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War had come to his gates between the blossoms of linden trees softly falling, between the songs of nightingales under the midsummer moon.
Celebrimbor thought he could hear the heavy thud of iron-toed boots just below the roaring of Sirannon, which they had turned long ago from a wide, languid river into a raging stream for their bellows and their forges. The noise made him half-deaf, but he told himself it was sweeter than any birdsong.
The smiths and artisans and alchemists of Ost-in-Edhil were getting ready for battle. If they were acting like a terrified flock of sheep, due to most of them having been born after the War of Wrath, they were, nonetheless, brilliant and cunning every one, and Celebrimbor was certain he could turn them into a proper army.
After all, he had been fighting for two thousand years, and that only if counted since the first sunrise. They should have been less surprised at how quickly their master-smith had turned into a general who ruled with an iron fist.
Celebrimbor had already seen two supposedly impregnable fortresses fall, and both due to treachery. This time, they were going to hold. If that meant that his guards had to go on double duty to ferret out the potential deserters, so be it. There was little time for niceties when the fate of Eregion was at stake.
Truly, was that his own thought? What happened to kings ruling by the faith invested in them by their men?
What had happened was Nargothrond, and Gondolin too.
Celebrimbor had sent away the Three well before he was told of the army of Orcs on the march; in fact, as soon as Annatar had stormed out of Ost-in-Edhil and rode away, due East according to Celebrimbor’s gatewarden. Celebrimbor assumed that Annatar had hidden the One beyond his ability to find it, too.
Instead of rings, now they had cannons and catapults, and hooks and spears galore, explosives to be thrown at the enemy and acid to be poured down. They had helmets, cuirasses and sabatons, swords and spears, some of them notched during the endless drills. They had amassed provisions to last three years and had turned the course of the stream to give them fresh water in abundance.
The best-defended city Celebrimbor had ever seen. He should’ve been proud.
Instead, he was lonely.
Strategy and tactics used to be their favorite topic, after metallurgy. Annatar knew many of the same battles, though, of course, all from the other side. His stories of the glorious victory of what Celebrimbor used to call the Tears Unnumbered, and the ignominious defeat of the Battle under the Stars, seemed designed to twist Celebrimbor’s mind out of shape.
He had enjoyed it, though. Now, he could admit it.
After all, it was not in Nargothrond that Celebrimbor had learned how to train the defenders, while Gondolin was so sure of its strength that nobody had even bothered to prepare for invasion, except, of course, his Silverfoot cousin. All his knowledge of strategy and tactics had come from their endless discussions, until the dawn and then some, while he was lying in Annatar’s arms, golden with sunrise.
Celebrimbor shook his head. Annatar’s arms, indeed. He’d be strangled now, and think it a good ending.
Did he… did they deserve it? An ending?
Even if it wouldn’t be a good one, Celebrimbor mused, at least it would be an ending, and some days he wished for little else.
---
The messenger had to kick the door twice before Celebrimbor noticed the noise and threw it open.
“Letter from enemy commander,” he growled. His hatred didn’t extend to breaking the seal, which was a good thing, because Celebrimbor would’ve thrown him out of the ranks and possibly, down from the walls.
Was he truly that desperate for a few words? They’d be mocking as likely as not, threatening at best. No good could come from the terms given by Annatar the lie-master.
Celebrimbor pushed the messenger out, slammed the door and locked it for good measure, and took a deep breath before opening the letter.
He wasn’t going to surrender, of course, and Annatar probably didn’t even deserve a reply.
What the letter contained instead was an invitation.
Not for Celebrimbor – for Annatar himself. To Ost-in-Edhil. For dinner before the battle that would determine if it would remain standing. Of course Annatar knew enough of war to realize this.
I would share with you a victory cup, and we wouldn’t need to say whose victory we’re drinking to, it said.
Celebrimbor could see the scars and calluses on the fingers holding the quill, the ghost of a satisfied smile at a successful turn of phrase quivering in the left corner of the lips. He doubted there had been anyone to watch Annatar write these words.
They had sworn to fight to the death, rather than surrender to each other the treasures they had so desperately sought.
If Celebrimbor wanted the One, it was only to keep it out of the reach of Annatar and anyone else who might use it to rule over Arda. If Annatar wanted the Three, it was only to corrupt what had been made beautiful and growing.
Though this was not what Annatar had vowed to do with the rings, once he got them on his fingers.
The Orcs now numbered in the thousands outside the walls, meticulously building the siege engines and the catapults.
There was no place for the soldiers of the Enemy in Ost-in-Edhil, Celebrimbor had told Annatar in no uncertain terms. Now, they were going to try to break through.
Celebrimbor scribbled a response at the bottom of the same letter, sealed it with the eight-point star of his signet, and called the same grumpy messenger to take it back through the lines. He threw in a golden arm-ring as a reward for the messenger’s courage.
---
Celebrimbor ordered to bring out his rarest wine, all the way from old Beleriand where fish were now darting between the rotten barrels. It might as well be drunk tomorrow, because the day after there would be nothing but water, until the fight was over, and then – well, then it would be the victors feasting in a ruined cellar.
He didn’t expect his palace to outlast the assault. He’d seen too many sieges and knew the machinery that Annatar had brought. He had designed some of it himself, as an exercise in measuring the forces and friction that would result in the most efficient battering ram. If his scouts were to be believed, he was going to see his designs in action at dawn, the day after tomorrow.
But first, there was one more day to get through, the worst in any battle, at least to Celebrimbor. That maddening day when the siege had already begun, and the assault is still being mounted, and there’s only so many times that one can polish the swords or load the stones for the cannons, or make sure there are enough bandages.
There were never enough bandages, nor water, nor essence of poppy, but the defenders of Ost-in-Edhil had no reason to know it. They had not walked through the ruins of Nargothrond.
Nor Angband, Celebrimbor thought with a shudder. The sludge, the ice and that strange heated river, now clogged… Celebrimbor still woke up sometimes with the smell of it lingering in his nostrils, though he had been kept back at the first gate, fighting the desperate last charge of the Balrogs, and Annatar, who had seen it all, who had lived through it all and had apparently spent decades gathering the survivors afterwards, had only spoken about it once, between sobs in Celebrimbor’s arms.
Celebrimbor wasn’t going to tell it to his Gwaith-i-Mirdain. They’d know soon enough. The terror at what they would have to see – at what they would have to do – would get blunted eventually, turned into a kind of black cynicism, if Celebrimbor’s own experience was any proof.
It had only been lifted from Celebrimbor himself when Annatar knocked on the gate and asked him if he could test this new contraption to add more air into the flame when forging iron.
The famous wave-banded steel of Ost-in-Edhil was only rivalled by their other discovery. Mithril, silver-steel, supple and tough and always cold on the skin. And damned near impossible to smelt from the ore into anything approaching purity. Annatar’s newly invented bellows were just the beginning of their experimentation.
Celebrimbor put the wine bottles on the table, and sent a messenger to the kitchens. A roast, for two, and get out the golden plates, for tomorrow evening.
He considered going through the plans again, but there was nothing complicated about being the besieged party. Instead, he took out his latest acquisition – a manuscript in Khuzdul that he had been painstakingly learning from his Khazad neighbors.
After another hour, Celebrimbor closed it with a sigh and walked down into the forges.
He knew he’d end up there, same as he knew that no sleep would be coming for him that night. After all, even if he somehow managed to squeeze out a victory, he might not be able to pick up a hammer ever again, or not by his own hands. If he lost... Well, that wasn’t worth thinking about.
---
Celebrimbor stoked the fire and turned on the bellows to start pumping by themselves, an improvement of Annatar’s own contraption that let both smiths work at the anvil together.
They had built themselves a rhythm, a way to understand each other without words while working. A single glance told Celebrimbor to increase the heat, a sharp raise of the elbow made Annatar slow down and move whichever piece he had been working on closer to Celebrimbor’s reach, and the pitch of the thud of their hammers served as a clear signal for when they were beginning to get tired and had to leave the work for the following day or risk ruining it.
At that point, Celebrimbor would usually end up in Annatar’s arms, complaining about the soot on his apron and secretly basking in the glow radiating from Annatar’s body, knowing that it meant that Annatar had briefly allowed himself to forget that he was an exile and a former warlord. For the precious few moments Celebrimbor would find himself in the presence of the craft-Maia, the fire-Maia, the forge-Maia of old.
Their inventions had fed on each other until they had caught the lightning and brought it to the streets of Ost-in-Edhil, and pumped clean water into every house. As befitting two former commanders, they had built machinery of war that could blow up mountains, and then lent it to the Khazad to delve deep under Caradhras. They had designed cannons and catapults and fires that could not be quenched with water, as a mere side project, when they felt too tired to concentrate, and tested new varieties of crops when they got bored of looking into the flames. Their city had grown in splendor until the silver ounce of the Mirdain had become the most-respected currency in all of Eriador.
And when they had felt at the height of their power and creativity, when their thoughts had burned brighter than their hungry kisses, they started forging the rings.
Celebrimbor thought that it had been his idea from the beginning. As a grandson of Fëanor’s, he had grown up on tales of light distilled and concentrated in jewel form, and had always thought that this power could have been tamed, could have been directed to be less destructive, more supportive of growth and of healing.
Annatar had been more interested in the kind of power that could be held over the minds, which, after all, ran on the same forces as the bodies did. Celebrimbor had always been a little uneasy about that. On the other hand, Annatar, who had seen Beleriand suddenly sink out of sight and out of memory, plainly spoke of his terror at using a ring to make the land lush and healthy, for what if that ring were suddenly lost?..
They had argued, and they had made up, and their hands had danced at the workbenches, and their words and their crafts alike had defied the Valar and the Noldor and the Lords of Utumno, and the fires that they had coaxed from deep within the Earth fueled their forges, and golden rings had hissed in the cold water of Kibil-Nala, losing their inscriptions as they cooled off. The jewels had come later, so did the designations.
Sometimes, just before the dawn, Celebrimbor used to climb down into the forges, alone, to work on his own secret. The Three Rings, those of growth and healing and preservation, of reawakening the vestiges of the world that he had once helped to break during the War of Wrath.
Sometimes, on moonless nights, while Celebrimbor was looking at the stars from the roof of his palace, Annatar used to climb down into the forges, alone, to work on his own secret. The One. The power he had been longing for, as the exiled general of a broken army, now starving and hunted in the forests between the settlements.
These forges are full of ghosts, Celebrimbor thought, and at least half of these ghosts were of himself.
All through the night, and the next day, he stayed away from the gold, and kept on purifying the last of the ores he had from Khazad-dûm. He had just enough of it to hammer a simple shape, a circlet, shining as moonlight and cold to the touch.
---
Celebrimbor was adding the final touches to even out the width of the circlet, when a loud knocking interrupted his work.
Rising from the bench, he was surprised at the cramps in his back and knees, and he couldn’t remember where the scratch on his forearm, now already half-scabbed over, had come from. Well, if this had to be his farewell to the forges, at least it was a fitting one.
“My lord,” shouted a messenger outside. “My lord Celebrimbor, a visitor has just arrived!”
“Take him to my chambers,” Celebrimbor said, peeling off his apron. He grabbed the circlet and pushed open the door, determinedly ignoring the shaking of his hands.
In his chambers, the table was set for two, as he had ordered. The roast was piled on plates of gold, and crystal goblets were shimmering in the candlelight.
A figure in an old grey cloak stood in front of the fireplace, its back to the door.
Celebrimbor closed the door and turned the key to lock it. His visitor must’ve heard him come in, but didn’t move an inch.
After a while, Celebrimbor cleared his throat.
“Annatar,” he said. “To what do I owe…”
“To me,” said the visitor, turning around and shrugging off his cloak.
His armor was black iron, polished to mirror sheen in so many facets that Annatar looked like a jewel, blazing with dark fire.
“Who else? Since you are too stuck up to invite me, what could I have done but invited myself?”
“For starters, you could have removed your army from my gates,” Celebrimbor shot back, falling into the familiar banter before realizing it. You are speaking to an enemy, he reprimanded himself.
“I most certainly couldn’t. There’s nowhere for them to go.”
“You could’ve asked me to solve this peacefully!”
“There’s about a hundred thousand, with families following behind. Our precious Gwaith-i-Mirdain would’ve thrown a fit at a dozen Orcs allowed inside the walls, and now…”
“So why are you here, then?” Celebrimbor asked in frustration.
“Because tomorrow, I’m going to win…”
Celebrimbor only raised his eyebrows at the hubris. That, he decided, would be answer enough.
Annatar ignored Celebrimbor altogether.
“…and we both know that the generals only fight in a single combat, singing of their prowess all the way, in the likes of the Noldolantë. Who knows if I’ll even see you alive, tomorrow. I’m not placing bets on myself surviving this, either.”
“You are so sure of victory,” Celebrimbor finally took the bait.
“Yes, well, I know we both have the same weapons, but the numbers are on my side. And the desperation.”
“My folks will be defending their home.”
“Mine will be fighting for a chance to have one.”
Celebrimbor opened his mouth for another reply, when Annatar silenced him with an outstretched hand.
“Should we have some wine?” he said, just a hint of a smile in his voice.
In response, Celebrimbor filled two glasses and offered one to Annatar. Their fingers touched, and Annatar openly sighed at the touch.
“Here’s to the joy of invention,” he raised the glass at Celebrimbor. “The rest be damned.”
Celebrimbor stared him down. “If you believed it, you’d be here, in the forges, and not leading a hundred thousand Orcs.”
“I am here,” Annatar smiled for real this time. “Not in the forges, of course, but for a night my Orcs can take care of themselves.”
“Tell me again, Annatar, why are you here? I know you too well to expect that it is just to give me your farewells.”
Annatar’s face abruptly lost all the joy, and without the smile dancing around his eyes, Celebrimbor could see how pale and worn he had become.
“The Three,” he said. “If we had them, we could – we could bring back what we once had. Rivers running hot and cherry blossoms falling in midwinter, and the fields and orchards underground.”
“And another War of Wrath? The Three remain my own,” Celebrimbor said with a finality. He had already received messages that they had reached their recipients.
“So you choose this war instead,” Annatar replied. “Which you will lose. How many deaths do you think are enough to pay for your stubbornness?”
“How many deaths for yours? If you gave me the One you had stolen, -“
“I had designed, -“ interrupted Annatar.
“It doesn’t belong in your hands. It doesn’t belong in anyone’s hands, and you well know it. Do you want another Ride of the Valar?”
“Not any more than you do. It’s a security, of sorts,” Annatar came closer to Celebrimbor. “As long as I have it, you may just leave me and mine to our own devices. Once we take what we need from here, of course.”
“Which is?”
“What do you think? Gold, silver, jewels? The lightning-catchers and the seeds from the vaults, of those crops we were working on right before I left. All the heavy machinery, of course. The explosives, too, those are annoying enough to make. And the entire hospital, if those idiots remember my orders not to break a single item. What? Did you think I wouldn’t admit it? What difference does it make now, anyway?”
Annatar drained his goblet in a single gulp, staring Celebrimbor in the eyes.
Celebrimbor only took a sip of his wine, before putting his own glass back on the table and fishing out the circlet from the folds of his cloak.
“Here. You had left all your jewels here. Your army needs to recognize their general,” Celebrimbor realize that he was beginning to babble.
He did not want to think why he had spent all this time making a gift for his enemy, so he focused on Annatar’s slender hands taking the circlet and putting it on. It shone cold against the dark of his hair, and was a perfect fit.
Annatar didn’t say a word. Instead, he pulled out a small bottle from a pouch at his belt.
“I have brought you a gift as well,” he said. “Just three drops of it will bring a painless death. I’d like to say that there will be no need for it, but we both have seen what happens when cities get sacked.”
Celebrimbor only nodded before taking the bottle from Annatar and placing it on the table.
When he stepped back, Annatar was in front of him in a flash, his arms so close to Celebrimbor’s that he could feel the heat radiating off the Maia.
“I’m not asking you to give in,” Annatar whispered. “Not even to understand… To remember, perhaps? Is that… Is that too much to ask?”
Celebrimbor could feel Annatar starting to break apart. He knew that he had to stop it, because if Annatar broke, then he would break too, and he had the city to save, tomorrow, Annatar’s assurances of his defeat be damned, and none of that could happen if he let himself fall into Annatar’s arms. And yet.
“I will remember,” Celebrimbor whispered back. “Promise…,” he reached towards Annatar’s face, his fingers trailing down from the circlet towards his chin.
Annatar leaned into the touch, his lips seeking Celebrimbor’s palm.
Celebrimbor's hand only shivered once before he pulled Annatar into a kiss.
That, he could afford. As long as he’d be the one to stop it too.
It tasted of wine, and salt, and iron.
Celebrimbor closed his eyes and refused to think of whose tears he was tasting. Of which of them had been desperate enough to draw blood.
Celebrimbor was the first to end the kiss. It had to be enough, for him.
When he opened his eyes, Annatar was wrapping himself into the same grey cloak, mithril shining from under the hood.
“Remember,” he said, voice low.
Celebrimbor couldn’t steady his voice enough to answer. He only watched as Annatar slowly walked to the door and turned the key to open it.
Annatar did not look back.
---
The stones remember.
“Deep they delved us,” they say. “High they built us. Fair they wrought us.”
“But they are gone.”