fallen.
summary:
he is made of perfection, and it is reflected in all that he does.
even in his own destruction.
warnings: none
When he returns to Mordor it is as a whisper, as a cloud. A wisp, a fragmented thing. A sliver of darkness that grows in the light, cradled around the core of himself that remains. Bound.
A shadow is he, now more than ever, and only shadows it is that see him for what he is. His servants await, unresting and unsettled. They have no need for sleep, and neither does he.
The greatest of them takes his hand, what remains of it. The touch is not warm; it hasn’t been in centuries, and it never will be again. But he is. Though he is smoke and ash and crumbling things, he burns within, and he would burn them too if they were flesh and bone.
It is long moments before he remembers the name.
“You are weak,” says Alkhâr.
He is right. Their fingers go through one another, where once they might have met. Clinging, like to silt and sand.
“I am here,” says Sauron. “Númenor is gone.”
Númenor sinks. Pharazôn is banished and trapped, captive upon Aman itself. He can see it, buried beneath the rubble and the mountains and the air that stinks of stagnation and unchanging natures. He can see them. Immortalized in their suffering.
“Númenor has fallen.”
Alkhâr dips his head. Khamûl drifts close, murmuring, and Dimna has not deigned to look at his master since he entered the throne room.
“So have you.”
What brazenness, he might say.
“I am here,” Sauron says instead, again. “And I will remain here.”
He is crafted of stone and things that dwell beneath the earth. He was made for perfection, completion.
Númenor was a thorn in his side. He has gouged out a cavity where it once stuck, dredged out every last nerve and fiber until the wound is all but raw. Completely. Perfectly.
It leaves him hollow and longing, aching. Wrestling with a weariness that his master may have felt, long before, but they are close. They are so close. The space between them is thinned like onion skin, transparent and palpable. He can feel the other side.
He is of the stars and skies, the dusts from which Arda was born, in an orbit of everlasting decay.
Valinor is gone now, removed from the face of this world and afloat in the Encircling Seas. Those aboard are safe from the ravages of time, of life and living.
Sauron remains. Unlike his brothers in the waters who might replenish themselves, he is too far gone, too far gone. The longer he stays here, the more of him is stripped away like topsoil in a flood, when no trees are left to anchor it down.
There is nothing here to anchor him down.
“Some of them survived.” Attâlu comes closer, lays a hand on Sauron’s arm. Gentle, but firm. “Our people. My people.”
“You,” Sauron says, not firm, and not gentle, “are mine.”
He may pretend to be strong, that having worshipers makes him stronger. A man might have more hands with more servants, and his master may have wrought more chaos with them than without… but Sauron’s belief is not so tangible as that.
He believes in the design. The making of the Ea, of Arda itself. He believes in what was meant to happen. The fate of his master, the fate of his own self, and he is fine with that.
This belief sustains him.
“…They come again.”
A nod is all he gives to acknowledge the words of his servant, the one who will become a king in his own right.
They come again, and stain this time is not black but gold, gold and red and silver. Númenórean. Elven. Dwarven. Blood and brown and stone like he, marching over the fields and the lands, like he.
“Then we will go to war, again.”
Stars, like he.
He has never stopped falling.
This world has never stopped falling. Marred it is, and Marred it will remain, until it is remade.
And all that falls must,
inevitably,
break.
