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Blood washed in and out with the shallow tide. He could see it even in dim starlight: all the light that remained to them. Red-streaked pearls rolled into the ocean with the undertow and were spat forth again clean. The water darkened in its turn, like the stream that coursed behind the tanners’ workshop in Tirion.
“Come on,” Galadriel said. “They've loaded the saddlebags. We ride north.”
Finrod took her hand and let himself be pulled to his feet. His hems were damp with saltwater now and bloodied, though he had never once drawn the blade his uncle Fingolfin had gifted him on a long past begetting-day.
“I should be telling thee that, little sister,” he said.
Her chin lifted. “I mind not being the bearer of messages, even grim ones. But they will go on without thee, if thou dost not come now. Fëanáro has already departed for the next bay.”
Finrod knew this: he had seen the fleet sail in haste, and poorly, some time earlier, their white shapes ghostly in the darkness.
“And they say that Olwë is reconvening his people, and—”
“As I would, were I in his stead.”
Galadriel bit her lip. It was rare the thing that could make Finrod's proud, sharp-tongued sister seem young. But of course nothing like this had happened before. He heard her thought, and did not want to: It was ill done, but if he had only given them freely— Beyond her troubled spirit, Finrod felt their father's where he stood apart from the rest, full of subdued restlessness, looking back at the houses nestled along the starry littoral. The ships were gone and Fëanor’s feet rested atop one’s shining deck.
“Findaráto,” she began, the outer slope of a question. It was not a question in his own heart, though: not really. It should have been more of a question.
“I will come,” Finrod answered, and stepped away from the shore. “Fear not.”
“I was not afraid,” she lied.
They went north. Standing near an empty space that could only have been Maedhros’, Fingon looked wraithlike greeting them as they took their places in the procession. His eyes burned with a fell and frightened fire, and Finrod rather felt sorry for him. Turgon did not look at Finrod at all until a dozen leagues of gray rock had passed beneath their horses’ hooves, and then he fell behind alongside him and wept into his shoulder, staining the front of his robe. When Menelmacar was at its height and a pause was called, they made camp together.
How long did they journey thus? In the dark, in the gathering fog, Finrod could not say. As they picked their way along the coastline, the landscape grew colder, mist hanging thickly in the air like another ocean, and it seemed the horses waded still through the bloodstained surf. The landscape looked foreign long before they passed the cairn he, Aegnor, and Angrod had once built on their most daring journey northward, and he knew he had truly left home.
In one dreadful hour on the Ice, years later, Fingon had looked at him terribly honestly, and Finrod read a gyring horror in his gaze. “How can you trust me?” he had said. Tensions had run high between the Arafinwean and Nolofinwean camps, a disagreement over the morsels of seal they now prized above jewels or honor, having eaten the horses. It had been Finrod who urged the shambling shapes of their people back to their tents, saying they must not become kinslayers. “I cannot ask it of you.”
“Three reasons,” Finrod had answered in his dancing-salon-voice. “First, I know thee, Findekáno, better than thou thinkest. Second, we will all of us die if our trust fails now.”
Fingon had huffed a laugh behind the scarves and furs that swaddled him, and sounded a little more like himself.
“Third, I choose to. I made my choice on the shores of Araman, and I do not yet regret it.”
On the shores of Araman, the mist swept up in a canting, cresting wave, and it became a figure, robed and hooded purely in shadow.
“Halt!” Finrod’s uncle—one of them, he could not tell which—was crying up ahead. The words were muffled, blown away on the rising wind.
“The Valar have come to put an end to our march!” Now that was Fëanor’s voice. “Discontent with his servants’ work at Alqualondë, does Manwë come himself to do battle with us?”
Angrod cursed under his breath.
“List not to him,” Aegnor whispered. “Nolofinwë and Father will have better words. They know what happened.”
Hear me!
The great, toneless voice rippled through their spirits. They halted, and the horses spooked unsteady beneath them.
A doom is laid on all ye who go further.
The words of that doom forever blazed in each unfading memory that heard them, even those who sang loudest of bravery and legend to be. Finrod’s father looked back to his host, arrayed behind him along the long road away towards Tirion. For a moment his weary, kind gaze crossed Finrod’s, and Finrod knew: he would forsake their march. He would offer words and promises to the grieving Teleri in the harbor. He would return to the darkened hill and its frightened city, and do what good he might.
Finrod thought of the shadowy unknown ahead and heard the determined muttering of his cousins, and knew whom he would accompany.
Clustered together, they spoke through that unending night, though the Fëanorians kept their own counsel. Fingon clapped his shoulder; Turgon, jaw set, and bold Elenwë, merry, drank and supped with him. Galadriel’s eyes were still lit with the same eager fire they had held ever since murmurs first spread that since Elves had come from Cuiviénen, they might to those lands return. Angrod drew his own unused blade and decried the evil of their grandfather’s murderer, not Fëanor and his children, and Fingon toasted him, and Aegnor’s quieter nod spoke of resolve. Finrod’s word might have swayed some of them—not all—from their doom. He said nothing. When their father announced his own intentions, dismay nearly scattered the firelit group. Galadriel’s mouth opened as though in shock. Fingon and Turgon rose as one to leave or to argue, pride on their faces, a strange new slant to the determination that burned ever in their hearts. They would go on, even to the edge of the world, and despite their bloodstained hands, Finrod loved them.
He had never acted a prince before. There had been no reason to. It felt strange now, like a delicate mechanism closing into place.
“I will go on with Nolofinwë’s people and lead our own against the Enemy,” Finrod said. “Good may yet come of these fell deeds, and spring follow this winter.”
Ahead, the ice stretched to the blurred line of the horizon. Somewhere beyond that gray haze waited all the wonders of Middle-earth.
Now, in that once-distant continent, Finrod woke with a start to the low autumn sun of late morning as it fell upon his face through the silken bed-curtains and clear window-panes of Tol Sirion, and the glow of two eyes like miniature stars. He felt cold, as though he had plunged into snowmelt, and dizzy.
“Thou art troubled.” Mairon said it simply. He knew already: the song-shield upon Finrod’s mind could not hide that kind of current, only individual thoughts like minnows flashing in a river. Mairon’s spirit pressed upon his like the heavy coverlets, ever seeking some way in.
Finrod groaned and sat up.
“Tell me,” Mairon pressed. Those eyes gleamed, and he pulled Finrod near, tugging him down atop the heat of his spirit’s body. The mattress dipped beneath them, and Finrod protested little.
“It’s an old trouble, and one I have settled in my heart as best I can. I don’t know why I’d think of it now.”
It was not a week later that Mairon felt his summons on his spirit, like the jerk of a leash. There was no denying it. He left Finrod abed and dreaming in the high chamber he had come to think of as their own, and took with him no retinue.
Strange did the isle look beneath his crow’s wings, and the wide river around it: a swirl of verdure that spread long up the pass between the mountains before at last beginning to wither on Angfaulith’s threshold. Gilded by autumn, its beauty was no lesser, and the reeds and trees waved as though taunting him.
Mairon flew over the greening landscape following the river’s course, and then into the smoke and ash that dimmed and buffeted the skies before the fiery mountains. No birds but his servants dared wing their way here, even the carrion-eaters for whom food was plentiful. Yet it was well-known to him and the same as it had been since the Sudden Flame, and that was satisfying. Beyond the three great peaks there was a vaulted arch that led into the mountains’ roots, a mere speck at this height. Mairon dove sharply, his sights on that dark mouth. He glided through its corridors until the air was too still for flight, and then landed lightly on his feet as a lieutenant, fair, yet terrible to behold.
In armor bearing his own sigils, he made his way down into the fortress he himself had carved beneath the mountains, and then further.
He sensed another spirit before he saw the flame-limned form.
“He's occupied,” Gothmog sneered. The cruel laughter in his voice gave Mairon pause, but only briefly. The Balrog was always jealous of the bond Mairon shared with him, that privileged intimacy none other could encroach upon.
His voice came: No. Send Mairon in.
“As you wish, lord,” Gothmog said in a voice of oil and black pitch. He stood aside.
Mairon smiled overwidely at him. He felt the spirit's focus from behind him like the shadows flung about by a flickering fire. Yet he was a small thing in Mairon’s vision, and ahead was one vaster than the encircling ocean, and the night again beyond that. On him Mairon’s sight bent its force now. Victory would follow victory, because with his might anything might be accomplished. His presence could be felt everywhere, even before Mairon slipped through the great iron doors between them.
Melkor was occupied.
Dark blood pooled and stuck under the boots of Mairon's fana. On the floor sprawled the broken form of what had been an Elf, bleeding and twisted nearly beyond even that recognition. His eyes had been struck out, leaving hollow wounds behind. There was a sharp rasping sound; distantly, Mairon observed that the creature still breathed.
Gelmir, he said. A skulking Elf of Nargothrond. Malice hung heavy in his pronouncement of the word, and Mairon did not shiver only by force of habit. He cared not, of course, for this Gelmir. It was the disconcerting thought of—but he must not think of him now, in his presence, beneath his stormy gaze.
Mairon made his mouth smile. Does this worm not please thee, lord?
He has pleased me well indeed in the years since our victory. He lied to me before, but he's honest now. I plan to make a present of him to his brother.
That is well, Mairon said.
The full weight of his attention fell upon Mairon like a stranglehold. Holding his own against that onslaught, Mairon felt light on his feet. He fought not to step backwards.
Dost thou find it so?
Of course, lord.
Melkor's great charred hands let the bloodied implements he held fall to the ground below. He wiped his hands upon his onyx robes.
No need for pleasantries. Let's cut to it, Mairon. I have granted thee far too much freedom.
Mairon sniffed, affronted. His lip curled. Without thinking about it, he shifted his weight, rising slightly upon his toes. Granted?
The blow took him by surprise. It was physical, yet Melkor's power was entwined with his body, and he struck Mairon's spirit as though he would scatter it altogether. It hurt, and he cried out, falling against stone slick with blood.
I'm indulgent, he spat, but I have never indulged lying. Didst thou think I know nothing but the dregs that thou givest me, faithful servant?
Reeling, he made to stand—not to leave, no, that would be fatal—but stumbled upon the bloody flagstones. His mind whirred, erratic. Certainly there was something he could say to forestall this. He knew something, but perhaps he did not know about—
For all Mairon’s old taunts, Melkor barely limped as he approached and took up a jagged rod of iron. His burnt hand held it easily. In that hand the iron blazed burningly cold even before it struck. The sharp edge sliced with terrible ease through the armor at Mairon's chest, both things fana. Mairon's form blurred and seared against it. Writhing, he tried to turn aside, to escape for a moment as a bird or a shower of sparks, but Melkor stabbed the iron through his shoulder, cleaving the stone beneath his spirit as easily as if it were sand, and that held him fast.
His laughter echoed in the chamber like ten thousand crows’ wings, like the mountains’ roar of fire. The press of his spirit against Mairon's crushed with its horrible weight. Mairon's vision was weak, the grasp of his fana's hands weaker as he tried to grip the icy spear. The edges of his spirit cried out for each other around the tear of the blade, and he bled. Still he could see his dark form over him, closer, then closer still. Melkor crouched beside him, the light of the jewels in his crown scorching at this distance.
News is slow to reach me from Nargothrond, but not as slow as that.
No. Mairon thought a vertiginous rush of fear, then denial, before he remembered he needed to think and feel nothing at all, for he must not sense—
Knowest thou there has been a succession there? That Orodreth sits the throne and Celegorm and Curufin beleaguer him? Of course thou knowest, because thou hast Felagund in thine own keeping. Thinkest thyself very clever, Mairon, but thou art a fool, and a barefaced one at that. A golden-haired Amanyar thrall harping in full view of your court? Dost thou think me as blind as Gelmir here? He laughed again.
Why had Mairon kept Finrod secret? It was hard to remember beyond that he must, that he must keep him out of Angband’s reach, that he alone could be trusted to manage his captivity. It had made sense. If he could only put it into words—
He did not see him summon a long whip of fire to his palm. He only screamed the moment its strands curled around him, cutting into his spirit, for it was a thing of spirit itself.
Melkor spoke with deadly ease. He marked his words with lashes. Surely thou enjoyedst playing with Finrod the beloved. I have heard he is passing fair. But thy carelessness comes at the cost of my charge in thee. I am a generous master. Thou hast one chance yet to prove thy loyalty. Deliver me Finrod Felagund, as thou shouldst have done from the first. He will be the message we need now that some speak anew of moving against us. We may send a fair arm or leg to each corner of Beleriand. I'll keep the rest of him. When he offers no more entertainment, he can hang upon the mountain.
My lord—
Be silent, Mairon. He raised the whip. Thou wilt speak when I ask thy obedient counsel.
And it was a long time before he did so again.
I have only ever acted for your benefit, lord. I sought to break his will myself and present you with a finished deed. I did so out of a surfeit of love for you. I wished you to be pleased with my efforts personally. I am so sorry to have displeased you. I will make it up to you, I promise.
It strained the matter of his spirit to take flight again. Then the scorched plain passed beneath his sight like a vast and spreading stain, followed by the dead forests of Dorthonion’s slopes, and finally the ribbon of the river Sirion, ruddy and iridescent and sluggishly flowing at its northernmost spring, where it bore the runoff of Mairon’s old workshops beneath Thangorodrim.
The island in the river was a jewel between the mountains, a pendant of wrought topaz and emerald in a world of ash. Mairon descended on it like a swooping hawk.
He did not go to the high chambers of the white tower, but threw open the door to the forge. He had maintained the mechanism of its hinges too well: they made barely a noise of protest.
Whatever his Orc-captain saw in his face made her blanch, and the thralls too. Good. That was a start.
Finrod would be grieved—
Mairon pinned the head of a human work-team against the hard steel of an anvil. Under his flaming hand ribs cracked and the man's coarse skin began to bubble. A woman behind started to plead something about having met their assignment. He didn't hear it.
“I expect better from thee.” Mairon curled his fingers into muscle and the man screamed. His other hand drew up a cooling knife-blade, yet unhilted. He held it poised by the throat that bobbed helplessly above the man’s ruined chest. “Dost thou name this workmanship?”
The woman was screaming too. At least that was something.
“Please,” burbled from the thrall's open jaws.
He spat bile. “Dost thou think thy precious Mirbhoz will speak for thee?”
The woman now: “Lord…”
Mairon whirled on her. One hand of his fana loosely wielded the blade; the other, half-embodied, seemed to melt into rivulets of blood. These deep, iron chambers were always hot: now he knew they scorched Mannish hair and skin. The thrall who had spoken sank shaking to her knees.
Mairon struck her with a booted foot and felt the pop and splinter of bone. They were so fragile, these weakling Children. “Yes, I am thy lord, and no other. Thou wouldst do well to remember it.”
Though her face was contorted with pain, the woman’s glance flitted to the man still gasping wetly for breath on the anvil.
“He can't work this way,” she whispered.
Behind her, the straggling remainder of the work-team had long since shuffled back from his gaze, as though the distance of half a room could make any difference to his sight.
“Then ye will work twice as hard,” Mairon snarled. He turned to the captain on duty, her features an ashen blur in his glow. “Where is thy overseer?”
“The pit, my lord. With the troublemakers.”
The mouth of his fana opened in the jagged slash of a smile.
“Good.”
In the fathomless dark he had delved beneath the tower, Mairon‘s eyes gave the only light. Limbs wrenched apart beneath the tools that had always shaped his best work. Skin crackled and tore under tooth and claw, the weak, material fabric that gave life to lesser beings riven all at once and then so very slowly. Screams rang out and they were sweeter to his taste than any singing.
Upon their twisted faces, their dim gazes blank with terror, he saw other eyes, warm and gilded with the light that had shone in Valinor.
The vision’s horrid persistence stoked his fury to new fires. He, Mairon, would not be so easily mastered. He would tear the thing to shreds that dared set root within him. All would mold to the shape of his mind. His servants did now, did they not? They all would, soon enough. He, even, would understand that his power was merely harnessed to Mairon’s machinery: machinery without flaw or tarnish. He would cut away the pieces that did not fit. He would make himself a mighty king, a worshiped god, alone in his perfection. When that was accomplished not even Melkor would be able to impose his will upon he who had been his shining lieutenant. It would not be long in time as it flowed for such as he: a few bars of the Music as it built to its climax. And then, looking down on his empire, his perfect work of gears and compartments, then, he would be satisfied. There was satisfaction in this forcing of his will, wasn’t there? In the crack of weakened bone, the fraying of emaciated muscle. Things worthy only to be fuel for his fire. Why should these pathetic creatures yet live?—Even those possessed of a bright spirit, or a small and fading beauty.
What a fool thou art, Mairon. It was his own, scornful thought, but in the inevitable rumble of his voice. Mairon heard that thought-voice again in memory:
Thou hast one chance yet to prove thy loyalty.
We may send a fair arm or leg to each corner of Beleriand. I'll keep the rest of him.
Finrod was a toy: a fair Elf easily replaced by any of ten thousand fair Elves. A mere distraction, as Mairon had named him from the beginning. A tawdry diversion from his true goals. It should be nothing to give him up, to see his body and pinprick of spirit mutilated and broken. Better than nothing. It should be entertainment.
Mairon’s spirit seized inside him like a closed fist.
Something had changed. Finrod could feel it in the quality of the air, in the marble stones of the floor that trembled beneath his bare and pacing feet. All day and night the tower had cried out to him, pain coursing through its threads like lightning and twisting them into knots. Mairon had returned, he knew that much, but the Maia’s overflowing spirit was oddly muffled from him. In the yard beneath the window, thralls and Orcs buzzed like birds upon a moving branch. In the island’s marsh-grasses beyond the wind had changed. Winding his robe more closely about himself—winter’s first approach was making itself felt—Finrod sat down by the sill and tried to brace himself for a storm whose strike he might not be able to withstand.
He was combing his hair for lack of diversion when he sensed that familiar presence flooding up the stairs, and he had barely set the comb aside, with moments only to grimly arrange his expression, when Mairon appeared in the high doorway of the bedchamber.
Finrod blinked at the sight of him, so furiously bright was he to look upon. As the image coalesced in his vision, he saw that Mairon seemed to burn from within, as though overlaid with the way he felt mind-to-mind: a leaping flame bound about with iron bands. The edges of his form were overvivid and eerie, so sharp they hurt to glance at, without any of the round softness of flesh-and-blood limbs. The red stars of his eyes consumed and enthralled. His was a cruel beauty, even as it took Finrod's breath away. The hem of his cloak, his leather vambraces, and his graceful, ugly hands steamed with blood. Whose, Finrod could not say.
Finrod stood. His heart beat in his throat, and there seemed little reason to affect ease in this moment, though it had dispersed Mairon’s uglier moods often enough before. If he was to die on this day, and in this place, he would prefer to do it on his feet, and fighting.
“Mairon,” he began.
The name slid from his lips without pretense. It hurt more than he had expected to think whatever hold he might have possessed in Mairon's heart, such as he had, could vanish all at once like so much vapor. Still, perhaps all was not lost. Gaze drifting to his bloodied wrists, Finrod opened his mouth to shape some guileless question, but whirling, Mairon got there first:
“Don't name me thus.”
“It is the name you gave me.”
“And I will not hear it.”
Finrod could not resist injecting a sardonic note. He tossed his head. “As you command, lord of Tol Sirion.”
That name made Mairon’s spirit waver with dissatisfaction, as Finrod had known it would, and he prepared for retaliation even as he enjoyed the flicker of reassurance that came from knowing he could still reach him this way, at least.
“It will be as I wish,” Mairon agreed, a short, ferocious clip. Finrod, reaching out in thought towards his spirit, did not understand why the words were so angry. And what he said next made no sense at all. “I release you from all your oaths except that of obedience, until its span ends. For I command you to leave my lands now and quickly. You must be leagues away by nightfall. Do you understand?”
Finrod stared at him. The world tilted around him and then dissolved altogether. He should have been gladdened, amazed, even, that his plays had borne this much fruit: for it was Morgoth’s lieutenant who now spoke so. He believed Mairon was not lying. Believed too, perhaps naively, that the pale fire of his spirit was too stricken to be urging Finrod into some ruinous trap. And if he truly wished to release him, that was a wondrous thing. But instead of joy, relief, or pride, Finrod felt something like horror, though not for himself. He knew without really knowing that something terrible had happened.
He spoke against Mairon’s mind, that vast and flickering presence. As always, Finrod felt the dreadful heat of it through the sheer veil of his own, secret spellwork, that shield from their first, grim days.
I'll make you a counteroffer, he said in the manner of their usual bargaining. Set me free, and come with me.
He felt Mairon’s bladelike laughter: he did not hear it. Come with you? How can I?
Then Finrod did something Mairon would never do. “I'll show thee,” he said.
As Thingol had once done in an ancient wood, Finrod reached out and clasped Mairon’s bloodied hand. And letting fall all the strands of his spellwork, he felt Mairon’s spirit without any shield.
For long moments they stood trapped in a spell of their own making. Ribbons of flame wound an aurora about their bodies and sparked from their joined hands. They did not see them. Stars winked into being in the darkening sky beyond the chamber’s window: distant, gleaming chinks of light. Beyond their celestial circles dwelt only the void, the endless night, and the song that pulsed on.
Finrod felt Mairon’s thought without words. He delved into Finrod’s memory, into the core of his being, into every secret place Finrod had guarded so carefully: he knew, now, everything. Yet he did not linger on the plans of Nargothrond’s passages, or the construction of Laiquendi riverboats for war. And Finrod felt no fear, only a curious opening, even as he saw again the ice and the blood of his mother’s kin, as he felt again the tender ache of each Elven parting and the keen tear of Bëor’s mortal passing, and the pain that the sorcerer whose fingers were interlocked with his had visited upon him in the depths beneath the tower, the worst pain his body had known: and the frightened quickening of his heart, the dark dreams, recalling each of these things after. How many scars thou bearest, he felt the other think, and the flamelike eyes he beheld seemed to weep gold. Yet somehow thou lovest me.
And there was fear Finrod felt too in that vast spirit, a sick fear as deep as the heart of a poisonous tree: the fear of the lowest, skittering thing. Fear of himself changed, or of himself in Finrod’s eyes. Thou must not see me. But the chains on him had broken, and he let his spirit meet Finrod’s in answer.
Not hundreds, nor thousands, but hundreds of thousands he had cut down or changed against their natures to cringe and obey. Those Finrod had known intimately and loved, and those born in lands Finrod did not know, in times Finrod had not been born to see. Shadows overlaid upon a great machine, upon a cruel and lonely song that passed for music. Its edges cut everything, and its singer no less. Melkor’s presence—Finrod felt it—was chain and weight, but beauty too, the beauty of anything you want, all you deserve, and the raw will to make it so. It had called to Mairon since before there was an earth to rule, before—or, Mairon feared before—there was a chorus to sing. But never had he opened his own mind entirely to that master; never had he been so closely and utterly consumed as he was now. Finrod’s small spirit: how weak it seemed to his sight. How tiny. But it was bright, brave, and beautiful, a cherished treasure-box of secret knowledge: cherished beyond every empty promise of power, beyond all other things in the world.
And Finrod felt a great, blank and unabated wonder twined with the fear, because But I do, Finrod thought. I do. He, too, was weeping, salt, Elven tears: for the things Mairon had wrought, and for the love he bore him.
Mairon embraced his fëa like licking flame, winding into him like a clawed thing, and as they stood staring at each other, Finrod's soul clung back.
As they made their way down the twisting stairs and out into the night and its whispering cattails, each one of the tower’s gates sprang open, and the barred windows too. Thralls poured forth and gazed up at the sky as though waking from a long sleep; Orcs scrambled frantically free and murmured to each other. The wolves howled at the setting moon. As they walked away over the grasses and the beaten mud of the road, the stones, too, began to crack and tumble free from their settings. The threads of the tower burst asunder, and its falling was like a thunderclap.
Mairon looked at him, and Finrod saw himself reflected through his encompassing gaze. Something in his bright eyes had changed, as if a veil of subtle fire overlay the warm Treelight.