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“So you require my personal attention in this too,” Sauron said. In the darkness, Finrod recognized that cruel, resonant voice, as if from a very great distance. Each shallow breath brought pain, the wet cough of filling lungs.
The world spun.
He had not feared the rough claws and iron implements of Sauron's monsters, even as they had brought him to torment. But the Maia's presence, like the moment before the caress of candleflame burns, sent a shiver through Finrod's battered body.
He was so cold…
Artaresto, he thought, as he felt the doors to the dim halls of Mandos open before him, the last of his strength slipping away into silence. Beren, I am sorry.
A song like the music of Varda's stars, its beauty so wrong but so arresting that Finrod nearly laid his mind bare before it. Bones snapped painfully together. Muscle reknit, nerves blinding, and his scream echoed in the dark. His skin itched as it healed itself, becoming smooth and unmarred.
“Perfect again,” Sauron said.
Finrod spat blood from lips that now were soft and un-split beneath the dirt. "Does it please you?"
"What would please me," Sauron said, the words so heavy with intent Finrod felt persuasion cloy his soul, "are your words."
"You won't have them."
The Maia spoke carefully, lifting Finrod's chin as if he knew the way his touch blurred against Finrod's fëa. "You are very fair. It has been long since my creatures had the chance to play with something that doesn't die partway through."
Finrod met those burning eyes. "Still you will not have them."
How many days had passed in this unceasing night? Finrod was not sure. But it was only a week that there would be no way out. The thought turned his stomach, but truth be told, it scared him far less than Sauron himself, with his shifting touches, his acute, piercing insistence that Finrod would yield, the pull of his spirit that Finrod had not anticipated. He could endure the orcs by comparison. He would: there was no other choice.
Maybe he had thought relief too loudly.
"Thou art a fool," Sauron hissed. The form was as strangely intimate as the long fingers at his jaw. "Thinkest thou not that others began defiant?"
The statement made Finrod want to weep, but not for the reasons the Maia had intended. He turned the words back towards him, speaking quietly. "It is for others' sake that I will not tell you what you seek."
"Fool," Sauron said, gently this time. "I will attend thee myself."
Finrod quickly understood that the creatures charged with his interrogation before had been as clumsy pupils compared to their master.
Sauron wrote upon him with blood and fire and crumpled his screaming body like discarded parchment. He sang Finrod back to health again: again and again he sang him back again. Dark poison wound through Finrod's hröa and fëa, making him retch and weep and want. The want was most horrible, most sickening. Days passed of which he remembered nothing but his soul crying out in pain.
Still, he will not break me.
It was those tendrils of darkness, choking him, that offered a refuge. The same dark lifeblood wound through the stone wall to which he was bound.
Findaráto, the stones murmured. Findaráto. You were ours, as we were yours.
His spirit ebbed, darkened, in his body, straining for an escape that was impossible, but then something held him. He sank beneath a web of woven song, his own tainted spell-song that had once set the stones one against the other. He felt the marshy ground, hewed into cellars and dungeons, beneath his feet, though they rested not on the floor of the dungeon where he was chained. He felt the choking clouds of soot about the tower's peaked windows and crenellations. For a few precious moments, he knew not how long, he felt Beren's heartbeat, and Edrahil's, and those of the other ten. Only a few walls away: Finrod had known that consciously, at some point, but he had not felt how close they truly were.
Thank you, Finrod thought.
He drew a breath.
Thank you.
He reached back, taking hold of that silvery web with his mind. The next lashes were easier, though the very walls shuddered under the blows. And he remembered, he remembered the blazing joy: this had not happened in his vision.
It took Sauron long enough to think of ice, or water. Finrod told him so.
The familiar song, beautiful as stardust, restored the color to Finrod's grey fingers in a burst of pain. His lungs, abruptly freed, beat for air.
"Really? You thought I could not endure that, of all things?"
When Sauron had made him scream again, Finrod presumed to take some petty satisfaction in doing so, he deigned to answer.
"You could not endure the memory of it," he said sweetly. The smile his flickering form showed Finrod was as cruel as a sharp knife.
Nothing is fixed. Not Ulmo's vision—none of it. They can still be saved. What is left of us can be saved.
"Try me again," Finrod said hoarsely.
It was the first time he had seen the Maia unsettled.
"I will."
Finrod barely had the time to brace himself before the room fell away around them. Sauron assailed his mind with images as vivid as the waking dreams that had so often halted him in his steps. They were both more and less muddled: no true memory so much as what had been stolen from him during his song—or, who knew, from others—it was not as it had been, but Finrod's heart still quailed in his chest, and his breath still failed him. The Teleri's white ships' decks ran with blood in the distance. Around him the swirling tide was red, the pale green seafoam and the glittering pearls in the pebbled sand beneath a color Finrod had never before seen and never would after. The ice loomed beyond the bay, settling with the rumble of a thunderclap. And around him, about him, Elves were falling: weapons wielded in clumsy and clumsier hands. Wielded between cousins: his father's kin and his mother's. Finrod had swum by these shores with his Teleri kinsmen, he had drunk and joked with them, his cousins had drunk and joked with them in happier days, and how was this… how could it have… The slaughter—this was no "battle," the Amanyar did not know what battle was, they would invent a new word for the evil that had been committed—turned, it struggled, it reached its conclusion with the inevitability of the tide, and some Noldor had fallen, but they were victorious… Victorious if it meant this was a bitter, harsh word. Some error in translation, his mother's family spoke differently… They were dead. The blood of kin mingled in the seafoam, and Finrod had done nothing to stop it but stare.
No. No. This time, you can. Remember where you are!
The waves churned about his feet, but Finrod laid a stone between himself and the tide. And then another.
He sang of staying, and shielded himself within his own mind, where such thoughts might be safe. Maedhros in Himring, who would never yield an inch of ground to the Enemy. The white flame that blazed from his oldest cousin’s eyes on the battlefield.
He sang of secrecy, of his Sindar kin in Doriath, encircled by a different Maia's magic in a stronghold hidden with seamless loveliness within forest and rock, having withstood the raging storm of the Enemy’s power before Finrod had set foot on the Helcaraxë.
He sang of trust, and saw his cousin Fingon’s face, bright as a shield with bold faith, sure and steadfast in love even when there seemed no reason to be so.
And he sang of changing. His little sister weaving songs of power in Melian’s tutelage. His own hands braiding gold-and-silver hair into a crown about her fair head. Endless night on the ice, the gleam of her eyes hardening. The way she spoke in the starry dark of the sights they would behold, the words comforting them both, winding around the pain of the crossing and what had been done like a warm blanket.
The prison opening, the chain that snaps.
Finrod set the final barrier between himself and the bloodied water. It was not so difficult as he had thought, now, after all.
He remembered birdsong. A day in spring, the cold air giving way to warm shafts of sun; a shawl around bony shoulders and dark brown hair. The light of Laurelin’s fruit caught in that hair where it fell across the tree they leaned against, brightening its silver edges.
And being thus pursued, have Men no hope? Finrod heard himself say.
They have no certainty and knowledge, only fears, or dreams in the dark. Andreth spoke wisely; he had not known then how wisely. But hope? Hope, that is another matter, of which even the Wise seldom speak. She looked at him, and her grey gaze, softening with affection, seemed to pierce through even memory. Yet, Lord Finrod of the House of Finarfin, of the high and puissant Elves, perhaps we may speak of it anon, you and I.
I love them, Finrod thought. They can be saved.
Sauron pressed against his fëa with stabbing, seeking force. Finrod resisted it. He resisted it even as black spots grew in his vision, and he did not give in, curling the wall he had woven close about himself as he struggled for breath. The scene the Maia had painted began to slip away, and he found himself on his knees in a dark, frozen cell, his hands bleeding where he had gripped the shallow edges of the flagstones. But his spirit was safe. Finrod let out a wild, astonished laugh. Then the ground rose up to meet him, impacting with strange lightness as he fainted and the darkness took him utterly.
After that, Sauron redoubled his efforts. Yet his body’s pain hardly reached his fëa at all, such was the joy in it, like a banked coal. Finrod screamed himself ragged but smiled at nothing afterwards. He barely heard the questions the Maia put to the broken form fixed in that coppery gaze: asking what his allegiance was, for what purpose he had come to the Wizard’s Tower. For his name and the names of his companions. Sauron’s voice was silky-sweet, coaxing Finrod’s wounds to burning. He had heard the same questions before in those times the Maia deemed him worthy of them, the leading, taunting suggestions. They did not matter.
“Celegorm?” asked that insistent voice.
Finrod was startled into responding though his lips bled when he moved them. “What?”
“You mentioned an oath, and you are fair of hair. Are you Celegorm, son of Fëanor?”
“No,” Finrod said, offended.
He sensed a ponderous amusement from the Maia. Art certain thou dost not wish me to know thy name?
Finrod cursed his pride and would not answer again.
“There will be time enough for that,” Sauron said, stroking Finrod’s torn cheek. Blood boiled under his fingertips. “I will not swear to let thee go.”
Sauron crafted visions to deceive him: elf-thralls with golden hair come to beg his help, Men with dirty faces and deadened eyes. (At the worst, he was not sure which was illusory and which was real.) Finrod wept, but it did not work. He held bitterly to his hope, and when again he saw Sauron's tall slim silhouette, the shadowed face contorted with anger, he laughed helplessly.
He had sung him back: that beautiful, horrible song. Finrod woke again, wrenched from total, blissful darkness into the dim light of Sauron's fiery eyes. His lips quirked in wry resignation.
The Maia's eerie form was purely raiment: Finrod knew this, and yet the sensation of the spirit's flamelike hand entering his chest, pressing down upon his heart, made him shiver, unsettling him as if his fëa were trapped beneath that burning palm.
“Tell me why thou smilest still," Sauron growled. "Art thou planning some assault?”
Finrod struggled against the strange sensation of intimacy. This was a new question. "If I tell you, will you free my companions?"
"One," Sauron said at last.
Finrod slowly let out a breath.
"Free the Man," he said. "And I will tell thee.”
He sat up on the blood-streaked slab of stone, albeit with hands chained. The lack of pain was dizzying. Sauron stood across from him, and folded himself into a seated position, waiting. They haggled over words, the sorcerer swore, and Finrod only prayed oaths were even a fraction as binding upon Maiar as they were upon Ilúvatar's eldest children.
"Centuries ago, I received a vision from one of the Valar," Finrod said, swinging his freshly healed feet from the table. His voice was ragged, but gained strength as he went on. "You spread about that they have forgotten Arda, and I know better than most what seed of truth is in that. But it is still a lie not so different from any of your other lies."
Sauron's eyes glittered. "It is of thee I would hear now, singer, not me."
Finrod inclined his head. "Ulmo who in no way forgot Middle-Earth, who has been with us always, whose waters surround your Isle of Wolves as we speak—that Ulmo showed me a vision of a future that should come to pass."
Please let this not be a mistake. Please, Ulmo, Námo, bright Varda.
"I saw lines broken, bodies sundered. Great battles," Finrod said carefully. "Your allies, well, that foul Enemy to which for some reason you have offered your allegiance, I imagine because you enjoy making Eru's children scream so—yes, I continue—was victorious."
"How so?"
Finrod's heart clenched in his chest. Sauron's oath was only good so long as he met the terms and did not lie. "I do not know when it happened. I do not know how." It was true, though he had puzzled over many strange details, and Elves forgot nothing they had seen. Don't ask me, please, don't ask me.
Sauron looked contemplative. "Why would this compel thee to smile, thrall? Dost enjoy my attentions so much?"
A very specific memory surfaced: Finrod blushed red, then paled in cold horror that he had blushed.
"I will tell thee, as I have sworn," he said crisply, holding his head higher. "Long remembered I this vision. I have always possessed some glimmer of foresight, and I have witnessed many things I foresaw come to pass. This is why I smile." He took a breath. "Because I saw the manner of my death before I came here: from the moment of waking in that pit where you had chained us.”
“Us?”
“My companions and I,” Finrod said, purposely vague. “You sent your wolves for us, thinking to learn our names and our errand. One by one, the wolves picked us off. None spoke,” he said pointedly. “I was able to free myself, trying to stop it, and in the effort died.”
“How could you free yourself, if I had set you in bonds?”
Finrod said nothing. The tower hummed in the back of his consciousness, senses winding outwards along the grain of the stone.
“No matter,” Sauron murmured, eyes covetous. “Go on.”
“It has not happened,” Finrod said. “And that is why I smile: because it did not happen, and none of it may happen, and all may yet change.”
The Maia leaned back. A shadow crossed that strange fair face. Finrod had witnessed no visions of triumph with which to comfort his hope, yet he had unsettled Sauron all the same.
“Morgoth the Constrainer can be defeated,” Finrod went on. He shared blood with Fëanor, after all, and occasionally it showed despite his best efforts.
Sauron laughed.
His laughter was as sharp as a blade. It was music, and leaping flame. For a moment Finrod saw across from him in the dark a being of impossible beauty, eyes aglow with molten light. Then the blade cut to the quick; the music jarred discordantly; the flame scorched.
“Thou amusest me,” Sauron said, the ugly words sparking bright as a file.
Finrod held his peace, though his fëa trembled.
“Release the Man that traveled with me,” he said quietly.
“It is done,” Sauron answered.
It was true; the tower whispered the opening gates to him, the steady human heartbeat becoming distant. Barahir, I did what I could for your son, Finrod thought, feeling a rush of relief that made him weak. Manwë bring him to the arms of his Eldar lover, and keep him from trying his quest a second time.
“A mortal life will end soon enough without my aid,” Sauron said cruelly. “A trifle, a wink of time, compared to your undying one, and those of your companions, and you know something already of how that eternity may be spent.”
Finrod smiled weakly. “Before long I will not be chained in this body, lest you make new terms with me.”
“Perhaps I will make them,” Sauron said. Dark robes shifted about his calves as he stood. He touched Finrod’s cheek, the brush of fingertips thrumming through his soul like a plucked note. “And I am not so convinced your fëa wishes to flee.”
Finrod gazed blankly at him. Whatever he saw in his face made the Maia smile.
“Keep thy false hope, thrall,” Sauron said. “It will keep thee longer.” He stepped back, looking Finrod over, the pressure of his attention like piercing darts against his mind. “I could throw you back to my wolves at any moment, and complete your vision."
Exhausted, and giddy on his gravest day, Finrod took another risk. "Yet thou wilt not."
"And why should that be?" Sauron murmured.
He beamed. He remembered his other song, warm and golden. "I amuse you."