Work Text:
When Mairon had gone to Utumno, his smithing had steadily deteriorated. At first he had made everything beautiful and perfectly orderly. The high main halls of Angband, his own domain, had fairly shone. To call his works then the image of Valinor would have insulted them. He had free rein here, without the lesser taints of his brethren, and he wrought perfection so bright to behold that the creatures brought in from the waterside quailed before it, their weak eyes dazzled or blinded. Mairon’s eyes, for their part, were satisfied. But then he grew frustrated. It was not as perfect as it was before.
Before all that, before darkness or light, before any name was given him, Mairon sang. In bitterer moments, now, he thought he had been content singing. He had been satisfied. Really, it was the bitterness that made him think so. He didn’t remember it exactly: not in the same way he remembered time after, for then time had not yet begun.
Mairon sang, and though he persisted in the more harmonious theme, he listened as the song changed.
I opened your eyes, he said, later. He laughed, in Utumno, when Mairon glared at him, his hands dripping molten steel from the wreckage of the latest creation that had failed to meet his own standards. Yes. Those flame-eyes. I opened them wider.
In the new and fresh-made world—in the world, for there had been none prior—he found himself apart from those who had sung with him, without initially meaning to be. He spoke brusquely to the others when he found them displeasing, when he found his own creations better, when he found they fell short by comparison in their service to their Vala. Yet it was not a state of affairs he would have protested. He cared little for their opinions of him. He liked to be alone, at his work, creating.
He was called Mairon, the Admirable, for his works when he was still young enough in Eä to go about all the time without a fana. When he did wear raiment it was usually tall and slender and sharp around the eyes: as beautiful as he could make it, which was perfectly beautiful.
Others had feasts and entertainments and together explored the marvel that was Eä unmarred, as they would later call it, adjusting what they wished, plants and creatures and mountains, but Mairon did not do these things, for he saw little value in them.
Aulë's workshop alone—that was what he liked. Not a mote of dust moved in that workshop without Mairon’s permission, let alone the flickering of peskily inconstant ëalar. No one dared to disturb him. Until he did.
The appreciation Mairon deserved. The control to order everything neatly. That was what they spoke of. But there was a bottomless darkness to his eyes that Mairon could not stop looking at. It made Mairon want to take them apart. It made him want to drown.
Melkor had summoned Mairon to Angband. (Wasn’t it a sign of how far they needed to go still to regain their old footing, that it was Angband, and not Utumno? It would be on the site of Mairon’s old halls, what had once been a mere outpost, that he would greet his supposed master.)
With a little effort, Mairon banished the memory, and banished Thuringwethil who had brought the news to him—as though he could not feel his sudden impatience in the long reach of his thought! It mattered little where they met. Well, Mairon had meant to return, too, to Angband, to ensure things were well there: his presence, he was sure, was necessary to force the machinery of the fortress to smoothness. And he had meant to return, of course, to him.
A few years were nothing in their reckoning: that was how long it had been since the Bragollach, when Mairon had gone at his bidding to Tol-in-Gaurhoth. Still he felt strangely relieved at the knowledge that soon he would see him.
“Your spirit is different,” Finrod said consideringly, when Mairon’s fana became un-solid enough that Finrod’s golden hair and pale throat slipped through the same space his hand occupied. He relished the Elf’s shiver, and drew blood from the tender skin of his neck. He enjoyed the thought that the mark of his teeth would still be there when he returned: unless enough years passed that even the scar of it was gone. But that was unlikely. And anyway, what was time spent at his side?
Mairon smiled a red smile. “Perhaps I feel more myself.”
He had served Melkor faithfully: no one could gainsay that. Throughout the long years, he had been faithful. It had been thrilling, in Valinor, to give him the information he wished for. The power to give or deny it had been almost as thrilling. Before his fellows, Mairon had maintained his flawless composure, his raiment revealing nothing, his works so perfect that his fellows cast him unsettled looks and he privately scorned Aulë’s blithe praise, which he had formerly esteemed above anyone else’s. When he left for Utumno, flying on the wind from Aman to the world that was called ruined, he thrilled all the more. Never had another being challenged him so: never had another understood him, he thought. Never had he craved another as he did now—as he had ever after.
He frustrated him. He mastered him. He relied upon him: Mairon was quick enough to realize the latter. He could not fulfill his aims alone.
They had exploded on this point. It was not solely for any appreciation, for the love they shared, that Melkor had coaxed him to his side, but because Mairon could still do things which he could no longer: finer creations, elaborate schemes. Still? Mairon had snarled. He had spread his dark hands and told him he did not truly expect him to change. Still?! Mairon had screamed at him.
He was dizzy in the aftermath and the hall he’d lately built was in smoking ruins. If I admired thee not, Melkor said, his voice in Mairon’s mind like the grinding of the earth, as though that scornful word admired were at the center of it, dost thou think I wouldst waste my time with thee?
Thou hast ruined me, Mairon hissed. But his words meant more to him than he would say. He was already mollified.
Wilt thou go back and be the Valar’s slave? No? Then speak not to me on this.
I’ll speak to thee on what I like, Mairon said.
At least then his rebuke bore pleasure in it. Their spirits joined, and knowing what he knew now, Mairon seized a bitter sweetness in the way the Vala flooded his senses with the taint of grit like impurity in oil, the way Mairon could always provoke him to more force, the brutal unbeauty of it, the flare like a furnace again of the feeling that they understood each other, the way no one else ever would tear out and shove back into place each other’s delicate and ugly inner gears and workings. It was he who had shown Mairon want. There was no connection stronger than the one, like molten wire, that flared between them when Mairon felt his greater, kaleidoscopic power and knew his own spirit would be extinguished, no longer his own, if he overtook him just a little more.
They always held some piece of themselves and their thought back when this happened, no matter how pleasurable or near their joining was. He was never certain which of them held back thus first, but he always insisted, of course, that it was Melkor. Was it flattering himself to think himself capable enough—enough of a threat—to be distrusted by his master? Coldly, Mairon did not think so.
In his mind, Mairon showed him the improvements he was making to Eru’s first children. They would be ordered the way Mairon had craved control in his workshop, their wills broken to his control. Good, he said. They will be ours as surely as if they were new-made.
The words should have pleased Mairon, but they sent dissatisfaction through him alongside the pleasure, like a snake—along with ambition. He would new-make them: beyond the Valar’s platitudes about living beings, anything was open to him. He was right, in Valinor they had been unfree. There was no limit to the things they could create, especially with his power added to his own: no limit to the things they could accomplish. It meant little if Mairon’s skill had disappointed his own expectations lately: he would craft anything he wished of Arda marred. He would unmar it. Why not people it too with living things of his own new-making? (Later, he would mock him for attempting what he himself had already failed, as though he had not said it to put the thought in his head, and Mairon would make some bitter comment in return, and go back to changing the existing Children to suit their wishes, only hating them now for being another’s true work.)
Perhaps sensing the shifting energy in his spirit, the restlessness only forward movement could try to ease, he gave more of their domains into Mairon’s control despite their argument, and kissed him.
He took the form of a bird, then a darting bat, departing Tol-in-Gaurhoth, and no retinue. It would have only slowed him down. Alighting within the gates, Mairon took the form most familiar to the Balrogs flanking the hall—tall and flame-eyed and -haired, fearsome in dark armor—and began to change it as he strode within the next layer of the fortress.
Since the Bragollach, he would not depart: and so Mairon must go to him. No matter that it had been the most stunning victory they had yet seen: he would not depart, and he limped when he left his throne. It scared Mairon, even as it made him feel a little scorn, the faint prickle of his own power increasing by comparison. Yet he was disquieted even more: it was another reason he had meant to see him, he remembered, even before the summons. (Mairon had tried to tend his wounds, singing to reweave the Vala's ancient, damaged, imprisoning form, and when that was done not quite right he had cut down a score of Noldorin captives before his black eyes to comfort him.)
As he passed along the dark corridors, Mairon shifted his fana to an approximation of the one he had worn in Valinor. His eyes took on more gold, his hair brightened a shade and fell more neatly, and his skin took on a pearlier hue. The armor gave way to a ornately belted robe. No: that was too ornate. In those days he had preferred simpler things when he was in the workshop. There: it was simpler now, with just a touch of the adornment he had favored on occasion. The form was fair, though not so bright as it had been before. It would please him. Mairon enjoyed the transformation of his spirit, the quickness and change that he no longer possessed, and he, unchanging now, enjoyed the game of repossessing him.
When he came back from Valinor with Fëanor's thrice-damned gems, Angband was flooded with Treelight that exposed every fleck of dirt and blood upon the high columns Mairon had re-wrought and the armor Mairon had ordered forged for the new armies. (He had not done the forging himself: the multitude of greaves and breastplates was a mean task, and he crafted things rarely, and crafted thralls more often.) Mairon had spent three hundred years awaiting him, rekindling the fires that the Valar had extinguished, rebuilding Angband and recovering what could be recovered from Utumno. He had done his bidding on both sides of the Sea. He had longed to see him return to his power; he had longed to come into his own power at his side, to be the reason for his dominion, to be victorious and owed their victories. He had loved him, deeply loved him, and been sick with his absence. Yet now that he had returned, Mairon found himself staring as much at him as at the Treelight within the Silmarils, the work of Fëanor's hands. As if to add insult to injury, the beautiful things were then set in the most brutally simple, ugly band of iron, because Mairon would not craft them a setting and Melkor manipulated the metal himself. Thence, from his brow, they radiated their stark and perfect light.
Needst thou trophies to wear when we are alone? Mairon had mocked him once in the early days of his return, hoping to get him to take the damned thing off and give them a moment in real darkness again.
I’ll craft thee other gems, he had tried.
Better ones? Couldst thou do that?
Mairon didn’t remember in what fana he flew across the room, but the Vala tasted like ash under his teeth and refused to bleed beneath his long claws.
I should burn thy hands with them too, he said consideringly, in his ponderous voice. We’ll match then. Thou wouldst like that.
No! Mairon slipped from his grasp, retreating, and snatched them closer to himself, a hairsbreadth from slipping out of his form altogether at the threat. His hands were clumsy and scarred now. Melkor laughed. But Mairon sneered ‘Twas not Fëanor that enchanted the Silmarils, but Varda to see his face grow stony. He hated him then. He hated him, but he had never felt so much before. Wasn’t there intimacy in knowing where to cut each other?
He awaited him upon his throne, the darkness at the corners of the room encroaching on the circle of light the Silmarils cast and fleeing a little from the edges of Mairon’s form.
Mairon, he said, and Mairon’s spirit thrilled, rising like flame. After all these centuries, his attention still swept through him and about him, and Mairon’s eyes, open the way he had said, fixed themselves upon him with fierce greed. He filled Mairon’s vision: his being was too magnetic, too great to be contained in the vast, vaulted hall, though his form rested therein, drawing the shadows inward to the Silmaril-light, sometimes seeming nearly to extinguish it altogether.
And he was in a good mood: that was good. Very good. Had Mairon breathed, he might have exhaled, satisfied.
My lord, he said smoothly, wouldst thou hear my report?
Come closer, Mairon.
He knelt in a single fluid motion before that dark throne, that scarred foot. Yet his face was tilted upwards, ever upwards towards him.
Aulë's apprentice deigns to visit me? Melkor purred, as though he were unscarred, as though Mairon were undiminished. Mairon was only too pleased to indulge him. Perhaps he should have taken more care.
The simple clothes dissolved into smoke as he drew them from the other raiment of Mairon’s form. His hand was a scarred, blunt instrument in Mairon’s hair, which coiled flamelike into his touch.
What meanest thou? Mairon gloated and coaxed, looking up at him. I am perfectly safe.
He rose from his throne, the first of several small victories. A darkness throbbed through Mairon’s spirit like a mortal heartbeat, almost painful in how it bound him. O, he wanted: he always had. The metallic belt that still adorned his hips shattered into a thousand sparks at a jerk of Melkor’s hand. He tugged Mairon’s head back hard enough to break a captive’s neck, and Mairon made a noise that was not quite song at how it pleased him.
Mairon, he hummed through the spirit that dwelt instead of blood in his fana. I see why thou wert named such.
With pleasure the illusion of perfection Mairon had shown him was marred. Though the Vala’s claws did enough for that, they tore it to shreds between them and the grit of the stone floor upon his back. Mairon’s own need was too strong to maintain it, and he drew the being that ruined him closer with the centripetal force of a vortex, his play of resistance doing more harm to both of them than defense. Those scarred hands on him, those dark and mesmerizing eyes: that was what he wanted. How good they were, no matter that they changed…
I’ll enjoy what I have stolen from him. Him, in this game, was Aulë, whom Mairon barely remembered.
I am not thy own, Mairon said. When they finished and he smiled at Melkor licking the blood that ran from his shoulder, when Melkor laid his gauntleted arm over his throat and he smiled wider, he said, I am thine.
Their spirits twined together as they joined. It was a relief to be close thus, to feel him so near and present and darkly alive, though a fearful relief because as always his spirit threatened to overpower his own: he could lose himself there, like a ripple subsiding into a greater current. Yet as always they did not intertwine all the way.
Thou hidest things from me, Mairon. His attention, more visceral than touch, traced the thin scar on the throat of Mairon's fana. His voice resounded within this close, blurred space, further shrinking the difference between their beings. Things that are new.
When have I not? Mairon said sharply. He felt oddly weary, though he had just been so raw and bright.
Indeed, Melkor spoke with his mind. Somewhere nearby, his ruined hand tightened painfully upon Mairon’s fana. Yet if it goes badly, don’t forget what thou owest me.
If thou wilt do the same, Mairon said, more for feeling like he ought to say it.
Always those stubborn gestures of power, of clinging to the thought that he relied upon his capability. That he had something that was not purely his, and was therefore someone he had to take into account. Were these thoughts his own, or Melkor’s about him? Mairon was not sure.
Gradually, Mairon let his spirit find a surer place once more within its form, its borders returning and torn skin sealing like molten glass. The light of the Silmarils radiated over him, a distillation of the clear and brilliant light that had outlined his steps in Valinor. The soft echo of the same light in Finrod’s eyes was homely by comparison, barely noticeable. Why remember that now? Mairon wondered. Yet it was… Perhaps the great Fëanor had made a mistake, after all, and not captured the beauty of the Trees in full. Yes. That was why he had recalled him.
At his master’s order, Mairon returned to Tol-in-Gaurhoth.