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Chapter Text

Evil has every advantage but one: it is inferior in imagination

-W. H. Auden

Eregion, The Second Age, 1697
Midwinter’s Day

Awareness was coming back to his friend. From its motionless stupor, his quick mind sparked back to living flame, and his own thought flared in answer, all warmth and light. There was a deep satisfaction to it, like that he had felt when he first put on the Ring: the world falling into order and strength and beauty at his will. He combed his fingers affectionately through the dark hair, teasing out the places where blood still matted it into great clumps and stuck it to the skin of the shoulders and the back. Beneath the blood, both dried and fresh, the flesh was once again whole and sound.

It was more than merely repairing the damage to the body. That would have happened on its own, given time. The renewed life forced into the flesh of the man on the table before him was a direct translation of his own will. The Ring’s power flowed through his friend like blood, like breath, and he knew that nothing, not the most obdurate will nor the deepest of arts, could stand before it. There was relief in that knowledge; contentment and safety.

But under his satisfaction, at once feeding it and inflaming it, anger burned like liquid stone. The infuriating necessity of having to be in this position at all – the unaccountable foolishness that had brought his friend to this point –

His fingers closed to a fist, tugging at the hair, lifting his head. The repair had indeed been successful, for now at the pressure his friend groaned, coughed, and shuddered into true waking. A tremor ran through his body and his hand came up as if reaching for something. He took it in his own, gently but as securely as an iron vise. There was a brief struggle, an instinctive resistance at finding himself caught, but reaching across his shoulder and supporting him, Annatar helped him find his way to sitting upright on the table. He swayed there, his breath shallow, before raising his head.

Blinking, he noted his surroundings: the Great Workshop of the Brotherhood of the Jewelsmiths, the diagrams and models still on the walls, the thin winter sunlight through the high windows. All was undisturbed. Annatar watched patiently as he tested the evidence of his senses against that of his memory. Surely I was somewhere else? Surely I was hurt?

When Celebrimbor saw whose embrace he was leaning against, there was a moment of disorientation; his eyes clouded then cleared. He seemed to be running through possible responses as methodically as if he were testing for fit in a function — relief, terror, sorrow, desperation, rage – finally settling on something cold and sharp that might have been resolve, or might have been mere irritation.

“You,” said Celebrimbor with a sigh.

An answering smile lit Annatar’s face; brilliant, innocent, bright as an arclight, flat and empty as a sketch of a carved face. He held him for a moment – slightly longer than was necessary – to establish that his friend was not about to topple over, then stepped back and regarded him with deep contentment.

Celebrimbor was not looking at him; he was, in his old experimental manner, testing the repairs made to his body.  The way the mended muscles bunched and stretched across his back, the expansion of the chest with the drawn breath, the range of motion of the arms. He moved slowly, cautiously, not troubling to conceal the instability he felt.

“This is better, isn’t it?” Annatar said quietly, watching him test the articulation of his fingers, the movement of the skilled hands as graceful and precise as it had ever been. Irritation flickered again over Celebrimbor’s mind. He could not deny the truth of the words, though: it was better to be healed than injured, better to be free than bound, better to be back in the warmth and light of Annatar’s favor than in the fire of his displeasure. As he clearly had no counterargument, Celebrimbor settled for raising his head and glaring at him.

“Well,” he said bitterly, “I trust that little exercise of power allowed you to settle whatever argument you were having with yourself.”

Shifting his robes aside, Annatar sat down on the table beside him. “I hope you’re not under the impression I found that somehow enjoyable. I told you once already: I do not want to see you hurt.” The skin tearing, the strong frame collapsing, the brilliant mind shivering into fragments of agony and terror —

“It must have been terrible for you,” said Celebrimbor, entirely straight-faced. “If only someone could have stopped it.”

“ Someone could have,” retorted Annatar sharply. “At any time. Tyelperinquar, you know the terms. You know what I’m offering you. Stop this posturing. I don’t like this any more than you do.”

“My heart bleeds for you.” The sympathy in Celebrimbor’s voice was a slightly less skillful mimicry of truth than Annatar’s smile. “Or, wait, not my heart, but something, anyway.” He put his fingers to his hair and drew them away fouled with drying blood.

“Stop sulking. You’re entirely whole. The Ring works on living matter as well as on inert – don’t worry, I tested it exhaustively before I used it on you. You can feel it yourself, of course, how well it works. You cannot help but know what this means. What I can do.” He turned to Celebrimbor, who had dropped his head again, and seemed to be deep in thought. He gently raised it with one hand. “What we can do, Tyelperinquar...”

He let Celebrimbor take his hand and examine it, but he pulled it away sharply when he moved to touch the Ring where it gleamed on his finger.

“I do know it now.” Celebrimbor’s voice was quiet and his mouth was dry. “Your will at work within me, pinning together the things you’ve broken... Well, now I suppose I know how it feels to be that Great Tower of yours, to be matter forced into your preferred arrangement without regard to—”

“My preferred arrangement,” Annatar said, standing back up and going to the water spigots along the workshop wall, “is the restoration of this forsaken world, the raising of these marred shores to heights surpassing the dreams of those beyond the sea.” He took a wide ceramic bowl from the shelves above the water spigots and inspected it briefly for chemical residues before filling it with water. “You shared that vision once. You spoke of how we would heal the world, you and I. I have not forgotten, even if you have.” He padded back to his friend and offered him the water. “There. Pull yourself together.”

Celebrimbor drained the bowl in a single draft – he must have been cripplingly thirsty. Even without the blood loss, effort and stress would have drained fluid from the tissues of the body. When Annatar brought him more water, he drank half of it, but then with the other half he washed the blood and filth from his face. Instinctively he reached for Annatar’s flowing sleeve to dry his face, a thoughtless gesture, centuries old, that had begun as a playful trial of his visitor’s powers. There was a momentary pause as he realized what he was doing, then with a slight shrug he continued.

For a moment they might have been at work together again, with Celebrimbor mopping sweat or forge-soot off his face after a long work day. Annatar glowed with the pleasure of it; no matter his determined recalcitrance Celebrimbor could not fail to appreciate how much better it was to be back together again, working in partnership rather than fighting a losing battle alone against an overwhelming force.

Celebrimbor released his sleeve, which had taken no marks from its use. He still seemed to be thinking hard, but he had not sunk back into himself. It was less like he was working out an unusually difficult theoretical problem, and more like he was working out a complex and urgent physical challenge — how to remove a fragile cast without breaking it, perhaps, or cool an overheating furnace without an explosion.

He looked back up at Annatar. “You’re not accustomed to distinguishing between repair and healing, are you?” he said. “In that, that language of yours, they aren’t even separate words, are they?”

They were not, but Annatar felt no inclination to concede him the point. “The Speech is an economical language, Tyelperinquar; it does not allow for imprecise expression or duplication of word function. It would, however,” he added, “allow you to express in words what now you seem to be trusting tone of voice to convey, if you add ekh, the particle of contempt, to the clause designating language –”

Celebrimbor was laughing, or at any rate breathing hard; the quick stuttering breaths might have been the precursor either to laughter or tears. Annatar gave him a few minutes to settle on one or the other before pressing him forward with “Yes?”

“Why do I like you?” Celebrimbor gasped out. It was laughter, then. “Look at you, still ankle-deep in the blood of my city, my friends, still covered in the dust of everything that we worked for together, carrying on about language construction as if we were sitting around a tea-brazier with Alagos and Naugwen!”

His lips tightened. “The losses in the Mirdain were a waste, Tyelperinquar, a waste that you could have averted at any time. It was through your own choice that I returned to this city with war rather than —”

“Don’t try that with me, Annatar, don’t even begin to try it.” Celebrimbor glared at him. “I don’t care about your excuses, I am not interested in your deflections; you are not going to shuffle off the responsibility for the deaths you ordered, the destruction you caused, onto me.”

Annatar smiled. “Your innocence is not something I would have thought you so invested in preserving, heir of Fëanor. Still, believe what you will of yourself! Believe anything you like, only come back to me, yield me my Rings, so that this can be over and we can start again.”

“My innocence?” He really was laughing now. “I have chosen you, Annatar, I think innocence is out of the question.”

Annatar stepped back, feeling his friend stir and attempt to rise. “Can I rely on you not to do anything exceptionally stupid?” he said, offering him a hand that he did not take. “You can try making a dash for the door, of course, but my people are behind it, and this time I would have to break something and leave it broken.”

Gingerly, with one hand on his shoulder for balance, Celebrimbor eased himself down off the table onto the stone floor of the workshop. He seemed surprised to find that his legs bore him up without trembling.

“My strength is not...”

“Drained? No, of course it isn’t. I have been generous to you, Tyelperinquar; I will be more generous yet, if only you will let me. I do not want you broken. I do not want you diminished.” He took him by the shoulders, leaning towards him. He spoke, low and urgent, into his ear. “You will not die, you cannot die; I will not let you die. If you die, then the Three, your great works, must be destroyed, and I will not have that happen. You are clearly determined to be as stubborn an ass about it as possible, but I know, I know there is something in you that will be worth any effort to save. We can still salvage the mess you have made of our work; I can still save you.”

Celebrimbor put up a hand to Annatar’s on his shoulder, touched it as if he meant to keep it there. He shook his head. “You really do think we’re negotiating. What did you do, pour your good sense into that Ring along with, what was it, the greater part of your soul? Very well, let me restate your case. You want me to give you the Three because, firstly, you consider yourself to have some sort of right to them as a creator, and secondly, because you see them as a necessary component in your plans for the world, and thirdly, because you will destroy me in body and soul if I withhold them; do I understand your argument correctly?”

“Is that really what you’ve taken from this?” Annatar found himself relieved; had he been anticipating something more difficult? He pulled his hand free to brush Celebrimbor’s hair back behind his ear. “It was not your way to be so petty, my bright one, at any rate not before your grandfather’s madness took hold upon you and led you to set your possessiveness and pride above the world’s welfare.”

“Am I wrong?” Celebrimbor insisted, cutting him off. The reference to his grandfather did not affect him at all; Annatar quietly discarded it as an angle of attack.

“Wrong? You are neither asking nor answering the right question.  Raise your eyes, Tyelperinquar. Look to the work that is greater than either of us, yes, greater even than me. Look to the work that raised us both from the wreckage of the past.” His voice dropped. “You saw that once; I saw it in you. It is within our grasp now, if you will only reach out your hand for it.” They were still facing each other, eye to eye, closer than conversation needed to be, as if any minute they might begin to grapple, or to embrace.

“Greatness, grasp...” Celebrimbor sounded out the syllables as if the language was unknown to him. “You can still say the words, Annatar, but there’s no meaning to them; you’re reaching out for nothing. What you’ve done to our city —”

He clearly had not heard a word being said to him. “Oh, Tyelperinquar. Still on your own injured pride? With all this before us? Look.”

It was not necessary to touch him to send the images pouring into his mind. Mountains moved, rivers shifted, cities fell and rose again, flying the banners of the Black Hand. Orc-hordes were turned to disciplined formations, armies drilled in the plains, roads spread across trackless wastes, cultivated fields sprang up in the arid lands. Decades passed in seconds, and above it all, vast as the mountains, stood the Great Tower, his will made stone.

He let the vision fade, but Celebrimbor stood staring at him, not with awe, but with horror, and that same strange quality he had felt in him before as he groped back to consciousness, that cold thing that might have been resolve or might have been anger, but which resembled nothing more strongly than weakness.

Out of that weakness he spoke, his breath cool against Annatar’s face. “ That is your more beautiful world? Annatar, look at it. Stars and spiders, you’ve made unwilling slaves even of rock and stone.”

“That is its beginning. Now do you see why it is that I need you, why I need the Three? They serve the One, as all the Rings do, with the full subtlety and power of the art of the Eldar. Of your art, your greatest art, which will otherwise rot wasted and hidden, wherever you have concealed them. Your craft must be joined to mine, you must complete in beauty what I have begun in strength.”

“So you can still recognize beauty. Where it is, where it is not...” Celebrimbor spoke quietly; would have been talking to himself if they were not still poised face to face. “You know what you’ve lost, Annatar, something in you does still know –“

“ Nothing is lost. Nothing need be lost.”  His anger went rippling through the room; the coals flared in the brazier in the corner. He felt Celebrimbor steel himself as if anticipating a blow, but he called that anger back into himself, back into the smooth perfection and contained power of the One. “You are – he looked with love at the golden circle – “a less perfect expression of my power than some things, but you are mine nonetheless, and your art will be brought into harmony with mine. You are a work in progress, my exquisite one, and there is no reason that you should not take your place at my side, the mightiest of your kind, the greatest of my instruments.”

“Can you still create at all?” Celebrimbor was talking past him, as if he cared nothing for all that was being offered. “Of course not, how could you? You had to make that Ring out of something; you made it out of yourself –“ Now horror and interest were warring in his tone. “You’re not just the wielder, you’re the instrument. How did you do that?  You must have split your – what is the word for it, your existence, your soul, your own nature – but of course that would account for the power in it; if splitting apart the elements of matter releases so much energy how much more splitting apart the core of the self –“

“I’m surprised you need to ask.” In truth, he was more pleased than surprised at having found something to draw Celebrimbor out of his self-absorption. “You had a rudimentary intuitive grasp of the principles involved at your first foray into Ring-craft, and our research – before our disagreement – was already beginning to lay the theoretical groundwork.” He began sketching on the board. The full expression of the theory he had in mind would require considerably more than two dimensions to diagram, but he trusted to the strength of Celebrimbor’s imagination. “You see now, I am sure, why the Three are more than incidentally related to my One. The One is the discipline of Ring-craft itself taken to its inevitable conclusion.

“Without the One, the other rings are scattered individual efforts. Interesting essays in the craft, perhaps, but no more. With the One, the Ruling Ring, they and their wielders are unified and brought into harmony.  There was an element of personal sacrifice in its creation, to be sure. But all great endeavors require sacrifice, and you see how richly I have been rewarded.

“The Powers have a word, suþâraȝûlûn, which signifies...” He tapped his fingers on the board, running through the inadequate approximations in the languages of the Incarnates, “both indwelling and being poured out. It is a term for relating to things, as well as to the means by which being is invested into matter.”

Celebrimbor had gone very pale, but as his pulse and breathing showed no evidence of distress, Annatar ignored it. “The greater that investment, the greater the power it offers. Not for nothing, after all, is a ring the signifier of a bond! The— ”

“I lived through the First Age,” said Celebrimbor hoarsely, “I’ve seen mistakes made over jewelry, but I do believe this might surpass them all. Ought I to congratulate you? I never thought to see anyone outdo the wrongs my family did when they bound themselves to the Silmarils, but in sheer self-destructive madness...”

“Stop being unreasonable, Tyelpe. Treating this, the pinnacle of our Art, like that unaccountably foolish Oath by which your ancestors bound themselves by what they could not understand to what they could not control –“

But Celebrimbor drew a long breath. “You may have actually made this simpler. I have considered your argument, and I reject it. Give up that Ring, and I will give you anything you want. Anything at all. Happily.”

Annatar kept his voice deliberately mild. “I don’t think you are in a position to be making bargains, even in jest.”

“You’re right. I’m not making bargains. I’m making demands. And I am demanding your unconditional surrender.”

He whirled from the board in a blur of white robes and a swell of power from the Ring. Though he did not touch him, Celebrimbor could no more stand against that power than a reed in a river, a straw in a furnace; he staggered back blindly against the table.

“Do you want me to admire your spirit?” he hissed.  “I don’t. Enough. Yield, Tyelperinquar, before I make you yield.”

Celebrimbor groped for the edges of the work table, braced himself, and raised his head.

“Do you mean,” Annatar asked, incredulous, “to set your strength against mine?”

Again that strange look came into Celebrimbor’s eyes, as if he were very far away or working out a delicate, crucial problem whose balance a breath might tip. “My strength?” he said, and even his voice was distant. “No.” He laughed quietly. “It’s my will I set against you, Sauron. And the strength I mean to set against you is your own.”

“Your will… You know that it would cost me nothing to burn out your mind and leave you a gibbering wreck.”

“I know.” Celebrimbor was looking past him, through him. “Oh, Annatar. I knew that the first moment I saw you.”

“Do you know?” Annatar spoke very gently. “I don’t think you actually do.”

Even when wearing the form of one of the Eldar, Annatar’s mind did not move like one of theirs, and so the experience of recognition, when it came, was rare and startling. But he recognized the strangeness upon Celebrimbor at last: it was not terror or resolve or irritation or anything else. It was pity.

He sank swiftly into the Ring, into the force and the order and the calm like the center of a flame. The patterns of the world around him grew clear to his sight and fragile to his touch, and he turned his full attention to the knot of desire and defiance that was Celebrimbor’s mind.  

Yield, or I will make you yield.

There was so little of him; a handful of matter, a tangle of spirit. He had only to send forth a slight vector of power, and as if beneath an unbearable weight, Celebrimbor was forced to his knees and then to the floor.

Muscle and bone and nerve, knowledge and memory, fear and hope and that mad and maddening pity. The Ring tore at him, body and soul, seeking a way in, loosening the bonds that held his being together, like phase transition under intense heat. He was writhing now, helpless, graceless motions in the futile effort to escape what could not be escaped. Annatar’s attention was not a place but a state.

Yield or I will make you yield.

There was little point to the words that he sent echoing through his mind; Celebrimbor certainly couldn’t speak and it was doubtful that he could comprehend. There was fresh blood on his face and his hands were clawing at empty air, his back arched nearly in two. There was no further point to the demonstration. Annatar released him suddenly and he lay on the floor like the dead.

There had been surprisingly little resistance. He had not called on his own Rings, not even on Fire. Annatar had not really expected him to, but it was interesting that not even in this extremity would he reach reflexively for his weapons.

The senselessness of it burned at him, an irritation like a grain of sand in the eye. They had been side by side again, almost like the old days, peace and strength and power and a place at his side all within Celebrimbor’s grasp, and to throw it away, to choose this over everything that he might have —

He sank to one knee at his side. “Tyelperinquar.”

There was no response, but he knew he had not broken his mind altogether. He had no patience left for this self-indulgence. He struck him across the face, fracturing the bone of the upper jaw. The prisoner could not help but respond to that.

“Tyelperinquar,” he said, calmly and firmly. “I do not want this to happen to you. Please. Let me stop.”

It took a moment for him to be able to speak at all, but his eyes were bright and clear and still showing pity where they should have shown fear. “Yes,” he said through a mouthful of blood. “Surrender now and I will show you mercy.”

Sauron straightened, wiping the blood off his hand with one of the cleaning rags stocked in the workshop. “You can joke all you want, in taste as poor as you please, when we have resolved this disagreement, but right now I really must ask you to focus on the matter at hand.”

“I have never —” He choked and spat; tried to struggle up on one arm but could not keep his balance. “Never been — more focused in my life — you haven’t noticed. Entirely serious. You — yield. While you still can —”

There was no point in reabsorbing his anger any longer. Annatar lifted him bodily back to the surface of the table and began searching through the workshop drawers looking for tools.

“I forgive you. You can stop this. You can come back from this.” The voice went on, quiet and relentless. “And I will die before I give you up.”

The tools in a well-equipped workshop were so marvellously adaptable; he began setting them out on the table by his head. “Why are you doing this?” he asked, laying out a matched set of crimping pliers. “I really hoped, for a moment, that you were prepared to be reasonable, even though your people clearly wanted to fight to the death.”

Celebrimbor was beginning to struggle again. He touched him on the neck and a simple command to the great nerve along the spine took away his power of motion. It would make it easier, what was to come.   

“Why do you think I waited until our defeat was sure before I gave myself into your hands? I will venture even this for the love that I bear you; I could ask no one else to accept it.” Celebrimbor was pushing down panic with words again, endearing and infuriating in equal measure.

“Can you imagine that department meeting?” he went on. Even in his extremity, his imitation of the voice of the Mirdain’s archivist was startlingly accurate. ‘Surrender to Sauron? So you’re going to give him what he wants?!’ ‘No, not voluntarily. You see, I plan on talking him out of his plans for world domination.’ ‘Oh well, go on then, all in favor say aye —”

Annatar laughed to himself. “Your people… What would they say, if they could see you naked here, I wonder?”

“You don’t need to wonder,” Celebrimbor rasped, “you must have heard them as well as I did. He has betrayed us all.”

* 

Three Days before Midwinter, Afternoon

“You can strip, or they can strip you.” Annatar’s face was set and blank.

They stood, face to face, in the Great Hall, with the winter sun white through the lead-glass dome and Sauron’s troops in ranks around the central dais. Celebrimbor could feel their attention, waiting on their lord’s command.They had been assembled hastily, and nominally for a peace-council, but Sauron must have known as well as he that there would be no peace between them, not now. The troops were still armed, and though a murmur of discomfort whispered through them at the order, they were clearly prepared for it.

They had taken no part in the negotiations — Celebrimbor doubted that any of them even spoke Quenya well enough to follow the speech between him and Annatar — but they must have seen the turns they took, the lightning reverses from conquered leader to honored guest to disgraced prisoner.

Sauron was twisting the Ring on his finger. “It makes no difference to me. I imagine it does to you.”

He was still dressed for battle. The armor designed and forged in the Mirdain over the last century, when they had turned their art toward war instead of knowledge, was light and practical. It could easily be put on and removed by one alone, and Celebrimbor, steadily and deliberately, began undoing clasps and loosening knots, removing arm guards, shin guards, and the plates that covered each shoulder. He set them piece by piece on the table. The sound echoed in the hall. Even the orcs at the edges were silent.

When he had undone the reinforced waist-piece and coiled the red cord with which it had been bound, he paused, looked up, and met Sauron’s eyes. The dark quilted silk he wore beneath the armor was made for use rather than display, but the edges were bright with gold embroidery and the Star of Fëanor was set into the back. Sauron watched him sharply but did not move, and after a moment he removed it too, and felt the cold of the air settling on his skin. Without dropping his gaze, he folded the heavy garments neatly and hung them over the back of the chair.

Unhurried, he removed his adornments one by one – the jewels from ears and throat and wrists, the circlet from his head, the heavy bronze ornaments from his hair. He laid them neatly on the table, but when he came to the clasp that held the braids back from his face, he held it in his hand for a minute, looking at the stones green as summer leaves in the winter light. Then, coolly and with measured step, he walked to Annatar, took his hand, and returned the first of the gifts his friend had given him.

Annatar looked at it, and at his hand, for long enough that Celebrimbor began to sense worry from the gathered troops in the hall: anxiety over what their enigmatic commander could possibly be planning. He heard them breathe more easily as Annatar began to move, stalking around him in a tight circle and examining him carefully, as if he hoped to read something in his person that he could not in the battle-armor or in the robes of his office.

“What do you want?” he asked.

“The Three, Tyelperinquar.” Annatar moved into his field of vision again. Though he seemed pleased to be asked, he spoke firmly; there was compulsion in his voice that would have moved undefended minds to instant obedience.

He scrutinized him as if he were inspecting a jewel for flaws, his face wearing the alert, abstracted attention that Celebrimbor remembered from their days together in the workshop.  He did touch him then, running his hand along the discolored scar that slashed across Celebrimbor’s abdomen from ribcage to the curve of the bone of the hip.

“I haven’t swallowed them,” said Celebrimbor, “if that’s what you’re wondering.”

Sauron did not laugh. “Perhaps not. Though I assure you, Tyelperinquar, it is not your person that is an obstacle to my recovery of what you have stolen.” He closed his hand lightly around his side, and Celebrimbor had the unnerving and unhappy impression that he could shut his fingers without regard to the muscle and skin between them.

Annatar’s thoughts seemed to be running the same direction. “What’s the word that you incarnates use to describe this?” He brushed with his other hand at his own skin, where the collar of his robes parted showing the hollow of the throat. “ Fana, isn’t it? Veil? An unusually accurate choice of terms, for the imprecise language of the Incarnates. You know what flimsy stuff flesh is, and how easily torn.”

“Do you have a point, or did you just want to discuss comparative biology? I dare say you haven’t had much by way of conversation, these last years, but —”

“You seem to think,” Annatar cut him off, cold and serious,  “that because you are of value to me that you can place limits upon my power. You cannot. I do value you, and I will not permit you to withhold from me that which makes you valuable, and I will — rearrange you as necessary to ensure victory.”

Celebrimbor burst out laughing. “Who on earth do you think you’re talking to, Annatar? Or are you having more difficulty with the language than you let on? All right, rearrangement signifies a deliberate alteration in an order or pattern. Given the nakedness and the threats and the roomful of soldiers, my guess is the word you’re looking for is torture, which signifies the deliberate infliction of pain, from the stem ngwal, which I know you recognize as an element in Cruel —”  

But Sauron closed his other hand around his other side and his boldness faltered; his laughter died in his throat, focus returning along with fear.

“You can stop this,” Sauron said quietly. “At any time. I can number all of the particles in your body, Tyelperinquar; you are finite and fragile and made of matter. Do not make me drive the point home.” He took his hands from his sides. “Do not be foolish.”

“I can make you do nothing.”

For a moment this seemed to puzzle Sauron — at any rate he paused again. “No,” he said to himself. “No, it is not such a terrible thing, and you shall be at my side in the end…” He lifted his head. “Give me your hands.”

He clearly did not intend to wait for Celebrimbor’s response, for he was already reaching for him when Celebrimbor took both of his hands in his. Annatar clasped them firmly, almost warmly, as if they were sealing some kind of agreement, but he looked out over Celebrimbor’s shoulder and spoke a word whose very sound stabbed into his head like the most vicious sort of headache. Guardsmen came running up with long strips of a tough cloth, binding his wrists together.

“Krimp...il.... – what language is that, Annatar?

“My own.” Another string of the bloody-edged syllables. The shifting of mailed feet behind him, and a bark of acknowledgement in the same tongue.

“Your — that’s not Valarin.”

“Indeed not.” Annatar had still not let go his hands, though his wrists were lashed against each other. “Valarin can be an exceptionally precise language, but to achieve that precision it sacrifices a certain degree of efficiency, and the Speech is intended above all to be used. Men can use it, even Orcs; I designed it to be simple enough to be grasped even by a dulled mind and as you can hear, the words do linger.”

They did linger, as if the sounds themselves were barbed. Celebrimbor’s ears were still stinging with them.

“Take what I just said to my men.” He looked about, as if for a board to start drawing on, but finding none, went on anyway, just as if he were delivering a lecture to a classful of apprentices. “That last word comes from mber, expensive — berzhug, more expensive, berzhugakh, most expensive. The comparative is implied, so the construction is blood-third person singular immediate-intensive-subject marker, life-second person plural-general-direct object marker, expensive-comparative.” He cocked his head slightly to see if Celebrimbor followed.

“One drop of his blood is worth more than... all your lives?” Annatar was clearly pleased with his effort at translation, but Celebrimbor suppressed his instinctive answering smile. “Well, I’d say I’m flattered but I think that says more about the price you set on the lives of your servants than about the price you set on my blood.” He glanced at one of the armed men who had bound him; his stance was poised and aggressive, but his eyes behind the face-mask were miserable and fear pulsed from him in waves.

Annatar was still holding his hands, with the same attention he used to show after a particularly long day of painstaking work, when he would hold Celebrimbor’s hands with greater care even than he gave to his tools: kneading suppleness into cramped muscles, rubbing rosemary oil into the joints. The memory of those times might have been working on him, because when he spoke again, it was quiet, tense, and unhappy.

“Tyelperinquar,” he said, “you can still stop this.”

He grasped his hands. “No. It’s you who can stop this. It’s not going to get easier for you, Annatar; so stop now, stop while you still can —”

Sauron shook himself free. “Well. I wish you weren’t making me do this.”

The soldiers, with an efficiency born of long practice, assembled a tripod and bound the prisoner securely to it. There were a thousand petty tasks that needed doing — the fall of a city was nearly as much trouble as the construction of one, and happened much more quickly — but no task was more urgent than this. He took a seat watching, on the marble bench at the top of the steps leading into the courtyard. The alertness in his troops surged pleasantly: consciousness of their god-king’s presence always spurred them on to great effort.

The prisoner evidently felt his presence too. Celebrimbor tried to turn backwards, to look him in the eyes, but the captain struck him viciously across the shoulders until he dropped his head, gasping, against the post. It occurred to him then that there were other matters that needed to be attended to, that he might be better employed elsewhere, but he had already chosen and now he could not leave.

The guards plied the lash with the same assiduous attention they gave to everything in his presence. They were working to impress, though their squad commander could not tell whether to watch his men, or to watch the Lord of Gifts. At the prisoner’s first cry he saw him smile reflexively, but his golden eyes went suddenly wide and black.

It took an unusually long time. Annatar watched them, unmoving, resting his closed hand against his mouth as a gesture demonstrating reflective consideration, but the guards who were closest to him noticed that he had been pressing the Ring against his lip so hard it left a bloodless indentation in the flesh.

The urge to escape was surprising and misplaced; perhaps he was still too closely attuned to the prisoner’s own reactions. He would not move. He had planned initially to leave his mind resting against his friend’s, to watch the moment when the thread of his awareness snapped. Perhaps thus he could learn something new of its vulnerabilities or something of the secrets that Celebrimbor was so determined to keep. He had been wrong; it was not necessary, and he found himself sharply disinclined to do so. When the prisoner lost consciousness at last, he saw the soldiers leave off what they were doing, ascertaining his condition by the crude physical means that were all that they had at their disposal: pulse, breath, response to touch and sound.

He got up from the bench and paced down through the courtyard, through the blood and the torn bits of flesh to where the prisoner — his friend — hung slack and motionless. The soldiers looked to him: do we continue? A mortal who had been scourged this way would be dead or dying now.

“You said, Lord, that one drop of his blood was worth all of our lives…” the squad commander began. He looked at the ground and did not finish the sentence. There was a lot of blood.

“There are a lot of you,” said Sauron coolly. He put out a hand to touch the face and felt Celebrimbor, astonishingly, struggling back to awareness of himself, of where he was and who was with him. That was surprising; why was he not sending himself away into the depths of dream or stupor?

He tried to speak, muttering a wordless, broken sound against his hand.

“Tyelperinquar,” he said sharply, “Let me stop this.”

Celebrimbor could not raise his head, but he opened his eyes and looked straight at him. Annatar saw him drawing his strength together again; he would not speak and he would not let him go.

He could feel Celebrimbor drawing strength from the act of defiance, clearly determined to make things as difficult as possible for him. It was only to be expected from one of his line, but it was a frustrating habit and he had no time for it. He pulled himself away as if the touch of his skin burned, snapping a command to the soldiers. They took up their whips again, and this time he stood only far enough away as to be out of their radius, ensuring that their work was done, and thoroughly.

*

Seven Days past Midwinter

In Khazad-dum, where Celebrimbor had spent long years before the founding of Ost-in-Edhil, the noise from the foundries pulsed through the stone of the mountain. In the foundry hall itself, the sound was so loud it seemed to slip past the boundaries of sense and become a thing to be felt, to be tasted.  Speech should have been impossible on the foundry floor. Even the Eldar would have difficulty understanding each other’s words through the howl of the furnaces and the thunder of the hammers, the hiss and scream of metal being shaped. The Dwarves were less keen of hearing, and packed wool into their ears to protect them.

He had asked Nordri, the smelting-master, how it was that they communicated, submerged in that overwhelming tumult. “When you cannot go over the mountain, you must go under it,” Nordri had pronounced, then chuckled to see the earnestness with which Celebrimbor had noted the Khuzdul proverb. “Not even you could hope to out-shout rock and flame, Master Elf. We cannot speak over the sound, so we must speak under it, with fingers and lips, the motion of the eye and the hand.”

It was pain and not sound now that echoed through him; Sauron was determined to make his point about the limitations of matter. He lost himself from time to time in the thunder and howl of it — day and night seemed to have lost any intelligible sequence — but he thought of the foundries and made no attempt to stand against it or overcome it, but rather to slip beneath it and hold to his purpose.

His own doubts sounded their chittering accompaniment in the clamor. The litany of why this would not work looped over and over through his mind. He let that pass over him too; he was past the point where doubt could turn him from his path.

Sauron bore down on his mind as well as his body, pressing and twisting, searching for weakness, trying to start the reaction that would end in surrender and reconciliation and precipitate out the elements of will. Visions rose before him: his friends, his colleagues, his lost family, still with their death wounds upon them. They whispered pleas and accusations: why have you laid this all to waste, when you might have had so much?

“You can’t even get the accent right,” he said to Sauron, and waited until they faded from his sight. “You were looking for the worst thing in the world,” he said to the emptiness, “but even you can’t bear to say what that might be…”

At last he woke to find that he was free, that he could stand again, that he could walk. Why had he thought that he was a prisoner? He stood at the gates of the Mirdain, and it was Spring again. There was a trouble in his mind, the fading sense of something dreadful having happened and of some obligation of awful urgency neglected, but it was passing from him like the patterns of a dream. He seized upon it as it slipped away. The voice from the fire, the words in the Ring, Sauron is here —

And, having seized it, he wanted nothing more than to push that knowledge away from him. It would be so easy, hardly even a choice at all, to remain there free and whole with his city shining around him and his colleagues beside him, back in the time before everything had gone so wrong, so wrong.

Let it go. Rest. Take the offered mercy. There is nothing back that way but blood and terror and pain.

He turned from the open gates back into the heart of the Mirdain, back to the Great Workshop, ignoring the blurred, startled faces of master and student alike.

I cannot cringe away from this. I cannot fail; if I refuse no one else will even try. If I do not win, my friend is worse than dead. I lost my father to the darkness; I will not lose my....

The workshop looked empty, but it could not be empty. “Annatar!” he shouted. “Where are you? I am waiting for you, tyrant, monster, brother, friend, face me, face me and yield!”

The workshop waved and flickered as true memory overlapped with false vision. The ash-gray sky, the gritty rain, the fragments of a broken world cast up on the coast. We have chosen these shores. We have chosen these shores.

The light of Annatar’s presence shining through his work-quarters. Have you come back to this world the gods have abandoned?

He called up the memory of the workshop again, built it up as he had seen it last. Blood on the table. Chains on the wall. Sauron and the Ring and the knife. He closed his hands on the arms of the chair, hard enough to hurt, as he cast his consciousness in search of the injured, suffering body that he knew to be his.   I am dreaming. I will wake —

He did wake then, in the workshop, tied to one of the chairs. Annatar’s face was inches from his, and for the first time he looked really taken aback, as if an established experiment had suddenly returned an unexpected and untoward result.

“What exactly did you think you were trying to accomplish there?” Celebrimbor demanded. His throat was raw and he was dreadfully thirsty, but the delirium was gone, the pressure on his mind released.

For an instant Sauron looked as if he wanted to ask him the same question, but perhaps through habit formed over four centuries of partnership, he launched into an explanation.  “I really don’t see how I can be clearer with you, Tyelperinquar, about what I am accomplishing. I am calling you back, I am loosening your hold on your destructive and selfish commitments, I am breaking your will.”

“A sound strategy. Sure to succeed,” Celebrimbor put in. “Torture will get you anything you want, so long as you don’t want anything but meat.”

Annatar ignored this. “Now, for a subject to respond to the experience of freedom and reprieve with the desire to return to…” he gestured toward the chair, the bloodstained cloth bands, “to a situation of constraint, is far more typical of a latter stage in the process. In your stage — where the subject is still talking, but not to the purpose — it’s usually more productive to show the prisoner their freedom, allow them to construct what that freedom might mean to them, and then make clear to them that freedom is in your hands not theirs.”

“Construct what freedom might mean …” Celebrimbor would not risk the effect of laughter on whatever it was that had been done to his ribs. “Think about this, Annatar. What did you expect I would do with freedom, but find you and face you and call you back? For the sake of all that we once shared, for all that there might have been, I will not see you lost to the darkness. Bound or free I will not let you go, until my death or your surrend —”

There was a sudden white flare like burning phosphorus and a short blunt movement that ended in the solar plexus and stopped his speech. But when Annatar spoke, he had smoothed out his anger to the very edge of his voice. “Do you still refuse to recognize that our goals are the same? That everything you claim to want, I offer you freely? There is nothing between us but your pride, your will —”

“And your knife. That is a knife? You moved awfully quickly there — all right, a knife then —” It tore downwards, crossing the path of the old scar.

“And now you’re just being dramatic.” Sauron was entirely calm again. “You were happy with me and you know that perfectly well.” The motion of his free hand took in the whole workshop. “There is no reason we can’t have it again. All of it. You at my side, Tyelpe, our work begun again, greater than either of us had dreamed —”

He had, he thought, perhaps another sentence left before the shock closed over him and the blackness took his thought. He bared his teeth in what was, under the circumstances, a passable approximation of a grin. “Your problem is that you’re so much less persuasive when your knife is, by the feel of it, somewhere in my intestines.”

Annatar was clearly about to tell him exactly where the knife was, but reconsidered, instead continuing in the same moderate tone. “I think you’ll find that very persuasive, eventually. They’re not complicated, the arguments you make directly to the body, but they do make it harder for you to pretend you’re anything other –“ something twisted – “than an incarnate. And there are much less unpleasant options available to you at any moment…” If he spoke further Celebrimbor could not hear him over the roaring in his ears.

There were no more visions after that. Annatar returned to the physical and the practical, quiet and tireless, never so much as leaving the workshop.  Celebrimbor matched him as best he could, calling on the strength of his line. His father had broken the courage of a city with nothing more than his voice, and the truth used as a weapon of war. His grandfather had swayed the hearts of an entire people. Could it be so much more difficult to break the will of one alone, though he was one of the gods?

Annatar’s argument was simple, repetitive, an idiot round of the same points: promise, threat, demand, pain. At one point Celebrimbor, immobilized in the chair, heard him rummaging in the drawers.

“Do you know what this is?” Annatar asked him, moving into his field of vision with something in his hand.

“I could not possibly be less interested in what that is, Annatar. I do mean that; it’s not bravado.” Celebrimbor sighed through his teeth, exhausted. “You’ve gotten boring. Have you noticed that? Oh, it’s a common workshop implement, but the twist is that you’re going to use it to cause pain! It’s the same answer every time; you’re like a five-year-old asking riddles. There’s nothing interesting or creative or even intimidating about that.”

“No?” Sauron pulled up a workshop stool beside him and set the vial on the table with a clink, prodding with his fingertips at the soft skin at the underside of the wrist. “Actually, I do agree with you. Pain itself isn’t nearly as interesting as some thought. But it’s not meant to be interesting. There’s nothing that I’m going to do to you with this that I couldn’t do with something else.”

He unstoppered the bottle and laughed to himself to hear the catch in Celebrimbor’s breath.  “I am making a point, though, and I suspect you know that perfectly well. This serves me. All things serve me. As you will. You can let that drive you to despair, or you can let that spur you to greatness; it really makes no difference to me so long as you are mine in the end.”

He poured out a small pool of the muriatic acid into his palm; it had no more effect on him than the burning coals once had, and so he had no need to search for any particular instrument of application.

Celebrimbor was finding it harder and harder to concentrate. Stronger than the doubts and the visions was the simple exhaustion: the longing to let himself drop away into the broken geometries of pain, let himself evaporate like quicksilver in vacuum under the pressure of the terrible will always pulling at him.

“It does, though.” His voice had gone unsteady. “Make a difference. Even to you.”

A flare of attention, the flash of golden eyes. He tried to focus on the place where the pale hair was pushed behind one ear as the edges of his vision expanded and contracted.

“I know my ends; I focus on attaining them.” Annatar’s tone was cool and pleasant as always; he seemed to be talking simply for the soothing effect of his voice. “You’re agitated at this point, and I do understand that, but –“

“It makes a difference to you whether or not you drive me to despair.” His eyes were beginning to clear. “Think about it. What if you get everything you want? What if this works? What if, in pain and in the fear of pain, I yield to your will? Where you once had a friend, you will now have a cringing slave. Then, Annatar, and only then, will we both be lost beyond recall.”

He considered this carefully, which was a mistake. Celebrimbor’s argument was far stronger than he had anticipated. In the days of their collaboration this would have been a source of pleasure — he enjoyed few things more than watching that eager mind mapping some angle or corner of reality that he himself had never considered. But now — what if this works? Everyone under torture was the same person in the end; there was nothing new to be learned about the ways the incarnates broke. And Celebrimbor as a hollowed-out shell, an echo speaking his own words back to him —

As he extrapolated the future from his words, it closed around him: the sudden, sickening, familiar sensation of defeat. The teeth at his throat, the ash-dark sky and the ruined fortress. Already he was running through the options: change shape, flee, surrender —

The Ring burned on his finger, steadying him, re-ordering a world temporarily misaligned. There would be no defeat. That thought was absurd; it should not be thinkable. He was done with defeat; he had made sure of that.

“There will be no defeat,” he said aloud. “I am become the first of the Powers in Middle-Earth; my vision will raise it to greatness.”

Celebrimbor was watching him sharply, far more alert than he had any right to be under the circumstances.

“You did notice that? What you just did there? You talk about vision, but you can’t even look at the world anymore, you can’t even let yourself think. ” He tried to lean towards him. “What you have done to yourself is already far worse than anything you could do to me.”

“I really don’t suggest you find out whether that’s true.” He laid one hand on the burns on his arm and heard him bite off a cry of pain.

“How much of the world do you think that Ring will leave you? How much of your own existence? You called it a signifier of a bond, I tell you have chained yourself more straitly than the Valar ever could.” He paused, breathing hard. “I am the third Curufinwë, and I know something, Annatar, about bonds which cannot be broken. What they will do to you. The way the world gets smaller and smaller and darker and darker until you can’t even remember what it was like to create instead of destroy.”

Celebrimbor really did seem be getting stronger as he spoke; it was unaccountable. “If I did to myself what you have done to yourself, how would you react? If I came to you saying ‘Annatar, behold my greatest work, now I shall never create again but that seemed like a fine tradeoff to get myself a bit more power,’ can you look me in the eye and tell me —”

He was not going to make the mistake of listening to him a second time, so he hit him hard enough not to have to deal with the question. He was not fond of the sounds that the prisoner made when he could not speak, but they were merely unpleasant, not dangerous.

Celebrimbor was already trying to recover himself, to force those shapeless sounds into something like speech. He laid his hand, quite gently this time, on his throat, feeling the lines of the Ring’s power at work all throughout the body that he had broken and mended over and over and over. The small muscles of the larynx answered readily enough to command, stilling into silence.

No sooner had he done so than he felt Celebrimbor’s mind against his, simpler and more ragged than his thought in happier times, but perfectly intelligible.  Look at me, Annatar; can you tell me that this is what you want?

He could silence those thoughts as well, shatter the mind as easily as a bone and have a moment of peace. He recoiled at the possibility. It would be a waste, and more than a waste, never to hear that voice again, never to see those beautiful complex shapes in Celebrimbor’s imagination nor the gifted hands at work.

A little less swiftly than it once might have, perhaps, its responsiveness dulled by torment and exhaustion, the motion of Celebrimbor’s thought answered his, a firm step forward into the space left by him pulling back. I love you. I forgive you. I will help you. You can stop this —

He was fire-blind, lost in a white heat past anger. If he stayed longer at his side, he would kill him, or worse. Quite calmly he turned and left the room, and did not return for a long time.

Annatar was not, he reflected, entirely wrong. He had simplified the terms of the argument, worn it down to the most essential points, and he was losing, and none of it made any difference. Being pressed toward truth meant only that Annatar abandoned argument altogether.  

Where you once had a friend, you will have a cringing slave. How much longer did he have before he broke? What was the first compromise he would make — or had he made it already? How long until Sauron rode out in triumph from Ost-in-Edhil, his new lieutenant by his side? This has been madness, to set his will against one of the Powers. Madness, to imagine there was anything left of his friend to be saved. He had told himself that he risked only himself in this desperate venture — madness, madness and pride. He was risking all of Middle-Earth, everyone who would suffer when his knowledge and his art were bent at last beneath the dominion of the One.

Sauron was not watching; the ones that came to him now from time to time were Men, disciplined by terror but out of the direct gaze of their lord’s eye. Surely it would not take so long to flee away into the darkness that seethed at the edges of his thought. Death did not come easily to the Eldar, but there was so much of death within him already. Once the despair took his spirit, even the Ring could not long hold the empty flesh together...  

And Annatar would be abandoned finally and wholly, and that spark that Celebrimbor had once seen in the ashes would be extinguished. Nothing left but an empty force of will, a whisper in the darkness, the Dark Tower rising over a withered land…

He did not want Annatar broken any more than Annatar wanted him broken, and he had the one great strength that Annatar did not: he could look at the world without the Ring-blindness; he could still imagine it otherwise.

He did not know how long it was before Annatar came back. At some point someone must have moved him; he was hanging by his wrists from one of the fixtures in the wall. His old friend looked worn, although Celebrimbor had nothing like the energy required to distinguish whether that was something in his appearance, or something in the jagged edges of his presence.

Annatar crossed to his side, not bothering to smile. “Tyelperinquar. Still?”

“Don’t you see? I have not given up, Annatar, I will not give you up. But you’ve given up already. The moment you brought out the knives was the moment you gave up.”

His hand closed around his throat, and his voice was quiet and terrible. “No, Tyelperinquar. When I give up, you will die.”

Celebrimbor laughed then, a dry choking that Sauron had to feel against his hand rather than hear. “My own death... it’s not far, is it, Annatar? You just admitted as much.” He could not tell if the pulse in the pressure against his neck was Annatar’s or his own. “How much more patience do you think you have, really? Is some corner of that, that nebula that you call your mind already making that argument to you? You clearly don’t need me whole or sound or free or happy.  Do you need me at all?” He let his head fall forward against his hand; the pressure increased for a moment, and then Annatar moved backward in response.

“You keep talking about how I’m going to kill you,” he said slowly. “I suspect you’re trying to provoke me into doing it. That’s an expected reaction from someone in your position, so I do understand why you would react that way, even if I find it hurtful. I prize you, I value you, and I will not lightly cast you aside, not for my own pride or for anything else.”

With sudden force, he skewered him through the chest with the awl he had left on the table. He ignored the ragged cry, instead listening for the pulse as it stuttered, raced, began to fade.

“This is what you want, isn’t it? This is what you’re hoping for?”

As the head began to tip backward, he pulled the awl back again, and sent the full might of the Ring’s power into the failing body. Flesh joined, veins knitted, the skin closed over. Convulsive tremors ran through the limbs, and Celebrimbor gasped for air.

“You still don’t understand what it is that I can do.” Annatar held him close, his laboring chest pressed against his own. “You will not die. I will not let you die.”

“I...” Celebrimbor’s voice was muffled against his robes. “I am not actually the one who wants me dead.” His head was resting on his shoulder, as heavy as if he were sleeping, and the slurring in his voice might almost have been taken for the exhaustion of a long day of intense concentration. “But eventually – you’re going to do that – and realize it’s not worth the trouble – to bring me back...”

“You’re confusing me with Morgoth again. I don’t get frustrated. I don’t get distracted.”

“No. This is based entirely on what I know of you. Of the person that I spent the last four centuries working beside. At some point you’re going to realize...” He had slumped forward; Annatar found himself supporting his entire weight. “This is a waste. It’s – a lot of energy and effort – just to restore someone to choking and screaming. If that’s what you want – there are easier ways...” He was dizzy, disoriented, his body trying to shut down while the lingering power of the Ring in his flesh still surged with energy. Annatar seemed perfectly content to hold him indefinitely, though, and after a while he spoke quietly, almost into his ear.

“Would serving me be so terrible? I will make you my lieutenant; my power will be at your command. Everything you wanted. Everything we wanted…”

Celebrimbor was silent for a very long time. Annatar did not press him for an answer, did not even move from where he held him.

“It’s strange,” Celebrimbor said at last. He did not raise his head from Annatar’s shoulder. “Everything I wanted… You came to me, Annatar, and the world was changed. Your art and mine, each pulling the other one forward, into the great dance. We lifted up our hands together, and I learned to want what I had never thought to dream. There was so much that I wanted. What was it you said to me? I do not think you can be satisfied...

“But now I want more. I want you. You, the person that I loved, not the weapon that you’ve made of yourself. You, free and whole, no matter who you’ve been, no matter what you’ve done.”

His wrists were pinioned, otherwise he would have taken him in his arms.

“If your own power, even now, were sufficient for you, you wouldn’t be here with me. And there is no way out, except through my life or through your work. The Ring stands between you and all the choices you will ever make. Let it go, Annatar. Come back to me.”

His eyes were closed, but he did not need them to see the turmoil in the spirit beside him, arcing and flaring like fumes in a furnaces, the black shocks of impossibility. But it was not turned against him. At last Annatar spoke, low and unhappy.

“I – can’t.”

*

Three Days before Midwinter, Morning

“Face me, Sauron, face me, brother,” he cried. “Face me, or yield if you will not!”

Whether it was Sauron’s troops pressing the crowd back from around them, or whether it was the silent pressure of the overwhelming will that radiated from the slender white figure, the two of them stood at the center of an empty space. Celebrimbor was armed and armored, his sword in his hand, but Annatar, though he shone with a light that stung the eyes, bore neither weapon nor any trace of armor, only the same rich white robes that he had favored when he was an honored guest and not a conquering god.

The gates behind him — Narvi’s work, once the symbol of the city’s welcome — were ruined beyond repair. The last defenses had been breached: Sauron stood at the entrance to the Mirdain itself, and his soldiers — so many of them, Orcs and Men, were pouring into it. The Brotherhood was lost, the city was lost, all that remained was the final confrontation.

Annatar stood before him, unmoving, waiting for attack or for something else. He means to face me unarmed.   Faintly, as if the distance were much greater than it was, Celebrimbor heard cries and clamor outside the gates, and the harsh bark of orders. The remaining troops of Ost-in-Edhil must be rallying to mount their last defense.  Still Annatar did not move.

It was the first time Celebrimbor had seen him since that night a hundred years ago, when he had turned and left him in the darkened workshop. How could so little have changed in him? Surely the Dark Lord should be wearing a form like Morgoth had worn once, huge and monstrous, a form to cow demons and send armies running. No, this was Annatar as he had known him, save for the new ring on his hand and the new emptiness in his eyes. He was still shining, still beautiful, and the terror that beauty carried with it was fully as great as if he had worn the shape of Morgoth himself, when the High King of the Noldor had braved him at his gates.

With measured steps, not raising his sword, Celebrimbor closed the distance between them. On the edge of his vision he saw Sauron’s guards surging forward, but Annatar stopped them with a quick gesture. They fell back again, keeping the space around the two of them clear, waiting for their leaders to decide the fate of the battle.

Annatar remained poised, as still as a serpent, making no motion toward attack or toward defense. When they were close enough that they could have reached out to take hands, Celebrimbor stopped. Looking into his face, he dropped his sword at Sauron’s feet.

A strange sound swelled in his ears, something between a roar and a groan from the onlookers. Annatar did not smile, but there was a shift in the impassive mask of his face, and a flicker in the depths of his fiery eyes.

“Annatar,” Celebrimbor said quietly. “Let them go.”

The golden eyes did not leave his face.

“My people. I will order them to stand down.  You have what you came for. Let them go free.”

Looking at him with wonder and suspicion, like a student puzzling out the meaning of a diagram, Annatar paced slowly around him, tracing out a narrow circle, coming around to face him again at last.  After a moment he nodded.

Something changed in the air, like the sudden relief of a storm breaking. The cries from the surrounding armies rose loud around him, but Annatar, without taking his eyes from his face or raising his voice, spoke a series of sharp orders that shifted his troops as one to a defensive stance and hushed the clamor again. The language burned in Celebrimbor’s ears; it was not one that he knew, but he was already repeating himself in the common Sindarin used in Eregion.

“The fighters of Ost-in-Edhil will lay down their arms,” he said, “and mine will escort them beyond the boundaries of the river. Give the order, Tyelperinquar, before your people break the peace I give you.”

Over Sauron’s shoulder, through the broken gate, he saw the black banner with the Star of Fëanor: Bruithwir, Maedhros’ old field commander, had brought up the remaining defenders from outside the walls. Coming to my rescue, he thought, and pushed the bitterness of the thought away from him.

“Bruithwir!” he cried. There was a movement among the troops; the leader coming forward. Bruithwir in his black armor was a shadow in the corner of his vision. Celebrimbor did not take his eyes from Sauron, and he could not bear to examine if this was because he did not want to look directly at the man whose loyalty he had accepted and whose life had been pledged to his own, did not want to see Bruithwir’s face as he heard his orders.

“Commander. You will stand down. Your troops will lay down your arms. You will retreat beyond the river and you will not re-enter the city.”

“Curufinwë — my lord —” He had never heard such desperation in Bruithwir’s hardened voice.

“That is an order.”

“And you to retreat with us.”

“You gave me your fealty, commander,” he said through set teeth. “I order you. Go.”

The murmur of a crowd was a strange thing; as eloquent as the voice of the sea or the wind, and now it spoke of desperation, mutiny, refusal to let their lord be taken alive. Bruithwir lifted his sword, but did not lay it down. “When I rode against Sirion,” he began, “I thought that was surely the worst thing one of Finwë’s house would ask of me —”

“I will not tell you again.” Celebrimbor raised his voice, pulling into it all the remembered power of his father, his grandfather, his forebears the Kings of the Noldor. “ Go, or be forsworn. ”

The color drained from Bruithwir’s face. He dropped his sword. Two of his lieutenants — Celebrimbor had known their names once — came up beside him. A detachment of Sauron’s troops — all unarmed as their lord, he noted distantly, what was that for? — came between them, cutting off his view.

But Annatar was staring at him, the beginnings of a radiant smile on his face. Without any warning at all, he pulled him into his arms.

It was no formal embrace, signalling the end of the hostilities that divided two hosts. Annatar clung to him fiercely, almost desperately, as if he never meant to let him go. Another deep inarticulate sound rose from the crowd: alarm, bafflement, anguish. He has betrayed us. He has betrayed us all.

Celebrimbor did not move and did not return the embrace. His face was set and very pale. But if Annatar was disappointed in his lack of response, he did not show it, eventually breaking away from him alight with pleasure.

“So you are prepared to be reasonable after all, Tyelperinquar! I was worried, you know, really worried, especially after you decided to fight a battle not even you could expect to win, just like the most insufferable habits of your people. Why didn’t you answer my letters? Why didn’t you do this months ago? You might have saved our colleagues, the whole city, not just whatever rag-tag survived the assault.”

“We all chose to stand against you, Sauron.” His lips were cold; the words came stiffly. “I do not — did not — command the Brotherhood. But if I — if I am the last one left, I cannot refuse to face you to the end. To try… Those whom I do command, I have sent away. This is not their quarrel. It is yours and mine alone.”

“Quarrel? There need be no quarrel, Lord of Eregion, Master of the Mirdain, Ring-maker, my own. Have I not just granted all that you ask? I am still the Lord of Gifts.” He laughed. “What, did you think I was some bloody-handed tyrant to kill for spite alone, did you think I was one of the Eldar, never to forget a grievance once suffered?”

He took both Celebrimbor’s hands in his. “But what does it matter? You’re here, you’re alive, you are mine, and this is the beginning of our greatness.”

He must have caught the blank sick look on Celebrimbor’s face. “But you look awful, Tyelperinquar; you must be exhausted. Come inside and I will make you some tea; my commanders will handle the evacuation. This isn’t the first surrender my armies have managed.”

“Annatar…” He did not know what he was going to say. He had mapped this day out in his mind, sending his thought down the various branching paths of possibility. But now it came to it, to truth and blood, his friend before him and armies of orcs in the streets of the city he had built —

“And you will yield me what is mine,” Sauron went on, “and I will show you the way that it all fits together; the great order underlying all our work.”

“Yes. I wondered when we would get to that.”

Annatar looked at him sharply, his eyes going flat and opaque.

“We will discuss it further.” His fingers tightened around his hands. “Come with me.”

*

Twenty-four days past Midwinter

He stood in the workshop, as silent and still as one of its pillars, watching his friend dying.

He could stop it at any moment, of course — repair the body again, force yet another infusion of strength into the failing spirit. And for what? You clearly don’t need me whole or sound or free or happy. Any choice before him committed him to a path that he had already decided was unacceptable. The jaws had closed upon him, he could not get free.

“How are you winning? ” he asked the figure before him. He was beaten, broken, naked, he had no power at all.

Celebrimbor, shadowed in the late afternoon light, gave no sign that he had heard him. He was conscious, or something close to it, but deeply sunk into himself. The strong features, now sunken and gaunt, wore a look of intense interiority, as if he were learning strange lessons from his body in its extremity.

Annatar went to the taps along the wall again and refilled the water bowl. Using the edge of his thumb, he brushed the water along his lips.

“Tyelperinquar, my brother, it’s me. Open your eyes. Tyelperinquar, can you hear me?”

He could hear him; his eyes flickered open briefly and closed again. He drank, but said nothing. What was there to say?

“It still doesn’t have to be this way.” He had thought he had given up pleading forever. The last person to whom he had begged for mercy was the Herald of the Valar in the full glory of victory — a glory that he knew would quail now before the strength of the Ring. “Tyelperinquar. Please. Yield the Three. Let me stop.”

“The — Three?” The blank unrecognition was genuine; Celebrimbor was no longer even making the effort to close him out of his thought.

Celebrimbor was pulling his way back to full awareness, but Annatar, in increasing horror, was working through the full implications of what he had said.

“The Three, Tyelperinquar, your Rings, your great work… They are not here at all, are they.”

“No. I don’t think they are.” Celebrimbor still did not open his eyes. “That certainly sounds like something I would have done…” He sighed. “But I told you the truth, Annatar, I don’t know what I did with them; I cut that knowledge out of myself before you could. Did you think I was going to walk into the arms of Gorthaur the Cruel carrying in my head the only secret I have ever kept?

Sauron stared at him, appalled. “So you expected me to —”

“I hoped you wouldn’t. But you did spend the First Age as Morgoth’s master of torments. What reason did I have to believe that you wouldn’t revert to old habits once you had decided that power was the only thing worth pursuing?”

“But you made the Three to face me, Tyelperinquar, you made them to fight me, and you — you gave them up? You have been facing me with nothing ? You —” The irrationality of it burned at him, the inexplicability of all the suffering. “ Why ?”

This time Celebrimbor kept his eyes open. “Because you are mine. And I will hold on to what is most precious to me, and not suffer it to be lost. I swear to you, by the world that is, and by the more beautiful world to...”

“Now? ”

It hardly sounded like Annatar’s voice. Surely it wasn’t just the distortion in his senses that added the layers of strange and dissonant music to it, as if a hundred voices were speaking at once, and all in distress.

“Now, now when it is already too late, you who told me you spoke no oaths, now you find something worth binding yourself to?”

Annatar pulled himself away from him and went to go stand by the window, as if he could find comfort in the patterns of the troops occupying the city, moving through the courtyard, spreading out through the countryside.

“One life,” he said to himself. “Against all this, what is one life, yours, or even mine…”

“Yes. I see the price at which you set yourself, Annatar, and I think it a poor one. I would not see a fine sculpture scavenged for scrap, I would not see a great book torn up for kindling, and I would not see your soul melted down and used as a glorified sledgehammer —”

“That’s not a very precise comparison. I would have expected better of you, though I suppose you might be excused under the circumstances. This Ring acts as all the Rings act: as a focusing device. You would do better to call it a lens —”

“I remember what else you called a lens, once.” Celebrimbor closed his eyes and leaned back against the wall. “Was it in this very room? No. Higher, smaller, it must have been the Lesser Theoretical Workshop — I will lose all the rest of my past, Annatar, before I lose that night. How I laughed then, that lens should be a word for love.”

Something happened in the presence by the window which he would have been hard put to describe in physical terms. The crumpling of a piece of paper, the oxidation of chromic acid, a demonstration of the incompleteness of an axiomatic system. He could not see Annatar; he did not know what he would have seen if he could have opened his eyes.

After a time — he could not have said how long — he became aware of a change in the room. Annatar was beside him, his burning presence gone quiet and dark. Instinctively he reached out toward him, but his hands were still pinioned; he only set some deep biting pain at work again in his chest.

When he had gathered himself enough to open his eyes again, he found that the light from the windows had faded to a dull orange-black, and the sunlight-stones in the overhead lamps were giving back the light that they had gathered throughout the day. They cast long shadows over Annatar beside him. He was twisting the Ring on his hand, and looking at him with a puzzled, abstracted expression, for all the world as if he were an apprentice run into a dead end on an examination, trying to figure where the error had been introduced, trying to remember what the point of all this had been.

“But was there anything there?” he said, half to himself. “Did we ever have anything, you and I?”

“Yes, ” Celebrimbor snapped, “of course we did, but you’re losing it now, aren’t you, you can’t even remember what it’s like to be happy — Annatar, if one of us has the right to be asking that question you’d think it would be the one who’s being tortured by the dearest friend he ever knew. Was it a lie from the beginning, was it all bound to end in this? But I know it was not, Annatar, I see the world where it was not a lie, and that is the world where I will live if I can and die if I must.

“But if you choose the Ring, you choose that other world, the world where it was a lie from the beginning, where you came to us as Sauron the Deceiver and through your cunning turned the craft of the Eldar to your own purposes, and cast us aside when you were done. I will die quietly — or not so quietly, just as you please — and you can take your slave armies and go in search of the Three. And once you have made a desolation of Eregion you can turn your sights West — on Numenor, on Valinor, why not? Bring all of Ea under your sway! Scour the world clean until you need look upon nothing outside of your will, hear no voice that does not echo your own thought, and tell yourself that this is happiness. No one will contradict you.

“Look at me, Annatar, not at the prisoner, not at your lieutenant, look at me. Don’t even think about trying to pretend that you can’t or you won’t; when you named that Ring to yourself you saw me then.”

The person beside him raised his eyes, the gold faded to nearly ember-gray. He had seen Annatar in fire and glory, and Sauron in blood and ashes, and they were the same being.

“It cannot be done,” he said.

Celebrimbor could have wept with joy – indeed, he was weeping already. The concession had been made, it had now moved to a matter of how, and the impossible was a small matter compared to the unthinkable.

“You cannot let it go,” he said quietly, “but you can destroy it.”

He had been prepared for the killing anger at his words, for the last sudden pain and the final tearing free. He had been prepared as well for the black incomprehension that blotted out Annatar’s presence whenever he touched too closely on the matter of the Ring. But the motion of his friend’s mind beside him was so familiar he almost failed to recognize it: curiosity.   I don’t know, Annatar had said to him once, looking at his work. I’m still trying to understand it. And beside the curiosity was something he had never seen from Annatar in his life — at any rate before these last few weeks: grief.

“Destroy it? You know me better than that, my brother; I thought I knew you better. To cast aside something so precious — to break my greatest creation —”

He had closed his hand around the ring, and closed his other hand around that, struggling to return to the theoretical side of the discussion.

“I had thought you had a clearer grasp of the principles involved in its creation. This is not mere gold to be melted down; this is my power, this is my self, poured forth into matter. It is more than a body, far more. I could burn through a thousand of these veils of flesh and never feel the loss, but this, but this... No, it must not be destroyed, it cannot be destroyed.”

“Annatar.” He kept his voice steady. “I do know what I’m asking you. I do know how precious that Ring is; I know what it is made of. But a creator can always unmake his works, even though the cost may be his life... My dear one. My dearest. I am so sorry.”

“You pity me, you dare —”

“How could I not? Annatar, you cannot go back, you must go on, and there is darkness on every path before you. I have chosen what I will not yield; I have sworn it. And you must destroy the Ring, or destroy me.”

Annatar’s gaze passed over him, careful and evaluative, noting the bonds and the chains, the body broken and mended over and over again. Perhaps he was numbering the particles in his body.

“I think,” he said at last, almost conversationally, “you may be right.”

*

One Hundred Years Ago

Annatar stood by the wall in the Lesser Theoretical Workshop watching Celebrimbor at work. They had been working together for weeks now on the postulatory principles that would represent the next stage of refinement of their ring theory. They moved as one now, in hand and in thought, their partnership as effortless as two meshed gears. Sometimes they finished each other’s sentences, sometimes they shouted at each other, sometimes they sank into shared and silent abstraction while the tea cooled on the table and the autumn breezes through the windows ruffled the sheaves of notes on the table.

By the angle of the moonlight coming through the latticed ceiling – a glass dome like a smaller version of the one that arched over the Great Hall – it was well past midnight. The air was edging past chill and into cold, but Celebrimbor seemed perfectly unconscious of it. He had freshly plastered over an entire wall for the purposes of constructing diagrams, and the faint mineral smell of freshly calcifying lime hung, light and pleasant, in the air. There were lines etched into the drying surface, and lines sketched over those in multiple colors. There were notes interspersed through it all: equations and sketches and in one corner a scribbled line of something that might have been poetry: poured out and poured out and yet ever replenished.

Now Celebrimbor was carefully setting faceted gems into the wall at certain points in the array. Annatar watched him closely, the motion of his hands among lines and light showing his thought more clearly than words ever could. He touched the surface of first one stone, then another, calling forth light from them, and then stepped back as a meshwork of light, mapping an intrinsic diffusion flow, sprang up across the wall.

Celebrimbor ran his hands back through his unbound hair, leaving streaks of plaster dust in the dark strands, and looked at his own work, as if he himself did not yet recognize what it meant. His long fingers were still charged with energy and tension, and one of his kind might have called the light in his eyes dangerous.

“Is this... right?”

“I don’t know,” Annatar said mildly. “I’m still trying to understand it.”

Earlier in their partnership anger might have bristled from Celebrimbor at that remark, as he believed himself mocked by a being for whom the inmost secrets of matter were no mystery. But they were long past that now. Instead he lit up with satisfaction, clear and luminous at the light he had been calling forth from his gems

“It is your work.” He looked over to Annatar, and smiled, sudden and brilliant. “Your work, passed through my hands... Do you wonder to see it return to you?”

He knew Annatar well enough now that he could map the movement of his thought as he retraced Celebrimbor’s theories. It was not that he understood him, precisely — whatever it was that Annatar called his mind was wider and stranger and more ancient than he could easily imagine, let alone describe. But even if it was like cooperating with a star system, they had grown familiar to each other. And there was nothing that brought him such pleasure as to see Annatar learning from his work, rare though those occasions were.

Annatar laughed softly, deciphering the final sequence of the diagram, and seized Celebrimbor’s hand. The gesture would have been impulsive, from anyone else, but everything Annatar did served some obscure order, some pattern that he could not see.

“That is greater than anything we have done yet.” Annatar’s fingers tightened around his hand. “But it is still – incomplete.” With his free hand he tapped at the board, his gesture catching at the lines of light and sending them dancing over his skin. “It – calls toward something higher yet...”

“Of course it does, Annatar.” Celebrimbor pulled his gaze away from the board and looked into his companion’s face. “To keep looking upward – that’s your lesson, that is what you have taught me. And something designed using these differentials wouldn’t just act as a focus, it would draw on the power of... well, whatever it was built in response to, I suppose.”

“An anchor.” Annatar was tracing a portion of the array. “You could harness an entire mountain, using this. In the East, you know, there are mountains where the fires of the earth still live...”

“Why should we not look higher? Say wind, water, fire itself.”

Annatar’s laughter was louder this time, a sound of pure delight. “Why not?” He paused. “And yet the Rings we shall make with this design would still be reaching outside themselves; using a power source rather than containing it. What would it take, do you think, to create something as powerful as this that wasn’t dependent on an external source?”

Celebrimbor frowned. “I don’t see how you would do that, though, unless you forged all of Arda itself into a Ring.”

That familiar, deliberate half-smile. “Who would be fit to wield it, I wonder?”

Annatar slipped his fingers free but did not move away from him. He seemed brighter than usual, as if the veil he wore over his nature were wearing thin, the illimitable spirit shining through the flesh. His very presence pressed at Celebrimbor’s mind, a pressure like that of an insight on the verge of breakthrough, frustration and fulfillment at once. The weight and the tension set his hands in motion; he moved to the board again and began sketching.

Annatar paused, seeming to weigh whether or not to speak. But when he did break the silence his words were a blank, as neutral as his white robes that took on every change of the passing light. “What is it?”

“Lord of Gifts...” Celebrimbor let the words linger. “We have been – I have been –“ He swallowed. “Fortunate in you. Do you ever wonder what would have happened, if you had not come to us?”

Annatar’s presence burned beside him. “Then you should be less than you are now. And so, my brightness, should I.”

“You?”

A hand on his own again, stilling its motion. “I came to the Eldar to give you what you wanted. Wisdom. Power. Beauty. The desires of Elves are a little more ambitious than those of Men, but still finite. Those who can be satisfied are solved problems. But you...” The pause was shorter this time; he was no longer weighing his words. “I came to bestow great gifts. Do you know how remarkable it has been to find someone who can receive them? I do not think you can be satisfied. You have taken my gifts, and still you look upward; you call greatness forth from me.”

Celebrimbor turned to face him. “We are less now than we shall be in the time to come. I have been fortunate in you. Arda shall be fortunate in us.”

Annatar turned, lips parted as if to speak. But instead he took his face in both hands, and kissed him, lips fierce against his, hands tangled in his hair.

He had not planned on doing it. He had been content for centuries, should have been content for centuries more, to slowly nourish the understanding between them. He should have been content with his effect on Celebrimbor, with watching his strength and skill grow with desire burning in the back of his thought.

But in that moment it seemed he could do nothing else. Like a great wave descending upon him, as if all the force of his nature had drawn itself suddenly into a single point, he took hold of him and kissed him hard.

Long, long ago, before the world had taken on the shape it wore today, he had been endlessly delighted by chemical reactions, by watching new order ripple and blaze through elementary particles, leaving the substance utterly transformed. He felt the transformation of the knowledge running all through his friend’s being, like hydrogen saturation in the presence of a catalyst.

And then, to his astonishment, he felt Celebrimbor reaching back for him, first in thought and then in the flesh. It was more than reaction, it was response. His hands moved over him, eager and inquisitive, as if they meant to read, or possess, or both.

He had always believed the physical nature of the Incarnates to be a limitation, a regrettable weakness that he had made use of centuries. Now, suddenly, he saw the value in it. There was something unsettlingly intimate about being touched by someone who was a body as well as a spirit, whose flesh was more than an instrument. It was Celebrimbor’s self in the strong skilled hands, no less than in the spirit that burned so brightly against his own.

This was the person he knew, the one took everything that he had given him, changed it and transformed it and asked for more. He wanted to keep touching him, to run his lips across the broad planes of shoulder and chest and the intricate folds at the corner of the eyes; he wanted to fill his mind until every unfolding shape spoke of him.

It was not how Celebrimbor had pictured the moment – and he had pictured it, had allowed himself, from time to time, to dream of how it might be if an emissary of the Holy Ones could be swayed by the same desires that moved the Incarnates. He had expected – no, imagined, he had never approached the audacity of expectation – something formal, courtly, something in Annatar’s elliptical style that raised ten questions for every one it answered, that changed the rules as it went along. A test, perhaps, a laborious revelation like their early Ring-work. Why did you say nothing before, he had imagined himself asking, in the midst of the slow imagined delight. If this was the truth, if we might have had all this, then why did you wait so long?

There was nothing courtly or elliptical about this; it was ferocious and simple and almost overwhelming. In the tenth of an instant before his consciousness was swallowed up, Celebrimbor thought that he had been wrong. There was no question of before, no question of waiting. It could not have been otherwise. There were so many better things to pay attention to than the question of whether things should have been different.

It was a little bit like the moment when a long-studied problem is solved at last: recognition and discovery together. Staggering back until something stayed him, Celebrimbor pulled Annatar hard against him, his hands tracing out the lines of his body beneath the robes, cool and precise as stone under the cloth: the expanse of the back, the bright angles of the shoulders, the line of the spine, the slender waist and narrow hips. Annatar arched gratifyingly into his touch.

He grew transparent at the contact, as if he could see not only through the eyes, but through every pore of his body. The brightness of Annatar’s being shone around and through him, light passing through a lens.

In the midst of that spirit surging against his own, ancient and strange, full of fearful brilliance and incomprehensible shadow, the touch of his body was a piercing counterpoint. Annatar tasted like molten metal, if liquid fire were not death to drink. He tasted like rare minerals, the covert elements drawn out of baser matter only after long search, and like blood —

No, that was actual blood, someone had bitten his lip. He had no idea which of them it was; more research would clearly be necessary. Celebrimbor gasped for breath as Annatar drew back and the world returned; he was pressed against the wall with the stones from the array digging into his back, and Annatar was in his arms.

He had no words, but Annatar was murmuring against his mouth, against his ear, words he did not recognize but whose harmonies set him resonating like a glass.

Annatar’s own language was useless to him. There were no endearments in the Black Speech. There were words of praise: god, lord, ruler, conqueror. There were words of value – three of them. There was ‘valuable thing possessed by someone other than the speaker or someone to whom the speaker owes allegiance’; to use that word was as good as a threat. There was ‘valuable thing possessed by the speaker’. And there was ‘expensive’. None of them seemed quite appropriate to the person in his arms.

He reached farther back, to the language of his kind, whose words could not be spoken carelessly, and there he found the words that he was seeking. It was a pale translation of a few bars of an unutterable music, the song that had resounded through the Powers when they beheld their thoughts translated into substance, and descending into the limits of Arda had seemed not bondage but freedom.

“What is that?”

“That? That is Valarin, the language of my people.” He spoke another of those words like the motion of mountains. It sounded from his throat to his heart, it rang in his blood.

“Su-þâra -phea...?”  Celebrimbor tried to catch the syllables as they passed, sounding them out in imitation.

Annatar laughed at the attempt.“You don’t recognize it? I thought your grandfather might have taught you something of the speech of the Powers.”

He could not tell whether the laughter was his own or Celebrimbor’s, it echoed through both of their bodies together. “I am not talking about my grandfather, Annatar, not now; what are you saying to me?” As it were not perfectly obvious from what it was they were doing, who they were to each other.

“Exactly what I mean to.” He spoke again, savoring the syllables.

“Wait, I do think I know that one — is that teacher? Master? ”

“Close. It shares a root; to pass through, in the sense of the immaterial passing through the material, but the meaning is closer to what you would call lens.” He nipped at the corner of his jaw. “Light-bearer, light-breaker, thou my lens; bear me, break me, let me pass through thee. You know,” he added in Quenya, “it was not until we of the Ainur heard it from your lips that it came into our hearts that we too ought to have a language... O thou by whom I am! Thou my world, my appointed dwelling, let me be for thee and in thee and of thee...”

“A-þâr... am I wrong, or is that one of the roots in Arda?”  He did understand; Annatar had felt that understanding sweep through him, and Celebrimbor now insisted on binding that understanding into words. Annatar could have kissed him again for the sheer pleasure of it, but it was almost as delightful to watch his mind at work.

“Or dwelling. Or inbeing. Or that-for-the-sake-of-which. ” Annatar pulled back, his hands still knotted in his hair. “I value precision of language, Tyelperinquar, and there is no word in any of your tongues to express what I wish to say. So we spoke when we saw our song made substance, when we descended from the Timeless Halls into the world which is, when we saw it and we loved it and chose to join our nature to it.”

Celebrimbor looked back at him, his bright grey eyes gone almost silver with desire. “I was right, ” he whispered. “You were –“

The word mine died on his lips. The silent music that had been carrying them failed and was lost.

“Annatar...”

Annatar looked back at him, his face inches from his own.

“Who are you?”

He knew this feeling, this sickening turn, the moment when satisfied certainty of triumph turned to doubt and the black abyss of defeat. What he wanted was within his grasp – what he wanted was clasped against his body – but between them –

Celebrimbor was pressing forward, prying, demanding, offering up the darkness in his own past, reaching for him. He saw no way out. Old habit pulled at him: change shape, surrender, run, only escape rather than face the ruin of all that he had worked for.

Celebrimbor felt the instant change; saw the burning golden depths of his eyes turn opaque. But Annatar did not pull away.

“So you quarreled with Aulë – why deny it? My people quarreled with every single one of the Valar.” He pressed on. “Oh, my dearest. I know you are no emissary of the Lords of the West. Whatever it was that brought you to us in the beginning, you have seen what we shall be in the world to come. Show me who you are.”

“I came to you as the Lord of Gifts.” Annatar’s voice was neutral again, with no echo of that resonance that had set the fibers of his body reverberating. “And so I have been to you. Do you know what you ask, Tyelperinquar? Not all knowledge is safe.” He looked past him, but still did not pull away.

“You showed me how to bind power itself to matter, and now you are going to speak of dangerous knowledge ? Look at this, Annatar.” He tipped his head back, indicating the interrupted array on the board.  “Look at what we are together. Look at me. You, you will not glimpse what you want and shy away from it.”

Annatar raised his eyes.

Celebrimbor reached a hand to his face, felt the familiar shock in his fingertips, the painless burn at the touch of his skin. “Annatar. Trust me as I trust you.”

If he had not just been immersed in the fiery depths of Annatar’s self, the onslaught of untranslated images would have been overwhelming, even to one who was accustomed to sharing thought with one of the Maiar. Gasping, he felt himself clutching at Annatar for balance even as his mind attempted to parse the unfiltered memory.

A disagreement – a quarrel – a deep discord sounding through the music of his being.   I will not serve anyone who cringes away from his own greatness. Annatar – no, more than Annatar, the ageless spirit of whom Annatar was only a single facet – was tearing himself free of his master Aulë the Maker, the Power of Order and Shape. The emptiness burned through him, a being created to serve. Then promise, then terror, then Celebrimbor saw through Annatar’s eyes the mightiest of the Ainur and the cry of reverence that rang from him needed no translation.

“Melkor...” The sound of his voice recalled him to himself. He was still standing in the workshop. He was still holding Annatar in his arms. “Morgoth...” He drew a long shuddering breath. “So that was your old master. I... I see why you would not speak of this. But, Annatar...”

Annatar tightened his grip on his shoulders, cutting off his speech. Sharp and precise as a series of diagrams, new images sprang into his mind.

The light of the Silmarils in the Iron Crown. The meshwork of stones and spells in the structure of a tower. Celebrimbor choked on a cry as he recognized Tol Sirion, but the images were marching on, each landing like the blow of a hammer on cooling metal. The fall of the great dragon. The spears of the armies of the West. The face of Eonwe, the herald of the Valar, as Sauron threw down his weapons and knelt in the dust.

I know when I am beaten. And I want to live.

He did not know when his hand had slipped from Annatar’s face – Sauron’s face; or when his fingers had let go their hold on Sauron’s robes. But Sauron was still pressed against him, he could still feel the heartbeat in his chest and hear the soft sound of his breath.

“Was it for this,” Celebrimbor said quietly, almost to himself, “that I was cut free of my family’s fate?”

Annatar leaned closer against him. “Yes, yes, you see it, you do see it. This is why you and I lived, that we might –”

“No. That wasn’t really a question. I mean that it might actually have been better – for all of Arda, to say nothing of myself — that I should have died spitted on the spears of my kin at Doriath. Better that your creatures should have gutted me at the rout of Tol Sirion than that I should ever been called –” He attempted to recollect those reverberant syllables, was too sickened to go on. “That I should ever have been so named by Sauron.” He tried to wrench himself away, but he was already backed up against the wall; there was nowhere he could turn. Taking his shoulders, he shoved Annatar away from him as hard as he could.

Annatar went staggering back; Celebrimbor nearly lost his own balance from the shock of it. He let me do that. I could never have moved him if he weren’t letting me —

Annatar caught himself against the table edge, looking back at him through eyes gone black and lightless, as unreadable as a text written in a language he had never learned. After a moment he stood up, straightened his robes, and left the workshop without another word.

*

Twenty-Four Days past Midwinter

Almost absently, his eyes fixed on the Ring, Sauron made a slight gesture with his other hand. The bonds on Celebrimbor’s wrists gave way. He swayed on his feet and nearly fell, stifling a cry at the sudden release of the nearly dislocated joints, but, still not looking at him, Sauron put a hand on his shoulder to steady him. The power of the Ring pulsed out again, the pain in his shoulders faded, and for a moment they might have been standing as they had stood hundreds of times over the course of their long partnership: the two greatest craftsmen of the Age, together in the workshop at the end of the day, thinking over a complicated problem.

But Celebrimbor Fëanor’s heir was stripped and beaten and at the end of his strength, and Sauron Morgoth’s lieutenant was dreadful in might and in power, and on his hand shone the One Ring, the Ruling Ring, the sum of all their labors.

He drew it slowly from his finger.

Celebrimbor did not breathe. Annatar took his hand and pressed the Ring into it, where it lay, round and perfect and unnaturally heavy, on his palm. He did not know if Annatar meant it as a gift, as some final attempt to save his work, as a last desperate argument. With power like this, what could you not accomplish? But his dreams for the world had narrowed to one focused and terrible point, and the Ring could not help him.

Its destruction would be beyond his art, that he could tell even from the most cursory examination. The forces that bound it together were only partially physical; indeed, like the one who had created it and poured his power into it, it was only tangentially a physical thing at all.

“It is beautiful,” he said, tracing it with one finger.

He lifted his eyes to Annatar’s. “How could it be otherwise?”

Softly he set the Ring back in Sauron’s right hand, closed the fingers over it, and enfolded his hand in his own.

“I can do nothing with this, Annatar. It has to be you.”

He reached a hand to Annatar’s face.

“Beloved. Trust me as I trust you.”

Annatar closed his eyes. The space around them went suddenly soundless. As if he dreamed while waking, Celebrimbor saw the world around them as a complex vector space, elements and the rules by which they were related, an order as strict and intricate and graceful as music. And there in the midst of it was a being older than world drawn into a ring, a tiny fragment of matter, smaller and more fragile than Celebrimbor was himself.

One quick breath, then he clenched his fist and the Ring crumbled in his hand.

The patterns vanished. The world went white, or perhaps black, a scalding uncolor that went straight to the mind with no need of the eyes. In a concussion of sound, and more than sound, the Mirdain rocked on its foundations. A cry of terror echoed around them, and Celebrimbor felt rather than saw far mountains quaking and distant towers falling as all that had been accomplished or begun by the power of the Ring began to shatter and snap and fade and pass away.

Annatar opened his eyes — he needed them now, as he never had before, if he wanted to see at all. The body, that thin veil, was all that was left of him, and it would not hold together for much longer; it was the last containment for the power in the Ring that had once been his, that had once been him. It hurt terribly; it had been hurled across the room by the force of the Ring’s destruction. He could not feel his right hand at all. And Celebrimbor —

He lay as he had fallen, not far from him, body twisted and broken. All of the works of the Ring were coming undone and the careful repairs that had seamlessly knotted up a dozen mortal wounds were unraveling. The dark blood was slowly spreading beneath him, but nothing dimmed the triumph on his face: pain swallowed up in victory.

Annatar met his eyes. He could not speak, but there was nothing that needed to be said. With a last effort, Celebrimbor was reaching toward him, and his hand found his own. Annatar felt a faint pressure of the fingers.

“I was... right,” Celebrimbor whispered, his voice wet and rasping over the blood pooling in the back of his throat. “You were...”

His lips moved, but there was no more sound; the blood was welling in his mouth, spilling over the edge of his lips.

Regret ran through Annatar, piercing, helpless, tinged with panic. So much had been lost, and now to see him lost too? This is not what I — You will not die, you cannot die, I will not let you die —

But Celebrimbor was unshaken. He remained steadfast, gazing into his face, until his hand fell open, and the light faded from his eyes, and he knew he could no longer see him.

He had faced destruction of his physical form before, and had thought little of it. But he had always had a self to sink back into, a self that was now dissipating around him in an exponentially increasing series of fission events. He could see nothing, imagine nothing, beyond the point of criticality, and pure terror washed around him, bearing him up like a black sea. This must be what the mortals mean by death. So this is why they fear it.

Trust me, the other one had said to him, the one who had seen worlds that he could not imagine, the one whose world this was.

I will meet you again, he said, though he could not speak and his friend could not hear him. In that world of yours...

His body was losing coherence; it could not longer hope to contain the power that surged uncontrollably through it. He let go.

*

On the far side of the river, Gil-Galad’s troops under Elrond’s command had met with the light guerrilla forces led by Celeborn, and together they had been taking in the retreating remnant of the troops of Ost-in-Edhil.

Each story from the fallen city was more wild than the last: Morgoth’s old lieutenant had arisen again and no one could stand before him, Celebrimbor bought their safe passage with his own life; Celebrimbor had surrendered and sold the city to the Dark Lord, Celebrimbor had been conquered without Sauron having to lift a finger, the Master of the Mirdain had been in league with Sauron all along and whatever horror would arise and come forth from the city would be a thousand times more dreadful than the army of monsters that had swarmed into it.

Bruithwir, the surviving commander of the city’s forces, would not speak at all, save to issue orders. “My lord is lost,” was all that he would say of the fall of the city. When his duties did not call him to rounds in the camp he stood on a hilltop, statue-still, looking toward Ost-in-Edhil.

The days dragged by. The scouts patrolled the borders of the city, but there was no sortie from within it, no motion of the army at all. It made no sense to Elrond and his commanders. Ost-in-Edhil should have been serving as a base for Sauron’s army to conduct its forays deeper into Eregion, but something was occupying their commander’s attention and holding him at bay.

Your nephew?  Celeborn had demanded of his wife, when her far-ranging thought touched his at evening.

Suffering, she replied shortly, a flicker in his mind. A darkness is over all the city, and I can see nothing clearly, but he suffers and he is not alone.

There was nothing for it but waiting, then, waiting for the reinforcements from Gil-Galad, waiting for the promised ships from Numenor, waiting for the muster of Khazad-dum, waiting for the struggle within the darkened city to end.

The end came quite unexpectedly one evening just after dark. Suddenly, silently, it was full noon, and they had just enough time to glance around at each other, to see their fellows’ faces stark in the appalling light. Then the darkness dropped again, and with it came the sound, a sharp crack and a long tearing roar. It shook the sky, it thundered through the ground; some cast themselves to the earth and even those who had been seasoned in the cataclysms of the War of Wrath trembled, and thought of dragons and the strife of the gods.

The horizon glowed dull red as in the distance rose a vast pillar of flame-mottled smoke, and there was no mistaking it now: it was coming from Ost-in-Edhil. A great cry went up, of fear as much as of triumph, and Elrond hurried to take counsel with Celeborn. But Bruithwir stood on the hilltop, weeping freely with joy.

“My lord,” he said to the distant swelling cloud. “My lord....”

They rode out that night and found the city was levelled, the waters of the two rivers were pouring in, and the House of the Mirdain was simply gone, a scorched crater where it used to be. The darkness that had obscured the area to the Sight was gone as well, and with it, all trace of that blank and overwhelming will. Those portions of the army that had escaped the destruction were leaderless and shaken; the Orcs already fleeing for the mountains and the Men organizing themselves into defensive camps.

What can you tell me of this? We are all in doubt and confusion, Orc and Man and Elf alike. Celeborn asked when Galadriel’s thought touched his. What has become of Sauron?

There was a long silence from his wife while she sent her far-reaching sight through regions that he had no name for. Gone, she said at last. Gone, and the world is changed.

And your nephew?  he asked again.

He has won.