Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“Are you sure you’ll be okay up there?”

The comm lines buzzed with feedback, and that was the only indication Mairon had that they broke hyperspace. In an S-class carrier like this one, there were no nauseating lurches or sudden gravity shifts that had him reaching for handles and walls. The fourth-gen Multimatter engines were the closest to the old antimatter tech their scientists had engineered since the signal blackout, or so he was told. There were no ships surviving that could tell him if this was true.

“Curumo,” he reassured for what was probably the fourth time since their conversation started, “I’ll be fine. Just cover for me until Aulë gets my holo.”

“Yeah, but…” Curumo was always the more reserved one in the forge. Mairon was a planner; had he forgotten that? “The T35-Sulimo is scheduled to cut right through dark space.”

“And it’ll pop right out on the other side,” he deadpanned. Brown eyes bled unwittingly into gold as he focused on soldering the new alarm wire, steady hands managing the board with a practiced finesse borne from all those late nights spent studying the books and exercising everything he learned there. “Trust me. We haven’t lost a single ship in dark space in ages. ‘Sides,” he couldn’t help but smirk to himself, “I’ve seen every blueprint of this thing. I’m a general-purpose mechanic. I know where all the escape pods are.”

There was nothing but faint static for a time on the other end and Mairon began to wonder if getting closer and closer to dark space meant that the signal was about to go bad. That was his job this week, too…with hundreds of thousands of the tiny, shining signal accelerators dumped in between his new crew, they were told to sort and report. And then they were to replace every single one on this massive, new carrier. Even state-of-the-art spacecraft like the Sulimo was bound to have recalls sometimes.

Curumo finally spoke after plenty of deliberation, his voice laden with enough emotion for the both of them. “…Please be careful. Don’t get caught.”

Mairon tilted his head haughtily before he remembered that his watch was set only to comm mode. “What will could they do to me anyway?” he challenged proudly. “We’ll be lightyears from home. Sending me back alone would be damn expensive.”

A door opened and he whispered a quick gotta go before turning pointedly back to the alarm panel to close it up. The panel sealed back perfectly, seamlessly. He turned around in time to salute the passing pilot—his blue lapels indicated his value as a squad captain which made Mairon grossly outranked in this place. Not for long, he thought; he already snuck into the mechanics’ crew so surely he could also sneak his way into pilot school. Only if this carrier could let him off on New Valinor first, and then maybe he could prove to Aulë that he was serious about following his dreams.

He wasn’t sure what inspired him to leave the forges. Call it an excess of ambition. He’d spent so long on that seasonless rock of a planet, examining garbage and assembling the tiniest, most sensitive parts of larger mechanisms—to someone else’s design, to someone else’s request. He was a scrapper and recycler in a yard with little other purpose, and as by the eve he snuck away precious metals to craft rings that glowed with an unnatural light, he pored over books of schematics that felt too familiar…he knew there was so much more he could do.

So he left. He left the forges and snuck on a ship and decided he was headed for anywhere but here. He landed himself a job on a secondary mechanic crew, the kind where no one asked questions and the pay wasn’t particularly great. The jumpsuits itched but they felt like freedom.

Then came the Sulimo—his lucky break. It would make its maiden voyage across Dark Space to get to New Aman and, with its skeleton crew, it would dock there in New Valinor. The same New Valinor that held the flight academy—and, Mairon reasoned, it would be easier to convince Aulë to let him stay once he arrived. It wasn’t like he was important, or powerful, or special in any way. The scrap yard wouldn’t even miss him.

Maybe it was dumb luck that the signal chips were recalled mere days before the launch. It was an opportunity to not only put him on the ship but to put him all over it, let him explore it. There was something spiritual about engineering at such a scale. There was a magic to it that buzzed in the air and left him invigorated.

Most importantly, it was better than the countless days spent over the forges. It finally felt like he was making something out of himself, and somehow this place he was in felt right with his life. Freedom.

The four central comm chips in the room that powered the security network for the doors were all behind a massive wall panel. To get inside, as he’d been instructed, he took out that little T-shaped tool and inserted it into the honeycomb mesh. A gentle pull and a seamless chunk of the wall panel came loose, revealing the electrical network behind it. This part was why he’d been chosen for the Sulimo job; he was tall, but he was lean enough to squeeze into the tight space between the walls. His arms were strong from dismantling dead cruisers, but he wasn’t bulky like the retired fighters who came in looking for quiet work. No, he was just right for the job. Like fate.

The panel slid shut behind him and he was left in the half-light of the machinery. Powering on the smaller of his two battery-powered torches, he balanced it in his teeth to work with his hands free. They always warned him in training of working in these small spaces, where a minor electrical short could lead to a very fleshy fire. Complete with infographics and scare tactics, of course. Always keep the hands free and work delicately. Be aware, be organized.

He had switched two of the four chips by the time he heard the automatic doors at the end of the corridor slide open. Quick breaths, quick feet. He froze.

“Whatever it is, it’s gaining fast,” a hurried voice said from somewhere beyond the wall and Mairon’s soldering iron stilled. “I don’t—someone needs to alert High Command—”

The door on the other end of the corridor slid shut and Mairon felt something settle in the pit of his stomach. Gaining fast, his head repeated. Whatever it is.

He popped the hatch on top of the wall panel and slid himself over to the sunken-in coppery ladder beside it. There would be three more units above the door so he’d be going into the mechanical floor above it. When he climbed his way up a few rungs and slid the roof panel open he immediately noticed the rush of warm air and the coppery tinge of light above him. He eased himself up into the gap there; above, it was high enough to stand and the panels were all painted the deep burgundy of the heat-traps. This, he realized, was an auxiliary engine room up above him—and luckily it sat empty right now, no prying eyes at his orange mechanic’s jumpsuit. He painted a comical figure against the lighting, copper hair against copper lights and recognizable citrus orange. General purpose mechanics certainly knew how to stand out.

He turned back to where he knew the corridor would be directly beneath him and walked on lightweight boots to the far panel. It stood out, its handles raised and silver against the rest of the paneled floor. Behind him loomed the side of an auxiliary engine that did who-knows-what, pistons lightly pumping with a familiar hum and clank that he hadn’t noticed before through all the soundproofing of the main cabin. All he had to do was pop it open with his wrench and solder in the last two sensors.

He couldn’t make it to the panel before the ship gave a great lurch.

He was lucky enough to be near a grav-lock. He scrambled for the handle and held on before it could throw him into the wall, letting out an indistinct cry as the force of the jolt pulled his shoulder hard enough to rebound with a snap. Anyone lesser than a maia would have suffered a dislocation. The emergency lights started flashing and the auxiliary engine squealed in protest. Then the pull relaxed and the gravity stabilizers kicked back in; and he was back on his feet, panting with his arm screaming in pain. The engine clicked loudly once, then the second time felt more like a bang—and then everything went dark.

He was scrambling for his torch on his belt when the auxiliary lights kicked in. The motor beside him was eerily silent. From somewhere below, he recognized indistinct shouting.

He started moving again when he noticed smoke wafting out from the engine. He didn’t want to be there to inhale whatever toxins came out of that thing, he reasoned, and so he slid back through the wall panel from before. The top of the panel was lost, thrown somewhere off to the side of the room, and he didn’t really care to retrieve it. Something serious was obviously happening. He needed to figure out what was going on.

He accessed his watch to flip a switch on his comm, the light on his wrist shifting to the COMM_LOCAL_PRIVATE channel. He practically spat out his identifier code when the security module prompted him; and then the screen flashed green as it set him up in the private channel.

“Boss?” he called distinctly, setting the system to broadcast. “The hell is going on?”

For a minute as he fussed with the wall panel to get into the corridor the comms were completely silent, but then the voice of one of the team’s programmers came in.

 “Shit—is there anyone there?”

“Me,” Mairon answered, maybe a bit too quickly. “I’m—I’m here. What just happened? There’s no power.” He finally slid the panel open and came out into an empty hall. Auxiliary power had forced open all of the automatic doors, but a quick check over the status screen told him that the main power was out shipwide. A low rumble began underfoot which he recognized as the fans of the analog life support system.

Finally, the voice on the other side answered, his outer rim brogue cutting through hazily on the comm static. The main network couldn’t carry the signal. Too bad for all of the electronics he just replaced, he thought to himself.

“I think there’s been some sort of explosion,” the voice explained. “Wait—shit, someone’s here—”

 “Who’s there?” he asked as he began down the corridor. “Where are you?”

 “I’m in the—wait, no—”

The comm line cut suddenly, the signal going dark as the screen on his wrist flashed red with a communications error. He was alone on the channel.

Some wise sense of self-preservation had him reaching for his wrench and holding it aloft like the closest he could get to a real weapon. He wasn’t stupid enough to wander the halls without one, here in the dark…not like he’d know what to do if he saw anything even remotely dangerous. The halls thus far were dark, and he relied on his memory of the blueprints to get around. He’d studied the Sulimo a lot in order to make it look like he knew anything about its mechanisms, design schemas pinched from Aulë’s library to hopelessly follow a dream.

Now, though, he was…frankly, terrified. This wasn’t supposed to happen. The stories about Dark Space were a joke—it was way more likely they’d be gunned down by some idiot gone rogue in Noldorin space. And the Sulimo was no joke—it could take a few blows.

This wasn’t supposed to happen because the rumors about Dark Space were just that—stories. Rumors.

Maybe it was just a standard engine failure, he defended to himself. Maybe it was nothing. Lots of things could explode on a ship. Not a lot could cut main power but realistically a first of its kind ship was bound to run into problems.

A clatter at the end of the darkened room he found himself in got his attention. He’d wandered into a maintenance hall, the panels lining the sides of the room dark. And at the end, where he pointed his torch—a panel kicked open and a single hand desperately reached out.

“Don’t shoot!” he called. “’M not—shit—” A leg appeared after the hand and then the figure appeared to be stuck, the fastenings of his boot catching on the edges of the panel. He didn’t see him wearing any orange jumpsuit that denoted the mechanic who should have been down there—just dirty, greasy clothes.

“You’re a stowaway,” he realized and accused all at once, though the grip he had on his wrench relaxed.

 “Depending on whether or not you’re planning on throwing me off the ship, I’d accuse you of lying,” he replied tersely from the other side of the room. He was sliding himself out through the panel now, having untangled himself. He had a crisp, clean voice—and Mairon figured he was from New Aman or maybe one of the other core planets by his inflection. A stowaway, headed to New Valinor—not much unlike you, his mind reasoned for him.

Could be an ally depending on what happens. Mairon had to tread carefully.

“I’m a friend,” he maintained. “It sounds like neither of us are supposed to be here.”

Mairon had approached him by the time he pulled his head out from the panel. Copper hair gleamed bright in the artificial light of his torch, his grease-stained face doing little to hide elegant features. He knew immediately this one was elvish—and with most of the elves keeping to themselves on their respective homeworlds or serving high in their highly organized fleets, he wasn’t sure what a stowaway was doing on board. Unless he was some kind of outlaw from the last great war—but that was many years ago, and many years before Mairon’s time, and he couldn’t see why any fugitives would be left from that age.

The elf pulled himself up to his full height—and goodness, he was tall, Mairon thought, simply towering over him—and he looked down at Mairon warily.

 “If this is what I think this is then we’re better off friends than enemies,” he reasoned, holding out his hand in greeting. Instead of taking it Mairon unhooked his other wrench and pressed it into his hand. This looked like someone who would know how to use it in a pinch.

“So be it,” he agreed with the copper-headed stranger. “What’s your name?”

The elf leered sharply at him. “Lesson one, kid,” he instructed as he brushed past him and in the direction of the door. “Don’t give out your name. That’s a bad move out in Dark Space.”

He recoiled a little, following carefully in his steps. “…Okay,” he conceded. “And where—exactly are we going?” He clearly had a direction in mind, the way he wove through the darkened hallway without even need of a torch.

“We’re going to get off this wreck before Morgoth decides it’s no use to him,” he answered. “His teams have a habit of blowing things up.”

Mairon’s stomach dropped. “You said Morgoth,” he repeated. “Like. The Morgoth.”

Mairon recoiled as the wall ahead of them blasted out, the panels scattering across the floor and ripping past his jumpsuit with force. He twisted on his knee and fell, the solid metal floor jarring painfully against his hips. But already the tall elf was dragging him to his feet, hard—pulling him back the other way and getting him blindly running. He heard him curse in a hard string of Khuzdul—an outer rim language, he thought in passing, but soon they were hurrying into a cramped corridor where dim emergency lights barely lit their passing. Mairon no longer had that familiarity with his surroundings; these were not maintenance halls. He didn’t see them in his trips into the upper levels of the ship.

“I don’t think they spotted us,” the elf noted as he peered around a corner, finally stopping to let Mairon catch his breath.

“Who?” He tried again. When will anyone tell me what’s going on in—

“Morgoth,” the elf spat again, running a hand through his red hair. It fell like curtains of fire over his shoulders, visibly bristling. “The enemy of the fucking galaxy. His stupid thrall. I should have known he would be interested in a ship with that name.”

“What? That’s not—” The elf stopped him then, pushing him close to the wall with his arm while he made a gesture for quiet with the other. The smell of smoke fell into his nose, an acrid and horrible thing, and footsteps, distant voices—

Little shit’s on the ship somewhere. Find him or the boss’ll find you.

The voices were staticky, like they were coming from voice recorders. Which made more sense when a heavily armored shadow passed before the bend in the corridor, quickly retreating after it seemed to confirm there was no one there.

The redheaded elf withdrew his arm then and Mairon breathed in deeply, feeling some of the tension leave.

“We need to go,” the elf whispered to him, pointing down the hall. They both turned, Mairon favoring his unbruised side.

“Hello, Copper-top.”

The voice was clean and feminine; Mairon turned around first and his eyes met immediately with the barrel of a gun.

He’d never seen a gun like this before, not this far up close. Blasters like this were uncommon because destructive potential and ships did not mix—this was for security fleets, for armies and fighters. He’d made knives, swords, shields, all sorts of tools in his spare time—but never had he touched the art of crafting ranged weaponry. That didn’t, however, mean he wasn’t aware of what they were capable of.

 “Hands where I can see them.”

He obeyed because he couldn’t see any alternative and he could hear the wrench in the elf’s hand drop behind him with an ominous clatter. Their assailant looked young and stood maybe to his shoulder, but if her gnarled ears and distinct markings told him anything it was that she was orcish and her powerful armored stance told him she was dangerous.

The soldiers filing in behind her raised their blasters, each piece of shining silver more terrifying than the last. One of those alone could rip clean through a person.

 “Which one of you is Maedhros?” she asked, but her question sounded more like an order.

“If you want to live then don’t tell her anything,” the elf mumbled next to him. Mairon didn’t have a problem with keeping quiet, and the orc woman seemed more interested in questioning them.

“Boss,” said another soldier through his muffled mask behind her, “I don’t think they’re going to talk.”

She swore in some heavy, darker language. “Cuff them both, then,” she decided. “Only so many red-haired rats can be hiding on one ship.”

Two of her officers came from behind her and Mairon found himself being pinned rather roughly against the wall with hands of cold metal. The force of the push rattled his jaw as they wrenched his arms back and bound him in tight steel cuffs.

 “Remember,” the elf reminded from beside him. Mairon could hear his cuffs clicking roughly shut. “Not a word. No names in dark space.”

He was pulled away just as roughly. An orc behind him chuckled as he struggled to regain his footing.

 “If I had the choice,” suggested the orc to the boss’s immediate right, “I’d gut them alive right here. Serve those orcslayers right.”

“The big guy wants the redheads,” she reminded firmly. “And he wants them intact. Unless you want to be on the receiving end of his wrath.”

 “Gotcha,” obeyed the orc. The one behind him hAulëd him back up in a steel cold grip, pushing him ahead as the group began to walk to…whatever horrible fate they were being taken to.

The orcs joked the whole time up. They pulled his hair, grunted awful things in a language he couldn’t quite understand but his mind supplied as horribly derogatory. How did he know this, he wondered?

Just as he recognized other choice words that they uttered into comm radios. It was like listening to himself. Like a voice in the back of his mind that he’d been ignoring for years.

 “They’re taking us to a ship,” Mairon supplied quietly to his companion under their captors’ noise and chaos. “They think we’re important.”

“Well, shit,” mumbled the elf followed by a string of Khuzdul. He doubted any of his choice words were any friendlier.

The orc nearest to them laughed through his breathing mask and responded in rough, barked strings of the same language. The elf’s eyes widened but he looked away, as if to look anywhere but at the orc who’d understood his insults the entire time.

They were marched to an open chamber in the cargo bay. Mairon realized they were to be boarding a ship. He also realized in the dim light that the wet ground underfoot was probably not water—but he wouldn’t let himself look hard enough at his surroundings to notice more than the stench of smoke and death.

When he’d escaped the scrapyards in search of adventure, this wasn’t what he had in mind.

The bay door opened to whatever cargo atrocity they had docked on the Sulimo, leaking acrid orange light into the dark room. It stung Mairon’s eyes, intense after a dimly lit journey down unpleasant broken halls.

“You got ‘em, boss?” shrieked a shrill she-orc from the steel dock of a far older ship. Older than anything Mairon had ever ridden, he thought, the kind of aged thing they got occasionally for scrap. Transport class sparrows like these went out of production at least fifty Valarin fiscal years ago; he reconized the model by the tape of faded yellow paint down the right side of the heavily vented loading dock. They weren’t very useful, but they were fast for transporters; the sparrow-class ships had been decommissioned because pirates had taken to filching them and upgrading them with stealth cloaking. He remembered pulling one of those exact cloaking panels off of the entryway of a scrapper years ago.

The chipped parts give it character, Curumo had joked as he hoisted his laser cutter over his shoulder. The fading light painted them a darker orange than daylight, like the candles from some vague memory that he couldn’t quite place. Still gotta move it. Want to give it a whirl? You’ve been flying the simulators, right?

The contrast as he was roughly shoved onto the ship’s docking platform reminded him of just how far from home he had gone. Aulë wouldn’t be able to help him here. No one would.

Mairon had thought he knew being alone, once. But he had never known it quite like this.

They ushered them in as they chattered in their orcish language. An uruk awaited them in the chamber that they used for transport, looking all too dangerous even without weapons. He pointed to the wall, and Mairon would have obliged even before he noticed the long knives that were strapped to the side of his firm vest; even more so at the battle-worn scars upon his face. This was clearly their muscle.

Transport, the orcs said a few times. Contact. He caught other vague words in their conversation. Perhaps in the past he had taken the time to study the orcish tongues. Just because he couldn’t recall doing it didn’t mean he hadn’t. The Signal Blackout represented a lot to the Maiar—lost memories, lost homes, lost friends and family.

“Any idea what they’re saying?” mumbled his elvish companion as they hunched close to the corner, hearing the whir of engines and the radio static of shouting orcs. Soon following in was bundle upon bundle of goods; medical kits, uniforms, food. It seemed the pirates were happy to raid whatever they could from the ship.

No other prisoners. That was either a good thing or a bad thing.

He listened closely for the both of them, trying to understand what was being said. Village. Money. Transport. Hunt. Copper. King. Hurry.

The words came through in a blur, a jumble of language and unknowns. It was like listening to something he could understand but in a very peculiar dialect.

Mairon looked over his shoulder and the elf seemed grave. Even so, his eyes worked with a thousand thoughts, the intelligence and drive in them clear. He behaved like it wasn’t the first time he’d been captured. He was probably thinking about ways to escape already.

 “To Morgoth, then,” he realized for the both of them. “I’d suggest you listen to whatever they tell you when you get in there. If you’re useful enough they’ll let you live.”

Morgoth was a bedtime story, a whisper of horrors untold, a tale of loss. They left their home world because of Morgoth.

He knew they were taking off when the lights dimmed to an eerie green glow, the ship giving a great lurch before he had a momentary sense of weightlessness. Then they were drifting smoothly through space to heavens knew where.

From the back windows into the closed airlock, he could see the shadow of the Sulimo against the lights of several sparrow class transporters like this one; and then they left the fleet behind and jumped into warp. He worked his jaw as the air pressure changed around them. Smaller ships never lasted particularly long in warp before the life support started running low. He wondered if they were just going to let the two of them run out of air out here, just die adrift in space. The Uruk watching them lowered his breathing mask onto his face and smugly watched Mairon struggle..

The ship gave another great lurch, sending him slamming into the wall with enough force to jar his hurt shoulder. He fought back a whimper while he regained his footing, pain registering in a distinct wave that spread from his shoulder down his arm and even into his collarbone and ribcage. The elf had been better prepared, his feet braced against the ground. He wondered how much time he had spent on ships like these. Probably too much, by the greasy clothes and the angry fire in his eyes.

His head cleared as the bay repressurized. He caught a glimpse out the window to notice dark steel glittering in the half-light of some distant star. It was smooth and horrible and the precursor to something massive that they had sailed in upon. It was massive, and as they drifted along its hull he noticed the large extruded writing bearing the distinct curl of ancient script.

The Void, it read menacingly.

He knew all of the protocol landing requests different groups used among the stars. He had pored hungrily over manuals, memorizing vocabulary standards for each group ranging from dwarves to gray-elves and everything in between. These call signs, however, were foreign and unrecognizable to him.

 “We’re a long way into dark space,” he whispered to the elf. He thought of the tall fellow as his only ally now.

“No shit,” the elf mumbled. His expression was grave. “Just do what they say, kid. Do what they say and they’ll let you live a bit longer.”

Mairon had never spared death much thought. Even now, it was not his looming demise that he thought about. It was the great curving crest above the docking platform that they slowly approached, and its vague familiarity that had him rapt with attention.

It was a strange feeling that he somehow knew what was to come for them. It was almost like, in another life, he had lived it before.

Chapter Text

“What do you think?”

Mairon hid his feelings with a grimace but he couldn’t help the warmth bubbling up in his chest as he beheld the grand hall, the fires, the vaulted stone.

“A waste of time and precious resources,” he criticized blandly. But the twinkle in his eye could not be missed.

“I told you I would create for you a finer forge than Aulë could ever offer.” A cool hand settled on his shoulder.

He laughed. It was like a chime that pierced the stone itself. “You haven’t the first idea what a forge is,” he teased.

Act I

Thud.

Thud.

Plink.

There was a leak in the pipes. He heard it every time they knocked vaguely against the ancient steel bars of the cell, and every time a drop of steaming water fell from the pipe to the ground roughly three feet from the door of their neighboring cell. If they had any neighbors.

His elvish ally had taken to commandeering his own corner of the cage, sitting there with his knees pulled up before him in a position of near nonchalance. Maedhros was his name, he knew now—a strange combination of ancient Sindarin and even older elvish tongues. The elves all had names from thousands of years ago, names that they took in lives long past. Like Mairon’s own name—which, he assumed, was some kind of ancient god-tongue like the name of his master. Not that there were many left to remember it. The Valar held their secrets close, and everyone else got scraps of a story to piece together from the lives they once lived.

The eeriest thing about Maedhros was how little he seemed to care about their situation. It was as if he had done it before—many times, perhaps, by the short and pointed advice he gave Mairon through the journey. Now they were looking for him again, for some reason that he had no interest in divulging.

 “You keep speaking in Khuzdul,” Mairon brought up conversationally. “Are you from the outer rim?” They were alone in these awful, damp halls, just the two of them and the hissing and knocking pipes. He wondered if they locked people up down here in an effort to drive them insane. The noise was overwhelming him already, setting him on edge and giving him the urge to talk just to take his mind off of it.

 “I’ve spent the greater half of the past age among the dwarves,” he dismissed. “Best place to avoid being found. Unless you want to be. Good place to endure the Blackout.”

“Sounds like you spend a lot of time on the run, stowing away on transport ships,” he remarked.

Maedhros levelled a harsh glare at him. His eyes were piercing and betrayed more than his informal speech ever would.

“Don’t take me for a petty criminal,” he chided evenly. “And what about you, kid? I’m very, very old—so I’m not stupid. What’s one of Aulë’s maiar doing so far away from his master? Felt like getting a taste of freedom?”

“Just a little side work,” he deadpanned.

“Aulë doesn’t contract his maiar out for general purpose mechanics,” Maedhros continued. He looked him up and down in his dirty jumpsuit. “Thought the lot of you were all about lives of glamor, you know—crafting finery for your rich friends and the lot. Foppish.”

“The Maiar aren’t a hive mind,” Mairon defended.

They fell silent as the door at the end of the hall slid open. The thud of boots, the drag of a body half-across the floor—then a shapeless figure was tossed rather roughly into the cell next to theirs, the one with the hot water dripping onto the floor. The faceless prisoner made a feeble attempt to scramble away from the drip of water and came to rest somewhere in the shadows at the far end of the cell, moving no more.

“Better him than us,” Maedhros spat.

“What do they plan to do with us?” Mairon asked, trying to hide the quake in his voice. He couldn’t say he had a real stomach for torture—he'd seen the scars on the backs of some of the fiery maiar and knew they echoed of wars from a very, very long time ago. But that was the most he’d heard of such times. Mairon’s own spirit must have been younger, manifesting a body clear of marks save for an odd ring-shaped scar around one of his fingers.

If this were really Morgoth’s ship as Maedhros claimed then maybe barbaric practices like torture weren’t so unfamiliar here. He hoped to anything that may be listening that it wasn’t the case.

Maedhros did little to assuage his nerves with a noncommittal shrug. “Can’t say what they’ll do to you,” he remarked. “Lots of former maiar of Aulë on this ship. Maybe they’ll ask you to join them. Maybe they’ll rip you apart and send the bits of your soul back to your master in a box.” Mairon’s stomach dropped. “We’ll find out soon enough.”

 “And what about you?” he wondered. He tried not to show that he was visibly worried about these claims. He didn’t want this elf, who seemed so hardened and undeniably dangerous, to see him as he really was—no maia on a quest, but just a young servant who decided to try something new after tiring of a life where the most exciting part of the day was building mechanical parts—by someone else’s design.

 “Morgoth knows who I am,” Maedhros admitted with a half-smirk. His expression was not as haughty as intended, but instead seemed distinctly fatalistic. “And he knows I’ve outgrown his brand of torture. He’ll hope to make a deal with my brothers, idiots that they are. I’m an expensive hostage.” He grinned like it was an achievement to be had.

Mairon nudged at the food they had been brought earlier, the tasteless protein rations in their outdated waxy wrappings. Careful to avoid the water leak, Mairon pushed what was left of his through the bars. Maedhros protested with a he’s probably fuckin’ dead that Mairon decided to ignore. Whoever it was in there would probably need it when he woke up.

“I don’t see any other prisoners down here,” he said. He tried to peer through the shadows at their new neighbor, but couldn’t make out much more than his large, loose hood.

 “Take that as bad news,” advised Maedhros. “What do you think happens to all the ships he captures?”

He turned back to level a harsh stare at the elf. “I didn’t think this place was even real until we were on it!” he defended. “All of this—it's just legends. Morgoth was defeated once again during the signal blackout. When the Valar destroyed all of the antimatter engines, he retreated so far into space that he was never seen again. That’s what I was told. This—shouldn't exist.”

 “What, does Aulë like to tell bedtime stories to the young maiar now?” Maedhros shot back. He rose from his spot on the floor to tower over Mairon in their close confines, and he was reminded again that this was a very, very old elf. All of the old ones had this air about them, always a mix of tangible fire and weathered stone. “No one defeats Morgoth that easily. Not my family, not even the valar—they just buy themselves time.” He shot a glare at their limp neighbor, as if his piercing eyes were trying to discern an identity from the shapeless heap of cloth and limbs. “You don’t get it. Look—I know the inner systems don’t have to worry about things like the old wars. They’d rather turn their heads away and pretend Morgoth isn’t poisoning the outer rim planets one by one. They like to pretend they have things under control. You’ll see him and you’ll realize that everything they told you was a lie.”

The doors slid open again. Maedhros backed up. The prisoner in the next cell curled in on himself at the sound—still conscious then, somehow. Mairon caught a glimpse of dirty brown boots.

There were uruks for them now, looking dangerous enough even if they hadn’t had heavy, impressive blasters in their hands. Before them, a pale-haired maia drifted in on light feet, her dark robes barely trailing the ground behind her. She didn’t even spare them a glance as she unlocked both of the cages with an indistinct word of power—and Mairon had wished he could have heard it. He hadn’t the power of his brethren to infuse their will into physical things like locks, but it would have at least given them a chance to know what it was made of…and how to escape if the need arose.

 “You will come,” she ordered, the words falling off a tongue that seemed unsuited for them. In the cell next door, uruks were hauling the other prisoner to his feet again. “Or we will drag you.”

His eyes followed her retreating footsteps with disgust. She had barely endeavored to look at them—which was perhaps a blessing, as had she looked up she may have recognized Mairon for what he was. But something about it didn’t sit right. He’d heard that there were many maiar who betrayed their masters for Morgoth’s service. It was more difficult seeing it in person.

Even more frustrating that he recognized her immediately as one of Irmo’s. How he knew, he couldn’t say—but maybe they had met once. Now she was a traitor.

Was that what they expected him to become? A traitor?

“You’ve got feet,” Maedhros prompted from behind him and he realized he was blocking the door. “Walk before the nice uruks decide that we took too long.”

 “Wouldn’t call them nice,” Mairon said as he withered beneath one of their heavy glares. They’d have him overpowered in mere seconds.

There was something oddly familiar about them, too, that he couldn’t place. It sat in the same place that his familiarity with their language came from. He must have studied their language at some point.

One of them pushed Maedhros forward with a shove and he responded by doubling his pace with more dwarvish vulgarities. Mairon was lucky that he didn’t know enough of the tongue of Aulë’s creatures to understand the things the elf had been saying in it all day. They definitely weren’t good things.

The prisoners ended up in about as orderly of a line as they could be—what with the warm steel of a primed blaster pressed against Mairon’s back. They only stopped for a moment at the top of a miserable winding staircase to find themselves in heavy cuffs like the ones the last group of pirates had them in before continuing a walk down a cramped black hallway, guided by the limited lighting coming from hot and fiery vents that channeled heat from who-knows-where. The ship was massive, would probably take longer to cross than he could ever have the stamina for even if he got away from his captors

Everything about the ship in these more-travelled halls was black. Black doors, black walls. There were no shadows in this place. It was made of the shadows. The lights on the door panels blinked only weakly in the gloom, as if the darkness simply swallowed them up. He couldn‘t catch the code that the uruk at the front punched in. The keys were too dark, their symbols too vague; and when he looked he saw not a ten-key pad but a sixteen-key pad.

Of course the servants of Morgoth would use a different counting system.

One, two steps forward. Then the gun jabbed his back again, ushering him by faster. They took them to another chamber, with another waiting orc. He recognized her immediately by the braided crown as the one who captured them in the first place. She had exchanged her armored suit for a sleek and dark uniform, a compact blaster strapped to her hip. Like everything else on the ship, it looked like the old tech he helped to scrap from before the signal blackout, but the chrome shine on the handle implied that it was in fact new.

In fact, everything here seemed oddly recent. Somehow, they were manufacturing technology that had been distinctly unable to operate since the last great war.

 “Enjoying the amenities?” she taunted at Maedhros, whose lip was curled in disgust. She spoke clean standard, unlike the other thrall of Morgoth who seemed more interested in speaking in their eerie, guttural—and somehow, familiar—tongue.

 “Fuck you,” Maedhros ground out. She smirked at him. An uruk grabbed his arms and forced them ahead—like he even bothered to resist, though his face reflected his disgust—and she snapped plain, heavy white cuffs over his wrists. They bound his hands together tightly, and he pulled back a bit as the uruk pushed him forward toward another door—but the creature growled threateningly and he quickly fell in line.

As if he’d done this before. By the way he spoke, he had.

There was a push on Mairon’s shoulder and he stumbled before their captor, all at once feeling a sense of fear and a rush of adrenaline that whispered at him to resist. His turn now.

Do what they say and you might live, he reminded himself. Not like there was much he could do. He was weak among the maiar, a brilliant mind but so very weak—he had seen elves who could perform more miracles than he could. There was no way he could defend himself against the entire room of what were clearly warriors. In fact, up until now he had just passed for an elf anywhere he went—and hoped for the best.

Better they not know who he was then, he thought. Better he not fight.

The orc seemed to notice his cooperation as she didn’t have any taunt to make; but she struggled still with the cuffs as Maedhros disappeared through the doorway into what he thought was a broad room with the low sound of chatter.

 “Damn things—” she tossed them to the side, reaching behind her for another pair. These opened easily and bound his arms with a cold click. A small red light came to life on the top. Of course they were electronic. Everything before the blackout was electronic—and he’d taken apart countless carbon shells obscuring row after row of twisted, rusting wires as they stripped out the rubber and piled the less-oxidized copper up for processing.

“Out the door with you, then,” she ordered. She turned her eyes up to him and all he saw was hate—a sort of blatant disregard for him that may have told a different story from a better perspective.

“Elves,” he heard her mumble as he found himself half-dragged out the door. He still ached from the injuries he sustained on the Sulimo with his arms pulled in front of him at just the right angle to make things more uncomfortable. He’d had twisting and bruising like this before, when a chunk of ship collapsed on him while he was working as a scrapper. He knew he needed ice, and water, and maybe a bath. Maiar healed quickly but he was on the lower end of their lot—and it would take some time.

If he had that time. From what he knew he was marching to his death. Except that—it was only his body that could die. At the thought of being thrust formless out into the vast expanse of dark space, floating and drifting for some eternity until he came across a ship...a sense of creeping panic overcame him. Was it any better if he fared as Maedhros said, thrown into a box and shipped off to his master?

Should he tell them who he was, he wondered? Or would they just kill him faster?

If the ship had a command deck, he realized, the door opened up here. Vast, vaulted ceilings funneled into the darkness. Somewhere at the far end was a great and terrible chair of command high on a command platform, something that he could only describe of as a throne.

A throne for the evil king, he thought darkly.

He didn’t know if he was looking at passive panes of glass like the older blackout models or the more modern paned screens, but at the end of the great hall he saw the stars. For the first time since he set out, he truly saw the stars outside of his planet, and it had to be when he was about to die. And they were beautiful. Unfiltered by the thick atmospheric gases at home, brilliant nebulae faced down the ship, bright swirls of galactic formations, massive star clusters.

He suddenly felt very, very small, with the entire universe ahead of him. If this was to be his tomb, he thought, then at least it was a beautiful tomb.

They crowded him into a line with other elves. There were roughly a dozen of them total, with him at the end—and he could only just make out Maedhros’ head near the front, towering over the rest of them. They all had the same features—lanky, some shade of copper to their hair. Clearly, they knew what they were looking for in Maedhros, even if they didn’t know his face.

There was another maia pacing the front of the line, in the shape of a dark girl with heavy combat boots and knives in her hands. They shone even in the dull light of the massive command deck that shone down from the upper level and the view of the stars. It was odd to see weapons like knives in this age, though he could guess she was pretty dangerous with them if she carried them now. How the dark lord's forces had managed to attract so many maiar, he couldn’t be sure. They said some defected thousands of years ago when there was only one Arda. He didn’t know about the rest.

Something stirred from the upper deck. Something dark. The gathered group of orcs fell quiet, their helmets removed and the splashes of colorful ornaments in their hair and on their faces the only real vibrance in the room. But the air changed as the figure approached the broad stairs to the lower deck.

The maia who was watching them paced back his way. Their eyes locked for a moment. Hers lit with recognition—his with confusion as she hurried to his side.

 “Mairon?" she hissed. “What are you doing—”

He didn’t know the maia. He didn’t know how she knew him, or why her wide eyes seemed vaguely familiar. Perhaps they had met once, before the blackout—but he wouldn’t remember. No one had memory of the days before the end of the Great War.

Heavy boots sounded against cold steel as the dark figure from above descended the steps. All at once, great malicious power spilled out around them in waves that were well near tangible. Mairon had an eerie sense of déjà vu as it pulled around him like the pull of the highly sulfuric ocean on his home planet, burning and bubbling.

 He had never felt so much power from one person before. He didn’t know it was possible.

He wore a great ornamental hood that glowed lightly with markings of power—and under it he saw the vague shine of armor, armor like the kind Aulë used to send him to shine in its ornate display case before he got assigned to the scrapyards. But this was not the glimmering golden armor of heroes.

Every bone in his body, every instinct he possessed told him that this was the dark lord, the Morgoth who ended life as they knew it and nearly destroyed the galaxy in the process. The dark lord who lurked in the shadows, whose will infested every single one of those ruined antimatter engines that Mairon had to rip apart in search of salvageable materials. He was supposed to be dead and gone—and yet here he was.

The very thought turned Mairon’s entire world upside down.

The maia who recognized him made a move to hurry to her master. “My lord, there’s something you need to see—”

He waved her off before she could finish her sentence. “Later,” he dismissed. His voice was dark, low, just enough to send a chill of terror down Mairon’s spine. The maia looked like she was half of the mind to say something else—but she cast her eyes over the audience slowly gathering around them on both the upper deck and the one on which he was lined up. Then she fell silent behind him, walking in a stance of high command like he’d seen Aulë with his favorites as they went off on diplomatic trips to central space. She was important, and she knew his name—how did she know his name?

The dark lord’s head was turned to the line of elves, and Mairon could not make out his features from the end; but he walked with a horrible foreboding, each step slow and deliberate.

He stopped as he spotted Maedhros.

 “Well?” he crooned, and it sounded like the entire room was holding its breath.

Maedhros’ lip curled. “Fuck off,” he spat.

Morgoth moved faster than Mairon could track. His hand gripped Maedhros’ jaw, the force pulling the elf forward. He seemed so tall and imposing before, but against the bulk of an evil god he was little more than a waif like the rest of them.

“You’ve done your kin a disservice, Maedhros,” Morgoth taunted lowly. “How many elves I’ve had to kill in search of you... and it could have all been avoided if you came to me quietly.”

 “Let them all go,” Maedhros threatened as the dark lord dropped him. He heard the sound of his feet coming back to the ground as he stumbled to regain his balance. “You won’t get what you want.”

“Will I?” Even with the hood over his head Mairon could practically feel the smirk accompanying his mirth. It was something low and horrible that bounced off of his senses.

Then the monster pulled back his hood, and Mairon nearly forgot how to breathe.

It wasn’t fear he recognized, it was—eerie familiarity. His stomach dropped with dread. The dark lord had the same elegant features as his brother, his foil—but he was twisted and grey, and far too satisfied at the way his audience trembled before him.

In fact, he looked far too much like Manwë Sulimo. It was wrong for the most evil thing in the galaxy to look like the last bastion of good they had.

He never once cast his eyes upon Mairon, all of his focus on Maedhros, and for that he was glad. There was something he was trying not to think about, some distant and vague memory that he didn’t want to dredge up—and that part of him hurt when he tried to think about why. If the dark lord were to look upon him now he didn’t know if he could process these things anymore.

 “You’ll tell me, elf,” he ordered. “Where is the Silmaril?”

 “You think I know where dad hid all of his things?” spat Maedhros. Mairon couldn’t see him from beyond the group before him anymore, but just hearing his shaking voice told him that it took all of the courage he had to speak to the dark lord that way.

Morgoth chuckled. “Oh, I think you do,” he purred, and his voice filled the room, chillingly wicked. “Augguth—if you would be so kind as to bring me your little guest.”

He heard an orcish chuckle, and watched as an orc crossed the vast room in the opposite direction of the door in which he came in. In his absence the maia from before came forward, wide-eyed with a certain urgency.

 “My lord,” she tried again, quietly—but not quietly enough that Mairon couldn’t hear her. “You really need to know. Your—”

 “Later, Thuringwethil,” the dark lord snapped. She backed up and her reaction seemed a bit odd to Mairon—like she was surprised. But she backed up anyhow and wrapped her way back around the audience. They parted ways for her, implying again that she was of some kind of status—and she let them, head high and haughty despite her dismissal.

She looked familiar, he thought. But she had very old eyes, eyes that he thought he would have remembered. He didn’t know a Thuringwethil, but the name itself made is head hurt.

 “You’ll need to speak up, Mairon,” she whispered to him when she passed. Like she knew him. It set him on edge. “He’s clearly in one of his moods today. I can’t get his attention.”

“What do you—” he started, but far doors came swinging open and the orc returned followed by two uruks who carried the hooded prisoner from earlier between them. With his hood pulled away, Mairon could see glimpses of another elf. Twisted gold jewelry hung askew and forgotten from tangled braids in his hair. They threw him on the ground before the dark lord and then the crowd tightened before him, obscuring the scene.

“No,” Maedhros gasped. To Mairon, even without seeing him, it sounded like the fight had suddenly drained from his voice.

“Do you remember each other?” The dark lord chuckled. It was low and deep and sounded somehow out of place. “I did suppose this would loosen your lips a little.”

The elf spoke up over the crowd, voice stronger than Mairon expected in his state. It cracked hoarsely with dehydration. “Don’t tell him anything, Maitimo,” he implored.

Maedhros sounded like he was begging now, panic laced into his voice. “I don’t know where the Silmaril is. My father hid them—I—I haven’t seen a single one since he died. Please—let him go and I’ll show you maps of—of my father’s old routes.” The scene before him moved just enough that he caught a glimpse of one robed arm reaching for the hooded prisoner. Mairon almost wished he could look away, but somehow he couldn’t bring himself to do it as the elf was forced to stagger to his knees. There was clearly little fight left in him, unable to stand, unable to flee.

“Liar,” Morgoth accused. “Try again.”

“Let him go," Maedhros pleaded again.

He could physically hear Melkor’s smirk. “Wrong answer,” he said.

That was when the elf started to scream.

Whatever grip the dark lord had on the elf’s arm was torture, so clear and painful that even the uruk blocking Mairon’s view visibly recoiled. His cries were unnatural, punctuated by a horrible crack in his throat. More than the cries of a dying man—he screamed like a man who wished for death. He’d never heard such a horrible sound in his life.

The scream was all it took to break Maedhros. Within seconds he had thrown himself at the dark lord’s feet, head bowed like a servant. Another sight that felt...too familiar. And wrong.

The other elf quieted. Morgoth dropped him and let him sink to the floor again, struggling no more.

 “Dwarven system K-A-R two-four two-four. Find the Maruk Khazâd. It’s—I embedded my Silmaril into the gauntlet. That’s all I know, I swear—let him go, he has nothing to do with this—”

Morgoth laughed. He heard the shrill sound of steel and knew he had pulled out a weapon. The crowd closed in around him in anticipation.

“You think I just let my guests leave so easily?” he challenged. “You think I’d want to leave either of you elf-lords alive—”

Mairon couldn’t watch this. His mouth moved outside of his control. “Stop.”

He didn’t know what inspired him to speak. He didn’t know how he was able to project his voice, so commanding, so clean. He did know that Maedhros, whoever he was to these villains, had helped him survive thus far. If they were all doomed to die, he was going to at least do whatever he could to stop it.

The dark lord’s thrall parted like a sea and suddenly there was nothing but thirty-odd feet between him and the worst nightmare of the civilized world. But the look on the dark lord’s face... his expression went from wild to unguarded, to utterly vulnerable, to wide-eyed with a combination of horror and astonishment. He looked ageless and somehow—afraid.

“Mairon,” he breathed. His name sounded like it had sat there for decades, centuries, millennia—too smooth and practiced and sad. “Mairon—”

He moved faster than Mairon could track, heavy hands setting on his shoulders, wide eyes tracking his every movement with a kind of disbelief. For a moment Mairon thought this was his death—but the hold was delicate, like he was afraid he would disappear at any moment.

 “You’re—in cuffs,” he managed numbly. Like he was supposed to be the one in shock. “You—” He’d never seen a god choke up before, much less a dark lord. Mairon was frozen to the spot, unable to fight, unable to flee.

The dark lord who captained The Void was looking at him like some sort of treasure he had lost long ago. Like they knew each other. Mairon didn’t like it.

“Who imprisoned you?” he finally asked. It was a low growl, a voice that echoed with the kind of unhinged anger only available to darkness. Mairon found his throat too dry to speak. Morgoth was tall, tall like a vala, he thought, all too imposing and leaving Mairon feeling smaller and weaker than Aulë ever would. When he let go of Mairon’s shoulders, turning to the gathered crowd, he was amazed he was able to hold himself up at all.

 “Someone tell me who in this void-damned hall put your lieutenant in a cell?” he demanded now, stronger, angrier than he had ever seen in that mocking discussion with the elves. “Or should your Lord punish all of you for your blatant insubordination?”

Mairon caught a glimpse of the orc who had first caught him in the Sulimo to his right. She cowered now, afraid to come forward, afraid to double back. Some dark, hidden part of him wanted to point her out, to see what horrors came upon her. He made eye contact with her for just a moment and saw the same horror and confusion that he felt. They were like a reflection, the two of them. She was following directions, evil or not. She hadn’t even been too rough with him.

He couldn’t turn her in.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said to the floor, to anyone but the dark lord. “They were just doing their job.”

The dark lord jumped from horror to anger as quickly as he shifted from delight to shock when he saw him. The rage of a god was something that could fill a room. It arced between them all like lightning, leaving even the grandest uruk quivering in fear. All, it seemed, but the maia who had sought him out before. Thuringwethil. She seemed unfazed by his raw emotions, a hand on her hip.

“See what I was trying to tell you?” she mocked. “Not now, Thuringwethil. Later, Thuringwethil. Well yes now, Melkor. Sometimes it’s important.”

Melkor. He’d heard that name before. Morgoth’s true name, the name the Valar knew him by in ancient times, when the land was young and the Maiar were still whole. That name seemed awfully sad to him for some reason.

He didn’t have time to gather his thoughts about it before a hand wrapped around his arm and the dark lord dragged him out of the crowd and away from the scene, back down the dark and cryptic halls of a spacecraft older and more renowned than the entirety of Manwë’s fleet. He barely kept up on his feet.

-x-

His bruises jarred painfully against the dark wall of the room as the iron grip on his arm let go, giving him the chance to spring back away from his captor. He had thought even then among the ship that the concept of Morgoth was ambiguous; he was a mere legend, a threat used to remind them not to toy with powers that they did not understand. To take one’s ambitions too far was the work of Morgoth; chaos was his domain, the improbable and the unexplainable. Always work within the realm of logic, Aulë would say.

To see him here, tall and gray, was to look upon a dark god from a thousand horrible legends. But the look on his face, caught somewhere between disbelief and indiscernible hope, had him remembering something that he shouldn’t. It was nothing of value, but a recurring dream that had always put him on edge during long days in the scrapyards. A dream of a faceless man, imploring he protect himself without a voice. When he looked up he could do nothing but recall that feeling of utter despair. It came from a place without fear and rooted itself deeply into his thoughts.

I know this face, his thoughts said. But he did not. Perhaps it was the occasional glimpses of portraits of Manwë that he was reminded of now, for there was a time that they were brothers.

His lip curled and he forced himself to look back up, to glare at the god-creature who powered this ship and remind himself of just who this was. He couldn’t forget just what kind of savagery he witnessed back there.

He stepped back until his hip hit a table. They were in a conference room of some kind, he thought, just a table and a light scatter of chairs that were not evenly set around it. On the far back wall was a large screen gone dark, leaving the room as shadowy as the rest of the ship.

 “Mairon,” Melkor breathed again through stony lips. Once more Mairon felt a horrible pull to some long lost memory. Aulë had said, once, that the things he could not remember were because they were simply too painful for him to recall—and perhaps he had been a prisoner once. Or maybe he had been like that traitor maia who dragged him out of his and Maedhros’ prison cell, enchanted somehow into his dark service.

He thought of the horrible wails of the dirty elvish prisoner as Morgoth dropped him onto the ground, let him cower there. Perhaps his fate had been worse than that of a thrall. There were whispers, they said, that many of the maiar who awoke without memory had done so because of the horrible things that Morgoth had exposed them to in the old wars.

“Stay back,” Mairon tried in his panic. “Stay—stay away from me.”

The dark lord looked hurt. Such evil wasn’t supposed to make facial expressions, he thought, but he looked upset. “Mairon,” he tried again, pronouncing every syllable slowly and with intent. He kept saying his name like he would lose it if he didn’t. “Where have you been? I’ve sent legions of orcs all over the galaxy in search of you. All we found were—pieces.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he replied, his hand going back to brace himself against the table before his legs could give out. “I don’t know you. Stop calling me by my name.”

Melkor’s eyes lit up with realization—and with horror. “No,” he breathed. His voice shook—and it was like a dying storm, more expressive than he should have been. “Tell me who I am,” he ordered. “Please. Tell me you know who I am.”

Mairon steeled himself. The room wavered around him.There was fear and panic in the air that Mairon couldn’t quite say was his own. Things were just...wrong. The dark lord, grand and imposing, seemed small before him. Desperate. This was a completely different figure from the confidently wicked monster who sought the destruction of civilization. He wondered if this was a trick—he wondered how the dark lord knew his name, just a low-ranking maia who’d never left his planet.

 “Tell me,” Melkor hissed again, and this time he sounded more forceful. This was a man who was used to giving orders. “Tell me or—I swear I will go back out there and kill those elves you just begged me to save—”

 “You’re Morgoth,” Mairon spat, summoning every ounce of hate that he could. He thought of the screams in that hall. “You’re the dark lord who destroyed our entire civilization. You—you waged war against my master, and all of the other ainur. You killed the herald of Manwë. You’re—the greatest evil in all of the galaxy.” He couldn’t continue from there, though he already feared the repercussions of his honest words.

The dark lord was quiet. Unreadable. Mairon could already feel the storm brewing somewhere behind his mask by the way he had closed himself off. There was something Mairon was missing—but thinking too hard about it made his head swim.

 “Centuries, Mairon,” he said. It felt like it took all of his control to maintain his tone, by the way the air crackled like grief. “Millenia, even. All that time and you never once called me by that wretched name.” He reached for him; but he stopped when Mairon shrank back against the cold table. Mairon saw the conflict happening in his mind; and somehow it felt like both of their worlds were coming crashing down on them.

“I don’t know you,” he repeated, holding onto this surge of bravery while he still had it. “You’re just—just a myth.”

Steely eyes shut and power languished through the room. It washed over his skin with a horrible chill, cool and analytical. Then it settled like an icy blanket. “Whatever they did to you to make you this way…it runs deep.” The dark lord looked up, somewhere to his right and away from Mairon. His gaze hardened to steel. Then his expression shifted, like he had made an unknown decision. “I will have to go deal with these elves. You’ll wait here.”

He swept out of the room in a flourish, leaving Mairon to finally sink down to the floor in a panic. They shouldn’t know each other. Yet something in his words made him feel like he was going to shatter.

He needed to get out of here. Morgoth left the door open; he could just walk through and hopefully find some way to escape. Steal a ship, something. This was all Great War tech. He’d overridden those protocols before and he could do it now, be in warp before they realize he’s gone.

But his legs wouldn’t move.

He focused first on breathing. Mairon was a natural logistician; he just needed to take in the symptoms. Rapid heart rate, difficulty moving, faintness—he was having a panic attack. Perhaps it was a bit overdue given the situation.

“Come on,” he whispered to himself. Deep breath in, deep breath out. He’d talked other maiar through these before, when they had those all-too-real nightmares, remnants of the old days. “Come on. Come on." Breathe in, breathe out. Two arms, two legs, nine fingers—nine? No—ten. Ten, counting the one with the mark.

He worked through numeric tempering levels of steel until he felt his muscles loosen. Breathe in, breathe out—prepare at 500c, temper at 230c until pale yellow, prep at 0.4 per cent carbon—

Numbers were enough to redirect his focus. Feeling crept back into his body slowly. This isn’t over, he thought—but he had to do whatever he could to get out of here. Even if it didn’t seem like this ship’s captain wanted to kill him, it wasn’t anywhere near safe here either.

Melkor had left the door open. All he needed to do was walk out. If he was lucky he could find a place to hide, or even a way out. He forced himself to repeat Curumo’s comm coordinates and access code so he wouldn’t forget them. It was the only cross-system communication code he knew from that reddish rock of a planet. Get out, find some way to get in touch. He’d been hoping to have his adventure, his chance to do something bigger and more ambitious. But taking control of his fate shouldn’t be at the cost of his life.

It was time, then, to go home. If that was possible anymore.

He willed himself up, using the table to steady himself for only a moment. He rolled the sleeves up on his dirty and ripped jumpsuit. He took a deep breath and hurried out the door.

The utility halls in the ship all seemed identical. Wide enough for only three or so people astride, with tall doors and high ceilings. Light came in from dark grates along the walls, an odd warm light that burned like fires from somewhere far below. The whole craft seemed to hum with power, access controls restricted to switches and keypads where the Ainur ships used complex touchpad interfaces. The ship was rough, strong, and functional, just like its occupants.

He hurried down the first corridor, then another before it opened up into a massive hall. Here it was busier, creatures of all shapes and sizes milling around. The murmur of language bounced off of the cold walls all around them, dim light filtering in from the grates below.

Far above he could see the stars of the galaxy, be it high windows or an elegant illusion.

He forced the panic not to overcome him as he ducked back into his corridor. He stuck out too much; he looked too much like the escaped prisoner that he was. He couldn’t venture into those halls in search of his escape. They’d catch him instantly.

He took one step back into the shadows, then another—and then he collided with something large and solid.

With a yelp he turned around to meet the imposing frame of the dark lord, and realized with abject horror that he was once again caught.

“I should have known you would try to run,” Melkor observed softly above the commotion of the space beyond them. He...didn’t even sound angry, Mairon thought. Just making an observation.

“Let me go,” Mairon said, almost begged. “Aulë will—he'll know you have me here—”

“Your Aulë won’t come near me.” Melkor shook his head like he knew something very private, very ancient. “Mairon. I can give you anything you want but I can’t let you leave. You don’t know what you’re asking of me.”

“Stop using my name like you know me,” he spat.

The softness in Melkor’s expression hardened then, piercingly tired eyes locking him to his spot. “I know you better than you know yourself,” he replied cryptically. “And while I won’t keep you as a prisoner on your own ship—I won’t let you leave so they can mutilate you again.”

“Mutilate? Mutilate?" He didn’t know where the strength in his voice came from, where the built-up frustration burst out of but he spoke without thought, crafting words in a language he wasn’t supposed to remember. “You are the one who lets them mutilate you.”

Somehow, by some twist of fate, he had rendered the dark lord himself speechless. A heavy silence followed them, punctuated only by Mairon’s shallow breaths.

“Do you really believe that?” Melkor asked. His words were guarded.

Mairon cast his eyes down, shook his head to clear his thoughts. “My—head hurts,” he mumbled. “I want to rest. I want to go home.”

Melkor took a single step back from him and the air cleared of its crackling shadows. At the same time he seemed to come to a decision.

“Come with me first,” the dark lord ordered—offered? Implored. He held his arm out for Mairon to take. “You can leave if you let me give you something before you go. I’ll prepare a Federation ship for you if that’s what you want.”

Mairon’s jaw tensed. His head was spinning. Somehow, he felt like he had lost control of his own mind—and with it came this sense of helplessness, this loss of self.

He’d spoken without thinking and he said words he didn’t even understand in a language he shouldn’t know. The worst part was that the people here seemed to have the answer—and it wasn’t what he wanted to hear. He didn’t want the enemy of the entire galaxy to know him. And yet...

 “...Alright,” he decided, brushing past the dark lord and his outstretched arm. He feared getting too close when so much as laying a hand on him may bring more of these thoughts to the surface. Things that didn’t make sense, that left his head spinning and his body weak.

In a lot of ways it felt like there was something fundamentally wrong with him while he was here. This horrible place, this murderer and destroyer of entire civilizations shouldn’t be so desperate for his cooperation. And he...shouldn’t be getting this sense of déjà vu when he looked at him. He was in this situation anyway, so he decided he was making the best of it—taking the route that would keep him from getting maimed or destroyed.

Melkor’s demeanor changed immediately, the air lightening as he practically purred with hope. “This way,” he directed, and Mairon followed him through the labyrinth.

Chapter Text

He knew it was over from the shouting and the crashing. Here, deep within the annals of his fortress he could hear it.

He’d already flipped the desk and braced it against the broad doors. Like they wouldn’t make quick work of it. It didn’t matter; with his mace in hand, Mairon knew he would wait. He would fight to the death to protect his master, even if the war was utterly lost, even if it was too late for either of them. He would war against them until he drew his dying breath—all for him. All for him.

“Mairon.” His master hadn’t said a word until now, and to utter his name so seldom used in these halls—and it was horrible, it was sobering. It was the most lucid voice Mairon had heard since before the day his master stormed into Angband with three horrible shining jewels burning holes in his hands.

It left him so disarmed, so unprepared for the look of resignation he saw written across his master’s face. The look of damning acceptance would haunt him for years to come.

“Leave,” he ordered. But it didn’t feel like an order, no, it hurt too much to be an order because orders were something he took and something he did without second thought, anything for his master—

 “No.” He’d already lost his composure before him, the great god who already looked so tired. He looked world-weary and perhaps now, after everything, he finally was. But still…

He wouldn’t leave him here. He’d defy any order if he had to.

-x-

The dark lord had a deep understanding of these utility halls, these high-speed lifts and nondescript doors that reminded Mairon of ancient scrappers from an era of unsustainable technology. Ships from before the Blackout were larger, grander, packed with power; a ship was an entire city, unimaginably large and impossible to traverse without turbolifts and trains. Their wreckage wiped out entire civilizations when they fell to the planets they orbited.

This was a destroyer-class ship, he guessed. It was smaller than the world-destroying ships, faster and armed to the teeth. That didn’t make it feel any less vast to Mairon, whose largest ship experience was the Sulimo. The Sulimo could land on the Void.

The vertical lift they took now was tiny and quiet. It flew past several floors with a distinct sense of weightlessness. Of all the off-planet technology he would never get used to, this was it. The sensation was almost the same as the first time he broke atmo while testing an old Eagle-class jet from their shop. The moment he broke atmo and switched off the fuel thrusters, he had a sense of weightlessness. He gazed into the void and for a moment it was like he wasn’t even here, this tiny maia on a rock hurtling through space. Then he dropped back into orbit and the moment was over.

That feeling could never be quite replicated but whizzing past the floors at the best speeds mag-lev could maintain, he felt like he could maintain a memory of the past.

The lift stopped at their destination and opened up to a vast chamber full of ancient architecture. He’d seen the same designs in the residence halls of Aulë and his most trusted assistants. The dwarves erected them, grand pillars and elegant carvings depicting ancient stories that they whispered with reverence to this day. But these halls, the halls of the dark lord, had a certain cut refinery to them. Here it looked almost like he had stepped into an ancient excavation of the likes they remembered through holovids and digital engravings on a planet that no longer existed. It seemed the old gods were the sentimental sort.

The effect of the vast room was lost on him by rows upon rows of old artifacts. He only recognized a few as what they were; crumbled pillars carefully roped together, half-formed statues, a basket overflowing with old swords that glowed with mithril warnings as Melkor neared. Most things were covered in dusty gray tarps and marked with paint in their odd language. Enchanted, Broken, Third age, things vaguely listed.

 “You collect artifacts,” he realized dumbly. It was obvious, yes, and he felt silly for saying it.

“Mm.” Melkor’s answer was little more than a grunt as he looked over a line of covered boxes. He had no idea what was inside as the plain sheets were unmarked in the twilight glow of the room.

He selected the largest box and gave the sheet a tug. The thing had to be twice his height and just as wide, but Melkor pulled the cover off easily and it fell to pool on the ground with a flourish.

It was a massive traditional safe. One side had the distinct markings of burns over brass filigree, but the structure was undamaged. There were analog dials, unpowered, dominated by two massive levers.

These things could survive anything, and clearly whatever was inside had Melkor interested in protecting it.

 “You might want to step back,” suggested Melkor mildly. “The door can be a bit touchy.”

There was a click and the heavy groan of a massive metal mechanism. The door buckled a little under its own weight then creaked open, giving Mairon barely a moment to sidestep its heavy swing. The door itself and the walls of the safe were several feet thick, its interior almost like a cramped steel room.

A single box sat in on top of a pedestal in the back. Its carved wood cast a light cherry reflection on the dark back wall. Melkor worked some kind of enchantment and a tiny ball of light drifted into the room, dimly bathing its surroundings in a cold blue glow.

Mairon didn’t even notice Melkor hovering behind him at first as he climbed into the small room of the safe. There was great power here, drawing him in. It whispered with a distinct familiariy, calling as it pulled him in.

Is it calling my name? he thought as waves of it enveloped him.

Melkor cut around him and he was half of the mind to put out his arm and stop him. There was a hunger that had woken inside him, a pull for whatever was there that he could barely hold back. But no one gets in the way of the dark lord, he reminded himself. At least—no one who lived to tell the tale.

The box itself was magicked, he could tell now; the mithril it was made of gave off intense light at the point of contact between itself and Melkor. Mithril could sense him and his thrall, but it didn’t seem to bother him one bit.

“Hold out your hand,” he instructed as he opened the lid of the chest. Mairon could do little but obey. He didn’t know what to expect—something cursed? Something evil?

He withdrew a necklace set with a deep red stone.

The stone itself, despite the intricate make of the jewelry, was little more than a polished rock. It didn’t seem special in any way, no unique shine, no chromatic shifts—but Mairon was all eyes for it anyway. It felt too familiar.

 “It was convenient that the old humans assumed these little pieces of rock were blessed in some way,” Melkor mused before him. “They took them in as treasures and they guarded them jealously. That made it easier to track them down. Unfortunately for us, I’m not the only one in search of the relics.”

The admission came with a certain level of care as he held it out by the chain and carefully dropped it into Mairon’s waiting palm.

Mairon had trouble tracking what happened between that moment and the rough jostle on his bruises as Melkor caught him mid-fall. There was a rush of power that coursed through him like electricity, jarring his muscles and pulling deep into his bones. The surge continued up into his mind, his heart, his spirit—and with it his blood felt aflame.

You are fire, some deep part of himself promised. The world exploded with color and he shut his eyes to it.

Light fingers traced the curve of the great arch, dancing among the crackling flames. “You were right,” he breathed with a pointed smirk. “Fire is more beautiful when it is free.”

A deep chuckle resonated with his aspirations. “I knew you would love it,” said a dark voice. “Tell me, pet—what shall you craft for me first from these fires?”

A thin smile graced his lips. “A great warhammer,” he promised.

Mairon opened his eyes to near-darkness. His shoulder should have pulsed in agony, close against hard black armor and cold silks as Melkor supported him. There was no pain. He felt energized, better than he had perhaps in a long time. Completely healed.

The necklace in his hand had crumbled. Only sand remained in his closed fist. It fell through his fingers in a quiet stream, pooling on the ground. Soon enough, he came to his senses—five feet rule, he thought, and put himself back on his feet and away from the dark lord’s arms.

“What was that?” he demanded, feeling a mix of panic and raw energy rising from within him. The world felt sharper, cleaner. “What did you just do?”

Melkor was harder to read than ever, face blank as he looked down at what ought to be a small, insignificant forge maia. Ought to be. For some reason, he had yet to feel like he was being seen that way under that cold gaze.

“I did nothing,” he defended softly. His voice was low and carried with it a distinct timbre Mairon had somehow been unable to pick up before. In the grand room in which they met he had sounded like thunder, rolling rage and power; but here…he was like rain.

Mairon steeled himself from feeling disarmed by his revelation. “Then what was that?” he asked.

“It was a piece of your soul, Mairon,” he answered firmly. “Your Fëa. I scoured the galaxy to find it. When you came into contact with it, you rejoined. Tell me—you feel lighter, yes? Stronger.”

He wasn’t lying. Mairon wished he was lying. He wasn’t lying, because somehow Mairon knew that was him. Other maiar had found similar pieces of themselves before, from ancient wars and old tales. Often they were embedded into rocks, scoured into the pieces of whatever place they fell. He knew the names of every single maia at home who still sought out pieces of themselves. It was quite a source of gossip.

Aulë had never told him that he was fractured too.

“Why did you have that?” he asked. He felt suddenly raw, defensive. Whatever core part of himself, whatever invasive piece told him to trust this man—this god, this whatever—he pushed it down, choked it out with thoughts of atrocities, forced his doubt out of his mind.

Melkor was a mix of an unreadable surface of stone and an open book, flashing between the two faster than his eyes could have followed mere minutes ago. But he was keen now, and he saw the concern there. The softness was unlike the ways of a fallen god.

 “…I couldn’t find you,” he confessed. “But I knew where that pendant was. I would take whatever I could get. Piece you together myself if I must.”

Mairon frowned, pushing his hair out of his face. As much as he would like to know why the fallen Vala himself would hunt for a forge maia, he had a feeling the answer was not what he wanted to hear. Instead he set upon him a steady glare that came far easier than it should. That rush of power left him confident. “You promised me a Federation ship and safe passage.”

He expected a fight. He expected to be kept by force. Something, even more than their conversation earlier, told him Morgoth Bauglir had no interest in giving him up. It made no sense—he was just a scrapper, just a passerby whose misguided ambitions led him to an unexpected place. No one special.

Yet he got an eerie sense that it wasn’t quite the case anymore. What that piece of his soul had really done was plant the seeds of doubt in his mind, and they troubled him now as he wondered what this feeling meant.

The whole day he’d been bothered by strange reflections of thoughts, by fragments of memories that should not be. All the maiar, the elves, anyone who lived to tell the story of the last great war had lost their memories. That was the real price of the signal blackout.

When he woke he was told that before everything fell apart, he was a forge maia. They didn't need so many maiar at the forges now, so he was a scrapper instead. Memories of sweeping halls, gray hands, wild and raging fires—should not come to him now. A language he had never heard in his life should not feel as familiar as his own thoughts. He should be remembering Aulë, the forges, his life among the gods. It was the same glimpses which his companions on that red planet received in their dreams. His shouldn’t be any different.

In an unexpected move, Melkor looked down. His face was like stone again, unchanging. A forced mask. He pulled up his sleeve and from his wrist he detached a dark band.

 “My comm chip,” he explained as he held it out. “This will get you anywhere you want to go. Just show it to anyone you come by and they will give you whatever you want. Just…” He penned some coordinates into the mini screen—a screen with a series of mechanical buttons on the sides, like the old broken tech from before the Blackout. It seemed all things here were miraculously working from a bygone era. “It will give you directions to Thuringwethil, and to the ship. She can give you some clothes that aren’t…” He trailed off, but the way his eyes swept over Mairon’s dirty orange jumpsuit said enough.

He took one step back, then another; then he was turning and for some reason Melkor wasn’t stopping him from leaving. He held the comm in his hands, the worn leather straps oddly personal. The tiny screen displayed a rudimentary map that gave him directions to the lift.

He didn’t look back. Melkor was silent behind him.

“…Thank you,” he finally said softly. It felt odd. “For keeping to our terms.”

Melkor didn’t answer. When he finally worked up the courage to look back, the dark lord was gone. The dust that remained from the stone still pooled on the ground by the old chest, and the safe felt somehow more worn than it did minutes ago.

He turned back, steeled himself, and hoped for the best. The comm could be lying. It could all be a trap. But something in the reluctance in the air had him convinced that he had a way out.

The comm sent him back the way he came, the lift opening automatically when the device came into contact with it. The ship was truly automated; none of the clunky levers and switches of Federation ships. Even eagle-class ships didn’t have comm scanners. Everyone scanned their access keys to get around, save for a few of the most elite commanders. There was a certain paranoia surrounding heavy-duty comm chips that led to their inherent simplicity and limited access range. No one forgot the signal blackout.

That was what made this place all the more eerie. He knew there should have been no way this ship was still running. Antimatter signals didn’t work anymore. When he was very young he used to play with the signal chips off of old scrappers, hoping that he could get one running again. They never worked. It was like the laws of physics just stopped applying to them one day and it never sorted itself out.

The lift let him off at a different floor from where he started. The lights were brighter here, the metal of the floors a cool grey steel instead of oppressive black. The comm told him to go to the left, which he did. He passed two plain metal doors and then went through an arch lined with data panels, green-lit digital meters and warning lights. A single light flashed under a signal code in pale orange.

It opened up to a pale gray common area of some sort, the lights soft and steady like those he remembered in the Sulimo’s halls. There was a kitchen directly across from him, and he recognized the same stove he knew from home, the same cryo storage and the same countertops. Even The Void was not devoid of hospitality. The maia from earlier—Thuringwethil—was sitting at a circular white table in the middle of the lounge and devouring a protein ration in what seemed like record pace. The wrapper was distinctly Federation coded in blue and white.

Funny how some things never changed.

As soon as she saw him she rose from her chair—so quickly that it fell back, clattering to the floor. “Mairon!” she said like his name were a declaration. He felt strange under her perceptive gaze. She watched him like she was searching for changes, catching every minor difference from some standard in her mind.

“You look better,” she finally said. “Healthier—taller? Did the boss set you up with that trinket he found on Gillion?”

“He said you would help me find clothes,” he answered automatically. It was all that could come to his mind. She seemed unarmed, unguarded. Even now she was still composing herself as if she were expecting something.

She looked him over as if the request were no surprise. “You’re a bit smaller than you used to be,” she observed. “I’ll—see what I can find.”

 “You knew me too?” he blurted. He stopped himself from continuing—even if Melkor was telling the truth, he couldn’t say for sure. She did, however, seem oddly familiar. Maybe he met her once before she defected.

On her part, her eyes widened only a fraction before she composed herself. Her expression transformed into a knowing smirk—some kind of secret with herself. He felt like perhaps that was the last thing he should have said.

 Somewhere in the back of his mind, he could feel the memory of a woman of the past, all dark cloaks and silvery smiles.

Working with Thuringwethil was always a game of strategy. To win her loyalty was to keep a valuable ally. She had no care for rank or role. To work with her was a constant, subtle exchange of power.

“Oh, we’ve met,” she answered vaguely with a knowing smirk. “I’ll just be a moment, then.”

He half-followed her until she slipped into that second silver door. She was only gone for a moment, though; then she was back with the door held open and a folded uniform similar to her own in her hands.

“I’ve got to get back to the maintenance dock before the mechanics decide to slack off,” she explained blandly as she let him in, handing off the clothes along the way. They were soft but thick, made of durable material. Finer than his scratchy orange jumpsuit, but simple in dark gray and black.

“Thanks,” he mumbled. She walked out without so much as a word, and he could hear the beep of a comm as she entered a dial code on her wrist.

The door slid shut and he took in his surroundings. It was just a storeroom, racks of uniforms and boots all around him. On the back wall hung five simple blasters, the cool metal reflecting the toneless lights in the ceiling.

If he could he would have wanted to hunt down a shower, but he didn’t want to try his luck on this ship. Clean clothes were enough to keep going. Small victories, he thought; just a few hours ago he was a prisoner on this ship awaiting what would inevitably be his death. How much could change in so little time? And now he felt primarily—curiosity.

 He should just do what he could to go, he thought. He should do whatever he needed to get home safe. He should be able to get back so he could tell Aulë that Morgoth was out there, that he had an entire army worth of orcs on his ship and he was attacking Federation transports. Yet he let his curiosity control him. Something wasn’t right here; there was a story he wasn’t being told. There were people here who knew him. Powerful people.

Morgoth himself looked at him like he was the center of the universe and everything about that made no sense.

He steeled himself as he buttoned up the uniform. The uniform was a simple quilted tunic and trousers, thick and durable but free enough for easy movement. The pants were a bit too long, the shoulders too broad, but it would work and was better than a torn jumpsuit. He laced up a pair of slightly-too-large boots, a belt with a holster like the ones the officers wore on the Sulimo.

His eyes fell over the blaster pistols again. In an afterthought, he walked over to the back wall and grabbed one. It was cold in his hands, inactive. However, he knew from repairing small models that all he had to do was flip the switch under the grip and it would heat up. These things weren’t particularly precise but they packed a punch.

He felt a bit better with a weapon. He didn’t know how to fire it, not really—not more than he needed to know to troubleshoot them. But it was better than nothing.

He picked the comm back up from the ledge he sat it on. Already it was giving him new directions. If Melkor was telling the truth, this was his way out of the ship. He longed already for the balmy desert heat of his home planet, the dry rock from which they worked and lived. It wasn’t necessarily the thought of returning home—surely he’d never be allowed outside again at this rate—but it was the familiarity. Maybe, coming home, he could find some sense of normalcy again and his scrambling brain would fall quiet.

He’d run away hoping to fulfill his ambitions. He’d dreamed of greater skies, of ships and adrenaline and raw adventure. He hadn’t wanted this.

He followed the directions to another lift, down a hall. Yet another lift. The ship felt endlessly huge, a network of doors and halls and endless people—so many people. This was his first time on a massive populated ship, and he found that it was like the cities planetside—a civilization. In common clothes he blended in and no one even thought to look in his direction, no one stopping or staring or questioning.

He walked down a massive hall that, like the one before in which he’d run into Melkor, seemed to be a popular thoroughway. He towered above the orcs bustling about; but he was not alone, serious-faced elves walking among them or the rare and finely dressed maiar whose power fell off of them in waves as they walked openly among them. It was different from what he’d always learned. He was weak and insignificant enough to blend in among elves and men; other maiar, though, were supposed to at least avoid making a scene of their inherent differences from their peers. In days long ago this did not matter, but in an age of collaboration and open forum the practice of humility spread quickly. It seemed that the rules were different in Morgoth’s realm.

There were uruks who were much like the ones he’d seen before, masked and armed and moving in small units. But at the other end of the hall he noticed an unmasked uruk on a bench, poring over a handheld tablet that let off a green glow with whatever he looked over. He saw another one walking in the opposite direction of him, laughter booming through the hall.

It was strange, seeing these creatures of war bumbling about like plain folk. He could have just as easily seen such a sight on the transfer station before he boarded the Sulimo, though be it less diverse—the core planets preferred the employ of men, who were quick to learn and willing to work for low wages. It was hard to equate creatures he had perceived as bred for war with civilization, to think of them as having lives and thoughts of their own.

What he saw, like much of what he had seen so far, was nothing like the stories he’d been told about dark space. Somewhere deep within the fog in his brain, he asked himself why he ended up here, when he very well should have been drifting in space.

The thoughts carried him far past the orcs, down the hall, beyond a veritable barrier of guards and officers who only averted their eyes and backed away when instinct drove him to level Melkor’s comm at them, an oddly nondescript symbol of power. This thing really did just let him go wherever he wanted. Right through electrically generated barriers, past doors, and down a broad staircase that led him into a docking bay.

He wished he had more time to gawk at this intact vision of ancient technology. Old forbidden diagrams and notes didn’t do the real thing justice. The rusted-out scrappers he took apart were only hints of an old world in comparison to what he was seeing now.

There was some kind of electrical field at the end of the docking bay that maintained a cool but breathable atmosphere. Rows of small single-passenger ships, parts and pieces scattered all around them, signified its purpose. The mechanics who puttered about paid him no mind, mumbling amongst each other, singing strange shanty tunes. Most of them were orcs—orcs. Orcs doing science.

It bothered him that he understood them, though they spoke only the same language as before. The Black Speech, he wanted to think to himself. The dark thrall had no proper, developed language according to the Federation. He understood what they were saying and felt the same words on his tongue, like a thousand other strange languages that had flitted through his mind since he laid eyes on their leader.

This place was disorienting. He needed to leave. He had—so many questions. Some voice of reason told him he shouldn’t be asking questions.

He knew which ship was his when he saw it—white-and-yellow, with the crest of the core planets on its side. The Landroval cruisers were the ranged scout ships of the Eagle-class line, quick and meant for long-distance missions for up to two pilots. They weren’t heavily armed nor meant for much more than stealthy reconnaissance, but they were fast enough to maneuver and something he’d tried a few times in flight sims. He could fly this, he thought, given the circumstances.

He climbed the wing to the popped hood, staring into the cockpit. Familiar buttons and switches, command consoles and communications HUDs that he had only seen virtually and through the lens of scientific data. The real thing was lightly scuffed, lined with clear use, and a little dusty—and as close as he would ever get to one of these ships again, he thought, because when he made it back he’d never be allowed off his planet again. He thought the scrapyards were miserable, but at least he saw the sky. They may well send him somewhere worse, to a mining outpost or a black-box research base.

The keychip was sitting in the seat in the front. Next to it was the shining metal case of a long-range communicator, no bigger than his palm. He reached for both. He tried to remember Curumo’s extension, tried to even imagine what he would say to him—hoping Aulë wasn’t concerned with the antics of a scrapper and metalworker; hoping that he hadn’t damned himself. He couldn’t imagine anywhere else to go; the moment he took off he’d be in a stolen Federation ship on enemy territory. If he didn’t talk to them then he may find himself in even deeper trouble trying to break out of dark space without clearance. Even worse would be explaining how he got out in the first place.

Room for two, his mind also provided in an almost dark glee. It was the same voice that told him to stay in this place. Too many questions.

He pocketed the keychip and the Federation communicator and, before he could stop himself, climbed off of the side of the ship. Shaking hands lifted Melkor’s comm, levelled the now-darkened screen.

It looked similar enough to the tiny comms used before the signal blackout with their strange screens and mysterious power source. Old comms took the form of a watch with two buttons on the side and a subtle turning dial that he wouldn’t notice unless he searched for it. He never did find out what they did.

Curiosity commanded him to push the first one, the one on the top of the device. The recording symbol that greeted him as the screen flashed to life was oddly universal.

 So it works like this, he thought to himself.

He raised the device to his face and spoke to it. “Give me directions to the holding cells,” he commanded as clearly as he could. He didn’t even think about using that strange language this time. He’d been using it a lot on the ship already without thinking about it. It felt wrong, and yet…he couldn’t fault whatever part of his mind knew it. He only knew that this was what he had become some time between landing on this horrid ship and now, standing before his one way out and making a ridiculous impulse decision to turn around.

The comm registered his instructions over the clamor of mechanical tools and the pervasive hum of the ship. The screen flashed with new directions, pointing much like a compass in the way of the last set.

It was incredible technology and it was all wrong that it still worked to this day when every single device he’d seen in the scrapyards had long since crumbled into a useless piece of scrap.

-x-

He wasn’t surprised that they kept the ships close to the holding cells. No lifts this time; just a steep flight of stairs in a utility corridor, somewhere between two heavy wall panels. He was surprised when he wasn’t tired by the time that he reached the top; just like his injuries from before, his stamina had improved since coming into contact with that strange piece of jewelry. Every fiber of his being wanted to tell him that Melkor was right, that he was right, that he’d touched a piece of his soul and absorbed it, making himself stronger—but the sheer wrongness of being more than a powerless maia in a scrapyard still jarred him.

This was what you wanted, he thought wryly. To be more than what they wanted you to be. The thought hit him with a sense of déjà vu.

The long, low-lit hall at the top of the stairs was empty. The door that opened up for him on the other end was—far too familiar. This was the corridor from before, he thought, from when he was first imprisoned here. The keypads and the black panels were the same. Every door yielded to him without so much as a touch, though; he figured it was this comm chip on his wrist, meant for the lord of this vessel. He could go anywhere.

Further down the ceiling panels disappeared and it became more familiar. Water and utility pipes buzzed ahead, snaking down the walls to some place below the floor right by the door he was supposed to enter.

It was solid and black. It groaned open with some lack of use when he held the comm over the keypad. The Void didn’t seem to keep prisoners very often, he thought. He and Maedhros and the hooded figure had been the only three he saw in that room before, and wherever those other elves had been kept must have been different.

There was an uruk on the ground before him—dead or unconscious, he couldn’t say. Over the uruk, Maedhros froze; he was crouched with the uruk’s communicator in hand, hair a tangled mess over his shocked face. A patch of blood bloomed on his dirty clothes.

He picked up the unconscious uruk’s blaster faster than Mairon could track, levelling it at his chest.

 “You,” he growled. “I should have known. Should have fucking recognized your disgusting face. You looked too pathetic to be him. Thought you had more dignity than that.”

 “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Mairon said cleanly.

“Liar.” He looked too unstable to shoot, Mairon thought, shaking arms faltering as the hooded figure from before walked through the open cell door behind him and looked him over with perceptive dark eyes.

“Maitimo,” the stranger tried quietly. “Shooting it won’t kill it.”

 “Sure, but it’ll hurt damn good,” the elf grit out. Turning his complete attention back to Mairon, he barked, “What do you want, Gorthaur? Come to string me up again? To spit in my face?” He raised his blaster back to full height where it had fallen. “I don’t make concessions to demons like you anymore.” His eyes were wide and wild.

Mairon remembered the chip in his pocket. Slowly—slowly enough that Maedhros could follow his movements and know that he meant no harm—he withdrew the ship’s activation sequence from his front pocket.

 “You said you had escaped from here before,” he said slowly. His eyes were on the weapon. He wasn’t a particularly powerful maia; a good blast was all it would take to shatter him. Maedhros didn’t seem to buy into that.

“You can’t keep us,” the elf replied cruelly, eyes narrowed. “Lock me up, try to kill me all you want. I’ll always find my way back out.”

“I’m not stopping you.” He tossed the chip on the ground. It landed on the arm of the unconscious uruk, close enough for Maedhros to see.

His eyes widened as he identified the chip. “You’re letting us go,” he realized. “Why would Gorthaur let us go?”

Mairon’s watchful eye hardened. “It’s a long-distance scout ship. Landroval class. Not the best but it’s fast and it looks like it’s got enough fuel to get you out of range. It’s sitting in a maintenance bay near here. There’s four guards at the door so be discreet.”

At once, Maedhros lowered the blaster so that he could reach for the ship’s command sequence. Mairon ducked out of the doorframe, far out of the way, and walked briskly down the hall. Once a door had snapped shut between them, he let out a measured breath.

They made eye contact just once as the door closed, an exchange of thanks that couldn’t be put into words. Every bone in his body screamed to hurry after him, to stop him. Your one way out, logic reminded him.

 He had just given up his one way out. He’d just trapped himself on Melkor’s ship. Sheer willpower kept the panic at bay. He’d have to find a different way home. There were too many strange things here, too many questions—and he didn’t have any of the answers he wanted.

The Federation communicator he grabbed from the ship sat heavy in his pocket, a flat chunk of shiny metal. He needed to find a chance to get away, somewhere private. Somewhere that he knew no one would be listening. Then he could make contact with the Federation.

With Melkor’s comm in his hand right now, he wouldn’t be finding that. But, he could find other answers he needed. If Melkor was as amenable as he’d been earlier, maybe he could make some sense out of this place. He held down that button on the side of the small square screen again. He took a deep breath. This may not even work, he thought.

The recording symbol flashed onto the screen. “Take me to Mor—to Melkor,” he breathed.

The screen flashed again and he didn’t know if the new instructions that appeared were comforting or terrifying.

Chapter Text

The forges were a prison sentence. They were no place for Aulë’s best, his brightest, his smartest. No, they were a punishment. The favorites, the true favorites—they were craftsmen, designers, whose work trickled down into instructions for the likes of him.

From the beginning of time, Mairon had pledged his loyalty to these halls. He only wished he knew what he was being punished for.

The deeper into the ship he went, the more dilapidated it became. He had to trust the comm watch. Its arrows guided him forward, around broken floor grates, rusted doors half on their hinges, electrical rubble. It looked like war had visited this place. The blaster scars that marred the walls spoke volumes of the story the ship wasn’t telling him.

According to the comm chip, his final destination was somewhere in the middle of the next room. The busted doorframe opened up to a much cleaner round hall—still worn, but cleaner.

In the middle of the room, approximately fourteen feet across and just as tall, was the antimatter engine itself. Or rather, the room wrapped around a chunk of the antimatter engine. He could see through the grating where it descended far into the ships. It provided the power that moved massive thrusters and grand contraptions. This must have only been the cap of the engine. He’d seen these before, pieced out in the scrap yards into massive chunks lowered in by huge junkers with engines that knocked cranes onto their sides. He’d never seen one operational. This particular engine had only a smooth black cap, no status screens or engine lights. He couldn’t say he knew for certain how any Antimatter ship was operated since he’d never seen one that worked, but The Void left him especially unsure.

Motion at the top was all that alerted him of the person comfortably perched high above on the cap. He wasn’t sure how he got up there, or how the comm knew where to take him, but he recognized Melkor’s pointed boots from earlier in the day.

His voice boomed through the room even at a low volume. The sound hummed in sync with the engine below him.

“I thought you were leaving,” he said. He was high above among the structural arches that anchored the antimatter engine to the walls. The engine seemed to hum mechanically with his words.

“I was,” Mairon answered vaguely. It was hard to say out loud that he changed his mind. He gave up his way off this ship. Something was keeping him here, he wanted to say, but he couldn’t quite put it into words.

“The ship is leaving dock, and you are not on it.” He didn’t know how Melkor could tell this. A wave of relief still washed over him; they got out, he thought. The elves would be well into warp soon. And he…was here. He’d made his choice. He could have gone, returned home with a story to tell—if they let him—but he was seeing too many things, feeling too many things. The teasing glimpses of memories that flashed through his head were too much to leave behind. He needed answers.

“I have so many questions,” he started slowly, taking a step forward. There was so much power in this dilapidated room. It all centered on him—on Melkor. Morgoth. Call him what he may. Tendrils of shadow lapped hungrily at his features, obscuring him from Mairon’s sight. It would be easier to talk like this, he thought, when he wasn’t able to see the expressive face of what ought to be an ageless god.

“Then ask.” It didn’t sound like a request—nor an order. He couldn’t decipher the emotion in that voice.

He swallowed. What was there to ask? Why did he know this voice? What were those words he spoke before—and why did he speak a dead language like he knew it? What were these strange memories?

Why did looking at his face make him feel so sad?

“In the room before,” he said, measuring his words, “why did you call me lieutenant?”

He didn’t know if his questions were the right ones or not. The shadowy fabric of Melkor’s clothes rustled as he dropped down from his perch. He did so in one smooth motion, his feet meeting the floor with little more than a tap.

“Lieutenant,” Melkor repeated. The frown that crossed his face was dignified and measured. He was holding onto a mask—one that Mairon had written into his own muscle memory. “Master. King. God.” He paced a wordless circle around Mairon, who turned to follow the movement. Never take your eyes off the enemy. Who taught him that?

“What does that mean to you?” he prompted.

Melkor’s eyes flashed like ice. “You could have had any title you wanted,” he said. “You chose it. Lieutenant. Second.”

“You’re saying I worked for you, then?” he asked. “I was a traitor?”

Melkor stilled. He watched Mairon with eyes like the frost that settled over the red rocks in the winter, jarringly pale on the dark landscape. Gone was the shock and grief from before. He had regained his composure as the lord of dark space.

“In his vast works and in the deceits of his cunning,” he quoted, “Sauron had a part, and was only less evil than his master in that for long he served another and not himself.”

Mairon tensed. “Valaquenta,” he breathed. He knew this story—and how it ended.

“So the legends of Men endure even now,” Melkor said evenly. “I am surprised Aulë would allow you to read the old legends.”

“Not all of them.” He shifted on his feet, in the slightly-too-large boots. He felt so small here. “Some stories were lost to time. Others were too sad to share. Too many wars on Arda.”

“Did he tell you who the men called Sauron?” Like before, he spoke the name sourly. Like it was a bitter drink, a poison. The sound of it never sat right with Mairon.

He thought of the stories. He hadn’t heard them in a long time. Sometimes, on a holiday, someone would read a passage. Mairon had never been interested; the legends didn’t resonate with him like the others. They weren’t instructional enough. Absorbed in his work, he spent most of those nights studying the old-war circuitry. He knew who Sauron was—because he knew about the earliest wars. Most of those stories gave him anxiety for reasons he could not explain. He wrote it off as disinterest.

The answers were all coming together in a way that didn’t sit right with him

“So you’re saying I’m this Sauron?” he accused.

Melkor didn’t answer.

Mairon bit his lip. The engine was picking up pace, the low hum of electricity intensifying. “I don’t understand,” he said. “This—whole place makes no sense to me. It’s like my mind can’t catch up to what’s going on. And when I look at you—” He cut off. His mouth felt dry.

When I look at you, he wanted to say, I feel an unexplainable sadness.

Mairon felt clumsy in here. Pitiful. In comparison, Melkor moved with the shadows and all the grace of a god.

He swallowed and forced himself to continue. “A week ago, I was just a scrapper. Today I was held at gunpoint, imprisoned, and now I’ve got orcs bowing to me and you’re trying to tell me that I was a traitor.” The scrapyard had always felt like a punishment. He had no passion for taking things apart—he loved design, science. The maiar were supposed to follow their strengths.

He remembered Aulë’s pitying stare when he tried to contest it. What is a maia who cannot even temper steel by his own power? He had challenged. Mairon shrank back, never returned to ask those questions again. He was taking ships apart because he was weak. If that necklace told him anything as it dissolved in his hands, it was that he shouldn’t be so weak. It wasn’t natural of him.

“There would have been no war without you, Mairon.” The finality in his voice stung. It was more logical not to believe someone with a reputation for trickery; he shouldn’t be believing an ounce of this. Yet the honesty when he spoke was tangible.

“With you? I doubt I could keep a secret for long.”

Thin lips curved into a sly grin. “Of course not. You are a terrible liar.”

He shook his head, a half-baked effort to clear the fog in his brain. The hum of the engine was maddening.

“I don’t know if I believe you.” A necessary lie. “But I am connected to this place somehow. I want to know why.” He frowned. “When you handed me that necklace, I remembered—something. Fire. A cave. And your voice.”

Melkor’s shadowy eyes lit up with—hope? Expectation?

“There will be more,” he promised. “I’ve leads on—more relics. Pieces of you. Now that you’re here, they will be easier to track.”

Mairon wanted to be a good maia. He wanted to be able to go back to the scrapyard, to live his mundane life as Aulë saw fit. But he couldn’t. Melkor was dangling a far-too-appetizing treat before a starving man. Power. History. Truth.

“If I stay,” he tried, swallowing heavily. “If I—stay, what will that mean? You are clearly the—highest power here.” Highest power. That was a mockery of the well of strength he sensed here. Everything was drenched in Melkor’s power. He was—a wellspring of it, a concentration of might. Suitable to his name.

Yet he lacked the cold eyes and the cruel smile that Mairon saw in the hall before. “I would put you back together,” Melkor replied easily. Like it was the only thing he could say. “And I would make it clear to the Federation—“ he spat the words like they were sour coming out of his mouth, “—that they will not hide you from me. With you by my side, we would rule the stars.”

He remembered a gray smile. With you by my side, Beleriand—nay, all of this world—shall be defenseless. In a mimicry of a life he shouldn’t recall, he extended his arm. Melkor took it—clasped it in a bond as old as time itself. His hands were icy cold.

His mouth moved without recollection. “We have a deal,” he repeated.

The air around them cleared. The shadows retracted. He came back to the present, to this room—to the one who watched him with curiosity and hope.

“Excellent,” the dark lord purred, pulling him in closer. “You were always smarter than the others.”

Here and now, the same mouth curled into a mockery of a smile—something sad, indistinct. “I have waited so long, Mairon,” he said. Without all of his power wrapped around him, façade broken, he sounded so old and weary.

Mairon pulled his hand back. Call him a fool for doing this—he probably was. But there was a sense of exhilaration too. This was his choice to make—he was standing on a hostile ship, in front of a legendary villain, and felt completely in control of his destiny. He could have left. He chose to seek answers instead.

The hum of the engine grew louder and more cacophonous than before. The ground beneath them shook, and Melkor’s eyes cast up to the top of the engine with a kind of knowledge that Mairon wouldn’t understand. Antimatter engines were a mystery the modern world had yet to solve.

“Something is happening,” observed Melkor. “Stay h—”

“I’m not staying here,” he protested automatically. “I’m not your prisoner. If I am, perhaps you should show me to the cells again—”

“Never.” He looked wounded. Then the urgency lapsed into hardness again. He looked at Mairon and there was only a moment of internal conflict before he brushed past him, all dark robes and billowing cape.

“This way,” he instructed.

Mairon may have been a fool. Maybe he was making the worst decision of his life. Or maybe, just maybe, he was seeking freedom.

In spite of every warning alarm in his head, he followed.

-x-

There were no alarm lights on the lower levels of the ship. Mairon jogged to keep up. The only urgency he noted came masked pilots who ran into the wide halls, all scrambling for the same place. He recognized this route and knew they were going to the docking bays.

Thuringwethil seemed to melt into perspective from nowhere, emerging from some narrow hallways in shining black armor.

“Boss,” Thuringwethil started. “You jumped us into warp, summoned the fighter pilots, and not a single mention to me?” Her eyes traveled briefly over to Mairon with recognition and then back to her master. There was a sudden chill in the air.

“Two scout ships,” he supplied. “They’ve tailed our warp. I need a wraith fleet out there when I disengage.”

She quickened her pace to flank him, Mairon trailing vaguely behind. He didn’t know if he was to be following them, or if it was just force of habit.

“Will my engineers be installing the new AP rounds?” she asked.

“Not this time.” Mairon felt invisible. He also knew there was nothing he could contribute to the conversation; he was no engineer.

Then Melkor spoke up again, almost on cue. “Mairon—would you accompany Thuringwethil to prepare my ship?”

He balked. “I’m—not an engineer,” he professed.

Thuringwethil cast him a knowing grin from over her shoulder, sharing with Melkor some secret he was not privy to. “You’ll figure it out,” she promised.

Melkor parted from them with little more than a nod, leaving him alone to follow Thuringwethil. He turned his head to look back to where Melkor seemed to be heading; but there was no one there, the hallway dim as doors slid shut behind them.

“So you’ve decided to stay!” She practically danced over to walk beside him. She had an oddly youthful gait, though her eyes betrayed thousands of years of knowledge. Everyone who had seen the old world had that same look about them. “I heard that someone had gotten clearance to take that captured Federation ship out of the system. I assumed that was you. Glad to see it wasn’t.”

“I don’t know anything about your ships,” he supplied. He tried not to think about the fact that he was being asked to work on enemy ships, part of an enemy fleet, on the dark lord’s ship of all things.

Thuringwethil snorted. “You designed them, Mairon,” she said. “Trust me. You’ll figure it out.”

He frowned. "I’ve never designed anything.”

There was a general buzz of action when they arrived at the docking bay. Rows of dark, unmarked ships were being boarded by masked and hooded figures, mechanics flitting about to make final preparations. The cacophony of shouting and machinery was only overridden by the softly pulsing red alarm lights high above them and the deep hum of engines firing up.

“I’ll disconnect the power lines,” Thuringwethil shouted over the melee as she led him to the far end of the bay. It was quieter here, as if the others habitually avoided the area.

Parked up in the corner was a sleek black ship.

“Anything I need to do?” he tried. She rolled her eyes and handed him a tablet off of the belt at her hip.

“I just had the main batteries replaced,” she explained. “Gotta make sure they’re fully charged. When I detach, just make sure the numbers here don’t drop. It’s hooked up to the ship’s central computer.”

He made his way around the craft with her to a nondescript port where the power connections snaked out from the wall. The wire was heavy and sagged onto the shining floor.

He looked over the ship. It wasn’t shaped like any of the others he saw. It was sleek and flat, its bulk supporting only the dangerous-looking blasters mounted to the front. He didn’t see any windows, any doors—he mentally reviewed the Federation schematics he’d studied before in his head, tried to make sense of it.

“It’s unmanned,” he realized suddenly.

“No shit,” Thuringwethil grunted, pulling at a series of clips that secured the battery cable in place. The tablet displayed a series of numbers as he came close, corresponding to the power available to the ship. They weren’t in a standard unit system that he knew.

His brow furrowed. “Thought this was Morgoth’s ship.” She disconnected the cables. There was a slight jump in the power readings, and then it balanced itself out again as the ship came to life. Banded lights that shone like fire emerged across the sleek surface of the drone.

“He hates that name, you know,” she warned. “Wouldn’t say it around the wrong people if I were you. There are those who have died for lesser offenses.”

“Maiar don’t die,” he tried to reason. Though, he didn’t like the thought of being disembodied, stumbling and weak through a cold and lonely galaxy, no one there when he calls—

Wouldn’t be anything new, some dark part of his mind decided.

She laughed coldly. “Keep telling yourself that,” she mocked. “How are the numbers?”

“Stable,” he answered. He didn’t realize until after that he could have lied. He could have told her something was wrong—or make it so that there was something wrong. But he told the truth—to the enemy.

“Thanks.” She pulled the tablet out of his hands, swiped around on it. He could see a series of readings come up and a collection of latches popped open automatically on the front.

She unbuckled a multimeter from her belt and handed it off to him. “Fucking blaster signal never responds right,” she mumbled. “I’ve already released the housing. Go check the terminals up there for me. Give me a call if there’s no signal—watch those wings.” He jumped out on the way right on time as a series of flaps extended on the wings, changing shape in swift and silent motions as it ran over manual tests. It was truly a marvel of engineering, he thought, however they got those motors so quiet—the ship only hummed softly, even as the rear jets began to take on a white glow.

He made his way around the side to the front and tested the terminals. He didn’t know exactly how to read these enemy multimeters—didn’t know whether he should say either. But the general workings seemed the same as any that he’d worked with in the past.

“It’s, uh…working fine,” he said, loud enough so that she could hear. She only asked for a signal—not the details. It’d have to do.

It seemed enough for her, because she grinned and patted the drone like it was a pet. “Ancalagon is ready to go!” she called up to somewhere beyond them—loudly. Her voice projected easily, laced with power. Had a Maia used magic for something that trivial on his home planet, they would have been in trouble. It was looked down upon to be so frivolous—but things were different here. Thuringwethil used her powers freely. So did Melkor.

He felt a lurch from the drone just in time to back away from it. It rose to life, the lights across the hull bleeding into dark blue, green, yellow—with Thuringwethil nodding and checking off of some list as the landing gear lifted into void-dark ports and it drifted toward the phasegate.

He’d never seen a fighter take off before. The sight was something to behold. The wraith ships that he’d heard mention of before were drifting into formation behind the drone, shouts of cap’n’s ready to launch echoing from one mouth to another through the bay. Thuringwethil grabbed him by the arm and pulled him back to stand along the wall.

“Check this out,” she said into his ear over the now-cacophonous hum of engines charging up.

There was a blast of heat, and then they all took off in unison, cutting a wide v across the stars. To see a fleet launch in person was more impressive than any of the promotional holovids he filched off of the scrapyard ships. Within moments they were gone, leaving him in awe.

“They have a manned fleet follow a drone,” he realized after the bay began to clear out.

“Boss doesn’t leave The Void,” Thuringwethil said as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. She rolled her eyes, hands on her hips. “You’ve got a lot to learn if you plan to stick around. You’ve missed out on a few thousand years of action.” She watched him steadily, all her years creeping onto her face. “So tell me why you came back now, of all times. We could have used you back during the Blackout.”

Mairon frowned. “I woke up with Aulë like all of his other maiar,” he said.

Her eyes flashed. “But something didn’t feel right,” she finished for him. “You set out to the stars for something else—answers, dreams. All you really knew was that you had to get away.”

Mairon leered at her. “How do you know these things?” he prompted.

She didn’t answer.

-x-

He wasn’t sure how or why but his feet guided him back to Melkor. Every door in this place opened to him; he walked without purpose and somehow found himself ending up here.

The room was dark. The hum of electronics around him and the indistinct flash of tiny LED lights was all that told him the size of the place—small, about as far across as he was tall, but long like a hallway. At the far end Melkor stared into an insistinct console mounted into a table. If he heard Mairon come in, he did not react. The shadows seemed to swallow up the glow of the screen, swirling and churning.

“You let the elves out,” he accused. “They called their friends.”

“Maedhros helped me out when I got here,” he answered. “I couldn’t just let him die in your cells.” The part of him with any common sense at all made sure to remind the rest of him who he was talking to. This was an easy way to get himself tortured, or maybe killed. Yet he wasn’t afraid. “He’d already gotten out anyway. You should be more careful with your Uruks.”

“You have to let go of your sentiments, Mairon.” Melkor spoke like a parent would. Authoritative, but there was no edge to it. The shadows relaxed their grip on the room. “I never knew you to have compassion.”

“Who was I, then?” he tried. He was grappling for information, bargaining with himself about how long he could stay before he got what he wanted: an explanation that he could believe.

Melkor rose from the console. He didn’t turn around—but his back straightened to his full height, and Mairon found himself cast in the dark lord’s shadow. “You were quick and precise,” he described. “You valued order and logic. You thrived the most when you were in control. Every decision you made—you based it on results.”

He was speaking Mairon’s dreams, and that scared him. Wasn’t Morgoth known for seducing Ainur into his service in the past? He was sharp enough to fool Manwë and work his way into their good graces more than once. That was the story he knew. He remembered Aulë’s sad voice as he told the end of his story on every Founder’s Day. We would never be so cruel unless we had no choice. Why not celebrate the founding of the scrapyard they called a planet by repeating propaganda?

He didn’t know where that dark thought came from or why he resonated so much with it.

“You really remember nothing,” Melkor identified, defeated.

“Nothing.” A lie. He knew these flashes to be something—something related to his history. He didn’t want to process them yet. Frankly, he was trying not to think about the distinct possibility that he was very, very evil. No one wanted to be evil.

“Think about it, Mairon.” He wanted to pull his name right out from Melkor’s mouth. Every time he said it, it hurt. “Focus. You must be in there somewhere.”

He did. His brow creased, fists clenched.

All he felt when he tried to recall those flashes, visions of fire and gray hands—was anguish. Righteous indignation. Pain, so much pain. His hand tingled.

“I’m sorry,” he dismissed. It wasn’t worth looking into. It was easier to lie like that when Melkor was turned away, those piercing eyes not boring holes into him. He was less vulnerable that way.

“We’ll keep working on it,” Melkor declared. “I know of a place in the Vanyar system—“ A red signal light came on, bathing the room suddenly in ominous light. It was so much more cramped with the dark walls illuminated. Melkor swore, fiddling with a control panel over his monitor.

“Do you still have my comm?” He had a lot more strength in his voice with the indescribable urgency.

“I—yes.” He held up his wrist with the black comm still attached. Not that Melkor was looking.

“Have it take you to Eönwë,” he ordered. “Manwë’s fleet is here. Tell him the pursuit team needs backup. And—ask him to unmute me. Please.”

Mairon should have been excited. That was very much a chance off of this evil ship and back home. But was he a prisoner here? An accomplice?

No, he realized, he was doomed to go down with this ship. The moment he refused his chance to escape, he crossed a line. And for what…?

“Now, Mairon.” He jumped, backing into the sliding door and letting himself out. Even he knew not to try the patience of a god.

-x-

The comm led him back to the messy maintenance bay where he found the Federation scout ship before. Now there was an empty space on the deck where it once sat, confirming the elves’ escape. A wave of relief washed over him—and trepidation. After all, he had just let two known enemies of these people flee. He wondered if their escape was related to the message he was on his way to deliver.

The bay was empty now. If there had been any mechanics milling about before there weren’t anymore—but this was where the comm led him. He walked past several half-dismantled ships, some more damaged than others, stepping his way around tools and wires. The floor here was interlocked with wide orange stripes, differentiating it from the one before with Melkor’s ship. If they shone once, they were dulled with scratches and gouges from power tools, burn marks and odd stains. It reminded him somewhat of home, just without the red dust. The dust from outside always worked its way into Aulë’s halls, seeping into everything; there was no dust in space. It still helped him humanize the enemy in a strange way to see things like worn paint and broken tools.

He spotted a single lone figure. Though his gray jumpsuit was covered in stains, his boots shone like they were expensive. He was laying half under a ship, surrounded by an array of tools. This, he thought, must be Eönwë, if there was no one else here to speak to.

“…Um,” he started.

“In a minute.” He spoke with more force than necessary. He was annoyed, for whatever reason, as if Mairon’s presence was a stain. He could hear the curl in his lip even if he couldn’t see his face from under the ship. Mairon felt a wave of frustration—he dare speak to Mairon like that—and crushed it down just like he did for years in the scrapyards. He didn’t know this person, or what he may be to Melkor.

“I have a message from Mor—from Melkor,” he continued, feeling more confidence at the very name. This is important, whatever it means, he wanted to say. You can’t treat me like a cockroach. If this was to be his life now, he realized that he wasn’t opposed to getting some base level of respect that he hadn’t had at home, even if it meant acknowledging whatever this Mairon from the past had done.

“Go on.” The click and motion of tools had stopped, though this Eönwë had yet to extricate himself from his project.

“He says Manwë’s fleet is here. The pursuit team needs backup.” Word for word, Mairon thought. “Also to—stop muting him?”

“Shit.” He reached out, sliding a detached panel door back under with him. “Fetch me some solder from the cart behind you so I can wrap this up.”

Mairon obliged, delighted to recognize all of the tools and trinkets on the floor and the rolling cart. Some things never changed, and the base composition of all of these electronics seemed universal on both sides of the Dark Space borders. The wrapped tube of metal wire was familiar in his hands. Low-temp solder was popular for work on panels that wouldn’t expect any heat exposure, good for delicate chips that could melt straight through with a higher standard temperature.

He heard a click and the high-pitched whine of a blaster warming up. He froze. When he looked back, Eönwë had extricated himself from the ship’s underbelly some ten feet away. The dirty jumpsuit he’d been working in hung half-removed around his hips, form-fitting armor in crisp black sitting underneath. And a holster with several gleaming, powerful blasters that made the one Mairon took before seem inadequate.

“Turn around and face me,” Eönwë ordered. “Hands where I can see them.”

Mairon obliged. There was little else he could do. Eönwë was clearly an important maia by his uniform and his crisp, clean haircut. He had a hawklike face that Mairon swore he recognized from—somewhere. But where? Had they too met before? This was more distinct than the vague nostalgia he felt from Thuringwethil. He’d seen him in this life.

“Never thought I’d see you here, snake,” Eönwë growled. “Already wormed your way into Melkor’s good graces, did you? Did you sing sad little platitudes about how you missed your dear master? Grovel at his feet and bat your pretty eyes?” He glared with such hate. Despite their predicament all Mairon could think about was the fact that—he’d seen that face before. Staring down the barrel of a gun, he only wondered who its wielder was. Had they met before? He definitely wasn’t one of Aulë’s. He had a name Mairon felt like he ought to know, a face he’d seen somewhere before.

Cast in bronze and copper. A heavy marble stand, a plaque retelling a story as old as the planet they stood on. He had a face like a hawk and sad, piercing eyes that only Aulë’s incredible craftsmanship could realize. Mairon stole away from the scrapyard to look upon it and wonder what it must be like to be among Aulë’s most senior maiar.

“You’re the herald of Manwë,” he realized with a horrible sinking feeling.

“So you’ve still got eyes.” The Herald of Manwe himself was looking at him like he was the worst possible thing that could have turned up today.

Mairon stared. “You’re supposed to be dead.” Every single story he’d been told about the last great war suddenly didn’t match up. Everything was supposed to culminate in the death of Manwë’s Herald. Eönwë was supposed to be the catalyst to it all. He had been erased from the world—there were memorials. Holidays. The entire memory of the last great war revolved around the death of the Herald.

Eönwë, very much alive, rolled his eyes. “So you’ve come back to life as a moron,” he mocked. “Do you believe every single thing the Valar tell you? Or just the things that make no sense?”

“I—don’t understand.” Seems there were a lot of things he didn’t understand. Eönwë wasn’t gone. He was—a traitor?

“I don’t have time to tell the history of dark space to someone I hate.”  He held out his hand, palm up. “Give me that comm chip. It doesn’t belong to you.” Shaking, Mairon loosened the wrist strap until it slid off, stepping tentatively forward until he could deposit it in Eönwë’s hand. He didn’t have many other options. While a blaster couldn’t necessarily kill him, it would hurt very, very bad, and he wasn’t the kind of maia who was strong enough to just recover from a blow. Aim right and it’d push him right out of his body.

Eönwë stepped around and took Mairon’s own weapon from him. Not that he’d have a chance to use it, he thought. Once he seemed confident Mairon was unarmed and essentially useless, he powered down his own blaster with one hand and slid it back into its holster.

“I’d really love to just shoot you now,” he said. “But Melkor would just spend the next decade putting you back together again. I’m not one to postpone my problems.” He leered at Mairon, much too piercing and stripping him of what little confidence he’d gained during his limited time on the Void. “I know he won’t get rid of you, so—just stay out of my way. If you try to ruin everything, I’ll ruin you. I know exactly how.” The sly smirk his mouth bent into only told Mairon that Eönwë knew something which he did not. Something important—but lost, just like everything else that Mairon found in this ship.

Mairon’s throat was dry. “I—” Eönwë was gone suddenly, disappearing just as he rounded a powerlift. There was a rustle from somewhere—like feathers, he thought. Then, an eerie silence as the maintenance bay sat vacant of all but him.

He slid to the ground, crouching there as he tried to absorb what was happening. The Herald of Manwë was alive, and he was working for Morgoth. The Valar lied about two things—the history of the galaxy, and his own role in it. They were the only people who had any memory of the worlds before the Blackout. And they lied.

Wouldn’t it be easy to lie, though, when they were the only ones that remembered…? If there was something to hide, wouldn’t it be convenient to just leave it out? Something that made them seem less than noble—flawed. How easy would it be to let the whole galaxy just forget about their mistakes?

Everyone except…the villains in dark space. They knew something and they weren’t talking about it.

All you really knew was that you had to get away, Thuringwethil had told him. Get away…from what? What was he forgetting? What really drove him away from Aulë’s planet?

He sat there, alone in a maintenance bay of a notorious villain’s ship, and wished he had the answers.

There was someone who did, though, he realized. From the pocket on his chest he removed the Federation communicator he’d taken from the scout cruiser. Fumbling with shaking hands, he flipped it open and the backlit screen slowly came to life.

He dialed the only number from home that he could remember—Curumo’s extension. The connection wheel took some time to work out his call, and then on the screen the grainy image of his one friend from the scrapyard came into view.

“Mairon?” his only friend tried with some disbelief.

“Curumo,” Mairon breathed with relief. His familiar face eased the shakes in his hands.

He looked worried even as the image occasionally faded in and out of view. “Where are you?” he asked. “The Sulimo was—well.”

“It’s a really, really long story.” Mairon could have laughed, but then he remembered what he really needed to do. “I need you to get me in touch with Aulë. It’s really important.”

Curumo looked worried, but without much effort he relented. “…Alright,” he agreed. “You timed it just right. Aulë is here today for something.”

Mairon’s face hardened. Of course he was. It only reinforced the feelings of suspicion that Mairon was already having.

He was realizing that he’d just stumbled into something much, much bigger than himself.

Chapter Text

A dark head ducked behind the anvil. “You saw nothing,” he hissed, wild eyes fixed on the entrance.

“If you don’t want me to turn you in,” Mairon teased, “don’t make it so easy.”

He covered the smirk he received in return with a tarp as his peers wandered in.

The cacophonous chanting of the orcs filled Mairon’s ears and clouded his mind. The lights in the massive hall were cold and low, leaving them cast in shadow. Save for the noise he would have never known the sheer scale of the room and the crowd trained on the platform before them. The glowing eyes of massive and fiery maiar watched from the distance, behind grates and windows. At the edge of the platform stood Eönwë, glowering with his hands carefully folded behind his back. He watched the scene unfold like a guard, measured and distinct.

Mairon’s cautious gaze kept travelling back to Eönwë. He hadn’t told Melkor what transpired between the two of them when he was eventually found stuck inside the maintenance bay. He held that secret close. A dark part of him knew he could weaponize it if he needed to. A line around Eönwë’s neck. Melkor would not be happy to hear that his trusted general tried to kill his favorite maia.

There was something twisted that took root in him and changed his tactics after he left the maintenance bay. There was only one fact he’d confirmed for sure by now—the Valar, the pillar of all things good and righteous in the galaxy, had lied to him. They were lying to everyone about what was supposed to be a very public death. They wouldn’t tell him what really happened during the last great war. And for what? To what benefit do they keep their secrets? Who had all of the answers? His eyes slipped back over to Eönwë, whose response was to grimace heavily at him. The maia emanated hate—the complete opposite of the stories he knew about the Herald of Manwë. No light left inside him.

His hands shook when Aulë appeared on the comm screen. The maintenance bay suddenly felt very cold, the chipped paint on the floor rough and uncharacteristic.

“Mairon,” Aulë greeted with an eerily warm smile. “I believe we haven’t had the chance to speak before.”

“Master,” he breathed. His voice trembled, and somehow he felt no relief by seeing him now. He felt dirty. ‘Master’—should he even call him that?

In this place, Mairon had no master.

Melkor’s voice was booming and full of confidence as he made his speech to his audience. It was a different Melkor from the one who took his hand and begged for his memories—for a solution. This was Morgoth, he thought. Mighty, powerful. He loved to be worshipped as the god of these people.

“I assume you have questions,” said Aulë. The mask on his face never faltered. It was as if the vala himself were cast in bronze.

“Nothing here makes sense.” Mairon ran a hand through his messy hair. “Our enemies are telling me I know them.”

“It is alright. They can be very deceiving.” Aulë spoke like a parent.

Mairon swallowed. The comm crackled occasionally. “Master,” he tried slowly. “The Herald of Manwë is here. You told me he was lost.”

The warmth in his master’s smile disappeared.

“You are mistaken,” Aulë said. “Morgoth killed the Herald of Manwë.” It was like he was reading off of a script.

Mairon wanted to believe in the Federation. It would be so easy to dismiss this entire ship and return home. It was what Aulë wanted. Come home, he said, and we will work things out. Back to the scrapyard and his mundane life.

A groveling creature of an orc came forward with a wooden box. Wood was hard to come by out here, always either very old or very processed. The woods favored by the forestry planets were light in color, while this was a rich dark cherry. Mairon knew it was incredibly old, and the gloss kept it very well preserved.

Its holder wore no uniform, indicating his status as a civilian in Morgoth’s domain. With his head bowed low he brought the box forward.

“For you, my lord,” the orc said against a silent crowd.

He didn’t know what to expect from Melkor. He could have killed the orc, or cursed it like whatever awful thing he did to the elf before. Mairon half expected it when he reached his hand out over the orc’s bald head.

His hand came down. He rested it on the head of the creature like a proud parent. In the hall, everyone held their breath, anticipating the words of their leader.

“You did well,” he said instead in a low voice. The creature was bright-eyed and fragile before its creator.

He took the box and held it aloft.

“All who sought this prize before now have perished,” he announced. “Of the team who left to retrieve it, we look upon the sole survivor.”

Mairon didn’t expect Melkor to refer to the deaths of orcs with any honor. They were creatures; they existed to serve. He perceived them as mindless, wild things; they followed the strongest leader they could find because it was all they knew how to do. They were not smart enough to lead on their own, after all. So the Federation said. But the Federation had already established a pattern of lying and hiding the truth.

When he looked out at washed, active orcs, with tools on their belts and badges on their uniforms—orcs who pored over holoscreens with immense focus and climbed into the cockpit of fighter ships—he wondered if the orcish narrative was another lie. It would be convenient, he thought darkly, to cover up the systematic slaughter of an undesirable society with the defense that they were nought but Morgoth’s creatures. He would just have to find out for himself if his personal biases were founded on fact.

Mairon was busy watching them while something Melkor said had them erupting into cheers. The massive hall curved outward, a marvel of acoustics; he imagined the volume was intense from within the crowd.

“Mairon,” Melkor said over the noise. “Come here.”

Mairon came slowly forward, wary of Eönwë’s eyes following his every move. He felt the threats from before wouldn’t be the last time Eönwë had something to say to him. Melkor gifted him with something akin to a smile when he stepped forward—small comforts. A sense of familiarity.

He raised a tarnished crown from the box and placed it over Mairon’s brow.

He assumed he ought to be familiar with the sensation by now—a rush of power, a blackout. The crown shattered into fire and dust as a billion memories played asynchronously in his mind. For a split second he felt whole.

He tried to hold onto that feeling. He knew that once it passed he would be back to the Mairon he was, albeit a bit more energetic—but he wanted to know. This was the truth he was seeking.

All he could feel was red-hot rage and vengeful grief.

The crown on his head was too heavy. Steel helms, chains of jewelry encrusted with precious stones—none of it had the same kind of weight.

“I don’t want this,” he whispered. His voice trembled.

The hand at the base of his neck curled into his hair in some mockery of a caress.

The blood that dripped down his arm was still warm and fresh, leaving searing tracks like liquid fire.

He drifted into the warm weight of the shadows, leaving the distinct taste of anguish behind.

-x-

He’d lived a thousand lifetimes in a thousand identities. Powerless, indistinct—or a god, all-mighty in his will. He created and destroyed, and every single time he lost one more piece of himself. They bled into veins of gold and rubies like the blood that spilled onto the stones as he conceded defeat again and again.

Long gone were any hopes of victory or redemption. It was hate that drove him now, bitter and tangy on his tongue. He was the knife in the stomach of an honorable man; he was the poison that killed kings and the aggression that started wars. He was hate, and every day that he exercised his will he faded further into obscurity even as he grabbed, clawed for purchase somewhere in reality.

Years ago he forgot what he was staying alive for. He was only hate.

He opened his eyes and he was Mairon. His fingers found purchase in silky robes, stiff when he slowly unfurled them and released his captor.

“So you still have nightmares,” Melkor hummed. He had him wrapped up in his arms, firm and still like steel under layers of billowing robes.

Mairon cast his eyes out. They were back in that hall where they met, high on the command deck. There was still some revelry below, indistinct music made of unfamiliar drums and the chatter of so many creatures reaching him in an indecipherable cacophony.

He flushed and extracted himself from Melkor and the command chair, a gray hand on his shoulder steadying him as vertigo took over and he nearly lost his footing.

“Sorry,” Mairon mumbled, looking away. The stars beyond were still beautiful. He didn’t know where they were going, but they had dropped out of warp and drifting at an indistinct speed. Every time he saw these stars, they were even more unfamiliar than the last glimpse—and it was exciting.

“You have nothing to apologize for,” said Melkor with earnest. He watched with an alien face—alarmingly smooth, youthful. Today his eyes had darkened again and Mairon was reminded that the valar were if anything talented shapeshifters. No scars, full-limbed.

“When did you regain the power to change shape?” he blurted suddenly. Those black eyes fell on him thoughtfully, different from the last time he saw them. Melkor per the tales he was told lost his abilities; he was chained and thrown into the Void to spend the next eternity alone with his crimes.

Melkor always answered his questions with honesty. If it wasn’t honesty, he realized, then it was at least a lie good enough to fool him. Maybe these were all elaborate lies, meant to manipulate some secret of Aulë’s out of him which he did not know. But instinct told him Melkor had other motivations than getting back at Aulë.

“In my isolation, I learned tricks which the Valar could only dream of knowing,” he said smoothly. “The secrets of the universe languished before me. The rules of Arda no longer mattered.”

“Secrets of the universe,” Mairon repeated. He thought of things like antimatter, the mysterious technology which powered everything in their society before the signal blackout. When that tech suddenly stopped working, it forced the federation back into a cosmic dark age.

His eyes hardened. His resolve had strengthened lately as he realized that at least in Melkor’s eyes, he had an advantageous position. When he saw him, he always had some of his questions answered. He also always found himself with more.

“What was your true role in the last great war?” he prompted. “Did you really start the signal blackout? Did you kill all those people? Wipe the memories of the maiar?”

If the shadows could get longer, then they did. Yet, Mairon continued with whatever scrap of courage he had, “The Herald of Manwë is alive. That’s the most important part of our narrative and it’s not true—he’s working for you! And—and nobody will tell me what happened.”

Melkor looked like he was pondering something. But his face went cold, and the unidentifiable mask of the dark lord fell back over him. “It’s not the time for you to know,” he dismissed firmly.

Mairon grit his teeth. “What does that mean?” he demanded.

Melkor set him with a steely gaze. “It means,” he hissed, “that you will remember when you are ready.” He rose suddenly, barely brushing Mairon as he walked past. The revelry below quieted as they noticed that their master had risen. Morgoth’s thrall were, it anything, undeniably loyal.

“Our quest does not end simply because you took one planet and found a crown,” he declared firmly. His voice boomed around the room, like it came from the walls themselves.

Whenever Morgoth spoke, the stars themselves trembled, the stories of the last great war told. There was some truth in it.

“We have a Silmaril to recover in dwarven space,” he continued. At the lack of movement below, he snapped, “Unless you would like to join those elves taking a stroll outside the ship? Plot a course.”

There was movement below as orcs cleared off consoles and plain blue screens flared to life below. They were, if anything, incredibly efficient; confused revellers were scrambling to clean up the hall, ducking out through tall doorways to take their celebration elsewhere. When the dark lord cancels the party, he noticed, they’re quick to get out of the way.

“Silmarils,” Mairon repeated. The word fell sour on his tongue. Something was horribly wrong about the very thought of them. Something of a memory flashed before him. Blackened hands. A twisted crown of iron.

“Mairon.” His voice broke the dead silence that had fallen over the command deck. Mairon turned around and Melkor was watching him closely again.

“These…silmarils,” he tried to say. It sounded like a confession. “They’re not—”

“Lord Melkor.” Eönwë’s voice cut in. He had rounded the steps to the top of the deck, dressed in full gleaming armor. In one arm was an equally bulky helmet. Seeing the two of them at the top, he hesitated with a scowl. “I hope I’m not interrupting anything.”

“Not at all.” Melkor was back to being impassive again. He seemed to shift through a myriad of emotions, but he settled on the same cold and stony expression he regarded his soldiers with most of the time. Mairon took this chance to put more space between them. With each step it felt like his emotional distance from the dark lord could grow with him. Why did he keep finding himself back here, with this person who was supposed to be his enemy?

Not an enemy at all, he recognized so easily that it was like breathing air. He forced the thought down with all the others. It was harder when he started trying to rationalize whatever was going on inside his head with everything he had done since he got here.

“The fleet sustained minimal damage in the retaliation attack from the Sulimo,” he said evenly.

“Good work,” Melkor praised. Eönwë straightened visibly and set down his helmet to run a hand through his hair. Preening, Mairon thought, like a bird. Melkor raised an eyebrow. “You have more to say?” he prompted.

“The retaliation we received from the Federation was incredibly limited,” he observed. “I have reason to believe they are planning something much larger. Perhaps it isn’t ready.”

It appeared to be time he was dragged back into the conversation. “Mairon.” Melkor spoke up enough to make Mairon flinch. There was an order in his voice.

“Y-yes?” he tried, looking up from under a fringe that was growing faster than he expected.

Melkor’s voice softened marginally when he saw the hint of anxiety on Mairon’s face. The change alone made Eönwë visibly seethe. “Did you see anything strange when you were working under Aulë?” he prompted. “Anything that could indicate they’re planning something?”

Mairon shook his head eagerly. “I’m—I was just a scrapper,” he denied. “I just stripped old ships for usable metal.”

“And what did Aulë consider—usable?” Melkor’s eyes lit up inquisitively. For such a stony face, his eyes were incredibly expressive. They shifted from bright to dark like a switch, exposing his thoughts.

“Graded for engines and above.” He thought carefully about some of the orders he handled, especially some of the sensitive work of taking apart antimatter tech. “They—always wanted the power cores out of the phaser cannons.” Not that antimatter power cores would do anything anymore. He learned quickly to never ask and just do his work.

Eönwë and Melkor exchanged a look that told him that he said something important. Melkor returned to his chair, activating up a holoscreen similar to the one in the command room for the drone that hovered in front of the command chair. This one was larger, reading out indistinct levels that Mairon couldn’t make out from where he stood. He couldn’t bring himself to come closer and look. Not with Eönwë practicing ways to murder him with his eyes.

He finished searching for whatever information he wanted to find. “Twelve thousand, Eight hundred sixty-five,” said Melkor.

“What?” Mairon stared blankly.

“That’s base ten,” he continued like it was something obvious. “You would need twelve thousand, eight hundred sixty-five phaser cores to build the Dagorath.”

Eönwë visibly tensed. “You think they have enough?” He stepped around the holoscreens too.

“Dagorath?” Mairon tried the word on his tongue. It sounded troublingly familiar.

“A weapon.” Melkor’s expression was grave now. He killed the screens, rising from the chair. He rose slowly, like a king descending from his throne. He walked until he was at the ledge behind Mairon, staring thoughtfully out over his crew. His demeanor didn’t betray his thoughts.

“I don’t see why anyone would be building a weapon,” Mairon defended. “There’s been relative peace for—” He didn’t realize how long. Since the signal blackout, of course. “Anyway, the cores are useless. Antimatter tech doesn’t work anymore.” No matter how hard I tried, he thought privately.

“Oh, it works,” Eönwë answered him. “In the right hands it does.”

“How many cores do they have?” asked Melkor pointedly.

“I don’t know.” Mairon stepped back, just one step further from the ledge. Why was there no railing in this place? “Only a few of us knew how to take them out. We probably did hundreds.” The phaser cores were rare, but he always made sure to remove them. A single ship could take weeks, months even, and not all had the phaser-specific power cores. Every fiscal year, they had quotas on how much engine-grade steel they could salvage, but not much else. Most of their work was spent prepping and packing the other materials for lower salvage yards or preparing mechanisms with the spare parts when Aulë’s higher ranking maiar put in orders.

Eönwë was outright ignoring him, reaching across Melkor to expand some other set of data on the screen. From this side Mairon didn’t know what they were looking at. He didn’t control when he understood their alien language and when he didn’t—and seeing it backwards made the blocky, heavy text look even stranger.

“I told you centuries ago that we should be bidding on ghost ships,” he said. “You were too preoccupied with being a terror to do anything. Look at these auction logs.”

Melkor’s reply was only a noncommittal hum that sounded more dismissive than anything. A hand curled under his chin and he watched the screen lazily, letting Eönwë tut over data.

“Those are Federation logs,” Mairon blurted suddenly. He recognized the logo and the curling tengwar from his side. “You’ve just…got copies of Aulë’s auction logs on hand?” He was being properly ignored as they fussed over the details, so he shuffled back over to the edge of the platform. Far below, there were workers buzzing about. There were a lot less orcs than he expected; maybe if there were, they were unrecognizable from up here. He could pick a few out from the intricate braids in their hair, with metals and ribbons worked in similarly to how inner ring citizens loved their jewelled hair ornaments. Lesson one of life in dark space: expect a passion for expression in spite of the regulation tunics, the identical dwellings and jobs that gave them number codes and not names. Every person he ran into was bright and strange.

Melkor was no exception. What he had thought at first was just a manifestation of the dark lord turned out to be a propensity for the dramatic; long shadows, sweeping black robes, ornamented crowns. His eyes changed with his moods. Right now, behind the screen, they swirled green with his thoughts and darkened with Eonwë’s interjections. Ainu eyes had a tendency to glow and sparkle; but Melkor’s seemed to pull the color from their surroundings rather than add to it.

Mairon knew where he wasn’t needed. But he was getting increasingly familiar with what was essentially a city in space and knew how to occupy himself. Subtle signage and use of color directed its residents around the ship in ways he didn’t recognize before only because he didn’t know where to look. Powered rails worked in a network across the ship based on colors and representative symbols. The Sulimo had a similar system but it was much smaller, sleek and minimal. This was brutal and industrial…but it had a lot of character. Like it was formed, not planned.

He was usually indistinguishable from the masses. Regulation mechanics’ uniform, unruly hair, unremarkable face. He could be any low-level maia or even an elf. Today was different. The crowds parted for him when he stepped onto the green train platform. Maybe the rush of power he’d felt at command hadn’t quite gone away; maybe he was becoming more recognizable. He was surprised at how much he actually liked that power he had over them.

He ended up getting the train to maintenance to himself. Didn’t matter. He punched in the opcode in the control panel to override automatic operation and set it to head straight for the maintenance platform. Faster that way. He was there in a couple of minutes without any unnecessary stops; and the maintenance bay, when he took the lift down, was quiet too. He learned that this particular platform was for the high-profile ships; a select team, led by Thuringwethil, were the only ones allowed to work on Melkor’s ship and Eönwë’s fleet. They were outfitted with the most expensive tech and needed the best eye for detail on their work. Mairon had become fascinated by Melkor’s sleek, remote-piloted fighter specifically. It cut a distinct black v on the floor. The familiar feeling when he looked at it never quite went away.

Comms chip needs to be reprogrammed, he thought privately. Never did fix that bug in—

“Mairon.”

He stilled at the instrument panel on the fighter, turning his head marginally to face the only other person in the massive bay. “Thuringwethil,” he greeted. She had a welding mask pulled over her brow.

“Figured you’d be out celebrating your new piece of jewelry,” she figured. “Unless someone made Melkor mad. He’s terrible at maintaining the atmosphere.”

“I have things to do,” Mairon dismissed.

“You always said that.” She leaned on the wing of the ship and watched him gingerly pull the backup comm chip out like it were a piece of glass. He unplugged the lead cable and then it was free. He slid it into a case and put it in his pocket to reprogram when he had access to a better computer.

“Melkor doesn’t mind that you’re taking his ship apart?” She tutted. “Of course not. He always let you have the run of the place.”

“Did he?” Mairon looked up briefly from the slow process of dismantling the central comm system.

“The only time you ever got orders,” she continued, “you had a fit, adopted a bunch of werewolves, and lost a fight against a magic dog.”

“Huan was a Maia,” he amended off of a memory he didn’t even recall.

“See? Still bitter about it.” She leaned forward over the panel he was working under. “You really going to remember how to put all that wiring back together?”

“Of course I will,” he dismissed. “You told me I designed it.”

She remained quiet and watched while he stowed the wires back into the panel, chip retrieved. He knew from the same back corner of his memories that he meant to wire this into the central computer, but a security issue had stopped him; now maintenance on it required taking part of the ship apart. He’d redesign this some time from the ground up, make it into something truly perfect. Melkor had followed the schematics well but the improvements made by his teams were primitive at best. He could do better.

He finally stood with the second chip, popping it into the case with the other. They’d be reprogrammed and rewired back into the ship.

Thuringwethil was watching him.

“Well?” he inquired. “Is there something you need?”

She looked thoughtful for a moment, then spoke frankly, eyes narrow. She was more calculating than she let on. “We weren’t friends,” she said. “You didn’t have friends.”

Mairon raised his eyebrows. “You’ve been friendly enough so far,” he observed. He wasn’t sure why she would bring this up now, now when he barely remembered the past and certainly didn’t remember much about her. A leathery cloak of black and laugher that sounded like windchimes. The feeling of the scowl on his new face when she came crawling back very much alive after yet another failure. Firm words.

You have failed me one time too many, Thuringwethil.

A desperate voice came from his memories. You always stack the odds against me. You do it on purpose!

She smirked. “Maybe I want to turn things around this time,” she said. “The Noldor always had something we didn’t. Unity.”

“The Noldor are now scattered across the galaxy in a desperate grab for power,” he remarked. “Doesn’t sound very unified to me.”

“There was a time when they would cut a man off the side of a volcano for unity,” she reminded. “If the enemy strung one of our generals up on the side of a volcano, would you have saved him?”

Mairon frowned. When he spoke he was on autopilot; he knew the memories were there somewhere, and he was acutely aware of the ways he couldn’t see them.

“…I would let them die,” he decided.

She frowned. “Of course you would.”

-x-

The rooms that had ultimately been given to him as a place to live were a lot larger and nicer than what he assumed was normal for this ship. The decorations were older, and Mairon had already set about repurposing them as he saw fit. A frame that was once on the wall turned into a well on the table to hold tiny bolts as he took apart the casing on the comm chips to wire them into the computer. He would definitely be making these easier to update. It would be made a priority. Did the builders of this ship just assume that his programming would never need an update?

He frowned when Melkor came in. He had a habit of appearing and disappearing at will. The way he travelled the ship was unexplainable. Mairon only knew he was there by a strange sixth sense, when the shadows grew and the air temperature dropped.

“I thought you liked paintings,” the lord of the ship remarked dryly. Mairon could feel the eyes trained on the back of his head. He didn’t turn away from his work.

“I found a better use for them,” he dismissed. “I need a workshop. Better tools. Then I’ll stop dismantling your ship.”

“But the Ancalagon is fair game,” he hummed. That was the name of the drone-ship class. Melkor’s new fire-breathing beasts. He recalled what Thuringwethil said about Melkor letting him have the run of the place.

“I can put it back together right away if you want to deal with comm stutter for the next thousand years.” Mairon swivelled on his chair to face him. In private, it was getting easier to face the dark lord. The intimidation was all a mask. Only the eerie calm remained.

“I never said I forbade it.” He came closer, until he was only a polite distance away. With the simple shadowy robes draped over his shoulders and the crown off of his head he looked a lot less like a dark god and a lot more like a person.

Mairon set his soldering iron down to face him completely. His hands were a little sore, anyway. He must have been at this for longer than he thought.

“What did you remember this time?” Melkor asked. He sounded hopeful, if it was possible for a dark lord to sound hopeful. The more Melkor sought him out the more he seemed like a desperate puppy searching for its master. Shouldn’t this have gone the other way around?

Mairon didn’t like to think about it. Something about this memory put him off. It carried a lot of pain with it that he didn’t remember from the last. “A black crown,” he said. “Cold hands. I hated that crown.” He omitted the rest.

Melkor didn’t look happy. Mairon narrowed his eyes. Something was off about his attitude. He knew something about this and he was choosing not to say it.

“What do you know about it?” Mairon pressed on.

Melkor was quiet and still. Hesitant. When he did speak, it was in a soft voice, almost impossible to hear under the electrical hum of Mairon’s set of screens. “…It was something I came to regret,” he finally said.

“That doesn’t help me.” Mairon meant to spin his chair back around but Melkor’s hand stopped him. He hadn’t even noticed his approach; now he was right before him, all looming and scary dark lord aura…and somehow so very, very vulnerable.

Was it really that easy to break down the legendary ruler of dark space? Have a face and a name he remembered, with spotty memories of someone who stopped existing?

“There are some things best forgotten,” Melkor implored.

“Tell me something else then.” Mairon held his gaze. Amber met swimming cobalt and violet.

Melkor would give him this. The Melkor of the past gave him whatever he wanted. “Ask,” he indicated, voice low.

Mairon knew what he was about to ask could be a dangerous avenue but he pressed on. “I need context,” he said. “If I want to understand what I keep seeing, I need context. Who was I to you?”

Melkor gathered his thoughts for a moment. He looked away and Mairon thought he was going to pull back and go back about his business. Leave him in peace to debug. Then he exhaled slowly, an oddly human gesture for a creature as far from human as they came.

“You were my spy,” he clarified. “You became my strategist. Then my lieutenant. Beleriand was yours to toy with.”

“Then it was normal to gift your lieutenants with crowns and volcanic forges?” he pushed. “Morgoth is supposed to be an oathbreaker.  Betrays his lackeys.”

He looked like he was struggling for words again. “…You were different,” he said with finality.

“Different,” Mairon repeated.

“Different.” Melkor pulled out the chair from the wall on the right—the other desk, where Mairon had already amassed a disorganized stack of books loaded with all the kinds of information he couldn’t find at home. No point in keeping manuals on technology that didn’t even work anymore. Things were different on this side of dark space.

Melkor sat in every chair like it was a throne. Maybe it was just his atmosphere. The clothes of black silk and brocade that harkened back to carvings of the Ainur in the age before science, the stone-carven face of a tired and ageless evil god. He watched Mairon with the same kind of curiosity as an onlooker at the scrap yards, shopping for spare parts on a freshly dismantled cruiser. If he watched carefully enough, he would see something important that he had overlooked.

“Is there…something you need?” Mairon frowned. “I don’t care for company.”

He thought Melkor was going to make himself scarce. When Mairon expressed his disdain he usually tended to leave. Like a sad dog with his tail between his legs, he retreated to lick whatever wounds Mairon inflicted by refusing to do…whatever it was he seemed to want him to do when he watched him with intent. Today he stayed, eyes flashing.

“I have…a mission,” he said. “For you.”

Mairon let silence fill the space between them. Breathe in, out. When did he become a lackey who received orders?

“Depends on what you want me to do,” he mumbled. He couldn’t go against the Federation. Couldn’t. He didn’t know the whole truth yet.

“Nothing dangerous.” Melkor fussed with his comm chip and a new set of instructions materialized on Mairon’s holoscreens next to his programming. “From what I understand you left Aulë’s planet to explore the stars. I owe you as much.”

“It’s always comm chips,” Mairon mumbled as he read over the details. They made it all the way across the galaxy and yet they still couldn’t create a stable communications network that didn’t need the latest and greatest update every few decades. “And if I refuse?”

“Then I will not force you.” Melkor was perceptive. Mairon knew what this was—a test. To see if the new Mairon was willing to work with him. But Thuringwethil was also right. Melkor didn’t force him to do things. It made no sense. He was weak enough that the dark lord could crush him under his feet and he didn’t.

“Just tell me where to go,” Mairon relented with a slow exhale. He was already a traitor. May as well have something to do while he was here.

Melkor’s self-satisfied smirk told a story Mairon didn’t want to hear.

Chapter Text

Orcs were more resourceful than Mairon formerly gave them credit for. They swung between rails high above the ground, using magnet guns to toss equipment between them. There was little Mairon had to do but supervise from his own place on the lower platform. He didn’t have much reason to be here except to get a bit of air off of that oppressive black ship.

Melkor made it very clear that this mission was, in fact, an excuse to get him off of The Void. Mairon wouldn’t say that this was the first real planet he’d visited since leaving Aulë’s home—but he was happy to experience some of the diversity the galaxy had to offer. The air was thin here but still breathable and the world that stretched out below him was broad and watery. The only ocean he’d ever seen before was the smelly and sulfuric shores of his old red-planet home; this was different. Crisp and unfamiliar.

It wasn’t just the view of a new planet that had him happy to leave. Mairon found himself with a keen sense of clarity that he couldn’t maintain while he was on that ship. The place was disorienting in more than just design; it made his head spin and his heart ache to stare at the sixteen-digit number pads and the painfully familiar symbols of war. Orcs and ainur alike bowed to him in passing. They played songs he remembered better than his own.

He was unable to deny anymore that he had been there before in some shapeless mockery of the past he learned about with the other maiar. The version of Melkor he met on that ship was too much like an obedient puppy and not at all like a domineering corrupt god. But it was really finding Eönwë under that wraith jet that him convinced that there was something going on here which he ultimately had a hand in. He found himself with a mixture of misplaced loyalty and frustration with the Valar; who were they to hide the truth from him? Did they really intend for him to live out his life confused and fractured on a red planet that he hated?

He also couldn’t pledge his loyalty to whatever movement Melkor and his thrall had going for them. One word turned his stomach and reminded him not to divide his loyalties: silmaril. Melkor and his officials refused to tell him the truth. Whenever he tried to ask about the thing he was dismissed. For some reason he was supposed to just know without being told.

He did know someone who could tell him. Here, on a platform far below the orcs where he had already finished the firmware upgrades he had come here to do, they could barely see him and certainly couldn’t hear him. He had an opportunity to utilize the network tower and relative privacy he found off of The Void to figure out for himself some of the details these rulers of dark space wouldn’t offer for him. He pulled out the Federation comm he’d been hiding and powered it up.

The only access code he knew was for Curumo so he dialed it on the assumption that someone with more influence would answer on the other end. The screen of the video comm flashed with a series of overrides in tengwar but it successfully routed through the upgraded network tower. To Mairon’s glee it let off a distinctive dial tone that indicated that it was working. He didn’t let it bother him that the tengwar onscreen was starting to feel like the foreign writing system and the ones the orcs used were as familiar as his own name.

The face that materialized on screen was, unsurprisingly, the golden-bearded Aulë. Mairon chose not to identify the emotion that ripped through his stomach when he saw him.

“Master,” he greeted in a measured voice. He felt a dignified mask slipping over his face that he never realized he had.

“Mairon,” said the inventor who was supposed to be his master. “…I did not think you would call me again.”

“You asked me to,” Mairon reminded. “You wanted me to spy on Morgoth and tell you what he was planning. Since he favors me so much.”

“…And you choose to accept?” Aulë’s eyes were more calculating than the tone of his voice. He put off a front of dwarvish warmth and hospitality but he truly was as impassive as more watchful valar like Námo. The more Mairon looked at him, the more he understood why he left in the first place. He wasn’t sure if someone like Aulë was even capable of caring about anything other than his creations.

Mairon knew how to play this game too. He’d played it before. That was a long time ago and he couldn’t remember the details but he recognized the feeling. The stronger he became, the better he was at identifying that sixth sense of things he’d done before. It no longer manifested in peculiar obsessions and repetitive thoughts. It was there, under his skin. Undeniable.

His mouth thinned and he changed the subject. “Morgoth is in pursuit of treasures.” He used every ounce of clinicality that he could when he spoke because if he didn’t, he feared he might break down and ask the things he really wanted to know. Why didn’t you tell me who I was? “What can you tell me about the Silmarils?”

Aulë hesitated. He gave information—which was what he really wanted, Mairon thought. Now he might get a scrap of truth in return along with whatever collection of lies the Valar had decided to go with so they could fit it into their narrative. It’d be enough of a lead to go off of. Maybe he could understand why the word silmaril alone filled his heart with such a frustrated rage and begin his research from there. All he knew about these silmarils was that he didn’t want Melkor to find them.

“They were precious stones,” Aulë confessed. “A very clever elf crafted them long ago. The dark lord saw them and coveted them.” His face and the false warmth there wavered on screen. “Has he…. located them?”

Mairon knew that wasn’t the whole story. He also didn’t want Melkor to get his hands on the things. The word evoked bad memories of cold iron crowns and frosty glares.

Maybe it was better if he stopped Melkor from finding them.

“He found one in Dwarven system KAR-2424,” he recited, voice clipped. “He’ll be after it as soon as he fixes up the wraith fleet. Eönwë’s fleet.” His last piece of information came with no lack of resentment. He wanted to remind Aulë that he was still lying to his maiar and that Mairon could lie in return if he wanted to.

“…Your master thanks you for the information, Mairon,” Aulë said. He made no effort to invite Mairon back, to offer words of advice or comfort. He knew he was losing grip on his Maia and he didn’t seem to care. “Do not hesitate to reach out to me if you learn anything else.”

Mairon finally felt his mask failing and he grimaced visibly. He was about to say something smart when a jolt had the comm flying out of his hands. He reached for the railing while the network tower rocked to the side. Another jolt and the comm slid off the wire grating and into the sky. He dove for it and barely missed it with the tips of his fingers, watching his only connection to his old life slide into the abyss. The tower began to rock violently.

This tower wasn’t supposed to be anchored into a seismically active area. It wasn’t designed for that. When he studied the schematics he understood that inspections listed the planet as fairly dormant and the tower was cheaply installed with no real concern about any threats that could topple it. Good metals were precious when building a fleet the size of Melkor’s and didn’t need to be wasted where they weren’t needed. As it rocked back and forth with Mairon clinging to the rails, he recognized that to be untrue. Orcs shouted from far above where they swung on their wires.

He ducked across the grated platform, doing his best to keep his footing as he dove for the transport pod docked at the far end. He forced the hatch open and ducked in with no concern for the orcs who had followed along to do installations. He needed to get this thing into the air before the tower sustained any damage. It was too late for them if the thing fell.

He managed to get inside and pulled himself into the cockpit against the sway of the platform. He started the boot sequence with relative clarity and grit his teeth while he waited for the startup sequence to run. Lights on the transport pod slowly blurred to life.

Something gave way with a grating clang on the tower and his vision went sideways. The pod’s footing gave way and he heard the sound of rails snapping while it tumbled wildly.

Then it was airborne and spinning out of control, ejecting Mairon from his seat and throwing him into the ceiling. Stars exploded into his vision when his head collided with something solid. Then he saw nothing at all.

-x-

Mairon came to with the sound of warning lights and shrill alarms calling through the cabin. The pod was upright and rattling violently, but Mairon didn’t register any real injuries beside a sore head. Anyone lesser and he may have been concussed.

He raised his head, blinking out the confusion. They were upright and rocketing through the sky in a broad loop around a tower that stood crooked and smoking from some unknown source of fire. Had one of the orcs made it in…?

The narrow gray hand switching off the alarms wasn’t orcish and certainly answered his questions.

Mairon took care as he sat up to register if he had sustained any other injuries. He seemed fine. His hair was sticky with blood where his head had collided with the transport pod.

Melkor noticed he was there first. He didn’t know how he could have heard him over the rumble of the jets. “Quite a coincidence that the dormant volcano near our radio tower became active with the arrival of a fire maia,” he remarked.

“Wasn’t expecting it if that’s what you’re implying.” Mairon frowned, shaking away the vertigo he felt while he stood. “When did you…?” He had a lot of questions. When did you get on the pod, when did you leave the ship—Melkor didn’t react or even turn around to answer.

“The ground always would get excited when you were in one of your moods,” Melkor continued. “I take it your conversation with Aulë did not go as planned.”

Mairon’s stomach dropped. Was he listening the entire time? “That—” He stopped himself before he could make an excuse. What kind of excuse was there to make? He was giving away information to Morgoth’s enemy. Blatantly so. The comm had fallen off the side of the tower and he felt empty without it.

“You’ve certainly made things more interesting for me,” Melkor continued. He didn’t sound angry. “I was planning on sending a small fleet to fetch the Silmaril. This will no longer be sufficient. We will depart at once.”

From the way he spoke—he didn’t even seem to care. Not a single hint of rage. If he was angry, it was buried deep. Instead he just sounded clinical, almost like he planned for this. Had he planned for this? Mairon thought about it. If he knew Mairon was talking to Aulë, he could very well have expected him to reveal their plans. Like Thuringwethil had said, like Eönwë had loudly complained, and like Mairon had sensed this entire time, he was just being given the run of the place.

“You’re not going to punish me?” Mairon snapped. “Not going to maroon me? Send me into space? Rip me apart and send me back to my master in a box?” He tensed. “You’re just going to move on?”

Melkor sighed audibly, just barely heard over the engine. He continued to operate the transport pod like Mairon hadn’t said anything. The fear in Mairon’s heart phased into anger. His temper took over and his eyes burned. Melkor was deciding what he ought to know and why—where his loyalties lay.

“You’ll destroy dark space from the inside if you let spies do whatever they want in your domain,” Mairon warned. His hand held tighter on the grav-lock he was using to steady himself. “Stop treating me like I’m made of glass. I’m your enemy. I’m giving information away to the Federation.”

“This is your army,” Melkor defended. He kept his eyes trained on the sky, their vague reflection in the viewscreen unreadable. “Do with it what you wish.”

Mairon shook his head. “Yours,” he denied. “Not mine.”

“Ours,” Melkor decided to amend.

Mairon had enough. He stumbled forward in the shaking pod to reach the pilot’s chair. He wasn’t sure what he could do—fight, maybe, or at least get him to look at him and say all this nonsense to his face. Mairon was already outed as a spy anyway. What did it matter if he lashed out? If Melkor was going to kill him he would have done it with that earthquake.

“Look at me when you speak—” Mairon said with force, pulling the chair to swivel it around. The ship gave another jolt through the cloud cover. The chair turned with his hand and he stumbled back.

It was empty. He was alone in the ship.

What…?

“Coward,” he muttered to the empty pod. The pod gave a shudder and the thrusters stalled out. Alarms chimed again on the dash.

Mairon didn’t have time to soak in the conversation he just had—or didn’t have? Melkor was there and then he wasn’t and that was all Mairon knew for sure. He jumped into the pilot’s seat, resetting the stalled thrusters and pulling back on the yoke to coast. The iron tang of blood filled his mouth when he bit his lip through the pressure to right the ship. He dove for the master override switch to cut the alarms so he could listen better to the sounds of the pod, creaking and groaning its way through the upper atmosphere. They hadn’t even broken atmo—and the engines were cranking too slow. He could hear the pistons turning over in the quiet. He had power—so something was wrong with the wiring, he thought, something wasn’t getting power to them. He locked the yoke and ducked over to the master engine controls. No warnings. But they wouldn’t turn over and crank.

The loud bang that shook the ship nearly knocked him off his feet. He’d gotten better footing since he’d grown in power; here he maintained his balance with very little grace but it was better than toppling when the ship careened to the right. He pulled himself back into the pilot’s seat just in time to right it, but he recognized the smoke smell coming into the cabin. They were down an engine.

He cut power to the engines before the other one could blow and braced himself for a manual landing. This was going to be rough. He was dropping altitude fast, with only the pod’s cheap landing flaps to help him maintain a decent rate of descent. Regardless of what he did, he was in for a rough landing—and this thing was going to land. With one propulsion engine out and the other two more than ready to blow there was no way to break atmo. He couldn’t help but feel like this was Melkor’s doing—some kind of punishment, he wondered, delayed but final in his judgment? Had he finally decided to stop lingering and dispose of Aulë’s troublesome maia?

He didn’t have time to think about it. He had a transport pod to pilot if he wanted any chance of getting out of this intact. He could see the jagged speck of one of the planet’s rare land masses in the distance and pulled the lateral pedals until he had the ship pointed at the island. He was not about to crash in the middle of the ocean if he could find a landable coastline.

With his determination came a force of fire not unlike the one he felt when he took that rough-hewn necklace out of Melkor’s hands. Heat flooded his vision and something new and powerful took over.

He was just a fragment of himself. He could feel how fractured he was. What he had left, though, was more than enough to work with. He had enough to invent.

Gray hands found his shoulders and stared over him at the vast network of stars above. High in the atmosphere, construction continued on their finest work yet. The Void, he dubbed it, for the sake of irony. His magnum opus. Greatest ship in the galaxy. It was beautiful up there, coming together piece by piece exactly as he had envisioned it. It would be the first and strongest of its kind. His enemies were ill prepared to face it.

“You have truly outdone yourself this time,” his master praised. He soaked up that velvety approval. Flattery had always been a weak point of his.

“I merely gave it a few moving parts,” he dismissed. “You gave it life.”

His master hummed low against his back. The familiarity of the gesture was not lost on him.

“Do you remember the black army?” he recalled.

“Mm.” His master’s hands stayed on him like a steady weight. “But it was your eye which they flew on their banners. Where shall we paint the eye on your fleet?”

“Nowhere,” he decided. “We’ll burn it into the grasses of Aman. When the heavens come down, I want them to know whose planet they stole.”

His master didn’t have to voice his approval to have it known. He turned his golden eyes back up to the massive steel hull high above the clouds.

Something bright forced Mairon’s eyes shut. When he opened them again, he was on a burning ship careening toward the coastline, comm bursts going in rapidfire behind him. For a moment, he was scrambling for purchase on the yoke again—he was coming in too fast and there was no way this thing’s landing gear was designed for these speeds—and desperation had him kicking out the electronics on the dash and ripping wires apart before the controls could automatically adjust with the computer again. If the ship couldn’t behave then he’d have to do it himself.

The smell of smoke was eerily familiar.

“Do it,” he spat.

His master watched him with calm eyes of cobalt and swimming gold. Ice and fire.

He grit his teeth. He didn’t like repeating himself. “Do. It.”

“You would destroy half the galaxy in seconds,” his master warned. “The amount of power we need—”

“Are you not the mightiest of Iluvatar’s creations?” he sneered. “Prove it. We’ve been damned anyway. Make it count.” He let the fire in his eyes choke down the fear and the uncertainty. He had no intention of losing. If he couldn’t win then no one could.

He watched his master break down against his will. Like a switch, determination melted into resignation.

“Then we make it count.” Grey hands cupped his face. Cold lips found his with haunting familiarity.

Something behind him exploded. The world dissolved into heat and light and then—silence.

It wasn’t the first time Mairon had ever found himself like this. The cold grip of the void was nothing new. He’d never been whole enough to care anyway.

The island had been a blur, but soon it was breaking waves, trees, sand. He was still going too fast. He pulled up on the yoke to try to lose some speed, but it was too little, too late. The flaps broke off. The tail of the craft struck a sand dune first and sent the rest tumbling across the beach. He was thrown from his chair and soon he was in open air, surrounded on all sides by fire and smoke. He hit the ground and the world went dark.

He was on his knees before a war god with a golden axe. Their audience regarded him with cold scrutiny. The hawklike face of the king of the Valar regarded him with a certain cold detachment that made his heart sour with hatred.

“This is it?” he sneered. “No best wishes to deliver to your beloved Herald? No greeting card for your doting brother?”

Manwë Sulimo was as silent as ever. He hated it. He hated looking at the King of the Valar and seeing only a statue. The soul of the King must have given up a long time ago. Whatever was left haunted this body with detached aloofness.

“You really think you can stop us?” He continued to challenge. “That I haven’t planned for this?” He let his wrists pull against the chains that bound him to this body. They dug into his skin enough to draw more blood from old wounds. “You think you can kill me in a way that means anything? I’m only a fragment of what’s to come.”

Tulkas lifted his executioner’s axe and kneed him in the face to shut him up. Mairon grinned and spat blood on the floor. His laughter was unhinged and bloomed from somewhere in the back of his chest where a smoldering fire burst through into a burning inferno. His eyes burned bright orange with the last scraps of power he had.

“Go ahead,” he finished with a wild grin. “See what I do when I come back, Manwë Sulimo. This all falls to you.”

The King of the galaxy made a wave and the axe descended. Mairon’s last thought was how angry he was that—through all of it, Manwë never once spoke. Like he didn’t even care. The whole galaxy could burn and he would watch with disinterest.

-x-

At first Mairon thought he was still dead. Disembodied, at the least. Then he sucked in his first breath and his heartbeat kickstarted, feeling returning to his limbs just fast enough to remind him that he was whole. Pain was an unwelcome reminder that he was still tethered to this body.

Mostly whole. With effort he raised his hand over his face. Where his finger should be was a bloody stub, already half-healed from whatever energy he used to jolt himself back awake. He grimaced. It wasn’t the first time he’d lost this finger, the one with the odd mark. He’d have to grow it back again, a process which he loathed. He had his fair share of freak accidents at the scrapyard and they always cost him the same finger on the same hand.

He didn’t have the energy to raise his head but he did turn enough to have a look around. Debris littered the beach. The pod must have disintegrated on impact. He lived by virtue of his ainur constitution. His clothes were torn and he was fairly certain he only had one boot but he was whole. Whole and alone on an island that belonged to an empty planet.

He shut his eyes and prepared to wait until he could move again.

It was a long wait that had him lying motionless in the sand for over a day. Knitting bone back together was an uncomfortable process. He hadn’t even known what was broken before he felt his spine popping back into place, his ankles reshaping. He tried his best to channel what little energy he could spare into the worst of it. Enough to get him sitting up after a day of the planet’s beating sun and frigid water, then a long night in which meteorites sailed ahead but no sign came of search ships looking for him.

It gave him time to think. Melkor knew where he was, he thought. He was the one who locked the ship. Mairon supposed this was his punishment for arguing with him—and he had asked for punishment, he thought, so that was Melkor’s cue to offer it. Sent to sulk on an island until someone decided he was useful and came around to pick him up. He wondered if this would change anything. He’d like to come back to a dark lord who acted the part. It’d make it easier for Mairon to decide whose side he was supposed to be on.

More than that—he didn’t think he was picking sides anymore. He was playing with whatever tools could get him where he needed to be. But what did he need? Answers, he thought—and power. He remembered what it felt like to be strong. He wanted his power back. He wanted it all—the admiration, the burning fire that smoldered barely below his skin and made Melkor’s underlings quake with fear when they had the rare chance to look upon him. He felt underdressed in his quilted regulation tunic when he remembered the luxurious feeling of deep red silk, of heavy golden trims and stolen rubies that reflected his fiery eyes. Whatever he’d been, he’d certainly been magnificent because without the weight of gold and jewels on his chest he felt robbed.

Mairon didn’t feel any better when he could finally will himself to stand. He tore at a scrap of cloth just to have something to wrap around the stub where his finger used to be. It didn’t hurt as much as it ought to, he thought, but he had also just spent the past day weaving bone back together and maybe the pain didn’t bother him the same way anymore. He was unsteady on his feet but he was standing. He staggered forward by a few tentative steps before reaching a bent piece of pipe in the debris field all around him that he could use to hold himself up with until he could walk properly. There was nothing dignified about this but it wasn’t like there was anyone to see and judge. This planet was supposed to be uninhabited, just a quick stop for a set of communications towers.

He tried to fiddle with the comm chip on his wrist. The black screen came to life with a few flashing debug messages and then cut back out with an error. No network. No power source either. These things should have been robust enough to maintain a connection with the ship as long as it was in orbit even if the comm tower went down. Maybe he’d been cut off.

Well. Nothing to do until help arrived. Melkor wouldn’t keep him here for long. He was probably sulking on his ship if his pattern of behavior until now was enough to go off of. Maybe he thought he was teaching Mairon not to talk back to him. He didn’t see how an impromptu vacation on an uninhabited tropical island was enough to convince him to go along with whatever this image was that Melkor expected him to fit into. Their past was undeniably intertwined and this proud, intense Maia that he’d been long ago had no hold on who he was now. Thinking about it too hard either made his head hurt or made him angry—sometimes both.

His first turn to stumble into the treeline was uncomfortable at best as his feet barely avoided the thorns growing over the sand. He ended up following the coastline until he found what looked like a natural path through. The tree cover was still thick but the trail lead in a clear line into the woods. Anything beat another day laying in the scorching sun on the sand with too-cold water lapping at his toes.

The island was larger than he thought. The vegetation was thick but sometimes his bare foot met smooth stone that felt unnatural. It’d been cut and placed there. Yet not a single soul existed to explain to him why it was there. Maybe a failed civilization had built something here before they all died from some tragedy or another. There wasn’t supposed to be anyone here; unless Melkor’s intel was a lie, but he didn’t see why Melkor would lie about this. This was someone who looked like he was about to cry from Mairon rightfully accusing him of manipulating him. He was learning that Melkor was good at withholding the truth, but he was a terrible liar.

More than that—Melkor left him here. Unless he hallucinated his image just like all of the other visions he had when he was trying to right the spacecraft—but it didn’t feel like that. They were having a very real conversation, not a memory. He just wasn’t physically there. Not unless he’d worked out how to appear and disappear at will.

Mairon hesitated. His footsteps stopped in the middle of the trail, somewhere under a tree with umbrellalike leaves. None of this sat right with him. He closed his eyes and focused on his Fëa, this evasive thing that was only recently making itself known again. It was fractured, yes—this he knew. He’d never put words to the feeling before because he’d only assumed that he was whole when he really wasn’t. It was there now and glaringly obvious to him that his power was only a drop of what it should have been. There was a time when he pulled molten fire from the ground in such volume that it burned the landscape for as far as he could see, and then for good measure he sent it even further. He could have entire civilizations bound to him with a few silvery words and a beautiful face.

What he didn’t see, no matter how deep he searched—was any of Melkor’s interference. Whatever he was becoming wasn’t being tampered with. He wasn’t under a strange curse or hiding any secrets. He wasn’t being manipulated—not in that way, at least. Not any more than he was under Aulë who told a completely different story about the state of the galaxy. He wasn’t whole, but he wasn’t under anyone’s control either.

He rounded the hill and got a better look at the island. Empty stone towers rose in the distance and he felt like he figured out the answer. No signs of life. Just the evidence that life had existed once.

He exhaled. Nothing better to do than to find out what used to be here. With only one boot and very little patience he set out down the abandoned trail to see what he could find out about his tropical prison. Maybe there was something he was supposed to find.

Chapter Text

Mairon only had one boot to walk in and nothing but time on his hands. He spent it gathering his thoughts and working out just what he knew for certain. A week ago, he was weak enough to mistake for an elf and insignificant enough that he could disappear and nobody would even start looking for him (nobody did). A week ago, he wouldn’t have survived a transport pod slamming into the beach of an ocean planet without being disembodied at the least and broken apart at the worst. A week ago he was a prisoner on a ship he’d been convinced didn’t exist anymore, a figment of the galaxy’s collective trauma that no one had seen in years. Now he was stranded on an island.

The Valar were definitely keeping secrets. It was obvious in the way Aulë denied him until he had something useful to say. If he didn’t know, and if he even cared, then he would have listened more. Instead he grasped at whatever he could to give the Federation a strategic advantage in a war they chose not to let anyone know was happening. They obviously knew what it meant when ships disappeared in dark space and he wondered what they would have to say about the disappearance of a high-profile new carrier like the Sulimo. Or if they would say nothing, and the galaxy would go along with it in their usual sense of devout worship. Meanwhile, Morgoth lurked dark space building an elaborate infrastructure network and apparently looking for silmarils for something he had planned. This part—Mairon hadn’t really worked out. He didn’t know what the hordes of dark space were actually trying to do. They weren’t actively planning for war in any way that Mairon could understand but they took commands from a warship armed to the teeth with nowhere to go. Did they really need all of this just to—do some archaeology or whatever it is Melkor was doing with all these old jewels? What did he see in Mairon when he looked so sad and lost?

Between Mairon’s resurfacing memories and the future ahead of him, he knew that something was coming. Something big. New and darker memories floated on the edge of his consciousness and shifted his sense of self closer to something bitter and dark. The ghost of his rage was waiting to emerge. Aulë had left him pitiful and undignified. He was desperate to reclaim a lost identity he couldn’t even recognize.

He didn’t know how long he spent walking but his uneven feet led him through tropical undergrowth and up a mountain. His hand, missing a finger, hurt in a way that was too familiar, so he held it behind his back and decided to ignore it. The broken rock that used to be a road wasn’t much under the palm rot and the fallen trees but the further he went, the more it opened up into something that used to be a civilization.

He pictured this hillside as it once was. It must have been a grand port city, he thought, when old haunted roads fell into shape around him. Stone was a traditional medium but it had no value—so whenever this place fell apart and the scrappers came in, old stone foundations remained like blocky and weathered fossils. Power still hung here. It was not the kind that drove ships but the kind that tugged at his soul. These were the memories of the old world and its magic. Elves, he thought. What were elves doing here?

He made it to the mountain and began his ascent. The buzz of mosquitos and the caw of coastal birds died down here. The place was silent and reverent. The stone entrance of a ruined citadel lay ahead, and the memory of an old city behind. Definitely elvish, he thought, by the curling arches that half-crumbled into the ground and the elaborate carvings slowly being overtaken by moss. Fascinating that it held on this long—it fared better than the forgotten civilization below and the metallic plating on the arches told him that scrappers dared not touch it. Only things scrappers wouldn’t touch were things that could kill.

Well, Mairon thought, he was more than the typical planet-hopping scrapper. He only had a body to lose.

The crumbling columns at the entrance didn’t bear good memories. The familiar architecture made him angry—then again, lately anything even vaguely elvish was making him angry. The fingers Mairon brushed along the wall left quiet scorch marks in his wake as his fëa reacted to the energy here.

It was a memory he willingly repressed, he realized. Something he forgot because he wanted to.

The vault and the abandoned halls all made sense when he saw the names carved into stone high above the steel doors—among them, a kingdom. Eregion. A city. Ost-in-Edhil.

He knew the name from the old stories. He hated that story. Curumo always egged him on about it. The elves knew they were being deceived, he always said. They let Annatar into their home anyway. Celebrimbor was a fool who earned his penance. Curumo would laugh and dismiss his complaints.

It made sense now that he could understand why he was so connected to stories like those. He was Annatar once. One of many names. Annatar, Tar-Mairon—and once to the elves and men, Sauron, Gorthaur. The Eye, some would say, whispering. Iluhen, later on, when Sindarin rejoined the other languages spoken across the galaxy and evolved from there. All eyes.

In the age of Eregion, he was Annatar. He stood towering and graceful in a way that mocked the gods and the elves alike for their inability to distinguish good and evil behind a beautiful face. It was a way to punish the Noldor and spit in the faces of the Ainur. Mairon had learned by then that cruelty belonged in its purest form behind a serene smile and a mask of generosity. He was waving an offering of ill will to the gods—look at me, look at your son who mocks you so. He spent a lot of time mocking the Valar in those days. He dared them to punish him.

He knew whose vault this was when he put his hand on the door and it gave way with ease. A wry smile crossed his face.

“Ever the fool, even now,” he whispered and let himself inside.

The chamber behind the cold doors was full of memories. They weren’t the kind he forgot when he broke apart—they were the kind he chose to forget. Forgetting was easier than remembering.

He remembered now. Repressed memories like these could only stay in the back of his heart for so long. Hate like that couldn’t stay down forever.

In the past, he wanted to destroy Eregion. He wanted to use its craftsmen to his own ends and then he wanted to watch it fall with barely concealed delight. Melkor’s destructive tendencies must have worn off on him. In the hollow space he left behind, Mairon searched for ways to take a world that had moved on and burn it to the ground. That place didn’t have the right to move on.

I would give you all of Eregion if you only asked, that elf once said with his bright and trusting eyes. Mairon didn’t ask for things. He took them by force.

It was Eregion he had now, every artefact and scrap of its existence laid out before him in a pristine chamber. How they preserved it all this time was beyond him, and what Celebrimbor’s personal effects were doing on an abandoned island in the middle of dark space was beyond him. The room wasn’t dark for long; Mairon called on a single word of power and old lamps flared to life with the same intensity as the daylight outside. The chamber was long and narrow, carved into the mountainside and clearly protected. It was dressed up like a mockery of a museum, untouched by time. Part of him was thrilled—he loved finding these pieces of history, but the feeling of rage these emblems evoked made him less eager than he would be to get something like old tech at Aulë’s scrapyard. Lined across walls were obvious pieces of an old world made from wood and silk—but wasn’t Melkor’s ship the same? He had an entire hold full of things he collected much like a crow hoarded wrappers and ribbons. This was more organized than the collections on The Void.

He recognized a sword that he’d assumed destroyed, whose handle had been cold to the touch when he drove it through the throat of its owner. Trinkets they made together, still sparkling out of some stubbornness that Mairon would assume was replicated if not for the feeling each piece gave him.

Every single thing he saw here had vague memories attached to it that brought the room into perspective. Maybe his crash landing here hadn’t been such a coincidence after all.

His eyes were drawn to the box at the end of the hall. It sat on a pedestal, its brushed walnut gloss carefully preserved by the will of its owner. It was different than the rest of this hall. Something about it drew him in. He was on autopilot when he reached it and slowly opened it. The hinges were still intact and moved smoothly.

There were three rings in the box. He knew these rings because he knew their creator. He remembered looking for them. At that time he was so, so angry. Maybe he had been a bit rash with his fury. The elf would have spoken if he’d gone about it differently. The fool had always done whatever he asked if he was patient with him.

A wry smile crawled across his face. He didn’t even bother to wonder who had found them, protected them, and brought them here. He didn’t care. Vilya. Nenya. Narya. He assumed when that elf died that he’d never find them—not in a capacity that mattered, since by the time their owners became known he was nowhere near the incredibly powerful god he had been when he sought them out the first time.

-x-

Mairon remembered the end of it all. The way his mouth curled up with wicked glee when he saw the elf hanging there by his chains. “Good morning, sweet Tyelpë,” he taunted. Fiery bright eyes looked back at him. Still so bright. How very like the spawn of Fëanor, he thought, so rebellious until the bitter end.

He’d see how brave this line of Finwë could truly be.

“Annatar,” Celebrimbor croaked weakly. His eyes were glassy. “…Why?”

“I told you why.” He inspected the ends of a few shining knives, picking a small curved blade from the bunch. He ran his thumb ever delicately over the sharpened edge, feeling the pointed tip with glee. “My sweet student betrayed me. I need to know where he sent his treasures.”

“I’ll never talk,” the elf hissed. Mairon’s bored expression didn’t change when he glanced back at him.

“I know,” he agreed. “I came to a decision.” Luxurious silks slid over the floor with each of his steps. He felt at home in his familiar black-and-gold finery. The copper eyes worked into the embroidery were a nice touch that he sorely missed. He approached the elf with only the soft glow of his crown to cast more light on his victim.

“You could have been a part of this,” he crooned, twirling his knife in his fingers. “I had a place for you.” Dark eyes widened when Mairon trailed the knife ever so softly over barely-healed cuts across his bare collarbone, up his neck, across his jaw. He hesitated at his mouth, watching the blood well under his blade. “Mm. I’ll just cut out your tongue instead.”

“You’ll never know,” Celebrimbor warned, wincing as the knife followed his head back. The threat had him a bit more…lively than before. But he’d never bargain. “You’ll never find them.”

“You never planned to say a word,” Mairon dismissed. “That mouth of yours has outlived its usefulness.”

He used to sing old elvish songs in these halls while he worked. Now Mairon hummed in his place, recalling a primitive tune that the orcs liked. The elf’s screams joined in harmony while Mairon forced the knife into his mouth, cutting into sensitive gums and broken teeth. There was no surgical precision here; he sawed into the elf’s mouth with little care and screams melted into bloodied gurgles. It wasn’t about keeping him alive anymore, getting information—this was revenge. Something sick had settled into Mairon’s stomach and it wouldn’t leave until he saw all the fire leave those perfect little dark eyes. It was incredible the pathetic thing hadn’t given up just yet. Mairon wasn’t forcing him to stay. He could die whenever he wanted.

He slumped forward when Mairon withdrew. Blood spilled onto the stained floor, hot flesh hitting the marble with a sick plop. Leave it for the rats, Mairon figured. He kept humming, cleaning his hands and the knife with a scrap of silk that may have once been a fine hanging. The orcs had taken his new destroy it all policy to heart.

The king of Eregion died that night. The world knew when his broken corpse was hoisted with the banners. With him, what was left of Annatar died too as Mairon shed that fair skin and began his next machinations on the world, a warm ring resting on his finger.

Only in death did that fire leave his eyes. Mairon chose not to think about how its memory haunted him. He may have destroyed the realm but he failed to do what he set out for. Mairon hated failure. He locked those memories away somewhere far, somewhere deep. Somewhere that he couldn’t touch.

Now, thousands upon thousands of years later, the fall of Eregion stayed with him. Haunted him. Mairon hated the story because he remembered it. He lived it. No one could truly erase the memory and here among relics of an age long gone he knew why he was here. It was always inevitable that he would find these.

His hands closed around the three rings. Nothing happened when he pulled them from the box. No panic, no alarm. He could feel their power thrumming through his fingers. They weren’t his but they may as well have been by how he knew that power. He invented the technique, guided his student. Well-crafted but—imperfect, he thought. Celebrimbor was talented but he was nothing compared to a god. He was still so young when Mairon killed him.

He held the rings up to the light and got a better look at them. After all these years they were still fine and glossy. He was surprised none had been destroyed. Someone had wanted to keep them intact even as the Ring and the wraiths fell. Someone wanted them gathered here, together, with all of these other memories of a shared history Mairon had with Eregion. It was almost like—

A traditional blade, cold and sharp, unsheathed with the high-pitched whine of metal on metal. A trap. Mairon turned around even as cold steel met his chest, forcing him to freeze. Sure, he could survive being run through—but that didn’t mean he wanted to be.

A wild, fiery-eyed elf looked back with unrestrained glee. He was tattered and unkempt in a way that Mairon never saw elves to be—his gilded robes were torn at the hems and his hair was a mess but Mairon knew that face. It was a face that haunted his memories. His student.

“Found you,” he purred. “Annatar.”

Mairon steeled himself. “I don’t know you,” he lied, letting the rings slip into his pocket.

“You are a terrible liar,” Celebrimbor taunted. “You always were.” He raised his ancient sword closer, pressing it up against Mairon’s chin and forcing his head up.

Mairon dropped the ruse just as quickly, a disgusted scowl falling over his face. “And you were the fool that let me into your home regardless,” he reminded.

Celebrimbor’s face turned in a sneer. “Now I have you here,” he said. “I knew you’d come one day. Everyone else left but I—I knew if I stayed in dark space then you’d come. You wanted my rings.” He brought the blade back down, hovering over Mairon’s heart. “Now I have you.”

“Is it not some elvish tenet to heal from the past?” Mairon deadpanned. This elf must have been down here for centuries at the least. He was disturbed. No elf waited that long for revenge—surely not after thousands of years had passed and Mairon had already broken apart.

Celebrimbor surged forward with the sword. Mairon sucked in a sharp breath and forced himself to stand still when it pierced his chest, his physical body reeling from the shock. Keep it together, he pleaded with it, like willpower alone could hold him together. He was barely over being flung from a burning ship and now he was stabbed through the chest. Fantastic. How much did he need before he would just disembody and go drifting around the galaxy again?

“I gave up on forgiveness when you cut out my tongue,” Celebrimbor hissed. “I’ve been planning this ever since Father left with the others. I’ll take everything from you, Annatar. You’ll repay the centuries that I spent waiting for you.”

His comm chip flared back to life in a series of short and soundless pulses from his wrist. Mairon couldn’t hold back his smirk. Comm chips automatically reactivated when they found an anchor to chain off of, meaning someone was nearby. He was in luck. He wasn’t going to have to stick around for much longer after all. He just needed to buy a bit of time.

He pulled the blade out with his own hands, ignoring the way it dug into freshly healed palms. Celebrimbor watched him with the mixed horror of anyone who was far too bound to their flesh bodies. “You think you are special?” he challenged. “I’ve killed greater kings than you, elf.”

He never got a reply. A blade flashed in a whistle of wind and he couldn’t help but let out a dry laugh, something between mirth and a croak. Mairon didn’t know what dropped faster—the corpse of Celebrimbor or the blade that had nearly run him completely through. Then he was looking back at a familiar hawklike face, a sleek haircut and a bloody blade that returned to his hand with a rush of air.

“Eönwë,” he whispered, masking his relief.

“You owe me,” Eönwë grunted with a familiar scowl. He prodded at the dead elf with the tip of his boot. Another grimace at the gore sticking to his sword. “What a fucking creep. You always keep friends like these?”

“Can’t say we were friends.” Mairon tried to ignore the blood dripping down his own shirt. Eönwë looked more and more dissatisfied as he looked him over, eyes lingering over the sore and poorly-wrapped stump where his finger used to be, the blood on his hands.

“Boss gave me some of your freaky jewelry,” he decided to say. He put his sword away and adjusted the lacing on his gauntlets. “It’s on the ship. Unless you want to stay here and reminisce about the good old days with the ghosts.”

Mairon stepped around the body and pushed back whatever misplaced surge of guilt he felt about seeing Celebrimbor die twice. “Did you really need two days to get me out of here?” he grumbled.

“Had to go fetch a Silmaril.” Eönwë adjusted his gauntlets. “Schedule got a little expedited. Someone tipped off the Federation. Probably that Nelyafinwë looking to get his daddy out of elf jail.”

So Melkor hadn’t told anyone what Mairon did, he thought. Eönwë turned around and left without any fanfare. His contempt for Mairon was at its usual levels. He grabbed a jeweled circlet as he passed it and slipped it into his pockets like it meant nothing to him. Mairon only gave himself a second to balk—Herald of Manwë, stealing. His eyes lingered for one more moment on the beheaded corpse of Celebrimbor and the blood on the floor. Felt strange to just leave him there. Even stranger that an elf lord of his status would just die in seconds without fanfare. This place was supposed to be abandoned with no signs of life whatsoever. No one to sing songs about his life and death this time.

The gold filigree on his robes was tarnished and the silk was threadbare. Waiting here, alone, since the signal blackout—Mairon knew he had done this to him. He remembered betraying him in the second age. Maybe he’d done it again, during the blur of time he spent in the first galactic expansion doing something that bore a semblance to surviving.

“Well?” Eönwë taunted. “You want to bring your pet with you? I’m sure the big boss would be delighted. He loves corpses.”

Mairon scowled. “Shut up.” He stepped over the corpse, bypassing the spreading pool of blood with his one boot, and thought that he’d need to get new clothes when he got back on the ship. Something with gold.

-x-

The walk back was unpleasant. Mostly because Eönwë set a bruising pace; he didn’t care that Mairon was wearing one boot, missing a finger, run through the chest with a blade that would have done enough damage to kill this body a week ago, and barely recovered from a brutal crash landing.

His exposed foot was bleeding and his knees hurt when a boxy trollshaw-class transport ship came into view. They were compact ships with broad doors that were optimized for trolls and other large races—a strange ship for Eönwë to come in on. He preferred his sleek and nimble wraith fleet based on the sheer volume of maintenance requests he submitted when he wasn’t working on them himself.

It made more sense when he saw his companion—easily nine feet tall and broad with a massive whip strapped to his belt. A balrog, Mairon realized, though he looked less…destructive than the forms of fire and rock that they took on in the early years of war. Only the more powerful balrogs could take on any shape that wasn’t going to set the palm trees on fire. It was a nightmare for logistics, but it was useful to have a godlike being of pure flame on the battlefield when they sought to conquer Beleriand.

He turned and greeted Mairon with a familiar bellow. Mairon knew that face and the name slipped off of his tongue without any thought.

“Gothmog,” he greeted. “I thought you were dead.”

The balrog general whooped with laughter. “Almost as dead as you!” he declared. “You’re shorter than I remember.”

Mairon didn’t let his thoughts reach his face. “You must have remembered wrong. Getting killed by an elf does strange things to your head.” He felt the irony of the statement. It wasn’t that he didn’t remember Gothmog—but he recognized his face and little else. The little piece of him left over from the first age reminded him that Gothmog was too stupid to betray us. If there was something Gothmog loved, it was battle and glory. He hated politics. He’d do whatever Mairon asked as long as it meant he could wave his silly fire-whip-sword nonsense about and smash as many pretty things as possible. Not surprising that his behavior inevitably got him killed.

“If I recall,” Eönwë decided to interject between unlatching the shapeless gray ship they had come in on, “Gothmog was killed by an elf but Mairon was killed by a hobbit.”

“I killed myself,” he clarified, not because he didn’t remember what happened (he didn’t). It fell off his tongue before he could stop it. The three rings burning a metaphorical hole in his pocket had something to do with it. He’d study them more on the ship, where he could source the equipment to do so.

His words got Gothmog whooping louder than before. “There’s my favorite unhinged lieutenant!” he guffawed. “Thuringwethil was saying you seemed sane. No way.”

Eönwë snorted. “That snake hasn’t had a lucid moment since he left Almaren. He must have thrown his brain in with the coals.”

Mairon wanted to interject with an I’m right here but it was two against one and he was exhausted. “If you can just direct me to this jewelry you mentioned,” he sighed. “I’d like to have my ring finger back.” And a change of clothes, he thought privately, but he doubted that’d be provided for him.

“Can’t regrow a boot!” Gothmog taunted. “You set yourself on fire or did you decide tits out’s the new style? Bet the boss loves it.”

Mairon headed for the open hatch in the ship. “You can stop talking now,” he suggested. Politely. “I can still cut out your tongue.”

Eönwë snorted. “Snake,” he reminded. “Come with me. I’ll get your silly jewelry.”

“Can I have a spare boot?” Mairon grumbled, pushing his hair out of his face. “And a hair tie.”

“No.” Eönwë hit the keypad a bit harder than he needed to and the ship flared to life.

The ship itself was clearly large enough to accommodate balrogs like Gothmog, who came in and headed straight for the controls, grumbling something about Eönwë flies everything like it’s a wraith class and that he certainly didn’t have the same death wish.

He followed Eönwë down a ladder and into some kind of threadbare medbay. He was grumbling the whole time—not that Mairon had ever seen him in a good mood, but he seemed especially snappy today. He wondered once again what horrible turn of events had someone like this serving the dark lord when he clearly didn’t want to be here at all.

In fact, he thought, inclining his head—the Herald of Manwë should have been serving Manwë. With the way he looked at Mairon with such contempt, it didn’t add up.

He noticed him staring and stopped searching cabinets. “What?” he leered. “Out with it.”

“I don’t know why you hate me,” said Mairon. “I don’t know what I did. You don’t treat the other generals this way. I don’t even know why you’re here.” He could say Eönwë treated them with contempt. Outright hatred was—not so much.

Eönwë pulled a face that was far too ugly for such an angelic being. He was good at making faces like these—angry and spiteful.

“Boss said your memory is selective,” he grumbled. “Sure is convenient that the parts you forgot are all about your crimes.”

“If you hate me so much for what I did,” Mairon continued, “then why not just let that elf keep me? Why kill him?”

Eönwë didn’t bother to make eye contact while he dug through a drawer tucked into a wall panel. “Because I don’t have another thousand years to put you back together again, humpty dumpty,” he growled, shoving a flat box into Mairon’s arms. “Take your weird jewels and stay out of my way. It’s not too late to leave you here.”

Mairon complied, mostly because he felt like there wasn’t much else he could get out of the maia. While Gothmog seemed to enjoy riling him up, his smug laughter coming from the controls, Mairon had a feeling he was better off avoiding doing the same. He was not friendly to Mairon but he was still Melkor’s best pilot and clearly played a big role in whatever strategy dark space had taken against the Federation. He was Mairon’s best chance to get more information since the dark lord himself seemed adamant Mairon figure it all out on his own.

He tucked himself away on the transport ship and dug through the drawers for painkillers. He felt the lurch as they finally kicked off of the sand and into the air.

A few hours later with all ten fingers and a renewed sense of energy, Mairon found himself stumbling down the ramp and back onto The Void. He couldn’t say he was home but he was happier to be back here than on a (mostly) deserted island whose sole inhabitant had wanted to slowly and painfully cut him apart. He really felt how tattered and dirty he was here when he stepped with bare feet onto pristine black floors. Fortunately, the bay they landed in was silent and empty. They had returned during an off-shift, he guessed, when most of Melkor’s thrall were asleep.

Gothmog watched him descend. He had a complicated look on his face. Didn’t know you were capable of real feelings, Mairon wanted to mock, but instead he kept walking with his head high and opted to ignore him. He needed to save whatever shred of dignity he had left.

The balrog general spoke and Mairon hesitated.

“I don’t keep secrets,” he said. Mairon turned around. He looked completely serious. “I know the others are busy being cryptic. I’m not playing games. What’re you looking for that the big boss would strand you on a shitty planet like Edhil-34 over?”

Mairon tensed. This could be some kind of test, some kind of hunt for information—or this could be what he wanted. Gothmog wasn’t the kind of person to deceive him. He had very straightforward motivations with which he served Melkor. He never cared much for politics.

“Silmarils,” he answered. One word. It was enough for Gothmog’s eyes to light up with recognition and for a grim look to cross his face. He was still an open book after all this time.

He turned to make his way out of the landing zone. “Find yourself some clothes that fit and meet me on the command deck,” he said. “I’ll show you what we want these Silmarils for.”

Mairon followed him out and headed for his rooms, intent on regaining his dignity before he did any more sleuthing on Melkor’s plans. For once he was grateful for the orcs’ tendency to clear the area when they saw him stalking past, even half dressed with no shoes and a ruined boot in his freshly healed hands. He looked pitiful enough in the regulation clothes Thuringwethil had given him, so now he really longed to be something closer to his past self. He’d been tall, regal—a head-turner even before Melkor had taken him on and indulged his more materialistic impulses.

When he made it to the space he’d been occupying as joint-workshop-quarters he couldn’t peel off the ruined tunic fast enough. It felt rotten in his hands; unconsciously fire flared in his eyes and the material burned to ashes in his fingers. Half dressed, he stumbled through a living space he’d repurposed into a chaotic work space and flung open a wardrobe he hadn’t touched since he arrived.

After a bit of digging for something that fit—he was even taller at his full power, he recognized, and his tastes had evidently leaned closer to Melkor’s and further from practicality—he emerged in something similar enough to what he’d been wearing during his stay here, but more suitable for someone who was being treated somewhere between an honored guest and a valued officer. He couldn’t justify anything nicer. All the gauzy bits and the jewels belonged to someone else. It wasn’t like Melkor had given him a real job to do that he ought to reflect.

When he emerged on the command deck feeling a bit more like a proper maia, Gothmog gave him an appraising once-over and nodded to himself. If he had anything to say, he didn’t bother—he keyed in a code on the far wall of the upper command deck and a door Mairon hadn’t noticed recessed into the wall slid open. Automatic lights flared to life behind him at the top of a spiraling ramp. He began his descent without a word and Mairon followed.

He knew he was about to see something that the dark lord had no intention of showing him. He was being let in on a secret much bigger than himself in scope. The thought alone of silmarils still brought bile to his tongue and a piercing headache that left him unsettled.