Unhappy Into Woe by StarSpray

One

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.