At first he strove for healing, for direction and hope, for the organization and rebirth of Middle-Earth. Melkor's orc armies had no memory of their old master, save for the script more elegant than any penned tongue that twisted in the tiny liquid caverns of their flesh; Melkor had been wise and beautiful, rewriting the inmost language of the newborn Elves into something more mortal, more useful.
"They are born, they know pain, and they die," Melkor had said, a dark rich mercy in his voice. "They will be my sword arm; they will free Arda with their wretched bloody work, and they will know fierce pleasure and then perish before their victories turn to ash in their mouths." Such mercy; such fiery dreams.
Melkor told him, whispered in his ear, of the earliest days of Arda, its upheaved crust untainted by any shadow of creeping green. Lines of fire, he murmured, and his fingers sifted the copper-gold locks that fell across Sauron's shoulders: lines of fire etched and writhing upon the sweet jet blackness of the burning ground. Once Arda had been a jewel.
And if Arda now lay infested with the basest accidental conjugations of substance, moss and mould and beasts without minds, Melkor still unraveled them and learned their helical secrets, creating tools for his own hands, building in the safeguards against eternity that limited their suffering.
Now the orcs thrived; their improved bodies grew strong, while the delicate humans starved and huddled in their caves, created to turn up their noses at the bounty of carrion and rot that was good enough for the rest of their beastly kin. And even then, Sauron felt pity for them, who had not known the touch of his master, and remembering the fear and sorrow and hunger in Melkor's eye as he was thrust through the Door of Night- the haunting knowledge in his cry, that Arda would continue without more than a postscript of his expertise- Sauron sought to rebuild a world of mercy, a world without pain.
An orderly world, according to the lines and numbers of Sauron's mind. A good world, without the meddling of the Valar. Certainly his subjects died and suffered; but this was all for the sake of order, structure, and peace. Wheels turned below his tower; men and werewolves marched in order, orcs were born to the knowledge of hierarchy and obedience, and great machines rose upon his horizons to comb the landscape for precious and useful minerals.
Is this what you wanted, Sauron breathed; do you remember, Melkor, from your distant prison, how my deft hands turned your passion and wrath into schemes and victories? Do you see through that dark door, beloved Master, how I have built upon your foundations, how this great continent is scoured clean in your name, how I have loved you? How I have loved you?
Melkor would not have approved of the Rings, and indeed even in the depths of the joy of creation Sauron felt the sting of his reproach. They rolled across his palms like jewels, perfect in their craft, gifts for his chiefest lieutenants, to make even their wills into things of order and service. Melkor would have disdained to share his power with humans, even rulers of Men as great and stern as the Witch-King; he would have scoffed at the thought of teaching the statue-faced Elves even a sliver of his own secrets.
And yet this had been Sauron's chiefest use to his master: he was subtle and cunning, willing to sacrifice to see his plans to fruition, not given to public rebellion when a silent coup would serve. Melkor would have scorned him as he stood, gasping and weak, scarcely more than a mortal body with a burning spirit, and threw down his tools to seize up the burnished golden Ring and feel its power- his power- settle around his finger and wind through his fragile veins.
Still, even if the Elves were clever enough to put away their rings, the Men were utterly consumed by them. Surrounded by his servants, Sauron rested upon his throne and saw the world shaped into his tool, piece by piece, and tried to feel the pride and triumph of it. The rank and file of orcs and Men below his feet unfurled across the fields like ribbons of ink, like lines of poetry upon dusty parchment, like a love letter. Like the twined keys of the language of life, Melkor's enduring reply scribed in the bones of the orcs, the lonesome Ainur's handwriting between the chaotic lines of the book of Arda.
-
Then the ships came from Numenor, and the kingdom crumbled, and in his defeat Sauron put on his most beautiful aspect- the smooth pale skin, the cascade of brilliant curls that had once invoked the ancient memories of Melkor's molten Arda- and cast his eyes down to beg for mercy. Melkor could not have done this. Melkor had gone into the dark cursing.
For this betrayal, Sauron loathed himself, that he could be such a coward; but his schemes prevailed, and the foolish King bowed his will. Melkor's name rose again on Arda; in every street of the greatest city of men, prayers went up to the lovely defeated archangel. Still Sauron's spirit was unquiet, and looking out at the unworthy mortal creatures who crept like maggots in the rotting wound of Numenor, presuming to wrap their wet lips around Melkor's austere names, he felt spite stirring within him as it had never arisen in subjugated Mordor. He was Melkor's high priest, and soon he had the grey-eyed Men of the West butchering each other, themselves, their children; the stench of burning human sacrifice rose over the hallowed tile roofs, and the groans and keens of the defiled and bereaved went up to heaven like an accusation.
It was not enough. It could never be enough. Melkor had gone into the dark for these worms, for his mercy to these beasts; Sauron wanted to rip the sky open and scream defiance into Eru's face, to point out the depredations of the easily deceived, the unpardonable wickedness of free will. Still the Valar held their silence, even as Middle-Earth drowned in its own blood, even as the Numenoreans descended into the deepest and hungriest evil that Sauron could summon from it. Foulness and filth to all the world, a fate to satisfy even Melkor's darkest passions, which had become Sauron's own.
At last the black ships that had once torn down his orderly kingdom turned their proud keels to the shores of the Valar, driven by rage and pride and Sauron's poisoned whispers; with them rode Sauron, his long red hair like a blooded banner in the sea-wind, the Ring burning upon his hand like a living coal, a token of betrothal to the boiling surface of the most ancient Arda that Melkor had so loved. He did not care any longer to cheer for one victory or another; if the Valar prevailed, Sauron would see the foul Numenoreans slaughtered to the last man, and if these fierce defiled Men rose up against their angelic captors in triumph, then Sauron would leave them to rule their slimy ball of rock and cast himself unbodied through the dark star-threaded expanse of the universe to wrench open the guarded door that separated him from his Master.
He did not anticipate the cowardice of the Valar, that they should appeal for- and receive- divine intervention, rather than meet their foes in clean battle. The wave overtook him, and the boats came apart under the least of its forewaves; the silence of the drowning Men pervaded the roar of water, and Sauron wept and cursed into it with all his power until the battering force became too much for even the body of a high Maiar. Like the cruel hands of imprisoning Valar, the weight of the implacable Sea bore him down, to the yawning gate of Death from which his body could not return.
-
His spirit left him then, for a time, and within the white abyss he felt a presence, many presences. Forgiveness, they offered; redemption. He had, after all, begun his task in love, and with the goal of reducing suffering. There would be work ahead, and great sorrow and loss, and white cities of Men and Elves for a hundred ages, and mercy, an end to the pain.
He wavered, tempted, for the space of an eon, for a thousand thousand years, while on Arda his vacant flesh sank into the grey dissolution of the unlit deep, while his red hair flowed upward like flames from a byre and the heat-light of his Ring flickered into darkness. The length of a few minutes; the spirit unchained by synapses and electrical impulses, to regard its choices with an eye of all light; the universe shrunk to a point, and before that point a choice. Redemption, with its labors and its penances, with sweet amnesia against the torment of Melkor's fall... or, like a witch-light luring its prey into the fen, a Ring.
The white receded; in the colorless depths was a ghost, the shadow of a broken desire, a tremor in the silent crushing water. The spirit of Sauron departed its body like a lover fleeing in the night, with only a moment to glimpse the fair figure behind it, turning its back and all its attention to lift the lead-heavy Ring and to surge toward the black and ruined shore behind. Below, the ivory and crimson of the body that remembered Melkor's touch; above, the stolen treasure, the potent oath, the golden wheel turning. Like a lover he fled, or a thief.
He coalesced in his oldest place of power, in the unclean land of Mordor, at the forge where he had first seen the Ring tumble from its broken mold. He wasted no time amassing his power; Gil-Galad had grown strong in his absence. He built himself a form to indwell, but he lacked Melkor's craft, and in the end he walked as a mockery of flesh and armor. None of it mattered; his body was only a tool, a useful object, and he would take no pleasure nor joy in it. Every scheme, every plan burned with his wrath, and he drove himself with the lash of memory until all that remained of Melkor was the last flint-sharp moment of despair at the threshold of the Door. There was no need for more.
Sauron knew, now that he had seen through the light-swift eye of the white abyss, that he had ceased to be the merciful Maiar Lord of Men long before he even forged the Ring, that he had drawn order and structure as a veil across his own atrocities. It would have hurt him, once, to see himself so wretched and foul, such an apparent evil. Now he only hoped that Melkor could see.
He truly believed, up until the moment when Isildur's broken blade cut the Ring from his hand, that he had suffered enough, that in forfeiting every trace of happiness or love he had earned the favor of chance. But the Ring fell away, and even the rude machine of his new body failed him at last, and when he fled there was no love in his wake, no blood-stream of abandoned curls, no treasure to bear along.
He hid himself in Dol Goldur while his spirit strove to take new shape. Thranduil he knew of old, the most ancient Elf-King, who erred toward caution; the Elves of Mirkwood would not trespass upon his tiny stronghold unless it threatened them, and he had little threat to offer for a thousand years.
He moved now with his greatest subtlety, aware that any false step would bring Thranduil's stern boot-heel down upon his spine. He longed for the Ring, knowing that the Council of the Wise would have cast it into the fires of Mount Doom within a day of his defeat. Certainly now, as he turned his will toward the wound in his soul where the Ring should have been, he found no mind to bend or tempt near it. At last he ceased his search, and focused all his will to the growth of his own power, until his Nazgul returned to his side.
Still his rages returned, and his dark hungers, and when he captured a traveler, it was his fierce delight to torment them into insanity: fingers broken early on, teeth pulled, splinters driven beneath the nails, and later the subtler torments, the defilement of the spirit, the lasting mutilation of the flesh, the abasement of his victims in participation with others' torture. Shreds and ribbons of his captives dried and festered on walls and floor, each gobbet and scream like a song in his ears, like a sweet whispered word through the chink of the wall between himself and lost Melkor.
When the Maiar at last drove him out- Olórin in his grey robes, Aiwendil cowering with his beasts, Curunír with his clever tongue, and the vengeful armies of Thranduil at their side- he went laughing, he went in power, surrounded by his slave-kings. He had received a word, a hint, that his most precious prize still existed. He went to Minas Morgul, where he did not bother to construct a body at all; instead he remembered the all-seeing eye with which he had examined himself once, and he sought to pierce all of Middle-Earth with that eye until he found his Precious.
Here in Mordor his power grew uncontested. His orcs defiled the land, burning Sauron's wrath and his tortured adoration across the green-tainted fields between him and his enemies. He made alliances with whatever lands could ignore the foulness of his servants for their prowess in battle, and no few of them did he betray and devour. He seduced Curunír at last; he poisoned the spirits of Rohan and of Gondor; his spies inveigled themselves into every court and city, and each whisper on their lips remembered the worship of Melkor in the streets of Numenor, recalling Sauron's sacrificial fires, the smoking homage to his beloved.
At last he picked up the trail of his Ring, and he grasped at it and grasped again, threw every power and army after it. He would have it, and with its power he would be whole again; he would lay utter waste to Arda and see its crust returned to barren tumultuous stone; he would unlock the encryption of nucleotides and build for himself a new and more beautiful body, one that might withstand all things, and he would fashion for himself a ship that sailed among the stars, and he would let the Valar wring their hands over the ruin of the earth while he set his keel for the Door of Night. Below him would fall the gold-red fiery tresses of volcanic destruction, gleaming molten lines upon the stark black stone, drifting away uselessly behind him; ahead would loom the Door, behind which lay suspended the one thing he desired more than the Ring, and he would bring his master back to see Arda whirling in its orbit, a jewel of fire and jet.
This is what Sauron imagined, what he dreamed as he searched his own lands in a frantic terror; this is what his great roving all-seeing eye beheld as the Ring returned to its fires, consumed by the molten stone that Melkor had once so admired, and the tower of Sauron's strength toppled and his burning eye fell, all rage and defiance to the end, trailing his curls of golden flame behind him as he fell.