Unhappy Into Woe by StarSpray

Three

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.