Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

“You are nervous,” Annatar said, with an air of satisfaction, as if he had succeeded in isolating an expected but elusive element from amalgamated material.

“Annatar, we share one life and heart and my soul is to you as your own, or something along those lines” snapped Celebrimbor, “it’s hardly a great feat for you to notice if I’m nervous.”

Annatar laughed. “Well yes, but it’s not your soul that gives you away. You go quiet when you’re nervous about something, and you look angry.” The look that Celebrimbor shot him must have been exactly the sort he had in mind, for he laughed again. “When you’re actually angry, of course, you look cheerful.

“Some,” he added, after a minute, seeing that Celebrimbor made no response, “might say that you aren’t the one of us who would be expected to be nervous under these circumstances.”

Even this failed to draw him. Like someone trying to carry a heavy, shifting weight, Celebrimbor was adjusting himself under the contradictory demands of his situation. He had not seen his family for more than an age of the world, and though he had no inclination to deny or conceal his choices, this balanced uneasily against the burden that he would be placing upon his family by returning accompanied as he was. Celebrimbor rarely flinched from anything, but a faint, weary, sour desire surged in him: to have the next few hours done with.

Annatar had, in his own estimation, grown more patient with the inconsistencies and self-contradictions in the minds of the Incarnates. That one who had not trembled to face a god in his wrath should be daunted by the prospect of seeing his mother again was absurd, but it was a beloved absurdity. He looked at Celebrimbor with deep affection.

Suddenly Celebrimbor burst out laughing - real laughter, not the thin sharp sounds of chosen cheer. “Are you honestly congratulating yourself on your tolerance and understanding? One of us was nervous enough about coming home that he got himself a new name, new face, and an empire rather than do it… Come, Annatar Aulëndil, it’s not much further now. We’ll be absurd together.”

“Who is this one?” Laicanis asked. She leaned back on her elbows in the thick bright grass, studying the stone figure emerging from the pillar.  

“Two people really. Calie and Culine were the models,” said Nerdanel, her red hair gray with stone dust, as she dug her fingers into the muscles of her forearm to relieve the ache from the repeated blows of chisel on stone. “You met them, I think.”

“Oh, those healers from Valmar? Yes, I remember them.” Laicanis did not spend all of her time at her mother-in-law’s halls, the thriving complex that had been the Fëanorian summer estates in the days before the quarrel that had splintered the House of Finwë. More often she was teaching mathematical metatheory at the scholars’ halls in Tirion and Eressea, and occasionally in the monasteries of the Notenduri [1]. But Nerdanel’s halls still felt like home to her. She had found them a harbor and a haven when she had returned alone from the Halls of the Dead, and now, she thought, it was likely her son would seek them out as well. His grandmother, after all, was the only living family member of whom he could be reasonably expected to know the location.

It had been nearly a month since Laicanis had felt the world change: a gentle, definitive rearrangement like the blossoming of sweet-scented trees, or the cutting of hair, or the final easing of an old and faded pain. Her son was in the world again, her son whom she had not seen since her death on a night of battle and storm before the first rising of the Moon.

“I had been meaning to ask you,” Laicanis said. “I have hardly any of the Sight compared to you, but blood does count for something, even across death and the long years, and I have been wondering.... Tyelperinquar. Does it seem to you that he is — not alone?”

Nerdanel considered. Her head moved in a quick half-gesture of negation. “He is not alone,” she said to herself, “and he is not the same…” It was hardly possible that he should be, after all. Her grandson had been hardly out of boyhood when she had last seen him, just beginning to grow into strength to match his long limbs.

“I cannot account for it,” said Laicanis. “I might have said that he is married now, but I’ve heard no songs that speak of a spouse, nor indeed of any his heart had chosen. Or I might guess it’s the greatness of his deeds that hangs about him, but the thought will not leave my mind: he is not alone.”

She shrugged slightly, content to leave the question to its empirical resolution if Nerdanel could provide no further insight. “But I’ve finished the gift-theorem I am making for him, anyway. A small addition to the field of functional analysis, to welcome him home. Linear transformation always brought him pleasure, for all that he was seldom content to sit and study. He had to be always at work with his hands upon something. He was like his father that way,” she added after a moment. “Like you.”

Nerdanel was still concentrating, her mind focused on the approaching, un-solitary figure of her grandson. “Not the same,” she said again to herself, “and not alone… Within the day, and before Ambarussa return from their hunting in the south, he will be here. Or, well, they will, and Tyelperinquar can tell us himself who he’s brought with him from the Halls of the Dead.”

Celebrimbor, indeed, was not the same on the evening that he came back to his grandmother’s halls, nor was he alone. The news had scarcely moments to precede them into the hall, and no time at all for the runner to explain herself beyond “They’re here, they’re here —” before Laicanis looked up to see two gray-clad figures just outside the hall.

The entrance was a wide stone archway, but the two figures seemed to fill the whole space: her son like a king, and his companion beside him like a god. It was as if they shone without light, or perhaps resounded without sound, like two frequencies integrated into a single function. Beside her Nerdanel sprang from her seat.

“Curufinwë —”

Laicanis looked up from her papers and let herself smile.

“Tyelperinquar.”

At first it seemed that her son meant to conduct their reunion with all the solemnity befitting legend, stepping over the threshold with measured pace, and sinking to one knee before her like a subject or a supplicant. But he glanced up, and met her eyes, and all at once sprang to his feet, scooping her bodily into his arms.   He was laughing and weeping together, and she buried her face in his hair.

“You took your time about getting here,” Laicanis said tartly, after a while, because words were unfit for anything else that there was to be said.

He set her down, and she studied him, trying to account for the strangeness about him. There was nothing of childhood left in him now, though she could see clearly the child she had known. He was unscarred and shining as any of those who returned from the dead, and like them he carried the darkness of Mandos under every glance and gesture. He smelled of the outdoors, of the wind and water of Aman, and about his hair hung the lightning-strike smell of the presence of the Ainur.

She would have said, at first, that he was taller, but that was an easy carelessness of Quenya, to conflate exaltation of the person with elevation of the body. He was higher, loftier, more than he had been, and he carried power with him as clearly as an artist or a king.

“What happened to you?” she asked him.

“Quite a lot,” Celebrimbor replied with studied ease, and then he grinned at her. They had once amused themselves, as large families will, in tracing familial traits from one face to another. Those are grandsire Finwë’s shoulders, Nerdanel’s laughter, Miriel’s own temper. Do you think those are his father’s eyes, or his mother’s? Celebrimbor’s smile, though, was all his own: a quick guarded flicker blossoming smoothly into open, contagious delight.

“And at some point along the way you began consorting with one of the Holy Ones,” added Nerdanel. She had stood back to let them have their reunion, but she had not missed the figure still waiting in the doorway. Indeed, he could not be missed; he shone like fire made flesh, and the world pulled toward him like a net suddenly entangled with some mighty creature of the depths. It was not immediately obvious to which of the Valar this Maia answered, but he was clearly mighty among his kind. Silent song resounded from him; the members of the household who were still in the hall had shrunk back against the wall in wonder and terror.

Laicanis rubbed at her temples, spanning her forehead and shading her eyes. “You don’t have to do that, you know,” she said to the figure in the doorway.

“Do what?” He turned upon her a look of such primal and concentrated innocence that she knew at once he was perfectly aware of his effect.

“The…” She could not immediately find the word, instead making a vague hand gesture intended to communicate radiance.

“It only means he’s trying to impress you,” put in Celebrimbor. “He did the same thing when he turned up on my doorstep.”

“Yes, well, it makes it hard to think. I’m very impressed but please turn it down.”

“I begin to see where you get it from,” said the stranger to Celebrimbor.

“If you hear a voice whispering to you in your heart of hearts,” added Celebrimbor, who appeared to be enjoying himself, “offering you all that you have dreamed or desired, that’s also him; ignore it.”

The Maia actually glared at him — a gesture too earthly to be anything but deliberate — but he did honor her request. The world was already resuming its normal orientation and the unseen brilliance was no longer quite as blinding. As Nerdanel came up to embrace her grandson, Laicanis studied his companion: the fiery eyes, the silver-gold hair, an overwhelming beauty of person assumed so casually it was almost insulting, as if a king’s robe had been thrown on for a bath-towel. The statue-like perfection was something she had seen before in the forms that the Ainur took for themselves, but looking at him she also had a brief and unsettling impression that she was looking at her son, or perhaps at something he had made.

There was a quiet, merry sound, and she looked to see Nerdanel laughing to herself beside Celebrimbor, surveying their strange guest from over his shoulder. “Well, this not the first time one of the lesser gods has followed one of my family home,” she said. “The last time I put down a bowl of scraps beside the fire for him, which I’m happy to do for you if you’d like, my lord Ainu. Still, I suspect this husband of yours might object.”

“Yes, about that,” said Celebrimbor and Laicanis, at the same time and with very nearly the same intonation, which momentarily diverted both of them from their purpose with laughter. The presence in the doorway flickered. Laicanis wondered briefly if that was his way of showing laughter as well, but a very recognizable expression soon followed — one eyebrow raised at Celebrimbor. “About that,” the Maia said, and did not go on.

She reached out to touch the side of her son’s face with curiosity, and deep affection. The lines of the jaw had hardened with adulthood, but the contours were the ones that she knew from the child who had nestled in her lap as she plotted polar equations. “Yes,” she said,  “I’ve been looking forward to learning the solution to this particular puzzle since first I suspected that you were not alone in your homeward journey.  You had no sweetheart in Aman to return to, and the songs of Middle-Earth that have reached our shores don’t speak of a spouse for you. As I have cause to know, they are notorious for omitting spouses, but one of the Ainur, I think, would have made an impression.” She looked hard into her son’s eyes; union was written there, and death, and something strange that left her own eyes stinging.

“Well, I suppose they wouldn’t — wait, songs? What do you mean? The songs of Middle-Earth generally left me out as well, as I had done or suffered nothing particular and I spoiled the meter on the tally of the sons of Fëanor.”

This time the flicker in the doorway nearly reached the visible spectrum. The Maia had raised one hand to his mouth. Nerdanel was watching him with close attention.

“That’s an odd way of asking me to flatter you! Nothing particular?! Or did you suppose all song had ceased with your death?” But Celebrimbor was still looking bewildered.

“Oh, my son,” Laicanis said softly, “you are a hero and a legend, and if half the things they say of you are true, then the High King himself should have been standing outside the Forest of Return, waiting to do you honor.”

“I’ve been telling him the same thing,” said the being in the doorway. “From you, perhaps, he’ll believe it.”

“Oh,” said Celebrimbor, and then “oh,” again, as it occurred to him why he might be celebrated in song. He opened his mouth as if to speak, looked around him, and shut it again.

“You see,” said his companion.

Laicanis chanted gravely in exceedingly correct Sindarin:
“O glad in peace and grim in war,
Hail, falling Star of Fëanor!
Who bore to earth the Lord of Night
And in thy fall put dark to flight.”

Celebrimbor looked at his companion with an expression closer to alarm than to anything else, but his husband was nodding in satisfaction. Turning back to Laicanis, he ran both hands backwards through his loose hair, a old, old gesture that caught at her heart like a flying sleeve snagged by a thorn. “So, Mother,” he said, “there are two ways that this could go! I could tell you the story from beginning to end, or you could tell me what you already know and I could correct and amend it as necessary.”

“Well, the latter would be far more amusing,” Laicanis said.

“You know that’s now a competitive event?” Nerdanel put in. “The Strife of Truth with Art is a feature of the Midsummer Festival at the Poets’ College in Tirion; you bring your own account of the story of your death and attempt to set it against the songs and legends that have sprung up around it, and you’re judged upon your ability to sway the hearts of the listeners. Many of the Amanyar feel it’s in rather poor taste, and it does tend to be a younger group participating, but should you ever feel the need to contend in song…”

The sound from the watcher in the doorway was not exactly laughter.

“Why don’t you come in, master Maia? No need to stand there like a doorpost; it doesn’t fit the hall architecture at all.”

He inclined his head in graceful, respectful acknowledgement, but his eyes did not leave Celebrimbor, and he did not move from the doorway.

“So, what I know of your fate...” said Laicanis. “Let me see. I left Mandos at the Pardon of the Noldor, so from that point on I must rely on story rather than sight -”

“I can start you off,” Nerdanel offered. “The leaves were gold, and white the flowers/The holly-branches sharp and bright/But fairer were the shining towers/The gems of lost Eregion… No, that will take all day and I haven’t the voice for it.”

“The songs paint you as a lord of some sort,” Laicanis went on, “whether a lord of a city of craftsmen or a metaphorical lord among craftsmen seems to be in some dispute. There’s reference to a Great Rebirth and a Second Noontide, and hints at some very interesting advances in chemical nomenclature, although unfortunately that’s not the primary focus of any of the surviving accounts —”

Celebrimbor shot a look at his companion in the doorway that seemed designed to preempt an interruption; certainly the aura of innocence he was projecting increased by a small but measurable amount.

“They also refer to you as the Ring-Maker. My initial theory was that you had taken up your grandfather’s study of polycyclic molecular structures, but a preponderance of the evidence seems to indicate that the title was literal, and that you had somehow fused the discipline of jewelsmithing with that of… they were never very clear on what exactly, but the words strength, healing, and blessedness tend to recur.”

“Is it… just me they refer to as the Ring-Maker?” asked Celebrimbor guardedly.

Laicanis searched her memory. “Well, there’s ‘the Elven-smiths’, ‘the sages of Eregion’, and a line which refers to your whole school as being led by ‘Elves and Men and stranger kin’ which I gather refers to Aulë’s children—”

“And the ‘Lord of Night’,” prompted Celebrimbor’s companion. “You did say something about him.”

“This is a terrible idea,” said Celebrimbor suddenly. “I thought perhaps - no. Annatar, I’m not doing this alone. Mother, Grandmother, this is my friend, my choice, my other self; Annatar to me, called Mairon in the morning of the world—” The pause was not long enough to be a true hesitation; his eyes were locked with his companion’s.

“Sauron to the High-Elves and Gorthaur to the Grey,” said Annatar coolly, “and Thû to the peoples of Eglador. There are other names in a similar vein, from peoples still less familiar to you, but I imagine that’s sufficient to make the point.”

Laicanis was not, at first, sure what that point might be. The cascade of bitter epithets caught her by surprise. They were familiar but she could not immediately place where she had heard them before. Then she did.

“There are stories that say you defeated a Sauron,” she said slowly to her son. “The Dark Lord that you brought down in single combat. Morgoth’s minion    in malice mighty / Sauron resurgent     rode on Eregion…”

“How many songs are there about this,” Celebrimbor protested. “That’s a completely different dialect -”

Laicanis looked to Nerdanel to see what she made of the news, but she had only the intense stillness she wore when listening.

“They speak truly,” said the man her son had married. “I am that Sauron which Tyelperinquar brought down.”

Celebrimbor had gone quite still.

Laicanis looked from one of them to the other, and slowly took her seat again, leaving her son standing at her side.

“You fought each other,” she said, “or so the songs would have it. Celebrimbor Fëanor’s heir made a last stand in the ruins of his city against Morgoth’s oldest servant, and spent his own life in bringing him down. The details are astonishingly unclear, even given the usual allowances for exaggerations of poets and errors in transmission.

“There in that place of sorcery/In magic strove they mightily,” she chanted softly, almost to herself. “But of that battle who shall tell?... Was it correct?” she asked, sudden and sharp, “in the major particulars? He killed you?”

Celebrimbor looked quickly to Annatar, both realizing that they did not know which of them she was addressing.

“Curufinwë —”

“Yes, I did kill him,” her son answered, and now she could hear the tightness in his voice. “Yes and no. I… I spoke with him. I persuaded him to destroy himself, and the, the consequences of that killed me as well. It is no small thing, for one of the Ainur to be unmade…” He was looking at her anxiously, to see how she bore up under the weight of such news.

“Well, I don’t understand this at all,” Laicanis said briskly, “so let’s hear your explanation. When we left Aman we were seeking revenge upon the Black Foe of the World.”

“Among other things. Yes.”

“And this is one of his servants.” It hardly seemed possible. Not that one of Morgoth’s creatures should wear so fair a face — she remembered the impeccable form that Melkor had worn when he walked free in Valinor — but that he should share so much of her son.

“Is he?” There was nothing of judgement in Nerdanel’s voice, only curiosity.  She might have been asking Laicanis’s opinion of a stone sample or a student monograph. “Morgoth is gone, and servants may change masters. Well, Annatar? Are you a servant of the one that we call Morgoth?”

“Why would a servant of Morgoth answer that truthfully?” Laicanis turned back toward her mother-in-law.

“I find it instructive to hear what people have to say for themselves,” said Nerdanel, staring thoughtfully somewhere past Annatar in the doorway.

“I left Aulë’s service for Melkor’s before your kind awakened,” Annatar said evenly. “I worked his will on Middle-Earth. But Melkor failed, and I was left masterless-”

“I hadn’t thought of it before,” broke in Celebrimbor, “but that would have been at almost the same time I was coming to Gil-Galad, wouldn’t it? After the Great War, after the world was broken and Beleriand drowned — I’m sorry, Mother, this must be just a stream of names to you.”

“Nothing I can’t keep up with,” said Laicanis dryly. “Go on.”

“So the songs apparently speak of our — er — last battle. Do any of them mention that we had known each other before that? That he was my friend?”

“Friend?” echoed Annatar. “I counted half the Mirdain my friends; I am entirely certain you can find a more precise term for what I was to you.”

“Colleague? Teacher? Guest?” There was laughter in Celebrimbor’s voice now, an easing of the tension. “Emissary of Aman and messenger of the gods? You did say what you were to me, after all… Or should I say co-creator, the light in my thoughts and the companion of my heart, who shared my vision and lifted me up with you —”

“This still doesn’t explain,” said Laicanis, a little more loudly than necessary — for Annatar’s presence was once again practically glowing and her son was becoming distracted — “how you came to be killing each other.”

Celebrimbor sobered at once. “Well. When Annatar came to us in the Mirdain — that’s the Brotherhood of the Jewelsmiths, my people in Eregion — he came offering knowledge and wisdom and help in our shared mission. He offered us only who he was, not who he had been.”

Annatar’s hands closed at his sides.

“I did not press him,” Celebrimbor went on. “We had all agreed to leave the past behind us.”

“I could see why you would do that,” said Laicanis.

“Eventually, he… he trusted me.” He looked up at her ruefully. “And I reacted with rather less poise than you, on learning that he had been a servant of Morgoth.”

“Tyelperinquar.”

It was not exactly unsettling, to hear the name that she had given her son spoken with such feeling in that musical voice. But once again, there was that sense of strange recognition, of the familiar blended with the utterly alien.

“If only I had confined myself to not understanding!” Celebrimbor said. “I rejected him; I drove him away from me. Our partnership was broken.”

“And so that’s how you ended up facing each other at swordpoint?” Nerdanel did not seem surprised; she had, perhaps, seen this transformation often enough before.

“There may,” said Annatar with unnatural evenness, “have been some overreaction on my part.”

“Not swordpoint exactly,” said Celebrimbor, electing not to comment on the degree of understatement. “I — I knew that I couldn’t defeat him in battle, not with what he’d done to himself, what he’d become. I met him vision against vision, will against will, because I believed that he could still choose to reject it.  In the end, he did.”

“So you spoke with him,” Nerdanel said. “He still had those armies, though, didn’t he? The ones he used to level your city? That does not seem like the strongest position from which to negotiate his surrender.”

It was Annatar and not Celebrimbor who answered. “He was right.”

Laicanis exhaled. “Well, frankly,” she said to her son, “that sounds a great deal more like you. Something as straightforward as a heroic last stand seemed much more in keeping with one of Nolofinwë’s line.” Her hands shifted restlessly in her lap. “No, I still don’t understand. I have all the pieces, but I can’t fit them together; they don’t all seem to belong to the same system. You loved him. You have chosen each other. He served Morgoth. You fought and killed each other.”

Annatar seemed as if he were about to object, but Laicanis forestalled him, still addressing Celebrimbor. “No, that’s not the part I’m having trouble with. I’ve killed friends myself, if it comes to that. But servant of Morgoth…” She looked up sharply. “For goodness sake, come in out of the doorway, Annatar.”

This time he did, drawing up a chair before her. Celebrimbor reached for his hand and she marked the familiar, effortless way their fingers twined and interlocked. But when she spoke, she addressed her son and not the one who had killed him.

“It is Irmo’s pleasure, or perhaps merely his nature,” she began, “to send us visions both true and false.” Annatar looked as if he had something to say on the subject; a quick pressure of Celebrimbor’s fingers evidently warned him off saying it.

“I saw you, from time to time, in my dreams.” Sometimes Celebrimbor had been a child, sometimes the youth she remembered, sometimes the man that she had seen through the unforgiving eyes of history in the Halls of the Dead. When she had returned to life, trading knowledge of the world for the ability to act within it and upon it, the Lord of Dreams had shown her many different fates that might have befallen her son. Sometimes he wore his father’s proud beauty, sometimes his grandfather’s fury-tinged inspiration, sometimes...

“The last time I saw you, you were standing alone in a darkened smithy. Cradled in your hands you held an ember, and you were breathing upon it, coaxing it to flame.”

She had marked the change in Annatar's presence as she spoke of true and false dreams; nothing altered on his face but something in the quality of his being grew sharp and watchful. She went on.

“The ember kindled. The light in your hands grew and grew, searing, blinding, until I could see nothing at all. Then I woke, and knew that you were dead.”

She had not remembered falling asleep, but she remembered that waking, cold and open-eyed, the starlight on the papers at her desk, that knowledge lodged in her too deep for removal or relief. It had been weeks before she could weep.

“Mother-” Celebrimbor was reaching his free hand toward her; she took it in both of hers.

“You are not so changed, my child, as to have lost your love of creation. Morgoth did not create: he stole, plundered, twisted, and destroyed. You say that you spoke to this one, your Annatar, you persuaded him, and I can well believe it. But what I cannot understand —”

“Why he found that worth doing in the first place?” asked Annatar.

“Precisely.” Laicanis gave him a curt nod of approval.

Celebrimbor was silent between them. She could see him marshalling his thoughts. “The art that arose between us,” he began, and then, jarred by the artifice of his own speech, began again with “All that we made together —”

“Oh, Tyelpe, you don’t need to persuade me! I said that I didn’t understand, not that I disapprove. If he is yours, then he is mine as well, and there will be time enough to work the problem out.” Belatedly, she looked over toward her mother-in-law, whose hall this was, and who had been studying the three of them with her usual watchful attention.

Nerdanel rose to her full height.

“Curufinwë Tyelperinquar — son of my son — you have brought a Maia of Melkor into my halls. Do you speak for him?”

Celebrimbor got to his feet in answer. “I do.”

“Well then. He’s not the first murderer I’ve had under my roof; by Mandos’ mercy he won’t be the last.” Nerdanel pushed her sleeves back up her arms. “Come along then.”

The two exchanged quick glances.

“Yes, both of you! While you’re perfectly welcome to spend your time here wearing the shrouds of Mandos, should you find yourself wishing for clothing a little more… comprehensive, I’ve put out some things for you in the guest bedroom just at the top of the stairs there. Yes, for you too, Annatar, unless you prefer to clothe yourself by whatever mystical means the Ainur generally employ.”

“Well,” said Annatar cheerfully, some time later, stretching out along the mattress in the guest room and examining the quality of the weaving on the bed-linen, “I thought that went quite well, don’t you?”

“I think,” said Celebrimbor, “that you think they’re done.” He began attaching the sleeve of the light over-robe. Valinorean fashion had altered out of recognition since the days before the Darkening, and he could not even put a name to half the dyes that Aman’s textile-masters were using now.

He had been, momentarily, afraid that the guest room would hold clothes that he remembered, though he was somewhat taller and considerably broader-shouldered than he had been in the days when he had spent summers at his grandmother’s estate. But the robes that Nerdanel had brought for her guests were of much more recent make. The fashion for elaborate embroidery that he remembered seemed to have been replaced by multiple layers of sheer and shifting fabrics, creating a depth like that of ink painting. He had noticed Annatar looking through the offered materials with some attention — perhaps seeking his once-customary white — but there were only colors, and after some consideration he had layered oranges and golds and blacks to striking effect.

The jewelry, on the other hand, Celebrimbor recognized at once. None of the Eldar would neglect a guest so far as to let them go unadorned, still less when the guest was a long-lost member of the family. The silver-work — intricate meshed circlets and arm-rings and necklaces was Curufin’s. Annatar had picked one of those pieces up, but set it down almost immediately, selecting delicate electrum ear ornaments instead.

“Your mother’s very like you, isn’t she?” he remarked.

“Well, yes, Annatar, that is the way among Incarnates; the parents must provide both material and pattern —”

“No— though she did a fine job creating you, and her work is to be commended. I mean in the shape of the mind. She’s set at even stranger angles to the world than you are.”

Celebrimbor presented him the back ties to be done up. “Well, we have been fortunate enough to commence your re-introduction to the world of the living with possibly the only person I know who would find he was right entirely persuasive and sufficient as a reason for abandoning your entire previous existence and setting your essence on fire. Now I don’t know why I was so worried about introducing you two; you’ll get on just fine. Grandmother, on the other hand…”

Whatever Annatar was doing with the ties was undoubtedly more complex than had originally been intended. “She rules here?”

Celebrimbor put some thought into conveying the intensity of the requisite response. “My grandfather listened to her. You can feel her authority here; she runs all through this place like copper through the Dol Caran. It’s like —”

He stopped. It reminded him of nothing so much as his brief visit to Lorien while Galadriel wielded her Ring: that sense of power and deep harmony. He was not sure how much was his altered perception and how much was the clarity of Aman, and the thought of his master-work brought a strange sensation, a painless pressure like a hand on a healed scar.

“Although,” he added, twisting backward to try and catch a glimpse of the knotwork in the ties, “my grandmother is not technically the King of the Noldor. That must be — oh —” He swore. Although Annatar did not appear to recognize the Khuzdul imprecation, the meaning must have been clear enough.

“What?”

“Annatar, besides the Valar, who knows you’re here?”

“You. Eru Iluvatar. The people we spent this morning meeting.” Annatar nudged him to the side to reach the second set of ties.

“You don’t imagine, do you, that any of the Valar would have sent any kind of word to the High King?”

“Which one? Ingwe? Olwe? Valinor is rather oversupplied with kings; it’s lit up with authority like a city at festival. Pretty, but wasteful.”

“You know exactly who I’m talking about. The High King of the Noldor. Of course the Valar wouldn’t bother to tell him; they didn’t tell me you were standing on the other side of Mandos’s gates —”  

“Is it any of his business who you marry? Your explanation of Noldor marriage-customs has been regrettably incomplete, but I wasn’t aware you required some sort of royal permission —”

“Come off it, Annatar. You’ve ruled; you always had more taste for it than I did even in Ost-in-Edhil. My word on your behalf may be good enough for my family, but if I’m bringing the ancient enemy of his people into someone’s lands, common courtesy at least dictates that I alert him of the fact.” Without waiting to attach the second sleeve to the over-robe, he went in search of his grandmother.

Nerdanel seemed to have been expecting something like this. “The Powers do learn, but they learn slowly,” she said to him, as they climbed the stairs of the observatory tower on one of the upper terraces. “The sort of news they consider important to communicate to us still follows their logic rather than ours.” A quiet half-smile crossed her face. “Though perhaps you’ve had a chance to observe quite closely just how different their view of the world can be.”

They emerged into a round, white-plastered room at the top of the tower, with a table in the center and a wooden roof for shelter but with the walls open to the wind and offering a full view of the country around. Nerdanel’s halls were built at the foothills of the mountains, not far from where her father’s people lived at the Tamin Martamo, the Forges of the Maker. The terraced fields were green and white, interspersed with stands of cypress and flowering plum, and the wind through the giant bamboo sounded like distant chimes.

“This land seems… well,” he said, searching for the word for the sense of wholeness in the landscape. He could almost hear it: the glad song of harvest and growth. In Middle-Earth, even the places that had been longest in the friendship of the Elves seldom spoke so clearly.

“It is well. Aman was thoroughly protected.”

Celebrimbor put his hand toward the palm-sized stone on the round central table, then drew it back.

“Seeing stones… Do you know, we never did succeed in making them in Middle-Earth? At least not the way they had been; they could help strengthen the Sight but nothing was really clear, and we couldn’t stabilize the temporal correction factor. You could be looking into the future or the past and never know it… And the last even of those were lost with Beleriand.”

“Of course, most of ours were lost too,” Nerdanel pointed out. “This is one of three known originals that were left after the sack of Formenos. It only survived because it was buried in a drawer in the workshop here. An early example, never intended for anything more than a test to see whether the design was feasible.” She did touch the stone, running one strong hand over its dark surface. “There were worlds that ended here as well. Even in Aman.

“We are making seeing stones again, but it’s not the same. They’re much larger now, so the most powerful ones are fixed in place, and they can be unpredictable if you haven’t had much practice in using them. Fëanor’s documentation on their construction was incomplete and contradictory, and the sages at Tirion had to re-develop the art very nearly from the beginning.

“We’re still working through his notes,” she said, her eyes softening, and Celebrimbor had no need to ask whom she was talking about. “He never had any sort of system for organizing his research, and he often wouldn’t so much as talk about something until he’d gotten it to a point he was satisfied with. Even reading his notes is a challenge, let alone understanding them. He’d invent whole scripts, entirely new notation systems, if he thought they’d be more suited to a particular idea — or simply because he’d thought of a new writing system and wanted something to practice it on. We spent most of a century trying to decipher one manuscript that proved to be nothing but a recipe for persimmon custard.” She smiled again, sadly. “It was good persimmon custard.

“There are still a few rooms in the workshop,” she added, “that are very nearly undisturbed from when your grandfather was working there. If you — and that husband of yours — want to take a look at them, you’re welcome to. These halls were less of a priority than the ruins of Formenos, or even than his laboratories in Tirion, but everything’s been meticulously catalogued by the archivists, and then placed back exactly as it was, down to the empty wrappings for rice-sweets and the dust where the apple cores once were.”

She picked up the stone, and its dark surface began to lighten and clear.

“You needn’t expect you’ll escape, either. The Department of Memory Unscarred, the Scholars’ Union for Trans-Alatairean Studies, and the Singers’ College are all going to want to hear everything about what you’ve been doing in Middle-Earth, to say nothing of the advances made by your city of scholars. They’ll probably let you alone at least until the King has had a chance to rule on the status of your Sauron, but they’ll be coming for you sooner or later.”

The stone in her hands was now entirely clear, and colored shapes were coming into focus through its depths. With a shock, he recognized the palace in Tirion, pale and strange with Arien’s light on its walls.

“Nolofinwë and I have been in contact a good deal, since his return. I can’t say he’ll be happy to hear just who it is you’ve brought home, but he will be glad you told him.”

Annatar’s enthusiasm at the prospect of looking through Fëanor’s research notes was only slightly dampened when they pushed open the door to the unused workshop and saw the condition in which those notes had been left.

“I did not think anyone — any finite being, anyway — could possibly have a less efficient organizational system than yours,” he said, leafing through a stack of closely written papers. “I suppose that’s why you called yourself Fëanor’s heir.”

“I called myself-?!” Celebrimbor began indignantly, before perceiving that he was being needled. Instead he picked up one of the notepapers and examined it. Though stained where a cup of something hot had once rested on it, the writing, in his grandfather’s strong graceful hand, was perfectly legible. The paper contained a beautifully detailed and carefully observed diagram of a cat’s whiskers, a lengthy equation that had been crossed out and rewritten, and a series of increasingly rude puns apparently intended as suggestions for names of Nolofinwë’s children.

“Look at this.” Annatar was leafing through a notebook, scanning through the numbers and symbols as easily as text, and occasionally laughing under his breath at what he read. “He must have been quarreling with someone, or maybe making a point; this is the basis of an entire non-Endorean hypergeometrical series, and it’s being used to set up the mathematical equivalent of a punch line… the answer is three and it takes the entire book to get to the system that allows the question to be asked.”

“I remember that speech! Or something like it, anyway; it was a tradition at the Feast of the Imaginary Integer at the scholars’ hall where my mother taught sometimes. The lecturer would begin, and if you thought you’d gotten to the answer before they finished explaining the question, you would light your candle, or set your flower to blossoming, and by the end the whole hall would be all light and color… I wonder we never thought to introduce it at the Mirdain.”

He looked at the sturdy table, deep in papers and dust, the high walls lined with mirrors and windows that to be adjusted just so for directing and intensifying light around the space. “The Fëanor that this place is remembers is much… happier than my grandfather as I remember him.”

Anywhere the Eldar passed, anywhere they worked, they were remembered, even in the darkness and confusion of war-torn Middle-Earth. But here in Aman, refined by the long years of peace, there was a clarity like that of a quick smooth river, where the sunlight shone straight to the bottom and glinted off sand and buried stone. The valley and the hall, the very stones of the place, all remembered the Elves who had dwelt there.

Faint but clear, he could perceive his grandfather’s presence as the workshop had known it once. Newly married, newly made a father, pausing in his restless forays back and forth from Tirion and deeper into Aman, passing the summers here as a pleasant refuge. By the time Celebrimbor had moved from childhood to youth, Fëanor came no more to his wife’s summer estate.

“He was so young,” Celebrimbor said softly.

“Don’t open that; it’s extremely corrosive,” said Annatar over his shoulder, as Celebrimbor shifted more papers aside and picked up an unlabeled, stoppered vial.

“I can see that. No, I can see that now. Look at it! It’s practically bristling with -” He found he did not have a word for the quality that he perceived in the heavy glassy liquid; it was not a color nor a type of motion. “...Generosity? Giver-ish-ness? There is something of itself that inclines outward…” He gestured in a manner that was not particularly informative, even to himself, but was intended to convey the property he observed..

Annatar looked extremely gratified. “So you can see šabaruz now?”

“What?” The Valarin word had jarred in his hearing but settled comfortably into his mind; still he was not sure what Annatar meant.

“Ah—” Annatar appeared to be running through the admittedly convoluted tables of Eldarin chemical terminology.  “Laicë, [2] I believe, though now you can see why that’s a very limited term.”

“Oh so this time you’re willing to translate rather than demonstrate?” demanded Celebrimbor, but Annatar was already continuing.

“What a pleasure it is not to have to talk around things! You were always a quick study, but I think that now we shall move on even more smoothly together, you and I…” He looked around the unused workshop: the ancient but apparently perfectly functional water pipes on one end, the worktables and the rows of tools, the burners and the shielded chambers.

“Did your grandmother mean this for our use? This space? Can we start setting up here?”

Celebrimbor’s automatic acquiescence — of course it is, our doors are always open — died on his lips. He had not set foot in a workshop since—

“Annatar,” he said, his throat gone dry, “can we go back?

He was expecting to hear both of course and of course not, but Annatar said nothing, only looked at him with that bright heavy expectation that he had come to know well.

“How far back can we go?”

There was still no answer. For the first time he faced the presence, not merely the thought, of returning to his work, to their Art, to what might lie beyond the Three, the One, the pillar of light over Ost-in-Edhil. He looked again at the empty space — not abandoned, but sleeping — and saw not the shifting depths of the past but the the solid matter and clear edges of the present. It felt like setting weight for the first time on a bone that had been broken, or taking the bandages off a half-healed wound.

“They’re going to ask us everything. About everything,” he said. “The Rings. The Ring-theory. What do we say to them?”

“You were very clear on the sharing of knowledge, once,” said Annatar, and the weight of that expectation — of Annatar looking to him for answers he did not have — bowed his head and darkened his eyes.

“Can we go back?” Celebrimbor said again, and did not know what he hoped to hear in answer.

He heard the rustle of papers being set down. After a moment he felt his hand being taken in both of Annatar’s: the old, practiced motions of the end-of-day massage. Annatar pressed gentle circles around each joint of the fingers, stroked the long furrows between the tendons down toward the wrist.

“We go forward,” he said, calm and matter-of-fact. “That is what I have learned from your kind: there is no going back. You have to work; it’s your nature.”

Celebrimbor said nothing, thought nothing, let images and words alike fade away, and for a long moment only felt the touch of Annatar’s hand on his. There was no memory in his hands, no ages of skill worked into muscle and bone. They were fresh and untried, new-wrought after death.

When Celebrimbor moved away at last, Annatar thought the change had begun. There was a brisk purpose to his motion, and a spark in his eyes, the same that he knew so well from the days in Ost-in-Edhil, when he looked out at the world and saw not only what was, but what might yet be.

He began investigating the workshop, noting its supplies and its equipment, and once stooping to the floor to peer under a set of drawers. Annatar, content to watch him, perched on a workstool, but all at once Celebrimbor’s motion ceased and the quality of his silence changed.

Annatar got to his feet. Celebrimbor was looking at a set of goldsmithing tools in the drawer of the worktable; well-wrought and carefully tended though never so fine as the ones that Annatar had given him in the Great Workshop of the Mirdain so long ago.

“No,” he said through his teeth, “not this, not this—”

His knuckles had gone white where he gripped the table, and his hand, when Annatar set his on top of it, was ice-cold to the touch.

Celebrimbor had grown accustomed to the way that lightless fear would come upon him from time to time, for all that it happened less often now, and passed off more quickly. But here in the familiar safety of his childhood home, he was angry as well as afraid, offended as a lord barred entrance from his own hall.

For his part, Annatar had, with some difficulty, learned to refrain from the immediate and instinctive desire to respond: to argue or distract or simply, by force if necessary, to soothe. So he waited, and after longer than he would have liked, Celebrimbor raised his head.

“You asked great things of me, once,” he said bitterly. He left the other half unsaid: and now I struggle simply to stand and breathe and keep my sight.

But Annatar looked at him, unfeignedly baffled. “Are you under the impression that I’ve stopped? You remade everything, Curufinwë Tyelperinquar. This is your world, into which I have followed you—” Even the most formal Quenya did not have a mode for expressing the degree of reverence appropriate to what he wished to say, and he slipped into the language of the Powers. “Lead, and I shall be led; see, and through thee I shall see.”

That caught at Celebrimbor, though he still barely knew enough of the language to guess at a translation. “Come here,” he said. There was very little here left between them, but Annatar moved closer nevertheless, stepping behind him so that they stood together as if working on some shared and delicate project. “Touch me.”

His hand was still resting on Celebrimbor’s where he gripped the table, which he refrained from remarking on. Instead he folded his free arm carefully around him, resting his hand so lightly on Celebrimbor’s shoulder that only close attention would register it as a touch at all.

Celebrimbor reacted exactly as he had hoped, twisting suddenly around to face him with a low sound in his throat, knotting his cold hands into his hair, and pulling him down to kiss him. The burnt-sugar taste of fear was acrid in his mouth, but Annatar no longer found that taste a pleasant one.

Celebrimbor was desperate and incautious, fiercely repurposing the agitation thrumming through his body, determined to overwrite it. “Do you think this is a good idea?” Annatar asked him, in a moment when he was left free to speak. Words seemed to be temporarily beyond his companion, so instead of putting forth an argument, he did his best to make Annatar unask the question. His best was extraordinarily effective, and Annatar soon left off questions altogether, speaking into his ear the words that could not be pared down into Quenya, and the endearments that could not be readily shaped into words at all.

Tilion rode high and bright in the sky, scattering sharp-edged shadows. It was Tilion here, Celebrimbor thought, walking barefoot along the raised wooden paths over the water-garden, not the Moon. Everything in Valinor seemed to be more of a person than a thing: stone and sky, water and earth. They murmured and sang, they looked back at him with familiar eyes. We remember you, Elda, Noldo, Curufinwë. Do you remember us?

Deep-throated calls of frogs echoed from the rushes around the edges of the water-garden, and the night-blooming lilies lay open on the water. Work and song did not cease, but the rhythms of the estate had shifted from day to night. In one of the outer sculpture workshops a group of students were learning how to call the qualities of moonlight into stone. Someone was chanting the Naming of the Stars from the rooftop of one of the towers in the main hall. In his mother’s study, he saw a light burning.

Laicanis had preferred the time of the Silver Tree for her own reflections, in the days when there had been nothing but light in the world. Now that darkness was a time instead of a place, she did the difficult, abstract part of her work by night.

She looked up from her work and smiled when he called quietly outside the doorway. “Tyelperinquar. Come in.”

“I worked through your welcome-home theorem,” he said, sitting down on the window seat. The cushions, blue in the daytime, were silver and black in the moonlight.

“I thought you might enjoy it. You can name the characteristic vector, if you like, the one that doesn’t change through linear transformation. I’ve just been calling it yanta — the tengwa, you understand — but if you have something you want to call it, I don’t think the math-masters will object.” [3]

“Unless I named it, say, after my husband,” he pointed out.

“The Sauron vector? That might cause consternation,” Laicanis agreed. “And why would you do that?” She looked at him curiously. “Is that what he is to you? That which doesn’t change despite transformation? You can see why I’d been thinking about linear transformations, thinking of you.”

“I’ve been thinking about it too, in somewhat different terms — which was why that theorem really was so good to come home to, I came to thank you — but yes. I’ve been thinking about what transformation means. What’s preserved in the translation from one… one module, one field, one vector space -”

“Say from one world, the poets will understand it better.”

“All right then. What’s preserved in the translation from one world to another.”

She left her work at the table and came to sit beside him in the window, and did not offer an answer.

“You’re not entirely all right, are you?”

“Is it that obvious?”

“Oh, Tyelperinquar, it’s the most natural thing in the world. Your soul’s still raw with the fact of your death, and you pushed yourself quite hard in returning as soon as you did.” The night breeze came through the window, cool and rich with the scent of the fields. “Dying was the most significant thing to happen to your body; of course your soul’s going to remember it. I couldn’t go near water for years.

“It does heal over, though. You don’t stop learning; your soul doesn’t stop learning. There are more things in the world than death.”

“It is late,” Celebrimbor said after a long silence, “to ask you for your blessing.”

“Really? I would have said it was early.”

“I mean that I’m not — not going to change my choices, you understand.”

She smiled. “So he is your yanta then, your characteristic vector? Transform the world however else you will, that line runs true?”

There was deep comfort in being understood so quickly, even with such distance and such strange matter having come between them. “Yes. So I don’t….perhaps I’m not asking you for anything at all. I just want you to know that it matters to me. What you think matters. Even if it doesn’t alter my choice — it does matter.”

“You mean what I think of your Annatar?” she asked. “Or what I think of you, for choosing him?”

The answer, of course, was both, but before he could bring himself to speak, his mother went on. “I think that I am not in any position to condemn you. I am, after all, still married to a man that you rejected.”

“Mother—” The question of his father had been on his mind as well, quieter and less urgent than that of his husband. What do you think of me, for rejecting him?

“Thank you for taking care of him,” she said quietly. “I saw what he did to the world, saw what was left of the spirit that I loved when he came in bitterness to death.”

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

“My child.” She took his hand. “Such courage you grew into.”

The old doubts and sorrows were fixed and still now, distant but clear as diagrams. He remembered when they had moved sharp beneath the surface of his thought, divided between you should never have left your father and you should have left him centuries before, when there might have been something of your family left to save.

“Not courage.” It was evaluation, not self-accusation. “How it gnawed at me, in the years after! If it had been courage I would have broken with him before Finrod’s death, if it had been courage I would have saved him somehow — No, it’s all right,” he said, as she drew breath to interrupt. “I’ve — Father and I, now that we’ve met again, it all seems to matter less now. Death pays all debts, as they say.”

“Do they?” his mother exclaimed. “What an extraordinary expression.”

Belatedly he remembered that the expression was a soldier’s jest of Beleriand, and his mother would have no reason to be familiar with it.

“I saw him, in Mandos. We have — made peace. He cared for me. There is still so far he has to go before he can bear the world’s full weight again, but I think that he will return one day. His heart is turned towards life; it must be, for he helped me towards it.” The smile that lit Laicanis’ face, bright as the moonlight, eased his own heart.

“Now his opinion on your husband, that’s one I’m really interested to hear. Did he know you went to his arms, when you left Mandos?”

“He… well…” said Celebrimbor carefully, “he knew I went to seek him. Finding him turned out to be a great deal easier than I had anticipated. To tell you the truth, I expected at this moment to be undertaking some world-spanning quest to recover him, but instead…” He gestured at the study, and by extension the estate beyond. “Here we are.”

Laicanis almost laughed. “You do know, my Tyelperinquar, that I am possibly the easiest person you will face, if you mean to stand at the side of your Sauron and come back to the world.”

“Yes, I thought you might be!”

“Not just because I know the more unsavory parts of his story only from hearsay, you understand; half of Aman knows him only as a name in song. But not everyone will find ‘he was right’ an entirely persuasive and sufficient reason for why a tyrant, bent on domination, threw everything aside at a word from you.”

“It was,” Celebrimbor said carefully, “more than a word.”

“I thought it would be. What was it you were right about?”

Celebrimbor considered for a long time.

“That what he had done to himself wasn’t worth it,” he said. Then, “No. I was right about that, but he couldn’t have seen it at the time… That what he wanted, he could not obtain by force.”

Laicanis looked at him searchingly. “He must have loved you very dearly,” she said at last, “to have realized that.” He knew her turn of mind well enough to trace the track of her thought: that for one who commanded as much force as one of the Ainur, the things that force could not obtain were few indeed.

Guests came and went from Nerdanel’s halls. Ambarussa, who alone of her children had returned to the world from the darkness of death, came home from hunting in the south, and they wept together to see their nephew come back to them. They wept as well, Celebrimbor thought, for the image of their brother, and for the father who they had little hope of seeing again.  A short time later they were off again with horses and hounds, ranging the northern forests.

One morning as they breakfasted together on an open porch high on one of the terraces, Nerdanel came to sit cross-legged on the floor beside them, a tea cup steaming in her hands.

“Annatar,” she said without preamble, “can you say something to Aulë?”

Annatar suddenly looked very blank, so it was Celebrimbor who responded. “Aulë himself? About what?”

“You don’t feel it?” Nerdanel asked. “He’s… well, I don’t know exactly what it is he wants, but he clearly wants something here, and I would think it has to do with Annatar.”  She turned to him. “You were Aulë’s, after all, weren’t you? His attention hangs over this place like a thunderstorm. It’s been building for weeks. The rocks are growing lively, the tools are waiting for his word. My students can’t work like this.”

“I have reason to believe,” said Annatar, sipping the pale gold tea with great deliberateness of motion, “that Aulë has no interest whatever in conversing with me.”

“Well, if you’re not going to talk to him,” said Nerdanel briskly, “someone needs to. You can’t go on ignoring each other at each other; my people live here and there’ll be earthquakes if this goes on. I’ve tried invoking him, but he seems to feel some delicacy about intruding—”

“So he’s looming over this valley hoping that one of us will come to him?” asked Celebrimbor, laughing. “That seems in keeping with my experience of his kindred. I’ll talk to him. Grandmother; do the Tamin Martamo still stand?”

“Still stand?” Nerdanel looked at him in puzzlement. “Why wouldn’t they?”

Another habit from Middle-Earth, that assumption of change. The carved halls of her father Mahtan’s people were delved into the glittering depths of the Pelori themselves, with their great smithies where Aulë himself was wont to walk in form among them, and pour out his knowledge to those that he loved.

“Well, then! It’s not more than a few days’ journey, and I will be glad to see them again. Aulë, I imagine, will speak with me, given everything.”

“You’re not going by yourself?” Annatar looked almost alarmed.

“Unless you’re coming with me?” The spark in Annatar’s eye answered that. “No, surely I can trust you on your own here, and I won’t be gone for long.”

The struggle between Annatar’s reluctance to confront his old master and his reluctance to let Celebrimbor out of his sight was subtle but evident, until Celebrimbor resolved it for him. “Stay! I’m sure you and my grandmother can find plenty to talk about.”

The journey into the mountains, along the well-used road from Nerdanel’s estates, was not a long one. When they learned his errand and its purpose, his grandmother’s people did not detain him for the days of feasting that had, in the Years of the Sun, become customary in celebrating the return of a long-lost kinsman. Instead, he made his way into the halls delved into the mountainside, and then beyond, the way that those who sought the Maker and his gifts must walk.

The carved hallways and delicate grottos were not as he remembered them from when he had walked this way in his youth, studying with Mahtan Aulëndur as his father and grandfather had done before him. But they were not unfamiliar. With a start he realized that the soaring pillars and intricate carvings, art blending seamlessly into the native shapes of mineral and stone, reminded him of nothing so much as Khazad-dum. There was a brief moment of something like vertigo as the memory of his years among the Dwarves — across the Sea, before Eregion, before Annatar — rose within him. He set one hand lightly against the cool stone wall, and felt, rather than saw, the chambers around him, leading inward and down. Did the Fathers of the Dwarves walk this road in their dreams, he wondered, or is this simply how Aulë’s realm appears to me now?

He walked on. The light was very dim, but the darkness was not oppressive. In the Years of the Trees places like this — caverns in mountains, the dense heart of the forest — were the closest thing the elves knew to true darkness, and darkness then was not the a thing of horror, but rare and strange and tinged with awe. Here he had learned to read stone with his fingertips. He remembered his great-grandfather accompanying him for the first time to seek Aulë at his forges, laying his great hand over his against the rock, asking him what his hands could see.

Now, as then, he felt the same life under his hand, as if the mountain itself were some great sleeping animal stirring toward wakefulness. The light grew ahead of him, but it was more than light, or other than light: a clarity that was not a matter of sight —

“It is the approach of Aulë Mountain-Shaker,” Mahtan had said to him. “On your knees, child, do him reverence. He is a kind lord, but he is our lord, and we honor him.”

But Celebrimbor was no longer a child, and he walked onward, into the forges of the Lord of Earth and Stone. And there was Aulë himself, at work upon an indescribably tiny fragment of matter.

Celebrimbor gazed, his purpose lost for a moment in awe. It was no element that existed anywhere in Arda, that he recognized immediately. It was too heavy — heavier than anything he had known could exist — and too unstable. By rights it should have collapsed already; whatever Aulë was using to contain it must be as far beyond comprehension as the fact of this impossible, intricate atom itself. Yet it was an earth metal, slotting neatly into the second tyelle of Naugwen’s tengwar of matter. [4]

Distantly, he knew he could not be seeing this at all;  this working was too small and subtle to catch light, let alone the sight of the eyes. It was not a thing at all, exactly, but an involute pattern of tension and tendency. The weight of wonder stopped his breath: a pressure like desire, or perhaps like terror.

“Lord Aulë,” he said, and his mouth was dry, “am I dreaming?”

The Maker released his creation. The air wavered as if with heat, the mountain thrummed, and when he could see again, Aulë wore not the Elven form that he used among his pupils, but that of a Dwarf, monumental as the stone figures that lined the Hall of the Kings in the depths of Khazad-dum.

“You are not asleep,” Aulë said to him, and his voice was like stone within earth, like metal within stone.

“This is — not as I remember it  from childhood.”

“No. It would not be, given what you have espoused. You are closer to our kindred now. Curufinwë. Son of Fëanor’s line. I have been waiting for you.”

“Yes, my grandmother noticed!” Celebrimbor was recovering, with some effort, his equilibrium. “I don’t know if I would have, though, if she hadn’t explained it to me. Aman is just so much more… so alive, so wakeful, than Middle-Earth, that your presence, or attention, didn’t seem that much more unexpected than everything else. You could have just said something, you know.”

Aulë laughed, but only once, and quietly. He still seemed to be waiting for something.

“What is it?” asked Celebrimbor after a moment. “You wanted to speak to me, and I am here.”

The question that Aulë was forming seemed to be as complex — and as heavy, and as unstable — as the atom to which he had been giving shape. Anger and thanks and warning gathered around him, swirling around a core of curiosity and grief and what he now knew enough of the Ainur to recognize as love.

“I’m glad you’re here, Annatar,” said Nerdanel without preamble, striding into the room with her firm, long-legged gait. “I’ve been looking for a chance to speak to you alone.”

“Indeed,” said Annatar, “I imagine that was part of Tyelperinquar’s purpose in leaving me here. His approach to diplomatic matters can be idiosyncratic, but I can hardly criticize it, now.” He gave her his second-most winning smile, neither too distant nor too dazzling.

As a matter of sheer habit, he was scanning the mind and character of the woman before him, mapping out a quick diagram of her desires and aversions, the levers both delicate and crude by which all minds were moved. Nerdanel’s mind gave him some trouble, though, not in its complexity but in its nature. Though he was not accustomed to think in metaphors, perhaps his time with Celebrimbor had altered his perception. He saw not levers, threads, or lines of force, in the shape of her spirit, but water-worn stone.

She seemed to know precisely what he was doing, and looked back at him without judgement or defense. Elves, and higher than Elves, had quailed before the steadiness of that gaze, and Annatar felt suddenly, unsettlingly exposed. She did not read him from the inside out, as the Ainur and those who followed the Ainur did. She looked at the outward form and noted it as outward form, waiting for Annatar to reveal whatever else of his character he chose. He watched her observing his unbound hair and his lack of jewelry, and the neat bite-marks at his neck and collarbone which he had not troubled to conceal.

“I don’t think you got a chance to answer the last time,” she said, “since my grandson interrupted. Whose are you?”

Celebrimbor could not guess how much time had passed, there in the heart of the mountains, locked in strange colloquy with one of the Lords of the Valar. Out of concern for his finite nature, Aulë had begun at first in words: “For what he who was once my servant has done to you, Curufinwë, my heart is grieved…” But seeing how readily Celebrimbor’s apprehension followed him, he passed from speech into song and then into shape, as if his accusations could be wrought from the substance of the world itself. Trust and betrayal and loss were his themes, and the marring of beauty. Books burned, flawed metal shattered, irreversible chemical and thermodynamic processes sparked and faded. And you whom I treasured, you my people, you stained your swords with your brothers’ blood. You have returned, beyond death, beyond guilt, beyond the brokenness you chose, bringing Sauron with you. I want to thank you. I want to warn you. I want to believe it. I cannot believe it.

The air cooled around him. Celebrimbor drew it, gasping, into his lungs; he was not wholly dreaming.

“I did not come to plead his case before you,” he said, and the sound of his voice was small and strange to him.

“Nor do I ask you to, child,” said the Maker, and a great weariness seemed to have come upon him. “It is you I seek to understand. What you have done. How it works.”

“Are you asking me to draw you a diagram?” But Aulë did not smile. The Lord of Matter regarded him with the same intense, serious, troubled attention he remembered from the youngest journeymen of the Mirdain, faced for the first time with a question they did not know how to answer or even to approach.

“No,” said Celebrimbor more softly, “I could not do that, or if I could it would be a diagram the size of the world itself. Forgiveness is not a mechanism. Is it so far from your understanding? For I believe you also love him, Aulë.”

Aulë did not deny it. “He should not be loved. How can I say of faith broken and knowledge twisted, of terror and suffering, that the one who wrought this should be loved?”

Stone groaned within the mountain. A fine dust sifted over them. “I descended into Arda to give good gifts to its people. I gave them Sauron. I gave them Gorthaur the Cruel. Will they thank me for that?”

“I would.”

The tremors in the rock stopped abruptly and all was echoless silence.

“You confound me, child of the One,” said Aulë heavily.

“A world that is the better for Annatar’s existence — I can’t argue my way to that. I can’t argue anyone’s way to that. I can only…” He searched for a word, briefly wondering if there were a diagram that might help after all.  “Have you not also been forgiven?”

The embers all glowed at once around them. “You speak of the great pardon for my over-reach.”

“Well, yes and no. I don’t mean by the One. I mean by your children. By the Dwarves, whom you meant to destroy.” He put a hand, unconsciously, to his hair, where he had once worn bronze Dwarven ornaments that he had earned in friendship. “Do you know, Lord Aulë, how much you are loved, on the other side of the sea?”

And Aulë knew. As Celebrimbor had felt the vibration of the living rock of the mountain, he now felt the depth of that knowledge and the terrible weight of love all around him, stretching back into a time before the Elves had awakened under the stars. But Celebrimbor’s own thought went back only a short way, to Narvi who had been his friend, and worked beside him, and spoken to him of Aulë the Maker. He spared us. We saved him. Because of us, he has children rather than slaves.

“I had a friend among them. He died. Some of them say that when they die, you have prepared a place for them where they will sleep until the healing of the world. He said differently, but I never knew, with him, whether he meant it for a lesson, or a story, or merely a flight of fancy...”

He did not get as far as the question, for Aulë looked at him severely from under brows as bristly as those of the Dwarves themselves. “Their fate is their own, Noldo,” he said. “I guard my children’s secrecy. But I will tell you this. They are not forgotten. They are not idle.”

Annatar was not in the habit of providing direct answers, least of all to those who had the power to deny him. He was on the point of offering some shimmering deflection, when he recalled to whom he was speaking. Out of respect for Tyelperinquar, he could not treat his family as problems to solved. With an effort that would not have been detectable by any of the Eldar (save perhaps one) he returned:

“Why do you ask?”

“In my observation, the Maiar generally belong to one or another of the Valar,” said Nerdanel matter-of-factly. “Well, belong is a careless word. Answer to, partake of, reflect, glorify… And you’re not one of Aulë’s anymore. You chose Morgoth, and then you chose — well, I think you chose my grandson.

“I’m not asking you why you changed,” she said, forestalling him before he could speak. “I’m asking you what you think now that’s different from what you thought when you looked at Melkor and saw… whatever it was that you saw.”

The juxtaposition was an uncomfortable one. The memory of Melkor and his service was shot through with new and unpleasant lights. Honesty was becoming more difficult by the second; intrigued, he noted his own thoughts shying away from the question.

“It was not different. Not in essence,” said Annatar, forcing himself through the question like wire being pulled through a draw plate. “He had a vision that was greater than my own; I gave myself over to it.”

“I was always deeply unimpressed by the scope of Melkor’s vision,” said Nerdanel, half to herself. “There are so many things to do with the world besides enforcing your will upon it.”

“So your grandson persuaded me.”

“Persuaded you? I know that’s enough for strange-humored Laicanis. For her there’s very little space between the thought and the deed, persuade her mind and she is persuaded. There’s a consistency about her, like metal or glass, she’s the same all the way through. I’ve noted something like that in many of the Ainur; perhaps she recognizes it in you. But I’m not your mother-in-law, Annatar, and I need more of an explanation. How exactly did Tyelperinquar ‘persuade’ you?”

Surely the truth would make no one happy. He already had half a dozen responses that would serve his turn: deflections, circumlocutions, outright lies, words that would leave Nerdanel contented and this uncomfortable line of questioning dropped. “He... made his case to me with words and deeds. He hazarded his own person to do it.”

“A poor hazard, it seems, since he paid the full forfeit. Has he then grown worse at games of chance since his uncles taught him to cheat at dice?”

Annatar had never once observed Celebrimbor playing games of chance in all his years in Eregion, and privately resolved to ask him about it at the next opportunity. “Very well, not hazard; say rather spend and come nearer the mark.”

“He seems to think that his life, and yours, were a fair price to stop you from doing - whatever it was that you were in the middle of; distance and time have elided it to conquest. As I understand it,” said Nerdanel tartly, “my grandson is hardly the first person to have died in the attempt to prove you wrong.”

The world was bright and narrow. The past bit at him; Nerdanel’s eyes would not leave him. “Felagund — that is who you’re thinking of, isn’t? — attempted to prove me wrong, failed, and then I killed him. Tyelperinquar — what I did to him was the proof that I was wrong.” Against his will the end came back to him: the emptiness where his friend had been. “I saw my dream at hand, and I believed it worth paying any price to grasp. But your grandson showed me a price that was not worth paying. It is his world I have chosen.”

Nerdanel studied him for a long moment, then set her strong hand on his shoulder. “I think I’m not the only one you need to say this to.”

“I have… made it clear to Tyelperinquar already.”

“I should certainly hope so!” Nerdanel actually laughed. “No, I mean to your old master. I don’t think he understands your choice, and are you really going to leave Tyelperinquar to explain it on his own?”

How much time had passed in the world outside the mountain, Celebrimbor could not say. It must have been longer than it seemed, however, for as he and Aulë were deep in their speech together, he looked up, and saw Annatar, once again standing in the doorway, a small clear light against the soaring black stone. Surprise, delight, and relief flooded through him, but Annatar cast him one rueful look before turning to face his old master, whom he had betrayed in the beginning of the world.

“Lord Aulë.”

“Mairon,” rumbled the Smith. The air grew heavy, the walls were already wavering and the mountain itself resounding with a low note somewhere between earthquake and song.

“Annatar!” Celebrimbor cried, his voice sounding thin and fragile, as if existing on only one plane of reality were barely adequate. “Come in! We have just been discussing you. You have been playing me false, it seems, at least in the matter of language!”

“What on earth are you talking about, Tyelperinquar?” The overlapping versions of reality were dizzying and hard to look at directly. Great shadows and strange shapes trailing him, Annatar came in and took a seat next to him as calmly and naturally as if he had happened to walk in on a language debate among the Mirdain.

“No wonder I haven’t been able to pick up much of the language of the Powers from you,” Celebrimbor said. “If I understand Aulë rightly, you haven’t been speaking standard Valarin with me at all. I was just asking about enne se-šabarzihi; Aulë, what does that mean?”

“I cannot say,” said Aulë. “It is not a sentence that can be given sense in your tongue, for it has none in ours.”

“It means,” said Annatar, “precisely what I want it to mean.”

“It implies an existentially impossible relationship,” said Aulë. “It is nonsense.” The Vala, still maintaining himself carefully in a comprehensible form, turned back to Celebrimbor. “The absence of the subject indicates the reverential voice, which is exclusively used for service, worship. But se is the particle of command; sabr the root for ‘to yield oneself, to surrender, to bestow lavishly.’” Aulë shook his head. “Yield yourself, my master? A phrase without meaning. You cannot command what you serve. Under what circumstances does he use it?”

Annatar was quite still and entirely without expression, and Celebrimbor knew that the slightest wavering on his own part, the slightest doubt or discomfort, would pierce him to the quick. But he had left shame behind long ago in Eregion, when he had thrown down his sword at Sauron’s feet.

“Is your objection,” he said, “to Annatar’s phrasing, or to the situation that gives rise to it? Because it doesn’t sound meaningless to me.”

“And if,” added Annatar, who could reliably be drawn into a language debate under circumstances even more tense than these, “you can translate what I’ve said well enough to know what I’m trying to communicate, then your quarrel is not with the language, but with the fact of linguistic innovation.”

“There is a difference between linguistic innovation and linguistic mutilation,” Aulë rumbled, “although I cannot expect one who left his appointed place to waste his talents in marring the great works of creation to recognize that difference.”

“I dispute that characterization; I am expanding the capacity of the language to allow me to express myself with precision.”

“And not without beauty, either,” offered Celebrimbor. “I may not entirely understand what’s being said, but I do find it — well, compelling. Attractive.” He swallowed the rest of the sentence, but Aulë was already answering.

“Of course you would. You’re made of matter; those are words of Power. If my former apprentice chose to command you from a position of authority, it’s doubtful that you could resist.”

Annatar’s indrawn breath at that made the soft, ominous noise of a gas furnace being lit. “Are you under the impression, Aulë, that I use the reverential voice carelessly, without meaning? I stand by what I said when I left you. I will only serve the greatest that I know.” The air around them grew heavy and glassy; the stone groaned deep in the mountain.

“And with that,” said Celebrimbor hastily, “I will take my leave; I am sure you have a great deal to talk about and you probably don’t wish to confine yourselves to the sort of expression that I could be expected to survive. I may be closer to your kindred now but my ears are already bleeding and I think we’ll all be happier if I come out of this with my mind intact.”

He clasped Annatar’s hand quickly as he passed him, and the shock of his touch was like the sudden discharge of electricity. He was speaking to his old master as one of the lesser gods to one of the greater and it would be dangerous to remain. But the thought that they were now ready to speak to each other lifted his heart as he hurried up and out of the Forges of the Maker.

What it was that Sauron and Aulë said to each other, Celebrimbor did not ask. The people in Mahtan’s halls looked warily up at the mountain; they rubbed their ears and their temples, soothed fretful dogs, and moved breakable objects to secure locations. But Celebrimbor was not met with the recriminations he had half-expected. What have you called down on us, what have you roused from slumber? That was another relic of life in Middle-Earth, he realized with an odd pang, where venturing into dark places of the world or the mind might waken danger not just for the venturer but for their people.

When Annatar re-emerged at last, with not a hair out of place and the eye-watering glory of his presence so far muted he might pass for one of the Eldar, he offered no account of the encounter, and seemed somewhat subdued.

“How did you get here so quickly?” Celebrimbor asked as they made their way back down the mountain.

“If you’re going to use an ordinal term like quickly, you’re really going to have to indicate what scale you’re using. I spoke to your grandmother, and then I came here with all the speed the situation merited, neither more nor less.”

“You cast this veil aside—” Celebrimbor brushed his fingers across his waist “—and flew bodiless through the air, on the wings of thought?”

Annatar gave him an amused look at the mangled line of Sindarin poetry. “This veil is now the means by which I am joined to you in the world; I don’t regard it as lightly as you seem to think. I walked, though the world can be persuaded to offer me swift passage if requested.”

Celebrimbor laughed. “Well, I don’t see any need for such request on the way back. Here we are again, Annatar, walking through the Blessed Realm, and I have almost forgotten how it feels to have time whirling forward as it does in Middle-Earth.” He looked out from the slopes of the mountain over the foothills, with morning mist rising from the valleys and here and there a tree white with flowers. “I… I suppose the world has changed a good deal, there. A century costs so much more, and counts for more as well. And here? This what we were trying to remember, what we were reaching for. As fair as Aman. It’s not just Aman’s beauty, it’s the — life here. What happens when the land and the Eldar live together, at peace, growing into each other. Quendi we call ourselves; the part of Arda which speaks. That is our Art and our excellence, and it is this Art which we teach to and practice on and learn from the world itself. Could you imagine that, in Eregion, with not just the voices of the Eldar, but of Men and Dwarves — and Ainur, why not? A world which speaks, a world which sings…”

It was some hours past midnight when they passed again into Nerdanel’s lands. The great hall was darkened, so they decided to enter through the kitchen annex, where a small and homely light was burning. Inside, Nerdanel was steeping white tea in its white-clay pot, and seated at the kitchen table was the High King of the Noldor.

Celebrimbor had been anticipating some sort of message from Fingolfin ever since alerting him to Annatar’s presence in Aman, but he was hardly prepared for the sight of his great-uncle, the wise, war-hardened king who had already become half-legend before his death had shaped all the songs of Beleriand.

“My lord and kinsman.” He started to make the Amanyar gesture of obeisance, but recollected himself, and instead gave him the royal salute that had become customary in Beleriand: the open hand over the closed fist.

Fingolfin returned the greeting, smiling to see it. “Curufinwë Tyelperinquar. Strange seas have swelled between us since we rode the plains of Ard-Galen, and the sun will rise no more on the Mountains of Shadow. Come, sit beside me, and rest from your wandering. And bring your companion with you; it is his case that has brought me here in haste.”

“Finwë Nolofinwë Arakano,” said Annatar, drawing up a stool and holding his gaze. “Wisest of Finwë’s sons; High King of the Noldor in the Blessed Realm. Greetings to you, and peace upon your reign.”

Unconsciously, Celebrimbor had tensed, waiting for the words to slip over into flattery or veiled threat. Annatar’s tone was cool and measured and impeccable and he remembered it well from their days in Ost-in-Edhil when Annatar would deal deftly with some Numenorean envoy or foreign prince come offering alliance.

Fingolfin studied Annatar for a long moment. “Gorthaur the Cruel,” he said at last. “You do not wear so foul a form as the stories give you.”

“If by the stories you mean whatever you were able to extract from the orcs you captured, I’m not surprised. They are not complex creatures; a certain presence was called for to command the appropriate degree of respect.”

“I wouldn’t have recognized you from Maedhros’s description either.”

Nerdanel, who had been observing their discussion silently, drew in a breath, and Celebrimbor winced. He had never heard Maedhros speak in any detail about his experiences in Angband, but of course Fingolfin would have thoroughly questioned his uncle, as soon as he was strong enough to answer, and Maedhros would have held nothing back—

“The forms I wore in Angband,” said Annatar, “were not, in general, designed for the comfort of the Eldar. Some were beautiful to them, but after a certain degree of exposure, those tended to cause almost as much agitation as the more abstract shapes.”

Almost against his will, Fingolfin seemed to be drawn into the conversation. “My people tend to conflate beauty with goodness; it’s a persistent weakness of ours. I know that, clearly—” his eyes flickered to Celebrimbor, “you do as well.

“Curufinwë Tyelperinquar is under no illusions as to my nature,” Annatar said sharply. “But for you, what is it you would have of me, Finwë Nolofinwë? A case made? An atonement offered?”

Fingolfin shook his head slowly. “Only to see you, Sauron, to learn what manner of creature you are, that I may determine what to do on behalf of my people. You were our enemy, and the servant of our Enemy. This is no court,” he added, gesturing to the strings of onions and herbs hanging from the kitchen ceiling, “though the duty of judgement falls to me. The Valar did not see fit to inform me of the fact that you were at large in Aman.”

A quick glance passed between him and Nerdanel; though Fingolfin was speaking in the awareness of the weight of his office there was evidently a good deal he could say on the matter and was electing not to.

“Tell me, Sauron, or Annatar as you now are called, what path brought you from the gates of Angband to the heart of the Blessed Realm.”

The discussions, or negotiations, went on for the rest of the night, until the air turned suddenly chill and the stars began fading in the lightening sky. At one point Laicanis slipped in, took up a place by the beehive oven, and watched the proceedings with interest. Celebrimbor could hear the household stirring, but no one came into the kitchens.

“I’m certain the household knows he’s here,” Nerdanel said to him in a low tone, nodding at Fingolfin. She set another pot of water on the brazier to boil. “Not everyone here can be so deeply sunk into their work they wouldn’t notice the presence of the King among us! But as long as he’s not officially visiting, we’re not failing in our duties by not offering him the sort of greeting that he merits. Or something like that. It’s not particularly important to me — anyone can turn up in my kitchen at any hour — but those sorts of rituals mean a great deal to some people.”

The sky was streaked with gold when Fingolfin excused himself and got up to pace along the terrace, to stretch his limbs and to clear his head. After a moment, Celebrimbor went after him. He had refrained from intervening in the conversation — the King of the Noldor had not addressed him, after all, and Annatar’s answers had been direct and unevasive, if discomforting to hear. Fingolfin looked up as he approached, and he saw in his face that he had been right to follow him.

“At some point, Tyelperinquar, when all this…” he gestured behind him to the kitchen, “has been settled, you shall speak to me of the new realms of the Eldar and the Edain on the Further Shores. For long years, in Namo’s darkness, I could not even imagine what could endure beyond the ashes, past the ruin of all our hopes. But you saw it, you built it, and so did even your Annatar, in his way. It is a strange thing, to see hope in a servant of Morgoth, when Angband ground the hope out of even its foes. I wonder if it was his service that preserved that in him, or something else?

“To tell you the truth, I didn’t expect to recognize him quite so clearly, but now that I’ve spoken with him a little…” He shook his head. “That was definitely the hand and the mind behind the sorties during the Watchful Peace. At first we thought the attacks were simply random — some of us even hoped that Morgoth was too stupid to stop mounting attacks that he couldn’t hope to win — but then I realized they were all a series of tests: ways of assessing our defenses, in particular to keep abreast of whatever advances in weaponry we’d achieved.”

“Investigating how things were made,” said Celebrimbor quietly, “and how they might be broken.”

“Whether the defense of a realm or the defense of the mind and heart,” said Fingolfin heavily. “And yet already I find myself thinking if we had had such a one on our side, what might we have accomplished. A foolish thought, a dangerous one; the strength he might have brought us would not have been fit to be used. And yet from what he has said of your labors in Ost-in-Edhil…”

He left his thought there, and returned indoors. Annatar looked up from where he had been sunk in conversation with Laicanis.

“I will not attempt to demand punishment for you,” Fingolfin said, standing in the early light slanting through the windows. “The judgement that allowed you to return to the world was made by One higher than I, and I cannot gainsay it. Nor will I question the decision of the Valar in releasing you to the custody of the one you have chosen. But their justice is not my justice. I am a King, and most particularly, the king of the Exiles Returned. You are not under my authority, Annatar, but my people are, and I cannot pardon you on their behalf. If they choose -” he nodded gravely at Nerdanel and Laicanis, “to allow you through their gates, into their lands, beneath their roofs, none shall hinder them. But you shall not come into Tirion without leave, nor shall you wander without warning through the cities of the Noldor in Aman. So I have spoken.”

Annatar rose to his feet and, very slightly, inclined his head.

“And now,” Fingolfin said, looking at Nerdanel, “not as your King, nor your guest, but in payment for your rest disturbed and a night of heavy matters, may an old friend and brother have the honor of sharing a morning meal with you?”

“He asks like that,” said Nerdanel to Annatar, “because he’s a far better cook than I am, but is too polite to say it. Of course, Nolo, don’t be ridiculous, and may I request your rice porridge with the pickled radishes? We should still have a jar of them somewhere about —”

But as the High King of the Noldor went to the kitchen shelves to look through the earthenware jars of pickles and preserves, there came from outside the kitchen a great noise of barking and belling, a glad cacophony of hounds.

“The steps of guests are numbered as shoals,” murmured Laicanis, quoting a Telerin-inflected proverb that relied on a complicated pun about the counting-words used for groups of fish. “Nerdanel, are Ambarussa back so soon? What—”

Before she could get any further, the door to the terrace was pushed aside. In staggered a figure that Celebrimbor knew but could not at first believe truly present. But the bright hair and the brighter garments were unmistakably those of Finrod Felagund and the person slumped against his side, half-supported, half-carried, was his father.

Behind them, his youngest uncles were crowding in the doorway. “Look what we found in the woods!” called one of them cheerfully. Celebrimbor’s mother leaped to her feet.

“Laicanis! I believe I’ve got something of yours!” Finrod waved his free hand as she rushed to him. Curufin raised his eyes at the sound of her voice, but could not manage more than a groan as he dropped his head onto her shoulder.

“Atarinke… are you hurt? Is he hurt?” she asked Finrod, taking Curufin’s weight and helping him toward a bench in the suddenly crowded kitchen. “I didn’t feel him return. I should have felt him return —”

“There’s just barely enough of him to exist in the world,” said Finrod, with a good cheer that seemed somewhat incongruous. “I picked him up in Irmo’s woods; I think the land may have been trying to send him off to Lorien so that he could dream his way whole. But he was fighting it; can you believe he was actually coming to me to apologize?” Finrod clapped Curufin on his slumped shoulder. “Pulling repentance out of himself as if it were his own intestines - which I suppose it is, after a sense.”

“I thought that you pressed your strength in coming home so early, Tyelpe,” said one of the twins, “but this is beyond all.”

“Yes, when you left Mandos that was like leaving the healers’ tents before you’ve fully gotten your strength back.” added the other Ambarussa.

“This is like getting up while you’re still dripping blood and dragging yourself out of the tent on the grounds that ‘fresh air is good for you.’” Laughter echoed back and forth between them. Quietly leaving the fractious family to negotiate their reunion, Fingolfin retreated to the hearth table where he carried on with the preparations for a breakfast suddenly grown much larger.

“That does sound rather like Curvo,” Finrod said.

“No, that was Turko. Curvo would milk every minute of injury for the maximum amount of sympathy.” Though Curufin had been nearer in friendship with his older brother Celegorm, he was closest to the twins in age, and growing up they had never let him forget it.

Laicanis paid them no attention, combing her husband’s lank hair back from his face. “Mandos let you go in this condition?”

“Mandos… nothing to do with it.” rasped Curufin in a hoarse whisper.

“Mandos,” said Finrod, “gave you a stern warning about pushing yourself to live before you were ready.”

Nerdanel, seeing that Finrod was in better condition to respond than her son, looked to him for an explanation. “How did he — how is he here?”

“The same way any of the Dead come back to the world,” said Finrod, “scrape together enough self to face what you’ve done, what you’ve suffered, who you are. And he did do it; it’s not as though he’s here under false pretenses. Insofar as he’s here at all.”

“No false pretenses! Can you imagine it, Curvo without his cunning?”

“No wonder there’s so little of him!” The twins’ laughter sounded unsettlingly like the laughter of blue jays or of wild dogs.

“It’s not enough to say you’re sorry,” Finrod went on, ignoring them, “you have to mean it. Of course in Mandos there’s no difference; the Dead can’t lie. Come to think of it, I’m not sure that Curvo could lie right now if he tried. He has spent what little strength he has in walking out of Death. When he couldn’t walk, he crawled. His deeds were heavy.”

“I thought I would never see you again,” Laicanis said to her husband, her voice low and clear. “After what you’d done. What you’d become. Curvo—” Laicanis was not of a demonstrative character, but she held him close, as if she could pour some of her strength into him.

“My cool flame,” he murmured into her shoulder, “my unbent light. I am sorry. I am sorry.”

“Personally I think this is all one of Curvo’s schemes,” said the one of the Ambarussa Celebrimbor was almost certain was Amras.

“To avoid the punch in the face that he knows he deserves from at least four — no, five people in this room; hello Uncle Nolo, what’s for breakfast?”

“Come on, Curvo, you can’t flag now! You think it’s difficult facing cousin Finrod? Wait till you have to drag yourself and your deeds before Olwe at the Havens!”

“Before the Returned of Doriath!”

“Before the Lady Elwing and her lord!”

“I don’t think she’ll see him at all, do you?”

“That does happen, Curvo.”

“Then you’ll just have to carry those murders with you.”

“Like being in one of the slave-trains of Angband — oh, hello Annatar — only instead of your dead friend, you’re chained to your dead self.”

The gold of Annatar’s eyes had gone nearly opaque, whether in acknowledgement or in recognition of the experience, Celebrimbor could not be sure. Seeing his father in such a reduced state, especially after the care and strength with which Curufin had tended him in Mandos, was a twist in his chest, half joy, half distress.

“Father —” He took his hand; it was thin and cool to the touch. “Father, why? You could have stayed, taken your time to heal…”

Curufin turned a sharp glance on him, no less piercing for the overall air of half-transparency that hung about him. “And leave you alone to face that — your—” He cast his eyes about, looking for Annatar, but there were now a great many people in the room, and the light seemed to hurt his eyes. They closed, his head sank back, and he drew in a slow breath through his lips.

“Is he — sick?” Annatar asked quietly, touching Celebrimbor’s shoulder.

Celebrimbor was not sure how to answer, but Finrod, who had seen many make the journey back to life, stepped in confidently. “Yes and no. He’s between life and death, which is one way of describing sickness, but he’s facing the right direction, as it were. He —”

All at once his speech was suddenly cut off. Always the most expressive of Arafinwë’s children, his face spoke eloquently for him now: recognition, shock, horror and wonder struggling against each other.

“Told you,” murmured Curufin without raising his head. “Brought home — Sauron. Couldn’t leave him. Not…”

“Do you really think he poses a danger to him?” Her husband’s weakened condition had no effect on Laicanis’s evaluation of his statements. “Annatar has told me why he chose to follow our son; that decision was a sound one. And if it was belatedly made, he would hardly be the first person in our family to put passion before judgement.”

Curufin struggled upright so that he could look her in the face. “Laica, do you know what he did to him?”

“I haven’t seen any need to inquire into the details. The chief story that we in Aman have of Sauron is the one recounted in the Fall of Finrod Felagund—”

“Hello, Finrod!” interjected Ambarussa, as Laicanis looked over to him in acknowledgement.

“If that’s a specimen of the sort of combat he prefers, I can’t imagine a blow-by-blow account would serve any purpose for either of us.”

“I saw it. Laica, you would feel differently if you’d had to see it; to watch our son being —”

“I’m sure you’re right. I’m glad I didn’t; there’s a freedom in that.”

She offered Curufin neither comfort nor sympathy, knowing he was still too weakened to resist either. Celebrimbor did catch her eye as she looked up to him, pained and evaluative but not betrayed.

“We have also shed blood, Curvo. Should the mothers and fathers of Alqualonde and Doriath grieve less than we?”

“Should,” said Curufin through gritted teeth, “has nothing to do with it.”

“No, it doesn’t, does it?” She rested her head against his. “Though I — or you — may understand perfectly well that the suffering of our own child is no more dreadful, and no less, than that of someone else’s, there is a limit to what understanding can do for us. ”

“Ordinarily,” said Finrod, rather too loudly, “I would welcome the opportunity for a spirited discussion of guilt and repentance and right conduct, but I think we need to address the fact that Gorthaur is standing here in this kitchen.”

It might have been the bond between them; it might have been merely how well he had come to know Annatar, but Celebrimbor could swear he heard him swallow, fully formed, I rather enjoyed our last spirited discussion of guilt and repentance, Felagund.

“I,” said Annatar carefully, “cannot blame you for your grievance against me.”

The kitchen hushed. Fingolfin set down the knife he had been using to chop spring onions, and even Ambarussa ceased their endless banter. Across Nerdanel’s kitchen table they faced each other once again: he who had once been the King of Nargothrond and he who had once been the sorceror of Tol-in-Gaurhoth, the Isle of Werewolves.

This time Celebrimbor was certain that the echoing in his thoughts must spring from his bond with Annatar. He had spoken to him mind-to-mind from the very earliest days of their acquaintance, but this was hardly speech at all: an inchoate frustration and fear, a discord sounding on tight-stretched strings. It resounded through Celebrimbor’s head: How could I wrong you; it is no wrong to make use of the weaknesses of your nature grating against the memory of his own voice; if you knew, then you know.

“Annatar? Shall we pause for breakfast before going on? We’ve been talking all night on much the same lines,” he added to Finrod.

“As several people in this room can attest, I’m not inexperienced in prolonged questioning,” said Annatar with studied grace. A brief burst of barking laughter shook the twins, and was gone.

“To break bread with Sauron? I sang of this,” said Finrod quietly, almost dreaming, “and did not know what I sang. A world where what was lost might be found, what was marred might be made new…

“Curufin has told me the story as he saw it.” He threw back his head, suddenly savage. “But now I would hear from you, to my face, Gorthaur, for Edrahil and Enedrion and my faithful Ten, for Maechir and Naechir and the garrison at Tol Sirion, for Nargothrond’s beauty broken — what gives you the right to stand here?”

Celebrimbor felt Annatar’s mind press suddenly against his own, ungentle in haste, like an urgent request for aid or shelter. The pressure was withdrawn almost immediately. Nothing showed on Annatar’s face, but Finrod looked from one of them to the other, as if he had seen the exchange, and wondered what it meant.

“The sufferance of my husband and his family,” said Annatar. “Nothing else.”

“What gives any of us the right to stand here?” said Laicanis.

“I certainly wasn’t consulted,” Curufin croaked, from her shoulder.

“The Valar have seen fit to put him in Celebrimbor’s charge,” said Fingolfin, from the table by the hearth, evidently feeling that Finrod was owed a more comprehensive explanation.

“If that satisfies you,” said Annatar.

Finrod considered this and shook his head. “No. That doesn’t matter; I thought it might, but it doesn’t.”

“Then you have grown wiser, prince of the Noldor,” said Annatar, and smiled.

Finrod was not easily angered; the last time Celebrimbor had seen anger like that on his face was in Nargothrond when he dashed his crown to earth. But after a few sharp breaths he drew it back into himself, forced peace and generosity across his features.  

“Why do you believe your anger has no place?” asked Annatar, and the question was genuine. “I wronged you, son of Arafinwë, and for what you suffered at my hands, I am sorry.”

“What I suffered — I was a king, Gorthaur, once, before we met. What of your deeds against my people? What of Barahir my friend?”

“Who?” said Annatar.

“You can’t tell me you don’t remember him,” Finrod hissed. “One of the Ainur, and not remember the deaths that you ordered? He was my friend, Sauron, bound to me by love and oath, blood spared and blood shed. I gave him his land and I owed him my life. You tortured his man to betrayal and you slaughtered him and you made Dorthonion a wasteland, you must remember him.”

Annatar considered. “No, the operation to secure Dorthonion dragged on for years. My people must have cleaned out a dozen nests of outlaws.  He could have been any one of them.” He spoke carefully. “What happened to that country — what I did to that country — was a waste. Was wrong. And for that, Finrod of Nargothrond, I am sorry. But I never knew of a Barahir, and it would be mere flattery to tell you that I did, and repent his death.”

Finrod stood up, nearly knocking his chair over, and abruptly left the room. After a moment Celebrimbor went after him, out onto the terrace, where, if  Finrod had only known it, the King of the Noldor had paced scant hours before, pondering another aspect of the same conundrum. Where the end of the path projected over the water-garden, Finrod crouched, doubled over as if in pain. The high morning sun glittered bright in his bright hair; a strange and bitter contrast to the grief and anger which shone from him as plainly as if they had been light.

“Finrod?”

“If I’d stayed there another minute,” said Finrod through his teeth, “I’d do something that I ought to regret.” There was a quiet, choking sound, that might have been either laughter or tears.

“Finrod, I…”

He looked up, his eyes wild and sadder than Celebrimbor had ever seen them, even at his departure from Nargothrond.

“My brother’s beloved — Saelind, of Beor’s people — there’s something I should like to say to her now. She’s gone, they’re all gone, Beren and Barahir and Beor, but if I could see her again, I would tell her — I know what she meant. We have fled from the shadow only to find that it is here before us. Sometimes there just — there isn’t enough to choose hope.”

“Enough of what?” Celebrimbor sat down beside him, and looked down at the water garden.

“I’m not sure. Enough of me, I suppose. I did believe it, Tyelpe. The world where nothing is lost. Where even evil can be turned to good. And I believe it still, I do, but if this is what it means — I can’t accept it.”

He laughed suddenly, though it sounded more like a cry. “Morgoth’s mercy, he’s got me again, how did he get me like this twice, I suppose I should be thankful that this time I had better sense than to try and outsing him. And now? Pinned by my own overreach. Reached for the sword that was too heavy to lift…

“How much harder could it be to forgive Sauron than your father? Sauron only killed me; Curufin betrayed me. And that betrayal still stings, but when I came across your father in the forest, limping toward life like a hart half-bled, that was worth so much more than what he had done. It wasn’t even an effort to pick him up, to help him forward. But Sauron —

“I thought I could do it, you know. I thought I had done it; Curufin told me the story and I thought this is the first of the good news, the world’s healing has begun in truth. I came ready to welcome him, and to wish you joy of your union. But all I can see are the wolves, and my people, my people dying for me.”

He dropped his head into his hands. “It’s not that I don’t believe the Valar, don’t believe you, don’t believe that Sauron could turn from Morgoth’s path and become somehow a force for good and not for ill. But that doesn’t matter. It ought to matter, I want it to matter, but it doesn’t. No. I can believe it, but I can’t accept it. I could lie and say I forgive him, but that wouldn’t be fair to either of you.”

“Finrod. I’m sorry.”

Finrod shook his head. “You don’t need to be.”

“I don’t mean that I think I’m doing something wrong. I don’t. But I’ve chosen a world that hurts you, and for that I am sorry.”

There was a long pause. “Don’t be. I’m glad — someone could.”

“What will you do?”

“Do?” Finrod reached forward, stirring the water with his hand and watching the fish come forward to nibble at his fingers. “Besides avoid being in the same place as your bridegroom, you mean? Well, I am afraid I will not be breakfasting with you, but beyond that? I don’t know. Give it time, I suppose. I make no promises.”

At this point Curufin would have dropped a double-edged remark about how the making of promises had served them both so far, but Celebrimbor was not his father. “I think,” he said slowly, “that is hope.”

“What do you mean?”

“I hardly know. Sometimes hope looks like a glorious vision, a world made whole, glimpsed for a moment as though through shifting clouds. But I think there are other times when hope doesn’t look like anything at all. Not the certainty of doom, not the promise of healing. And you go on anyway, without that vision. You go on.”

Finrod looked back at him, half in affection and half in wonder. “You have changed, Celebrimbor, since your days in your father’s shadow in Nargothrond.”

“Annatar? Are you quite all right?”

It was the end of a long day that had come on the heels of a longer night. Annatar was standing by the window in the guest bedroom, blue and silver in Tilion’s light. He stood so still that the room itself seemed to move in comparison, so still that for a moment he seemed not a living being but an image or a statue. For a moment the question seemed to break over him without registering, then his eyes moved, and he was present once more.

“A little tired, perhaps. Tired as I have not been since returning to Ea, and on few occasions before that either. I could endure centuries beneath the eyes of the Valar, but your kinfolk are exhausting, Tyelperinquar.”

“What we do in these situations,” offered Celebrimbor from where he sprawled on the bed, “is generally to cast ourselves onto the nearest horizontal surface and sleep. I suppose it’s useless asking you, though I still think it would do you good.” Annatar had refused to sleep at all since that strange day in the forest together, when Celebrimbor had woken to find him in tears. He had not previously realized that Annatar was capable of weeping.

“Or, not your kinfolk,” Annatar went on, as if he had not heard of him, “but the extraordinary constraints under which I must interact with them; blindfolded and with both hands bound. It would be much easier, you know, simply to give them what they want, and they would be happier with it as well. Your kind is really frightfully particular, Tyelperinquar.”

“I’m sure I’m going to regret asking, but what do you mean?”

“Your Finrod, for instance. He hardly remembers the harms done himself, and the ones he does remember, he is positively eager to forgive. But those done his companions — for which I will willingly answer to them — are strong in his memory, stronger even than his own desire to believe himself just and merciful.”

Celebrimbor pushed himself up on his elbows. “Annatar. You know why it’s worse to use someone’s love or duty or loyalty to break them and don’t pretend you don’t.”

“More effective, yes, generally; and I acknowledge now that breaking someone’s will harms them. But attachments are one weakness among the web of weaknesses that make up your beings; I don’t see why they’re so much more significant.”

Celebrimbor looked Annatar straight in the eye. “So. You pride yourself on knowing how people can be made to do one thing or another. If someone wanted to control you, to break your will, to make you do what they wanted, how would you suggest they go about it?”

Something changed at the moment when Annatar understood what he was driving at. He went suddenly cold and sharp-edged, like a cat bristling or ice gripping the surface of a lake. He saw his peril with terrible clarity, a vulnerability as acute as that of the Ring. Despite his exhaustion, he gathered power to himself in a sudden rush, eyes flaming to light, hair stirring as if in a sudden wind. In that moment, it seemed, he could have raised the Great Tower or the Pelori themselves. But it was checked; his hands fell useless to his sides. The ordinary channels of defense — dominion, retrenchment, power exercised and maintained — were useless, and he felt their uselessness.

Celebrimbor did not soften. “Do you want me to reassure you? I won’t. This is what it is to love something, Annatar, and don’t believe for a minute it’s different for you than for Finrod, or for Aulë, or for the lowest servant in your empire. This is why you don’t do that. This is why you do not turn someone’s love into a tool for your own use.”

“But — you —”

Celebrimbor got off the bed, tension vibrating through him. “How do you think I won?”

“Did you not just this minute say,” Annatar returned, the air around him trembling though his voice was as sharp and cold as ever, “that this was an unacceptable form of persuasion?”

“Well, technically you were doing it to yourself. I just pointed it out to you until you noticed that was what you were doing.”

“You don’t understand what I would have done.”

“I’m fairly certain that I do.”

“No. Tyelpe, I saw it. What I would have done to you. I was there. I was smiling.”

The horror was nearly palpable in the air around him. Celebrimbor was reminded of the impossible atom in Aulë’s hand, too heavy to bear up under its own weight. “Oh,” he said softly. “Is that why you won’t sleep?”

“I had not intended to speak of it,” said Annatar tightly.

“Yes, well, as horrifying revelations go I think I’ve learned a few things about dealing with them, and anyway, this, for once, isn’t something that you actually did. There are plenty of horrors in what was without troubling yourself over what might have been.” His voice softened at last. “If that is all it is, then come. Sleep with me.”

“Irmo is a Vala; if it is his will that I dream of –” He could not actually finish the sentence. “He is not wrong.”

“No, wrong is exactly what he is. That isn’t what you chose.”

“It is what I might have chosen.”

“Beloved, who knows that better than I?” He caught Annatar’s hand in his own. “And given that choice, you turned away. If the Powers wish you to suffer, suffer for what you have done, not for what might have been.”

He drew him toward the bed. “You have watched my dreams often enough. Let me watch yours.”

The look that Annatar gave him would have required an entire paragraph in Valarin to describe the types and degrees of refusal, but he did not pull away.

“I am perfectly serious. If Irmo has any accusations he wishes to make on behalf of the futures that did not come to pass, I have told you want I think of them, and I am happy to repeat them to whatever passes for his face.”

He felt Annatar’s laughter through his own chest as Annatar, still careful and coiled, leaned back against him and closed his eyes.

Since Aulë’s explanation of Annatar’s grammatical innovations in Valarin, Celebrimbor had been paying particularly close attention whenever his companion slipped into the language of the Powers, piecing together vocabulary, making notes on grammar. Annatar had not taken his eyes from his body that morning, murmuring untranslated endearments all through breakfast. At last, gazing straight into Celebrimbor’s eyes, he pronounced harsh syllables heavy with strange harmonies. He caught the marker for question and the particle of command: a request and a promise together.

“You really are going to have explain that one,” said Celebrimbor, as calmly as he could.

“Or perhaps demonstrate it,” said Annatar.

“He asked you,” said Nerdanel, “if you would pass him the salt.”

“Wait, you understand Valarin?!” cried Celebrimbor.

Annatar was entirely impervious to shame, but not to surprise. “When did you learn the language? I thought none of your people but Fëanor…”

Nerdanel gave him a reproving look. “Fëanor has been dead for more than an age of the earth. He became distracted from his Valarin studies when he took it into his head to create a writing system for it and realized it would be too large to be useful. The last of his notes were attempts at solving some of the problems of his proposed script, such as its danger of setting fire to any surface it was written on. I am less distractible. Over the years I have developed a practical vocabulary for conversing with the Powers.”

“Then you can — all this past morning — What has he been saying to me?” Celebrimbor demanded.

“Nothing,” said Nerdanel with grave diplomacy, “that you would care to have your grandmother repeat to you. He was ennumerating your physical charms. There were numbers involved. Valarin can be astoundingly specific sometimes.”

“Do these notes still exist?” inquired Annatar with interest. “A writing system for Valarin is a futile project, but intriguing in its futility, which seems to be something of a motif with your family.”

“I’m more interested in whether he ever developed a lexicon,” put in Celebrimbor.

Nerdanel laughed. “I see you haven’t gotten very far in that workshop after all. All his Valarin material’s in the gray cloth-bound folios and on the stack of thin metal plates by the far wall, under the scorch mark.”

Time in the Blessed Realm passed unmarked save by the internal and interweaving rhythms of learning and healing and labor. Curufin grew stronger, and despite his habit of hissing at Annatar like an angry cat whenever he said something that reminded him of his past, he proved more capable of co-existing with him than Celebrimbor had feared.

“I don’t hate him any less,” said Curufin cheerfully, when his son asked him about it, “but unlike some Arafinwëans whose names I cannot at the moment call to mind, I’m not under any sort of self-imposed regimen of forgiving seven unspeakable things before breakfast.” Laicanis looked from Curufin to Annatar and back again, and laughed behind her hand, and would not explain why.

They began to work again — slowly at first, and tentatively. It reminded Celebrimbor of his time not in Eregion but in Lindon, and he caught Annatar from time to time gazing eastward, as if he could see beyond the mountains to the Sea.

Fingolfin returned occasionally — never in his official capacity, as he took pains to make clear — and would pass long hours in conversation with Annatar, speaking of the state of the Blessed Realm and the rumors of the world without, poring over maps they had assisted him in redrawing. “Arafinwë would be absolutely horrified to learn that I consider you an advisor,” said Fingolfin, “and so I don’t. But it’s good to speak with someone who knows Middle-Earth; what it is to live in a state of constant compromise... You said the Numenoreans were logging as far South as the Enedwaith?”

“Farther by now, most likely,” said Annatar. “The fall of the Tower will have left the South and East in some confusion, and Numenor is a ruler in search of an empire.”

Fingolfin frowned, remembering the Noldor’s own oversupply of kings. “Do you,” he said, turning to Celebrimbor, “know what became of your work? Can you tell whether your Rings are being used as you intended?”

Celebrimbor paused, considered. “No,” he said. “I can’t. It’s strange. I put into them everything that I had; all the art that I possessed. But they’ve passed from me now; I can’t sense them at all. They seem like something in a story that has ended.”

“I don’t imagine,” said Annatar dryly, “their guardians feel the same.”

That was a sobering thought. In those last desperate months he had thought of Gil-Galad and Galadriel principally in terms of the danger they faced and the peril he had placed them in, a peril which had ended, must have ended, when the Ring-Maker of Eregion and his foe perished together.  “This world the gods have abandoned…” he said softly. “I suppose I must understand the Lords of the West a little better now. The way they left Middle-Earth to pick up the pieces of their wars. I have done the same thing, and to those who trusted me.”

“Some degree of allowance can probably be made for you,” offered Annatar, “on account of how very dead you were at the time.”

“Death is certainly one excuse for not taking action,” said Fingolfin dryly. “But the world does not stop for it. As I understand, the two of you left rings of power scattered across a continent and a half.”

Celebrimbor paused. “Annatar — the other Rings — do they still work?”

“I have not the least idea. I lost that with the One.” Annatar spoke lightly, but his eyes grew distant and troubled. “The One really was the keystone of the Ring-Craft; it was my art and my self and it is gone from me. In that respect, Tyelperinquar, you might justly accuse me of abdication.

“I dare say my old master,” he added, “would take this as an opportunity to draw a lesson on how even doing the right thing provides no assurance of positive consequences; he seems to have recently absorbed this himself and is thus repeating it every chance he gets. I must have heard a dozen different versions of this revelation when I faced him beneath the mountain. He was like an apprentice who has just grasped the concept of non-Endorean geometry.”

“What, you find that revelation less... revelatory?”

Annatar shrugged. “I have spent more than five minutes in Middle-Earth.”

“And your notions of doing the right thing,” returned Celebrimbor, with an entirely straight face, “were not altogether above critique, as I recall.”

“And that is the point,” said Fingolfin, sober and undeterred. “We don’t get to stop trying. Not while the world lasts.”

As the long years turned, in ones and twos their friends began to return from the Halls of the Dead; the people of his city who had fallen at the last stand of Ost-in-Edhil. Celebrimbor counted facing the returned of the Mirdain the most difficult encounters of his renewed life, for they had befriended Annatar and been betrayed by Sauron, and they had died for Celebrimbor’s defiance.

The first of the Masters of the Mirdain to leave Mandos were Alagos and Tirnion, side by side in their return as they had been at their fall. Death did not appear to have altered them at all, neither sobering Tirnion’s flamboyant personality nor moderating Alagos’s contrarian tendencies.

Alagos had gone to Arafinwë’s court to seek out his Amanyar betrothed, who had apparently taken the addition of Tirnion to their household with equanimity. “It’s not every stonemason who needs a bodyguard,” said Tirnion, with palpable relish in recounting the story, “but evidently she has met Alagos, which doubtless gives her a certain tolerance for eccentricity.”

“I’m not surprised.” Celebrimbor retorted. “Having a noble lord of Doriath follow you home is, on the whole, a much more acceptable situation than having Gorthaur the Cruel do likewise.”

On the side of the mountain, where a clear spring rose from the rocks to join the snowmelt from above and rush to the broad slow river in the valley below, the people of Nerdanel’s halls had built a series of bathing-pools, some shallow and sun-warmed, some deep and icy. They were nothing like the great baths of Ost-in-Edhil[5] but recalling Alagos’s love for bathing, Celebrimbor had invited him and Tirnion to pass the afternoon there and take the risk of reacquainting themselves with their old friend and colleague and murderer.

“Why, Annatar!” exclaimed Alagos. “Now I see that III’s tale was true, and you are transformed indeed.” He gestured broadly at the pool in which Annatar was submerged to his chest. “See, Tirnion,” he added, “I told you those robes could come off.”

“Clearly they can come off now,” returned Tirnion, “but have I passed through death at your side to accept your conclusions without question? He has died himself since we saw him last; this body is as new as yours or mine, and I put forth the hypothesis that he may well have designed the new one in detail more complete than the old, as fitting his requirements.” Here he cast a very insinuating look at Celebrimbor, with a meaningful crook of one perfectly groomed eyebrow.

“Or perhaps he has reconciled with the Lord of Waters and is no longer barred from his domain,” offered Alagos, peeling off his own robes and dropping them in a heap by the pool, “or perhaps he no longer dreads exposure in the physical or metaphysical sense, or is it some third thing? Annatar, do you have anything to say on the subject?”

“I bow to your superior wisdom,” said Annatar dryly, and Celebrimbor had to duck under the water to keep from laughing.

“Are you quite sure you’re all right with this?” he asked, surfacing, looking up at Alagos who appeared to be hesitating at the water’s edge.

“Not in the slightest,” said Alagos cheerfully. “I find the whole idea grips me with a sort of cold horror that radiates outward from the viscera.” He splashed down into the pool. “I must thank you, Sauron — and you too, III. For exposing to me the inconsistencies of my own thought.”

“He is actually serious,” said Tirnion in mock despair. “He was going on about this the whole way here from Arafinwë’s halls. ‘Finally! A real challenge to my commitment to seeking truth wherever it may be found!’”

“I was getting lazy,” Alagos agreed. “Satisfied. Self-contented. It’s fatal to inquiry.”

“He kept trying to get me to press him on the point. ‘Do you mean that you will let me get away with declaring the possibility of reconciliation for some but not for all? Don’t you want me to articulate where I would draw the line?’ I tried explaining to him that I didn’t have particularly friendly feelings toward Annatar either and certainly wouldn’t fault him for feeling the same way—”

“You see? He declares himself my friend,” said Alagos, “and yet seems content to let me stumble along in the darkness of error. Again, I thank you for not allowing me this dangerous ease!” He stared at Annatar, his head cocked on one side, delighted at his own discomfiture.

“I am,” Annatar said carefully, “glad to see you both again.”

“I really am sorry,” said Celebrimbor.

“I don’t think the fault was yours,” Tirnion protested.

“Not for falling in love with Sauron, to be sure,” Alagos agreed, “he was an attractive individual and nobody knew he was Sauron at the time, but in the end III chose Sauron over us, for which I find I do appreciate the apology. There were a number of deaths and a good deal of destruction brought on those who hadn’t chosen to be a part of it..”

“But surely you understand why III would do it?” Tirnion seemed slightly disconcerted to find himself making Sauron’s case, but centuries in Alagos’s company had accustomed him to arguing strange positions. And before the dreadful revelation of Sauron’s identity, Celebrimbor remembered, Tirnion had been frank in his encouragement of his connection to Annatar.

Alagos dashed a handful of water over his face and scrubbed briskly. “Absolutely. And I wouldn’t bar someone from bad choices even if it were in my power; bad choices are frequently educational ones.”

“You’ll understand if I don’t invite you to visit us,” said Tirnion that evening, when they made ready to leave. “As you said, having Gorthaur the Cruel follow one home can be a bit disconcerting, and Alagos’s lady has put up with quite enough already.”

Alagos looked faintly disappointed. “I suppose you’re right.  I was hoping to show you some new designs that I’ve been working on for a bell-tower, but I can bring those with me next time. What?” he added, off Annatar’s look, “of course there will be a next time! Whenever I find myself in need of a bracing dose of moral uncertainty, I will certainly be back.”

“Catch,” said Celebrimbor without preamble one evening on the rooftop of the hall, tossing a small shining object toward Annatar. He closed his hand around the flying spark as easily and unhurriedly as if he had been plucking a fruit from a tree, then opened it to find a silver ring, set with three stones; three small lenses in transparent crystal, gathering the light and scattering it again. Annatar looked up at him, stricken, and Celebrimbor held his gaze.

“What…”

“It is the custom of our people, if you will recall, to exchange rings in token of vows of marriage. You have already offered me a ring; I thought it was time to return the gesture.”

Annatar turned the ring between his fingers.

“Nothing more than matter,” Celebrimbor said as he studied it. “Metal and glass. Significant only for what it signifies.”

Annatar would ordinarily have returned with some retort about how Celebrimbor’s attempts at poetry were more elliptical than his lenses and he should stick to saying exactly what he meant, but the ring in his hand stopped his speech. And in silence he stood for several minutes, while the sky turned from orange and gold to deep blue and purple, and the light of the last Silmaril shone low on the Eastern horizon.

“Aulë wept with me,” he said at last. “For the loss of the Ring.”

It was Celebrimbor’s turn to be stricken to silence.  

“He said —well, not said as such, but you know — that he knew what it was to yield the greatest work of your heart. To lose something so precious.”

“Do you,” Celebrimbor said quietly, “miss it?”

Twice Annatar drew breath to answer, and twice reconsidered. “No. That is not an answerable question. The loss was — at the time, the loss was everything. But what I have gained is greater. I saw that, when I spoke with my old master. That when you yield your heart’s labor, what you receive back is not the work itself, but something changed, something greater, something — something that lives.”

“I think,” Celebrimbor said, his voice thick in his throat, “it does matter. Whether you do something for love. It doesn’t mean that it’s the right thing to do. It doesn’t even guarantee that things will turn out right. But at least it means— I don’t know how to say this. That you still exist. Even though you may be destroyed, you still exist.”

“Now you really are getting elliptical,” said Annatar lightly, and Celebrimbor took his hand and set the ring on his finger.

The sky was blue-black now, and the stars shone in it not like single and distant objects, but like a lattice of pinpricks offering a glimpse into a brilliant and illimitable light shining beyond the curtain of the sky.

“How bright the stars are, in Aman!”

“Stars? Look again, Tyelperinquar; you have no excuse now not to see.”

The sky itself wavered, swept aside like a cloth, and when he could see again there were two figures, a woman and a man, standing beside them on the rooftop.

“And here they are,” said Annatar sourly, “the witnesses you called to your vows.”

They were not the forms that Celebrimbor remembered Manwë and Varda wearing when they came among the people of Aman in the great festivals before the Darkening. Indeed, these were hardly forms at all; mere sketches on the surface of the world.

“A breath,” said Manwë.

“A glimmer of light,” said Varda. “Significant only for what it signifies.”

Celebrimbor had not expected to find the Star-Kindler commenting on his word choices, but there was laughter in her starlight. Perhaps there had always been. But Manwë and Varda were not speaking to them, but to each other. He and Annatar seemed to be suddenly included in a conversation that had been going on for a long time, and which only occasionally surfaced into words.

“The Dark Lord is gone,” said Varda.

“Which?”

“Both of them, really.”

Manwë shook his head; clouds rolled and broke against the heights of the Pelori. “The Dark Lord is gone, but the world still suffers. Sorrow and loss eat at the hearts of the Eldar, and fear and greed the hearts of the Edain. The world is better. But it is not - well.”

“It seems that not all its woes can be laid at your feet after all,” said Varda, and cast a sidelong glance at Annatar. Annatar swallowed what would doubtless have been an extensive rebuttal, and Varda laughed as the stars shone through the clouds.

“You see it now,” put in Manwë. “Why the will of the Incarnates is a precious thing, that even we must treat with reverence. Why it is perilous to interfere. Why we cannot just stretch out our hands and fix what is broken.”

Celebrimbor protested. “That doesn’t mean there aren’t ways to make things better. Even for you…. Look at Annatar. We thought he came to us from you. He won our trust, and brought us wisdom, and what he made of us, what we made together…”

“Was shattered, in a few short years, by his own hand?”

Annatar took up the argument, not in his own defense, but for Celebrimbor. “If it had not been a -” He would not, or possibly could not, say the word lie. “If I had been in truth your emissary, Lords of the West, would the good to the people of Middle-Earth have been different?”

The stars smiled, colors dancing through the upper airs.

“You speak well, Returned One. Shall I consider the offer as good as made?”

More shapes were resolving around them on the rooftop, more sketches on the surface of reality. This was the Mahanaxar Unseen, the continuous colloquy of the Powers one with another and each with all.

“That is justice,” said Vairë. “Let him redeem in truth the effort he made in falsity.”

“What?” Celebrimbor demanded.

“We can’t send him to the same people.” That softness in the air must be Este.

“Indeed not, nor should we send him alone.”

“I have servants,” said the twist of light that was Oromë, “as have you, Kementari, that have longed to walk among the peoples of the Hither Shore and speak for the beasts and the growing things, to mend the growing breach before it grows too wide to bridge.”

“This one knows Men and their ways,” said Manwë, “though that knowledge was ill-bought. And he has spoken truly: we have neglected them. Let him return. His life new-gained is not for him alone.”

Annatar’s hand closed on his own. The future was opening before them, half-seen, dizzying with promise.“It goes without saying, I trust,” said Celebrimbor, “that I go wherever he does.”

“It does indeed go without saying, which was why no one said it,” said Yavanna, suddenly sharp and clear against the shifting sky. “If the taste of power prove too sweet to him, who shall check his folly?”

“I am his husband,” put in Celebrimbor, “and not his jailer; I feel this point may have been overlooked—”

A stir of moths, and the voice of Irmo. “Indeed, you do not hesitate to make your opinions clear. I have not forgotten your words to me, little one. If you would have your consort live in which might be rather than what might have been, now is the time for you to prove it.”

“Let them return.” Varda’s words were Valarin, and Celebrimbor knew enough of its nuances now to recognize the language of commission, not command; a charge laid, not permission granted. “Let them return,” echoed the Powers in their many voices.

The shapes of the Valar began to fade, lost in dancing lights like the auroras in the night sky over Araman. Celebrimbor caught flashes of plans and designs, names put forward and rejected, strains of a distant music. But the longing was kindled in him, to see again the world that he had lost, that he had loved. And then he heard Annatar’s voice, strange as those of the greater gods, familiar as his own breath and blood.

“Tyelperinquar. Shall we go back?”

“Not back,” he said, and thought of his mother’s theorem, and the vector that passed unchanged through transformation. “To the world. Together.”