Ash Seeketh Embers by Ari_Phi

Ash Seeketh Embers

Read Ash Seeketh Embers

Melkor had once stood astride the continents of Arda. In the days of his greatest power he had enveloped the lands under his dominion like an eclipse. He had looked down upon the Iron Mountains from the Orocarni to the Helcaraxë and perceived them not as a line, oscillating up and down across the horizon, but spread all flat upon the land. From above, the mountains were not defined by their height, nor the rhythm of their peaks and valleys. There was no progression from West to East. Melkor saw them all at once: from snowbound peaks to iron-black roots where they had been disgorged by the land, they were visible all at once, two-dimensional and uniform. 

Time in the Void felt like that. Melkor had spent lifetimes in this place; was spending; would spend. He had been banished here, to the place beyond all that Was, but now that he was here his sentence seemed meaningless. He was exiled to the Void - he was imprisoned in Mandos’ halls - he was drowned in the light of the Lamps, the Trees, the Silmarils - he was wandering in the Void for the very first time. The Song of the Ainur echoed within the Outer Dark, not as a melody but as one single chord, the Song as a whole heard all at once together. 

Melkor strained to make out his own notes within the chord, discordant and unique. He had defined the Song with his dissonance, had he not? He had shaped the fate of Eä with a single note. Those voices that had contributed to the harmony were subsumed into the whole and became as nothing, but Melkor had bent the obedient harmonies of all the Ainur around his discordance like light around a star. 

It was not enough. It was not enough to take Eru’s song and claim it. Melkor wished to sing his own Theme; not corruption, but creation. In the endless Void he wandered, and he sought the Flame Imperishable

sought

 

seeks

 

seeking

that treasure of Eru’s beyond all treasures, the gift of life from nothing. 

It troubled him to think that he might never find the Flame, for surely if he would find it then he had already found it, and yet it was not with him. But perhaps there could be things already with Melkor that he simply had not noticed, much like bringing out different notes from within the chord of the Song simply by focusing on them. So when he found it, it must have been like that. A change of focus, seeing that which had always been before his eyes. 

And he did find it. He did find the Secret Flame. 

He had expected a majestic inferno, but the Flame was a delicate thing. It flickered orange and lovely in the Void like a heartbeat. Melkor reached for it with unclothed hands. Would Eru not snatch it from him, as everything else had been snatched? Yet he touched it. He cupped it tenderly  in his palms. He was not stopped. The only light in all the blank expanse of the Ancient Darkness guttered and trembled in Melkor’s hands. 

The Flame seemed to pool and flow like liquid, dripping from his palms. Melkor had always imagined himself wielding the Flame like a tool, like a weapon. His magnum opus should have been realized in a tempest of furious creation. But now that he possessed the Flame… it entranced him. He crouched over it, possessive, jealous. He tried to shield it with his body, as if to conceal the glow within himself. It burned feebly in his hands and he had only one thought: beautiful, beautiful. Blue and orange and deep, low-frequency red danced before his eyes. It was weak and wretched, but it settled in Melkor’s hands and it burned for him without diminishing further. Its frail radiance and gentle warmth were sustained for him alone, and at last, it was enough. 

Melkor was kicking down the Door of Night. He was tearing the Sun from Arien’s hands and the Moon from Tilion’s, extinguishing the last traces of the Trees from Arda. In the same instant he found himself at the Beginning and at the End. He heard the first note of the First Music; he heard Eonwë’s last, terrible battle-cry; he felt cold sting his cheeks for the very first time as he fled Valinor for what became Dor Daidelos; he felt the Black Sword pierce its fatal path through his heart. And he was at all places in between. 

And he was also here, kneeling in the Void with his prize, his treasure. He was satisfied with so little warmth and so little light, now that there was nothing left but himself and the Flame. The infinite spacetime of the Outer Dark enclosed him there, and the Second Music never reached his ears. 

 

---

 

For the first time since his creation, Mairon experienced what it was like to burn. His divided spirit was consumed by the fire along with the yielding metal it was bound to. He felt every moment of the burning. It was a terrible, bone-deep agony; he felt it as he was ripped apart, immolated and torn from himself bit by bit. Mairon forgot all memory of dignity. The humiliation of his defeat in the War did not touch him; the fear of consequences meant nothing to him. He screamed, screamed, and begged to be saved, writhing in his anguish and pleading to all the Powers of the World for it to end. 

Eventually, it did. 

Mairon was nothing. He was beneath nothing. No longer whole, no longer a Maia; barely even an echo of one. There was not enough of him left for form and barely enough for substance. He could only shiver where he had fallen, debased. 

He could not have said how long he laid there. He had no wish to move. He merely existed, now. The remains of his broken feä could not be healed, yet could not cease their being altogether. So he remained where he was, as he was, and he made no more efforts. 

Then hands slipped beneath him and lifted. He was cradled, then covered. Coveted and protected. Am I safe? He could not overcome his weaknesses; he could not fight any longer. Exhausted, he could only permit. His body had already been broken for three thousand years before his defeat. Punishments and rejections had heaped upon him until contentment was beyond his power to attain, until any victory left to grasp would have been Pyrrhic, and satisfaction was just a mockery of a wish. He remembered this in half-glimpsed flashes. 

He did not find himself in Aulë’s Forge, or in his black new-burnished armor in Utumno, nor wearing the starlight-eyed and golden-haired adornment called Annatar in Eregion. The parts of him that had been in those moments were now burned away to ash, and the ash burned to nothing. Mairon existed in a single point, precisely where he was. 

There was a voice, too, more felt than heard. Weary, cold, and restlessly furtive, it spoke in no more than a grinding and intimate whisper. 

    “Ah, my little Flame… at last, I have you. Ah, little Spark…” 

Am I no longer alone?

The hands and the voice and their concealing embrace were like a hearth for Mairon to burn in. He settled there, casting what little warmth he could. 

Eru Ilúvatar swept like a wave across the world, and Eä as it had been, along with all that which had marred it, was washed away.