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b2mem2018-03-28 08:39 pm
nathair_nimhe) wrote in b2mem2018-03-28 08:39 pm
Last Song by uumuu
B2MeM Prompt and Category: March 3th Daily Prompt ("And the music and the echo of the music went out into the Void, and it was not void.")
Format: Short Story
Genre: AU
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Implied Torture, Character Death, Imprisonment, Graphic Violence
Characters: Maglor, Sauron
Pairings: None
Creator's Notes: I started this over two of years ago (I think) for a ToT exchange. The original inspiration for it came from the anime Kara no Kyoukai and its OST, but the above-mentioned B2MeM prompt was key to actually finishing the story.
Summary: Maglor makes a discovery, and invents a word.
Maglor closed his mouth. He had repeated the word long enough, he wouldn't forget how to shape it, wouldn't forget its meaning. He ran a dry tongue over dry lips, out of habit rather than for any relief. Out of habit he swallowed the aftertaste of blood from the cuts in his lips and the gash running across his cheek, and tried to fend an overlong lock of hair away from his face.
Only his wrists were chained together. There was no risk of him escaping from his prison, naked and weakened from a long captivity, no way for him to slip past the orcs guarding the lower floors of the tower even if he had been able to run.
Sometimes he still thought he should at least have tried to avoid being captured, but it had seemed pointless to put up too much resistance.
He had nothing to fight for, at the end of the First Age.
He had thought he had nothing left to lose.
Sauron made it a point to prove that there was something he could still lose. Sauron had taken his voice, and his ability to hear, locking him inside a bottomless silence which only his presence could breach, and in which pain blazed all the more savagely for it.
Maglor was nothing more than a diversion to him, a pastime for when Sauron wasn't busy carrying out his greater plans. His promises – of a better life, of power – were mere taunts. More taunts and visions Sauron poured into his mind, garbled tableaus where past and future intertwined and the end Sauron planned for his nephew was one and the same with the torment of his brother.
Maglor never responded. He would remain immobile, refusing to so much as move his head or open his eyes, unless forced. His body was of no use to him, and there were layers of consciousness even Sauron couldn't reach. Or maybe there were layers of consciousness he didn't possess. Many had accused him of being heartless, too detached for an Elda, and maybe it was true, and it was a blessing after all. Wasn't lack of empathy a defining trait and a point of strength for the Valar?
When he grew bored of him, Sauron left him alone, free to travel the distorted pathways of his ever-wakeful mind. In silence, in darkness, dizzy from pain, spiralling into the umpteenth nightmare, he had long ago begun to weave a single thought into something far more substantial than a thought.
The world had been born of song, and there was a point where the Music ceased and the Void took over. Morgoth had been thrust into the Void, but he was expected to return. The Void still had a potential – for existence, for endurance.
The absolute silence that clawed at him and pressed down on him from all sides suggested to him the idea that there had to be a point beyond which everything ceased. A realm of pure nothingness, where not even the Void could exist, and the Music died out.
He had time all the time he could wish for. Time, gathering in the gaps between Sauron's visits, unforgiving, churning and churning and churning around that one thought.
And then he began to see the cracks. In the absence of all noise, as he tried to recall the patterns of songs he knew, they flashed before his eyes unbidden. Soon he became able to anticipate where he would find them in familiar melodies. From those melodies he followed them, thin lines which ran through everything, threatened the very fabric of the universe. He saw, clearly, the lines in the Music along which the world would break, and through those he found it: the jagged border where the last notes died out, the very boundary of nothingness.
He mouthed the new word again, aware of the power it carried.
It was his last recourse, but even if he failed he truly had nothing left to lose now.
Sauron came to him again, unsuspecting, his footsteps boomed inside Maglor's head.
Sauron surely had no notion of non-existence, of the abyss where all sound died, and Eru's own thoughts ceased.
Sauron came to him, confident as ever, suavely ruthless as ever, looming over, him half-shade half-beast.
But that time Maglor raised his head, opened his eyes of his own accord, and looked straight into Sauron's blown-out, bottomless pupils.
'No-' he mouthed slowly, letting his tongue flap in his own mouth in a sound he couldn't hear.
Sauron laughed, then lashed out and hit him.
Maglor's head hit the wall and ricocheted on top of his chest. Pain sizzled down his back and if he had been able to make noises he would have sobbed.
The orcs who stood guard near the door laughed too. Maglor had learnt to understand when they did even without sound and without seeing them, hidden behind their master's massive shape.
Sauron grabbed his hair and forced his head up.
No-thing-ness, Maglor mouthed, too quickly he feared.
Again Sauron hit him, in the front, paying no attention to his voiceless mutter. A cramp seized Maglor's empty stomach, made him choke.
Right then, abruptly, there was an echo, feeble but distinct, of 'No'.
Sauron frowned, believing it to be an illusion, but when he looked behind himself it was clear that the orcs had heard it too. The one syllable grew into that one word: nothingness. By the time Sauron understood what it was, the echo had already become a full-fledged melody, sung in a voice it wasn't hard for him to recognise. It was Maglor's voice that he had stolen and locked away. It was Maglor's voice, coming from everywhere, from inside and from outside, strengthened by a chorus of other voices singing the same word. The voices overlapped with one another, stacked upon one another, nothingness nothingness nothingness.
A further noise came from outside: a mighty clap of thunder. The sky over Mordor was rent open and rain fell where rain had never fallen before. Water – the giver of life, the bearer of the Music – flowed down over the grim walls of Barad-dur.
The orcs looked outside, agape, recoiled when a few raindrops which rebounded on the sill of the narrow window hit them. Then they turned and looked at their Master in disbelief.
Sauron didn't hear their confused questions. He had let go of Maglor, dropping him like an emptied sack at his feet, and brought his hands to his ears, attempting to shut out the combined peal of voices and water. But he realised he could not repel them. The chorus grew louder, deafening. Sauron took a couple steps away from Maglor, conveying all his might into hurting him, into making that song he had started stop, but he only managed to break one of his fingers. Maglor's face twisted in pain, but his lips opened into a hideous grimace of a smile, as if he had gotten exactly what he wanted. He sat upright, propping himself against the wall.
Bend, he spelled out.
Sauron had but a moment to frown before his left arm stretched out against his will.
It began twisting.
Sauron looked into Maglor's eyes. Maglor kept on smiling.
The arm twisted and twisted, bending the restraints of his physical form, turned a little more and a little more. Bones cracked, sinews stretched thin, skin frayed and finally the whole limb snapped, flying from his body in a shower of blood.
Even as it did, and Sauron stood with a bleeding jagged stump, Maglor repeated his command – bend – and his right arm stretched out in the other direction. It twisted at the wrist and then up the whole length. The hand was torn off first, the arm following soon after.
Bend, Maglor mouthed again, and it was Sauron's legs which contorted and bent in unnatural ways before being destroyed. He didn't fall, held aloft by the chanting, thick and heavy about him like a cage.
Through the pain of the breaking, Sauron despaired. It wasn't only his raiment which was falling apart. Maglor's song was denying his existence, pulling him towards that boundary Maglor had found and which Sauron now saw clearly too, outlined by the voice he had stolen.
He teetered at the brink.
Bend, Maglor said one last time, slower, much slower than the previous times.
An invisible vice folded around Sauron's neck.
He made one last attempt at speech, at resistance, but all he had in his mind was 'no-thing-ness', and his very last utterance was a tiny yelp that repeated that word.
His eyes bulged out, his tongue stuck out of his mouth.
His neck turned all the way, making a knot of his skin. His head snapped like a withered branch from a tree, and rolled on the ground.
He fell.
Maglor was half-drenched in blood when he forced his abused body to rise, fighting nausea and utter, hollowing exhaustion. His chest heaving, he set his feet on the icy flagstones of the ground. The sensation was excruciating yet he hadn't felt it in so long it was almost welcome. He closed his parched lips and extended his chained hands towards the orcs.
The orcs, who were cowering in a corner, timidly peered at him, took one terrified look at the smile on his blood-splattered face, at the scattered body parts of their once-master, at the gore dripping from the walls at the same cadence of the raindrops dripping on the windowsill.
The chanting still echoed, and in its droning aftershocks the footsteps of one of the orcs barely made any sound. He crossed the room, and unchained Maglor's hands. Maglor inclined his head slowly in thanks and even more slowly took a step then another, wobbling like a child who is still learning how to walk. Leaning against the wall for support, he stepped right into the pool of blood and took Sauron's head by the hair. He lifted it.
The hideously distorted features screamed at him impotently.
Maglor gathered some of the blood in the palm of his hand and wet his lips with it.
*
The rain over Mordor didn't cease for years. The fires of the Orodruin were extinguished, and life quickly spread over the plains of ash. Some of the orcs fled and disappeared, others perished in a land that became hostile to them. It didn't take too long for their existence to become but a faint memory, a vague shadow lingering only in Men's tales.
The new lord of the land was not forgotten.
The Hater, some called him, for none who trod beyond Mordor's mountains ever came back alive. The Lord of Light others dubbed him, after the strange light that sometimes flashed from the highest peak of his realm, a light more beautiful than the sun itself.
To the people who lived closest to Mordor he was the Nightmare King, for that same light shone in their nightmares, and it was said that he fed on nightmares to keep the light shining as bright as it did. The wisest among those people realised that it was not a simple light, that its roots reached deeper than any other light's. When it shone brightest, the very wise would climb the mountains fencing off the Nightmare King's land, but didn't cross them. They waited at the top, straining their ears for the echo of a song, carried far by the wind, a fragment of bliss.
---
To my knowledge Quenya doesn't have a word for “nothingness”. There's nothing (munta), but it doesn't really convey the meaning of non-existence. A negation of ëa wouldn't do here either, since the Ainur existed before ëa. Maglor could have used something like álanávë (i.e. not being).
Technically, the Ainur don't bleed (I think), but since it's an aesthetic detail rather than anything essential to the progress of the story, I chose to go with it.
Format: Short Story
Genre: AU
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Implied Torture, Character Death, Imprisonment, Graphic Violence
Characters: Maglor, Sauron
Pairings: None
Creator's Notes: I started this over two of years ago (I think) for a ToT exchange. The original inspiration for it came from the anime Kara no Kyoukai and its OST, but the above-mentioned B2MeM prompt was key to actually finishing the story.
Summary: Maglor makes a discovery, and invents a word.
Maglor closed his mouth. He had repeated the word long enough, he wouldn't forget how to shape it, wouldn't forget its meaning. He ran a dry tongue over dry lips, out of habit rather than for any relief. Out of habit he swallowed the aftertaste of blood from the cuts in his lips and the gash running across his cheek, and tried to fend an overlong lock of hair away from his face.
Only his wrists were chained together. There was no risk of him escaping from his prison, naked and weakened from a long captivity, no way for him to slip past the orcs guarding the lower floors of the tower even if he had been able to run.
Sometimes he still thought he should at least have tried to avoid being captured, but it had seemed pointless to put up too much resistance.
He had nothing to fight for, at the end of the First Age.
He had thought he had nothing left to lose.
Sauron made it a point to prove that there was something he could still lose. Sauron had taken his voice, and his ability to hear, locking him inside a bottomless silence which only his presence could breach, and in which pain blazed all the more savagely for it.
Maglor was nothing more than a diversion to him, a pastime for when Sauron wasn't busy carrying out his greater plans. His promises – of a better life, of power – were mere taunts. More taunts and visions Sauron poured into his mind, garbled tableaus where past and future intertwined and the end Sauron planned for his nephew was one and the same with the torment of his brother.
Maglor never responded. He would remain immobile, refusing to so much as move his head or open his eyes, unless forced. His body was of no use to him, and there were layers of consciousness even Sauron couldn't reach. Or maybe there were layers of consciousness he didn't possess. Many had accused him of being heartless, too detached for an Elda, and maybe it was true, and it was a blessing after all. Wasn't lack of empathy a defining trait and a point of strength for the Valar?
When he grew bored of him, Sauron left him alone, free to travel the distorted pathways of his ever-wakeful mind. In silence, in darkness, dizzy from pain, spiralling into the umpteenth nightmare, he had long ago begun to weave a single thought into something far more substantial than a thought.
The world had been born of song, and there was a point where the Music ceased and the Void took over. Morgoth had been thrust into the Void, but he was expected to return. The Void still had a potential – for existence, for endurance.
The absolute silence that clawed at him and pressed down on him from all sides suggested to him the idea that there had to be a point beyond which everything ceased. A realm of pure nothingness, where not even the Void could exist, and the Music died out.
He had time all the time he could wish for. Time, gathering in the gaps between Sauron's visits, unforgiving, churning and churning and churning around that one thought.
And then he began to see the cracks. In the absence of all noise, as he tried to recall the patterns of songs he knew, they flashed before his eyes unbidden. Soon he became able to anticipate where he would find them in familiar melodies. From those melodies he followed them, thin lines which ran through everything, threatened the very fabric of the universe. He saw, clearly, the lines in the Music along which the world would break, and through those he found it: the jagged border where the last notes died out, the very boundary of nothingness.
He mouthed the new word again, aware of the power it carried.
It was his last recourse, but even if he failed he truly had nothing left to lose now.
Sauron came to him again, unsuspecting, his footsteps boomed inside Maglor's head.
Sauron surely had no notion of non-existence, of the abyss where all sound died, and Eru's own thoughts ceased.
Sauron came to him, confident as ever, suavely ruthless as ever, looming over, him half-shade half-beast.
But that time Maglor raised his head, opened his eyes of his own accord, and looked straight into Sauron's blown-out, bottomless pupils.
'No-' he mouthed slowly, letting his tongue flap in his own mouth in a sound he couldn't hear.
Sauron laughed, then lashed out and hit him.
Maglor's head hit the wall and ricocheted on top of his chest. Pain sizzled down his back and if he had been able to make noises he would have sobbed.
The orcs who stood guard near the door laughed too. Maglor had learnt to understand when they did even without sound and without seeing them, hidden behind their master's massive shape.
Sauron grabbed his hair and forced his head up.
No-thing-ness, Maglor mouthed, too quickly he feared.
Again Sauron hit him, in the front, paying no attention to his voiceless mutter. A cramp seized Maglor's empty stomach, made him choke.
Right then, abruptly, there was an echo, feeble but distinct, of 'No'.
Sauron frowned, believing it to be an illusion, but when he looked behind himself it was clear that the orcs had heard it too. The one syllable grew into that one word: nothingness. By the time Sauron understood what it was, the echo had already become a full-fledged melody, sung in a voice it wasn't hard for him to recognise. It was Maglor's voice that he had stolen and locked away. It was Maglor's voice, coming from everywhere, from inside and from outside, strengthened by a chorus of other voices singing the same word. The voices overlapped with one another, stacked upon one another, nothingness nothingness nothingness.
A further noise came from outside: a mighty clap of thunder. The sky over Mordor was rent open and rain fell where rain had never fallen before. Water – the giver of life, the bearer of the Music – flowed down over the grim walls of Barad-dur.
The orcs looked outside, agape, recoiled when a few raindrops which rebounded on the sill of the narrow window hit them. Then they turned and looked at their Master in disbelief.
Sauron didn't hear their confused questions. He had let go of Maglor, dropping him like an emptied sack at his feet, and brought his hands to his ears, attempting to shut out the combined peal of voices and water. But he realised he could not repel them. The chorus grew louder, deafening. Sauron took a couple steps away from Maglor, conveying all his might into hurting him, into making that song he had started stop, but he only managed to break one of his fingers. Maglor's face twisted in pain, but his lips opened into a hideous grimace of a smile, as if he had gotten exactly what he wanted. He sat upright, propping himself against the wall.
Bend, he spelled out.
Sauron had but a moment to frown before his left arm stretched out against his will.
It began twisting.
Sauron looked into Maglor's eyes. Maglor kept on smiling.
The arm twisted and twisted, bending the restraints of his physical form, turned a little more and a little more. Bones cracked, sinews stretched thin, skin frayed and finally the whole limb snapped, flying from his body in a shower of blood.
Even as it did, and Sauron stood with a bleeding jagged stump, Maglor repeated his command – bend – and his right arm stretched out in the other direction. It twisted at the wrist and then up the whole length. The hand was torn off first, the arm following soon after.
Bend, Maglor mouthed again, and it was Sauron's legs which contorted and bent in unnatural ways before being destroyed. He didn't fall, held aloft by the chanting, thick and heavy about him like a cage.
Through the pain of the breaking, Sauron despaired. It wasn't only his raiment which was falling apart. Maglor's song was denying his existence, pulling him towards that boundary Maglor had found and which Sauron now saw clearly too, outlined by the voice he had stolen.
He teetered at the brink.
Bend, Maglor said one last time, slower, much slower than the previous times.
An invisible vice folded around Sauron's neck.
He made one last attempt at speech, at resistance, but all he had in his mind was 'no-thing-ness', and his very last utterance was a tiny yelp that repeated that word.
His eyes bulged out, his tongue stuck out of his mouth.
His neck turned all the way, making a knot of his skin. His head snapped like a withered branch from a tree, and rolled on the ground.
He fell.
Maglor was half-drenched in blood when he forced his abused body to rise, fighting nausea and utter, hollowing exhaustion. His chest heaving, he set his feet on the icy flagstones of the ground. The sensation was excruciating yet he hadn't felt it in so long it was almost welcome. He closed his parched lips and extended his chained hands towards the orcs.
The orcs, who were cowering in a corner, timidly peered at him, took one terrified look at the smile on his blood-splattered face, at the scattered body parts of their once-master, at the gore dripping from the walls at the same cadence of the raindrops dripping on the windowsill.
The chanting still echoed, and in its droning aftershocks the footsteps of one of the orcs barely made any sound. He crossed the room, and unchained Maglor's hands. Maglor inclined his head slowly in thanks and even more slowly took a step then another, wobbling like a child who is still learning how to walk. Leaning against the wall for support, he stepped right into the pool of blood and took Sauron's head by the hair. He lifted it.
The hideously distorted features screamed at him impotently.
Maglor gathered some of the blood in the palm of his hand and wet his lips with it.
*
The rain over Mordor didn't cease for years. The fires of the Orodruin were extinguished, and life quickly spread over the plains of ash. Some of the orcs fled and disappeared, others perished in a land that became hostile to them. It didn't take too long for their existence to become but a faint memory, a vague shadow lingering only in Men's tales.
The new lord of the land was not forgotten.
The Hater, some called him, for none who trod beyond Mordor's mountains ever came back alive. The Lord of Light others dubbed him, after the strange light that sometimes flashed from the highest peak of his realm, a light more beautiful than the sun itself.
To the people who lived closest to Mordor he was the Nightmare King, for that same light shone in their nightmares, and it was said that he fed on nightmares to keep the light shining as bright as it did. The wisest among those people realised that it was not a simple light, that its roots reached deeper than any other light's. When it shone brightest, the very wise would climb the mountains fencing off the Nightmare King's land, but didn't cross them. They waited at the top, straining their ears for the echo of a song, carried far by the wind, a fragment of bliss.
---
To my knowledge Quenya doesn't have a word for “nothingness”. There's nothing (munta), but it doesn't really convey the meaning of non-existence. A negation of ëa wouldn't do here either, since the Ainur existed before ëa. Maglor could have used something like álanávë (i.e. not being).
Technically, the Ainur don't bleed (I think), but since it's an aesthetic detail rather than anything essential to the progress of the story, I chose to go with it.
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Thank you for your comment!
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I can see that nothingness might be a very powerful concept, in Arda, and that Maglor, because he knows about music, might also be pushed by circumstances to find the borders of Song.
I'm intrigued by the light at the end. Is there any (notional) connection with Ungoliant's darkness here?
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The light is Silmaril light, in my mind (either from Maglor's Silmaril, or from 'the star of Eärendil'), though other interpretations are possible (I kept that vague on purpose, since I haven't really thought about what Maglor might have gotten up to).
Thank you for your comment!
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