Unhappy Into Woe by StarSpray

Thus came they unhappy into woe,
to dungeons no hope nor glimmer know,
where chained in chains that eat the flesh
and woven in webs of strangling mesh
they lay forgotten, in despair.
- The Lay of Leithian, Canto VII

- - 

TA 2840

They caught him off guard and unaware, orcs melting out of the mists in the Anduin Vale as dusk faded into night. Maglor had known, of course, that dark things crept beneath the trees of Mirkwood, but he had not thought they would find him so far from the forest’s eaves. His sword had been lost long ago, washed away into the depths of the Sea, and it had been even longer since he had engaged in any real fighting—and so the orcs took him, though they did not kill him. They bound him instead with rough cords that bit into his skin, burning when he struggled and tried to twist out of them. They gagged him, too, after his shouts made their ears bleed and sent one running and shrieking into the river to be taken by the current, shoving dirty rags into his mouth until he nearly choked, and wrapping another cord around his head to keep him from spitting them out. 

He was too big to carry, so the orcs dragged him, first through the tall grass and then over dirt and leaves and roots that caught and tore at his already-worn clothing, and scraped his skin raw. Darkness closed over them like a solid thing as they passed into the forest. Maglor flinched away from the thoughts of the trees as they pressed down upon him, dark and terrible and somehow sickly, though their trunks and branches were strong and solid. There was little in the way of underbrush, but it was still impossible to see very far through the gloom beneath the trees. Above and on the sides of the paths that the orcs took, thick rope-like spiderwebs hung, tattered and tangled, old now and unused. But even through the darkness Maglor saw the occasional flurry of movement, and the chittering of spiders. The orcs moved quickly, and did not linger in any one place for very long, and did not give Maglor any chance at all of escape. 

The trees fell away suddenly, though it remained dark, heavy clouds hovering low in the sky over the bare hill and land surrounding. The earth was rutted and pitted, and nothing grew there. Upon the hill stood a fortified tower. Once it had been a fair place; Maglor did not know who had dwelt there, but he could see Elvish hands in the tower’s construction, though it was darkened now, turned ugly and broken by the Necromancer who dwelt within. He thought of fair Minas Tirith on Tol Sirion that his cousin had built, and the place of horror that it had later become. 

A chill hovered over the place, sinking through his skin into his bones as he was dragged inside and through the dark corridors. Torches cast dim, flickering red light, and the air smelled of pitch and smoke, and of other worse things. Maglor felt also a growing sense of dread that seemed to be pressing upon him from the outside. He tried again to free himself, but a blow to his stomach from an iron-booted foot had him choking, struggling to breathe through his nose as bile burned the back of his throat. 

His legs were unbound before the orcs hauled him to his feet outside of a large hall. The ceiling vanished into darkness; braziers lit the room only a little better than the torches, and offered no warmth. Upon a dais at the far end sat a throne, and upon the throne sat—or did not sit—a figure, robed in black, face hidden in the shadows of a deep cowl—but for two eyes that burned like points of red flame. There were other figures flanking him, and standing around the perimeter of the room. Maglor could feel the orcs tremble as they pushed him foreword. He stumbled on numb feet, and felt the cold gaze of the four figures around the room focused upon him, and he knew them for what they had once been: kings of Men, great kings once, fallen somehow under this Necromancer’s sway and tied to him beyond the bounds of their mortal lives. 

As for their master: Maglor knew him too, as he was forced to his knees, falling hard on the cold stones of the floor. His thoughts before of Tol-in-Gaurhoth had been more apt than he’d realized, Maglor thought as he gazed into the darkness where Sauron’s face should have been. There was the ghost of a face there, a suggestion of the form he might yet take should he grow strong enough again. He thought again of Finrod, who had battled and lost. Maglor was a mightier singer than his cousin (or he had been, once), but he was weakened now, battered and bruised, and weary from long years of wandering in loneliness and in grief, and with neither any great cause nor allies, nor friends to support him.

Fear was their weapon, both Sauron’s and the dead kings’, alongside despair, and Maglor felt both pressing in on him, clutching at his throat like icy fingers, sliding down his spine like drops of freezing water. He tried to speak, though what he wished to say he did not know, but the gag in his mouth kept him silent. 

Sauron leaned forward in his seat. It was carved of ancient wood, in patterns of vines and leaves, and once a fair Elvenking had sat there. Now, like the tower, parts of it were broken, and the precious stones and metal inlays had been gouged out, leaving deep scratches, like scarred wounds. His gaze pierced Maglor, sharp as knives and as painful. Maglor squared his shoulders as best he could with his arms and wrists bound behind his back, and met that gaze with all the defiance that he could muster within himself. 

In response, Sauron laughed. It was a deep and cold sound that shuddered through Maglor’s very bones. The orcs cowered and gibbered, shrinking back and leaving him kneeling alone before the dais. “An unexpected prize, indeed,” he said, satisfaction rumbling through every word, his voice like stones grinding against one another, like the crackle of fire in a forge—or a dragon’s throat. “It has been sung that the Great Sea drowned your voice long ago, Maglor son of Fëanor.” He leaned back in his seat, regarding Maglor as a cat might regard a freshly caught mouse. “I am glad to see that it is not so.” Then he spoke a word in his own foul speech that shivered through the air and unraveled the cord holding the gag in Maglor’s mouth, and unraveled too the dirty cloths stuffed into his mouth, so that they fell in a tangled pile of thread on his knees. Maglor shut his mouth tightly, swallowing hard and trying to regain some moisture on his tongue. “Won’t you sing us a song, minstrel? Let us hear whether your voice is still as mighty as history has made it.”

It was a trap—an invitation to enter into a song battle not unlike that between Sauron and Finrod so long ago. And for a moment Maglor was tempted, oh so tempted. He could scream a single note that would bring the walls crashing down all around them—or so Sauron wanted him to believe. But after Finrod, after Lúthien, would Sauron really be so careless as to risk his fortress in such a way? No. But his invitation had the weight of a command, and with the force of his will behind it. Maglor could feel it pressing on him as the silence stretched taut between them, like a string that would soon snap. 

But he had not spent years beyond count beside the Sea without learning anything from it. In the Sea could still be heard the Music that shaped the world—and Maglor had learned, too, of the Ainulindalë long ago at the feet of those who had seen and heard and sung. He had learned of all the Themes, and he had listened to the echoes of them in each wave that crashed against the rocky shores, and in the whisper of the tide as it flowed gently over soft white sand. He knew well, too, the discord of Melkor, for he had battled it for centuries, and listened to its echoes for even longer. 

So he did not meet Sauron’s challenge with a mighty swelling of his own power, as Finrod had once done in Tol-en-Gaurhoth. Instead he began to sing a low, soft song, not of breaking chains or escaping imprisonment, but of jagged stones smoothed to pebbles by flowing water, of winter melting into spring, of cracks in hard stone where flowers took root and bloomed on barren cliff sides. He sang of raindrops on rose petals and of mist hovering over streams, of the colors changing in fall and barren branches in winter—and of budding leaves coming again every spring, without fail. 

It did not take long for Sauron to realize what he was doing, and he leaped to his feet, voice booming out in his own Song, of breaking stone and grinding ice and blood on the quays of Alqualondë and Sirion, of unnumbered dead piled upon the Haudh-en-Ndengin. Of fire and molten stone bubbling up from deep within the earth to consume all that it touched. Of chasms lit from below with fire and doom. Of children stolen from their homes, and the betrayal of friends and of kin. 

But Maglor had sung of all those things before himself, and had endured the weight of them for thousands of years of the sun, and Sauron could not use them to break him as he had once broken Finrod. He kept singing, weaving his own small quiet melody through the cacophony of Sauron’s voice, of snowfall after fire, and saplings springing from ashy soil. And the Sea. He sang of the Sea, of its crashing waves and their smaller, whispering counterparts passing swiftly and gently over bare feet in soft sand. He did not sing of the jewel-strewn strands of Valinor, but the weather-worn coasts of Middle-earth where he had wandered for so long, learning their ways and their rhythms; and he sang of the gulls whose tongues he had learned, and of the crabs and the urchins and starfish that could be found in tide pools at times, where dark seaweed clung to grey stones. He did not seek to overpower the louder song, but he took its beats for his own and undercut its most powerful notes with the softer tones of his own voice. 

Back and forth they sang, for what felt like many hours, but may have only been minutes. Maglor’s throat burned with the effort, and the force of Sauron’s will beat upon him like a scorching desert sun, like the weight of mountains bearing down on his shoulders, like waves of cold water rushing up and around him to both freeze and drown him. 

Then Sauron ended his Song with a great shout that shook the very foundations of Dol Guldur, and struck Maglor like a physical blow. Pain burst upon him, and he knew no more. 

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Maglor woke to darkness and to cold. His head throbbed, and he shuddered as he curled in on himself as best he could—which made the chains binding his wrists to the wall somewhere over his head rattle. The iron of the manacles was cold as ice, and bit painfully into his skin. His throat hurt, too, and his mouth was dry, lips chapped and peeling. The stone floor and wall were cold, too, and it was very dark. It was impossible to tell how long he had been there, or even where there was. Somewhere beneath Dol Guldur, of course, but how far down, and whether there was any hope of seeing sunlight again…

A scream, either far away or muffled by thick stone, made Maglor jump, jerking his chains. It was a terrible sound, all drawn out agony that then cut off abruptly. And now that he was listening he heard other voices. Weeping, crying out, pleading. There were elven voices, and what words he caught were in a tongue strange to him. That of the Woodelves, he thought. Elves who had once, perhaps, called this place home, and now found it a place of imprisonment and torment. And others he thought belonged to Men, taken from the small settlements of woodmen who dwelt near the forest and the River. He shuddered again, from cold and from growing fear that he could not banish. There had never really been hope for escape—not since he had entered this place—but it was one thing to be defiant in front of an audience, and quite another alone in the deep cold darkness. Maglor could do almost anything in front of an audience, even if that audience was only the stars.

After a time, Maglor sat up. He felt dizzy, and somehow not being able to see made it worse. He closed his eyes and leaned back against the cold stone wall. Once he felt as though he knew which way was up again, he tugged experimentally on the chains, and followed them to where they were secured firmly into the stone. After a little more time, he stood, finding the ceiling high enough for him to do so but not by much. He found the next wall a few steps over, but its opposite was out of the reach of his chains, in spite of their seemingly generous length. He could not reach the opposite of the wall to which he was chained, either, and so he could not tell how large the room—the cell—truly was. A cold draft came from somewhere over his head, and the air was damp. He was shivering before too long, and retreated into the corner where he could curl up with the assurance that, at least, nothing would come for him from behind.

It was a very long time before someone came. In that time the draft from above came and went. Screams and cries rose and died away. Harsh voices echoed in and around them as orcs went about their foul work, laughing and singing their own discordant songs. Maglor slept, and dreamed unsettling dreams that faded like mist upon awakening, which brought only darkness and silence. No one brought him food or water, and he grew weak with hunger and thirst. But he made no sound. He did not call out—it would be better, he thought, to fade away from starvation than to face whatever the orcs’ attention brought. It would be a mercy, and so he did not expect it. Sauron would not let him go so easily. He had not been tossed away to be forgotten—not Maglor son of Fëanor. What Sauron did want from him remained to be seen. 

At last, the door opened. The light from the torches was dim, flickering red, but still Maglor turned his face away, closing his eyes against the sudden blinding brightness after so long in utter darkness. He resisted when rough hands seized him, hauling him up. The chains were released from his manacles, but others replaced them, and he stumbled on weak legs and numb feet when his captors—Men, this time, not orcs—pushed and yanked him toward the door. There were more torches, and lamps, and the light hurt, even as it was a welcome relief from the dark. Maglor flinched away from the lamplight, and his hair fell across his face. He glimpsed a corridor, carved into the stone rather than built up like the rest of the tower above, with dark doorways carved into the sides with no particular pattern. Then he was pulled into another room, large and cavernous, lit by many torches and braziers so that the chill was chased away so thoroughly that it was almost too warm—and that just thickened the metallic smell of blood until Maglor nearly gagged on it. The floor was stained rusty brown, and there were patches of fresher, slicker blood near the doorway. It was splashed onto the walls, and across the many and varied instruments that lay strewn across benches and hung from the walls and ceiling. 

Maglor resisted, then, but his feet slid across the slick floor as he was dragged to the center of the room. Hooks on chains hung from the ceiling, and he realized what was going to happen moments before his captors started to raise his arms. He swung at them, knocking one to the floor, and turned to flee—he didn’t care where he went, as long as it was away from there—but he got only a few steps out into the dark corridor before they seized him again, shouting both at him and at one another. Maglor twisted out of their grasp, but he’d forgotten his ankles were chained, and he fell hard onto the cold stone floor when it caught at him. As they descended upon him he twisted around, kicking and clawing, drawing blood but unable to break free. There were orcs among them now, and not only Men, and they were crueler in their kicking and striking, stopping short of a full beating only when shouted at to do so.

They dragged him back into the blood soaked room, tearing the remnants of his clothes off as they did so, and hoisted him up onto one of the chains, arms yanked roughly over his head, his feet only just touching the ground—until someone pulled the chain again and he was raised up several inches, all his weight now on his wrists, the iron biting cruelly into his skin. His feet kicked out instinctively, though there was nothing to hit, as he thought of Maedhros and wondered, for a hysterical moment, if Sauron would have him hauled up to the tower’s ramparts when his servants were finished in the dungeons, and leave Maglor hanging there as his brother had once hung from Thangorodrim.

He heard the whip crack before he felt the strike, a line of burning, searing pain across his lower back. A cry escaped before he could catch it, but he bit the inside of his cheek hard before the next blow fell, and kept silent. There was no rhythm or pattern to the blows, nothing to anticipate or be inured to. Blood trickled down his legs to pool on the floor beneath him. Maglor’s head hung forward, his hair in front of his face—a small mercy, that his face was hidden from his tormentors as he grimaced and ground his teeth and bit his lip until it too bled. His eyes screwed shut against the pain that after a time did not fade between blows. His whole back was a mess of burning lines and slick blood and torn skin. All the while the orcs laughed and jeered at him in their own tongue. 

It went on like that for hours, with no apparent point to any of it. He was asked no questions, had no demands made of him. The orcs just wanted to hear him scream, and complained bitterly when he would not give them the satisfaction. The Men were there, it seemed, to keep the orcs in check. 

All at once it stopped, and the chains were loosened, so that Maglor crashed to the ground, knees buckling. He landed hard on his shoulder, and only narrowly avoided smashing his face into the stone. “Watch his hands,” someone barked, as an iron-booted foot came very closed to crushing his fingers. Maglor could hardly hear over the ringing in his ears and his own harsh gasps, and he curled in on himself with a breathless grunt when that same foot kicked at his stomach. The blood pooled on the ground smeared across his skin, and he could taste it on his lips. The smell was thick in the air. 

He heard the pop of a cork and then something was poured all down his back. It burned, and he cried out, jerking and arching away, but someone grabbed his hair, and someone else his wrists, and held him in place as more burning liquid was poured down his back. He could feel the skin knitting back together, barely-healed scars, and it hurt—almost worse than the blows themselves had. Someone raised his head and poured something else—or perhaps the same stuff—down his throat. It was like swallowing fire, and he choked, only swallowing most of it because an orc clamped a hand over his mouth to keep him from spitting it out. 

Then they dragged him back to the dark cell and tossed him in, wrists and ankles still shackled but not this time to the wall, and slammed the door shut behind him. There was the creak of rusted metal as a key turned, and then silence. 

Slowly, Maglor pushed himself to his hands and knees, and then sat. He touched what part of his back he could reach, and though his fingers came away bloody, he did not touch open wounds. They were tender, and his whole body hurt—it burned and it ached with each breath he took—but it was not as bad as it could have been. 

Sauron wanted him in one piece. Maglor did not want to think about why.

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Sleep eventually claimed him, and he dreamed. In the dream Maglor walked along the beach—but it was not the coast of Middle-earth that he knew so well by now, having wandered it for years uncounted. The sand glittered with diamonds and rubies and emeralds, long washed by the water into tiny shimmering grains, so that it seemed that he walked on a rainbow, lit by the Treelight spilling out of the Calacirya behind him. Over his head the stars glimmered, and before him the Bay of Eldamar was smooth and quiet, its waves like gentle whispers over the sand. So different from Belegaer whose ways he knew so much better now. 

Maglor turned away from the water, but as he did so the Light went out, and before him, blocking the way to the Calacirya and beloved Tirion beyond, stood a tall and dark figure, shrouded in black, face hidden. Without thinking Maglor stepped back, splashing into the water. But when he looked down it was not water but blood, foaming pink around his ankles—and he was splattered with it, as though he’d just come from battle, though he wore no armor and bore no weapons. 

When he looked up again, the figure thrust out a hand towards him, and in a voice that echoed off of the Sea and off of the Mountains, spoke: On the House of Fëanor the wrath of the Valar lieth from the West unto the uttermost East; the Dispossessed shall they be for ever. Not even the echo of your lamentation shall pass over the mountains. 

Utter darkness fell, then. The stars went out. The waves were silenced. A cold wind blew—and Maglor woke up, alone in the dark deep beneath the tower of Dol Guldur, and knew that he was utterly forsaken.

He lay on the cold stone and drifted, not quite sleeping but not quite waking. He heard others crying out, and he heard the stones beneath him lamenting what this place had become. Once they had been the foundation for a place full of light and laughter, for merry Elves to dance beneath the stars and sing under the sun. When Maglor dozed he sometimes dreamed of them—but then the darkness came, a sickness in the trees and the scuttling of too-big spiders, spinning webs to snare even the most careful of travelers. He woke to the feeling of being bound in sticky ropes more than once, though it faded quickly into the bite of cold iron. 

Time passed, and he could not keep track of it. The orcs came back to beat him whenever they seemed to feel like it, though he went long stretches without hearing the key in the lock, left alone to shiver and listen to others put to torment, and wondering if he had been forgotten. He was fed sporadically, and when he refused to eat the orcs came to pour more of that fiery, sour liquid down his throat. 

Then the Wraiths came. Nazgûl, Maglor heard them called among the orcs, who fell to quiet muttering when one came down into the dungeons, and went about their business with bowed heads and little of the savage joy they usually took in devising torments to make their victims scream. Maglor still kept silent, grinding his teeth and biting the inside of his mouth bloody—he could not escape, he could not resist, but he could at least deprive them of that satisfaction. 

Then a Nazgûl entered the chamber. Maglor lay strapped to a table, though he could not have moved even if he wished. The air seemed to grow even colder as he opened his eyes to see the ghostly form of an old king with a broken crown, sitting atop his head like the ruin of an ancient fortress on a hill. To the orcs he looked like no more than a dark figure in a black robe, but they knew that he was more than that—more and less. He wielded terrible power, but he was held to the world by the merest of threads. Should his master fall, he would fade away into nothing. Maglor was not even sure that he would pass beyond the Circles of the World as Men were meant to do, or if he had been so distorted and diminished that even that way was closed to him. 

When the wraith spoke, his voice was thin and harsh, like a bitter wind blowing through a broken window. “The Dark Lord is not unmerciful. He offers you respite, if you will join yourself to him. Dispossessed you have been, but a prince you may be again—or a king—and the power and splendor of your voice will be heard from the farthest eastern lands even unto the uttermost West.”

How little Sauron knew of him, to think that he would yield to an offer like that. “I pity you,” Maglor whispered. His voice was a shadow of its former self, his throat aching and dry from lack of water and the effort it took to keep silent. His laps were even drier, and they cracked as he spoke, and blood smeared over them and onto his tongue, bitter and metallic. “Was it worth it, whatever he gave you, to become like this?”

The wraith drew back with a hissing sound, fury radiating from it, so cold that it burned. Maglor closed his eyes. Whatever befell him, at least it would not be that. 

Sauron himself came, after the orcs moved him to a chair, binding his arms tight behind his back so his shoulders ached, and chaining his ankles to the floor, lest he got any ideas of fighting back. Sauron was little more, still, than a wraith himself. But not quite the same—he was a flame to the killing frost of the Nazgûl. Maglor did not look up when he entered the room. He had not the strength to lift his head. Sauron swept forward, dark robes whispering over the stone, and grasped him by the hair, pulling his head up and back so that he had no choice but to meet that terrible, burning gaze. There was no real face, and so it bore no real expression, and Maglor could not see what lay behind those awful eyes. 

“I am surprised,” said Sauron, his voice like crackling flame and grinding stones. “I had not thought to see such defiance in you, the last and least of the Sons of Fëanor.” Maglor said nothing. “Do you think you have suffered here? You have not—not yet. You could avoid it altogether, too, if you would but consent to serve me. I will need a pretty minstrel for my court, when my time comes. Would you not like that, Canafinwë Macalaurë? To be adorned in jewels and given your choice of instruments with which to dazzle your audience, such as you had once, long ago in the Undying West? The Straight Road is closed to you, but you and I could build something even greater here.”

“I have lost my taste for jewels,” Maglor said, and Sauron laughed. It was an ugly sound, and he shuddered, turning his face away. Sauron turned it back, grip tightening on his hair until strands tore from his scalp. 

“Your nephew was bolder,” he said, and Maglor’s blood ran cold. He had heard distant tales of Celebrimbor’s city, of its splendor—and its fall. He had heard that Celebrimbor had died in its defense, and he had wept long for him. “He raged and he shouted and he sang—but he gave me what I wanted in the end. The Rings that we had made, he surrendered at last.” And he put into Maglor’s mind images of Celebrimbor’s torment, of his body broken and bruised, bloodied, his eyes glazed with pain and unseeing as he screamed. The screams, too, Sauron gave to Maglor, and he jerked in his bonds, crying out himself at the sound of his nephew pleading for an end to it all.

The sounds faded and the images darkened, and Maglor was left staring up at Sauron’s eyes, tears falling from his own. “I don’t believe you,” he said when he could master his voice. “He did not give you all that you wanted.” For Sauron was a liar—and yet he had betrayed himself, an echo of his last demands ringing behind Celebrimbor’s cries and the awful, deliberate snapping of finger bones. “He did not surrender the Three, and they are for ever beyond your reach.” Maglor did not know what was so important about the Rings, or what they did, or why Sauron so desperately wanted them, but he knew that. Wherever they were, Sauron would never find them.

The blow to his face was unexpected, and snapped his head to the side. His ears rang with it, and he tasted fresh blood as his lip split open against his teeth. “Celebrimbor was a fool,” Sauron said, fury restrained behind a mask of calm. One more image he put into Maglor’s mind, of Celebrimbor’s corpse mounted on a standard and raised above the armies of Mordor as they marched out of the ruin of Ost-in-Edhil. Arrows pierced his already broken body, and slowly thickening blood dripped bit by bit onto the standard bearers below, who jeered and laughed as they marched. Somewhere in the forests of Eregion ahead of them were those who had fled the city, and those who had come to help them, who had then found themselves caught between the mountains and certain death. They would see Sauron’s new standard, and despair.

Maglor had not heard what became of those who had escaped Eregion, if indeed any really had. He closed his eyes against the furious satisfaction in Sauron’s, and said nothing.

Sauron regarded him for what felt like a very long time. Finally, he turned and spoke to the orcs waiting outside, in that terrible grating language that felt like claws being scraped over Maglor’s skin. In the Common tongue at the end, he added, “Leave him his tongue, and leave him his hands. I will have him serve me yet.” And with that he swept out, leaving Maglor shuddering and shivering in the sudden cold of his absence, and with tears still falling as the echo of Celebrimbor’s last days played over and over through his mind. The orcs came back in but the fun had gone out of his torment for the moment, so all they did was drag him back to his dark cell after pouring one of those awful burning draughts down his throat. 

Alone in the dark, Maglor curled in on himself and wept all over again for Celebrimbor, for Tyelpë who had been the best of them, who had tried to build something beautiful out of the ashes of the War of Wrath, and who had been rewarded only with darkness and torment and death. His tears ended only with exhaustion that dragged him down into dark dreams—of fire sweeping through holly groves and across the plains of Ard Galen and the Gap long ago; he kept trying to outrun them, but he could feel the heat beating at his heels, and hear laughter in the roar of the flames. There was someone ahead that he was trying to find. His brothers, perhaps? But they were already gone, lost in Doriath and at Sirion and at the very end of the world, and there was no one else. He tried to turn towards the Sea, but it was also out of reach, beyond mountains and beyond the flames, its music also lost to him for ever. 

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Left alone again for such long stretches of time—Sauron seemed in no hurry—Maglor’s despair began to harden. It did not transform into something else. He did not hope for escape or for rescue. But he began to think that even there, in the dark, he might do some small harm to the Enemy. He began to sing again, very quietly, scarcely above a whisper lest his jailers hear. But he sang of roots sinking into stone, of water finding the cracks in foundations, of freezing and thawing over the many changes of seasons, slowly, slowly wearing away, of heavy chains slowly rusting, of the ever-marching years and ever-changing seasons. He could feel his words sinking into the stones, who drank in his voice, weak and hoarse though it was, like tree roots taking in water after a long drought. 

Maybe it wasn’t enough to make any real difference. Maybe he did not have enough of his own power left. But it was something, and it was better than silence. He sang until his voice dried up entirely, and he couldn’t even scream when the orcs came back to put him to more torment. And when he got it back he started all over again. 

When the orcs came for him, more often than not now one of the Nazgûl was with them. They did not do anything but watch—watch, and press their will upon Maglor. He could feel it, like icy fingers reaching for him, tracing down his spine even as the whips laid fire over his skin. They were there to watch him break, Maglor knew. He could feel their satisfaction every time a hoarse scream was torn from his throat, every time a sob was choked out of him. 

The orcs obeyed their master and left his hands alone, but not his arms, or his legs. They took wicked rusted knives and carved ugly things into them, words in some crude script, or else symbols, or else meaningless shapes meant only to disfigure and make him howl. A whip caught his face once, leaving a welt that tore open when he was thrown against rough stone. They tore at his hair and sawed it off by the fistful. They beat him until he felt his bones crack, until he coughed up blood, and then they left him alone in the dark and the cold for them to mend, slowly, while he wandered in dark dreams. 

The dreams were the worst, perhaps. He did not know which ones were put into his mind by Sauron and which came from his own mind, but it did not matter. In many of them he stood at the edge of the Sea, but it was silent, despite the waves that beat against the jagged and broken shore. The light was flickering and red, appearing and disappearing from different places behind him as the land shifted—also silent, though in reality it had been a terrible, cacophonous thing, groaning and roaring by turns, chasms opening to fire and molten stone and then sealing up again when seawater rushed in, hissing and steaming to freeze the magma that rose up like blood welling from a wound. 

He kept looking for Maedhros. Kept seeing him, a flash of red hair, a glint of armor, out of the corner of his eye, but every time he turned there was no one. Maglor screamed for him but could not hear his own voice. His hands dripped blood, and he did not know if it was his own. None of it was as it had been in reality—except for the fear. The fear was familiar, refreshed by the dreaming, though it had never left him—not really. He had never been so utterly alone until Maedhros had vanished into the fire. There had always been someone within reach—a brother, a comrade, a cousin. But there on the shattered shores of Beleriand, as the sea rushed over the plains of the Gap that he had once loved so dearly, as it swallowed the hills where he had raced his cousins, and the forests in which he had hunted with his brothers, there was no one. His father was long dead, his mother forsaken across the Sea. His brothers were gone now, every last one of them slain by the Oath they’d sworn in the flickering torchlight of Tirion. His cousins were dead, too—all but one. Celebrimbor had lived, too, but neither he nor Galadriel would ever have welcomed Maglor. Kinslayer. Betrayer. Dispossessed and accursed.

The fear and the loneliness had stayed with him, though he wore them as a familiar mantle these days, a weight that he no longer knew what he might do without. The pain of it was renewed, though, as bad as every broken bone or new bruise planted on him by a fist or an iron-shod foot. Every time he woke with Maedhros’ name on his lips it was like he had just died all over again. 

He kept thinking that he would run out of tears. That surely, soon, they would dry up and he would have none left to shed. And sometimes he thought the same of his blood, when the orcs went farther than they should have. The Nazgûl rebuked them in ways that Maglor did not see—though he heard—and those terrible burning draughts were poured down his throat and over his wounds. Sometimes he even received stitches, if they were bad enough. These were done by Men, pale silent Men who did their work quickly and without grace, who would not look at him but who did not flinch at the sight or the sound of the things that were done in the dungeons and pits of Dol Guldur.

During one long stretch of isolation, Maglor lay awake, unwilling to sleep although he was too weak and exhausted to move. His lungs ached with each indrawn breath, and the stone beneath his torn up back was so cold it nearly burned. He heard a sound at the door, and turned toward it as the door swung open. There was a figure there, an outline that Maglor thought must be some strange trick of the light, for it seemed to be the shadow of an old man, robed and bearded, and wearing an odd broad-brimmed hat. He said something, his voice low and gruff, but it was too quiet to make out in the clamor that erupted somewhere else. The old man muttered something else and disappeared. The door fell shut after him with a solid thud, and the heavy clank of the lock resettling. 

When the clamor faded, Maglor was dragged out again, sooner than he had expected. This time two of the Nazgûl were there, and they had questions. Who was the intruder—what did he look like, had he said, and what had Maglor told him? Maglor couldn’t answer any of those questions—and even if he could have, he would not—and he suffered for it. 

He had determined, at one time, never to beg. He would howl and scream and sob, because he could not help any of that, but he would not beg. But when a brand was brought out, big and heated red-hot on one of the braziers, he broke down and begged them not to, begged them to spare him this, just this, do not burn him—

The brand pressed into his chest with a terrible sound and the smell of burning skin and flesh, and Maglor’s scream made cracks appear in the floor and across the ceiling, sending dust raining down, and all the orcs but the one doing the branding fell back, hands over their ears as dark blood trickled between their fingers. When it was at last removed, it left behind a livid, red, lidless eye to stare out of his chest. Maglor’s head fell back as darkness swam around the edges of his vision, threatening to overwhelm him. His whole body burned; he couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think, couldn’t—

Then something in the air shifted, and the agony of his chest no longer troubled him. It still hurt, but it seemed a strange and distant thing, like the lingering memory of a bad dream. The light had changed, too, to something silver, something golden, like an imagining of Mingling in his mother’s favorite workshop, long ago and far away. Maglor lifted his head, confused and dizzy. He lay on a bench by a window—he had fallen asleep there, though he could not recall what he had been doing before.

“What are you doing, Macalaurë?” His mother was there, smiling at him from across the room. 

“Ammë?” he rasped. 

“You have been working too hard,” she said—and something about this was wrong. She had said things like that before, but he had never fallen asleep in her workroom like this. He had never dreamed of such dark things as—as— “Why do you not let yourself rest?” She came over, wiping clay from her hands on a cloth, and cupped his cheek in her palm. Her smile was out of his memories but her face was wrong, somehow blurred—the freckles were wrong, somehow; the pattern was strange. Her hand was warm but the palm was smooth and soft. Nerdanel’s hands, a sculptor’s hands, had never been either one of those things. “Rest, Macalaurë,” she said, and there was a frisson of command in the words. Her hand slid up into his hair, and he felt the strangeness of it, of a gap where a finger should be. “Stop fighting.”

He wrenched his head to the side, and the world spun back into the dark flame-lit chamber beneath Dol Guldur. Nerdanel faded away into Sauron, and the agony of his burns and his wounds came roaring back. “I will not,” he gasped, fury rising in him like a sudden fire—fury that Sauron would dare use his mother in such a way, of all those he held dear the one who had remained unsullied and unstained by the darkness that they had brought upon themselves. He looked back up at Sauron and sang, summoning all his remaining, waning strength to use his voice as a hammer against the foundations of the tower, like the waves of a tempest against a cliff face. He heard the stones respond, felt their eagerness to crack and crumble. The ground shook. He would have sung it down as Lúthien had once toppled the walls on Tol-in-Gaurhoth, and buried both himself and Sauron under it and been glad to die that way, crushed under stone, a cairn of his own making.

A hand around his throat broke off the song, and as Maglor choked Sauron spoke a single word, so that silence fell and the tremors stopped. He spoke other words, then, that Maglor couldn’t hear past the roaring that filled his ears, and then the rasp of his own breath as he struggled to fill his lungs after Sauron released him. 

“He will be silenced,” Sauron said. “The great singer of the Noldor will sing no more—not until he sings for my pleasure.”

It was not orcs who came to him then but Men—men with needles and thick thread, and when Maglor realized what they intended to do he tried to struggle; but his strength was spent, and he could only beg once more—and then not even that, when they pressed his lips together and threaded the needle. 

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Unable to sing or to speak—to scream or to beg—he was thrown into the darkness again, chained to the stones, and forgotten. He offered no more entertainment for the orcs, and so they left him to the company of his own mind, and the ghosts who lived there. He had no songs to drive them away now, and there was no wind or waves or birdsong to drown out their voices. After a time he could not even bring forth the memory of such things. He could not recall the feeling of the waves washing over his feet, or the sun-warmed sand—or the warmth of the sun itself. He could remember the shapes of the constellations but not how they looked as they slowly turned, rising and falling in the sky with the passing seasons. The smell of rain had left him, and the taste of apples off the branch, or strawberries found hidden in a thicket. He sometimes attempted to hum, but the notes of his voice were muffled and fell flatly into the dark, and he could not even get the scales right, or recall the simple melody of the songs he had learned as a child, and so after a time he stopped trying.

Sometimes the Nazgûl passed by and paused, pressing their will against his, leaving him trembling and shivering by the time they moved on. His strength was gone. It was tempting to let go entirely, to free his spirit from his body—but he feared the workings of the Necromancer, and feared even more that Mandos would turn him away, if he was not ensnared first by Sauron’s evil enchantments. 

On the House of Fëanor the wrath of the Valar lieth from the West unto the uttermost East; the Dispossessed shall they be for ever.

He drifted, but did not sleep, and found no rest. In his waking-dreams his brothers paraded before him, their younger selves laughing and cajoling, reaching for him and calling for him to sing them a song or to join in whatever merriment they were planning. He tried to reach back, but their fingers passed through his like smoke, and they vanished in the dark; other times Celegorm came snarling at him, furious and feral as a wounded animal, and Curufin behind him, sneering. He’d thrown away his Silmaril, after all they had done—all of them—to get it back. What brother was he of theirs who would drown their sacrifices in the Sea? And Maglor did not know how to answer them. Caranthir and the twins said nothing, only turned away, their ghosts dissolving like mist. Maglor wanted to rail at them—they had never touched the Silmarils, had never felt that burning, that pure white distillation of pain that he could not but throw as far from him as he could. But of course all he could do was weep and moan. He could not even beg for them to come back as they walked away, fading back into the darkness.

Maedhros was the worst, a silent shadow, flames behind him, face as blank as the stones of Himring’s walls. It was he who Maglor missed the most, he who had been the one great constant of his life, from the moment of his birth until that horrible day at the edge of the breaking world. His dearest friend, his protector and his comrade in arms, his liege lord. Maglor wanted to shout and rail at him, but he couldn’t. He wanted to embrace him, but like all his dreams, Maedhros dissolved the moment he tried to touch him, leaving Maglor again alone in the dark. They all left, in the end, in dreaming as in waking life. 

In time he really did run out of tears. 

He did not dream of his mother. His dreams were a torment in that dungeon, not a comfort, and except for Sauron’s theft of her face, Nerdanel’s memory had only ever been a comforting one. He kept his thoughts of her locked away in his heart, never to be touched, never sullied by imaginings of what she would think of what he had become. He did, sometimes, dream of his father—of his father at the end, his last words a demand to hear them swear the Oath again. The memories of Fëanor in happier times, when he had laughed under the Mingling light and guided Maglor’s small hands under his own across harp strings for the first time, were growing ever more difficult to bring to his mind. They were smoke-tinged now, and the light in his father’s eyes had taken on a manic sheen that had not been there then. That had come later, so much later, alongside the swords and the helms, and the sudden deepening of his hatred toward his brothers and their families. 

I would have followed you anywhere, Maglor wanted to say to him, when his father’s ghost appeared before him in that dark and cold place. Even there, he burned—the heat felt like the fire of the Silmarils. It hurt. Did you see, with the eyes of death, what would become of us? Did you care? But the Fëanor who appeared now out of Maglor’s own mind was as silent as in life he had been loud. His dark hair fell about his face like the shadows, and the light in his eyes was more like the flames of Sauron than of blessed Treelight. Maglor wanted to scream at him, to shout, to weep, but all he could do was turn his head away, hating him and loving him and feeling nothing but bitterness. 

Sometimes he fancied he saw eyes glinting in the dark, yellow wolfish eyes, and he wondered if he was going mad. He did not think he only fancied the howls that sometimes pierced even through the earth into the dungeons. Lord of Werewolves, Sauron had once been, and it seemed he was still. It would have been a relief if one came to him as it had once to Finrod beneath Tol-in-Gaurhoth. But Finrod had been Doomed but not cursed, and his death had been a hero’s, one worthy of song. Maglor had long ago given up his chance for that.

Whenever he summoned enough strength to move his chains scraped over the stone, the sound so loud in the silence that it hurt. He did it anyway, trying to stretch stiff limbs before curling back in on himself. It was the knowing that there would not be an end that was the worst. He was not Maedhros, and there was no Fingon coming to rescue him. He was not Beren, with a Lúthien coming to sing the tower town for him. No one even knew that he was there. And if anyone did—who would come? Galadriel? There were many, he thought, who she would storm this tower to save, but he was not among them, though they two were the last of Finwë’s grandchildren left in the world. 

But it would be worse if he gave Sauron what he wanted. He had nothing left to lose now except himself, or what remained of him—and that he would lose indeed, if he accepted the relief and comforts and promised riches that came with entering into Sauron’s service. He had not fought the long defeat against Morgoth only to surrender to his lieutenant. Sauron did not return to him, but at times Maglor felt his awareness, his gaze seeming to pierce through the layers of stone and earth between them. Maglor could feel also his power growing, more rapidly now. He was preparing for something. Had been since that strange old man had slipped in and out without being caught. Maglor wondered, sometimes, who that had been, and what he had been looking for. It must have been desperation that would drive someone to enter into the fortress of the Necromancer of Mirkwood. He hoped that the old man had escaped unscathed, whoever he was—that he had escaped the darkness to see the stars again. 

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The shift was abrupt. Maglor jerked out of a troubling dream in which he was searching a dark forest for something, or someone—he could not remember upon waking. The stones around him trembled, and he heard them crying out in—joy? Relief? Then he felt the presence of Sauron pressing down upon him, sudden and weighty, pressing on his ribs and constricting his lungs, closing like a fist around his throat. He tried to gasp for air, but couldn’t breathe. The brand upon his chest burned with sudden intensity, but he had no strength for anything except a weak, muffled whimper. Sauron’s voice was in his mind like a shout: The great singer of the Noldor will sing no more.

There were other wills striving against that of Sauron, and he almost fancied that he could hear the Music of them, a Power speaking into the stones that was somehow familiar, but mingled with others that were not, slipping through cracks in the defenses that Sauron had not known were there—or perhaps he had not cared, thinking himself unassailable until it was too late.

As suddenly as he had begun, Sauron released Maglor and withdrew. Maglor did not know or care if he had fled Dol Guldur entirely, or merely released his hold upon him to focus on the battle happening above. He lay struggling to breathe, drifting in and out of wakefulness. Chaos erupted in the corridor outside, but that was not unusual. The orcs fought with one another, or with the Men who served in the tower, as often as they came to torment the prisoners. The sound of tramping feet had long ago ceased to inspire anxiety. 

The sounds of the orcs died away after a time, and were replaced by other, stranger sounds. Fair voices calling out in the Woodelven tongue—and in Sindarin, and in the Common Speech. Calling for prisoners, any who might be alive. Maglor did not move. He could not have answered even if he wished to. It was a new trick, surely, this bringing of false hope. He tried not to listen, but the voices only grew louder.

But then something rattled at his door. He heard the lock break apart, and the rusted hinges scream as the door was pushed open. The wood had warped, and now dragged reluctantly over the uneven stones until it stuck—but it was enough to let in a beam of light. It was a lantern, a bright yellow light that shone far steadier than the red torches that the orcs used. Maglor flinched and turned his head away from it, raising his arms with a great effort to try to hide his face. The light hurt. The chains dragged over the floor, and fell heavily on his chest and stomach. “Leave it,” he heard someone say. “There can’t be anyone in there, if the door won’t even—”

“There is someone! I saw—here, help me—” There was a heavy thud, and then another, a few muffled curses before a third, and then the sound of splintering wood. Maglor felt dizzy. Those voices—surely this was another new trick, a new form of torment, or he had finally gone utterly mad, to be imagining those voices here, where they did not belong, where they had never been and could not be. He kept his eyes closed, although the light changed and dimmed. 

“Ai, Elbereth,” one of his apparent rescuers murmured as they came to kneel by him. “Look at his chest.”

“Look at his mouth,” said the other, in a tone of horror. Maglor cringed away from the hands that reached for him, though they were gentle. He jerked back and his head hit the wall. “Easy. It’s all right. We’re here to help you, not hurt you. Elladan, we’ll need a stretcher.” 

One of them left. The one that remained ran his hands over Maglor’s body, gentle but efficient, checking for fresh wounds or broken bones. When he finished he carefully took Maglor’s face in his hands, turning him toward the light. “Can you hear me? Can you open your eyes?” Maglor did not want to, but he found himself opening them anyway, blinking against the light, still painful even dimmed. 

It was Elrond’s face that looked back down at him. Or Elros’. Maglor tried to shrink back, but he couldn’t move, except to tremble. “It’s all right,” said Elrond, or Elros, or the phantom sent to torment him. “We are going to take you away from this place.” 

He had thought himself past tears, but found that he had been wrong. The phantom wiped them away with gentle hands, and then the other returned, identical in face and voice—and not alone. Another was with him, whose spirit shone so brightly that it was as though the sun had stepped into the room. Maglor flinched and closed his eyes again. His head ached, and he struggled to take a breath. Their voices passed above him, speaking quickly and quietly, and he understood little of what they said past the sound of his heartbeat in his ears and the dull throbbing of his head. The chains fell away from him, and soft cloth was wrapped around the raw skin instead. Someone caught his hand, fingers running over the ancient scars there, but nothing was said of it. 

Then one of the twins began to sing. If he’d been able to move Maglor would have covered his ears. The soft words were that of a lullaby—a lullaby that he had written and sung to them long ago and far away, that he hadn’t thought of in so long, that should not be coming back into his mind now. A hand smoothed over his hair, and there was a quiet, subtle power in the song that caught him up like a child in a blanket, bringing sleep of a different kind than he had known in that place. 

His next waking was sudden, and filled with pain. Someone held his head still, and someone else was pulling the cords from his lips, long-since healed over. It was slow and it felt like his mouth was being torn apart. He wanted to scream with the pain, but somehow his throat would not produce a sound. Voices rose around him, and other hands came to hold his shoulders and arms and legs, though he didn’t have it in him to do more than twitch. Whoever was pulling at the cords worked methodically and slowly, and every second of it was agony. Even after the last of it was gone, his entire face hurt. He couldn’t breathe, and his mouth was filled with blood that flowed down into his throat and choked him. “Lift him up,” someone said, and he was raised to sitting, leaning back against the one who had been holding his head still. They kept their hands there, holding his hair out of his face as someone else pressed a warm wet cloth to his bloody lips. It had a fresh smell to it that eased his mind, and a little of the pain. 

He did not open his eyes; the room seemed too bright around him. Someone put a cup to his lips, helping him open his mouth for the first time since he could not recall when, so he could drink cool water that washed away the taste of blood and soothed his aching throat. Someone used another cloth, also damp and fresh-smelling, to wipe away the tears from his cheeks, before he was laid back down on something soft. “Rest, now, Maglor,” said a woman’s voice, deep and unaccountably familiar. A soft warm hand rested on his forehead. “You are safe. Sleep.” It was a command as much as a reassurance, and he was powerless to disobey. 

His mouth still hurt when he woke again, but it was an ache of swollen, slowly-healing flesh rather than the pain of fresh wounding. The light in the room did not seem so overwhelming, either, and he dared to open his eyes. He saw first the ceiling, made of pale wood and with living vines twined about the beams. He lay in a bed, a proper bed with blankets and pillows so soft it made him want to weep. It sat beside a window that opened out into tree branches, with leaves of brilliant gold. Maglor stared at them. He had forgotten that there were such colors in the world, such beauty. The wind passed through the boughs and the sound of the leaves did make him weep, silent tears escaping as the music of birds joined with the sound. Somewhere distant an Elven voice rose up in song, a merry tune in the tongue of the Woodelves. 

The sound of a door made him turn, reluctantly tearing his gaze from the trees outside. The room was light and airy, with soft rugs on the floor and colorful hangings on the walls. A stand near the bed held a basin and ewer, and another small table sported a vase holding some dark green leafy plant, and a few bottles of silver and colored glass. But it was the ones who had entered the room that caught and held Maglor’s attention. For a moment he had dared to believe that the rescue had been real, and he was truly away from Sauron and his cruel torments, but the twins had returned, still looking as like Elrond and Elros as they had in the darkness of Maglor’s cell—more so, now, with sunlight to brighten their soft grey eyes. They wore robes of green and gold, and smiled to see him awake. Those smiles faded when he flinched—though he found himself powerless to turn away, drinking in the sight of them although he knew they could not be real. 

One of them sighed, “It is as Arwen said.” He crossed the room to sit on the edge of the bed, taking Maglor’s hand in both of his. “We are no trick of the Enemy, Maglor,” he said, so very gently. “This is no dream—you are safe in Caras Galadhon. I am Elladan, and my brother is Elrohir. We are Elrond’s sons, not Elrond and Elros.”

Elrond’s sons. Maglor had not even known that Elrond had wed. He looked at them again, and up close and in bright sunshine he could see that the resemblance, though very strong, was not absolute. They had freckles where their father had none, and Elrohir sported a scar through one of his eyebrows. 

They tended to the wounds on his mouth with gentle efficiency, washing them with warm water into which a few leaves from the vase had been crushed and dropped. He was gently ordered not to try to speak with his mouth still so swollen, but Maglor slowly came to realize, with growing horror, that he could not speak anyway. His voice was gone, as it had not been before—he could have whimpered or moaned, back in the dungeons of Dol Guldur, but here even when such sounds should have escaped—even when he tried—there was only silence.

The twins left him alone to rest after a time; they had filled the room with cheerful chatter as they had tended to him, talking of the city and of the forest surrounding it, words that he heard but did not really listen to as he tried and failed to make even the smallest of sounds. In their absence it was quiet—but not silent. The wind still made the leaves rustle, and a nightingale had alighted just outside of the window to sing for a while. Maglor leaned back against the pillows and watched it until it flew away, and then he watched the leaves, and tried to swallow down the tightness in his throat. He was safe, or so they said. The Enemy was gone, fled from Dol Guldur in the face of whatever power had assailed it—and that same power was there in Caras Galadhon. He could feel it in the air. Who wielded it, and what they intended to do with him, Maglor could not guess. He was weary, though it felt as though he had been asleep for years, decades, perhaps centuries, caught in an unending nightmare. Time held no meaning in the dark. Now he was back in the sunlight as autumn was waxing, and found precious little comfort in it. The Enemy had had the final victory over him, in the end.

Who was he, if not a singer? What was he, without his voice?

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