Chapter Text

Act I: Revelation

Wavering between the profit and the loss

In this brief transit where the dreams cross

The dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying

(Bless me father) though I do not wish to wish these things

From the wide window towards the granite shore

The white sails still fly seaward, seaward flying

Unbroken wings

Redeem the time, redeem the dream

The token of the word unheard, unspoken

Till the wind shake a thousand whispers from the yew

And after this our exile

T.S. Eliot – Ash Wednesday, Parts VI and IV

*

The beginning of the end announced itself with a deceptively polite knock on the door.

It was a late afternoon in early September and most lessons in the tower of the Jewel-smiths had already come to a close. The soft light of the setting sun was streaming through the windows into the classroom, where Annatar was in the process of stacking his notes for the recently-ended lecture on materials science, while the last two remaining apprentices were cleaning the workspaces and wiping the blackboard. He was just setting a stack of papers aside when a knock on the doorframe of the classroom caught his attention.

An elf was leaning there: slender, with auburn curls framing his angular face. He had his arms crossed in a casual manner, and a perpetually mischievous smile was tugging at the corners of his mouth – a familiar expression that put Annatar into a state of watchful alertness whenever the elf so much as entered the room.

“Daeror,” Annatar said, straightening. The two apprentices paused in wiping the blackboard. “To what do I owe the pleasure of your visit?”

Daeror let his eyes wander over the worktables and the assorted devices: volumetric flasks, torches, glass containers that held shavings of raw metals. He took it in with a slight frown, then turned to look at Annatar. “Am I intruding?”

“Aren’t you always?” Annatar replied wryly.

“You do me an injustice, Aulëndil.” Daeror cocked his head to one side. “I might have come here merely to watch and learn.”

 “The lesson is over, unfortunately.” To underline the finality of the statement, Annatar closed his book with an audible thud. “If you want to join the class, you have to come by earlier next time. Though that would be a surprise – I hadn’t taken you for one to be interested in the... precise sciences.”

Daeror blinked slowly, then his smile widened. “Then you know me well, Aulëndil. Indeed, some of us prefer beauty and art over crouching over microscopes, number tables, and tomes all day. I have not come here to join your lesson – much to the relief of both of us, I’m sure. I could never for the life of me sit still during a lecture, and I’m certain I would make a horrible student.”

“Something, at last, on which we can agree.” Annatar leaned against his desk and crossed his arms. “What then chased you away from your harps and sonnets and up into the revered halls of proper science?”

In the background, one of the students snorted, and then coughed when she failed to choke back her aborted bout of laughter.

Daeror’s gaze briefly flicked over to a point somewhere beyond Annatar’s shoulder. “What a way to talk about the art that created the universe itself, and for one of the Holy Ones no less.” The elf raised both eyebrows. “Where were you when the Song was Sung, Aulëndil? Watching from the sidelines and complaining about the noise while you were trying to invent arithmetics?”

“Something like that.” Annatar uncrossed his arms and set them on the desk at his sides, resting his weight on them. “You still haven’t answered my question, though.”

“That is a ridiculously obvious way of deflecting my line of inquiry. But oh well, I shall accept it for now. Though you must tell me about your role in the Song one day. I’m sure it is nothing short of amusing.” Daeror grinned and Annatar shook his head with a roll of his eyes. “I cannot wait to write my magnum opus about it and present it to everyone in the Mírdain.”

“May fate preserve us from the loquaciousness of bards,” Annatar said with a sigh.

“And from the prickliness of the Maiar,” Daeror countered easily. “Though your temper will surely brighten if I tell you just who has sent me.”

“You were sent here? I didn’t know you were working as a messenger in your free time.” Annatar ran a finger over his lips, an amused smile tugging at the corners of his mouth.

“I am not, and I can assure that I wouldn’t allow anyone to take up my time with such tasks – but as coincidence would have it, I was headed here anyway.”

“Why is that?”

“That, Aulëndil, is none of your concern,” Daeror deflected, still smiling. “Suffice it to say that I have my own business here, other than taking up your precious time.”

“I wouldn’t have guessed,” Annatar commented dryly. “So? Who sent you?”

“Tyelperinquar, of course!” Daeror exclaimed, making a wide, dramatic gesture with one arm. “Who else would have dared impose on me as I was walking by their study, minding my own business and thinking of neither the evils nor the over-enthusiastic scientists that might befall me!”

“You poor man.”

“Quite! I couldn’t even get a word in edgewise! He was clearly unable to contain his excitement, and he sounded very urgent when he asked me to tell you to come to the lake beyond the city walls and meet him there.”

Annatar raised an eyebrow, mildly intrigued. “And why couldn’t he come and fetch me himself?”

Daeror waved it off. “What do I know? You and your silversmith never deign to tell anyone anything about your oh-so-secret projects. It is remarkably difficult to get a straight answer out of either of you where your craft is concerned. As it is, Tyelperinquar hurried off before I could even get out so much as a “You’re welcome”, saying something about how he had to ‘figure out the water’ before you came.”

“Hm. That is curious,” Annatar said. “He seems to be onto something again.”

“Well, quite.” Daeror shrugged. “He sounded very excited, and I’m sure he wants to show you the wondrous things he has discovered. As it is, I have fulfilled my task and will now leave you to yours. Have a pleasant evening!”

“Likewise … wherever you might be headed to,” Annatar replied slowly.

“You have your secrets, I have mine.” Daeror gave a short salute, then turned elegantly on his heels and was gone.

Annatar stared after the insufferable bard for a moment, then turned around to face his students. “Finish cleaning up here. You may go afterwards. Leave the classroom unlocked – I will return at a later hour to fetch my writings.” The apprentices nodded. Annatar turned around and took a few steps towards the door, then stopped. “And no snooping around in the papers for the exam plans,” he added. “I will know.” He gave them a warning glance.

The young human man shrank a bit into himself, but the young Dwarven woman just gave him an unimpressed glance and blinked innocently.

Annatar narrowed his eyes at her, then rushed out of the room. He was in no particular hurry, but he suspected that Celebrimbor’s experiments with their new series of Rings had finally borne some fruit, and he would be lying to himself if he denied being curious to see what his friend might have found out. Thus it was with a fairly quick pace that Annatar made his way out of the towers of the Mírdain, then down through the lower rings and out of the city. Taking one of the smaller gates facing out towards the western woods, he descended the hill Ost-in-Edhil was built upon and followed a winding path through a copse of alders until the forest fell behind and the land opened up before him. About three quarters of a mile to his left he could see the long ramp that was leading up to Ost-in-Edhil’s main gates, the white stone gilded by the light of the setting sun. A wide plane of rolling hills stretched out for miles in all directions, the gentle meadows only broken by the shimmering surface of a small lake that mirrored the oranges, purples, and blues of the evening sky above.

Annatar had no trouble spotting Celebrimbor, seeing how the elf was the only living and moving being out in the open as far as he could see. However, for once Annatar wasn’t entirely sure he could trust his eyes. He was not in the habit of doubting his senses – they were as acute as they could possibly be while he was inhabiting a physical body. Still, for an instant sheer disbelief stopped him in his tracks. Annatar blinked and, sure enough, his eyes had not deceived him, however improbable the picture before him might be: Celebrimbor was there and he was walking back and forth upon the surface of the lake.

Now that would certainly explain his excitement. Annatar watched him for a while, regarding Celebrimbor as he tested out his newly-found power. The elf’s steps were careful at first, but when the water kept bearing his weight, his caution quickly gave way to excitement and curiosity. The elf tapped his foot against the water surface, creating some concentric waves. Gingerly he tested whether the waves would, in fact, trip him when he stubbed his toes against them (which was not the case). Following this he went on to try whether he could still submerge his hands or feet in the water (which worked just fine).

Then Celebrimbor stretched out his arms and lifted his hand, and a glittering stream of water followed his movement, twisting and coiling in the wake of his movements like a translucent serpent. Celebrimbor turned and flung out his arm, and the stream of water shot out in a graceful arc before bursting into a rain of glittering droplets that refracted the light of the setting sun. For a moment Celebrimbor seemed to stand suspended in time, bathed in the splintered colours of the light. It appeared that he was standing in the midst of fire, for the lake was mirroring the flaming colours of the sunset above, while water and air rushed around him as the light of the sun shattered into rainbows.

Annatar stood absolutely motionless, his eyes never leaving Celebrimbor. He would likely have remained there, rooted to the spot and watching, had the elf not turned around at that very moment and spotted him.

The passage of time resumed. Wind and sound returned to the world.

Annatar took a brief moment to compose himself, then he approached Celebrimbor who was now turned towards him, standing nonchalantly on the surface of the lake, as if there was nothing more natural than elves walking on water. The glimmer in Celebrimbor’s eyes alone betrayed his excitement.

Annatar walked up to the edge of the lake, stopping just short of the water lapping softly at the shore. “I see your self-made apotheosis is coming along nicely,” he commented mildly.

Celebrimbor grinned. “Oh, it is. I suspect I might be all-powerful as soon as I learn to run on water without stumbling.”

Annatar laughed. “The world shall look upon you and tremble when you do, I’m certain.”

“The world shall be safe from me for quite a while in this case.” Celebrimbor slowly walked closer until he was standing only about two feet in front of Annatar.

Annatar tilted his head to one side. “I wouldn’t count on it.”

“I would.” Celebrimbor raised his hand and held it up for both of them to see, showing a silver ring and its ultramarine gem gleaming in the last rays of sunlight. “The enchantment is a minor one, but already almost impossibly complicated. The nature of water was so hard to capture that I was beginning to fear it was simply not feasible to incorporate its aspects into something as immutable and inflexible as a gem stone. Now it seems I found a way to establish at least a basic bond with the element, although I’m not sure what the extent and limits of the Ring’s powers are. What do you think of it?”

“I don’t need to tell you that no mortal has achieved this in millennia. Perhaps not ever,” Annatar said softly. “I didn’t know your grandfather, but even he needed the ships of the Teleri to cross the Sundering Seas. I imagine he wouldn’t have taken them if he had been able to walk on water.”

As always, a shadow briefly passed over Celebrimbor’s eyes at the mention of his grandfather. Before it could take hold, Annatar reached out and took Celebrimbor’s right hand in his own, regarding the ring and the ultramarine blue stone set into it. “But you captured even more in this ring, didn’t you? I saw how the water followed your call. How much can you do with this?”

“Truth be told, I don’t know,” Celebrimbor admitted. “I’ve only just finished it and I haven’t gotten around to experimenting with it a lot, so I haven’t been able to test its limits yet. I do have a few ideas, though.”

Annatar looked up from Celebrimbor’s hands and at his face. “And those would be?”

Celebrimbor pulled his hand out of Annatar’s grasp and took a few steps backwards. “I was thinking about testing my control over the element while working with or against external parameters. How far can I bend it beyond its normal physical properties? How much can I delay or stretch the limits of its phase transitions with my will as my only tool?” The elf made a small, sharp gesture, and a thin sheet of ice briefly crystallised at Celebrimbor’s feet before melting again. “It would be fascinating to see to what extent a will could shape the world with the aid of the Ring with a bit of time and practice. For example, could I force water to freeze in warm temperatures and remain frozen even when flame is directed at it? Or – to follow that train of thought further: how would two elements interact when they are no longer governed by the laws of nature, but by the strength of will?” Celebrimbor looked at Annatar, a curious look in his eyes.

Annatar raised both eyebrows. “You are getting ahead of yourself, Tyelperinquar. You are not one of the Powers. Yet,” he added with a grin and a brief flash of teeth. “So if you are suggesting that I throw fire at you, I must disappoint you.”

Celebrimbor cocked his head to one side. “I refuse to believe that you have so little control over your powers that you couldn’t keep your fire from harming me.”

“There are plenty of ways you could harm yourself with this, even with me taking all possible precautions on my end,” Annatar replied. “I refuse to run this risk just to satisfy your curiosity.”

“I merely believe in the benefit of practical experiments,” Celebrimbor replied with a wry grin.

“There are safer experiments you could conduct until you are more certain of yourself and the extent of your control, both over the ring and over water,” Annatar said. “I’m sure you will find plenty of hypotheses in the meantime that are less dangerous to test, and just as interesting.”

“Ah, what a pity.” Celebrimbor sighed. “But you are, of course, right. I can think of plenty of questions regarding the Ring that could be both entertaining and enlightening to answer. For example, could water that is controlled by my will momentarily overcome a stronger, but less focused willpower and drench a usually very water-resistant Maia if I caught him off guard?” Suddenly Celebrimbor grinned and with a quick, sweeping gesture, the water reared up like an uncoiling snake and surged forward.

For all his supernatural reflexes, Annatar wasn’t quite fast enough to avoid it entirely. He took a quick step backwards so that only the edge of the wave brushed him, but it was enough to drench the front of his robes from the chest down.

For a brief moment, Annatar was actually rendered speechless. He was used to Celebrimbor treating him no differently than other colleagues when it came to status, and with no particular reverence that others might have afforded a primordial entity that was older than the world itself. Apparently though, Tyelperinquar had unlearned any and all humility in the face of beings greater than himself – whether he had ever possessed it in the first place remained open to debate.

No one spoke, until Celebrimbor said, “Well, that worked splendidly”, with a smile on his face that was not even slightly apologetic.

Annatar raised an eyebrow. “Oh, did it?”

“I would think so.”

“Would you?” Annatar narrowed his eyes. “Think again.” He quickly jerked his chin in a brief sideways motion, and before Celebrimbor could react, a wave of both water and disproportionate retribution rose up to once and for all to answer the logical follow-up question of whether a Maia might be drenched with impunity.

*

Half an hour later, Celebrimbor and Annatar were walking back the woody path towards Ost-in-Edhil. Celebrimbor was dripping puddles as he walked, but this didn’t do anything to dampen his spirits. The late summer air was warm, even beneath the canopy of alders, and flecks of golden sunlight were flitting over his legs and arms as he went. “Well, that was nice,” he said cheerfully.

To Celebrimbor’s left, Annatar just gave a brief huff. He was, as a matter of fact, fully dry, with not a single fold of his robes out of place. “If you say so. I honestly don’t see what could possibly be nice about being in repeated physical contact with water – but whatever makes you happy.”

“Ah, Annatar, I will never understand why you dislike water so much.” Celebrimbor stretched his arms over his head and laughed brightly.

“It is cold, it is wet, it reeks like decay and death, it slows and hinders, and it only ever pulls everything downwards,” Annatar retorted. “As someone who appreciates the diametrically opposed traits of fire, I fail to see its appeal.”

“For someone who dislikes the element that much, you have an impressive ability to control it,” Celebrimbor noted. “I knew you had an affinity for earth and fire, so I assumed you’d have a harder time with the opposing element of water.”

Annatar shrugged. “You are mainly left-handed, and you still manage to write and complete all manner of tasks with your right hand. Exerting my will over water is a similar thing for me – it requires more effort and focus, and I will always be more powerful and naturally precise when relying on elements that are closer to my own nature. However, that doesn’t mean I cannot bend it to my wishes at all.”

Celebrimbor thought about it for a moment. “It’s a fine analogy, though it amuses me that you would compare your control of water to my right-handed chicken scratch.” He looked at Annatar and smiled. “Anyway, it was extremely interesting to see you display your powers for once. You are always so reluctant to use them, and when you do, you never do it in an open or noticeable way.”

Annatar raised both eyebrows. “For good reason, as today’s events should have demonstrated.”

“I don’t know what you mean. A few splashes never hurt anyone, and a late summer swim is always nice.”

“Speak for yourself.”

“You sound like a cat, if cats could talk.” Celebrimbor laughed and shook his head, spraying droplets of water everywhere.

Annatar raised his hand to shield himself. “Says the one who’s acting like a dog right now.”

*

Speaking of cats must have invoked some unholy summoning ritual, for upon entering his rooms in the tower of the Jewel-smiths, the first thing Celebrimbor saw was Annatar’s black cat perching comfortably in the midst of his inked sketches of ring designs. The insufferable creature had practically burrowed itself among the papers, where it had kneaded the most advanced sketches for ring designs into crumpled balls before plopping down on them and curling up to sleep. As Celebrimbor discovered, the cat had compensated for taking up lodgings by dropping a dead, half-eaten rat in the middle of the room. The other half of the rat existed as a formless regurgitated mass that the cat had mindfully thrown up over the carpet in the middle of the room, so as not to soil the floor.

Celebrimbor picked up the cat who let out an indignant yowl in response and unceremoniously shoved her into Annatar’s arms. “Take your little monster and keep it away from my desk.”

“She’s a cat,” Annatar said archly, though faint amusement tinged his voice. “I can’t tell her what to do.”

Celebrimbor threw him a pointed look. “You are one of the Holy Ones, I’m sure you’ll find a way to keep a cat in line.”

Annatar frowned, while the little black beast climbed up onto his shoulder and perched there, glaring daggers at Celebrimbor. “Cats are not dogs, to be trained to act and do only as their master pleases. It is in her nature that she should have a will of her own.”

“Which expresses itself exclusively by sitting on my notes whenever I try to write, or retching up hairballs all over my sketches.” Celebrimbor pointed over at the crumpled notes on his desk.

“Well.” Annatar brushed his index finger over his lips, trying to hide a smile. “You’ll just have to get into the habit of keeping the doors to your rooms closed.”

“As if that would help,” Celebrimbor retorted. “I’m convinced that this little demon of yours is able to either walk through walls or materialise wherever it wants, because it keeps getting into my study and my bedroom, no matter how much I take care to keep the doors closed.”

“Hm, I wonder why that is,” Annatar remarked lightly.

Celebrimbor gave Annatar a long look. “Yes, I was wondering about it myself,” he said pointedly.

“I wouldn’t know.” Annatar shrugged. “Maybe you’ll just have to pay better attention.”

“Or maybe I’ll have to extend the ban of cats in my private rooms to lesser gods.” Celebrimbor raised an eyebrow.

“Or maybe you’ll just have to learn to accept and embrace creatures different from yourself. Aren’t you always advocating for accepting and cherishing the things that make us diverse and special?”

“So you are saying I should be glad that you keep letting the cat wreak havoc in my rooms?”

Celebrimbor was momentarily tempted to tell Annatar what he thought of twisting his words like that. However, just then another idea came to him and he held up his hands in surrender. “You know what? You’re right. I should not be so strict with you and the cat. Let me make up for my mistakes and correct my errant ways.” Celebrimbor took a few steps towards Annatar and the cat with his arms spread wide.

The cat actually let out a hiss and Annatar stopped him short with a hand on his chest. His palm was slightly too hot against the wet fabric and Celebrimbor’s cool skin to be considered normal. “What do you think you are doing?”

“Embracing you and the cat, as you wanted.”

“Don’t you dare approach me in this state, Tyelperinquar.”

The cat hissed again, fur bristling and standing on end.

Celebrimbor sighed. “Ah, you and the cat, you’re just the same.”

“Yes, we both have a sense of common decency. I recommend that you acquire one as well. Now change into something dry, like a normal person.”

“Oh, don’t worry. I will.” Celebrimbor walked past them towards his wardrobe, then quickly turned around, but not without quickly and furtively flicking a lock of Annatar’s hair. The cat on Annatar’s shoulder had been staring at him, seemingly only waiting for Celebrimbor to get his fingers near her where she could claw at them. Her pupils dilated and within an instant she pounced, nearly toppling off Annatar’s shoulder in her excitement and clawing into his back and hair so as not to fall.

Celebrimbor walked on, not turning around and pointedly ignoring both Annatar’s hiss of dismay, accompanied by the cat spitting in protest, as well as the sounds of the ensuing scuffle at this back. “I keep telling you, you should keep your hair tied back during the day,” he said, fighting to keep his tone serious. “It’s a matter of workplace safety inside the workshops, and a matter of practicality everywhere else.”

Annatar didn’t reply, but Celebrimbor could feel the Maia’s eyes boring into his back when he opened his wardrobe and pulled out a set of more comfortable clothes.

When he turned around, Annatar had gotten his cat back under control, though the left shoulder of his robe and some strands of hair were looking a bit worse for wear.

“I am going to take a shower,” Celebrimbor said, walking over towards the bathroom door. “I’d thank you if you put the cat out and cleaned up her mess in the meantime.”

*

Chapter Text

*

Celebrimbor was wondering whether he would really find the cat gone when he returned, but to his pleasant surprise, he found his study cleaned up, the papers on his desk neatly stacked, and the little black monster nowhere in sight.

The sky was growing dark, with deep reds and violets glowing on the western sky. Annatar had lit the lamps in their ornamental iron cages, dousing the room in soft, orange light and dancing shadows.

Right now, Annatar was leaning over the desk, his back turned towards Celebrimbor, while going through their latest calculations on the elemental rings and turning the Ring of Water absent-mindedly over in his right hand. It was a picture of precise focus and silent intensity – every angle and shadow, every contour and movement appeared incredibly sharp in the light of the setting sun. Celebrimbor could see the slightly red-golden reflection of firelight on Annatar’s hair and robes, and the sinews in his hands working under his skin, highlights and shadows shifting and rolling over the back of his hand with every motion of his fingers.

Celebrimbor leaned against the door frame with his arms crossed and let his gaze roam over Annatar’s form: this perfect imitation of a living, breathing being. The illusion was so flawless that Celebrimbor could utterly forget about the true mind-shattering nature of the Maia for weeks on end. Each time that he remembered was as surprising as suddenly becoming aware of his own heartbeat. For like his heartbeat, Annatar’s true nature was always there, so familiar and unobtrusive that it faded into the background – and yet, if he paid attention, its thrumming reverberated in every cell of Celebrimbor’s body with such intensity that it was impossible to conceive how he could possibly have forgotten about it in the first place.

There is a lesser god in my study. The thought hit Celebrimbor out of nowhere and he had to suppress the sudden urge to laugh out loud at the absurdity of this statement that was nothing less than the summary of his ordinary, day-to-day life. He is brilliant and prickly, at once alien and approachable, with a strangely dry humour and oddly mundane habits and quirks. He dislikes water, aimless discussions, and disorganization, but loves candied fruit, heated debates, and cats. He is a lesser god, and he chose me to work with him. He offered to become my teacher, and in the process, he became my dearest friend. If I told it to someone who didn’t live here with me, in this place and time, would they believe me?

“Do you care to share what is giving you cause for such amusement, Tyelperinquar?” Annatar asked, without turning around.

Celebrimbor shifted his stance slightly. “Oh, I was just thinking about how strange it is that I see nothing extraordinary in having a Maia in my rooms. We have gotten so used to having you around that we have thoroughly forgotten that not every city has one of the Holy Ones to call their own.”

Now Annatar did turn around, leaning back against the edge of the desk. “How bold of you – laying claim to me.”

“You have been living amongst us and working alongside us for too long for some not to lay a claim to you,” Celebrimbor replied, amusement tingeing his voice. “Some even call you our Melian,” he added.

“Do they?” Annatar said slowly. “How peculiar.”

“Is it?” Celebrimbor asked, still smiling. “I do see some similarities. You chose this city, just as Melian chose Menegroth.”

A brief pause. “Melian did not choose Menegroth,” Annatar replied and tilted his head slightly to one side. “She chose Thingol.” His expression was hidden in the backlight of the sunset. “Menegroth was a side effect.”

Celebrimbor, too, cocked his head aside, mirroring his friend. “It seems I must correct our friends’ assumption, then.”

A long pause. “Not necessarily,” Annatar said slowly. The words were easily spoken, but there was a false bottom to them: a dare to enquire further, a barely hidden admission, the lure of a revelation.

“No?” Celebrimbor asked, although his heart had begun to beat faster. “What was it that you chose?”

The silence was vibrating, the air thick with building energy like a rising storm. The sun went up in a ball of fire, the inferno refracted through the windows and the glass shard mobile dangling over the desk and reflected from the mirror on the left-hand wall. Annatar was all shadow now, outlined by a blazing corona of golden light.

Slowly, the Maia set the ring aside on the desk, then extended his hand towards Celebrimbor. Annatar’s eyes flashed amber-golden through the shadows veiling the rest of his face.

For a moment Celebrimbor stood in an equilibrium of light and darkness as purple-lilac dusk slowly submerged the room from bottom to top like dark water, slowly rising as the sun sunk behind the Western Mountains. He was looking at his friend, watching as twilight revealed his hidden features one by one, and the world transformed into something soft and mystical in the silver light of moon and stars.

Slowly, as if in a dream, Celebrimbor pushed himself off the door frame where he had been leaning to cross the room, letting himself be drawn towards Annatar.

Annatar didn’t move when Celebrimbor approached, he merely waited as Celebrimbor took his extended hand, and then gave the gentlest of pulls towards him before lowering both of their still intertwined hands to rest between them.

Celebrimbor stopped just in front of Annatar. The air between them was warm with the remembrance of sunlight and, perhaps, other things, and there was a pulsing energy reminiscent of a low, steady heartbeat. With the low light and the shadows shifting on his face and his glowing eyes, Annatar appeared more than ever like a strange, unknowable entity, which – through twists of fate that could never be unravelled – just so happened to be standing before Celebrimbor.

I am standing face to face with a god. The thought returned suddenly, violently, and with the force of a hammer-blow that momentarily stole his breath away.

I am standing face to face with a god, and I –

“I think you know the answer to your own question,” Annatar said.

“At times I find it hard to distinguish between the knowledge of what is true and the hope for what I want to be true,” Celebrimbor replied.

“What then, were you hoping for?” Annatar asked.

“Âzhrai,” Celebrimbor said, the Valarin word reverberating strangely in the still air. Us. First person plural inclusive.[1] I hope that you chose us – all of us, everyone in this city, including the choice to let yourself become part of us.

Annatar just looked at him, a slight smile playing around his lips. “Almost, but not quite. It is not wrong, but it is not describing the entire truth, either. Êzhirai would be the correct term.”

“What does that mean?”

“It also means “us”, but it is the first person dual absolute.” You and me and no one else.

Annatar’s voice was calm and measured as he said this, as if there was nothing special about it, as if his words weren’t enough to make Celebrimbor feel like the floor had dropped out from beneath his feet.

I am standing face to face with a god, and he chose the two of us.

For a while there was only silence, thick with all the unsaid things that hovered like ghosts in what little space remained between them. Celebrimbor looked at Annatar and the Maia looked back at him, his golden eyes bright in the falling dusk. Seconds passed like slow, pounding drumbeats, reverberating through Celebrimbor’s heart and ribs and stomach. There was a tightly wound knot in his chest, expanding outward with unrelenting force and almost unbearable to contain.

It was an ember of desire that had formed and coalesced over centuries, only held in check by self-control, professional distance, and the knowledge – or the excuse he had taken refuge in? – that some chasms were too great to bridge. Work and ambition and the certainty of the impossibility of his wish had allowed him to file it away, to push it to the back of his mind and regard it as nothing other than a childish fluttering that would lose its novelty and, eventually, cease as the years wore on. His feelings would abate, and his attention would inevitably wander elsewhere. And for years it seemed like his prediction would hold true.

Celebrimbor had been aware of the notion, always there at the back of his mind, deceptively meek and seemingly dormant, for there was no kindling to stoke the fire. He had believed it to be something he could hold back, something he could control, and if need be, set aside forever.

But then Annatar had, for the first time ever, reached out to Celebrimbor in a way that made it undeniably clear what Celebrimbor was allowed to want from him. What Annatar was willing to give. Offering, even though he had not spoken the words aloud.

But now he had extended his hand towards Celebrimbor and all Celebrimbor had to do was … reach back. Ask.

If he was not granted what he wished for right here, right now, he never would be.

Celebrimbor slowly raised one hand to Annatar’s face. The Maia let it happen, motionless, his eyes never leaving Celebrimbor’s.

Celebrimbor laid his palm against the side of Annatar’s face, his fingers tracing the perfect imitation of a living, breathing body – the warm skin, the rise of taut muscle and hard bone underneath, the curve of his lips.

What a magnificent creation, the elf thought, what a marvellous illusion. How fitting, that you should have created your greatest, most sublime masterpiece out of yourself.

Celebrimbor looked at the golden curls that fell in lazy waves over Annatar’s shoulders and down his back, not a hair out of place. He glanced down at Annatar’s robe, drew in a slight breath, and gingerly touched the unmarred white cloth at his shoulder where the claw tears had been not half an hour before, letting his fingers glide over the flawless imitation of fabric, whose existence was imposed upon the world by mere willpower alone.

“Is it at all times a conscious decision to let other beings touch you?” he asked slowly, running his fingers over the embroidery on the collar.

Annatar was silent for a few moments. “Yes,” he said at last.

Celebrimbor looked up at him. “Is it difficult for you? To have someone or something actively reaching out for you and accept its touch?”

Annatar’s golden eyes seemed to glow strangely in the candlelight, but his posture seemed at ease. “Sometimes. It was harder in the beginning when I was still getting used to being incorporated, but it got easier with time, as do all things when one gets used to them.”

 Celebrimbor frowned slightly, recalling one of Annatar’s lessons that he had attended as a spectator, as he was wont to do at times; they had made a habit of occasionally visiting and listening to each other’s lectures.

He remembered how the Maia had demonstrated a highly dangerous experiment which required absolute precision in its execution to a student, but hadn’t touched her even once in the process. Annatar in general didn’t seem to seek out physical contact with any living beings, save for his cat – and sometimes with Celebrimbor, his hands especially. People, on the other hand, didn’t reach out for the Maia. Celebrimbor was almost sure that it was not because they were afraid of him (not all of them, at least, though a case could be made for some of his younger students); it simply didn’t seem to occur to them. Shoulders didn’t seem to brush or bump Annatar when he moved through crowds; he was never asked to dance during a ball; children never tugged at the hem of his robes.

“Do you discourage the very notion in those that are around you?” Celebrimbor continued, without breaking eye contact.

The Maia smiled slightly. With the low light and the shadows shifting on his face and his glowing eyes, the Ainu seemed more than ever like an unknowable, strange entity, so far removed from anything that Celebrimbor could comprehend as Varda’s stars from Arda.

I am standing face to face with a god. The realization returned with the force of a hammer-blow, its full scope beginning to radiate over the horizon of mortal comprehension like a rising sun.

“Not more and not less than anyone else might do by using certain postures, gestures, or body language,” Annatar said at last, his voice low and soft. “But yes, I do. In most cases.”

It was not spoken as a secret revealed or as a grandiose announcement. It was a simple statement, and yet in its simplicity it was overwhelming how far Annatar could remove himself from the confines of the physical world if he chose to. He would never have to suffer a touch, a shower of rain or the burn of a fire that he didn’t explicitly choose to allow to reach him.

“And yet there are some touches of the world that you allow.” Celebrimbor brushed the pad of his thumb over the collar of Annatar’s overcoat, then after a brief hesitation, raised his hand higher and ran his fingers over Annatar’s jaw, brushing the corner of his mouth almost imperceptibly.

Annatar didn’t move. He simply watched Celebrimbor. He did not appear guarded or tried to remove himself from Celebrimbor’s hold. There was no surprise on his face, just an unreadable expression like a closed book or a wiped slate.

“There are exceptions,” Annatar said. “Some are carefully and consciously chosen. Others were forced upon me against my will.” The last sentence was spoken in a hard, flat tone that belied a sudden, underlying sharpness.

Celebrimbor’s gaze landed immediately upon the scar that cut through Annatar’s left eyebrow and down past the corner of his eye to his cheekbone – a remnant and reminder of an encounter with a Balrog deep below the kingdom of Khazad-Dûm that Annatar had survived as narrowly as the claw strike had missed his eye.

Celebrimbor remembered the conversation they had had after Annatar had recovered enough to get up and move around for the first time after his self-induced stasis to avoid the destruction of his physical form and salvage what could still be salvaged.

“Could you have undone this?” Celebrimbor had asked, fingers brushing over the thin scar, the sheen of Khazad-Dûm’s lampstones painting a twin shadow of his hand across his friend’s skin.

Annatar’s gaze had darkened, turning his head towards the mirror where he had been regarding his reflection for the past half hour, his gaze dark and his face like stone. “No. There are limits even to our powers of shaping ourselves contrary to what we experienced and suffered. Most things will not harm us and most wounds will not leave a scar, but there are marks that go deeper than the mere form we choose to assume. These marks are ingrained upon our ëalar and no matter how much we change our appearances, they will will remain. Our fana, too, will carry the marring forever.”

“Are you still bitter about that?” Celebrimbor inquired gently, tracing the fine white line with his index finger.

“Would you have me rejoice over permanent marring on my face?” Annatar responded, raising one eyebrow.

Celebrimbor frowned. “Do not speak of it as marring.”

“What else should I call it?” Annatar replied curtly, perhaps sharper than the question warranted.

“Call them what they are: scars.”

“Where is the difference?” Annatar asked sharply and withdrew from Celebrimbor’s touch.

Celebrimbor pondered the words for a while, regarding Annatar’s angry, closed-off expression, then took his friend’s hand in his own. “Come, I want to show you something.”

Annatar’s expression remained dark, but he allowed himself to be pulled along. Celebrimbor led them into his bedroom and over to a spot where a few armchairs were arranged around a table in front of a hearth built into the stone wall on its northern side.

He noticed Annatar’s brief hesitation at the threshold – his friend had never entered here before and even as a Maia he must be aware of the weight of an invitation into one of the most private rooms mortals possessed. It was amusing, looking back that they had – despite their century-old friendship – never been in here together – not even to look for one of the books of Celebrimbor’s private collection, arranged neatly on the high shelves lining the eastern wall. Then again, Celebrimbor mused, their relationship had always had a different focus – and in a way the time they had spent side by side in the workshops and forges had allowed them to share more intimate moments that were so uniquely theirs – propelled and tied together by a shared desire, a vision, dreams and discoveries – than laying bare their living spaces to each other could ever have had.

 Celebrimbor put aside a few books and scrolls he had laid down on one chair and lit the lampstone on the small side table before sitting down on one chair and indicating for Annatar to do the same.

Annatar slowly lowered himself onto the chair, his eyes always fixed on Celebrimbor as he lifted his left foot onto the edge of the table between them. The wood was cool under his bare sole. Celebrimbor leaned forward and rolled up his trousers up halfway to his knee. He shifted a bit so as not to block the light of the lampstone and its yellow glow fell upon the familiar ring of angry red flesh around his ankle, welted and oddly glistening as if the skin had been melted and turned to wax.

“A Balrog gave me this scar,” he said, tracing his index finger along the oddly taut and smooth ring of skin, with its edges that were in places serrated and undefined in others. Touching it evoked a strange feeling – a numbness, a missing feedback: the dissonance of knowing that he was running his hand over his scar while not registering the contact in the dead skin itself, but merely through the press of his finger pads. “My father, my uncle, and I had been hunting it down after a battle. It was grievously wounded and we didn’t want to leave it alone for long enough to regain some strength and turn around in order to hunt us. It hid in the forest and we almost missed it.” He spoke slowly, still absent-mindedly tracing the scar.

“When we did notice it, it was almost too late. It was not as wounded as we had previously thought – or maybe it was just desperate. And what we had wanted to avoid at all costs came to pass: we turned from hunters into prey. The Balrog chased us the three of us through the forest. I’ve never run that long that fast, and I think I’ve rarely been more afraid. At some point it lashed out with its whip and hit me. The whip burned clean through my boot and I fell immediately.” Celebrimbor paused, gripping his ankle. “My father noticed and stopped running.” He gave a small huff and smiled sadly. “It was said that Fëanor stood his ground against three of the Valaraukar before he died. My father took on but a single one, but he lived. I dare not say who is the more terrifying foe of the two.”

He looked up at Annatar, who had been watching him intently for the entire time. “It reminds me of him,” Celebrimbor said. “That he turned around and saved me … and that I lived on a day when I should have died.”

There was a long pause as Annatar turned his gaze back down to the scar, staring at the burnt flesh around the ankle like he wanted to sear away the scar and the past events with his eyes alone. “Does it still bother you?” he asked at last.

“Sometimes,” Celebrimbor replied with a shrug. “The skin always feels a bit too taut, and my ankle has never returned to being as stable as it used to be. I have to be careful not to twist it on uneven ground. The joint feels stiff every morning, but gets better after I have been moving around a little bit.”

“So you too are marked permanently both inside and outside.” Annatar let out a humourless huff. “We are not so different after all, it seems.”

“Yes, but is that necessarily a bad thing?” Celebrimbor replied.

“Your persistent attempts to glean something good from wholly disagreeable circumstances are strange, Tyelperinquar. The loss of something good and beautiful and whole is something to be mourned, is it not?”

“I don’t know. Is change necessarily evil, transformation always a loss? What about experience and learning, about making yourself better today than you were yesterday?” Celebrimbor set his foot down again and leaned forward to hold up his left hand between them. “Do you see these scars?” He bent his fingers, indicating a burn scar that ran in an arc across his index, middle, and ring fingers.

“I got them the first time I was in the forges with my father and grandfather. They told me to be careful, but they also warned me not to be afraid. I did, of course, not listen to them. I was too bold and I wanted to help them lift a white-hot model from the kiln. They let me. It was heavy and the tongs were ungainly, so it took me longer than it should have to transfer it to the water basin. The tongs grew hot in my hand and I panicked. I tried to set it down on a table mid-way, but in my hurry I misplaced it and the model and the tongs fell off the edge. The hot end of the tongs hit my hands. I learned afterwards not to get ahead of myself and never let pain – or fear of pain – master my mind.” Celebrimbor smiled ruefully. “It was a valuable lesson to learn.”

“A lesson that is now burned into your skin,” Annatar said, sounding unconvinced. “One could say that you paid a high price for youthful foolishness.” He paused. “And that, perhaps, there was a gentler way to learn this lesson.”

“You’re not wrong,” Celebrimbor replied. “But I see my skin as the canvas upon which my life has been imprinted. My scars are as much part of me as my arms and my legs. They are a reminder of the mistakes I’ve learned from … and wounds that were not enough to kill me.” His hand slid down the front of his loose, half-unbuttoned tunic. Just visible between the part of the fabric was the top end of a scar that ran from his right collar bone down to his left hip. It was a brutal, ugly thing, a reminder of the grievous wound that had been a permanent gift of one of Gorthaur’s commanders, and had almost cost his life at the Battle of Tumhalad.

Annatar’s eyes dropped down to his chest and his eyebrows drew together, before he looked up at Celebrimbor’s face again. When he spoke, his voice was carefully controlled, “Who did this to you?”

“An enemy I can put neither a name nor a face to after all those centuries,” Celebrimbor said. “It doesn’t matter to me. It marked me, but looking back I’m glad a scar is the only thing I have to show for what could have happened to me. After all, only corpses do not attain scars when they’re sliced open.” He smiled sadly.

Annatar looked back down at the scar, then raised his hand and gingerly ran his fingers over the hardened, reddish tissue. “What undeserved luck for that nameless creature that the course of time might never be reversed. Were it not for the abyss of millennia to shield them, I would see them unmade for the perfection they have destroyed.” The Maia’s tone was flat and cold on the surface, like a frozen lake in midwinter. But beneath that, Celebrimbor heard something echoing from the depths underneath. Something writhing in hidden darkness, something fell and vengeful.

Celebrimbor frowned. “As you said – the course of time runs ever forward, so I’d consider it amiss to waste anger on things that cannot be undone.” He paused. “Besides … I could name no sign of my survival a marring.” He reached forward and touched the side of Annatar’s face, tracing the scar there. “Just as I would not have you call yourself marred because you survived saving the lives of so many.”

Annatar leaned back and out of his reach. “It means I wasn’t quick enough to sidestep a hit that I should, by all means, have been able to avoid.”

“A hit that you would surely have avoided if you had fought with all the powers at your disposal and not held back for the sake of the Incarnates fleeing the tunnels.” Celebrimbor held his gaze. “I know what you are. I know what you are capable of. And I know that Khazad-Dûm would no longer exist if you had not restrained both yourself and the Balrog in order to allow us to flee without the mountain coming down on our heads.”

“More fool me, it seems,” Annatar said, and in his bitter tone Celebrimbor recognised the spite of not wanting to be consoled, the obstinate refusal to see any good that might have come of this deed.

Celebrimbor was in no mood to give in to this wilfully self-destructive stubbornness. “Well, even if you are not – I am grateful that you could bear to receive a scar so that all of us could live.”

Annatar’s eyes flicked over to him, his features shifting briefly. “I did not mean it like that,” he said after a pause. He looked away. “You know that I could never regret doing what I did back then, no matter the consequences. It is just –” He paused again, thinking, then let out a harsh breath at last. “These marrings are permanent. No matter which shape I take, the scarring will remain – on my skin and spirit. Something was taken from me that day. I will never be whole again, for as long as I exist.”

“I know,” Celebrimbor said. He let the pads of his right index finger run over the welts of the burn marks on his left palm. “We all do.” He looked out of the window, at the starry sky. Who of those that had not lived the darkest of days would believe that there had been centuries when the sky had been shrouded with black and red clouds, and that generations of Men and Dwarves had died without ever seeing Varda’s stars? Who of those that had not survived the blackest age would have believed that you could come back from a war that had nearly broken the world in two? But, oh, how high a price many of them had paid.

“Nariel will never walk again”, Celebrimbor said slowly, still watching the stars; so silent, cold, and distant – and yet so beautiful and peaceful. “Aragant will remain blind forever and never again see the stars he so loves. Teleuton will likely remain locked inside his own head for the rest of his life because his spirit could at some point no longer bear the horrors the outside world forced him to witness. Ríanu has not spoken a word since Tirhan pulled her from the slave mines of Angband.” Celebrimbor closed his eyes. “This world is not kind. It takes as much as it gives, and it marked us forever – in body, or mind, or both. And even beyond the war, there are a thousand ways this world tests our strengths and limits and takes a little bit of what was once ours, day by day, year by year. Our entire lives are connected by the thread of losing the abilities and the health that we once took for granted, and by learning to work around the effects of our aging, our wounds, and our scars.”

Celebrimbor sighed. “For all its beauty and wonders, this world is as merciless as ice and as unsympathetic and deaf to begging as the ocean. We have learned to live with it. Despite – or perhaps because of its cruelty and the scars we will bear – we are intent to make the most of the fraction of Forever that was granted to us and is all we will ever know.”

Celebrimbor looked back at his friend. For the briefest instant, Annatar looked angry. Even decades after their argument in Khazad-Dûm, Celebrimbor talking so off-handedly about the possibility of his death was still a sore point for Annatar, who could not (and probably would not ever be able to) accept mortality and decay in things and beings he valued. Yet another insult to his proud nature, and to his – perhaps immortality-born – desire to keep and preserve. To his credit though, the Maia quickly schooled his features into something more graceful, probably realizing that it would be uncalled for to go on a mistimed tangent about the – in his opinion – demeaning nature of death.

“With everything you just said,” Annatar replied, “how can you still be so complacent about being robbed of health and beauty, youth and perfection? All these marrings that are imposed upon us by this world – shouldn’t we be able to rid ourselves of them at some point? Shouldn’t our work to improve the world and ourselves further and further eventually grant us the power to free ourselves from the constraints of the material world? Of decay and damage, and mortality itself?  Why should we aim for anything less than regaining what was taken from us? We should at least have a choice in whether to keep our scars or not. Must we be saddled with the markings of old pain and past mistakes forever, to be reminded of them at every turn?” He sounded angry, indignant, as if the very idea of this insulted him personally. But there was also a wild, raw edge to his words that Celebrimbor had rarely heard before.

Celebrimbor regarded him calmly. “The past made us into what we are today. My past is me. I see no way or even a reason why we should deny this part of ourselves.”

“What if there is nothing to be learned or gained from the past?” Annatar asked quietly. He was not looking at Celebrimbor now. Instead he was staring at his hands, studying them as if he had suddenly become a stranger to his own physical form. “You see no need to repudiate things that helped make you grow wiser and more experienced, or reject markings that tell of the love that others held for you. I understand that, even if I do not agree.” Annatar still wasn’t looking up, his gaze fixed on his hands as the flicker of flame shifted light and shadows over his skin. He didn’t speak for a long time.

“I have no good scars to tell of,” he said at last, his voice brusque. Clipped. His words weighed down by all the things he didn’t – or likely couldn’t – say out loud.

“Why don’t you let me be the judge of that?” Celebrimbor said quietly.

Annatar did not reply.

“Show yourself to me,” Celebrimbor said. “Tell me what formed you and made you who you are, so I can understand you better.”

“There is nothing good hidden behind these marks,” Annatar said evasively. “Ugly memories and deformities, all of them better left in the dark.”

“Do you think the same of my scars?” Celebrimbor said. “Would you rather have me beautiful and unblemished, a different version that is sitting before you? Naiver perhaps, and more inexperienced for all the things I did not see or witness? With a different life behind me that set my mind to different goals and formed me into a different person?”

“No, that is not – I would not.” Annatar looked away.

“Is it so hard then, to trust me that I would want you as you are now?” Celebrimbor said as he leaned forward and tried to catch Annatar’s eyes. He reached out and clasped the Maia’s hands in his own, and his friend finally met his gaze. “With all your scars and blemishes, your imperfections and experiences that make you who you are?”

“You cannot fathom that which you demand to look upon. Perhaps you would speak differently then.” Annatar turned his head away, fixing his eyes on the lampstone on the table.

“Annatar.”

The name compelled the Maia to look back at him.

“I want to know you,” Celebrimbor said, his voice low and rough. “You and all that there is to you.”

Beneath his hands, he felt Annatar tense, his skin growing colder as if every part of him, including his blood, wanted to withdraw from Celebrimbor’s touch.

“You don’t know what you are asking for,” Annatar replied, his voice barely more than a whisper in the still air.

“Perhaps not,” Celebrimbor said after a pause. “And yet this is what I want,” he said, taking one step closer so that they were only a few inches apart. “You have offered me so much over these years: these unnumbered gifts that you gave freely, that I did not even need to ask for. So let this be the first, the last, and the only thing I ask for myself.” He tilted Annatar’s chin up to make their eyes meet.

Let me in.

Let me know you.

Show me who you were, before you came to me. Let me know all that is ancient and primordial, terrifying and incomprehensible about you. Show me the god beneath the face of the man. Permit me to know you as you truly are.

Annatar’s eyes were wide, his face unmoving. Celebrimbor knew that the Maia could be moved as little by mortal inclinations and emotions as a mountain could be moved by the wind. He had created this form and mastered its every expression – according to Annatar’s own words he was not subject to its reflexes and instincts, but every molecule in his body existed as he willed it, in whatever form he willed it, for as long as he willed it. What then, did it mean, that Annatar’s shoulders tensed almost imperceptibly, that he made as if to lean back and out of reach? What did it mean when his face showed unease and the desire for retreat, avoidance, flight?

And what did it mean, when despite all of that, the Maia suddenly closed his eyes, and with an effort of will forced the tension from his shoulders, his retreat in body and soul halting and reversing as he leaned closer and rested his forehead against Celebrimbor’s?

For a long while neither of them spoke, and Celebrimbor did not dare move, dared hardly even breathe, so as not to disturb the moment.

“For you, Silver-grasp, Diamond-mind, Mirror-soul”, Annatar said at last. “For you, and no one else.” His voice was rough, brittle.

Annatar pulled back and stood up straight to his full height. For a moment he looked like glass, only a moment away from shattering, light passing through him at violently splintered angles, jagged lines of bright white fire illuminating a myriad of fissures, fault-lines, and shatterpoints. In this instant he was a kaleidoscopic mosaic of a thousand broken, shifting pieces, held together by the massive gravitational force of a will older than the world itself alone. Never had Annatar’s guise as an Eldarin being seemed more ill-fitting and more ill-equipped to encompass and cloak his true nature.

Then the otherworldly sight faded. Annatar stood in the room, once more wearing his familiar shape, no longer radiant, but opaque and somehow shrunken and burnt-out, like a star that had used up all its fire.

“For you and no one else,” Annatar repeated quietly, as if speaking to himself. He took a few steps over towards the bed, then, as if he had decided otherwise, stopped and turned in place, standing in the middle of the room, somehow looking both imposing and lonely and lost at the same time. He appeared as if he was being pulled in multiple directions. He looked as if he wanted to run; he looked as if he wanted to stay. He desired to be somewhere else, but there was no place anywhere that could accommodate him and give him any comfort. He looked torn. Displaced. A stranger to the world he was inhabiting, more so than Celebrimbor could ever remember witnessing.

“I have no words for these memories,” Annatar said at last. “They were formed at a time when no language that I could convey to you existed to describe them.”

“That’s alright”, Celebrimbor replied, forcing himself to stay seated, to give his friend space to unfold what had been compressed over the thousands of thousands of years of his lifetime.

Annatar threw him a glance. “It is not,” he replied with finality, then he walked over towards the armchair he had been sitting in and started undoing the clasps of his sharvani overcoat, the leaf-and-vine-patterns of the Sindarin grey-silvery design shifting in the low light as he did so.

Celebrimbor raised his eyebrows, surprised, but then he recalled what Annatar had mentioned before: Most wounds will not leave a scar, but there are marks that go deeper than the mere form we choose to assume. These marks are ingrained upon our ëalar and no matter how much we change our appearances, they will remain. Our fana, too, will carry the marring forever.

It figured that his friend would bear physical scars, and yet Celebrimbor was taken aback by his own surprise at the Maia resorting to something as incarnate as undressing to make them visible.

Then again, maybe Incarnates and spirits were not so different in this regard after all. Annatar had made it clear that every part of his appearance was part of his very being, but perhaps some aspects of his appearance were … truer than others. Maybe gods, just like mortals, used parts of themselves to vest other aspects, to retreat and hide behind, to layer and shield and protect.

It would explain a few things about his friend, in any case.

Annatar had always dressed in a way that left little uncovered. At first Celebrimbor had merely taken it for a choice of taste, perhaps apt and proper for someone of his nature and station. But the more he thought about it, the more he considered that everything in Annatar’s appearance was a conscious choice, down to the last little fold of his attire. He should have guessed that there was more to the long sleeves, the billowing robes, and the high collar that closed just under his jaw.

Annatar was a creature of diametrically opposed desires: seeking at once to draw the eye and to divert glances, to be the middle of attention while hiding behind dazzling glamour, to be seen and yet to remain unknown. Like a black hole, his presence was bending even attention and light towards himself, while the singularity at its core remained forever out of reach beyond visibility and comprehension.

It was a miracle Celebrimbor had not noticed it before.

Annatar pulled off the overcoat, folded it with a slow, almost meditative meticulousness, as if he could draw out the progression of time that way – and perhaps he did, for himself, if not for Celebrimbor. Below, he was wearing a thin tunic, a simple beige neckcloth, and loose linen trousers.

Celebrimbor fought the momentary urge to avert his eyes. There was nothing untoward about the sight, and he was usually quite unmoved by however his peers, Mannish, Dwarven or Elvish, chose to walk around him, be it on formal occasions, in informal meetings, or in the bathhouse.

But with Annatar, there was something so unusual about seeing him without his clear-cut, immaculate state of dress, Celebrimbor felt like he was witnessing something far too intimate in watching him shed even the outermost layer of the appearance he had wrapped himself in for centuries, with only slight changes here and there over the passage of years.

Annatar did not appear to notice Celebrimbor’s discomfort, or simply chose to ignore it. Now that he had made up his mind, he seemed intent on getting it over with, his face betraying no emotion as he undid the top buttons of his tunic before pulling the folds apart.

Celebrimbor momentarily forgot that he needed to breathe. He didn’t notice that he had gotten up before he became aware that he was standing directly in front of Annatar, his hand already lifted as if to touch his chest, his fingers hovering inches away from Annatar’s skin.

“Who … who did this to you?”

If either of them noticed the irony in Celebrimbor echoing Annatar’s words from earlier, they paid it no heed. Annatar might have made a sound like a scoff, but Celebrimbor’s attention was too riveted on the gruesome sight revealed to him to pay it much mind.

“I did it to myself. Do you remember what you told me about permanent markings acquired in the folly of youth? This is mine.”

Celebrimbor stared at the scar. It was located where the heart of a mortal would have been. And it was big, so big that he wouldn’t have been able to cover it with both of his hands. The skin there was knotted, twisted and burned, and it reminded him of the shape of gnarled roots extending like a twisted six-pointed star pushing up just under the Maia’s skin. It looked like something had been ripped out of his chest, something like a braided cord whose destroyed remains were still buried in his ribcage.

“What happened?”

“I severed the fetters I had not chosen for myself,” Annatar said. “I broke the foundation stone upon which my entire being was constructed, and I nearly unmade myself in the process.”

“Aulë’s bond,” Celebrimbor whispered. He looked up into Annatar’s face. His eyes were utterly blank and cold, blind mirrors that let nothing through and allowed nothing to be reflected back out of them. “What have you done to yourself?”

“I did what was necessary,” Annatar replied, his voice devoid of inflection. His eyes were still fixed on Celebrimbor, still with that eerie aloofness, that far-removed look, as if looking at him from light-years away. In this moment he looked nothing like the friend with whom Celebrimbor had worked side by side for years, talked to for hours, fallen into step with both mentally and physically as if it was the easiest thing in the world. The being he was looking at right now was nothing like this – cold, inhuman, entire unapproachable.

Celebrimbor wanted to ask further but he knew he shouldn’t. Any description in language could by necessity only be an insufficient approximation of the utterly unimaginable process Annatar must have undertaken to rip himself away from everything that had made him who he was. Perhaps Annatar could have shown him, in both of their minds. Perhaps he even would have, had Celebrimbor asked. But for the first time since he could recall, he found that he hesitated to follow this path of inquiry any further. Down there lay no insight he should want to gain. He was certain.

And yet. He had made his desire to know clear, as good as a promise. An assurance to not shy away.

“Did you ever regret it?”

Annatar’s face was still, expressionless. “I’d tear myself apart into a thousand fragments if it meant being able to break free from shackles I have not chosen.”

Celebrimbor exhaled slowly, then raised a hand to rest it over the place where Annatar’s heart was beating in his chest. An imitation, he had to remind himself. A guise, nothing more. But a chosen shape – nothing less. Excepting, of course, those scars which would stay with him in whatever shape he took. “So there are scars you do not regret.”

“Regret has nothing to do with any of it.” Annatar stepped back, out of reach. “If anything, there is anger. Anger at being fettered against my will, at choices being made over my head. Of making the scarring inevitably necessary in order to free myself in the first place.”

“And yet you weighed your choices and decided that there was something that was worth it.” Celebrimbor dropped his hand that had been hanging in the empty, cooling space that his friend had vacated.

“Perhaps. And yet – what worth has a decision born out of the necessity of avoiding a worse end? Stop trying to attribute inherent nobility to a choice that might as well not have been one, for all that no other ways stood open to me.” Annatar had half-turned away, his face sliding into shadow and darkness. He looked like he was about to fade away and become one with the gloom building in the remote corners of the room.

Celebrimbor didn’t follow him. He could read his friend, and he knew when following him would pull him back and when reaching for him made him slip away all the faster, like a dream turning to morning mist come sunrise. “Was it so bad?”

Annatar thought for a long time. The low amber glow of his eyes was the only discernible feature on his shadowed face. “It was for me,” he said at last. “Sometimes no ill intent is needed to bring harm. Sometimes too close an embrace suffices to suffocate. Sometimes we chafe at walls others erected around us out of concern and care. I would not be kept. I would not be walled in. So I left.”

“For what?”

Annatar’s eyes slowly slid over to him, the pinpricks of his pupils black holes in the midst of a swirling accretion disc of fire and gold.

“Possibilities.”

The word rang out, longer, louder than it should have been. Ominous. Monumental. All-encompassing.

For a brief second Celebrimbor thought he caught a glimpse of a primordial yet unformed world of spaces not yet claimed, of continents not yet formed. Trees as tall as mountains, mountains as tall as the sky. Crashing waves in an untamed ocean reaching for the clouds themselves, foaming, consuming. Roaring thunderstorms throwing spears of lightning that could split an entire island in half.

A mountain range, dark and sky-high, and standing upon it, gazing down into this wild abyss that was the Old World, a waiting figure, a beckoning hand, an alluring promise of a higher purpose in a greater world under a wider sky.

No, there were no words for this old world and the promise of a higher meaning. But the image was burnt behind Celebrimbor’s eyes, and for a moment in time, the memory was his own, and he felt drawn inevitably forward to this vision, towards the edge that lay before his feet, and desired nothing more than to topple into the abyss and learn what secrets lay in the darkness at its bottom.

He saw blackness, and in it, silver pinpricks of light. He didn’t know whether he was staring at diamonds embedded in the darkest places under the Earth, or stars glittering in the unfathomable vastness of space.

Just as he was processing this, space and stars and time itself seemed to fold around him and he saw things, things he had neither the senses to perceive or the language to describe. Interconnecting lines, four-dimensional projections of space, and geometric bodies that were folding in on themselves and blooming outwards at the same time, overlaying projections of probability and space of the smallest matter, forming little clouds of impossible colours, sinuous lines spiralling along an elliptical course of bodies revolving around a central mass, bends and bottomless abysses in space-time –

Do you know what lies at the end of entropy?

It was not words he heard, but meaning. No voice had uttered it, and yet he felt it as if someone standing next to him had spoken directly into his soul.

And just as his mind had perceived the question, the frantic, unending movement around him stopped. Waves flattened into lines, space-time was pulled taut, its ripples and mountains and abysses flattening into uniform stillness. Stars burnt out and he was plunged into darkness. Black holes evaporated. Matter degraded, gravitation ceased, electromagnetism died as the last remaining particles rapidly decayed.

Around him was nothing. It should have been death, but this was less than a graveyard. This was void.

And suddenly, although he had no body to speak of in this vision, and hardly even possessed an awareness of his own consciousness, he was suddenly seized by an abject terror that made him want to blow himself apart and to scream, just to shatter this terrible, terrible dead silence and stillness around him.

This is the ultimate victory of order. The death of all variation. The end of possibilities.

No.

This is what they represent, this is what they desire.

No.

I stand against this. I alone.

No.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. Slowly, small dusty particles of light sparked in the void. The smallest of impulses extended outward, just a wavelength of light, but in the ocean of silence it was like a tsunami. Matter reformed and dispersed, clumped together and broke apart, chaotic, erratic, unpredictable. Space-time was rippling, as if there was something enormous caught beneath its surface, just waiting to push through.

You have ingenuity. You have power.

Spacetime was foaming. Stars lit up again. Light returned. Masses reformed. Clouds of matter, light-years long, full of stardust and rare earth elements, golden light filtering through them and fracturing into greens and blues and lilacs.

Mathematical manifolds unfolded before him, topological spaces once more extending and bending around him, probabilities once again branching out into a myriad of possible futures like tree roots forking and splitting and forking again.

We could stand against this together if you want. Will you join me?

And what answer was there to this, in the face of what he had seen, but “Yes”?

Celebrimbor stumbled back, pressing his fingers to his temples. He couldn’t open his eyes, couldn’t, for what he would see would make his mind evaporate like a raindrop in a volcano. He sensed his mind plunging back into his body in a desperate attempt at self-preservation, but it didn’t fit anymore, he didn’t fit anymore. He couldn’t make heads or tails of who he was, what he was, where he was, how he was supposed to move or think or breathe or speak –

The dark chasm yawned before him. In another world he distantly felt the back of his calves bumping into something, his knees buckling. In this one, teetering on the edge of the wild abyss that was calling him, pulling him. He tried to regain his balance, tried to resist the terrible undertow – in vain.

In both worlds, he fell.

[1] Valarin has three levels of clusivity:

Chapter Text

*

Just as his legs gave out, warm hands caught him around the shoulders and broke his fall. Celebrimbor sat down heavily on a yielding surface.

“Tyelperinquar,” a voice said, and for a second his body didn’t recall how to process sound with his ears, how to translate soundwaves into meaning in his brain after the shattering immediacy of having intent and meaning placed directly into his mind with no distance or filter to protect himself.

“Tyelperinquar,” the voice said again, and Celebrimbor finally took a breath he had neglected to draw in for far too long – the breathing reflex his body had been born with momentarily forgotten as his mind had become so estranged from his physical form that communication between the two, even on the level of base instinct and reflex, had briefly become impossible.

“You nearly went too far,” the voice said. “I should not have allowed it to go on for that long.” The grip around his shoulders didn’t leave, and the pressure of it helped Celebrimbor to reorient himself within the confines of his body.

He opened his eyes and saw Annatar standing before him, his face back in the light and bereft of shadows, except for a grey shade of worry that passed over it, but vanished quickly as soon as their gazes met. The room around Celebrimbor swam into view and slowly, ever so slowly, his mind was able to readjust itself to this reality he was familiar with. He felt weak to the bone and wrung out, as if he had walked a journey of a thousand miles, drawn out over millennia. Maybe he had.

Celebrimbor slumped against the backrest of the chair. He slowly lifted a trembling hand to his temple and, for a few seconds, only focused on breathing while looking at his knees. In. Out. In. Out.

“That…” he tried, and paused when the sounds wouldn’t come out quite right. “That was … him, wasn’t it?”

When Annatar didn’t answer immediately, he looked up.

His friend was still standing in front of the chair Celebrimbor had collapsed into, but his posture was stiff, his arms crossed tightly, his gaze averted. Where his hands had been warm on Celebrimbor’s shoulders before, Annatar’s frame now only spoke of taut expectation, distance, and frigid cold.

Awaiting judgement, Celebrimbor realised.

“He …” He paused, searching for words, but it didn’t escape him that Annatar’s eyes had flitted over to him for a split-second.

Celebrimbor thought back to the vision he had seen, to the universes that had been unfurled before him, one like a threat and one like a gift. He thought of the figure on the mountain, the hand extended in invitation. A great vision shared. The promise of a better world, and the will to be the one to instigate that change. An echo of this promise repeated through time, again and again and again, so very familiar to Celebrimbor himself.

And who better and greater to do this than the Guardian of Change? Who better an ally in this undertaking than the Warden of Transformation and Chaos?

“He was … magnificent,” Celebrimbor said at last.

Annatar’s head slowly moved to meet Celebrimbor’s gaze, eyes unblinking and his face expressionless., Behind the still façade, however, there was a glint of something else there, like a light hidden behind a shattered mirror, just waiting to burst forth.

“I understand why you feared to show me this,” Celebrimbor said. “But … I see why you went with him.”

Annatar stood utterly still.

Celebrimbor paused, considering his next words, evaluating their truthfulness, then –

“For what it’s worth, I think had I been in your place, I would have gone with him as well.”

Silence filled the room. Time was cut into thin slices by the ticking of the mechanical clock on the mantelpiece of the fireplace. Annatar remained motionless, not even his eyes moving from where they were fixed on Celebrimbor.

“Even his plans were seemingly not all evil from the beginning,” Celebrimbor spoke quietly, thoughtfully. “And even if they were – how were you to know?”

Annatar did not respond, his gaze never straying from Celebrimbor’s face.

There was a long pause.

“He was great and powerful,” Celebrimbor said at last, carefully, trying to keep open the small gateway for a continued conversation which he sensed was rapidly shutting. “He ensnared many to follow him.”

“He had no need to ensnare. His arguments spoke for him,” Annatar said at last, his reply curt. “Those who went to him did so willingly.”

“So he was speaking the truth?” Celebrimbor asked. “About entropy and order?”

“Insofar as that he was the only force of chaos and disorder combatting the eventual heat death of the universe?” Annatar looked out the window, where the still world lay shrouded in night, blissfully unaware of the dismal end that had been conceived for it. “Yes, to my knowledge he didn’t lie about this.”

“About this.” Celebrimbor repeated. “But he left out other things, didn’t he?” he asked, keeping a close eye on the face of his friend. “Like what end he had planned for the universe.” He recalled a fraction of a fraction of the vision from before, interposed like one picture over another, come and gone almost too quickly to notice – it must have been the same briefness with which Annatar had glimpsed the Dark One’s plans millennia earlier: violent chaos, fire and rarified elements, flung apart and fused into new and terrible radioactive isotopes of each other, a chain-reaction of explosions at the heart of every star.

How convenient, to threaten and scare with the consequences of one power gaining the upper hand, while keeping silent that a victory of the opposing forces would lead to the same end – merely from the other direction.

“He may not have lied, but he certainly didn’t tell the entire truth, and left out facts where they didn’t serve his purpose,” Celebrimbor said.

Annatar’s golden eyes slowly slid over him and their gazes locked. “He had his own agenda.”

“But he didn’t share it.”

“No. Not in the beginning at least.”

“And when he did? Did those who had flocked to him stay willingly then too?”

“There was a time when leaving was an option,” Annatar replied. “That window had long closed by then. Individual will was no longer a primary concern; it had become secondary to having chosen an allegiance rooted in principles and upholding this loyalty, come what may.”

Celebrimbor leaned back in his armchair. “This sounds an awful lot like exchanging one set of chains for another – exactly what you wanted to avoid when you left Aulë.”

“You seem to be under the impression that want is the only guiding principle, even for gods,” Annatar said, his eyes narrowing. “I had not seen his ends at first, nor the means he used to reach them. Had I known everything I do today, I would have made different decisions. As it was, I could only act according to the knowledge I gained over time and by then his hold over us had grown.”

Celebrimbor stiffened. “Did he bind you as well?”

Another pause.

“He tried. It did not go over well.”

It didn’t escape Celebrimbor that Annatar took care not to specify further how for whom it had gone badly. He felt a pang in his chest when he looked at his friend – discerning now this shadow that lay still over Annatar which the Maia had concealed so carefully from view. A shadow of too many ties, too many chains, of wrong decisions, and attempts at breaking free and doing better, twisted and thwarted time and time again.

How long had Annatar served the Destroyer? How long until Morgoth’s purpose had at last become apparent, all masks and pretences dropped, and his fell goals were laid bare in all their horrifying clarity before the world – and before those who had followed him?

“What did he do to you?”

Instead of an answer, Annatar pulled his tunic over his head. He did it swiftly and carelessly, shaking his wild mane of golden curls out over his shoulders before pulling his wrists from the sleeves and letting the garment drop to the floor.

Celebrimbor flinched. He wanted to stand, but his knees gave out and he fell back into his chair as a breath escaped him that he hadn’t realised he had been holding.

Annatar’s arms were a ruin. Down from the shoulders, around the elbow and forearms, stopping only just before the wrists, looped angry black-and-red welts in the form of chain-links. The skin was burnt in places, almost melted in others, and everywhere, like a branding, scars like a dark chain were looping over his skin. The size of the scars and the depth to which the skin had been burnt away in places spoke of the violence of the binding.

Their minds were separate, but even so Celebrimbor could hear the echo of a scream over the divide of a hundred thousand years – an inhuman thing, not of the body, but of the very soul, multiplied and fractured like a mirror shattered in the middle.

Celebrimbor wanted to stand, but he found he couldn’t. He was unable to feel his legs, and his arms were lying nervelessly in his lap. He could only stare at the ruin of Annatar’s arms, and how closely that binding had come to utterly destroy those hands with which he – they both had done so much. An involuntary twitch ran through Celebrimbor’s own hands – a pain mirrored, if not remembered.

“He grew demanding,” Annatar said tonelessly. “Possessive. Mindlessly violent. He was no longer content to have loyalty. He wanted servitude. Unquestioning aid in his increasingly unhinged plans. No followers. Only tools.” He lifted up his arms and regarded the ruin of the skin there, the criss-crossing of scars and burns. “No other fire ever managed to hurt me,” he added, his head inclined to one side as he considered the wounds almost pensively.

The clock on the mantelpiece ticked away, its sound loud enough to shatter the silence into shards of brittle glass.

“So you left?” Celebrimbor asked, after he had found his voice again.

A pause.

“Eventually,” Annatar said, still looking at his arms as if he was seeing them for the first time.

“When?”

Another pause, fraught with weight and tension, the air ripe to bursting with things that had never been said before.

“Too late.”

A cold ripple ran up Celebrimbor’s spine, and when Annatar looked at him this time, his eyes were that of a stranger. Not eldritch and removed as starfire like before – unknowable, yet somehow familiar – but void. In this moment Celebrimbor knew – he knew that his friend had not left immediately when Morgoth’s true intent had become apparent, when he had realised the lengths the Dark One was willing to go in order to subdue, to conquer, to dominate, to exterminate.

And with an icy, sudden certainty it became clear to him that he had misinterpreted the shadow; that he had – maybe just as Annatar had, in the beginning, willingly overlooked Morgoth’s plans – closed his eyes to the alternative that had always been there in his consciousness, but which had been pushed to the back, unwanted and wilfully ignored. The alternative that now dawned on him to be the truth: that the shadow he had seen around his friend might stem from something different, something far darker and eviler than he had ever allowed himself to believe.

And like shards of crystal that comprised the entirety of a shattered diamond, he saw the other facets – the second truth to them that he had not allowed himself to grasp until now: who and what his friend had been beyond an errant spirit in search of a new freedom.

Misled – but willingly overlooking the dark intentions of his new master.

Not privy to Morgoth’s darkest plans, at least initially – but smart enough to sense them, to catch bits and pieces and deduce their meaning – and deciding to ignore them. Or accepting them as necessary. Or not caring about them at all.

The decision to stay, despite it all.

He didn’t say when he would have left.

He didn’t say what he would have done differently.

He never said he would have forsaken his master.

Kept and bound – but no mere slave, no mere prisoner, chained to the Dark Throne against his will, as Celebrimbor had hoped.

Bound in servitude – but also in loyalty. Eagerness. Forgoing empathy and morals in favour of a cold callousness that would allow him to reach for the new world which he and his new master had envisioned. The jaded willingness to pave the path to this new dark and glorious world with blood and bones if necessary. The nonchalant dismissiveness towards life and the freedom of others, the refusal to ascribe value to anything that did not align with the plan. The reckless disregard for those who stood in his way. The indifference as the once valued tenet of freedom was sacrificed on the blood-drenched altar of Morgoth’s ruthless self-importance, and the Dark One’s enemies and servants alike fell to his wrath like grain to the scythe. The improvement of the world had become subordinate to the single-minded fixation on the goal of overturning the old order and the domination of the new world that would rise from the ashes - and Annatar had known and accepted it.

Not just a lost, lone spirit caught up and ensnared in dark machinations – but a willing participant, a remorseless, unrelenting enforcer who stayed when many others had recoiled in horror and already left after learning the truth about Morgoth. One who accepted and embraced the means needed to reach those violent ends.

Celebrimbor noticed that he had tensed up all over, like a hare ready to bolt from its form under the eyes of the fox.

Annatar’s words from before occurred to him: You cannot fathom that which you demand to look upon.

Maybe he was right, Celebrimbor thought. Maybe I asked for knowledge that was beyond me to hold, to be in any way prepared for. But when I thought he had made mistakes – how could I have been prepared for this?

Then again, how had he not at least inferred something along those lines? How hadn’t he, what with Annatar’s reluctance to speak of it, his quickness to shirk away from anything even remotely to do with this time in his long existence? It had to have been something along those lines and that level of gravity. The Maia’s entire manner had suggested – nay, spelt out clearly – that there was something abominable, something despicable in his past – something that he had hidden so deeply and never told anyone for fear of what was about to happen now.

To be pushed away in fear and disgust.

To be shunned.

To be denied a hand extended in friendship and forgiveness for any and all future days to come.

But he told me.

Why did he tell me if not because he wants to rid his conscience of it? For what reason other than distancing himself from it and asking for forgiveness? He would never have done what he did today if he didn’t regret it, if he didn’t want to unburden his mind from things he would see undone, were they in his power.

“Why did you leave?” Celebrimbor croaked.

Please give me an answer that I can bear. Please give me a reason that allows you to be redeemed. Anything. Anything at all. Please.

The world was tilting out of balance, the scales already tipping. Fate was a flailing thing, already half-stepped out over an abyss and threatening to fall. Celebrimbor sensed it. Annatar must have sensed it, too, for suddenly something about him seemed to crumble and break, and he spoke – quickly, without any hesitation or pauses, just to get the inevitable over with.

“He was failing and falling apart,” Annatar said, “and I saw no future there.”

“So you were with him until the end,” Celebrimbor said. He was tired. His bones were made of lead, and yet he was hardly aware of his body at all. He felt as if he was floating three handspans above his own body, while simultaneously feeling he was sinking to the bottom of a deep, dark lake with a weight tied around his ankles.

“I was.”

“You never truly left him, not while he was himself.”

“No.”

“You were no prisoner of his. You were never there against your will.”

“No.”

Every word was another weight dropped on his chest. Celebrimbor fought to breathe. His skin felt too hot, his palms and the soles of his feet were burning up.

He couldn’t speak. He couldn’t ask.

But he had to.

He had to.

He had promised. To Annatar. To himself.

I won’t shy away.

You don’t know what you’re asking for.

Too late.

Too late.

Too late for everything.

“Who are you?” he rasped.

Rather than answering, Annatar slowly walked closer, nearly disrobed of clothing and secrets both – as bared to the world, as vulnerable, as pretenceless and defenceless as he had ever been. He stopped in front of Celebrimbor’s armchair and then slowly, impossibly slowly, lowered himself onto the carpet before the chair. His eyes never left Celebrimbor’s face, the gold of the eyes, brighter than he remembered, slowly swirling around the black of the pupil. So beautiful, so inhumane. His golden hair was tinted fire-orange by the light of the lampstone, and shadows danced and flitted across his brow, the bridge of his nose, and below his lower lip as he sank to his knees in front of Celebrimbor.

Celebrimbor watched it, unmoving, unable to either lean forward or press himself back into the armchair. His sluggish thoughts lapped like scalding water at the insides of his skull, boiling him from the inside out. He should surge forward, he should flee, he should say something, do something. But there was nothing, nothing, nothing left to say or do, except to ride the terrible, building wave to its crest, to break through the snagging underbrush of the dark forest into the unknown beyond, no matter how much it might hurt to continue, no matter how much he might wish to recoil, for once, from knowledge itself. He was drowning, sinking to the bottom of the lake. He was running downhill and he could not slow down, the momentum gone too far, grown too great. He was in free fall, and there was no-one to catch him, nothing to break the fall. All he could do was to grit his teeth, close his eyes, and prepare for the impact, hoping against hope that it would not shatter him.

Without conscious thought, he leaned forward and his hands rose to the sides of Annatar’s jaw and throat, where the only remaining piece of cover remained, shielding the secret from being known, the last question from being answered.

Later, he would wonder if he had already known at this point.

Later, he would wonder how he could ever have continued moving.

Later, he would ask himself if he should have, could have broken the Maia’s neck in this moment – or if that would have seen him to a quick, violent disintegration, the only answer to a truly laughable attempt to murder a god. But he would wonder if he should have at least tried.

Later, none of these questions would matter anymore. (But Celebrimbor could never assure himself that he would have been able to kill his friend. Even if Annatar had let him. Even if he had known for sure it would work. Not even then.)

His palms touched the skin of Annatar’s jaw, touched the rough linen of his neckcloth, and for a moment they remained like this, suspended in time, surrounded by the orange glow of the lampstone. Annatar on his knees, Celebrimbor with his hands on both sides of his face. Their gazes were locked, their faces close enough that Celebrimbor could feel Annatar’s breath (all illusion, nothing real, nothing had ever been real) ghosting over his chin.

I wish I had never asked. I wish I could undo this.

I wish I could unmake the past. I wish I could fix everything.

He didn’t know whose thoughts they were. He saw the same desolate desperation mirrored in Annatar’s eyes, not knowing whether it was a reflection of his own feelings or something welling up out of the Maia’s own mind.

But they had long since tipped over the point of no return. And if there was one thing that was outside of both their power, mortal or god, it was to reverse the course of time and undo what had already been done.

Free fall. Accelerating. Faster. Faster.

Celebrimbor reached around Annatar’s neck, under the warmth of the curtain of hair at his neck, soft curls sliding through his fingers without snagging. Nothing was holding him back, not even an errant twist of hair. The way was free, the answer at his fingertips. Gently, slowly, he undid the neckcloth where it was tied at the back of Annatar’s neck. Impossibly slowly.

And yet, the clock on the mantelpiece was ticking, urging him forward, pulling them inexorably into a future where they would no longer look upon each other as they were in these last few seconds. Into a future of things that were forever lost, away from a past that could never be retrieved.

The tie at the back of Annatar’s neck came free and Celebrimbor carefully pulled it away. He didn’t look down, not yet, his eyes fixed onto Annatar’s, his heart clinging to those last moments of ignorance, when he – despite the scream welling up inside of him – did not yet have certainty of the knowledge that would destroy everything they had. He could still pretend, he could still … could still …

When Celebrimbor looked down and saw the scars on the mangled skin, the distinctive, unmistakable indents of two rows of abnormally huge carnivore teeth – sporting the markings not of four, but eight canines, which only one hound in the entire history of Arda had ever possessed – he felt nothing. No surprise. No shock. Not even relief, to see his worst fears confirmed and knowing that nothing from now on could ever be as bad as this moment of revelation.

(A scene he had never seen, yet knew as well as if he had been there himself, as was the nature of events turned legend: the gloom of Tol-in-Gauroth. Luthien’s pale face full of determination and desperate bravery as she and the big hound by her side saw a gigantic shadow emerge from the fell fortress in the middle of the island, its shoulders as high as those of a draft horse. Huan springing forward, meeting the beast mid-leap, throwing it onto its back, his double-row of teeth clamped around the monster’s throat –)

The clock was ticking.

The future was spreading throughout the room, filling it up like water from bottom to top.

Celebrimbor realised that he was still holding Annatar’s – Sauron’s face, and let his hands fall away.

The floor dropped out from beneath him.

Sinking.

Falling.

Drowning.

He slumped back in his chair, his throat suddenly tight and his lungs not drawing in enough air. He dimly realised he was choking, nearing an attack that would double him over, fold him in half like paper and leave him sweating and trembling on the floor with the sheer force of it.

Sauron had not moved. He was still kneeling in front of Celebrimbor, his eyes still fixed onto Celebrimbor’s face. Then he shifted as if making to stand. “Tyelperinquar –”

“You should leave.” The words cracked like a whip, cutting Sauron off in the middle of the sentence. The Dark Maia froze.

Celebrimbor did not know from whence he took the strength, air, or self-control to speak like this. His words were cutting, cold as ice, brooking no argument. It seemed to be someone else using his voice, with him only watching as a far-off, detached spectator.

“Tyelperinquar,” Sauron said again, and it was more than he could bear – his mother-name, spoken in his mother-tongue with such familiarity by Morgoth’s lieutenant.

“Leave,” Celebrimbor repeated. It was all he could do to not scream. The pressure building in his chest was unbearable. “Please.”

Sauron hesitated, then something in his eyes shuttered. All emotion had gone from his face. With an almost contemptuous flick of his wrist, he was clothed again in his robes, the overcoat closed high under his chin, the embroidered white sleeves covering his arms and the cruel scar over his chest hidden from view by layers and layers of fabric.

“As you wish,” Sauron said coolly.

He left.

Chapter Text

Act II: Reflection

We shine with brightness. And I who am here dissembled

Proffer my deeds to oblivion, and my love

To the posterity of the desert

T.S. Eliot – Ash Wednesday, Part II

Time had become circular. The stars had stopped in their course, the moon had been hanging low over the mountains of Khazad-Dûm for ten thousand years.

The world itself seemed unable to move forward from the unsurmountable fulcrum upon which its premises had been shattered. Or maybe eons had passed, time had come full circle and returned to this point. There was no more meaning to be discerned in anything. Dimensions had flattened out, the walls and the mountains in the distance as well as the sky all looked as false and artificial as theatre properties.

Annatar is Sauron.

The thought kept returning, again and again and again. It threw itself against the walls of Celebrimbor’s mind like a fly against a windowpane – mindless yet relentless. It tried to wedge itself into the reality of the world, but his mind was either unable or unwilling to accommodate it. But the thought returned, again, again, again, unwilling to be denied, battering at the walls of crumbling numbness and denial, knowing that finally, eventually, something had to give, and it would break through and expand to fill the universe and swallow it whole.

Celebrimbor sat in his armchair, his eyes unseeing. He did not know how long it had been since he had last moved. He did not feel his body. It was frozen in time. His mind was caught in a loop that he had heretofore only known in his worst nightmares – dreams in which he relived the night Alqualondë burned and he had cut a kinsman’s throat for the first time. Dreams in which he ran searching through narrow, windowless stone corridors without beginning or end that resembled nothing so much as the fortress of Nargothrond, calling out his father’s name and never receiving an answer, never finding a door that would have let him out of the terrifying labyrinth. And now – this. A nightmare, created specifically for him, to throw his life’s work – his resolutions, his determination to do it differently , his dreams – back in his face in the worst, most insidious way imaginable.

Sauron is here in this city. Gorthaur the Cruel, the right hand of Morgoth himself. He is here and he has been working alongside me and the Mírdain for centuries. Because we invited him . I invited him. He stood before us and we did not recognize him. We opened our gates, extended our hands, our trust –

An image rose, unbidden, in his mind. Annatar, as Celebrimbor had known him, a figure of white and gold, always framed by sunlight, with that gentle, almost ironic tug upwards to the corner of his mouth whenever he knew something that Celebrimbor didn’t. His hands, always busy, turning something over in his fingers – a ring? - with the effortless grace of a seasoned prestidigitator. Then, overlaid on this: violent flashes of a black creature wearing a spiked crown, red-eyed, slit-pupiled, long-toothed, features invisible, form wreathed in darkness. Blood dripping from taloned hands, too-long fingers twitching, opening and closing from fist to claw, from fist to claw.

The images would not mix, would not align – as if a fundamental force of the world forbade it.

And yet.

And yet.

They’re the same. They’re one and the same.

They are one.

And I have given him everything.

Again, flashes of images, too fast to process as his mind cycled through centuries in the span of a heartbeat – trying, desperately searching for something that had to have been there, analyzing and re-examining the past in the merciless light of this night’s revelation:

The first eye contact, curious but critical, sizing each other up – dust motes dancing in a slant of sunbeam in his workshop, the question, “What do you know about the Old Arts?”  – An evening-dark terrace, stars overhead, a quiet, but nevertheless unspeakable admission, “I want to fix this world.”  – Strong hands taking Celebrimbor’s own, leading them through the motion of an enchantment – a close-up look, no, a feeling of the molecular structure of a crystal, a question: “Can you see it now?” – The intimacy of a night-dark study, quiet words, spoken with straining insistence, against the flickering, otherworldly backdrop of dancing candlelight: “I am not my grandfather. I doubt even he would have been able to achieve what you are talking about when he was creating during the Noontide of Valinor”. – A flash of golden eyes. “I am well aware of who you are. But I would not have come to you if I believed that there was a limit to what I could ask of you.”

– A starry, wide-open sky, a warmth in his chest that even the evening chill could not chase away. A voice, “Maybe I am like you. Like you, I would see this marred world shine. Like you, I would have a true new beginning, a second chance to do better.” – A quiet assurance, followed by the cold edge of doubt. “I wonder whether you realise the extent of your proud claim of forgiveness. Where will you draw the line? At those who partook in the wars willingly? Or at those who provoked them? Opportunists, murderers, betrayers, will you welcome them all into your home? What about those tainted by Morgoth himself? If they come to your door on their knees and beg your forgiveness, will you give it to them, Curufinwë?”

His answer, so self-assured and proud, and so very naive in retrospect, certain still of absolute truths and faultless solutions: “ Once tainted does not mean something is corrupted forever. I will not give up for lost what is marred when I could change it into something better instead.”

Celebrimbor ran his hands down his face. His eyes were burning; it was near-impossible to keep them open.

What a way to throw my words back into my face. If the gods are watching, they must be laughing.

His breathing was flat and strained. Something was stuck in his throat, and with horror he realised that it was laughter that was working its way up to his mouth, a thing of utter madness and strangling despair.

He leaned his head against the backrest of the chair, his right hand covering his eyes while sounds that did not belong to him forced themselves out of his chest in violent, painful bursts. There was wetness at the corner of his eyes, and Celebrimbor realised he was laughing and crying at the same time.

By Varda’s stars. Could the world not have given me an easier opportunity to test my resolve? Did it have to be Sauron himself to whom I unwittingly promised absolution, binding myself to be held to these words that I spoke without knowing who I was facing?

And, his memory supplied, a promise that you failed to keep.

Again, flashes of the past came to him, like a reel of memories flitting past his eyes, spanning from the distant past into the present: a dozen quiet, strained moments when Celebrimbor had asked one question too many and the hollow silence afterwards where an answer should be – Annatar retreating into himself when the conversation came to his past, but not after hesitating, something that he otherwise never did – probing Celebrimbor’s resolve, testing his willingness to forgive like someone might test whether the ice upon a frozen lake might carry, always wary, watching, waiting, hoping –

He wanted to tell me. He has wanted me to know for a long time.

The look on Sauron’s face when Celebrimbor told him to leave, like shutters closing in front of a window, the rawness and openness suddenly gone and replaced by the unfeeling expression of a marble statue –

But he didn’t tell me. Because he knew I would reject him. And I did. How could I not?

Celebrimbor looked out of the great eastern window, where moonlight formed a trim of silver on the slopes of the mountains of Khazad-Dûm.

I wish I had never asked , he thought suddenly, with futile desperation. I wish I had left him alone and allowed Annatar to continue existing. Perhaps he would have felt content living in his disguise and the world would have been safe from him.

Another voice inside his head, acerbic and quite reminiscent of his father, immediately inserted itself into the argument. Nonsense. Ignorance never protected anyone. Or do you honestly believe being unaware of the dragon will protect you from its claws?

Celebrimbor closed his eyes and breathed out. No, no. I know better than that. Better to know what I am dealing with.

But, oh, if only the truth hurt less, if only it did not feel like someone had pried his ribcage open and ripped his heart out with their bare fist.

With a clench in his chest, Celebrimbor thought of their time spent together in the workshops, the countless discussions of more and less seriousness; the banter, the good-natured mutual needling – and other, more profound things which had mostly happened when they had been alone together. Hands brushing against each other. Standing close in the light of the dying embers of a forge-fire. Walking through the city of Khazad-Dûm together and admiring its marvels. Annatar throwing himself between Celebrimbor and the dark terror that had been awakened beneath the Dwarven city. Celebrimbor running through the ruins of a collapsed mine and digging Annatar’s nearly-destroyed body up from under the wreckage. Annatar whispering against his ear, I knew you would come back. Annatar – Sauron telling him, “I have no good scars to tell of,” and looking for all the world like he meant what he was saying. Celebrimbor insisting that he show them to him anyway.

Sauron saying, “For you, Silver-grasp, Diamond-mind, Mirror-soul. For you, and no one else,” with that look in his eyes that had reminded Celebrimbor of fractured glass.

Annatar-Sauron kneeling before him, disrobed, dismantled and with a look that resembled nothing so much as despair, waiting for Celebrimbor to tear the last one of his lies away, to undo the last bit of his disguise and lay the truth bare.

Celebrimbor’s eyes were sightless, his hands and body numb.

What part of it was real? What was the act? It was impossible to distinguish. Another, terrifying thought: How much of Annatar was Sauron – unmodulated and unchanged?

And following that, How much of who I loved was Annatar – and how much was Sauron himself? And what does it say about me that I loved Sauron the Abhorred?

The ground beneath his feet tilted, the room turned. Celebrimbor had to grip the armrests of his chair, trying to steady his breathing and stop the reeling sensation that made him feel like he was about to pitch headfirst into a black chasm.

For a few minutes he just sat there, bent forward and trying to brave the waves of pain so raw that they could not be fought, merely endured. It felt like drowning, like suffocation; his heart being at once compressed into a single point in space while at the same time being torn to shreds. His ribcage felt too narrow for his lungs, the systolic pressure spikes of his heart too violent for his veins. He was crumpling and bursting apart at the same time.

After an indefinite amount of time, Celebrimbor reopened his eyes. The room in front of him was blurred, swimming in his line of sight like a mirage. The pain had abated, but what remained in the hollow carved out by the anguish was a grief so profound that it defied any attempt to put it into words. It was the mourning of every star that had ever burnt out, of every sunset that had passed, never to be repeated. It was the regret of every wrong turn taken, of decisions that could not be undone. It was the grief for a limb that had never been there, a friend you had never had a chance to say goodbye to, a loved one you had lost forever.

My father told me he was never able to weep for the life and love he had lost through the Oath. I wonder if I will ever be able to weep for this.

*

For a long while, Celebrimbor sat in silence and watched the moon rise over the eastern slopes of Fanuidhol. He felt cold inside, and empty, like a hollow carved deep into a mountain of the Dwarves, but without any of the beauty and care that the Khazad put into their work. He felt bereft, like part of him had fallen away and he knew that he would never find it again.

And yet, while hours and minutes passed, a growing unrest came over him.

He knew now who he was dealing with. That still left the question of how to deal with Sauron. The thought of having unleashed such a force upon the world– quite possibly angered and untethered, now that it had lost its anchor in Ost-in-Edhil – made his stomach clench.

Whatever happens hereafter will be my responsibility. My fault.

What would Sauron do, now that his true self had been revealed and Celebrimbor had recoiled from it in shock and horror? Was he even still here within the city walls? The order to leave had certainly been sharp enough that it could have been understood as banishment.

What if he has already left? What is he going to do then? Retreat from the face of the world and wait out the end of the Age of Elves, until he can walk this continent unrecognised once more?

Even as he thought it, the idea felt wrong. Celebrimbor didn’t know Sauron, but he did know Annatar, and although he wasn’t certain how much of Annatar had ever existed or whether it had all been an elaborate illusion, he felt like not even Melkor’s lieutenant could have hidden his entire personality for centuries on end. Annatar was restless. Impatient. Not content to sit back and let the world run its course when he could interfere to manipulate or accelerate events in his favour. Or to correct a perceived wrong.

No, Annatar would not sit back quietly, watching, waiting to see which way the dice would fall. And neither would Sauron.

Celebrimbor could not discard the possibility of the dark Maia wanting to take his secret back. The idea made cold sweat erupt all along his back and nausea rise in his throat. 

However, in stark contrast to his physical reaction, the inevitability of such an outcome the raging turmoil in Celebrimbor’s mind quietened. The surreal stillness of night, the dark, and the aura of being caught in a nightmare had kept his mind captive in a frantic ever-repeating loop. But now that he was faced with the imminent possibility of the destruction of everything and everyone he cared about, his thoughts broke free, slowed down, and solidified into clearer courses.

I cannot stall much longer.

He had gone too far to stand back now and allow events to overtake him. He had to act, as quickly and decisively as possible. If I still can.

A sudden urge to act rose inside him, buoying him upward. Celebrimbor leapt to his feet. He had to know, to find out what he was working with. Control the damage, if at all possible. The quicker, the better.

He knew, in his heart of hearts, that if Sauron truly sought to oppose him, he wouldn’t stand a chance. For once, the difference in sheer power between them painted itself in his mind with horrifying clarity.

There is no world in which I can win against Sauron by force alone.

Thus, he would need something else. Something that could level out the playing field even the slightest bit, something that gave him the fighting chance he needed. Something only the oldest of magic of the Elves would be able to provide him with.

He needed to speak to Artanis.

*

Celebrimbor sent his spirit forth, wandering across the reaches of Eregion, searching across the mountains of Khazad-Dûm, and winding through the ever-spring of Lorinand.

He could feel Artanis’s mind becoming aware of him as soon as his spirit crossed her border, and he fought not to shy back when he felt her sharp, unrelenting gaze upon his mind.

Nephew. You seek me out during night’s quietest hour. I sense turmoil and anguish in you. What is the matter?

I need your help, he replied.

He sensed Artanis pause. Not hesitating, but considering, trying to gauge the circumstances of his request. At last, he sensed her reply. What is it that you need from me?

Your Sight. And your silence.

There was utter stillness in his head, during which he could only hear the heart hammering against his ribs and the blood rushing in his ears.

Your request is disquieting, Telperinquar. What happened?

His aunt was not prying or actively searching his thoughts, but Celebrimbor felt the walls he had erected around his mind crumbling under her sharp scrutiny, her gaze bearing the force of a quasar – impossibly far away, but piercing stone and earth as easily as if they were glass. He closed himself off further, retreating and leaving only the barest of threads of their connection between them, shielding himself best as he could.

He could sense Artanis’s growing unease – and something else, something dangerously akin to distrust.

What is going on, Telperinquar?

I made a mistake, Celebrimbor replied. And to rectify it I need to gaze beyond the veil of the present, into tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. Perhaps into different futures as well. There are many variables at play, and no Sight that I possess allows me to estimate the proper course of action, and how to mitigate the damage I might have wrought.

Artanis didn’t reply immediately. You remain very elusive on the nature of your mistake, yet the time of your request and the despair in your soul speak their own language. What happened, Nephew?

Celebrimbor hesitated. He knew he had to give her more than that if he wanted her to trust him and help him. But –

I cannot speak of this. Forgive me.

I cannot forgive what I do not know the extent of, Artanis replied, and, oh, how Celebrimbor could have laughed or broken down in tears at those words – for was that not exactly the nature of his mistake, the core of his hubris when he had spoken so grandly of making the world a better place and granting amnesty to everyone who would help him with it? It seemed fitting that even without knowing what exactly was at stake, his aunt knew better than to ever make the same foolish promise he had made, and unknowingly (or was it?) aim her remark at the festering terror at the back of Celebrimbor’s mind.

I shall not ask for forgiveness then, Celebrimbor thought, after he had gathered himself. But will you help me?

There was another long silence, and for a moment he feared that the connection between their minds had broken.

But then he felt a pull at the bond invisibly spanning the miles between Ost-in-Edhil and Lórien, like an exhale, and fire lighting up at the breath of fresh air.

What is it that you need?

A brief pause, the held breath before the plunge.

Knowledge, he replied. Tell me how to build a Mirror.

*

Chapter Text

*

The workshop was lit only by moonlight falling through the high arched windows facing east. Celebrimbor had not lit a fire or candles, for he knew of the restless spirits among the Mírdain who worked even at night, and he did not want to be disturbed. That, at least, was what he told himself. Another, more honest part of his mind might have told of the fear that he was holding just barely at bay behind too-controlled movements and too-strictly regimented thoughts. He and Sauron had spent thousands of hours in this workshop – and there was a terrified part of Celebrimbor that feared that Morgoth’s lieutenant might come looking for him. He likely would attempt to find Celebrimbor in his chambers first. But when he found nothing there, Sauron would retrace his steps, moving on to the place that was most likely to harbour the smith besides his personal rooms.

Celebrimbor didn’t know whether darkness was his friend in this, but the night and the moons and stars of Varda had always been protectors and friends of the Eldar, ever since they had awoken and found themselves at the shores of Cuiviénen beneath a star-strewn sky.

Let the night protect and shield me now from unfriendly eyes, Celebrimbor thought while lifting the silver basin upon his workbench.

You need a vessel, Artanis had said through the connection in their heads. Clear and clean and wide it must be, so that when its eye opens it might look at you and reveal its answers to you.

He reached for the pitcher standing beside the basin and slowly began to pour. Water fell in a silvery arch, glittering as if holding the light of the stars themselves inside. Celebrimbor had fetched the water from a fresh spring as his aunt had instructed him and had invoked the purification rite under the open starry sky according to her instructions, repeating the words she had told him. A strange hymn it had been, only half-Elvish and half something else that had reminded him of the few phrases of Valarin that Annat– Sauron had taught him.

His tongue had felt clumsy speaking those ancient words, and there was a thrum of power in them that made his chest vibrate.

Where did you learn this?  he had asked her.

Lady Melian was a good teacher, Artanis had merely replied.

Celebrimbor had been silent for a while after that.

“Some call you our Melian,” he heard himself say, just hours earlier. The irony of those words tasted bitter on his tongue now. Would that we had been blessed with a friendlier Power to take notice of us. But no Girdle of protection can be woven now, for the foe is among us and within our walls, and I do not know how to stop him.

The basin was filling up. Motes of silver light flitted to and fro at the bottom of the vessel, trailing tails like little comets and forming erratic nets of fine webbing, traces of light, come and gone within the blink of an eye.

Knowledge twinkled in the basin’s shimmering depths.

He craved it and feared it all at once.

He needed to know, and yet he was terribly, mind-numbingly afraid of diving into it, and learning, seeing, knowing — beyond hope, beyond doubt — what was going to happen and what needed to be done.

*

At first the mirror didn’t show him anything. It remained still, silent, dark. Seconds ticked by, then minutes, and Celebrimbor could feel his body cooling down, his sweat-soaked shirt sticking to his back, ice-cold in the autumn night. An involuntary tremor ran down his arms. From the cold or the fear or the force with which he was gripping the rim of the basin, he didn’t know. 

The Mirror remains dark, he thought, feeling out for the distant connection to his aunt. It doesn’t answer.

What was your question? Artanis replied immediately. She had been waiting for him, all these hours in which he had been working in silence. It would have been naïve and too hopeful to think it was out of concern for his well-being alone. There was a deep, dark suspicion weighing down on their connection. His aunt was refraining from prying, but Celebrimbor knew that if it had been anyone else keeping something of this magnitude from her, she would have ripped their mind open like a dragon and pulled out this doom – his doom, hers, the doom of everyone she knew – that had been hidden from her to the light where she could see. She sensed the scale of what was being kept from her, but she was holding back. Barely.

Celebrimbor hesitated. I… I wanted to prevent something from happening. Undo a mistake.

Prevent what from happening, Nephew?

Celebrimbor floundered. I – I can’t. I cannot tell you. Please, do not ask me again.

Again, silence. Foreboding this time. An invisible thread, tense to a breaking point, its edges fraying.

Retrace your steps, Artanis said curtly. Go back. Clarify your starting point. You have to give the Mirror something before it can reflect it back at you. Tell it what happened and ask what is going to happen before you ask further how to prevent it.

Celebrimbor nodded, then sent his agreement down their mental link when he remembered she could not see him.

I don’t want to know, Celebrimbor said. I already asked too many questions tonight.

To himself he thought, Besides, what if the Mirror remained dark because there is nothing that can be prevented. Because there is -

No. Thoughts like these would not aid him now.

He had begun to tread this path, and there was no shying back from the avalanche he had set in motion.

Celebrimbor thought back to the night before, to the moment Sauron had revealed himself to him and how Celebrimbor had ordered him to leave. Like blips and bolts of lightning, the scene was intercut with a myriad of moments from a happier past – sunlight instead of the darkest hour, happiness instead of terror, blissful ignorance instead of the horror of knowledge. He poured it all into the Mirror, hoping, hoping, hoping against hope and reason that Artanis would not be able to sense the story he was telling.

With every memory he was handing over to the Mirror, the water began to glow brighter and brighter, until it shone like starlight caught on a silver plate.

This is what happened. Now show me the future.

*

The future was – broken.

There was a city – no, there were two cities, existing in a state of superposition, one hovering slightly above and to the right of the other one, like a three-dimensional image that had been forcibly split into its two-dimensional halves.

They were different, though.

One city was bustling with life and clamour, but the other one, hovering just behind the first image, felt empty, so empty. Something important, something vital was gone.

Celebrimbor hurried through the streets, and the people who looked back at him had no faces. He averted his eyes and went faster, not knowing where and why. He entered the central District of Artisans, and the further he went, the emptier the streets became. The cobblestones of the street became uneven, and out of the corner of his eyes, he thought he saw craters in the ground. The lively, neatly tended houses with light and laughter pouring from inside fell behind and the buildings around him became more and more derelict. Broken windows. Holes in walls and roofs. Doors hanging from only one hinge. Dead trees, a burnt city green stretching in a circle around a fountain without water.

The pervasive feeling of emptiness, of absence, of wrongness made Celebrimbor’s chest hurt like someone had thrust a fist through his ribcage and closed it around his lungs. He could smell smoke, choking and thick, but there was no fire. The air seemed clean, and yet with every breath he felt more like he was suffocating on ashes.

He continued on through Ost-in-Edhil to the central plaza. The abandoned city that had been hovering like an after-image behind the intact one began cutting through more and more, pressing into the foreground. The sky became darker with every step, turning green with an unnatural storm. Lightning burst through purple clouds, but no thunder followed. There was only silence. Such a deep, all-encompassing silence that Celebrimbor thought he must have gone deaf.

When he came to the central piazza, Sauron was there. He was standing in the middle of the circular space, at the centre of the logarithmic spiral mosaic that arced out from the centre of the piazza. In the eye of the storm he stood, golden-haired, white-clad, as fair as a memory of summer; that slightly expectant, challenging smile on his lips that jolted Celebrimbor’s heart even after four hundred years, and even now, even now, even now— please no, please no, please no.

The houses around him were intact, the high arched windows of the great auditorium in the tower of the Mírdain glinting in the sunlight. A blue sky, high winds, lush green-and-golden leaves rustling on autumn trees.

The sun was behind Sauron’s head, and it was lending a corona of light to his head. He was almost too radiant, too beautiful to look at.

That cannot be it. This is not him.

Suddenly he noticed how close the sun was. A giant burning, molten ball on the horizon that took up half the visible sky, summer blue fleeing to the fringes of outer space, chased away by red and gold.

There was a flare of light, and Celebrimbor had to blink against the glare. When he opened his eyes again, Sauron was gone – or not gone, but transformed. He looked like broken glass through which a light of impossible brightness and violence shone, refracted a million times in a million facets. Then the fractures melded together, and Sauron seemed to become a lens himself, and through his ethereal form of glass and light Celebrimbor could see the walls of the lecture hall burning, the white wall darkening from the heat, the trees in front of the windows crowned with flame, the trunks and branches charred black. The sky above was overcast with black and red clouds. The air was choked with dust. Ash was falling like snow.

Ost-in-Edhil was burning. Celebrimbor saw bodies lying in the streets, broken limbs akimbo, and dark shadows hunting children, hacking them down like stalks of corn in autumn with fell swords and impaling them with cruelly hooked spears. Fire and ruin. And in the midst of it a shining, bright figure wreathed in white flame with a band of gold on its finger.

Celebrimbor’s eyes were drawn to the golden band, which seemed made of fire itself, as if it carried a weight great enough to draw in the mind, the eye, and the very sense of self of the onlooker. It was the hinge of doom, the primordial axis of force around which the future, time, and possibility themselves revolved and were inexorably drawn into like moths to the light, like light into a black hole to be swallowed, burned, destroyed.

The band of gold grew and grew and grew, until the thing itself was like the sun, and it consumed everything in Celebrimbor’s vision, the city around them, the corpses of the dead, the shadows feasting on them, even Sauron himself. Then Celebrimbor felt the pull of it on himself, wrenching, ripping the very atoms he was made of from their molecular links until he was only strings of atoms being torn to shreds by a force that was ripping reality itself to pieces.

Look away! Look away!

Summoning every ounce of willpower that remained to him, he wrenched his gaze away from the vision.

Celebrimbor was shunted from the vision with the violence of a punch to his breastbone and he stumbled backwards, gasping for air like a drowning man. No—air. No—air. There is no air.

He grasped his chest and doubled over, gasping, wheezing, unable to draw breath into his shrivelled lungs, which had been collapsed by the force of the vision as if a solid rock had smashed into his chest.

Breathe. Breathe. BREATHE.

At last, after an eternity, something cracked in his lungs and he was able to inhale again. He dimly realised he had thrown an entire array of volumetric flasks, glass cylinders, and diamond lenses to the ground in his flailing panic.

There was a chair. Knocked over. No matter. He couldn’t remain on his feet  anymore. Needed to sit down. The ground would do.

He collapsed where he stood, crashing against the leg of a table and bruising three ribs. He didn’t feel it.

After a while, he noticed that he had buried his face in his hands, and that he had – once again – stopped breathing for far too long. Celebrimbor consciously drew air back into his lungs once more. And like the air that filled his tortured lungs, realisation flooded him – finally putting words to the unimaginable vision that he had witnessed.

The end of Ost-in-Edhil. The end of the world. And he is going to cause it. With a Ring. With the Rings we are going to make.

*

It took him about half an hour to get to his feet again. The terror hadn’t lessened, but he couldn’t afford to grant it more attention and time that he had already lost to it.

Celebrimbor climbed to his feet. Because that was what he always did. And because he had to.

He stumbled over towards the Mirror, steam rising from water that should be cool, ten degrees above freezing at most, because it was September…

He shook himself, gathering his thoughts. It cannot happen. I cannot allow it to happen.

He looked down, focusing on the water, now clear once more, blinking up at him like a bowlful of star-strewn sky.

Show me how to stop him.

*

Celebrimbor tried every possible course of action he was capable of imagining, with varying levels of failure.

Sending Sauron away was the quickest and most violent path to this future of fire and death. Left alone with his anger and disappointment, Sauron's retaliation came with the swiftness and force of a hammerblow.

He tried talking reason to Sauron. But unlike Annatar, Sauron was not a creature that could be reasoned with.

Celebrimbor tried to convince him into staying, attempting to prevent this rift that seemed to form inevitably between them, even though in those futures he never asked who Annatar was, and the Maia never revealed himself.

He even tried to prevent Sauron from leaving by driving their relationship forward much more quickly, and in a much more physical direction than they had ever attempted before. He could not, however, shut out the truth of Sauron’s identity from his mind, no matter how much he tried to pretend everything was alright and feign the ignorant fool in love. He wanted to crawl out of his skin every time he touched the Maia, and when Sauron reached back for him it took all his willpower to remain where he was and not slap his hand aside and bolt from the room. He tried to hide it. He truly did. Sauron must have seen something in his eyes, though, because the next morning he was gone. When he returned, it was with an army at his back and a band of fire on his right hand.

In one future, Celebrimbor was too adamant about not continuing the creation of the Rings together. He held a long, rehearsed speech about how it would be better if he continued the work on the Rings alone, because it was personal, almost a family matter to him (he did not use the word Silmarils). Oh, and wouldn’t Annatar’s knowledge and craftiness be of better use elsewhere? Sauron just watched him and listened, not saying a single word. From the moment of his sudden disappearance to the arrival of his dark forces less than six months went by. When Celebrimbor died in this timeline, it was to the image of two golden eyes hovering above his face and a hissed “ Betrayer” in his ears.

In another version, Celebrimbor managed to hide his intentions better, pushing less and nudging more. In the end, they didn't stop working on the Rings. Instead, they made the One together and when Celebrimbor stared at the abomination lying on the worktable between them and then raised his eyes to see the wide, wild smile on Annatar’s - Sauron’s face the only thing he was able to think was, What have I done? What have I done?

Slowly, desperation was beginning to bleed through into increasingly disturbing iterations of a future that seemed to be impossible to push off its fixed path. Eventually, he realised that changing the future would not work without sacrificing something from the old timeline. He could not expect a different outcome unless he changed the initial parameters.

It seemed only logical to let his own integrity go first. In the grand scheme of things that were at stake it seemed such a small thing to give up. He tried seduction. Misdirection. A trap. The knowledge that the one he was misleading was Sauron was always there. And yet. And yet. When Annatar-Sauron stepped into his embrace, trusting und unsuspecting, and Celebrimbor pulled him into a kiss to mask the movements of his free arm as he slid a knife between the Maia’s ribs — when Annatar’s eyes widened and blood burst forth in heartbeat-pulses over his lower lip and chin, when the strength of his legs gave out and Celebrimbor slowly knelt with him as he guided Annatar’s dying body to the floor and blood began to pool around both of them—

He could help but feel—

He couldn’t help but think—

Not like this.

What followed in the wake of trembling hands, blood that would not come off his fingers, the stain on his carpet, a desperate, and an ill-thought-out excuse were isolation and cold, distrustful glares of all those he had called colleagues, friends, even. Whispers of egomaniac, psychopath, would not be outshone, outdone, could not bear to share the glory, blood will out, filled the air. Celebrimbor did not attend the burial of the body.

He wondered if Sauron would have come back to avenge this betrayal. He wondered how long it would have taken and how terrible it would have been. He never found out. One week after killing Annatar he gulped down a vial of nightshade sufficient to kill three horses. The last thought he had before dying was that he was too much of a coward to use the same knife he had used for Annatar.

Not like this.

And yet, it seemed impossible to prevent Annatar from becoming Sauron, impossible to prevent his involvement in the creation of the Great Rings, which appeared to inevitably precede the creation of the terrible master-ring.

After another dozen fruitless, terrifying, and painful attempts, Celebrimbor gave up his attempts at deflection and deceptive cooperation. Another way, then. A sacrifice of another kind: a friend, this time.

He allowed the creation of the Great Rings. He stopped trying to keep Annatar from leaving. He watched and waited a hundred, a thousand times, as years passed and shadows gathered in the East, and the world darkened. He looked toward the sinister clouds gathering on the eastern horizon from the highest parapets of Ost-in-Edhil, then down at the three magnificent bands of silver in his palm, at the diamond, the ruby, the sapphire embedded in them, and wondered, How? How am I supposed to do this?

Celebrimbor tried to unmake the Rings. The wrath of the Dark Lord upon discovering this treachery was worse than anything he could ever have imagined. Afterwards, not a single stone, not a single building of Ost-in-Edhil remained, its existence and all its lives purged from the map.

He tried to hide them. Distribute them. Change them from devices of protection into weapons more terrible than even Sauron could ever have foreseen, if the widening of the Dark Maia’s eyes was anything to go by when Celebrimbor’s sword crashed down upon Sauron’s dark Morgul-blade in the courtyard of Ost-in-Edhil. The city burned and crumbled and died around them, while the woods of Eregion lit up the night like torches, consumed by flame.

That was, of course, before Sauron inevitably struck Celebrimbor down. If Celebrimbor was lucky, Sauron killed him immediately. If he was not (and he wasn’t, excepting a few very rare timelines), Eregion’s defeat was followed by the inevitable, sheer endless period of questioning and torture.

Sometimes Sauron found the Rings. Sometimes he didn’t. Sometimes Celebrimbor’s willpower broke, and in one despicable timeline (for which he hated himself, even after having completed multiple other iterations of the future), Celebrimbor gave them up of his own free will, just to expedite his murder at the hands of his former friend so that he might try yet again.

The future differed in shades and nuances.

A few years more or less of peace; the Great Rings being created a bit earlier here, a bit later there, either by Celebrimbor or Sauron alone or both of them together; war arriving a few months earlier or later; a few weeks more or less that Celebrimbor could withstand the torture.

In the grand scope of things it didn’t matter, because on the heels of completing the Great Rings, sooner or later inevitably followed the creation of it: the all-consuming, evil band of fire and gold that swallowed Annatar, Celebrimbor, and the entirety of Eriador whole.

From there on out, all further events were just variations of the same end. Eregion was razed to the ground. The world was burning and Sauron installed himself as the God-Emperor of the mountain of ashes that remained.

In the worst of all timelines, which thankfully happened only once, Sauron didn’t kill Celebrimbor, but instead took the elf to Mordor with him. Celebrimbor felt like he had entered a fever-dream in yet another nightmare when he saw the Black Gate looming before him. Then he noticed the mountain range towering before them and asked, “Are those mountains arranged in a rectangle?” At Sauron’s glare he actually had to keep himself from laughing, festering wounds, broken ribs, missing teeth and all, because this raised Annat- Sauron’s compulsive obsession with order to levels that were too bizarre to imagine in a serious conversation. That one moment of morbid levity aside, the timeline took way too long to reach its end. Sauron was very set on not allowing the elf to die of natural causes or wounds, and (in a very cynical turn of fate) took such good care of his physical needs that it took Celebrimbor ages to be able to fade away.

Ages, in which he saw the entirety of Middle-earth fall to Mordor. Elrond, Artanis, and Gil-Galad were cut down like weeds when they marched on the enemy, Númenor was destroyed, and all his remaining former friends and allies were led before the two thrones he and Sauron were sitting on, only to be beheaded by a massive troll with a blunt war axe for all to see.

Afterwards, Celebrimbor made sure to die in battle before he could be taken captive, and with every iteration of the future that passed, he became perversely proficient at stabbing himself in the throat or cutting a vital blood vessel even through gaps in his armour in the midst of a battle. The pure, unadulterated rage on Sauron’s face every time Celebrimbor bled out before the dark Maia was able to get his hands on him was almost worth it.

Still, Celebrimbor didn’t think one should be getting used to killing oneself as easily as that. It had to be doing something to his mind, of that he was certain, but he could not stop to examine it.

He died, the timeline ended. He plunged back in and tried again.

*

Celebrimbor resurfaced with the rattling gasp of a man drowning in his own blood. He pitched sideways, almost swiping the basin off the table before he caught the edge of the desk and pulled himself back up. He was panting, reeling, his body convulsing in the aftermath of yet another death. It was not real, nothing of it was. But how was he supposed to convince his body of this, if his heart remembered stopping, if his ligaments remembered tearing, if his muscles remembered being cut, and if every single bone in his body was still screaming with the remembered agony of being broken with the intensity and detail of a real memory?

His mind, too, was reeling, unable to come to terms with the two diametrically opposed and mutually exclusive experiences of being at once dead and alive, or having been killed a hundred times or more and yet continue existing…

It’s not working, he thought desperately. I can’t find it. I just can’t find it.

Celebrimbor felt old, wrung-out, desiccated like a mummified corpse. His skin was pulled tight over his bones, his gums drawn back from his teeth, his lungs shrivelled, every nerve in his body blazing with agony.

With a sinking feeling he realised that he wouldn’t be able to do this for much longer. Even from the far reaches of unrealised futures, the strain of a thousand lifetimes ending in torture and pain was becoming too much – for his body and mind both.

His breath was coming in rattling, shallow rasps. He could hardly move anymore, his limbs jerking with uncontrolled twitches and tremors.

I am going to kill myself if I continue this.

And yet he couldn’t stop, because at the finale of every venture into the future, the one thing that awaited him – and the world – without fail was death. Again and again. And while Celebrimbor could accept that he deserved to die for what he had wrought, that it might even be a fair punishment for his boundless arrogance, he couldn’t, he wouldn’t accept that fate for everyone else.

Not again. I won’t be like my grandfather and make the world suffer for my mistakes. There has to be a way out, there has to be a different way, a turn I didn’t take, an attempt I didn’t make—

Then, suddenly, a voice – sharp, polished, so very reminiscent of his father, as if Curufin was standing right behind his shoulder. If you keep getting bad answers, you are asking the wrong questions.

Celebrimbor stilled, fingers still clenched around the rim of the basin, resting too much weight on the fragile, thin metal, it would bend… it would bend…

Bend. Change your trajectory. Approach the problem from a different angle.

One breath in, one breath out. Reminding himself and his body that he was not dead, no matter what the screaming nerves, the hurting muscles, the bones that still remembered breaking so vividly, were telling him.

Sauron. Sauron is one immutable constant. He cannot be stopped. He can never be stopped. Not by me nor by anyone else.

I see. Curufin’s voice was quiet, challenging. So change your target. Aim for another facet of the problem.

Which one? he almost asked, but just as that the answer came to him:

Annatar.

His breath hitched in his throat. But how? Annatar was a lie. A mask. A farce, acted out to play us all for fools.

He noticed he wasn’t breathing and forced himself to suck in air through bluish lips. Remember that I’m alive. I’m not dead yet, I’m not dead yet—breathe, breathe, breathe—

He collected himself. Started thinking again, while tapping out a rhythm against the side of the basin with his fingers, something for his heart to keep pace with, to remind it to continue beating.

Annatar. Can I target Annatar, if nothing of him was truly extant?

A profound silence, a void that begged for questions to be reexamined, for supposed certainties to be reevaluated.

Celebrimbor thought of Sauron throwing himself between the entirety of Khazad-Dûm and the Balrog.

He thought of Annatar, buried alone at the deepest levels of the mines after the fight against the Balrog that had almost killed him. Remembered how he had found his friend there and cradled the Maia’s bloody, battered, nearly destroyed form against his chest, and Annatar telling him quietly, almost inaudibly, I knew you’d come back.

He thought of Sauron saying, For you, Silver-grasp, Diamond-mind, Mirror-soul. For you, and no one else.

He thought of Annatar-Sauron kneeling before him, waiting for Celebrimbor to tear off his mask and reveal the truth.

Êzhirai. You and me and no one else.

He was breathing. Slowly, deliberately. With more conviction now, his body learning to believe in its own existence once more.

Perhaps… perhaps it was real. Or some of it was real. Real enough to provide a leverage point that can be targeted.

Celebrimbor stared into the Water, which was glittering up at him, expecting his next question, his next attempt at throwing himself into a timeline where the world as he knew it didn’t end.

Change the question, his father’s voice spoke in his mind, cool and curt.

Celebrimbor closed his eyes. Listened to the beating of his aching heart.

For you, Silver-grasp, Diamond-mind, Mirror-soul. For you, and no one else  

—and allowed himself to ask the question that he had been wanting to ask all along.

Show me how to save him. Show me how to save us.

He leaned forward, pitching his soul beyond memory and time once more.

*

Chapter Text

*

When dawn broke Celebrimbor was lying face-down on the table next to the basin, his arms cradling his pounding skull. His eyes were burning with lack of sleep. The skin at the corner of his eyes felt taut and raw.

A shaft of golden brightness hit his closed lids. He slowly turned his head and opened his eyes to look out of the east window of his workshop. Sunlight was streaming in through the high, arched windows into the workshop and the skylight above, illuminating dust motes dancing in the still air. Papers and lenses were scattered on all available surfaces. Wax models of rings were carefully shut inside a glass case in a shadowy corner. Chalk drawings of light refraction and index tables were visible on the big blackboard to his left, some ring prototypes safely locked away in another cabinet on the right-hand wall. Outside, the sun was slowly rising out of the white-blue mist on the eastern horizon as a glowing red ball. Birdsong filled the cool blue air over the city towers and the treetops of the holly forests on the mountain slopes around Ost-in-Edhil's walls.

Celebrimbor slowly sat up, stretching his aching joints and stiff muscles.

It was a lovely morning, and in the golden light of dawn, the events of last night seemed more than ever like an evil nightmare, a conjuration of his tired mind, his subconscious running away with the guilt and shame of a bygone age. 

And yet, for all that the world and his workshop seemed to have stayed the same on the surface, something had changed. There was an absence where there was supposed to be none: empty air where there should be a friendly face turning around to meet him, smiling in greeting. Silence instead of a teasing remark about sleeping in late (always, even when he got up at dawn), before inviting him to join the day’s work with a nod of the head. 

A glint of golden eyes, a smile.

Do you see it now?

He felt the pang of loss as keenly as an amputated limb. Celebrimbor stumbled over to one of the worktables and collapsed into one of the revolving chairs there. His heart was aching with a pain beyond the physical, the agony of a loss that could not be described with words. He would have loved to break down and cry; it would have been a relief if he had been able to. But there was a wall around his feelings now, a dam he could not break.

Celebrimbor pressed his fingers to his lids to stave off the burning in his eyes and leaned forward to rest his elbows on his knees, trying to breathe through the pain of a heart threatening to tear itself in two with every beat.

This was how Inarë found him.

“Tyelperinquar?”

He looked up and over to the door, where he saw the Master of Botany standing, her greying hair plaited across one shoulder, her sleeves pushed up to her elbows under her brown frock, and her kind face creased with worry.

“I almost didn’t notice you sitting there, were it not for the open door. Whatever is the matter with you?” Inarë asked, stepping into the room, limping only slightly on her prosthetic left leg. Then she caught sight of the upended chair, the broken equipment, and shards of glass on the floor. Her face grew grave, her pace quickened – and stopped. “Are you unwell?”

Celebrimbor hurriedly ran his hands across his face to mask anything she might have seen there as exhaustion, and stood. “No – it’s alright. I’m fine, thank you.”

She stepped up closer and eyed him critically. “You don’t look fine. You’re as pale as a ghost and trembling like a leaf – what happened?”

“It’s…” he trailed off, at a loss as to how to continue. “I’m fine,” he repeated at last. “I was just …” He hesitated. “Have you seen Annatar by any chance?”

Inarë raised one eyebrow. “Why, I’d wager he was already off to start this day’s lessons. To be honest, I had expected the same of you before I found you here. Though, with how you’re looking, you might want to take yourself to the hospital.” She gave him a critical once-over but said nothing more.

Instead, she just waited and looked at him, her face open, exerting no pressure - inviting him to speak, to regurgitate the black mass of terror and despair that had taken up residence in his chest and free himself of its writhing mass inside his lungs and heart and throat.

And he would have loved to do it. To share the burden of his knowledge, to speak to somebody – anybody –  about what he had seen and what he had to do.

But he couldn’t.

“No, no…I am fine, truly.” Celebrimbor was already pushing gently past her, his mind whirring and already elsewhere. At a lesson?  He wouldn’t  – he’d never – not after last night – or would he?  “I have to … thank you. I must be on my way.”

Inarë called something after him, but he didn’t hear it.

*

Celebrimbor briefly returned to his private rooms. He was still wearing yesterday’s clothes, but he didn’t bother to change. The only thing he grabbed before walking out of his chambers was the Sindarin cloak his aunt had gifted him three years ago, which would hide him from unwanted eyes.

He wished to be discreet, at least for now, because there was still a possibility that the only reason Ost-in-Edhil wasn’t burning to the ground right now was that nobody knew what had happened.

Celebrimbor pulled the cloak around his shoulders and the cowl over his head as he walked down the hallways at a quick pace. When he reached one of the countless stairs, he took the spiralling steps downwards, descending to the ground floor where most classrooms were.

Could he really be as bold – as callous – to simply show up to his lesson and go on as if nothing at all had happened?  He paused, considered this. Then again, why not? There is nothing I can do. Because if I open my mouth, if I do anything to threaten to reveal him, he has the entire city as a hostage and he can snuff it out with a flick of his hand.

For one moment Celebrimbor fought the mad urge to laugh, but suppressed it. 

A god in our city indeed. But no Melian did I invite! No, if Morgoth had not already been cast out into the void, I might just as well have welcomed the Dark One himself to stay, fool that I am. And what difference would it have made?

He walked on, past the awakening inhabitants of the tower of the Mírdain , but no one seemed to take heed of him even when he was passing them by.

Annatar would be giving his chemistry lessons to the third-year apprentices today first thing in the morning. Two hours, lasting from the eighth hour of the morning until the tenth. After that he gave a lecture on advanced optics before noon, and after the break, materials science for two hours in the afternoon.

The schedule came as naturally to Celebrimbor as the times and places of his own lectures. They knew each other’s timetables by heart, having gone so far as dropping in and listening in on each other’s lessons when time and opportunity allowed it.

Celebrimbor reached the hallway for natural sciences and pushed through the throng of elves, dwarves, and humans from all over the continent, of all appearances and ages, a bright, good-natured din of mixed mother-tongues and the common tongue of academics – a curious blend of Sindarin and a Númenorean branch of Adûnaic. Most were apprentices, some of them guest lecturers from Khazad-Dûm and Erebor and Harad, and others still the resident masters of Ost-in-Edhil. When they felt his shove, most looked up, irritated, looking out for who had run into them, but all their eyes slid off his cloaked form like water off a lotus petal.

Celebrimbor stopped before the door that led into the great, tiered auditorium with its descending rows of seats, arranged in a half-circle around a central table in front of a great blackboard. The lecture hall was meant for the larger audiences of those interdisciplinary lectures that were relevant to more than one branch of the natural sciences. A group of apprentices was just about to walk in, with five minutes left until the start of the lecture. Celebrimbor waited until the last of them, a dark-skinned Dwarven woman with her hair braided in the style of Far Harad, had walked in, then followed them inside, gliding after them like a ghost, unseen by all eyes.

The room inside was flooded with sunlight slanting golden through the row of eastern windows and echoing with the reflected chatter of many voices. Seats were taken, satchels put down, quills sharpened, parchment laid on the tables with a rustle, while laughter and excited conversations filled the air. Celebrimbor kept his hood down as he walked, unseen and unheard, like a shadow to the last, highest row of seats closest to the door and looked down, students passing him by without noticing him.

The table at the bottom of the auditorium was unoccupied. The surface was blank, no papers strewn on top, no notes on the pristinely cleaned, great blackboard mounted on the wall behind it. The equipment for experiments and live demonstrations was set to one side of the long table, the chemicals lined up and labelled neatly, the glass flasks polished and glinting in the morning light, the gas burner at a safe distance from everything.

Annatar had always enjoyed giving lectures in here. He had relished the opportunity to speak in front of a big audience – just as much as Celebrimbor had enjoyed watching him, walking up and down in front of his desk as he spoke and explained, his voice loud and clear, basking in the attention of inquisitive minds who were looking up at him, even when he was standing on the lowest level of the amphitheatre-like room. Every now and then he would lean back against the desk – just to push himself off the next moment and sketch something on the blackboard – his eyes never leaving those of his students, carrying his audience along with whatever he was saying at a rapid-fire pace that left no time for dawdling and wandering thoughts.

His teaching style was like a diamond – sharp, multi-faceted, and brilliant, and it brought forth sharp-minded graduates that had been cut and polished in the same vein.

He is brilliant. The most brilliant of us by far. Whatever else he was, whatever else he did – not even knowing what I do now I could deny it. Though what did he intend by it? What did he want to achieve by coming here? And why did he stay this long, teaching us, talking to us, guiding us with no discernible purpose other than the beauty and the joy of it? Celebrimbor knew Annatar’s single-minded determination, his impatience. His inability to dawdle, his almost indiscriminate dislike of lacking purpose. Why stay this long? Why let himself be diverted by all those tangents – teaching, travelling, spending time with us? What did he want from us?

Then, all at once, Celebrimbor became aware of the silence.

The conversations around them had ceased, as had the sounds of utensils being prepared, papers being rustled to the correct page. There was a hum of expectation in the air that had not been there before.

And there was something else. Something inside Celebrimbor was rising, answering to a presence that had not been there before, drawn forth and outward by a pull that was as natural to answer to as an opposing magnet.

Celebrimbor slowly raised his head and felt his heart stop beating, before resuming with a heavy, painful thump that made his ribs reverberate.

Sauron was standing in the middle of the auditorium, clothed in white, adorned with the golden rings on his hands, the embroidered girdle with its golden stitches, and the wild, beautiful fall of golden curls down his shoulders and back, set ablaze in the morning light. He was shadowless and radiant, like a sun that had stepped into the room, and it was impossible, simply impossible – in the light of day, in the gentle gold of this autumn morning, that he should be who he was. That the marks of Huan’s teeth should lie behind this collar, and the chains of Morgoth be forever imprinted on his arms, that the deaths of millions should be owed to his hands, which had clasped and gently, but firmly guided Celebrimbor’s own so many times, and were now hanging at his sides: empty, the fingers only slightly curled, no force or violence in his entire posture. Just silence, radiant, blazing sunlight, and … searching.

Celebrimbor flinched when Sauron’s eyes roved over the assembled students in the hall, fixing on one person, only to discard them and quickly flit to the next, his gaze climbing the rows of seats, seeking, probing, looking for something. Celebrimbor pressed himself against the back of his seat, clutching the edge of the table.

I sensed him. He sensed me as well. He knows I am here.

And despite having come here of his own free will, of having searched for Sauron with the eventual goal of confronting him, Celebrimbor wished for nothing more to remain unseen, to be granted a little more reprieve before he was forced to act. He was still thrown off balance and reeling after coming face to face with the friend of four-hundred-years and the lieutenant of Melkor, in his city, his home, and seeing him for who he was for the first time.

Not now. Not yet. He pressed himself further back against the seat. His cold, trembling hands gripped the table tighter.

Sauron’s eyes were now on the row of students in front of him. They slid over each one sitting there, his eyes snagging on nothing. Then he was looking straight at Celebrimbor. It was like standing at the focal point of sunlight bent and focused through a lens. He felt like everything around him was being stripped and burnt away, the walls, the floor, the seat he was sitting on, the clothes he was wearing, his skin, every layer of muscle and sinew and fat, until only bone was left, and then even those evaporated in the unrelenting, searching fire of that gaze, before his atoms were ripped apart at their molecular bonds.

Celebrimbor gasped, his hands spasmed –

– and then Sauron’s eyes slid past him, a slight frown on his handsome face, but nothing more.

The heat abated and Celebrimbor’s atomized body rearranged itself, although every one of his nerves felt raw and as if burnt by fire.

Sauron turned away to walk behind his desk. Celebrimbor stared at him, briefly not comprehending, then realisation dawned on him–

Galadriel’s enchantment had held. In a more fitting moment, when his mind was not reeling from the feeling of being disassembled by the eyes of Sauron alone, he would have to think more about the fact that his aunt could weave magic that could withstand even the probing of one of the Ainur. But it was a consideration for another day, one when his bones didn’t feel like liquid and his veins like someone had poured burning lead into them.

For now all he could do was to keep breathing, half-slumped over, and wait.

Below him, Sauron began his lesson. Starting, as always, with a repetition of his last lecture and throwing rapid-fire questions into the crowd of students to test what they had retained. Later on, he would go on to explain the macrostructures of carbon-tubes. Focused. Voice level, never raised and never needing to. With easy poise, and effortless control of the auditorium. Answering questions, once, twice, a third time. Slightly impatient perhaps, but never angry. Walking over to one student, coming to stand beside him, and pointing out one critical flaw in his calculations on a sheet of paper, before walking away again, his footfalls almost too quiet to hear.

Nothing about him would have allowed anyone in this room to guess at the scars around his throat and arms, the blood on his hands, or at the dark mirror of the ingeniousness that he used to teach them: the boundless knowledge, be it of dead matter or living bodies. Creativity – at coming up with solutions for scientific problems, or how to torture an individual to the brink of madness but never into the oblivion beyond. The easy, silent understanding – of problems, of solutions. And even of those who had survived the Dark Ages.

Many in Ost-in-Edhil were at least suspecting that Annatar had survived Angband, along with countless others here. They had picked up little hints about his past, but, oh, how treacherous, how two-sided they were in retrospect.

They thought he knew the Iron Hells because he, too, had been imprisoned there. They believed that he could relate to the wounds and traumata of the survivors because he had lived through similar terrors. No one would have ever guessed that he knew Angband’s dungeons not because he had been imprisoned there, but because he had helped Melkor delve them into the lightless depths. No one would even be able to suspect that he understood the pain and terror inside Angband so intimately not because he had lived it, but because he had been its architect.

And no one would ever know how that same being had looked at Celebrimbor, just a few hours before, with such hope and fear at first, and then anger and betrayal.

Nothing of it was showing in Sauron's face even now. Yesternight might as well have never happened, for all that it seemed to affect him. His voice was level, his facial expression so nondescript as to be almost blank. A flawless mask without any weak points. An act played to perfection, for centuries and centuries.

And we would never have known, had he not decided to tell me of his own will .

 Again and again, Celebrimbor’s eyes slipped to Annat—Sauron’s hands. Slender, yet strong. Long-fingered, nimble.

He couldn’t understand.

These are the hands who killed countless of my kin. The same hands that kept a Balrog from killing me and destroying an entire kingdom. And the hands that will strike me down, put me in chains, and pull the flesh from my muscles, the teeth from my jaws, the nails from my fingers… for what? Pieces of jewellery? Betrayal? Jealousy? Retribution? Power?

Celebrimbor noticed that he was drenched with sweat. His head was spinning. He had to leave. He didn’t know what he was waiting for, what he was still hoping to see, why he wasn’t trying to slip out unnoticed and steel himself for what he had to do.

He had already risen from his seat, and made his way silently over to the exit, when he turned around again. The students were doing a quick exercise in-between two topics. One of the younger Dwarven students from the Blue Mountains was having trouble with a wave function. Sauron had walked over to her and was leaning slightly over her shoulder, listening to her question, then replying quietly.

His hand – the hand – rose, then gently took the quill from her hand, threw down the sketch of two differing orbitals, pointed between them, and added a small correction to one of her notes.

The student nodded, looking up at him from her seat; shy, slightly intimidated, but with gratefulness and awe on her features. Sauron returned the smile, even though it didn’t reach his eyes like it did when he was acting genuinely and not out of an obligation for pleasantry. Then walked off in the direction of another raised arm.

Celebrimbor was still standing, rooted to the ground like a statue, standing before the exit door for everyone to see and at the same time unseen.

Aim for another facet.

Could he really try? Could it work? Did the shatterpoint that he was aiming for even exist? 

Maybe.

Could he be so foolish again, one more time, and allow himself to hope? For life, for a future? For avoiding the end that he had seen in nearly every single branch of all timelines he had visited?

Maybe.

Not certainly. Not even likely. The Mirror had made that clear. “Maybe” was all that he was ever going to get.

He had to try.

As silently as a ghost, Celebrimbor opened the door and slid out, unheard and unseen.

*

After Celebrimbor had written and sent away the summons, he went into the bathroom and took a shower. He combed out the tangles and knots in his hair with his fingers, then, when it was possible in the first place, with a comb. Afterwards, he donned the set of fresh clothing that he had laid out on his bed. Slowly, methodically, he pulled on the dark trousers, they grey tunic, the black waistcoat with the silver stitching that went over it. He cinched the broad leather belt around his waist, then pulled the long, black cape around his neck.

He had washed it, but even so there was a smell to clothing that had lain folded in a corner of a wardrobe for half a millennium – cared for, well-preserved, but duly overlooked and never again worn ever since it had been put here.

Now as he threw it around his shoulders, the black fabric fluttered and billowed, before coming to rest against his back and showing the elaborate embroidery of an eight-pointed silver star. The star was repeated in the clasp that held the cape closed at his throat.

Black and silver, black and silver all over. His old colours. The first colours he had ever worn, before the images and deeds he had associated with them had become too much of a weight on his mind to make them bearable and he had discarded them.

He couldn’t remember the last time he had worn anything but shades of brown or light grey, bronze or spring green. Colours of the Khazad, of the Sindar, of the melting pot of cultures that came to Ost-in-Edhil every day. But never black and silver.

Up until today.

Celebrimbor regarded himself in the mirror and found a stranger looking back at him. He did no longer recognize Tyelperinquar, the Silversmith, or Kurfinni, the Dwarf-friend in this reflection: in this haughty, proud face, the stern angle of the brows, the tension in the jaw, the battle-ready set of the shoulders. The star-clasp at his throat was catching the light of the setting sun as he turned, blinking once when the light caught it, and then receding into grey shadows.

Looking back at him from the glazed surface, out of eyes as hard as flint, in which the light from the Two Trees mingled with the darkness under the Thangorodrim, was Curufinwë. Which one, he could not tell. He wasn’t entirely sure it mattered anymore.

*

Celebrimbor had never felt at ease in the High Hall of Ost-in-Edhil. Even while his aunt and Celeborn had still held court there, he had sought to avoid it whenever he could. He had never spent much time trying to gain some insight into his visceral aversion against the space, rather than just assuming in wilfully upheld ignorance that he did not want to give fodder to accusations of wanting to oust his relatives from their seat of power – or later, avoiding the impression of having done just that und taking a seat on the throne. He saw himself as a steward of Ost-in-Edhil, a representative of a greater whole, not its ruler. Thus he insisted on receiving guests of all rank and provenance, even delegates and royal messengers, in the smaller halls throughout, not without causing some raised eyebrows and questions when those guests inevitably got wind of the far more adequate High Hall. Celebrimbor prided himself on an almost politicianesque ability to deflect and redirect any inquiries in this vein and shut them down within moments. He had not set foot into the hall ever since his aunt had left. If anything, this, too, had made it easier to believe that his sole reasons in avoiding his place lay in memories of the ill-fated departure of his aunt.

Now, though, as he walked up the long path from the great double doors to the empty throne, he could no longer uphold the self-deception. Too much did the high-backed chairs at the elevated end of the hall remind him of his grandparents’ seats of honour, too strongly did the arched stained-glass windows at the eastern side of the hall and the shafts of light lancing down into the echoing, cathedral-like interior recall the image of the Great Hall of Formenos. If he turned around, Celebrimbor knew that he would see a memory of open doors, and a torch-lit night beyond. And framed between those doors he would see a ghostly crowd, gathered around a great fire in their midst, tongues of flame blazing into the dark sky like a raised sword, and he would hear the echo of voices raised in unison, to proclaim a great and terrible promise that would bind their very souls…

No, he did not like to think of his grandfather’s seat. Formenos had been a place of an unmendable break in his life, and a point of no return. Celebrimbor cared little for its echo here, on the other side of the sea, though he couldn’t help but note the irony of how well it set the stage for this scene in the play, for which the curtain was about to lift. Daeror, he was sure, would have appreciated it for the repeated theme and the dramaturgic cohesion. But the grandeur of the hall was permeated with a grey undercurrent of sadness and disuse, and the way his steps echoed in this huge, empty hall left Celebrimbor feeling alone and small.

Feeling like a puppet pulled on strings, Celebrimbor climbed the three steps leading up to the elevated end of the hall and to the thrones standing there. Slowly, he stepped up to the tallest of them, the one his aunt had used back in her time as ruler of Ost-in-Edhil. The white marble was cold and hard.

A ruler should not sit comfortably, he had heard Artanis say once. Coming from any other person, the words might have been an empty proverb. Coming from his aunt, he knew that she meant it.

With a rush of air catching in his long cloak as he turned around, Celebrimbor slowly lowered himself onto the throne. The empty hall stretched out before him. Dust motes were dancing in the golden light shining in through the high windows. In the silence below the vaulted ceilings, he waited.

*

Chapter Text

*

He didn’t have to wait long.

One leaf of the great entrance door opened, and then Sauron was there, framed in impossibly bright light by the low-hanging late summer sun. For a moment Celebrimbor was reminded of his vision in the Mirror: the city burning, the sky itself set aflame, consumed by a sun that took up the entire horizon. He blinked, and the image was gone.

Sauron, too, seemed to hesitate for a moment. Celebrimbor saw him taking in the unfamiliar location, then Celebrimbor sitting on the throne. His eyes lingered on the embroidered Fëanorian star on Celebrimbor’s waistcoat for a fraction of a second longer than on everything else. Celebrimbor saw Sauron taking note of the sombre atmosphere, distance, and the cold formality, both in the choice of location and their personal constellation. He noticed Morgoth’s lieutenant shifting almost imperceptibly, a tension in his shoulders that had already been there before, but not quite as pronounced. A narrowing of the eyes, an imperceptible twitch of his corner of the mouth.

Even now I can read him so well, Celebrimbor thought. And yet it was never even remotely enough to discern the things that mattered.

Slowly, Sauron walked down the length of the hall. The echoes of his steps hurried forward and sideways and all around his feet like little frightful animals fleeing the predator on their trail. Sauron walked quickly, determinedly. There was no languidness, no indifference in his stride, and when he stopped right at the foot of the steps leading up to the throne and looked up at Celebrimbor, there was a brief flash in his golden eyes when their gazes met.

“You have summoned me, Lord Curufinwë?”

The cold formality and the mockery of subservience were a precisely placed stab, and a mirror-image of Celebrimbor’s own choices for this meeting, twisted around and reflected right back at him. Annatar had always known how to do this: in a good way when they had played ideas off each other, refining them with each time they shared and sharpened them in the back and forth between their minds. But even back then Annatar had always known how to turn around an undesired comment or treatment he disapproved of and reverse it with surgical precision and cruel efficiency. No, Annatar would never have let such treatment stand. And neither would Sauron.

He was assuming formality and coolness before Celebrimbor could do it and push them apart from positions of friendship into something much colder and more distant. 

You cannot do to me what I do to myself first. You cannot push me away if I choose to remove myself in advance. 

“I have,” Celebrimbor said, not reacting to the provocation. “Because I have come to a decision on how to proceed in the light of what you revealed to me.”

There was a glint in Sauron’s eyes, dark and dangerous. “And that would be? Are you banishing me from the city, now that the cards are on the table and you find that you cannot stomach the truth you so foolishly asked for?”

You cannot wound me if I stab you first.

Again, Celebrimbor ignored it. He would not rise to the bait, not least because he could not afford to. If he let this argument spiral out of control, the entire world would pay for it. He had seen it too often, in too much gruesome detail, to allow this downfall of everything he knew and loved to repeat itself if he could help it. It might happen anyway in this timeline, but not without him attempting everything in his power to prevent it.

“I considered throwing you out,” Celebrimbor said instead, keeping his voice calm. He waited. Longer than he might have done otherwise, had he still not known who was standing before him. Not trying to provoke, but advertising certainty, calm, and dominance, like a great standing stone. We will talk of this at my pace.

Annatar did not suffer being ruled over, but he respected strength of will and despised fear and mindless deference, both in himself and others. Celebrimbor conjectured that Sauron had to be similar. Still, he was acutely aware that this was a walk on a tightrope. Go too slowly and lose your balance and fall. Go too quickly, and the same would happen.

Sauron’s eyebrow went up in an impatient arc. “And?”, he asked, his voice sharp. “What do you say?”

Celebrimbor looked at him with an unreadable expression. A thousand futures flickered before his inner eye and winked out like motes of flame. All gone, leading to nothing but void and ruin. Safe for…

Show me how to save us.

“You may stay, and I will keep your secret,” he said. “Under one condition.”

Surprise flickered over Sauron’s face, mixed with distrust and a spark of anger. “Which is?

Celebrimbor closed his eyes, fighting down a surge of pain rising in his chest, knowing what he was about to do. This agonised part of him was almost like a living thing: awakening and thrashing in panic like cattle that realised it was about to be dragged to the slaughter block.

Don’t allow pain, or fear of pain, to master your mind and make your decisions for you. Curufin’s voice was a ghost at the back of his head and in a memory of Tirion of old, Celebrimbor could feel strong fingers taking his burnt hands, holding them close. Master yourself. Do what has to be done.

When Celebrimbor opened his eyes again, his gaze was steel, and his mind was made up. “Our work on the Rings stops right here, right now.”

Sauron’s eyes blazed. “What?” For a moment the light falling in through the high windows was all-red.

Celebrimbor forced himself to ignore it and held the Dark Maia’s gaze.

A walk on a tightrope. Madness, foolhardiness, the odds a million to one. But I have to try.

“The Rings are too dangerous. They could be devastating in the hands of the wrong people,” he said.

“We would not just hand them out to anyone,” Sauron snarled. “What is going on? Do you suddenly think us brainless fools?”

“We wouldn’t need to hand them away to wreak death and destruction!” Celebrimbor shot back, throwing his arm out in a helpless gesture, encompassing the hall, the city, the world all around them. “I, a mere mortal, managed to force one of Arda’s elements to do my bidding yesterday. With a Lesser Ring! A bare shade more than a prototype! And you and I know that we would not have stopped there. It would only have been the first step on an endless ladder of yet another attempt, yet another set of rings more powerful than the last. We would never have stopped!”

“No, and why should we?” Sauron growled.

“Your question is the answer!” Celebrimbor retorted, his voice rising, clutching his armrests, before remembering himself and forcing himself to calm down. The pain in his chest was almost unbearable. But he could not relent, could not step back now, even if it meant killing this part of himself.

“That you should ask why we should stop at all,” he continued, calmer now, “illustrates better than anything that there was never meant to be any limitation to this project. None at all. We would have ended up with devices of world-ending powers, and …” His voice broke, then he went on. “And we would have been the wrong ones to create them. Or worse, wield them.”

Sauron’s eyes were wide, his pupils small pinpricks in blazing gold. “What has gotten into you all of a sudden? Is this because of what I told you yesterday? If so, I’ll have you know that your idiotic ad-hominem argument doesn’t change anything about the validity of attempting to reforge the world into a better likeness of itself! Just because I am who I am and you are who you are doesn’t mean that anything else has changed!”

“Does it not?” Celebrimbor asked back. “You revealed to me who you were, and in doing so, you held up a mirror to me, and when I looked in I couldn't … no, for the first time in centuries I think I recognized myself. Stripped of all pleasant delusions, wilful blindness, and high-minded intentions, I could for the first time in an eternity ask myself the question, What are you doing?, and answer honestly. That I was about to create a World-Ender with Morgoth’s lieutenant at my side. That I was about to run every risk of failing and doing an unimaginable amount of harm, for the sliver of a chance to rearrange the cosmos to my – our liking. You do not get any more hubristic than that. And two such beings should be entrusted with the power to reshape the world and challenge the gods?” He looked at Sauron “And we would have, wouldn’t we?”

Sauron’s eyes narrowed. “Yes.”

“Knowing all this, would you give us access to this power?”

“I would,” Sauron snarled, “because we have a vision and the will to see it through, contrary to everyone else I have ever met, including my old master.” His eyes narrowed. “Although I am beginning to doubt your strength and commitment.”

“Doubt it all you want because I know it would be wrong. Us having the perfected Rings would be like handing Morgoth the Flame Imperishable and Eru’s Power.” Celebrimbor closed his eyes, fought down another wave of pain. “Which is why the work on the Rings stops.”

 “This has nothing to do with what we talked about yesterday!” Sauron bristled. “I chose to be honest with you, I revealed my past to you, but making my further staying here conditional on stopping working on the Rings –”

“It has everything to do with who you are!” Celebrimbor rose from his throne, staring down at Sauron, who looked like he was about to shed his disguise as Annatar and burst into a monstrosity of metal-spoked wheels, fire, and smoke at any moment. “Look where your good intentions led you in the past! Look what you did with power as soon as it was granted to you!”

“That was thousands of years ago,” Sauron said, and his voice cracked with anger. “I don’t have the luxury of being able to die and start, returned to innocence. I made amends in the time afterwards, I tried to show my honest –”

“What, and that makes you think you are above facing some justified distrust for your deeds?” Celebrimbor interrupted harshly.

“Why is this distrust justified if I have never done anything to give you a reason to mistrust me in all the time I have been here?” Sauron snarled back.

“Your history doesn’t begin when you came here,” Celebrimbor retorted. “Just as mine doesn’t. We are the wrong people to make the Rings, Annatar.”

“We are not,” Sauron growled, pacing up and down in front of Celebrimbor’s seat like a caged lion. “We are the only ones that can achieve it. And it is unreasonable that you should demand that we stop.”

“I don’t demand anything,” Celebrimbor said. “I am merely presenting you with a choice. Me or the Rings, Annatar. You will not have both. Show me that you are truly a different being from who Sauron was. Choose.” He sat back down on his throne.

Sauron stopped in his tracks, blazing with anger, his contours rippling like heated air. “You cannot make me.”

Celebrimbor laughed, the sound brittle and utterly humourless. “I know. That is the only reason why your choice has any meaning, Annatar.” He leaned forward. “I cannot make you and even if I could, I wouldn’t. I will not fight you. I will not make you bow to my will or my expectations. If your choice is to have any meaning at all, you must make it from your own free will. I want to know your intent, your priorities, not to make mine your own against your will. But know that because it is your choice, your nature that answers me, you will – perhaps for the first time ever – be held to the consequences of your choices. Me or the Rings. What will it be?”

Sauron stood rooted to the spot; his fists clenched. “I could fight you, he said. I could just take the Rings and our writings and be done with it. With you.”

Celebrimbor watched him and no movement betrayed any emotion on his face. “Yes. You could. But will you? You would win any real fight between us with utmost certainty. But you will have lost me, Annatar. And if I am to believe that you have changed, truly changed, from who you were before that must mean something to you.”

There was a long silence after this. Outside, a cloud passed over the sun, and the inside of the hall turned dim and grey. The birds in the trees had gone silent.

“I lose,” Sauron said, his hands opening and closing into fists in quick, agitated turns. “It is either you or the Rings. No matter what I do, I always lose.”

“So do I,” Celebrimbor said quietly. “The Rings are my work as well, Annatar. They are our shared vision for the world. But I would not have them, not if it meant destroying the world we both wanted to heal. The power of the Rings is too vast and too unpredictable to be in the wrong hands.” He closed his eyes for a brief moment. “I made my choice, Annatar. What about you? Do you want power or my friendship? Knowing who you are, I cannot in good conscience give you both.”

Sauron looked up at him askance, his face half turned away. “But will I have your friendship, even if I forsake the Rings?” he asked. “I see how you are looking at me, Tyelperinquar. Your distrust, your fear is written all over your face ever since you know who I truly am.”

“I cannot prevent something primal as fear. I cannot undo what your revelation did to me. I don’t want to.” Celebrimbor replied coolly. “You are different to me now. I don’t know what, if anything, I can still give you after this. I don’t know if I am even willing or able to do this, after all that you have taken from me and mine under a different name. I cannot guarantee I can ever forgive you. But I can offer you to try – if my heart can bear it.”

Sauron’s eyes narrowed. “So you’re saying that I should give up everything I worked and planned for, even though you can’t even promise me you’ll hold up your end of the bargain?”

“This is not a bargain,” Celebrimbor said, his voice hard. “This is a concession – and most people would say that you don’t even deserve that. You will not get anything more from me. I am neither willing nor able to promise you something I might not be able to keep. This is what I can offer you. Take it or leave it.”

A long silence stretched out after those words. Sauron paced the room, prowling like an angered lion, throwing Celebrimbor side glances – repeated, measuring. Dangerous.

He stalked up and down in front of Celebrimbor’s throne a few times, then turned suddenly on his heel and faced the throne once more.

“It’s not exactly ‘this for that’, though, is it?” Sauron asked acidly.

“Do you want to call in an obligation or do you want to have friendship?” Celebrimbor asked. “Because one can be broken down to this for that and always must equal out, and the other doesn’t. Besides, in the light of what you have done, it certainly isn’t ‘this for that’. On my end.”

“It always comes down to this, doesn’t it?” Sauron snapped. “If you’re not willing to have me, just say so outright, Lord of Eregion, but don’t stall us with might be and maybe. If you say I don’t deserve forgiveness –”

“I never said that,” Celebrimbor said. “I only said you are not entitled to it. You might try to redeem yourself in the eyes of those you wronged, but even if they choose that they will never forgive you, they wouldn’t be at fault. Forgiveness is not ‘this for that’. It is not a trade, not a bargain where you can demand a certain expectation of yours to be met. You might never get what you want.”

“What good is redemption then?” Sauron snarled. “What good does it do if I can never rid myself of what I have done? Should I slave away at redeeming myself for all eternity until others decide that it is enough – or that it will never be enough?”

“That might happen,” Celebrimbor said, very slowly and a shadow passed over his face. “Sometimes… it is never enough. There are some things that others might never be able to forgive you, no matter what you do or say, no matter how much you regret it.” For a moment Celebrimbor’s gaze lost its focus as a vision rose beyond the veil of space and time. White shores. Dark waters. Burning ships. Blood in the water, blood in the streets. There was a suppressed twitch in his hand, a helpless, aborted gesture, a sign of a futile wish to intervene or act differently long after it was too late. Then he pulled himself back out of bygone, lost centuries of darkness and pain and his eyes were seeing Sauron once more.

“Your question is entirely wrong to begin with,” Celebrimbor continued. “You cannot ask ‘what good is it?’ as if you’re expecting to reap some profit for yourself off it. Redemption is something you should do for others, and if it is honest, it doesn’t depend on eventual forgiveness. Redemption is not given its value by its eventual outcome, but by a change within yourself that has to withstand the fact that it might forever be rejected.”

“A poor harvest for a lot of investment on my part.”

“You’ll have to stop thinking about relationships in terms of efficiency, Annatar.”

Sauron scoffed. “Maybe I should reject the concept of relationships altogether if the yields can be so very poor compared to the expenditures I’m making.”

A few seconds ticked by in silence.

“What about us?” Celebrimbor asked quietly. “Did you think about us like that?”

Sauron didn’t reply immediately. He also didn’t meet Celebrimbor’s eyes. “I… saw potential. In you. In the guild,” he said elusively.

“What kind of potential? To find friends? To redeem yourself? Or to use us in order to further your own ends?” Celebrimbor leaned forward. “What were we to you, Annatar? A project that you would pursue  for as long as it was profitable, and afterwards cast us aside if we didn’t benefit you any longer?”

The silence that followed told him all that he needed to know.

How can this still hurt so much? After everything that he has already revealed to me, it is still painful to not hear him deny what I should have been expecting already.

“What did you plan to gain from this potential, Annatar?” Celebrimbor asked quietly. “Power? Control over us? Revenge?”

Sauron was silent for a long time. “It was a game,” he said at last. “In the beginning I had no idea what you were capable of – if teaching you would be worth my while at all. But I had been alone and bored and frustrated for so long, I wanted to at least try and change something about this world that kept disillusioning me. I was looking for something worth my while, and… proof. Proof that this world could be changed. That it could be lifted from the ashes that a divine war left behind and turned into something better. I turned to the Eldar, because if anyone had the power to shape the world in the ages to come, it would be them.

“But Gil-Galad turned me away, same as your aunt. I set my eyes on you, then. I had not thought much of Ost-in-Edhil in terms of power – and how so? It was ruled by the last scion of a disgraced Noldorin line, and all of you seemed to occupy yourselves with studying and experiments rather than trying to gain more influence on the fate of the world. You were a self-contained unit that seemed content to look inward, not outward at the world, satisfied with studying abstract matters and philosophising about theories.

“I was looking for the desire for power that I believed necessary in order to find someone who might yet have the drive to change the world – and I didn’t see it in you. I had little hope to find something here for me, but I was so bored and tired of existing between places and watching from the sidelines.

“Then I found you, and I had to admit that I had been wrong about all of you all along.” Sauron looked at his hands. “I had almost forgotten how fulfilling it was to seek knowledge for its own sake. How rewarding it was to let creativity flow, unhampered by plans and fixed concepts. The joy of creating something beautiful, not as a means to an end, but simply because I can.”

Sauron paused, then went on, “Even that idle intrigue and joy would have been enough to fascinate me and keep me here, for a while at least. But then I started teaching you and I saw that it was possible that I could have everything at once: beauty and friendship, power and creation, and a higher purpose.” He was looking directly at Celebrimbor now, even took a half-step in his direction, one foot on the first step leading up to the throne. “I saw in you the same hunger that I felt within me, and the revelation was staggering. You answered me in everything like a mirror image. Every desire I had was reflected in you. I looked at you and I saw myself, and I knew that we both could achieve everything, if we only so desired.”

Celebrimbor felt bile rising up in his throat at those words. A mirror image to Sauron. Not even my grandfather had to suffer being compared to Morgoth.

Silence settled over the hall, thick and choking like ash clouds. For long moments, neither of them moved or spoke.

It was Annatar – Sauron who broke the stillness. “What of the world?” he asked at last. “What of our dreams? Our plans?”

“Let someone else save the world,” Celebrimbor said. “There is an infinite number of people out there who will be born over the turning of the ages, and all of them are more fit to do this than we are. Dreams can endure beyond one lifetime and plans can be carried out by other people. People who are by leaps and bounds more fit to do what we had set our mind to.” He paused. “We are not the right people for this, Annatar. We never were.”

“Others couldn’t even have imagined what we conceived, what we’ve created -” Sauron started.

“And we’ve sown the seed,” Celebrimbor said. “Let it grow on its own. Step back.”

“Give up, you mean,” Sauron snarled.

“You inevitably give up something when you make a choice, Annatar.”

Sauron snarled. “I wouldn’t have to give up anything if you didn’t insist on making me choose between you and the Rings.”

Celebrimbor laughed, but the sound was hard and utterly humourless. “Now wouldn’t that be a beautiful world, where we could always choose what we wanted with no detriment to ourselves? Where we could do what we liked and never be forced to face any consequences?” His face suddenly turned serious again. “I am doing this on purpose, Annatar. I am testing you. But I can only test you if I give you a true choice whose outcomes hold real weight – not a false one where the outcome is a foregone conclusion. So for the last time I ask you: choose.”

There was a long silence that followed his demand – and it was a demand, no matter what Celebrimbor might have called it.

And then – after an immeasurable amount of time, Sauron stepped forward and towards Celebrimbor. “You are throwing away everything we have worked for,” he snarled.

“I am saving everything that was ever between us,” Celebrimbor replied. “Give up the Rings, Annatar. Step back. Show me that there was a reason you came to me and stayed for, other than the desire for power.” 

“I can’t,” Sauron said, and there was a hitch in his voice that Celebrimbor did not know how to place. Like someone or something had just wounded him physically, impossible though it might be.

“Why?” Celebrimbor asked his voice hollow.

“Because I cannot let you die,” Sauron said.

There was a long silence in the wake of this statement.

“I need to perfect these Rings, if only for this purpose,” the Maia went on. “I need something to ensure that you stay alive.” Sauron threw out an arm in a violent, helpless gesture. “What if something like in Khazad-Dûm happens again? What if you just run into something you cannot protect yourself from, and I won’t be there to save you?”

Celebrimbor just watched him. “I looked into the future before I came to meet you here,” he said quietly. “Last night, with the help of a Mirror of Melian, I gazed down its myriads of pathways, and I saw the Ring you are trying to make. You are going to call it ‘the One’.”

He was watching Sauron closely as he spoke, and there was a twitch in the Maia’s features, just the slightest widening of the eyes, that told him that he had been right. That the Mirror had been right. He was already planning it. Even now, while we were still working together. The One was always going to be created.

“I know of it, and I know what you are planning to do with it,” Celebrimbor continued relentlessly. “The Rings we made were the cause for everything that happened afterwards. You leaving. Building your fortress. Razing Eregion to the ground with an army of abominations.” His breath hitched. “Capturing me. Torturing whatever I knew of the Rings out of me.” He paused, gave himself a moment to steel himself. “Killing me, eventually.” Celebrimbor looked at Sauron, whose features were frozen. “It happens every time, no matter what I attempt to change.  I was trying to find a future where we created them, and both lived.” He paused. “It doesn’t work. It never works. In every future, the only thing I run into that I cannot protect myself from is you. And you are there to kill me. Every time.”

Sauron stared at him, his eyes wide, his mouth slightly open. For the first time ever since he had known him, the Maia seemed to be dumbstruck, caught off-balance.

Now.

Celebrimbor rose and took a step in the direction of the Maia. He paused at the steps leading down from the throne and extended his hand towards the friend whom he had believed he knew so well. “The One brings nothing but ruin. It will lead you to kill me and bring you to do unspeakable things to yourself. Let it go.”

For a moment, the time seemed to stop.

Sauron stood there, caught like a particle in an electromagnetic storm, thrown about, pulled and torn in two opposing directions. Here in the present was Celebrimbor, to whom he had at last laid bare who he was. Celebrimbor, who offered only silence and a tolerance that was even less than acceptance. A place to stay, but the death of all dreams and ambitions. And there – not even created yet, but already working its irresistible lure and gravitational pull from a future that had not even yet come to pass: the One, with his magnificent song of power immeasurable, and the promise that all that was wrong might be righted in the world. It pulled and yawned like a black hole rising over the horizon in place of the sun, a door the Void, a pull so strong that it swallowed and consumed everything in its way. 

Even Celebrimbor could feel it, having sensed the terrible spirit of the One and having come so close to it in the hundreds of iterations of his life when he died by Sauron’s hands. Even its echo was enough to make the hairs on the back of his neck stand and icy cold spread through the marrow of his bones. He did not want to remember what facing the real One would be like. But even as an unrealised ghost, even as an echo, it was so strong, so impossibly powerful and seductive: a siren’s song of might and possibilities, the two things Sauron had always, always desired most.

Sauron’s eyes were flickering. A shadow was clouding over them, the brilliant gold of his eyes fading to a murky bronze. The sky outside darkened. The pull intensified, and it came from the direction of the door of the hall, as if the all-consuming black hole that was the One was waiting just behind.

Come to me, come to me, it seemed to sing. You will have everything.

Celebrimbor felt cold all over, horror rising like nausea in his throat.

Not this timeline, too. Not like this. Not like –

But he could already see the last traces of Annatar fading, as the shadows grew in the corners of the hall and seemed to crowd around the Dark Maia, as light and life seeped from his form, turning his white robe ashen grey, his golden hair dark like soot and flame.

“Annatar,” someone said, and it took Celebrimbor a moment to realise that the brittle croak of a voice had been his.

Sauron’s slitted pupils slowly slid up to him, returning from where they had been staring at another plane of existence, or another branch of reality, to the hall and the elf standing before him.

Celebrimbor took one step closer, although everything inside his mind screamed at him to run, run, run, to the farthest corner of the world, get out, get out, while you still can!

Then, another voice: Do not let fear dictate your actions.

He descended one step, and his left hand was now directly in front of Sauron’s face.

Time stopped. Darkness writhed. Fate teetered at the crossroads of destiny.

 Celebrimbor’s right fist was balled so tightly that his knuckles turned white and his nails broke skin. A tremor ran down his left arm.

“Annatar,” he repeated.

For a moment, their eyes met. And although everything within him was rearing up in terror, Celebrimbor opened the doors to the fortress of his mind and he allowed Sauron to see inside. There was a white flare behind his lids as their minds connected and stream of images, a thousand futures congealed into a lightning-quick sequence of mere flashes, glimpses rushed along the bond –

It was over in less than a second.

Celebrimbor slammed the defences around his mind back into place, withstanding the urge to gasp for air, because his lungs seemed to have shrivelled up, his legs wanted to give out -

Sauron, too, had taken a step back, eyes closed, and one hand half-raised to his temple, as if there was something invisible in the air that he wanted to ward off. For a long moment, neither of them moved. 

When Sauron opened his eyes, he looked at Celebrimbor; wordless, his face devoid of all expression. Suddenly, he seemed to sway on the spot and almost fall, but Celebrimbor recognized too late that the Maia had taken a step forward to close the distance between them once more.

They were very close. If Sauron would have reached out for Celebrimbor, he would have been able to grab the elf’s throat from where he stood at the base of the steps.

Celebrimbor was frozen still, reminding himself to remain upright, to keep breathing, even though he felt his death closing in from a thousand iterations of timelines that were nearly the same as this one, closing in on him like a pack of wolves backing prey into a corner –

He heard the thunder of his heart echoing in his skull, even though he could no longer feel his body, just the cool, floating sensation of losing his tethers, and those red, red eyes before him, fixed on him, piercing through him –

And then Sauron took Celebrimbor’s offered hand, went down on his knees before the elf, and bowed his head.

“Accept me,” he said, pressing Celebrimbor’s hand to his forehead like a thane swearing fealty to his liege. “Let me stay by your side. I forfeit the Rings. I forfeit power.” Sauron paused. “I forfeit the brighter world yet to come. I don’t do this lightly.” He raised his eyes, and they were shadowed, but they were of a muted gold once more, and no longer the colour of a coal fire. “But I hope that the fact that I’m doing it nonetheless means something to you.”

“It does,” Celebrimbor said quietly. “It means everything. And among all the things you forfeited, a brighter world is not one of them.” As he spoke, the shadows that had amassed in the hall retreated, and grey sunlight, like dawn, seeped back in through the windows.

Sauron did not reply, but Celebrimbor sensed that everything in the Dark Maia was rearing up against this choice that he had made against desire, against his wishes, against his very nature. But Sauron remained silent.

For a moment neither moved, then Celebrimbor uncomfortably tried to pull his hand back. “You can let go. And stand, please.”

Sauron’s face was dark, his eyes shuttered, when he stood. He was staring at a point on the ground slightly to the left of Celebrimbor, not looking up. “May I take my leave?” he asked, the words directed at the floor.

“You may.” Celebrimbor took a slight step back. “But stay in the city. I might have to call on you at some point.”

The Maia nodded, still not meeting his gaze. “As you wish.” With a rustle of clothing, Annatar turned around and started to walk down the length of the hall – Annatar at last, and nothing more. Only he wasn’t even that any longer. No more gifts.

“Who were you?” Celebrimbor asked, driven by sudden impulse, as the Maia was already halfway down the hall to the entrance door.

“I already told you that.” Annatar didn’t turn around.

“No, I mean who were you before?” Celebrimbor said. “You were of Aulë once. He would have named you differently.”

“He named me Admirable,” Annatar said after a brief pause. “But I would ask you not to call me that. It is my name no longer. I discarded it, and it doesn’t fit me anymore.” And with that he left.

*

Celebrimbor waited until he was sure that Annatar had a far enough head start to be nowhere near the hall anymore, then slowly and with measured steps, he walked out into the bright autumn morning. Clouds were chased across a cornflower-blue sky by high winds, and birds were singing their farewells in every rose and juniper bush. He crossed the cobbled courtyard, entered the main building of the Mírdain, and walked down the hallway. His pace quickened the closer he came to his room. His hands were hardly trembling when he put the key into the lock and turned it. His gait and posture were straight and measured as he closed the door behind it, crossed the room to his desk, and set the keys down. He slowly walked into the little side chamber where the bathroom lay. Only when he had stepped inside and closed this door beside him, he allowed himself to drop to his knees in front of the toilet and vomited out the meagre contents that were still left in his stomach after yesterday’s lunch. His fingers were gripping the washing basin next to him like a lifeline as he heaved and heaved and cold sweat poured down over his brow, his neck, the small of his back. He was burning up under his skin and yet he was shivering when he finally slumped against the mosaic-tiled wall of the small room, his teeth chattering, his skin clammy and wet all over.

It was in this moment that a familiar voice came to him, borne by air and osanwë across leagues and leagues of Eregion and the Mountains of Khazad-Dûm.

Nephew, Artanis said. Your spirit is thrashing like a trapped hare. Are you well?

Celebrimbor closed his eyes. Of course, his aunt would have had an eye on him after yesterday. What he had gone through today must have felt like wild lightning shooting along the conduit of their shared mental connection, even without him consciously reaching out to her.

I have been better.

She sensed the lie as easily as a tangible thing. Are you in danger? she asked.

This time, Celebrimbor hesitated before answering. Listened to the silence around him. To the bustle of the city below. Alive. Intact. The sun on the cobblestone streets, the birds in the trees and bushes. No. No, I am not. Not right now.

His aunt was silent. Again, it must be clear to her that he was withholding things from her. He suspected that there was a limit to her patience, and a point where she would disregard his unwillingness to share his thoughts in favour of finding out about the invisible danger they kept dancing around.

But today was not that day.

What happened? Artanis asked.

What happened, indeed? How to put what had happened today into words?  

I have faced down Sauron. I had him come before me, wearing the face of the dearest friend I have ever had. I set my will against his and forced him to make a choice. I brought him to his knees and he … he gave up. He gave up the Rings. He gave up our vision. He gave up power. To stay. To remain. For the shadow of a shadow of a promise. For me .

(For you, Silver-grasp, Diamond-mind, Mirror-soul. For you, and no one else.)

He let a moment pass, just staring at the opposite wall, not seeing it at all. No, that was altogether saying too much and saying not enough at all. So instead, he replied in the only way he knew how to make sense of the madness that had come to pass, the impossibility of today pared down to its bare bones:

I won.

Chapter Text

Act III: Retreat

Under a juniper-tree the bones sang, scattered and shining

We are glad to be scattered, we did little good to each other,

Under a tree in the cool of day, with the blessing of sand,

Forgetting themselves and each other, united

In the quiet of the desert.

T.S. Eliot – Ash Wednesday, Part II

*

After the terrible wars of the First Age most survivors tried to pick up the threads of their life where they had been ripped away from them. Sometimes they were successful. Some veteran soldiers, some widowed spouses, some orphaned children, were able to return home, embrace what was left of their families, and bury the horrors of their pasts deep enough that they were able to return to the semblance of a normal life.

But most of those that had lived through the horror of Morgoth’s wars found either the old world or themselves irreversibly altered. And their old life, which had been like the light at the end of a dark tunnel during the darkest days, would no longer fit them, just like old clothing that did not account for stiff joints or lost limbs. Some had been wounded too deeply, either in the body or in the soul, and even though they had returned to their old homesteads, their minds and bodies kept living in a past that would not set them free. They would at once walk in bright daylight and in choking shadow. They would be surrounded by people who loved them, and yet be utterly alone. The days would roll forward into a peaceful future, but their spirits were forever locked away in the dark past.

Celebrimbor had seen it in many friends and colleagues, in the countless souls who had been lost to Morgoth’s wars long after the fighting itself had ended. He had always observed it from a distant standpoint, never affected deeply or directly enough that it would allow him a more than clinical analysis of what it meant to be unable to return to one’s former life.

Perhaps it was because he had not allowed anything in his life to cut him so deeply, no matter how many events might have had the potential. Perhaps he had just been very good at dealing with what everything life had thrown at him.

Or perhaps it was because there had always been a way out, a way forward, which he had eagerly taken, leaving the past behind and charging headfirst into the future.

Now, though, there was nowhere else to go. Nowhere to run. Nothing to leave behind. Ost-in-Edhil was his home, and being its leader was his role. And so, for the first time in his long, long life, Celebrimbor found himself experiencing the bewilderment, the sense of displacement, and the disillusioning realisation that the world had shifted around him like the planes of a hypercube, that he had been shunted outside the dimension he had been living in, with no hope of ever returning to his old life. 

He had begun thinking that he might be fine, that everything might be alright, and that – with time and some thought – he would somehow manage to reconcile the fact that Sauron the Abhorred had secretly been living in Ost-in-Edhil and working and teaching alongside the Mírdain with allowing a semblance of normal life to continue.

And for a while he managed.

Celebrimbor kept his silence, mostly out of fear that the tiniest disturbance of the current precarious equilibrium might turn out to be the straw to break the horse’s back and cause Sauron to break their pact and leave. Thus he told no one else the truth and allowed the Maia to stay, rather than unmasking him, sending him away, and unleashing Sauron upon the world, like he had seen in a myriad of futures. 

Annatar, in turn, kept his promise and refrained from doing any more research or work on the Rings. One night, under the shadow of a new moon, he and Celebrimbor burned down all the notes that they had on Ring-craft, and melted down their prototypes. Celebrimbor had felt like he was burning part of himself on a pyre, his chest tight, his hands shaking, but when he had turned his gaze to Annatar, the Maia had only watched the flames and the molten, unrecognisable residue of the Rings with an impassive expression. The day after that, Annatar had gone back to teaching students and giving lectures, and if anything had changed in his demeanour at all, it left everybody none the wiser as to what the reason for it might have been.

It might have continued like this. Maybe it would have been alright.

But with every passing day, something rotten grew in Celebrimbor’s chest. The knowledge that he was allowing Sauron to roam amongst his unsuspecting colleagues and students turned into a festering knot in his stomach, leaving him with permanent nausea in his waking hours.

Every night, he woke from dreams of burning gardens and crumbling walls, of a fiery eye and a great band of fire, gasping for breath and drenched in sweat.

Not even the burning of their research papers had managed to assuage his fear – for, in his heart of hearts, he knew that Annatar only forgot what he chose to forget, and that the knowledge of Ring-craft was forever stowed away in his fathomless mind.

Outwardly, there was no indication that Annatar intended to renege on his promise and take up his Ring-studies in secret once more. But even so, Celebrimbor knew that if the Maia set his mind to it, there was no way he could ever find out and nothing he could do to prevent it from happening.

Inwardly, Celebrimbor realised that no matter how compliant Annatar seemed to be, his trust in his former friend had been utterly lost. Celebrimbor no longer saw him outside of official meetings. The forges of Ost-in-Edhil lay dark and cold. When they happened across each other in the hallways, all Celebrimbor could bring himself to do was to give a stiff nod, and then hurry on his way, because the proximity of the Dark Maia made his skin crawl. The irony that this loss of trust had been caused in turn by the greatest show of trust and openness of Annatar in him was not lost on Celebrimbor. He was also aware that the growing distance and coldness between them was a poor show of reciprocation for Annatar’s rejection of the Rings. And yet.

He couldn’t rule out the possibility of Annatar going behind his back.

He couldn’t rule out the possibility that Sauron had been and was still lying to his face.

He couldn’t rule out that the Rings were still going to get made, no matter how many safeguards he might try to put in place.

He couldn’t rule out anything, not after having been told that the person he had trusted the most – had loved the most – had been the right-hand-man of Morgoth himself.

And he simply couldn’t afford to be wrong.

So Celebrimbor kept his distance. And he kept his own secret – that of the Water Ring, which he had (in going against his own words and warnings) kept for himself, even though he had told Annatar that they would destroy every last trace of Ring-craft. As a safeguard, he told himself. Just in case.

But who is telling me that he hasn’t been doing the same? a quiet voice in his head whispered.

And so his distrust and disillusionment kept growing as the days of autumn waned into winter and leaves fell from all trees but the ever-green holly of Eregion. With every day, exposing his city, his people, the entirety of Eregion to the danger that Annatar’s presence posed became more and more unbearable.

In his heart of hearts, Celebrimbor had known for a long time that this situation was not made to last. But it was not until a cold, dark night in mid-winter when he was sitting alone in his bedroom in front of the crackling fireplace, that he was able to bring himself to admit the only logical way out of his conundrum.

He was perched in the very armchair Sauron had revealed himself to him, a cooling mug of tea in both hands, suffused in the darkness and loneliness of the shortest night of the year. Up in his tower room, with only the storm and the snow outside for company, he felt as removed from the world as if he had been placed upon the silver cart of Tilion. He had been alone often these last few months, and while loneliness was eating at his insides like hunger, placing himself among people had become similarly unbearable. If they talked to him, he didn’t know what to say. If they smiled at him and asked for his guidance, he felt like he was betraying them. Do you not know? he wanted to ask. Don’t you know what I have done to you? What I am still doing to you?

Also, he might run into Annatar. He had no idea if the Maia had kept up the old act, or similarly withdrawn from the company of their fellow craftsmen, but Celebrimbor could not stomach the thought of attending a colloquy and finding Annatar there. Moving amongst them like a wolf amidst a herd of sheep, unrecognised and unhindered.

It can’t go on like this, he thought suddenly. I cannot send him away because the stars alone know what he might do then. And yet every day he spends here is a day where he could be tempted to reconstruct the Rings. Every day he remains, he – I put everyone here in danger.

Celebrimbor set his teacup aside and pulled his legs to his chest, encircling them with his arms. He rested his forehead against his knees and closed his eyes. And allowed himself to think one step further than all those times before:

I am his anchor. I allowed him into these walls and I grew closer to him than anyone else. He is tied to me, by my promise and his. I can – and must – keep him far away from where he can hurt anyone. Let this be the penance for the mistakes I’ve made, so that this latest and greatest of my mistakes can be mine and mine alone.

When he looked up again, he saw his room with different eyes: the bed he had been sleeping in for three hundred years. The wardrobe with his Fëanorian waistcoat. The sword Father had forged for him in the First Age, which he had carelessly wedged between wardrobe and the wall, hoping he would never have to take it in hand again. The bookshelf, half of which contained bound annotations on chemistry, astrophysics, and thermodynamics as well as topology in his own hand.

And he saw … no longer a home and a sanctuary to retreat to, but merely a place in-between – like a hallway or a crossing in the road. Somewhere you arrived and moved on from after a brief amount of time. His heart felt heavy in his chest. It felt like farewell.

*

It was late January when the Lady Galadriel and Lord Celeborn finally followed Celebrimbor’s invitation to Ost-in-Edhil. The invitation itself had caused a lot of whispering and outrage in certain circles.

Back when the former Lord and Lady of Ost-in-Edhil had suddenly left the city, there had been quite a bit of talk, as well. However, since both Galadriel and Celeborn on one hand and Celebrimbor on the other had refused to comment on the reasons on the former two’s departure and had, in fact, not acknowledged aloud that anything untoward had happened at all, there had been nothing to feed the flames of outrage. Soon thereafter, the denizens of Ost-in-Edhil had accepted the new status quo and gone along with the fact that they were under new leadership, mostly without putting any label or value to what had transpired behind closed doors in the halls of the palace.

Now, though, that Celebrimbor was inviting his aunt and uncle back, wasn’t it as good as admitting that he had ousted them from the city before, and was now graciously allowing them back into walls that he viewed as his?

If the rumour mill of Ost-in-Edhil was anything to go by, Celebrimbor didn’t even want to know what had to be going on in Caras Galadhon right now. Worse still, Celebrimbor had explicitly asked for his young cousin Celebrían to come along as well, which was fuel to the rumour mill in a way oil was to a fire.

Did he really – did they dare suggest it – did the Lord of Ost-in-Edhil intend to add insult to injury and ask for his cousin’s hand in marriage? Or was it intended as appeasement – a way for the line of Lórien to have access to the throne of Eregion once more?

Celebrimbor was almost relieved when he was finally able to greet his relatives at the gates of the city, to kiss the hands of his aunt and cousin, and give a greeting and a bow to his scowling uncle.

At least they were here now, and that could hardly be worse than facing the incessant murmurs and whispers that had been going on behind his back for the past few weeks – although the thunderous expression on his uncle’s face told him that Celeborn was very intent on proving him wrong on this particular account.

*

Dinner was exactly as stiff and unpleasant an affair as Celebrimbor had imagined it would be. Silence reigned supreme over everything but the loud clinking of silver cutlery, while both the Lord of Ost-in-Edhil and his three relatives took care to keep their gazes fixed on the food. Celebrimbor must have been staring at his dinner for twenty minutes without even lifting his gaze, though he couldn’t have told you later what he had actually eaten.

Celebrimbor waited until they had finished their meal, then he leaned back in his seat. Might as well get it over with.

“Cousin,” he said.

Celebrían looked up at him.

Celebrimbor inclined his head to one side. “I was wondering, would you like to rule a city?”

*

“How long have you known?” Celeborn asked quietly. He was never loud, neither in joy nor in anger. But there was a cold undercurrent to his words, cooler than the burbling stream of the Nimrodel in winter.

Galadriel didn’t turn around to face him, looking out over the flets and trees forming Lórien, her beloved home. The shelter she had created for herself, where a glimmer of Aman’s reflected splendour might be found in its trees and flowers. This sanctuary – which had been an exile at first, after she had ceded leadership of Ost-in-Edhil to Telperinquar.

“You’re insinuating I knew what my nephew was about to do.”

“I need not insinuate.”

She glanced at him sideways, her brow furrowed. “I am not privy to his every thought and plan, my lord.”

“And yet you were not surprised.”

At last, she turned around fully to face her husband. “I know my nephew, Celeborn. I know that he has been going through a troubling event last autumn, and that it left him shaken and unable to recover. The idea that ruling a city might eventually become too much of a burden on his shoulders – given that he was never much interested in the act of ruling in the first place – was not very far-fetched.”

Celeborn looked at her, his eyes full of shadow and anger. She met his gaze head-on, daring him to inquire further, to overstep into the innermost privacy of her mind where trust would not suffice.

He didn’t.

“Good,” Galadriel said, and turned away, as if the last word on the matter had thus been spoken. “Besides, it is a good opportunity for Celebrían to test herself as a ruling lady. She is apt and shrewd, and I would hate for her potential to go to waste locked away in a mountain dale.”

“You disapprove of the High-king’s steward,” Celeborn said.

“I do not disapprove of him,” Galadriel replied calmly, perhaps too calmly, running her finger over the wooden banister twisted into the shape of growing ivy. “I just want my daughter to know – and live – a reality that is more than existing to be the wife to a greater lord and nothing more. If she decides that she wants to remain silently and demurely in a house for the greater part of her time in Middle-earth, then at least it will be after having experienced that there is more that life has to offer her.”

Silence followed in this wake and Galadriel could sense that Celeborn was staring at her, his gaze boring like a knife between her shoulder blades.

“She is less like you than you are willing to admit – even to yourself,” he said at last, his voice flat, but not entirely devoid of an underlying edge. “Not everyone chafes at the thought of living in someone’s shadow, and being thought of, spoken of, mentioned only in relation to someone else. You can learn to live with it.” A pause. “I certainly did.”

“My daughter is more like me than you are willing to admit,” Galadriel said, voice cold. “If she wishes to step back and fade into the shadow, I will not hinder her. But as for now she is young, and she thirsts for the light of the sun like a growing sapling. I intend to give her a place where she stands so high that she might receive as much light as she could ever wish for.”

“So you want to take your nephew up on his hare-brained offer? Celebrían, ruling the city that we have left in shame like thieves in the night?”

“I will,” she said. And with that, the matter was decided.

She could sense more than hear her husband shaking his head and retreating from the platform, probably to his study. Galadriel remained outside, and when she could sense no one in her immediate vicinity, she finally allowed the wards and walls around her mind to relax.

With an exhale, she leaned heavily on the banister.

Forgive me, my husband. Sometimes cruelty is needed to prevent further pain. I needed to be cruel today, for if you had asked more questions, it would have done either of us more harm than good.

She would never speak with anyone about the truth of Tyelperinquar’s offer, and she had been deeply afraid that Celeborn would attempt to search her thoughts.

For then he would have seen the truth: that she had known of her nephew’s plan, and the madness and danger that had given birth to it. In fact, she had expected him to propose it ever since that fateful morning. When he had told her, heart racing, blood rushing, his thoughts shattered like a broken mirror, just two words, I won.

She had not understood, not at first. Celebrimbor’s behaviour when he had first contacted her about the Mirror had alarmed her, and she had been teetering on the edge of just prying his mind open. The only thing that had kept her from doing so was the knowledge that in this case she would have been no better than the dragons and wyrms of the First Age. And so she had allowed her nephew to keep his secrets.

When she had asked him the morning afterwards, though (Won? Against whom?), her nephew had answered. Like a river finally breaking the dam confining it, he had told her everything, and with every word her terror and dread had risen until she thought she had to scream, scream, scream, until her voice gave out or her lungs ruptured.

What have you done? she wanted to ask. How could you be so foolish? What possessed you to create such objects – and with someone like him at that!

Only too well did she remember the handsome stranger that had shown up on her palace’s doorstep one day, the private audience that had followed, during which he had spoken her deepest desires and most secret of wishes aloud for her to hear, as if someone had dragged her own unfettered, untamed and immoral unconscious forth and given it voice. And reason, oh so much reason. The worst thing about it all had been how unassuming, how reasonable his propositions had sounded. As if reaching for power immeasurable was nothing more than a necessity, a foregone conclusion, truly, rather than a gross and irreversible misstep in a very dangerous direction.

But panic and ire would have been of no help to her nephew, whose voice and mind had been trembling as if they were coming apart at the seams, so she had remained calm and cool as always, when she had asked, What do you plan to do?

Back then her nephew’s reply had been a quiet, I don’t know, that had reminded her of a time on the other side of the Sea, when he had barely come up to her chest – still young and bright-eyed, and weaving through oh-so-many great shadows, larger than life, in his own family.

If you knew of Telperinquar’s childhood, perhaps you would find it in your heart to think more graciously of him, my husband, she thought with a sigh. You are not so dissimilar, you and he.

So many shadows, so many ghosts. And so few of them true and kind, no matter how pleasant their faces.

And the worst of them all had come to her nephew. Small wonder he had been thrown off balance, small wonder he had been left reeling. But he had found his feet again, as she had known he would.

He had declined her offers for help, military or otherwise.

I will manage, he had said.

I have to do this alone, was what he had not said aloud. Perhaps because he had not realised it himself, back then.

But when they had last spoken, on a quiet spot high up on the walls of the upper ring of Ost-in-Edhil on the evening before she and her husband and daughter had returned home, Celebrimbor had told her.

It was my mistake, he had said. I cannot undo it. So I have to take it somewhere where it will not do any harm.

And that was all that there was to say on the matter.

I will miss this, Celebrimbor had added, nevertheless, because his heart was bleeding, and it had every right to. Once again it would be torn from its moorings, once again it would be uprooted.

She had not told him it would be fine. She had not told him he would return someday. There was no comfort to be found in lies.

So she had just laid a hand over his and said, I know, and held him when he had begun to weep.

*

Chapter Text

*

They set out at the first grey light of dawn at the end of March. Celebrimbor had tried to keep it a secret, but of course, nothing in a city like Ost-in-Edhil could remain hidden for long. Not if he had been setting his affairs and succession in order all through late winter and early spring. And thus it was that both he and Annatar ran straight into a waiting group of conspirators when they attempted to sneak out through one of the side doors in the walls of the city, leading down a steep hidden path along the flank of the mountain the city-fortress rested on.

“You did not truly think that you could sneak off in the small hours of the morning on that secret journey of yours without saying a proper good-bye, did you?” Daeror, who had been leading the group (because of course he had) asked.

And the group of Mírdain that had been waiting for them said their farewells and gave them parting gifts and it was the hardest thing Celebrimbor had ever done to smile through all of it, every now and then glancing back at a city that had been his home, at the west-facing windows of the tower room where he had lived, in rooms that were no longer his.

However, when Daeror had asked, “When will you return?” and Celebrimbor had said nothing for too long, the smiles had faded from their faces.

“Why?” Ingwen, the young master of optical physics had asked, her face so puzzled, so uncomprehending all of a sudden. “We thought your cousin – we’d believed it would be for a short time only –”

And the only thing Celebrimbor had managed to say had been “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry”, before taking a step backwards and then another, and then turning their back on them - knowing how cruel he was being, how cowardly he must appear to them, but knowing it would be even worse if he had stayed and explained himself.

*

Eventually the city vanished behind trees and mountains, and for a while, travelling was easier for it.

Annatar, who had accepted the announcement of their sudden journey without any prospect of return without moving a muscle, and had endured their farewells in stoic silence, spoke for the first time since they had set off. It was the second day of travel.

“Where are we going?”

Celebrimbor did not turn around. “Away,” he just said.

Annatar did not ask further. Which was just as well because there was no better answer Celebrimbor could have given him.

*

They travelled the world together. They passed Cardolan’s Keep, and walked the Old North Road to its end until they reached Fornost and Annúminas, continuing to the icy Bay of Forochel beyond. When Celebrimbor stood at the promontory at Cape Alagos at the end of their first year of their journey, with nothing but grey skies and steel-coloured, foaming waves stretching out before him, he felt like he had when he had stood at the newly-formed beach of Lindon, just after the great cataclysm of the First Age that had sunk Beleriand beneath the waves.

This is what the end of the world looks like. There are no paths from here. Walk no further.

An old pain built in his chest as he looked west, where he imagined seeing the mountain range of the Ered Luin marching away from the coast and sinking into the sea. Something in his chest clenched, and at last Celebrimbor turned aside and walked back the way he had come, past Annatar, who had been standing back a few metres, wordlessly waiting.

From there, they journeyed east through the Forodwaith and passed the Misty Mountains with its northernmost spur to their right. They walked along the Ered Mithrin and crossed the Withered Heath, where once dragons had roamed in great numbers, the Greenwood stretching away like an emerald wall to the south. But these days, the skies were empty and the mountains abandoned. It was May when they reached the Lonely Mountain coming from the north and took a few days to rest and restock on supplies in the small, but quickly growing settlement of Esgaroth lying in its shadow. Afterwards, Celebrimbor led them south along the Celduin, until it merged with the Carnen that came down from the Iron Mountains and formed a great, broad river that ran into the Sea of Rhûn.

They stayed there for a few weeks, wandering its shores, and watching the coming and going of many ships with colourful sails that struck out in every direction where rivers would lead them. The lands of Rhûn themselves were gentle and beautiful in early summer, with wide open plains, overgrown with wildflowers and lavender, and gently rolling hills.

It would have been a lovely place to stay, but soon Celebrimbor found himself growing restless, and they set off due south again. They kept walking in this direction, until Celebrimbor rose one day and the skies were clearer than they had been in a long while. While he was tying up his bedroll, his gaze strayed towards the horizon all around him, as it was wont to do when he was mapping out their travels at the start of a day – and he froze when he looked south.

Ahead them, green fertile lands were stretching away, cut in two by a range of mountains of middling height. And through a gap between those mountains, he could see the volcano. A flash – and the land before him was not green, but ash-choked and barren, and the volcanic mountain that was rising like a peaceful guardian over the lands in the present had transformed into a roaring, fire-spitting terror that had killed the land for miles and miles around it, with veins of lava running down its sides. For a moment Celebrimbor was unable to disentangle the vision he had seen in the Mirror from the present. He jerked back, closing his eyes, and shaking the image from his mind.

The summer day had grown cold all of a sudden, and a shadow seemed to have fallen over the land.

Annatar had been watching him but had not spoken. No words passed between them when Celebrimbor abruptly changed their course due west. Celebrimbor kept his gaze fixed on the horizon, where he knew Wilderland and the Emyn Muil lay, refusing to look south again. And yet the afterimage of the volcano seemed to be burned just into the corner of his vision.

This is where he was building his fortress. Those were the very mountains he erected even higher and darker, as a wall around the entire land.

Annatar’s presence weighed heavier and darker than ever. Celebrimbor didn’t say anything that let on his thoughts, but at some point the Maia fell back further and walked almost a quarter of a mile behind the elf for the remainder of the day.

And they journeyed on. Hundreds and hundreds of miles, and thousands of peoples, tribes, kingdoms, fiefdoms, and empires.

Celebrimbor had toyed with the idea of doing this with Annatar before, a few hundred years ago, but as always, obligations and reality had soon swept the plan up in its torrent and the idea had remained unrealised. He couldn’t help but think that the idea would have been better off staying a dream. This way, at least, Celebrimbor could have continued imagining the journey as he had in the past: a pleasant trek to many different countries, getting to know different cultures, with a good friend by his side. He had imagined travelling with Annatar would be like travelling with the sun or the south-wind in summer: easy, warm, and pleasant company for pleasant conversation.

Now, though, Annatar’s presence was like a shadow; a gloomy, taciturn wraith that never left his side. The Maia never complained or argued when Celebrimbor set a course, took a detour, or chose a resting place. Ever since the day in the throne hall of Ost-in-Edhil, every bit of fight seemed to have gone out of him.

They never spoke, safe for necessary things like calling attention to things or Celebrimbor announcing a route or a stop for the day. Their minds were closed to each other. When Celebrimbor was lying on his bedroll next to the campfire, the wide, starry autumn skies of Far Harad stretching out above, and the endless dunes of the Golden Sea, as the Haradrim called it, below, the silence of the night was thrumming with all the things that were never said.

And yet Celebrimbor did nothing to change it.  He had forgotten how to speak to Annatar, could not remember what they had ever used to talk about, what they could have possibly had to say to each other.

Annatar had tried, in the first few days after Celebrimbor had ended the Ring project. But when his tentative attempts had been met with absolute silence by Celebrimbor, he had eventually ceased all tries to regain the ground they had lost, to close the chasm that was yawning between them. The silence never broke, and they grew from friends to acquaintances to strangers. Soon, it was as if there had never been anything between them but silence and stillness. In the space between them words died before they could be spoken.

During the first few weeks Celebrimbor had waited for Annatar to lose his patience any day and to declare their agreement void, because Celebrimbor was violating his part of the bargain. (Me or the Rings. Choose.) 

But Annatar did no such thing. He remained silent and waited. Waited, until they left Ost-in-Edhil. After asking Celebrimbor where they would go, he followed, wordless. Far away from laboratories and forges, from cities and people, from power and its lures. He followed in Celebrimbor’s footsteps, no matter how far the destination, no matter how dangerous the road, no matter how arduous the journey.

And with every day that passed without complaint, the feeling of debt, as absurd and misplaced as it might have been, of not holding up his end of the bargain, began to weigh on Celebrimbor’s mind.

And yet. Despite the fear of unleashing Sauron once more due to a broken oath, Celebrimbor could not find it in him to close the distance that had opened up between them. There was no more familiarity or affection between them, only the lingering horror of Annatar’s past and a hollow sense of loss concerning what intimacy and trust there had once been between them.

Oh, they tried to pretend to the best of their ability that they could return to normalcy from where they were, in time. Celebrimbor tried to hide his revulsion every time Annatar came near him, whereas the Maia pretended not to notice and cloaked himself in guarded silence. The resigned patience of his waiting became, at some point, worse than any primordial fit of wrath that Sauron could have indulged in.

And yet, as the months wore on, one thing crystallised into painful clarity: the only thing that was keeping them together was their unwillingness to admit failure and their refusal to give up on trying to hold together what the violence and horror of Annatar’s revelation had blown apart beyond repair.

One night they were both perched at their campfire, with the frigid winter night of South Gondor stretching out around them. Two years had gone by since they had set out from Ost-in-Edhil, and no more than perhaps a few hundred words had passed between them in the meantime. The stars shone overhead in an impossibly wide sky, cold and far away.

They sat in the silence of people who realised that the only thing connecting them was gone.

*

Four years into their meandering journey through Middle-earth, they stopped. They had visited but a fraction of the known world, and recently arrived at the coast south of the Ethir Anduin. It was a forgotten, abandoned place, miles from the next settlement – just nature left to its own devices in all its lonely, harsh beauty. Celebrimbor had not planned to stop – in fact, when he climbed the white dunes behind which he would see the Bay of Belfalas, he was already firmly set on where he would go next.

But when Celebrimbor crested the dunes that fell away down a gentle cliff to a soft, long beach below – when he saw the ocean for the first time since he had stood at Cape Alagos, he felt a sense of inevitability and finality that made it clear to him that this – this here, was as far as he could run.

Suddenly, all at once he felt the weight and exertion of the hundreds upon hundreds of miles that he had walked for the last few years. The idea of keeping on running, doing it again, and again, and again, in an endless circuit of a world that could not change fast enough to make such a journey have worth or even sense …

I can’t.

His knees gave out and he let them, slumping into the white sand below and running his hands over the hard stalks of yellowed, brittle dunegrass that was growing in clumps and clusters everywhere on the sandy cliffs. Seagulls were wheeling overhead, cawing and crying, looking like pieces of seafoam against the pale blue sky. The salty air blew in his face, and Celebrimbor closed his eyes. Exhaustion overcame him, more of the soul than the body, and for a while he just sat like this.

Where will you go? Artanis had asked him, years ago.

I don’t know. Away.

You cannot run forever, she had said. And as always, she had been right.

He could not outrun a past and a revelation that was bound to him like a ball on a chain. There was nothing to leave behind, because for once, his mistakes were keeping pace with him.

He glanced at Annatar, who had stepped up to his side, and was now looking down at him. His face was blank, as it had been for months and years. A mute shade he had become, barely calling attention to himself anymore. The whites and golds of his usual robes had vanished, exchanged for an austere, unadorned grey that looked like mist and winter skies. Even the colour of his eyes and hair seemed washed out and pale, as if Annatar was slowly fading against the backdrop of a world in which he continually became less and less real. And maybe he was. The proud, striking Lord of Gifts was gone, and so was the Ring-maker, and the lieutenant of Morgoth. If the essence of a Maia expressed itself in his appearance, if his body was, in fact, his spirit bleeding through into something visible, what did it mean for such a being when everything that had been the core of an old self was falling away?

A thought, too sudden to suppress: What if he faded entirely? What if he became unmade, and went away, and never came back? I could be free. Free of him.

Celebrimbor flinched. Immediately, he averted his eyes, afraid that Annatar had been reading his thoughts on his face.

If he had, the Maia made no comment. As he always did since he stopped speaking.

“We’ll stay here for a while,” Celebrimbor said, looking out over the surf crashing on the white beach, the grey sea stretching away to the horizon. No city or town was visible for miles and miles.

Silence was his answer.

*

Building the cottage was Celebrimbor’s favourite thing that he had done in years. He had always loved working with his hands, especially when it involved building something, and having something to show for his labours at the end of the day.

He had never really held much interest in carpentry and masonry, but as to all other things that required manual dexterity and careful planning, he took to it quickly. The first three attempts went nowhere, but by then he had the layout of the cottage he wanted to build, and he had already made the most crucial mistakes in building before – the ones that could bring the entire cottage down on his head.

After finalising his architectural plan, he dug the building pit at the beach (far enough from the waterline so the foundation wouldn’t be washed out), levelled it, then proceeded to burn out limestones in a firepit and create a quasi-concrete with gravel and water. It took him a while to figure out a sensible mixing ratio, but eventually he ended up with a mass that was liquid enough to fill the building pit, and able to harden enough to withstand the weight of a building on top.

Cutting the wooden beams to cement into the foundation was arduous work, but Celebrimbor didn’t mind. With his hands occupied and his mind focused on the tasks at hand, he felt more at ease and balanced than he had been in a long time. In fact, he dreaded the moment when the cottage would be done. It would mean going back to the dreary, purposeless existence from before, where his own thoughts haunted him day and night, without any project or constructive plan to focus on.

Thus he took his time. He could live in a makeshift shelter for a while longer, at least before the high, stiff winds of autumn came to take over the coast. He could forgo comforts if it meant that he had a task for a little while longer.

Annatar did not take part in the building. In the beginning, he seemed to hover nearby, as if debating whether to approach and offer his aid. But Celebrimbor never spared him a direct glance or invited him over, so they remained at a distance – separated by an invisible strait that both had long since lost the knowledge and energy to cross.

Weeks turned into months, and Celebrimbor tried to savour every minute of building the actual house. But no matter how much time he took, no matter how he tried to draw it out – eventually the cottage stood before him, thatched roof, and windows and all, and there was nothing more to be done.

Except –

Celebrimbor walked inside. Three empty rooms looked back at him. A fireplace was built into a corner where the chimney was placed, but that was the extent of the comfort the building offered.

“Furniture,” he said to no one in particular, and his voice sounded rough from disuse, strange even to himself. “We need furniture.”

He turned around and walked back out again, brushing past a silent grey spectre that had been waiting in the doorway, but taking no heed other than the fleeting contact of his shoulder meeting something semi-solid.

*

Creating furniture was comparatively easy. Not too far away, there was a little copse of evergreen trees, which had already provided the wood necessary for the building’s beams. Celebrimbor had – at the start of the cottage-building process, and with the help of a wainwright from the nearest (but still very remote) village – built a little cart with which the wood could be transported. There were days when he spent all daylight hours in the wood, marking trees and cutting them down to size. On others he made four trips to the wood with his cart, transporting everything back.

It took too little time until he had created all the bedframes and chairs, benches and tables, cabinets and shelves that he could ever possibly need.

A few weeks later, the shelves and cabinets were stocked with cutlery, pots, and pans, the bedframes equipped with mattresses, blankets, and pillows, the table covered in cloth. Even the floors were covered in reed-woven mats, and he didn’t even like weaving.

Outside was his tool-shed and a fire-pit. He even had his own kiln made of clay bricks a few metres from the cottage.

Celebrimbor turned around, looking around himself almost desperately, his eyes searching every corner of the three rooms, looking for something, anything he had forgotten…

There was nothing more to do.

Nothing but going back into the grey, mindless repetition of endless days that were always, always the same, as immutable and unchanging as the ocean outside.

*

And the years passed.

Celebrimbor kept finding ways to keep himself occupied. Every now and then, a new project, a new idea, would light up like a beacon of hope on the horizon and he would throw himself into his work with all that he had. He learned how not to build boats, and eventually how to build them in a way that they would swim. He learned to knot fishing nets.

Even though he had never been much interested in plants and gardening, he even cultivated his own patch of vegetables. When he grew bored of vegetables, he extended the plot and added flowers.

He had infinity before him, and there was only a finite number of things to try and do in one universe. He would be a fool not to try all of them in order to alleviate the overwhelming ennui of eternity. For a time at least.

But it was never enough to fill the emptiness stretching out on the beach around them, and not enough by far to fill the emptiness and grey void in his chest. The days marched on in numbing uniformity, each one as unremarkable and as repetitive as pebbles arranged in a line that stretched to infinity.

There was no goal, no purpose to anything, other than the self-serving little tasks he undertook just to keep himself occupied – for a minute, for an hour, for a day.

There were days when he wanted to run, to be anywhere but here, but every time he set out from the cottage and climbed the cliffs with the firm intention of leaving, he looked back at the house and the candlelight flickering within. Then he remembered the ghost that was chained to him, and turned back.

He had to stay.

This is what I have to do. If I do nothing else in my life anymore, and the world is allowed to continue existing, it will have been worth it. It must have been worth it.

*

One day he realised that he had not seen Annatar in … an indefinite amount of time. Celebrimbor avoided him most of the time, so going days without seeing him was nothing unusual, but at least after a few days they would inevitably run into each other – if only because the doorframe of the cottage was only so broad and could fit just one person at a time.

Had the Maia left?

Sudden panic swelled in his chest. Had he at last had enough of waiting and never getting the forgiveness or friendship he had given up the Rings for? Had he set out alone, gone back to his volcano, perhaps, and decided that this was the limit of his patience – and let the world suffer for it?

His heart raced in his ribcage when he rushed out of the house, looked around– and stopped for a moment when he saw the dog.

It reminded him of a wolf more than anything else, the tail long and the ears small and pointed, but no wolf he had ever seen had had a coat the colour of sand. The dog lay there, stretched out in a spot of shade provided by a crippled tree, its head resting on its forepaws, staring out at the waves that came and went and came and went, and had done so for a million years, and would continue it for a million years to come.

He had expected relief at seeing the dog, but in its place was just a sense of numbness. Everything was as it had always been and would continue like this for tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

I wonder if we will be there, Celebrimbor thought dully. At the end of eternity, when time stops and the world breaks, and the tides of the ocean will cease at last.

He knew that he could potentially live forever if he didn’t fade or illness or violence didn’t kill him. The thought had never terrified him more.

*

Annatar did not revert to his old form. The golden-furred wolf remained in his place, staying out of the way and curled up on itself most of the time, its bushy tail covering its snout, its eyes closed. Once, Celebrimbor dimly wondered whether it was easier to bear the mindless passage of time that way. Perhaps an animal could not feel boredom the way a god could, its brain lacking the capacity to grasp concepts more abstract than present and near future, which was everything that an animal needed. It also did not need a purpose other than feeding, breeding, and sleeping. It did not ask Why, it did not wonder if things were ever going to change again, or would continue in this numbing, senseless vein until the sky above them was all burnt out of stars.

Perhaps this reduction of cognitive capacity was a protection of sorts. Perhaps infinity was less suffocating when there was a very small space you could retreat to and shut the endlessness out.

Celebrimbor stared at the cottage he had built, and of which he was just now repairing the roof thatching, because rainwater had gotten in during the last storm.

A sense of unease gathered like nausea in his gut. Then he put the thought out of his mind.

*

Years passed. Then decades.

The tides came and went, the moon waxed and waned a thousand times. The cottage was showing first signs of disrepair, and Celebrimbor jumped at the opportunity to have something to do again.

It was not enough.

There were days when he had trouble rising from his bed.

What for? he would ask into the silence.

And he could only ever give himself the same answer: Because I must. And like a puppet pulled on strings, he would move, motions almost automated, eyes unseeing, brain unthinking, and go through the same old idiotic daily routine he had thought up years ago. Not because he wanted to or enjoyed it in any capacity, but because the alternative was either going mad or never rising from his bed again.

*

The house had no mirrors. Celebrimbor had not thought to buy one when he had furnished it, and he had not seen the necessity for it ever since. He could keep himself clean and groom his hair without the help of a reflection.

Only sometimes a feeling washed over him where he wondered what he must look like now. He could feel the stubble of his beard, and he dimly recalled that it must have been something he inherited from his great-grandfather on his maternal side. The Dwarves of Khazad-Dûm had always made fun of him for it.

You look like a half-molted crow, Floki used to say. Why would you even stop shaving this disgrace of a fuzz if you can’t grow a proper beard anyway?

Celebrimbor had cut off one of his beard-braids in retaliation.

The memory was strange, as if it didn’t belong to him. He couldn’t imagine himself having such a spirited argument with anyone, let alone making jest and laughing.

Was he even the same person anymore? Perhaps, if he ever came across a mirror, he wouldn’t even recognize the face looking back at him.

Sometimes, he turned over his hands and regarded them like alien things, searching for anything interesting in the lines of his palms or the joints and bones moving beneath the skin. Sometimes, he looked for signs of ageing – any indication at all that time was passing and it would eventually affect him, too. That there could be an end to this.

When he found none, there was only a vague sense of disappointment, briefly felt, but soon gone like a brown autumn leaf ripped away by the wind, never to return. And in its place numbness, grey and never-ending.

*

And the years passed.

The days came and went, and they were all of them the same. Until they weren’t.

The sky was overcast; the clouds and the sea were of a dull slate grey colour, wind-blown and jagged. 

Celebrimbor was out in his boat, waiting for fish to bite when he suddenly saw the shape of a man walking down the length of the beach. His dark cloak was flapping behind him, and he walked in the foam of the crashing waves, letting the surf and the water break over his boots.

Celebrimbor sat up a bit straighter. No one ever comes here.

The man did not seem to realise this, because he walked forward unperturbedly, his long, unbound hair fluttering like a storm-tossed vane behind him. His gaze was fixed on his steps, watching the surf wash over the leather of his shoes, but his back was very straight – pensive, but without forgoing a poise that was so deeply instilled within him, that even in contemplation his posture would not waver. 

And something … something about …

Celebrimbor squinted. Then he dropped his fishing pole. It vanished into the steel-coloured water and was gone in a matter of moments. He paid it no heed. He grabbed the rudders and drove them into the choppy sea, into the dells between the cresting waves, and pulled with ruthless abandon. He rowed and rowed, and barely paused to drag the boat out of the surf when it landed on the beach with the soft rasping sound of sandpaper on wood.

He leapt out and ran in the direction of the wanderer, who had stopped, watching Celebrimbor madly dashing towards him. The wind and salt were biting in his eyes, making his vision blur. For a brief instant, Celebrimbor feared he might have been mistaken, that desperation had conjured up an image of wishful thinking. Just another one of so many dreams where a light of hope shone on the horizon, only to reveal itself as nothing more than a figment of the imagination, a phantasm. But then he was close enough, and the stranger was still there, and Celebrimbor was able to see the face of the man whose eyes widened in recognition –

Celebrimbor reached him, hesitated – and threw his arms around the wanderer’s shoulders. The wanderer staggered back under the force of the impact, but quickly braced himself and then they were locked in an embrace of shock and joy and incredulity, neither able to fully believe that this was real, but not letting go either.

Celebrimbor clutched at the man’s shoulders as if he might turn to mist at any moment, and the wanderer returned the embrace after his initial surprise had worn off.

“By the light of the Trees, Tyelperinquar,” Maglor whispered, his voice rough from disuse. “What are you doing here?”

*

Chapter Text

*

The inside of the cottage was unusually warm. The windows, usually carelessly thrown open, and often as not, forgotten and left in this state until a gale banged them shut, were closed. Candles were lit against the gathering gloom of the arriving storm, and a fire was crackling in the hearth.

Fumes of boiled mint and dried herbs wafted from a clay pot, and little twirls of steam rose from two mugs on the table.

“I’m afraid I have nothing to offer you other than cured meat and a bit of bread and cheese,” Celebrimbor said, returning from the pantry. “I haven’t been to the market in –” He hesitated. “I haven’t been there in some time, and it seems I’ve run out of a lot of goods I should have stocked.”

“I told you, don’t bother yourself over me,” Maglor said, half-turned around on his stool, and motioned for Celebrimbor to join him at the table. “Please, sit down.”

Celebrimbor obliged. He pulled his mug towards him, then regarded his uncle through the gentle veil of rising steam. “I thought you were a dream at first,” he said after a few long seconds of silence. “I am still not entirely certain you are not,” he added after some more thought. “I’ve had these kinds of dreams before.”

“I might not be the best judge of that,” Maglor said, taking a sip from his own cup of tea. “After thousands of years wandering the shores of the world in solitude, my dreams resemble my waking hours as much as the other way around. It’s hard to judge what is real when you have no one else around as a point of reference. Did you ever notice how uncertain we become in our judgement of what is real when we are alone for too long and have no one to assure us of the reality of our perceptions?”

Celebrimbor was silent for a few moments. In the years of silence and loneliness, his own self had become dulled and distant to him, as had the world around him. It was a sharp jolt to suddenly be faced with another living being and forced to examine oneself against a world that was suddenly thrown back into sharp contrasts and outlines after years of haziness. He felt his mind, after a long time of being numb and drowsy, grinding back into motion like rusted gears of clockwork as it worked through the question and attempted to provide an answer.

“I think I …” He hesitated. Waiting for the thought to form fully before he continued, “I think I know what you mean. Yes. It’s like … being in a void without walls, where you scream and scream, and not even the echoes of your voice return to you. It’s hard to gauge whether anything is real, whether you yourself are real, if no one and nothing can hear you.”

Maglor regarded him for a while and Celebrimbor suddenly felt like after years of saying too little, he might have said too much too fast. But if his uncle had expected him to be more concise, more succinct, he made no comment.

“A non-place without echoes indeed,” he said at last. “You understand what I mean, I guess. Which in turn brings me to the question I already asked before. What are you doing here, Tyelperinquar, that you have forgotten about time and space and the very act of having a conversation?”

Celebrimbor opened his mouth to answer, but no words, not even thoughts would come. He drew breath, and tried again. “What – what do you know?” he asked at last, not knowing in the least what kind of an answer to expect. What had his uncle heard, what news could even reach him, in his eternal damnation, his endless wandering on ghostly shores, with wind and waves as his only companions?

“Not much,” Maglor replied. “News rarely travels far and fast enough to reach me, and I can never linger to hear their aftermath.” He paused. “I did hear you vanished,” he said at last. “That was close to a thousand years ago, and no other news about you has reached me ever since. I thought – I feared –” He broke off and did not attempt to finish the sentence. 

Which was just as well, because across the table, Celebrimbor had utterly frozen.

“One thousand years?” It was barely more than a whisper, a hoarse rasp. The mug almost slipped from his grip and he just barely kept it from falling.

Maglor regarded him with a heavy-weighing look, one that spoke of understanding without joy: of countless years lost to the overwhelming torpor of a mind caged in eternity, of blinking and finding yourself somewhere half a world away from where you swore you had been just a moment before, with half a millennium gone, never to return.

Slowly, carefully, Maglor stood and rounded the table to lay a hand on Celebrimbor’s shoulders. “Come, Tyelperinquar. I might have lost my taste for wandering after all this time, but even I cannot argue the fact that there’s hardly a better way to get your thoughts in order than by getting your feet moving along a straight path.” He gently gripped Celebrimbor’s upper arm and gave it a pull. “Let us go outside and take a walk.”

Celebrimbor followed numbly, letting himself be pulled along like a marionette on its strings.

One thousand years.

*

In the end, Celebrimbor told Maglor everything. He spoke of Nargothrond and Lindon, where he had stayed for a few decades after the cataclysm at the end of the First Age. He told his uncle of Khazad-Dûm and Ost-in-Edhil, the involuntary bid for power, the confrontation between Artanis, him, and Celeborn, and it seemed to him as if things he had had forgotten returned to him only in the telling of the tale.

In the end, he came to Annatar, how he had arrived one late afternoon in July, so many centuries ago – a lesser god standing on the threshold of Celebrimbor’s sun-flooded workshop, watching him with such sharp intelligence and challenge, asking, What do you know about the Old Arts? , with a nod at the diagrams Celebrimbor had been drawing up as an idle challenge to himself.

“He tried the same with Gil-Galad and Galadriel, yet I was the only fool who didn’t turn him away,” Celebrimbor said bitterly.

Maglor made no comment, he just kept on walking. On and on, along the waterline that was now rising with the tide rolling in.

It felt strange to speak of the centuries that followed: any synopsis of that time seemed to be at once much too detailed and much too reductive to properly convey what had transpired between them. The countless hours of conversation, the unnumbered arguments, the days and weeks and months buried in workshops, then in laboratories, then in forges. How do you tell of someone who inserted himself in your life so utterly and completely that erasing him would mean erasing half of your own self?

Maglor listened patiently. He didn’t interrupt or judge, merely asked a question every now and then when something wasn’t clear to him, or he wished his nephew to elaborate further upon a point.

Only after Celebrimbor had ended, and a few minutes had passed in pensive silence, interrupted only by the rushing waves and the flock of seagulls wheeling overhead, did he speak.

“So you chose to remove yourself – and him from the path of destruction,” Maglor said. “This I understand, and from what you told me, you had few enough other avenues open to you. The only thing I don’t see is the end to the means – does this future demand that you spend the rest of eternity in a godforsaken stretch of land, forever locked out of company, space, and time? Is that why you are still here?”

Celebrimbor couldn’t meet his gaze. He kept walking, and his uncle was keeping abreast of him. Although Maglor made no move to pry or enquire further, an invisible pressure was building in the air, pressing like hot steam against a valve, until it reached a critical point – and broke.

Celebrimbor stopped suddenly. One might think that after having travelled half the known world, I’d have learned that I cannot outrun these things, he thought bitterly.

Maglor’s steps crunched to a halt next to him. His uncle didn’t speak. He just waited.

“I told him that if he gave up the Rings and visions of power, he might eventually have my forgiveness.” Celebrimbor raised his gaze at the horizon, the wind whipping his hair across his face. “Which is the only reason he forfeited power and came with me, and now we are here and we haven’t spoken in – in five hundred years, I believe, and  –” He drew a deep, sharp breath. “I cannot give it to him.” He didn’t know when he had crossed his arms and gripped his own upper arms as if trying to shield himself against an impending attack.

Again, another few seconds of silence.

“I see,” Maglor said at last. And nothing more.

Celebrimbor turned towards him. “I know that it was wrong of me to offer such a thing,” he said quickly. “I know that I’m to blame for all of this and I am aware that I am endangering the entire world, that I am possibly drawing us back to the very future I tried to prevent by doing this, but after everything I know now, after everything we –” He broke off. Opened his mouth to speak. Closed it again. Choked on something when his throat constricted suddenly. “I can’t,” he managed to get out at last, giving his uncle a desperate, beseeching look. “I know I am failing my promise, and that the world will have to pay for it as soon as he loses patience, but I –”

Maglor held up a hand and Celebrimbor’s next words died in his throat.

“If I may, Tyelperinquar,” the old elf said gently. “You do not need to justify your reasons and decisions to me. I have neither the will nor the authority to judge you, and I understand, perhaps, better than most, that there are limits to what you can give of yourself, before that self starts to sunder.” He gave Celebrimbor a small smile. “Fear no judgement and no disappointment, Tyelperinquar. I am the last person who would condemn you for not tearing your soul into pieces over a word given.”

He didn’t wait for Celebrimbor to reply, but just made a gesture to follow him, and resumed walking. They followed the beach line for more than a mile to the north, either of them lost in their own thoughts, before his uncle broke the silence.

“I feel that the concept of forgiveness is gravely misunderstood,” Maglor remarked suddenly.

Celebrimbor threw him a side glance. “How so?”

Maglor shrugged. “Why, we interpret forgiveness as the ultimate absolution of another – of their mistakes, their crimes, the evils they committed – call it what you like. But is the absolution for wronging others – or the entire world really for any individual to give? Who, I ask you, could speak of granting such a gift and have it hold any meaning at all?”

Maglor looked down at the salty tide lapping at his worn boots. The smell of the sea was strong, the wind was blowing in from the west.

“I have pondered this question for a long time, and I eventually concluded that forgiveness of this kind holds neither truth nor meaning. What is done is done. Guilt and consequences are something that must be borne. You cannot absolve others of any blame, just as you cannot undo the deeds they have committed. Your influence ends where you yourself end. And that, I think, is what forgiveness really means: a decision for yourself to let go of things that hurt you, and take from them the power to wound you further.”

“But –” Celebrimbor hesitated. “One cannot simply choose not to have been wounded. You said it yourself, what is done is done. And some wounds will not go away just by ignoring them or summoning grace for the offender. Becoming hale once more is not a decision.”

“Is it not?” Maglor asked with a wry smile and softly nudged Celebrimbor’s ankle with his boot – the ankle the Balrog’s whip had wrapped around, an age ago, seared skin, torn ligaments and muscles, had twisted and broken bone. The ankle that had healed despite every warning of healers to expect the opposite. The ankle that he had, once again, learned to walk with, even though everyone – except for his father and uncle – had told him that it would leave him limping and hurting for the rest of his life and that it would never again support his full weight.

When the healers had told him to remain still, Curufin and Celegorm had urged him to get out of bed, and ride out with them, to escape from the huge tent that served as a field hospital, and the pervasive sense of sickness and decay. They had pressed him to return to the world of the healthy and living, first as a spectator, then as a partaker. At first, Celebrimbor had only been able to do so riding on horseback, every stumble of the horse jolting his ankle so painfully his vision went white. Then, eventually, he had dismounted and attempted to walk, just a few steps at a time, while leaning heavily on his crutches. Slowly, he had begun to ease more and more weight onto the ankle until the agony became too much. Had gone back into the saddle. Had dismounted again. Walked another few steps. Every day just a bit further, just a bit longer. Five steps, ten, twenty, then fifty. Until one day his father had taken Celebrimbor’s crutches away, smashed them to smithereens upon a boulder and tossed the splinters into a river, and had told him to keep on walking without them. And Celebrimbor had.

Oh, the ankle had remained unstable, had kept on hurting for a long, long time, and it had never gone back to the way it was. But Celebrimbor had never returned to the crutches or the sickbed. And with time, the pain had faded to a background humming in his life, hardly noteworthy when he opened his eyes on a new morning.

Even as the memory faded and his vision cleared, something hardened inside Celebrimbor. “One example does not make an axiom, Uncle.”

He swallowed again – something seemed to be stuck in his throat, then spoke on, “You and I both know that nothing Sauron has done can be compared to what you told me. Much less can all the hurt and terror he has caused be resolved similarly to one person stupidly deciding to put weight on a wounded limb until it heals wrongly and half-functionally.”

He looked at his uncle. “Your approach might work when applied to single offences that can be resolved between two people. What of horrible deeds? Deeds that affected not me, but hundreds, thousands, millions of others? How could I decide to dismiss something of that scale? Would I not betray everyone who has ever suffered under him and fought against him by choosing forgiveness?”

Maglor made a thoughtful sound. “I apologise. I should have known that semantics – or philosophy – would not help you. You are too much your father’s son for that, and I am too little like either of you. A different approach then, perhaps.” He looked contemplative, then raised his gaze to Celebrimbor. “I assume you are familiar with attacking a problem from a different angle when your initial approach has brought you to a dead end.”

Celebrimbor shrugged dispassionately. “Father taught me well.”

Maglor gave him a brief, sad smile, but his face quickly turned serious again. “So let us lay out the facts bluntly and without pretty embellishments: If you choose to bind yourself to past actions, and your principles that arise from them – forgiveness would mean betrayal. But who made you steward of the justice for those millions? Whose justice do you truly uphold? Your own? That of the survivors, taking it in your hands, unsolicited? That of the dead? And what will it cost you to defend it?”

“I don’t understand you!” Celebrimbor snapped, anger suddenly flaring up inside his chest, making him feel as warm and alive as he hadn’t felt in a long time. He stopped in his tracks and rounded on his uncle. “Do you want me to forgive Sauron? Do you also want me to open the gates to the Void and welcome the Destroyer back himself, while I am at it?”

“No!” Maglor cried sharply. “But I want you to think about what you are doing!” For a moment they just stared at each other, almost like two wolves about to strike. Then a shadow passed over Maglor’s eyes, and suddenly the fire that had flared up inside him went out, leaving nothing but cold ashes. His uncle looked old and sad and shrunken. “A word of advice, if I may, Tyelperinquar,” Maglor said, much quieter now.

Celebrimbor didn’t reply, but just stared at him. He could feel the heat seeping out of him, leaving him as damp and cold and empty as he had been for hundreds of years.

Maglor seemed to sense something similar because he pulled his cloak tighter around his shoulders. He was not meeting Celebrimbor’s eyes now but looking out over the sea instead. “You have seen what chaining yourself to an eternal cause looks like – and how these things end. If you do not have to do it, either because it is your soul’s deepest wish or because you have sworn a binding oath…” Maglor let out a breath that he seemed to have held for far longer than this conversation had already lasted. Perhaps for far longer than even that. “Don’t.”

Celebrimbor lowered his gaze, watching the tide rushing in. The tips of his toes were already wet in his boots, even though five minutes before the foaming waves had not managed to reach up the shore this far. He perked up when he felt a hand on his shoulder.

Maglor was looking at him now, and in his eyes, Celebrimbor saw the loss and ruin of all that had been fair and good, the light of the Two Trees replaced with a terrible emptiness that was deeper and more lasting than mere absence. This, here, was a void where all light had been consumed, and all hope had been lost forever.

“Do not make the same mistake that we made, Tyelperinquar,” his uncle said softly. “Learn from us, so that you do not have to repeat them.”

“I’m not sure I can forgive him,” Celebrimbor said and suddenly his throat was tight. He hardly managed to get the words out. “I’m not sure I want to.”

“I’m certain you don’t,” Maglor said quietly. “And I do not ask you to do or not do anything. I just ask you to consider that you cannot save the world or make it just, however much you might want to, Tyelperinquar. It is not yours to save, and the burden of blame lies with Sauron, not with you.” He paused. “Save yourself. Allow closure for the mistakes you made and do not torture yourself further for deeds that were never yours.”

“But how?” Celebrimbor asked. “I don’t know how.” This time his voice broke. “I can’t not take responsibility – it is my fault, if I hadn’t shown him the diagrams or the formulae I had come up with, if I hadn’t taken him in, he would never, he would never have been able to – I gave him the power to destroy this world.”

„Don’t be ridiculous!” Maglor snapped suddenly and Celebrimbor flinched. „You, your father, and your grandfather! Birds of a feather, truly! You believe that you are so important that the world would stop turning without you - indeed, that you are to praise or blame for either all good or evil in this world! It’s either hubris or martyrdom, there is no middle ground!”

Celebrimbor couldn’t reply, but only stared, his jaw slack. Too unexpected was it to see foul temper get the better of his usually soft-spoken uncle.

Maglor seemed to be surprised by his outburst as well. He blinked, shook his head, and when he continued, his voice was level once more.

“I know Sauron – not like you do, but I have heard enough of him to be certain that he is able to affect this world far more thoroughly and deeply than either you or I could ever hope to do. Had he wanted to, he would have found a way to create the Rings, or something like them, no matter your involvement.”

“So you’re saying it didn’t matter what I did or didn’t do, one way or another,” Celebrimbor said flatly.

“I did not say that,” Maglor corrected. His voice had not entirely lost his edge, but he was notably less angry than mere moments ago. “What you did might be considered foolish or naïve by some, but even they can’t deny that whatever you did, it led to Sauron not plunging this world into fire and darkness when you ceased working on the Rings. So do not speak lightly of what you have achieved, and do not torture yourself for all eternity for what might have happened. Even if worst comes to worst, and the future you saw comes to pass after all – it will have been the Betrayer’s decision. Not yours.”

“That is hardly comforting.”

“It’s possible to try everything within your power and still fail,” Maglor said quietly. “That is not a weakness or a moral failing.” His uncle laid a hand on his shoulder. “Stop torturing yourself over something that was never in your hands to begin with. Allow yourself to heal and be whole again.”

Celebrimbor shook his head. “You don’t understand – I can’t do that.”

 “Why?” Maglor asked gently.

Celebrimbor pressed his eyes shut, the salt was burning in them – though how he had gotten seawater in them, he could not tell. He pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes and rubbed them, but the pain would not go away. His chest was clenching with an unbearable pressure. There was a wave building inside of him, pressing against his ribcage as if it wanted to burst outward and shatter him to pieces.

Centuries of silence had built up inside his heart, of wilful ignorance, of a veil of single-minded duty spread over it, that he hadn’t allowed himself to question or second-guess. He had locked away the growing hollowness in his chest; refused to spare it a second thought while he went about his endless, ever-same days in a mindless stupor. But now all that pressure was pushing outside with violent force, sensing the growing cracks in the walls Celebrimbor had erected around his own mind. Crowding and pressing against the shatterpoint that Maglor’s question had created – by forcing the one introspection which would bring everything crashing down.

And the walls broke.

“I want him back,” Celebrimbor choked, finally admitting the truth that he had buried and locked away for centuries together with all the shame and disgust he felt for himself. But now the words were out, and they kept rushing forth like a raging river through a broken dam.  “I want him back more than anything, and I want to be allowed to want him back. I miss him so much. I miss him more than anything. He completes me. Without him I feel like missing a limb – and I despise myself for it. How can I miss him, knowing what he did? How can I love him despite it all? What does that make me?” He buried his face in his hands and sank to his knees, and in this moment, he wanted nothing more than to collapse into himself and be gone from the world, just so that the torment of his guilt and longing and disgust would go away.

“Oh, Tyelperinquar,” Maglor said with a sigh. 

He sensed, rather than heard his uncle kneeling down next to him. Maglor laid an arm around his shoulders and gently pulled him into an embrace – as if they were still in Tirion, and Celebrimbor was still an elfling in his first century, merely upset about a scolding or parental punishment. Celebrimbor clutched at his uncle’s vest and leaned his forehead against Maglor’s shoulder, his eyes screwed shut, his shoulders wracked by tremors. Maglor held him there as he unravelled.

*

Chapter Text

*

An indeterminate amount of time later, Celebrimbor was sitting at the edge of the water. He had his knees pulled close, and his arms loosely looped around his shins. White surf was washing up and retreating just before reaching the toes of his boots, accompanied by the endless rushing of the waves. The sky and the sea were both slate grey and bleeding into a haze at the horizon. A sharp wind had risen as the tide had retreated, and the stiff breeze was whipping loose strands of hair across his forehead and cheeks. Salt was stinging in his eyes. They felt raw and he blinked against the wind and the spray of the sea.

Maglor had left some time ago. Whatever cursed forces were tugging at his oath-tortured, fettered soul had become too strong for him to remain. I would have liked to stay with you just a bit longer, his uncle had said. But every minute I stay the tearing at my heart gets worse. Farewell, Nephew, I have to continue my wandering. Perhaps we will meet again. For now, take some time to think about what we spoke of. 

Hours had passed, but Celebrimbor’s mind had remained largely empty ever since he had watched Maglor walk away along the shore. He felt hollowed out and numb, much like the centuries before. Only now it wasn’t the numbness of locking his soul away even from himself. No, his soul had been pried open and bled out on the sand. There was truly nothing left inside of him. His inner fortress had been breached, and everything he had kept hidden and suppressed there was gone.

There had been no catharsis there, no relief. Merely the pressure of something straining against its fetters had vanished, like a headache that had been accompanying him for decades and was now suddenly gone. Whether it was for better or worse, he didn’t know. From a philosophical standpoint an argument, though a trite one, could be made for the virtue of facing up to the truth. However, from a more grounded angle it begged the question what good truth did when it gave you neither counsel nor comfort, because there was no right path ahead.

I cannot give you the absolution you are looking for, Maglor had said. No one can. But you cannot go on living half a life and being torn in two for every moment of your existence, because what you feel you must do and what you truly need are impossible to reconcile. His uncle had closed his eyes briefly. Believe me, there is a limit to how long such a state can be endured.

So it comes down to the question of whether I choose Sauron above everything and everyone else, Celebrimbor had said hoarsely, or whether I cut myself loose from him and let me and the world bear whatever consequences it might bring. What kind of choice is this, Uncle? How could I ever choose between these two options?

His uncle had not replied to that other than, The choice must be made, and it is yours alone. And if you do not decide, someone or something else will do it for you eventually. Sometimes there is no virtue in choosing any option that is available. But there is never any virtue in dithering at an inevitable crossroads.

Ever since this moment, Celebrimbor had sat rooted to the spot, with the same thoughts circling in endless loops in his mind. He was sitting motionless, his eyes open but seeing nothing.

Noon had passed and a soft drizzle had begun to fall when he finally stood and walked back to the cottage.

His mind was made up.

No use dithering at the crossroads.

*

He found the cottage empty, as he had done so many times in the past few centuries. But unlike in the past few centuries, he did not take its interior in wordlessly and went about his own business. For the first time in decades, looked around himself with his eyes and his mind open, searching for a sign that someone else had been staying here.

He found none. The table was empty, safe for the two mugs he and his uncle had used. There were no books strewn about that weren’t Celebrimbor’s own. No plants and keepsakes that he hadn’t collected or fashioned himself. No coats and boots that did not belong to him.

There was no sound except for increasingly fat raindrops drumming against the windowpanes and the wind whistling through cracks and crevices in the rafters. It was only afternoon, but the interior of the cottage was as dark as if dust had already fallen.

Celebrimbor turned on his heel, his eyes catching on a door frame that his subconscious had dutifully erased from his field of vision every time he had glanced in that direction, making his eyes slide over it like water droplets off leaves.

He walked over to the door, then stopped in front of it, his hand raised as if to knock. Hesitated. Drew breath. Squared his shoulders.

Then he knocked. “Annatar?” he asked, the name strange and unfitting on his tongue. “Are you in there?”

When there was no reply, he called out again. Silence was the only answer. The rain was rushing down in earnest now, a white noise that swallowed everything else. The outside world beyond the windows was hidden behind a veil of grey.

Celebrimbor stood before the door for a few moments, as if faced with an unsolvable quandary. Then he reached for the doorknob and turned it. The door swung open silently. He must have oiled its hinges, even while ignoring the presence of the room and its occupant on the other side. As far as feats in compartmentalisation went, it was quite impressive.

Celebrimbor steeled himself and stepped over the threshold.

“Annatar?”

Again, no reply. He looked all around, but the only thing that greeted him was an empty room – a room which looked exactly like it had centuries ago when he had built and furnished it. There was no sign of someone having lived in it. No personal effects, no signs of use and disuse. No books on the shelves, no clothes or plants or anything at all anywhere. The bed stood in its corner, its sheets folded, its pillow in the exact same position Celebrimbor remembered setting it down, all these years ago.

He took a step further into the room, shuddering as the impersonality, the emptiness of it all touched his skin like a chilly breeze.

There’s no one here. There hasn’t been anyone living here in a long time, perhaps not ever.

Shock jolted through him, a bizarre thought – Have I even come here with him? Did he ever accompany me here? Or did I just imagine – and really, would it have been a surprise after all the abuse he put his mind through in the Mirror? Have I ever even exited it?  He froze, feeling cold all over, and briefly his mind was reeling. What if – what if I didn’t find my way back, what if I got lost and all of this is one more dead end, one more unreality –

No, no, no, he couldn’t think of that, that way lay madness –

Celebrimbor turned on the spot and his gaze fell upon the small desk that stood tucked into a niche between a wardrobe and the windowsill, quite invisible from the door.

And there, he saw something that caught his eyes: papers – strewn across the entire surface and covered in small, cramped handwriting. A quill lying forgotten across the uppermost sheet, droplets of ink smeared like dark tears across its surface. An inkpot – left open and forgotten in this state.

Suddenly, Celebrimbor’s heart was beating against his ribcage with the force of a hammer. His mouth was dry as he approached the desk.

The writing was not in a hand he recognized. Oh, there were characters and letters he recognized, as he would have recognized a familiar fingerprint. The way the tethar over the tengwar were lengthened almost into accents in the writer’s hurry to get their thoughts down onto paper, forgoing vowels in favour of quicker diacritics. The way the bows of the letters were drawn in an almost excessive flourish. However, where they were usually well-rounded and even, and now looked cramped and spiky. In fact, there was none of the usual care and regularity in the handwriting, the script was tilting – sometimes left, sometimes right, as if the author had been standing on a rocking boat. Ink splashes covered the sheets of paper, words were crossed out and hastily scrawled over – something Celebrimbor had never seen Annatar do.

There was a lump in his throat and a tight feeling in his chest when he picked up one of the sheets of paper.

This, too, was chock-full with text, but he could hardly read it – not for the handwriting, but because the text written on it did not translate to any language he knew. It was neither Quenya nor Sindarin – and, after an attempt to imagine runes in place of the tengwar, he determined that it was not Dwarvish either.

Celebrimbor laid the sheet aside and shuffled through the pile of scattered notes. He found others he couldn’t decipher, and some that he at first took for strange notes on astronomy. There were only a few lines hastily jotted down in the middle of an otherwise empty sheet – a flagrant waste of space, which Annatar had never condoned – then the notes broke off. In the middle of the sentence. Celebrimbor shuffled through the pile, trying to find the continuation. 

Many sheets he tossed aside, letting them carelessly flutter to the ground, while he hunted for others he could read, arranging and rearranging them a dozen times, until he was faced with a disjointed sequence of sheets laid out above and next to each other.

It was not a letter. It was barely even a text that deserved to be termed as such. But when Celebrimbor read it, he felt himself going cold right down to the marrow of his bones.

I have been broken, splintered

The shards of Me are now 

beyond anyone’s power to retrieve.

Too much has been flung out too far into space

Or fallen beyond the event horizon of the singularity

That was once the core of something radiant that was Me.

Am I radiating, evaporating?

The angular momentum of my reeling spin

a trajectory for the last remnants of myself to escape

and be free of the bottomless well that I have collapsed into.

But what then remains for me? Of me?

Or is the question altogether wrong?

For if the being posing the question does no longer exist –

What can it miss, for what can it long?

Perhaps it is better that nothing is left

For my proximity can only destroy

Any and all that is close to me

Drawing it into the relentless abyss

That is hungry and eager to devour

Inexorably, indiscriminately

Pulling in all, to make them part of the dark

And yet any light I could swallow

would not brighten the shadow

But only feed the void and help the darkness grow

Better I remove myself from all, and far

For even if I have grown incapable of doing good

I can at least prevent myself from doing evil,

And not destroy another star.

Celebrimbor took a staggering step back, staring at the writing.

No. No. No.

It couldn’t be. Not now.

(If you do not decide, someone or something else will do it for you eventually.)

He looked around, as if anything in this ghostly, empty room could tell him when or where Annatar had gone. What he would do now, that he had given up on waiting. Countless possibilities shot through his head, each more terrifying than the last.

His eyes flitted over to the inkpot. Opened, but the ink was not yet dried up.

He can’t have left too long ago.

Celebrimbor turned on his heel and stormed out of the room. The rain was building to a crescendo now, the storm was howling outside, arrived in full force at last. Dimly he thought of his uncle, hoping that he had found shelter on his wanderings to keep him out of the worst of the gale.

However, the storm took the thought and tore it away like a dry leaf from a tree in autumn. His thoughts all came back to the Maia that should have been here and no longer was.

I have to find him. And stop him.

(From doing what? – He did not know.)

(There was a possibility that Annatar had given up on waiting for an absolution that might never come, and let Sauron take his place. But the tone of his letters, the at once frantic and resigned lines – spoke of another possibility, far more final than that.)

Without thinking Celebrimbor had grabbed his coat and pulled it on. When he ran outside, a gust of wind almost blew him backwards. Celebrimbor stumbled back and only barely caught his balance by grabbing onto the doorframe. Dark clouds had gathered overhead. The gale had whipped the sea up into a choppy, steel-coloured mass that would drown a man as readily as throw him against the nearest cliffs. Sheets of rain were coming down, reducing sight to a few metres in every direction.

Celebrimbor narrowed his eyes against the biting wind and burning salt, then shoved his hand beneath his shirt and pulled forth a cord which he had worn beneath his clothing. And on it, hidden from sight and unused for centuries, dangled the Ring of Water – the one Ring which he had kept from destruction, going back on his own promise to destroy them all.

Now he tore the cord from his neck and slipped the Ring onto the fourth finger of his left hand. He raised his hand in a warding gesture, and immediately the curtain of rain parted before him, even if the wind kept buffeting him relentlessly.

Where are you?  he thought, casting his mind outward, but finding nothing but the raging elements and the lifeless beach.

Without a backward glance, Celebrimbor walked out into the storm.

Chapter Text

Act IV: Redemption

Because I do not hope to turn again

Because I do not hope

Because I do not hope to turn

Desiring this man's gift and that man's scope

I no longer strive to strive towards such things

(Why should the aged eagle stretch its wings?)

Why should I mourn

The vanished power of the usual reign?

T.S. Eliot – Ash Wednesday, Part I

*

After the storm came the quiet: a stillness so absolute that it crept through the world like poisoned roots and vines, slowly strangling the colour and life from what had been vibrant and splendid and good before.

It was a silence that was so other, so powerful, and profound that not even voices raised in laughter or birdsong could shatter it. The songs and sounds of the world were mere strings of gossamer in this absolute void, flimsy, weak, easily torn, leaving behind nothing but cold emptiness that stretched like a chasm between Celebrimbor and him.

It had been seven days since their confrontation in the throne hall, and not a single word had passed between them.

And yet, every moment, the image of how he had found Tyelperinquar hung before his inner eye: sitting on the throne that had once belonged to his aunt, clad in the colours of Fëanor’s line, looking as hard and stern as one of the ancient stone likenesses of the long-dead Dwarven kings that Annatar had seen once, far, far below Khazad-Dûm. He himself, summoned before the throne like a criminal about to receive judgement. So ready to argue, to fight, to attack, after having gone through every way this meeting might go in his head for a thousand times. And yet, as he now realised, utterly unprepared for what was coming.

He remembered those grey eyes, usually warm and kind, turned suddenly so hard and cold when they looked at him.

“Me or the Rings. You will not have both. Choose.”

A retort, almost childish in its petulance, in its teeth-bared-hackles-raised aggression: “You cannot make me.”

Looking back, it would have been laughable even to himself, had it not been for the despair clawing through the threat. (The last resort of the tyrant, the final answer of everyone who had run out of good arguments and therefore lost the fight: And yet I am the stronger one of us, so even if you win, I’ll make you lose.)

(And why was he even resorting to this? It was not as if Celebrimbor’s demand was reasonable, or fair. Had he not laid himself bare to the elf and given him the truth he had asked for? Hadn’t he been acting in nothing but good will and good faith towards him for centuries? Was that worth nothing at all now? Were all those years, all those countless hours, the effort, the trust suddenly forgotten?

And what of this irrational extortion? “This or that”? “Me or the Rings”? Was that how Tyelperinquar was going to repay him? By requiting trust with distrust, openness with suspicion, gifts with thievery and treachery? What else was he supposed to do to prove that he meant well, that he would not harm him or the others, but that he had chosen them to work alongside him to remake the world, to unmar it, to raise it higher and themselves with it –)

(It was not fair, it was simply not fair, what was he supposed to do –)

(How can he do this to me, how dare he demand this, I’ll end him I love him why why why doesn’t he trust me why -)

A laugh, bitter and utterly joyless. “I know. I cannot make you and even if I could, I wouldn’t. If your choice is to have any meaning at all, you must make it from your own free will.”

An answering growl. Hackles raised, teeth bared. “I could fight you. I could just take the Rings and our writings and be done with it. With you.”

Silence. A gaze, emotionless and yet as heavy and knowing as he had only suffered once before, when he had knelt before the Herald, and suddenly realised that he was seen through, known – and he had sworn himself, sworn that he would never allow himself to be at someone else’s mercy like this another time, and yet –

 “Yes. You could. But will you? You would win any real fight between us with utmost certainty. But you will have lost me, Annatar. And if I am to believe that you have change, truly changed, from who you were before that must mean something to you.”

He felt himself slipping – (It means everything! You mean everything, and I have changed, I have changed, please just tell me how to prove it, tell me how to show you I mean it please – no no no NO. It means nothing! The gesture has nothing to do with what is supposed to prove, this isn’t fair, this is extortion, this is you twisting my arm and throwing away everything we ever worked for – I’ll show you, I’ll show you, if you are as foolish, as insolent to think that you can force me into doing your will, I’ll show you who’s the stronger one of the two of us, if I must lose, I will make you lose with me –)

This could not be it. This could not be the end of their collaboration. He shouldn’t even have hesitated about his answer. The fact alone that Celebrimbor would pose such a choice, the fact that he would demand such a thing just to prove a point meant that he should have struck the elf down where he sat on that throne in those blasted colours of his grandfather. Because if those where Celebrimbor’s true colours, then there had been nothing here for him at all, not ever. But somehow – he – couldn’t.

For some reason, he didn’t turn around and walk out, or storm forward and rip the elf’s throat out.

For some reason, he remained standing, as if there was still something to be won here, as if trying to negotiate further for this farce of a friendship could in any way measure up to what he would have to give up for it – for no other reason than fear and illogical principles.

“I lose. It is either you or the Rings. No matter what I do, I always lose.”

(Why was he still standing here? Why wasn’t he leaving? It was the sensible thing to do, to cut his losses, to retreat, to pursue his own plans, far away where no one else with questionable principles sporting the stability of a house of cards and feigned moral compunctions would bother him.)

“I made my choice, Annatar. What about you? Do you want power or my friendship? Knowing who you are, I cannot in good conscience give you both.”

He didn’t understand Celebrimbor anymore. He didn’t understand why the elf was being so obstinate, so shortsighted, so afraid – nothing in the world has changed, only your knowledge of who I am, but haven’t I shown you that I meant everything I offered, haven’t I proven that I can raise you up higher, haven’t I told you the deepest secrets of magic and power, didn’t we want to remake this world, didn’t we want to do better, didn’t we share this dream, does this mean nothing to you, why would you throw that away, why would you make me chose – what do I have to do to make you see?

They argued, they fought, but Celebrimbor remained as immovable as stone, and just as impenetrable to good sense.

Only when he asked Annatar for his motives for coming to the Mírdain and Annatar told him, there was, at last, a crack in his emotionless mask.

“I saw in you the same hunger that I felt within me. You answered me in everything like a mirror image. Every desire I had was reflected in you. I looked at you and I saw myself, and I knew that we both could achieve everything, if we only so desired.”

It should not have hurt that those were the words that caused a lightless horror to fall over Celebrimbor’s face, and at this point he didn’t understand why he kept on talking, why he kept on doing this, because it was as stupid as taking a knife to his own chest and carving its insides out for everyone to see and trample over. It was idiotic, it made no sense, and since when was he doing the work of his enemies for them – why couldn’t he just walk out and be done with it, why did he keep on talking, why did Celebrimbor look at him like that and why did he want nothing more than to cringe away at the horror and pain and disappointment in those eyes –

 “What of the world?” he asked at last. “What of our dreams? Our plans?”

“Let someone else save the world,” Celebrimbor replied, so nonchalant, so careless, as if it wasn’t their life’s work and every bit of imagination and ingenuity that they had poured into them, as if he wasn’t taking their shared dream and smashing it to smithereens upon the marble floor of the throne room. In this moment he hated the elf, hated him like he had not hated anyone in a long time, because this was not about morality and safety, as Celebrimbor claimed, but merely about making an example.

“I wouldn’t have to give up anything if you didn’t insist on making me choose between you and the Rings.”

Celebrimbor laughed, then, and Annatar did not tear his throat out, but it was a close thing.  “I am doing this on purpose, Annatar. So, for the last time I ask you: choose.”

Silence.

“You are throwing away everything we have worked for.”

“I am saving everything that was ever between us,” Celebrimbor replied. “Give up the Rings, Annatar. Show me that there was a reason you came to me and stayed for, other than the desire for power.” And the elf had the gall to extend his hand, as if he was being generous.

But this was his choice, apparently. The paradigms of reality had shifted, and suddenly there was no longer a world where he got to keep both Celebrimbor and the Rings. And without the Rings there would be no fulfilment of the purpose they had envisioned for them: beauty, power, but above all –

“I can’t.” Just two words, and yet enough for his voice to stumble over one of them like a clumsy mortal over a rock on the road.

“Why?” At the honest confusion in Celebrimbor’s face, his anger ebbed against his will. (He can’t not know. He cannot pretend he doesn’t guess what this was all about. I told him to his face, back in Khazad-Dûm.)

“Because I cannot let you die.”

(He recalled a place deep under the earth, with smoke and fire rising all around them as the mountain above their heads trembled. At the back of his mind, he still felt the echo of the agonised scream of Dwarven souls, whose bodies had been atomized by the heat of the fire geyser as the Balrog shouldered free from its dark prison in the bowels of the world. He remembered so vividly looking around and meeting Celebrimbor’s eyes and knowing in this instant, that if he didn’t do anything, if he didn’t throw himself against the momentum of fate with every ounce of his power, that Celebrimbor would die here, and he would lose him, and he would never find anyone else like Tyelperinquar again. He would not allow it. He would not. And if he had to find a way to end Death itself. Celebrimbor would not die.)

(And afterwards, in the long days he spent recovering from a fight that had almost cost him his own physical incarnation, while he had examined one of the Ring prototypes Tyelperinquar had made, one envisioned for protection – it came to him that this was it, this was what he had to work on.)

“I need to perfect these Rings, if only for this purpose. I need something to ensure that you stay alive. What if something like in Khazad-Dûm happens again? What if you just run into something you cannot protect yourself from, and I won’t be there to save you?”

Celebrimbor just looked at him, and suddenly there was no more horror, no more fear in his features, just a flat, grey tiredness to his face that made it seem like he was fading to stone and about to become one with the cold marble around him. When he spoke, his voice was just above a whisper.

An age of the world ago, Annatar had watched Fingolfin reduced to blood-red mist and a smear on the ground when Melkor had hit the Elven King with all his might, Grond coming down in a blur and with enough force that a score of avalanches went off in the surrounding mountains. It had not been a hit. It had not been a kill. It had been obliteration.

The words that Celebrimbor spoke now struck harder than any blow Grond had ever dealt.

“I saw the future before I came to meet you here. Last night, with the help of a Mirror of Melian, I gazed down its myriads of pathways, and I saw the Ring you are trying to make. You are going to call it ‘the One’.”

For a moment, he thought he had misheard. For it could not be – there was no way that the elf could know, he had never uttered these plans to anyone, dead or living, so how –

The world seemed to tilt on its axis.

“I know of it, and I know what you are planning to do with it. The Rings we made were the cause for everything that happened afterwards. You leaving. Building your fortress. Razing Eregion to the ground with an army of abominations.” Celebrimbor’s breath hitched, but he forged on relentlessly. “Capturing me. Torturing whatever I knew of the Rings out of me.”

A pause.

“Killing me, eventually. It happens every time, no matter what I attempt to change. I was trying to find a future where we kept on doing what we did, and both lived. It doesn’t work. It never works. In every future, the only thing I run into that I cannot protect myself from is you. And you are there to kill me. Every time.”

He heard the words, but they made no sense.

(How does he know? How can it be, he could never have guessed – did I slip up? But no, I was so careful, so careful not to reveal too much too soon – he mentioned a Mirror of Melian – was this his bloody aunt interfering, this blasted disciple of hers? Did she plant those ideas in his head?)

(Lies, lies, all of it. I would never attack him, never hurt him, never kill him. Not even if we fell out over the Rings, even if he didn’t agree with the creation of the One. That was not what I intended to do, I would never –)

(Wouldn’t we, though? Did we not wish to silence him just before for all the lies and threats and extortions he kept spitting? And weren’t we right to do so? In fact, we could do it now. Get rid of him. Take what is ours and leave, and then return and show them that you cannot stand against power such as ours with impunity.)

(Who is he that he dares to withhold our own works from our hands? Who is he to demand that we give up the great vision we have foreseen for this world? It was we who gave him the knowledge in the first place. He has no right to the Rings, none at all. He could never even have conceived of their creation without us. Us!)

(His words are lies, all of them are lies. He just wants to have the Power for himself. As soon as we acquiesce and give up the work on the Rings, he will make off with our knowledge and create them himself. He will steal it, that is all he ever wanted, we see it so clearly now, don’t we –)

(I would never kill him. Nothing could ever be worth this. Not even my – our – dream. There is no dream without him.)

(Perhaps we wouldn’t kill him, if we felt merciful; though we would be within our rights to do so. He’s an obstacle. A hitch in the plan. The smart thing to do would be to get rid of him now.)

(No, I wouldn’t raise my hand against him. He cannot die. If he is no longer, everything was for naught. Everything I did was so he wouldn’t die – I wanted to protect him, not lose him –)

(We’ve already lost him. Don’t you see? He’s lying. He’s lying to us so he alone might reap the fruits of our labour. He never intends to give up the Rings. He wants them for himself. What a cruelty to pose this choice, when he has no intention of ever adhering to it himself. What an idiocy to paint the world as black and white, good and bad, power as an opposite to goodness, and put it as if we must choose one or the other.)

(He has never lied to us before. I will not hurt him. I cannot lose him.)

(Then don’t. Keep him! Chain him so he cannot run! Love him! For all eternity, if you want! If we follow our plan, we will never have to suffer anything going against our will ever again. The One would prevent everything, if we only become more powerful, the most powerful being that there ever was, we could steer fate itself and prevent anything bad from happening, to us, to him, to everyone.)

(But the choice – he won’t give in.)

(There is only one choice of consequence that you need to make. You needn’t give up anything for it. Just come to me. You will have everything.)

“Annatar,” someone said, and it shook him out of his thoughts, layers upon layers upon layers whirring through his head at the same time in the fraction of a fraction of a second, in a way that no mortal brain could ever hope to even compute.

He didn’t recognise the voice or even the speaker at first, but then something in his strangely blurred vision adjusted, and the throne room slid back into focus, and it was Celebrimbor before him, Celebrimbor who was reaching out for him, as if he wanted to pull him forward, pull him back from wherever he had gone –

“Annatar,” the elf repeated.

Their eyes met, and the future was upon him like a great beast bringing its prey to the ground, flaying his mind open with thousands and thousands of iterations of death and horror.

*

Afterwards, he spent a long time just standing in his quarters. He looked around at the sparse furniture, at the books he had collected or written himself, which were the only concession towards something personal in a room that was otherwise merely good to him for its door and its four walls, if he wanted to retreat to have some time to himself. He had not decorated it, nor had he acquired many collectibles of gifts in his time here. He despised random accumulations of clutter, and the desks, chairs, and reading tables were all clean and empty. He had not lain in the bed in the adjoining room even once, not seeing the sense in it if he never became incarnate enough to need such a thing as sleep, though the black cat had claimed it as her lounging spot.

The stark emptiness now seemed stronger than ever, and less like something he had chosen, but something that the city wanted to impress upon him.

This is not home. You do not belong. Leave, leave, leave.

But that would mean going against Celebrimbor’s express orders, and he had given his word – he had given himself over to the elf in a decision he himself did not quite understand yet.

How could he have given up their dream? How could he have thrown it away? He had seen the futures, he had felt their violence – and yet, something inside him recoiled from the idea that it might be the inevitable consequence of creating something as powerful, as good as the Rings.

And yet.

And yet.

There had been no lie in the vision that he could discern. He had never before built a Mirror himself, but he believed he could envision enough of how it might be constructed that he would be able to notice if the images had been manipulated. The search of absolute truth was about as vain an undertaking as trying to nail down your own shadow, but there were weighted probabilities at play here: countless branches growing and splitting and splitting again, as they ran away into a myriad of possible futures. The Mirror must be feeding on the present, and given enough data, its prediction model became by necessity an approximation of the truth with divergences possible only in the infinitesimal range.

And all of them full of fire and ruin.

Not only for Celebrimbor and Eregion, but also for himself. A gaping maw running straight into the void, an endless scream of a spirit rent into pieces in a process so cruel and violent that his separation from Aulë paled in comparison. A damaged thing, a broken thing, a vortex that looked only inward and eventually devoured itself –

He could not see how or why it would end like that.

(Which is why those visions were foolish and ascribing them any credence was no better than superstition. Which is why this concession was foolish, and we should pack our things and leave to create the Rings alone.)

(No. He wanted to meet me halfway, he could have sent me away immediately upon learning who I was, but it didn’t. There has to be something else. And there must be something to the vision.)

(Why would he have shown us, and rob himself of any strategic advantage of those oh-so-true-futures, if not as a desperate gambit to frighten us away from ever attempting to create the Rings? And the One? The culmination of our work, the greatest creation ever on this side of the sea, great enough to raise us up to the level of the Valar themselves –)

(He never lied to me before. He told me he was afraid of me, but that he was willing to extend goodwill to me, so why shouldn’t I do the same?)

(Because Tyelperinquar is a scared animal right now, and he is acting with all the rationality of one.)

(He didn’t look scared on his throne. He didn’t look scared when he told me I could stay and accepted my pledge.)

(Well, maybe he is a formidable liar, just like we are.)

(Both of these things can be true at the same time: the vision and the fact that he wants to force me away from completing the Ring projects. Because the visions would become true.)

(He’s lying. He and his aunt, both of them colluding to manipulate us. You’ve sensed her mind. You know what she would be capable of, were she only willing.)

(He is not lying.)

(Yes. You just don’t want to see it.)

(No.)

He could not see how or why it would end like that. But that didn’t mean that the Mirror was wrong.

(Yes. Yes, it does. Because Tyelperinquar knows us now and he is afraid, so he wants to frighten us away from doing anything that might render us even more powerful.)

(No. Think. Think. Be rational.)

It did not mean the Mirror was wrong. Much more likely was –

(You just don’t want to see it.)

His fingers closed into fists and his shoulders were stiff, but he forced himself to follow the thought to its conclusion.

– that it held a truth that I have remained wilfully blind to.

He breathed out, and the breath was an uneven, staggering thing, then walked over towards the divan under the windowsill, placed where there was enough daylight for reading comfortably. He sat down on the settee and leaned his elbows on his knees, his finger interlacing, untangling, interlacing, untangling, while his eyes were fixed on the grain on the wood of the reading table, the small scratches in the surface, the tale of its history scratched into its surface for posterity to puzzle over –

He didn’t know for how many hours he had sat like this, but darkness had long since fallen and the silver light of the moon was falling into the room, cut into little diamonds by the wooden window lattice and spilling over the table, the floor, the sofa, when he saw movement out of the corner of his eye.

In the doorframe to the unused bedroom stood his cat, green eyes bright in the darkness and staring straight at him, half questioning, half with the ever-present reproach cats seemed to exude towards their chosen companion.

A dauntless little critter she was. Animals sensed his true nature, which is why most dogs didn’t take to him and slunk off with their tails between their legs or growled at him. Some horses even refused to carry him, and prey animals, birds and hares especially, generally flew or ran as far and fast from him as they could. The cat had never seemed bothered by it. She didn’t like most people but had taken to following him around without being coaxed to do so. At some point, she had slipped past his legs into his chambers and returned there ever since. He had never given her a name, because he saw no sense in naming a creature that would not answer when called – but when he watched her, he was reminded of a blot of ink, a little ghost, a silent shadow, for she never made a noise, other than a rare hiss or purr. Sometimes even he didn’t notice her approach until he felt her claws dig into his shoulders when she leapt from a wardrobe or a tree or a shelf, the cat having apparently decided that she had walked enough and would be carried from now on.

Like a diminutive wraith, she now, too, glided soundlessly over through shadows and ghostly light, stopped before him, and assessed his posture, his mood, the height of his angled legs. Then she jumped into his lap, pushed aside his arm with her forehead to gain more space, turned three times upon the mysterious invisible axis that only cats knew, curled up and went to sleep. A soft, almost ghostly humming issued from her throat. The tip of her tail twitched softly.

Annatar didn’t move for a long while. Eventually he lifted a hand and ran it down the cat’s side. The humming intensified. His fingers curled into the dark fur, digging into the warmth and softness there and only at a warning side-glance out of a half-open green eye, did he pull his hand back. But not entirely.

He stayed like this, unmoving, while the still hours of the night passed and the moon rose and began to sink again, and at last the first greyish tinge of dawn filtered through the windows before him.

The cat suddenly rose, stretched, and jumped from his legs without preamble. Cool air rushed into the warm spot she had vacated.

With the coming of the sunlight, the world regained its colours and solidified around him once more.

And with it, one realisation gained shape and form and weight:

No matter what I do, it will end in death and ruin. For Tyelperinquar, for the world. For me.

If I follow his lead, I will lose the Rings, but I might be able to keep him.

If I don’t follow him, and do anything else, we will lose everything.

He sat like that while the amber-golden morning light of early September filled the room, drawing the disillusioning conclusions of all his ruminations of last night, finally stripped of avoidance and self-deception, just like he himself had been – kneeling before Celebrimbor in that quiet room in the tower, before the elf had softly, almost gently, pulled away the last of the veils of his disguise.

I cannot act of my own motivation and my own volition. I may not influence Tyelperinquar into acting, either, not by force or lies or persuasion. I am the fulcrum upon which doom hinges. The fact that I still cannot believe in those futures he has shown me is the prime reason why I am no reliable judge for my own actions: I cannot see it, I will not believe it. I would create the Rings in a heartbeat, and yet every loss that follows their creation is going to come pass. The knowledge does nothing to curb the desire and the disbelief.

I still want to create them. I want to go on and not be kept away by superstition and fear. And yet. What I would do is what Sauron would do, and it is Sauron who brings down everything. I cannot risk it. I cannot risk him.

So I will stay, and do nothing. I will not walk away. I cannot believe in the visions, but I can choose to believe in Tyelperinquar. I can choose to believe that he meant what he said, against my own convictions. And I can try to show him that I meant it, too. I will not follow my own plans and give Sauron a chance to act through me, for those visions to come true, with me as a willing tool. I will not act. I will not be used. I will … wait.

For what?

He didn’t know.

But he would do it. He would take the loss of a radiant future, he would give up the dream they had shared. He would content himself with a world where they would attain nothing of what they had been working for, and refrain from making the world as beautiful as it deserved. He would forfeit the vision of an unmarred land with diamonds strewn at its shores, with white towers and green gardens, surpassing even the radiance of the Western World. A world where Death was but a memory, like a plague that had long since been eradicated, a world where there would be order and justice and beauty in every mundane thing.

I will give it up.

For you, Silver-grasp, Diamond-mind, Mirror-soul. For you, and no one else.

*

Chapter Text

*

The autumn equinox came and went.

It had been seven days since their confrontation in the throne hall, and not a single word had passed between them.

*

Weeks passed. Annatar saw Celebrimbor in the hallways, on his way to give lectures or to call upon a colleague, but he never acknowledged Annatar beyond a brief, tense nod, and then went on his way.

They didn’t speak.

Celebrimbor didn’t offer, and Annatar did not press him.

Patience. Do not force him into anything. You must wait for him, now.

The first time Celebrimbor broke the silence was three weeks after their confrontation, after he had come knocking at the door of Annatar’s quarters in the middle of the night. The time of day or night didn’t matter to him overly much, and he knew that Celebrimbor himself often made good use of the night hours to get work done that he couldn’t finish during the busy daylight hours, when diplomats and students, visitors and relatives, ambassadors and emissaries of other realms demanded his attention.

Still, Celebrimbor kept to his own rooms after nightfall. That, or the workshop. He had never before visited Annatar in his private rooms. Even when he had first been introduced to them it had been the quartermaster of the Mírdain who had taken on the task, not Celebrimbor himself.

The fact that he had come now, at this hour, and all alone, spelt nothing good.

When Annatar pulled open the door and saw the pale, drawn face of Tyelperinquar, his sunken eyes and the dark shadows beneath, he didn’t know what to say for a split-second. Then he gathered himself, pulled the door open further, but was careful to keep his distance.

“Yes?”

Celebrimbor’s eyes slid up to his own, and there was a darkness in them and an exhaustion that did not belong there. For a brief moment they held each other’s gazes, but it was nothing like the natural way their eyes had met before. Now there seemed to be a weight pressing down on both of their necks, forcing their heads to bend and their eye contact to break.

“Come,” Celebrimbor said, and turned around without waiting to see whether Annatar would follow.

He did.

*

It was a night of the dark moon, and the blaze of the fire was the brightest thing for miles. On the pyre, they executed Celebrimbor’s judgement, burning the books like Númenor burnt the most vile of its criminals, sentenced to be consumed by the flames.

Celebrimbor’s face was like stone as he worked, almost frantic, almost feverish, but in a rare moment where he made to grab the first ever diagram for the Rings they had drawn up, he hesitated, his hands shaking almost imperceptibly, and it was like watching cracks run through the foundations of an impenetrable tower.

Annatar looked away.

Neither of them said a word while they threw their life’s work, their dreams, their heart’s blood into the fire and watched it burn to ash.

*

“Aulëndil.”

Annatar looked up. He had been resting his elbows on one of the ring walls of the upper gardens of the city, stroking the black cat which had sidled up to him (still nameless, but to himself, he had begun of thinking of her as Wraith).

Daeror stopped and leaned forward, imitating Annatar’s pose and looked out over the city that stretched out below.

When he didn’t continue, Annatar raised an eyebrow in question.

The bard met his gaze levelly, then turned around, now leaning his lower back against the wall and crossing his arms. “You and Tyelperinquar,” he said.

Annatar looked at him. “What is with him and me?” he asked, his tone carefully neutral.

“You don’t talk much anymore, do you?”

Wonderful. Then again, it would have taken either a miracle or a blinding curse cast over the entirety of the city for someone not to notice eventually.

“We’re busy,” Annatar replied, his voice clipped.

“Ah. So I see. Busy looking out over the city with a morose expression and contemplating life’s injustices while petting ill-tempered little monsters, I take?”

Annatar briefly considered whether it would be possible to hurl the bard down the wall onto the cobblestone street a hundred and fifty feet below, and make it seem like an accident. He quenched the impulse. Mostly because in this moment, Daeror had reached out for Wraith, and she’d slit open his palm for his trouble, whipping around and onto her feet. She hissed at the elf before bounding off.

“Among other things,” he answered at last, while he watched the bard stifle a curse and press his other palm to the bloody slashes on his hand.

“There goes my performance of The Mariner’s Wife next Tuesday,” Daeror hissed, then pulled a handkerchief from the pockets of his trousers and wrapped his hand.

“I shall add it to the list of tragedies I am contemplating as I am staring out over the city,” Annatar said tonelessly.

“Very thoughtful of you.” Daeror tied a knot into the handkerchief, then hopped onto the wall and looked at him expectantly. “But seriously now, what happened? You went from being joined at the hip to not even looking at each other in the hallways.”

 Annatar threw him a side glance. “I wasn’t aware that I was accountable to you. If you want gossip, you should head elsewhere.”

Daeror had always been an impertinent specimen of an elf, but he was apparently ever eager to strive for new heights of insolence, because he reached out and cuffed Annatar across the shoulder.

Annatar stepped back, his face darkening. “What was that about?”

“That was about you and being impossible, Aulëndil,” Daeror said lightly. “Why are you so intent on viewing everything I say through the worst possible lens? You are not accountable to me or anyone else, as you might well know. I was only asking because I was intending to offer help, should you want it.”

This did, in fact, give Annatar pause. “Why would you want to help?”

“Other than the fact that it gives everyone around you a headache to see you two suddenly estranged without any discernible reason? But a reason there must be, and I personally have never been overly fond of tragedies – grossly overrated, in my opinion – so I thought I would try to get to the bottom of it. And why, yes, it might also be because we are all friends and colleagues in the Mírdain.” Daeror inclined his head to one side.

Annatar narrowed his eyes, then averted his gaze, letting it roam over the autumn-golden gardens. The grass was still green and a few flowers were clinging to their petals still, but there was a coolness in the air that spoke of the coming of cold nights and short days, and many leaves had already fallen from the trees.

“Thank you for offering. I don’t know any way you could help me. Ask Tyelperinquar, perhaps he knows something,” he said, then pushed himself off the wall and made to walk away.

He had almost made it around a bend in the way when Daeror called after him, “If you change your mind, let me know.”

Annatar’s steps slowed briefly, but then he walked on without turning around.

*

A few other members of the Mírdain tried to approach him after that. But Annatar always brushed them off, and eventually they left him alone.

He held his lessons, but aside from that, he kept to himself. He no longer attended any of the colloquies and debate circles, or ventured out with the other masters to meet in theatres or dining houses, drinking wine, discussing and philosophising.

One reason was the fact that he wanted to avoid questions about Tyelperinquar and him.

The second, more pertinent reason was that Tyelperinquar wouldn’t be there, and frankly – though it might sound callous – he had never much cared for anyone else in this city. Certainly, he was on good footing with all the masters, and every now and then what they said and did would even hold his attention or evoke amusement for a brief time. But even though Daeror had told him that the Mírdain were thinking of him as a good acquaintance or even a friend, he had never come to think of them in the same way.

Winter came, with short days and dark nights.

He was in his own rooms more often than he had ever been before. Lately, drawing up walls and closing a door into the face of the rest of the world seemed to be the most bearable way of passing the time. In here, he was used to being alone. Every time he stepped outside, he was reminded of what he had lost.

Wraith kept him company, more often and longer the worse the weather got. She also brought him a lot of mice and birds she had caught – whether it was her way of giving gifts or being smug about her hunting skills, he didn’t know.

“I wish you would stop doing that,” he said, picking up the broken body of a sparrow she had just laid at his feet.

Wraith just gazed at him with an unrepentant expression.

Annatar looked back, then realised that he had, for the first time he could remember, spoken aloud to a common animal as if to a sapient being.

Wraith blinked slowly, following the dead bird with her eyes.

Annatar frowned and went to dispose of the cadaver.

*

“We’re leaving in April after the snow has melted,” Celebrimbor said, not meeting his eyes.

It was another rare, surreal evening – just like the night when they had burned their notes. They had not spoken in months, and suddenly Celebrimbor had appeared at his doorstep, his voice hard, but his gaze evasive and his entire body tensed to flight.

After all this time, it should have hurt less, not more.

It took him more time than it should have to summon his voice, to find the words. “How long?”

A shrug. “I do not know yet.”

A cold had seeped into the room that had nothing to do with the icy winter nights of February. Silence, for moments, then minutes.

Celebrimbor didn’t move. He was staring at a point on the floor some three handspans in front of the tips of his shoes. His arms were crossed, his fingers clenched into fists so tight his knuckles where bloodless. He had lost weight. His cheeks were hollow, his face drawn. The dark shadows under his eyes were his ever-present companions now, taking the place that had once been Annatar’s, in a way.

“What about the city?” He couldn’t care less about the city. It seemed, however, like a snag that might keep them from leaving. Unfortunately, Celebrimbor had come prepared.

“My cousin will take over.” The elf still wasn’t looking at him. “She has had enough time to learn from my aunt and uncle. She will manage.”

Annatar froze.

(See? See? The Elf-witch is behind everything after all! And look now, what she gains from all this misery! Her nephew ousted, her daughter installed as the ruler of the city she once lost, and any threat to her power by any Rings you might have made – removed! Gone!)

Annatar frowned, resisting the urge to shake his head like a dog trying to shake off vermin.

“Your – cousin.”

At last, Celebrimbor raised his gaze. “Yes,” he said cautiously, as if he was waiting for an objection.

Silence fell, as it did so often, rolling out like a carpet unfurling in the space between them where it had gotten so comfortable.

“I see,” Annatar said at last.

Celebrimbor was still looking at him, waiting, wary. As if he was expecting Annatar to reach out and rip out his throat at any moment.

(And we should. We should. He betrayed us.)

(He just told me that he is planning on losing everything.)

(Maybe it doesn’t matter what he loses, as long as we lose more. Underhanded, wretched, disgusting deceiver, we should – )

Slowly, so as not to startle the elf, Annatar took a step back, taking care to keep his hands where Celebrimbor could see them. His movements were small, controlled, deliberate. Increasing the space between them. Backing off. Ceding ground. Lowering his gaze slightly and breaking off eye contact. In his mind, running on repeat, like a mantra: I will not push, I will not force, I will not attack, I will not insist, I will not threaten, I will not frighten, I will not fight, I will not I will not I will not.

It didn’t help. As soon as he made the most minute of motions, the tension that had never truly abated snapped back with full force into Celebrimbor’s back and shoulders.

Almost as if in reflex, he tensed as well. His fingers, which were holding the door open, tightened around the wood.

Celebrimbor put his weight on his back foot. “I should go.” He made a step backwards, but not turning around.

(Not turning his back on the predator.)

(It should not have hurt so much.)

(It should not have.)

“I will tell you when we leave.” Celebrimbor spoke quickly, quietly, haltingly. Gaze evasive, eyes fixed on the floor. The hare caught in the gaze of the mountain lion. Hoping against hope to make himself unseen by not fixing his eyes on the danger. “We will travel light. Think – think about what you want to take with you.”

And with that he went. Two more steps, then he turned on his heel and walked away as fast as he could without running.

(I will not insist, I will not interfere with his will, I will not force mine upon his, I will not bind, I will not chain, I will not keep. I will not – follow.)

He remained where he was, watching as Celebrimbor’s form retreated further and further down the dark hallway.

*

It is not fair. It is not fair. He cannot make me the prisoner of my past forever. He cannot hold it against me for all time. I gave him so much. Didn’t I show him that I wanted the best for him – didn’t I show him that I would raise him up next to me, didn’t I didn’t I didn’t I —

—You did. But you never proved you regretted what you did, and that you are changed from that.

—Because I do not. I did not care about those people then, I do not care about them now. I would do it all again if I thought that it served my ends.

—What, then, do you expect? Trust? For what? For giving him everything that was easy for you to give, but nothing that matters?

—I want to give him everything. I want to be what he wants me to be. But how do you learn to care? How do I convince myself that things and people that meant nothing to me are supposed to matter?

(You could always lie.)

— I do not want to lie. I did not reveal myself to him only to begin the deception anew – I could have saved myself the trouble and just kept on doing what I had done before.

(Yes, and think of how much easier that would have been. See what honesty gained you.)

— No more lies. That is final. But how do you learn to believe in something you are not already convinced of to begin with? How do you regret things that you still think were the most efficient, the most sensible thing to do at the time?

(Why would you even want that? When did we begin to give sentimentality precedence over reason and effect? Just give it up, there’s nothing here for us anymore, just leave, leave, and do what you intended to do to begin with.)

—I wanted to give him everything, and now he takes and he takes and he takes, he takes everything from both of us, and we lose and lose and lose—

We lose everything.

*

Annatar knew that Celebrimbor, despite keeping his distance, was keeping a close eye on him and his whereabouts. There was no doubt that it was fear that was making the elf do this – fear of Annatar leaving without a word, like he had done in so many of futures he had seen, forsake Eregion, and create the one, so that everything would have been for naught.

There was nothing Annatar could have said or done to assuage this concern, no matter how much he might have liked. Every word he said could just as well be a lie, and as of late, his only viable course of action had, ironically, transformed into its inverse – inaction seemed to be the only thing that remained to him; the only thing that did not irrevocably break something further and destroy futures, fates, or Celebrimbor and himself.

(I will not leave, I will not argue, I will not fight, I will not insist, I will not force, I will not – )

So the only thing he could keep on doing was to reassure Celebrimbor, time and time again, that he wasn’t gone. Thus, quite contrary to his habit in the past, he took to moving about in a manner that could easily be traced. He made sure to hold his lectures reliably and without interruptions. He no longer attended any debates or colloquies or social gatherings, but he ascertained that he was, from time to time seen walking the halls or the city streets – once a day at least, so as to leave at most a few hours that he was unaccounted for. Whenever he could not avoid interaction with other people, he acted as he had always had – with a reserved, professional amiability that gave no hint whatsoever that anything had changed.

He knew that even though Celebrimbor mostly remained invisible, he would hear about Annatar’s appearances and lectures from other people – students, teachers, masters, visitors. Their word would be the assurance that Annatar himself could not give; relayed by neutral parties without ulterior motives, by voices the elf could still trust.

So Annatar maintained his performance, deliberate to the last.

It was an attempt, however desperate, to show the elf that he meant to keep his word.

Look, I’m still here. I’m not going back on my word. I am waiting for you.

*

Three days after Celebrimbor had told him that they would be leaving Ost-in-Edhil, Annatar quietly left his chambers. Darkness had fallen hours ago. Lessons had ended in the late afternoon, briefly after sunset, and most workshops and offices were closed by now. The time for supper had come and gone, and the refectory lay dark and abandoned as he walked past. He could avoid being seen if he so wished, but in the cold gloom of late February nights, it was a feat that any mortal might easily have achieved, too. The guild of the Jewel-smiths did not employ guards, and the public areas of the guild houses and towers were unlocked and accessible at all times.

Trust and openness.

It was what the Mírdain stood for; it was what Annatar wanted to restore between Celebrimbor and him. Stealing out of the guild complex through one of the side doors in the shadow of the night felt like breaking with those tenets. It also felt like trying to reach a destination by running in the opposite direction. He was acutely aware of the irony of trying to restore lost trust by going behind Celebrimbor’s back, and keeping up a farce of openness and accountability, only to sneak around in the darkest hours of the night when no one would see him.

Outside, the sky was overcast, and a heavy snowfall had covered the walkways and gardens under a blanket of white that reflected what sparse light there was from the city, making the night appear brighter than it actually was.

Annatar looked around himself, but there was no living soul to be seen. An icy wind was coming from the East, down the slopes of the Misty Mountains, and had driven every sensible person into the safety and warmth of their houses. He could merely sense the little rodents that were moving far under the cover of snow and earth, quick little lives hurrying along in their holes and tunnels underground, hiding away from the bite of winter.

The moon and the stars could not be seen, but the nights of winter were long, and it would be hours before the first shimmer of grey dawn would be visible in the eastern skies. Hours during which he would not be missed.

Something clawed at the inside of his chest, and for once it wasn’t the intrusive presence that he had come to think of as the potential for his corrupted future self. He had gotten better at silencing it, almost like a wild, wily beast whose temper and moods he had learned to read and anticipate before it could lash out and overwhelm him. It felt strange, to regard one part of himself as something split off from the rest, but it was easier to separate it into a discrete entity that he could look at from the outside and keep under control. Tonight, Sauron was silent.

What he felt instead, was something that he had a hard time naming, for he had never admitted such thoughts in the past, but recently had become more intimately familiar with them than he would ever have asked for.

He looked up the height of the west tower, to the uppermost row of windows of Celebrimbor’s room, dark at this hour.

The twinge repeated itself.

Annatar forced himself to look at it and analyse it. He couldn’t afford to remain opaque to himself when Sauron might be hiding in the shadow of wilful self-ignorance.

Unwillingness to be seen. Desire not to be caught. A fear of setbacks. So far, there was nothing new, but –

(That’s enough, what more could there be to it.)

(Look at. Look at it. LOOK.)

A wish to be seen as reliable. A hope to prove oneself trustworthy. A – a – fear of disappointing. A bad conscience. A wish – not to not be caught as a liar – but not to be a liar.

(And anger. So much anger, so much rage, who thinks about our disappointment, who thinks about how we get left behind and thrown to the wolves by all of this, no one no one no one, why should we be considerate of others, why shouldn’t we simply take what is ours do what we want kill those who oppose us, rise above, rise above, rise, rise, rise, and stomp down on everyone who –)

Annatar pulled his gaze away from the windows of Celebrimbor’s rooms. His mind clamped down on the other thing, smothering it.

Enough.

Introspection was fine and good, but as with any good thing, there could be too much of it. And he had, he found, reached the limits of his tolerance rather quickly.

(Introspection did not make him uncomfortable. He just didn’t see the use in getting frozen in the passivity of self-reflection when there were problems he could be actively working on instead.)

Besides, while it had its uses, the ensuing misgivings didn’t help when his actions would remain uninfluenced by them no matter what. Some things had to be done.

With a last look around himself to ensure that he was alone and no one was watching him from a hidden corner, Annatar stepped forward and with a rush of wind and a flurry of snowflakes, the guildmaster Aulëndil was gone and in his stead, a white eagle rose through the winter storm.

*

Despite the gale that kept trying to throw him against the mountainsides, he made good time and after a mere few hours, landed at the edge of the wood.

The gale seemed weaker here, and the cold less biting. Between the silver-grey trunks of the trees, the forest floor was visible, carpeted in leaves of orange and gold, like a distant memory of autumn.

He had barely touched the ground and assumed his usual form once more, that shifting movement under the trees heralded her arrival.

The Lady of Lórien looked like winter and starlight when she stepped out from beneath the trees, stopping just short of the very edge of her realm, where its power was still protecting her. Her gown was white, her hair looked like spun gold. Her grey eyes were cold, and he recalled that she had faced the grinding ice and the gruesome cruelty of the Helcaraxë. Some part of it had remained with her and claimed its place beside the shine of the Light of the Trees, spreading like a dulling veil over the shimmer that bore the memory of Aman.

It was this ice in her gaze that fixed him now. Her guards stood three paces behind her, falchions drawn, but not moving.

“What do you want here?” she asked without preamble. “You are not welcome.”

“It’s not welcome I seek,” Annatar replied curtly.

“What, then, brings you here?”

“I need help.”

“I have no help to offer the Betrayer.”

“Not for me,” he ground out between gritted teeth, feeling his patience fraying, the ever-present rage that he kept so tightly sealed just barely under the surface bubbling up like water in a pot reaching its boiling point. “For Tyelperinquar.”

Her eyes narrowed just slightly and for a few moments, she did not reply. “My nephew is beyond my help now,” she said at last; slowly, with finality. “He ventured too far, and subjected himself to a burden that will grind him into dust like a millstone will grind corn to flour. You of all people should know that.”

“I have no desire to bring him harm.”

“It may be that our desires, least of all yours, play little role in how the future unravels.” She had her hands folded before her, her body drawn up to its full height, like a young birch tree. And yet no tree could have been so cold, so full of sharp edges.

“He gave up everything to give this world a fighting chance,” Annatar growled. “I will not repay the favour by giving up on him.”

“Tyelperinquar will neither rise nor fall through the hand of anyone else now. He is the master of his fate, and its slave. The dice have fallen, Betrayer. My nephew made a choice, and he will be bound to it – to the bitter end.”

“He chose a chance. He chose a timeline that didn’t end in ashes and ruin.”

“Yes,” the Lady said. “For the time being. But at what cost?” And briefly, only for a split-second, come and gone so fast that he would not have caught it, were it not for his Maiarin nature, he saw hurt flash across her face like a shadow: the agonized expression of someone who, in her mind, had already said her farewells to someone who might still be walking Arda, but under the shadow of a doom he could not escape. As quickly as it had appeared, it was gone.

The fury inside him boiled hotter. “You have given up on him.”

Something flashed in her eyes and for a brief, absurd moment he believed that she would reach out and strike him. But the Lady of Lórien was made of ice, and if there were flames to her temper, they were buried deep beneath a glacier of cold and iron self-control. “I know that there is nothing more I can do for him, and I don’t delude myself into thinking otherwise.”

He took a step forward, closing the distance between them. The veil of her realm’s power was humming only inches from his face. “There is always something that can be done. That is why I came here, asking you, of all people, for help, thinking you would give it. If not for my sake, then for his.”

“And what help do you think I could give someone like you, Sauron?” She measured him up, and for the second time in his life, he found himself subjected to the unpleasant feeling of being sized up, weighed, and being judged wanting. (Oh, she reminded him of Eönwë, the same cold judgement in his eyes, the cold gleam of satisfaction of having the moral high ground on him, the barely hidden disdain –)

(See, this is what happens when we ask. This is what happens when we rely on others. This is exactly why we swore to never subject ourselves to the whims and wiles of –)

(Stop.)

“You know the futures,” he ground out between clenched teeth. “You know your nephew, differently and perhaps better than I do. Tell me what I should do with them.”

“You equate knowledge with mastery,” she said curtly, “and I am neither my nephew’s nor the future’s mistress. I saw what you and he have seen, no more, no less. And I know – as he and you both know – that your venture is balanced on a knife’s edge. There is no room for error here. You have little potential to remain standing, and every potential to fall into the abyss on either side – or plunge into darkness of your own volition. But that, too, you know already.” And with that she turned and began to walk away.

He stepped forward, then flinched back, when something invisible in the air lashed out at him as he had come too close to the warding power around Lórien. “Then what would you have me do?”, he snapped, and he wished he had sounded harsher, harder, and less impatient and desperate.

She stopped in her tracks and half-turned to face him once more. Her guards had whirled around, their falchions raised as if their laughable little toys had any role at all to play in what was going on between Annatar and their lady.

“Lower your weapons,” she said with a slow, but unmistakable gesture that bore no disobedience. She took a few steps back towards him. “If you have been honest about your reasons for coming here, if you truly want my advice, Betrayer, then you shall have it: Telperinquar has forged as deeply into the future like no other before him who was not deathless, and he paid dearly for the knowledge he gained. This knowledge might be the torch by which you might find your way through the dark – in one out of a million worlds. So listen to him. Follow his lead. Suspend your own judgement and desires; indefinitely if you must.”

“I have been doing that already.”

She shrugged, a small, disaffected gesture. “Then continue. Do what he wants, and do not go against his word. If Vairë is kind, she will weave a tapestry for him without frayed ends or holes in it. But this cannot happen if you interfere.”

For a few seconds, Annatar could not speak. “He wants to leave,” he managed to get out at last. “He feels that he cannot stay in Ost-in-Edhil anymore. Because – of me.”

How have we already given up everything and still keep on losing, losing, losing?

 “Does that surprise you?” she asked, her tone even. Because, of course, she had already known.

Again, he wrestled with himself, with his words, which otherwise never happened to him, and yet it kept on happening now – with Tyelperinquar, with his aunt.

“I do not – want him to lose any more because of me. I want to help him in a way that consists of more than standing by and watch him lose everything that was dear to him and waste away in the wake of it.”

For a few moments, the Lady of Lórien didn’t move. Then she returned, her steps surprisingly, almost menacingly quick and when she halted, either of them could have reached out and grabbed the other by the throat.

“You are Tyelperinquar’s burden, and for whatever reason he decided that it was worth bearing. None can help him now or relieve him of it – except of course, if you yourself were to demonstrate more courage than I would ever have granted that you had, and took the burden from him with your own hands.”

And with those words she pulled a silver dagger from her girdle and held it out to him blade-first, without affording him the caution or the courtesy of offering him the hilt.

Annatar stared at the knife, then at her.

Slowly, he took one step backwards. Then another.

“Keep your counsel,” he spat. “I can do without advice like that. I will not leave him.”

The Lady let her hand sink, and for a moment, she almost seemed darkly amused. There was no humour in her expression, but the sardonic expression of someone being proved right on a thing they already suspected. Her eyes however, were dark and empty.

“Then go,” she said. “Go and cling to him, but know that it is you alone who is responsible – for what has already happened, and for all that will follow.”

He wasn’t listening anymore. He threw his cloak around him in a flourish, and even while he was going through the motion, his arms turned to wings, his hair to feathers, and within moments he was gone with the wind and the snow.

*

Chapter Text

*

The spring equinox came, but although the hours of daylight grew longer, the sun itself hardly seemed to grow in power. The air remained cold and the forests and meadows of Eregion were crusted with ice and rime even during the noon hours. In the end, though, the change of seasons was inevitable. At last, on one of the last days of March, the sun rose with a sudden strength it had heretofore not possessed after the death of the old year and the birth of the new. The icy flowers of hoarfrost were burnt from window panes, needles, leaves, and grass alike. The streams broke free from under their cover of ice, and fresh green spread over the land as the snow melted, replaced by snow-drops that once again vested the meadows in a second garment of white.

It was as if with one great demonstration of strength, spring had broken winter’s grip once and for all. In the last week of April a missive arrived from Khazad-Dûm, bringing the news that Greyvale, a dale between Caradhras and Fanuidhol was free of snow and passage was once again possible. People poured from their houses where they had endured the dark season, locked up between closed doors and a burning hearth, the first spring market of the year took place, and the streets were once again filled with life and languages from all corners of the known world.

Annatar watched the goings-on from behind the windows of his room, his eyes fixed on the joyous hustle and bustle outside, dampened by the walls and the glass panes. He only became aware of how tense he had been when a knock came at his door, and his fingers dug deep enough into his crossed lower arms to nearly split skin. For a moment, he didn’t reply.

Then he said, “Come in, the door is unlocked.”

Another few seconds passed, until the door was pushed open. Slowly. Hesitantly.

Annatar turned around.

Celebrimbor stood in the door frame. He had stopped just short of the threshold and hadn’t ventured even a single step into the actual room.

For a while they just stared at each other. Annatar took in the perpetual greyness of the elf’s face, his hollow cheeks, his deep-sunken eyes. There was almost no longer any imagination involved in picturing the skull beneath, so eager did it seem to push outward and to the front of the thinning mask of a living face stretched taut on top. Annatar’s gaze slid over Celebrimbor’s clothes, which hung off him as if they didn’t belong to him. His hair hung lank and loose around his shoulders, save for two braids at his temples, done with less than the bare minimum of care to keep the strands out of his face. His once strong hands had become thin, bones and veins pushing up under the skin, and the knobs of his finger joints unnaturally thick compared to the stick-thin bones in between.

It was as if after all that they had sacrificed to stave off doom, death had still reached out for Celebrimbor, only instead of ripping him from life with blood and violence, it had latched onto him like a disease, slowly draining his life force and hollowing him into a lifeless husk. All those things that they had lost and given up, all the waiting and silence: for a future that seemed intent to meet the same end by a different road.

It’s not fair.

(What are we even doing this for why are we doing this to ourselves – )

Annatar stood completely still, forcing himself to remain motionless while fighting down the black knot of emotions rising inside him at this sight – wrath, denial, worry, disbelief being just those easily discernible at a moment’s notice – and just barely resisting the urge to turn over the table and smash the windows to pieces, to torch the entire guild building the ground, and the city with it.

I did this. Even doing nothing, I did this.

(We did nothing, we did nothing, he did it all to himself, it’s his own fault, HIS fault, like everything – )

Celebrimbor’s voice cut through his thoughts like a knife.

“We leave in five days. Make sure to put your affairs in order until then.”

And that was all. Without another word the elf left, looking as if it had cost him all his strength to speak those two sentences, and drag his body back to safety now.

The door closed with a soft click and Celebrimbor’s footsteps faded in the hallway outside. Annatar listened to them receding, his breaths coming in uneven stutters, tremors wracking his entire form.

The moment the footsteps were gone, he whirled around and grabbed the heavy oaken side table that was standing next to the sofa and hurled it through the air with one hand. It shattered to smithereens on the opposite wall.

Hours had passed when Wraith found him sitting on the sofa, curled in on himself as if in pain, his fingers clawed into his hair, nails digging into his scalp. He wasn’t moving, was hardly breathing. His entire focus was turned inward, fighting to tamp down the volcanic pressure that wanted to burst out from this abyss inside his mind, teeming and writhing with dark things, violent things that desired nothing more than to break free. (Let us go, set us free, we did nothing wrong, we did nothing wrong, let us take what is ours, let us end this farce, let us end the pain, it all will end, it all will end, Tyelperinquar is wrong he’s wrong he must be wrong, if you only let us out all will be fine, if we only become powerful enough, if we only become mighty enough we can fix this we can fix everything, – )

Thus, he barely took notice of her until Wraith wormed her way between his arms and legs, squeezing her small, narrow body into the frozen framework of his rigid limbs. Her quiet, almost ghostly purr vibrated against his chest and pulled him back into the outside world. The cacophony inside his mind quietened to a bearable degree, its force vanishing like lightning that had found earthing, its voltage bleeding off into the ground. Her body heat gradually thawed the rigor from his hands. Slowly, he disentangled his fingers from his hair and reached down to run them through her warm fur, still thick from winter.

Night had fallen outside.

*

He found Daeror in the rehearsal room in the wing of the guild quarters dedicated to the fine arts. Annatar had rarely ever found his way here. Concerts and theatrical productions were usually presented to the public in the theatre of the city proper, more central and accessible to the public that the building that housed the Mírdain. Beyond their usefulness in creation Annatar had always had little interest in music and song, something which the bards had first found insulting and later on, amusing, seeing how the world itself had been created by Song.

At Celebrimbor’s behest, Annatar had made at least a few token appearances at the more prestigious productions, though that was the extent to which he actively sought out contact with the theatre folk, since he found their oftentimes melodramatic behaviour bewildering; bordering, at times, on irritating. Otherwise, he was happy to leave the artists to their devices and be left alone in turn.

Thus he drew more than one sideglance as he walked down the hallway and to the rehearsal room a young Dwarven actor from the Blue Mountains had pointed him to, though none spoke to him or questioned him on his reasons for being there.

The sound of a grand piano being tuned greeted him as he stopped in the doorframe.

Daeror, who had been tapping repeatedly on one key, while leaning halfway into the big instrument, looked up. “Ah, Aulëndil!” he said. “To what do I owe the pleasure of your visit? Have you decided that you respect the fine arts, after all? Perhaps even take music lessons?”

“Nothing so absurd, I assure you,” Annatar said, as he entered the room and descended the steps to the lower part of the room where the orchestral instruments stood in their assigned places and stands.

“Hm. More’s the pity.” The elf straightened. “What brings you here, then?”

Annatar stopped on the other side of the grand piano and looked through the open cover at the intricate hammer mechanisms inside. “Am I disturbing?”

“Aren’t you always?” Daeror replied wryly. “And even if it were so, would you really care?”

Annatar threw him a look, making to answer. Hesitated.

Honesty and asking for help had both flown back in his face up until now. So was there really any reason for him to get annoyed at himself for not speaking immediately? For gauging the bard’s expression, weighing his options, and seriously considering turning on the spot and walking straight out again?

He stared at the floor between them for a few seconds, frowning, then looked back up to meet Daeror’s expectant gaze.

“I need someone to look after the cat.”

Daeror raised his eyebrows. “Your cat? Are you going somewhere? To Khazad-Dûm again, perhaps, now that you’ve successfully purged it of Balrogs?”

“No,” Annatar replied without humour. “And yes.” Again, he hesitated before continuing. “Tyelperinquar. He wants us to travel together. He didn’t say – he didn’t mention when we would return.”

Daeror didn’t reply immediately. Instead, he inclined his head to one side, his gaze uncharacteristically serious and sharp. “I see,” he said. “Your cat hardly seems like it needs a minder, though.”

“She doesn’t.” Annatar ran his finger over the glossy wooden surface of the piano’s corpus. “But she’s used to finding me in my rooms and being let in there. Being given food, at times. I thought – perhaps – you could go there. Unlock the doors during the day, so she can get in if she wants. Until –”

A pause. He didn’t recall interrupting his own speech.

“Until she’s understood that I won’t be coming back.”

Silence.

Annatar watched his own reflection in the dark surface of the piano’s cover, slightly distorted by the angle it had been propped up at, and the way sunlight hit it.

Stillness filled the room that was usually alive and resonating with the chorus of a dozen instruments.

“I see,” Daeror repeated. He, too, paused. “Yes. Of course.”

Annatar nodded. He ran his fingers over the keys, pressing down on a random triad in major, transposing it into a minor, before shifting it into the wistful yearning sound of a four-three suspension. He could hear the slight friction, not of two notes grazing against each other, but of an instrument not tuned to absolute perfection. A chord turned to imperfection despite flawless input.

A sudden dark heat bloomed behind his eyes, and with a quick, sharp motion of his hand, he hit the keys of the tritone, the slight friction blazing into screeching dissonance and dying like a single, sharp scream.

“Aulëndil –” Daeror started, but Annatar cut him off with a look and whatever the bard saw in his face convinced him that it was wiser to remain silent.

Annatar turned around and walked out without another word.

*

Four days later they left Ost-in-Edhil.

For a while, they wandered the world, striking out seemingly aimlessly in all cardinal directions, as if Celebrimbor was determined to find all four ends of the world.

They trudged through biting ice and burning heat, crossed mountains and dales, tundras and grasslands, forests and deserts.

Celebrimbor did not look back once. He would stop at some point, perhaps rest, then, without preamble, pack his stuff and journey on. Annatar followed, wordless and without argument.

Miles turned to leagues under their feet, and weeks of wandering into years.

Not a day passed when Annatar didn’t look at Celebrimbor, walking – almost marching relentlessly ahead of him without turning back around even once, and told himself, I will not leave, I will not argue, I will not fight, I will not push, I will not force, I will not fight, I will not I will not I will not. I will wait, I will wait, I will wait.

*

In the beginning he had the vague hope that things would settle down as soon as Celebrimbor was able to convince himself to stay in one place for more than three days.

But then they arrived at the Bay of Balar and they stayed, and Celebrimbor even went so far as to build some sort of cottage to brave the high winds and the harsh seasons at the coast, but –

They didn’t speak.

Initially, when Celebrimbor had begun his firsts attempts at building his hut, Annatar had tried to stay out of his way. Only once he had attempted to offer his help, but the glassy-eyed glance the Celebrimbor had given him – as if he really didn’t know who he was looking at – had stopped his plan in its tracks. The words had died on Annatar’s tongue – they never did that before, but lately it seemed that all that was available to him was silence – and he had walked away. Later, unbeknownst to Celebrimbor, he had tried to add a few little things, here and there. Improve the flue of the fireplace, so that smoke could exit through the chimney more easily, levelling the floorboards that were never entirely straight, even trying his hand at secretly helping Celebrimbor’s garden grow – not a good idea, he’d never gotten along with plants, or, in fact, gotten them. Half of them died when he tried to coax them into growing. He had to resist the instinct to fix it and thus likely kill the rest.

 Perhaps it had been an attempt to recall their former cooperation, even if Celebrimbor wasn’t aware of it now – and would not approve if he knew –

But it wasn’t the same. They were no longer working on a shared project. They hardly even shared their lives anymore. And so, he had eventually ceased to do even that, fading into the background, as it seemed to be most comfortable for Celebrimbor – not having to see Annatar, not having to take note that he was even there.

*

Now they existed next to and yet divided from each other, passing each other like ghostly ships in a foggy night. Initially, Annatar had told himself to wait, reining in his natural impatience, bridling his temper like one might bridle a wild horse; going against every intrinsic instinct and telling himself, Give it time. Give it time. Perhaps he needs one more day. One more week. One more year. Perhaps we can get better. Eventually. One more decade. But even after centuries of waiting, there was no change in the flatness of the days, no words to fill the suffocating silence, no light of recognition and friendliness in his former friend’s eyes that had long since gone cold and empty. If they happened across each other, Celebrimbor would just look past and through Annatar, the elf’s body almost automatically angling itself aside so as not to bump into him, then walk on, as if nothing had happened – indeed, as if nothing and no one had ever been there to take note of.

And Annatar just stood and looked after him and almost, almost willed the elf to turn around, thinking, Look at me, look at me, look at me –

But then, in nearly the same instant, just before desperation could turn to rage, and a plea into domination he yanked himself back, at once the wild beast rearing up and the rider wrenching on its bridles –

I will not insist, I will not interfere with his will, I will not force mine upon his, I will not bind, I will not chain –

And he didn’t.

He watched Celebrimbor walk away, not having sensed anything amiss, not looking back.

*

The days turned grey. The sun became a distant, cruel white glare in the sky when it was cloudless, and a ghostly eye behind fogs and stormclouds when it was not. Lights and shadows were cast into stark relief – bone-white and coal-grey, a world without colour and gradients.

At times it was hard to distinguish whether the world was fading away, or Celebrimbor, or him, or all three. He sought refuge in different shapes: from the passage of time, from the ever-present anger boiling so close under the surface, from the shadow of Sauron that was always only a hair’s breadth away from breaking over him like a giant wave. But no matter how much he changed his exterior, his essence remained the same, and his ghosts kept finding him. Not even animals, unable by nature to feel anger or hate, provided a form strong or simple enough to distance himself from the overwhelming weight of his true nature.

His mind remained that of an Ainu – and even though he attempted to build a fortress around his mind, he could never make it simplistic or sturdy enough that the darkness didn’t eventually find its way in through cracks and crevices that he could – by nature – never keep closed.

In the end he returned to the shape of the fading shade of Annatar. It was more out of habit than because of any comfort he found in the form. He could not be bothered to think of another appearance for himself and frankly, he didn’t see a reason why he should expend the effort.

Celebrimbor’s eyes kept looking through him no matter what.

*

He tried to change in a more profound way. Truly change. Tried to remake himself. They were both halfway to ghosts already, how hard could it be to remake oneself in a better image, after so little that was substantial still remained?

Perhaps I could be someone new to him. Perhaps I could be someone else. If he cannot love me as I was, perhaps he could learn to love a different version of me.

But how to do that? How to unmake yourself and recreate yourself from scratch? How do you strike out into the unknown without any map to reach the desired result?

And what even was the desired result? Everything, everyone he knew how to be – the ambassador Aulëndil, the Ring-maker, the gift-giver, the friend – they had all become an impossible choice. Damaged variants, fallen identities, broken mirrors.

What would Tyelperinquar want of me? He would want me to be different. To be not-Gorthaur, not-Sauron, not-me. How do I become someone different than myself? How do I turn away from anything I ever was, and reshape myself into something that’s unrecognisable even to myself?

He looked at his hands.

Perhaps I can begin with regret. I am no stranger to regret, after all. Not anymore.

*

Decades passed, then centuries.

Unbeknownst to Celebrimbor, he struck out on his own during some nights – not that the elf had ever given any indication that he noticed, let alone cared.

On the cold east wind that blew in from the wintry steppes of southern Rhûn, he flew to the nearest settlements and cities in the shape of a falcon. There he wandered the abandoned streets, clad in a grey cowl – a ghost shifting among the winter mists – and sought out those that he had never spared a glance before.

He went to the old and the sickly, those weak of body and weak of mind. He knelt by the side of cold, stiff bodies in dark alleys, reeking of sickness and addiction, and pulled the poison from their bodies and their minds.

He never stayed to receive their gratitude, nor did he care for it if they called it after him.

Soon, rumours spread of a benign spirit. Some nights people were waiting for him at their doorsteps and on the streets.

They beckoned him, grown strangely fearless thanks to their faith in superstition, and even invited them into their huts and hovels, houses and manors, temples and palaces. Tending to their sick and their infirm was as easy as a hand gesture – mending misaligned bones, restoring broken minds. Easing the suffering of those that could not be healed and pulling those back from the brink of death that were still salvageable.

He looked on as the shadows of worry lifted from their brows, bent backs straightened, pinched faces lit up in smiles, when the wounded rose from their sickbeds, the terminally ill ceased suffering, a feverish, grey-faced child got up from her deathbed and told her mother she was hungry. He watched with a dispassionate expression when they thanked him and kissed his hands, fell to their knees, and offered him their gratitude, their gold, their undying loyalty, all equally worthless to him. A local lord even offered him a post at his court and threw Annatar a look of barely hidden disbelief when he declined.

I am doing good, he told himself. Tyelperinquar would want me to be good. This was fine. It was desirable. He wanted to be good, because that was what Sauron was not and what Celebrimbor would want him to be. (Anything but that dark, powerful spectre that seemed like a simulacrum barely contained behind a looking-glass and waiting to burst forth every time Annatar looked inside.) So why did he feel nothing? Why did the gratitude and the smiles of those small, weak lives not touch him – not even in a way that made him feel better about himself, if he couldn’t be bothered to join in their joy?

Annatar looked at his deeds, looked into himself, and found himself presented with a puzzle in a language he couldn’t read. How does one act ‘good’ and is proud of it, if it doesn’t mean either efficiency or helpfulness or might or devotion? How does one learn care for that which holds to no worth or value to oneself? How could I learn to look with love and sympathy at those to weak and lazy to make their own fortune? How do you take leave of pity and disdain, and replace it with warmth and compassion?

*

For a while, he went through the motions. Eventually, he stopped.

It was not as if he could have told about Celebrimbor about his attempts, anyway. Running to him and extolling his own virtuous deeds felt as laughable as an actor leading a spectator on a prepared stage and expecting the display to be taken for reality instead of a carefully crafted scene. Besides – who was to say that Celebrimbor would even believe him? Annatar was easily powerful enough to misdirect and lie and conjure the spectre of a benevolent ghost that had never existed in the minds of the many mortals he had aided. How did you prove that you didn’t do something that was impossible to ascertain or deny by nature, other than by trusting the one telling you that it was the truth? The sorcerer alone could craft the illusion, see through it, and dispel it. So what would happen if no one trusted the sorcerer’s word and every word he said had the capacity to be a flawless lie?

A dead end. And no way out, forward, back into trust.

*

Annatar stared at the pages he had filled, a mad kaleidoscope of shattered thoughts, piled in too many layers above each other to make sense to a mortal mind, and estranged to the brink of unrecognizability even on paper.

Staring back at him was a merciless reckoning with the bygone millennium – with the absence of success, and the ubiquity of loss, the inability to change, the impossibility to create worth from nothing – in himself and others.

A burden that will grind us into dust like a millstone.

In the end it would destroy both of them.

His eyes flitted over the words, then he came to a decision. With a sudden motion and a sweep of his sleeves that sent the scattered papers flying, he stood.

For years, he had existed in suspension, unable to make progress, unable to back out of what he had walked into alongside Celebrimbor. Unable to move, unable to act, unable to do anything. Now that he had made up his mind, the force of his will, of his decision propelled him forward like storm winds at his back. His motions were quick, decisive. Without a backward glance he walked out of the door of his room, out of the door of the cottage for the last time.

If I have grown incapable of doing good, I can at least prevent myself from doing evil.

*

Dark clouds were hanging low on the sky, reminiscent of a hammer about to come down on an anvil. There was a pressure in the air that spoke of an oncoming storm. Briefly, he was tempted to look for Celebrimbor, who had gone to sea in his flimsy boat earlier, but then he wrenched his legs off the path to the waterline and forced himself not to look for a small dark shape out on the slate-grey water.

Leave him alone. It is better this way. He would prefer it like that.

The wind was picking up as he walked, only a few feet over the waves that were rushing to the shore, coming in more forceful and higher by the minute.

He could sense the cottage growing more distant behind him but refused to spare it even one last glance: this horrendous place that had become so much like an in-between for him, a symbol for this unchanging, directionless limbo his life had decayed into. So many years, so many centuries stranded there, trying in vain to wrest meaning and purpose back from an existence that no longer held either of those things.

So many years spent waiting for Celebrimbor to turn back to him; too blind or too proud to allow himself to see that there was nothing there for either Celebrimbor or him. Nothing left to lose, nothing to win back.

Giving up was not usually in his nature. He had seen greater highs and deeper lows than most anyone on this world, of that he was certain. And no matter how deep he had fallen, he had always clawed his way back up. He didn’t know any other way. He couldn’t act any other way.

However, now there were no more highs, no more lows other than this shadowed vale that they had been trudging through ever since Annatar had revealed himself to Celebrimbor so long ago.

Celebrimbor wouldn’t leave him, not after they had already endured centuries side by side. Even if no gentler, kinder feelings would return between them, the elf would stay true to his word and not send him away.

But that seemed to be the extent of what Celebrimbor was capable of offering – or enduring – just as he had warned Annatar in the great hall of Ost-in-Edhil so many years ago; sitting on the throne, clad in the colours of Fëanor’s line, looking as hard and stern like one of the ancient stone likenesses of long-dead Dwarven kings, that Annatar had seen once, far, far below Khazad-Dûm.

The words that Celebrimbor had said back then had driven their barbs into his mind and hooked themselves there forever:

“I cannot make you give up the Rings, and even if I could, I wouldn’t. If your choice is to have any meaning at all, you must make it from your own free will. You would win any real fight between us with utmost certainty. But you will have lost me. And if I am to believe that you have change, truly changed, from who you were before that must mean something to you.”

Not a day had passed since this conversation that he had not thought of those words.

Not a day had passed when he hadn’t either followed Celebrimbor to whatever far corner of the world his plans took them, or simply sat beside him, waiting, watching him, and thinking, I made my choice. I want it to mean something. Can’t you see that?

Or, Look at me. Just look at me. Talk to me. Tell me that you’ve noticed. Tell me that you’ve seen. Seen me. Seen that I’m trying. I’m trying. For you.

But the words never came.

What did you do if you were a climber, and there was no ravine to climb out of? Just the endless plain of uniform eternity, as flat and unchanging as a salt desert under a merciless white-burning sun, stretching away in all directions – forever?

Rain began to fall. Thick droplets splashed into the sand, painting it with fat, dark dots. The world faded into an impenetrable grey haze.

Enough. I forfeit.

His steps slowed as he came to a halt, the wind whipping his hair across his face as it rose. Thunderclouds were rolling in quickly from the west, the sky as dark as night on the horizon.

How easy it would be to walk away from this, count his losses and create the Rings, as the voice in the back of his head had been whispering for centuries (we can fix this we can fix this if you only let us loose we can fix everything). No word was binding him, and Celebrimbor must have known that. The elf had never demanded an oath, or a promise. But Annatar wouldn’t betray him. Not after Celebrimbor’s words had haunted him for centuries. Not after he had long forgotten the reason why he  - not the voices – would even make those Rings if they could never give him back the one and only being in this universe he cared about.

“Me or the Rings. You will not have both. Choose.”

It taken him a thousand years to realise that he would not have one or the other, but neither.

I promised to never create the One. You swore to let me stay. To keep me by your side.

I relieve you of your promise.

Be free of it. Of me.

The wind picked up, pushing at his back, almost as if to coax him forward, into the slate grey water. Briefly, he resisted (because resisting forces who sought to push and bind and coerce and tie him, like so many other things, was an immutable part of his nature). But then he relented. He stepped forward. Hesitated, just briefly, staring at the water rushing up and retreating from the shore, almost like a beckoning hand, telling him, Come, come now.

He had never liked the water, for more reasons than those he had told Celebrimbor all those years ago.

Ah well. Some things could not be helped. A force of nature was what he needed.

It takes one to unmake one, after all.

He let out a breath (how used he had gotten to breathing during all those years living in his chosen incarnation) – and stepped into the water.

Chapter Text

*

The white surf washed over Annatar’s bare feet, saltwater soaking the hem of his light linen trousers.

The change in the waters was immediate.

The wind picked up, the clouds banked up like dark towers, and the sea began to churn. The water withdrew. Far. Further than should have been possible with the tides, exposing a mile of mudflats stretching out into the sea, crabs and worms wriggling in surprise as they were suddenly left stranded.

Far out, the sea reared up like a horse. A hill, no, a mountain of slate grey rose up, growing taller and taller by the second – and rushed in the direction of the shore. As if a vacuum had built up in the wake of the ocean rushing forward, the storm clouds, the wind and the rain were pulled with it, racing for the shore with unnatural speed.

Annatar didn’t move, even as the sea piled itself up into a mountain range of water in front of him, half a mile high. He heard the water rushing and churning like a living thing. He felt the violence of the forces building up to being unleashed upon the coastline, and the tremors running through the ground beneath his feet. The storm winds tore at his hair, the rain lashed at his skin like a thousand icy needles.

The giant wave was looming over him now, blotting out half the sky, water pulling itself up to impossible heights. It reared up like a snake poised to strike, looming over him, threatening to crash down upon him with enough violence to smash ships into smithereens and break lighthouses from their cliffs. Lighting forked across the sky, splitting the purple-grey gloom under the thick clouds. Thunder rolled in its wake.

It was a terrifying sight.

Annatar didn’t budge an inch. A muscle in his jaw twitched, his eyes were narrowed.

“Finish what you started,” he snarled, “or stop the theatrics. I’m not here for cheap entertainment.”

The wave rose and rose, its huge shadow falling over him, higher than even the great towers of Harad in their cities hewn from mountain sides. It swayed, held up for an unnaturally long time by a force and will more ancient than the world itself. It bent, threatened to fall, crested – and crashed down upon him.

Annatar lifted his hand with a disdainful expression and parted the wall of seawater, letting it crash down to both sides of him and smash into the cliff of the coastline at his back. Stone cracked. Tree trunks splintered and were swept away like leaves in a torrent.

For a moment, the sea seemed to claim the entire shoreline, flooding up to the rim of the cliff, pressing into the landmass, as if it wanted to gorge itself on new territory by taking out a bite of the continent itself. But then the pressure relented, the current of the water reversed, and it slowly flowed back into the seabed, moving naturally now, and without the malicious, violent intent that had governed it before. Only a minute later, the waves were lapping at the beach again, which had lost the greater portion of its sand, ripped away and shoved against the cliff, or pulled out into the deeper sea.

“Aren’t you going to show yourself?” Annatar asked. “Or will you do as you have always done, and run from every opportunity to stand your ground for once?”

Lightning stabbed down from the sky once more, hitting one of the few trees that had remained standing in the miles-wide swathe of destruction after the giant wave. There was a sound like bones breaking, and Annatar didn’t need to turn around to know that this particular tree was no more. Instead, he kept his eyes on the steel-coloured water, which roiled and churned as if coming to a boiling point.

“You dare to enter my realm, Dark Fire?” the ocean hissed, and then a figure made of rushing water rose out from the waves, forming into a vaguely humanoid shape. Nine feet tall, fish and seaweed flitting inside its form as if in an aquarium.

“I stuck my toe in it. I figured that would be enough to provoke you, Prince of Seaweed and Anemones – or whatever you style yourself nowadays.” Annatar smiled darkly and clasped his hands behind his back. “It seems I was right.”

The watery form slid closer. “You don’t look like you can back up provocations like these,” it hissed, its voice sounding like a torrent of rain rushing down. “You’ve seen better days, Mairon. I can see all those little fractures and cracks in your fëa. You’re not half the spirit you were when you left the Realms to serve Morgoth, and you don’t have a great patron to back you up now. I could just tear you apart and rid the universe of your presence.”

Annatar smiled thinly. “Please, you and I both know that no matter my current state, I could still beat you every time.”

The water spirit hissed and drew itself up even taller, sucking more seawater, fish, and hapless crabs up its form, where they were tossed to and fro by the currents churning in its insides, like leaves blown about in the wind. “I have always known you to be insufferably arrogant,” it said. “I wasn’t aware that the millennia had made you stupid.”

Annatar shrugged, still smiling. “I don’t see the need to be afraid of you, although I guess I could imagine how the concept might be foreign to a craven like you. Tell me, have they ever taken you seriously again in Aman after you proudly announced you’d leave and join Melkor, only to get cold feet at the last possible moment and crawl back to their doorstep, begging them to take you in once more?”

The water god rushed forward, seaweed sprouted, wrapping around Annatar’s ankles, and a cold hand grabbed the front of his tunic. Rain was beating down on both of them, and it only seemed to make the watery form grow taller and broader. “Careful now,” Ossë growled, his inhuman face only inches from Annatar’s own. “You already overstepped once today. One more word, and I will break you in half.”

Annatar watched him with an impassive face. “That is the third threat in as many minutes you haven’t followed through with. Why don’t you bite instead of bark for once? Or are you still afraid of me, even while you’re standing in the water and have me grabbed and bound, with the ocean at your beck and call?” He revealed his teeth in a wolfish grin. “How much of a handicap would I need, I wonder, that you would dare to go up against me?”

Ossë stared at him out of yellow pupilless eyes, the water around him going white and choppy. The waves raised higher. Lightning flashed. Thunder rolled.

Come now, Annatar thought, as wind and rain lashed his face. Go ahead. I’m ready.

But Ossë sensed that something was off. Suddenly he retreated, and the sea with him. “I know what you are doing,” he hissed. “Look at you, you pitiful, broken lump of slag. I’ve heard what happened to you. Even the fish and the seagulls far from the shores tell of the tale of the god who fell in love with a mortal and was rejected. And instead of smiting him or leaving him and keeping your pride, you tagged along like a kicked dog, waiting for years and years for a pat on the head you would never receive.” Ossë straightened, his pupilless yellow deep-sea-anglerfish-eyes staring at Annatar. “Pathetic. Unwanted and unloved you’ve lost your will to go on, and now you are not even able to end yourself without the aid of a henchman.” He chuckled, his voice rushing and gurgling like a riptide tearing out towards the sea through a stone reef. “I will not be the one to do you the favour, Úmairon.” Ossë laughed and his form shifted further away, submerging itself under the waves. “Find someone else to do it – perhaps even your elf. Maybe he finds enough mercy in his heart to kill you, even if he’s otherwise unable to feel pity for you.” He turned and his form sank deeper into the waves.

“You truly were always too much of a coward to serve the Mighty Arising,” Annatar called after him, even while a roar of thunder almost drowned out his voice. “It was a good thing you turned and ran back home when you did, like a dog with its tail between its legs. You daren’t even stand up to me, pitiful and broken as I allegedly am, according to you. He would have broken you asunder like a faulty blade on an anvil. A shame it didn’t come to it. I would have watched. And I would have cheered him on and laughed.”

Ossë halted, but didn’t turn around. “Save your empty taunts,” he rumbled. “I won’t be goaded into doing your dirty work for you.” He slid further away, already almost lost to the eyes behind the veils of rainwater.

“Oh, won’t you?” Annatar murmured to himself.

In the next moment, a whip of flame lashed out from the shore over the water, thirty, forty, fifty feet, evaporating the pouring rain to steam and illuminating the gloom beneath the stormclouds with reds and oranges. Ossë whirled around, but not quickly or deftly enough. The stream of fire whipped across his face, making it explode with steam. Ossë let out a shriek and – momentarily disoriented and taken aback – clawed at his form, as the water threatened to evaporate in the heat of the hostile element of flame. The whip returned, and this time it coiled itself around the Sea-Maia’s neck. Ossë struggled and thrashed in the grasp of the flame whip, attempting to tear it away with fingers that hissed into steam as soon as they came too close. Annatar dug his heels into the wet sand and hauled in the whip with mighty pulls, dragging the other Maia back towards the shore.

“It seems like the fish and the seagulls will have another story to tell soon,” Annatar snarled. “That of the water god who had the storm and the ocean at his service and lost to the oh-so-diminished Fire Maia he ridiculed a minute before. If the Fire Maia is pathetic, what then, I wonder, is the water god?”

Suddenly, the whip went slack. One moment, he was standing at the shore, in the next, the water had crashed down over him and suddenly he was so far from the shore that his feet didn’t find the ground anymore. The water foamed and bubbles rose around him, where waves crashed down like hammerheads onto an anvil.  Something wrapped itself around his arms, legs, chest, and squeezed. The whip of flame died.

He fought it – instinctively – but the entire ocean was bearing down on him now, he was cut off from air and earth and fire, the elements he could draw strength from. The cold was all around him, pressing in from all sides, pulling down, down, down –

An iron grip closed around his throat and he was yanked upward. There was a splash when his head broke the surface and after the silence underwater, the roar of the storm and the thunder was deafening.

Ossë lifted him from the water with one arm. His form was shifting, growing, mutating, even while Annatar was struggling for the breath his corporeal form needed so direly. The water god was growing, until he was a tower of churning salt water, many-armed and with a leviathan-like head with a dozen yellow eyes arching in two lines over the top of his skull and down his long neck. The surface of the water was at least fifteen feet below now, and Annatar’s own weight was strangulating him.

Ossë leaned in, three rows of needle-like teeth bared. His breath smelled of salt and rotting algae.

“You wanted a quick end,” he said, his voice low. “Oh, don’t think I don’t know. The favour of a blast of violence so strong and final, your body and spirit would be undone in one fell stroke – so fast you would never have to endure the terror of being stuck in mortal flesh while it slowly and painfully dies. Even you cannot separate yourself from a horror so primordial while you are wearing a physical form.”

His maw slid even closer to Annatar’s form, his yellow eyes and needle-teeth filling his failing, black-rimmed vision.

“You will not have it,” Ossë hissed. “First, I will choke the life from this form.” His grip around Annatar’s throat tightened. “And then I will drag your ëala to the abyssal chasms under the water, where the spawn of the deep the likes of which even you have never seen will feast on your soul until nothing is left. This is the favour you shall have.”

Annatar felt his entire body spasm, his legs kicking out against his will, as his dying body was fighting the rising blackness with everything it had, intelligence and higher thinking gone, operating on an instinct even he could not control – and the tide of terror was strong, so strong it was turning on him, swamping him, burying him –

And then something – something like a mirror – no, a sheet of ice – sliced through Ossë’s wrists and with a terrifying scream the Water Maia’s hands fell away from the stumps of his arms, and Annatar fell with them. The fingers of the dead hands came loose from his throat even before he hit the water and went under in a roar of air, water, bubbles, and the rushing of his own blood in his head. The impact was strong enough to make his body lose consciousness for a split second, and when he came to, everything was dark and every sense of up and down was gone. His already empty lungs were screaming for air, and for a few seconds Annatar kicked uselessly – he didn’t even know which direction he was going in – until something cold and liquid tightened around his chest like a rope and he was hauled backwards with breathtaking speed and thrown prone onto the storm-beaten shore.

Annatar’s body dragged in a rasping, rattling inhale, and he braced his hands against the ground to push himself up on to his hands and knees. Far from the shore, Ossë wheeled around, a whirlwind of water rising and swirling around his midriff, pushing him even higher as his hands regrew and additional arms and tentacles sprouted from his form, the resemblance to an eldritch, living tower stronger than ever. Lightning split the sky behind him, and for a moment the world was a two-dimensional canvas of blacks and whites.

“You!” Ossë roared. “You dare use my own element against me?”

Only then did Annatar become aware of the figure standing next to him. Black spots were dancing in his vision, and everything appeared smudged and out of focus as his body was teetering on the edge of falling to pieces. The only thing he could discern were a storm-tossed cloak and long dark hair flying in the wind. Even so, there was no mistaking the voice that spoke next:

“Well, you had something that belongs to me. I took it back.”

Annatar could only watch with wide eyes as Celebrimbor stepped in front of him – between him and another god; as if it was nothing, as if there was nowhere else he should possibly be, as if he had nothing to fear, nothing to lose.

Nothing at all.

*

Chapter Text

The Water Maia was a terrifying sight. After hearing how his grandfather had died, and after being wounded by a Balrog himself during the First Age, Celebrimbor had sworn never to go toe to toe with a Maia again if he could avoid it.

After that, of course, he had hunted down a Balrog in the deepest levels of Khazad-Dûm and after that, today, he was stepping right between two Maiar who had been at each other’s throats not a minute before, both of whom were known neither for patience nor restraint, let alone for a stable moral compass.

It seems that I am exceedingly bad at keeping promises, even to myself.

He looked at Annatar, who – and he still couldn’t understand how or why – had just been about to get killed by this oceanic monstrosity. Which was a question for later, not now.

“Can you stand?”

Annatar, who had been staring at him like an apparition, got to his feet, a wild array of emotions flitting over his face – Surprise? Incredulity? Pain? Anger?

“What are you doing here?” the Maia rasped. He looked as if he wanted to grab the elf by the shoulders, but pulled back at the last moment.

Celebrimbor glanced at the sea creature, which hadn’t yet moved, then back at Annatar, who looked battered and sodden to the bones, his lips blue, his face grey. His throat was bruised red and purple from the strangulation marks of eldritch claws and he was distinctly favouring one leg. Considering that the material world usually never even touched the Maia unless he allowed it or didn’t have the strength to prevent it, seeing Annatar’s physical form so damaged spoke volumes about the severity of the situation.

Celebrimbor did not ask why the Maia was looking like this. He didn’t ask how or for what reason the two gods had been fighting.

“I was looking for you,” he replied instead. “Though now it seems as if I am going to battle an ocean god. Not that I planned for this when I left the house,” he added, glancing at the towering monster that was slowly sliding closer, lifting its arms like in a gesture of supplication. Far off at the horizon, what looked to be a mountain range of grey was building up against the backdrop of a green-and-purple sky. “Can we run from him?”

Annatar looked taken aback, as if he had wanted to say something else, then seemed to realise that it was neither the time nor the place, and shook his head. “At this point, he is just going to sink the coastline for miles in all directions.”

Celebrimbor tilted his head pensively. “I see. So we fight.”

“I fight. You run.” He could feel Annatar glaring at him.

“No,” Celebrimbor replied without taking his eyes off the approaching tsunami.

“Tyelperinquar,” Annatar said, his voice eerily flat. “You can’t set your strength against him. You’ll die.”

“Oh, I won’t do one or the other,” Celebrimbor said, bracing himself for the inevitable impact. “You’re about as strong as him, aren’t you?”

Annatar’s glower was answer enough.

Celebrimbor shrugged. “Good. Then you will fight him, and I will try to twist awry whatever he’s trying to do with the water. I can’t be the combatant here.” He threw Annatar a brief glance. “But with a bit of luck, I can be the featherweight to tip the scales.” With a weak smile he lifted his left hand, the ultramarine stone glowing with its blue light on the silver band. Lighting flashed across the sky and the stone lit up with blinding white radiance when it reflected the blaze.

Annatar’s eyes widened. “You didn’t destroy it.”

“No, I didn’t.” Celebrimbor met his gaze.

Annatar didn’t ask him why he had lied. Which was just as well, because then Celebrimbor didn’t have to tell him the truth.

Annatar didn’t order him to leave a second time. Which was fine, too, because both knew that Celebrimbor would have refused.

Time had run out, anyway.

They tore their gazes away from each other, facing the sea.

The giant wave was roaring closer. A mile high. Perhaps more. And fast. Incredibly fast. The water was sucked back from the beach, leaving the mudflats dry for leagues. Thunder rolled. The storm was strong enough to break small trees and Celebrimbor had to lean into the wind with his full weight so as not to be blown over.

“How well do you deal with your weakest element?” he asked with a side glance at Annatar, then going back to eyeing the wave.

Annatar braced himself, lifting his arms. “Well enough, I hope.” He hesitated, glancing at Celebrimbor. “Stay close to me.”

“I will.”

In the next moment, the wave was upon them. Annatar moved and with him, the sand, earth, and bedrock at their back. The wave crashed down. The coast itself rose to meet it. Water and Earth collided.

*

He had not fought like this since the war of Wrath, which had been the last time that the gods had made the mortal world their battlefield; the last time that primordial powers and elements had raged over the face of a world that had come within a hair’s breadth to being rent asunder by forces it was never created to withstand.

He recalled the violence, he recalled staying in motion, making himself hard to catch, and hit back when it was least expected, unleashing every bit of strength and cunning in this raging cataclysm, in which thousands upon thousands of lives were extinguished each second: people, elves, even gods, dying like vermin. Quickly, gracelessly, indiscriminately.

This fight, here, today, was nothing compared to a host of Valar and Maiar waging a war that had sunk an entire continent. And yet, he had never fought as focused or as fiercely before as he was fighting now, because not even back then had there been anything on the line that had been even nearly as important to him as it was today.

Gone were the thoughts of ends and deaths, gone was the grey of fading that had become part of him, taken over him.

He was alive again, fire become form once more.

His mind was in three places at once as he moved and shifted, forcing the world around him into servitude against an opponent that was intent on ending him and Celebrimbor.

(Celebrimbor who had come looking for him, Celebrimbor who had looked into his eyes and seen him, Celebrimbor who had come back, Celebrimbor who was now in danger of dying because the elf had followed him – again. Not a mine this time, not a Balrog this time, but otherwise just the same, it was the same.)

(Celebrimbor who had come back after Annatar had thought he was gone for good, and now the Noldo was about to die – was about to be killed for it.)

(He – would – not – allow – it.)

Annatar diverted the water – this inimical, antagonistic element that was under the power of someone whose sway over it was stronger than his own and opposed every order from him – away from himself, away from Celebrimbor.

At the same time, he was calling upon the air and earth to throw up walls and rock needles to divide the lethal ocean roaring around them, as well as to create air pockets when avoiding a hit was impossible. He was deflecting more than he was hitting back, saving his strength, dividing his focus between attack and defence, between himself and Celebrimbor, between water and the other elements.

He wanted nothing more than to use fire. It was raging inside of him, demanding to be let out. But if his fire and Ossë’s water ever met, it would produce a cloud of steam that would have boiled every living thing within a half-mile radius – including Celebrimbor – within seconds.

He could not unleash an attack that was strong enough to end the fight while he was near the elf. But he also could not send Celebrimbor away, because Ossë would be upon Celebrimbor as soon as the elf was gone from Annatar’s side and out of the range where he could still protect Celebrimbor in time.

A quandary; impossible to solve – and one he was refusing to accept.

Once, long ago, Annatar had intended to create the One to keep Celebrimbor from dying, long after he had last thought of using it as a tool for other kinds of domination. He had given up on the One when Celebrimbor had told him that that way lay not the avoidance of his death, but its inevitability.

He was not willing to let Celebrimbor die now.

Not now that he had come back. Not now that the elf had looked at him for the first time in centuries, had seen him and told him, I was looking for you.

With increasing frustration Annatar diverted Ossë’s attacks, wrapping a dome of air around them both when another wave crashed down. He pushed aside the rock avalanche that the water had broken out of the cliffside behind them and was now pulling out towards the sea with enough speed to smash every bone in their bodies.

In this tumult, it took him a startling second to recognise the feeling of another mind brushing against his own. It had been so long since he had last felt the intimacy of being so close to another living being that he jerked away from it like he would have flinched away from a physical touch that had long since become unfamiliar.

In the next moment, a lightning bolt that was far too well-aimed to not have been guided by precisely accumulated moisture in the air – Valar be damned, another thing to keep track of – nearly obliterated his physical form on the spot. If he and Celebrimbor had not pushed the surrounding water to a safe distance and Annatar hadn’t formed an impromptu lightning rod from a stone needle shot through with metals that he called forth from the ground, the little distraction would have been the end of them.

Deadly voltage roared through the water around them. The air smelled of ozone.

Celebrimbor was close behind him. Upright. Breathing.

Good.

When the touch to his mind came for a second time, Annatar was prepared.

Wait until he is not focused on me, Celebrimbor thought. I will create an opening for you.

An opening? Annatar thought, the tender connection between their minds so unfamiliar it ached. And then what?

He couldn’t see Celebrimbor’s face, because the elf was standing behind him, but he was sure that if he had turned around, he would have seen him smiling – the slow, dangerous smile that only ever appeared when the two of them had been alone, the smile that made it suddenly impossible to tell which Curufinwë he was speaking to (and he had met all three of them in his long, long life).

Show him fire.

*

Time and time again, Celebrimbor was – in a detached way – surprised by how little lethal danger impeded his thinking or decision-making. In a curious way, functioning under pressure almost worked better for him than at other times. It was as if his brain, spurred into action by the need to survive, was branching out along several lines of thinking simultaneously, finding viable ideas and expunging useless ones with ruthless efficiency.

It wasn’t always clear to him why his mind went down the paths it did, but somehow, he had always been well-served by listening to what other people might claim to be harebrained gut decisions, even in the midst of battle.

Especially in the midst of battle.

It was as if the world that was diffusing into mindless chaos for everyone else, sharpened into crystal-clear focus for him.

(“I was thinking about testing my control over the element while working with or against external parameters. How far can I bend it beyond its normal physical properties? How much can I delay or stretch the limits of its phase transitions with my will as my only tool?”)

He shifted, avoiding a razor-thin sheet of water that would have cut his head off if Annatar hadn’t deflected it, lending his own power to Celebrimbor’s minuscule manipulations. At any other time, he would have been either horrified or fascinated by seeing Annatar, at last, unleash the powers at his disposal: the effortless way with which he subjugated the world to his will, reaching into the very essence of the elements and wrenching them into the state and place he foresaw for them. Considering that water was Annatar’s weakest element by his own admission, it would have been terrifying to see him unleash fire.

Right now, though, it hardly registered with Celebrimbor when another wave, high, high, higher than a tower, crashed down around them and Annatar’s will flooded outward like a physical thing and tore it from the enemy’s will that was propelling it. Like a curtain the water split, eliciting a growl from the Ossë that spoke both of increasing frustration and that their time was running out.

Annatar was stronger than his opponent. Their fight up until now had demonstrated it clearly, and it explained why the leviathan was, for now, staying at a distance. Increasing it, even. But Annatar was attending to too many things at the same time: attack, defence, and, worst of all, having a dead, mortal weight hobbling him that he wanted to preserve at all costs and prevented him from going all out against his opponent. The fact that Annatar was refraining from using fire, which came easiest and strongest to him and would have counteracted Ossë’s power on all counts, was all the evidence Celebrimbor needed. At some point, something had to give.

It wasn’t enough. They needed something else.

(“For example, could I force water to freeze in warm temperatures and remain frozen even when flame is directed at it? Or – to follow that train of thought further: how would two elements interact when they are no longer governed by the laws of nature, but by the strength of will?”)

Ever so briefly, without either of the Maiar noticing, with just a slight effort of concentration, a thin sheet of water crystallized into ice before dissolving into the mass of the ocean raging around them, which was currently tearing city-sized bites out of the landmass and hurling it at their backs when the sea pulled back out.

Annatar shifted the spot of land they were standing on, then threw up a stone barrier, as high as Ost-in-Edhil’s outer walls, almost as an afterthought.

– a brief notion, a sudden clarity, and Celebrimbor’s stomach dropped as if he’d missed a step on the stairs in the dark – We’d never have stood a chance if he’d decided to march on the city –

Moments later, there was an impact strong enough to nearly throw Celebrimbor to his knees, if he hadn’t already half-expected the quake and thrown his left arm around Annatar’s chest, who stood preternaturally still, as immovable as a mountain. Of Aulë, indeed.

Annatar’s shield wall broke when a wedge of stone the size of a mansion crashed into it and Annatar grabbed Celebrimbor, switched their places and then something happened – it wasn’t entirely clear, the Maia was there, but not, and in his place something dark and old, made of stone and iron, with veins of magma and mithril, appeared, like realities being superimposed upon each other like two foils.

The wedge of the cliff shattered into smithereens. A few broken bits raced in Celebrimbor’s direction, but they turned to dust before they reached him, burned to nothing like an asteroid being vaporized in the atmosphere of Arda.

Celebrimbor righted himself, looked at Annatar, who had reverted to his old form, face grim, eyes blazing. However, there was a laceration on his temple that had not been there before, and a dark stain was spreading across the left side of his chest.

I am a burden, and it’s going to get both of us killed if they just continue throwing everything at each other.

He needed to do something.

Tip the scales.

But how?

(“Could water that is controlled by my will momentarily overcome the stronger, but less focused willpower of a Maia if I caught him off guard?”)

He looked at Annatar again, then gazed ahead at through the choppy, raging waves, towards the towering shape, a deep black against the purplish skies.

An idea –

In a split-second decision, he opened his mind and sent it forward.

He wasn’t prepared for the recoil. He didn’t know where it had come from – whether something had gone awry with osanwë, or if it had been something either he or Annatar had done – but their minds were blasted apart like two magnets who’d had their respective identical poles pressed together.

For an instant their eyes met, then –

Both Celebrimbor and Annatar sensed the build-up of energy in the air just in time. They both shoved the water outward, away. Lightning hit. For a moment, the world was quicksilver bright, and Celebrimbor saw nothing. He could feel the voltage in the water all around them, the hairs on his arms and neck rising, the hot air enveloping him. He half-expected to breathe in scalding steam, but when he drew breath, the air was cool. His vision didn’t come back immediately. Bright, jagged flashes were still dancing across the inside of his eyelids.

No time to worry about it.

He reached out for Annatar a second time, blindly feeling out in the dark for the beacon of another mind. He found it, bright like a lighthouse in the confusion and chaos around them. There was something like an electrical shock when their minds touched, and he was taken aback by how unfamiliar the sensation had become. Centuries of isolation, and that was just one of the things they had eroded away.

But no time to focus on these things. No time.

Wait until he is not focused on me, Celebrimbor thought. I will create an opening for you.

An opening? Annatar replied, his mind probing the suggestion dubiously. And then what?

Celebrimbor smiled; eyes still closed.

Show him fire.

*

Waiting for Ossë to forget about him was only a matter of patience. Give it enough time and Celebrimbor would inevitably slip the god’s mind, just like a man was unable to focus on an ant while a dog had its teeth clamped around his legs.

Annatar, whose mind was now half-merged with Celebrimbor’s own, knew exactly what the elf intended to do and launched an assault on the Water Maia, trying to skewer him with earth spikes and cut his watery form in two by drawing reefs up from below the sea. He pushed Ossë back. Further. Further. Creating the distance they needed.

Considering Earth wasn’t Annatar’s primary elemental alignment, it was a terrifying attack.

When Celebrimbor reached out and turned the water all around Annatar and him to ice, he met no resistance. The gods in his vicinity only cared about the momentum, about the direction of the water, about the acceleration, about the build-up of force. Its aggregate state, however, was completely untouched by a dominating will that Celebrimbor could never have overcome.

The coldness spread and spread and spread. It happened more quickly the longer he upheld the mental command, exponentially more mass and volume being touched by the expanding corpus of the ice and being transformed into turn. Had the Ring been drawing on him, Celebrimbor would have died in an instant due to the amount of life force it would have ripped from him to achieve such a feat. But this Ring was not merely a leech or a conduit of the innate strength of its bearer; not like the earlier versions. It was a transformer, and it drew strength from the very element it was designed to change. Around it was the sea itself, and although the ocean was being yanked and torn at between two lesser gods, its bottomless strength remained untapped. The Ring of Water had never been more powerful.

He had to hope that it would be enough.

(“If you are suggesting that I throw fire at you, I must disappoint you.”)

(“I refuse to believe that you have so little control over your powers that you couldn’t keep your fire from harming me.”)

(“I refuse to run this risk just to satisfy your curiosity.”)

Ice enveloped them from all sides now, a shield, fifteen feet thick, twice as high.

Ossë was almost half a mile away.

Celebrimbor reached through the Ring and pushed the ice – and with it the sea that it was shoring up – back. Further, further, further. More space, more distance. Cooling down the air with it. Colder, colder. Colder.

Ossë only became aware of Celebrimbor’s interference when the water he wanted to direct at them was suddenly slow, sluggish, then frozen. The field of ice had been spreading under the surface, and by the time white-blue, jagged teeth broke through the waves it was too late. Ossë tried to move, but found his torso enveloped by ice. It took him a split-second to undo the phase transition and bring it under his control again.

It was enough. It had to be enough.

Now, Celebrimbor spoke in both of their minds, threw his arms around Annatar’s chest from behind and buried his face between the Maia’s shoulder blades, holding on for dear life.

One moment there was ice.

The next, fire.

*

Chapter Text

*

A note of scientific interest:

The explosion that took place in the Bay of Belfalas on October 4^th in the year 2526 of the Second Age could be heard two hundred miles away and had been seen in bright daylight at double that distance by Gondorian eyewitnesses.

According to reports of four Haradrim meteorologists, who had been standing upon the peak of Mount Kharal to chart barometric changes during the autumn’s storm season at the time the explosion had happened, a dome of light had been visible for approximately four seconds, at a luminosity comparable to the midday sun in June, accompanied by a seismic tremor.

It should be noted that Mount Kharal was located seven hundred miles southeast from the Bay of Belfalas and remarkably far inland.

Taking into account distance and strength of the tremor as well as the stretch of solid land between the supposed epicentre and the mountain, this suggested an explosion or earthquake with an estimated energy amount of 630 trillion joules having been released at the site of occurrence.

Which was, of course, ridiculous because that would mean that the greater part of the bay would have to have been completely destroyed, and everything within ten miles of the epicentre of the explosion all but atomized. Not to mention that a giant tsunami would have flooded dozens of kilometres of land, destroying about two hundred cities, towns, and harbours, none of which had been reported from South Gondor.

And because there was no reason how an explosion could at once be so strong and yet have a comparatively contained area of destruction, most people concluded that the four were just a bunch of self-important cockalorums, trying to hijack an inexplicable phenomenon to make a name for themselves on the (arguably heatedly contested) stage of Haradrim science.

*

An addendum:

The general populace was, of course, wrong, and the four meteorologists were right. But by the time some thought to ask, “But how else do we explain it?”  Gondor and Harad were far too busy accusing each other of warmongering by conducting bombing manoeuvres at their shared border to listen.

And that was that.

*

Chapter Text

Act V: Restoration

The new years walk, restoring

Through a bright cloud of tears, the years, restoring

With a new verse the ancient rhyme. Redeem

The time. Redeem

The unread vision in the higher dream

T.S. Eliot – Ash Wednesday, Part IV

*

The sun was setting and casting a silver-golden light over the Bay of Belfalas. Puffs of gold-rimmed clouds were hanging in a lilac-and-orange sky. The sea was the colour of bronze, only the little waves far out were capped with evening light, as if the sun had bled out liquid gold where it touched the horizon. A gentle breeze blew inland, dispersing the last few pockets of hot air that had been hovering between crags and cracks of cliffs that had not been there before, long after the rest of it had cooled down during the last few hours.

The coastline was unrecognizable. The cliffs lay miles inland now, as if the sea had taken a bite fourteen miles wide out of the land and dragged it under. Reefs had risen out of the water where there had been none before, tongues of land stretching like breakwaters into the sea in other places, a mile long each. Broken trees were floating in pools of water gathering in the mud and sand that now made up for a wide, flat dividing strip between the higher land and the sea. Here and there, curiously enough, a few small icebergs floated on the surface of the water, rising and falling with the gentle waves rolling towards the new shore.

Already, the birds were returning to the scene of the calamity, some of them driven by curiosity, others by opportunism and hunger, intent to see if some crabs or fish had fared badly in the storm and if that meant, perhaps, that there was some food to be had.

It was quiet. The soft lapping of waves and the mournful cries of seagulls were the only sounds to be heard far and wide. A lone osprey stalked up and down the wide strip of flat shore, every now and then pecking down at an unfortunate crab or mollusc.

For a while – nothing.

Then – a splash.

A silhouette resurfaced from the water, black against the setting sun, the long hair trailing an arc of water as the figure threw it back and out of its face, before half-submerging again and pulling a second shape along with it.

Arms wrapped around each other’s shoulders, the two shapes half-swam, half dragged themselves into the shallows, rising higher from the water with each step, until it only came to their knees, then to their ankles, and then they were at the shore.

A few staggering steps, and they both collapsed onto the sand.

*

Celebrimbor carefully stretched his legs out on the sand, his upper body propped up on his elbows as he looked out over the bronze-coloured sea, where the sun was just beginning to dip under the horizon. Reefs and ice floes were dotting the surface of the water. He raised his hand to push his hair out of his face, careful not to disturb the reddened, burnt skin everywhere on his body. Bruises and burns were warring for supremacy on what parts of skin that were uncovered by clothes or visible through the countless tears in his shirt and trousers. His limbs felt stiff and clumsy, and the smallest movements caused him pain – some of it searing, some of it dull and throbbing. Nothing seemed broken, though, which bordered on a miracle.

Annatar, who was sitting next to him, spared him a brief side glance, before going back to staring out over the water.

After a few more seconds of taking stock of his own condition, Celebrimbor looked over at the Maia, who was sitting not three feet from him. A patch of brownish-stained hair was still sticking to Annatar’s temple where the blood from a laceration on his scalp had oozed through and dried. His clothing was torn, the strangulation marks starkly black and purple against the skin of his throat in the evening light. Annatar’s posture was tense as if it was painful or exhausting for him to remain upright: his back was bent; he sat hunched forward, his hands were braced against the sand, one leg was pulled almost protectively close. He didn’t look quite as bad as he had appeared after fighting the Balrog under Khazad-Dûm, but it was a close thing. Had the fight against Ossë taken place in an enclosed space, and had all that force released earlier had nowhere to go, it would have been a different matter entirely. Even so, their counterattack had been but a hair’s breadth away from ending in a catastrophe. Any less distance between them, Ossë, and the water-turned-steam, any less ice and cold air to create a life-saving barrier around them, and –

No use thinking about ends that didn’t come about. We did it, while barely. Although I do tire of walks on a knife’s edge.

“Thank you,” Celebrimbor said quietly. When Annatar glanced sideways at him with an unreadable expression, he added, “I would be dead if you hadn’t shielded me.”

Annatar said nothing. He averted his gaze and just shook his head slightly, accompanied by a dismissive gesture with one hand.

Celebrimbor didn’t press the matter further. Instead, he looked out over the water. “Do you think he’ll come back?”

Again, Annatar didn’t answer immediately. “No,” he said at last. “Not for some time.”

“Ah. Good.”

For a while, they sat in silence, watching the sun transform from yellow into deep orange and finally red. Seagulls were wheeling overhead. The clouds were glowing pink and purple. A deep, dark midnight blue was bleeding into the sky dome from the east. The Evenstar had risen once more for its lonely watch, cool and bright and beautiful.

“You came back,” Annatar said at last, his voice hoarse and quiet. “Why?”

Celebrimbor hesitated. He dug his fingers into the sand, combing through the cool, coarse grains. “I had a … conversation. It put things in perspective. So did the very real threat of losing you for good.”

He turned his head to look at the Annatar, who met his eyes briefly before averting his gaze once more. The Maia’s eyes reflected the last evening light. Almost golden. Almost fire. Immortal and strange, inhuman and yet familiar. “So it does,” Annatar said at last.

A few minutes passed in silence, wherein they simply sat side by side, their eyes following the flight of an osprey high over their heads. Soon, darkness would fall, and sight would be too bad for the bird to find prey, forcing it to return inland for the night.

Then Celebrimbor felt Annatar tense slightly beside him, just a slight stiffening of his shoulders, a straightening of his back. A few seconds passed. “Does that mean that you –” Annatar broke off and didn’t finish the sentence.

Celebrimbor shook his head. “I don’t think I can,” he said quietly. “I don’t think I will ever be able to forgive you for the things you have done. But –” He paused, noticing out of the corner of his eyes how still Annatar was sitting, how unmoving his expression was.

“I’m tired,” Celebrimbor continued, and in those words, at last, echoed the entirety of the bone-deep exhaustion that he felt. Talking was still hard, and the words didn’t come easily, but at least he was able to speak. Haltingly, searchingly, but still. “Tired of being alone and angry. Tired of keeping my distance and constantly feeling like I’m missing a limb.” He grabbed a fistful of sand and let it run through his fingers, like all those wasted years. The sand glittered like gold dust in the evening light as it fell and vanished, merging with the featureless mass of the beach, never to be retrieved. Suddenly he wanted nothing more than to weep.

Annatar was silent for a long time before he spoke again. “So where do we go from here, then? You cannot forgive me, and yet you won’t let me go. Are we going to continue like this for all eternity – chained to each other, yet unable to bear each other’s presence?”

At his tone of voice, Celebrimbor looked up. Annatar had spoken coolly, curtly – but in the cracks between meaning and the choice of words, something else shone through: pain – sharpened to a razor’s edge over the sheer endless time of their exile.

“Release me,” Annatar pressed on. “I will keep my end of the promise. The Rings will never be made. But let me go.”

Und just like that the words were out; the very words that had been on Celebrimbor’s mind for so long and the only thing he had been thinking about in a way a starving man desires food, or like one dying of thirst desires a droplet of water.

Let me go. Be free of me and unload your burden. It is not yours any longer. Whatever there was between us, let it end, and allow us to move forward again.

He had convinced himself that this is what I want, this is what I need, when everything that it really represented was a surrogate goal for a true desire, born out of the desperation of not daring to admit what it was that he really wanted – all the while ignoring how good of a liar he was and how willing to buy into his self-deception.

“No,” Celebrimbor said quietly. “Don’t go.”

“Why not?” Annatar asked, and his voice sounded strained now.

Celebrimbor closed his eyes and ran his hands down his face.  Because I convinced myself that I hated you and wanted to be rid of you. Because I was afraid to face what it meant if I didn’t.

“I can’t ignore who you were. I can’t forgive what you did,” he replied softly. “But I – don’t want you to leave.”

He felt Annatar tense next to him. “Then what do you propose?” the Maia asked sharply. “I have been existing on a promise for uncounted years now. I am not a dog to be locked out of the house and then called back for comfort at my owner’s whims and leisure. Tell me what your plan is. What you want. Do it now. I will not be sidelined for another two thousand years until you make up you your mind whether or not to treat me like a ghost.”

Celebrimbor opened his eyes and looked at Annatar. The Maia stared back, unblinking, his face like stone. Celebrimbor let his gaze rest on him, for a few seconds, taking in everything: the fire in those primordial golden eyes that spoke of Mairon and Gorthaur, Sauron and Annatar, with no difference between them; the long-fingered hands that had maimed and tortured, and, an Age of the World later, carefully taken Celebrimbor’s and guided them through the motions of creating the first set of the Rings – hands with an infinite potential to hurt and kill, and an equally great, if not greater, potential to create and heal and set the world itself to rights. The carefully crafted body, initially created to appear trustworthy and pleasing to the eye – a bait, as Celebrimbor realised in hindsight, to lure in and ensnare and to never let go – perhaps even specifically to his liking. A personal trap, built from thoughts and ideas that had, perhaps, been taken from Celebrimbor’s mind before he himself even realised what would make him trust this stranger that had suddenly appeared on his doorstep. The same body: its fairness thrown away without a care in the face of death, a vessel brought to the brink of destruction for a second time – for me, Celebrimbor thought. Not once, but twice. For me.

Celebrimbor saw the dark and the light, the good, the evil, the infinite shades of grey in between; all of it merged inseparably into a being older than Arda herself. A being that should, by all means, be as detached and distant from this world and its fleeting joys and pains as the stars, and yet had come and stayed as if it were his home, and allowed Arda and Celebrimbor to bind him and wound him like nothing else had wounded him before. A god that had somehow come to him and remained at his side through a millennium of silence.

Suddenly, Celebrimbor felt an ageless sadness and a bone-deep yearning well up inside him: for things that had been lost for good, for others that could never be, and for decisions that could never be made cleanly or easily.

There is no black or white. It’s the shades of grey we get.

“I want to have you back,” Celebrimbor said softly.

Waves rushed over the smooth sand. A last burst of golden sunlight lit up the waves, the reformed shore, the edges of the clouds.

“What?” Annatar bit out through gritted teeth. He rose to his feet in one fluid motion that belied his numerous injuries, staring down at Celebrimbor like he wanted to incinerate him on the spot.

Laboriously, Celebrimbor stood as well, straightening his aching body to its full height and met Annatar’s gaze head on. “I am tired of the silence and feeling like I am existing in a void. I want you back,” he repeated. “I want us back. Like we were. Before.”

“No,” Annatar snarled, and if he had ever tried breathing fire while speaking, this was what he would have sounded like. “No. You don’t get to say this now. All those years,”– and his voice was jagged, sharp, so much like a broken blade –, “you wouldn’t even look at me. How dare you say you want us to act like the last one thousand years hadn’t happened after all of – that.” He threw out his arm in a slashing, violent gesture that encompassed both of them, the world, and more than likely all the lost, grey years that had passed them by like autumn mist.

The sun lent its dying blaze to Annatar’s hair, tinting it in the colours of flame, outlining his frame in white, radiant fire. His eyes were looking like they were about to throw sparks. The sand under Celebrimbor’s bare soles was suddenly far too warm on this October evening. A wind that had not been there a minute ago began to pick up and spread out in a growing circle with the Maia at its centre, whipping up the sand around Annatar’s feet into the beginnings of a swirling, circling storm. He looked like an avatar of fire and destruction in that moment – wrathful and dangerous and beautiful; tears and scrapes and wounds, and all.

“You asked what I wanted,” Celebrimbor replied. “I told you.”

Annatar looked like he was about to spit fire. His eyes were blazing, bleeding into a golden-reddish tint in the evening light. “That you’d have the gall to demand this –”

“I wasn’t demanding anything,” Celebrimbor interrupted, trying to keep his voice even, even while his own temper was rising to meet Annatar’s.

“You weren’t? What if I don’t comply with your wishes? Another millennium of silence? Or ten?” The air around Annatar was beginning to blur with heat, his contours swimming and wavering. Hot winds were whipping up little arcs of sand around his feet.

“I wouldn’t do that!” Celebrimbor snapped, his voice rising. “I would never punish you for doing as you wanted, I am not cruel –”

“Oh, aren’t you? You could have fooled me, Curufinwë.”

Celebrimbor felt heat rising inside him like a buried fire. “What are you implying? That I treated you like this as a punishment?”

“Your intent hardly matters in the face of facts,” Annatar snarled.

“No!” Celebrimbor took two steps forward until he was standing face to face with Annatar. He didn’t notice that the low tide had drawn closer to the shore again, like a curious dog drawn near by their argument. “You don’t get to turn this around on me! I didn’t have anything to do with your past, but everything with attempting to work out what to do with it. It was me who was saddled with deciding what to do with you, it was I who had to work through everything you had kept from me. This was not my fault what happened; you do not get to foist the consequences of your deeds onto me!”

“All well and good, Curufinwë!” Annatar growled, leaning forward until they were almost nose to nose. The air around him was as hot as it had been near the greatest forge fires Celebrimbor had ever seen in Khazad-Dûm, hardly even bearable. “But don’t you think you could have managed to work through it in less than a thousand years if you hadn’t spent the first nine hundred and ninety-nine avoiding to even look at the facts that would have forced you to come to a decision?”

“You do not get to dictate how much time I have to decide how to go on from – from – do you even realize the scope and nature of what you kept from me?”

“Even if I hadn’t already known, your behaviour shoved it down my throat every day of the last three hundred sixty-six thousand five hundred and thirty-two days I had to exist at your side, so yes, in fact, I do!”

“Will you stop painting yourself as the one who’s been wronged!” Celebrimbor snapped with a sharp gesture.

Had either of them been less focused on their argument, they would have noticed the water at the shore rising up and snapping out like a whip alongside the motion of Celebrimbor’s beringed left hand. As it was, it went unnoticed by either of them, agitated and high-strung as they were, staring into each other’s eyes and by all appearances looking as if they were moments away from leaping at each other’s throats.

“There is taking your time and there is putting off facing the truth to an extent that makes you either a coward or someone who cannot be bothered to end this sick charade! I can’t say I care much for either type of person!” Annatar shot back. He was nearly yelling. Celebrimbor had never, never before seen him like this – with the reins he usually kept wound so tightly around his temper, his posture, his restraint, coming loose in a way that not even the fight against Ossë had managed. Annatar looked like he was unravelling, and the primordial fire that was his true essence was breaking through the cracks of the mortal guise he was wearing. It might have been trick of the dying sunlight, this last glorious blaze of gold – or not – but it looked like flames were running down his hair, and the backs of his arms, gathering in the hot sand at his feet.

“You say you are sick and tired of existing like this?” the Maia snapped. “I can tell you – the feeling is mutual! I don’t demand that you forgive me, but I can’t change what I have done no matter how much I wish it undone! You’ve been refusing to even acknowledge my existence for hundreds of years, and when I ask you to leave you then refuse to let me go, and then you tell  me – of all unspeakably inane and insolent things to say – that you want us to go back to what we were before, when everything you do or say clearly tells me that we can never –” Annatar broke off, looking nearly apoplectic with rage, his anger apparently having reached a point where completing one’s sentences had become an afterthought. “You say you’re not cruel? I say I could learn a thing or two from you, you –”

“I love you!” Celebrimbor shouted over him. His voice cracked. “Do you think it was easy to admit that to myself when I am aware of everything you have done, look at it, and say, ‘I know, and I don’t care, this doesn’t change a thing’? Is it in any way understandable that I might not gladly face up to this and conclude what kind of person this makes me?” Only then did he realise that he had grabbed the front of Annatar’s torn tunic on an impulse, heat and fire be damned, and just barely withstood the urge to shake some sense into the head of this – this insufferable creature of a Maia.

For a moment, Annatar appeared stunned, taken off guard by the confession, but the bafflement on his face rapidly darkened into black fury. “Repeat those words and I am going to make you regret them,” Annatar hissed. His eyes were shining, filled with red-and-gold fire.

Celebrimbor met his gaze, his hands still fisted in the Maia’s torn tunic, and pulled him closer provokingly, challengingly. Their faces were mere inches from each other. “Do your worst then,” he countered, voice low. “Because I am not taking back what I said.”

Annatar’s eyes were blazing, and in them was a fury he had never seen before. “You lying, manipulative –”

Celebrimbor pulled him in. In the moment their lips met, he opened his mind and reached out, encompassing them both like wings of gossamer folding closed around them.

If you do not believe my words, he thought, perhaps you can believe my memories and feelings.

Together, their minds toppled into the abyss of a lost millennium.

The sun sank below the horizon. When its last blaze was swallowed up by the endless dark ocean the westernmost beach of Middle-earth fell into darkness. For a moment, two entangled silhouettes were sharply outlined against the bruised, darkening sky, clutching onto each other in way that made it impossible to tell if they were locked in a silent fight or trying not to let go, whether they were attempting to hold each other up or tear each other down. Then they fell as well.

*

Chapter Text

*

Midnight enveloped the world like a blue-black, star-sprayed dome. It was curious, Celebrimbor thought, how noticeable things became at night that went usually unnoticed during the rush of bright day.

Thoughts went from whispering to loud, feelings and sensations transformed from background noise to all that oneself seemed to be made of.

Right now he heard the silent hoots of distant night owls farther inland. He smelled the salt and the bitter tang of the sea, tasted it on his tongue, even. He heard the rush of the waves lapping up to the stretch of destroyed land that had become the new shore. He felt every grain of sand on his cheek, chin, arm, and on his bare feet where the left side of his body touched the ground. The ground was unnaturally warm, almost comfortably so in the chill of the night. Just under his reddened, tender skin, he felt heat, the ghostly echo of an inferno that had been staved off barely enough for his skin not to melt together with his muscles and bones. He felt the sharp sting of a thousand tiny cuts of razor-thin slices of water, the bruises of projectiles that he had not managed to duck. He felt the tautness of the skin around his eyes and on his cheeks where his tears had dried.

All these things that he hadn’t managed to take even passing note of – before, when the world had been so loud and bright and reduced to win or lose and fight or die.

Now, at night, there was finally time for the quiet things, the things that would otherwise have been lost in the violence and anger of a day that permitted no silence, that allowed for no gentleness. Those things came to the forefront now, not unlike shy, timid little animals that left their dens and fearfully scurried across the surface of Arda only when the greater, more dangerous things were gone or resting.

He felt the pressure of his own skull against his left arm, upon which his head was pillowed, and the cool breeze at his back, contrasted with the warmth of a living, breathing body pressed up to his front.

He felt soft hair tickling the underside of his chin and the slight pressure of bone against bone where Annatar’s forehead was resting against his clavicle.

Their arms were loosely looped around each other’s ribcages and Celebrimbor had been lost for an undefinable time – minutes, hours, days? – in tracing the outlines and contours of Annatar’s back beneath his fingers. The ridge of the spine, the hard arc of the ribs, the flat planes of the shoulder blades, the muscles that held everything together. A perfect imitation, down to the last sinew, the tiniest bone process, indistinguishable from the real thing.

Does something remain unreal when there is nothing left by which you can tell the difference to the true thing? Celebrimbor mused. If you imitate something for long enough, closely enough, does it transform the imitation into something more? Does the pretence become the truth at some point? And who is going to be the arbiter of it, if there is no way to tell what is true and what is make-believe?

Annatar, who had been lying still for a long time, shifted slightly. Celebrimbor could nearly believe he had been sleeping, had it not been for the slightly too-regular circling of Annatar’s fingers on his back. And, of course, for the fact that the Maia never slept.

“Your thoughts,” Annatar said quietly, “are very loud.”

Celebrimbor smiled against the top of the Annatar’s head, breathing in the smell of ozone and fire, and the fading heat of a blazing summer day during night hours. “I can close my mind, if you prefer it that way.”

“No.” The reply was immediate. A pause, then, “It doesn’t bother me. It’s just – it makes me aware of how used to the silence I have become.”

Celebrimbor hummed in agreement, then shifted his legs a bit where they were entangled with Annatar’s, so that the bones of their ankles weren’t pressing up against each other so much.

Annatar moved away from him minutely. “Do you want to –”

“No.” Celebrimbor pulled him closer again, wrapping his arm more tightly around the Maia’s back. “Stay.”

For a moment, there was a resistance, a tension between them, like two identical electromagnetic charges seeking to flee each other – then Annatar relented. Halfway, at least.

He didn’t try to sit up or remove himself from the embrace, but he shifted a bit further away and up, so they were lying face to face. Celebrimbor loosened his hold, but kept his arm around the Maia nonetheless. Their gazes met and even now, in the absence of any natural light but the distant stars, Annatar’s eyes were preternaturally bright.

“What are you going to do now?” Annatar asked, and there was a twinge in Celebrimbor’s chest at those words.

‘You’, not ‘we’.

“Well,” Celebrimbor replied, trying to keep his tone light in defiance of the grey fog that was still hovering at the back of his mind, just barely held at bay. For now. “I’m reasonably sure that our cottage has not survived our fight with Ossë, so I doubt we can go back.”

“Good,” Annatar said, and one word should, by all means, not have been able to convey so much loathing. “If I never see either this house or the ocean again, it will be too soon.” There was a layer beneath this deep, dark dislike, a layer that spoke of things that would take decades to unravel, but now was not the time. It was too early, too soon; the wounds they had inflicted upon each other still too fresh for them to be able look at them with the objectivity and distance that working through them would require. Another daunting task that awaited them in the future. Not now though. Not yet.

“We don’t have to,” Celebrimbor said, once again consciously choosing his wording to include either of them. Not forceful, not demanding, just an invitation.

Annatar didn’t take it. “Where will you go, then?”

Celebrimbor rolled onto his back and clasped his hands behind the back of his head, looking ponderously up at the stars. “We could try to go further east than before. Return to Rhûn, perhaps. It’s a lovely land, and it has plenty of universities. I think – I think I want to try to take up teaching again.” He felt his way forward carefully, knowing he was venturing close to dangerous territory that he had taken so many years to avoid. Stay away from knowledge. Away from experiments. Away from anything that might seduce either of us to start anew what we so painfully tore ourselves away from.

He felt Annatar watching him from the side, then heard him sitting up.

“You miss Eregion,” he said. It was not a question.

Celebrimbor stared up at the stars for a moment longer, then noticed he was doing it again – refusing to face what needed to be faced, he had sworn to himself he wouldn’t do that anymore, he needed to stop this – and sat up, as well. Sand fell from his hair and his shoulders.

“Yes,” he admitted, meeting Annatar’s eyes at last. “It was home. More than any other place I’ve ever lived in. I’ve never been as happy anywhere else than I have been there. Not even …” He swallowed. “Not even on the other side of the sea.”

Annatar met his gaze, his face half in shadow, half in starlight.

“I could leave,” he said after a few minutes, heavy with silence.

“No,” Celebrimbor said immediately. “I made my choice. That bridge is burnt.”

“You don’t know that,” Annatar replied. “If you returned alone, there might be a chance that you could be allowed back.”

Briefly, his aunt’s face appeared before Celebrimbor’s inner eye, then that of Celebrían, adorned with a silver crown, her gaze serious and stern and knowing, so much like her mother’s. “Believe me, there’s none.” He couldn’t hide a pained smile. “Stay. Please.”

Annatar stood suddenly. “I will not stay if it means that it undoes any chance of you having any life at all.”

Celebrimbor rose as well. “I knew what I chose when I made my decision,” he said. “I stand by it.”

“But at what cost?” Annatar asked, taking a step backwards. “This is nothing what either of us hoped for, this is nothing like anything we both wanted. This limbo – this exile – we will have nothing. Home, plans, goals, dreams – we gave up everything – and for what?”

“For the sliver of a chance that things might end up being different,” Celebrimbor replied. That you might not choose to be Sauron the Betrayer, that I and so many others might live, that the world might not bleed and darken.

He reached for Annatar’s hand, and although the Maia looked like he wanted to pull away, Celebrimbor succeeded in intertwining their fingers. Anchoring him. Keeping him from turning into mist and slipping away.

“You don’t understand, Tyelperinquar,” Annatar said, his voice barely audible. Again, a tug at Celebrimbor’s hand. Again, Celebrimbor held him back, knowing very well that if Annatar had truly wanted to tear himself loose, there was nothing that he could do.

“What don’t I understand?” Celebrimbor asked, keeping his grip on Annatar’s hand. Firm, but not crushing. Steadying, but not imprisoning.

Annatar didn’t meet his gaze. He stared at a spot somewhere on Celebrimbor’s chest, his arm taut and stiff from the shoulder down, not responding to the gentle pressure of Celebrimbor’s figures.

When Annatar spoke, his voice was very quiet. “You love this world unconditionally. So much so that you gave everything of yourself that it might be saved. But I am not like you. I will never be intrinsically compassionate, caring for everyone equally without dividing into worthy and unworthy. I cannot love this world by myself and for what it is. I tried to, and I found that I can neither force nor will nor convince myself to care for something I feel nothing for.” He paused, hesitated.

“I can never be who you want me to be, Tyelperinquar,” he continued, still not looking up, still not meeting Celebrimbor’s eyes. “I can try to play the act as I have done in the past. My acting skills are far above and beyond than what is necessary to pretend. But I cannot make it become true.”

Celebrimbor, who had listened pensively, averted his gaze and looked out over the line of the horizon. “I feel that if I compared myself to ants, I would find that I have very little understanding and compassion for their lives and trials, and regrettably little motivation to acquire either of those things. Maybe it is similar for the Ainur when dealing with those who are not deathless. I would not fault you for the lack of a skill or a trait you were created without, Annatar,” Celebrimbor said. “I would fault you for doing what you can rationally recognise as morally wrong, and still make no attempt to change.”

“But I did,” Annatar said, and looked up at last, his gaze drawn and harrowed, desperation making his voice crack on the last word. “I tried to change – dozens of times. Hundreds of times. It didn’t work. I cannot do it.”

“Do you want to know what I think?” Celebrimbor said, inclining his head to one side. “I think Gorthaur would not have stayed in Ost-in-Edhil after he revealed himself to me and was rejected. He would have gone and transformed this mountainous land into the fortress I have seen and plunged Middle-earth into darkness. Gorthaur would not have come along with me, patient to subsist on a promise that was never fulfilled.”

He reached out for Annatar and took his hand again. “I am aware that you are not only the most pleasant facet of yourself. I know what hides in the dark under layers of your control. I know it personally and intimately, for it has been under my skin, between my ribs, inside my mind, a thousand times.”

A minute flinch of fingers under his palm, almost impossible to discern.

“And I see now how you fought it every step of the way,” Celebrimbor said softly. “I believe you when you say that you met your limitations in what you are able to change about yourself. I realise that you cannot learn to summon love and affection for things that mean nothing to you. But I think there are other things you can learn.”

He opened his mind to Annatar, who shied away from it at first. Another thing to look past for now, to postpone for later, just like a thousand other little stabs and slices, tears and pinpricks that they would have to face when the time had come.

Celebrimbor tried again, and this time Annatar took the invitation into his mind – tentatively, slowly, like being invited into a stranger’s home. When their minds mingled, Celebrimbor called forth the image of a world, but it was an abstract one – not the world as it was, and the people in it as they knew them, but filtered through a lens of emotions and personal bonds. And ethereal image, bathed in a golden glow, that was at once more poignant and less substantial than its counterpart in reality.

Annatar hesitated, but Celebrimbor sensed that he had understood.

When Annatar’s thoughts reached out to him, the ideas and notions came forth slowly, hesitantly, like someone feeling their way forward in total darkness. But Annatar didn’t stop. Didn’t relent. Made himself see the idea through to the end and pass it on to Celebrimbor’s mind.

Perhaps I could learn to see and love the world through your eyes. Because while I might not care for anything else, I do care for you. And maybe that love you possess for all the things I cannot feel for might be focused and changed as it passes through you to me, and turned into something I could work with. Something that could be good for this world in a way that you want it to be. Maybe I could learn to appreciate the things and people you love not because of something that has its origin in me, but because it is you who cares for them - and thus I could, in time perhaps, come to be their guardian.

“And if you can promise to try this,” Celebrimbor said softly, gently severing the connection between their minds, “then you will be everything I could ever ask of you.”

Annatar held his gaze. His posture remained stiff, his weight on the back foot as if was still poised to walk away. “This could always go wrong. Tyelperinquar. I will have to fight against myself for the rest of our shared lives. Every day is a day I could fail. And when it happens all will have been in vain.”

“We’ve come this far, haven’t we?” Celebrimbor said softly, clasping one of Annatar’s hands between both of his now. “We’re still here. And that is not nothing.”

“Would you stake all your hopes on a mere chance that things might not turn towards the ends that they are so desperately striving towards?” Annatar asked, his voice raw. “All timelines we have seen are bent towards ruin. Why not do the smart thing and cut your losses? Save yourself and return to the life that you gave up instead of continuing to pursue this foolish endeavour that is more than likely doomed to fail.”

“Do you honestly think I could go back to my old life after having known you?” Celebrimbor asked. “Our shared past cannot be changed, and I would not see it undone. Of that, at least, I am certain. If nothing else, a fool is always sure of himself.” He gave a rueful chuckle. “As for the other thing you said…” Celebrimbor took a few slow steps towards the Maia. “I forfeit the life I could have had. I forfeit simplicity, easy decisions, the way of least resistance.” He looked at Annatar intently. “I forfeit the brighter world we dreamed of. I don’t do this lightly. But I do it gladly if it means that we get to keep our chance at creating a future where we can both exist together as … friends. More than that, perhaps.”

He stepped closer until there was barely any space between their bodies left.

“I want to find a way to start anew from here. Find a new home. Find new friends. Find a new purpose that doesn’t endanger us and the world as much as our old one. I don’t know how, or if there is indeed a way to achieve that in the first place. I don’t know if I can ever find fulfilment in it. But I would like to be not alone when I try to find out.” He reached out and brushed a few strands of golden hair behind Annatar’s ear. They were stiff and heavy with blood and salt, half of them fell back immediately.

Annatar didn’t reply, didn’t move. Briefly, he looked like he wanted to say something, but no words came. He lowered his gaze, staring at the ground between them.

“Stay with me,” Celebrimbor said quietly, leaning his forehead against Annatar’s. “If you still want to, of course.”

Annatar closed his eyes and exhaled. Slowly, incrementally, he leaned into the touch. “Of course I want to stay with you,” he said, his voice breaking. He took three, four breaths, flat, tightly controlled, as if he didn’t trust himself to speak. “I chose you.” His hands came up to grip Celebrimbor’s torn shirt and his knuckles were white, his hands trembling. “I chose you a thousand years ago.”

Celebrimbor pulled him close, wrapping his arms as tightly around as he could around his friend, his beloved, the former enemy of the world, this god who had come to his doorstep, who had followed him to the ends of Arda, and decided to stay. Who had thrown everything away, just like Celebrimbor, for the shadow of a hope of changing what seemed inevitable. “Let this be our choice then,” he murmured into Annatar’s hair. “Let it be each other. Let it be us.”

Those last words, he spoke in Valarin.

Þûraz-eru-oz êzhirai.

Êzhirai. First person dual absolute. Us. You and me and no one else.

 *

The single Rose

Is now the Garden

Where all loves end

Terminate torment

Of love unsatisfied

The greater torment

Of love satisfied

End of the endless

Journey to no end

Conclusion of all that

Is inconclusible

T.S. Eliot – Ash Wednesday, Part II

***

Chapter Text

Epilogue

The sun was setting in a blaze of reds and oranges and the whitewashed houses were throwing long shadows across the street as Celebrimbor took the turn to the road that would lead him away from the main thoroughfare and up the street that climbed the hill at the foot of which the city of Azamûn lay. The hill was steep, and the road upward wound its way between olive orchards and boulders of white limestone, passing under the shadow of trees and stones alike. The sounds of the city faded the further he climbed. Soon, the red-shingled houses fell away beneath him, and beyond the city, the russet-coloured surface of Lake Lornîn glinted like a polished mirror in the evening sun.

Beyond, the green-brown, rocky slopes of Amon Tirion rose before the purpling sky, its peak crowned by the first stars appearing in the east.

The heat of the day was only fading slowly, and Celebrimbor’s sandals were kicking up clouds of reddish dust with every step. Sweat was trickling down the back of his neck and between his shoulder blades. The bag in which he was carrying the books on today’s lectures as well as the essays he still had to grade beat against his hip with every step, the shoulder strap biting into the thin skin over his collar bones. He would have to get used to leaving it at the university or have it taken up the hill by cart.

He climbed on for a few more minutes, and as he rounded the hill, at last a house with white walls, many windows, and gently sloping, red-shingled walls came into view, surrounded by low walls overgrown with vines, and cypress trees.

A great terrace stretched out toward the south, and the doors and windows of the house towards this side stood open, allowing the evening breeze to chase away the heat of the day and sending the sheer curtains blowing like animated ghosts through the window frames.

Celebrimbor walked up the path leading up to the main door, paved with great white flagstones. He pulled the door open and stepped inside, the cool air in the corridor welcoming. He sat down on a wooden chair by the door to pull of his boots, then went barefoot down the corridor and into his study, which lay in the perennial penumbra of high summer – the wooden shutters closed against the unforgiving blaze of the sun during the day. He set his bag down, then listened.

No other sound came from inside the house.

Knowing what he knew, that didn’t mean much. Sure enough, when he turned around one of the quiet occupants of the house was already standing in the doorway and staring at him out of green lamp-like eyes. Since the rest of the cat was black, that was about the only feature of it that Celebrimbor was able to discern.

“Hello, Shadow,” he said. “And where might your master be?”

Shadow only stared unblinkingly at him. One day he would find out what it was with cats and their unnerving way of staring into one’s soul.

“Never mind,” Celebrimbor sighed, rolling his aching shoulders. “I’m going to find him myself.”

He walked past the still staring cat and back down the hallway and turned left, where both the terrace, the kitchen, as well as the combined dining-and-living-room lay. Here, the doors and windows were thrown open to allow the heat that had accumulated during the day to escape, and a not-quite-natural breeze was making the curtains move in the window frames.

A clattering sound came from the kitchen and Celebrimbor moved between the sofa and armchairs that were gathered along a low, long table covered in stacks of paper – student’s tests, diagrams, data sheets, documentation, past a wooden dinner table, and through a narrow door into the kitchen proper.

He stopped and smiled when he saw Annatar stow away two pans and a skillet, apparently just finishing up the clean-up after preparing dinner. Said dinner already sat neatly arranged on two plates.

Annatar had his back to Celebrimbor and either hadn’t heard him arrive or was too focused on his task to do so. He had – of course – not bound his hair back, because not even after all those years could Celebrimbor convince him to adhere to safety measures that concerned a Maia as much as drowning was a concern for a fish. Despite the oppressive heat, Annatar was wearing long linen trousers and a long-sleeved grey robe again. The only concession the Maia had made to summer and being at home was that he had forgone wearing shoes and covering his neck. It was not often that Celebrimbor managed to surprise him, so when the elf walked up to the Maia, he kept his steps quiet, then slowly, gently, wrapped his arms around Annatar from behind.

“Hello there,” he said quietly, pressing a kiss to Annatar’s shoulder.

The Maia had tensed imperceptibly when Celebrimbor had embraced him, but with an effort of will that was palpable through his bones, muscles, and clothing, he relaxed again.

“Hello, Tyelperinquar,” Annatar said, stilling in his process of tidying up and letting his arms sink to his sides.

“I told you hundreds of times that you don’t need to prepare dinner alone. You can wait until I’m here, and we’ll do it together. You don’t even need to eat in the first place.” Celebrimbor ran his hands down Annatar’s arms until they reached the Maia’s wrists, gently sliding forward to lace Annatar’s fingers with his own.

Annatar gave a small shrug. “And I told you just as often that I don’t mind. I got home earlier than you did, I had time on my hands, so I made good use of it.”

“Perhaps I enjoy doing it together.” Celebrimbor closed his eyes, relishing the feeling of simply holding Annatar close, then pressing another kiss just behind his ear, before resting his head against the Maia’s.

“Don’t be ungrateful.”

“I am not.”

“You are. And take a shower, you smell like you ran five miles in the heat.”

“That’s probably because I did. It will be a day when they get the hydroelectric transformers for the cable cars to work – no more climbing up the mountain and the hills around Azamûn, and sweating rivers while doing so. I will have to find another way of exercising that doesn’t shave too many more hours off my day when that time comes.”

“Hm. Quite. But that day seems a while off yet, so go and wash up.” Annatar half-turned around in his embrace and slightly pushed him away at the chest, and Celebrimbor let him go, albeit reluctantly.

“How was your day?”

Annatar threw him a side glance. “It was fine. Shorter than yours. Now go, we can talk over dinner.” And with that, Celebrimbor was ousted from the kitchen and banished to the bathroom.

Even if the cable cars didn’t yet work reliably, the plumbing did – something that Celebrimbor had set as a first priority as soon as it had become clear that Annatar and he would settle down in Azamûn for the time being.

In those first few weeks, he had been desperate for a new project anyway, the shadow of the mountain looming far too present and too large in the corner of his vision, no matter which way he looked. So like any scared animal in the presence of a frightening thing, he sought to take the edge off the fear by occupying his mind with more urgent things, all the while forcing himself to get used to the looming spectre of the mountain, until the primal part of his brain finally lost the verve to sustain a near-constant panic, and capitulated in the face of the repeated experience of nothing bad happening against all expectations.

So yes, the plumbing worked. Celebrimbor had made sure of that. And since they had decided to live in the hills at the outer edge of the city, it had become clear after one too many ascents in the evening heat that turned the horizon to a shimmering line of liquid mercury that they – that he would direly need a working shower. There wasn’t a day that passed that Celebrimbor wasn’t grateful for the decision to solve this particular issue of basic amenities first and postpone the more lofty projects for later.

Celebrimbor had even managed to lure Annatar in here one time, though only for the Maia to compliment him on his plumbing prowess, comment that the pressure gauge for the boiler needed some adjusting, since the needle was obviously off by a few kilopascals, and then turn around and walk out, never to return.

Celebrimbor did not get why one would want to forgo the bliss of showering under scalding hot water in the winter and ice-cold water during the summer, but then again, there were a lot of things he didn’t understand about Annatar. Like how he constantly seemed to attract cats whenever he stayed in one place for more than three days. And how these cats seemed to acquire an almost eerie level of intelligence over time, as if their very souls changed by sustained proximity and exposure to the Maia.

(“I draw the line at explaining differential equations to a cat,” Celebrimbor had said one day. “They’re animals. They neither want nor need to know this.”

Annatar had just looked at him from his place behind his desk, one eyebrow quirked up and twirling a pencil between his fingers. “And who appointed you the judge of the limits of feline knowledge?”

“Me-ow,” the cat in question, a humongous, orange thing that was all huge eyes, fur, and a bottlebrush tail, had added with an accusing glare in the elf’s direction. Then it had looked down at the page covered in mathematical formulae, studying it with interest and summarily consigning Celebrimbor’s presence to the plethora of things with the same level of import as empty air.

Celebrimbor had heaved a long-suffering sigh and left them to their devices.)

There were a lot of things he didn’t understand about the Maia. Another thousand years of living side by side wouldn’t change that.

Still, it wouldn’t keep Celebrimbor from enjoying a well-deserved shower at the end of the day. Afterwards, feeling quite reborn and a lot less sore, he pulled on light clothing and with his hair still damp against his back, he walked back through the house and out onto the terrace, where Annatar had already set the table.

With the practised ease of the seasoned (albeit involuntary) cat owner (although Celebrimbor would steadfastly argue that cats, being the little tyrants that they were, owned people, not the other way around), he stepped over an impressively long, white feline specimen stretched out exactly on the threshold that led out onto the terrace. This particular cat went by the name of Ghost, which was a tragic misnomer, for it should have been named Tripping Hazard, this being the essence of its very existence.

He walked over to the balustrade that ran around the edge of the terrace, gazing out over the hills and olive gardens falling away into the dales beneath them. He took a deep breath and closed his eyes, basking in the light of the setting sun like a content salamander for a few minutes. When he heard the sound of footsteps, he turned around to see Annatar in the process of setting down two glasses and a bottle of wine on the table.

Celebrimbor walked over to him. “All set, or do you need any help?”

Annatar looked at the table, then at the dark rectangle of the doorway leading back into the dining room, appearing as if he was mentally running down a list, then he shook his head. “No, it’s fine,” he said, rather curtly. “Sit down.”

Celebrimbor frowned at the tone, but obliged without comment. Nonetheless, as Annatar joined him at the table, he gave the Maia a closer once-over, not even aware of what he was eating as he did so.

Upon arriving Celebrimbor had not immediately noticed that something was off, but now that he paid closer attention, he could see that Annatar was unfocused, almost absent, as if his attention was directed inward. There was a tightness to his mouth and his eyes had assumed an unnatural boring quality, even more piercing than his usual gaze. His entire body was tense to the point of snapping a tendon, had he been mortal, and his grip around his knife was tight enough to turn his knuckles white. As Annatar went to cut one of the sweet potatoes on his plate with an expression of grimness and focus that was usually reserved for him tackling the unification of electromagnetism and quantum theory, his hand suddenly twitched, as if something hidden and alien waited just under his skin to burst forth.

Without a word, Celebrimbor stood and rounded the table and gently took the knife from Annatar’s hands. The Maia’s grip didn’t open immediately, but when Celebrimbor didn’t relent, some semblance of life seemed to return to Annatar’s frozen form after a few moments and suddenly, his fingers gave the piece of cutlery free.

Celebrimbor laid it aside, out of Annatar’s reach, then bent down so their faces were of a height.

“A bad day again?” he asked quietly.

Seconds ticked by during which none of them moved. The Maia was still staring at his plate.

Celebrimbor gently touched Annatar’s shoulder. “Arion. Can you hear me, Sunlight?”

Another moment passed, until Annatar seemed to pull himself back from wherever his mind had been lost. Wordless, he nodded. His eyes were fixed on the polished surface of the table, unmoving, as if he was trying to find a handhold in reality and feared of letting go of it even with his eyes.

Celebrimbor laid one arm around Annatar’s shoulders and used the other hand to coax the Maia into standing. “Come,” he said. “Let’s go inside.”

With movements that were as wooden as that of a marionette, Annatar followed Celebrimbor’s lead.

The interior of the house had half-sunken into darkness already.

Celebrimbor led them both over toward the sofa, guiding Annatar much like one would guide a mindless puppet – the Maia was for once entirely devoid of purpose and volition. He followed Celebrimbor’s guidance without even the slightest resistance, like a leaf blown about by a breeze.

Celebrimbor gently pulled the Maia down to sit on the sofa, Annatar, usually so wilful and stubborn and opinionated, let it happen as if he had gone away and merely left behind the empty shell of his body. He all but collapsed where he was standing, leaning forward, hunched over, one hand shielding his eyes as if he was fighting off a migraine.

With a tight knot forming in his chest, Celebrimbor laid one arm around Annatar’s shoulders, while the other clasped the cold, stiff fingers of the incarnate god, as if he could hold him there this way – even knowing that it was in vain.

Already, he could feel Annatar retreating from the world, the presence of his body fading more and more by the moment, in a futile attempt to flee what could not be outrun.

“You have to remain incarnate, Sunlight,” Celebrimbor reminded him quietly. “If you retreat out of your body and your spirit gets lost, I won’t be able to reach you anymore. Keep the door open. Stay here, with me.”

For a moment, Annatar did not react. Then, with a palpable effort of will that seemed to change the very barometric pressure in the room, he became more… present again. More tangible. The weight of a being existing in one space settled into the room. Something that had been on the verge of vanishing took up space once more.

Celebrimbor knew how little Annatar loved this – his usual degree of embodiment was half-hearted at best – permanent enough to constitute a recognizable appearance, but little more. Annatar’s chosen form was only nominally incarnate and wasn’t subject to any shortcomings or needs of a true body. Shifting along the sliding scale of incarnation towards true embodiment was something the Maia loathed still, even after all those centuries – and probably would, until the end of time.

And yet, Annatar never fought Celebrimbor whenever the elf asked him not to retreat into the ethereal realm of spirits where the Noldo could not follow. Instead, the Maia settled deeper into his body once more, to the point where he needed to breathe, eat, and rest, no matter how little he relished it.

It was a love language of effort and anguish, and Celebrimbor loved Annatar all the more for attempting to speak it nonetheless, knowing what it took out of the Maia to do it – again, and again, and again.

Annatar’s incarnate form was the tether that was keeping Celebrimbor and him connected when the entirety of the Maia’s mind was taken up with the battle he was waging inside his head. Just as it was doing right now.

Annatar was frozen in his posture like a statue, his shoulders rigid, every muscle in his back a taut, tense cord. Holding him felt like holding cold marble. Even the usual furnace-like heat of his incarnation was absent, as if Annatar was trying to keep all of himself behind a wall – a wall behind which things were raging that even Celebrimbor had only ever glimpsed shades of.

Oh, Celebrimbor had seen what Sauron was like and he knew very intimately what the Lord of the Rings was capable of doing – to him especially. But, as he had learned, there were depths and shades even to the deepest imaginable horrors, and seeing Sauron from the outside was still not the same as leaping into the terrifying abyss that was his mind.

There was a monster in the abyss, and it would not die, because it was as immortal as Annatar and as real as the room they were sitting in. And Annatar kept on fighting it. Again. And again. And again.

When it happened, it passed in absolute silence.

Just like now. Annatar sat, half-curled in on himself and as stony as a million-year-old fossilized ammonite – not a living being, but the imprint of a living being frozen in time. His eyes were closed, his lips pressed together, his arms slung around his torso as if he was bodily trying to hold back something terrible that was threatening to burst out of his chest and into the world.

Celebrimbor held on to him. The places where his fingers were closed around Annatar’s hands were ghostly anchor points, no stronger than a single thread trying to hold an entire ship in a storm. But it was what they had, and with this they had to make do. Time and time again, waiting for the storm to pass.

Today it was worse than usual.

Daylight faded to a faint mist of blood-red when Annatar at last righted himself and opened his eyes again. In the dying light he looked sickly, his eyes bloodshot, with deep shadows under his brows and the hollows of his cheek.

His fingers tightened once around Celebrimbor’s, briefly, absently, like someone feeling their way forward in the dark by instinct, ensuring themselves of the one guiding rope that was their way out.

“Is it over?”, Celebrimbor asked.

Annatar’s glance wandered over to him, slowly, sluggishly, as if he was still in the process of pulling himself back from a distant, dark place. “Yes,” he said at last. “For now.”

Celebrimbor nodded, then pulled him in so that the Maia’s head sank onto his shoulder.

Night seeped into the living room, filling it from the bottom like deep, dark water. The windowpanes were opaque rectangles of brushed copper in the blazing glare of the setting sun. Birds were singing in the olive trees outside.

“Tell me,” Celebrimbor said quietly, carding his hands through Annatar’s hair.

Annatar didn’t answer for a while, his voice was low and hoarse, as if he had screamed himself raw. Maybe he had – in that dark, distant place full of monsters. “I would prefer not to.”

Celebrimbor’s movements halted briefly. “And I would prefer for you not to be alone in this. I can differentiate between you, Gorthaur, and Sauron.”

“There is nothing to differentiate,” Annatar said through gritted teeth.

“I beg your pardon. The fact that I am sitting here, alive and breathing, very much disproves your point,” Celebrimbor said. It was a low blow, to be honest, especially in light of what Annatar had just gone through. The almost imperceptible flinch against Celebrimbor’s shoulder confirmed this. But sometimes there was no other way to get through to Annatar and that thick skull of his.

Quiet followed in the wake of these words – deep and dark and midnight-blue.

“It’s the anniversary,” Annatar whispered into this profound stillness. “The 21^st of July. The day when I decide to – to kill you. In most timelines.”

Celebrimbor felt his heart seize in his chest, but suppressed a flinch and kept stroking Annatar’s hair.

A knife in long-fingered hands.

A dinner knife hovering over a meticulously prepared plate of food – in one world.

A dissecting knife – in another.

A sunset – bloodred.

Flooding a dusk-quiet home on a hill, surrounded by an olive orchard – in one world.

Illuminating a destroyed workshop, now turned into a butcher’s lair – in another.

Fate – wrenched away from its intended course, bent into violent loops, always seeking a way back towards its initial path like water following gravity. Possible futures – torn to shreds, twisted into unrecognizability, a mad torrent of events, emptying into a factual present that was just as strange, just as warped; a product of a bastardization of actions and time that would never have come to pass naturally, but hand-crafted in a laboratory after a myriad of failures. A tailored, bespoke version of a vision that was founded on forcing water to flow uphill, and objects to fall into the sky, and causality itself to founder – a battle, again. Again. Again.

Celebrimbor took a breath and pulled himself out of the downward vortex of his thoughts. Then he asked the question that he had been afraid to ask the last time, and the time before that. And the time before that.

“Do you think it is getting worse?” he asked quietly.

Can you put a timeline under so much strain that it will break down under the stress of improbability? Is there a breaking point somewhere down our path that we are hurtling towards, because this is as far as probability can bend – and we’ve pushed beyond it?

Annatar didn’t answer for a long, long time. “I don’t know,” he said at last. He sounded tired in a way that no immortal being was supposed to sound. “At some point even I run out of shades of grey to distinguish one event from the other.” Then, after a brief pause, “The colour black has no gradients.”

Stillness returned in the wake of this reply, for what was one supposed to say to this?

The sun had set. Shadows filled the room. Outside, the stars were lighting up in a velvet blue-black sky. Suddenly the room seemed too narrow, stifling even, with its walls and ceiling that seemed to be closing in, choked with the captured heat of the bygone day. Breathing was suddenly a great strain, Celebrimbor’s lungs didn’t seem to wish to expand. His palms were slick where they had been dry just a moment before. He wanted out – he wanted the borderless world around him, the endless sky above his head, balmy, but fresh air in his lungs.

“Let’s go outside,” Celebrimbor said quietly.

Annatar lifted his head. Their eyes met. Then he nodded. When he sat up, a line of cold ran down Celebrimbor’s side where Annatar had been leaning against him. Slowly, stiffly, they stood.

Annatar looked like someone who had just come out on the other side of a two-week fever spell; he moved slowly, carefully, and with ghostly quiet, his face still drawn and tinged ashen grey, his golden eyes too bright. He looked thinner somehow, less present, less … there, as if the fight with himself had taken a chunk out of him, and reduced him to near-transparency.

Annatar was fighting his ghosts, and yet it was him who got closer to becoming one, with each taxing battle against the weight of a million destinies defied, pulling at him and tearing at him like spectral hounds.

His clothing, skin and hair were damp with sweat, a side-effect of his self-imposed incarnation to a much more thorough degree than he usually deigned to establish. The state must have been supremely uncomfortable, bordering on unbearable, for the Maia, unused and unwilling as he was to lean into true embodiment. Could he have done so with an acceptable risk, Annatar would immediately have sought refuge in a more spirit-like appearance, immaculate and untouched by the undignified drawbacks of physicality. The fact that Annatar chose to remain in this near-complete incarnate state that he loathed so much nonetheless spoke volumes about the precariousness of his current condition, of the fragility of the hard-won equilibrium, the desperation with which the Maia must cling to the physical world as his anchor in the face of the ghosts clawing at him.

The Maia looked as if he was ready to crawl out of his own skin.

Celebrimbor regarded him with a sympathetic ache in his chest, but there was nothing for it. If Annatar went so far and forsook removing himself from the world willingly, then there was no acceptable risk anywhere that would have allowed for a more comfortable course of action.

Celebrimbor’s lungs grew tighter, the air thinner. He had to get out of here, and soon.

But perhaps there was a way to take the edge off this unpalatable quandary, for both of them. They needed some air to breathe, literally and metaphorically.

“Before we go,” Celebrimbor said.

Annatar halted, a very conscious, almost machine-like slowing of the motion of his limbs until they stilled. He barely turned his head, his golden eyes unnaturally bright in the gathering gloom of the room. Saying, I’m listening, without going through the effort of speaking out loud.

“You should take a shower,” Celebrimbor said, and at Annatar’s disbelieving narrowing of his eyes, added, “You will feel more comfortable in your own skin afterwards. Take it from someone who’s had his fair share of bad moments. Some things cannot be fixed, but there is no need to make yourself more uncomfortable with regards to things you can ease.”

Annatar considered this for a moment, his eyes sliding off Celebrimbor to stare at something in an invisible middle-distance. Then he nodded and slunk off out into the hallway, his steps barely audible.

After Annatar was gone, Celebrimbor turned around and almost rushed out onto the terrace and in the solitude of the lilac sky above him, with nothing but the call of evening birds for company – and finally, finally allowed himself the panic attack that he had been wrestling into submission ever since Annatar had told him of his visions.

He folded over, hands on his knees, gasping for breath as he was clutching at his own chest. The warm evening winds that carried over from the lake and the volcano beyond brushed over his suddenly sweat-slick face and hands.

The world shrunk to a needlepoint, wherein the only thing that he could still manage to think was Breathe-breathe-breathe.

Sunlight filtering through the blood-spattered skylight of his workshop in Ost-in-Edhil, the visceral feeling of having hands tear and grasp around inside his ribcage, a fist closing around his beating heart, exposed to the open air, this cruel band of gold gleaming like fire, like the sun, growing growing growing until its circle filled his entire vision, becoming a gate, beyond which lay nothing but void void void and death and unmaking and destruction –

It took him an unknown amount of time to extricate himself, so deeply was he nestled in the chaos of his mind and the workings of his body, the pumping of his heart, the wheezing of air through his lungs that an invisible hand kept compressing with an iron fist.

When he finally straightened up and was able to discern the world around him once more, the sky had turned a deep blue, interspersed with silver stars. A film of sweat covered his skin, and the eastern breeze made him shiver.

I’ve seen and heard it so often by now – won’t it ever get any easier?  he wondered.

Slowly, he turned around – and froze, when he noticed Annatar sitting on a bench behind him, pushed up to the wall of the house, just under the sill of the kitchen window. His hair was still damp, lying heavier and flatter than it usually did on his scalp and shoulders, though a few stubborn waves were already curling at the ends. He had one leg pulled up to his chest, his arms loosely circling it, and his chin resting on his knees. In the growing darkness, his eyes were shining like those of a cat. Other than that, he was almost one with the gathering shadows.

Celebrimbor took an involuntary, startled step backwards. “How long have you been sitting there?”

Annatar straightened slightly. “Long enough.”

Celebrimbor sighed and ran his hand down his eyes. For a few seconds, he pressed his fingers to his eyelids, making white spots dance in the blackness of his not-vision. When he at last spoke, his voice sounded strained even to himself. “I did not want you to see this.”

“I figured as much. Which is why I thought it better to leave you in peace until the spell had passed.” Annatar regarded him intently. “I hope this was the correct thing to do.”

In other situations, having the Maia ask him for directions on how – or how not to – comfort mortals as if doing so was no different than following instructions for assembling a machine would have made Celebrimbor laugh. Right now, he didn’t have the energy.

Apparently, though, he had taken too much time in answering, because Annatar added, his tone tense, “I did not mean to intrude.”

Celebrimbor waved it off. “This is your house as much as it is mine. I can hardly fault you for sitting on your own terrace.”

“You know what I mean.”

Celebrimbor took a deep breath. “I do. Thank you – for being considerate.”

Annatar regarded him for a long moment. Then he unfolded himself from his rather cramped position and in doing so, Celebrimbor at last realized why the Maia had seemed to nearly vanish in the dark. He was not wearing his usual whites and light greys. His attire was completely black – a colour which Celebrimbor had never seen him wear before. In fact, as Celebrimbor discerned while taking Annatar in, the Maia was not wearing anything of his own make at all. Both his dark trousers and the short-sleeved black shirt he had on were no Maiarin extensions of thought and will. They were nothing like the otherworldly immaculate, sharp cut of perfectly fitting seams and angles that Annatar usually created for himself. Instead, they were bafflingly mundane, made of linen and cotton, slightly loose around Annatar’s frame, and a bit wrinkled from his earlier position: dark and ordinary and utterly unremarkable.

“You are wearing my clothes,” Celebrimbor said. It was not really a statement, but not truly a question, either.

Annatar tensed slightly. “Did I overstep?”

“I – no. It’s fine. It’s just –” Celebrimbor broke off, not knowing what he even wanted to say. Certainly, they shared everything they had in their lives, but even up until today, there remained a few gaps which they had not bridged, not least owed to Annatar’s refusal to partake more than he had to in the physical world, remaining, for the most-part decidedly independent from physical needs and comforts, real clothes being among them.

But maybe they were both of them in need of comfort, and perhaps of a different sort that they used to fall back on – something to hold on to in his never-ending gauntlet of their lives.

In any case, Celebrimbor would not deny him. He had more than enough pieces of attire, more than he strictly needed, to be truthful.

“I was just surprised, that’s all,” Celebrimbor finished at last, forcing a tired smile and dropping onto the wooden bench, next to Annatar.

Annatar nodded, the slight tension bleeding from his shoulders. He was silent, but Celebrimbor could feel the Maia’s gaze resting on him. At last, Annatar said, “You are not well.”

Celebrimbor, who had been tracing the whorls and curlicues of the bench’s iron armrest with his fingers, looked up. “I’m better than I was before.”

“Yes. Now. Until things take a turn for the worse again,” Annatar said, his voice hiding an edge that was barely audible. But Celebrimbor knew him so well by know and he knew what to listen for, and he knew what Annatar meant by it, by the scant few words he uttered aloud and by the innumerable things he didn’t say. The nagging unrest, the soul-rending dread that was always just around the corner.

What if this never gets better? What if it never stops? What if this is just another loop we are stuck in for a thousand years, doomed to never escape?

Celebrimbor could not help him with it. It was one of those things they both feared and yet were powerless to change. Come what may, they had to forge ahead anyway.

But he could feel it, too: the restlessness in his legs and hands, itching to do something even though he was tired to the bone. Everything was better than being stuck in place. He needed to move.

Celebrimbor got up and held out a hand to Annatar. “Come on. Let us walk.”

Annatar looked at him for a few seconds, unmoving, then at last he took the offered hand, pulled himself up and they set out into the night.

They walked under the star-strewn midnight-blue sky, the leaves of the olive trees painting sharp black silhouettes against the dome of night, like cut-outs of void overlaying the world. The air was warm and quiet, the bird calls gone silent during the nighttime. The cats, as was their strange habit whenever Annatar went for a walk near the house, had come along, flitting in and out between tree trunks and underbrush like small ghosts, appearing and disappearing without sound.

Celebrimbor quietly watched as Annatar walked before him, shadows and moonlight flowing over his form just as he himself seemed to be made of shadow and light alike: silver-gold and dark grey. His lower arms were bared to the air, and the scars of Morgoth’s chaining were running down his arms like a cruel tattoo, ending at his wrists and vanishing under the sleeves of Celebrimbor’s shirt. His fingers were, as they had ever been since leaving Ost-in-Edhil, entirely ringless. In fact, neither of them had worn jewellery in a very long time – they existed in subdued tones on a colour palette of gradients of grey, and nothing ostentatious had ever found its way into their presentation once more.

They walked downhill for a while until they reached a second hilltop, lower than the one that their house was standing on, but closer to the edge of the elevated ridge they stood on, allowing them a wide view over the surrounding lands, the volcano and Lake Lornîn. The land below them was a patchwork of blues and greys, interspersed with yellow and orange dots where lamplight shone through windows. The dots of light got more numerous the further into the valley you looked, clustering together like so many fireflies, and getting sparser the further away from the centre of the valley and the lake you got – up the cragged mountain sides that ringed the vale and stretching out into the distance in the west. The stars shone above like diamonds strewn upon a dark mirror. The air smelled of summer, of citrus trees, oleander, and jasmine.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Celebrimbor said quietly.

Annatar didn’t reply.

“Sometimes I nearly do not manage to see this place for the wonderful haven that it is, because visions of what it could have become in another world keep interfering.” Celebrimbor glanced over at the volcano, its green flanks grey in the starlight, then back to Annatar. The Maia was watching him quietly.

“Not just you,” he replied.

Celebrimbor sighed and looked out over the land again. “It seems always very present, doesn’t it? As if this reality is just a thin veil, and if you tear it away, the ugly true shape of everything comes out.”

Again, Annatar didn’t answer.

“And yet, it has to count for something,” Celebrimbor said, speaking more to himself than anyone else. “This is what is, and nothing else.”

For a while they stood in silence and watched the world that was, so unlikely, so improbable – and yet extant while the other world – the one that was so much stronger and darker, and victorious in a million other worlds – was relegated to a grim spectator, futilely pushing up against the other side of the mirror, but forever caught behind the looking-glass.

“Strange,” Celebrimbor continued at last, inclining his head to one side and regarding the city of Azamûn sprawling in the dale beneath the mountains on both sides. “We’ve been here for so long, and yet I still feel like someone who is only passing through.” He chanced a side-glance at Annatar, who was staring down at the countless dots of golden light, the sound of distant traffic and voices wafting up to them on the still, warm night air. His expression was shuttered and unreadable.

“Forever passing through,” Celebrimbor repeated quietly, as if talking to himself. “Not truly belonging. Drifting…”

“… like a leaf on the wind,” Annatar finished.

They looked at each other, a memory from a distant time, a distant place resurfacing, spoken by someone who was long gone by now – like sand lost in the desert winds, only traces remaining of his life, and even those would soon be washed away by the tides of time.

“I wonder if I will ever be able to truly settle down again,” Celebrimbor whispered. “Fundin – he told me once that he thought my heart had been able to grow roots at last.” He paused, something invisible laying itself around his ribcage and squeezing. An ache that would be there forever – a hole in his heart that would never be filled. Death didn’t give anything back. His friend was long gone – alive only in the memory in Celebrimbor’s heart.

“He said it with so much surprise,” Celebrimbor continued quietly. “As if he hadn’t ever thought that I would be able to find a place – or a person, rather – to call home.”

“A person?” Annatar asked.

 Celebrimbor smiled sadly. “You had just saved Khazad-Dûm from the Balrog. I had just plunged back into the inferno in the Deep Paths to rescue you.” He averted his eyes, looking over at the still, dark slopes of the peaceful volcano. “You were in the library of Khazad-Dûm, going over the issue of Ring geometry. I do remember watching you. You had nearly been broken into pieces, yet you refused to rest any longer. You were so … content to be out and about again. To be doing something.” Celebrimbor paused. “I must have – I must have looked at you in a certain way. Fundin noticed. He was always … very perceptive.” He broke off, his voice stumbling like a foot getting caught upon a rock on the road.

It took him a while to gather his bearings. The pain, he had learned, never went away entirely. Merely the edge of its blade was blunted slightly by the passing of the years. The hurt remained.

When he could go on, Celebrimbor spoke once more. “Fundin knew me at my worst: lonely and bitter and angry. Being his friend made me into a different, better man. On this day in the library he said that it seemed my hearts had finally grown roots. He was looking between the two of us when he said it. And – I agreed.”

Celebrimbor heaved a sigh – there was no way to say this without being cruel. “But my heart was never only tied to one thing – or one person. There is – home in having a family, a place where you are known and loved. Our hearts do not dangle by one single string. We’re in a web of people and places that are our home, and the web makes us who we are – but who do we become without it?”

He looked at Annatar. The Maia’s usually golden eyes were deep and dark, utterly unfathomable. He did not speak.

“How did you bear it?” Celebrimbor asked quietly. “Cutting yourself loose from everything you had ever known, leaving behind Aulë and Aman?”

“I wanted to leave.”

“So did I. But I know the wound the parting left you with.” Celebrimbor wrapped his arms around himself, only a half-conscious gesture, as if he was trying to keep himself from coming apart at the seams. Valar, his chest was hurting so bad, he could hardly breathe. Slowly, he breathed through the agony, until something in his chest loosened and became softer, wider again. Celebrimbor lifted his head, looking at the fallen Maia standing next to him, marked by the scars of cutting himself loose from only father figure he had ever had, the scars he received for his undying loyalty to his dark master, and those he received in protecting Celebrimbor himself.

So many scars. Unfathomable, how much determination and yearning for freedom, how much devotion, how much suffering was encapsuled in these marks.

Celebrimbor reached out and ran his fingers softly over the scars of Morgoth’s chaining on Annatar’s arms, the snarled knot on his chest where Aulë’s bond had been, the bite marks at the throat that Gorthaur had received from Huan. His fingers traced their way up the Maia’s jaw, across the cheeks and finally, feather-light, along the fine line that cut through Annatar’s left eyebrow.

Received while protecting me and the ones dear to me. So many battles, so many bonds. But at what cost? Can you learn to bear this better? Can you learn to stand with your back straight and shoulders back, and smile, even while the tears and cracks all over you are growing? How often can you carve out part of yourself until nothing is left?

Celebrimbor looked up into the dark, fathomless eyes of the Maia. “Can you teach me how to exist, being torn in two?” he whispered.

For a while, there was silence. Then Annatar let out something almost like a sigh. “Oh, Tyelperinquar.” He reached out and pulled Celebrimbor into an embrace; each one clinging to the other like a lifeline, each one burying his face in the other’s neck. Thus they stood, like two crippled trees in the middle of a wasteland, after the surrounding forest that they had grown up in had long since eroded away.

*

July and the first half of August passed, and with them the relentless heat that drifted up from the reaches of northern Harad – heat that turned the midday sun into an incandescent globe of white in a cloudless turquoise sky, that rendered noon-shadows ink-black and short; the white-hot light banishing them into alleys and under windowsills and in the cool lecture halls of the university.

The days grew shorter and the weather more gentle, the late summer rains drifted in from the plains of Rhûn, and the scorched plains and the grey-brown, burnt slopes of Amon Tirion bloomed with fresh and delicate green. The days were still warm, but the nights grew fresh and crisp, with the first hint of autumn on the air. The new semester had not yet begun, thus Celebrimbor and Annatar had currently no teaching obligations and were mostly focused on their own studies. Which meant that Celebrimbor spent nearly every night outside with his telescopes and trying to further develop the imaging technology a postgraduate student had come up with in order to prove the red-shift of certain celestial bodies.

Annatar, on the other hand, was in the clinic nearly every day. He needed neither sleep nor rest, and most of the staff preferred to take the gentler late summer months partially off to be with their families. The Maia, who had neither preferred times of the year nor family, took over their shifts for them, while working on his research on the side.

At times, their side projects coincided, such as when a selected few research colleagues came to their house upon the hill, when it would inevitably fall to Celebrimbor to abandon his darkroom and take over the duties of hospitality, because Annatar was way too taken up discussing their research to care a fig about being a good host.

On one such afternoons, Professor Doctor Tamaritha Pathrami was their guest. She worked alongside Annatar in the hospital, and also co-authored his current research papers on immunology. She was a stern-faced woman of about sixty, her greying black hair bound into a long braid that feel down her back, yet – and quite startlingly to her austere expression and behaviour – perpetually dressed in the colourful wrapping gowns of Eastern Rhûn, going so far as to go to work like this and expressly violate the dress code in the clinic. Her only reasoning given when asked was, “I have been chief physician for over twenty years now. I can do what I want. Besides, they can do with a bit of colour – whoever is supposed to get healthy with all that white around yourself?”

Celebrimbor always made sure to be present when Doctor Pathrami was there – at first glance, she was all edges and corners you could cut yourself on, but at second glance she had a brilliant sense of humour, as dry as the desert, and in discussions she could give Annatar a run for his money.

Doctor Pathrami, as it was, held firmly to a few principles in her life:

Work hard, and you shall reap the reward. Do not expect to be given anything if you do not give something first.

Do not ask me to change into a white frock while at work.

And thirdly, but not least of them: Respect is earned through deeds, and not given due to name or status.

Which had the delightful consequence that Doctor Pathrami had about as little misgivings to completely rake a lesser god over the coals as she would have done with an assistant doctor fresh out of the university.

Which was, incidentally, just what she was doing now.

Celebrimbor was on his way out of the kitchen with a fresh carafe of elderberry juice, right in time to hear her say:

“ – cannot risk an immunotherapy with monoclonal antibodies this if the result is going to be a cytokine storm that is going to kill the patient anyway and even quicker than the tumour.”

Annatar had been listening to her – not interrupting, but listening – but Celebrimbor could see how he was drumming his fingers impatiently on his knee under the table. “Which is exactly why I was suggesting combining it with corticosteroids or antibodies that target IL-6 .”

“On an already weakened patient?” Pathrami leaned forward over the table. “And how do you suggest that we keep them alive for the duration of the treatment? IL-6R antibodies are contraindicated during infections and half of our cancer patients are ticking off a list of all known infections as it is. You know as well as I do that we cannot hermetically seal them off, not even in quarantine. Their immune system is compromised enough as it is; never mind the added danger of anaphylactic shocks.”

“Everything we do is balancing risks,” Annatar countered. “At some point you are going to have to pick the poison the patient can live with.”

Pathrami leaned back, folding her arms. “It’s exactly your risk assessment that makes me worry, Annatar-sidhra.” Even after a decade working side by side, Pathrami had not dispensed with the honorific suffixes. “A poison that the patient can live with – live being the operative word. What you are proposing is an extremely high-risk approach. We cannot, at this point in time, allow it as a general treatment.”

Annatar steepled his fingers. “I am trying to expedite the research concerning the Genome Decoding Project. If we get to the point where we can analyze the underlying genetic factors that promote cancerogenesis, we might be able to attack the problem at the root and dispense with the side-effect-fraught treatments we are now relying on. What is more, the studies on the use of monoclonal antibodies are sound. I do realize that we are doing frontier research and I acknowledge the added risks of trying something new. But we must explore new avenues and conduct another round of trials.”

Pathrami sighed and rubbed her forehead, then took off her glasses and massaged the bridge of her nose. “Very well,” she conceded. “Run the trial. Keep the sample group to a middling size, and keep immunocompromised and pregnant people out of it for the time being. I’ll have them overhaul the quarantine station in the clinic. We’ll need new air filters installed anyhow. I’ll tell Yevel to overhaul the quarantine protocol, too.”

“Good.” Annatar nodded. “Thank you.”

Celebrimbor approached the table. “I heard you talking in acronyms again and took that as my cue to interfere. Are you pushing the boundaries of medicine yet again?” he asked, setting down the carafe and taking a seat at the table.

“Annatar-sidhra is certainly pushing something,” Pathrami said with a side-glance at the Maia. “Though to what end and effect, we do not know yet.”

“Cowardice never won anybody anything,” Annatar said blithely, filling his glass and taking a sip of juice.

“Easy for you to say,” Pathrami countered. “Mortality is merely a curio in the big landscape of human life for you. You wouldn’t have to suffer the consequences of your errors in any case.”

Annatar raised one eyebrow. “I might not be human, but I am capable of empathy.”

“Still, you will always remain one step removed from it all,” the doctor said with a shake of her head. “Believe me, if you ever had to fear for your own mother – or worse, your own child – dying like that, and be it during a promising trial run for new treatments – you wouldn’t speak so easily of this.”

“Easy or not, we must risk something if we are to have a chance at progress.”

“Yes, but do not forget that we are risking someone else’s lives. We are playing cards and the stakes are the livelihoods of other people.”

“I am aware,” Annatar said slowly.

“Good. See that you keep it in mind,” Pathrami said, emptied her glass, and stood. “Sidhre, if you will excuse me. As enjoyable as it is to come here, there remains work for me to do.”

Annatar stood as well. “Of course. I will see you out.”

“I can find the door, Annatar-sidhra, I’ve been here often enough.” Pathrami gathered her skirts around her, but a smile was tugging on her thin lips.

“I have utmost faith in your ability to navigate our abode. There remains, however, the matter of common courtesy,” Annatar said and offered her his arm.

“My, aren’t we well-mannered,” she said, but took the arm, her smile widening.

Celebrimbor got up and followed a few steps after them, deftly stepping over Ghost, who had stretched himself out luxuriously right on the doorstep leading towards the hallway. He tried not to think about what it meant that unconsciously avoiding cat-obstacles had become second nature to him by now.

“By the way,” Pathrami said as she was putting on her sandals in front of the door, “have you looked over the shift schedule for next month in the emergency section? We are three people short ever since Yue took ill.”

Annatar shrugged. “I am aware. I can fill in for her.”

Pathrami nodded. “Good.” She looked at Celebrimbor. “What about you, sidhra? Won’t you consider giving up the study of stars and black holes and descend to the gritty depths of every-day worries of mortal people?”

Celebrimbor grimaced. “Thank you for asking, but no. The clinic doesn’t fit me, I’m afraid. I would make a lousy physician, as I have been repeatedly told by trusted sources.” He glanced at Annatar.

“Ah, balderdash! I know that you are handy with tools – do not think I haven’t seen your prototypes for the people in nuclear medicine. But I guess not everyone is cut out to be either around sick or dying people at all times, or elbow-deep in someone’s intestines.” Pathrami sighed. “Surgeons,” she added, as if she was speaking of her least-favourite grand-nephews.

She finished lacing her sandals, straightened, and looked at both of them. “Anyway – I must be going. Have a nice day. We’ll meet soon again, I think.”

“We will.” Annatar opened the door. “Good bye.”

Pathrami nodded, then turned to walk across the patio, along the white-paved path and out through the garden gate.

“A delightful woman,” Celebrimbor said with a smile as they returned to the kitchen. “I’ll never get tired of her visits.”

“You just like her because she has absolutely no reverence for the powers and talks to me like to a green undergraduate.” Annatar took his glass and wandered over to the sofa, where he gracefully sat down and crossed his legs.

“If you mean by this that she doesn’t treat you with the wide-eyed admiration of the younger generations – yes.” Celebrimbor sat down next to him.

Annatar snorted. “That’s putting it mildly. She seems to find my very nature a disqualifying factor when it comes to dealing with the issues of mortals.”

“She was an atheist before she got to know you,” Celebrimbor said and nudged Annatar with his elbow. “Give her a bit of time to acclimatize to the fact that the gods are real – and interfering in her work.”

“She’s had years to acclimatize to that fact.”

“Maybe she’s enjoying prolonging the process,” Celebrimbor chuckled.

“Oh, that she does,” Annatar said darkly, taking another sip of his juice.

In this moment, there came a knock on the door.

Celebrimbor craned his head around to look in the direction of the hallway. “Did the professor forget something?”

Annatar frowned. “It seems like it.” He got up and went outside. Celebrimbor heard the door being opened and the sound of soft voices. He frowned. It didn’t sound like Pathrami. He waited for Annatar to reply, say something, shut the door.

But he didn’t. In fact, there was no sound at all coming from the hallway.

Suddenly – for reasons he did not know – there was a lump lodged in Celebrimbor’s throat, and his chest felt too tight, too constricted.

Something is wrong.

He hurriedly got up from the sofa, and went out into the hallway.

Annatar was standing in the doorframe, one hand still on the handle. He and the people outside were stark black silhouettes in the backlight of the sinking sun, so Celebrimbor didn’t recognize the strangers immediately.

It was only when the foremost person spoke – a slightly hoarse, feminine voice, with a distinct Telerin accent, but the crystal-clear enunciation of a Quenya speaker – that realization struck.

“Well met, cousin,” the woman said. “I do hope I don’t come at an inopportune time.”

She took a step forward, into the shadow of the hallway, and in the half-light of the late afternoon, Celebrimbor saw the face of his cousin Celebrían.

*

It took about half an hour for Celebrimbor’s hands to stop shaking, and another ten minutes for his eyes to flit to Celebríans guards, who had taken up their posts at a corner of the terrace, trying to look unobtrusive. One guard was especially restless. His eyes kept wandering towards Annatar and he looked like he wanted nothing more than to drag his mistress out of this house and far away. Only at a second glance did Celebrimbor recognize the Gil-Galad’s former steward. Elrond Peredhil – so he has left Lindon at long last? On any other day, he might have wondered what this meant for shifted alliances and powers in northern Middle-earth, but today, Celebrimbor merely registered the face and filed it away as a curiosity to be examined later.

Annatar’s face, on the other hand, had been as carved from stone from the moment that Celebrimbor had invited his cousin in, and he hadn’t spoken a single word.

Now they sat down on the terrace table while the sun hung low in the western sky. There was a warm breeze coming from the south, stirring the crowns of the trees which were throwing shadows as long and sharp as lances across the wild olive gardens below the terrace wall.

Uncomfortable silence reigned for a few seconds, during which Celebrían regarded both Annatar and Celebrimbor with a penetrating gaze that reminded the latter uncomfortably of her mother.

“How are things at home?” Celebrimbor managed to get out at last. “I trust Lady Artanis and Lord Celeborn are fine?”

“They are,” Celebrían replied, taking a sip of juice from the very same carafe Celebrimbor had prepared for Pathrami. “The same goes for you, I hope?”

“It does.”

“You’ve settled down quite far from the coast,” Celebrían noted, looking around. “It’s a very different climate here than in Eregion, though admittedly pleasant.”

“The winters are warmer, for sure,” Celebrimbor said tonelessly, trying to stomp down the ghosts of the past that were rising all around him. “The summers –”

“Enough pleasantries,” Annatar suddenly cut in sharply. “Why are you here?”

Everyone looked at him. Silence fell like a hammer onto an anvil, leaving the air ringing with the sudden absence of sound. Even the birds had fallen quiet.

Celebrían slowly turned her head, sizing the Maia up. “We haven’t been properly introduced before, I think.”

“Introductions are needless,” Annatar said quietly. His tone was dangerous, like the last warning growl of a mountain lion before the pounce. “You know who I am. I know who you are – the incumbent ruler of Eregion, for one. Which is why I repeat myself: What are you doing here?”

Celebrían raised an eyebrow. “Right now? I was trying to reacquaint myself with a long-lost relation of mine, Annatar,” she replied. “But seeing how you seem to take issue with this, it seems that I must dispense with my care and curiosity about Telperinquar and cut to the quick of the matter.”

“Please do,” Annatar ground out between clenched teeth.

Celebrían inclined her head to one side, not taking her eyes off the Maia. Her fingers were drumming a slow, measured rhythm on the polished surface of the table. “My mother did not send me, if that is what you are worried about.”

Annatar’s face was carefully still, but Celebrimbor recognized the smallest of twitches in his jaw muscles.

“Annatar,” Celebrimbor said warningly.

The Maia spared him a quick side-glance, but nothing more.

Celebrimbor took a deep breath, then leaned forward, clasping his hands on the table. “I must be honest with you, cousin. I did not expect your visit, and frankly, I cannot make heads or tails of it, either. I can only assume that there is an important reason for you to undertake so long a journey – and I hope that the reason for it isn’t anything dire.”

Celebrían raised both eyebrows. It was the first sign of surprise on her side. “Ah. No, nothing dire, I can assure you.” She waited and watched Celebrimbor and Annatar for a few moments, noticing that the tension hadn’t lessened one bit. “This is not about my family, the rule of Eregion, or the Ring business,” Celebrían said bluntly. “With that off the table, I do hope that we can speak more amicably, because I didn’t undertake this journey to be insulted or brushed off.”

Annatar’s eyes narrowed, but he didn’t respond.

Celebrimbor cut in before the situation could take a turn for the worse again. “Of course, cousin. No insult was intended. We are surprised, that is all.”

“You are afraid. Be honest.” Celebrían leaned back in her chair, her eyes steel-sharp, her posture ramrod-straight. In the very same moment, she seemed to become aware of it, though, and with a conscious effort, her posture became laxer, her gaze warmer. “There is no need for fear. I do not come as an agent of revenge, and I represent no one’s interests but my own. In fact, if this sets your mind at ease,” and she looked at Annatar as she was saying this, “my mother was strictly against me coming here. That should ascertain you of the nature of my motives.”

Celebrimbor smiled wanly. “I imagine it does. What brings you here then, cousin? What scheme have you contrived to earn the displeasure of Lady Artanis?”

“A most despicable one, for sure.” Celebrían briefly returned the smile, but her expression turned serious again when her gaze landed on Annatar. “I do understand that you have taken up medicine as a profession.”

Annatar’s shoulders were as tense as bow strings. “Yes. Do you find that objectionable? For an ad-hominem reason, perhaps?”

“Not at all. If I disliked ideas just because I dislike the people that have put them forth, I would be a poor ruler indeed. Not to mention that I would be all out of ideas.” She smiled thinly. “No, Annatar, even knowing that your prowess in anatomy might have come from objectionable deeds, I do not object to you taking up medicine, seeing how you seem to have focused on the healing aspect of it – and less the dissecting parts.”

Annatar regarded her with narrowed eyes. From the corner of his eyes, Celebrimbor could see Elrond standing one step in front of the other guards, still seemingly ready to leap forward and draw his sword if the Maia should make any untoward motion towards his lady.

Celebrían seemed undeterred by the Maia’s inimical behaviour. “What is your current focus, if I may ask? I am not at home in the subject, merely an interested laywoman.”

“Why should I tell you?”

“Humour me,” Celebrían said. “I’ve heard it told that you respect genuine interest.”

Annatar raised one eyebrow, visibly tempted to inquire who was telling those stories about him, but at long last replied, “Investigating and reversing genetic degradation and detrimental genetic mutations in humans. Undoing ageing processes in telomeres.”

Now it was Celebrían’s turn to raise an eyebrow. “Aiming for immortality?”

“Humans cannot become immortal,” Annatar replied blandly.

“Quite. And you are not making them immortal, merely eliminating every natural cause of death for them.”

Annatar met her gaze impassively. “If you want to put it that way.”

“So you are depriving them of Eru’s gift?” Celebrían asked.

“If you ask humans, this gift is not as popular as one would think; toted by those unaffected by mortality though it might be,” Annatar said. “I’ve always found it quite noteworthy that the staunchest defenders of death were those who didn’t have to suffer it.”

Celebrían tilted her head to one side, giving him a considering look. “I see your point. And yet this sounds like something that is very much against the spirit of the rulebook of Eru.”

Annatar shrugged. “He should have written a better rulebook, then. If you leave a loophole, don’t fault anyone for finding it and making use of it.”

That, at last, coaxed a small smile out of her. “You’ve missed you calling as a lawyer.”

“I’m fine in medicine,” Annatar replied, his face remaining impassive. “Less nitpicking and arguments. More pragmatism.”

“Even in ethics panels?”

“Those are the exception to the rules,” Annatar replied drily.

Celebrían smirked. “Tell me you cannot stand the panels without using as many words.”

Annatar did not respond to her attempt at levity. “As flattering as your interest might be to someone else,” he said, his voice taut with icy politeness, “I do not see why we are talking about my work. This isn’t a professional interview.”

Celebrían’s face turned sober once more. “In that you are mistaken. It very much is.”

Annatar froze. Celebrimbor straightened in his chair.

“Pardon me?” the Maia said, each word enunciated very clearly, very slowly.

Celebrían leaned back in her chair, crossing one knee over the other and resting her hands on them. “It is very much a professional interview. If you want it to be, that is.”

Annatar eyed Celebrían with the look of a wild cat that had seen a hunter lay out a poisoned bait. “And why would that be, I wonder?”

Celebrían met his gaze. “Surely you are aware that news of your progress in certain fields of medicine have reached as far as Númenor. Your new healing methods are spoken of everywhere where Men have settled – which is everywhere, nowadays.” She cocked her head slightly. “You are making waves, Annatar.” She paused. “Was that in bad taste? If yes, I apologize.”

It took Celebrimbor a moment to make the connection. So, as it seemed, did Annatar. Celebrimbor cleared his throat.

“The Bay survived,” the Maia said tonelessly.

“Yes, thankfully,” Celebrían said. “But back to the topic at hand: You do not need me to tell you that what you and your fellow physicians here in Western Rhûn are researching could revolutionize everything we know of medicine. I have heard the talk in our own university, and everywhere my messengers bring me tidings from, they hardly seem to have anything of more import to relate.”

Annatar’s expression was unreadable. “And?”

“You might have heard of the approaching symposium of oncologists in Northern Eriador. Ost-in-Edhil is hosting the conference next year,” Celebrían said.

Celebrimbor went very still. So did Annatar.

“I think a name as prominent as yours would fit well on the guest list – not to mention that you could have something to contribute that everyone attending would be interested in,” Celebrían said evenly.

Annatar did not respond. He did not move. He looked as still that he might as well have been cut from stone. Celebrimbor’s own heart gave one slow, painful thump, and only then seemed to resume its beating – though fluttering and hurried.

“You are – inviting us?” Celebrimbor managed to get out.

“Indeed I am,” Celebrían said.

“Bold of you to assume that I would make the journey for a three-day-symposium,” Annatar said. His voice was calm, but Celebrimbor could spot his clenched fist under the tabletop.

“I wasn’t assuming anything of that sort,” Celebrían said. “I also wasn’t assuming that what you had to offer to the world of medicine stopped at breakthroughs in oncology, which you were kind enough to confirm for me. Which is why I intended to offer you a tenure at the university of Ost-in-Edhil.”

Annatar froze. Utterly, and completely froze.

“You’re not serious,” Celebrimbor said. He wasn’t sure how he managed to sound as calm and collected as he did, what with his heart lurching and stumbling and wanting to smash its way out of his ribcage. His vision was swimming slightly, the world seemed to tilt a few degrees to the left.

“I rode hundreds of miles to extend the offer in person,” his cousin said. “I had hoped it would count for something, as far as gestures go.”

For a while there was absolute silence at the table. Not even the guards in the background dared to shift their weight from one foot to the other.

Then, suddenly, Annatar was on his feet and with a rush of cloth, vanished inside the house.

Everyone stared after him, Celebrían half-twisted around in her chair. When she turned back, she looked at Celebrimbor enquiringly.

Celebrimbor was already halfway out of his chair. “Excuse us for a moment, cousin,” he said, not even waiting for her to respond before he followed the Maia inside.

He found Annatar in their shared bedroom. The orange evening light was filtering in horizontal bars through the blinds, throwing hard, merciless shadows across the room like prison bars. Annatar was sitting on his side of the bed, his back to the door, staring at the closed shutters.

Celebrimbor quietly rounded the bed and sat down next to him, the mattress dipping under their combined weight. For a while, neither spoke.

Annatar kept staring straight ahead, one hand clenched around the other to the point where his nails were in danger of breaking skin. His pupils were pinpricks, his jaw taut.

Tentatively, Celebrimbor reached over and placed his hand across Annatar’s.

“She meant well,” he said quietly.

And with those words, a spell seemed to be broken. In an instant, the Maia was on his feet and in his eyes there was fire, and the room was suddenly too hot for comfort. A hot dry desert breeze that came from nowhere stirred the curtains, making shadows dance around the room like dark flames.

“If she meant well then she would have stayed away from here, instead of barging into our lives and seeking to turn them on their heads!” Annatar snarled. “How dare she prance in here with that smug expression of hers and throw us this offer as if we were dogs that could be lured by a mouldy bone?” His shoulders were heaving; his breath was coming hard. The Maia was a hair’s breadth away from losing his temper, which would end badly for everyone involved.

Celebrimbor forced himself to stay seated. He reached out, grasped Annatar’s hand and pulled him back down to sit on the bed.

“Calm down,” he said, quietly but firmly. “You are upset, and I understand why. But you are seeing ulterior motives where there are none.”

Annatar tore his hand away. “None? Do you honestly mean to tell me that Galadriel’s daughter came here out of the goodness of her heart after – what? – a millennium and a half? – to tell us that she will graciously allow us to return from exile? Now? Just like that?” Annatar shook his head. “No. No. I do not believe it. And I already told you once. Never again will I be treated like a dog left out in the rain and grovel in the mud when I’m allowed back into the house.”

“Nobody expected you to do anything of the sort,” Celebrimbor said, his tone still even, but now with an edge of sharpness. “You are projecting.”

“And you are deluded if you think that this offer doesn’t come with strings attached,” Annatar shot back. “What reason do they have to invite us back? They were glad enough to see our backs – or mine, at the very least. They know who I am, don’t think I don’t know that. I will not insult your cousin’s intelligence by implying she is too stupid to know what she is doing. She has an ulterior motive.”

“She does. Which she told you about,” Celebrimbor replied. “She wants your expertise. Isn’t that self-serving enough for the offer to be believable?”

“Self-serving enough to make inviting Gorthaur into your city believable?” Annatar threw his head back and laughed. It was an ugly sound. “Yes! Yes, it is, Tyelperinquar. With all due respect for the egotism and the overconfidence of your family – that is a step too far even for your kin.”

“You have spent a long time making amends. She knows as well as I do that you will not revert to what you did in the First Age.”

“But do you?” Annatar asked, suddenly deadly serious again and regarding Celebrimbor without blinking. His amber eyes seemed like an abyss all of a sudden; they resembled now the molten gold of the magma that moved deep under Arda’s crust. Celebrimbor became acutely aware once again that he was sitting side by side with a being that was older than a universe in which even he was hardly more than a child.

“I am eternal,” Annatar said. “And I have shown my potential for boundless evil. This potential is neither gone nor diminished just because I chose to act friendly for a few centuries or millennia. The past proves or disproves nothing when it comes to possibilities that have always been there. You know this. She knows this. You will never be able to tell when I lie. You will also never know when I am honest. I am too good at what I am doing. I will out-act, out-smart, out-manoeuvre you every time.” He spoke calmly, in a way that was very measured. “There is no way of knowing. There is just hoping – a fool’s hope, when you are dealing with someone like me.”

“Then I am a fool,” Celebrimbor said tiredly. “And maybe my cousin is as well. Will you condemn us for having hope?”

Annatar’s glance darkened, then he looked away. Clearly, he believed nothing of the sort to be the case with Celebrían.

Celebrimbor regarded him wordlessly for a few moments. His blood seemed to be pulsing under his skin. There was thumping in his veins, a pressure that sought a vent for release. He distantly realized that his hands were shaking with a slight tremor.

“Are you sure that you are angry?” Celebrimbor asked quietly.

Annatar threw him a side-glance. “Pray, what else would I be?”

Celebrimbor looked down at his hands, his own fingers, which were restlessly kneading themselves. “Afraid?” he ventured.

Annatar snorted. “Afraid? What should I be afraid of?”

Celebrimbor was silent for a few moments, not looking at his partner, merely watching his hands which seemed to have taken on a life of their own – an outlet for a restless energy that was just waiting to burst forth from under his skin.

“Of taking the offer into consideration,” he said at last, glancing at Annatar. “Imagining what it would be like – to return.”

The Maia went still. A few seconds ticked by, the clock in the hallway counting them out – impossibly loud in the otherwise complete silence. “No,” he said sharply. Then, repeated, “No. We said we weren’t going back. We said we were done with looking back. Nothing good came of it.”

“I know what we said.”

“Yes, and?”

“I always imagined myself shutting out the past for good,” Celebrimbor said tonelessly. “I never imagined it coming knocking wearing the face of my cousin, and politely asking me whether I wanted to be invited back in.”

Silence. Again.

“You are considering it,” Annatar straightened where he sat, as if bracing for a blow.. His tone was unreadable. Incredulity? Anger? Betrayal? Shock? It was impossible to tell what he was feeling just now.

“Aren’t you, as well?” Celebrimbor asked softly. “If it were as absurd an offer as you claim it is, would you have left the table as you did?”

“So you want to go back?” Annatar kept looking at him. The weight and heat of his gaze was bordering on being uncomfortable, but Celebrimbor said nothing – he already wanted to crawl out of his own skin as it was. What was one more little discomfort?

Celebrimbor thought long about his answer. “Yes,” he said at last. “And no.” He wrapped his arms around his torso, a half-conscious gesture of defence, retreat, of self-protection. “I still keep dreaming of it – how it was. Before. But I also know that there is no returning to this place, this time – these … people that we left there.” He sighed and ran his palm down his face. “And when I think about returning, of putting aside the daydream and doing it for real, I – I am afraid. Afraid of what we might find. Of what we might not find. Of realizing that all that time, I have been chasing something that has been lost a thousand years ago, only to live with disappointment and loss for all the years to come.” He hesitated. “And I am afraid of what it might do to us.” He let out a deep breath. “And yet, the dream remains.”

Annatar was silent. Seconds passed in utter stillness. Seconds turned into minutes. Then Annatar reached out and this time it was he who took Celebrimbor’s hands in his own.

“I am sorry,” he said quietly.

Celebrimbor regarded their joined hands, their interlaced fingers. “For what?”

Annatar didn’t reply immediately. “For everything. For forcing you to tear yourself in two, most of all.”

“It was my choice to leave,” Celebrimbor replied.

“Just as it was mine when I left the Smith. And yet the fact remains that we wouldn’t have walked away if there had been any other path open to us.”

Celebrimbor was still looking at their hands, but the image was out of focus, blurry, and his thoughts were only half there, though the words were clear in his ears.

“Tyelperinquar.”

The elf blinked, then looked up, only to find the Maia looking directly back at him. The eldritch fire was gone from his eyes. Right then Annatar just looked like any other Incarnate – the radiance of his spirit quenched, the overwhelming force of his mind shut away. He looked finite, somehow, then and there. Comprehensible, for once. Tired.

“You should not have to go one like this,” the Maia said.

Celebrimbor blinked, pulling himself back from that remote place that his spirit seemed to yearn to linger in. “What are you saying?”

“I am saying that you are still hurting,” Annatar said. “After all those years you remain torn. The wound you inflicted upon yourself – that I inflicted upon you hasn’t healed. I am beginning to think that it might forever remain so. And I do not want this for you.”

Celebrimbor frowned. “I do not regret the choices that I made.”

Annatar leaned forward and tipped his chin upward, so they were looking straight into each other’s eyes. “Neither do I – at least not the one that left the scar on my chest. And yet you can hurt even without regret and despite the absolute certainty that you would not act differently.”

Celebrimbor remained silent. Something in his chest clenched. There was a weight upon him that he was rarely aware of in the daylight hours. It usually came in the still, dark hours of the night, when dreams and fears and thoughts grew to many times their usual sizes.

Annatar was still looking at him. “You cannot always remain torn in two, Tyelperinquar. This world needs you hale and whole.” He hesitated. “I want you to be one and whole.”

“We cannot go back and undo what we did, you yourself have said so many times,” Celebrimbor said.

“No, we can’t.” Annatar said. “But maybe we can move forward.”

Celebrimbor leaned back, puzzled. “What are you suggesting, Annatar? Not half an hour ago you were nearly up in arms about the mere suggestion of taking my cousin up on her offer.”

“Half an hour ago I only saw your cousin and myself,” Annatar said. “Now I see you. And I changed my mind. There are more important things in this world than what I want or deem reasonable.”

When Celebrimbor didn’t reply, he added, “Maybe we need to go back, and allow things to come full circle, at long last.”

What we want and what we need. Oh, what a kind world it would be if those two would always coincide. Celebrimbor dropped his gaze. His breath was heavy and cold upon his own lower lip. We swore not to return, to this place of old hurts and limitless potential, and even more limitless danger. What if we relapse because we get too close to what once nearly pulled us both in? Come full circle. Become a Ring. The image was there in his mind, an arc of fire that closed in, its end meeting its beginning, a circle of flame and brightness. Too similar, too close, too dangerous. Do we really want to tempt fate thus? He didn’t voice his thoughts aloud.

“Are you not in the least afraid to go back?” he asked instead.

“As afraid as I ever was of something, in my long, long existence in this world,” Annatar said evenly.

“You don’t sound like it.”

“I am a good actor.”

Celebrimbor sighed and buried his face in his hands. For a while, he just remained like that, hidden away from the world and its decisions for a few moments of grace – before he straightened to face them once more.

 “I will not go alone,” he said. “I told you back at the bay, and I stand by what I said. We go together, or not at all.”

Annatar held his gaze. “Say the word, and I will go with you.”

Celebrimbor just sat there, a droning in his ears, his veins, his heart, that nearly drowned out everything that the Maia said. He felt slightly dizzy, and detached from himself as if he was standing one pace to the left of his own body and looking down at the scene as a distant spectator. Then, suddenly, almost unconsciously, he felt the corners of his mouth tugging upwards.

He glanced to the side, at Annatar who was sitting next to him. “Does that mean that we are finally going home?”

Annatar considered this, turning over the question in his head.

What does ‘home’ even mean for one of the Eternal Ones? Celebrimbor wondered. Did he ever have a home before? At Aulë’s side? At Morgoth’s?

The Maia seemed to consider the same question. His face was pensive, then a shadow that had been upon his fair face lifted and, at last, he smiled when he looked at Celebrimbor and took his hand. “Yes. Yes, I think we are going home.”

He hesitated. “On one condition, though.”

Celebrimbor raised an eyebrow, taken aback. “And what might that be?”

Annatar looked straight at him, very serious at first, but then the corner of his mouth twitched and his eyebrow quirked up a bit. “This time we are not going to walk.”

*

Three days later, after visiting Azamûn, the university, and the hospital, the delegation of Lady Celebrían and her entourage took their leave. It was agreed that Annatar and Celebrimbor would follow later, after they had set their affairs in the city in order.

It was strange – clearing out their personal possessions that had gathered around them over the turning of the years like so many strange animals. The cats, they would be taking along, and Annatar would hear no complaints about it. Leaving them, he said, was out of the question – and in any case, he would take care of the logistics himself, alone, so he didn’t see why anyone should be bothered by it.

The very last thing to do was selling their house.

Celebrimbor was surprised by how little sadness he felt when he was standing in the empty living room, mostly cleared of furniture and utterly empty of personal belongings – a space now, like any other, but no longer a home. Sunlight slanted in through the windows in golden spears of light, dust danced in the air and glittered like gold.

Celebrimbor slowly, as if in trance, walked through the room, brushing his fingers over the sofa, now covered in a white dust sheet – as were the armchairs, and the chairs.

“They look like burial shrouds,” he said quietly. “Is this the eulogy to a lost home?”

“You are in a morbid mood tonight,” Annatar said, detaching himself from the shadows of a corner of the room. “Lingering will not make it better. Say your goodbyes.”

“Oh, I did. A hundred times over.”

Celebrimbor looked around, at this place where they had lived for so long, their past echoes imprinted like ghostly images wherever he looked. The sofa that had seen so many discussions and arguments, break-downs and reconciliations. The desk where Celebrimbor had written his papers on subatomic particles, and Annatar had proof-read and edited it for him. He imagined that he could still see their shades, hunched over the desk, shoulder to shoulder, deep in discussion, even deeper in thought.

Despite his words, Celebrimbor made his way through every room one last time. The kitchen where they had spent so many hours trying their more or less apt way through the Rhûnic cuisine. The bedroom they had shared; the echoes of warmth that was long gone on the now stripped mattress. The bathroom where he had suddenly pulled Annatar into the running shower one evening, and the Maia had reacted so much like an outraged cat that they had both ended up on the floor. Considering how many dark hours this house had seen, remembering these rare moments when there had been nothing but breathless, carefree laughter made those brief, fleeting vignettes of joy and levity seem all the more precious.

At last, Celebrimbor came to the door where the Maia was waiting, together with his horde of cats and few bags of belongings that would be all that they were taking along with them on their journey.

Strange, Celebrimbor thought, how much importance we place in owning things, and how few of them actually matter. How curious that in the end, a life can be condensed down into a few rucksacks and bags.

“Are you done?” Annatar asked.

“I am,” the elf replied, hoisting the heaviest rucksack onto his back and taking four other bags in his hands. “Will you be able to carry the rest?”

“Oh, I’m not going to carry them. At least for now.” With a small gesture of Annatar’s left hand, the bags floated up in the air and followed after him when he opened the door and stepped outside into the golden-red evening light. The world around them was burnished gold and copper. The leaves of the olive trees in their front garden were glazed with bronze. Lake Lornîn was a mirror of the sky – gone up in flames and radiant colours.

Annatar didn’t heed the spectacular view for very long. Instead, he turned around, took the key and locked the door, before placing the key under a terracotta vase next to the doorstep where Pathrami would be able to find it later.

“That’s it,” Celebrimbor said quietly, looking at the door that they had closed behind themselves for the last time.

“That’s it,” Annatar agreed.

“To the hilltop, then?” Celebrimbor asked.

“Yes. I will need some open space.”

Together, they trudged uphill, and the cats dutifully followed. After only a few steps, Celebrimbor’s arms and legs were hurting from the weight on his back and carried by his hands.

“I am truly glad that we will not be walking,” he said, his breath coming in laboured puffs. “I don’t know how I would carry all those things hundreds of miles back north.”

“Neither do I,” Annatar said. “Which is why we are going to be smart about it. After you leading me across the entire continent five times in the past, I have quite enough of scenic routes.”

At long last they reached the hilltop, which had been cleared of trees and bushes, enough to create an open space of about one hundred feet in diameter. Annatar looked around, assessing the room that he would have, then nodded.

“This will work.” He caught his cats one after the other, put them into the woven baskets with air-holes that he had prepared for them, secured them with belts so they wouldn’t open, and then turned towards Celebrimbor. “Are you ready?”

“As ready as I will ever be,” Celebrimbor said, setting down his bags and rucksack and rolling his aching shoulder. He took a last, lingering look at the gentle Rhûnian autumn evening around them. Felt the warm air, took in the scent of jasmine, the brown, green slopes of the hills, the great rise of the volcano. “Well then. Work your magic.”

“Oh, I will.” Annatar looked at him and for once, honest to Varda, grinned. “You might want to take a step back for this.”

Celebrimbor obeyed, and not a moment too soon.

Annatar raised his hands. His eyes flashed golden. Only an instant later, a white-hot glow swallowed the Maia, the clearing, and then the entire hilltop.

*

Celebrían was just sitting in a conference regarding trade agreements with Greenwood and Lindon when her advisor and messenger burst into the sitting room.

“My lady!” the messenger shouted, and then doubled over to catch his breath.

Celebrían’s scribe, Anwyn, flinched and nearly allowed a blot of ink to fall on the draft of the agreement that they had hashed out over painful, long hours of discussion and haggling about minutiae. Elrond, Lord Oropher, Lord Amdír, and High-king Gil-Galad all turned their heads with frowns on their faces.

“I say!” Lord Amdír exclaimed. “What is the meaning of this intrusion?”

Celebrían, too, frowned, though not out of anger at being interrupted. Such unrefined behaviour was highly unusual in her normally so composed advisor and friend, so she was immediately more worried than irritated.

“What is going on, Corryn?” she asked.

“My lady,” Corryn said breathlessly, fighting for every word to make it out of his throat. “There is – there is –”

“Slow down, my friend,” Celebrían said, walking over to the man and putting a hand on his shoulder. She glanced at Elrond, who had stood up, evidently ready to either berate the poor messenger for his interruption – or, more likely, to storm off and see what had agitated him so. Celebrían threw him a long glance and motion for him to sit down, then turned back towards the man gasping for air on her doorstep. “Breathe. What is there?”

The messenger was nearly bent double, his hands on his knees. “It must sound – I must sound like a madman,” he wheezed. “But you must – believe me – my lady.”

“I will, if you tell me what is going on,” she replied calmly.

“There is –” Corryn fought for air. “My lady – there is a dragon in the courtyard.”

Celebrían’s hand dropped away. She looked up and saw the four Elven lords at her table staring back at her. Elrond had gone as pale as a sheet. Meanwhile, the quill had fallen from her scribe’s hands and was slowly spreading a dark stain over the draft of a trade agreement that was suddenly and entirely forgotten.

*

The news had spread through the city like wildfire – which was perhaps an indelicate metaphor considering the rumour of a dragon. Now, in any other city, the inhabitants would have lapsed into panic and ran into the woods the news. Ost-in-Edhil, however, wasn’t any other city. Likewise, its inhabitants were not like any other inhabitants, as Celebrían had come to learn over the years governing it and its people.

Which was why this was probably the only place in the world containing the only bunch of people that could be told the news of a dragon in the main courtyard and not flee, but run towards it. Too see. It was not exactly comprehensible, but it was nevertheless a fact, as so many other things about Ost-in-Edhil and its people were simply that: incomprehensible facts.

Celebrían had to fight her way through throngs of people as soon as she set foot outside of the palace. At some point, her guard caught up with her and created space for her to walk mostly uninhibited. She nearly ran down the steps of the palace that her parents had once built, then marched with crisp steps along a walkway with an arched ceiling, turned a corner – and stopped.

She had told Corryn that she would believe him, and she head meant it.

Nevertheless, it was something entirely different to know of something, and to have something standing right before her eyes – the something in question being a white-scaled dragon that must have been more than hundred feet from head to tail, its long neck reaching high enough to comfortably look over every single building around the courtyard with the sole exception of the palace itself. Its wings were outstretched and put the entire courtyard in shadow. A jagged double-ridge of ivory-coloured spikes ran down its body from head to tail and its claws were as long as a child was tall. If it breathed fire now, a thousand people would be burnt to ashes within the blink of an eye.

Celebrían was too young to have lived to see the great fire-lizards of Morgoth of the First Age, but even so she instinctively knew the destructive, horrifying power of the great reptile before her. She was frozen in her steps, Elrond at her side clasping her hand – she didn’t think that he was aware of doing it. She also saw the Lords behind her, struck into silence by the view of the magnificent beast. Even the High-king, who was old enough that he could hardly be surprised by anything, was silent and still where he stood, his right hand grasping for a sword at his side that was not there.

Just then the great lizard folded its wings, all at once, bathing the courtyard in sunlight again, curled its tail and lowered its head a bit. The crowd surged back a bit in surprise, but there was no panic. Instead, there was utter and complete silence – silence the likes of which shouldn’t be possible with so many living people around that breathed and moved minutely every single moment.

Celebrían was very aware that she should be doing something, but for a moment, she couldn’t move.

“Rían,” Elrond whispered by her side. “We must –”

It was enough to break the spell. She blinked. “Yes, I know.” She stepped forward, the crowd now aware enough of her to part for her. People stepped back and suddenly, there was nothing between her and the dragon. The monster was no more than fifteen feet away from her. If it chose to lunge forward with its long neck, it would be able to snap her up like a mouse.

The reptile, however, did nothing of that sort. It eyed her with slitted pupils surrounded by molten gold. Otherwise, the beast didn’t move, and it didn’t speak.

However, it was just then that someone stepped around the dragon – too close, much too close, closer than any sane being should ever get to such a creature. The shape finished unloading a lot of bags and baskets (some of which were, for inexplicable reasons, meowing). Then it stepped forward, one hand on the flank of the dragon, a shadow in the shade of the huge, folded wings. Only when the figure stepped out of the dark and into the sunlight did Celebrían recognize them.

Her eyes widened.

“Tyelperinquar?”

Her cousin met her eyes, a sheepish grin working over his face. “Hello, Lady Celebrían. I hope we didn’t put you into too much trouble by landing in your courtyard. My companion insisted on alighting here directly, I’m afraid, seeing how he absolutely did not want to walk.”

At those words Celebrimbor looked, incomprehensibly, at the dragon. The great reptile bent its head, looking down at the elf and looking suddenly very smug and very self-satisfied.

Celebrían blinked. It took her an embarrassing moment to reach the obvious conclusion. “Is that – ” She broke of, incredulous.

When it heard her speak, the dragon turned its head and its impossibly smug look upon her. Suddenly, there was a wash of light and wind that made everyone raise their arms before their eyes. When they could see again, Aulë’s fallen Maia was standing in the middle of the courtyard, wearing his preferred form: white-robed, golden-haired, fair of face. The form would have reminded her of a beech in autumn the first time she had set eyes upon him, if something in his nature hadn’t seemingly refused to be compared to a tree, and instead bent her thoughts towards sharply cut gems and veins of gold, to magma and pale opals.

“Ah, so you did accept my offer,” she said flatly.

A few eyes in the crowd turned towards her.

“I do hope you will not make a habit to appear as a dragon in the lecture halls,” Celebrían continued. “We have neither the space nor the gold to replace all the walls, ceilings, and equipment you would break.”

“Not to worry, my lady,” the Maia said evenly. “I reserve those transformations for grand entrances. And wrathful resignations from teaching posts.”

Celebrimbor had the gall to laugh at that.

Celebrían fought down the urge to grimace. “Well, you have proven once and for all that you know how to make an entrance. But enough of the spectacle – come in. We need to get out of the public eye, lest the city life remain at a standstill for the rest of the day.”

“We are very fascinating,” Celebrimbor remarked.

Celebrían let out a heavy, controlled breath. “Come,” she said, already half-turning around. “You must be hungry and thirsty after your journey. I’m sure we can find you something to eat before we get you accommodated.”

It did not much help that she could feel her cousin and his Maia sharing a grin behind her back.

“Are you sure you know what you have gotten yourself into, Rían?” Elrond asked quietly as they climbed the stairs back to the entrance of the palace, their new guests on their heels.

“Not anymore,” Celebrían admitted. “Though I do suspect that interesting times await us.”

“Hopefully not too interesting,” Gil-Galad, who had heard their whispered conversation, remarked. “I will refrain from re-opening this very old argument, but seeking peace with Morgoth’s former lieutenant is a risky gamble.”

“I don’t seek peace with him. I am not naïve enough to appeal to his better nature.” Celebrían flashed him a faint smile. “He is proud, though, and I know he cannot resist the chance to prove himself. I provide him with the stage he desires – and I get the knowledge that could help the humans in our midst. I think we’re making a good trade in a currency both of us are willing to pay.”

Gil-Galad threw her a pointed glance. “Has anybody ever told you,” he said, “that you are very much like your mother, my lady?”

Celebrían laughed. “Everyone! Everywhere! All the time! But truly – I am not. She wouldn’t have stood for him coming here.”

“That much is true,” the High-king said. “And I defer to your cunning – though her wisdom still rings true. It will be interesting to see which of the two will prevail, in the end.”

“As I said, my lord,” Celebrían said with a shrewd smirk. “There are interesting times ahead of us.”

*

Some hours later, after an awkward dinner with Celebrían and the Elven lords, and a few even more awkward introductions, Celebrimbor and Annatar were finally able to flee the stilted noble company, and make a hasty exit.

If their welcoming committee was any indication, reintroducing a now known fallen Maia into the society of Ost-in-Edhil was going to make some waves. There was an exhausting time ahead of them, of that there could be no doubt. Many people here, chief among them Dwarves and Humans, had only ever heard of the terrors of the First Age from the mouths of their grandparents and out of storybooks. Gorthaur was to them nothing more than a nightmarish figure that lived, if anything, on the pages of their fairytale books. Even knowing that the Maia who would from now on be living among them was supposedly one and the same as the monstrous creature in their scariest tales, they wouldn’t be able to truly connect to this knowledge in a way that was required to truly understand the enormity of the fact.

There were, however, others, who had lived long enough to remember the First Age, and not few of them had worked in the guild halls – side by side with a Maia whom they had believed they could trust, only to later learn that they had collaborated with the former lieutenant of Morgoth. Celebrían had warned them beforehand – not every reintroduction would be kind, and they would have to proceed with caution.

Celebrimbor had glanced at Annatar when she had said this, and later asked him whether he was alright.

Annatar just shrugged. “No one said that it would be easy.” He glanced at Celebrimbor. “I did not expect it to be. It’s fine.”

And it was. For tonight, at least, it would be fine. Tomorrow would be another day, but they would cross that bridge as soon as they got to it.

For tonight, though, it was just the two of them.

They climbed through the Rings of the city, until they reached the Third Ring, uppermost in the city and home to the guild quarters. When Celebrimbor climbed the last step of the great stairs leading up from the Second Ring, he stopped.

The gardens stretched out before them, dark and devoid of fireflies now in late autumn. Lightstones glowed along the paths, illuminating the gold and brown and russet of the trees. Beyond the lawns and trees rose a dark, multi-towered silhouette against the inky night-sky that was strewn with stars.

“This feels like a dream,” Celebrimbor whispered.

Annatar, who neither slept nor dreamt, said nothing. Instead, he reached out and laced his fingers through Celebrimbor’s. “You deserve a good dream,” he said quietly.

Celebrimbor nodded. “We do. Both of us.”

And with that, they slowly made their way towards the guild towers, those well-known paths that they had walked a thousand times, and yet believed to never retrace again. Up towards the guild buildings, past the gardens, the terraces, through the main doors – always unlocked, always open for those who desired to come, no matter the time of year or the hour of the day. The hallways were empty at this late hour of the day, the few remaining smiths who were awake at this hour having retreated to their workshops or their private rooms.

Celebrimbor felt his steps slowing as they followed the old, familiar path up the stairs, into the Western Tower, up to the highest level. A weight seemed to descend upon his shoulders, and yet there was a restless, almost exuberant energy in his chest that wanted to burst forth and make him race up to the tower top. When would it stop – this feeling of being torn in two, of being twofold and made up entirely of conflicting desires?

Annatar never let go of his hand. The Maia was a surprisingly calm presence at his side – perhaps sensing the upheaval in Celebrimbor’s mind, and deciding to be the pole star that the elf needed to navigate the troubled waters of his thoughts. Together, they climbed the stairs, until they came, at long last, to a halt at an unassuming wooden door at the very top of the tower.

Celebrimbor just stared at the door for a few moments, his heart beating in his throat for reasons that had nothing to do with the fact that he had just climbed ten flights of stairs at a respectable tempo. It hit him with force that he remembered every groove, every whorl in the wood, even the feeling of having stood here before, so many times, and thought nothing of it. About to end an exhausting day, about to pull off his shoes and formal clothes and discard them. About to go home.

At last, he reached into the pocket of his cloak and produced a key from it. He held it up in front of them, then looked at Annatar.

The Maia nodded, his eyes shining faintly golden in the dim light of the corridor. His fingers tightened around the elf’s in a reassuring squeeze.

The key slid into the lock without resistance.

“Well,” Celebrimbor said, taking a deep breath. “We’re back.”

He turned the key, opened the door, and together, they stepped inside.