Part I

The naming of the Worm

In an age far ago, in a land far away, a man sold his soul for a cause he thought worthwhile. His fate is told in no more than a few sentences. His motives are no longer rightly recalled. All that remains is his name, and hardly even that. Wormtongue. The snake. Saruman's bane. A witless worm he was called, before he met his bitter end. Yet, there is a story behind those few sentences. A dark story, yes, but one that still aches to be told…

In a time of heroes, a time where legends and stories came to life and long forgotten prophecies were to be fulfilled, there lived a man who did not believe in hope, who did not strive for glory. A man of skill and wits, he used his words to persuade the world around him to become slightly more to his liking. He took pride in his abilities, and rightfully so, for he was both bold and cunning. But he had come to believe that he alone could see things others could not, and in time his pride made him cold and aloof. While it was true that he could often see straight to the heart of things that others thought complicated or clouded, he forgot that others might in turn see things that he himself could not. He also forgot that he was not the only one with a talent for seeing things for what they truly were. In time, he would remember, but by then it would already be too late.

As he slowly detached himself from his kin, thinking that he was superior to their simple lives and worries, they in turn separated themselves from him. The man did not quite see that though simple they may be, they did not lack depth nor intelligence of their own. And while he came to despise them for their unsophisticated ways, they in turn came to view his intricate manners with increasing suspicion. One who sets himself aside from everything around him soon finds himself quite alone, and this man was no exception.

The turns of his life eventually led him to a noble position serving at the court of his land, a position where his wit and talent was greatly appreciated and his manners were often forgiven. The King was respectable and well educated, and the man, now made Counsellor, held him highly in regards, at first.

To learn new lessons when one is already well into adulthood, content and set in one's ways, is hard. No less so for the Counsellor who was about to be taught anew that others did indeed see things that he could not make out, and that they might have strengths he'd never dreamed of. It dawned on him slowly. Two children came to court, relatives of the King, orphaned by a war that had gone on for far too long. Endearing they were, bright and laughing once the memories that had scarred them began to fade deep into the back of their minds. Children must heal quickly in order to survive. An adorable girl and her brother no less so, a handsome young man in the making.

The first lesson to be learned was of envy. The Counsellor had not known true envy for a long time, if ever. He had always found ways to acquire the things he desired, be it through coin, persuasion or downright lies. He only stopped short of stealth because he had found he didn't need to, often the coin would be enough and if not: there were oh, so many ways to persuade. But this time was different. He had grown comfortable at court, found a routine to follow and convenient strings to pull whenever needed. The King would heed his advice more often than not, and matters could almost always be arranged so that orders were carried out to the Counsellor's liking, never quite contradicting the King's but not always exactly in the way the ruler might have intended. Life had become, yes, easy. And now it was not. Children play, and run and scratch their knees, but they also watch and listen, and learn. Above all that, children always ask questions, and there had been no children in court for many years, no one to question the routines or the old ways. To say "it has always been so" bears no meaning to a child; sometimes, what was always so needs to change. This is how kingdoms survive, they evolve under the questioning eyes of their children.

It was not the questions themselves that were reason to envy. No, it was the attention they got, the thought put into every query or suggestion made by that bright eyed pair. No longer had the King got ears only for his most clever servant, his attention must also be shared by twittering birds in the gardens and small hands pulling him down dusty corridors to venture bravely into half-forgotten storerooms and discover anew trinkets stored away long ago. The King would send his most trusted away to make time for some small talk with the children, fondly looking down into their big, serious eyes as they told him of the day's adventure, the night's dream or their hopes for the future. The Counsellor watched, and felt envy. The feeling crawled deep within him, and at first he could not recognize it for what it was. To see the three of them, heads close together, one stained with gray and the others still golden, whispering secrets or softly humming some old tune to which none of them could rightly remember the words; it made the man itch inside.

He was held high in regards by his King, yes, but never was he asked about his dreams, his past, his visions more than in light conversation, soon forgotten. Never was he included in childish embraces or invited to treasure hunts behind the stables. He told himself that he'd never want to anyway. Him, a noble man! The mere idea! None the less, the man who had chosen to stand apart from others was, at last, beginning to feel lonely. As his King took the children to his heart, the Counsellor stood aside and wished, for the first time, to belong. But how could he? He, who had prided himself in not needing anybody, would not know how to begin. Small trinkets, stories told and some education, this he could offer. All he proposed was received with polite thanks from the children, or the King, when it came to the education. But a teacher is not family, and the man was not let in as far as he had hoped. The children understood each other as only those who've grown up together can, instinctively reading one another, always knowing or understanding what the other needed or wanted. That one person could understand the other so well, the man had never realized till now, and he wanted badly to be a part of it but found that he could not. And as envy bloomed in his heart, he tried the only way he knew how to quell it: by tearing apart what he himself could never have, by planting distrust between the brother and sister. Such is the nature of envy: the man thought that if he could not have it, then they too must be undeserving. So he set to work with taking their trust in each other away from them. Sometimes he would be successful, managing to place a wedge between them, whispering rumours and lies to make them wary of each other. But sometimes he was not. And as he was truly not understanding the nature of trust, of love and the worth of family. It took long before he became aware that the wedges were sometimes pushed out after he was gone, that small cracks would be healed or plastered over, that voices which had cried out in anger could just as soon turn soft again, explaining and soothing. The brother and sister grew wary of each other, yes, but they grew even more wary of the man who was trying to force them apart because he could not have what they had. As time went by, the bitterer became his lies, whispered clandestinely in darkness. As woodworm in rot wood will gnaw away on the inside till naught is left and the tree will fall apart on its own accord, so were the Counsellor's words gnawing on them. And on the King, once they tried to turn to him; he would not believe such things of his most trusted servant, and failed to recognise the man's subtle hand in such wry chords as now rang within his court and family.

Alike as the two siblings might have been, they were yet different. Both were kind, both well mannered, but the would-be-princess held steel in her soul; a cold determination to get her what she needed, while her brother held fire; a sparkling, everlasting source of energy. He was the one more likely to speak before thinking, she more likely to brood on words flown out too hasty, and to contemplate their meaning. These character traits were both good and bad and would have brought them joy and sadness alike, had they been left alone. The Counsellor, however, had learned to target such traits, seeing them as weaknesses that he might use to his liking. To make a young man speak out in anger is not hard, especially if he's hot-headed. That a young woman should dwell on such heated words would follow without further urging. So easily done, so hardly undone.

Trying to find strength from each other, the young sister and brother came up with a nasty nickname: Wormtongue, they would call him, for his tongue is forked and his words will gnaw and gnaw and gnaw away at us if we let them. Better not to let them, better not to trust a word he says. They took comfort in each other, and they shut the man out.

And the man, the Wormtongue, would moan and curse and spit into the darkness because in his efforts to belong he had ended up lonelier than before. The envy curled itself around his heart, blackened it, bore a hole into his soul and left him with no way to fill it other than to double his efforts in tearing at what others had, thinking it would bring him satisfaction. If he could not have it, neither should they. And it did bring satisfaction, after a fashion. But it left a bitter taste, and the hole within him would keep on tugging.

As the brother and sister grew older, a new bitter lesson was to be learned by the man now known to them as Wormtongue. The brother took to the sword and became a rider proud, tall and strong and good-humoured. The sister also learned to wield the sword, as was the custom in their land, but her duties lay not with the riders but with the affairs of the kingdom. The King had a grown up son, destined to take the crown after him, and the young brother was to be schooled as Marshal, a captain, while the sister was thought of as wife of a regent to be, which meant she was taught script and figures, names and customs of other lands, practising to write introduction letters for emissaries with all the correct greetings for trade, and a thousand other tasks that she could not bear to remember. Too many. She had not wished for it at all, thought her brother's task the longer straw. How could it not be? Grab your sword, stick the pointy end into the enemy. There. Simple. She had never wished for anything more. But the King had great hopes for her, for both of them. A Marshal, he thought, was a job best suited for a man. And even if it was not so: school two new captains, and end up with nothing when they both fall in battle. Nay, the King had other plans.

So the sister sighed, and set to work, often tutored by the Counsellor she did not yet openly call Wormtongue. He was well suited for the job, knew what she would need to learn and the means by which she would. Ledgers and scrolls were produced, figures explaining different routes of commerce, what to trade and to whom, what might work and what might not. As the brother and sister would spend more time apart, what with their different tasks and schooling, so the man called Wormtongue would lessen his attempts at turning them against one another, thinking it no longer needed. All by himself, one on one, he could be pleasant, charming even if in a good mood. But the sister remembered well his little seeds of discord and she never fully relaxed in his presence. With a sigh, she would dip her quill in her inkpot and set to work on the proper way to address a regent if one hoped to trade within said regent's lands.

The girl grew to become a young woman, and a beautiful one at that. And the man she would not openly call Wormtongue, not yet, felt the hole in his soul start throbbing as in pain whenever he set eyes on her. When he finally put a name to the sensation, he called it love. She was beautiful, and he wanted to own her, to consume her, to keep her and to never let her out less she be touched by another man's gaze. He called it love, but the second lesson to be taught was that of lust, for he lusted after the now young woman such as he had never lusted for wealth, nor intelligence, nor anything ever before. And in his heart stirred the old wish of belonging. His loneliness called out from within and he thought that if only he could have her, if only she would have him; she would look into his eyes and she would love him. And she alone would fill up that hole in his soul with her love, and he would become whole and never lonely again.

The young would-be-princess bore steel in her soul, a cold sharp blade covered with thin layers of silk. Not always visible, but always there, always handy for her to bring out whenever needed. The Wormtongue, however, could be said to bear water in his soul, and water runs as water will, always finding cracks where it might slip in to form dark pools and lie waiting. Dark thoughts may breed in such pools, and water is oh, so difficult to scope out or to take hold on, ever slipping away. Drop by drop, water may taint even the sharpest steel with specks of rust. Her brother would boil the water away with his anger, would he ever find such pools in his mind. He would boil them to the last drop. But water boiled has a habit of turning to steam, and steam, when cooled down, will yet again be drops of water, slowly slipping down the walls of mind to make new pools. The sister found another weapon and took to the coldness of her mind to freeze the water that was placed in there by the Wormtongue. Freeze it to ice, till it lay unmoving, never to slip deeper into the cracks of her mind. But then again, water frozen has a habit of expanding, and sometimes a frozen pool would force itself to inhabiting a yet larger space in her mind, spreading its chill deeper into her soul. And so, the young girl grew up a fair maiden, but there was to be a coldness about her, and the many layers of silk surrounding the steel in her soul would get worn thin, till only a few remained. Fair but cold, she earned a reputation and was sometimes called Ice Maiden. Still kind and loved by her people, but all the more unattainable, all the more unreachable and too often lost in contemplation. And as the slight frame of childhood was replaced by the willowy shape of a young woman, ever increased the Wormtongue's lust for her.

Had he known lust before? Most certainly, he was only human, a mortal man with the urges and needs of one such. But never to this extent, and it scared him slightly that he would feel such passion for this young would-be-princess that it at times would cloud his better judgement and make him act in ways unexpected, allowing himself strange follies such as he had never succumbed to before. He tried to win her trust, shadowed her steps to be close to her, and he obsessed over her until the mere idea of her with someone else made him grit his teeth in wrath and jealousy. And yes, there was always the envy, underneath it all, envy to feel such closeness as the brother and sister would enjoy, jealousy that they would have that while he was left out. He again increased his efforts to pry them apart, planting new seeds of discord between them. And whenever the sister would turn from her brother in anger or tears, the Wormtongue would be there waiting, offering words of consolation, being to her as kind as he knew how. She would abide his company then, but only for a while. The strong love shared between her and her brother would always bring them back together, once again reminding one another that the Wormtongue's whispers were poisonous, reassuring each other that they would be forever watchful, to mind their steps around the Counsellor who wished to pry them apart.

And as the Wormtongue once more saw his efforts ruined, he would slip again into the shadows, gritting his teeth while forming yet a new plan to get the young sister to himself. He lusted after her and he named the sensation love, thinking his desires were as pure as the feeling he'd often heard of in songs and poems. But love is to be a giving and taking based on trust. True love is generous, and can be shared by two or many. Love is grander than lust, which is often one sided, while love is forever giving and taking. Sometimes just a little, sometimes overflowing, as if to make up for time lost. Love is warm, and big, and strong, love will make the hearts on those as let it in grow large enough that they may embrace even others. Such as family, such as children to come. True love is forever growing and embracing, but the man called Wormtongue saw the beauty and grace of the young woman who would one day be a princess, and he wanted it all to himself. He wanted to take everything that was she and stuff it into that dark hole in his soul so that she would be forever his and that he would be whole. He wanted to take and to have, but had no thought of giving back. Such is not the nature of love, but the man did not understand because he had failed the lesson and he did not know love at all.