Celebrimbor's Betrayal

Lugbúrz, SA 1592

9:00 am

Sauron sat at the table he used as a desk, skimming each page in a stack of reports from his agents.

Whenever reports came in from Sauron's extensive network of spies, he and his Steward sat down together to go through them. Sauron would look them over, and when he found something interesting, he would read it aloud and his Steward would write it down for him.

"I wish you'd let me screen those for you and just give you the highlights, Tar-Mairon." said his Steward.

"That would be a good idea, except that I have trouble delegating." said Sauron.

His Steward, the great-grandson of the steward who greeted him when he first came here to live, was his right hand man and most trusted advisor. He was also one of the few people in Lugbúrz who called him by his given name.

Sauron skimmed a report from Eregion and froze. He went back to the beginning and read it carefully, to see if he could be mistaken. He wasn't.

He got up so abruptly his chair tipped over and struck the floor.

"How could he? I will effing kill him!"

He put a hand under the edge of the table and knocked it over. Paper, ink, and quills went flying. He looked for something to break.

"What happened? asked the Steward, edging towards the door.

"My closest friend betrayed me."

Sauron paced back and forth, clenching his fists and breathing hard.

"At least I thought he was my closest friend. We worked together to make the Great Rings. I taught him everything I knew, and he used it to make things greater than he ever could have made by himself.

"But all the while, he was developing secret knowledge of his own that he withheld from me. He went on to make rings in secret, without me."

"How do you know?"

"The report doesn't say much, except that Celebrimbor was heard to tell someone he sent the Three into hiding last year.

"Three of the sixteen?"

"No, I don't think so. Otherwise why just three of them, and why now? I think he made three more rings after I left, different from any that came before, greater and more powerful."

"I think you're reading a lot into one report." said the Steward.

"Oh really? Right around the time I left Eregion, he was working on something in secret, but I never really understood what it was. He used me for my knowledge, and when he'd learned all he could, he discarded me.

"I'm going to punish him for it. I'm going to take back everything he built using my knowledge, and that includes the Three."

Sauron resolved to attack Eregion. He'd been breeding Orcs for a century, and had close to enough to field a small army. At that moment, he was prepared to march on Ost-in-Edhil and take the Gwaith-i-Mírdain by force.

He was desperate to recover the Three. He believed wearing them could increase his own power, which the other Great Rings did not. He wanted to know how they were made. And he wanted to keep them out of the hands of anybody else.

"He still has the sixteen rings, which he couldn't have made without my help. I should have taken them with me when I left."

"The Three are different from the others, but Celebrimbor couldn't have made any of them without the skills I taught him. By rights, the Great Rings belong to me. All of them. And I'm going to take them back."

Which was going to be difficult. He didn't know where they were, or who had them. He didn't know anything about them.

He thought for a few minutes.

"But I don't need to have actual physical possession of the Three. I don't even need to know where they are. I just need to control them."

But how? Bind them to something even more powerful than themselves. Except that, at the moment, no such thing existed.

He would make the Ring he'd wanted to make for himself, and he would bind the Three to it.

"Help me put the table back the way it was. And bring me some more ink, this has all soaked into the carpet."

He picked up the chair he knocked over, and gathered up sheets of paper from the floor. The Steward returned with a new inkwell.

"Close the door when you leave. And don't let anyone else in to see me."

"Will that be all, then?" asked the Steward.

"Bring me my notebooks from the workshop."

He looked out the window at Orodruin, thinking. He heard the door being pulled closed.

To bind the Three, he had to make the One. He could do this.

When he came to Mordor from Eregion ninety years ago, he brought a finished design for the Ring. He could have forged it right then, and he would have, except that he got so busy with everyday matters like establishing himself as Dark Lord, breeding Orcs, and building his fortress.

He would forge it now. He would check the finished design for completeness and change it if necessary. He needed to identify the tools needed, and if he didn't have them already, he would need to make them. And he would need to prepare a quantity of the alloy from which the Ring would be made.

He remembered the first time he thought about making a Ring for himself. It was the day they made the first of the Great Rings. After it was finished, he secretly tried it on. He felt nothing. The next day, he told Celebrimbor what he'd done. Celebrimbor tried it on too, and Sauron could tell from his face that he felt something pretty impressive.

Celebrimbor said the more native power you had, the more you felt it. Of course, Celebrimbor couldn't have known at the time that Sauron's power was far beyond his own.

Sauron guessed that the Rings amplified power up to a certain point, but after that, they stopped working. Consequently, the Great Rings enhanced the natural abilities of Elves, but they didn't work for him. Acquiring a Great Ring and wearing it himself would have been pointless.

If he wanted a Ring for himself, he would have to make something far stronger than the ones they were making for the Elves.

He didn't tell Celebrimbor he wanted to enhance his Maia powers. After all, Celebrimbor didn't even know he was a Maia.

But at home, he worked late into the evening filling up notebook after notebook with ideas. He considered a number of designs to enhance his Maia abilities, like shaping the landforms of the Earth, influencing the Free Peoples, or controlling the creatures of Melkor.

But before he made any of his designs, he had to find a heat source.

All his designs required temperatures that could be found only in dragon's fire. The dragons that could product that kind of heat were extinct, but even if they weren't, he would have had a hard time winning their cooperation.

Soon after, he left Eregion for a couple of weeks and made a secret trip to Mordor. When he arrived, he climbed the slopes of Orodruin, which he did whenever he was in Mordor.

The volcano sprang to life as he approached. Looking down into the caldera, he had an idea. Instead of dragon's fire, what if I used the volcano for the forging? Would it be hot enough? He wasn't sure. How would he get to the lava? How would he avoid dropping his work, or falling in? What sort of tools could withstand those temperatures, and how would he make them?

Over the next several trips, he enlarged a chamber around the Cracks of Doom, and set up his workshop there. His workshop, the Sammath Naur. He did some simple projects to practice using lava as a heat source. After that, he could have made the Ring any time he was in Mordor. He had a workable design, and he had something hot enough to forge it in.

A servant came back with his notebooks. The tall stack of leather bound volumes reached almost to his chin. Somewhere in there was the design he was going to build, the one that would magnify his power.

"Put them anywhere." He waved his hand towards the corner of the table.

He arranged the notebooks in order, which was easy since he'd numbered the spines. He picked up the first one and skimmed through it.

It all came back to him. The earliest entries were about amplifying a specific Maia ability, like the ability to find gold and minerals deep underground.

In the middle of the series, there were a number of designs like Languages, which enhanced the ability to learn other tongues easily, or Structures, which would make him able to strengthen fortifications with enchantments.

In some cases, the designs weren't as mature as he remembered. Or he'd used part of one design in another without realizing it didn't fit. Or a design had unresolved flaws he hadn't noticed before.

Each time he found a new design, he wrote its name on the top of a blank sheet of paper. Then he filled in the rest of the sheet with a description of what it did, a schematic of how it worked, and any drawings, diagrams, or calculations he thought might be useful.

noon

He wrote furiously. Bymidday, he'd filled every sheet of paper he had, and sent for more. A servant returned with new writing materials, and also food and drink, but he left it untouched. He didn't want to stop writing long enough to eat.

In the last few notebooks, he began finding finished designs. He could have taken them to Orodruin and forged them at any time.

By the time he closed the last notebook, he'd found three finished designs, Influence, Landforms, and War. Each would enhance one of his native abilities. Influence would enhance his ability to influence and persuade the Free Peoples of Arda. Landforms would magnify his ability to shape landforms like mountains and rivers, and War would help him raise an army and lead it to victory.

He cleared the table of everything else and arranged the sheets with the three finished designs in front of him. He looked at them with satisfaction. Logical, compete, and well thought out. They represented some of his best work.

But something was bothering him. He couldn't find the design he was looking for. It was his best designs of all, the one he intended to make. It was a composite of the specialized designs, and it would amplify all his abilities at once. He had a distinct memory of working on it, and he was sure it was among the finished designs, but he couldn't find it.

3:00 pm

His Steward looked in in mid-afternoon, and brought him a mug of tea. He waited a few minutes, but Sauron was in the middle of a thought and didn't want to be interrupted. The Steward set the mug at his elbow, and began to withdraw.

"Wait!"

It must be in one of the more recent notebooks, possibly even the one he was keeping right now.

"Go to my bedroom and get the notebook on my desk. If it's not there, look in the bottom of my clothes chest."

A few minutes later, the steward returned with the notebook in his hand. Sauron leafed through it. It was filled with plans for construction of the fortress, particularly the massive central tower they hadn't yet been able to build. He found lists of all the things the Ring should do, but there were no finished designs, or even rough outlines for designs.

He reached the last page. It wasn't there. The design he'd planned to make wasn't there. If it were anywhere, it would have been in this, his current notebook.

With a sinking feeling, he remembered the notebook he'd left behind under the floorboards in his house in Eregion. He slammed his fist on the table.

He couldn't go back and get it, obviously. But the notebooks he kept before it should contain the early work leading up to the composite design. He should be able to reconstruct it from that.

He went back and leafed through the older notebooks. There was no trace of the composite design, not so much as a short description or a rough sketch. Increasingly frustrated, he called his Steward over.

"Can you have a look at this for me? I'm not seeing what's right in front of me."

"You're handwriting is legible, but its written in a language I don't know."

The Steward closed the notebook and handed it back to him. The notebooks were written in Valarin, Sauron's mother tongue, with a number of Sindarin words and phrases thrown in. He wrote the way he spoke in his head.

He was surprised his Steward couldn't read his notes. Sindarin was the most widely spoken language in Arda, and included words like Mordor (BlackLand), Gorgoroth (Horror of Horrors), and Orodruin (Mountain Burning). And Lugbúrz (Prison Dark) and Ash Nazg (One Ring) were technically Valarin phrases, because Black Speech was pigeon Valarin. Melkor had many admirable traits, but originality wasn't one of them.

He flipped through the pages some more, but didn't see anything.

"Somewhere, I have a finished design that combines the best features of all the others. I can't find it, but I know it's there. I'll find it if I keep looking."

"Or not. Something like that happened to my cousin. He wanted to buy a horse, so he went to a horse fair and looked at dozens of horses. At the end of the day, he hadn't seen anything he liked. Then, when he woke up the next morning, he remembered he'd seen the perfect animal. It was a chestnut color, with sound legs, good bloodlines, and not too expensive.

"He raced over to the fairgrounds to be there before they opened. He talked to every trader he'd met the day before, with no luck. He did find one horse with the same pretty chestnut color, but it was swaybacked. Another had the same nice shape, but it had a terrible disposition. And the one with impressive bloodlines was ruinously expensive. He searched everywhere, but he never did find his horse."

"Oh." Sauron said, very quietly.

He closed the notebook and put it down with the others. He had a feeling the notebook under the floorboards contained fortress designs, and nothing else.

He hadn't worked seriously on the Ring since Eregion. In the century since then, the specialized designs had run together in his head. The design that did everything, the one he wanted to build, didn't exist.

He was disappointed, but the only thing to do was press on. He had a number of specialized designs to choose from, all finished and ready to go. He would pick one and make it, and then he would bind the Three.

He arranged the pages of finished designs in front of him and reviewed each one, Influence, Landforms, and War, in turn. How mature was the design? Was it structurally sound or unstable? How hard would it be to make? And finally, much of his own power had to go into it? Some designs cost more than others, but all of them cost more than he wanted to spend.

Unfortunately, Structures did not make the cut. That was a disappointment. It was one of the designs he attached great importance to. It would have allowed him to strengthen the foundations for his Tower and still bind the Three. However, it was not as mature as he remembered.

He didn't like having to choose a specialized design. Whatever he chose, he had to give up something else. Influence and Structures were his first choices, but they were all important to him.

The fact that he had to put his own power into the Ring was a sore point with him. Neither he nor Celebrimbor put any of their own power into the sixteen Great Rings. He felt he shouldn't have to do so for his.

Actually, his early designs for the Rings of Power did require an infusion of personal power. It was Celebrimbor who figured out how to rework the design so it wasn't required.

He decided to make Influence. He saw being persuasive as his most important attribute. It helped him wield political influence, lead an army, and talk his way out of a bad spot. He was already manipulative and deceptive, and he lied with great skill. It was the basis of his power, so that was the attribute he chose to enhance.

He made his decision, but he wasn't happy. The specialized designs cost more and did less than he remembered. All day, he'd been making compromises and lowering his expectations, but he was afraid he hadn't reached the bottom yet.

6:00 pm

The light outside faded. A servant came in to light the lamps. He sent him to get more paper and ink.

There was a knock on the door.

"What?"

His Steward came in, carrying a tray.

"I said 'What?' I didn't say 'Come in.'"

The Steward set the tray down on a chair. There wasn't a free space on the table anywhere.

"I brought you something to eat." said the Steward. He fixed him a plate and set it down at his elbow.

"I'm not hungry." said Sauron.

"Suit yourself." he said, fixing a plate for himself. He pulled a chair over to the table and sat down.

"Well, I am hungry, but I don't want to stop right now."

"Take a break. Five minutes won't kill you."

Sauron pushed some papers aside to clear a space.

"So, what's going on?" asked the Steward.

"This morning, I was so sure I could do it. And I can, but I'm not happy about it."

"What's the problem?"

"It does less than expected, and costs more than I planned to spend."

"Well, can you afford it?"

"Technically yes, but it's not that simple. I have the resources, but I'd planned to spend them on something else. Now I have to choose."

"Between what and what?"

"Making the Ring, or strengthening the foundations of the Tower."

"You can't give up the Tower." The Steward looked appalled.

"The stone blocks are all ready, after centuries of work. The fittings, door hinges and window glass and roof slates, are sitting in workshops ready to go. Once the foundations are strengthened, the Tower just needs to be assembled. It will go up quickly. You can't abandon the Tower, not now!"

The Steward was right. Sauron was in charge, but his Steward was his chief advisor, and he should at least listen to what he had to say.

"Let's say I listened to you and stayed with my plan to strengthen the foundations. I'd have to give up plans to make the Ring, and with it, any hope of binding the Three."

"Are they important? You only learned of their existence this morning."

"I want to punish Celebrimbor."

He realized he was clenching his teeth. He stared off in the distance, lost in thought.

He was at home in the Mansions of Aulë, which for some reason was also the Gwaith-i-Mírdain. Tharbad was nearby, but so was the Circle of Doom. He sat at his place at the long table with the other Maiar and the Aulëndil. For some reason, the Jewel Smiths were there too.

He spent his days working with Celebrimbor in the workshops at the Gwaith-i-Mírdain, and at night, he climbed the stairs to the apprentices' dormitory, and slept in the same bed he did when he was young.

Then, Celebrimbor said something that made Aulë turn against him. He'd committed an evil deed? He wasn't a good craftsman? Sauron never did learn what it was.

When he went up to the dormitory, he saw that his bed had been stripped, and that his clothes chest was empty. Downstairs, his workbench had been swept bare. His tools and his work were gone. As soon as he realized he was in trouble, he knew he has to leave, immediately. There were no people around, anywhere. He never had a chance to say goodbye to anybody, not even Aulë.

He stepped out into the street. The heavy door swung of the Gwaith-i-Mírdain closed behind him and clicked shut. He spun around, startled. He pounded on the door and tried to open the latch, but the door was barred against him forever.

He shook his head to clear it.

"No, I have to bind the Three. I'm going to take back what's mine."

"You'd give up the Tower to punish Celebrimbor?"

"I'd give up the Tower to make my Ring and bind the Three."

"Can you bind the Three? Are you willing to bet the Tower on it?"

He had no idea. He didn't know anything about them.

"Yes." he said.

"You do realize you're being irrational?" said the Steward.

7:00 pm

After the Steward left, he sat down at the table and thought about what to do next.

Even though they disagreed, the Steward had, in fact, talked him out of making Influence if it meant giving up the Tower. But he also knew he was still going to make his Ring.

He opened his current notebook, the one the steward brought from his room, and began writing. His first thought was to make the Structures design. Then he could use the Ring to strengthen the foundations, and still bind the Three.

But he knew that if he made a Ring, it would have to be a composite design. Influence, Landforms, Structures, War, Languages, and Creatures, they were all important.

He would merge the specialized designs into a single unified whole. But how? They were all so different, for the most part, they weren't mutually compatible. As an experiment, he tried to modify Landforms to include Structures, but in spite of their similarity, the composite was unstable and would have fallen apart. He tried again with Influence and Languages, but he couldn't merge them, either.

10:00 pm

He rarely stayed up past nine orten o'clockat night, but late in the evening, he was still at his desk, trying to make it work.

I'm looking at this wrong. I'm trying to create a composite by merging specialized designs. What I need is something general purpose, something that will enhance any attribute I happen to have.

He started over from scratch.

He thought about fundamental principles, and was careful not to get caught up in details. Soon he had a rough outline for a general design he thought would work. It could be used to strengthen the foundations. It would magnify his influence over others. It would help him to raise an army and achieve victory in battle.

Close tomidnight, the pieces started falling into place. It was an excellent design, better than anything he'd done before. But it would take time to finish. Still, he felt confident that he could complete it in under ten years.

He worked through the calculations to find out how much it would cost. Each of the specialized designs took as much as he was willing to spend, and more than he was happy about. He expected the general design to cost him even more.

He added up the numbers, then leaned back in his chair, reeling in shock. It wasn't just more than he was willing to part with, it was more than he had.

Midnight

He was stalled. When the watch changed atmidnight, he was still sitting at his desk, drawing pictures of volcanoes and dragons on scraps of paper, and drinking cold tea.

He was still looking for a way to build his design without the ruinous expense, and was getting exactly nowhere. He tried another tack. Perhaps he could reduce the cost by doing less, and keeping it simple.

He worked through page after page of calculations, and learned that one of the capabilities, military success, added more to the total cost than all of the other capabilities combined.

Why would War cost so much? He wrote a list of each capability and its cost, and ordered it from least expensive to most. There was a pattern. Intrinsic Maia abilities, like shape shifting, raising storms, or changing the course of a river, cost the least. Things on the border, like learning languages or building structures, cost more. Things that weren't Maia attributes at all, like leading armies against Elves and Men, cost the most.

Suppose he dropped War from the general design? What would happen if the Ring didn't bring him victory in battle? Probably nothing. He preferred to achieve those ends through diplomacy, propaganda, and fear. And the design still included Control of Melkor's creatures, so he could raise an army of Orcs and control them easily. He decided that War was too expensive and could be dropped.

Another simplification was the choice of alloy.

He'd always planned to make his Ring from iron, his favorite metal. It made him think of the Iron Crown. But iron was brittle, had a grain to it, and was subject to corrosion. It was too hard to work with for what he was trying to do.

He briefly considered making the Ring from tilkal, an alloy of copper, silver, tin, lead, iron, and gold. It was red or green, depending on the light, and was famed for its hardness. But nothing about it was simple. He probably wouldn't have been able to mix it anyway. Just as well. It would be like wearing a link of Angainor on his hand. He preferred not to be reminded of the chain that bound his Master.

Several of the Great Rings, including the first one they made, were Mithril, which was hard and brittle. It was difficult to work with, and it wasn't a pretty color. Most people loved Mithril, but it didn't do anything for him. He didn't like Silmarils, either. Maybe I'm just weird, he thought.

Make it from gold. Gold was easy to work with, malleable, and stable. Just make a plain gold band. Leave off the gemstones and ornamentation. Make it simple and strong, like yourself. It will pack a punch like a sledgehammer.

He worked through the numbers again. Between dropping War and using gold, he was able to reduce the cost from 'totally out of the question' down to 'painfully expensive'.

But he still clung to the hope that if he were clever enough, he could forge the Ring without investing any of his own power in it. Or at least, not so much that it was painful.

Was there a way to do it? What would the Elven smiths have done? Something elegant and sleek. They would have made something flexible and stable, that would do a little of everything. Most of all, it would do exactly what was needed and nothing more. It wouldn't cost any more than it had to, because nothing would be wasted.

If he worked on the design for hundreds of years to the exclusion of everything else, maybe he could pull it off. And maybe not.

Although realistically, if he built a house, it would be all heavy timbers and cross braces, with more nails than necessary. An Elvish design would be light and airy and soaring. But if he could, just this once, do something light and airy and soaring, he might be able to pull this off.

He realized he was never going to come up with an Elvish design. He'd already been working on this project for hundreds of years, and he wasn't even close. He wasn't an Elven smith like Celebrimbor or Fëanor. He was someone solid and workmanlike, like Aulë. And his Ring would be the same.

He considered his design. The cost was higher than he wanted to pay, but not higher than he was able to pay. All night, he'd been trying to solve the problem of how to do this without paying the price. And now he knew.

The answer had been right in front of him all the time. Just do what you've been trying to avoid. Put in your own power, however much it takes.

4:00 am

He turned to the next problem, binding the Three. He'd never seen them. He didn't know how they were made. He might not even have the ability to understand them, not even if he watched them being made.

It seemed like an insolvable problem.

He knew how to bind the others. When he first came to Eregion and joined the Gwaith-i-Mírdain, he had no particular plan other than to live among civilized people for a while, and win a place among them by teaching them what he knew.

He became an important person in Eregion. In the courtyard at the Gwaith-i-Mírdain, mural of himself teaching the jewel smiths dominated the courtyard. It was painted above a small stage, like an altar piece. He looked larger than life, like a god. He wondered if it was still there.

He was the one who first proposed making the Rings of Power. He supported Celebrimbor's ambition to make his workshop as great as Fëanor's. Then Annatar would become an influential figure among the Elves. They would admire him for his strength and skill, and rely on him for protection.

At some point, before the first of the Great Rings was forged, he began to feel anxious about losing control of them. What if the Elves weren't grateful to him for all he'd done? What if they didn't listen to his advice?

How could he maintain control of the Great Rings after he'd lost physical possession of them? He wanted the rings to convey strength and wisdom to the Noldor Lords who wore them, but he also wanted to retain his influence over the Rings.

He modified the design so that, after they were forged, the rings could be bound at a later time. Because he found it pleasing if a feature served several purposes, he made the binding feature double as a minor structural element, too important to be left off, but not important enough to attract any attention.

He kept meaning to mention it to Celebrimbor, but whenever he started to say something, someone interrupted them, or some crisis came up in the workshop. In all the time they were actively forging Rings, he never managed to have that conversation.

5:00 am

It started to get light. The things he was writing stopped making sense. He stood up stiffly and headed for bed. When he lay down, he felt like the room was spinning. He was exhausted but too wired to sleep. He still didn't know how to bind the Three.

I don't know how they were made. I don't know where they are, or who has them now.

And then it came to him. What I don't know doesn't matter. I know Celebrimbor, and he, like every other craftsman, builds new things on existing foundations. Sure, new techniques were used to make them, but for the most part, they were probably made like the others. The hidden binding feature in the sixteen will also be in the Three.

I don't have to do anything different. The Three will bind exactly the same as the others.