Author's Notes: Written for erlkoenig during the 2019 Slashy Valentine challenge. Many thanks to Maitimiel who betaed this behemoth for me! All errors remaining are mine.
Story Notes: On canon: The Second Age is a matter of some complexity and contradiction. I've cherry-picked the pieces with the most potential for conflict.
"Our virtues and our failings are inseparable, like force and matter. When they separate, man is no more."
— Nikola Tesla
"The Devil hath power / To assume a pleasing shape."
— Shakespeare, Ham.,
He touched a taper to the spirit lamp. Whump, hiss . A thrill of flame burst above the jet. It pulsed then steadied: a colorless tongue with a heart of amaranthine heat. Thin warmth spread to either side though nothing would ever quite eliminate the damp. Stooping, he groped through other people's wreckage for pot, mug, and tea leaves.
The bell above his door chimed, silvering the air. A breath of air, rich with oncoming rain, exhaled across the room and sent several pages, loosely gathered under a tome, spinning across the floor.
"Master Enerdhil?"
He was almost getting used to it — the discomfort of a name not his own, shrugging it on like a coat that didn't quite fit. Nothing could conceal his dark Noldorin looks, but in this city, so many struggled with their own private tragedies, they felt no compulsion to inquire after his. They did not blame a man if he styled himself outside the context of his lineage.
The woman at his threshold stood for a moment, blinking her way out of the thickening light outside.
"Can I help you, miss?" he prompted when she remained there, not venturing further in but not quite willing to retreat.
"Are you Enerdhil? The one they call Enerdhil? I was told you had a shop here."
"I am and I do, as you see." He set his pot above the spirit lamp then gathered the fallen pages from the floor, tapped them on the counter to neaten their lines and tucked them more securely under a different tome. "Woodwork. Metalwork. Leatherwork. Engraving. Book-binding. Silver-smithing. Paper-making. Even embroidery, if you like."
She looked about her, taking in the cluttered shelves, tables, countertop. All flat spaces (and most of the vertical ones) were occupied by all manner of things: relics of war and circumstance, the histories of unraveled lives and drowned lands in various states of (dis)repair, treasures salvaged and hauled long leagues, their bearers unable to part with them even when practicality demanded otherwise.
"I was told you have skill in such matters. Even—even things that might not be fixed. I'm afraid I don't have much in the way of coin…"
He cleared a space on the countertop before him. "Let's have it."
She laid a music box of weathered grey wood before him. Filigreed leaves unfurled along its edges and across the lid. One hinge buckled upward, the wood bulging as if it had been rained on.
"This is Doriath craftsmanship," he said. A cold, prickly sweat broke out down his spine and along his ribs as he turned it over in his hands.
"It hasn't sounded since… since we left."
"Yes."
The music box had lost its voice: the merry tune of water bubbling, spinning away under a canopy of unbroken leaves. It hadn't sung since those dark men had come with their dark swords and bright eyes. Ever since they had taken mistress, who it had played for so often, from her bed. They had made her sing a song it could never repeat.
Always, it was like this. He would stitch closed a hole in a gown that belonged to a young woman in love with someone she could not have. He polished tarnish and old anger out of brooches and silver. He swept a dust cloth over a mirror until it glinted with secrets (he did not look; he mistrusted mirrors). He hid in beauty what could never be spoken.
Swallowing hard, he wound the key in the opposite direction gently, feeling the tension go out of it like a sigh. He oiled it and soothed its splintered edges; he straightened the jostled comb, the crooked cylinder. He worked polish over the blackened gold, and slowly, tentatively, it gave up its grief to him.
This time, he turned the key, and a bright, sprightly tune danced through the shop, springing tears to the woman's eyes.
She tried to press a few coins on him, but he refused. She seized his hands instead, her eyes over-bright and fierce. "Thank you. Thank you . We had tried everything…You have a gift, truly."
The back of his neck grew hot. Carefully, he extricated himself. "My family had a knack for the making of things: gems, in particular, but metal and stone as well."
And for never knowing when to relinquish them.
He feared, as he always did, that he had given away too much. That somehow this stranger might unearth the truth of his words and his name in his eyes. Instead, her face softened with sympathy.
"They are not with you? Your family?" She had taken note of nothing more in his words than its careful phrasing in the past.
"No."
After he bowed her out of his shop, he threw the bolt on the door and snuffed the light in the window. His fingers trembled, the grief of the little music box echoing in him like a bruise.
The shop, low and rectangular and familiar, enfolded him in its silence and the company of other people's things. Everything in the shop belonged to someone else. Everything but a small chest in the corner. Its presence crouched like an animal lying in wait, all iron hasps and dark rosewood. He had carried it longer than anything else — even when practicality demanded otherwise. The parts not taken up with stacks of books and the folds of a half-mended tapestry were covered in inches-thick dust.
The stench of scorching metal hit his nostrils, spurring him gratefully across the room. He snatched the pot off the flame. The bottom was discolored — not for the first time — with a blackened ring.
With a sigh Celebrimbor fetched up a bucket and stepped out of the ghosts of overheated metal and ancient regret and went to draw more water from the well.
A fortnight later, he braved the wet misery of the evening and slogged uphill towards the Great Square and the House that sat above it. The journey was one he made as often as he was summoned — the summoner was not one a man refused if he possessed any wisdom.
Along the boulevard the holly trees were neatly pruned and evenly spaced, unlike the wild, blowsy tangle down by the city walls where he dwelt. Lamps hung from their limbs, silver and blue. In fair weather or foul, they burned clear without smoke or need of trimming (a quiet commission he had undertaken some years earlier). They never failed — yet tonight, the light behind their glass housing flickered: capricious as marsh lights.
As he reached the top of the hill, within sight of the Lord's House, he looked back, the city of Ost-in-Edhil beneath him, glimmering like a white gem in the rain. No ring of mountains encircled it. No enchanted girdle kept out the wicked or unwanted. Only high walls and an ever-open Gate, more ornament than armament. For the first time, the Elves lived without fear of some hidden figure in the dark North. No more fortresses. No more hiding.
The only shadows were of their own making.
Chin buried in his collar, he waded across the courtyard and up the steps into the shadow of the portico.
The light of a silver lamp slashed across his face.
"Halt and be recognized!"
Celebrimbor threw up a hand to shield his smarting eyes, but even squinting through the glare, he discerned the face of the young sentry behind it. "While I applaud your enthusiasm and dedication to duty, Erestor, at least have the decency to not blind me with my own lamp, will you?"
The sentry sheepishly lowered his arm, but the one behind him stood forward. Older, lampless, a Sinda man by his look, he ran an eye over Celebrimbor up and down, more searching than any lamp.
"Forgive our caution… sir…" he said, sounding neither as apologetic nor deferential as his words. "We have had reports of strangers at the gate."
"As you can clearly see, I am no stranger," Celebrimbor said, stepping hard on his impatience. Water dredged from his shoulders and dripped from his hair down the back of his collar. "Indeed, I am expected."
"He is, Captain," Erestor chimed. "She asked me to keep an eye out."
Celebrimbor cast him a grateful look even as his elder shot him a baleful one.
"You speak out of turn, lad. Unless you wish to exchange your lamp for a shovel, hold your tongue." He returned his gaze to Celebrimbor, and though the ire behind it did not lessen, he was too well-schooled to do more than tug the door open and stand to one side.
"Your vigilance does you credit," Celebrimbor said as he passed. "I shall remember it."
He stepped into the hall and shrugged out of his dripping cloak.
"Tyenya!"
Still nettled by his reception, he missed the blur of motion from the other end of the hall until too late. The pale bolt tangled in her overlong nightgown and socked him solidly in the belt buckle.
He grunted, almost overborne, but gamely righted himself and the small figure whose bright, untarnished eyes, the color of lapis lazuli, gazed up at him from a pillow-tangle of gold and silver hair. "What did you bring me?"
"Well, I like that," he said, crossing his arms with indignation only partly feigned (she had come close to damaging more sensitive parts than his belt buckle with her head). "No 'hail and well met, uncle.' Merely a demand for payment, is it, milady?"
The young girl looked properly mortified at once, but he waved aside her apologies and, crouching to her eye level, chucked her gently under the chin. "You don't think I'd visit and bring naught for you, do you? But, alas, I seem to have misplaced it."
He made a show of fumbling through his cloak and pockets while she, familiar with this ritual, rocked on the balls of her bare feet. With a deft flick of his wrist, he produced between two fingers as if from the air a glimpse of the proffered treasure, vanished it, and, leaning forward, gave her left ear a playful tug and dropped it into her waiting palm.
Her small fingers curled around the broach. Despite the hall lamps, too dim to strike its facets, its colors spilled across her face: the rich copper of beech trees in autumn…became dove-like curls of smoke…which gave rise to green ferns flourishing and broadening to the brilliance of a summer sun...before sinking, twilit, into the deepest of lilacs.
"Oh, Uncle, it's beautiful!" And in its wash, every quality of hers — and there were many both hard and bright — magnified in all their brilliance.
He smiled his first and truest smile of the day. "That is an opal you know. You may thank our friend, Narvi, for that gift. He—"
"Celebrían!"
Both of them startled, guiltily, and Celebrimbor unbent his knees.
The Lord of Eregion strode down the hall towards them, eying his progeny sternly. "You are to be asleep."
"I'm not tired, Adar."
Her father lifted a single, silver brow and waited, patient as the Ages.
Celebrían deflated, but the look she shot Celebrimbor was full of sly mischief as she slipped the bauble down her nightshirt. Oh, child, when come to womanhood, you will cause more men than your father no end of grief , Celebrimbor thought fondly.
He returned her conspiratorial wink even as he made obeisance to her father.
Though given over more to politics these days than polearms, Celeborn still resembled the warrior he had once been: confidant of Melian the Maia, bannerman to Thingol Singollo (Celebrimbor had only ever glimpsed the Woodland King on the edge of his halls, once and from a distance, and was glad he had come no closer). The Lord of Eregion was no less imposing, and up close he was a force to be reckoned with.
"Forgive the untimely summons, Telperinquar " Celeborn said, sounding much more sincere than his door warden as he nudged his wayward child in the direction of the family wing.
Hearing his true name in the mouth of a Sinda man never ceased to unsettle Celebrimbor. Like Thingol of old, Celeborn bore little love for outsiders, even less for the kin of those who had sacked the realm of Doriath and driven him and his lady-wife into the wilds. Unlike his former liege or the men who followed him, Celeborn did not permit his dislike to disadvantage him. A quality Celebrimbor rather admired, despite himself.
It was also not the only thing of Celeborn's he admired.
Aware that his boots and cloak hem were collecting a not-insignificant and rather unbecoming puddle beneath him, he dipped his head again. "I wait upon your pleasure, as always, my lord."
"I only wish it were," came the oblique reply as the Lord of Eregion led the way down the corridor.
Despite the chill of rain and Celeborn's foreboding, Celebrimbor's heart quickened in anticipation as they entered the audience hall: a long rectangular room hung with more silver lamps. They shone across the polished floor despite the thick penumbra of the ceiling.
At the top of the dais sat a woman, tall even sitting, with a much more ordered fall of hair than her daughter's tumbling down past her shoulders. The tresses glimmered, soft as bronze, tensile as copper. He had crafted the lamps for this very hall with the only thought in his mind of how that hair needed but a finger-caress of light (candlelight, unbound) to cull forth the ghosts of Laurelin and Teleperion anew. The fairness of Celebrían came to its full fruition in her mother. Stubbornness softened by wisdom, both annealed in a beauty that was hard to look at for long.
She rose and walked down the wide steps, sleek and gold where her husband was tall and silver. She presented a slender hand, the one not reserved for her husband's token. He took it, cradled it in both of his, carefully, the way he handled his burners when he had not waited for the glass to cool enough. His callouses caught against the smoothness of her unmarked palm, and a tingle raced up his forearms to his scalp and all down the length of his back that had little to do with rain and nothing at all with a chill. He lifted her knuckles towards his lips, careful not to let them touch. He dared not so much as exhale lest the suddenly-fitful stutter of his breath betray him in such close quarters.
"You drag me away from my work and out into a wild night that almost makes me prefer dragon-fire. Now what, may I ask, is so urgent, Alatáriel?" He inquired over her wrist, impertinent, more petrified than daring (petrified that she might descry his mind — with those uncanny eyes of hers — it nearly unmanned him there). So he looked at nothing but her eyes as he straightened and smiled and released her.
"You have been too long away, my friend," said the Lady, returning his smile. "I would that our meeting was a merrier one. We have need of your counsel."
But it was Celeborn who answered his question (the faintest stiffening of his shoulders all that he would ever give away at their familiarity). "More than you have braved the storm this night. We have a guest."
Celebrimbor looked about him. There were not three of them in the hall but four.
The fourth sat on the second lowest of the steps, a shadowed figure wrapped up and hooded, so still and closely resembling the stone that Celebrimbor had missed him entirely.
In spite of the foul weather, not a single droplet of rainwater wetted those humbly-clad shoulders. The boots, resting firmly on the stone floor, were untarnished by mud and dyed a vibrant shade of scarlet such as Celebrimbor had only ever glimpsed on traders out of the Far East. But nothing else of his person (if indeed a 'he' — it was hard to discern from the shadows of that great hood).
"Greetings." The voice was light, musical, neither wholly male nor female, giving as little away of the speaker as the ragged garb. "Forgive me if I do not rise. I fear my journey has made me terribly weary. I've come a long way. Enerdhil… is it?"
"It is."
"Annatar is my name. I am told that you have a gift…Enerdhil."
"I have been told so." Sharp heat crept up into Celebrimbor's face. He did not like the look of this stranger and even less the look cast at him, all owlish and inquisitive. "A lofty name for a wilding come out of the rain. Annatar. Lord of Gifts?"
"What are names but the things we use to comfortably clothe ourselves to others." Annatar threw back his (for more and more male in voice and features had he become) hood and shrugged out of the burlap in one, smooth motion, holding it out on the tips of his fingers. "As for gifts: this is the least of them."
Bemused, Celebrimbor took it.
Though it had seemed like burlap, it was heavier than expected, smoother, and utterly dry. There were no needle pricks or stitches or anything that betrayed it as a garment of any kind. It was one, long, unbroken sweep of cloth that glimmered as if some benevolent spider had woven a vast web that caught and repelled rainwater.
And then, faintly at first, like a bell from far off, he heard music. Music such as he had never heard sung in many fair and unearthly voices that raised the tiny hairs on the nape of his neck even as they broke his heart. For they were far away. Farther than any ship might sail.
He almost sank to his knees under the weight of such music. Only Celeborn's arm under his shoulder spared him an ungainly sprawl across the flagstones.
Celebrimbor let fall the cloak and stared, unabashedly open-mouthed, at the small man, his hands folded demurely before him. For all that he appeared of elven-kind: neither young nor old in the ageless way of the Eldar, he seemed more like a piece of unpolished crystal, opaque and cloudy and unremarkable, but polish out the rough and facets of variegated color might spring from its surface, full-revealed.
"You…You come of the Valar?"
Annatar smiled. "Your liege-lady wished to put my claim to the test. I blame her not. Indeed, I met with even less welcome in lands further west and south. Looking as I do, I should be grateful they did not send the dogs after me." He laughed self-deprecatingly.
"Why are you here?" asked Celeborn, who shifted closer to his lady.
"The Valar would take counsel for the governance of Middle-earth. If there are still those dwelling here who might heed such."
Celeborn sniffed. "When last I beheld them, the Valar cared less for listening to counsel than exerting their will and claiming it right."
Annatar nodded. "Admittedly, mistakes were made. Indeed, even by those of the Highest Order, who might be thought beyond reproach. We have learned from those errs of judgment. Not by might and glory shall the Eldar be guarded. Nor through dwimmercraft and majesty are the greatest battles won. That you yourselves have proven with valor and steel alone. Even when we would not. They should have done more. And only now are they giving us leave to amend what we can. It may seem too little and far too late by your estimation, but I would beg for the chance to prove myself to you, if you would allow it."
The Lady listened to this with her head tipped to one side, her expression unreadable even to Celebrimbor who marked her shifts well. "Your words seem fair. Yet we were warned against you, Annatar. Despite his defeat, Morgoth left his shadow on the world, and not all of his servants have gone into the dark with him."
Annatar bowed, his expression one almost of pity had it been directed at any lesser a personage than the Lady of Eregion. "My lady. Aulë ever named you highest in his praises. Your wisdom and beauty in equal measure — I am glad to see he was not mistaken. Yet I would implore you not to mistake suspicion for wisdom or allow an excess of caution to forbid friendship. I can guess where such warnings may have come from. But Gil-galad is far, and Lindon's concerns are not Eregion's. Let trade and taxes be a king's affair! The governing of a city he ought to leave in hands more capable and more knowing of their people's best interests."
Ah, here is a keen and subtle mind. The Lady was not one to subject herself to the rule of another, and her discontent with Gil-galad, though known to few, was known. Despite himself, Celebrimbor felt for their strange visitor. He knew what it was to weather suspicion undeserved and hostility that he could not answer with anything other than words.
"My Lady, if you will permit me," he said in an undertone. "Others with less to recommend them have you permitted in your company against all counsel. Even if this Annatar is not who he claims to be, what harm is there in granting him leave to prove it? If he is found lacking or dissembling, we may dismiss him."
She looked at him in that way she had that made him feel as if she were burrowing into the very marrow of his bones. Then, obliquely, her gaze shifted away from him, peering at the far wall as if through space and time, lingering on some memory long past — or some future as yet un-glimpsed. "Even though we swore no oath, still we are ensnared, the paths laid before our feet ere we set out from our door. Now I understand why he did as he did though he knew the cost."
Celebrimbor did not understand this, but he pressed on, hoping to shake off this eerie woolgathering. "The power of Morgoth is, as you say, broken but not undone. No clearer is that seen than in the continued division between us. To that end, perhaps, we should not dismiss offered help out of hand — or stubbornness. You summoned me here for honest counsel and that is mine, if you would have it."
Celeborn touched his wife's arm. As if his fingers recalled her to herself, she stirred and laid her own over his. "What then do you suggest?"
"Leave him in my charge. I shall look after him and see that no harm comes of it." When she hesitated, Celebrimbor added. "Have I ever given you reason to doubt me?"
"It is not you I doubt."
She said nothing more as Celebrimbor escorted his newfound charge from the hall.
The rain had ceased by the time they returned to Celebrimbor's shop down on the lower street.
Annatar took in the cramped and, by now, rather dank room silently. The piles of books and discarded furniture. The cobwebs, the cot in the corner with its neatly folded blanket.
"It's—" He ran a finger over the dark wood of the chest, gathering up a layer of dust on his forefinger, "—charming."
"I have everything I need." Celebrimbor sifted through his few billets of wood beside the hearth. "And if it is little to your liking, you may sleep outside."
"I rather thought you dwelt in the House with your kinswoman."
"I am not a member of the household."
"No?" Annatar tilted his head, giving him that queer, uncanny look again. "Strange."
Celebrimbor straightened abruptly, frowning. "How did you know she was my kinswoman?"
"Let us dispense with the subterfuge, shall we?" Annatar passed his hand over the stub of a candle stuck upright on the worktable. The wick sputtered and flared to sudden life, dappling shadows across the underside of his face. "I know your name, and it is not Enerdhil. I must admit I would not have expected to find a descendant of Fëanor hiding himself away on a street shy of a rookery in the humble guise of a tinker."
"No more than I would have expected to find a servant of the Valar in the guise of alms guest," Celebrimbor blustered, resenting the hint of scorn in 'tinker.' "What makes you think I am hiding?"
Annatar cast him a look that required no answer to embellish it. "You do not wish to be dunned with the black brush that plagued your kin."
"Not an unreasonable fear," Celebrimbor said, not desiring to gainsay a Maia, too much, but unwilling to agree wholeheartedly. "My family did not enough harm to the world, and many of those who dwell here remember the ruin of Doriath, the sack of Sirion. To say nothing of my father's deeds in Nargothrond—" But he stopped there. He had no desire to invoke the old ghost of his father before this stranger.
"Deeds for which you are blameless."
"Not in all eyes." Celebrimbor stooped to the hearth again, stacking the drier billets in the cold hearth. He laid them with care, arranged and ordered, refusing to turn towards his guest who remained silent for a little.
"So, because of the ill judgment of a few, you would deprive yourself of greatness."
"Those that rise to greatness tend to fall a long, dark way. I am content."
"I do not believe you. You cannot tell me you are content with this…this sad little hovel. Mending the wounds of others because you fear to look too closely at your own."
"I begin to doubt my own wisdom," Celebrimbor muttered, almost to himself. "Mayhap I should have let the Lady have her way and expel you. Preferably from the height of the city walls."
Annatar held up his hands with a laugh. "Peace! Peace! For all your demurring, you possess a fire worthy of Fëanor. I only mean to help."
"Then you might lend a hand with the fire. One of us, at least, is cold and wet."
Annatar tilted his head as if considering this. "It is cold in here."
The wood that had been frustrating all of Celebrimbor's efforts began to smoke and then burst with a flourish of auburn sparks into a gout of flame. Surprised, he dropped the log in the grate and piled on the kindling to catch and cradle the flame.
As heat spread over him with a warm glow, the room contracted on itself. For a moment, and a moment only, he glimpsed in the flat and turning flames, unfurling like a vision or a dream of a vision, a vast flame-city of Ost-in-Edhil. Near the top of the hill, close to the holly trees (each leaf and berry orangered in shades of flame), sat a house to rival the Hall of the Lord and Lady. It gleamed like a jewel under a radiant sun, the flank of the High Road turning beyond its walls. Within, though he could not see it, he could feel a warmth, a pulsing that had nothing to do with the gathering fire. It was not just a house, but a Home. A family. A purpose of his own. Something more than a meagre hovel on the outskirts of the city, burning his chair legs for warmth.
His own.
His fingertips of their own accord and despite wisdom stretched out towards the flames as if to graze those high, white walls. His heart swelled.
The vision fluttered, faded and broke apart like rain smearing down a window pane. A rush of acrid smoke hit his face, and he staggered back, coughing. He blinked away the strange turn, shaken, sweating with nerves and desire all at once.
Annatar was watching him, a small, little smile curving his lips.
"Show off," Celebrimbor muttered, yet he could not entirely conceal his wonder and bustled to set the kettle on, to fish out a cup or two that did not have chips or a layer of dust in them. "I don't suppose you take tea?"
"I do, in fact. With two sugars, if there's any to be had. I feel cold and hunger and weariness as you do. Even heartbreak," Annatar said, mildly affronted. "I wear the flesh of the Eldar, after all, and living in Arda Marred, I am subject to its rules and laws. However inconvenient or uncomfortable I find it."
"I meant no offense," Celebrimbor said, chastened, and set a passably clean mug before his guest. "You are the first of your kind I have encountered."
Annatar seated himself at the worktable and folded his long hands before him. "You have much to learn, Telperinquar."
"And you are the one to teach me?"
Annatar helped himself to a spoonful of sugar, his easy smile renewed. "Yes. I am just the one."
Chapter Notes:
Tyenya - a term of endearment meaning 'dear kinsman.'
Technically Galadriel and Celebrimbor are rather distant kinsmen - but Celebrian deliberately calls him 'uncle' to denote a closer claim of kinship.
The first and only mention of Celebrimbor's attraction to Galadriel occurs in Unfinished Tales "The History of Galadriel and Celeborn."