Three Black Islands by Idrils Scribe  

'In Eregion long ago many Elven-rings were made, magic rings as you call them, and they were... of various kinds: some more potent and some less. The lesser rings were only essays in the craft before it was full-grown, and to the Elven-smiths they were but trifles — yet still to my mind dangerous for mortals.'

The Fellowship of the Ring, LoTR Book 1, Ch 2, The Shadow of the Past

Ost-in-Edhil, Eregion. Midwinter of the year 1499 of the Second Age

“Too weak!” Prince Telperinquar of Eregion snaps a brown-edged petal off the tiger lily and crumples it between his fingers. The juices smell of decay.

The costly Valinórean bloom was forced from imported bulbs in the Mírdain’s heated hothouses. A vision of tropical beauty when he laid it under its crystal dome ten years ago. Now the vibrant orange and blue have faded into dullness.

Telperinquar sighs. Only ten of Middle-earth’s fleeting sun-years. Not at all like the eternal, deathless flowering of Valinor. Not at all.

Failure, once again.

He picks up one of the pair of rings set beside it on a silk cushion, and holds it up before the window. Middle-earth’s pale winter sun catches the ruby inset, washing the velvet and gold leaf panelling of Telperinquar’s study in bars of red. A thousand eight-pointed stars set aflame.

“Weak indeed.” Annatar slides off His chair and extends a long-fingered hand to lift the second ring. “These rings do preserve living matter, but a mere decade is nothing.”

Aulë’s Maia has clad Himself in splendour to match the Gwaith-i-Mírdain’s tastes. The perfect, symmetrical face eclipses even the fairest Elf. Hair of the exact golden shade to match the eyes. A body of such strong, masculine beauty it might have been precision-aimed at Telperinquar’s basest desires.

“These rings were but trials,” he says quickly, eager to distract himself. “We must improve the design yet again.”

Glad to face away from Annatar he turns to his desk, rolls open a scroll filled with equations, and hangs it from the ivory display stand, scouring the calculations once more in search of some flaw.

“But I do not see how!” he exclaims, hating how he sounds like a petulant apprentice. “The Song of Making was pitch perfect for the rings’ resonance, and the ruthenium alloy oxidized upon tempering as we calculated. Why do these rings not arrest entropy?”

“The truly great Maker must look beyond the mundane.”

Annatar rounds the desk, placing Himself back into Telperinquar’s line of sight. A long-fingered hand emerges from a draped silk sleeve to tap the perfect, rose-tinted lips. The muscles of His forearm ripple beneath golden skin.

“What do you mean?” Telperinquar stutters, dropping his eyes back to the scroll.

“There is one forge in Middle-earth where we might glean the secrets of that art.”

Telperinquar’s head whips up. What lesser smith has surpassed Fëanáro’s grandson?

“A great forge, though it lies in ruin.”

Only then does Telperinquar understand. Shameful relief at finding himself the greatest still floods him before the full horror of Annatar’s idea poisons it.

“Are you mad?” he gasps.

“Not mad, my prince” Annatar smiles that golden smile. “Merely brave. Only the daring may create true greatness.”

“What would you hope to find in that cursed place?”

“The secret of halting entropy is known to a select few.” Annatar drops his voice to a conspiratorial tone, so Telperinquar must lean in to hear. “None but a Vala might wield such power.”

Under His luxurious perfume of frankincense from Far Harad, Annatar smells of the forge - hot metal and a hint of sulphur. The scent rouses Telperinquar’s hot blood. He must keep that shameful lust off the surface of his mind, lest Annatar read it. With a desperate act of will he presses it down and slows his heart’s sudden frantic hammering.

Annatar gives no sign of having heard. “I once studied those crafts in Aulë’s Halls, but the Great Smith’s counsel now lies beyond My reach.” He pauses a moment while his golden gaze pierces Telperinquar like a hot blade. “Another Vala has done it here, in Middle-earth.”

He need not say who.

Morgoth, the Black Foe.

Morgoth once performed morbid experimentations that tore the very fabric of Eä, bending and breaking the Eru-given laws of physics.

Telperinquar stands stricken. He should now utter an indignant refusal. And yet, he does not wish to see the esteem in that golden gaze turn to disappointment.

“The peaks of Thangorodrim must still stand amidst the frozen wastes,” Annatar continues. “We must find them, and search the ruins of Angband beneath. We can glean priceless knowledge from the remains of Melkor’s laboratory. Perhaps even his log books.”

Morgoth’s own laboratory logs. Annnatar’s idea is horror and madness both, and Telperinquar must now tell him so. 

“The high king forbids all expeditions to Thangorodrim,” he stutters instead.

“Such laws protect the weak and ignorant from their own folly.” Annatar steps forward and lays a hand on Telperinquar’s arm, leaning in as if disclosing some great intimacy. “We are neither, you and I. As men of science, what use have we for legalism?”

Telperinquar’s skin burns with that touch.

Annatar smiles, baring snow-white teeth. “Surely young Artanáro would not dare hinder you, Fëanáro’s heir?”

He uses High King Gil-galad’s father-name as if they are intimate friends. Telperinquar knows they are no longer. Annatar arrived in Eregion on the heels of a stern royal warning, delivered by Elrond.

It makes Annatar’s tale of a falling-out, a case of spite on Artanáro’s part, sound all the more believable. Artanáro sent his royal herald to smear a former friend over a mere personal quarrel, and Telperinquar thinks less of him for it. Those who wish to claim kingship should not indulge in petty grudges.

“He will not hinder me,” Telperinquar agrees. The authority of Nolofinwë’s heir over the Fëanorian Prince of Eregion is shaky, at best.

Still, open defiance of a royal edict might prove a step too far.

“We might feign a different purpose as our cover,” Annatar says. “Another survey perhaps? The Mírdain are forever in need of rare earth elements, and Forochel is rich in neodymium.”

“None of my Mírdain will agree to this.”

“We do not need them!” Annatar says quickly. “And they should not share in knowledge so perilous. We alone need to know. “

Telperinquar shakes his head. “Just the two of us can hardly pretend to be a mining expedition.”

“True. Then let us stay as close to the truth as possible,” Annatar suggests at once. The mark of a skilled liar, but Telperinquar dismisses the thought. “We will pass near the magnetic North Pole. Tell Artanáro that we need to conduct experiments in ringcraft there. He knows so little of the art that he will believe it at once.”

Telperinquar hesitates, but then he must concede he likes this little white lie. A fool’s errand after magnetism would be a fine red herring to throw at the High King. Telperinquar was not the one to start this distrust between Eregion and Lindon: ever since Annatar’s arrival, the king has been planting his spies among the Mírdain.

“Agreed,” Telperinquar says eagerly. “We shall go next summer.”

“I thank you, my prince, for your wise and generous commitment to the advancement of science.” Annatar’s smile as he stands there before the sunlit window is a vision of masculine beauty, pure gold backlit in yet more gold.

Telperinquar’s mouth is suddenly dry, his body aflame. He saves his decency with a quick turn to the sideboard, where he busies himself with a crystal decanter of miruvorë and two glasses while he wrestles for control.

He has regained a semblance of mastery when he turns around to offer Annatar a glass of golden liquid.

“To the success of our expedition!” Telperinquar raises his glass.

Annatar smiles that golden smile, and clinks his own against it with a slow and deliberate motion. “To our partnership.”

Telperinquar almost chokes on his drink, and makes a desperate grab for the bell cord.  He is rescued by the swift appearance of a liveried footman.

“Summon the council,” Telperinquar orders, only a little hoarsely. “I have an announcement to make.”

“Aye, my prince."

The footman bows and makes to withdraw, but Annatar stays him with a wave at the wilted lily. “And throw out that flower.”

----

“Have you considered that Ereinion and Elrond might be right?” Netyarë bends in a rustle of brocade skirts to smell a flowering branch of snow-white lairëlossë. “What if Annatar is not Aulë’s emissary after all?”

As Telperinquar’s chief counsellor, she gets to be frank with him. She straightens herself, and to give him time to think she looks up to the great crystal dome of the hothouse sparkling overhead. The snow melts off it so the winter sun can reach the plants below unhindered.

Standing here amidst the flowers, she might believe herself in one of Tírion’s pleasure gardens. Walkways lined with Yavannamirë in perfect golden bloom radiate from the greenhouse’s center like spokes from a wheel. Between lie beds of fragrant lissuin, artful trellisses laden with flowering bougainvillea and hibiscus. Priceless three-coloured carp lazily wheel through the lotus pond. 

She knows this place for the illusion it is - beneath their feet lies the great hypocaust, fed by Dwarf-mined coal from Khazad-dûm. But a single day of starving the furnace and frost will kill these painstakingly reared Valinórean plants.

And all things in Middle-earth must one day perish. She imagines the dome in ruin, its roof beams bare as the ribs of a dead dragon with a scatter of shattered crystal beneath. The carp frozen solid in their pond. Windblown snow whips the skeletal limbs of the dead lairëlossë.

“Where else would he be from?” Telperinquar turns into a lane lined with Nessamelda in glazed planters, and Netyarë falls into step beside him.

She eyes him. “You know.”

Fëanáro’s grandson has his grandfather’s looks. That same handsome face, that tall and broad-shouldered figure, and his sea-grey eyes carry that same hungry intensity that marked Féanáro and Curufinwë both.

The most eligible bachelor in Middle-earth, save perhaps the High King himself. Women flock to Telperinquar, but even in these days of peace and prosperity the Prince of Eregion remains unwed. Married to his craft, some say. Other, less charitable tongues wag in different directions. Ones that will beget no heirs.

Netyarë has caught Telperinquar’s eyes lingering on Annatar’s gold-skinned fána longer than might be called polite, or friendly. She can only hope the infatuation does not cloud his judgement.

Telperinquar cuts her off as if he read the thought. “Annatar’s art is so great, it cannot spring from any but Aulë.”

“Then how come I never met him at the forges of Aulë in Aman?” Netyarë demands, “or under the banner of Aulë’s folk, when the Host of the Valar marched against Morgoth?”

“I asked him that very question,” Celebrimbor says quickly. “Annatar has devoted himself to Middle-earth, ordering its chaos. He has wandered long and far in that great work.”

“And you believe him?”

Telperinquar shakes his head, suddenly frantic. “Do you not understand the nature of what he offers? To bend the very laws of physics! Who but Aulë might grant such power?”

They have reached the heart of the garden. There, at the wheel’s axis from which all paths radiate, stands Telperinquar’s finest work.

Fëanáro took a cutting from the White Tree before he left darkened Tírion. He used the sword he had raised for his terrible Oath but moments before. The Great Square beneath Mindon Eldalieva was filled with torches, the air gravid with smoke and anger as Fëanáro took his blade to Galathilion, and carried the hacked branch away beside his banner.

All care was taken with water and nutrients to coax the cutting to grow roots, but under Yavanna’s wrath it withered and died in mere hours. High King Féanáro’s kingdom in Middle-earth would have no White Tree.

The eye alone cannot distinguish Telperinquar’s work from the real thing. Standing in a planter made of mithril etched with the Star, the White Tree of Eregion looks alive down to the last pearl-white petal. Only touch reveals the smooth hardness of metal and gems.

Telperinquar strokes a jade leaf. “Annatar knows the secret of halting entropy, and by that we may vanquish the decay of Middle-earth. We will keep all things fresh and undying even in these mortal lands.” He pauses. “As it should be.”

Netyarë knows his mind. Many things might become as they should be. A sovereign Fëanorian princedom in Eregion, its power and wealth rivalling Tírion itself. Let Nolofinwë’s grandson sit on his empty title! The true High king of the Noldor in Middle-earth shall be from Fëanáro’s House.

Telperinquar is so eager. Too eager.

“This expedition is perilous,” Netyarë attempts another warning. “Even if Annatar proves a true Aulendil, he leads you to a dreadful place. You know what force was unleashed there.”

She cannot bring herself to utter the name. Angband, the iron jail. Specter of horror for all the Eldar.

“It has been over a thousand years,” Telperinquar says very calmly.

“Not long enough, Tyelpë. The danger remains.”

He scoffs. “I am no sickly Mortal to whither from it. And think of what we stand to gain!”

Rings of Power. Jewels made to vanquish entropy, so the Elves might perfectly preserve all things. Not the vitality of Mortal races, where new life springs forth from the withering of the old, but an eternal standstill created by artifice. The circle of Middle-earth’s seasons frozen at the height of a deathless summer.

Embalmed. She shudders.

“How we still long for Valinor! That is our curse,” she mutters.

“Oh, Netyarë!” Telperinquar lies a hand on her shoulder in comfort. Where he chose to stay in Middle-earth, Netyarë had no choice in the matter. A kinslayer and an exile she remains.

“Why return to Tírion in sackcloth and ashes?” Telperinquar comforts, “to spend eternity as Arafinwë’s subjects? Are things not better here, in our own free city?”

“Is it right, what we are attempting?” she answers question with question, her doubt clear in her mind.

“What is wrong with preservation? Surely death and decay are not right?”

Spoken like a true Fëanorian, like his father and his grandfather before him. Sometimes wrong, never in doubt.

“Perhaps for Middle-earth, they are?”  she protests, searching for words to express the unease growing in her heart.

Even as she speaks, she can tell she chose wrong. Open opposition only ever served to fix the Fëanorians firmer upon their chosen course. 

“Middle-earth shall become what we make it.” Telperinquar smiles. “And we shall surpass even the bliss of Valinor, for here we are our own masters.”

It was in Eregion that the counsels of Sauron were most gladly received, for in that land the Noldor desired ever to increase the skill and subtlety of their works.... Therefore they hearkened to Sauron, and they learned of him many things, for his knowledge was great. In those days the smiths of Ost-in-Edhil surpassed all that they had contrived before; and they took thought, and they made Rings of Power. But Sauron guided their labours, and he was aware of all that they did; for his desire was to set a bond upon the Elves and to bring them under his vigilance.

The Silmarillion, Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age

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Cape Forochel. Summer of the year 1500 of the Second Age.

“Do the peaks still stand?” Telperinquar leans forward so eagerly that his head almost hits the whale rib serving for roofbeam. “Can you tell us the way?”

This Lossoth hunting camp sits on the very tip of Cape Forochel, a clump of sealskin tents teetering on the edge of the sea ice. The last human habitation before the vast desolation of the northern wastes, and reportedly the home of the only living being who has seen the peaks of Thangorodrim since the War of Wrath.

The wind bites to the bone even in high summer.

The coming of their small expedition caused an upheaval among the encamped clan. The woman they seek is a respected elder, a priestess of some kind, and they seemed very protective of her. 

The elder’s abode is the finest and largest among the tents, its sealskin walls painted in swirling motifs of red and dark ochre. Only after much pleading were they admitted, accompanied by a stern-looking woman who did not speak, but quietly crouched in a corner.

From her seat atop a snow-white polar bear fur, the Lossoth elder eyes the pair of Elves with wariness. Deep lines cut her wind-tanned face. The branching web of ridges and grooves folds her skin like scorched leather. She sits very still, her hands hidden in the long sleeves of her sealskin parka.

Númenóreans do not age so wretchedly, but these Lesser Men make a harrowing spectacle. Telperinquar hovers between compassion and unease. He pities Mortals when he meets them, which is but rarely. Some among the Mírdain take Mortal apprentices, out of pity or for coin, but none ever make it to second rank before their inevitable grave. Telperinquar never taught any himself - he has no heart for such doomed undertakings.

“Do not ask this of me, Deathless One!” The elder has a clear voice, though her Westron is warped by the Lossoth’s accent. “I have seen many winters, and many lives lost on the ice. My heart misgives me. Turn back south, to your stone houses and your fields, or you shall meet a bad end.”

Many winters. Telperinquar cannot meet her eyes. He does not have the heart to tell this wretched creature that he is older than the very existence of winter.

“Cold does not affect us, Mistress,” he coaxes instead.

“I speak not of cold.” Her pupils are milk-white with cataracts, but they spark like embers in the red light of the seal-oil lamp. Somehow, she knows he has been staring at her.

She is proud, and she scorns his pity.

“Near blind I may be, but I serve the Mother of the Deep, She who sends the seal and the whale to the hunter. Her wisdom preserves us, and Her counsel to all Men is clear. Do not seek that place. Turn back, for your own sake!”

Now Telperinquar notices the patterns on the tent’s walls, dark wave-forms shot through with strands of red seaweed, almost hair-like in its feathered length. The motif returns in the intricate beading of the elder’s parka. Her many necklaces are a wealth of varicoloured shells.

Uinen.

Uinen has always been fond of coast-dwellers. These Lossoth are wise to venerate Her, but surely She does not speak through so strange a vessel as this Mortal crone?

The old woman certainly is no Tuor. Still, Telperinquar hesitates.

“Name your price,” Annatar cuts in. “We shall make you rich.”

That word seems to mean little. “I am old. This summer shall be my last. Come winter, my bones shall lie beneath the ice.”

“Would you not leave your children gold?”

“Bah, gold!” The elder makes a gesture of contempt. “Such useless metal, too soft for making knives!”

Telperinquar lifts his Mírdain-made dagger from the sheath. He has foreseen this, and brought a few spares.

”This steel cuts even walrus ivory,” he praises, holding the long knife out to her. “The edge will never dull, not even for your great-grandchildren.”

She does not reach for it, but is silent for a moment.

“I brought harpoonheads, too,” Telperinquar raises his offer. “Enough for each hunter in this camp.”

The cloudy eyes narrow, and at last, she nods.

Telperinquar smiles. He was always good at bargaining. Everyone has a lever, and he has found the one that will move this old woman.

Life in this icy land is harsh. A flock of children runs between the tents while their mothers scrape seal hides, babies at their breast. A large clan, and the hunters must somehow feed them all. Before she passes from this world, the old woman will give her descendants all the help they might get.

She gestures at the silent woman crouching beside her. The attendant takes the knife from Telperinquar, and accepts the offered package of leather-wrapped harpoonheads.

She spreads the wrapping open and inspects the barbed, vicious things. Telperinquar always honours his bargains: the finest steel the Mírdain can forge glitters cold and blue. These lethal points will bite deep into a thrashing seal and hold it fast. At the elder’s nod of approval, the attendant folds the wrapping and hides the knife and package away in the wide sleeve of her parka.

The elder leans back against the folded bearskin that serves as her backrest, and her voice takes on the sing-song tone of a storyteller.

“In the summer when I was a lass of twenty, a great heat came down. The sea-ice melted away. We could find no seal to hunt.”

This old woman is no Elf-minstrel, but she has a strong mind, and Celebrimbor can see the indemmar within. The images feel alien, tainted with mortality, like drinking oil instead of water. Still he takes them to himself.

He sees hollow-cheeked children wail with hunger as the last food goes to the hunters. Sled-dogs slaughtered for meat. And over it all like a menacing cloud, the approaching polar winter.

“Our hunting party followed the narwhal in our kayaks. Hunger drove us further north than ever, beyond the knowledge of our living Elders, further than our oldest songlines recall.”

He can see her as she was then, young and strong at the paddle and harpoon, the black cable of her braid untouched by grey. As he watches, he commits the landmarks of her journey to memory.

“North and north until we saw them on the horizon.”

The image in her mind is small and shimmers in the vast blue distance over ice and sea, but it makes Telperinquar gasp.

He has heard the three mountains of Thangorodrim described in a thousand songs, but never saw them with his waking eyes. They still exist, and this Mortal woman has shown him how to reach them.

“Did you approach!?”  

“Ai!” she hisses, her grooved face a mask of pain. “Do not make me speak of it! That shore is cursed. Evil spirits walk even in the light of summer. Flesh melts and Men are driven mad.”

“Surely you can tell some-”

“See then, if you will not listen!” The elder snarls, and pulls back the long sleeve of her parka.

In the reddish oil-light Telperinquar first believes she is wearing some glove of thick, knotted material in bright pink and purple. Only then does he realise he is looking at her skin. The fingers are stumps, covered in webbed scars thick as cords.

The Curse.

His gorge rises at the sight. The Mortal strangeness of this woman and her people seem to close in and choke him like vapour. Swallowing sour bile he gropes for some familiar thing, and rests his eyes on Annatar’s Elvish face.

At once Annatar’s mind pours into Telperinquar’s smooth as warm honey. Peace, Telperinquar.

Telperinquar. Gone is the politely distant ‘my prince’ of their days in Eregion. The realisation snaps Telperinquar out of his stun. Even if they never find the mountains, at least one good thing has come from this expedition.

A soft smile plays on Annatar’s lips. They are not called the Sickly for naught, He thinks into Telperinquar’s mind.

The elder should lack the senses to perceive their osanwë, but somehow she knows. Her sightless eyes hold his gaze unflinching.

She lowers her sleeve, and the clouded eyes find him once more. Her voice is like the Vala Mandos proclaiming doom.

“Hear me, Deathless One. The three black islands are no place for the living.”

----

Sea-ice beyond Cape Forochel. Seven days later.

Telperinquar never thought he would long for the Lossoth encampment. Strange as those people were in their blatant mortality, this world of ice is yet more alien.

The darkest hour of the polar day has come. The midnight sun low at the horizon drenches the ice in a scarlet twilight through which their dog-sledges seem to float like vessels adrift in a frozen sea of blood. 

Incarnates have no senses that can perceive the Curse, but must read the traces of its effect. Ainur possess other ways of seeing. Annatar must perceive the radiation in the air, the particles slowly corrupting all living flesh down to its very atoms.

The signs are everywhere. They came on slow and small, easy to overlook. Occasional deformed seals amidst the shoals resting on the ice. A missing flipper here, a twisted tail there.

Now what few seals remain are all misshapen. Telperinquar watches a skeletal pup with a deformed maw. The wretch roots for its mother’s teat, but it cannot suck. Milk sprays through its cloven lips to run down the crusted fur at its chest. The pup bellows with hunger as it slowly starves to death.

Overhead flaps something that looks like no seabird Telperinquar ever saw.

The dogs whine and grow uneasy. These teams of sled-dogs are the finest Mírdain steel could buy. Apparently there is an art to mushing, but Annatar saw no need to learn from the Lossoth who sold them the dogs. As soon as the man was out of earshot Annatar spoke a single word in Valarin, strange and grating to Elven ears, and both teams have run obediently ever since.

Now Annatar drives them forward once again, with a Valarin hiss that runs like an electric shock up Telperinquar’s spine. They do not speak as they glide side by side, ever further north in the blood-red light.

But a few miles further, their sledges slow once again. This time Annatar’s hiss fails to drive the faltering dogs forward. The once steady rhythm of their leaps breaks and scatters. In the middle of Telperinquar’s pack one falls limply to the ground and is dragged along by its harness.

“Hoooo!” Telperinquar leaps off his sledge and runs to the front to inspect his team, while beside him Annatar’s sled stutters to a halt.

Telperinquar’s lead dog is a clever feather-tailed bitch with bright blue eyes. As he approaches her she whines and vomits at his feet, spreading a stench of sour seal fat. Then Telperinquar notices the trails of fluid running down the hind legs, looking blackish in the strange light. Around her the other dogs stagger, lie down, panting and whining. Dark pools seep from their bodies and begin to freeze into matted clumps against the snow. The scent is unmistakable.

Blood. 

“What is wrong with them?”

“Acute radiation sickness.” Annatar’s tone is even as he descends from his sledge, eyes on his dying dogs. “The intestines always fail first.”

Telperinquar reels. The old woman was right!

He doubted her, allowed himself the comforting belief that perhaps her memory had failed in her dotage, that slow descent into humiliating senility that strikes some Mortals as the house of their mind crumbles. Now he knows her tale about these lands was true.

Immortal flesh can bear the Curse. Even now Telperinquar’s own body works to heal the damage inflicted by every breath of tainted air. Annatar’s fána is not flesh at all, but merely the manifestation of His will.

They both stand apart from these wretched, dying creatures, moving unharmed through this cursed land where the very air and water are poison.

“We brought a medicine kit,” Telperinquar yanks open the drawstring of his pack. “We might brew-”

“They are beyond saving,” Annatar cuts him off. In the red light of the polar midnight, his golden eyes and hair look washed in blood.

“You knew.” The cold knowledge fills Telperinquar’s chest with ice. “You knew they would die, and you brought them all the same.”

“We needed their speed.” Annatar bends to unbuckle his panting lead dog from its harness. “From here onward, we shall pull the sledges ourselves. It is not much further.”

The beast lies limp beneath his hands. He moves on to the next dog without looking at Telperinquar.

When Telperinquar does not step in to help, Annatar turns with a questioning gaze. “They are but dogs, and short-lived ones at that. What does it matter if they die now or in a handful of years? They have served a noble purpose.”

“Did you not come to Middle-earth to care for its creatures?”

Annatar looks him in the eye, wholly focussed on him, and Tyelpë is uneasy under the weight of that golden-eyed gaze. Away from the eyes of the Lossoth, Annatar has abandoned all pretense of Elvishness. The heavy furs he wore at the encampment have dissolved into thin air, and now his fána wears the gilt-edged robes of purple silk he would wear in Ost-in-Edhil. The polar wind whips the fine cloth around his chiseled body. 

“My aim is to bring progress and order to all Middle-earth, not each individual beast and bird,” Annatar says, in a tone in which a wise teacher might explain harsh truth to a beloved but naive student. “The advancement of science requires sacrifices, Tyelpë.”

Telperinquar shudders at the sound of that intimate name in Annatar’s mouth. Does he want Annatar to shut up, or keep calling him that forever?

Annatar lays a hand against Telperinquar’s cheek. He wears no gloves even in this flesh-eating cold, and yet his palm is hot, a sharp contrast with the icy gale. 

Telperinquar’s shameful lust roars back to life like a forest fire. He must wield all his long mastery of body and mind to press down the desire that threatens to overwhelm him even here, even now.

To distract himself he lowers his eyes to the writhing dog at his feet. He must agree with Annatar now, and be thought wise, or rebuke the Maïa, turn back south, and show himself a petulant child who cannot bear the requirements for his own plans.

And oh, how sweet is the esteem in that golden gaze, that elegant hand against his skin!

He bends down, and unbuckles his lead dog’s harness. The beast lies on her side panting, her muzzle a half-frozen mess of bloody foam, and does not even raise her head as he slips off her collar.

The sun has climbed higher when they move on, pulling their sledges across the polar desert side by side. Clouds have rolled in, merging ice and sky into a single sphere of sinister opalescence without a visible horizon. 

Behind them the dead dogs are a grey pile in the white nothingness, slowly receding in the distance amidst ghostly swirls of ice-dust. The cadavers could not be buried, not with the ice underfoot frozen hard as adamant.

Childishly, Telperinquar wishes he need not turn his back on the heaped corpses. The skin between his shoulder blades prickles as if the carcasses might leap up to give chase and maul him, their dead flesh possessed by malevolent spirits whose voices a more superstitious man might hear in the piping howls of the polar wind.

Annatar is silent beside him, but when Telperinquar looks aside he smiles.

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But above this gate, and behind it even to the mountains, he piled the thunderous towers of Thangorodrim; and these were made of the ash and slag of his subterranean furnaces, and the vast refuse of his tunnellings. They were black and desolate and exceedingly lofty; and smoke issued from their tops, dark and foul upon the northern sky.

The Lost Road, Ch 9, Of Beleriand And Its Realms

The sun rises and lowers itself once more, staining the landscape red and bleaching it to bone-white.

On the second day the three peaks emerge from the distant horizon. First they lurk on the very edge of Telperinquar’s sight, shimmering like a mirage in the icy polar air. Soon they grow solid, black as gaping holes in the white desolation as if they absorb the strange light of the midnight sun.

Thangorodrim. 

Small as ants, their shrunken company crawls across the windswept vastness of the ice towards those dreadful pinnacles, where Húrin was bound and Maitimo hung in torment.

These mountainous corpses are the skeletal remains of the great fortress and prison that was Angband. The peaks are mighty still, even after the apocalypse that was the War of Wrath. Flows of vitrified slag run down the slopes. This close Telperinquar can see the faint glitter where the Curse of the Valar blistered the very stone into glass.

The sight brings such horror that each step is an ordeal. Forcing one foot in front of the other becomes a triumph of will over the body’s base flight instinct. Each breath feels harsh, as if his very lungs resist the entry of such foul air. The weight of the sledge against his harness grows unbearable.

Telperinquar halts, a moment’s relief from that terrible march, and leans his elbows on his knees to catch his breath and master himself. Snow and slag crunch beneath his soles. With the tip of his boot he shifts the windblown layer of powder snow. The ground beneath is black as the Void, smooth as a sheet of water. The cliffs and crevasses of old were levelled when the alien fires that raged here melted the very bedrock into volcanic glass.

The danger lurking in this place is all the more dreadful for the lack of any warning that Elvish senses might perceive. Nothing stirs here. No sight, smell or sound betrays the Curse’s perils. Only the wind pipes forlornly across the silent vastness.

Telperinquar is strangely relieved that the dogs died when they did - to force any beast into this approach would have been an act of torture. The radiation is a faint prickle all over his body as Elvish healing knits his tissues back together under the ceaseless bombardment of charged particles. Mortal skin would peel off like a ragged garment. Annatar’s shape has grown faintly luminous in the polar twilight, a halo of deflected radiation edging his fána in an eerie glow.

Only now does Telperinquar grasp the wisdom in the high king’s ban upon this place. Nothing from here should be carried back to poison Mortal lands.

At the feet of the mutilated giant that is the central peak loom the tumbled remains of the Great Gate of Angband. Telperinquar shudders as they approach. This pockmarked ground is where Nolofinwë was crushed under Morgoth’s heel.

When at last they stand before what was once the gate, Telperinquar ‘s heart sinks. The battering rams of the besieging Valar have crushed and broken the gargantuan door panels and their grotesquely sculpted jambs and lintel. After the sack, it seems the departing Host collapsed the gateway into a shapeless mound of rubble.

That devastation alone would have sufficed to close the way, but the snows have heaped here undisturbed for an age of the world, and the ruined gate now lies entombed in a sarcophagus of ice.

Telperinquar  inspects the ice with a prospector’s eye, calculating height and depth and density, and swears when despair sinks in its fangs.

Ever since the dogs he felt tainted, infected by the ruthlessness this expedition requires. Now all of it proves in vain. He bites back a particularly foul curse.

They did bring ice-axes and a measure of black powder, but the gate is buried so deeply that the two of them might languish here long indeed. They will slowly hack away at this vast mound of blue ice and rock until their victuals run out or the long dark of polar winter overtakes them.

A team of Khazad-dûm’s finest miners could manage the task, if Dwarves could somehow survive merely breathing this air.

“Dwarves are hardy. They resist the Curse far longer than Mortals,”  Annatar says, plucking the image from Telperinquar’s mind with that eerie Maïarin power. “Still, not long enough to get much digging done at these radiation levels.”

How would He know such a thing? The thought inserts itself almost against Telperinquar’s will.

“Aulë was My teacher once, and it was Aulë who molded the very earth into Dwarven flesh. I know its limitations well.” Annatar smiles His golden smile, and adds in a tone like a whispered confidence, “You and I, we are made of better stuff.”

Wonder overtakes Telperinquar’s dismay. Does that smile mean that Annatar sees hope still?

Indeed Annatar seems wholly unaffected by Telperinquar’s despair. Still smiling, He turns to face the tumbled gate encased in its icy mausoleum. He stands still for an instant, watching it with a strange expression on His face, a golden statue descended into the white expanse of the wastelands.

Then He raises his arms, flames kindling in His open hands, and begins His Song.

Annatar’s voice is a firestorm that rages fell and furious, red-hot with barely contained Power.

Within that voice lie the burning winds that rush down from volcanoes, scorching all things in their way. Annatar calls upon the magma at Arda’s fiery heart as He Sings into existence a column of roaring fire.

Telperinquar tries to listen, but  soon he must turn away and cover his ears. That voice is too much for a mere Elf.

With a hiss like a million hot rods being quenched the ice sublimates, releasing a cloud of boiling steam that cuts off Telperinquar’s breath and scalds his exposed face. With some final reserve of reason, he snaps out of his stunned wonder and backs away. At a safe distance he crouches and cools his reddened cheeks with handfuls of snow.

Annatar stands unmoved amidst the raging fires. He Sings of uncovering, piercing, opening. He calls up the thundering chaos at the heart of each star, hot enough to inflame the very atoms of which Eä is made. Telperinquar must cover his face lest the radiance sear his eyes.

When he dares risk another look, Annatar and the gate are wholly hidden in swirling vapours of boiling steam. At the edges the steam freezes in the icy air, raining to the ground as a million crystal ice-needles that reflect the sun like scattered gems.

At last silence descends. The vapours recede, and amidst the thinning swirls Annatar is left standing on a tapestry of icy diamonds, bright and fair as a golden flame.

Behind him the remains of the gate still glow red with heat, but in the polar wind they cool swiftly with strange, tinkling sounds. Between them gapes a square of complete and perfect darkness.

Annatar turns to face Telperinquar, His face full of wild, vicious triumph. The very Powers have closed this door against them, but His is the mastery.

The way lies open.

Telperinquar dares not look up to meet Annatar’s gaze, so struck is he with sheer awe. It is easy to forget that Annatar is not His Elvish body but a spirit older than Eä, merely clothed in its physical matter. This brief unveiling of His true power has carried them from despair to triumph in mere moments. 

“Come, friend. Let us enter.” Annatar’s voice has gentled once more.

Telperinquar raises his eyes to meet Annatar’s. Annatar’s pupils are dark as the night between the stars, and just as ancient. Telperinquar alone among all the Eldar has been chosen to touch such greatness. He must not squander this chance.

That proud purpose overtakes even his terror as he follows Annatar into the gaping blackness of the gate.

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"Many of the Noldor and the Sindar they took captive and led to Angband, and made them thralls, forcing them to use their skill and their knowledge in the service of Morgoth."

The Silmarillion, Quenta Silmarillion, Ch 18, Of the Ruin of Beleriand and the Fall of Fingolfin

Angband. The Hells of Iron. Impregnable stronghold and mighty prison. Forge, mine and armoury. Capital of the Dark Lord’s dominion. The source of his black essence that taints Arda’s very atoms.

A pale sliver of daylight pours into the entrance hall, greyly illuminating an age of darkness. The vast carven arches of the roof stretch away like ribs of a giant carcass until they fade beyond the light’s reach. The hall’s far end remains dark as the Void.

Telperinquar and Annatar pull their sledges through the gate, but the metal runners screech against the flagstones, shattering the tomb-like silence. The sound echoes through the hall in eerie reverberations. At once Telperinquar halts his sledge. Every animal instinct he possesses screams that a stillness so profound should not be broken.

He scolds himself for such irrationality - this vast subterranean labyrinth has lain abandoned since the departing Host of the Valar sealed the entrance. And yet, he cannot bring himself to make even the slightest noise, lest something hear it.

Annatar seems unconcerned. Without a word he leaves his own sledge behind beside Telperinquar’s and wanders away from the wedge of light falling through the entrance. He stares up at the distant shadows of the roof with a strange expression on his face.

Dark shapes shift and waver up there. Telperinquar needs a moment to grasp that he is looking at the ragged remains of banners, bearing Morgoth’s device of sable unblazoned.

The sight seems to fascinate Annatar beyond any practical consideration. He walks off at a brisk pace, following the line of banners towards the dark depths of the hall, all thought of supplies or even lamps cast from his mind. 

Telperinquar dares not call out, and so he quickly sprints after him and taps his shoulder. Annatar wheels, his expression vacant like a man woken from a daze of memory or dream.

“The banners remain,” Annatar  mutters as if to himself. ”What shall we find on the lower levels, I wonder?” His strange eyes flame with eagerness, golden and red.

“I need a lamp to see by,” Telperinquar reminds him, pointing at the sledges in the daylight by the gate. He is well used to the long dark of Khazad-dûm’s mineshafts, but standing lampless in Angband’s age-old darkness makes him uneasy.

“Of course,” Annatar smiles. “Apologies.”

The sight brings Telperinquar some small, familiar relief. How often has his Maïarin friend made a similar apology for forgetting the needs of Telperinquar’s incarnate state, over the long years they have worked together?

Together they return to the sledges, and in silent accord they choose which provisions they must leave, and which will fit into their rucksacks. Victuals, lamps both crystal and oil-fed, a plentiful supply of ink and notebooks, and several large bags in which to carry away any documents or artefacts.

Telperinquar girds on his sword. He wishes he had brought armour, to have more than a fur coat between himself and an ambush in the dark. Another wholly irrational thought in a place that has stood empty for a thousand years, but still he cannot shake it. It irks him - a man of science should master his baser instincts.

At last they hide the sledges in a nook behind some slabs of fallen masonry and continue on foot, their footsteps echoing in the unfathomed silence.

Outside the Curse’s fires raged hot enough to melt the very bedrock. In here the mountain overhead provided shelter from the heat and the blast.

They walk side by side, over polished flagstones of titanic size scattered with the decaying debris of ancient battle. This very hall is where Morgoth’s legions took their last desperate stand against the besieging Host of the West. Barricades have been erected across the vast space, their wood now slowly pulverizing into dust.

Behind the blockades the bones of fallen defenders still lie. Angband has become a vast and silent tomb. Thousands of Orc skulls stare with empty sockets from helmets rusted to red crumble. Amidst the slain slave-soldiers lie their officers, greater and more dreadful things. Boldogs, werewolves, vampires of various shapes with skeletal wings. The spiny arches of a dragon’s ribcage form a bony tunnel through which a man might walk, if he could bear to step through those fanged jaws that gape open in their dying scream.

Where the daylight fails and twilight deepens, Telperinquar brings out his Fëanorian lantern. Its beam of white-blue radiance spears through the darkness. The light reveals a multitude of dark doorways pockmarking the far wall, like a fly-bitten corpse or some deep-sea creature with many eyes, lying in wait.

Now Telperinquar takes from the inner pocket of his parka his most precious asset. He carried this book on his body the entire journey, lest it be lost with a pack fallen off a sledge. The slim, leather-bound volume was assembled an Age ago.

When Angband fell, a multitude of Elf-prisoners staggered into the light.  With the inside knowledge these broken souls revealed, many hidden floors were charted and concealed cells opened. That lore of Angband’s layout has been sketched in this booklet. All of the Mírdain’s considerable skill at spycraft has been spent to secretly acquire it.

Telperinquar opens it onto the first sketched floorplan. “The Great Forge would be situated lower, near the coal deposits. Beneath the central peak probably, given that the mountain was constantly belching smoke.” He points at one of the doorways, giving into a rough-hewn corridor that runs steadily down.

“What we seek would not be in the Great Forge,” Annatar says in a tone of absolute certainty.

Telperinquar glances aside at him. “Why not?”

Annatar turns to the nearest Orc skeleton, and prods the tarnished remains of its halberd with the tip of his boot. The thing crumbles into rust-powder at the mere touch.

“In the Great Forge, slave-smiths churned out standard-issue blades for the rank and file. Morgoth must have possessed a more private location for his own experiments.”

How can he be so sure?

A dark clump of doubt gathers in Telperinquar’s stomach. Annatar has never accounted for his whereabouts during the War of the Jewels.

What if-

No. Annatar has been Telperinquar’s boon companion in the laboratory for two long-years. So many hours spent close together - achingly, longingly close. Telperinquar never saw any sign that Annatar might be something other than the well-meaning teacher he claims to be.

No sign at all - unless he missed something?

“How do you know this?” he asks, afraid of the answer.

“Morgoth suffered no witnesses.” Annatar shrugs, seemingly unaware of Telperinquar’s dark doubts. “Had he been performing his cutting-edge research in front of his captives, those sly Noldorin smiths would have gleaned his secrets long ago. Every last equation would sit catalogued in the library of Ost-in-Edhil, and you and I would have no need to search this place.”

Logical and eminently wise, as always. Telperinquar is annoyed at not having thought of it himself.

He rifles through the pages analysing the sketches, his eyes glued to the book. “A private laboratory then, where could design his prototypes away from prying eyes. But not too far out of the way - even he would need fuel and ventilation.”

Annatar looks at the sketches over Telperinquar’s shoulder and taps his finger against the page. “These must be the ventilation shafts.”

He is right. The shafts do seem to run through every single sub-layer into the very depths of the fortress.

Telperinquar passes Annatar the booklet. Annatar leafs through it with quick, energetic motions, his eyes alight with keenness.

“Not here,” Annatar skims and flips several pages, each one containing the floorplan for a single level, ever deeper down.

What hopes Telperinquar had of a short sojourn in Angband are quenched. What they seek lies deep in the very bowels of this lightless labyrinth. Already, the weight of the mountain above seems to press down upon them, and they must go deeper still. Much deeper.

At last Annatar points at the very last page, now positively excited. “This is the only possible location. Morgoth bored his private chambers down into the bedrock, near the Nethermost Hall.”

Telperinquar stares at the simple line-sketch made in charcoal. Annatar is a fine architect indeed, if he can glean all that from a drawing so coarse. These downmost floorplans show little detail. Few captives dragged to the deepest layers ever lived to tell the tale.

One did.

Maitimo survived the Nethermost Hell, but whatever befell him there drove him mad. He clawed back a semblance of sanity by burying the memories deep. He never spoke of Angband. Whatever Maitimo knew of Morgoth’s deepest halls, he took with him into Mandos.

Now Telperinquar will walk in his uncle’s footsteps. He shall settle that old score, and carry away Morgoth’s secrets as weregild for the House of Fëanáro.

“To the Nethermost Hall,” Telperinquar whispers, more to spur himself than for Annatar. He points first at the sketch, then at the tallest portal beneath an arch wide enough for ten orcs to march abreast. “That seems to be the main thoroughfare.”

Annatar smiles, and follows.

The portal gives out onto a stairway decorated with a frieze of crawling Elf-prisoners. The descent itself is not difficult. The great stairway is perfectly sculpted, each step even and symmetrical.

Once they lose the faint grey glow of daylight in the entrance hall, the darkness becomes a living, breathing thing with a will of its own. Like some great gelatinous sea-monster it retreats before the moving globe of lantern light and expands again to fill the space behind them.

The horror is all the greater for what the leaping light reveals.

Telperinquar’s lantern shows bas-reliefs and frescoes in the styles of Doriath and Gondolin. Every scene is a masterpiece worthy of an Elven king’s palace.

The Lamps of the Valar cast down, their mighty pillars broken.

The Darkening of Valinor.

The Two Trees destroyed and trampled into ashes.

A journey down to the Nethermost Hall is a descent into Morgoth’s triumph, and each image is more horrible than the last.

Who made these dreadful depictions? What sculptor was forced to chisel such horrors?  By what foul coercion Morgoth did Morgoth extract this degree of skill from his Elvish captives? Telperinquar is a craftsman himself, and he fears to imagine what levers would be needed to force one to such work.

The next scene is a well-laid mosaic of semiprecious stone. Telperinquar stops and stands stricken.

Finwë lies dead before Morgoth’s feet, his crushed skull a mess of blood and brain.

The gore is not the worst of it. No. What truly sickens Telperiquar to the point of nausea, is the background.

The great hall of Formenos is faithfully reproduced, from the gem-laden chandelier down to the red-and-golden star pattern of the tiles.

Whoever made this mosaic knew Formenos well, and none but Fëanáro’s inner circle were ever welcome there. Telperinquar must have known them - one of Maitimo’s luckless companions, perhaps. They suffered and slaved in these dungeons, forced to create this monstrous image of Finwë’s murder.

“Námo rest you,” Telperinquar mutters, and walks on.

Side tunnels branch off at regular intervals, gaping holes of absolute blackness. Something scurries away into a side passage as the lamplight passes over it. Telperinquar slows his pace to look, but in the tunnel beyond nothing stirs. He speeds onward, lest some horror leap into the light.

On the walls the Dark Hunter reaps his grisly harvest by the shores of Cuiviénen. Trains of chained Elf-prisoners are driven into Utumno by the whips of Balrogs.

Ahead on the stairs below pale shapes seem to be moving at the edge of sight. Perhaps his eyes, those limited instruments of the flesh, are fooling him with images born of his terror.

They cross another side tunnel. Telperinquar walks past, then quickly turns on his heel and  raises his lamp. He catches something darting across the main stairs. A pale streak, its shape vaguely humanoid, but moving too fast to be properly seen.

“Something is following us.”

Annatar shrugs. “The Curse of the Valar failed to kill all of Angband’s denizens. The offspring must still roam these halls.”  He turns aside to face Telperinquar. “Do you wish to turn back?”

Telperinquar straightens, and rests his hand on the pommel of his sword. The familiar shape is comforting against his palm. “Let it not be said that Fëanáro’s grandson crossed Morgoth’s threshold, but dared not go within.”

The glow of fierce approval on Annatar’s face warms Telperinquar like a draught of wine. Side by side they go on, step after step descending into darkness.

The friezes grow more dreadful still. Captive Elves changed and twisted by slow and horrible stages into the ruined state of Orcs. Every image a descent into further mutilation.

Telperinquar shudders. The loremasters have always known this, but to be faced with the methods by which the horror was achieved drives home the bleak reality.

They are us.

The pale creatures grow bolder. Slender and skeletal, they move unnaturally fast, almost insect-like.Their skittering sounds now ring from every side tunnel, and they dare ever closer to the moving circle of light. Before and behind they lurk on the edge of sight, writhing white shapes whose nature he cannot quite make out.

“They are hungry,” Annatar observes.

Terror briefly takes Telperinquar. Light alone keeps the monsters at bay. His Fëanorian lantern has served him faithfully for many years, but the pitiless decay of Middle-earth wears even the finest Valinórean crafts. Crystals have been known to wink out into sudden darkness. If his lantern should break he will have no time to grab a spare. But a single heartbeat of darkness, and the hungry things will fall upon them.

He cannot bear the thought. From his pack he takes a spare lantern and spears a second beam of blue light into the darkness ahead.

The shrieking thing caught within the light should not exist. Angband has sat abandoned for a mere thousand years. Evolution does not act that fast.

And yet… he cannot tell whether this being was once Elf or Orc, but like a cave fish its skin has become white and transparent, showing blue veins and muscles beneath. In its skeletal face the eye sockets are mere skin-covered dimples. The mouth is fanged. The jaw works in chewing motions, drooling with hunger.

The ears are pointed.

For an instant Telperinquar stands paralyzed by the sight of this creature whose very existence violates Eru’s creation.

Then years of military training under Maitimo return to him. With a hiss like tearing silk he draws his sword from the sheath, and raises high the lantern. Blue steel sparks in the light. These things shall learn that Fëanorian flesh is paid dearly. 

Annatar draws no weapon. He speaks a Valarin command in a tone so deep that Telperinquar feels the resonance in his bones. At once the shadows seem to swallow Him in a deeper darkness. Perhaps the light plays tricks with Telperinquar’s sight, but for an instant a flash of fire lights up Annatar's eyes.

The pale things retreat at once. With a rush of chittering moans they scurry away into the darkness.

Silence descends once more.

“What was that?” Telperinquar gasps.

“A pack of cave-adapted humanoids, it would appear.” Annatar answers dryly.

“How-”

“Radiation speeds the rate of genetic mutation. It bred many new variants here, I imagine. The fittest survived.”

Were these things once Orcs, or surviving Elf-prisoners forgotten in some hidden cell or mineshaft, left to breed and slowly degenerate into this mutilated state? Or perhaps both? Telperinquar shudders.

Then a realisation strikes him. “The light is not what kept them at bay - they have no eyes to see it.” Telperinquar whips around to face Annatar. “You did, Annatar! How come they obey you?”

“They would fear any of the Ainur.” Annatar says dismissively, as if such obedience were self-evident. “Come now. Let us go on.”

Telperinquar keeps only a single lamp, but he stays closer to Annatar.

Lower still they descend into hell. Telperinquar loses track of time. Have they been walking down these stairs for hours, or have days gone by? They must be deep in the earth, judging by the rising temperature. He halts them a moment to remove his fur parka and stow it in his pack. 

Some time later they come upon the corpse of an eyeless cave-dweller. Desiccated, but still showing the bite mark that killed it. A maw with spiralling teeth has bored a perfectly round tunnel into the creature’s torso and sucked it dry.

“What did this?” Telperinquar asks, his mind aflame with horrific possibilities.

“Old and strange things are said to have dwelled in the lowest levels,” Annatar says. “It seems they, too, have survived, and come up to feed.”

Telperinquar clasps his sword-hilt. Whatever blood-sucking horror may slither through these tunnels, it will taste cold steel before the end.

“Fear not, my brave friend.” Annatar smiles again. “No power here is greater than mine.”

They leave the mummified corpse behind.

A ways further into the depths, Telperinquar stops with a moan and stares at the wall.

A remarkably well preserved fresco in bright paints shows a red-haired Elf knight captured and carried to Angband in triumph by a company of Balrogs. Their glowing eyes are inlaid rubies.

A cold fist of dread closes around Telperinqar's heart as he runs ahead to the next panel.

Maitimo, bound before Morgoth’s throne.

Telperinquar stares at the fresco, transfixed. His mind cannot contain the horror of what his eyes are seeing.

His beloved uncle Maitimo, the High King of the Noldor, stripped and flogged before a jeering crowd of Orcs and fouler beasts. Maitimo’s blood drips onto the stained ruin of his own starred banner spread on the floor beneath. His face is a mask of agony.

Annatar studies the painting with the detached curiosity of one unfamiliar with physical pain. “He was your kinsman,” he says pensively, as if this had not occurred to him before.

“My uncle, and my liege-lord.” Telperinquar struggles to keep his voice even and calm.

“Did you know him well?” Annatar will not let go of the subject, it seems.

“I lived in his household as a youth.” Telperinquar hesitates, then adds, “he was like a father to me when my own father … was not.¹”

“Is that so?” Annatar seems to think this family tale a fascinating revelation.

“Maitimo taught me law and rhetoric. To this day I remember his teaching every time I address my council.” Telperinquar hates to taint the memory of their days together by speaking of them here, before this dreadful painting.

His eye falls once more on Maitimo’s bleeding back beneath the knout, the welts running all down his body.

“He was a changed man after Angband.” Telperinquar has no words to describe the sorrow of Maitimo’s transformation. Maitimo’s once-handsome face was a web of scars. He never spoke of what was done to him, but behind his eyes roared an unquenchable fire born of pain.

“I heard that the High King of the Noldor proudly defied Morgoth’s will,” Annatar seems unaware that he is touching a painful subject, “and thereby suffered much torment and humiliation.” 

Telperinquar watches Fëanáro’s painted banner on the floor. The eight-pointed star trod on by Orcs and spattered in Maitimo’s blood.

Hot anger roars through his veins at the pride of the Noldor laid so low.

“Curse the Black Foe!” He yanks his knife from the sheath and hacks at the painted Maitimo. Flakes of lime plaster rain down. For good measure he crushes them under his feet so only coloured crumbles remain.

Annatar watches him in silence, until at last both Maitimo and his banner have been erased into a shapeless crater. Telperinquar stands panting, knife in hand.

“I am sorry,” Annatar seems taken aback by Telperinquar’s anger. “I was too forward with my questions.”

“It is not your fault,” Telperinquar mutters. He turns his face away as he sheathes his knife and pats the plaster dust from his sleeves. The fire of his rage is cooling, and he begins to doubt the wisdom of his outburst.

“You shall prove Maitimo’s equal I think, both in courage and doughty strength,” Annatar smiles. “I hope one day to witness that.”

Telperinquar returns the smile, relieved that Annatar has not taken offence. “I hope so too, Annatar.”

For how this happened, see "The Art of Speech Through Smithcraft." ^{[ ▲ ]}

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This place is not a place of honor. No highly esteemed deed is commemorated here. Nothing valued is here.

Nuclear site deterrence message. Sandia National Laboratories, U.S. 1993.

At the stairs’ end gapes the towering arch of the Nethermost Hall, that deepest of caverns where Morgoth’s throne once stood, the dark heart of his dominion. Now his keep has fallen, and the titanic doorway gives out into deepest darkness, framed by the twisted remains of bronze doors hanging half-molten in their hinges.

Beyond the door the light illuminates only a short stretch of flagstones covered in fallen masonry and debris. Telperinquar raises his lamp to shine into the hall beyond, but Annatar lays a hand on his arm, turning the beam aside.

“That hall holds nothing for us.” Annatar was never one for sentiment, but now he bears a strange expression, almost as if he grieves the wretches who perished in the final battle for Morgoth’s deepest cavern. “Leave it in the dark where it belongs.”

Telperinquar takes pity on his friend. An icy shiver snakes down his back as he turns away from that dreadful, yawning gate. He takes out the booklet once more and holds it open so they can both consult the sketched floorplan.

Annatar barely looks at it. “There!” he points at a side corridor. “Judging by the air shafts, the laboratory should be that way.”

How eager he has grown. Telperinquar tries to share his enthusiasm - the deepest secrets of the Valar now lie within reach! - but he finds he cannot shake the weight of Angband’s horror. This darkness is too deep for a mere Elf to bear.

He follows as Annatar leads, through twisting hallways of polished black stone. They pass many dark doorways, but Annatar does not spare them even a glance. At one only does he slow his step. He hesitates, then picks up his pace once more.

His interest piqued, Telperinquar stops to shine his light into the dark rectangle. Beyond the crumpled remains of the metal door the beam hits a cavernous space.

“This way,” Annatar gestures for him to continue along the hallway, but Telperinquar does not let himself be distracted.

He steps inside the room and raises his lantern. At first he thinks it is some kind of healing facility. On one side are tiled lab benches, still white and strangely clean after all this time. The spells set upon them must be strong indeed. The lantern light reflects off scattered shards of the many exotic glasswares required for experimentation in organic chemistry.

Behind him Annatar’s footsteps whisper against the flagstones as he silently follows Telperinquar into the room.

Telperinquar does not turn to look at him. A shape in the darkness has caught his eye. He walks further inside, still holding the lantern high.

The beam of blue light reveals a surgical table on a raised central dais dominating the room.

Telperinquar’s skin crawls as if with insects, but morbid fascination overcomes his revulsion. He steps up on the dais to examine the table.

The surface is stainless steel, gleaming cold and clean in the blue light. A harness of stout leather bands hangs off the sides. The straps have cracked and crumbled with time, but their purpose remains clear enough. Once strapped in even the strongest Elf would be held still no matter how fiercely they struggled. Neat little gutters direct bodily fluids to an ornamental grate in the floor.

Blessed Valar!

Even now some small, analytical part of him wonders at the unusual geometry of the room, the way the ceiling curves over the dais. His footsteps have grown unnaturally loud as he approached, and with a bone-deep shudder he understands.

This entire space has been designed to amplify the screams of the vivisected victim bound to the table.

Cold sweat prickles on Telperinquar’s back. His mind refuses to contain the nature of this room.  

Against the farther wall the doors have been torn off a large cupboard, revealing rows upon rows of surgical instruments, some in trays and others dangling from hooks. Yet more stainless steel  glistens coldly, reflecting the lamplight with evil intent. Vicious little lancets. Spreaders. Probes and pincers. Clamps. Bone saws.

Telperinquar had always been careful not to stare at Maitimo in the bath-house. Maitimo’s body was an obscene tapestry woven of scars. Knife marks and whip lines and knotted pink burns thick with proud flesh gouged into his torso, snaking off over his limbs, even across his neck and up to his cheeks.

Did Maitimo once thrash and howl on this very table as Morgoth’s blades laid bare his tender insides?

The lantern beam jerks as Telperinquar turns away like a man stumbling from a sudden blow. Beside the table on its dais, the light hits an enclosure of iron bars, its lock hanging in rusted ruin off its staple. Its floor is badly worn, the imprints of bare feet still visible in the timeless dust.

A holding cage for prisoners, Telperinquar realises, clammy dread seeping through him. The poor wretches were forced to watch and listen to all that befell on that dreadful table as they waited their turn. Sour bile rises in his throat. He swallows frantically to keep it down. 

“Telperinquar?” Annatar has been studying the diagrams hung up on the wall - the anatomical differences between Elf and Orc. Now he makes for Telperinquar’s side. 

“Let us leave,” Telperinquar blurts out, reeling.

“Does this room distress you?” Annatar asks in a tone of polite puzzlement, as if making a study of some strange but fascinating aspect of the Incarnates. His gaze is fixed on Telperinquar, drinking him in.

Telperinquar battles his own body, desperate not to shame himself by throwing up like a fresh recruit at his first skirmish. He, who stood at the Nirnaeth!

He swallows the spittle that has leapt into his mouth as he breathes his stomach back under his control. How to explain torture to a being that knows no pain? Mutilation, to one who can don and discard bodies like a man changing shirts?

“I never was one for the healing arts,” Telperinquar finally manages between deep breaths.

A sharp little blade of a thought slides into his mind. What has Annatar so fascinated of a sudden? He tried to lead me away from this room before.

He looks up at Annatar, and opens his mouth to voice that very question, but the words never take shape.

Annatar catches his gaze, and at once their minds melt against each other like two edges sealed with wax. Strangely intimate. Annatar is fire, strangeness, the incomprehensible void beyond the stars, the silence that was before time. Magnificent, and utterly alien to the Incarnates.  Annatar is not concerned with the body or its destruction, for he is above the substance of Arda.

Telperinquar shudders. How limited his own Elvish mind compared to the eternal vastness of the Ainur. How blessed he is by this chance to see beyond the bounds of his incarnate shape.

"Come, Telperinquar,” Annatar looks at him with a conspiratorial smile. “The forge is not far now.”

Onward they march through the maze of hallways that burrows through the black bedrock like crawling veins of rot. Annatar leads at a brisk pace. Telperinquar follows him in a daze. Down and down, ever down until in the very deepest abyss, the corridor ends in an arch.

The Host of the Valar must have descended even to this dreadful depth. Through the half-molten remains of a steel door blasted off its hinges, a red glow spills forth. Hot air wafts into their faces from the doorway, sharp with the penetrant stink of sulphur.

The chamber beyond must once have been a natural cave, so tall and cavernous is the space. The floor is smooth as glass and black as obsidian, but far above their heads a multitude of stalactites erupts from the ceiling. Their shapes look strange to Telperinquar’s eye. He halts and throws back his head.

Elvish slaves have carved every last stalactite into twisted and baleful shapes, sculpting the living rock into a malicious fever-dream of hanging corpses, grotesque mutilations, faces twisted into grimaces of suffering.

He looks away from the horror and turns to the hall’s far side, where the floor drops away into a glowing chasm from which spills red light that paints the cavern in blood. The very air trembles with heat.

Annatar is standing on the abyss’ edge. The magma chamber below lights him in a crimson glow, his silk robes fluttering in the hot wind that rises from the ravine. Telperinquar approaches, dry ash crumbling beneath his feet. He must blink his tearing eyes against the raw heat and the stinging sulphur-stench as he comes to Annatar.

Side by side they peer down into the depths of hell.

----

The magma chamber surges, splashing up jets of molten rock to greet its returned master. Sulphur-yellow smokes rise from the roiling depths. 

Sauron steps closer to the edge, the better to hear the hiss and crack of stone and gas. The reek of the earth's bowels assaults His body’s nostrils, and He breathes deeply of it, basking in the radiant heat that scorches His skin. A spirit of fire He remains, and in this place His power is greatest.

Aeons ago when Angband was founded He dug this channel down into the secret fires hidden at Arda’s very heart, so He might harness their power for His own purposes. And now at last He has returned to the place that once was His.

A strange sensation stirs in His chest.

Ah, this body. It feels.

Sorrow is of the flesh. A pure spirit is above so base a thing. Oh, how Sauron longs to return to the perfect state of order! The time is not yet ripe. He must wear this form for many years yet while His long, slow scheme plays out.

Telperinquar’s frail flesh cannot bear to remain this close to the magma chamber. Sauron watches him wander off into the laboratory proper.

Doubtlessly this space looks familiar to him: a well-equipped forge, outfitted for every possible artful aspect of the craft.

Telperinquar’s eyes scan the anvil, bellows, crucibles for mixing various metals hanging from chains and rails in the ceiling. Gem-cutting tools. Vials of acids and oil for etching and quenching. Every possible utensil.

More complex equipment, too, for changing the very nature of matter. Telperinquar must recognize the lead-shielded reactor and the centrifuges. Sauron crafted similar devices in their laboratory in Eregion, to aid in the Rings’ creation.

Telperinquar runs a careful hand over the top of a uranium-centrifuge, wiping away an Age’s worth of fine volcanic ash. For an instant, his gaze leaps from the device to Sauron, as if wondering at the resemblance to the device standing in his own workroom in Ost-in-Edhil. He makes as if to speak, then thinks better of it and turns away.

Denial is a powerful force, Sauron has learned through his many manipulations of Elves and Men. Telperinquar does not ask the question because subconsciously he understands the answer would destroy him, and so his mind turns away from it.

Sauron smiles.

I have spun my net and wrapped it all around you. All that remains now is to draw it tight. Slowly, oh so slowly. But surely.

Telperinquar turns his back on the centrifuge and its unwanted questions, and makes for the row of metal filing cabinets that holds Sauron’s archived logbooks.

Sauron was always meticulous in writing down His findings. The dry heat of the chamber would long ago have turned paper and vellum to dust, but for the mighty Spells of Keeping He laid upon these volumes. Scrolls and notebooks remain intact, as whole and unfaded as the day they were dictated to the slave-scribes.

The Host of the West has left these notes behind. In a final humiliation, Eonwë spurned Sauron’s work and forbade all his companions to even touch it. That haughty coward felt too good for Sauron’s methods.

Telperinquar pulls out a book and leafs through, skimming the contents. He lays it down on the table with trembling hands, takes out another. His eyes dart back and forth as he eagerly absorbs the text. His mouth opens in a gasp of pure awe as he realises what the files contain.

The hot, satisfying glow of professional pride fills Sauron’s chest. The bait he laid to draw Telperinquar to this place is very much real.

A scientific marvel indeed. Entropy halted. The relentless decay of Middle-earth staved off. The very Eru-given laws of physics pummeled into submission, tamed like a dog to its master’s hand.

Telperinquar shakes with excitement as he frantically pulls out one notebook after another. The logs are in Tengwar script, but the language is Black Speech. The tongue proves no impediment to Telperinquar - Uncle Maitimo taught him many things, it seems.

Each booklet is written in a different hand. Sauron used captured Noldorin loremasters for their fair handwriting, but He never risked any one among them gaining full understanding of His experiments. As soon as a project was completed, Sauron discarded the scribe into the magma chamber to be replaced with a freshly ignorant specimen.

Telperinquar is none the wiser. “This is …” he gasps. “This is it!”

Like a man possessed he dashes back and forth pulling books from the cabinets, rifling through, and sorting them into stacks on a nearby workbench.

“Such treasure! These books cannot all fit on the sledges - alas, that we can carry but a fraction to Eregion!” Telperinquar mourns as he frantically sorts through the logbooks. “We should take care, Annatar - the very paper is so radioactive a Mortal would die at the mere touch.”

“Take your time to make a selection,” Sauron assures him, flashing a smile. “I will be with you soon, but first I must see to our safety.”

At Telperinquar’s questioning glance, He adds, “Balrogs once dwelled here. I must check the magma chamber for any remaining, lest we be ambushed as we work.”

Telperinquar had eyes only for the books, forgetting Angband and all its perils. Sobered, he looks up and his eyes find Sauron’s. “Thank you, my friend.”

“Think nothing of it,” Sauron says with a smile that looks friendly indeed.

He leaves Telperinquar with his nose safely buried in the laboratory notes. He will soon happen upon the most relevant ones. Sauron could point him to them now - He has won the foolish creature’s trust - but let the Elf search a while longer, and allow him the belief that he found them himself.

Less suspect, and it gives Sauron more time to fulfill the true purpose of this expedition.

He returns to the ledge overlooking the magma chamber, steeling His physical body against the crackling heat before leaping over the edge into the abyss. The magma below surges to receive him in its fiery embrace.

Standing on the molten rock, engulfed by the glorious heat of His own element, His power swells  to delirious heights. The heat grows more intense, the colours brighter - sharp sulphur yellow, the fell orange of magma, turning to red where liquid rock hardens into blackest obsidian.

Commanding the magma to solidify under His feet, Sauron walks across the surface. At the far end of the chamber He finds the place He has been longing for. A small ledge in a patch of obsidian, obscured from the main chamber by a curve in the wall.

He looks over His shoulder to check if Telperinquar is watching him from the ledge, but the Elf remains engrossed in the books.

His secrecy assured, Sauron runs His fingers over an unremarkable dimple in the crackling stone, and hums the Song of Power that will reveal its secret to His voice alone.

The hidden compartment proves undamaged. Those proud fools in Eönwë’s train only searched for prisoners. They utterly failed to find Angband’s true treasure.

The rock face melts away to reveal Melkor’s final gift. A single, priceless vial of heavily enchanted glass shines with its own deadly light.

The bottle emits a pale glow of radiation that would melt any eyes but Sauron’s. This isotope should not exist in Eä. Nuclei so loaded with neutrons that they would tear themselves apart in mere picoseconds.

Only within the raging heart of Varda’s largest stars is such an alien state of matter to be found. Oh, how they rejoiced when Lord Melkor’s might succeeded in creating it at will!

The power to make these precious atoms is lost, foolishly extinguished and thrown beyond the Door of Night. For that, Sauron will have his vengeance.

Sauron Sings again the spells that hold the unstable nuclei frozen in time. The radiation is intense, and even he must adjust his flesh by his will to keep the skin from blistering off his fingers when he picks up the vial.

This rarest of elements is what he needs to impose his will on Middle-earth, to forge it into eternal order under his rule. The final and most noble material needed for the greatest work he will ever make. The crown and capstone of his coming dominion.

My One Ring.

He cannot wait to take the vial to the great smithy he built in the magma chamber of Mount Orodruin.

He might have forged it here in Angband, in His beloved Lord Melkor’s memory, but this fallen fortress has been tainted and made into a symbol of defeat. Sauron needs a new beginning.

He will break down Middle-earth and build it anew as it should have been from the beginning. Pure, unmarred order. A perfect pyramid of peoples, with the lesser ones serving those above them, and Him at the apex. He has begun this great work with the more biddable races, Orcs and Trolls, but now His Rings of Power will set all others into their proper places at last.

Nine Rings for Men. Base creatures barely above animals, in need of firm control.

Seven for the Dwarves, whose proud heads shall bow at last.

The Elves require but Three, which they shall willingly forge themselves. Slave-collars for their own necks.

And once Sauron has used this precious vial to forge His masterpiece, His One Ring, He will rule them all.

His impending triumph sends fire surging hotly through his veins. The magma chamber grows restless in response, belching shafts of red-hot matter up towards the roof.

“Annatar!”

Sauron does not startle. Inwardly seething at this pathetic creature that dares disturb His moment of triumph, He closes His fist around the vial to block its phosphorescent glow. He slides it into the lead container He brought for the purpose, then into a hidden pocket. Only then does He turn around.

Telperinquar is standing on the ledge, calling down into the chamber. His weak Elf-eyes pinch to slits as he struggles to pierce the fumes and shimmering heat.

Ordered around by a mere Incarnate. I, who Sang at Eä’s very making! Curse that fool. He will pay - oh, how he will pay!

Sauron allows himself a moment to relish the memory of Telperinquar’s terror at the sight of Sauron’s old laboratory.

I will make another table, Tyelpë dear. Especially for you. And then we will see if you are made of the same stuff as your Uncle Maitimo. Oh, how you will scream before I am through with you!

Briefly His eyes grow red with the lust for pain and domination, the torturer’s ultimate pleasure.

But not yet, not for many long and subtle years. Telperinquar’s usefulness has not yet run its course. The prideful creature must be further harnessed, and Sauron must remain patient like a stone.

He molds His face into benevolence as He crosses the magma lake back to the ledge and swiftly climbs up, commanding the rock face to melt into fitting hand- and footholds that cool crackling in his wake.

“All is safe,” Sauron smiles as He gains the ledge beside Telperinquar, but the Elf does not return it.

“They used isotopes on prisoners - on people!” Telperinquar bears a wild, wide-eyed expression as he thrusts a sketchbook into Sauron’s hands.

After all this time, Sauron is pleased to see that His series of full-colour drawings of the skin blistering off an Elf-prisoner force-fed a dose of plutonium remains quite lifelike. He only ever used the finest inks.

“We should not be reading this!” Telperinquar backs away from the book as if it might attack him. “No one should. I thought the Host was foolish for leaving these documents behind. Now I understand why they sealed this place with everything inside. We should never have come.”

“All knowledge is worth possessing,” Sauron answers with all the patience He can muster. Calmly he leafs through the sketches detailing a series of comparative radiation exposure experiments on Amanyar versus the Dark Elves of Middle-earth. The results had been most instructive.

“You would throw away such precious data, after all you did to obtain it?” Sauron believed He knew Elves and their ways, but this development has Him genuinely baffled.

“See how it was gained!” Telperinquar cries, and thrusts the sketchbook into Sauron’s hands.

Sauron gently closes the book, taking the tone of a wise but disappointed mentor chiding an errant pupil.

“These experiments have been performed. We cannot undo them,” He appeals to Telperinquar’s rational side. “All that remains for us to decide is what to do with the results. Would you have all this work be in vain?”

Telperinquar lets out a wordless cry of disgust and spins around as if to make for the door.

Sauron curses inwardly. Has He misjudged His hold on Telperinquar?

“Tyelpe…” previously, the Elf would shudder in delight at the sound of that name from Sauron’s lips.

Under pressure, seduction seems to have lost its effectiveness. Sauron has observed this before in test subjects, once the sense of threat grew great enough. He must calm Telperinquar so the Elf will be amenable once again.

“We have come to the final pass. I know it is bitter, but stay the course. Think of all we shall achieve!”

That steely look of rejection remains in Telperinquar’s eyes.

“I see that the destruction of Elvish bodies brings you distress,” Sauron pleads, “but that has no bearing on our purpose here. And see the matter in perspective - Unhousing is not permanent. Námo does return such spirits to flesh.”

Telperinquar eyes him with a sharp, piercing gaze. “What are you, Annatar?”

“I was created a Maïa of Aulë, as you know already. The incarnates’ preoccupation with their physical bodies is alien to me. ”

“Have you no decency?” Telperinquar exclaims, pointing at the sketchbook in Sauron’s hands.

“The past does not concern me.” Sauron allows his voice to be tinged with the slightest edge of disappointment. “Only the future. I did not come here to mourn those long dead, or catalogue their passing. My purpose is to bring Middle-earth glory and bliss to surpass that of Valinor. I believed you, a scion of Fëanor, to be a fitting companion in that greatness. No other among the Eldar has shown such promise.”

Sauron drops the sketchbook to the ground - a thing of little meaning - and steps over it towards Telperinquar. “Please, show me that I chose well. Of all the Eves in Middle-earth, you alone possess the skill and wisdom to build our vision of a new world.”

The flattery fails. Telperinquar’s eyes still shoot fire. His suspicions run deeper than Sauron first estimated.

Damn that stubborn Elf!

Sauron should not have left him to freely browse the archive, but distracted him with some less perilous task while He retrieved the vial. He is appalled at His own mistake.

If Telperinquar turns hostile Sauron will have no choice but to kill him here and now, long-years before he has served his purpose. It would destroy His cover as Annatar and cost Him what control He has over the Mírdain. He needs those Elf-smiths to make and distribute the lesser rings.

Sauron’s entire long and careful scheme now rests upon a knife-edge. One more mistake and it will fail. He must deploy his final and most desperate stratagem.

The very idea has always repulsed Him. He never could fathom Melian’s willingness to submit to the physical indignities of the flesh. Despite all his loathing, Sauron must now follow in that besotted madwoman’s footsteps.

From a technical standpoint it is not so hard. In these very halls Sauron once methodically observed scores of prisoners ordered to perform such acts. He now draws from those experiences to improvise His own variation.

He steels himself, raises both arms, and lays them around Telperinquar’s quivering form.

“Telperinquar-” he whispers softly. “Tyelpë … look at me?”

Telperinquar’s face softens from the mask of outraged anger. Sauron gently takes it between his palms. “Please, Tyelpë. Never forget who you are. You are destined for greater things, son of Curufinwë. You and I.”

The Elf takes a deep, shuddering breath. His eyes are wide with some emotion Sauron cannot fathom.

“Annatar…” the Elf whispers.

Sauron sees his chance, knows what he must do now. He tamps down a wave of disgust, tilts his head, and presses his lips to Telperinquar ’s.

Telperinquar eagerly opens for Him. Telperinquar’s mouth has no particular taste, He notices, methodically filing away the fact for future reference. He has sampled Elf-meat both raw and artfully prepared in Angband’s kitchens, but never noticed this particularity about the tongue or cheeks.

Telperinquar pulls Him closer, so their bodies touch all over. They stand locked together amidst the scatter of notebooks, wreathed in the yellow fumes that belch from the roiling magma below.

Sauron wants nothing more than to snap his jaw shut and bite off the Elf’s probing tongue, but harsh necessity stays him. He must carry His chosen tactic on to its end.

At last, Telperinquar pulls back.

“Apologies, Annatar.” Telperinquar seems to have returned to his senses. The anger has ceased, and his heart rate is lowering. “I panicked.”

Sauron presses another small kiss to Telperinquar’s lips, a detail he remembers. “No matter.”

Telperinquar seems content now. “We found what we came for. Now let us carry it home and begin our work. Together.” Then he pauses.

Sauron needs all His subtle senses to perceive the slightest edge of hesitation in his manner, a flicker of doubt in his mind.

He is not wholly won. Not yet.

To sweeten the deal with a promise of more pleasures to come, Sauron reaches for his hand.

“I am looking forward to it,” Telperinquar agrees, and allows him to take it.

Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky,

Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone,

Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die,

One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne

In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.

One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,

One Ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them

In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.

Chapter End Notes

Hi everyone!

I'm more than fashionably late, finishing my Halloween story in February. Thanks for your patience!

I'd love to hear your thoughts on this chapter and the story as a whole. What do you think about Sauron's true reason for this visit to Angband? I feel like I'm massacring Tolkien's Ring-lore, but the One Ring's corrupting influence being nuclear in nature seemed like a cool idea. 

And of course I owe many thanks to the incredible Marchwriter for her excellent beta read that vastly improved this story.

Thanks for reading and commenting, it means the world to me!

IS

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