Two yéni swept by since the night of their first circling in the hall, their tentative meeting of minds in the lambent light of a fire, but it was far from their last. Though their engagements had acquired a warmth their earlier encounters had lacked, Celebrimbor could not even now resist questioning his friend's wisdom.
"If you would rather not try it, I understand."
"It is not that I would not try it, but it seems a rather large risk for little gain."
"Ridding yourself of that pitiful hovel was a risk. Commissioning Narvi's folk for the building of this House, that was a risk. Forsaking that unfitting name for your own… well, that was a success even I cannot claim full credit for."
"You know what I mean."
"I think you fear yourself unequal to the task."
"Have I ever proved unequal to any task you set me?"
Annatar raised his head from his long-accustomed place in the moat of their worktable. "Never."
Easing his aching back, Celebrimbor walked the length of the room to the windows spanning the eastern wall. Sunlight warmed the marble floors beneath his feet and even the deepest recesses overhead. Beyond the panes stretched a view of the gardens and fountains in crooked spokes as they wound their way even to the city wall. The whole, lean length of the city sprawled beneath him like a careless lover across a bed. Around him, Celebrimbor could feel the hum of the House lifting itself. His small and eccentric circle had swelled to a host of men and women (and even a few of Durin's folk) that others were already naming the "Gwaith-i-Mírdain" — derelicts of war left purposeless in peacetime; the tragedy-stricken sifting through pieces of their lives for anything salvageable; children born in the summer of the Second Age who knew nothing of strife, bored with the vocations and strictures of their parents… They all came to him, and none cared a whit that the get of a kinslayer was, at least nominally, their chief.
"Rings are best for the task," Annatar said as if continuing a debate they had had. "Less prone to loss or thieves. They may be disguised simply with a glamour. In the early days of course one would simply craft a gem or brooch and lock the essence of—"
"I am familiar," Celebrimbor said, arching a brow at his friend's pedantry.
"Quite so," Annatar agreed. "Even thus did your grandsire pull the light of the Two Trees into the Silmarils."
"That art has long been lost, even to my people," Celebrimbor insisted.
Annatar laid a finger against his nose, conspiratorially. "Lost only means 'misplaced.' Not forgotten. Unlike my brethren who prefer not to learn more than is good for them, I have looked in many corners of this earth and spoken with many of all different planes and kinds. And some there are, who once numbered among Fëanor's people, with such knowledge that they were willing to impart — to those willing to seek them out."
"'Fëanor's people,'" Celebrimbor repeated, rather startled by the revelation. "Then… have they come forth? From Mandos Halls?"
He told himself he did not care what the answer was. In every outward way, in every way that mattered, the man Curufin had been dead to him long before Dior of Doriath had struck the fatal blow.
But in reflective moments — few and far between as they generally were — came the father who had given him life, a name, a purpose to go with it. Hands, rough with crafting and not too bloodied yet, closed his small fingers around the heavy smith's hammer, that low whisper a flash in the dark. The feeling kindled in Celebrimbor's mind long after he failed to recall the precise words.
"That," Annatar said with extraordinary gentleness. "I do not know. Mine was the province of Aulë."
The sympathy in his face was unbearable — almost more so than the understanding. Celebrimbor dropped his gaze back to the plans before him, but the cream of the vellum glowed too bright for him to see the inked designs in Annatar's careful, orderly hand.
"There is power to be forged out of pain, Celebrimbor," Annatar insisted in a voice quiet and irrevocable as thunder. He had said as much before, on other matters than the making of rings. "Instead of hiding such things in gems and music boxes, you might redirect them. Harness them. Make something mightier from them. It will make you ever more powerful, more the master of your own fate."
Celebrimbor glanced at the chest, its iron hasps gone black with age. It was still covered in dust, merely shifted from one corner to another.
Annatar gripped his shoulder, refused to release his eyes or let him hide. "I will be your guide. I will not let you fall."
"I trust you."
And it was that simple truth that made him want to try. Whatever the risk, if Annatar asked it of him, he could not refuse.
Annatar's smile was bright and filled all his face. Canting his head in that uncanny way he had — he could sense a shift in thought from across the room — he asked. "What now has you in so reflective a mood, my friend?"
Celebrimbor shook his head. "We're going to need gold, for one thing."
The kiln yawned open, releasing a furnace-blast of heat that stroked his skin and made the air swim with its vibration.
Sweating, though stripped to the waist, Celebrimbor took a pair of tongs from the worktable and carefully maneuvered the glowing clay to the wooden surface of the table. It was the red of blood. Wax ran through the channels like tears as the mold fell away. Moving swiftly lest it cool too soon, he took up the crucible with its precious contents. Neither iron nor wood had he used for this purpose. Not one ounce of lesser metal and a few drops of something that wasn't metal at all.
The gold for tonight's endeavor had been dearly bought for the Lady had refused his proposal to venture beyond the city walls. The metal quarries within reach of Ost-in-Edhil were exhausted, the Dwarves unwilling to share what they considered their sole province. Even prevailing upon his friendship with Narvi did not move them one jot.
The Lady, in her infinite wisdom, would not raise their hackles even for the sake of defense of their people. What they might do with those metals if they could. He did not press it, at first. Until Annatar voiced another way: a path high up in the fells, unknown to either the Lady or the Dwarves. An ancient and forgotten place where they might procure some little material for their task.
The barrows were overgrown, clotted with weeds, and they toiled long hours to shift the stones and reveal what lay beneath. The bones still retained their shrunken stature, the weight of mail and cuirass and hatchet. The very weapons that may have cut Thingol down as the murderers fled with their treasure. The greatest of it they had not kept, and few enough of their host had made it even thus far. None returned to their homeland.
What ill befell them upon the road, not even Annatar could say, but long after food and hope were exhausted, they carried their treasures with them, and those treasures remained there still, the like of which was gone from the world now, buried beneath foundered lands and sunken seas.
Only these remained.
What need had the dead of such anyway, he told himself as he gathered up the graveyard gold, and even if they did, they were thieves and murderers themselves. They had no right to what they held in their fleshless fingers.
He tipped the crucible against the clay.
Close at his side, Annatar murmured words of power and of melding, of emerging and shaping, of tempering and strengthening. Sometimes, words he did not understand. They flitted in and out of his awareness, meaningless sound full of purpose, thrumming in him and through him.
Once the mold cooled, he took up his workman's hammer and tapped its edges, carefully, gingerly. Any error now in this moment and all their work would be for naught. With every tentative stroke, he conjured as Annatar had instructed him.
He thought of his family. Their willfulness and their pride. Their anger, if thwarted. The swearing of oaths, of vengeance, of pursuit against all who would gainsay them. He thought of that last night, in Nargothrond, after Finrod and his ten had been seduced to their deaths. Of the expression on his father's face. Of the screaming and fire that came afterward to Nargothrond and spared none.
He remembered when first he had laid eyes on the Lady, in Sirion, tall and slender and worn with travel, her legs bare against the sand. He had loved her even then, and his heart ached as she chose Celeborn of the Trees. Though the ache was a softer one now.
More potent was the presence of the man behind him.
In this once-stranger he had found a worthy mentor and friend when he had never needed one more, and over the years, his gratitude had blossomed fulsomely at finding a mind that allied so closely with his own. Even if it hadn't, Annatar's potent presence…his ready laugh…his insistence on excavating Celebrimbor's room and ordering it to his satisfaction…the furrow of his brow over a particularly thorny problem that even his prowess could not unravel (yet) — for, as he had explained, his power was not infinite…all of it enchanted Celebrimbor as only one other had before.
It was all too easy for Celebrimbor to imagine him one of the Eldar — if particularly learned and (more than) particularly comely.
And that — that would not do.
He was not so fickle (he hoped) or so foolish (he prayed) that he would exchange one unattainable desire for an equally unattainable one.
For Annatar was unattainable.
What did a Maia know of such things as desire? What need had he for comfort, for validation? A form of flesh and bone he might have, but surely such earthly concerns were beneath one such as he.
The hammer tapped. Flakes of clay drifted to the table like the blackened edges of a wound, picking the imperfections away.
A runnel of sweat teased down his lower ribs, Annatar's low voice an anchoring presence, guiding and steadying. He felt something go out of him or pass through him, draining the strength from his legs. The hammer rattled against the table. He sagged, propped up only by the table edge against his belly and Annatar's presence at his back. He felt drained, sore, as if he'd run leagues without water or rest.
Annatar lifted the little circlet in an uncovered hand despite the heat still radiating from it and inspected it in the light of the lamps. The lamps at that moment burned red as coal-fire, crowning Annatar's pale head with a fiery radiance that absorbed all the other light in the room.
Celebrimbor held himself immobile, afraid to break this moment. His heart was throbbing, hard and low against his ribs. He was not unfamiliar with such feeling. In the desperate days after Nargothrond fell, when the only things that held a man together were his desire to survive and to feel, he had succumbed now and again to fierce passions with refugees as lost as he. They dwindled to ash when the fire passed, but he remembered their taste, the scorch of it. It had been a long time since he had allowed himself such utter disarray.
Adjudging, Annatar turned the ring, beautiful in its roughness, in his fingers. When he turned to Celebrimbor, all the light in the room flew to the centers of those remarkable eyes, a spark that warmed and comforted even as it burned.
"Now for a jewel worthy of the master of the Gwaith-i-Mírdain," Annatar whispered.
Flushed with their triumph, they retreated from the sweltering workroom, up the long, spiraling flight of stairs that opened from the astronomers' tower to the roof where the wind slipped over the stones.
It was a clear night and full of stars, wonderfully sweet and cool after the blaze of kiln and crafting.
Annatar eased down beside him with a soft groan and poured each of them a dram from the bottle in his hand. A fine fig wine from their not inconsiderable cellars.
"To success!"
"To our next task: employing you a decent vintner who will spare you a bout of blindness drinking this swill!" Annatar laughed.
Celebrimbor leaned back against a bench and tilted his head heavenward. The expanse of night sky stretched above him, long and low, so close, he felt almost that he could reach up and cup those stars in his hands. He raised his hand, reflectively, examining the band that encircled his forefinger. The ruby, red as furnace fire, glowed, fierce in its unfinished state. There were imperfections, of course, but they could be filed and smoothed away.
"I could not have done so without you." He was feeling overbold already. The low warmth of drink in his belly, the ring on his finger made him the more eager to declare himself and have done with these half shadows between them. He stroked a hand over the tresses spilling over Annatar's shoulder.
Under his touch that Noldorin mane paled silver under starlight with a gleam of gold, and the collarbone beneath his splayed fingers curved outward in a swell that a moment before had been a flat plain. Fingers alighted on Celebrimbor's cheek, slender and shapely. They stilled him for the very familiarity of them. Familiarity that he had lifted and smoothed and dared not kiss. The eyes that gazed back into his were undeniably woman-shaped and the same, sharp and depthless blue.
"Are you sure this is not what you truly desire?"
Celebrimbor recoiled as if the touch of that white hand had doused him in icewater. "What dwimmercraft is this?"
Alatáriel gazed back at him. But her eyes were all hollows. As if her fair form were no more than a sheaf of gold-plating stretched over latten. "I wished to be certain you were not thinking of another. She haunts you still." said Annatar's voice. "Even after all this time. Even after… I see it in your eyes. I hate that it eats at you so. That she would rather spread her smooth, white thighs for a country squire of the deep woods than for you."
A provocative splay of the knees had Celebrimbor on his feet, heat rolling the length of his back. "Stop. Why are you saying this?"
"Because you will not let her go. You do not see clearly in this. How she belittles you. How she scorns your brilliance. She would take your talents for her own purposes and leave you wanting."
"She has been a great friend to me."
"So long as you serve her purpose. How often of late has she scorned your counsel? Belittled your successes? Refused you aid though you had good reason to ask?"
Too often, a voice whispered.
"If she had had her way, we would yet be laboring with brass and cabochons."
"I know." The gold upon his hand glittered, and he squeezed his fist closed, forcing aside his misgiving.
Annatar laid a hand over his. "I am sorry, my friend. You know I want only for your happiness. You must free yourself of her, cut her out of your heart like a flaw in a gemstone. So does fire purify a forest and make it grow thicker and stronger in the aftermath. A bone mends stronger in the broken place. A wound debrided heals instead of festering. Yes, it hurts. Pain is the price of greatness. It must be faced. It cannot be avoided or ignored. But I will not be balm for it." He took his hand away, leaving Celebrimbor's the colder for it.
"I have set my feelings for her aside."
"Have you?"
"Yes."
"Show me."
This time the fingers that clutched at him bore a man's thickness and a man's hunger, urging him forward though Celebrimbor needed none. Annatar's mouth tasted of wine, mellow and sweet. There was no remoteness there that Celebrimbor had feared, but the hunger of a man made ravenous by deprivation: all heat and languor, the spark of a tongue against his lips, the sweet rake of teeth down the line of his throat.
Though a dark seed niggled at the back of his mind, Celebrimbor found himself thrusting it away under the onslaught of Annatar's consuming kiss and counted himself blessed. In casting aside a flawed jewel, he had netted a star instead.
Overhead, unremarked by either of them, red Borgil burned low in the western sky, a watchful eye on the edge of the horizon.
Chapter Notes
A note on ring-making in this story: The Noldor have access to techniques and skill with metallurgy that I could only find the briefest and most secretive of accounts on. The secret lies somewhere under the waves.