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With blinded-eye, I’d know your face
My flayed-hands recognize your shape
Deafened, your song resounds in my bones
You are the last hospitable——
(fragment from the Narn Ercharmion, popular in the early Second Age, author unknown)
Four hundred and fifty years after the one calling himself Annatar appeared at their stoop, a hundred fifty years after his abrupt departure, someone is brought through Eregion’s gates.
Three men and a hunter carry him, too many hands pressing down the wound in his gut. When they lift at the healer’s command, a seamless pressure pass off, their palms are dark with gore and offal
“I didn’t see him,” Untirn insists as the first healer on the scene surveys the damage. “I didn’t see him, I didn’t see him.”
He hunted with Oromë, stalked the woods of Nargothrond, saw Glaurung shake the earth. This… is a lesser age. No one quite believes that he was caught off guard by a mortal man but they pull him away, hush his litany of explanations, let him lean on their shoulder.
The first responder is a young elf whose experience is limited to industrial accidents, petty fights, and the rare orc incursion from the north. Peacetime’s child, she’s well aware of her own limitations. Her lips pull back from her gums in a contemplative snarl.
“Bleeding first, bleeding first. I’m not sure though— can someone fetch Nûrwen from Wavesong House? You,” she points to a specific bystander, “Go get her.”
By the time Nûrwen is retrieved, the crowd has grown. Down the great central street leading into the city a small delegation from the Jewelsmiths is approaching, with Lord Celebrimbor leading the way at a brisk pace.
“I didn’t see him,” Untirn repeats miserably as his lord draws nearer. Nûrwen, kneeling at the injured man’s side, is engaged in her own muttered councils.
“We’ll have to cleanse the internal cavity, humans are infection prone,” she tells the assemblage of healers, all offering whatever tools could be brought at a moment’s notice. “Best to stop the bleeding before moving him further. That arrow could dig deeper with the wrong jostling. Who has sutures and a cautery?”
“Lady,” the man laid out on the cobblestones says, barely opening his eyes. They’re dark as Varda’s canvas, gleaming with what must be pain (it can’t possibly be mirth). “Must you relieve me of this arrow? I won it, fair and square.”
“You can keep it, and have much better use of it when it’s not piercing your little intestines,” Nûrwen promises.
“Then I am at your disposal,” he agrees, and falls silent once more, only a few shades more saturated than a corpse.
Even on the verge of unconsciousness, he clings to a certain dignity, hums with understated power. It would be exceptional on an elf, on a mortal it’s princely.
The prospect of impending street-surgery clears the crowd little. It’s far from the worst most of them have seen, and besides, elves are always willing to watch something new just to say they’ve seen it.
Lord Celebrimbor has to shoo them away. “Come on, come on. Is this how we treat a guest in Eregion? Gawking in the street, honestly. I know you have a workshop, Erien!” Flapping hands, tied up sleeves swing from his shoulders as he bats his fellow citizens away.
Slowly, the watchers disperse, leaving only the circle of intent healers and the initial parties to the incident. As Nûrwen begins to stitch, pinching shut the major arteries and veins, closing up the exposed intestines but leaving a small hole in the abdominal wall and silky inner membrane, Celebrimbor turns his attention to the rest of the newcomers.
These are not the mortal men who dwell in the woods and swamps about Eregion. Their dress is loose, layers pinched around the waist by girdles or gathered at the shoulders. Their armor is neither metal or leather; eventually one of the remaining elves recognizes the materials as linen, layered thick with glue. Everything is travel-stained, once bright pigments and fine fibers worn down by years of hardship. A shroud of former glory cloaks them. Their faces are masked by fear.
“Be welcome here,” Celebrimbor says, fumbling a bit over the Adûnaic. Annatar was always better at Mannish languages, he’d be able to address these men in their own tongue. Fortunately, they seem to know the vulgar Númenorean. The foremost man, who is tall, heavily scarred, perhaps forty, nods.
“Thank you, lord. This is the great city of smiths?”
“It is,” Though they were, literally, escorted in, their strangeness has Celebrimbor’s hackles up. The handful of close advisors at his back are inclined to agree. There has been… unsettling news from the east of late. Visions of betrayal, terrible omens, whispers of gathering forces. There are varying levels of awareness of the extent to which they’re threatened, it doesn’t do to panic the entire populace. Still, the city is on edge. (Maybe that’s why Untirn spooked and shot a passerby.) “Might I ask how you came to our woods? You do not seem like common travelers.”
The man swallows, glances at his two other companions, neither of whom say a word. “You would have to ask our master—he knows our mission best. We have come to beg for your aid. An… something powerful threatens our home.”
The words sound rehearsed, as if he’s been practicing them on the way into the city. Poor man. Still, his resolve is clear, a bright surety of purpose that illuminates his otherwise plain face.
“I will speak to him when he wakes,” Celebrimbor agrees. He would wake. Mortals can be frail but this one looks different. “In the meantime, please accept our hospitality.”
As he hands them off, Nûrwen starts to order away the remaining crowd, “Get him to the Jewelsmiths,” she tells those carrying the injured man, “They have the good chemicals and I’m going to need to synthesize some showstoppers fast before infection sets in.” She thought her days of treating blood poisoned humans ended with the wars.
The younger healers, carrying bloodied linens and supplies pulled out of nearby buildings, scatter. A few of Nûrwen’s trusted nurses follow her as she harries the procession through the city. Unable to let an injured man be dragged through his home like a half-dead bird without some supervision, Celebrimbor hurries after, leaving instructions for someone to console and softly interrogate Untirn.
He quickly finds himself caught up watching Nûrwen’s craft. She doesn’t abide questions but he doesn’t need to ask many. The jewelsmiths (and assorted other smiths, architects, engineers, carpenters, glass blowers, machinists, alchemists, and weavers) of the compound drop their work as quick as it’s safe to do so and set themselves to following her orders, however strange.
First she demands purified water, salt, and a weak solution of kelp-purple and potash, made to exacting specifications. This she washes through the small entry wound with the help of a repurposed alembic, filling and draining the abdominal cavity several times.
As she rinses her patient out like a dirty dish after supper, she talks fast to the alchemist at the door. Tew, who specializes in coal tar dyes, is shaken out of bed to help synthesize a medication Nûrwen swears keeps humans from dying of overactive blood. “He has a good chance of making it,” she says moodily, as if miffed by his good fortune. “Wasn’t much in those guts to cause complications.”
“We haven’t eaten well these last few days,” the man sighs, startling the entire room. It’s a shock to see someone awake after such traumatic experience. The mandrake wine trickled down his throat as Nûrwen began to work should have put him out of nothing else did.
His eyes are barely cracked open and through his long, dark lashes he’s looking at the nearest figure; Celebrimbor kneeling by his head.
“Might have saved your life,” Nûrwen informs him, blunt as ever. “Less shit to sift out. Now sit tight, I’m going to stitch you up.”
“You’ll be fine,” Celebrimbor reassures, taking the stranger’s hand.
On his fourth finger gleams a gold ring, roughly incised with lettering. The brotherly squeeze tightens, till the man hiccups in pain, then relaxes.
“Friend, where did you find that?”
Fluttering lashes catch at the tears that have been pooling in his eyes, wetting the bruised skin above and below. “In the stronghold of a great sorcerer. He has— he has business with you? There was a map with this place marked. You are not his ally, are you?”
Nûrwen layers on a loose dressing, comfrey and verdigris beneath linen. She’s watching their conversation keenly, prepared to exile him from the sick room if he threatens her goals.
Careful, aware that though he’s the closest thing the city has to a leader he’s powerless in the face of medical precedent, Celebrimbor shakes his head. “No. No, we did not part on good terms.” The admission aches but it’s a dull pain, irrelevant in the face of real injury.
Like metal in the crucible, their guest melts into his makeshift cot. His eyes slide shut, his muscles finally relax. Limply, he lifts the hand a few inches. “You can look, if you want.”
The hand is warm in his, pulse slow. At first touch the band seems unremarkable, which was always one of the goals of the higher series rings. A magical object that seems magical is easy; far more difficult is crafting a magical object that strikes everyone as perfectly mundane.
“May I?” He tugs lightly, threatening to pull the ring off of its finger.
“I am a guest in your home,” the injured man demurs, still not opening his eyes. “Just—if you could return it, after? Many good men died for that trinket.”
Celebrimbor inspects it carefully, noting the horribly familiar writing scratched into the side, the slight imperfection on the inner surface, a tiny marring. He slides it on and finds traces of Annatar’s power, the sort conveyed through normal workmanship. Nothing remarkable. No echoes of the soul-rending, artifact binding horror he was shown.
A prototype then, perhaps an attempt to finalize the script work. There are rings to die for in the world, this is not one of them. He slips it back on the man’s finger.
“You have come far. All on foot?”
“You’d be surprised how fast desperate men can walk.”
Untrue. Desperation is still familiar to them even in this age of bounty. Some things you never forget.
Like a benediction, he places his palm on the stranger’s feverish forehead. “Be welcome here and rest. I am Celebrimbor, of the Union of Jewelsmiths, first guild of this city.”
Another glance, through slitted eyes. “Doros. Once I held other titles. Now I come to you with empty hands.”
All I bring are gifts, Annatar said, in this same room, the wide entrance hall where guests are greeted and crises sometimes averted. Invisible though they may be.
“Let him rest,” Nûrwen insists, with the force of one who once administered great triage tents amidst fields of fire. Without another word, Celebrimbor leaves.
The leader of the three men who came with Lord Doros is named Ahirom. The other two do not offer their names; in fact, they do not even speak.
Skittishness is to be expected, so far from home. Mortals fear what they do not understand and there is so much to wonder at here. The steward finds them quarters, food, and leaves them to get comfortable.
Drugged every time he opens his mouth, their lord still manages to make more conversation. His tolerance is unbelievable and he heals fast, with no signs of the infection Nûrwen stands vigil against.
Piled under blankets despite the spring warmth, his bedside table cluttered with sulfa pills, ephedra, painkillers, rehydrating fluids, and a tiny vial of substance painstakingly extracted from the bile of game animals (to be injected in case of emergency), Doros tells his story.
Once, he explains, his family ruled the eastern lands, before being conquered by an undying magician. “He is as bright as gold and outshines whatever jewels he wears, or so they say,” Doros confides. “I have been fortunate to never meet him face-to-face.”
They’ve moved him to a proper bedchamber, with a soft mattress and chairs to fit an entire interviewing party. As he speaks, at least three people try to get Celebrimbor’s attention, by kicking his ankles, catching his eye, or discreetly coughing.
“Then there is resistance?” Ferpin, a terrible smith but an excellent strategist, asks.
Lord Doros grimaces and rubs the ring on his right hand. “There was. Now… myself and my three compatriots are the only survivors. Perhaps you understand why we risked everything to come to you.”
They are all exiles in one way or another. They know what it’s like to flee; from tyrants, sinking ships, threatening darkness, sundered cities. Awkward sympathy descends over them, punctuated by scuffing feet and shifting bodies.
The story of the world is a story of refugees. They will never reject anyone fleeing shadow. They could not.
“I am sorry such an evil has come upon your home,” Celebrimbor watches for any reaction, catches the faint twitch of displeasure, nostrils flaring.
“Is power evil?” Doros asks, rhetorically. “It is power. We might well have been upended by a volcano or a flood. You can’t reason with such forces of nature, or divert them. I watched people try all my life.”
Ferpin, whose aunt died damming the Sirion at the end of the last war, when the wild rivers of a foundering continent threatened to break their banks and wash away scattered survivors, motions to the window. Outside the towers of the city glitter, stone spires stretching up towards the sky. At the tips of towers, pinwheels and weather vanes catch the wind. At the river bank, water wheels churn hungrily.
“We have found some here sway with nature here. There is great incarnate wisdom, magic to shape mountains.”
He’s clearly trying to reassure. Doros’ eyes turn up in a smile. “It is wonderful.”
Without pain twisting his face, he’s even lovelier—deepset eyes heavy at the edges with wisdom, a tightly trimmed beard, shining black hair loose around his shoulders. Túrin Turambar, young and troubled, would have struggled to match this show of beauty.
Celebrimbor spreads his hands. “Power makes such things possible but it is disposition that determines the outcome. Good things rarely come out of ill intention and ugliness more often comes out of the dark. I take it your home does not look like this?”
With Doros still staring out the window, none of them can see his whole face. There’s just the corner of his mouth, curling. “There is a very fearsome tower—but it is not like this, no.”
Overtaxing the recently injured is strictly forbidden so the group makes their exit.
“Stay as long as you desire,” they say on the way out. “You have a home here.”
“I do wish he’d be a bit clearer about the Shadow’s plans,” Ferpin complains, several hallways away. “If he’s planning an attack, how soon, what the troop movements look like…”
“He’s recovering!” one of the other elves scolds over Celebrimbor’s shoulder. “Give it time!”
“I worry that’s the one thing we might not have.”
Talking to the other three men requires effort; they aren’t in their room when Celebrimbor goes to find them.
“Adjusting to the city!” their self-appointed guide, Cerion, chirps. “Best way to learn your way around is to get a bit lost.”
It has been too long since the shadow of Angband. Some in the city, Cerion included, have never known paranoia. Woodland elves smart enough to eschew yesteryear’s battles and this millenia’s children cannot imagine the heart-stopping terror of the long peace. The Enemy liked to let prisoners escape, wander a bit, then when they’d just made their way back to safety, snap their minds like kindling.
A shy, scarred victim might beg for your aid one moment and try to rip out your throat the next. Worse were the clever spies, the ones that tried to worm their way in, using honeyed words to catch tidbits of military intelligence and then spirit it back to their master. Even they were half-shattered, flinching creatures, so their schemes rarely made it far. The true damage was that done to morale.
He waits for the men to return.
A few hours later they slip through the doorway, foot-weary and skulking a bit, like teenagers slipping back home at sunrise. They startle to see Celebrimbor sitting just inside the door on a low folding stool.
“A moment of your time, if you haven’t been too exhausted by sightseeing?”
As always, it’s the lead figure, Ahirom, who answers, hands clasped behind him like a soldier, Adûnaic heavily accented. “Of course, my lord.”
The room boasts a decent number of chairs, yet the three men choose to sit on one of the beds, lined up shoulder to shoulder.
Ahirom, roguish, a burn scar down the left side of his face. Now that he’s found his confidence he has a wild charm. To his left, a slender man, nearly gaunt. The fall of his hair and lightness of his gait make him easy to mistake for an elf from some angles. To his right, a burly fellow, built almost like a dwarf, with one eye scooped tidily out of his skull.
Everything that Ahirom says agrees with the account given by his lord. There is a great power in the east, their young Prince tried to combat it, the losses grew to be too much. After a final infiltration mission yielded only scraps and a ring, they chose to flee. Better to live and perhaps warn another than die ignominiously.
As he speaks, one of his companions stares into the wall. Gaze blank. The other is blinking, rocking his weight back and forth, stealing glances at Celebrimbor out of the corner of his eye.
“Your friends?” Celebrimbor asks at a lull. He’s flagged down a friend passing through the hall and gotten mulled wine and biscuits sent up. The plate is untouched. “I understand if they don’t speak a shared language but they seem very willing to let you do all the talking.” This entire time there has not been one interjection, one whispered aside.
“Nemintas and Lecne? They cannot speak—they were both given to the mines. The slaves there have their tongues pulled out so they cannot forment rebellion.”
Celebrimbor stares for a moment at the table, the ginger biscuits, the candied orange peel from the coast. “Yes,” he agrees at great length. “That sounds true.”
It is the truest thing they’ve said to him so far.
The communal dining hall of Eregion’s Jewelsmiths is built large enough to accommodate their entire host in a pinch. It’s rarely busy, as the residents keep staggered schedules and, in many cases, have to be coerced into eating.
Today it’s buzzing, the low stone benches in one corner packed full. A dozen or so people are waiting attendance on Lord Doros of the East, who sits in front of a plate of untouched parsnips, lecturing the rapt audience.
He tells them about river cities which raise stone obelisks and use them to measure the passage of the sun across the heavens, fertile volcanic lowlands rich with grain and grapes and the hardy people who farm them, the olive trees stretching as far as the eye can see where he hid successfully from the Enemy’s gaze.
There are fine sculptors of alabaster, he says, and metalworkers who engrave bronze in lacing geometries. The Firebeards bring many treasures from afar; silky nephrite, glittering rubies and emeralds, chunks of malachite big enough to use as masonry, and queer little gems that change color from day to night.
His confidence is unimpeachable. Sitting there you’d think he’s lived in the city for a thousand years. Warm orange burnishes his cheeks and glistens off of his oiled beard as his deep-divoted lips push forth Adûnaic’s dark vowels. The soft firelight catches the gold ring on his fingers, pouring into the lettering like molten gold into a mould.
Celebrimbor stands by the wheelchair Nûrwen still insists their (“injured! he’s injured! I’ll prove it to him if he forgets.”) interloper use. Between sentences, Doros meets his eyes and smiles.
The burly human runs into him one day coming out of a lesser used storage closet. Wearing a silvery woodland grey, he blends into the stone walls, presence remarkably subdued for one of the Aftercomers (whose every rattling breath announces their oncoming doom).
Celebrimbor catches him by the arm. “Ah! Did you find Ulunn as I suggested?” Survivors of Angband are rare on this shore, those who do remain talk sparsely of their experiences. Ulunn is the loudest and proudest voice in the city, maintaining a stalwart defiance in line with the House of the Hammer.
Unblinking, Lecne drags his hand down Celebrimbor’s sleeve. Fingers settling in the palm of his hand.
As he nods, he begins to trace something there, curving lines—Tengwar letters, a shorthand Quenya mode.
Tinco, ára, rómen, telco.
Watch out.
The trap is set in his own forge, itself a private indulgence to paranoia. Allowances are made for a master craftsman who is known to dabble in deep magics. The door locks, to protect nosy apprentices from their own curiosity. It’s a far sturdier lock than the one on his bedroom door.
Every night, Celebrimbor curls into a ball in a corner between workbench and woodbin. It’s not a universal opinion but he’s always preferred the day for practical work. Daylight brings details into crisp focus, casts colors anew. Evenings are reserved for planning, research, socialization. (Less of the last one this past century.) Through the deepest night he dozes fitfully, knees to his chest, imagining his own bed. At times he sketches in a tiny notebook only to find himself drawing war machines, tapering blades, and plate armor.
It takes nearly two weeks of the routine for his trap to spring.
The door swings open soundlessly, as if there was never a lock at all, letting the pale moonlight of the courtyard. A shadow falls across his anvil, his mandrels, the dapping punches standing like a crowd in their wooden frame.
Doros glides in, footfalls inaudible. He’s just a gleaming silhouette but there’s no mistaking the texture of his beard when he turns profile. Nor is there any ignoring how he flits from hiding place to hiding place, checking everywhere that’s held snacks or gifts-in-progress.
When he reaches the workbench, Celebrimbor lunges. Grabbing the nearest ankle he pulls, and is unsurprised by the solidity he finds. It’s like trying to tear down a building barehanded.
Eyes glare down at him, ancient, lucent. “Oh, familiar heart. Why here?”
Annatar pulls back, an Ainu burned. “You know why I came. What I’m here for.”
On his knees, tucked between furniture, is hardly a position of power. Still, Celebrimbor’s voice stays steady as he replies: “You’ve come to take what isn’t wholly yours. But why like this?”
Sauron responds neither to the question or the jab at his claim on the rings, the claim he so clearly made amidst basalt and smoke. He doesn’t draw closer either, prowling back and forth by the anvil, out of arm’s reach. “Who was it in your bed? I’ll admit, the trick had me fooled.”
Gingerly, Celebrimbor draws up. Standing, he braces himself against his workbench, hand inches away from the planishing hammer he’s been using to finish a teapot. It’s a lightweight tool, not made for combat, nothing like the great war hammers of ages past. They have prided themselves on peace. Luckily, it’s very easy to kill.
“I asked Ewgîn to sleep in my quarters.” She looks much like him, and, more importantly, tends to sleep with her face buried in her pillows—a defensive habit since she shares her rooms with a dozen talkative birds. The chance to rest peacefully for a few nights delighted her, she didn’t ask too many questions.
Given the lightness of his step and his familiarity with Celebrimbor’s room, Annatar won’t have woken her as he poked around.
“Clever. And if I’d killed her in her sleep?”
“A murder would make an extended search of the city difficult,” Celebrimbor points out. “There are so many places to look and you only have a few servants at your disposal.”
The door is still open. Outside is a distant fire-glow, and the nearby noise of metalworking and woodcraft. There’s a faint chemical stench on the breeze. The city never sleeps, or if it does it sleepwalks, sleepworks, sleepinvents. They’re both speaking low to escape detection, which means that neither of them wants to be caught.
Annatar smirks, awash with false confidence. “You have no idea where I have set my hungry eye. Dear heart, I’ve been here for weeks.”
This time, when Celebrimbor takes a step closer, Sauron doesn’t flinch. He’s committed himself completely and stands firm, even as Celebrimbor presses into his chest, circling his wrists loosely in an imitation of chains. “And for weeks I’ve been watching. Did you really think I wouldn’t recognize you?”
Sliding his arms forwards and wrapping them around Celebrimbor’s waist flips the game, leaving Celebrimbor to grab at his biceps—such wonderful arms in this shape. “It matters little what you thought. You doubted your own assessment long enough to let me in.”
They locked enough frightened escapees on the other side of the gates in the last Age. In the aftermath of Nargothrond and Gondolin, strategists and philosophers had their say. They spoke of the foolishness of Finrod, the stubbornness of Turgon. Such sophists approach the matter from a distant perspective.
Eregion’s residents are the ones who survived the Worm, who fled the Hidden Cities. It is nowhere in the city charter nor in the exhaustive bylaws, but carved into the very stone is the understanding that it is better to let a thousand traitors in and be destroyed than leave a single victim in the rain. They have been betrayer and betrayed and exiled alike and all things considered they’ll take the pain for the mercy.
That does not mean ignoring common sense or offering oneself up for the blade. If it did, Celebrimbor wouldn’t be here, paring away rot.
He gives up on pushing against Annatar’s solid biceps and instead loops himself around the column of this new neck. It’s sturdier than the old one, corded muscle meant to show rugged strength, not promise weakness. “I let you in and now I must be prepared to escort you out,” he murmurs as they lean into one another, indulging in a moment of nostalgic closeness. Then he shifts, pressing his knife between two vertebrae.
While Sauron watched his hand so close to the jeweler’s hammer he’d slid the blade in his sleeve down. Now it sits at the cartilage that encircles nerve, pressing harder than is strictly necessary. It takes a lot of force to push through the tough tissue of a spine and he wants to be ready.
Annatar goes very still. Perhaps Lùthien was onto something. Not the trust, that clearly hasn’t worked out, but her brand of violence seems effective. “You are so eager to hurt me, a guest in your house.”
He has had weeks to think this through, weeks to prepare. Still the tremor in Annatar’s low voice makes Celebrimbor shake in turn. “I thought you’d arrive with an army! I resigned myself to fighting you long ago— what happened to the great forces amassing in the East? Where are your dark servants? Why did you come alone?”
Arching his neck, viperlike, only puts more of Annatar’s throat on display. The bulge of his imin’s apple, the wavering line where beard gives way to smooth skin. “They are being fractious. A little rebellion, easily put down, but I didn’t want to wait the decades to retrieve what was mine. A risk, but you know I’m known to take them.”
Celebrimbor laughs, resisting the urge to know the knife away, grab this creature by the shoulders, and shake him. “A scrap of truth in the lies then. Are you wearing some poor mortal’s face?”
Sauron shows all his teeth. “No. I made this one just for you. The details proved fiddly.”
“Then you stepped in front of an arrow on purpose?” White knuckled, Celebrimbor holds the knife.
Annatar leans in even further, straining away from its bite, till they’re forehead to forehead. “No, that was a surprise. But we know perfectionism can reap unintended rewards. Hearth to my fire, mirror molecule, you must understand.”
There is a moment—
It passes.
Slowly, carefully, he puts down the weapon, steps back, tugging against Annatar’s encircling arms until he lets go. Distance clears his mind a smidge.
“You are weaker in this form,” he says finally, “Not by much, but enough. Goodness, it must have been quite a rebellion to make you this stroppy.”
The eyes that glare him down are different in shape, in color, even in size, from the ones he remembers. It is the light behind them that gives the game away; that and the haughty affect shaping every movement.
“I do not think that you could get out of this city if I did not let you.”
“Ah,” Sauron interjects. “On that point you would be wrong. You have been focused on me, not my servants. Mortals are good for some things. These ones have been rearranging the back storerooms and chemical supplies. A spark…”
Their own fault for keeping such dangerous materials in quantity, simply because restocking every century was more convenient than restocking every decade. Celebrimbor’s for not sharing his fears more openly, not setting some guard on the humans. “I could kill you very fast,” he counters, unsure if it’s even true. In the old days every standing soul fought or died and few made it out without some kills. Flailing desperately with a sword is different than driving a knife slowly into someone’s heart.
“You could try,” Sauron agrees, leaning doorwards, so the moonlight fully illuminates his face. The absence of shadows drains him of some menace, makes him look nervy and silverboned, slender.
Before he can flee, Celebrimbor makes up his mind.
“I—May I see it? The ring?”
Moving more like a fluid then a man, Annatar slinks over. “Your knife for my hand?” he offers, already extending it.
Celebrimbor takes the proffered palm but doesn’t relinquish his blade. “You must have faith that I wouldn’t hurt a guest who comes with good intentions.” If the jab lands, he doesn’t see it, entranced by the gold ring.
It would be silly to call it delicate. Neither is it sturdy, or worn, or remarkable in any way except for its fundamental unshakable Ringness. Every surface is perfectly, pleasingly round. The ratio between width, height, and depth strikes a person on inspection as ideal, the platonic summation of what a ring should be. The longer you look at it, the deeper this conviction grows until you’re half convinced that this is the only real ring in the world, that all the others are amateur knockoffs.
It’s as alike to the decoy first presented as a lily is to a paper flower.
The writing on the sides flares cherry red like hot glass. Thought it appears etched in, all the surfaces are smooth to the touch and cool as river water.
“How long did it take you to figure out?” Annatar asks, a hint of old teasing in his voice.
Celebrimbor doesn’t look at his eyes—a project made easier by the fact that they’re not his eyes now anyways. “Too long. I’ve decided.”
“Yes?” The hand in his twists, squeezing his fingers.
“You should leave by morning. I’m going to go undo the damage, alert the guards. I want you gone. Come back with an army, come back to kill us all. Just don’t play with your food. I— surely we deserve better than that.” They’ll mourn their missing new friends, and mourn again when Celebrimbor tells them the truth (honesty among equals has never felt so wretched).
Because he is not looking he does not see the incoming kiss until it brushes against his cheek. “I tried to give you an easy way out, dear one. Don’t say I can’t be kind.”
“Many people will say that,” he informs Annatar but kisses him back, wondering if this is how Beleg felt dying. Slowly disintegrating with beard hair tickling his chin. “Just go.”
For once, Annatar doesn’t insist on having the last word.
They find the humans’ bodies by the gate the next morning, an undignified pile of corpses. Poor men, taken so far from home. Ahirom, Lecne, Nemintas. They’ll have names for the graves, at least.
Placed on top, in a makeshift leather envelope to protect it from the blood, is a letter.
Such is the state of magic in these latter days that you must forgive me if I return to you in this same mode. Hopefully it will be less distressing than the old one for some of our more sensitive compatriots. It always hurts to kill a friend. I suspect you will not be troubled to see this face again—haven’t you always known my heart?