Author's Note: This chapter is for almostinsane, A.K.A. Orolin - you'll know why!

Araloth: In your last review (which was fantastic, by the way - thank you! I think it's the very most glowing review I've ever gotten on anything in my life! *hugs*), you said it seems that Melkor has only minions, not friends. That's an "Oops!" on my part! I must not have been expressing my ideas about that as clearly as I hoped; the way I see it, he does have a real friendship with many of his people, especially Culnaur. At least, to the extent that their evil doesn't get in the way! Cruelty and ill-treatment are reserved for people who are NOT loyal to their side! XD! But that's where their mutual respect - and Culnaur's personal loyalty to Melkor - comes from. The 'Friendship' part of the 'Adventure/Friendship' genre I've got this fanfic posted under is definitely intended to mean the frienship between Melkor and Culnaur A.K.A. Sauron. =) Anyway, thanks for giving me the heads-up that I need to quit obscuring my own plotline in subtlety and understatement!

Chapter 10: Doom

This is a disaster. Watching as a shadow on the stone as his friend and master, Melkor, was bound and hauled away, Culnaur knew that it was time to save what he could and escape. Silently and invisibly, he slid along the wall behind the departing Valar, knowing that if he drew their attention they would not fail to perceive him even without a physical form.

They did not notice. Culnaur slipped away into the deepest shadows and left through a narrow hallway. Now, he thought, knowing there was still very little time before they would completely overrun the fortress. The Orcs!

None of the unliving items in Utumno were of importance; Culnaur held all the secrets of their making in his mind, at least for the most part. The Orcs, though, were another matter. The work that he and Melkor had put into their creation must not be wasted!

Traveling upwards and eastwards from the deep mine where Melkor had been captured, Culnaur arrived within moments at the Orcs' breeding pits and training barracks. The barracks were mostly deserted, of course, but some of the finest Orc-warriors still waited there in readiness for a final wave of reinforcements that Melkor had never had time to summon.

Resuming his physical form, Culnaur entered the barracks and chose several dozen of the very best slaves who were there. Quietly explaining his orders to them, he led them out into the adjoining cavern.

Followed by his silently running slaves, Culnaur hurried into the separate, locked chamber that was reserved for the females who were currently carrying offspring.

One of them, wearing a ragged, gray gown over her enormously swollen belly, was standing with her hands chained to the tops of two posts, screaming in unheeded pain as she struggled to give birth. It was a usual precaution, to make sure that the captive, unwilling mothers would not harm or kill their own infants after birth. In normal circumstances, a birth-attendant slave would have been summoned when the mother was closer to actual delivery, to ensure that the child was breathing well and to carry it to the infants' training area. Then the mother would be thrown back into the main breeding pits, in chains if necessary, where she would sooner or later conceive another whelp.

Now, the agonized mother struggled against her chains, crying out in pain as her belly muscles rippled. Culnaur left her there. She would probably lose the whelp in any case if she were moved in haste now, and her screams would give away the secrecy of their escape. Let the Valar have her!

A short distance past the laboring mother, the rest of the pregnant females had crowded themselves fearfully into the far end of the chamber. The arrival of the armed Orc-warriors, not to mention Culnaur himself, first lieutenant of Melkor, could mean nothing but pain to them.

Culnaur watched, pleased by the efficiency of his well-trained soldiers, as they descended in pairs on the terrified, scattering females. Each pair of Orc-men quickly overpowered one of the round-bellied women, throwing them to the ground and firmly binding their hands and feet with leather cords.

Some of the females put up quite a spectacular fight, brief though it was. One of the oldest - a violently rebellious one called Alakë, who had been bearing Orc-whelps for several centuries now, proving surprisingly resilient to the poisons that sooner or later tended to kill the breeding females - actually knocked one of her attackers to the floor and delivered a vicious blow to the other's gut, doubling him over, before they finally subdued her and bound her. As the cords tightened around her wrists and ankles, she began to shriek wordlessly in fury.

Culnaur stepped towards Alakë and her captors, frowning. He did not want to lose her: she was consistently the mother of very excellent slaves. But she was now screaming even more loudly than the one he had left chained to the birthing posts.

He considered threatening her with torment if she would not be silent, but her actions had always been unpredictable. He could not take the risk that she might agree, then begin screaming again at some disastrous moment in spite of the threat.

Culnaur's eyes of yellow fire stared into Alakë's blazing deep-gray ones, as she stood wrenching and twisting her body in an effort to pull away from the Orc-soldiers who held her up between them. Coldly, he struck her a sharp blow across the side of her head.

Alakë sagged, unconscious, hanging limply between her captors. Culnaur shrugged and turned away. She would survive or not; Culnaur had no such healing powers as the ones his lord Melkor possessed. Now, though, there was at least a chance of keeping the use of her in the rebuilding of the Orcs' race.

Briefly, he considered treating the prisoner who was in labor the same way, but he decided not to take the time or trouble. To the sound of her now-frantic screams as she seemed to realize that for some reason she was being deserted, Culnaur led his slaves with their burdens past her. Ignoring her trapped, wild eyes that stared after them in panic as they passed, he unlocked the doorway of a long, winding passageway that led to the surface outside the Great Gate.

Listening with the alertness that Oromë had taught him, Olórin caught a faint sound in the near distance. "This way!" he said, beckoning to Eönwë and the others. "There is something at the end of this passageway."

They followed the corridor swiftly. It ended, as they all seemed to, in a vast round cavern. This one held an enormous building within it, but that seemed to be deserted now. The sounds that Oromë's young huntsman Olórin had heard were coming from the other side of the cavern. From this close, it was starting to sound like a person's voice.

In seconds they came to a thick steel door, locked and without any kind of window or bars, set in the rough gray stone of the cavern wall. The voice was coming from somewhere just beyond this door, and as the Maiar drew near, Olórin could hear it clearly.

"Moranna, Moranna!" a sweet young voice was saying, in a tone of utter weariness and despair. "My dark gift, my little cursed one! If I could reach you, I would kill you." The voice's owner seemed to be choked by a sob. "Because I cannot, you will feel such pain..."

Behind it all, there was a thin small wailing sound.

What is this? Olórin wondered in horror. He looked over at Eönwë, whose face was as grim as he knew his own must be.

With one hand, Eönwë pushed the door open. It would have taken a much stronger lock to stand against the righteous anger of Manwë's herald.

The door banged against the stone wall inside. Eönwë and Olórin entered, along with the rest of the small group of Maiar. The sight that greeted them tore at Olórin's soul.

A beautiful young woman who could only be one of the Quendi whom Oromë had met, her body terribly scarred by many wounds and filthy with black grime, was standing in obvious misery between two thick, round metal posts that stood as high as her shoulders. Her slender hands, terribly knobbed and twisted from some unthinkable injuries, were bound with cruel, heavy chains to the tops of the posts. Tears had left messy tracks through the black dust on her face. A hunted look of absolute fear flooded over her face and through her eyes as she saw the Maiar.

At her feet, lying in a pool of birth-blood and kicking her own little feet helplessly, was a small, crying child. The infant's body was cruelly misshapen, though she could not be old enough to have ever been wounded herself; there would have been no time for it to heal, even if such a tiny child could have survived such violent treatment. She was the one who had been wailing; the desperate words must have come from the prisoner who was obviously her mother.

The wonder that Olórin felt at his first clear sight of Ilúvatar's Children was overwhelmed by a wash of savage pain. How could Melkor even imagine the thought of doing such a thing? his mind protested in shock.

He stared, enraged, at the short, iron-red chains on the lovely, tormented mother's wrists. His eyes snapped like living fire, and he raised his right arm, pointing stiffly at one of the chains with all five fingers held close together.

"Break open!" he shouted in fury. The chain not only broke, it splintered into pieces under the force of Olórin's wrath. With a second, equally outraged cry of command, he shattered the chain on the anguished mother's left wrist.

Wide-eyed with helpless confusion, the Firstborn mother instantly bent down to the floor and snatched up her baby. She clutched the tiny, twisted girl to her chest, looking as if she meant to hold her and not let go even if Melkor himself, or all of the other Ainur, were to try and wrench the baby from her grasp.

Looking at them, Olórin suddenly and fiercely wanted nothing more than to lock his own arms around both of them and help the mother to hold on.

But I would only terrify her if I moved towards them, he thought. What she must have endured! He had never even imagined anyone feeling such pain as this youthful Elf-maiden must have been put through.

Several seconds after she had been freed from her chains, the mother suddenly looked fiercely around at Olórin and the others.

"Do not touch Moranna!" she warned. Her eyes and her voice were filled, at the same time, both with naked terror and with a towering wrath.

Eönwë stared back at her. "We will not harm you," he said, his voice kind but as stern and strong as it always was. "Do not fear us. You and your child will be safe now."

She looked at Manwë's herald with hunted, suspicious eyes. Backing away a few paces, looking as if she would clutch her child even more tightly if that were possible, she said nothing.

Olórin smiled gently at her, though he was seething inside. "He is right, my lady. No harm will come to you or your daughter. Whatever has happened to you, we will all protect you now."

Somehow, the terrified young mother seemed to see something in Olórin's eyes that awoke a feeling of trust in her exhausted spirit. With a strangled half-sob, suddenly seeming even more heartbreakingly young, she dashed towards him with her child and tucked them both firmly under his left arm. She was shivering deeply, though not from cold; she was obviously in absolute panic, at the end of her mind's strength.

Olórin held both of them close, feeling as though his heart might be torn in two between the overwhelming pity and anger that he felt.

"Dear girl," Melian said, stepping forward, "what is your name?"

The young one looked up, still huddling as tightly as she could into the reassuring strength of Olórin's embrace. "I don't remember," she said. The memory of years of horror was reflected in her eyes. Slowly, in a voice of desperate pain, she said, "I had a brother... he was captured with me. Where is he? And I do not know where my other children are... I only heard them screaming as they were carried away from me when they were born..."

Olórin's spirit seemed to freeze inside him at the look of unspeakable horror that now filled her eyes. "I am the mother of thirty-five children now," she whispered in a tone of absolute searing agony. "None of my people has ever borne more than four... except here. And always, every year, before every child, the poisons - Ai! Every time, I feel that I will die! And the burning fires - where is my brother? By the stars, I do not know what they have been doing to him!"

She suddenly looked up, full into Olórin's face. "Are the stars still there?" she asked softly. "Has the Horseman killed them, too?"

What? Olórin thought in sudden confusion. My lord Oromë, kill the stars? Then, in a flash of sudden insight, he understood what must have been happening. He remembered how Oromë had said that some of the Elves had run from him when he first saw them. Melkor wanted the Quendi to fear Oromë so that we could not help them against him!

"The stars are still there," he assured her. "The dark one has no power to touch them. See! Very soon we will show them to you."

He knew that he could not answer her other questions, about her brother and all of her other children, and that knowledge filled his heart with savage grief. Still, he could at least protect the young mother herself and this one beautiful, marred child, as he had promised.

"Come away now," he said softly, looking down into her haunted eyes that were still almost as terrified as when he had first seen her. "I will take you and your child to Nienna. She will care for you both."

"At the least you shall be allowed to see," Manwë said, his voice sounding arrogantly pitying to Melkor's ears as the defeated lord lay facedown and still chained on a smooth, flat expanse of soft grass. "You are still my brother. I will not allow you to remain in darkness while your fate is decided."

The blindfold was removed from Melkor's eyes. He looked up suddenly into dazzling brightness, finding himself surrounded by a light so brilliant that it was almost painful after the complete darkness in which he had been carried all the way from Utumno to whatever this place was. Unable to shield his eyes with his chained hands, he narrowed them to slits.

Manwë said nothing for a moment, seeming to understand and allow Melkor a moment to adjust to the light. Then, as his stern, sad face and short brown hair gradually came into focus before Melkor's slowly opening eyes, he finally spoke again.

"What are we to do with you, my dear brother?" Manwë asked in deep sorrow. "You have rebelled against the will of Ilúvatar almost since he created us. You have destroyed many of the fairest things we have wrought in this world." He gestured with an expression of poignant grief towards Yavanna, then looked around at all of the others as well.

His eyes sincerely pained, he looked back at Melkor. "Now you have tormented and twisted the beautiful Quendi, firstborn of Ilúvatar. Surely no crime could be more grievous than the agony that you have caused them! Yet I still love you, my brother. Would that you had not ruined yourself this way!"

Melkor's vision had been clearing further as Manwë spoke. Looking past his brother's throne, he suddenly made out the source of the brilliance that filled the area. On a smooth green mound not many paces away, there were two small trees unlike any that grew in Middle-earth. The one to Melkor's left was a gently glowing combination of green and silver, its branches heavy with many white flowers; but the tree on the right was shining so brightly that Melkor could barely look at it. A dazzling golden light poured out from among its vivid, youthful green leaves, blazing in rays of warm light from its golden clusters of flowers and its round yellow fruits. Astonished envy filled his heart for a moment, before he recalled that he was in dire peril.

Lowering his proud head, Melkor pressed his face into the green grass in front of Manwë's feet. He barely managed to keep his body from shaking with the agonized humiliation he felt. "Please, my brother," he said softly, desperately fighting to conceal his hatred, "forgive me! I should never have defied Ilúvatar. I..." He was at a loss for what else to say. How could he convince Manwë to free him?

He looked up, knowing that his face showed the suffering he felt at his captivity. "Have I not been in chains long enough?" he asked of Manwë. His heart screamed out a silent protest inside him as he deliberately abased himself, but Melkor knew that this was his only chance for freedom. "How can a Vala endure such bonds?"

"Do not look as if this is a new thing!" Tulkas snarled suddenly, speaking for the first time since he had challenged Melkor to single combat in the deep mines below Utumno. "For have you not bound countless of the Firstborn, and chained their spirits in suffering and slavery? Think not that we do not know where your Orcs came from!"

Melkor bit back a furious retort. As if the Quendi could ever be compared to him! But he was far too clever to think that such an answer would do him any good. Instead, he decided to use Tulkas' words to his own advantage.

"And never did I realize how wrong that was," he answered gravely, in his best impression of repentance. "I thought not enough about the meaning of my actions. Therefore I ask for pardon."

"Do not tell us that you could not see the pain in their eyes," Nienna said sadly. "Even you, Melkor, are not so blind."

Manwë nodded. "For this and your many other crimes, you shall not escape doom, Melkor," he said. "Mandos shall declare your fate." He turned to the Judge.

Mandos, the Vala that Melkor had known long ago as Námo but who was now apparently known by the name of the fortress he ruled, looked sternly at him. His eyes held no such pity as Manwë's did.

"There is only one prison in Arda strong enough to hold you," Mandos said slowly, "and that is mine. For three Ages you will be held there, bound as you are now in that same chain which Aulë has wrought for you."

He glanced briefly at the lord of Valinor who now sat silent on his nearby throne. "For the sake of your brother Manwë," he told the chained and furious Melkor, "I will not say that you must remain a captive forever. At the end of the three ages, you will be brought forth to stand trial again. Then you may plead for forgiveness; and if you have truly repented of your crimes, the Valar may be merciful."

Melkor looked around at the silent, accusing faces of the Valar and Maiar who surrounded him. He caught sight of Thuringwethil standing quietly among the others with her usual, unreadable expression.

Finding a small island of calmness in the middle of his rage and the growing panic that he was trying not to admit to himself that he felt, Melkor looked briefly into her dispassionate brown eyes. Find Culnaur, he told her privately, making sure that none of the others heard his thought. Tell him all that you have seen here. He deserves to know.

I will. Thuringwethil's face did not change, but her thought was strong and assured, and Melkor was confident in her loyalty.

Melkor's attention was drawn suddenly away from his secret messenger when he felt Tulkas grab him by the upper arms and pull him to a more or less upright position. "Mandos has spoken," the warrior said in a tone of grim satisfaction. Without another word, he picked Melkor up again as he had done at Utumno, slung him matter-of-factly over one shoulder, and strode off in what must be the direction of Mandos' prison. The mighty, chained Vala's fear and rage flared up again as his heart finally realized that he was trapped in this fate.

Three Ages, wearing this chain! The need he felt in his spirit, to pull his hands away from the position in which they were bound, was already becoming desperately intense. Drawing on the angry will that he would have much preferred to use in physically striking out at his captors, Melkor somehow managed to keep himself from struggling. They will not be allowed to see how much this hurts me! he resolved, turning his furious eyes of red fire on his brother Manwë in a glare of condemning accusation.

Manwë stared back, unmoved in spite of the grief that still shone in his blue eyes. He said no word; the trial was over, and Melkor's sentence had already been passed.

The cell door slammed closed behind the departing Tulkas and Mandos. Melkor, lying on the gray stone floor where Tulkas had dropped him, stared at the inside of the thick metal barrier that was set in one of the room's four featureless stone walls. The sound of a massive lock closing - something Melkor knew well from the many locked doors and chains in his own fortress - echoed with a deep clang from just outside the door.

Light filtered into the cell from somewhere, brighter than in most of the chambers of Utumno even though it was much dimmer than the somewhat dizzying radiance of Yavanna's two glowing Trees that filled all the air outside.

Knowing that he was no longer watched, Melkor finally allowed himself to struggle against the chain that bound him. Wrenching at it with all the power of his mighty arms, he fought to snap it, but it held as he had known it would. Frustration and pain burned acutely in his heart as his hands remained firmly locked behind him.

A moment later, Melkor turned deliberately in his chains. He moved slowly this time, feeling in his heart the beginnings of a painful acceptance of his captivity. He looked around the cell in all directions, his intent, fiery gaze taking in all of what little there was to see.

This cell contains nothing but myself, he thought as his eyes came to rest for a moment on the blank, smooth gray ceiling. His heart, strong though it was, quailed at the thought of the long, empty time that stretched before him. There are so many things I want to be doing! Three Ages here will be very difficult to bear.

Author's Note: So, Orolin, how was my portrayal of you in your hotheaded youth before Nienna got through teaching you as much patience as you learned from her later on?

Moranna, of course, is another of my Index-based Elvish names. As her mother said in the text, it's simply a combination of 'mor' (dark) and 'anna' (gift).

The idea of using a small group of pregnant females and a few males to rebuild a population is my sister Razzle's. (Yeah, I know - like a lot of Culnaur's contributions!) She thought of this one quite some time ago, though, before I even started "The Last Note." She originally meant it for a sci-fi type plot, like a colony spaceship, but has very generously allowed me to use the idea here. She still may well use it somewhere else; so if you see it in something by Razzle later on, it IS her idea and she just let me use it in my fic too! By the way, you really should go and read some of her stories. I promise, I am NOT a better writer than her! If you're reading my fanfiction, you ought to like Razzle's too. And she even has a few Silmarillion fanfics. So check out her author profile, okay? :)