Chapter Text
The birds they sang
at the break of day
Start again,
I heard them say
—Leonard Cohen
In molten fires at the heart of a mountain, a circle of gold fell, deceptively small for what it had wrought in the world. If it once had held anything resembling consciousness, it now noticed nothing of the small creature that fell along with it, or the two others who knelt trembling not far above.
Its maker, or what was left of its maker, cried out as the Ring flared and warped and faded to nothing.
That cry reverberated not within the circles of the living world but somewhere beyond them, in a Void outside of time. Yet an untouched string may vibrate in sympathy when its twin is plucked, and one particle may spin in tandem with another no matter the distance between them; and the last outcry of the one who had forged the Ring did not go unheard.
Across an ocean and an age, a bodiless spirit who had long ago delighted in the joy of making felt the anguish of that unmaking, and heard the cry that fell soundless in the Void. If the spirit had possessed a body, it might have fallen to its knees, or clamped its hands over its ears to stave off the deluge that washed over it. Unhoused and unshielded as it was, it had no defense. The full force of that turmoil fell upon that once-bright spirit, as one who had helped to craft the world was lost to it.
At the center of that agony, in the eye of that storm, the bodiless spirit had room only for this thought: No. Not you. Not like this.
And that, too, did not go unheard.
∫∫∫
He existed formless and nameless. It could hardly be called existence, this state of undoing, unbeing. An instant could have passed in the living world, or an eon. To him, untouched by matter or time, it made no difference.
Yet even here, Music found him. Perceiving it, he became aware that there was something left of him that could perceive, and therefore became aware that he still was.
Even thou art not unmourned, it told him. There is one who intercedes for thee, though he knows not that his sorrow is heard by any but him.
In the cadence of the Music he sensed who it was that mourned, and in that moment sensed also something of what that spirit mourned for. Thus did he remember himself and who he had once been: admired and feared, walking the world in forms both terrible and fair, a giver of many gifts and poisoner of them all.
It jarred, that note of grief. He could not account for it. Whatever had been forged between them had failed and foundered at the last. He had been defied, and taken his vengeance many times over for that defiance. What reason now for sorrow, for pity, from one he had destroyed? The desire to understand had long faded from him, even before his unmaking. What need was there to understand that which he could simply control? But this—this did not make sense. It nagged; it rankled; it burned. It pulled him to reach out for it in turn, with something almost like desperation, until he would have reached back into the world, back to when they had been something other than enemies. Back to when he might have asked, Why? and gotten an answer, if he had known the way.
Again, then. Thou art not done with life, nor it with thee.
∫∫∫
The sound of moving water was the first thing he noticed, followed by the faint brush of a light wind. On their heels came the inescapable deduction that he must have a body again, if he was perceiving the world through physical means.
He had not had a body in… he did not know how long. Had he not been unmade, and claimed by the Void? Disorientation struck, a swift upending of every point of reference by which he aligned himself to the world.
For a moment or possibly an age—his mind could spare no attention to the marking of time—he felt himself plunged back into the maelstrom of flame and fury that was his last coherent memory. That same ferocious tearing at the very essence of his being, that same horror as the Ring dispersed in the fires of its making; that same agony as the strands it bore of his deepest self came apart with it. It threatened to overcome him entirely, and nearly did.
But the rush of water and the caress of wind continued uninterrupted. From those fixed constants he quieted the tumult of his spirit. Slowly, self-control returned.
This was not, then, the heart of Mount Doom. Nor was it the emptiness of the Void. He searched his memory for something to account for whatever this was, but between the dissolving of the Ring and his return to consciousness here, he could recall nothing.
Perhaps this was some other grotesque punishment, then, from the Powers of the West. If so, he was resolved to resist it; had so resolved even in his last furious, anguished moments. What right had they who had abdicated their own power in Middle-earth to condemn him for the exercise of his? Anger, as it so often had, lent him clarity of thought. First he must understand the nature of this prison. Then he could set about breaking it.
He did not reach out with the part of him that needed no physical body to understand the world. Easier, for now at least, to shield his truest self against whatever this place might be by filtering it through his fana’s senses. He was supine; could feel grass prickling at the back of his neck and his bare forearms, fabric against the rest of his skin. And he could smell the water now, mingling with the rich scents of damp soil and algae, overlaid with the sweetness of spring flowers. He discovered he had eyes too, and opened them.
Stars shone overhead.
He recoiled, bracing for pain. The Star-kindler had looked on his erstwhile master with little favor, and it boded ill for him if this was a cage of her making.
Yet none came. The wind remained gentle, and the stars went on twinkling with kindly light. A poor job Manwë and Varda had done of meting out punishment, if this was the worst of it. Or perhaps they had not been the ones to devise this doom, whatever it was.
It struck him then that these stars were familiar. He knew them; had spent years honing the lenscraft of the Mirdain’s glassworkers so that he might render them clearer in his companion’s sight. They had passed hours together beneath these stars, which were as familiar to him as the hands that had adjusted the focus of the telescope. Along with the scent of the flowers, and the river he now recognized as the Sirannon flowing unfouled, he had enough to pinpoint where he was: Eregion, in late spring, an hour or two before dawn. Or a semblance of it, at least.
That star hovering a radian above the northeastern horizon had exploded into a nova early one summer, perhaps a half-century after he had come to Ost-in-Edhil.
A hand closed around his wrist. He would have shaken off any other touch; this one, he permitted, familiar calluses at the fingertips and strength in the grip. “Come, my friend, it is nearly dark enough! Let us not waste time!”
“Now? The sun has only just set. I might expect such haste from one of the Secondborn, but you need not race against the dwindling of a mortal life. You have scarcely rested a single night since it began.” Archly, he added, “Lest you forget, you have a body. Eventually it will demand respite. I hold it not against you that you cannot match the endurance of my kind. This supernova’s luminescence will last a season at least, and even were it not so, surely you have seen one before, and will again.”
His companion laughed, quick and bright. “But I have not yet seen one with the benefit of tutelage from one who witnessed the stars’ making! With such a gift before me, I couldn’t rest if I tried. I’d only pace my rooms and wish I were at the telescope with you. So come, indulge me.”
“Very well, Tyelperinquar.” He was amused, and did not bother to conceal it. In truth he had largely labored elsewhere while the stars were being wrought, but no matter. Let the folk of this city continue to think his fount of knowledge inexhaustible. In an eyeblink he maneuvered so that he was the one clasping his friend’s wrist in his hand: skin, warmth, the tracery of blood vessels with their swift-beating pulse, and the delicate jigsaw of bones beneath. What an inconvenience, to require a body, and yet how adept the craftspeople of the Noldor had proven themselves at making beauty out of inconvenience. “Then let me lend you some speed.”
Another peal of laughter, tumbling forth like a meteor shower at its peak. “Lead on!”
Celebrimbor. Tyelperinquar.1
What they might have wrought together, had Celebrimbor not turned from him! With the Three bent to his purpose—and more than the Three, that brilliant mind! In Celebrimbor he might have had a true collaborator, a deputy worthier of the role in craft and skill than any of the lieutenants that had been left to him.
In the space of a thought he was on his feet. But before he had done more than settle the drape of his robes, a small folded missive tumbled from his sleeve. He caught it as it fell past his fingertips, thumb finding the sigil pressed into the wax seal. Gil-galad’s device. His lip curled. A strong candidate, as Noldorin kings went, for the greatest nuisance of them all. But a source of crucial information, now: he had carried such a letter only once, on his way from a cold welcome in Lindon to a much heartier one in Eregion. The sleeve the letter fell from was embroidered with intricate tessellations of overlapping holly leaves, the same design he had summoned to his form in preparation for his arrival at the gates of Ost-in-Edhil. And based on the stretch of river where he found himself, that city lay but half a day’s journey away by foot. A fraction of that, for one who could travel as he could.
Might this be, then, not punishment, but opportunity? If this truly was Eregion in the Second Age, the Gwaith-i-Mírdain dwelt nearby. Was Celebrimbor among them, awaiting the arrival of an emissary of the Valar? Would he be as eager to receive that emissary’s gifts, so perfectly suited to his quick intelligence, and to receive their giver as a friend into his city and his halls? Into his heart?
It was a hypothesis easily falsified. So whence his hesitance?
Do not waste this chance.
The thought struck him with a force that felt almost beyond himself. No, he would not waste it. There was no reason he could not investigate what had sent him here while at the same time putting his memories—his foreknowledge—to use. Middle-earth might have been great under the strength of his will; it might yet be. Whatever miscalculations, whatever betrayals had marred the past, or the future as it were, he would circumvent them this time.
Ost-in-Edhil beckoned. Annatar set off to answer its call.
1 The Quenya version of 'Celebrimbor,' comprised of the same elements, 'silver' and 'hand closed so as to grasp.'