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Chapter Text

In molten fires at the heart of a mountain, a circle of gold fell, deceptively small for what it had wrought in the world. If it once had held anything resembling consciousness, it now noticed nothing of the small creature that fell along with it, or the two others who knelt trembling not far above.

Its maker, or what was left of its maker, cried out as the Ring flared and warped and faded to nothing.

That cry reverberated not within the circles of the living world but somewhere beyond them, in a Void outside of time. Yet an untouched string may vibrate in sympathy when its twin is plucked, and one particle may spin in tandem with another no matter the distance between them; and the last outcry of the one who had forged the Ring did not go unheard.

Across an ocean and an age, a bodiless spirit who had long ago delighted in the joy of making felt the anguish of that unmaking, and heard the cry that fell soundless in the Void. If the spirit had possessed a body, it might have fallen to its knees, or clamped its hands over its ears to stave off the deluge that washed over it. Unhoused and unshielded as it was, it had no defense. The full force of that turmoil fell upon that once-bright spirit, as one who had helped to craft the world was lost to it.

At the center of that agony, in the eye of that storm, the bodiless spirit had room only for this thought: No. Not you. Not like this.

And that, too, did not go unheard.

He existed formless and nameless. It could hardly be called existence, this state of undoing, unbeing. An instant could have passed in the living world, or an eon. To him, untouched by matter or time, it made no difference.

Yet even here, Music found him. Perceiving it, he became aware that there was something left of him that could perceive, and therefore became aware that he still was.

Even thou art not unmourned, it told him. There is one who intercedes for thee, though he knows not that his sorrow is heard by any but him.

In the cadence of the Music he sensed who it was that mourned, and in that moment sensed also something of what that spirit mourned for. Thus did he remember himself and who he had once been: admired and feared, walking the world in forms both terrible and fair, a giver of many gifts and poisoner of them all.

It jarred, that note of grief. He could not account for it. Whatever had been forged between them had failed and foundered at the last. He had been defied, and taken his vengeance many times over for that defiance. What reason now for sorrow, for pity, from one he had destroyed? The desire to understand had long faded from him, even before his unmaking. What need was there to understand that which he could simply control? But this—this did not make sense. It nagged; it rankled; it burned. It pulled him to reach out for it in turn, with something almost like desperation, until he would have reached back into the world, back to when they had been something other than enemies. Back to when he might have asked, Why? and gotten an answer, if he had known the way.

Again, then. Thou art not done with life, nor it with thee.

The sound of moving water was the first thing he noticed, followed by the faint brush of a light wind. On their heels came the inescapable deduction that he must have a body again, if he was perceiving the world through physical means.

He had not had a body in… he did not know how long. Had he not been unmade, and claimed by the Void? Disorientation struck, a swift upending of every point of reference by which he aligned himself to the world.

For a moment or possibly an age—his mind could spare no attention to the marking of time—he felt himself plunged back into the maelstrom of flame and fury that was his last coherent memory. That same ferocious tearing at the very essence of his being, that same horror as the Ring dispersed in the fires of its making; that same agony as the strands it bore of his deepest self came apart with it. It threatened to overcome him entirely, and nearly did.

But the rush of water and the caress of wind continued uninterrupted. From those fixed constants he quieted the tumult of his spirit. Slowly, self-control returned.

This was not, then, the heart of Mount Doom. Nor was it the emptiness of the Void. He searched his memory for something to account for whatever this was, but between the dissolving of the Ring and his return to consciousness here, he could recall nothing.

Perhaps this was some other grotesque punishment, then, from the Powers of the West. If so, he was resolved to resist it; had so resolved even in his last furious, anguished moments. What right had they who had abdicated their own power in Middle-earth to condemn him for the exercise of his? Anger, as it so often had, lent him clarity of thought. First he must understand the nature of this prison. Then he could set about breaking it.

He did not reach out with the part of him that needed no physical body to understand the world. Easier, for now at least, to shield his truest self against whatever this place might be by filtering it through his fana’s senses. He was supine; could feel grass prickling at the back of his neck and his bare forearms, fabric against the rest of his skin. And he could smell the water now, mingling with the rich scents of damp soil and algae, overlaid with the sweetness of spring flowers. He discovered he had eyes too, and opened them.

Stars shone overhead.

He recoiled, bracing for pain. The Star-kindler had looked on his erstwhile master with little favor, and it boded ill for him if this was a cage of her making.

Yet none came. The wind remained gentle, and the stars went on twinkling with kindly light. A poor job Manwë and Varda had done of meting out punishment, if this was the worst of it. Or perhaps they had not been the ones to devise this doom, whatever it was.

It struck him then that these stars were familiar. He knew them; had spent years honing the lenscraft of the Mirdain’s glassworkers so that he might render them clearer in his companion’s sight. They had passed hours together beneath these stars, which were as familiar to him as the hands that had adjusted the focus of the telescope. Along with the scent of the flowers, and the river he now recognized as the Sirannon flowing unfouled, he had enough to pinpoint where he was: Eregion, in late spring, an hour or two before dawn. Or a semblance of it, at least.

That star hovering a radian above the northeastern horizon had exploded into a nova early one summer, perhaps a half-century after he had come to Ost-in-Edhil.

A hand closed around his wrist. He would have shaken off any other touch; this one, he permitted, familiar calluses at the fingertips and strength in the grip. “Come, my friend, it is nearly dark enough! Let us not waste time!”

“Now? The sun has only just set. I might expect such haste from one of the Secondborn, but you need not race against the dwindling of a mortal life. You have scarcely rested a single night since it began.” Archly, he added, “Lest you forget, you have a body. Eventually it will demand respite. I hold it not against you that you cannot match the endurance of my kind. This supernova’s luminescence will last a season at least, and even were it not so, surely you have seen one before, and will again.”

His companion laughed, quick and bright. “But I have not yet seen one with the benefit of tutelage from one who witnessed the stars’ making! With such a gift before me, I couldn’t rest if I tried. I’d only pace my rooms and wish I were at the telescope with you. So come, indulge me.”

“Very well, Tyelperinquar.” He was amused, and did not bother to conceal it. In truth he had largely labored elsewhere while the stars were being wrought, but no matter. Let the folk of this city continue to think his fount of knowledge inexhaustible. In an eyeblink he maneuvered so that he was the one clasping his friend’s wrist in his hand: skin, warmth, the tracery of blood vessels with their swift-beating pulse, and the delicate jigsaw of bones beneath. What an inconvenience, to require a body, and yet how adept the craftspeople of the Noldor had proven themselves at making beauty out of inconvenience. “Then let me lend you some speed.”

Another peal of laughter, tumbling forth like a meteor shower at its peak. “Lead on!”

Celebrimbor. Tyelperinquar.¹

What they might have wrought together, had Celebrimbor not turned from him! With the Three bent to his purpose—and more than the Three, that brilliant mind! In Celebrimbor he might have had a true collaborator, a deputy worthier of the role in craft and skill than any of the lieutenants that had been left to him.

In the space of a thought he was on his feet. But before he had done more than settle the drape of his robes, a small folded missive tumbled from his sleeve. He caught it as it fell past his fingertips, thumb finding the sigil pressed into the wax seal. Gil-galad’s device. His lip curled. A strong candidate, as Noldorin kings went, for the greatest nuisance of them all. But a source of crucial information, now: he had carried such a letter only once, on his way from a cold welcome in Lindon to a much heartier one in Eregion. The sleeve the letter fell from was embroidered with intricate tessellations of overlapping holly leaves, the same design he had summoned to his form in preparation for his arrival at the gates of Ost-in-Edhil. And based on the stretch of river where he found himself, that city lay but half a day’s journey away by foot. A fraction of that, for one who could travel as he could.

Might this be, then, not punishment, but opportunity? If this truly was Eregion in the Second Age, the Gwaith-i-Mírdain dwelt nearby. Was Celebrimbor among them, awaiting the arrival of an emissary of the Valar? Would he be as eager to receive that emissary’s gifts, so perfectly suited to his quick intelligence, and to receive their giver as a friend into his city and his halls? Into his heart?

It was a hypothesis easily falsified. So whence his hesitance?

Do not waste this chance.

The thought struck him with a force that felt almost beyond himself. No, he would not waste it. There was no reason he could not investigate what had sent him here while at the same time putting his memories—his foreknowledge—to use. Middle-earth might have been great under the strength of his will; it might yet be. Whatever miscalculations, whatever betrayals had marred the past, or the future as it were, he would circumvent them this time.

Ost-in-Edhil beckoned. Annatar set off to answer its call.

¹ The Quenya version of 'Celebrimbor,' comprised of the same elements, 'silver' and 'hand closed so as to grasp.'

Chapter Text

Celebrimbor blinked, and a familiar room resolved around him. It was not the dim grey stone of the Halls of Mandos, where his last conscious memory had been of a deluge of horror and anguish, of feeling at long last the destruction of the One Ring and its creator. No, this room had high ceilings to accentuate the light pouring in from the wide windows in the south wall, and three large worktables bearing projects in varying stages of completion. The remaining walls bore panels of slate fitted to slide up and down. Nearly all of them were scrawled with chalked equations and haphazard notes. Most were in his own hand, though there were a number of contributions from others of the Gwaith-i-Mírdain. Just in front of him was some of Taugwen’s work on surface transformations, above which she had written, in a little box: Death to whosoever erases this. Beneath her conjectures was an addition in Artalórë’s elegant tengwar:

…possible to define a function on a complex manifold such that…

The rest was hidden by the panel in front of it, which showed the integral difference between a catenary curve and a parabola, along with some force calculations: his earliest ideas for the Sirannoniant.

This was the larger of his workrooms in the halls of the Gwaith-i-Mírdain. Home, for most of his time in Eregion, more so even than his sleeping quarters.

How could he be here? This room had seen the best of what he had labored over and wrought. It had seen the flourishing of the greatest friendship of his heart. It had also seen him bloodied and bare, had stood as the last of these halls waiting for its architect to die before it too would be reduced to rubble. Was this a vision, or some sending of Irmo’s? A memory? Like the surface of pond reflecting and refracting light at once, layering its visible depths against a mirror of the sky, he saw the room for a moment both as it was and as it had been: worktables destroyed except for the one he was chained to, windows shattered, shards of slate still bearing fragments of beloved equations turned to blades against his skin.

Yet the floor was hard beneath his feet. Gravity anchored his hröa in a way his fëa alone would not feel. Even the most vivid of his memories in the Halls of Mandos had lacked such solidity, such weight. The double vision cleared.

On the table farthest from him, which stood beneath a ventilation hood, were arrayed a burner, crucible, and alembic. A rack of carefully labeled and stoppered vials stood alongside them. The faint scent of ammonia lingered in the air. He remembered that experiment.

He remembered, too, what had prompted it: the arrival of a courier from Lindon.

The letter she carried had been marked only with an anga written with a split-nib pen.¹ He’d unfolded it to find the inside blank, and it had taken him the better part of the day to reveal the text. Applying heat, which was his first impulse, yielded only one line, in a cipher, which decoded to a chemical equation. Preparing and carrying out the reaction it represented took most of a morning. By the time he identified the correct concentration of the correct byproduct to apply to the vellum, it was well into the afternoon. The ink, sensitive to the alkaline solution he’d distilled, was in Elrond’s hand, not Gil-galad’s, though the initial on the cover-fold said he spoke for the king. Celebrimbor had burnt it after reading it. Still, closing his eyes now, he could easily picture the fragments of it flickering through the flames.

…styles himself Annatar Aulendil. We were not sure what to make of him. If the Valar wished to send such an emissary, why now, and not a thousand years since? And why one, alone…

…spoke of grand designs for Middle-earth, and his skill seems formidable. Perhaps we forgo a great opportunity by turning him away, but…

…means to travel next to Eregion. With luck, this will reach you before he does. Certainly you are better equipped than we to assess his craftsmanship; so too, I hope, his character…

Celebrimbor swallowed a bitter laugh, remembering that part. It must be no more than a day after the letter had come, for the little ceramic bowl holding its ashes was still sitting at the end of the worktable.

The question, then, wasn’t so much how he could be here. Rather, how could he be here now, on the very eve of Annatar’s arrival? Had he returned in time in truth? Or were his memories of the years ahead just a vision of a future that had not yet come to pass?

Something dug into his palms. Looking down, he found he was holding a wire cutter in one hand and an unfinished torc in the other. Of course; he’d turned to a more tactile craft than chemistry—an hour ago? a lifetime?—to settle his exasperation at Elrond’s overblown encryption efforts. Now he just felt a bit sick. His fists were clenched unconsciously around the torc and the wire cutter, knuckles bloodless. The sunlight flooding the room felt abruptly too weak and distant to warm him, the very air too thin to reach his lungs. This time, he was helpless to stave off the memory.

“You recognize this, do you not?” Annatar circled him slowly, tapping the fractal whorls of gold wire on the torc set around his throat. Celebrimbor followed his movement as far as he could, but the manacles chaining him to the floor meant he could not turn his body, and Annatar had left the previous day’s damage to the vertebrae at the base of his neck unhealed. He could only move his head a few degrees to either side without setting off a dangerous numbness. “The first piece you made for me."

He withdrew a small cloth roll from his sleeve. Celebrimbor recognized that too: it held the set of jeweler’s tools with which he had made the torc.

“You were generous, then,” Annatar went on. “Open with your craft and with your mind. What was it you said to me, when you gave me this? ‘A small gift, for a lord of great ones.’ Just so the fractal design, each section representing in miniature the greater pattern of the whole. Recursion through multiple orders of magnitude. Can you not see I ask nothing different of you now? You were quick enough when we met to gild me with adornments of your making. What are three more, when it is only the same pattern repeating?”

Celebrimbor spat out the bile that was surging up his throat. It saved him having to reply. He could not have given the answer Annatar sought even if he had wanted to. The Three were well beyond his reach, now. He could only hope that put them beyond Annatar’s.

Annatar moved out of Celebrimbor’s view, making every nerve in him scream in warning. There was a rustle of fabric as Annatar extracted something from the roll of cloth, and then Celebrimbor felt cold metal against his jaw. It quickly warmed with the heat of his skin. As the press of metal slid to his cheekbone, he recognized the shape of it: his pair of needle-nosed pliers. Something jangled faintly. After a moment he realized it was the chains of his own manacles, trembling as his hands shook. All of him was shaking. The only steady point in the universe was the pressure of the pliers against his face, still clamped closed.

Annatar withdrew them. Celebrimbor still couldn’t see him. He risked straining his neck a fraction more, trying to catch even the barest glimpse of Annatar in his periphery. It set his whole left arm tingling.

“Enough,” came Annatar’s voice—from the opposite direction to where Celebrimbor had tried to turn. Celebrimbor only just managed to control the reflexive impulse to snap his head around. “You risk losing the use of your hand that way. I would not have you destroy yourself so, when there is much yet you may create.”

“What you’re doing isn’t creation,” Celebrimbor croaked. Unwise, probably, to speak out of turn like that, but silence was hardly any safer. “I want no part of it.”

“No? And yet you waited here for me, when you could have fled with the last of your defenders. A vain effort, by the by. They scarcely made it to the ford.”

Celebrimbor closed his eyes, fighting despair. He’s lying, he told himself. Thaliel had two Ages of strategy to draw on; Laegon knew the land better than anyone. If anyone could have gotten the last survivors of Ost-in-Edhil safely to Khazad-dûm, it was them. And surely, surely the Dwarf-caverns had not fallen.

“Your quarrel lies with me, not them,” he rasped.

“Quarrel? Nay, say rather my business. It is a simple thing I ask of you, Tyelperinquar. It need not be a source of strife between us. Some part of you knows this. Why else would you remain behind, in this city, in this very room even, if not because you repent of turning away from me? Do you seek some token of my forgiveness in return for the Three? Gladly would I give it. Only name what you want.”

Annatar knelt behind him, his presence a looming radiance that wasn’t quite heat or light, and yet was akin to both. Tenderly he drew Celebrimbor’s hair back and smoothed it over his shoulder, the points of his nails brushing over Celebrimbor’s jugular vein.

“I want you to get rid of that Ring you made.”

Out of the corner of his eye Celebrimbor saw Annatar’s backhand swinging toward his face, too late to brace for it—but Annatar stopped a hairsbreadth from his jawbone. Had the blow landed, Celebrimbor thought it might have broken his neck for good. “You see?” murmured Annatar. “Even now I forbear. Nevertheless, Tyelperinquar, such petty provocations are beneath you.”

Celebrimbor didn’t hear him move, but the manacle around his left wrist began to heat. It clanked open scarcely an instant before it would have started to burn him. Annatar reached past his elbow to catch his freed hand before he could think of moving it.

“Another demonstration, then, and we shall see if you grasp the One Ring’s genius. Even the body of an incarnate being like yourself, damaged past the point of any other means of repair, is not beyond the Ring’s power to remake. Let me show you.” He drew Celebrimbor’s hand back toward him, and then Celebrimbor heard cloth rustle again as some other implement was drawn from his tool set.

The infinitude of primes may be demonstrated by contradiction, he recited to himself, his mind desperate for somewhere to go beyond the terror of waiting, but unable to reach for more than the most basic of proofs. Assume calma represents the largest prime.² Take the product of calma and every lesser prime and add one. The result cannot be divisible by calma or any lesser prime, for as constructed it yields in each case a remainder of one. Therefore it must—

Pain interrupted, and the sound of someone screaming. Eventually it occurred to Celebrimbor that it might be him.

The scrape of the door-hinge behind him brought Celebrimbor back to himself. Annatar had made sure the hinge was kept perfectly oiled after he took over Ost-in-Edhil, so as to deny Celebrimbor any warning when he came through that door. If the hinge still creaked, the worst had not yet come to pass.

Celebrimbor spun around, torc and wire cutters clattering to the table, just in time to see Taugwen shoving her way into the workroom. She made straight for the board with her mathematics on it, sliding his bridge plans aside with hardly a glance at him. Celebrimbor fought to control his breath. Aftershocks of remembered pain trembled through him. Odd, he noted distantly, that memories of events this body had not yet lived through could affect it so profoundly. His fingers drummed as quietly as possible against the table, each tap a tactile reminder of where—when—he was.

“Damn it all,” Taugwen muttered to herself, catching sight of Artalórë’s addition to the problem she had been working on. Then, after some minutes, she said, “Hah!” and wrote: Only if it is infinitely differentiable at every point in the domain. She punctuated it with a stroke of chalk so viciously emphatic as to suggest an unwritten you blithering lackwit. “Still, this does suggest a number of generalizations,” she added, still mostly to herself. “Solids, higher-order sets, provided they locally resemble real space of tinco dimensions… I hate it when they’re right.”

Celebrimbor’s racing heart at last began to settle, Taugwen’s familiar flurry of conjecture and complaint soothing him. Well matched as she and Artalórë were in interests and intelligence, he knew better than to suggest they collaborate more directly. Taugwen had survived both Doriath and Sirion; Artalórë had followed the Fëanorians until the end.

Taugwen huffed a sigh and turned, finally noticing Celebrimbor properly. She blinked. “Are you all right?”

It took him a moment to find his voice. “It is nothing. Only a memory.” He couldn’t read her face well enough to know what she saw on his, but she seemed to take him at his word; many among the Mírdain had memories they held close and did not speak of. It was lucky she’d been the one to find him. Artalórë would have pressed. Taugwen only nodded and changed the subject: “What are you working on?”

Celebrimbor looked down ruefully at the torc and wire cutters, lying askew on a coil of gold wire. “It matters little. I doubt I shall finish it.”

Taugwen shrugged, already turning back to her mathematics. “Faethorn mentioned needing gold for something yesterday. He’ll take the metal, if you do not mind him melting it down.”

“Please,” Celebrimbor said, and fled.

He had a day.

That was, of course, if he had indeed been sent back in time. If his memories were indeed true, and the future before him played out as he remembered it. If he hadn’t already changed things irreparably by saying something different to Taugwen than he had the first time around. He breathed deeply, focusing on the clean scent of the river flowing alongside the footpath he followed.

If only he had more time! Time to work out what had happened to him; time to strategize, research, plan.

Time to untangle the whole mess of Annatar, before he had to face him.

Celebrimbor wasn’t sure he could face him.

What had they been, he and Annatar? Whatever had lain between them loomed in Celebrimbor’s memories like a complex, multidimensional object perceivable only by its projection onto a plane. One projection captured their years of collaboration; more than collaboration. An orthogonal one captured all that Annatar had done in service of Morgoth, and after—the fall of Eregion, Celebrimbor’s own death, the other realms he had destroyed or conquered. It seemed impossible that the same source could produce them both. Must he search every memory of Annatar for signs he had missed, warnings he had ignored? Had it all been a lie from the start?

Was that all Annatar had ever been: a torturer, a deceiver, a tyrant seeking only a world he could control?

And here it was: the problem he kept coming back to. If there was nothing more to Annatar, then what had Celebrimbor grieved for, when he first understood what the Ring had made of his friend? What did it say of him, that after everything, a part of him grieved for it still? This was no syllogism with a tidy theorem at the end, no axiom to set as a foundation, no way to derive a result he could trust as true. Proposition, conclusion; conclusion, contradiction; and all of it unbearable.

Yet how else could he avert the future he knew lay ahead? Annatar would arrive tomorrow, and Celebrimbor would have to be ready.

He tucked his hands into his sleeves, tapping his thumbs rapidly against each fingertip in turn. Back and forth, one-two-three-four, four-three-two-one. It helped less than usual, so he reversed direction on one hand so that the pattern no longer mirrored itself. That required a good deal more concentration, which was better. It diverted the tumultuous churn of his mind enough that he felt less like he was being crushed at the depths of an ocean and more like he was looking at a fluid vector diagram of that ocean’s currents. The same problem, but from enough distance to seem solvable.

Elrond and Gil-galad had turned away the supposed messenger from the West. Even if none of them had known then that the guest at their gates was Morgoth’s most insidious lieutenant—Sauron, Gorthaur, cruel and deceitful, dread sorcerer of Tol-in-Gaurhoth—Celebrimbor had not been so oblivious as to harbor no suspicions. Admitting Annatar into Ost-in-Edhil had not been a folly of total credulity, but a calculated risk, a choice to uphold the Gwaith-i-Mírdain’s founding principles. For hundreds of years it had seemed to pay off a thousand times over. Until it hadn’t. He could nudge their weighing of that choice differently this time. It might be the easiest solution: to simply refuse to admit Annatar into the city, so that he would never have the chance to take advantage of the Mírdain’s craft.

And then what? What was to stop Annatar—Sauron—from departing instead to who knew where to work his malice in secret? Without Ost-in-Edhil’s artisans he might not turn to Ring-craft, but he could no doubt find some other method of achieving the same ends. He might find a worse one. And then he would emerge from obscurity all the stronger, with the element of surprise to aid him.

Better then, perhaps, if Annatar were slain at once, as far as one of his kind could be—but that thought felt like putting weight on a hairline fracture. Celebrimbor's mind shied from it, his breath going shallow as the world seemed to tilt askew. He switched the rhythm of his fingertips from a linear sequence to an oscillating one, one-three-two-four, four-two-three-one. Breathed. Listened to the river, until he could walk forward steadily again.

Perhaps he could send word in secret to his aunt Galadriel, who had not yet left Eregion, and to Gil-galad. Celebrimbor didn’t know the minutiae of the events that had followed his death, but he was at least aware of some of the larger turning points. Had not Gil-galad cast down Sauron once before, even if it had been at the cost of his own life? Surely together, armed with foreknowledge, they could find a way to separate Annatar from his body, or bind and confine him somehow. Surely they could survive doing so. But would such a prison hold? If only Celebrimbor had taken more heed of Vairë’s weavings during his time in the Halls of the Dead! He knew too little of Sauron’s defeats and how they had been accomplished.

And what would he even tell his aunt and his kinsman? ‘The one calling himself Annatar Aulendil is in fact Sauron, which I know because I lived through a whole future that is yet to come, in which I collaborated with him, shared everything with him, and betrayed us all by putting the tools for our destruction into his hands, and then an Age later he too was finally destroyed, and I somehow found myself here’?

They would think him mad. He wasn’t sure they’d be wrong.

Perhaps he’d been mad from the start, and Ost-in-Edhil had always been doomed.

“So you plan to leave Lindon.” The king’s tone betrayed neither censure nor relief.

Here where the Gulf of Lune widened, the craggy escarpments near Harlindon gave way to shifting dunes and wetlands held together by scrubby bunches of sea-grass. The sound of the sea and the smell of salt were ever-present. Shorebirds of all kinds wheeled and darted about. It had been Gil-galad’s decision to leave the wetlands intact rather than expand the city’s harborage, as space for wild creatures and a buffer against storm-borne floods; the memory of Beleriand succumbing to the whelming waves was fresh in all of Lindon's minds. For his own selfish reasons, Celebrimbor was grateful for it. Gil-galad was hard to read at the best of times, and the distraction of bustling fishing docks wouldn’t have helped. At least here, outside the intrigues of the court, he could trust that what Gil-galad said was what he meant, even if he wasn’t saying everything on his mind.

“Yes. The Dwarves of the Hithaeglir have discovered a lode of mithril. There is much to be learned, I think, from their uses of it, and much to be learned from studying the metal itself.” Gil-galad hadn’t phrased his not-quite-question in the manner of a sovereign deciding whether to grant or withhold permission, so Celebrimbor didn’t phrase his own response as though he were seeking it. The matter of fealty was a subject of careful omission between them.

“And much, perhaps, to be gained in trade?”

“That is more your area of expertise than mine.”

At that Gil-galad laughed. “Celebrimbor, I doubt there’s any subject on which you could not develop expertise as soon as you put your mind to it. A year or four of careful study and you would no doubt have a trade network as robust as your uncle Caranthir’s ever was.” Celebrimbor winced, but as awkward of any mention of his family always was, it gave him an opening into his other reasons for leaving. And, your uncle, Gil-galad had called Caranthir; perhaps he would even understand.

They came to the crest of a dune. Gil-galad turned toward the sea, tilting his face into the wind. A small sailing boat was making its way up the gulf. Celebrimbor fixed his gaze on that.

“That’s the other piece of it,” he admitted. “I know it has not been easy, harboring the remnants of the Fëanorians in the midst of your court.” Now that his feet were still, he reached into his pocket for something to occupy his hands instead, pulling out the latest trinket from his forge: a little puzzle of interlocking steel triangles and rods.

“You’re not wrong,” Gil-galad conceded. “But nor has it been easy for you, leading them. Inasmuch as anyone does. Yet we have managed without bloodshed for nigh on seven hundred years. What’s changed?”

“The discovery of the mithril-lode, as I said. But more than that…” Celebrimbor considered his answer carefully, trying to put words to an impulse he doubted Gil-galad shared. “Hearing about it, seeing the examples of what the Dwarves have wrought with it, was like—like a catalyst that renders otherwise inert substances volatile. And the reaction it has set off, now that it has started, feels nearly impossible to stop. I have done no real smithwork since Nargothrond. Nor any real science, for that matter. I’ve been making what we needed to survive, of course, and a bauble here and there, but nothing new. Nothing challenging. Nothing interesting. Yet now I feel the call to craft again, as strong or stronger than ever in my life, in a way I have not in years.” It was a piece of himself he hadn’t even realized needed healing, until it returned. And it was calling other deeply-buried fragments of his spirit back to the surface as well.

“You cannot satisfy it here?”

“I would only be riding off to Khazad-dûm for months at a time, if I tried.”

“So settling in Eregion is two Orcs, one arrow. You fulfill your craving for craft, and you take your fractious followers with you rather than leaving them unsupervised in my court.”

“Them, and anyone else who wishes to come. Mithril is only the start. There is much in Middle-earth we have yet to see. And many peoples from whom we have yet to learn. There should be a place for that. A crossroads of craft and knowledge.”

Gil-galad raised an eyebrow. “That is as much politics as smithwork you’re talking, cousin.”

“I'm no king,” Celebrimbor demurred. “I’m not even a lord, not truly. I have no intention of governing as one.”

“You might have to,” said Gil-galad mildly. “If you plan to establish a whole new realm.”

“Hardly anything so grand. Just a gathering place for seekers of knowledge, welcoming all who come with open mind and good will.”

“And if any come with ill will?”

“By treachery and the fear of treachery would ruin come to us, the Doom said, and so it was. Yet the barring of the way west was lifted, at the last, for those who chose to go. And for us who stayed, is not the remedy to treachery, trust?” For a moment they gazed out in silence together over the placid sea. Losgar rose in Celebrimbor’s mind, and Nargothrond, and the ash and blood they’d fled past in the rout of the Nirnaeth. If the balance of trust had been even a little different, at any one of those moments, would it have been enough to turn the tide? “At least, trust well earned. Any coming to us should at least have the chance to earn it. We have had seven hundred years of peace. We cannot live in the shadow of fear forever.”

The last triangle of the little metal puzzle, which Celebrimbor had been absently fiddling with for a while now, clicked into place. This time both of Gil-galad’s eyebrows shot up as he saw the finished pattern.

“I thought you’d renounced your family.”

Celebrimbor looked down at the rayed, eight-pointed star in his hand. “I renounced my father’s deeds. But they weren’t the whole of the House of Fëanor. They weren’t even the whole of him. And I will not be less than honest about what made me who I am.”

He held up the completed puzzle at arm’s length, out toward the gulf where wide-winged pelicans now skimmed over what had once been Ossiriand, and said, “Middle-earth reclaimed itself from the Shadow. Year by year it does so still. Forever changed by the last Age, yes, but not lost, and so much more than the worst of itself. May not the House of Fëanor do the same? Wasn’t that why we stayed, in hopes that what was sundered might be healed, and what was twisted to evil might be turned again to good?”

“Hm.” Gil-galad clasped his hands behind his back. “Middle-earth is my home. I’ve known no other. You came of age in Aman; you could have gone back.”

Celebrimbor shook his head. “The works of my father’s hands and spirit turned to harm. I meant, and mean, for mine to turn to healing. What need have they of that in the Blessed Lands?”

They were silent for a time. Then Gil-galad said, as though the conversation had never lapsed, “Sort it out with Elrond if you plan to requisition any supplies. We will help as we can.” He waved an easy dismissal, and Celebrimbor bowed and started back toward the raised wooden footpath that led back to Harlindon. That had gone much more smoothly than he’d feared. He was nearly out of earshot when Gil-galad called to him again.

“Cousin!”

Celebrimbor turned.

“It is a worthy aim. I wish Eregion well of you.”

Celebrimbor raised a hand in acknowledgment, and continued on his way.

Trust. It was what they’d founded Eregion on, he and the companions who first followed him from Lindon. That had never changed, even as Ost-in-Edhil rapidly outgrew his early dreams for it. Through trust Eregion had flourished, and through trust ill-bestowed it had fallen.

His feet had carried him, deep in thought, to a place where the path dipped away from the riverbank to skirt close to the wall of the high Star-hall, which housed Ost-in-Edhil’s telescope dome. He paused, looking up toward the dome even though the angle of the wall hid it from view. Annatar’s face took form in his mind as he had last seen it beneath the great telescope: sharp and cruel and withdrawn, all of its usual mobility gone still. Trust betrayed.

No—he couldn’t face that yet.

Maybe, just maybe, he could avoid having to face it at all.

If it was time he needed, well, nearly three hundred years had passed between Annatar’s arrival and the forging of the first Great Rings. Perhaps, with careful planning and a bit of luck, Celebrimbor could divert Annatar away from forging the Rings at all. He could at least come up with some way to warn his cousins. In the meantime, safest to keep Annatar where he could be watched by one who knew the truth of him. Celebrimbor could surely manage that, a path forward based on reasoned caution, not terror. Or unfounded hope.

No matter what it might cost Celebrimbor himself.

He resisted the urge to preempt Annatar’s arrival by waiting in the main Gathering Hall, instead trying to act as though he had no knowledge of the precise hour Annatar would reach the city. He didn’t entirely succeed. Breakfast was out of the question, as was working on the now-abandoned torc, which had occupied this morning in his previous life. Instead he paced his workroom, arms folded, stomach in knots, fingertips drumming a staccato against his upper arms.

Around midmorning Thaliel came to get him. Unlike Taugwen, she had the courtesy to knock, so he had just enough time to uncross his arms and rush to one of the slate boards as though he’d been working rather than fretting.

“We’ve a new arrival,” she said without preamble.

Celebrimbor turned, making a show of dusting nonexistent chalk dust from his hands. He remembered this conversation well enough. Surely he could repeat it without fumbling. “Seeking to study with the Gwaith-i-Mírdain?”

“Seeking to teach the Gwaith-i-Mírdain, or so he says. He gave his name as Annatar.”

“‘Lord of Gifts.’ He must think highly of his skills.” Before, it had been amusing. Now, knowing the uses to which those skills had been put, he couldn’t bring himself to laugh.

“Annatar Aulendil.”

“Aulendil?” He tried to feign surprise.

“An emissary from the Valar, sent to offer counsel and aid. Again, so he says. He wishes to meet the leader of our Brotherhood.” She jerked her head toward the door, and Celebrimbor followed her out of the workroom and down the corridor.

“There is no one leader among the Mírdain.” Was this one of the signs he should have heeded? That Annatar sought to treat with a single ruler, assuming or demanding a hierarchy that the Gwaith-i-Mírdain had deliberately resisted?

“True, but you're the closest we have.”

And the letter from Lindon had come to him alone. Still, he found himself protesting harder than he had before, if only to buy himself more time before he had to face Annatar. So much for not altering the future yet. “Thaliel. We govern by rotating council—which was your idea, if you recall. Faethorn chairs it now. My turn will not come again for another dozen years, and I confess myself glad of the respite. Even if we set aside the council and consider who truly handles most of the daily logistics of running the city, you are a clearer candidate than any of us.”

“And I can't be the face of the Mírdain, Tyelpë, you know that. Especially not to a messenger of the Lords of the West.” She was right, as she usually was when it came to matters of governance. More than four centuries as Maedhros’ seneschal in Himring and, later, Amon Ereb had given her unparalleled experience in managing people and supplies. It also disqualified her from any prominent public role in the administration of Eregion, where far more of the populace hailed from Gondolin and Nargothond, Doriath and the Falas, than had followed the Sons of Fëanor. “This city was your idea, and it is your name folk in other realms think of when they must guess who leads it. Annatar is no exception. He asked for you.”

As he wrestled for a response, memory rose up.

“Thaliel. Artalórë. Eärion. A moment, if you would.”

The three of them stayed behind as the rest left. Many of those who had been wearing a Ring of Power at the moment Sauron donned the One Ring leaned heavily on others, not yet recovered enough to fully bear their own weight. By Thaliel’s grim face, he could tell she guessed why he had kept them back.

“We will face a siege soon,” he said. “We have a little time to prepare, but I would not bank on more than a handful of years. If I know him, he will fall hardest upon Eregion when he comes. I have hope of aid from Lindon, and from Númenor, but I cannot be sure how much they can spare, or how much time it will take. You three had the greatest hand of any here in holding Himring through siege. How long can we hold out?”

“We will need to know the city’s population counts from the last census along with the range of error estimates, and how many of those have the skill to fight,” Eärion said. “And the same for the surrounding lands. I’ll talk to Faelir about supplies. We are provisioned for three bad harvests, four at a stretch, but we will need much more to prepare the city for a siege.”

“Tread carefully with him,” Thaliel said. “He will do his utmost to help, but he doesn't always tell you what it costs him to look back on those days.”

“I know,” said Eärion. “I will. Tyelpë, we must ascertain how many will shelter here rather than seek safety elsewhere.”

“I doubt anywhere will be wholly safe,” Celebrimbor said. “But I think we will see battle before Lindon does. Lórinand is likely to be safest, for it has protection in the arts of my aunt, who studied with Melian behind the Girdle. That will be no easy realm for Sauron to penetrate. I will find out how many they think they can harbor, and let us put out the word so that those who wish to evacuate can do so.”

Thaliel frowned. “Does that not risk panic? And a mass exodus, as soon as folk see others leaving?”

“We can put whatever efforts we can spare into coordinating orderly departures,” Celebrimbor conceded. “But we cannot deny our people information they have a right to know, even temporarily, and I would not keep anyone here unwilling.”

“What about those who may wish to enter Ost-in-Edhil?” asked Artalórë, their voice as steady as ever. “Some in the surrounding towns may join the muster, or seek shelter here rather than flee Eregion. Yet we do not have unlimited space, and as Sauron draws nearer, there is an ever greater risk that we will admit one of his agents into our midst.”

Thaliel, her gaze very distant, said, “Himring barred its gates eventually, even against those who had been with us from the start, if we could not be sure. There was a scouting party that went missing, near the end of the Bragollach. They returned a week after we had expected them, and their account of the delay had too many uncertainties to trust…. Tirinwë was among them. They’ve never said, even to this day, whether the Shadow already lay upon them on that day when we shut them out, or whether it was our refusal that led to their capture and thralldom. I have wondered ever since if they might have been spared if we had been kinder.”

“They might have been,” Artalórë agreed, matter-of-fact in a way that suggested this was not the first time they had coaxed Thaliel out of this particular line of thought. “Or we might have woken one day to find that our chief healer had slit the throats of everyone in the infirmary under their care.”

All at once the terrible choices ahead loomed clear in Celebrimbor’s mind, a decision tree that was less a tree than an invasive strangling vine, sending its runners scuttling forward to choke out all other growth. It felt like defeat without a single blow struck: to shut his realm, whose founding principle was openness, against its own citizens out of fear and mistrust. He thought of Nargothrond, which might have survived had it not accepted Curufin and Celegorm when Himlad burned; of Doriath, which had fenced itself against attack and fallen anyway. He thought of Annatar twirling a piece of chalk between long fingers—Consider a closed set, Annatar was saying, that may be formed by taking the union of an open set with its well-defined boundary—and he thought he might be sick. Carefully he breathed through the nausea until it passed.

“We are hardly built for a blockade in any case,” Eärion pointed out.

Thaliel was nodding grimly. “That is the piece we should have reckoned with first. You asked us of Himring, Celebrimbor, but Himring was designed from the beginning to endure a long assault. It was chosen for that; that and its closeness to Angband. High ground, bedrock strong enough for thick walls, and groundwater accessible through deep wells. Many thought it a grim and forbidding place, and they weren't wrong. That was why it held. Ost-in-Edhil, however…”

“You need not say it. We are built for open access and free travel, and we have made a point of walling none out. We’re exposed on all sides. An Elvenfort that is anything but a fortress. Call it folly if you wish. No need to spare my feelings.”

“Blame serves no purpose, now,” Thaliel replied, but she did not gainsay him.

Eärion broke in, softly, “In every battle, we make sure to avert the errors of the last. It is the same principle in the innovation of craft, is it not, even if the stakes are lower there? We will inevitably make mistakes, but we try not to make the same ones twice. Failure of trust, and betrayal of it, was the downfall of your father, and of our own chosen liege-lord. To make trust the foundation of your own realm was a risk, aye, but I would deem it a worthy one. Not folly, my lord.”

In the face of what he knew was coming, that was scant comfort, and Celebrimbor huffed a bitter laugh. “No need to call me lord, either. A poor one I would make, anyhow, when I have thus put all of you at risk.”

“This city is the work of your will and your hand, your mind and your skill. With it, you gave me a home when I thought no part of Arda would harbor me. You need not have taken us in, thrice-damned kinslayers as we are, yet you did. You will lead Eregion now through whatever may come. That makes you my lord, whether you seek my fealty or not. What risk we face in the time to come, we will face together.”

“Eärion has the right of it,” said Artalórë. “Or did you not notice how, throughout this discussion, we have all been putting our questions to you and abiding by your answers? We are with you.” Pointedly, they added, “My lord.”

Thaliel said nothing, but she met his eyes steadily and touched her fingertips to her forehead and then to her breastbone, a gesture of fealty hearkening back to the Great Journey, and one he had last seen her offer to his eldest uncle. In the way of the folk of Himring, she made it with her left hand instead of her right.

When Celebrimbor could speak again past the tightness in his throat, he said, “Together, then.” He drew in a deep breath and let it out, passing a hand over his face. “Very well, this is my will: the time may yet come when we must turn away those who come to us for succor, but not yet. Not for as long as we can avoid it.”

Celebrimbor forced himself to keep walking through the remembered grief, gripping the textured hems of his over-robe's sleeves in shaking fists. He would not convince Thaliel that he was not Ost-in-Edhil’s liege-lord before they reached the Gathering Hall. But perhaps he could prevent the war that would force him into that role in truth; better to focus on that. Sidestepping the argument, he asked, “What do you think of him?”

“I’m not sure yet. He draws the eye; it was as hard to look away as it was to see much of anything past the glitter. A compelling presence, and I tend to mislike compulsion.” She cast Celebrimbor a sidelong glance and shrugged. “But I’ve met Maiar who are simply… like that. I think some of them scarcely realize the effect they have on incarnate beings. If it is by deliberate design, though, that is a different matter.”

Celebrimbor hesitated. He’d told a few of those closest to him about the letter from Lindon, before, including Thaliel. Now he wasn’t sure if he trusted himself not to give too much away. But did he not owe it to his people not to withhold information? Bad enough he was already sitting on centuries of foreknowledge he couldn’t yet bring himself to confess. Perhaps nudging his colleagues toward just a little more vigilance would be enough. “He went to the king in Lindon first,” he said. “I had a letter yesterday. Gil-galad turned him away. Apparently Lindon shared your misgivings.”

“Interesting. If by ‘Lindon’ you mean Gil-galad, that surprises me little. He has hardly outlasted his predecessors by as long as this through being reckless. He would err on the side of caution. But if it was Elrond’s decision, then I deem it more likely to stem from some unease he sensed directly from this Annatar. Elrond ever saw more than he said out loud.” Her tone was fond, if a little rueful. “Even as a child.”

“I know not which of them had the greater say in it,” said Celebrimbor, who had always felt it vaguely incumbent upon him to apologize to Elrond for a great many things his family had done, but had never quite figured out how to do so without causing even greater offense. His interactions with Gil-galad’s herald had always been awkward as a result. He had realized too late that it had not been an apology Elrond was looking for; it occurred to him that this might be one thing he could remedy, this time around. “The letter was in Elrond’s hand, but it bore the king’s initial. It could have been either, or both.”

“You wouldn’t have to guess if we appointed a spymaster,” Thaliel pointed out.

“That is a matter for the council I am not currently on.” It was a long-running disagreement between them, and he let himself settle into the well-worn argument as they emerged into a broad courtyard where the pathways criss-crossed among stands of holly. Across it stood the Gathering Hall. Three or four others were hurrying that way; it seemed news of Annatar’s arrival had spread quickly. “But if it were up to me, I would not do our neighbors the discourtesy of assuming such ill of them.”

“That is precisely the point of having a spymaster: so that you know, and need not assume one way or another.”

“Why learn by subterfuge what we could just as easily find out by asking?”

“There are plenty of things it's useful to know but impolitic to ask. And for the rest, it would still save our couriers the extra trip. I’m fairly certain Gil-galad has someone posted here for that very purpose.” With only a faint hint of moroseness, she added, “If I had to guess, my money would be on Ruillas. I doubt she would be anywhere near me if it weren’t an assignment.” Ruillas, originally of the Mithrim Sindar and a skilled maker of musical instruments and glassware, was—or had been—Thaliel’s wife. But she had refused to fight at Doriath and had once and for all deserted the Fëanorians, and by extension Thaliel, just before Sirion. The two of them hadn’t spoken since then.

Thaliel didn’t wait for the words of comfort Celebrimbor was struggling to find in any case; she was never one to dwell openly on her wounds. “Anyhow, it’s not about whether the information speaks well or ill of them. It’s about not letting anyone else control how much information you have. I would have thought you of all people would understand that, considering you value empirics more than anyone else I know.”

A spymaster in Lindon would not have averted our fate, Celebrimbor didn’t say, not when the seeds of Eregion’s destruction lay in Annatar and me, and we were here the whole time.

“You’re sure Annatar Aulendil is in fact one of the Ainur?” he asked, redirecting the conversation back to its original purpose.

“Of that there is no doubt,” Thaliel replied. “Which to my mind leaves three possibilities. First, that he is in fact who he says he is. The safest option, I deem. Not necessarily the simplest, for it raises a great many questions about the Valar’s plans.” She had never quite lost her Fëanorian distrust of the meddling of the Powers. “Second, that he came with the host from Aman at the end of the last Age, and has been in Middle-earth since the War of Wrath. But then why claim otherwise? Especially among those of us who chose to stay, who understand that choice better than anyone. It makes little sense. Third… third is that he served a different Power.”

Celebrimbor was glad he hadn’t had to be the one to say it.

“Which in turn raises the question of how, and how long, and whether he repented of it, and what he now intends,” interjected another voice just behind him, accompanied by the faint tap and scrape of a cane along the ground.

Thaliel and Celebrimbor stepped to the side, making space for the newcomer to walk abreast with them. Faelir was ruddy and broad-shouldered, and he wore a wool cloak even in the warmth of the approaching summer. In Lindon he had almost always kept the hood up to mask the scars that mottled his face from brow-line to cheekbones, but in Ost-in-Edhil he had started to leave it thrown back, and walk with his face upturned to the sun. He nodded in Thaliel's direction a bit apologetically. “I did not mean to eavesdrop. But you speak of our new guest, yes?”

“Annatar Aulendil,” Celebrimbor confirmed. He hesitated, then asked a question he hadn’t before. “Do you think you would recognize him, if he had been a follower of Morgoth?” Faelir had given no sign that he did, before, though he’d never been entirely at ease around Annatar either. Maybe that was another sign Celebrimbor ought to have heeded. He had no wish to dredge up unpleasant memories for Faelir, but… just a little more vigilance this time, he had promised himself. If Faelir could pinpoint the source of his unease, it would be a reason to send word to Lindon that didn’t require any mention of being yanked around in time.

“Perhaps. I cannot say. Certainly not by sight,” Faelir added wryly, “but I doubt he would wear the same form anyhow. I may even have an advantage there; I hear he’s quite distracting to the eye. But I was only in Angband from the end of the Nirnaeth—”

“That was long enough,” Thaliel muttered. Faelir continued as though she hadn't spoken.

“—and much of the complex was barred to us. There were some I came to recognize by voice or gait or other sign after they blinded me, but my memories of that time are not entirely reliable. Even if I did recognize him, would it necessarily decide the matter? There were Maiar there who by the time of my capture were nearly as much thralls as I, even if they followed the Enemy willingly at first. Such a one might be sincere in offering knowledge as recompense.”

“And certainly would not be the only one here with a past they were less than proud of,” Thaliel added quietly. “I’m not sure I would blame him for concocting a more palatable one, if it were so.”

“Nor I,” Faelir replied. “Yet neither am I sure I could stomach admitting him to our Brotherhood.”

Sauron had repented, Celebrimbor remembered suddenly as he and his companions walked through the arched entryway of the Gathering Hall. Or at least he had seemed to. Celebrimbor had been more preoccupied with finding the freed thralls who had served his uncles, Faelir among them, but he remembered seeing, from a distance, a Maiarin figure kneeling before Eönwë. No judgment can I give, Eönwë’s voice had boomed out. It is our Lords in the West you must face to know your fate.

Celebrimbor hadn’t seen what happened to Sauron after that. Hadn’t seen him again until—

Until this moment, now. He was out of time for any more strategy or delay; no sooner had Faelir finished speaking than they were passing through the propped-open doors of the Gathering Hall.

And there was Annatar.

He had gathered an audience already, more than two dozen of the Gwaith-i-Mírdain’s members and a handful of visitors circling him like a disc of dust pulled into orbit around a star. The power of his presence was unmistakable. Taugwen was in the crowd, not seeming to notice or care that she stood barely an arm’s length from Artalórë. Even Laegon, who preferred the company of fungi to any speaking creatures, hadn’t been able to stay away.

Annatar seemed as luminous as a star, too, with a radiance that somehow surpassed the colors visible to the eye. He was clad in the vivid red of holly berries, with a tessellation of dark green leaves embroidered onto the sleeves and hems of his robes. A fine network of golden chains lay over his hair, woven into a segmented spiraling pattern; even at this distance, Celebrimbor recognized it as a visual representation of Nirwë’s Sequence of two-term sums.³

Had Annatar always been so bright?

No, Celebrimbor remembered with a pang. After the forging of the One Ring, into which Annatar had siphoned so much of himself, the fana he’d worn had dimmed. Even the unseen radiance of his ëala, though it grew sharper and more fearsome, was colder, more brittle somehow. Celebrimbor’s last memories of him were murky with pain. But he had known, in the moments of clarity when the pain occasionally ebbed, a keen grief at that diminishment.

Yet here was Annatar whole again, unsundered from himself.

Celebrimbor felt a sudden, fierce clenching behind his sternum. That Annatar could have believed the Ring to be worth destroying this!

As if sensing his attention, Annatar looked up. Like the matched poles of two pieces of fornang,⁴ unerringly their gazes found each other.

Looking into anyone else’s eyes for too long always carried an uncomfortable intensity; Celembrimbor usually found himself uneasily reminded of his father’s exacting glare. But looking into Annatar’s was easy, like looking at the flames of a forgefire, or a waterfall, or molten gold swirling in the crucible. Their color ever seemed to shift, the movements halfway between pattern and chaos. Suddenly Celebrimbor understood how Thingol could have forgotten his people, his plans, his very self upon meeting Melian’s gaze in the forests of Nan Elmoth.

Had it been thus, at their first meeting in Ost-in-Edhil in his first life? Or was it the burden of the past they had shared, and the future he must find a way to avert, that gave this moment its weight?

He couldn’t tell. He couldn’t even seem to move—which was probably for the best, as he hardly knew whether he would have dashed across the room to embrace Annatar or turned to flee. For what felt like an eternity, Annatar was still as well, a constant inflection point around which the rest of the room oscillated. Then at last he spoke.

“Curufinwë Tyelperinquar, unless I miss my guess.” His eyes narrowed in satisfaction like a contented cat’s, and his lips curved in the slight arc Celebrimbor recognized as the widest smile he ever permitted himself. As though he had not just overturned Celebrimbor’s heart with the sound of his own name from those particular lips, in that particular tone of barely-veiled delight, Annatar added, “I seldom miss my guess.”

That was enough to break Celebrimbor from his stupor. “Hardly a guess, when you requested my presence yourself, and saw who went to fetch me!” he retorted. “A trivial deduction at best.”

Something flashed in Annatar’s eyes, a particular mix of pleasure and challenge, familiar and beloved. Or it had been, once. Celebrimbor had not thought he would ever see it again. “Then let me offer a better one. I count around me twenty master smiths, eighteen gemcutters, a dozen masons and as many master weavers, fifteen woodcarvers of unparalleled skill, nine mathematicians, seven who study transformations of matter, ten linguists, five botanists, or rather six now,” he amended with a nod toward Thaliel, “and one master of mycelial lore. I have come, I think, to the right place.”

Celebrimbor surprised himself by laughing, even as he knew what a perilous path it was to let himself slip back into the old manner of his interactions with Annatar; he couldn’t help it. Here, face to face with Annatar, he no longer felt the churning dread of the morning, only exhilaration. “We are glad to hear it! Yet that is one hundred and eight loremasters you have listed, and there are fewer than thirty here. A pretty puzzle it might make, if you had not already collected the answers: the number of metalsmiths who work also in gemstones is double the number with mastery in wood; there are as many chemists who are also botanists as there are linguists who are also mathematicians; the tally of us who follow at least four disciplines is a perfect square; and so on. We could set it as a test for those seeking to join our Brotherhood.”

“Too easy. Set the meta-question: the smallest number of parameters needed to fully specify who studies what, and a proof that it cannot be done with fewer.”

At Celebrimbor’s elbow, Thaliel muttered, “Did he just get brighter?”

Annatar had, Celebrimbor realized.

It hit him then: this was Annatar showing off. He was reminded, absurdly, of Ost-in-Edhil’s pigeons, strutting around in springtime with their neck plumage fluffed up. Had Annatar gone this far out of his way to try to impress them, before? Or had Celebrimbor simply been too awed to notice what was, after their hundreds of years of friendship, utterly obvious now?

Worst of all was that he found the image of Annatar as a pompous pigeon oddly endearing.

Opposite Thaliel, Faelir was tapping an irregular rhythm on the knob of his cane, in the simple code he had devised to communicate without speaking aloud. Celebrimbor had at first found it unwieldy compared to ósanwë, but as Faelir wasn’t the only one no longer comfortable opening himself to mind-to-mind speech, he had quickly recognized its utility. Not one I know, Faelir tapped. If from Angband, none that I met, or too changed to recognize.

Celebrimbor gave two quick taps against his own wrist cuff, message received, as he said with asperity to Annatar, “Think not that it has escaped my notice that you propose, as the test of admission, a problem you no doubt have already solved. But whether you have come to the right place depends on what you seek.”

“Knowledge,” said Annatar at once, “and to share mine. Greater than the craft-caverns of Doriath and the forges of Gondolin, it is said, are the workshops of the Gwaith-i-Mírdain in the Elvenfort of Eregion. Yet I say, seeing them now, that nigh even unto the smithies and salons of Aulë’s mansions in the Undying Lands are the labors of this Brotherhood in greatness. With the aid of one who has studied in those very mansions, who is to say you may not yet surpass them?”

Similar words had thrilled Celebrimbor when this meeting had taken place in his first life. Now they made him uneasy. “We delight in the seeking of knowledge and the practice of craft, yes, but we have no wish to usurp the Valar, or hold dominion as overlords here,” he said carefully, watching his erstwhile friend.

Annatar’s expression did not flicker at all. “That is well, for they will not come to these lands again, and so there is naught in any case to usurp. There is only what you make of the home you have chosen, now that you and that home both enjoy the freedom that was so dearly bought. Yet the Lords of the West do not entirely forget these lands they once loved well, nor the Children who remain on these shores. Many years did it take me to prevail upon Aulë whom I served to permit me to journey hither. But permit it he did, and I am here. Make what use of me you will. To you, my thought is open!”⁵

“To us alone? What of Lindon? We had word you went there first.”

“I came from across the sea; do you wonder then that of all the Elven realms I might visit, I came first to the one that has a harbor? But hold, I have a letter of introduction from the king.” He reached into one sweeping sleeve and drew out a neatly folded missive with two elegant fingers. Celebrimbor took it and turned it over in his hand. The seal was intact and showed no sign of tampering, but that signified little. “Much profit might Lindon have gained of me, but it is here, I deem, that my arts may be put to better use.”

This letter was in Gil-galad’s own hand, and suitably courteous, but short and to the point. There was nothing in it to hint at any misgiving. Celebrimbor had known there wouldn’t be. He hesitated a moment. Already in half a dozen ways he had diverted from the script of his first life, even just in this conversation, but what he thought to say now would be a greater risk than those. Yet following the same steps he had trodden last time around would only bring about the same devastation. At least this time he would not repeat his old mistakes, though that was cold comfort when the new ones he might be making could easily prove to be just as dire. Careful to keep his voice steady, he said, “My information from Lindon was that they turned you away, not that you chose us over them.”

Was that hesitation, from Annatar? Or perhaps Celebrimbor was only imagining what he expected to see. When Annatar spoke, his inflection was smooth as ever, with no sign of rancor or affront. “Ereinion Gil-galad has learned too well the lessons of the First Age; he fears the battles his predecessors faced, and so calculates his actions to prevent them. But the insight to be drawn from that time is limited. Beleriand was under constant siege, trade and travel were restricted, and even in years of peace your people could not help but govern for the threat of war. He has learned distrust as a strategic necessity. I grudge him not the lesson, but I hope you at least have been brave enough to unlearn it. With less thought devoted to fighting the battles of the past, how much more may be given to the creation of a new future? What does it matter if I chose Ost-in-Edhil before I left Lindon, or because of it? I choose you freely now. Let me work with you for a time, and see what we might build together. If in the end your caution outweighs your creativity, so be it; I will go, and carry no grudge. But we are in a new era now, are we not? An era of hope and freedom, of learning and making. Let us lift ourselves out of the murk! Much is possible that was unthinkable before.”

Looking at the rapt faces of his friends and colleagues, Celebrimbor knew that Annatar’s words had moved them. They had moved him too, even though he knew how they would ultimately prove false. And Annatar’s request was only what Ost-in-Edhil claimed to offer any who came to its gates. There is no perfect decision except with perfect hindsight, came the memory of his father’s voice in his mind. Do your utmost ahead of time to collect the knowledge you need to make your choice as well-informed as possible, but once you have made it, commit to it and look not back, whatever the consequences may be. Indecision will serve you ill; regret will serve you worse.

It turns out there is no perfect decision even with perfect hindsight, Atar, though my regrets may yet be of use; but I will heed you at least in holding to my choice.

He summoned a smile and extended his hands. “Then be welcome here, Annatar Aulendil,” he said, and hoped he hadn’t doomed them all anew.

¹ Anga: The tengwar letter denoting the [g] sound in the mode of Sindarin used in Beleriand.

² Calma: The tengwar letter denoting the [k] sound in both Quenya and Beleriand Sindarin, here used as a mathematical variable. I have assumed that Elven mathematicians of the Second Age, like human ones of the Seventh, follow the convention of using letters to denote variables. I have guessed at a secondary convention of using letters in the first tyellë, or row, of the tengwar to represent discrete variables, while letters in the third tyellë represent continuous ones. The choice was mostly arbitrary. To the extent there is a reasoned justification for it, it's that the first tyellë consists of voiceless stop consonants in the Quenya mode, which create a discrete break in airflow when uttered, while the third tyellë in the same mode consists of fricatives, which maintain continuous airflow.

³ What we would recognize as the Fibonacci Sequence.

⁴ Fornang: Sindarin, ‘north-iron’ (i.e., ‘magnet’). Despite the frequent references to iron in the Legendarium, and the number of prominent characters who are metalsmiths of some sort, I could find no gloss from Tolkien for ‘magnet’ in any Elvish language (if someone knows of one, I will gladly be corrected). Fornang is my own speculative coinage, and rests on the additional speculation that pre-roundworld Arda has not only a magnetic field but specifically one oriented north-south. However, given that I've elsewhere speculated about pre-Sun auroras, this is hardly my most egregious leap of conjecture.

⁵ This is, of course, an oblique homage to the mathematician Paul Erdös, who was reputed to arrive at colleagues’ offices or residences and announce himself with, “My brain is open!” Considering that this story's misquote of his famous catchphrase has landed in Annatar's mouth, I should note that Erdös managed to be just as prolific at mathematics while completely eschewing all the torture and conquest. (You see, Annatar? It is in fact possible.)

Chapter Text

They offered him an airy suite of rooms overlooking the river, the same ones he had taken in his last life. This time Annatar refused them. Instead he requested, and got, rooms in the same wing of the same hall as Celebrimbor’s.

Eredwen, the Elf currently tasked with assigning and keeping track of the Mírdain’s living quarters, shrugged at his choice. “These are much smaller,” she said, “but if you’re sure, you are welcome to them.”

No doubt his request was at odds with the glittering display he’d put on in the Gathering Hall, but this was a matter of strategy, not humility. The closer he was to Celebrimbor’s workspace, the more opportunity he would have to start planting the seeds of Ring-craft. It ought to go much faster this time, since Annatar himself had the benefit of hundreds of years of research he’d had to build from first principles before.

“I am sure,” he said.

“Very well. If there is aught else you require, please, ask. We weren’t sure what one of your kind would want or need.”

He recalled Eredwen well enough. A quick mind, though she wasted it on training horses rather than anything more innovative, and a shrewd battle tactician. She had become quite the thorn in his side when his armies came to take Eregion. But with the Ring, he could craft more and deadlier flying creatures than he ever could have made without it—and even the best cavalry could not forever evade assault from above. This time, of course, he would have Celebrimbor’s unbroken loyalty, and would not need to spend his armies on Ost-in-Edhil. Still, the memory of two vicious winged beasts dragging Eredwen screaming from the saddle brought him a small smile of satisfaction.

He didn’t bother to conceal it. Let her think him merely pleased with his lodgings. “This will suffice.”

She sketched a bow and departed. Finally alone, Annatar set out at once in search of Celebrimbor. He wasn’t in his usual large workroom, the first place Annatar looked. His smaller, private one proved empty too, when Annatar opened his senses to any movement of hand or mind behind its door. He made his way through the whole corridor, and then the whole building, and then out into the courtyard. From the laboratories and workrooms he passed on the way came many eager calls for him to join those inside, but he ignored them all.

He found Celebrimbor at last in the Gallery of Elbereth, a large, circular chamber adjacent to the Star Hall’s telescope dome. The Mírdain had inlaid its polished-wood floor with glittering gems to make a star-map of the midwinter night sky. A corresponding map for midsummer was set into the high ceiling above. Halfway between them, a curved mezzanine ran around the perimeter of the room. Celebrimbor stood upon it, deep in conversation with two other Elves. One of them, whose long red hair was braided severely back from her face, was pointing down at a spot on the floor. Celebrimbor was looking more at it than at her, but even from the threshold Annatar could sense how intensely focused he was on what she was saying.

He swept into the room. At once, although his footfalls made no sound, that keen attention turned toward him. His efforts were paying off, if Celebrimbor was already so attuned to his presence. What a waste it had been, when that exquisite focus had bent at the last to defiance above all else!

“Annatar! There you are!” Celebrimbor said, as though he were the one who’d had to go looking. He tilted his chin toward his companions. “Ruillas and Calenos had some ideas, inspired by your Nirwe’s Sequence hair ornament, and some questions. Perhaps you might have answers.”

“Reminded, not inspired,” retorted Ruillas. “The problem is not newly posed, only of revived interest. We may not have the skills of the Ainur, but we are not wholly dependent on the West for ideas.”

Her eyes lacked the glow of Treelight, and she spoke as one determined to prove herself the equal of any Amanyar Elf in knowledge and skill. That was the sort of pride Annatar could well use. Even so, it was at Celebrimbor he looked as he answered, “It would hardly avail me to come here if you were. You are not the only ones who stand to gain from our collaboration. I do as well; more, so too does the whole of Middle-earth.”

“I for one did find your chain-work inspiring,” the third of their trio—Calenos—put in with a grin. “I would not refuse a demonstration of how you drew the wire so finely. Almost as thin as thread the chains were, with no visible welding to the links. There is some secret technique there, and I would know it.” He was dark of skin and golden of hair, with bright green eyes that ought to have been his most distinctive feature. But his sleeveless tunic left uncovered a long, ragged scar down the length of his upper right arm, and it was by this that Annatar remembered him. One of his own wolves had put that scar there, as Calenos fled Tol-in-Gaurhoth with Orodreth and the rest of his followers. He’d fled Ost-in-Edhil the same way an Age later. Annatar had made sure to give him a matching scar on the other arm. It was small enough punishment for abandoning Celebrimbor, whom he should have served to the end.

“Focus, Calenos!” Ruillas swatted him lightly on the shoulder.

“Ai, see how she attacks me, Tyelpë!” cried Calenos, making a show of clutching at the spot where she’d hit him. “And too, when it is hardly my focus that’s the limiting factor!”

Ruillas rolled her eyes. Annatar found himself catching Celebrimbor’s. They held a look of fond commiseration, as though Celebrimbor expected Annatar to share both his amusement and his exasperation at his colleagues’ antics. And perhaps he was right to expect it, for Annatar found himself raising a sardonic eyebrow and earning a quick twitch of Celebrimbor’s lips in response.

“Several celestial bodies approximate the spiral pattern Nirwe’s Sequence generates,” Celebrimbor explained, before the others’ bickering could devolve further.

Ruillas jumped in at once. “There’s the well-known one near Wilwarin, which might be the easiest to spot.” She gestured again at the patch of floor she had been pointing to before. “But that one in the Valacirca is of equal or greater interest, as it is oriented toward Arda face-on and offers a clearer view of its structure. It has some interesting asymmetries.”¹

“We can get to the asymmetries after we explain the enduring stability of the spiral arms,” protested Calenos. “If they are made of matter, why do they not wrap in toward the center of the structure over time, as they ought to unless the outer ends of the arms move much faster than the inner? We know of nothing that would cause such a difference in speed.”²

“Ost-in-Edhil has perhaps the best telescope on this side of the Sea,” said Celebrimbor, with a hint of pride in his voice that said there was no perhaps about it. It was not vanity; Celebrimbor wasn’t vain. It was more the quiet satisfaction he had always taken in a piece of work well done. “But even ours lacks the resolution to make out the details that might explain these more mysterious of Elbereth’s creations. We hoped you might have some suggestions.”

Why the Eldar always gave Varda so much credit for simply scattering a load of dust into the skies and setting it spinning, Annatar would never understand. But he kept any hint of contempt from his voice as he replied, “As to the construction of your telescopes, or as to explanations for the structure of celestial bodies?”

“Either. Both!” said Celebrimbor, smiling. “Ruillas is skilled in glasswork and can implement any recommendations on the design of our lenses. Yet there is surely much to learn about the skies that even the mightiest of telescopes can’t tell us. Perhaps you can.” In the face of such unguarded excitement, Annatar’s irritation could hardly persist. He made his way up the staircase to the mezzanine—exactly sixteen steps, just as he remembered—stopping a little way from the trio of Elves, where an archway opened onto a raised footbridge. At the bridge’s other end rose the Star Hall’s soaring dome.

“I shall gladly examine your telescope. You might in turn consider: fish in the river may crowd together as the banks narrow, but that is due to a property of the river, not of the fish.”³

“How is that supposed to help?” Calenos said, throwing his hands up. “You probably saw the stars’ creation, o Lord of Gifts. Can you not make a gift of just a little more to go on?”

Annatar merely tilted his head. He was hardly going to divulge all of his knowledge wholesale, when the process of discovery was more than half the point. Where would be the fun in that?

“Come now, Calenos,” said Celebrimbor mildly, casting an amused glance at Annatar. And ah, there was that familiar eagerness, and beneath it an equally familiar hint of mischief, as if he were already coming to relish the puzzles of Annatar’s piecemeal tidbits of information. “Where would be the fun in that?”

Annatar blinked, then interposed swiftly, “To the telescope, then.” Someone had to keep them on task. For a moment he considered offering Celebrimbor his hand—but no. It was too soon. He turned the movement into a sweeping gesture at the archway behind him. “Lead the way.”

Several hours later saw him descending from the dome with Celebrimbor and the other two. There was a staircase that would have been quicker, but Celebrimbor opted instead for the gently sloping walkway that wound around the inside of the dome tower. “I have been thinking in spirals for the better part of the day,” he said. “My feet will not be satisfied until we walk one.” He, Ruillas, and Calenos all had several notes in hand, scrawled with promising modifications they planned to make to the lenses in the coming months and some new hypotheses about the motion of stars. Annatar hadn’t bothered to take any; he needed none. The lessons he had taken from the afternoon’s efforts had little to do with star-science.

He must be careful from now on. One of Celebrimbor’s greatest strengths was the quickness with which his mind latched onto new ideas. But it meant Annatar would have to be all the more cautious about influencing his research. He had expected to have his counsel sought for the gold- and mithril-smithing that had been Celebrimbor’s obsession at the time of his arrival here in his first life. Instead, it seemed that the motion of galaxies was to be the project of the hour—and because of nothing more than a hair ornament! If that was all it took to so thoroughly shift the direction of Celebrimbor’s thought, Annatar’s influence was even greater than he had surmised.

Not a bad thing, necessarily. It boded well for his chances of changing the course of the future. And starting with celestial mechanics instead of metalwork would hardly stop him from guiding the Mírdain to Ring-craft eventually; a Ring’s physical substrate did not necessarily have to come before an understanding of the many forces it channeled. It would likely take longer, though. The changes he had seeded in their first conversation, which he’d thought small enough, now seemed more significant. Like altering a single cell’s starting condition in a vast iterative array, where every cell’s state depended on its neighbors, one small difference had swiftly cascaded into much larger ones for Celebrimbor and Ost-in-Edhil as a whole. And he misliked that this change was one he hadn't predicted.

At the base of the dome tower, Calenos split off from the group. Turning down a forking path with a cheery wave, he announced, “I shall leave you here. I told Faelir I would meet him for supper. But I’ll be back at the telescope later tonight, when it’s properly dark, if any of you wish to join me. Many thanks, my lord Annatar.” Ruillas watched him patting at his cloud of bright hair and straightening the drape of his tunic as he went, and snorted.

“I don’t know why he bothers so with his appearance,” she said as they resumed walking. “Faelir of all people is hardly going to be impressed with looks.”

“Perhaps it is merely a matter of raising his own self-confidence,” suggested Celebrimbor.

Annatar glanced at Calenos’ retreating figure and then back at Celebrimbor. “That one, it seems to me, lacks not for self-confidence.”

“Have a care, Celebrimbor!” cried Ruillas, laughing aloud. “If your Maia here makes such a quick study of all of us, we shall soon have no secrets left!”

“He is not my Maia,” Celebrimbor retorted dryly, though Annatar could hear that his heartbeat sped up, just a little. Intriguing. “Maybe impressing Faelir is the one arena where Calenos doubts his abilities. Faelir guards his thoughts well. Small wonder if Calenos is uncertain of his reception.”

“Then he should just come right out and ask,” Ruillas said.

Celebrimbor laughed, shaking out his sleeves so that he could tuck his hands into them. Had the evening air cooled so much already? Annatar’s own fana had scarcely registered it. “I don’t disagree, but I shall not be the one to counsel him on his methods of courtship. I am hardly qualified to do so.” Celebrimbor’s gaze flickered for a brief moment, not quite in Annatar’s direction. Annatar made sure to give no sign that he had noticed. “You may, if you dare.”

Ruillas’ mouth twisted, her demeanor souring at once, and she said with sudden bitterness, “Am I any better qualified?”

“Ai, Ruillas—”

“You meant no harm, I know.”

“Still, I should have spoken more carefully.”

Ruillas exhaled hard through her nose. “No matter. You’re not to blame for my wife’s deeds. And I should be slower to take offense at every chance remark. Or must you scrutinize each word you say to me with your strongest loupe before uttering it?” She sighed, then summoned a smile. “I shall bid you both a good evening. Annatar, you have my thanks for your suggestions. We’ve much to work on.”

She set off briskly toward her quarters. Annatar and Celebrimbor continued toward theirs. Celebrimbor kept glancing sidelong at Annatar, not quite making eye contact, as though at an optical illusion he was trying to solve, or at a distant star that appears clearer with slightly averted vision. They made their way past graceful buildings of pale stone, whose rooftop gardens spilled over into the terraces that dotted their walls, and open grassy courtyards where small groups of people clustered here and there in idle conversation. Through it all ran the sound of the nearby river. Annatar waited.

Eventually Celebrimbor said, “Does it bother you? That there are kinslayers among us?”

It wasn’t the question Annatar had expected. He took his time pretending to think about it. “I was not ignorant of the history of Beleriand when I chose to come here. If your worry is that I bring judgment instead of aid, that is not my intent.”

Celebrimbor let out a snort. “You seem perfectly capable of conveying judgment whether you intend it or not.” Then he stopped, stricken. “Your pardon. I meant no disrespect.”

Annatar let him stew only for a moment before answering dryly, “I convey precisely what I wish to. And you, I deem, say nothing you do not mean.”

“Your words are a compliment to my honesty. Yet your tone is an indictment of my lack of tact.” But the undercurrent of laughter was back in his voice.

“Be at ease. Kinslayers or not, I measure your people by their skill, not their history.” Even you, Tyelperinquar. Even though I know what potential for betrayal you harbor within you.

“Even so, I might have thought one of your kind would seek some accounting, some greater show of atonement.”

“I studied with the Smith, not the Doomsman. I have more interest in forging the future than perseverating over the past. Punishment has value only inasmuch as it teaches a lesson. The lesson it teaches has value only inasmuch as it prevents future transgression. Have you need of such methods of deterrence?”

Celebrimbor was quiet for a long time. Twice he seemed about to speak, but said nothing. Only as they were entering the building that housed both of their quarters did he finally reply. “I do not know. I hope not. On such hope we have staked… much. We said at Ost-in-Edhil’s founding that we’d welcome all, no matter their past, provided they were willing to offer the same goodwill to anyone else seeking entry on the same terms.

“But I carried a sword at Alqualondë. We have more than a few here who did so at Doriath and Sirion as well. Survivors of both are also counted among the Mírdain. We coexist. Not always easily, as you probably guessed from the way I put my foot in my mouth just now with Ruillas. But peacefully, at least. Still, sometimes I wonder if a greater reckoning is due. Sometimes I wonder if there is any reckoning that would ever be enough.”

“Need the forged metal reckon with the stone from which it was mined and smelted? Stone would only weigh it down.”

“I’m not sure the analogy holds. Metal doesn’t have to share research space with the ore it comes from,” said Celebrimbor dryly. “And people aren’t steel to be forged.”

Annatar shrugged. People, if anything, were for the most part even easier to work than steel. “Learn from your past. Do not live in it, lest it rule you.” Ironic advice under his current circumstances, but it seemed his companion needed to hear it.

Celebrimbor gave a strangled sort of laugh. “I’m a Fëanorian. Perhaps no one uses my father-name anymore, but everyone knows it. Even if I wanted to escape my past, no one would let me.”

“You do not strike me as one who waits to be let.” Annatar eyed him sidelong. “Nor as one who seeks escape. The Star of your House adorns half the lintels in these halls.”

They had reached the corridor leading to both of their apartments. Celebrimbor only seemed to realize as they entered it that Annatar had walked him nearly to the threshold of his rooms. “I didn’t mean to lead you out of your way,” he said, not commenting on Annatar’s observation.

“I know my way well enough. My quarters are here.” Annatar gestured at a door across the hallway and a little way down from Celebrimbor’s.

Celebrimbor startled minutely, showing it only in the momentary stilling of his shoulders and not at all on his face. “I told Eredwen to offer you the River Hall. It’s much nicer.”

“She did. But I would reside closer to the labors of mind and hand that brought me to Eregion. I shall be well served here, equidistant between the smithies and the telescope dome, and mere steps from your laboratories. After all, I came to Ost-in-Edhil not to stand idle, but to craft and teach. Mayhaps even learn,” he added archly, just to see if he could crack Celebrimbor’s façade of courtesy enough to make him roll his eyes. Celebrimbor managed not to, but the twitch of one eyebrow suggested it was a near thing. “If I lack for space at any point, I shall simply ask to move. But what use have I for a large bedchamber when I do not need to sleep?”

That, unexpectedly, brought a faint warmth to Celebrimbor’s face. Once again, intriguing. Desire—if indeed that was what it signaled—had not risen between them so quickly the first time. For decades Annatar had wondered whether Celebrimbor experienced it at all.

Annatar let his awareness drift a bit ahead of him, a gentle questing presence through the workroom door, reaching toward Celebrimbor’s mind. Between that, the creaky hinge, and two hundred years of shared custom, he could be assured he wouldn’t startle Celebrimbor in the midst of delicate work. Sure enough, the Elf didn’t look up from the slender titration apparatus set up beneath the ventilation hood as Annatar entered. “Hello, Annatar. Secure your sleeves and hair, if you would.”

Annatar thought about it for a second and concluded that in fact he would not. Instead he approached until they stood shoulder to shoulder and eyed the liquid in the burette, which Celebrimbor was carefully releasing into a beaker below. Then, without offering any warning, he dipped one long nail into the beaker.

“Don’t touch that, it’s—”

Ignoring Celebrimbor’s horrified cry, Annatar brought his fingertip to his lips to taste the solution, then slid his nail free, clean.

“—oil of vitriol,” Celebrimbor finished, voice going weak.⁴ His hands, though, were swift and steady as he reached for a flask of distilled water with one hand and cupped the side of his face with the other. “Angband’s hells, Annatar, are you—”

“I am unharmed,” Annatar told him, fending off the flask with a hand around Celebrimbor’s wrist. “This form is not so vulnerable to such things as the hröa of an incarnate being.”

“But—”

“Look.” He parted his lips slightly to let Celebrimbor see they were undamaged, even where the last remnants of the acid solution still glistened.

Celebrimbor peered at him closely. Annatar let him, watching his pupils go wide beneath the glass shields he wore across his eyes. His breath ghosted across Annatar’s face. Abruptly Celebrimbor seemed to realize just how close to Annatar he had gotten. He jerked backward as though burned and started to pull his hand away from Annatar’s face. Annatar found, suddenly, that he had no wish to hear whatever apology Celebrimbor was about to make. They had been dancing around this for too long. If Celebrimbor truly did not desire him, that was one thing; but Annatar doubted it. He rarely read anyone wrong. And if Celebrimbor’s hesitance was instead born of some misplaced sense of reverence for the Ainur, or doubt as to Annatar’s own desires, those were easily remedied. Annatar was done with subtlety.

He caught Celebrimbor’s hand with his own and brought it back to rest against his cheek. He did not press; Celebrimbor could still pull away if he truly wanted to. But Celebrimbor didn’t move. He only went still, eyes wide and hand warm. Annatar smiled. At last. Gently he reached up and slid Celebrimbor’s eye-shields off, setting them down on the worktable, then ran his nails through Celebrimbor’s hair where the strap of the eye-shields had mussed it. With his other hand he tugged the flask of water away from Celebrimbor and set it aside too.

“You can test for yourself.” With a quick flare of his spirit, Annatar burned away the last of the acid, then guided Celebrimbor’s fingertips to his lips. “You see?” he murmured against them, tilting his head a little closer.

Celebrimbor met his eyes, then glanced back down almost involuntarily at his lips. Annatar waited, perfectly still, letting the strength of his gaze and the burn of his spirit speak for him. Celebrimbor was the one to close the final distance between them, taking Annatar’s face in both hands and pressing their lips together.

When they pulled apart, he looked dazed. Annatar didn’t blame him. He indulged himself with a quick kiss to Celebrimbor's forehead and let his hands come to rest at Celebrimbor's waist.

Tenderly he murmured, “Your titer is off."

Celebrimbor let out a startled bark of laughter, his gaze clearing at once. Annatar permitted one corner of his mouth to tilt upward and added, "Mithril-etching, if I have correctly surmised its intended use, will demand a higher concentration." Celebrimbor was already turning to close the burette’s valve, which had been releasing a slow drip of acid into the beaker below all the while, though he kept one hand on Annatar’s shoulder as he did so. He looked closely at the measurements etched onto the side of the burette, then sighed ruefully.

“This has gone well past what I’d meant to add. I shall have to dilute it again.”

“I think not. Did I not just say you would need a higher concentration? Try it as it is; in fact, another half-grade of the acid would not go amiss.”

Comprehension dawned on Celebrimbor’s face, exasperation swift on its heels. “You did that on purpose, didn’t you? I’d wager you didn’t even need to drink it to gauge the concentration! You can probably see it, or just sense it somehow without even bothering with trivialities like sight or taste.” It was true; Annatar’s spirit, whether or not he clothed it in a body, could have sensed the composition of the burette’s contents easily. But that would have been far less rewarding. Celebrimbor, as if hearing his thoughts, shook his head. “You are completely incorrigible—I should ban you from my laboratory.” His gaze softened. “I won’t, though.”

“Good.”

“You’d just ignore it anyway. And my science would suffer.”

“I would not wish that.”

“But no more ingesting the chemicals, Annatar, for my sake if not your own. That was very discomfiting to watch.”

Annatar conceded the point with a nod. There had been a moment of genuine panic on Celebrimbor’s face. “Very well. For your sake, then, gladly.”

Celebrimbor hesitated, angling his face slightly away from Annatar’s and starting to drum his fingertips against the worktable. “I wasn’t sure. If your kind felt such things the same way as we do—as most of us do, anyhow.”

“Perhaps not entirely the same way. But then, is there not variation within your kindred? You do not feel such things the way, say, your friend Calenos does.”

“Hah. No, that is true enough. I’m something of an outlier, in this.”

“Outlier or not, what does it matter? If our desires complement one another, need we look further? What will it avail us, to painstakingly sort out what is a difference of kindreds and what, a difference of individuals? I know my own mind; you know yours. Is that not enough?” He shifted, moving to set his hand idly next to Celebrimbor’s on the worktable and drumming a counter-rhythm. For a few moments they both stood there in silence, letting the intersection of the rhythms create its own, new cycle.

“You understand me in a way no one else has,” Celebrimbor said. “And I understand you in a way I’ve never understood anyone else. Sometimes. Other times I can’t understand you at all.” He smiled to himself. “It’s a little terrifying.”

“You would not feel thus for anyone you could wholly predict, I think,” Annatar pointed out. “You would have nothing to be curious about.”

“You see? There you go again, understanding me.”

“I will stop, if you wish.”

“Don’t you dare.” And he took Annatar by the shoulders and kissed him again.

He’d gotten his answer eventually: Celebrimbor did experience desire, albeit rarely. Uniquely, in fact, for Annatar himself. Even then the physical side of things had proved a distant second to the dance of mind and spirit. Yet it had been worth the wait, Annatar thought, even a wait of more than two centuries. Fascinating, then, to see what might be the first hint of it now, on his first day in Ost-in-Edhil. Of course, he hadn’t put on nearly as much of a show of splendor upon his arrival before. Ring-making might not be the only thing he could hasten, this time around.

“Well, if these are truly the rooms you want, it will be convenient to have you close,” Celebrimbor said, voice admirably steady. “I should warn you, though, a number of us already have long lists of projects on which we hope to get your help. Even if you don’t sleep, you will need to guard your leisure time carefully.”

Time, leisure and otherwise, has proven far more malleable than I would have expected, Annatar thought. Aloud, he said only, “Forewarned is forearmed.”

Celebrimbor huffed out the ghost of a laugh. “Is it? Let us hope so.”

“What projects are on your list?” Annatar asked, stepping away from the threshold and into the first of his rooms. One side of it was outfitted with a writing desk, a pair of armchairs, and a low table. Opposite these were a pair of sturdy worktables bracketed by cabinets and shelves, which were stocked with all sorts of equipment. He lowered himself into one of the armchairs, inclining his head in invitation for Celebrimbor to do the same.

“Too many to name; I’ll write them out for you. But you’ll stay, I hope, long enough to reach them all.”

It was necessity, not my wishes, that sent me from here, before, thought Annatar. Necessity to which you drove me.

“For now,” Celebrimbor continued, “let us start with—call it a gift, of sorts. Or a challenge.” He reached into a pocket of his robes, and Annatar thought for a moment he would bring forth a familiar golden torc. He had a moment to contemplate wearing that piece, offered all unknowing, now that he knew what the hands offering it looked like covered in burn scars in the pattern of those fine gold whorls—but Celebrimbor withdrew a piece of folded paper instead. Of course; he must have spent no time on metalwork today, thanks to Annatar’s hair ornament diverting him to astronomy instead. “This is a little conjecture I’ve been working on. A proof eludes me. It is quite simply posed, yet is turning out to be delightfully difficult to solve. I thought it might amuse you.”

With a raised eyebrow, Annatar took the paper and unfolded it. He took in the flowing tengwar at a glance; Celebrimbor had clearly gone out of his way to make the writing beautiful, for his notes were usually half-indecipherable to anyone but himself. “‘Consider any positive integer. If it is even, halve it. If it is odd, multiply it by three and add one. Repeat this process again and again, creating a sequence of numbers. Will the sequence always reach one eventually, no matter the starting point?’ Hm. Simply posed, as you say.”⁵ He re-folded the paper and looked back at Celebrimbor, who was watching him with a grin.

“Try it. Pick a number.”

Three Rings for Elven kings under the sky… Three Rings withheld from him. A fitting place to start, though he could see at once where it would lead. “Three.”

“Ten,” Celebrimbor shot back, the next in the sequence.

“Five.”

“Sixteen.”

“Eight. And four, then two, then one. Ah. Any power of two must always reach one, by repeated halving. And of course, performing the function upon one takes it right back to four. A perpetual cycle. How far have you tested?”

“I thought you’d like it. Into the tens of thousands. So far every sequence converges to one, eventually, though there seem to be some fascinating patterns in how they get there, and how long they take. Some oscillate quite a lot before ending.”

Annatar thought about it for a minute, testing a few numbers in his mind, only into the low millions. It took hundreds of steps in some cases, but always the sequence ended at one. He thought of the One Ring, calling all of the lesser Rings back into its dominion, however far they strayed. Of himself and Celebrimbor, oscillating around each other, retreading familiar ground. “So you seek either a logical proof that every starting point leads to the same place, or a proof by counterexample of the opposite. A sequence that grows with no upper limit.” Once, he had thought there was no limit to the ambitions and aspirations of the Mírdain, and their leader. He had been proven wrong; they had failed him at the last.

“Or one that enters a repeating cycle that it cannot escape,” Celebrimbor replied. And wasn’t that just all too fitting for Annatar’s current predicament. But escape from the course of the past wasn’t impossible, he knew; already things were set on a different course. “Other than the obvious four-two-one cycle. As I said, it feels like it ought to be intuitive, yet a proof eludes me.”

“A worthy gift. I think you have not yet the mathematics for such a task as this.⁶ To begin with, a faster way to test ever-higher starting points would be helpful.” Annatar tapped the folded edge of the paper he still held against his lower lip and watched Celebrimbor’s eyes follow it. “I look forward to giving it my thought.”

“I look forward to hearing what you find. Good night, Annatar.” With that, Celebrimbor stood, bowed, and made his way out of the room.

Annatar remained in the armchair for several hours afterward, idly running sequences of numbers in the back of his mind as he thought back on the conversation. He found himself reconsidering his earlier impatience. Was there, really, any need to rush their path toward the Great Rings? Or anything to be lost by moving more slowly? Only time itself. But time had been given back to him, hadn’t it, and neither of them faced the finitude of a mortal life. What matter, then, if he took as long or longer to guide the Mírdain toward Ring-craft as in his previous life? If it let him more thoroughly cement Celebrimbor’s loyalty, it would justify the wait. And passing his days thus, in the company of a Celembrimbor who had never turned away from him, was hardly a burden to Annatar.

Eventually he stood, decision made, and went to take stock of the equipment on his shelves. He would take his time, and savor it.

“So.” Narvi elbowed her way to a place next to Celebrimbor at their usual table in the rooftop courtyard above the Feast Hall and set down a full plate. Fallen leaves danced around their feet in swift eddies of wind, but the holly bordering the courtyard remained evergreen. Celebrimbor smiled, taking a moment to drink in the sight of her, vibrant and hale as in the best of his memories. Her death had been a peaceful one, of old age in the halls of her home. The memory of it came with no pangs of guilt or dread. Even so, how he had missed her! “Everyone is abuzz about this newcomer. Where is he? Who is he?”

Her youngest child, Durvi, blinked up at Celebrimbor from the sling wrapped around Narvi’s torso. In this, as in many things, Narvi was an anomaly among her people. It was part of what drew them together; Celebrimbor, in different ways, was as much of one among his. Most of Khazad-dûm’s folk were protective of their children, permitting outsiders to interact only with Dwarves already of age. But Narvi refused to be separated from her work for so many years at a stretch, and she refused to be separated from her children for the sake of her work. When craft called her from her mountain halls, she simply brought them with her. It was a mark of her skill and perhaps her stubbornness—and, Celebrimbor liked to think, of the depth of friendship between their realms—that this was tolerated.

That hadn’t prevented him from going stiff in panic the first time he’d been given Narvi’s eldest to hold. With no instinct for what to do, he’d simply tried to copy what he could of the easy way Narvi, her spouse, and her siblings interacted with the children. Somewhat to his surprise, it had worked. He’d unbent more with each successive visiting Dwarf-child until engaging with them became habit. Now, he even found the young ones’ unabashed curiosity a welcome reprieve from dealing with most adults.

Durvi was still too young for conversation, but that same curiosity was already present. Unbothered by the brisk wind, they reached with unwavering confidence for the brooch pinned to his collar. Their three older siblings had given Celebrimbor practice enough that he only laughed, tugged away the brooch with its sharp star-points, and offered Durvi the end of one of his braids instead, making sure the beads woven into it were not of a size to choke on. Durvi put it in their mouth at once. To Narvi, Celebrimbor replied, “You’ve only just arrived from Khazad-dûm! Do you not want to rest first?”

“No, I sleep at this one’s whims.” Narvi patted the frizz of tight curls springing from Durvi’s head. “What I want right now is to sate both my curiosity and my stomach.” She set to work on the latter, every now and then diverting a bit of mashed carrot to Durvi, who gave it the same treatment as Celebrimbor’s hair-beads.

“He is one of the Ainur. He has only been here since spring, yet with his assistance we have made greater advances in mathematics in six months than we had in the last sixteen years.”

“Only in mathematics?” laughed Narvi, who enjoyed the subject, but more for its applications to the tangible crafts closest to her heart than for its own sake. “Not in metallurgy? Or masonry?”

Celebrimbor paused. The true excuse for that was hardly one he could openly admit. Narvi continued devouring her luncheon, unperturbed by his silence. It was what made her such a good collaborator: she was quick enough to keep pace with the movement of his mind, patient enough to wait when his speech was slow to follow, and perceptive enough to tell if an interruption would be welcome.

In the first half-season after Annatar’s arrival, he had swung wildly between exhilaration and sheer panic. The delight of once more working in concert with a mind that so closely matched his was impossible to deny. Yet it was marred often, those first weeks, with the abrupt terror of memory. The greatest risk had come from the fact that in those early days, he couldn’t predict what would throw him into that haze of remembered agony. There seemed little rhyme or reason to it. Anything could set him off: the weight of his jeweler’s tools in his hands, or the rhythm of someone’s forge-hammer happening to match the exact cadence of Orc-boots beneath his window, or simply working past mealtimes until his body, with no warning, gave him a visceral reminder of how hunger too had become a tool of torment. It was just as hard for him to predict whether he would be able to fend off the memories, or instead be plunged into the past—the possible future—until something shook him out of it. He’d spent weeks terrified that one of those episodes would strike while Annatar was with him. Only luck had saved him, luck and some brutal experimentation in the hours he had to himself, when he knew he would be undisturbed. But eventually his guesses about what was and wasn’t safe territory grew a little more reliable. Endeavors of theory and observation seemed less risky than anything that required working with his hands. Eventually he might be able to work a forge again; how long it would take, he had no idea.

The episode of memory set off by that realization had been the first to carry more rage than terror. To be cut off from so much of his craft, even though his body bore no injury—and worse, to have to hide it, slowing his path to repairing this marring of his fëa—he could hardly bear it. And it was Annatar who had done it. How Celebrimbor wanted to hate him for it!

Yet the things he was angriest about were the things for which this Annatar deserved no blame. He had done great ill to many, no doubt, but he was innocent of the specific and intimate torments a different version of him had inflicted—would inflict—on Celebrimbor personally. Nothing was personal between them, yet, except on Celebrimbor’s side. In this life he was alone in both the attraction and the anger. Easier, then, to hate himself for both: the anger, and the way he was drawn to Annatar despite it.

Narvi was still waiting patiently for him to speak. He sorted through half a dozen possible responses and settled on, “Now that you are here, no doubt that will change. At the moment I am wholly consumed with astronomy and number theory by turns, but he seems open to pursuing a great many more obsessions at once. We were up at the telescope dome together this morning, calibrating some new lenses. But he had no difficulty working on that at the same time as he was entertaining Galadreth’s conjectures about the metatheory of formal logic. They’re still up there, I think. Do you know, Galadreth posits that one might be able to derive the whole of arithmetic, perhaps even the whole of set theory, within a single formal system? Provided you had a robust enough set of starting axioms.”

“It seems Annatar was not the only one entertaining Galadreth’s conjectures,” Narvi broke in, adroitly heading off what promised to turn into a full lecture on axiom construction. “I am surprised I didn’t have to track you down at the telescope too.”

Celebrimbor ducked his head, a bit self-consciously. “It was remarked upon that I had missed breakfast; I was exhorted to come down to eat.”

“And you listened? Now I really must meet him. I’ve never been able to convince you to interrupt a project for a meal.”

Celebrimbor carefully did not think about being hungry enough to beg for the strip of charred Orc-meat Annatar held before him, and protested, “You missed just as many meals as I did when we were working on the gates!”

“That was before I had children. Their stomachs follow a stricter schedule, and I find mine does too as I age. Is it true he studied with Mahal?”

“He names himself Aulendil, yes. And his skill is great enough that I can think of few others who would have had much to teach him.” Durvi spat out Celebrimbor’s braid. They had run out of room in their mouth for both beads and the final piece of carrot. Celebrimbor began trying to wipe his hair clean of the mess, mostly in vain.

“Ah… that must have been magnificent. I wonder if Mahal ever spoke to him of us.”

“You could ask him.”

Narvi gave him an amused look. “No, I don’t think I will.”

“You don’t want to know what your Maker might have said of you?”

“Of course I want to know. But I’m not going to ask,” Narvi said. Celebrimbor considered leaving it at that. In his first life he’d held back from probing into her thoughts on Aulë, not wanting to overstep her privacy. Now, though, he asked, “Why not? You need not explain, but I would like to understand, if you’re willing.”

Narvi finished the last few bites of her meal with methodical precision and set down her knife. Just as she had given him silence so that he could order his thoughts a few moments before, he did the same for her now. “It’s different for you,” she said at last. “Your people were made to be as you are from the start, or so your lore says. But we… Mahal made us, yes. Yet the final act of that making was not his. Our histories tell us that when he first crafted us, although he wished us to be beings of our own will, we had no independent thought and moved only at his.”

“I don’t think anyone could accuse you of lacking independent thought.”

“Hah. No, probably not. But that is precisely why I shall not squander it. That my people have it was a gift, not only to us but to Mahal himself, for it was the One who made our Maker who completed the craft and gave us the ability to think and act on our own.”

Her words had taken on a graver cadence. Celebrimbor got the sense that he was listening no longer to lighthearted debate but to some much deeper lore, with the weight of generations behind it. He let his carrot-stained braid drop, pressed his fingertips together, and closed his eyes to better listen.

“It is said that Mahal was ready to destroy us, in penitence for attempting a making that was beyond him,” Narvi went on. “Yet our lore tells us that even as he raised the hammer, we spoke to plead for our lives. This was no speech willed by our Maker, who had already resigned himself to unmaking us. And so Mahal understood that the wish of his heart had been granted in the very moment he gave it up. It was the greatest of gifts: that he need not destroy us, the dearest works of his spirit. Shall I then reject that gift by asking what he wills of us, like some puppet looking for strings and a script, when I know that his will was for us to exercise our own?

“No, Celebrimbor, I think I’d rather honor the freedom my Maker won for me. I’ll meet him eventually anyhow, when he gathers me to his Halls. If I’ve done ill with that freedom, he can tell me so then.”

“Hm,” said Celebrimbor, digesting that. Then he opened his eyes and frowned, troubled by something. “Does it bother you at all, that Aulë would have destroyed you? That your people’s first words had to be a plea for their lives?”

He could scarcely imagine it, taking a hammer to something he had just made, into which he had put so much care. He was hardly one to hoard his creations, preferring rather to put them to use, or give them freely to those who found joy in them. But the idea of just destroying them, violently and wantonly, unsettled him. Still more unsettling was the thought that, if Aulë had not realized in time what Ilúvatar had done, he might have destroyed, not unthinking automata, but living beings. Narvi would not have existed.

She, however, shrugged. “I’ve destroyed many of my works, if I realized I’d made them amiss, or if they outlived their use and I could reclaim the materials for something else.”

“Yet this was different, was it not? A masterwork, not some tool or prototype. You said it yourself: ‘the dearest works of his spirit.’” Like burning the swan-ships at Losgar, which had been the masterworks of the Teleri, only aimed at his own craft. Celebrimbor realized suddenly that he could imagine it after all; or rather, he didn’t have to, for he had faced such a choice himself and nearly done it.

“Well, cousin?” said Gil-galad, as soon as he, Celebrimbor, Galadriel, and Elrond were out of the large council-hall. “You said you had something you wished to discuss with the three of us, in confidence.”

Elrond closed the door behind them, shutting out the hubbub of the main hall. The war-council Gil-galad had called included representatives from each of the great Elven realms, as well as a contingent from Khazad-dûm, invited at Celebrimbor’s insistence. Gil-galad had called a break from the official discussions to allow a few hours for meals and rest, but many remained in tense negotiation in the large hall. Even with the decades they’d had to prepare while Sauron tarried in the East, there suddenly seemed to be a thousand last-minute decisions to sort out. And they were nearly out of time. Sauron would be upon them by summer. It had taken all of Celebrimbor’s will to get through the meeting without fleeing, screaming, or being sick, not least because of the many pointed comments about his own part in Sauron’s rise. But Thaliel had been a constant, steady presence at his side, and Durvi had interposed as well, wheeling their stately chair forward to the front of the Dwarven delegation to speak in Celebrimbor’s support. Between the two of them, he had managed to keep his calm—but only just.

Gil-galad’s private office, separated from the council-hall by an antechamber and thick walls of stone, was blessedly quiet. He hadn’t even lit the wall-lamps, so the room was illuminated only by the fire in the great hearth; the dimness helped, too. Elrond busied himself tidying the pile of papers on the heavy desk, an assortment of maps, supply ledgers, coded scout reports, and diplomatic missives. Celebrimbor even caught a glimpse of one in his own hand. Galadriel said nothing, but her gaze lay heavy upon him. He took a moment to settle himself, focusing his gaze on the play of light in the fireplace and doubling numbers in his head. Two, four, eight… He tapped his fingertips to keep the count of doubles, reaching the twenty-fifth power by the time the silence of the room stilled his whirling thoughts.

Somewhat steadied, he pulled a small wooden box, no larger than his palm and plainly carved, from an inner pocket of his robes. It had not left his person since he had made it. But now he unlatched its lid and set it on the desk before him, then stepped back. Narya’s fiery gem glinted from within. “I can’t keep this. Indeed, I am of the mind that we must destroy it. We must destroy all of the Three.”

“Destroy them?” Gil-galad frowned. “Destroy our best hopes at warding ourselves against him? At staving off the despair and death he brings?”

“You know we cannot use them while he holds the One. And we cannot let him take them.”

“I have been thinking about that. Did you not say he had no hand in making the Three? Might they not then be free of his influence? If they’re beyond his touch and his sight, perhaps we can use them safely after all.”

“He had no hand in making them, but I did. And he had a hand in making—”

Me, he didn’t say, and everything I know and love and live for now. Everything I am.

“—the knowledge I used to craft them. I cannot disentangle which parts of the Ring-craft I used were my own invention, and which were ideas we built together. We shared so much, when we were forging the theory of the Rings. He never touched the Three, true. But because of the trust their maker placed in him—because of my folly—he knows enough that we can’t risk using them openly now.”

“Enough,” snapped Galadriel. “We have no time to retread such recriminations.” She left the rest unsaid, though her tone made it clear enough: that they might never have time to settle all the reasons for recrimination he had given them, and that she blamed him for that too. Still, perversely, her anger heartened him a little. Fierce and palpable was her desire for him to survive, if only so that she could have years enough to hold him to account for his mistakes. He would be sorry to disappoint her, as it seemed ever more likely he would; one more strike against his ledger. “What exactly is it that you ask of us?”

“Your counsel, first, as to whether you agree with me that keeping the Three is the greater risk than destroying them. And if we are in agreement, your aid in unmaking them.”

Elrond looked troubled. “Will it hurt you? To destroy them?”

“Does it matter?” In truth, Celebrimbor was not sure he would survive it with all his faculties intact, but the odds that he would survive the task ahead of him in any case were vanishingly small.

“Do not speak so,” Elrond protested. “Of course it matters.”

Galadriel said, with steel in her voice, “Even if it would not cost you, I am loath to give up the Three, for I believe we will prevail.”

“Is this foresight?” Celebrimbor asked. Desperation rose in him, and treacherous hope.

But Galadriel smiled grimly. “No. No foresight have I been granted in this. Yet I believe it still. I believe it because I must. We will prevail. And when we cast him out of our lands, we will need to restore them. I refuse to give up my home, no matter how he tries to befoul it. That means we will need great works of preservation and restoration and healing after this battle. No better tools do we have for that purpose than the Three. I am not in favor of destroying them; too much does it seem to me like giving up hope of the future we seek to win.”

“I am with the Lady of Lórien,” said Gil-galad. “I would not see them unmade, if there is any other way. Yet you are right that we risk much if they should fall into Sauron’s control.”

“We risk everything. He cannot take the Three,” Celebrimbor said, willing them to understand. “He cannot, at any cost. What he might bend them to, what he might inflict upon those who wear them—it’s a ruin we cannot risk. The one point in our favor is that, because he had no hand in their making, they’ll be hidden to his sight unless you wield them while he wields the One. But that will avail us none if he gains access to the mind of any who knows aught of them.”

“Then we shall make sure he doesn’t,” Elrond said firmly. “Let our strongest protections of art and arms go to you three who hold them, their maker and their bearers.”

Galadriel tilted her head, considering Celebrimbor carefully. “He seeks a stronger guarantee than that,” she said, directing her words at Elrond although her gaze never left Celebrimbor. “I am no kinslayer, yet I was Doomed as one, and in this I would not shrink from earning that Doom in truth, if it becomes necessary. Telperinquar, I say to you now that if the hour comes when the choice before us is capture or death, I will not let it be capture.”⁷

Elrond made a small broken noise, his gaze very far away. Abruptly it struck Celebrimbor that Elrond had not come to Gil-galad until twenty years into the War of Wrath. The first half of that war, he had spent with Maedhros and Maglor. The last sons of Fëanor had fought in the shadowed lands of East Beleriand, grim and unacknowledged allies to Finarfin’s forces and Gil-galad’s in the west, but effective ones nonetheless. Those of their followers known to have survived Sirion had been few, and they had dwindled further still in that last war. Yet Celebrimbor had found none of that last group among the freed thralls of Angband. Captives from earlier battles, yes, but none from those final years. He had not thought to wonder why, but it hit him now. No doubt Elrond knew something of such choices as Galadriel described.

But even that wouldn’t be enough. “I thank you for that,” Celebrimbor told her. “But if I stay here, we give up the one other advantage we might have. He wants the Three first of all, so he will seek me out before anything else. If I remain in Lindon, I’ll only draw him here all the sooner. That serves no one.”

“Tyelpë,” Elrond started, hearing something in Celebrimbor’s voice that must have betrayed his intent. It had been a long while since Celebrimbor had heard that epessë in that distinct Fëanorian cadence. It nearly set him weeping.

He had overheard his father and Celegorm once, unintentionally, through the narrow ventilation passages that connected their adjoining rooms in Nargothrond. Celegorm’s voice had been the first to rise enough to catch Celebrimbor’s attention. ‘Convince him, Curvo! This is madness!’

‘You think I have not tried?’ Curufin had snapped, viper-swift. ‘Do you know what Findaráto said to me? “I did not think I would have to explain to you of all people the import of an oath.” It was all I could do not to throttle him then and there.’

The growl Celegorm had let out at that sounded more like a noise Huan would have made at a warg at bay than something from an Elven throat. ‘The one he swore it to is dead! How is that not enough to end it? Will he owe the same obligation to some doddering scion a hundred generations hence?’

‘We have never had that kind of luck.’

‘What if they succeed?’

‘Succeed? How? Or were you not there when our brother informed us, with demonstrative exhibits in every scar and screaming nightmare, exactly what it means to enter Angamando? Were you not there when we lost our own home? When every careful defense you or I could devise for Himlad went up like oil-soaked kindling?’

‘That you do not wish to face something is not reason enough to turn away from it,’ Celegorm said, matching Curufin now in viciousness. ‘No one wishes to face a charging boar, but if you turn aside you will be killed as surely as if you drove your spear through your own gut.’

‘This is not one of your little hunts.’

‘Curvo. What if they succeed?’

‘Do you think I did not put that question to him too? Do not presume to tell me what I have and haven’t faced. Do you know what he answered to that? He said, “Then, Curufinwë, know that you have my forgiveness for what may follow.” His forgiveness! As if that was what—damn him. Damn him to the Void and back. It is a trap, Turko.⁸ A trap of the Enemy’s making, and that fool Thindicollo’s.⁹ You know it, and I know it, and he knows it and is walking straight into it. I shall not forgive him that. I want none of his forgiveness in return, and well will he know it ere we are done.’

A trap it had been, Celebrimbor thought now, yet a trap as much—more—of their own making as Morgoth’s, or Thingol’s, or Finrod’s. It was a terrible thing, after all this time, to finally start to understand his father, when it had been incomprehension of Curufin’s deeds as much as shame over them that had driven Celebrimbor to part ways with him. How the Oath must have closed around them! How the cords of the snare must have tightened, until to break free of it would have been to break themselves. Had Elrond seen the same in Maedhros and Maglor, at the end? Celebrimbor couldn’t bring himself to ask.

Still, he knew his own choice. He faced, now, his own trap of his own making, and he would break himself to enter it. He would do it because of the tiny chance of freedom he told himself might still be won, but more than that, because choosing otherwise would break him yet more thoroughly.

“It’s all right, Elrond,” he said, as gently as he could. “I’ve had time to think it through. I do not think he will surmise that I would destroy the Three. At least, not all of them. Indeed, I had long thought to wield Narya myself. Now I know I cannot. My part is a different one. I must return to Ost-in-Edhil, and we will hold the Elvenway and the Sirannoniant as long as we can. If the city falls, as—” he swallowed, hard—“as I deem likely, soon or late, though I will endeavor to make it late, it’s me he will seek.”

“What?” cried Gil-galad. “Tyelperinquar, you can’t go back. Ost-in-Edhil isn’t defensible. It’s certain death!”

“I thought you were evacuating,” Galadriel said. “Lórinand already shelters a thousand of your folk. Do you not mean to follow them, then?"

“You have my gratitude, truly, for taking in those who have fled Eregion. And you, sire, for the ones who have chosen to stay here in Lindon. For sheltering my people, I owe you both a debt I doubt I can ever repay. But this will make some little recompense, I think. I can buy us time. If I go back, openly, and await him in Ost-in-Edhil, we can be assured he’ll go there first. I will forestall him as long as I can. I don’t deny I’ve misjudged him, yet still I deem I know him best of any of us, and he may tarry as long as he believes there is a chance I would join him willingly. I think—I think I can win you a few years, at least. He won’t want me dead if he can have me as an ally.

“But don’t you see? When he gives up on that chance, he will use all his arts to open my mind to him. If his efforts are beyond my skill or strength to resist, he will wrest everything I know of the Three from me, whether I will it or no: the method of their making and the knowledge of who holds them now. I can delay his march on Lindon, and I think I must, but if we don’t destroy the Three, it will only make things worse in the end.”

“Whatever debts lie between us, Tyelperinquar, this isn’t the way to pay them,” Gil-galad said. Elrond, looking miserable at his side, nodded in agreement. Galadriel said nothing, stone-still beneath the storm of grief that beat upon her face. Celebrimbor knew that grief was not all for him; perhaps it wasn’t even mostly for him. The memory of Finrod lay leaden between them. And though it was not for Finrod’s sake that Celebrimbor had chosen the path he now followed, perhaps his choice might yet make some recompense for that wound as well.

Perhaps even Finrod himself, if aught reached him in Mandos of what transpired in Middle-earth, might take a measure of poetic justice in the knowledge that Curufin’s son willingly walked to face the same foe into whose jaws Curufin had sent him, bereft of all but a handful of companions. Celebrimbor vowed to himself that he would not even ask for that much; if it came to it, he would order his people gone and meet Annatar alone.

Finrod’s song had nearly vanquished Sauron, it was told. Mighty in courage and mighty in hope he had been, and but for the grief and guilt of Alqualondë perhaps he would have been mighty enough to prevail. Celebrimbor had greater guilt and less strength of song-craft by far—and yet, he thought, he might have a better chance to succeed. Finrod, wise and generous and high-hearted Finrod, with no blood of kin on his hands, could hardly offer a path out of evil he had never needed to imagine for himself. Nor would he have sought to; his aim had been only to defeat Sauron.

“I have other reasons to choose this course,” Celebrimbor said quietly.

Gil-galad looked distraught, distress breaking through his normally impassive façade. “You are resolved, then? There’s nothing we can say to turn you from it?”

“Unless the time it will win you would be of no use, I am resolved.” Gil-galad made no response; he and Celebrimbor both knew that a few more years of preparation could only help. “That is, if we can reach agreement about the Three. Otherwise, the only option I see is to end my life before he falls upon us, to put my knowledge forever beyond his reach. He will still hunt you, but at least that way he can’t be sure who bears the rings he seeks.”

The others were silent for a time. Then Galadriel said, quietly, “There may be another way. If he were to delve into your mind and yet find no trace of them, would we not avert that end?”

“In theory, yes, but I doubt there’s any shield strong enough to withstand him. Maybe for a little while. Not forever. Probably not even for very long.”

“Not a shield,” she told him. “I suspect you are right about that. But what if there were nothing there to find?”

It took him only a second to grasp her meaning. “Is such an excision within your skill? The arts of mind were ever the strength of Arafinwë’s house, and you who might be the greatest child of that house have Melian’s teachings to draw on as well.”

“Greatest by virtue of being the last sibling standing?” she said sharply. Stricken, he bowed his head in apology. “Well, Curufinwë Telperinquar, skill is one thing you have ever judged accurately, whatever else you judged awry. Yes, I think I can do it, if you are willing. You would be… bared, with it. And I cannot promise it would be a comfortable process. But it is within my skill.”

Then take the rest of it, too, part of him wanted to plead, even as most of him recoiled at the idea of any kind of manipulation of his mind. Take all the memories of him I can no longer trust, all the moments of joy that have burned to ash.

She would see all of it. What he hadn’t known and what he had, and what he had chosen to do with that knowledge at every step. The shame of it nearly drove him to his knees. It would be a mercy to forget.

But no. For what he meant to attempt, he would need everything he knew of Annatar. Even if he couldn’t be sure which pieces of it were true. And he would need Vilya, Narya, and Nenya put beyond his erstwhile friend’s reach.

He met Galadriel’s eyes and nodded. “Then I am willing.” She lowered her gaze and said nothing in response; nothing more needed to be said.

Celebrimbor turned to Elrond next. “I think, if this is to work, the other piece of it must be yours. We must heal my mind around the missing memories so that there’s no sign of whose arts accomplished their removal, no scar or break for him to follow. And there is no greater healer on these shores.”

Elrond had gone pale. “Do not ask this of me, Tyelpë, please.” Gil-galad laid a hand on his shoulder.

Heart twisting, Celebrimbor said, “I know of no one else to ask who possesses the necessary skill. For this to work, the signs of the excision must be more than hidden. They must be healed over well enough to conceal the fact that anything was cut out at all.”

“That’s not healing. That is… suturing the skin over the still-ruptured organ or the broken bone. That is severing a hand and deluding the mind into believing it only ever had one to begin with.” If Celebrimbor had held any doubt over what had brought that particular analogy to mind, Elrond passed a hand over his face and murmured almost too quietly to hear, “How many more of my family must I watch choose death?”

“What I choose is to bear the responsibility for my mistakes,” Celebrimbor said gently, touched and a little surprised that Elrond would name him family. Elrond’s grief in this moment, like Galadriel’s, was not for him alone. Unlike Galadriel’s, it was not a grief anyone around him would think justified. Celebrimbor wished he had understood sooner, for justified or not, it was a grief they might have shared. “Can you accomplish this? If you cannot, or will not, say so now, so that we may decide which must be destroyed: the Three or me.”

Elrond said, “It won’t come to that.”

“It has already come to that.”

“Are you so determined to die?”

“I’ve made my peace with the possibility. Yet I have hope, too, faint though it might be. He may yet be diverted from his course.”

“Whence this hope, Telperinquar?” Galadriel broke in. The light in her eyes grew brighter as she focused on him, but it was like sunlight reflected off ice, bright enough to blind and yet without much warmth. “I cannot confess I share it. Even if I did, why must you be the one to divert him?”

“In part because you do not share this hope, either of you. I am the only one who thinks it might be done, which is a necessary prerequisite to doing it. In part…” He sighed. “Well, you will both see it for yourself, since I am about to give you unfettered access to my memories. I am sorry for the pain I know it will bring, and I don’t expect you to understand, only to know that it is my choice. And that if I fail, at least this time the only price will be my own life, and even it may be worth the time we gain. Elrond. Cousin. Will I have your aid?”

Elrond looked sick, but he nodded.

“Will you do it now?” said Gil-galad. “We have a few hours before I call the council proper to order again.”

Celebrimbor drew in a breath. “No reason to wait, then. How must we begin?”

In the end he hadn’t had to destroy the Three, last and best of his works. He hoped his kin had been able to make good use of them. And with a start, he realized that his knowledge of how to make them was restored to him. Perhaps through his years in Mandos, or perhaps through some trick of whatever had sent him back in time; that particular injury to his mind was healed. Was it a sign that he would have to use that knowledge again? That the Three Elven Rings would be needed? Was he doomed to fail at preventing disaster this time, too?

He shook off the thought. He would puzzle it out later, when he was alone. Now, he returned his attention to Narvi. Aulë hadn’t had to destroy the Dwarves either, and for that at least he could feel an uncomplicated gladness.

“True, it is a different thing to lay waste to a craft of great care than to a lesser work,” Narvi was saying, and now she looked grave. Even Durvi, sensing something of their mother’s seriousness, had ceased their infant babbling. “But how could we live freely in truth, if he were not willing to let us go?”

“Letting go is not the same as destroying, though.”

“It was an act of repentance, for having sought to overstep the limits of his skill and transgress upon the domain of his own maker.”

Celebrimbor heard no footfalls behind him, so his only warning was a fleeting, familiar brush at the edge of his mind before Annatar’s voice broke in. “Was it such a transgression, though?”

He swept into view, the wind touching not a strand of his unbound hair even as it made a dramatic swirl of his robes. They were of russet silk shot with gold and made him look like the spirit of autumn itself, come to grace Eregion’s harvest-time.

Celebrimbor leapt to his feet. “Annatar!”

“I have left some suggestions in your workroom, Tyelperinquar, on a method of further reducing chromatic aberration I believe you will find useful. Ruillas should be able to handle the glasswork. I also left you some updates to our conjecture.”

“A proof?” Celebrimbor asked, feeling a grin break across his face.

“Not yet. But a demonstration of some properties that an endlessly repeating cycle must have, if one exists other than the trivial one. Specifically, I have made some advances on the minimum length of such a cycle; it substantially exceeds what you had previously established.”¹⁰

“That is indeed a breakthrough!”

Next to him, Narvi burst into laughter. Annatar turned back to her as she rose, more slowly than Celebrimbor had, and made as much of a bow as she could with Durvi bound to her chest. “Greetings, Bright One,” she said, still chuckling. “I begin to see what has my friend so captivated.”

“Narvi, daughter of Noli, I have heard much of your skill. And a little of your conversation, just now. I ask you again, was it such a transgression for your Maker to overstep the limits of his skill, as you put it? How do you know the limits of yours, if not by seeking to exceed them? And have you not sometimes succeeded in doing so, and thus honed your skill beyond what might previously have been deemed possible?”

Celebrimbor tensed. Perhaps he ought to step in. Narvi had after all made it clear she didn’t wish to ask Annatar about Aulë’s creation of the Dwarves. But she only laughed. “I always seek to exceed the limits of my skill! But there’s a difference between what is possible and has merely not yet been attempted, and what is beyond the reach of any khuzd—or beyond the reach of the world itself.¹¹ I might someday craft a contraption that would let me soar through the skies. In fact, Celebrimbor here keeps saying we should try it, though I for one like good stone over my head and would prefer a device that could delve into the fires below ground. But I’d know better than to launch myself off a cliff in hopes that I would sprout wings, or into a river of lava in hopes I would not burn.”

“Actually the former has been done, once,” Celebrimbor murmured. “The latter… did not turn out so well.” He thought of the uncle and the Silmaril that had vanished thus—and of the One Ring. That much of its end, at least, he had felt. He very carefully didn’t look at Annatar.

“I’ll have to hear that story sometime,” Narvi responded, casting him a sidelong look.

He’d told her, eventually, nearly all of his family’s history. But that had been near the end of her life. “Someday you will,” he promised.

“Say that you are right,” Annatar interposed smoothly, “and there is a fundamental difference between what can be done and simply has not been, yet, and what will forever be out of reach. How is one to tell which is which? And why should one be punished for erring?”

“If I tried to soar off a cliff and plunged to my death instead, I don’t think I would count that punishment,” Narvi retorted. “Merely a predictable consequence of the laws of moving bodies.”

“That is not the same as the case of your Maker. What bound him was not a law of Arda’s structure that he could have discovered himself by observation or experiment, but a dictate from his own creator. How should he have known of that dictate, except by testing it?”

Narvi raised her formidable eyebrows. “Isn’t that just discovery by experimentation?”

“Should not an experiment’s results vary based on its parameters, and not on the willingness of those performing it to abase themselves? If my former teacher’s efforts proved an experiment in anything, it was in the workings of subordination and power.”

“Or of humility and compassion,” said Celebrimbor, softly. They were edging close to dangerous territory. But how many moments like this had there been, before, which he had failed to notice, or noticed only fleetingly and dismissed? Moments where he might have guessed at Annatar’s aims and intentions, and his veiled desire for power?

“Well,” said Narvi briskly, stacking her empty plate atop Celebrimbor’s and collecting their utensils. “We shall not solve this today, and there are more immediate puzzles at hand. Let’s see these updates to that telescope of yours. And tonight we can look at the stars. If Durvi is to be a friend to Elves, I should teach them sooner rather than later about your perpetual habit of seeking high ground and open sky.”

“You’re the one of the two of us who lives on a mountain!” Celebrimbor exclaimed.

“In a mountain. There’s a difference.”

Annatar watched this exchange in silence, a small smile playing about his mouth. Celebrimbor had the sudden sense that both of his friends were laughing at him, but with fondness and not derision. His chest filled with a sudden, almost painful warmth. “Come, then. Let us take our dishes in for washing. Annatar, we shall meet you at the telescope in a quarter-hour.” Annatar inclined his head.

“He lives up to the rumors,” Narvi remarked, watching Annatar glide away as though his feet barely touched the ground. Then all at once she elbowed Celebrimbor, catching him in the thigh. “And you! Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Tell you what?” Celebrimbor asked, bewildered.

“Oh, come, Silver-grip, don’t give me that. In all the years we’ve known each other, I’ve never seen you so smitten. In fact, I think I’ve never seen you smitten at all, until today.”

“I—what—I’m not smitten!” He could feel his face heating and folded his arms, tapping his fingertips hard against his elbows to tamp down his chagrin. Was he so obvious? Worse, could Annatar tell?

Narvi’s gaze softened. “All right, then. I’m sure it was just the prospect of a proof for your conjecture that had you opening up like a poppy at sunrise. All I’m saying is, if you were smitten, you’d get no judgment from me. It’d be complicated, would it not, with one of his kind? But you challenge each other, that’s easy enough to see, and rare enough too, for you. I’d wager for him as well. Ach, what do I know? Mayhaps it’s just motherhood making me soft.” She hoisted Durvi a little higher with arms like banded iron, winked at him, and started off with their dishes, leaving him staring after her. Belatedly he came to his senses and rushed to catch up, tugging away the stack of plates when he reached her so that Narvi could tend to the last smears of carrot on Durvi’s face.

He was in trouble. No doubt about that. Yet at the same time, he had an unexpected gift here: Narvi’s counsel, on a subject he’d often wished he could discuss with her in his previous life, and never gotten to. She had died long before the nature of his relationship with Annatar changed in this particular way.

The prospect of rekindling that intimacy thrilled and terrified him, filled him with longing and repulsion in equal measures. But Narvi’s pragmatism could almost always cut through the snarl when his own thoughts grew tangled. He would welcome her input, even if he couldn’t tell her everything.

And, maybe, there was a seed of hope. I’d wager for him as well, Narvi had said. Was she reading into things overmuch? Or was she seeing what he hadn’t, catching signs he’d missed for years upon years? Maybe it hadn’t all been a lie; maybe Annatar truly had felt some of what Celebrimbor did, and there were pieces of their history that had been more than manipulation and ruse. What if getting closer to Annatar sooner was the way to avert Eregion’s wreckage and Sauron’s rise? What if that very closeness was the means by which he could convince Annatar to take a different path?

And what if he tried, and failed again? What if he was merely taking a longer and more circuitous route toward the same ruin, a sequence with more oscillations but the same inevitable end?

Annatar’s voice echoed in his mind: Say that there is a fundamental difference between what can be done and simply has not been, yet, and what will forever be out of reach. How is one to tell which is which?

Only by trying, Celebrimbor thought as he and Narvi set their clean dishes on the drying racks and started for the telescope dome. Only by trying.

¹ Ruillas is referring first to what we would know as the Andromeda Galaxy (M31, NGC 224), following the popular assumption that the constellation Wilwarin (the Butterfly) corresponds to Cassiopeia; and second to the Pinwheel Galaxy (M101, NGC 5457), a spiral galaxy in Ursa Major. Barring excessive light pollution, Andromeda is typically visible to the naked eye as a roughly oval patch of hazy or cloudy light. The Pinwheel Galaxy can be spotted with binoculars or a small telescope. Applying some back-of-the-envelope trigonometry to these galaxies’ angular diameters, coupled with the fact that Legolas is canonically able to make out multiple riders, their weapons, and their relative builds at a distance of five leagues, I posit that distinguishing Andromeda’s spiral arms would be well within the naked-eye visual acuity of the average Elf. On a dark night, the Pinwheel Galaxy’s arms probably would be discernible as well (to humans, its spiral arms are not apparent without the aid of (1) a sizable telescope and (2) very dark skies). However, even Elven vision would probably have trouble picking out individual stars within them.

² Readers may recognize this as the winding problem of spiral galaxies.

³ Annatar is hinting here, perhaps too obliquely to be of much use, at density wave theory. First formally proposed in 1964 by Lin and Shu, it is the prevailing explanation to account for the winding problem, hypothesizing that the arms of spiral galaxies are not made of distinct collections of matter but rather are areas of higher density through which stars and other matter pass as the galaxy rotates. Stars at varying distances from the center of the galaxy orbit at different speeds, and concentric orbits may be offset from one another, producing the spiral patterns. See Lin, C.C. Lin and Shu, Frank H., “On the spiral structure of disk galaxies,” Astrophysical Journal 140:646-55 (August 1964), DOI: 10.1086/147955.

⁴ Sulfuric acid (H₂SO₄). It is highly corrosive and volatile, and can cause severe skin burns, eye irritation, and even blindness upon contact. If inhaled, it can cause serious difficulty breathing, and should under no circumstances be ingested, as it is capable of burning holes through the stomach lining and wall. Annatar’s laboratory safety practices are objectively horrendous.

⁵ This is a famous number theory problem known as the Collatz conjecture, after Lothar Collatz; I have also seen it referred to as the Ulam conjecture (after Stanislaw Ulam), Kakutani’s problem (after Shizuo Kakutani), or simply the 3n+1 conjecture. It remains unsolved, but as of 2020, it has been tested for numbers up to 2^68, all of which converge to 1. Barina, David, “Convergence verification of the Collatz problem,” Journal of Supercomputing 77:2681-8 (2021), DOI: 10.1007/s11227-020-03368-x. For a more playful treatment of the subject, see Pickover, Clifford A., Wonders of Numbers, Oxford University Press (2001), pp. 116-118.

⁶ Once again, Annatar is paraphrasing a quote attributed to Paul Erdös, who is rumored to have once said of the Collatz conjecture, “Mathematics is not yet ready for such problems.” It is hardly fair to poor Erdös to give all his most famous quotes to Annatar, but alas, needs must.

⁷ In a nod to her mother’s side of the family, Galadriel uses the Telerin form of Celebrimbor’s name.

⁸ Turko: A diminutive of Celegorm’s Quenya father-name, Turkafinwë.

⁹ Thindicollo: The Fëanorian Quenya form of Thingol's name.

¹⁰ Annatar is glossing over the details quite a bit, but his work here mirrors some recent developments on the Collatz conjecture. Notably, a recent paper showed that a nontrivial cycle must have a minimum of 92 local minima, with corresponding implications for the number of odd members the cycle must have and for its overall length. Hercher, Christian, “There are no Collatz m-cycles with m ≤ 91,” Journal of Integer Sciences 26(3), article 23.3.5 (2023), DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2201.00406.

¹¹ Khuzd: Khuzdul, ‘dwarf’ (singular). The plural form, khazad, is found, for example, in ‘Khazad-dûm.’ Khuzdul canonically is not spoken much among non-Dwarves, but Narvi lets a smattering of it into her conversation with Celebrimbor.