Ignorance is bliss, but knowledge is power. There's a reason clichés become clichés, after all. I never had the gift of ignorance, instead I had the "power" of knowledge. The knowledge that I was descended from a traitor to herself and her kind. That her mistake had cost thousands of lives. The knowledge that all of my foremothers had died paying for her crime, as soon would I. I know, while I do not remember, that my mother died in childbirth. A fairly common occurrence, except that she turned into a pile of ashes when I took my first breath. A less common occurrence. The women of my line share a strange sort of blood, along with one other creature in Arda. The fallen Maia we were created to preserve, and determined to destroy. Our father.
The knowledge of the making of the Great Rings of Power has been lost to time. No one knows how Sauron the Great managed to put his own life force in the One Ring, or why. Many believe it was to make the Ring stronger, to link it with the others. I know otherwise. It was his insurance. So long as the Ring survives, so does he. But the Ring can be destroyed, as those who have stumbled upon my tale already know. Never one to take chances, and always having believed in the power of the mystical number three, he decided to preserve his power and life force in a third option. A self-perpetuating option. Descendents. Sauron the Deceiver was also a seducer, and so ensnared an elleth named Sitari. Blinded by her love for him, she recklessly ignored signs of his evil. As he was crafting the Great Ring, he was also devising his way of having a more adaptable, less conspicuous vessel of his power and life. He wrought the One Ring of his own blood, and joined it with the Everlasting Fire. This was the only way to truly consecrate such great magic. The effect it has on living beings is quite different. Sitari bore his child at the same time of this consecration, a coincidence of his design. Promising Sitari that the consecration would protect their daughter, he cast the Everlasting Fire into the babe. Such a ritual was supposedly done by using his own sword as the bridge between child and fire, plunging it into the heart of his newborn daughter. She bore the mark for the remainder of her short life, as our legend goes.
Once the One Ring was revealed to the world, and his true intentions were revealed, Sitari was too deeply in love with him to leave, and too attached to her child. She hated what her lover had done, but could not hate him. He used her continuously against her own kind, until she was eventually killed in one of his covert attacks. His daughter grew swiftly, far too swiftly for an immortal elf or Maia. The Everlasting Fire is not meant to be encapsulated in the body of a living creature. Having been consecrated and raised by Sauron, she was entirely under his control. Then one day, she went into sudden labor and bore a daughter with no father. No sooner had the baby breathed her first breath than Sauron's daughter turned to ash. The everlasting fire had consumed her life, but created itself a new form. Such has been the life of every woman of my line. Around the age of fifty, she gives birth to a daughter and dies.
It was an ingenious plan. So long as the fire burns in us, the Dark Lord keeps his insurance. Furthermore, if the current descendent, as we have called ourselves, is killed, her force and power joins back with him. If the Ring is destroyed, the same occurs. If his physical form is destroyed, his spirit lives off of his two spawn, the Ring and the descendents. But, if both the Ring and the descendent were truly destroyed? He would face death as any other. Of course, destroying the Ring requires melting it in the fires from which it was form. Destroying the descendents is far more difficult. True, you can kill any of us like any mortal, although we are warriors by heritage, but the fire remakes us, passing this curse onto another descendent. When a descendent does not die in childbirth, the child springs from he body three days after the death of the mother. I do not know which was the case with me. The only way for the life force of Sauron to be returned to Sauron himself, and thus remove the curse and destroy his insurance policy of descendents? The prophecy has been handed down, mother to daughter by the necklace we all wear, our shared memory. I have four hundred generations of memory at my disposal, contained in the star shaped pendant around my neck. The prophecy says that the scarlet fellow will meet the maker and only by the maker's sword shall she redeem her line in death.
I've never liked prophecies. They have a ridiculous tendency towards the cryptic. The general consensus between former descendents and myself is that the final descendent must be killed by Sauron's sword. My opinion? The bastard isn't quite so thick as to kill me himself. But I've an eye for loopholes.
Now we come to the point? The "scarlett fellow", the final descendent? It took me years to discover why it said fellow, but the first part wasn't hard to understand. The shewolf who nursed me named me Scarlett.
Imagine knowing since you were born that you were doomed. I guess it's part of the human condition. Such a shame I'm not human.