Archive of Our Own

He dreamed...possibilities.

He dreamed those he had known and loved. They burned like blue-white stars, like golden suns.

He dreamed fire and pain and death and strange worlds. He dreamed of doom and passion and death.

He dreamed betrayal and heard mocking laughter threading into every world, every sun.

Wars, the names of kings, gods, hatred, bloodshed, a cramped malice that that reached beyond death — and love that defeated it.

He dreamed his life; a great book unfolding, pages turned by an invisible hand. Each one was splashed with blood, the water-marks of tears, yet some glinted gold and silver. The last page tore away, vanished into the dark. The book burned to ash. A great mirror shattered.

No matter how far thou may go, thou canst never break the chains which bind thee. For thee, there is no freedom. Remember that.

Everything they will take from me...Everything.

Dost thou think I do not see thy games? Parading as if you were something, instead of a slave. I have heard of what they name thee. Dark Prince.

Thou doth exist to serve me.

'Thou art nothing. Sterile as a mule. Now get hence

I am no-one, Macalaurë. A slave. I am nothing.

I love thee! I was born for thee!

By blood and by pain, by fate, thou art bound and thou art what we made thee!

Burn in the Hells, Vanimórë!' 

'I already have, Maglor!''

We forged thee as a sword is forged...


Thou doth not want to claim kinship with me, Fëanor. I am not the Blood of Fire, I am of the Dark. I am nothing.

A storm of images: Himself screaming (until he no longer screamed) under the pound of Melkor, and Balrogs, Fell-wolves and orcs, and his father, who twisted him to breaking point, knowing just how far to push. (And how to bring him to terrible pleasure). Ages of battle, of rule, of slavery, and at the last freedom.

And for nothing. Nothing. Or — no that was not true, but nothing for himself.. Elgalad’s face floated like a lost star in his memories, loving, trusting. The only person he had ever believed, even for a moment, was naive enough, foolish enough, to love him.
How perfect, how poetic a betrayal. And his own fault. He should have known or guessed, at least after Elgalad’s ‘return’ from death, when he was revealed to be more than an Elf; a god under orders from Eru...well, that last was true if you looked at it sideways from a good long way away.

The last drop of the cup...he drank it to the dregs, and Eru had supped of his power through it.

An illusion, born out of his own pathetic need. He had been so desperate, so ripe and ready to fall: the child he could never sire, the youth growing so beautifully into maturity, the dependency, the adoration, the blossoming of desire.

Eru had known him very well indeed.

Who could ever love thee?

He lashed out: I do not care. I do not care if they loved me, if they used me. I loved them. It was enough.

Laughter like acid on his skin. Dance for me, Melkor/Sauron/Elgalad commanded, as chains rang and whips cracked and the Balrogs burned and red light glared over black stone.

Dance, slave!

In the midst of nothingness, he threw back his head and screamed. Screamed as he had not when facing his betrayer, the end of the Universe, feeling them die.

Oh, yes. I will dance. Watch me.

Seven veils flared around his naked hips, black as the eye of sin, as the inward-sucking force of a black hole. He drew one free, threw it out with a snap of one wrist, and a universe exploded in heat and light. Another followed, and another until they whirled about him in undulating orbit.

He had at least saved the souls of those he loved; they had not died with that universe.

Thou canst not be lost; thou canst never be lost.

He named them, released them in fierce defiance and, opening his mind with a smile of pure fury, the last name Fëanor! rang like a treble bell, shaking the aether as he unleashed the Flame Imperishable, Fëanor-that-was, that would be. Into every universe, every reality.

Go. Be free.
He held a yellow sun in his hands, looked upon past and future and different realities lived upon a blue and white world.

He saw himself with Maglor, meeting a hating passion with his own.



He saw Maglor wandering beside a grey northern sea; an ancient town, the ruins of an abbey starkly outlined against an ice-and-cinder sunset. A fire burned on a beach and Maglor sat with one arm around the shoulders of a woman whose hair reflected the flames, giving back glints of gold and red. Then he watched himself in another house, sitting beside the bed of the same woman with Vanya, in the guise of ‘Nanny’, standing watchfully over them both. He handed the woman a glass of brandy and his own blood as the fever-poison of Thuringwethil rose in her veins, flushing her cheeks. She drank and fell into a sleep that would change her forever. Gently, he kissed her brow.

I can give thee no blessing, Claire James, I was never any good at that, only the hope of a measure of happiness. Thou wilt not forgive me, but perhaps thou wilt understand, once day.

Go. Be free of me!

The universes whirled away like a flight of brilliant birds, leaving him naked and alone.

He opened his eyes, stared up at a white, featureless sky that was no sky. Pushing himself to his feet, he saw the monument that had been Angband and Barad-dûr recreated. Huge as a mountain, it sat in the nothingness, solid as adamant. The black spike of Barad-dûr was driven deep into the enormity of Angband like a sword into stone.

He frowned, remembering that, after all he was not the only relict of a dead universe. There were the Ithiledhil, including Finwë; there were also Coldagnir and Celebrimbor. And Sauron.

His heart bounded. He wanted to break into a run. Like a man long lost on a lonely island, finding footprints other than his own on a beach, he yearned toward them — even his father, an emotion that caused him to flinch. He slammed his will down on the leaping need.

No. Let them be free.

As for Sauron...There were enough to control him.

He need not disturb them.

Free of me, and my foolish need to love. (To love or be loved?)

That thought brought his head up, eyes narrowing. He turned quickly, searching for any sign of Eru-Elgalad, and stumbled over a body.
It was his own, the dagger he had used on it embedded in the heart. The purple eyes still stared into betrayal, into destruction and grief.

In a flare of wrath, he wrenched the dagger free, slicing it through the eyes, the face, the body, pulling out the heart and casting it away. He cut through the tendons of the neck, twisted the head free and kicked it, trailing black hair, across the raw rock. He swore as he went to work on his own corpse, hacking it into unrecognisable meat, in every language he had ever learned.

His hands and face were bloody when he finished, and the ichor sparkled on his skin as it dried. With a last disgusted look at the wreckage, he turned away.

Dust sifted and drifted in directionless winds. There was no sign of Eru-Elgalad. Vanimöré had said he would not destroy him — indeed such a titanic clash of power might tear apart the fabric of all Times — but he was unwilling to test his words. He did not want, at this moment, (or any moment) to look into the face of his betrayer.

As for Melkor, he could not feel him as a personality, but he was present in the ribbons of darkness that whipped through every universe. Eru had said he wanted the part of Melkor that was Vanimórë. Well, good luck trying to winnow it out, Eru.

He strode toward the edifice. Great doors of gold-flecked marble stood open.
It was empty. Every chamber, every hallway. He saw, near the gates, a patina of dust blown in from the outside, and in them the faint imprints of booted feet. Headed out of the edifice. He closed his eyes for a moment, thinking he could smell them: burning diamond and midwinter ice: Edenel and the Ithiledhil; the pulsing heart of the Sun: Coldagnir; the metal-and-spice of Sauron, the deep crimson fire of Celebrimbor.

So they were gone, and where could they go but to the Timeless Halls?
No matter, he thought, considering his father once again. Only Coldagnir and Edenel knew where the Portal was located.

He sat down on the crown of Barad-dûr, pressed the heels of his hands over his eyes.

As thou didst say, father, and rightly, I am a useless piece of shit.

Of course, Sauron had always known him better than anyone.

And he had no plan, no idea of what to do next except sit here for eternity. That was the danger. He had never been suited to idleness. If he did not do something, the danger was he would do something.

Almost he laughed at that, but the effort died in his throat, and his eyes burned. He came to his feet, slammed a fist against the wall to bring himself pain. The monument shuddered from crown to base. His skin split and glossed with ichor — and then healed. He regarded it with loathing. Thou canst not even do that right. But how could he? He had left humanity behind long ago.

He could stay here, he supposed, fill the emptiness with beauty and light, and even populate it with the images of those he had loved like some incontinent pasha presiding over his seraglio. His mouth twisted in distaste; they would be replicas, artificial, and Vanimórë’s pride rebelled. It would be like biting into a luscious dream fruit to have it dissolve into dust on the tongue.

He took flight, came to earth again and and looked back at this no-place that should not exist. It lay on the Outside’, beyond even the Timeless Halls.
Ah yes, thou art the spike driven into the multiverse, that holds it all together, where light meets dark. A place of limitless possibilities. A crucible of gods.

Well, he was damned if he was going to sit there until he did something supremely and dangerously stupid. He walked away from it and did not look back.

Go. Be nothing. Because that is all thou art. No more love or needing it. None of them had ever needed him. He was nothing but a tool, a weapon, as his father had fashioned him to be. Useful at times, or he hoped he had been, but one did not love either a weapon or tool. They were there to be used.

So go.

Go where? He was not needed or wanted, save in a manner beyond comprehension, holding the multiverses in his hands. And who cares for that?

Be that self which one truly is.

Well, that should be easy.

His father’s voice whispered in his mind. Thou art nothing.

Being nothing was effortless. It was what he had been born to be, after all.

But he had been human so long, with all the glorious, painful emotion that came with humanity. He had not been born a god, with the Valars’ easy disregard of life and love. He could not be so cold. And memory is cruel; it comes like a knife in the dark. He stopped, sinking to his knees on the wind-scoured stone, as their faces bloomed like lit gems in the darkness. Maglor. Elgalad. His Khadakhir. Tindómion. Fëanor. Edenel. Coldagnir...House Of Finwë. House of Fingolfin. And then, out of other worlds: Claire...

He waited. He breathed. Then he came to his feet and walked into the weave of worlds.

art by the wonderful Lidia.
https://www.deviantart.com/lidiash