The liveried fellow who had brought him the message led him into a small, well-kept parlor off the main hall of the Lord's House. He studied the elegant array: the table beside the window set for two, the understated Beleriand china and teapot (rescued from Doriath? He wondered. One of the cups was chipped).

Beware a woman's wiles, he thought, though never before had such thoughts crossed his mind. Certainly never regarding her.

The Lady of Eregion herself was standing at the window, silhouetted against the casement and gazing down on the cloistered gardens below. Her face in profile (still beautiful, despite everything) had a washed out color to it. He sensed a restlessness in her stillness. Yet he would not be the first to break the silence and waited, upright as a soldier, hands tucked into the small of his back.

She did not turn, and the silence, spiraling, set his teeth on edge.

"To what do I owe the summons?" he asked lightly, but she cocked her head as if she'd detected the thread of impatience beneath it.

"An invitation between friends is not a summons." She glanced at him from under her lids with reproach.

"Are we yet friends?"

Things had not stood easily between them for some time — since that rainy night in the Hall, truth be told — though he could not say with certainty whence the chill had come. His craft took him ever more often afield and kept him to his workroom when he was at home. He seldom came to the Hall, refused the so-called "invitations" if they came, until they dwindled and finally ceased altogether. On the occasions he attended the Lord's Council, their exchanges were ever briefer, more polite. He sensed a coldness in her that he could not account for and returned it with a chill to match.

Yet the summons today had been delivered formally (the pompous messenger all but daring refusal in his immaculate cloak and rigid manner).

She surveyed him in silence, took him in whole from crown to boots. He had spared no expense for the audience. No longer did he clothe himself in common workman's drab. His hair lay washed and gleaming about his shoulders (for once not reeking of hot metal and coal). The surcoat, stitched with the silver emblem of the House of the Mírdain, accentuated the breadth of his shoulders and the strong angle of his throat, one of the few gifts he had inherited from his father. Snowy linen and stiff brocade, even a pair of richly tooled boots he had purchased from a Númenorean tradesman at no little expense. They were his weapons of choice — though he had not come armed for combat. Only a leaf-bladed dagger hung from his belt, bound with golden wire and a black opal set in the pommel. Under her gaze, he did not shift though, inwardly, he squirmed under such prolonged perusal as if somehow she could see beneath his very skin. (The passion marks hidden by his hair, the rake of nails left across his shoulders).

"You do not look well," she said.

"I have been working."

"Celebrían misses you."

At that, he softened a little. Pulling out one of the spindly-legged chairs, he eased himself into it and helped himself to one of the apples heaped in a bowl there. "She is a woman grown now. She should be seeking more suitable attentions than those of an old tinker."

"Is that what you think you are?" She asked though she did not seem to expect an answer. "I have ever been your friend. I must speak as I must at Council, Telperinquar It is upon us to govern wisely. And to not let others speak for us."

Ah, there it is.

"You have misliked him since he arrived. Why I cannot fathom, and you will not explain. He has never done anything but treat you with courtesy, and you cast it back in his face as if it were bile. Why do you not trust him? What reason has he ever given you?"

"I fear he has too great an influence on you."

"Greater than your own, you mean?"

"You are in thrall to him."

"I think you fear he brings too much change in his wake. For too long have we bent the knee to Gil-galad and the concerns of Lindon. Our king has long since ceased to care for the world beyond his gilded walls. Yet ever more we obey his policies to our detriment."

"He is our king. We owe him our fealty." But the words were pale, without her usual fire. "Annatar desires change for his own sake and his own glory. He has that luxury. I do not."

"You do not believe that. That old Finwëian pride stirs still. You forget. I know you, Alatáriel." He plucked one of the apples from the bowl and set his dagger to it. The lush, scarlet skin, split at the kiss of steel, and a few drops bled on his fingers and dappled the silver fist on his surcoat. He slipped the morsel in his mouth, chewed, slow, deliberate.

She would rather spread her smooth, white thighs for a country squire of the deep woods than for you.

"Or is it, perhaps, that you are jealous? That I no longer look to your table for…scraps?"

"You speak out of turn, Curufinion." And for the first time, he heard the steel beneath the silver of her voice, and her eyes glittered like adamant in a face of marble. "You are no stranger to the desire for loyalty, I am told. There are whispers that those among your following swear oaths to you."

"I ask for no oath, Lady. I hope you know me better than that," he said, cold. "But if some of my friends desire to seal their dedication to the craft with solemn words — surely that is no crime?"

"Ever your actions are couched in fair seeming reason. So, too, did you father speak once."

A hot pulse of anger rushed through him, crown to heels, like the blast of an open kiln, radiating in his skin. Sweating with it. "I am not my father. Though if I prove Curufin's son in truth, perhaps, it would be wiser, Lady, to speak more softly to me. Pride did not avail Beren or Dior… or your own brother, for that matter. Save that your wolves will be of your own making."

The words were not his.

That voice — where had that come from? that dark timbre, harsher, more strident than he had ever uttered — it scorched his throat, hot and metallic and utterly, completely unlike himself.

As quickly as it flared, it ebbed, washing through and over him like a bad fever breaking. He was shivering, unaccountably, in the warm, still air.

She was watching him the way one watches an adder within striking distance.

He sighed and wiped his dagger, slipping it back into his belt. "I have no desire for a quarrel, Alatáriel. You know I have ever valued your counsel and wisdom. But in this, I fear I must disagree. Eregion must be its own master, or it will perish. I had hoped to have an ally in you."

She said nothing.

There was nothing left to say.

He rose, leaving the remainder of the apple, uneaten, on the table. The white flesh, flayed-looking and raw, was already beginning to brown.

"They say you influence me overmuch."

Annatar, head and shoulders above him, braced the heels of his hands on Celebrimbor's bedwarm chest, and pressed upward as if flattening a sheaf of gold. "Do I?"

"I believe it was your suggestion to retire this eve when we had work yet to do," Celebrimbor murmured. Blue shadows of ribs showed beneath the spread of Annatar's hands, and his muscled, tawny body settled deep against the knifelike ridges of Celebrimbor's hips.

"Too weary?"

"Never." It was not quite true, but he twined a lock of hair between his fingers as it dangled over his face and tugged, imperious, until Annatar's mane curtained them in warm shadow.

Annatar ran a hand over Celebrimbor's worn cheek and rocked in small, coaxing circles, his black hair tumbling over his shoulder. The amber knot, Celebrimbor's gift, nodded against his throat. Sometimes his gaze, bright and dark as gemstones, would fall on Celebrimbor from above, and he would think of a crow over a stricken deer pecking tears from its eyes. But the strangeness passed.

"And here I thought you once immune to such earthly hungers as desire."

Annatar lifted his chin, withholding those besetting lips up-tilted in an arch smirk. "If you believe the Ainur and their retinue hungered for nothing more substantial than music, let me firmly disabuse you."

Celebrimbor scraped his hips upward. "Firm, indeed. However, I believe I require more convincing on the matter. The most enduring truths are only uncovered by repeated assessment, are they not?

Annatar laid a finger against his lips to silence him though he hardly had need for that glitter in his eyes held Celebrimbor bespelled and speechless. "You will not distract me with talk of absolutes, Telpëlamba. Now hush. Tonight of all nights, set aside your questions and labors. I have better uses in mind for that silver tongue of yours."

But it was Annatar in the end who descended, and Celebrimbor hummed in the back of his throat. His body, however weary, remembered the echo of kindling. He stroked that black hair, tried to concentrate on giving as well as receiving pleasure, but he found himself drifting. His head these days was full of wheels and glinting gems. They peered at him like eyes of fire through the dark.

A huff against his hip. "You are otherwhere."

"Hmm?"

Annatar folded his arms against Celebrimbor's breast and appraised him frankly. "Once upon a time, it would take me but a feather of a breath to have you buckling at the knees. Now this sad, little soldier sleeps at his post and even a raucous fanfare won't rouse him. You are distracted."

"I am a little overworked, perhaps."

"It is more than that." Annatar rolled to one side, propped his chin on a long hand. "She will have reached the other side of the Hithaeglir by now. Safe harbor amidst the other wildings content to remain in the past."

To his credit, the man did not sound sour (at least, not entirely so). If anything, a small, ironic smile lurked about his mouth.

"It is not that."

"No?"

Alatáriel had left the city, encircled by an entourage — 'entourage,' though they went armed, watchful and circling before even they reached the Gate as if they feared some treacherous stroke. He had not restrained her going; indeed, he had sent a missive (unbeknownst to Annatar, who viewed the entire situation with distaste and regret) to Narvi to foretell her coming and request passage for her and her daughter through his realm.

That had not stopped the whispers.

Some who had survived Nargothrond's fall remembered the going of Finrod and his ten companions. The doom of that fair city had been sealed by the lying tongue of a Fëanorian. Was Ost-in-Edhil, fairer and more inviolate even than that ancient realm, to suffer the same fate? For was it not whispered that Fëanor's blood now ruled in the place of the House of Finwë and dared to take its rightful lordship?

Uglier things, darker things he had heard too, even in the halls of the Mírdain. Things he did not dare speak of to Annatar. Things he dared hardly think himself and set just as soon aside.

"I am all attention." Hauling himself up, he straddled Annatar's golden body. "I swear it. Now. You said you had uses for this silver tongue of mine. Shall I wax lyrical on philosophy? Sing your praises? Or…?"

He closed his mouth and his hands around warm, hard flesh.

Like his craft, this, too, was something he could sink himself in utterly: the heat and languor of it…the striving for something just beyond reach…something that you could grasp if only you could endure the starts and stops, the inevitable challenges… because whatever discomfort there was in unfamiliarity, eventually, slowly, it blossomed and surged. He strained like a bellows — strength and air draining out of him to keep the fire lit. Though what fire and whose hands worked him he did not know.

There were rings again before his eyes. But these were grey, about his periphery, fluttering like tapers of ash in a high wind. His vision narrowed to the amber pendant in the hollow of Annatar's throat, a flaw at its center like a slitted, dark pupil. He brushed it, but the world was going — the rings of grey splintered into wings and beat themselves out inside his head.

He woke — or thought he woke — to a chilled feeling in the center of his chest. The sheets beneath him were damp and clammy, and the room was full of moonlight. The beeswax candles, disregarded and left to burn, had nearly guttered out, sunk in pools of their own making.

Annatar was sitting on the edge of the bed, the linens tangled about him, forearms resting on his knees. In the moonlight, he looked very much like a man instead of an emissary of the Valar. Troubled, folded in on himself.

Celebrimbor rolled to his side and soothed a hand over that chilly expanse. "What stirs you at this hour? Come. It is dark yet."

"The hour is late, indeed."

"There must be a few hours til dawn, surely."

"That's not what I mean." Annatar raised his head. "I have outstayed my welcome. You have heard the whispers, I am sure of it. What they say of you? Of me?"

Celebrimbor ceased trying to coax him back down into the warmth of the bed. His hand fell lifeless to the sheets as if cut from his arm. "I care not. Let the little people complain as they always do. What do they know?"

Annatar pressed his lips together, but it was a pale echo of his usual, sure grin. "If it were only the 'little people,' I might agree. But when the very men who walk these halls whisper that their master is mastered… when our 'friend' Narvi sends couriers skulking past our walls with missives to Lindon—"

"Narvi? What missives? What are you talking about?"

But Annatar was already rising, hunting out trousers, shirt, boots, belt. "Celeborn has more than a few loyals who remain with him. If they stir others to their cause, there will be insurrection. Bloodshed."

"Celeborn is a man of better sense than that."

"He has not his lady-wife and daughter to fear for now. That may make even an even temper hot — especially in a fighting man."

"I do not understand. What makes you talk so?"

Annatar pulled his black hair out of his collar and began to gather it up in a tail. "I am leaving."

Celebrimbor kneaded the sheets in his hands. He seemed incapable of moving, of thought. The linens still remembered their lusty disarrangement yet only cold disquiet seeped into him now.

"It is time and past time. In truth… I had not intended to remain as long as I did," Annatar's voice was soft and unspeakably gentle. "Surely you did not think I would remain forever."

"I-I confess I hadn't thought on it much."

"If I remain, it will cause trouble for you. Our time together was…pleasant…but it was destined to come to an end." He shook his head, once, and raked a hand through his hair. His eyes were all shadow.

Celebrimbor said nothing. The word 'pleasant' had knifed him, robbed him of the power to answer or argue or speak at all. His memory retreated to that rainy night in Ost-in-Edhil when he had staked what remained of his faith on a stranger in a burlap hood. For all they had shared throughout the years, all the subjects they had debated, all the theories they had put to the test, all the things they had caught in jewel and glass and metal — love had never been one of them.

True to his word, Celebrimbor never asked for or swore oath. Not aloud, anyway.

As ever, though, his lover plucked his thought from the air. He took a half step towards the bed, halted, and addressed the gilt adorning the far wall. "I do not love, Telperinquar Desire is as far as I may muster. But love is for the lesser children. I have…greater tasks that do not permit it."

And in that moment, Celebrimbor saw himself as Annatar must see him: a jewel, polished and bright, lovely and empty.

"When will you go?" His mouth was not his own; his lips numb and tingling no longer belonged to him. They shaped words without meaning or implication. There was a dull sort of knocking in his chest he knew would be pain, eventually, but for now, blessedly, he felt nothing but a vague sort of bemusement. As if he were in a dream of a dream. Or a nightmare of a dream.

Annatar stepped closer to the bed, leaned over him.

For just an instant, a flicker of an eyelid, the shadow on the wall behind his lover changed. Black and blasphemous, it groped along the wall, stretched from one end of the chamber to the other, with a terrible, unknowable reach. It swallowed the dying candles whole.

Lips brushed his brow, benediction and curse. A muting darkness filled his ears and eyes, and he plunged into a sleep, deep and dreamless as an abyss, and if other words were spoken, he never knew them.

Celebrimbor woke alone. The amber knot on its fine gold chain lay on the other pillow, chilled and abandoned.

He rose and attended those necessaries his position as nominal lord of Eregion demanded of him, and as soon as politics and politesse allowed (or a little before, truth be told), he shut himself up in his workroom and refused the curious, concerned and insistent alike.

But even here, in the realm where he had always felt his steadiest, the simplest of tasks refused their office. The kiln overheated and cracked an array of wax molds. Chisels broke. Light fractured and refused to be caught. It was as if absence had carved something out of him, some necessary element.

With a sweep of his arm, he cleared the table, relishing the rattle-clatter-shatter of breaking on the flagstones.

Long ago, he had become convinced a sickness infected his family tree — though where it began or what caused it he did not know; others speculated: a mother wearying of life; a father's desire for another wife; a son comforting himself with knowledge of jewels and oaths or when the sons of those sons darkened their sword-blades with kin's blood on white quays…But Celebrimbor suspected it was older than that. That, perhaps, even in the Time Before time… it had lain there, waiting.

Rooting in a cabinet, he thumbed the cork off a tall, brown bottle and tipped a few thick fingers of its contents into a glass. The juniper fumes hit him full in the face, obliterating the stench of charred wax and ruined gold.

Gone were the days of fig wine and starlight.

He toasted their end and drank until he no longer tasted misery or fumes.

Weaving between the wreckage of his instruments, he took up a post before the eastward facing windows. A dull, dark, soundless fog was crept steadily out of the lower vales and down the High Road, obscuring the wide loops up into the foothills and the realm of Dúrin's folk. The long grasses, bleached of all their colors, bent their blades beneath it.

Time passed only in the changing of the fog: pearl and opal struck with droplets of adamant, slowly dunned to shades of tourmaline then sank into a shade the color of bruise and heartbreak that had no name but absorbed all light into itself that no crystal could capture.

He would drift from time to time and wish for oblivion, but oblivion brought no relief, only a deeper void, and he would drag himself back into wakefulness only to seek darkness again.

Eventually, the fog reached the gate and came no further, hanging there, a wall of cloud about the city — the forerunner of dragon fire, he thought. So had it been in Nargothrond.

In a corner of the room stood a long, upright sheet of copper, polished clear as any glass. But it was all dark on the other side of the mirror. No lamps. No shadows, even. Or all shadows, perhaps.

He knew the face in that mirror.

It was not the one he desired.

It was not even his own.

His father gazed back at him, his expression — faced with his only offspring — riding between wonder and reproach.

"My lamp languishes for want of fuel," he told it in the grave tones of the inebriate. "But I find myself too parched to share. And you are dead."

The face in the mirror tilted at an imperious angle as if to dispute the truth of his words.

Their last words to one another had not been kind (if only words had been the only ways they had wounded one another).

"You ruined everything you touched. The blight comes from you — you and your bloody oath. Not me. You pursued those thrice-damned jewels whatever the cost. You slaughtered innocents. You cared nothing for the blood on your hands. I made one choice. One. Am I to be punished for—" He stopped.

The face in the mirror remained implacable, unmoved by either accusation or appeal.

"I was a man. Then a fool. Now a beast."

He laughed then, laughed until he had to sit down on the flags, laughed until he choked on tears.

When he could at last raise his face, the mirror was smooth and empty of anything but the room beyond it. He folded his arms around his knees. The ruby flickered on his forefinger.

There is power to be forged out of pain. Harness it. Make something mightier from it.

"Master of your own fate."

His mind was churning ahead, calibrating. Well-oiled and stripped of its usual armor, it could work unimpeded. The idea circled wildly like a bird under a roof; he had nearly grasped it when fire blossomed before his eyes like a match striking dried parchment and obliterated the room. If he had not already been sitting, he would have fallen.

A wasteland spread out about him. All naked stone and scorched earth. A lifeless, bloodless place and yet orderly. Without the riotous chaos of beauty or variation. The ring on his forefinger blazed, white-hot in an instant, a shackle around his finger and his will like the cage of an unrelenting lover's arms. The acrid sizzle of the small hairs on his knuckles reached his nostrils before he could summon the wherewithal to remove it.

As quickly as it had come, the heat faded. In its place crept a bone-deep chill, radiating from his chest and slipping icy fingers all the way down his spine. It banished the fog from his mind at last. Groping for the table edge, he pulled himself up.

The iron hasps gave him a little trouble, but he opened the chest after a little fumbling, hunted with his fingers through the detritus of years, of things half-forgotten, until they closed around a sleeve of silk. About the length of his forearm, the long, smooth cylinder lay in his hand, near weightless. The flute was all of Valinorean gold, untarnished despite all the years tucked away at the bottom of a damp chest. The gems about its mouth were his mother's, her words of clarity and sweetness bound into them. The metal had been worked and polished by his father in Tirion upon Túna in the days before the Darkness for a boy who had once fancied himself a minstrel.

Shrugging out of his finery, he fished out an old canvas shirt and pulled it over his head. Then he stoked the forge's coals alight and began to work.