Unhappy Into Woe by StarSpray

Four

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.