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With a body not made of flesh, Maedhros didn't need to sleep. His dreams, his thoughts, his memories and his desires were all constantly present to him, continuously flowing through and out of him, cutting through space and encroaching on his enemies'.
The Valar didn't sleep either, so it was Námo's fully alert consciousness that started being plagued by the intrusions.
They began underhandedly, brief moments of dizziness, spells of agitation, that left him disorientated, but more because they happened at all (how could they?) than because they were severe.
They quickly escalated.
Sometimes he heard wailing. Wailing wasn't new to him – it broke out, now and again, in both lamentation and recrimination in his Halls – but he was untouched by it. Now it was as if it came from his innermost core, and throbbed inside him as a second heart. It would grow to shrieking, and quieten to a treacherous sobbing laughter, deafening him to everything else.
Sometimes, a choking mist engulfed him. His attempts to dispel it were ineffectual. He tried to grab at it, but it was immaterial, and all he grasped was air. It was only mist, it wasn't intimidated by his power. Walls, physical or spiritual, availed nothing against it. It swaddled his essence like a second skin, seemed to insinuate itself beneath the very substance of his fana. It did nothing else. It caused him no hurt. It merely would not leave him.
Sometimes, he felt like he was wading through a lake of fire (and on an intimate plain of existence, he was). His legs were heavy (too heavy, it could not have been just the fire biting into them, perhaps under the fire was water), and putting one foot in front of the other took an effort he should never have been susceptible to by the might of his divinity.
From the fire, ghosts rose. Spirits so luminous the sight of them was afflicting. Spirits unfamiliar to him, souls he had never had in his custody. They stared at him glazedly, emptily, and stood before him like an impenetrable barrier, shoulder to shoulder and merged into each-other. Passing through them, cleaving through their fragile existence, was akin to trampling on newly blossomed flowers – or newborn babies – but he always did as he dragged himself forwards. He couldn't have lingered among them.
At the other end of the lake, a figure stood. It was, from afar, nothing more than a smattering of red among the refulgence of the ghosts. When (if) he managed to reach it, he thought he recognized the visage lurking behind it. He had known it, but not under that guise. He knew its essence, its conception, but in that moment he couldn't put a name to it. It smiled at him, silently.
Eru was silent, too.
He found no explanation, no respite in the Music, either (the Music, he came to realize, was ripping apart, broken strings of a harp, tatters he could not hold on to).
The only sounds he managed to perceive, if he strained – murmurs that interrupted the deathlike stillness, the reverberation of a forceful voice from far, far away – were words, always unchanged.
“To evil end shall all things turn that they begin well”.
He recalled them, he had espoused them, but perhaps not in the manner he had presumed. Perhaps he too had been treading the path they traced. No, he couldn't -...or could he?
There was no answer; there was the smile of his antagonist (but who had the power to confront a Vala?), and the certainty of something forever lost.
He could never leave the lake, his own will held no sway there. If he attempted to step on the shore, the figure repelled him, and a presentiment which caused his spirit to quake (could it be what the Children called fear?) seized him: the fire would swallow him.
The words rumbled then like a condemnation – his own.