Two Powers meet upon the edge of the world.
One walks free, and she is robed and hooded all in grey like the cold hour before dawn when the stars are dim and the silence impenetrable; and she wears a mask upon her face made of a smooth, silvered wood, and the carven eyes are closed and the carven mouth is a hard line drooping at the corners.
The other kneels upon the ground, in a cage barred not with iron but shadows. He wears no garment save the collar at his neck and the cuffs at his wrists and ankles, all chained together and clinking, clinking, with every tiny move that he makes. The cascade of his long black hair is the only modesty that he is afforded.
It is the first who seeks out the second, walking for a long time through the Halls of Awaiting until she comes to their uttermost end: a doorless archway leading to a small, simple chamber that is separated from Arda’s precipice by a single wall. There are no windows here, no furnishings, no adornments, nothing to delight the eye or comfort the heart. Just the cage, and he who kneels in it. A cool, soft light falls upon him from a brazier stood in one corner, filled with flames so pale they seem like they have died and returned as ghosts.
The Power that is chained lifts his head at the sound of footsteps. His mouth twists into a sneer.
“You are the last to come to gloat.”
The mask gazes blankly down at him, and from behind issues a voice that is soft-deep like water in a well, yet muffled slightly by the wood. “That is not my intended purpose.”
The bearer of that voice folds down upon her knees before the cage, and he watches her with baleful eyes of icy blue. “What is your purpose, then? What torment would Nienna in her ineffable wisdom inflict upon me?”
He has no weapon, so instead he sharpens his words into one. Yet Nienna seems ruffled not at all. She kneels grey and still as stone, and the mask’s closed eyes remain trained on him, and its wooden contours reveal nothing of the thoughts or feelings that might be bubbling underneath.
“I seek to inflict nothing,” she says, “only to share the gift that I was given, if you are willing. May I weep for you?”
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That surprises him. He shifts, clink-clink. A frown gathers like a cloud upon his brow.
“I hold no bond of lordship over you. You may weep or no according to your own designs. You need no permission from me.”
“Even if I called you lord, I would not need your permission to weep.” The mask tilts slightly to one side, as though she were regarding him from a different angle but—there are no openings for her eyes in the wood. “Weeping is a right we are all born with; it can never be taken away. The lowliest slave can weep freely in their dungeon cell, and their master can do nothing to stop them. You misunderstand me, Melkor: I do not ask for your permission. I ask for your participation.”
As far as his chains allow, Melkor recoils from her. “I have always thought you a fool, and you prove me right. Me, weep with you?” He gives something like a laugh, harsh-throated. “Whatever for? Do you take me for a weakling? I may be held in bondage, but I am still me, which means that I am mighty.”
“There is no edict that says the mighty must not weep,” she replies mildly, in her imperturbable greyness. She rights her head, and continues pinning him with the mask’s carven, fathomless eyes. “Fool you name me, and I may indeed be one. But your imprisonment grieves me, and I would like to weep for you. For you, mind, not with you. I ask only that you witness my pity, and know yourself to be worthy of it.”
“Pity,” Melkor scoffs. He bares his teeth at her, and at the empty spaces of the room behind her. Anger is wrapped around him like a lover. “A thing for those who are wretched and cannot help themselves. You insult me, cousin. I would rather be put to torment.”
Nienna says nothing. Staring at him with those sightless eyes of wood, she peels off one grey silken glove and exposes the skin underneath, dark as Arda’s soil after rain. Her hand reaches for him, slips through the bars of the cage, and—
“How dare you?” Melkor growls, and his muscles bunch with his monstrous might, and the air about them grows deathly chill as he summons up his power.
But he has nowhere to go, and trammelled wrist and ankle he cannot strike at her; and those cage-bars of shadow have the spellcraft of the Doomsman in them, and will not allow Melkor to cast any part of himself, not even his own thaumaturgy, outside their bounds. So it is that she touches him, laying her naked palm upon his naked forearm. The gentlest of holds. She does not pinch him, does not scratch him, does not attempt to mar him with bruises. Outwardly, nothing happens.
Yet in Melkor’s face there comes suddenly a spasm of shock, and once it passes there is nothing left in him but blackest despair. He looks at her with wide eyes, then looks away, down down down to the stone beneath his knees as if he could see through it to some hidden rot in the heart of Arda. The breath shudders out of him. His shoulders bow, the whole of him crumpling up small.
At length, Nienna unhands him. It takes him a moment to lift his head again.
“The weight of it…” he whispers, and his voice is raw, and his eyes as they settle on her have something new about them, a touch of wonder, or fear, or perhaps—
“Has the Mighty Arising found pity for Nienna?” she asks. There might be a smile behind the mask, but it is impossible to tell for certain. “I am glad of it, and grateful; but please know I do not need it. Grief is good. For no thing or creature is made perfect, or if they are then they will not stay so. Grief is the bridge between what should have been and what can still be. If we cannot grieve, then we will hate this life that is fated to dishearten us; and hatred is a fire that burns, burns everything down to cinders, giving no warmth at all.”
She slips her glove back on. Inside it, her fingers close and flex a few times, as though they pained her.
“No, cousin, no,” Melkor retorts. On his knees he shuffles closer, as near the bars of swirling shadow as he dares. Clink. Clink. His hands grip about the long length of chain connecting all his bindings, throat, wrists, ankles. He squeezes it, hard, as though by strength alone he might shatter it. A light seems to bloom inside him, bright like freshly spilled blood, suffusing him from head to toe. “Hatred is what emboldens us. It is what spurs us to dream loftier dreams in which we crush those infidels who think ill of us and who would usurp from us our power and our peace.” His words flow from him fast and fevered. “Would you not crush me, if given the chance? Would you not wish to take vengeance upon the Mighty Arising who has yoked the world to his will?”
Minutely, her shoulders slump. “No, cousin, no,” she answers, and sadness speaks with her. “Did you not hear what I said? You ask me about crushing and vengeance, yet these are the furthest things from my mind.”
“Why?” Melkor demands; he draws himself up as tall as he can on his knees, and in pride and belligerence he glowers down at her. “If you hate me—”
“I do not.”
“Why? I am the architect of most of your grief.”
“Yes,” Nienna agrees. “But that is not all that you are.”
She might as well have produced a sword from within her robes and skewered him on it, front to back, in a fountain of blood. Melkor shrinks away, huddles into the furthest corner of his cage. The chains drag on the ground with a bright, strident sound. That light inside of him, that ruddy, hungry, living light—it’s gone. He makes to press a hand against his eyes, but has to dip his head low to reach with the chains holding him fast.
The world is young and so are they, yet in this moment he seems a husk, weary and fragile even as the Men who are still to come.
“Weep, if you must,” he murmurs. “I shall be your witness.”
Wordlessly, Nienna pushes down her hood, then unpicks the mask’s fastenings at the back of her head. It comes off with some effort, like a scab. The face left naked under the pale-burning brazier is neither plain nor lovely, framed with straggling tendrils of silver hair that have escaped her braid. Set against Nienna’s dark skin, the eyes are startlingly colourless, irises only a shade or two less white than the surrounding sclera. They glimmer, for she is weeping already and always. On her cheeks are scars, vertical troughs carved there by her unending tears.
Melkor has seen—and done—worse maimings, so he does not avert his gaze.
He has heard her weeping before, on the edge of his hearing from his seat in Utumno if he bent his will westwards. Soft, lilting sobs. A melody. A strain of the Great Music plucked out of time and space and rendered here within the confines of Arda.
But before now he has never seen it. There is artistry in it, yet also something that discomfits. Nienna does it openly, scrunches up her eyes and lets her tears build to a stream, a river, a torrent, opens her mouth and warbles out her sobbing song. Her cheeks grow wet, her neck, her clothing. It makes her glimmer, like a precious thing. All the while her hands rest loosely in her lap; she makes no attempt to stifle herself, silence herself, wipe away the wetness.
She weeps, and forces the world to reckon with her grief.
Yet Melkor is not the world. He made it; he is not of it, nor is he like any other creature in it. Stern and cruel and strong-stubborn like the roots of mountains: he cannot be moved—much—by such a trifling thing as weeping.
She is mistress of her own choices, and if she chooses to waste herself on grief then that is not his burden to bear. Fate drives him. He is king and god and master of all, and he will have the peoples of Arda on their knees in obeisance to him or if they prove unwilling then he will clap them in irons until they change their minds or rot; after all, a lord of corpses is still a lord. This is his course and purpose, and he will not stray from it for any tears, no matter whose cheek they fall down.
And fall they do, inconsolably. Her sobs echo off the walls as though she were not one but a thousand, a whole weeping army. About her knees a clear puddle of tears is steadily forming. And mighty though Melkor is, Nienna is cousin to him and wields power of her own.
In his breast his heart stirs. The ebb and flow of her sobbing conjures visions for him, what might have been, what can still be. As a lord he sees himself that is not dark or dreadful but revered. When he speaks, the world listens, and his words are fair and good and wise. He wears no crown and sits no throne, but wanders freely as far west and east and north and south as his legs can bear him, ensuring Arda remains in balance, life and death and decay and rebirth, so the seasons keep turning and everything from the littlest buzzing fly to the highest snowy mountain has a place to call its own; and he shares his vast knowledge with all who ask, and Manwë his brother is a lord alongside him.
The visions fade. Nienna has ceased her weeping. Her white eyes, when she blinks them open, show red with tiny, spidering veins.
“Foresight is not a gift I possess,” she says in a voice gone hoarse, cracked right through. “I do not know if what you saw will come to pass. I know only that it is one option of many, and I know that it grieves me to see you hating and hated when it needn’t be this way.”
“It would not be this way,” Melkor snarls, coming back to his cage and his chains and finding himself bereft of freedom again, again, and feeling that loss pulsing in him like a festering wound, “if our brethren recognised me for what I am, the rightful king of the world, and did not jealously throw me in bonds. Why do you not weep for the hurts they have wrought upon Arda, hmm? They care nothing for the lands beyond their mountains, else they would not have dragged me away leaving them to grow riotous with no one to tend them.”
Nienna looks at him with less expression even than her mask of wood. Underneath that look fatigue runs deeper than the deepest depths of the sea. “I weep for all the hurts of Arda, regardless of who is responsible for them.”
The wetness shining in the deep grooves on her cheeks stills any further recriminations on Melkor’s tongue.
“I do have a measure of foresight,” he tells her, less harshly than before, “enough to know that your purpose here is vain. You have not convinced me to retire my crown and join you in your weeping vigil for this our ailing world. I will have my vengeance, cousin. This imprisonment is an unfairness and I will not abide it. I will go home, I will find a way though all our brethren take up arms against me, and I will have my reckoning, in death and darkness and blood and more weeping than even you could know what to do with.”
There is a hardness behind Nienna’s eyes. A bristling about her mouth. “You do not listen, Melkor. Ever you have sung your own tune too loudly to heed anything else. Have I not told you of my purpose? It was never to sway you to one path over another. That can only ever be your choice, not mine.”
“I listened well enough,” Melkor retorts, “but I did not believe you. You said you came here to weep for me, to show me I deserve pity.” At this Nienna nods, which makes Melkor snort, with all the amusement of a broken bone. “Come now, cousin. None who walk upon the earth or above it are so selfless.”
A contemplative noise hums in Nienna’s throat. Her eyes are still wet, tears trickling quietly from their corners, and the grooves in her cheeks glint as though filled with diamond-dust. “That may be so. Perhaps I came because I was sick of weeping on my own.” She shrugs, up-down, heavy. “Why does selfishness need to negate selflessness? We are none of us purely one or the other.”
Melkor regards her long. He regards her quizzically. “Not even the Mighty Arising?”
“None of us,” Nienna says. “I have spoken. What you do, or do not do, with my words is your prerogative.”
And with that, she picks up her mask from its resting place on the floor and puts it back on, in meticulous silence. Once that is done she stands, sodden in her robes, their hem stained a darker grey like a storm claiming her from below.
Two Powers take leave of each other upon the edge of the world.
One is masked and robed in grey; without word she treads softly towards the open archway that serves as a door, and sorrow walks with her, and strength also.
The other kneels in his cage of shadows, because he has no other choice. He watches her go, listening to the whisper of her robes upon the floor, remembering her weeping.
“Goodbye, cousin,” he calls to her as she reaches the threshold to the Halls beyond.
“For now,” she answers from behind the mask, her back to him. “We may have cause to meet again.”
He says nothing more, and after a handful of moments she steps over the threshold and melts away into a corridor that is hidden from his view.
As he kneels there in his solitude, and the silence scratches at him as though with pointed nails, and his body aches in one unbroken wave of pain from his restricted position, he thinks of what should have been and what can still be. He thinks that there need not be any difference between them: that what was lost can be reclaimed. It may not be so for Nienna, who at birth was given only knowledge of grief by Eru in his holy cruelty and must, perforce, find cause for weeping everywhere she turns. But he is not her. He has his might, his dreams, his purpose; he has his will of hardest iron, which makes a laughing stock of grief, just another name for giving up.
And from within those teeming thoughts, the first inklings of his vengeance start to stitch themselves together.
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