Archive of Our Own

You wake up from a dream or a nightmare or something in between. You can’t quite remember what it was about. All you know is that you dreamed of him again, Melkor, your lord, your master, your—

You take a deep breath, loud in the silence of your bedchamber. Lover, you meant to add, but you didn’t realise how much it still feels like an injury. Dawn is still an hour or two away, or at least such dawn as you are willing to allow in Mordor. You take another breath, and then another after that. The movement of your lungs inside your body feels like mockery. Why should you be here when he is not?

You are here because you have subjects to rule, you remind yourself, but it is a pale and distant thought. Your crown is waiting for you on the bedside table. Soon, you will put it on, resume your duties, run your empire with a steady hand. Now, though, you are not a king; you are only Mairon.

You let yourself think of him as you haven’t in too long. He was touching you, in the dream, hands to naked skin, mouth following after. His touch was a holy thing, a breaking, a burning, stripping everything from you until you were left with nothing but your beating heart.

You gave all of yourself to him. Or rather, he took all you had to offer, and then he continued to take until you were something new, something other: something moulded in his image. You wonder if this is why you’ve felt so empty in all the long years of his absence. You used to hold two people inside of you, yourself and your second self, the self that he created from the bare bones of the first. Now... well, now there’s only you.

You think of him coming back to you, what he would look like, what he would say, what he would feel like clasped in your arms. You can picture his lips, now twisted with cruelty, you’re a disappointment to me, now curved in a smile so soft and so sad that it pierces your heart like a blade: I’m here, I’ve got you, you are mine.

Mairon, you want him to say, your name in his mouth, your heart on his tongue. My admirable one. That’s what he used to call you, in moments of passion or praise or the rare gentleness of early morning when he’d roll over, still warm with sleep, and pull you close with an arm around your waist.

You’ve always treasured that gentleness in him, so seldom seen and not bestowed upon anyone other than you. His power was dizzying, straining against the bounds of comprehension. A mountain was nothing to him; he could crush anything into dust as easily as leaves trodden underfoot. You loved that about him, loved watching him work as with hands and voice he would break and then put back together until the world was remade in his image. You wonder if it was intentional, this remaking of the world into mirror-shards, his own destructiveness reflected in the tumults of the earth until he felt fractionally less alone. You cannot blame him if it was: greatness is a terrible thing, and he was the greatest of them all.

But the gentleness. Oh, the gentleness. It always surprised you, stole the breath from your lungs; one second he could be splitting the earth open down to its molten core, and the next he could take your face in his hands, tracing the freckles on your skin as though you were made of glass. You always wanted to stop him in those moments, wrap your fingers around his wrists and pull his hands into your chest, holding him against the beat of your heart. Stay with me, you would say, this land is ours, this kingdom is ours; we can rule together, we can drive such progress that the Valar will burn with envy to see it.

You can picture the steely glint in his eye as clearly as though he was standing before you. He would draw back, spine straight, head held high despite the weight of his crown. If we can rule this kingdom, why not the world?

You tried to give him the world. You tried, and you failed, and you think that even if you had succeeded, it would still be failure of a sort. Not even the world can be enough for one such as he.

You think of him in the Void, cast outside the borders of the world he had so coveted. The darkness there cannot be likened to anything on this earth. It is not an absence of light because it existed before light came into being and will continue to exist long after the last flame is extinguished. It is emptiness, more than anything else, black and hungry, and you think of it hemming him close, pressing against his eyes until he thinks himself blind. You think of how cold he must be, his spirit left naked and alone, so terribly small against that devouring nothingness.

You have heard it said that it is not a fair punishment. He is a being of darkness—wouldn’t the Void feel like a second home? But you know him better than that, you know him better than anyone else on this earth or in the spaces outside of it. He is a being of darkness, his own darkness, a shadow cast by his majesty. But the darkness out there is an entity in its own right, mindless and massive, primordial and eternal. He wanted it banished, kept at bay by creation. He looked upon the vision of Arda that was shown to all of you in your youth, and understood that before love of a world comes fear of an existence without it.

You’ve always disagreed with him about this. You find comfort in the thought of the nothingness at the end of all things. But then again, the world has never meant to you what it did to him. For you, he was your whole world.

Sudden anger surges within you. Such curses blister on your tongue that the very air seems to curdle. You think of the cold blackness of the Void tightening around his neck like a noose, and you think of the Valar sitting their holy thrones in their holy land across the Sea. Most of all, you think of war.

These are old thoughts, an old anger that the millennia have done little to appease. But you cannot grieve: you cannot build him a grave when you have no bones to bury. Grief is for things without recall, but he is here still, just outside the bounds of the world.

You kick off the covers and spring to your feet, taking a familiar route between the furniture as you pace. The band of gold on your finger starts to burn as though it was newly forged, but it doesn’t hurt you, no, it cannot hurt you, for it is you and you are it.

You cannot grieve; you will not grieve. He is not lost; you will not hear of it. You twist the Ring on your finger, round and round and round, a blur of gleaming metal in the darkness. You do not have the might to assail the Valar, not yet, but your armies are growing, and your Ring whispers to you of power and strength, of victory in bloodshed and burning gold.

It would be an impossible feat, breaking open the Void and drawing your master from its depths.

You look down at your hand, at the Ring glowing upon your finger with an inner fire of its own, and you smile.

Impossibilities are for lesser beings.