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Celebrimbor clings to life. He has forgotten why he clings to it, but he sinks into the agony and abandons his reason. Time has come untethered from its delicate elven hold; there is only light, dark, heat, cold, and pain. The sounds of his own disassembling and the shattered screams that echo through his skull grow distant; his nose is blind to the stench of his own blood and offal. The world fades.
But does not descend into complete darkness, nor does the call of Námo split the silence. There are still strings holding his spirit to this land and its inhabitants and Celebrimbor follows the chain that shines the brightest.
He slowly emerges from his web of pain, curiosity cajoling him as it ever has.
Strange air, strange sounds, and song of unfamiliar stone prod him into an unpleasant task: taking inventory of his physical state. He is faintly surprised to realize he has none.
His senses are strange — how can he see without eyes, hear without ears? And yet he calibrates some kind of awareness, finding himself in an approximation of his former self.
He is in an empty workshop: strange, yet with traces of something familiar.
Celebrimbor feels a pang of loneliness. He had been expecting someone else, something had pulled him to this spot after all, though this compulsion is muted like everything is, the world a shadow of what it once was. I am the shadow.
Despite the loneliness — who wouldn’t be lonely, after so long with such intense attention paid him? — he is not regretful that he is not in Mandos. He never intended to return to the West while he was alive and his desire has not changed in death.
Celebrimbor drifts around the workshop, noticing that some objects spring out of the faded world. He stops by a hammer with a sharp bright outline, for there is spirit woven deep into its metal — a beloved and well-used tool reflecting the care with which its owner used it.
There is the sound of booted feet in the stairwell.
Sauron is bright when he enters, another thing in this dulled world that shines more than before. Celebrimbor wants to hide, or to run to his side, but he stays where he is. What is space to a ghost?
He expects Sauron to see him — after all, he is primarily a creature of spirit as he had often said. Yet he glides right through Celebrimbor. The scent of rot fills the room and a group of Men follow him in, their faces taut with barely-contained disgust at whatever is in their arms.
“Leave him there.” Sauron waves vaguely at the floor, and Celebrimbor realizes quickly they are carrying a corpse. His corpse.
He drifts over to examine his remains. He’s in bad shape, though it’s not like Sauron started with pristine material. The little flesh he has left is sagging and loose, the shape of still-firm bones poking up from the wreckage. His abdomen has split, the work of decay busiest there in the digestive organs, and its rot drips onto the floor.
“You are dismissed,” Sauron says, industriously pumping water into a copper tub. The Men do not linger.
Celebrimbor watches as his once-beloved bustles around the workshop, his step and the flick of his sleeves so familiar. He looks happy.
“Were they not so recalcitrant at the start, I might have had them up there instead. What do you think? We might have had two banners, one for each of us. Or spare the herald and raise your lovely cousin, she who spurned me also.”
Sauron addresses this to the corpse he is disassembling, neatly trimming limbs from torso, severing the head last.
Celebrimbor moves closer. It seems death has not deterred Sauron from conversing with him, and moreover that his participation is not required. He speaks anyway.
“Is your mind still filled with thoughts of Galadriel? I’ve made sure she’ll outlast us all.”
He wonders if Sauron can hear him, if anyone can hear him when he has no vocal chords.
“She was insolent,” Annatar says, though Celebrimbor is not sure if this is a reply. He lights the stove with his breath. “Yet in the end, there was no one but you. So you see your jealousy would be misplaced indeed.”
A wave of sadness washes over Celebrimbor — how tragic, to be lonelier than a ghost. But then he notices the wheel of fire circling Sauron’s index finger and his rage bubbles back up.
“You’re a proud fool, following your Master’s mistakes. Carving yourself into pieces for what? Power? Control? Your creation is foul, and its perfection only serves to make it fouler.”
Sauron is examining the severed arm, playing with the decayed fingers. He grasps the hand like Celebrimbor is still there to be comforted by a squeeze.
Something like pain passes over Annatar’s face.
“Enough of that. It’s time for a bath.” Sauron drops the severed arm into the tub.
~
Sauron is rather attached to Celebrimbor’s skull, so Celebrimbor’s ghost stays attached to him. He is not compelled to drift after Sauron, a stale breath of air dragged behind the itchy hum of Sauron’s aura; he could choose to go elsewhere. But there is still something connecting them, not love, but whatever is left when love dies. He chooses to follow the last person he knew in Ost-in-Edhil, though he does not feel he knows him anymore.
Sauron is busy, frantic in a way Celebrimbor did not remember him in life. Ordering, inspecting, drilling; there is no part of his war effort he is not involved in. But he still has time for Celebrimbor’s skeleton, now cleaned and reassembled in the workshop. Sauron does not care if he appears mad before his troops; it seems most are under the influence of the Ring, preternaturally biddable and pliant.
He is affectionate one moment, caressing the bones, circling the empty sockets with his fingers in an almost lewd manner — and irritated the next, suddenly shoving the skull away as if it has burned him, rushing from the room, the remains unbearable.
But he always comes back, or bids his minions fetch the skull, and then he will cradle it in his lap, stroking the smooth bone.
And talking to it.
“You are a skull,” Sauron says. “You cannot remember.”
Sauron seems put out by the boney presence, though he was the one who ordered the skull be brought to him in the first place.
“I remember—”
Celebrimbor pauses. His memory has faded like his perception of the world. The events of his long life are still there, and his ghostly mind can review them, but they are not as crisp as they once were. Celebrimbor has found he can get stuck, circling a memory over and over like a vulture.
“I remember you were kind, and not only when it served you,” Celebrimbor says at last. “You had greater patience with those who came to learn from us than I ever did.”
“I am as I ever was,” Sauron snaps.
It is almost as if they can actually speak again, understand each other in the bone-deep way they had, but then Sauron dons his smug armor of irony (this too Celebrimbor remembers) and asks, “How can I assist you, Telperinquar?”
“Destroy the Ring, abandon your war.” Celebrimbor says this, but even he does not believe it is possible anymore. He could not destroy his own creations when he was whole and filled with conviction; this splintered version of Annatar could not even think of wrecking his own craft.
“Let our works fade into obscurity,” Celebrimbor says.
This too is an empty urging. They would not be forgotten so easily.
“After you died I had you trussed to a banner pole and borne up at the fore of my legion.” Sauron says this lightly but his posture is rigid, his eyes fixed on the skull.
Ah. So that was what had gotten his corpse in such a sorry state.
Sauron is becoming visibly upset. He beats the mattress and bares his teeth. He slowly stretches his hand out to Celebrimbor’s skull, then staggers to it, resting his forehead against the white expanse. Then he picks it up with great gentleness and lays back down on the bed with it.
His hand drifts down, parting the ostentatious gold robe he wears.
The act is so painfully embodied Celebrimbor cannot stand it, and leaves Sauron’s side at last.
~
Mordor is grim, and there are few ghosts here, though there is plenty of death. Celebrimbor watches as orcs mine for iron in an open pit. It is a mockery of the precision and care he remembers of the Khazad’s operations, leaving the earth scarred, the water filthy, and the air full of fumes.
The sky is always grey or beige here, and Celebrimbor does not think that is merely due to his shadowed spirit-senses. Yet amid the dullness beauty lingers — there are rows of tilled earth, even a few trees, and sometimes he catches a child’s laugh among the low slave-huts that dot the fields.
But this is an accident, an unintentional side-effect of the life Sauron still requires to build his empire.
We were going to bring more beauty to the world. All you have done is pollute and destroy.
A yearning filled him for the clean Hithaeglir air and the sparkling waters of the Sirannon and Glanduin.
The last thread that tethered his heart to Sauron’s snaps.
~
For once, it is difficult to find Sauron. The shining link is gone. So Celebrimbor looks for his own remains first, and there he is: looking down at the skeleton, the bones laid out in an anatomical replica of how Celebrimbor had been assembled when he was alive, though a few were so badly damaged they were discarded.
“It’s time for me to leave.” Celebrimbor does not know what compelled him to speak to these unhearing ears — perhaps it’s because they never said goodbye in life.
“Absolutely not,” says Sauron.
“You cannot keep me here. I haunted you from habit, clinging to what once was, but I can feel the last pieces of the person I loved sloughing off. It will be better if I leave.”
“What, down to Khazad-dûm, to molder with your Naugrim friend?”
“Perhaps.” The calcium frame that had once been ensconced in meat and flesh is still here, but Celebrimbor’s works left other scattered markers he can feel pulling him away: rings, a name on a door, foundations of stone left after walls were pulled down.
“Your bones are mine. If you like I will set them in the center of the earth beneath a thousand thousand tonnes of rock and make of them a brighter harder jewel than any yet dreamt of. But they are mine.”
“I think it will be better if you begin to forget me.”
“What?” Sauron sounds stricken. They spent much of their last years speaking past each other, each sure the other was convinced by their vision, but the thread of their thought is aligning again.
“Forget me. You cut me out when you cut out your heart for that Ring — keeping my bones won’t fix that.”
“And so you cannot. The Age marches onwards.”
“I cannot forget you, maybe not; I do not think I can change or learn or grow in this state. As time marches onward I will be left as I was. You will not. Already you are almost unrecognizable, and I do not want to watch you change further. So I must leave.”
"Are you begging me?"
"Telling you rather. I think you have heard enough of my begging.”
“So be it,” Sauron says.
Sauron feeds the bones to the millstones himself — he has never shirked labor — but Celebrimbor is already following the tug on his heart, pulling him back to a place where he had poured out his spirit and imprinted stone and metal with flesh and Song.