your temples. Your vision went black with sharp agony, and when it returned it was dull and colorless. 

The hammering, until the metal went thin and shapeless. Each blow knocked the air out of your lungs and left your heart pounding unsteadily in your chest. The sky was grey. It was so very grey and you were looking up at it because you were on the ground, convulsing. 

It started to drizzle. You got up again. 

The crucible shook as you removed it from the flames, your tong grip unsteady. Steadiness didn’t matter anymore, it was white hot and waiting. Rather than risk drawing out this process even more, rather than chance one ring outliving you, you took all three of them, your creations now rendered useless, in one hand. Even ruined they were beautiful and you can see the work of your hands in their making and their unmaking. 

Your fingers didn’t want to unclench. In the end you had to peel your hand open one finger at a time, until finally the twisted, misshapen things fell into the waiting heat. 

Fire roared up, steam hissed, a clap of expanding air knocked you off your shaking feet and to the ground. 

Good, good, you thought as the screams of final undoing reverberated down the anvil and into the bones of the mountain. It was done. 

There was no happiness. Destruction would never merit celebration. But as the darkness took you and you felt the fire begin to catch on even your spell-woven forge clothes you felt such relief. 

and

Galadriel saved you. Galadriel who never strayed far, Galadriel who could not stand and watch you doom yourself from her faroff woodland mirror. How could you ask her to? She had known so many deaths from a distance, this one you could let her see up close. 

Galadriel, being Galadriel, she didn’t let you die. 

You wish she had. Instead she stroked your hair when you woke up in a bed of beech-cloth. She let you cry.

You were alive and all that you have made had been reduced to ashes (or would be soon). You were alive and you still had a duty to the people you may have doomed. 

You returned to Ost-in-Edhil and hoped he would make it easy on you. You hoped the inevitability would play out quickly. Perhaps, if you were lucky, you could still save a few more lives. 

Perhaps he would take the news better from you, but you doubted that.

A quick death sounded better. A slow and tortuous one would buy more time for Celeborn and Elrond. Dead man that you were, you could stand a little torture. It mattered little when you’d already killed your own soul. 

 

Sauron wrenched himself away from the contact of mind-on-mind and heart-on-heart with such force that his physical body toppled back and lay on the blood soaked flagstones. On his hand the One Ring spasmed. The image of the three lesser rings being methodically destroyed sent spirit pangs up his arm. 

Lies, it had to be lies. It hurt just to think about unmaking such a definitional work. Celebrimbor metaphysically could not have put quite as much of his being in his own take on the rings, but they were still strongly bound to him. The earlier sets had been collaborative, and thus the toll of creation was dispersed. The brief glimpse Sauron had caught of the three suggested they were Celebrimbor’s alone. 

Yet the memories burn in his eternal mind. Undistorted and raw, a half dozen aspects of their nature attest to their fidelity. 

The flurry of images, sounds, and colors— duller than anything his constructed form could perceive but still hawk-keen and hound-sharp— was unmarred by any misdirection or fuzziness. 

This could be said about elves, unlike humans they could not lie to themselves or make false what they had remembered. 

Then there was the sheer despair. He knew, from echoes torn out of the tormented, what it felt like to self destruct, and Celebrimbor’s recollections ached of self inflicted pain. 

Celebrimbor slumped in his bonds. Opening his mind had been an immense act of fortitude and it had pushed his already fragile spirit to the brink. He was already weak, of course. With the Three undone his very survival came at great cost. 

On the heels of sympathy came anger. 

The witless coward. He called Sauron monstrous yet he would ruin what was precious? He would tear out his beating heart just so no one else could own it? Beauty and power were wasted on the weak, on those who would so quickly throw away all that was valuable. 

Sauron had a hand around his throat, ready to throttle him for his waste, when he remembered that death was his goal. He wanted to die? Well, he would not find satisfaction here. 

Nor would Annatar allow his petty, destructive ploy to bear fruit. If he’d acted to protect his friends, in the hopes that this imprudence would save them, he would be disappointed. Eregion was broken and Lindon was ripe for the taking. 

Númenor would bring aid in time. Their alliance with Gil-Galad was too strong for them to neglect his pleas entirely. But an island far across the sea needed time to gather troops and put an army aship.

Before they came he would be able to shatter what Celebrimbor had hoped to protect. 

His touch gentled, his hand came to smooth his friend’s tangled hair. Waste wasn’t in his nature. Celebrimbor squandered what was precious, demonstrating far less sense than Annatar once gave him credit for, yet despite this he remained one of the best smiths alive. His continued existence allowed for the possibility of redemption. 

It also allowed Sauron a chance to make him see what his lack of reason wrought. 

 

There is sunlight behind his eyes, a throbbing in old injuries. The sensation of existing in a body settles over Celebrimbor before he wakes and tugs him through the first restless stirrings.

He is still in his own flesh, not ensconced in Namo’s halls. Strange. When he felt the rolling tide of Sauron’s rage engulf him he thought, certainly this time .

Continued life means continued torture, a proposition that he has been increasingly unable to stomach. When he let Annatar into his mind at last, it seemed that would be the end of it. Perhaps the memories weren’t enough? 

Sunlight shines through his eyelids, a softer, more muted glow than the thin shards of light that would come in through the high windows of his cell. He’s prone, laying on a soft surface. Soft fabric is touching most of his skin, an encasement too close to be a blanket. Clothing, then. It’s been a while since there’s been clothing.

He tries to move his hands, hears the clinking of chains, and is reassured that this much has not changed. 

“You’re awake, should I call the High King?” comes a whisper in what is distinctly the Sindarin of the Greenwood, sibilant and with a few of the rounder mutations of Silvan. The discrepancy prompts him to open his eyes and focus blearily on the speaker. 

A child is sitting at the foot of his cot, light diffusing through the fabric behind her and surrounding her with a warm glow. Ages are hard to judge with humans but the style of her chin length hair and compactness of her frame are good tells. She is human because she’s not an orc and she’s wearing Sauron’s colors. Carmine and black. Spoilt as he has been by the alizarin and chromium black made by his chemically minded associates (dead now), he’s still cognizant of the expense of such dyes in the mortal world. 

Annatar always did like to flaunt his power. Servants and battle standards of scarlet are just as discreetly flashy as his old habit of wearing white in an ashy forge. 

Well. He was so hoping this might mean freedom. 

Having identified his location and with the presumption of continuing torment, Celebrimbor closes his eyes again. You have to use moments of peace to their greatest advantage while in Gorthaur’s tender care. 

“My lord?” the child repeats several times, still speaking Oropher’s tongue fluently. Then there’s some footsteps soft on carpet, textile rustling, and she’s gone. 

His respite is short lived. In just a few moments there are footsteps again and the sound of a body settling gingerly at his side. 

“Do you need water, food?” the child offers. 

It would be rude to ignore her, Celebrimbor knows. None of Annatar’s actions are her fault. Still, he can’t bring himself to stir or respond. Not when the rest is so restful. 

Blessedly, she abides, anxious breathing settling into an easier pattern, letting him doze…

There are no warning footsteps before Sauron’s arrival. The only indication of danger is the sudden abrupt stop in the child’s respiration, as if she’s holding her breath, and the hurried whisper of fabric shifting.  

He opens his eyes once more, taking in the tent in afternoon light and Sauron’s face above him. 

Taller. He’s taller now than he was when they first met, tall enough that if Celebrimbor could stand they’d be eye to eye, and thinner. The familiar features are bloodless, haggard, the familiar sleek hair pulled back tightly. It looks like he was stretched on a rack and drained of all color, even those once friendly dark eyes have gone golden and cold. 

It hurts to look at him and there’s no point anymore to the pain. Rolling to the side as much as he can with arms bound to the cot, he turns away, hiding in the spotty darkness behind his eyelids. 

Without overmuch harshness— he could break his jaw again, could pull him so sharply his neck sprains— Sauron yanks him back. He doesn’t wait for Celebrimbor to open his eyes before he starts his monologue. 

“I always knew you were reckless, especially with your meddling cousin whispering in your ear. I didn’t believe you to be a butcher; inclined to ruin without reason.”

At that Celebrimbor does open his eyes, just a slit, enough to see the clench of his jaw, the curl of his lip. Who knows destruction better than Angband’s right hand? The torturer, the killer, maker of wickedness and the end of so many wonders. Yet as he reviewed the titles in his mind, formulated responses, his eyes betrayed him. No matter how many reminders he got, from the scarlet, to the spikes, to the pain in his own body, he still couldn’t help but see Annatar having a snit.

Heartache consumes him again and he falls back onto his sickbed, eyes shut. 

Never one to let a lack of opposition get in the way of a really good rant, Annatar continues. 

“The Three were truly excellent, possibly the pinnacle of your expertise. Even with just a glimpse of the underlying craft it was clear that they had immense power, more focus and drive in their making than any of the other sets. You gave them all your hopes and dreams, and if you’d just stopped and thought for a moment you would have realized that those hopes and mine were not opposed.”

Celebrimbor does open his eyes then, if only to give Sauron an incredulous look. It’s not tasteful to start talking about shared dreams when a city is in ruins behind you. 

“We could have done what you wanted, preserved this place, built it up in greatness,” for a moment it seems this will simply be a reworking of older topics, then the dark lord pulls himself back on track. “But no! You had to go and destroy them! You could have killed yourself!”

That was rather the intention, both times. 

“You could have upset the balance of the series and corrupted the lesser Rings,” accuses the very person who turned the Rings to his own ends. If Celebrimbor cares to look he can see the mechanism of their twisting, sitting round, swollen, golden on Sauron’s finger.

“I would have destroyed all of them in my possession.” When Celebrimbor speaks it’s less of a croak than he expected, someone has dripped water down his convalescent throat. “If I were able.” The Seven and the Nine, not being wholly his own works, were unfortunately not his to kill. 

Sauron hisses through his teeth, the same offended noise he has heard Annatar make a hundred times before over failed experiments and clumsy apprentices. 

“Who did you think you were saving?” he challenges. “What benefit did your destruction bring, besides allowing you to indulge your familial deathwish? Because I will tell you this, if you thought it would save your allies you are mistaken.” 

That had been the hope, actually. That Sauron, put off by the disappearance of new prey, content with the few Rings that could not feasibly be hidden from him, would slink back to wherever he’d found shelter these past centuries. That Lothlórien, Lindon, Khazad-Dûm, and the human kingdoms sprawled between, would not need to suffer from his mistake. That perhaps the refugees in their flight would go unmolested, that this war would be shorter than the last one he remembered.

Sauron must see his weakness, Annatar knows too well what his fear looks like. He leaps, like a hunter sighting injured prey. 

“I cannot countenance Gil-Galad’s aggression or Galadriel’s meddling. Both had their hands in recent battles. Their inability to stay out of my affairs must be sanctioned harshly. You’ll see how pointless your petty act of injury was.”

Celebrimbor tries to focus on the weave of the tent ceiling, how light is playing around Sauron’s head. His right arm, splinted but still broken in several places, hurts. “I don’t expect to see much of it at all.” 

Annatar laughs, strained sort of giggle shrill in places with anger. “If you think you get to die, after all the effort you’ve put into it— No. You’ll live. You’ll live and you’ll watch .” It’s cruel, perhaps the cruelest thing Annatar has ever said to him, the barest proof that he was once called Tormentor. In a mockery of tenderness he brushes a few strands of hair off of Celebrimbor’s forehead, then turns to the girl. 

She’s done a good job of making herself background noise during their discussion. Quiescent as humans can be, breathing shallowly, leaning back into the folds of hanging fabric that make up the walls— it helped that there was a far more pressing threat in the room to distract from her presence but she has an evident knack for camouflage. Now all she can do is wither under Sauron’s attention. 

He barks a few orders in his own language, that awful clanging. None of them are words Celebrimbor has come to recognize over the course of his captivity (he’s certain he’s picked up Stay and Hold Him and another word that’s either prisoner or elf), though the grammatical structure is growing familiar. 

Before he leaves he cuts the ropes off Celebrimbor’s arms, smiling as he does so. There are still chains, shackled at the wrist, but they have enough give to allow him to sit up and move around. Not that he tries, for in the wake of Sauron’s audience all he wants to do is collapse back into unconsciousness. 

“Please.” The child is sitting next to him again, shaking him very gently, speaking in her Silvan way. It’s as unsettling as it is drawn out, vowels left to roll along like pinesap. “Please, you should eat something.”

“Is that what your master said?” he asks her, though it’s hard to summon sharpness against such a target, no matter what badge she wears. 

“No, he said to look after you, and you haven’t eaten in at least two days.” More than that. Sauron has sketched out the edges of elven resilience and both of them know that Celebrimbor is nowhere near his limit. 

The human girl, whatever her Sindarin skills, doesn’t know that. She looks concerned, for his sake. 

Celebrimbor smiles shakily and sits up, ignoring the protestations of every barely set break and recently bandaged wound. He is brought water and gruel; to his surprise though the fare is thin it’s well made. The water tastes clear, the porridge has specks of meat in it and an aftertaste of spice. Perhaps the salt in it came from Ost-in-Edhil. One of his commanders, an old lieutenant of Maglor, had, in a stroke of inspiration, burned down the main storehouse two nights before the city walls broke. Some still remembered the old days, a war where winning meant burning down everything behind you, when elves learned lessons from their human allies who would slit the throats of their families before letting them be captured by orcs. Unfortunately a city had many silos, many kitchens. Celebrimbor had ordered that efforts be focused on killing their enemies directly, even if it meant leaving them with more of a supply base for later. 

By the time he finishes the last spoonful, the bowl is as much tears as gruel. 

“Do you need anything else, my lord?” the child hovers. 

The wounds will heal in time, his body will recover, and Sauron has cleverly made his prison warden a creature he can’t even resent. “No, just let me rest.”

For a while the everlasting darkness is kind enough to take him. 

 

When he next wakes up the girl is gone, replaced by a bearded old man in the same uniform. Not particularly wanting to interact with anyone else, Celebrimbor launches himself back into Irmo’s realm, to dream quiet dreams.

 

 

It falls into a pattern very quickly. 

He has two main shifts of attendants; the girl and the boys. 

The girl is already a known variable, the boys arrive in his new muted world like a meteor strike. Like a meteor strike there is an initial flash and then it’s all adjustment.

There is a maximum amount of sleep one person could use, having already borrowed against his debt in Lórien’s bank he is simply pretending to be asleep when they throw open the tent flap. 

“Maha!” “Maha!”

His young jailor, whose name he can now guess is Maha, hushes the two new voices. Both carry the tinge of adolescence, that uncomfortable newness of timbre, the awkwardness of vocal cords adjusting. She murmurs to them in Sauron’s tongue, the words are only fractionally less dread from her lips. They whisper back and as they speak Celebrimbor sits up. 

The boys are tall, taller than Maha, though still shorter than most elves, and half bearded. The sort of beards Narvi would make fun of when they were still alive. Human children sometimes grow facial hair before they’re fully of age, but rarely before puberty. They’re wearing piecemeal armor— linothoraxes, some leather pteruges— but neither carries a weapon.  

Glancing over her shoulder at him, the girl continues with her instructions in Sindarin. “Please make sure he drinks some water and eats a little.”

“We will, Maha.” The one who speaks, the taller one, is less fluent, with an accent Celebrimbor can’t quite place. Despite his reassurances she looks reluctant as she leaves; reluctant and tired. It’s been about thirteen hours, just her sitting in the corner of the tent with her lap full of papers, a long shift for any body to bear in practical solitude. 

The shorter boy is quick to find the pitcher of water, tucked in the shade and covered with a cloth, quick to offer him a cup. It’s his friend who asks, outright, “Can we help?”

No, Celebrimbor waves him away. No, they can not. 

“’m Tarike,” the taller boy presses. “Aydir, introductions.”

“I think you did already, afihsh,” says the other sharply. His Sindarin is about the same, awkward but functional with a good grasp of structure. The way the two of them shorten the personal pronoun into a cut off gasp of ‘ieh’ is familiar; the coastal elves down south do the same. It’s an Edhellondish habit, Celebrían picked it up once when she visited family there for a summer.

Tarike sighs and sits back on his heels. “You know what I meant. Is there— are you sure you’re well?”

He must still look frightful, bad enough to scare these baby soldiers with their empty sheaths and mouths full of awkward enemy words. “Thank you,” Celebrimbor tells them truly, because it is nice to know the names of the fragile creatures ringed around him, a parody of guards, there to force him to eat and to make him feel guilty about killing them should he try to escape. Sauron has a surprisingly good grasp of psychological manipulation for a person who battered at a prisoner with brute force for months before thinking to try other methods. “I will manage. Just— sit.”

Maha at least brought work, a parcel of papers, parchment, a quill and ink. The old man had a veritable workstation on his side of the tent. For a moment he worries he’s going to have to entertain the boys but they quickly devolve into an argument of their own, a spirited conversation a world away. It’s easy to pretend to go back to sleep. 

 

It goes like that. Maha, Aydir and Tarike, switching off in turns. 

Of course now that Annatar’s ambition is set, the army is moving. Due to the large proportion of orcs there seemed to be in the ranks it must do so at night. 

In the evening the tent is dismantled, all sparse camp accoutrements packed away. Celebrimbor remains, rooted in place. The chains at his wrists have a fairly long lead, between the two of them he has a circle of movement just beyond the bounds of the tent, but both are connected to iron stakes driven deeply into the ground. He can hear the stone crying out against the dark enchantments laid on the metal, a protest from the earth beneath his feet that he can’t answer. 

The only one who can undo his binding is Sauron. He shows up briefly, a train of advisors behind him, and coaxes the staves up, undoing the power beyond mere force that sets them in place. He makes it look like he’s pulling pins out of butter, though each bar is as long as a man. There’s a troll to carry them. 

Celebrimbor tries not to look at him over much. 

With the troll as a lumbering follower, he’s bustled into the wagon carrying his disassembled prison, along with his guards. Though only one shift seems to feel obligated to keep watch, all three of them get to sit in the cart, a fact that Aydir and Tarike find some joy in. It is, they revealed before remembering who they were talking to, much better than marching. 

When they arrive, amid the hectic rush of an army trying to bivouac before sunrise, someone will lead them to a nice spot. Then the troll hammers the iron stakes back into the ground— they don’t need magic for this, just brute force— and the tent is assembled around him once more. A clever system, if a bit extraneous for one injured prisoner (he mislikes the idea that Annatar is thinking ahead to a point when he will no longer be injured). 

It takes a few renditions of the procedure for him to notice that in the wagon Maha and the boys all sit across from him, leaving him to himself. It can’t be comfortable, three bodies pressed between tentpoles and empty space. Some of them are still in the stage of bony elbows and too much energy. Aydir and Tarike keep poking each other in the ribs, sending whoever is on the outside edge dangerously close to falling off. 

“You know you’re allowed on this side of the cart,” Celebrimbor tells them after a bump in the road causes another near disaster. 

They glance at each other, frightened. After some deliberation, Maha lurches across and makes herself small in the corner next to him.

It’s not her shift. She takes longer than usual to fall asleep but after a while settles quiet, a warm body at his side. 

He never truly hated Sauron’s hirelings— his fear of their master made it hard to fear them fully. Back then he killed plenty of them, and they in turn killed most of his friends. There was no time to pity or resent in the short, grievous time they were players on the board. Now he is tired and in his debility sympathy settles in.

Besides, it’s nice to feel another person again, however brief the touch. 

 

Dreamlessness doesn’t last forever. 

Irmo has been kind but his mercies aren’t infinite. Eventually the sheer amount of sleep Celebrimbor has been getting catches up to him, and in his slumber he’s haunted by memories. 

Irmo still is kind, the memories are not the worst they could be. He does not dream of his city falling, of his friends slaughtered, of his blood on his own floor and his dearest confidante crooning over him. He doesn’t even dream of taking apart his final, greatest works, unmaking them until his heart went cold in his chest. 

Instead he dreams of Annatar. 

Maybe Irmo is kind but it is dreamtime kindness— a loopy, contorted mercy that circles back around to injury. How awkwardly dreaming reckons with the weight of a heart, how easily it fixates on the hungers of the unconscious and does away with sensibility. Would he have preferred the torture? No, but it’s a close thing.

They are clear memories, untampered, unyielding, as fresh as the day they were formed. 

That’s the problem with elven memory. It does not change. Even now, in the shadow, his memories of sunlit days are sharp. He cannot take the joy away from his recollections, nor strip the associations (light, laughter, warm and wild nights, hope, pride, longing) from those images of Annatar’s face. 

In the place between sleep and awakening he sometimes forgets where he is, what has happened. The pain in his chest reminds him… it is a shortlived pleasure, to live in that long lost world of gifted lies and outstretched hands.

He wishes he could say the ghosts keep him from his bed. Instead he throws himself even further in, welcoming the dreams and the ache when the truth reasserts itself. 

 

It was just as easy to be suspicious of Annatar as it was to fall in love with him because every part of his form seemed designed to engender trust. He was slightly shorter than most elves, a half-head shorter than Celebrimbor. With his apple round cheeks, fawn skin, hair like a beam of mid morning sun, and sparkling eyes even his sarcasm came across as fond. When he smiled he had deep dimples. Though his hands were agile, disproportionately long fingered, and double jointed like a dwarf’s, they were also as soft as a baby’s and always warm. He was always warm, the cats and birds and smaller dogs of the city figured that out quickly.

It was possible he’d based his shape on one of the Fair Elves, who varied the most in height of all the kindreds, and wore their closeness to divinity in their faces, without thinking of the consequences. More likely he’d engineered himself trustworthy, neotenous, soft and golden and always faintly glowing, to win hearts.

Celebrimbor could either stew in mistrust, questioning every gleaming second, or he could let himself be won over.

He chose the latter. There were better things to do in life than second guess each time Annatar asked for help fetching sandpaper off a high shelf, each time his eyes crinkled brightly over a finished set of plans, each time he let Celebrimbor plait his perfectly smooth hair into a more sensible style for the workshop…

The hands, Celebrimbor thinks upon waking. Those spidery hands are still the same. Artist’s hands. How terrible that he makes war with them. 

 

 

The children are good at keeping him fed and watered, and even neat and conscious part of the time. Naturally, after a while, they start trying to make conversation. 

It’s Maha who begins it, naturally. She’s probably bored in a way the boys— inseparable and constantly entertaining each other— aren’t, though she has her work to occupy her. 

(Celebrimbor realized the other day what she was curled over; a stack of his correspondence, no doubt looted from his home to be patiently studied by scribes in Sauron’s colors, picked apart for clues and advantage. At least she looked sorry when he asked if she was enjoying the gossip and apologized for not keeping his desk in better order. Since then her little pile has been thinner.)

“My lord,” she says one afternoon. 

“I really don’t think I’m the lord of anything right now,” Celebrimbor tells her. He’s staring at the silhouette of a flower through the tent fabric. It tilts from side to side in the wind and that dance has been enough to fill the last hour. He suspects Sauron will come early this evening and they’ll have another fight, full of accusations and vitriol, which will end as all of their arguments have with Sauron threatening to kill more people in front of him.

“That’s still what I’m going to call you,” she says, mulishly. “My lord, did you ever know any elves from the east?”

That makes him lean forward. “East of me or east of you?”

“East of Arn Galni ,” She did know what the Greenwood was then, he had wondered. After all, she spoke its language. The dialect she applied to its name was so Silvan, so Avar tinged, that it took a second to untwist, but even that habit was thoroughly native.

“No. Not in recent centuries.” They’d disappeared in pieces, first the scattered trade with the dwarves stopped, then the occasional messages to their kin, then finally even stories of them. It was hard to tell if it was more of their isolationism or if there were more sinister causes, and no one had quite gotten up the nerve to check. “Why, did you?”

She bites her lip and looks down, suddenly shy. “Mmhm.”

Misery can sense company, he knows in his bones that there’s a tragedy here. He’s known it since he first heard her accent and began imagining lost Greenwood elves, caught and tormented and allowed, perhaps, by clever captors, to become fond of little scribes. To tutor them until they spoke fluently, a last bit of usefulness wrung out before death. 

“You might as well tell me,” he says gently. “We have,” a glance at the angle of the flower shadow as it lengthens, “three hours still.” That’s factoring in an entire hour for Annatar to act like an opera villain at him. 

Still, she holds back. Even in his state it’s easy to remember how to be a teacher, how to coax out secrets (who broke the good glassware, why everyone is refusing to share tools with Ferpin), shore up trust. “Were they from the Greenwood?”

“Yes,” Maha says. “And no, my lord. They lived there for a while, though they were born in the deep woods, further east than even I knew.” She uses the plural of the pronoun, a small distinction. 

Celebrimbor takes a moment to feel sorry for those Silvan folk, just trying to go home to a people fallen out of contact. “You knew them well.” 

She looks up at him sharply. “Yes. As well as anyone can know their parents.”

That takes him by surprise. “How…”

“Elves like babies, my lord.” The words, when she comes up with them, are stumbling, as if she’s piecing together the way to tell the story. “Everyone knows that; they’re said to steal— my parents were wandering and found favor with a human king. Outside of the domain of Evúrnizg—” that isn’t elvish but Celebrimbor recognizes it. It’s the title Sauron’s people call him by. “At least outside of his domain back then. They were— very good with plants. Eventually they wanted to move on, to find their family, and the king didn’t want them to. And everyone knows elves like babies, so he gave me to them.”

As if a child were a gift that to be handed away, an object to be traded. The terrible thing was that it had probably worked. Adoptions are rare among elves and taken very seriously. Those Silvan travellers had no doubt taken the bartered infant as a responsibility, rather than a bribe. 

“How did Sauron find them?” Celebrimbor asks, because he has to know. There are certain responsibilities towards kin, however distant, who died in distant lands, unmarked, almost forgotten. 

Maha spreads her hands. “Empires expand, lord.” It seems a nonchalant observation, till she adds, half-choked, “They were going to leave. They stayed because they wanted me to grow a little more before we travelled.”

A handful of figures, not quite orcish in the sun though not human either in their full armor, tromp past outside. One of them steps on the flower, though it rebounds in their wake. “Do you know how they died?”

“No. Only that they did.”

“And their names?” When he ends up in Mandos, if he’s ever allowed to leave, he’d at least have something for those mourning the missing. 

A tearless sob shakes through Maha’s chest. Celebrimbor crawls over, chains dragging behind him, and pats her on the back with his good hand, the one with no healing bones. “No. I only called them mother and father, and no one else knew our language.”

“Shhh, shh. There there.” He can’t summon up a Everything will be fine . Hopefully it’s enough to sit there, hushing and patting. 

After just a few short minutes the vulnerability is gone, covered back up by an unchildlike display of self-control. “Apologies, my lord. I shouldn’t have troubled you.”

Even the half dead have responsibilities, for distant relations, for the terrors they have wrought. “It was mine to be troubled by, I promise.”

 

They’re going after Elrond. At least that’s what Sauron tells him. 

The two of them are glaring at each other over a camp table full of rich food. It’s all for Celebrimbor, Annatar doesn’t seem to eat in this company. Facing down an enemy and stuffed quail at the same time is overwhelming; he’d prefer the thin sickbed food. But now that his arm is out of the splint, his lacerations have scabbed over, and his stomach has readjusted to actual sustenance there’s little justification for it.

So he picks at the precut meat while Sauron goads, until the frustration finally builds and his once-trusted snaps, “What have you done to yourself?”

Celebrimbor shrugs, a motion accompanied by the ever-present jingling of chains. He’s gotten used to that iron music, the same way he’s gotten used to clothes that wrap and tie at the waist and sleeves, sitting idle for hours, and eating without knives. A weakened spirit allows him to accept many things “I made a choice to remove a weapon from your grasp.”

“You tore out your heart to spite me and now you sit here, bloodless.” 

He swallows another dry bite of quail. “Yes, torture is bad for a person’s disposition. My apologies for not being sparkling company at the moment.” 

“You made something perfect, and then you destroyed it and now you wonder why you’re half alive.” Again, there’s more venom in Sauron’s demeanor than the conversation seems to merit. He seems to enjoy getting upset on Celebrimbor’s behalf, over the destruction of rings he had no part in making. Or maybe he can’t help but work himself into a tizzy, self regulation has never been one of his strong suits. 

“I wonder not. I knew what I was doing and the consequences.” As he speaks, Celebrimbor looks over Sauron, searching for some clue as to his investment. This tirade, not the first of its nature, feels like it has some cause beyond the ire of a warlord denied a weapon. It feels… betrayed. 

The oily sheen of the Ring catches his eye. It does demand attention, as much as Annatar always did. Its luster is unsettling, its dimensions bloated. Celebrimbor suspects that it would look too big on any hand, threatening to overwhelm the knuckles and spill over the fat of the palm. Though it is perfectly fitted and simply made it contains too much power to content itself with its own shape. Even on Sauron, a volcano of glory, it is a stomach-churning well of power. Should a mortal ever wear it, Celebrimbor suspects they would be swallowed whole. 

And it sings a song of avarice, of admiration, of unspeakable wonder. 

Looking at it, Celebrimbor begins to form a thought long past due.

“You’re afraid!” he accuses, standing so quickly that his chair falls to the ground, raising his voice in what feels like the first time in years. (It’s always whispers and soft voices with the children, if he shouted at them they might pass away out of terror.) “I destroyed the Three and you’re frightened, because they were to me what that monstrosity is to you and the idea of it being taken to pieces makes you sick.”

Sauron stands to match him but doesn’t yell. That’s almost worse. Instead he just flicks his eyes over Celebrimbor, pale and shaking, half recovered from torment. There is a certain look about elves lost in spirit, Celebrimbor saw it often enough in the war years. A lack of light about the eyes, a thinness of voice, a sunless-moonless pallor. It’s impossible for him to judge his own state, not without a mirror and a degree of objectivity he lacks right now. But whatever Sauron sees makes his upper lip twist. 

“If I were as foolish as you, I’d be dead, or closer to it than you’ve managed. A being of my nature can afford to put more fire in the forging than you can. So yes, I suppose your fit of temper is sickening.”

“Because you are afraid of the idea of casting aside that thing you made.”

“Because I have a working sense of self-preservation.”

“Because you’re a coward. You can’t even see what it made of you.” More fire— Celebrimbor saw its making. Among other horrors and betrayals he saw a friend shredding himself and thinking it a victory rather than an undoing. 

“A coward?” Sauron laughs, and its that terrible laugh again, gay and savage. “I think it cowardice to ruin what is powerful.” Typical, he always pivots away from his own issues.

Better to be injured and in my right mind, than to build a fortress of my soul to rot it. You want everyone to see your creation and admire it. But it is betrayed by its very nature, it has might be beautiful and powerful but it is still a tomb. You built yourself a tomb on purpose, I just found one amid my own ruin. Though he thinks all this, Celebrimbor says none of it. This is not a fight that he has the strength for. 

He sits back down, picks up his fork. Sauron remains standing over him, fists clenched, ring shining, waiting for an answer, for a long time. 

 

It took several centuries of friendship for him to get Annatar to stay in bed while he slept. Restlessness was a part of him, he wasn’t spendthrift with his hours. More importantly, he needed the regard of others as plants needed water. In the nighttime hours he gravitated to sleepless places, corners of the city where craftsmen were engrossed in work, where researchers were burning candles, where drinkers were chatting. To sit quietly while another slept without even the promise of their dreams to tempt him was not in Annatar’s nature. 

At least that was what Celebrimbor thought until one winter day when he laid down for a long overdue nap, Annatar pushing him into his bed with bodily force, and almost instantly fell asleep. When he woke in the cold dawn he was surprised to see Annatar still there, boots kicked off, next to him. 

“I thought you did not like lying idle, perfect mover that you are.”

“You protested when I pulled away,” Annatar liked wearing furs in winter, though he was even less susceptible to the chill than the rest of them. The ermine lining of his hanging sleeve was trapped between the two of them like a small animal. “I thought you were not supposed to get cold, you people of water and starlight.”

He talked to cover his embarrassment, he hadn’t been an unquiet sleeper since childhood. “Not minding cold doesn’t mean we can’t prefer the warmth, and you’ve made yourself such a furnace. A fuzzy furnace too.” With a smile and a sweep of the hand to neaten the bedding he tendered more sincere apologies. “I do hope I didn’t keep you from anything, entertaining my sleeping fancies.”

Annatar smiled back, cheeks dimpling. “No. There was nothing more pressing on my schedule.”

“And you weren’t bored?” Recovering from the initial shock it was easy to poke fun. “You didn’t whip together a trinket of immense power or upend our understanding of craft?”

“I have done waiting measured in centuries, Celebrimbor,” Annatar sighed. “I do have the patience for a three hour nap.” 

Hair neatened, teeth brushed, linens switched out for a fresh set, he almost felt like himself again. “But four hours would be pushing it?”

“Yes, exactly .”

 

The escalation of socialization continues, so he takes advantage of the chance to properly learn Sauron’s fell language. 

“No,” Maha corrects as they bump through hilly terrain, the land and place that Celebrimbor once loved. “Akht,” she throws the sounds back in her throat. 

“Akht,” he repeats, more velar. 

He recognizes this sound from Khuzdul. None of the phonemes of the language are in and of themselves malicious, Valarin is more guttural and rougher on the throat by far, yet far less unsettling. Perhaps it’s the intent? Or the weight of the tongue, the evil deeds done with it? No, that’s a ridiculous idea. A whole body of people clearly speak this language, dough faced humans, children, soldiers from across a breadth of personhood. The love confessions and congratulations they’ve doubtless used this language to convey (even if he doesn’t think Sauron built it for such occasions) count as much as the terrors inflicted. His best guess then is that it’s some perversion of Valarin, upsetting simply because it is two shades off from perfection. Even that instinctive recoil might fade with exposure, the way puppeteers are inured to the disquieting nature of their tools.

 “And what does it mean?” Celebrimbor asks.

“Girl.” Maha pauses. “Or servant girl. It’s made out of the bakht; servant. Mostly humans who use it, only humans really distinguish. Don’t use it with the High King.” She uses the term she taught him, a silly title for Sauron who is only lofty in his own estimation. 

“And what would everyone else call you?”

“The same thing they call Aydir and Tarike; sharma.” Like the other word, it’s familiar, he’s heard it shouted at his minders, a prelude to questions and instructions.

“Human?” Celebrimbor guesses, bolstered by some experience with languages and with people shouting. 

“Young man.”

Tarike frowns sleepily from across the cart. “We don’t even get ‘girpi’.” Their fluency has improved slightly over the weeks, making their Sindarin less stilted, though it’s still far from smooth.

“Soldier.” Maha translates under her breath. “I don’t know if you qualify anymore.”

Tarike folds his arms, adolescent stubbornness dimpling his chin and its scraggly half-grown beard. “We came here to be soldiers.”

“Came here to have an adventure,” Aydir mumbles, throwing an arm over his eyes. “Because they promised to take us far from home. Don’t complain.”

“Where do you live?” Celebrimbor inquires. These child soldiers that Sauron stole from their warm beds in the East to kill people who never knew them, they feel like his responsibility somehow. And it fascinates him how quickly they wither under scrutiny.

“A city, sir,” Tarike is adrift, language failing him. “And the road?”

Maha steps in, translating the unspoken. “They’re both from big trade clans, out of Leshkerru, my lord. Their families ran trade goods up the coast and dealt with the elves near the mouth of the—” now even she is lost, “a river.”

“The Ringló, ‘s a good river.” Tarike yawns wide. It isn’t his turn to be awake and dealing with the elf, this late is, Celebrimbor reflects, a charity. 

Aydir’s eyes slit open. They’re the golden brown of Valinor, of Ingwë’s kin, that rich earthen color that gleams gold in the light of Laurelin, or in this later age, the sun. At night they’re dark as the cloudy sky that follows Annatar, moonless, starless black. “I liked the elves at the Havens. They were sad and gentle. Like you.”

“So you came to kill their kin,” Celebrimbor reproves, too tired for true fury. 

“We wouldn’t have come if we knew. All they said was that there was a war. We’d never been west so we ran away to sign up.” The tone is almost apologetic, he realizes too late that he’s being offered redress by the last person responsible. 

“We were younger then and stupid ,” Aydir tells him, with more grief than a simple apology requires. “We wouldn’t have come…”

“They were very young, my lord,” Maha tells him, her eyes wide as well. All of them are glistening in the dark, earnest and kinder than he deserves. “If it was two years ago— fourteen. They’d have been just fourteen.”

They’re looking for reassurance that he doesn’t blame them, looking for absolution for a crime that isn’t their own. Whether it’s because they’re scared of him or because they’re guilty— whatever for he can’t say, they’re children — it’s impossible to tell. Still, he reassures them, for whatever a corpse’s word is worth. 

“I know, truly. This war was set before you were born.”

Before their grandparents were born too, he suspects. This sequence of events began when Annatar left so many years ago, an inexorable tide towards conflict. How many young humans fought and died in his city for rings forged a hundred years ago?

There are no more language lessons that evening. 

 

The next afternoon, when her shift rolls around again, Maha tells him what makes her partners so afraid. 

“As soon as it was found out that they spoke Sindarin they were moved over to our department,” she tells him very soft. “We don’t have many who speak your language, much less speak it well.” No, they wouldn’t. They are very far away from the large cities of elves who treat occasionally with neighbors. Edhellond and the Greenwood are not much for cultural exchange, aside from limited trade. Númenor puts out books and sends ships to port; they'd have more Quenya speakers than Sindarin. A sharp change in fates from the language distribution an age ago. 

“They can’t read or write it though,” she confides, “So they were put to translating the interrogations. There were other prisoners, aside from you, my lord.”

Years ago, when Angband stood, elves learned to die in battle if they could. There was rarely any future in being captured by the enemy. Even the handful of ex-prisoners, survivors of an experience barely conceivable, in Ost-in-Edhil were determined not to repeat their experience. He hopes all of them got their wish, such misery should not be felt twice.

“Did any of them survive?” A pointless question but one that has to be asked. 

Maha shakes her head, barely looking up from the plants spread out across her lap. Just as well, this isn’t a conversation that benefits from eye-contact. (He’s reminded suddenly of Maedhros, who would always stare at the rafters when hearing bad news.)

“I heard,” she tells him, after a thoughtful period dissecting a cuckoo flower, “that they were not very good at their jobs. They couldn’t stop crying.”

It’s been a while since Celebrimbor was overcome by tears. That stage of mourning seemed to have come and gone with the last of his bruises. Yet now he finds himself beset by them again.

 

He is pulled from a dream (not one of the regurgitated memory dreams, thankfully, but a more abstract patchwork of words and sensation, the stuff of life processed and repackaged) by a cool touch on his brow.

Fingertips in his hair, combing, carding, the way he used to card wool for knitters as a child. His neck at an angle because his head is in someone’s lap. The sensations register at first as dream sensations, unreal and blue-tinged.

As he further wakes the hands in his hair stop. The lap he’s lying in disappears, his head is back on the firm blankets of the camp cot, boiled wool pressed against his cheek instead of tightly woven, slick silk.

Baffled, he opens his eyes. Closed-eye sleep has been his preference of late, it doesn’t requires an extra expenditure of energy organizing blinking, and it allows access to the deeper, quick-twitching realms of rest. It’s a vulnerability he’ll have to reassess, he thinks as he adjusts to the brightness of midday. He sees the hangings and soft weave fabric of the tent, creamy golden in the sun. He sees the boys, frozen still, hands clasped together in solidarity. His eyes roam.

There, by the tent entrance, is Sauron, slipping away.

 

They are marching on Elrond, on Celeborn, and their troop of already battered warriors and refugees. Maha, his little informant, tells him that they are about a league away, catching up every night. Though Elrond’s force is smaller they are hampered by their injured and unable to move as quickly as Sauron’s massed forces, which replenish their leading edge with new marchers when the old ones tire. There have already been skirmishes between scouts.

Elrond advised Gil-Galad to turn away the stranger at the gates of Lindon. Celeborn never trusted him. They do not deserve this. 

They are marching on Elrond and there’s little Celebrimbor can do to stop it. Arguing would probably spur Sauron to push his troops faster, he’s in a contrary mood. What he can do is slow them down. 

What a complex beast an army is! So many moving parts, so many places to make a nuisance of himself. 

Celebrimbor refuses to walk of his own accord from cart to tent and back again. He ties knots in his chains, knocks over tent poles, attempts to confuse the troll carrying his bonds (according to Tarike the troll’s name is Grithr; Celebrimbor has never been on a first name basis with a troll before), breaks a wagon wheel, and picks arguments with Sauron about everything from the color of the sky to his new habit of wearing black. 

Let them carry him. Why should they get the benefit of a dead man walking, instead of the rightful burden of a corpse?

Still, the banner of the Eye moves forward.

 

Despite the odd confession or terrible secret that crops up between them, Maha continues to try for conversation. 

Her latest ploy involves wildflowers. Now that her paperwork has either run dry or been forbidden to her she’s started bringing flowers to his tent, and asking him about them. 

“What’s the name of this?” she’ll inquire, doe-eyed and sincere. “Do you know where this one grows? Is it safe to eat?”

Most of the time they’re not questions he can answer. He’s not a naturalist by practice and though he can identify a few of the plants, from the forest, Galadriel’s gardens, or the greenhouses of the Gwaith-i-Mírdain, he doesn’t know much beyond that. 

“That’s… enchanter’s nightshade?” he squints at the little white flower in her hand, one he can recognize this time. “I know other nightshades aren’t good to eat so I’d guess the same is true of this one.” Some elves eat the berries for the hallucinations but they’re not supposed to be especially pleasant. Worse than drinking a barrel of fungus-derived moonshine out of Khazad-Dûm, was the review he got from one adventurous friend.

Maha scribbles in the notebook in her lap. It’s small and uneven, it took a while to realize that the pages made from the parchment left over when hide was cut down to evenly sized squares. Scrap paper for a scrap project. 

The next flower might be related to a mustard, it has a similar flower shape though colored purple instead of yellow. Beyond that he’s lost. 

“It tastes a bit bitter,” she reflects. Then she writes something else, next to an exquisite ink diagram of petals and pistils.

Celebrimbor reaches out, as if he could snatch the plant from her from across the tent. “Please don’t put strange plants in your mouth.”

“There’s just one more in this batch, my lord.” Maha rolls right over his warnings. Her formalities are just a tag on the end of sentences now, peppered in here and there to give the illusion of decorum. It must be hard to respect a chained prisoner. “It’s hard to find plants once the legions have been through.”

Yes, Sauron’s troops clear cut the forest so there will be no place for enemies to hide. They’ve left Eriador a clearcut road. He struggles to focus on the little golden flower, six petaled, with toothy leaves like a rose. 

“Silverweed.” Another one he knows. “It’s said to be good for digestive ailments. You might need it if you insist on tasting your finds first and asking questions later.”

 

Annatar held a stalk of yarrow up in one hand. Cupped in his other fist a wasp was buzzing angrily.

“Would you like to see a trick, Celebrimbor?”

The basket of research materials— more whole yarrow stalks, cut flowers and leaves, uprooted rhizomes— was quickly abandoned. When Annatar promised entertainment he delivered. More importantly, Celebrimbor knew that after a half hour sitting quietly in the meadow his friend was getting bored. It had been his idea to volunteer them for this trip, one which the younger pupils and research assistants of the Mírdain could have easily handled, and that was probably down to boredom as well.

The long planning stages of the ring-making process bored Annatar. Not the research, he lived for that, he had seemingly infinite patience for trial and error. But the design workshopping, the endless sitting in meetings debating the placement of gemstones, the diplomatic benefit of additional glitz (not a technical term). This was what you got when you signed up for a group project. An undertaking so massive required most of the guild and that meant committees. 

The Seven were going to be even worse, and without Narvi, eternal friend and supporter of artistic license, to aid in the struggle.

(In the future, when the system was developed enough for a single craftsman to make a ring as powerful as the ones they were contemplating, there’d be a much welcomed collapse back down to smaller groups. They were as much artists as scientists and they were fractious in a mob.)

The planning committee, led ostensibly by Celebrimbor, had decided to make the fifth of the Nine softer in form after Galadriel had pointed out, ice in her eyes, that most of the human rings they were using for inspiration were for human men. Magic rings grew and shrunk to fit the wearer, this was an issue of fashion, not size. Their quick tongued work-friend Gelríl suggested they incorporate a botanical theme; if Lady Galadriel wanted to project onto human queens they’d give her a nice trinket in her style to pack her feelings into.

Drust, the human cultural consultant, reflected that a floral or herbal component, though not as traditional as braids, spirals, knots, and hands, wasn’t unheard of. (Unlike other mortal residents who, young and yearning, heard of their fair neighbor and walked the miles to learn, Drust had actually stumbled onto Ost-in-Edhil by mistake. He’d been a peddler up river, moving shells from the coast inland, furs from the deep wood out, never dabbling in iron or flint for fear of starting a war between petty kings. Expanding his range he’d stumbled upon a city of elves and found first a waystation and later a home in his old age. The breadth of his journeys meant he was oft consulted when people wanted a sense of human sensibilities as a whole. He’d died a few years before the last of the Nine were finished.) When asked for a plant that represented everything they wished to imbue the rings with—magic, good health, healing, longevity, fortune— he’d dithered a bit and then settled on yarrow.

Good for bleeding, agreed the elves, who did not sicken but did sometimes find themselves stabbed.

At the very least if Annatar’s promised trick resulted in flesh wounds Celebrimbor would be prepared.

“Not mine,” he protested, in response to whatever hesitance was playing out on Celebrimbor’s face. Last week he’d gathered some of the youngest learners resident in the central nave, barely half a century old, and showed them how to process hot lye into shining metal that exploded in water. Excitingly, he hadn’t told them about that last quality, just sort of let them figure it out on their own. “One of Oromë and Vàna’s shows of savagery.”

As he spoke he opened his fist, letting the desperate insect inside fly free; then just as it took to the blue air, caught it again between his thumb and forefinger, and killed it with a quick pinch.

Celebrimbor crept within arm’s reach, curiosity winning out over caution. He’d never been a naturalist and aside from some hunting knowledge he had little understanding of wildlife. “Show me, friend.”

The yarrow stalk was thrust out, then one ferry green leaf curled back to reveal the stem and the caterpillar sitting on it. He was a fine auburn fellow—rather small, dozing perhaps in the warm sun—with a half dozen white specks on his back.

“It’s already dead,” Annatar said. “This one,” he held up the long bodied wasp corpse, “or one of her sisters, would have injected it with a virulent venom as she laid her eggs.” He draws Celebrimbor’s attention to the long abdomen, the sharp ovipositor, moving like he’s teaching a lesson to the little jewelsmiths back home.

(What would be the sodium explosion here, Celebrimbor wondered?)

“That wouldn’t have killed it as quick as the wasp larvae though. They ate it from the inside out and right now they’re busy pupating on it’s corpse. A clever system, especially since both wasp and caterpillar feed on yarrow. You can have a graveyard and a nursery all in one plant.”

“Hmm.” Celebrimbor leaned closer, till he could taste the oxidizing death and tiny nascent lives all curled under that yarrow leaf. “Tidy.”

It didn’t appeal to him, he has never been good at the more biological arts. That didn’t mean he was going to pass judgement. Oromë’s kin knew the world ran on life and death. “Nothing with a real body exists without eating something else,” he remembered hearing as a child, “Even plants grow from corpses.”

He glanced at Annatar, who could if he so chose go without eating, without drinking, without air; but who absolutely devoured a venison steak when it was offered, comparing the flavor of flesh to the richness of a good wine.

“I didn’t realize there were so many types of wasps.” Celebrimbor admitted. Galadriel would have poked fun of him for that, she made a point of knowing everything, but Celebrimbor preferred his few specialties to her plethora of pastimes. If being the best jeweler in the city meant that he was only a moderately talented knitter compared to her flawless cabling, then that was a price he was willing to pay.

Tossing the wasp corpse aside without a second glance, Annatar leaned over the waist high yarrow again, hunting for some new objective. “Oh, thousands. Some of them lay eggs in ants too, or in aphids. It’s rather awful to watch with the smaller insects, they swell up and then hollow out after the wasps pupate. You can see the holes left in them, like egg shells.”

That was enough to make Celebrimbor a bit ill. It was only in their nature; except that Annatar had reminded him that nature had architects. “Lord Oromë’s ways can be wild but that seems almost cruel.”

Annatar stood straight, wiping his hands on his always pristine samite. “I doubt he organized it personally. He and Yavanna follow a more organic method of design. They set the parameters, seed the ground, and let natural forces shake out the winning ideas. Without micromanagement...”

“The wasps win?” Celebrimbor joked.

“No one wins, Celebrimbor. That’s not the point. The point is the balance. Nature doesn’t care what keeps it. Here, I’ll show you—“

He bounded off, through the field of wildflowers, towards the distant dark of the treeline. The long heavy hemline of his robes didn’t seem to slow him down a bit. With a glance back at their basket, which wasn’t going anywhere, Celebrimbor followed.

In the shady woods he found Annatar crouching at the foot of a pinetree. “I thought I heard a mature one,” he said smugly, gesturing Celebrimbor over to the limp, off-white protuberance from the leaf litter that so soundly held his attention.

Another matter was more pressing for Celebrimbor. “You can speak with the plants here? Everyone knows they don’t talk back.” Only a few places in Eregion— Galadriel’s gardens, the greenhouses kept by the more ecologically minded of the Mírdain— had conversationally inclined plantlife. Odd when most elfhomes had their trees whispering Sindarin within a century. Oropher’s representatives always complained about it.

“They don’t talk in your language,” Annatar chided, “because your people have not spent enough time talking to them. You prefer to chat with the ground, the stones, the houses, half-dwarves that you are. Your proclivities don’t mean the trees don’t speak though, just that they keep to the tongues they had before your ancestors woke up.”

Celebrimbor swatted at him for the aspersion, Annatar dodged easily. The conversation continued apace. “So what was it you wanted me to see? Is this plant also full of wasps?”

It did look half dead, a translucent cream slump. Even the little bell flowers (flowers?) were the same parchment yellow and facing the ground.

“No,” Annatar smiled patiently. “Like the wasp it’s a parasite. It takes and gives nothing back.”

With a gentle movement he cups the kyphosed curl of the stem, ghosts his fingers over a few fine furred flowers. “The roots underground feed off of the local fungal community, which is in turn dependent on the web of tree roots below us. Unlike those fungi, which contribute in turn, this is an opportunist, it gives little for what it takes.”

If he strained his awareness Celebrimbor could almost sense those root networks underground, pushing aside protesting stone, breaking rocks with century slowness, surrounding the treasures of the earth in cages of vivid green.

Drawing himself back to a level of listening more suitable for conversation required a focus; he meditated on Annatar’s glacial slow breathing for the length of one inhale. “And your argument is?” Annatar could talk in circles for hours before making his point. As entertaining as those discussions could be— had been— it paid to occasionally cut to the point.

With a vegetable snap, Annatar broke off the stem of white flowers just above the base and dropped it on the ground. “Is this a well ordered system?”

“It does work,” Celebrimbor pointed out. “And it’s lovely, even if it’s not efficient. Maybe the point of that flower you just decapitated is to be a flower, a little wonder.”

It was said Yavanna loved all growth, even the slimiest mushrooms or the most irritating weed. Surely she had some place in her heart for parasites. (He didn’t bring this up because conversations about the Valar always devolved when Annatar asked, in exasperation, which one of them had actually met the powers in question, to which Celebrimbor would stubbornly cite some high festival in Tirion that he barely remembered. From then it would become a game of credentials and history, both of which Annatar possessed more of.)

Annatar shook out his sleeves, too long for gardening, and spread his hands. “All of it? What about mosquitos? You can’t tell me they’re beloved to anyone.”

It would be summer soon and the mosquitos would come, up from the marshes around the Sirannon and the Glanduin. They’d assail Ost-in-Edhil, drink from her people, sicken the handful of human inhabitants with fevers. Everyone would smell of thyme and lavender for months, and smoke would billow from braziers.

“Maybe the Enemy made them,” Celebrimbor suggested.

“He did not,” Annatar’s nostrils flared. “They’re just… a loose end. An unintentional consequences of an untidy design model.”

Celebrimbor picked up the broken flower, tucked it thoughtfully into his hair though it made for an ungainly decoration, a hand long and a thumb in circumference. When he moved his head one end scraped against his collar. “So what, you propose we tidy it? It seems a lot of work.”

“But with potential benefits.” Annatar argued. “Yavanna and Oromë’s style of management is inventive, and very self-sustaining, but the results can be chaotic. And they’re certainly not on this side of the sea to make needed adjustments.”

It sounded reasonable. That was the problem with Annatar, he could make a bridge to the moon sounds reasonable. You’d order the stones long before remembering that Tilion didn’t take well to guests.

“Without wasps and thief-flowers, what will you lecture me on?” Celebrimbor asked, standing and offering his friend an arm. “And without mosquitos, we wouldn’t have horse tails to make brushes. We wouldn’t have ever developed that cedar incense you like either.”

It was clear from Annatar’s face that he wasn’t amused; his mouth was unmoving while his eyes were tight. “I think the world would go on without incense and brushes.”

“Who’s to say? I’ll admit I am not a student of the natural sciences. I can’t pass judgement on what I don’t fully understand.” He did know that the high summer ague killed a lot of humans. Dwarves too, though they avoided the damp conditions in warm weather and wore thick enough clothes to avoid the worst of the illness. It was hard to completely discount that; surely something could be done to help without upsetting vital balances.

The hand over Celebrimbor’s tightened. “No, I suppose you wouldn’t understand. The yarrow, then?”

“The sooner we get back into the less chance there is of Gelríl suggesting we add swans or lovers knots,” Celebrimbor agreed. He had a design in mind already, a bit experimental, with leaf chased metal and chunks of topaz clustered together, imitating the rounds of tiny yarrow flowers, and was eager to get it down on paper.

Ambling out of the woods and back into the meadow arm in arm, Annatar scooped up the basket while Celebrimbor whistled for their horse. “Shall we go home and make a ring?”

 

The next day she’s back, with more plants for him to inspect and explain. It takes his mind off the press of the army moving forward, a crush of single minded soldiers— like an amoeba moving, unseeing, unthinking, yet purposeful, all the parts of the whole set to a task. 

“How do you pick them?” he asks, amused, after he identifies what he thinks is some sort of orchid, the dark red of blood with a fat yellow heart. “I’m sure you have some sort of system, but there are more plants than you have time to study here.” Though there’s less and less greenery every time he leaves his carpeted tent— armies aren’t good for vegetation— it would take Sauron a few more years to uproot every tree in Eregion.

Maha looks affronted “I look for ones I’ve never seen before. Plants that grow everywhere else aren’t interesting, we all know how they work already.” From time to time she’ll do that, say ‘ we ’, throw herself in with the invaders, remind Celebrimbor that though she speaks his language like an elf she is not his. 

“And you’re making notes about their qualities for future armies?”

She looks up at him, round face made rounder by the disgruntled pull of her cheeks. “For herbalists. That’s what I was raised to be, before.”

Ah, the parents, who she has never directly mentioned since their first conversation, only angled around. Poor wanderers, poor child.

“You seem well trained.”

Making a little noise of affirmation, she looks back down at her lap. “They didn’t think of themselves as that, I’m pretty sure. They just knew plants, and plants knew them. My lord, if I can dare to ask-”

Polite even in this soft-fabric jail cell, where his every movement is matched by the percussion of shackles. Sweet, and not just out of terror of Sauron, her frightening High King, but because she truly seems to worry about his health. Celebrimbor has to match that unexpected hospitality, the oasis of kindness he has found in the hearts of these fledgling army-attachés, with generosity of his own. If he can’t manage warmth at least he can be accommodating. 

He leans forward. “Ask whatever you please.” 

The question takes a few minutes to materialize, as if she’s pulling it together from a thousand strands of memory, or simply summoning up the courage to ask it. “I remember when I was younger, a garden. Half a forest. My parents kept it for a hundred fifty years, since they settled in the palace. And it talked in their language. Mostly the trees, they were the loudest, the oldest, but if you listened very closely even the newest flower—” Frustration collapses her frown into a snarl of lost opportunity. In her lap is the venous red flower, abandoned.

Humans, unless they spend a lot of time in woodcraft, don’t usually listen to the trees. Neither does Celebrimbor, so the most he can offer is, “Yes, they do that, if you love them long enough.”

A brief flash of victory crosses her face, a spark of light across usually grave features. Then it’s gone, replaced by the same frustration. “They’ve never talked to me anywhere else! I thought maybe here they might.”

“No, not here. We were never kin to them. And, though it’s nothing personal, I cannot hope you ever find yourself in one of the kingdoms where they do.”

She accepts this without acrimony, just a shudder of sorrow. Pitying, Celebrimbor slides off his bed and scoots across the carpeted floor towards her. It’s a rare move, he usually tries to respect her gender and the modesty of humans, the fundamental vulnerability of a child left alone to guard someone within reach and capable of snapping her neck. He tries his best not to make any threatening moves, even now he is slow and careful. 

“The stones here do talk, if you know how to listen to them. Do you want me to show you?”

It might just make things worse. The bereft rocks of Eregion have been doing nothing but crying lately, asking where the people who shaped them have gone. But Maha is so pleased that he can’t think of it as a mistake. Surely she’ll comprehend the timeline of mourning, perhaps she’ll even give them more comfort than he can. 

 

True to his word, Sauron makes him watch.

Armies from a distance look like facsimiles of themselves. Like the perfect dolls of soldiers dwarven craftsmen make, articulated at every joint, each with a different face, for children to play with. A thousand, many thousand, of warrior icons arrayed and moving of their own accord. Their blood might as well be paint. When they fall still and splayed they are only dolls returning to their first and most natural state. 

Lies he can almost believe, if he doesn’t let himself see the way Elrond’s banner shakes in the standard bearer’s hand as he surveys the enormity of the foe. If he doesn’t catch sight of Celeborn’s helm, made in the old Doriathrin style. He can’t catch sight of Elrond, he blends in with his soldiers at a distance, but he must be among those thronged elves, fighting, bleeding, falling back.

Far behind them, amid the trees, are more elves, families and noncombatants from all the places Sauron has burned (those that have managed to escape, at least), fleeing. A few of the refugees have taken up arms and are among Elrond’s forces. They’re easily distinguished as their garb is quickly assembled, their hands inexpert, and Elrond has mercifully clustered them towards the back. 

He can see everything from the hill Sauron has stationed them on. The first advance of Sauron’s forces is made by the human troops, because they catch up with Elrond during the day and the Enemy is not willing to wait till nightfall. The humans die quickly, it’s not their fault, they are far from their homes and the places they are used to making war. They are, he’s been told in whispers by his informants, frightened of the foe. Elves unsettle most of the eastern men, what is unknown is always seen as a threat. 

In spite of the odds against them and the lack of support they’re receiving, after all they’re just the bait to keep the enemy pinned down until nightfall, they still kill dozens of elves. Celebrimbor catches sight of a few faces as helmets are knocked off, recognizes them and sometimes mouths names. Sauron watches him watching, vacillating between triumph and dismay. As if he wants Celebrimbor both broken and repentant yet doesn’t want to do the breaking himself, as if he thought he could separate the violence from the reward. Despite these mixed emotions, he still forces Celebrimbor’s attention back to the battle whenever it wavers. 

“Don’t you owe them this much?” he insists.

He does, and besides, there is little here to pay attention to except for Sauron and his servants clustered like shades about him. The ring couchant on his hand, a wild beast curled and quiet.

All the rings carry the power of invisibility. It’s a side effect of the way they dig the wearers deeper into the skin of existence, an interesting quirk of how most bodies react to being shifted slightly left into the realm of spirits. With some fiddling and practice they’d managed to flip that power on and off, apply it to the ring or to the wearer in turn. Even Annatar, who was already a spirit and needed no further aid in to access realms unseen, managed to utilize the trick with effort. If he wanted, he could make the Ring unseeable. Since he doesn’t it must be because he wants it to be seen.

After a few hours the sun sets and the battle takes a ghoulish turn. 

Orcs have always been the terror of elves. Celebrimbor suspects Sauron has been intentionally keeping them away from him, for the physical safety of both parties. Sometimes Aydir and Tarike talk about them as if they were unpredictable, eccentric, uncouth allies and even that third-hand contact sets him on edge. Orcs are not a force reasoned with, they do not make unions in anything but destruction. Every story of ages past, of outstretched hands bitten off, of brutality after brutality, of the monsters in like-face who first poured out of the shadows to murder their kin at Cuiviénen, crooning foulness from Morgoth’s mouth, has taught that lesson. 

Orcs terrify elves but there has always been the certainty that the relationship goes both ways. They express their fear with more dismemberment; that doesn’t make them any less afraid. Sauron’s orcs, however, have buried that ancient mirror-revulsion. They’ve covered it up with pride and Sauron’s own words in their heads. The scraps that remain are not as strong as the instinctive flinch of Elrond and Celeborn’s forces, most of whom have not faced orcs since the First Age, if they’ve ever fought them at all.

The orcs cut a quicker swathe through Elrond’s army. More bodies, more familiar faces. 

He cannot look, nor can he look away.

Pinned by duty, by Sauron’s hand, the Ring on top of his black gloves and the gloves holding Celebrimbor’s upper arm, he watches until there is screaming behind them. 

Behind them, where Sauron’s army is camped in a blaze of crimson. Behind them, towards the Misty Mountains. 

Elrond’s forces initially marched north from Ost-in-Edhil, aiming for the High Pass and the promise of the Greenwood in the east, allies to send their wounded and vulnerable to shelter with. It’s a good strategy, the elves of the Greenwood hold a vast and powerful domain, one that even Sauron might hesitate to attack. Because their idea had potential, Sauron took care to direct all his raiding parties between Elrond’s line and the Mountains. Bit by bit, he inserted himself between the army and their goal, turning his marching line into a lever, pushing Elrond’s force away from their goal.

They caught on and redirected, ran for Lindon and Gil-Galad instead though they surely knew it was too late. Though they made it over the Bruinen and almost to the Mitheithel they were still nowhere near rescue from Gil-Galad when Sauron caught them.

The mountains were discounted— even Celebrimbor discounted them. It was enough that the King in the Mountain opened his doors for Celebrimbor’s people, enough that he allowed his best to go out and aid others, enough that he surrendered the his of the Seven without a word of complaint when it became known that the rings were compromised. Dwarves were friends to Ost-in-Edhil, and Ost-in-Edhil repaid them by burning on their doorstep. 

Yet here, from the east and the mountains, comes the sun. 

It comes first in fire, the crimson tents a conflagration, a line of bright flame quickly spreading across the scorched out land Sauron has claimed. Then the horses and war ponies are visible, and the bright helms. Gold and mithril. He sees long beards there, and the beechwood armor of Lórinand. He sees the gleam, brighter than starlight, of Galadriel’s hair in the night. She wears it down sometimes for battle, like a standard of her own. 

The little hill of captains is aflutter, giving orders and looking for them. Celebrimbor even recognizes many of their directives, thanks to his lessons. They are looking to alert their forces, but even as they rush to make troop adjustments the tide of mountain mithril and forest gold washes over them. It rushes around the hill, barely taking note, in the eagerness to free their friends, that their ancient enemy is just a few steps up.

Sauron then begins to move. His gaze is fixed on a point amid the rush of warriors, he lets go of Celebrimbor’s arm— and Celebrimbor, seeing an opening, grabs his sword from his unguarded waist, throws it to his other hand, and brings it up in an arc of silver.

The men of Sauron’s troop rely on fixed formations with long spears, the orcs rely on the advantage of spears. Caught unawares they are stripped of both, they flounder, break apart, allowing access to the beset forces of Celeborn and Elrond. 

Meanwhile Sauron holds Celebrimbor’s wrist where he caught it, mid-swing, and squeezes. Where he touches seems to burn.

“Absolutely not.”

The burning is real now, a cracking of flesh and the smell of singed hair, new and reassuring pain circling Celebrimbor’s wrist, a red-hot glow from the iron of his shackle. (Better that there’s pain, the painless burns are worse in the long run.) That is what he sees as he falls, the chain shimmering with heat, the words incised on that wretched Ring lighting up to match, Galadriel and Celeborn making their escape with the people he couldn’t save. 

 

Celebrimbor awakens violently, dry heaving. His wrist—

His wrist is wrapped in bandages, thick swaddling covering up the burn. For once he’s only shackled on one side. 

Aydir is by his side, pushing water into his hand and mopping at his brow, determined not to lose this elvish prisoner, the one allowed to live. On the other is Tarike, asking questions. Their voices and helpful hands fade into the background. The only thought in his head is Sauron, the ring on his hand burning, his face aglow with fury.

I loved you, he thinks, delirious. I love you. Of course, love is an irrational number. It cannot be divided, it continues on forever. But though it exists it is easily superceded by other forces. 

I love you. Why am I still alive?

 

“How do you live?” he asks Maha. Stolen child that she is, she’s likely best equipped to answer. 

There are no flowers today, all her focus is on fussing over him. (He’s terribly glad Galadriel and the dwarves didn’t kill these solicitous babies, even on accident.) 

“What do you mean, my lord?”

“How do you live when you’re alone among…” he gestures at the camp, the crushing work of empire that Sauron has immersed himself in. “All of this?”

Maha balances her chin on her fists and gives the question her full attention. “I suppose I never had a choice? You don’t choose to live, you just do, until it becomes a habit. If pressed I would say it seemed a waste, my parents bought my life and I don’t want to spend it cheaply.”

“So you stay here and tolerate it?” It comes out more combative than intended. Trapped in bed again, injured again, he’s irate with himself. She’s just a good proxy, the shade of elvish in her manner making it easy to see her as one of his own. 

Her cheeks puff out. “I’ve thought about running, but I wouldn’t get far.” 

“You could go now,” Celebrimbor suggests. “We can’t be too far from the others.” 

“They have no reason to trust me, and I have no way to find them,” Maha points out kindly. “Besides, I might be a slave and the lords crack down on escapees on principle.”

New horror, entirely unrelated to his own misery, engulfs Celebrimbor’s thoughts. It’s another reflex, this one borne of years in proximity to the Enemy and his servants. Elves find it hard to tolerate the unthinking bondage of others. He’s slowly learned to tolerate the practices of his human neighbors, the debt-labor and wedding contracts and servants bound by deep oaths. These arrangements are close enough to honorable systems of weregild and fealty. 

He doesn’t trust Sauron to approximate a fair order; he values tidiness and simplicity over equity. 

“ Might ?”

At the very least she looks unsettled by the idea as well. “I wouldn’t have been at home— where I was born— you couldn’t trade people there, or make them into something they aren’t. But the High King has different rules and I never figured out what I became when they took me. Maybe no one decided.”

How awful. To make it even worse, little Maha gives him a reassuring pat on the arm. “You get used to it.”

“And if I don’t want to?”

“It’s not a choice, in my experience,” she says with human confidence. “It just happens.”

Celebrimbor’s fists clench and that makes his wrist burn with new pain. “There has to be something that can be done.”

She looks down, abruptly guilty. “There isn’t any document I could light on fire that would change anything! I’d just get killed and then—” 

“Yes, I know,” Celebrimbor reassures her. “It isn’t your fault. You should live.”

After all, she’s just a child and she’s right, there probably isn’t anything she can do. It’s different for him, he must be able to fix this if he puts his mind to it, if he breaks out of the fog of ennui swallowing him and manages to think. 

He stares for a while, at the carpet, at the thin wove blanket over his lap, at Maha’s blotchy face, trying to marshal his thoughts. Sauron, Annatar, his weaknesses, his foibles. Eventually, his eyes drift down to the badge on Maha’s front, a delicately embroidered eye with a great, round, yellow iris. 

 

Celebrimbor is sitting outside in the afternoon sun, his soul eating up warmth, when he first begins to reel Sauron back in.

The boys have convinced him to come out, to sunbathe and, more importantly in their minds, watch them play board games scratched into the dirt. The radius of his iron chain only allows him a few steps outside the tent door but they’ve solicitously assembled a seat of pillows there, on the stamped down grass, and are busy arguing over pebble game tokens a few feet away.

He hasn’t yet figured out the rules of their game— it’s somewhere between Huntlord’s Chase and Starcatch. There’s a lot of small stones and the board they’ve drawn is a winding road between them, and they’re fighting furiously over technicalities. The honor of someone’s grandmother, who taught them how to play the disputed variant, is being called into question.

Easier to tune out the bickering and focus on Arien’s light, the memories of bright uncomplicated days spent basking in brightness.

There’s a sound of feet, some of them in heeled boots. Important people, then. When he opens his eyes he sees Sauron and a gaggle of hanger-on humans stopped, watching him from a distance.

Once he would have been able to feel Annatar coming. There’s a heaviness to one of the old powers, a way they distort the world around them, a tangy weight to the surrounding air. But he’s much dulled of late, they both are.

Celebrimbor is resolved so he makes his opening salvo, he hold out his hand palm up and is surprised at how quickly Sauron closes the distance between them. He places a hand over his, and it’s feverish, dry but burning up. The Ring, in comparison, is cool, unaffected by fire under Sauron’s skin.

Annatar inclines his head, cheeks widening in a smile. With the sun behind his head it’s easy to ignore the small differences in his demeanor, the ways he’s gone sour. “Hello.”

Lacing their fingers together, Celebrimbor looks back, staring past him into Arien’s corona till his eyes fill with rings of light. “Hello there, old friend.”

 

Their intimacies never went beyond those shared between the very best of friends. Marriage skirting experimentation, fond kisses, a bed shared for as long as Annatar would stay in it. Though they gave him a room with big windows, it had nowhere to sleep; they’d made a lot of assumptions in those early days, despite their fear of offending. Though they’d been correct about his sleep habits he still preferred Celebrimbor’s room to his own.

Friends could sit close together, braid each other’s hair, soothe one another’s aches, bring each other joy. Separate the body from the soul (only one at a time), make no oaths, trust only in continued affection, and it remained a friendship, regardless of the particulars of flesh. Such cherished, long lasting relationships were respected, understood. 

Neither of them ever brought up marriage. Whenever he thought about it, Celebrimbor came to the conclusion that Annatar didn’t have a taste for matrimony. He certainly seemed to scorn Melian’s example.

The closest they came to discussing it was one lead-boned night, after a bath to wash away the ash and grit of the day Annatar had pressed a kiss onto his bare shoulder blade like he could sear the mark of it into flesh, or deeper, into bone. “I wish I could keep you forever,” he said.

Such a wide, encompassing word. Humans used it too lightly. Elves, doomed to the world, knew forever in its fullness.

Puzzled, Celebrimbor twisted to face him. “I won’t leave. This side of the sea has my heart.” New dread seized him. “Does it not have yours?” ‘Emissary of the Valar’ couldn’t be expected to be a permanent station

Annatar rested his chin on Celebrimbor’s chest, the point of it digging into pectoral muscle or, when he shifted, rigid sternum. For such a deceptively squashy figure, without half the muscles needed to accomplish a quarter of the feats of strength that he regularly managed, he was angular. Hidden beneath the softness of flesh were very sharp bones. “I do not intend to go back there. I would find little satisfaction in it, whereas here it is full of possibilities.”

Their hair was still damp from the bath. Celebrimbor had combed his and put it into a sleep braid. If it wasn’t dry by morning it would dry quickly in the desert heat of the forge. Annatar, whose hair never tangled, hadn’t bothered. Strands of pale sunlight spilled over his shoulders, loose and unseemly. “Then why do you think we must be parted?”

“Nothing lasts forever, Telperinquar.” That old name sent a shiver up his spine. It reminded him of the sounds of battle coming up from the beach, silversmiths killing silversmiths, his mother’s leavetaking. He paused, hands enmeshed in Annatar’s hair, before continuing to separate out eight sections for a basket braid. “Even this world will one day perish.”

An even broader forever then. The sort that made even elves shudder at the enormity of the term.

“Unless we do something about it,” it was an old line of discussion, a path tread many times over.

“Even if we do something about it,” Annatar’s skin was chilly beneath his hands and the corner of his face not nuzzling the hollow of Celebrimbor’s throat was pensive. “This place is long marred and abandoned. Your foe may have been cast into the darkness but his influence still lingers. It will never go away. Our appointed dwelling is rotten and someday it will fall down around us.”

Ah, apocalypse philosophy. You couldn’t spend time in houses of learned elves without dabbling in it, though there were a thousand and one opinions about how, exactly, the world would end, and what would come after. Celebrimbor privately liked the theory that a wistful, tipsy Finrod had explained to him when he was younger. That men would get a chance to be the elder children in a world beyond the world, that they would do the remembering while elves and dwarves lived by the candle flame. Or maybe he was fondest of the explanation Narvi had given him, that dwarves when they died went to rest beneath a great workshop, waiting for a project big enough for all of them. He would trust the demolition and reconstruction of the world if it was handled by dwarves.

Importantly, years surrounded by scholars inclined towards doomsaying had given Celebrimbor a good suite of tools to deal with brilliant minds getting fixated on the eventual destruction of all that was known.

He folded his knees up to bracket Annatar’s waist, then used the leverage to flip them over. Once Annatar was on his back on the bed, he started collecting the pillows, more than he’d kept on his bed centuries ago, before this stranger bearing gifts arrived. Two under Annatar’s head, one folded up on each side, pillows tucked around his body, underneath his arms and his knees, until he was locked in a goose-down fortress. The construction of the cushioned cage was met with with pleasant puzzlement, but no resistance. When he was out of pillows, Celebrimbor drew the blanket up to Annatar’s chin, tucked it in around him, and then laid down, full body over his.

Weight and warmth and soft darkness, the world pared down to the crackle of the hearth, the smell of bath oils, pillows, and Annatar’s face. The two of them hidden in a little world behind the bed hangings.

“Is this marred?” Celebrimbor asked softly. “Does it feel rotten?”

Annatar melted into the bed, “No. Tainted goods don’t always show their fault but I can find no trace of malice in you and yours.” A little tension crept into him again, like a late spring freeze coming over a lake, as he went taut beneath the blanket. “That does not mean it will last forever though.”

“We can try for forever,” Celebrimbor said cheerfully. “And if we fail we’ll know we gave it our best. Do you want me to let you out?” If Annatar really wanted to, he suspects he could throw Celebrimbor across the room, even with his limbs all pinned.

“No,” Annatar said, going limp again. “I’ll stay for your time.” In addition to being a vague commitment, it meant that he’d lay there until Celebrimbor fell asleep. Irrepressible silver tongue that he was, he added, “Though I do not think it will be forever.”

 

It’s so simple to win him back. All Celebrimbor has to do is give in, to entertain him, and he’s hospitable, amiable again. As if all he’s been waiting for was the return of their friendship, unstained by all the blood between them.

Children are winsome, when you give in to their tantrums. That is what this returned affection feels like, the forgetful joy of a child finally getting his way after a long tantrum.

One of Narvi’s nephews (baby dwarves are all boys, in languages not their own), in the gleaming halls of the mountain king, screaming himself hoarse until his brother gave him an extra bite of skyr, over Narvi’s protestations that it was just going to make things worse. Celebrían, unusually pensive and stalwart even for an elvish child, giving her mother the silent treatment over some slight (the emotional warfare dragged on until her father intervened). 

They no longer argue at dinner anymore. Not for long, not as long as Celebrimbor makes a show of being won over.

There’s some bitterness to the dinner table playacting. It feels like aping a long dead man, like the pang of pain when he saw actors reading Curufin’s role in the Lay. Even that eases, with practice, and he gets better at remembering how to be Annatar’s friend.

“Sauron—“

“I’d really prefer you didn’t call me that, not here,” Sauron ladles more bright green soup into his bowl. It tastes of mint and lovage, summer flavors.

“Well I’m not going to call you by those silly titles everyone else does,” Celebrimbor stirs rapidly, staring at the lawn whirlpool. “You can’t tell me you call yourself the High King in your own head.”

“I suppose I think of myself as this and that, everything and nothing, including the High King.” He grins, a flash of full cheeks and mischievous eyes. “Really, precious, you of all people should know that names come and go.”

“But not Sauron?”

Sauron grimaces. “It is rude. And it sets a terrible example for the help.”

Some of the weariness in Celebrimbor’s heart leaks out, past the hardened defenses. “I’m not calling you Annatar.” Not out loud, out loud it is admitting the unspeakable.

“Then call me Artano, I am still a smith.” The ring again, it circles all of them. Celebrimbor would rather call him nothing.

Shaking off the perilous conversation, Annatar creeps around the table. “Speaking of works, and works in progress, may I see your scars?”

How he exclaimed the first time he noticed the tightness of the healing injuries, up Celebrimbor’s arm, across his back, slashing his torso, hamstringing him. “Really, you know better than to let fresh tissue sit immobile. It will begin to adhere—“

“If you didn’t want me to mend badly maybe you shouldn’t have broken me in the first place,” Celebrimbor had snapped then.

Now Sauron takes the time to stretch out all his scars, pulling at the edges he once rent so carefully until knotted threads snap and begin to reorder themselves in the parallel rows of true flesh. At Celebrimbor’s wrist he changes the burn dressing and soothes the surrounding areas with a numbing larkspur balm. He checks the bones too, prodding lightly at every old fracture point. Without the background hum of pain it would be nice, to be touched.

Existing now it is something to be borne. 

On his knees, artist fingers digging into the back of Celebrimbor’s calf, rubbing little circles into the skin to detach the tangle of surface scar from the deeper muscle, that’s when Sauron decides to look up and start talking again. 

“Do you know we’re going to Nan Laur?” That golden valley, where Amdír offered him shelter though he had no reason to love the works of the Noldor. Those singers, kind beyond their means, kind enough to come and fight against a wickedness some of them did not even know the first time.

“I thought Lindon.” But then Galadriel put such a crimp in his plans. Sauron has always been the type to hold grudges.

The hands on his calf are very gentle, they don’t even pull enough to make the lingering injury jolt into fresh pain. “I’d prefer not to race against Gil-Galad’s Númenórean allies, if I can help it. And knowing that you did not hide your rings in Mithlond I can set my attentions where I please.” It must please him very much, Annatar’s upturned face is beatific. 

A shame, a shame. 

And yet, even if he’d stayed his hammer, left the Three whole, there’d still be a war. He can’t even say it would be a better one. Fate turns in such mysterious ways. All he knows is that they are already ruined and he cannot give in to regrets.

“Are you angry?” Sauron asks, probing the dimensions of his recently reoffered acquaintanceship like a scientist performing stress tests. “I do mean to burn Eriador thoroughly first, if it helps put off the inevitable guilt. No sense giving Galadriel extra allies to gather up to her cause.” 

Those extra alliances Galadriel might garner; the isolated pockets of woodelves who lived around lake Nenuial or in the marshy Swanfleet. The men who live about the woods and hills, their villages, towns, castles. In the deep pines, there are secret places of the Drúin, who know their homes as well as any tracker of old Doriath knew that dark forest.

So many people. 

“Once I might have been,” Celebrimbor said. “Now I am weary.”

Sauron pets his shin. “Yes, you’ve been through a lot, dear one. I am sorry it came to that.” The worst part is wanting to believe him. Wanting to give in, for real, to perish in this blistering almost-love. 

Is it love? Celebrimbor loved him once and cannot stop. Maybe love was sweeter when the Three were whole but right now it just feels like choking.

 

“Kiss me,” Celebrimbor demands, because that sort of exchange is much easier than talking. How fortunate that he and Annatar reached the point of creature comforts before it all collapsed!

Sauron is quick to oblige.

Revealing your foul nature and turning on your friends does not change the taste of your lips, Celebrimbor discovers as he presses up against Sauron’s mouth.

He still tastes very clean and a little tangy, like someone who considered the complexities of oral bacteria and decided he wouldn’t be having any of that. He still smells like hot iron being quenched in safflower oil; a scent unmistakeable to anyone familiar with the forge and undecipherable otherwise. It’s somewhere between a feast and a battlefield, there’s the sizzle of hot oil at it’s flashpoint, the red iron’s demand for air, then undertones of sweet beeswax smoke and leather.

Then there are Sauron’s teeth, still a little too sharp because he’s never worn them down with the minutiae of living. None of the little ridges on his front incisors have been ground flat, his canines remain long. Celebrimbor remembers how to navigate around them though, his tongue handily avoids the sharpest edges as he twines himself around his torturer.

It feels like home, enough to drown out the half-panic as his flesh remembers what the hands curled (one in his hair, one at the back of his shoulder, pulling him forward) did. The still raw burn is a good reminder— it stings as he wraps his arms around Sauron’s chest— and an entirely unneeded one. The point is to give in.

Better to think of Annatar’s familiar kisses and clever hands than Sauron turning those same hands to torment. Luckily he has a century of ingrained faith and only a few, dolorous months of torture to rely on. It’s easier, more natural, to trust Annatar than it is to mistrust him.

The show of affection— or desperation, Celebrimbor’s legs are locked around his waist— must win Sauron over. He murmurs, “Really?” against Celebrimbor’s mouth, as if responding to some unheard comment. Then he grips his wrist, the one still shackled, in an iron hand.

That does make Celebrimbor flinch, a useless spasm that changes nothing about his position but does prompt Sauron to stroke his spine, a soothing gesture. He’s only touching the cuff, Celebrimbor realizes, relaxing again. When he bears down it’s the steel that screams, not Celebrimbor’s bones.

With a wrenching metallic cry the shackle breaks.

“There,” Sauron says contentedly. “I don’t think you need that anymore.”

 

Smoke comes after fire.

As promised, Eregion burns but Sauron’s army chokes on the ashes. The great pines’ destruction leave the smell of resin and creosote on the air, while the smaller shrubs and detritus of the forest floor contribute to the billowing columns of smoke visible for miles. The body of the army stays on safe, already burned ground, slices of earth scoured by the less ambitious clear cutting of their march, while firemen carry charcoal from the black land into the evergreen places and stack it high around century old trees.

(Only a century old because many of these forests have already been logged by enterprising Mariners. Their newness makes them vulnerable.)

Pine trees do well after fire, their seedlings thrive in the wide open biochar plains. They might recover in many years. The same cannot be said of Eregion’s hollies, which burn just as sap quick as their taller cousins but have smaller, more vulnerable seeds.

The air is always hot and full of particulate. Everybody wears a handkerchief or rag across their face, to try to catch the grey ruin before it reaches their lungs, except Sauron, who must not mind coughing up black mucus at night. There’s a faceless solidarity to the endless smoke-stained veils.

Though their lungs are suffering, the lightly dressed southern army does not need to worry about the cold now. Apparently they suffered last year. Unsurprising, this land’s winter comes fast and icy, moving immediately from the last days of summer to the first frost. That frost never touches them in the fire’s halo, even as the weeks tick by.

Only Maha shivers, constantly. (It’s not from the cold.) Out of misplaced kindness someone finds her a heavy mohair cloak. Pale blue, woven with stars, looted from Ost-in-Edhil; even with a knot tied at the bottom it’s too long for her. Beneath it she shudders even more.

(Her teacher, he master, though that word feels tainted, the old man Celebrimbor saw when he awoke for the second time after his torture, apparently died in a toppled over, burning tent after Galadriel’s sweep. He heard the boys talking to her about it in whispers when they thought he was asleep, offering their awkward adolescent condolences.)

They make their way south in a westward loop, to cover territory not already terrorized. There must be deaths, humans do not dwell densely here but there are scattered villages, hidden enclaves. The local kings treat elves are particularly exciting, dangerous features of the landscape— there’s the high mountain you shouldn’t climb, there’s the fast river you shouldn’t ford, there’s the elf city you shouldn’t enter if you want to come out again— but their constant conflict with the Númenóreans keeps everyone abreast of their politics and strength where diplomacy does not.

A people quick witted and martially competent enough to set fire to ships to express their displeasure with Númenor’s lumberjacks could and would put up a fight.

Yet the only indication he gets of possible hostilities is Aydir and Tarike being recruited to strip and straighten saplings for arrow shafts. With paring knives they work, the new responsibility not dimming their chatter. Celebrimbor gives in and asks them what they know of the war; pointless since they have only scraps of information.

“The chief fletcher said for more arrows,” Tarike supplies, stumbling over the word for arrows, “And the outward parties sometimes come back injured. That’s all.”

That doesn’t tell him which village is being destroyed, if he sent gifts and promises to their king in an effort to improve relations, if the great-great-great-aunt or distant cousin of the people dying visited Ost-in-Edhil centuries ago to sit at his table and smile with Annatar.

“Is it a person you know, sir?” Aydir asks, knife pausing in its downward scrape. Above his bandana his eyes are downturned.

Rather than explain his guilt he tells them a story about accompanying Gil-Galad to help mediate another outbreak of violence between Númenor’s wood hungry merchants and the rightfully defensive local lords. It was really more Galadriel’s job to handle this sort of diplomacy, she’d taken the last three such meetings, but she was visiting friends in the Greenwood and so the role of local elven representative fell to him. There had been a lot of smiling while Gil-Galad wielded the power of a High King to force agreements that hopefully last a few decades this time, while Númenor glowered and the local men watched them all like they were wolves in human skin. At the end of it he’d promised, in his role as one of Eregion’s lords, to do his best to protect his neighbors from needless aggression.

“I know them in the way they know me, as a reliable force.” One side of a coin might never see its counterpart but it could not exist without the balancing, that was the sort of comfortable coexistence they’d settled into. Now the elves had let the arrangement down first, had let the enemy in. “And they were good neighbors.”

A few days later they arrive without knives and shafts to turn. “We were very bad at arrows.” Tarike emphasizes. “Terrible.”

Bad craftsmanship too, can be a gift.

It does not stop the slow roll of the fire front or the fall of embers when the wind changes. Tents still sometimes go up in flames, though the charms now hung over every doorway seem to have diminished the danger.

The days roll away too.

Sauron on a black charger, without a speck of ash in his hair, stops and smooths the fold of linen over Celebrimbor’s nose, uses a wetted finger to wipe away a speck of smut from his forehead. “There, perfect.”

It’s working. It’s working .

 

At this juncture Celebrimbor has come to understand much of Sauron’s own, handcrafted language. As he had initially suspected, the dread that accompanied each word has faded with exposure, until it is little more than a thrill of discomfort up his spine.

For this reason he does not hasten to speak it, even as his understand progresses. Words shape minds, shape worlds, and there are realms of thought that it is better to not grow accustomed to.

Instead he practices one word, one syllable at a time, making sure he can pronounce all the sounds fluently, stringing them together into gibberish that does not ring as discordant against the sky.

The words of Sauron’s language are saved up for a master stroke, because Celebrimbor knows how effective a well placed phrase can be. Language is a weapon, they have all learned this by now, from Fëanor, from Thingol, from Annatar of the honeyed tongue.

“Hapmûk nekimb tin-yagti.”

All treasure pales next to you. The word for treasure is closer to the old Quenya harma , a thing that is treasured, rather than the more complimentary maina , an excellent work, but the latter root doesn’t seem to show up much in this tongue.

Sauron, who he thinks suspected him half asleep before he spoke, leans over him so they’re eye to eye in the soft dimness of the tent. They have rested like this before, Celebrimbor with his head in Annatar’s lap. Maybe they would have sat like this again, if he’d gotten Sauron to kill him. It’s a good posture for naps and corpses.

“An unexpected compliment.” Sauron says in his quilted linguistic abomination (which has a word for compliment, a word for honor, even a word for love, because people use it and people must), though he’s obviously pleased.

Exhausted by his brief foray into compromise, Celebrimbor grumpily settles back into Sindarin. “Not wholly a compliment. Dragons covet gold too.”

“Still,” Sauron holds out his hand to catch the orange light. The Ring flashes promises. “I shall take it as one.”

“Evúrnizg,” Celebrimbor says, and that’s another word in the speech, the ridiculous name Sauron’s people call him by. The human ones, at least, the orcs seem to use a variant more focused on darkness, which he has come to recognize is as good and comforting to them as starlight is to elves. “Evúrnizg… it is a fine work. Terribly conceived but well made.”

This much is true. He can find the beauty in it, it’s just like admiring the craftsmanship put into a siege engine or a killing sword.

This time it’s Sauron’s eyes that gleam like the luster of gold by candlelight. “Please, beloved,” he breathes, using the Sindarin lightly, and it is light in that tongue, used for all sorts of dear ones. “Feel free to expound on its virtues and terror all you like.”

Yes, Celebrimbor still knows him.

 

In Valinor all matters of Song were framed through song. The nature of the Ainur was the nature of music and they could not be understood without understanding that the had once sung the world into making.

A very small Maia, the littlest woods creatures who flitted as birds, swum as fish, or lived transient in the air, was a single note. Their greater kin might be a chord, more resonant and complex. And the very great Valar held the range of an instrument, many smaller themes blended together, yet still limited in scope in some way. It was impossible for any player to be the whole of the song, only the aftercomers, who luxuriated in the world made by the singing, could partake in all things freely.

Their natures followed thusly; they each comprised a certain chord, a certain key, a certain aspect of being rendered up from the quivering allness before the music was ordered. It was important though not to mistake their purity for a lack of complexity. A single theme could mean many things.

There were multitudes of meaning contained in every note of the Music, Queen Indis had once explained during one of those rare days when his mother would take messages from Formenos to Tirion. Her kindness to him as a child was more remarkable in hindsight, looking back his childhood was full of veiled hostilities that she never took out on him. Since her grasp of Song was second to none, he trusted her ancient tutoring sessions better than gibberish learned in Beleriand or frustrated anti-deist rants from his grandfather.

What she meant was that a single Maia, seemingly simple, could contain a wholesomeness of insects walking on water , and icebergs drifting at sea , and a barge being poked down a river , and mallard ducks , and many other things beside. And they could do this while still being one note, because all these things were tied together by properties too complex for any of the Children to understand.

The Valar, who encompassed many notes and yet were greater than all of them, were even more difficult to understand, because they held the being of many other smaller sorts of being inside their range. This was how Irmo was the dream and the hallucination, the mist, the entheogen, the voice outside of hearing, the vision outside of sight, the poppy, the butterfly, the moth, and yet there were Maia beneath him who were more of one of those things than he was. He couldn’t be the allness of a nightmare when he was busy being a daydream too, so there was a Maia who was just the one self-same complex mote, who was the note or the chord to be played by the instrument. To complicate matters, the fields of various Vala overlapped, just as the ranges of instruments overlapped, so Maia might be a little of one or a little if another, might float between domain, might fall into none at all or choose to abide by none at all because at the end of the day they were people too. Music made people, the people who had made the music. Which had come first, had they had personalities when they’d solidified out of the everything-all-the-time wave of the universe? Were they frequency and amplitude then souls or had the two happened simultaneously?

He’d asked Annatar once, to his once friend’s bemusement, and Annatar had rightly pointed out that none of them had memories of not being people and could not tell him any more than a child could attest to their own conception. “It’s not a question you could address to any of us, Celebrimbor.”

In his more winsome moments he’d tried to grasp the shape of what their guest might be. In his pride, his easy eagerness, he’d thought he knew what Annatar was. He was the self-satisfied preen of their friend Ewgîn’s parrots, he was a schematic drawn perfectly in chalk onto one of the smoothed walls of their home without a compass, he was the gleam in the eye of a giver when the gift struck true, the careful fiddling and carving as they perfected the wax model for one of their ring prototypes, the sensation of camaraderie and pride when they stood in front of the Mírdain to present the Nine. He was his own obnoxious habit of quietly encouraging interdepartmental fights if people weren’t paying enough attention to him at meetings! It had taken a long time for everyone to get comfortable enough with their local immortal for that to become an issue and Celebrimbor had made such fun of him when he’d figured out the pattern behind his baiting remarks.

Annatar had seemed like a solved equation, a known variable.

Then he’d become Sauron. What a silly way to frame it. Then he’d been Sauron all along and all Celebrimbor’s assessments proved false.

If Sauron sings of anything it is fire. It is molten gold, steel being hammered into blades. The smooth motion of muscles under fur as a cat or wolf or horse moved, the flawless machinery of life stalking forward.

It would be different if he could say there’s nothing of his friend in this new-old monster. But every part of Sauron is just Annatar recast. Instead of a benevolent teacher surrounded by adoration he is a king demanding tribute. Where he once told Celebrimbor’s bones stories of high towers, now there is only the image of a fortress rounded with spikes. He hasn’t changed himself, just the key.

Which meant that he loved Sauron. That they all loved Sauron, but him most of all. Trust is not the issue, he will not regret trust shared after an age of faithlessness (at least that was what he’d told Galadriel, the words ring so hollow now). The love...

Well, there’s nothing for it now, is there.

They all made their beds. Now all they can do is die in them.

What matters is that he knows the core of Sauron’s being, or a part of it. Somewhere deep in the music of him is a want to be wanted, a need to be needed. The child looking for praise, the teacher basking in students’ upturned eyes, the king demanding glorification, they’re all the same sound. A note of desire for affirmation, a single pure thread of desperation older than the universe.

There must be other notes to him too, he’s one of the more complex and powerful of his people. Celebrimbor can even guess at some of them— neatly kept lab benches, organizing animals by type and property, double entry ledgers, ripping out weeds in a garden, thinking of people as weeds in a garden , certainly, and he has suspicions about the metaphysical overlap between pride and fire his family has so often demonstrated. Admiration just happens to be an easy heartstring to pluck. He so dearly wants to be adored by someone who knows enough to do it right, who understands what he is praising.

Maybe that’s why he let Celebrimbor live; to bear witness to his achievements. The idea doesn’t alleviate his guilt about using that affection to his own ends.

Because I love you, he thinks, because I love you, let’s make this quick.

 

There is a castle town upriver of Lond Daer. Small, mostly a fort on a hill with the added protection of stone walls, an arrangement reminiscent of the turtle-shell keeps that proliferated in the First Age, during that first worst war for elves and men. People sprawl around outside the walls but when times are bad men and beasts withdraw to safety, the pull their herds in, they bar the gate.

This siege arrangement did them little good when Sauron pulled their walls down in a day. Now the buildings leftover— the granary, the smithy, the little castle, sit naked on the hill top.

It’s not a bad castle, Celebrimbor thinks, sitting in one of the bedrooms (it does not have many). These people were not wholly Númenórean but they weren’t untouched by Númenor. They bore her touch in their stone cutting, their brick laying, their hot steel smithing. Those who were able took to their boats and fled to her colony. The remainder surrendered. Annatar is smug about that, about the ease with which he forces the world and it’s people to bend to his whims.

So they’re staying the night in the castle while Annatar doesn’t gloat. A cozy arrangement, thick stone walls affording more privacy than a tent.

As Celebrimbor thinks about the distance to Lond Daer, to the southern pass with Lórinand on the other side, to Galadriel and more carnage, he realizes that it will have to be tonight. The trap is sufficiently baited and there have been enough towns made into turtle soup.

“Do you need help with your hair?” Aydir asks very quietly some minutes after Celebrimbor stops combing. His friend is bringing dinner.

“No,” Celebrimbor runs his fingers through the last few sections. Only a few tangles stand out. He can talk and brush; now that it’s come to it he’s suddenly low on time. “Just lost in old sorrows. This world seems fit to drown in them.”

The children should be fine. Sauron has always treated them with the same casual disdain with which he seems to regard many of his human associates— not all but too many. Unless he’s giving them an order they matter little to him. Goodbyes would only invite suspicion, Sauron does from time to time pluck thoughts straight out of his servants’ minds.

Though he’s resolved to hold his tongue, laconic Aydir has words for him today. Isn’t this how it’s supposed to work, the last great speech with allies before battle?

“You are sad, like the haven elves. I saw that at first. But they don’t have your fire.” Almost as soon as he says it, he looks afraid, more afraid than he’s been in some weeks, though there’s the ever present sensation that he’s afraid for Celebrimbor, not of him.

“I think something put my fire out, soldier.” Finished with his detangling, Celebrimbor unwinds the lost strands from his comb and starts twisting those few, thin hairs into a braid.

Aydir shakes his head very empathetically. “No. It’s in you very slow and steady, like a coal that lasts till morning.”

There’s no room for goodbyes, still, Celebrimbor says, “I hope that you can take away a bit of that fire and keep it until you’re all grown up, you and Tarike and Maha. Fan greater flames when you’re fully adult.”

“We are grown, sir,” Aydir complains. As if he doesn’t still eat like a starving man and fold on new muscle every day. By elven count he wouldn’t even be into his fifties; not yet done growing in body much less in mind. Even humans measure that young. “Maha’s at least twenty!”

That does silence Celebrimbor because, inexperienced as he is with humans, he knows that twenty is of age. It seems, at first, an absurdity, until he realizes his own fault. Short hair does not indicate childhood among all people and humans come in all sizes, even barely up to the ribs. Her careful way of speaking, her incongruous wisdom, the responsibility rested with her, evidence that she is not the child he thought. 

Celebrimbor finishes the braid and casts it into the fire, the way Galadriel always used to with her rare flyaway hairs. “Then she already knows how to carry a decade of grief. She can wait a little longer to burn.”

For a while the boy just watches him, then the crackling fire in the hearth. “I don’t want any more burning. None, at all.” 

Poor thing. These are the lowlands, already deforested by Númenór, yet the smoke has followed them. It clings too, Celebrimbor had a bath earlier and the smell still sticks to his skin. 

Sauron makes his entrance before Celebrimbor can make any false promises. In his hands is a tray with food, he must have waylaid Tarike and taken the meal he was fetching. With a quick nod he dismisses Aydir, who moves speedily to get out of his way, and then he’s at Celebrimbor’s side. 

“Dinner?”

“If you insist,” Celebrimbor sighs and Sauron sits down next to him.

“I truly do. Eat.”

The platter is full of the sort of food they used to eat while working, simple dishes, small bites you could hold in one hand. There’s small slices of toast with salted butter, pared figs, some soft summer cheeses, pickled herring wrapped around olives, and prunes.

Because he wants sweetness in his mouth, Celebrimbor goes for the figs. They’re just overripe, with syrup threatening to overflow from the between the fleshy red strings.

Figs too need wasps, he remembers that much. Nargothrond kept fig trees on the mountain slopes above the city. Finrod had them at his table. Every season, a few weeks before they were ripe, he’d gather Finduilas and Celebrimbor around and cut open a green fig to reveal the dead black insect hidden inside, before telling an impenetrable parable about the cycles of nature.

When he’s swallowed the suddenly too sweet mouthful, Celebrimbor takes a slice of toast. Instead of bringing it to his own mouth he holds it up to Sauron’s.

He takes a bite, though he laughs as he does so. “I’m in no danger of starving.”

“But it grows boring to eat with an uninvested dinner partner,” Celebrimbor argues.

“I do aim to entertain.” Sauron bites the last of the toast away from him.

There’s wine at the table as well, pale gold like Annatar’s hair. Just one cup and a carafe. Celebrimbor pours and then sets the cup in front of Sauron, before taking a small sip from the pitcher itself.

“Perhaps that’s why I’m so bored without you.” With an overexaggerated sigh he leans in closer, rests his head on Sauron’s shoulder.

“You’re in a mood today.” Despite his cautious gaze, Sauron’s smile is pleased. The mood’s work on the face will climb it’s way up to the mind in time; even Sauron, less connected to his raiment than one of the Children is not immune to being influenced by his body. He’ll soften, long as Celebrimbor can keep him smiling. Mirthlessness is not in Annatar’s nature, even when his laughter is cruel it’s still laughter.

“I’m tired.” Simple honesty is better than complex lies. “So very tired.” The weight of existing still bears down on him. This is the fatigue that must have sent Great-grandmother Míriel to her wakeless sleep, a heaviness of limbs and heart. He feels like one of the wandering dead, those houseless spirits and unquiet wights that walked even in sunlight in the last days of Morgoth’s nibbling war. Like them he is driven by an aching purpose.

“Yes, you have done a number on yourself, precious.” Sauron’s reproach is fond, the roaring anger of the first days after Celebrimbor revealed the destruction of the Three has faded to a haze of disappointment. Maybe he too realizes that if Celebrimbor had successfully hidden the last rings he’d already be dead. As easily as Sauron is given to merriment he’s just as quick and wild in his anger. And he hates to be denied.

“I’m tired,” Celebrimbor repeats, not moving his head but grasping at the front of Sauron’s shirt, as if he could yank them closer together. It’s soft, fine fabric, no armor here. “I just want…”

It’s terribly easy to get Sauron to kiss him. Though he claims to have no interest in bodies on their own merit (once, when Celebrimbor asked if he’d ever been friendly with anyone before, Annatar had laughed and said that it was all distasteful flesh; knowing now that the answer came from the Lieutenant of Angband and not one of Aulë’s curious pupils, suspicions arise about the sort of flesh Annatar had access too) he is quick to turn to bodily comforts to soothe Celebrimbor. It’s the same principle he tortures by, he tries to manipulate the body before he can begin to understand the mind. Though it seems counterintuitive, at first, for a being of spirit and will, he has always had a low opinion of incarnates.

Once Celebrimbor was concerned, worried that he was pushing his friend too far, crossing boundaries. That worry had remained even after Annatar’s insistence that he made his choices wholeheartedly, even after the physical evidence piled up that Annatar was far more interested in tawdry matters of flesh than he claimed. Even his flushes, his advances, his startled delight, couldn’t wholly quiet Celebrimbor’s misgivings. On the occasions that they pushed the far edge of friendly intimacy, Celebrimbor had been mindful for signs that he was unwanted.

Now he feels no guilt, not even a second of hesitation as he drags Sauron further into his embrace. This must be how Lúthien felt before the dark throne, like a steel wire cage, strong and empty.

They end up horizontal on the rough wooden bench, a position so awkward that Celebrimbor doesn’t have to suggest moving; Annatar scoops him up like a sack of coal and deposits both of them on the bed. This is the best bedroom in this little castle and the bed is the centerpiece of the room. The lumpy mattress wheezes goose down dust and the thick counterpane is dyed a vivid shade of scarlet to match the hangings.

The swirl of red makes the thinned down creature Annatar became even more striking. There’s no friendly softness to him anymore, no easy angles. The wrist Celebrimbor catches in his hand feels bony to the point of danger. If he were not the exact thing he is Celebrimbor would want to take him to a healer.

But there’s no remedy for the soul-parasite Sauron has saddled himself with, and frankly Celebrimbor has no room to judge. He’s gotten skinnier in captivity too, inactivity eating at his muscles, lack of interest diminishing his appetite. They’re just two misericordes locked together now, spare metal with killing points.

He thinks the trickiest part is going to be pinning Sauron down but he goodnaturedly tolerates the weight of Celebrimbor’s body, the hands grabbing his to trap them. His loose posture suggests that he sees little danger in letting himself be held down. It’s probably true that Celebrimbor couldn’t kill him, even like this. Good thing that’s not what he has in mind. 

The kisses start migrating, Celebrimbor lays a cluster at the corner of Annatar’s jaw, another two at his collarbone, one very gently at the tip of his nose. He pulls Sauron’s wrist to his mouth and nibbles, thinking about the tender arteries beneath the skin. 

The hand at his lips is Sauron’s ring hand. With just an exploratory nuzzle he finds the Ring and kisses it too, gratified by how red the sudden touch turns Sauron’s ears. He may have sheared himself to pieces but the chunks remain connected. Just as his veil is more a piece of himself than he likes to admit, so too is this ring. 

There is a piece of him in there, trapped in cool metal, thrumming against Celebrimbor’s skin. More than Celebrimbor ever fed into the Three. Perhaps it’s even the part Celebrimbor misses, the flashes of self-awareness Annatar sometimes displayed, gone now, the joy in beauty, the harsh kindness. The idea makes it easy to curl his tongue around the gold, to try to warm it with his body heat to no avail. 

“Celebrimbor,” Sauron sighs, all in an exhale.

Celebrimbor looks at him, his lovely, loved face, even now fair. “It is beautiful,” he admits. “It’s you, isn’t it? It’s forever been you.”

“I had so hoped you’d see.” Though the Ring remains cool Annatar is a soft pink all over, just as undone by this as he was by their first giggly assignations. 

Talking to him hurts so instead Celebrimbor pops the finger, Sauron’s ring finger, fully into his mouth, letting wetness replace words. It works too, he shivers, soft and pliant as molten metal, barely holding his shape. 

There is a gracelessness to having someone else’s hand in your mouth. The base of the tongue, the back of the throat, these are not places fingers were meant to be. It’s tricky, getting deep enough for his teeth to scrape the Ring without gagging.

To lessen the distance between them Celebrimbor swaps hands, so he’s pinning Sauron’s left wrist to the red bedspread with his crosswise hand, holding his ring-hand to his mouth with the other. The tangle of limbs lets him rest his forearm on Sauron’s sternum, so they’re nose-to-nose. Pulling his plan together feels like choreography, so many body parts to organize. The flowering anxiety in his stomach is briefly offset when Sauron leans forward to press a brief kiss to Celebrimbor’s philtrum, the only part of his mouth accessible with the hand occupying him.

What was a good angle? He’s never done anything like this before. But joints are joints, they have a machine-like reliability. It’s easy to find the give just above the knuckle, below where the Ring sits.

When it happens it must happen all at once. The arm resting lightly on Sauron’s breastbone moves up and then sharply down, so it’s pressing into his throat hard enough to choke. Celebrimbor pulls back even as Sauron, sensing a threat in the press of teeth, flails , tries to headbutt him and is foiled by the abrupt distance and the arm choking him. He manages to get his ringless left hand free of Celebrimbor’s crushing grip seconds too late.

With premolars and the right leverage it’s not hard to bite off a finger. Celebrimbor bites right through the skin, tastes the sudden flood of ocean bright blood, then grits his way through the tendons, yanking the digit free of Sauron’s hand with a single, full-body jerk.

Sauron doesn’t scream but he does make a noise deep in his throat, somewhere between an animal groan and a whimper, made deeper by the pressure on his windpipe. And then it’s over, the red bedding is stained a deeper rust color, there’s a severed finger and a Ring of Power in Celebrimbor’s mouth, and they’re staring at each other, panting unevenly, eyes wide, both caught in the shock of after.

He expected Sauron would go for his throat, that’s why, preemptively, Celebrimbor has an arm threatening to cut off his air. Instead he just watches, pale as a ghost, eyes tracking Celebrimbor’s frantic gaze, the gush of blood that falls from his lips when he parts them slightly.

“What exactly,” Sauron says after what feels like an eternity of gasping, “Were you planning to do next?”

He would have preferred bloodthirsty to furiously curious. There are questions Celebrimbor hasn’t gotten around to asking himself yet. Besides, he can’t very well answer in this state. His mouth is full.

It takes some coordination of tongue and teeth to separate the Ring from the severed finger. He spits out the lone digit, which falls onto Sauron’s stomach, but still has blood and metal staying his tongue. Sauron, never one to waste an audience even when he’s held down and injured, continues heedless.

“I mean, you could swallow it, but I wouldn’t even have to cut you open to remedy that problem. Time would messily put everything to right. And you really can’t keep it in your mouth forever.” He’s wrapping his injury up in the hem of his shirt, is exerting pressure. Impossible to say if the bleeding is slowing, there’s so much of it already soaked through both of them, but it keeps his hands busy. He’s always needed something to do as he talked.

“You know how they work,” Sauron adds. “The only injury you’ve dealt me is this one,” he holds his wounded hand a little higher, then winces.

Celebrimbor, with the Ring at the tip of his tongue, can only glare. Then, slowly, watching Sauron, he lifts his free hand to his mouth.

The Rings of Power only work on someone’s finger. There was discussion, early in their design, of the ideal mechanics of a magic ring and it was agreed that there ought to be an off-state, a way to quickly stop the magic and just as quickly start it. If they responded to the touch of skin, or a command, or any of the other offered alternatives, it would be too easy to accidentally activate them, too difficult to carry them around.

They tested them extensively with the help of one of Celeborn’s hunters, who lost a hand to orcs in Nargothrond and wore a wooden replacement. When Galacham could put one of the prototypes on his oaken finger and turn invisible then take his hand off his arm and flicker back into sight, they counted their work complete. Sauron’s ring was made to the same specifications as the others so Celebrimbor’s plan had started and stopped at “get it off his hand”.

Perhaps, in his dearest dreams, he’d hoped that there would be a blink of magic and Annatar would come back into view. A foolish, desperate thought. Annatar is right in front of him, bloodless lips quirked in a smile, staring at Celebrimbor’s mouth like there’s something there to devour. It was Annatar’s hand he just maimed.

Now, well past crunch-time, he must face the only path forward.

“Now that seems reckless, doesn’t it?” Sauron blinks in panic as Celebrimbor reaches inside his own mouth. “Really, do you think my best work doesn’t know it’s master?”

If the little whispers filling Celebrimbor’s head since he first touched the cursed thing are proof then it is not loyal. It has been singing of glory, of Ost-in-Edhil built high again. All great deeds that a shambling revenant has no place in. Celebrimbor’s experience with great rings and the pale, pillowy haze of sorrow dulling his mind make these shining dreams feel false. There’s no place for optimism and the sparkle of gold anymore so he ignored the failed seduction, the same way he’s been ignoring the plaintive cries of stone and the smell of ash and the ache in his wounds.

The Ring will have another master though. It wriggles for one, weighing heavy on Celebrimbor’s tongue to make sure he doesn’t forget its presence. It wants to be worn, seen, loved, desired. Every needy plane of Annatar’s soul is reflected here, distorted by the curve of gold and the binding words etched into it.

He’s come this far, what’s one more wretched choice? Wraith or Ringbearer at least there will be a conclusion.

Sauron is still cradling his injured hand tight to slow the bleeding. He finally lunges, too late, trying to wrench Celebrimbor’s hand away from his open mouth. He’s stronger, yes, but his grip is slippery with blood, and Celebrimbor only has to make it another few inches to reach his ends.

The ring is on his finger and the world blazes anew.

 

There is a moment in every relationship when you first feel the sting of recognition, when the illusions of politeness first fade and you grasp, however fleetingly, that the person before you is just as real as you are.

Annatar seemed more an ideal or a promise than a person for some months after his arrival in Eregion. All the sky-high hope and curdled nostalgia for Valinor and shining pride of the city settled around him in a cloak of expectations. The Valar had not written them off, they were wanted, they were still full of potential for greatness even on this abandoned shore. Until they came to know him as himself and not as an emissary he was not Annatar, he was Aulendil.

For Celebrimbor illumination came before dawn one morning when he went into the workshop (it was best to have someone senior supervising at all times, for the littlest smiths were also the most foolhardy— there was a biweekly schedule for apprentice minding) only to find Annatar alone at in front of a jeweler’s bench, surrounded by broken glass and droplets of liquid as black as the void. He was picking up the scattered shards with his bare hands and as Celebrimbor entered he smiled.

“Excellent— I need to know where the broom cupboard is.”

Celebrimbor went and fetched two, there was enough glass to merit lending a hand and it gave him an excuse to talk. “You’ve had an exciting night.”

“Mmm. I had a very convincing theory about the nature of the Palantiri; disproven now, I suppose. Unless you think Fëanor had access to raw unlight and containers capable of holding it during the brightest age of Aman.”

In Celebrimbor’s recollections Fëanor was more interesting in catching light than its absence. Still the theory does make some sacrilegious sense— the place outside of the world is said to be everywhere and nowhere, absorbing what the Palantiri reflect.

“If such darkness existed back then, I never saw it.” It was nice to talk about his grandfather without fear of judgement. Perhaps he should have been afraid, Annatar was supposed to be a messenger from the very gods Fëanor had scorned, but his matter-of-fact questions carried none of the awkward codices so often attached to conversations about Celebrimbor’s kin.

“That makes sense,” Annatar mused, “Still, it was a very convincing idea.”

The last of the glass was off the floor now and the not-quite-unlight was wiped up. They’d have to burn the rags, just to be safe. “The ideas we have in the middle of the night are always convincing, at least until dawn breaks.” It was remarkably easy to chastise someone as old as the universe like he was another colleague brewing mad experiments at midnight. Which… he was, technically.

The realization that Annatar, who shone like a forge fire and looked so trustworthy it instantly raised eyebrows, was as prone to inopportune and misguided acts of science as the rest of them, froze Celebrimbor in his tracks. How many times had he been scolded for testing an theory without backup?

“Next time I’ll wait until morning before I break your glassware,” Annatar promised, featherlight, and for a moment Celebrimbor knew him entirely.

 

I know you, Celebrimbor thinks with the Ring red-hot on his finger and Sauron pressing down on his throat. I know you and it doesn’t change a thing. 

For the first time in months he feels horribly, miserably alive.

---

Chapter End Notes

So the seed of this was a story by simaethae where I thought "I want Celebrimbor to bite the One Ring off his finger like a terrible Gollum" and everything spiralled from there.

Thanks to everyone who helped me talk over ideas for this and tol-himling who was betaing it before I panicked and just posted it.

I posted an extra bit of Maha backstory on my tumblr (https://herenortherenearnorfar.tumblr.com/post/658349753842778112/im-waiting-on-a-proofread-on-my-long-fic-but) along with some character design stuff. I'll probably post my mega-document of planning and language design at some point as well.