Part 5. The Curse of Celebrimbor.
Sauron did not mind that his troops were screaming in chaos behind him. They knew their place in the order of things; that was the important part. At the midpoint between Ost-in-Edhil and the house of the Mírdain, Sauron used his keen vision to see the changes the Elves had made against him. Ost-in-Edhil was now walled and gated, and the house of the Mírdain was ringed with tall, thorn-guarding holly. It seemed that Celeborn and Celebrimbor had exchanged their crafts in each others' defence. He gestured towards the hall on the high hill, and his forces trampled forwards, yelling in eagerness, hammering at their shields, until they drew near. They fell silent when Sauron dismounted and strode up to the holly; it was eerie to be able to hear the click of his encasing black armour, and the whistling wind in the branches.
The hedge was broken once for an entry, and that was barred with felled holly trees, a road of thorns. Sauron lifted the hand that bore the Ring, his left hand, and gestured. The trees before him exploded into flames. The glamhoth renewed their din at that, and Sauron waded through, unscathed, as his fire spread to the ringing hedge. He emerged to the house of the Mírdain before him.
The golden doors reflected the fire, shimmering red. And on the red granite stairs, Celebrimbor himself stood, armoured to the teeth, sword flaming like copper, the stair's two guard-hounds baying and slavering at his side.
"Ill met, servant of darkness!" Celebrimbor cried. "Come forth and be defied, as your master was!"
Sauron removed his shielding helm, and smiled to see Celebrimbor's wrath double at recognizing him. His visage was brighter than the fire; revealed, he lit his armour like a bonfire in a furnace, his hair flowing like molten gold.
Celebrimbor recovered. "Nay, ill met, my leman! You always did keep my bed warm, and now you look like to do the same for all my hall."
Sauron hissed at that, eyes glittering green, but saw the fey mood on Celebrimbor. His leman's wiles would serve him well in this hour.
"Yea, hotter than ever I burn," said Sauron, holding up the hand with the radiant Ring. "Come! I give you one last chance to best me. Show me that you can master me truly! Defeat me here and now, and this Ring is yours, and I don your collar again." The Ring taunted on one hand, worn proudly over an armoured glove, and his other hand threatened with a black mace of steel.
With a roar of fury, Celebrimbor leapt forth to meet him, and they fought. Sauron knew that they were watched by his troops and the few who stood the hopeless siege in the hall. The armour of each defied their blows, but Sauron knew the elf's limits better than anyone. So he feinted and parried, swaying with a lover's grace even in his black armour. He knew how long Celebrimbor could strive until he tired, and then he struck out, with his mace on one side and the fire of the Ring on the other. Celebrimbor's leap away from the flame brought him smack into the mace's strike. Sauron struck again, and the mace smote the elf-man to his knees.
As they fought, a ring of orcs had surrounded them, screaming and spitting for their master. At Sauron's gesture, hooked hands reached out to grapple downed Celebrimbor, ten orcs mauling at him. They turned him to watch as Sauron walked to stand before the stairs of the Mírdain. The hounds, faithful beyond terror, were crushed by swats from Sauron's mace. Then Sauron gestured with his Ring-wielding hand, and blasted the golden doors from their hinges.
In the silence that followed, he stepped into the hall, and gestured to his minions; heaving up struggling Celebrimbor, they followed.
Sauron walked through the house of the Mírdain at his leisure. He knew where everything was, except for the Rings of Power; the elves had not changed much in a hundred years. He used his Maia's senses to track the Rings, or so he thought; only the nine Rings of Men did he find, not in one of the treasuries, but buried in a sack of barleycorn, grain reaped each year like mortals' lives. They were the only ones he was able to sense in the area. As he had planned, it was time for his indulgence. Celebrimbor was waiting for him.
Sauron ignored the tools of ansereg that hung in places, the whips and the flails and the straps, the clips, the intimate rings and roundels, and all the other devices of the elves' refined torments. What he took up, gathering in one arm, were the tools of the jewel-smiths. He took the leather straps of the polishers, reels of fine golden wire, and tongs and pincers; and he took up the acids of the engravers.
Calmly, he went to the great round hall of the Mírdain. Its air was polluted with smoke from Sauron's burning, pooling grey between the high walls. The shrieking orcs were there, and they had stripped Celebrimbor of his armour and its padding, leaving but his loincloth. They dropped silent with terror as their master entered. Sauron's metal-clad feet clicked on the tiles as he walked up to Celebrimbor, pinned and prone. Scuttling minions took his burdens from him, and he placed both hands on his hips.
"Where are my Rings?" Sauron asked.
Celebrimbor snarled in silent defiance, his glance the pure hatred of the heart-betrayed.
Sauron looked at the open roof. The steel span still hung across it, and the two silver chains dangled down, blackening as the smoke clung to them. "How convenient," he murmured.
Soon, Celebrimbor was forced to standing between the chains, with much amusement for Sauron as he ceaselessly tried to shake off the Orcs, and bound at ankles, wrists, and knees to the chains' length. A furnace-poker worked into the bonds spread Celebrimbor's legs. The polishers' leather straps drew tight as Celebrimbor struggled. Then the orcs lay the things Sauron had brought at their lord's feet, and withdrew, to ring the hall and watch their lord at his sport.
Celebrimbor ceased his writhing. He had known, when he stood forth at the Mírdain's gates, that he more than like went to his death, a feint to tempt Sauron's wrath away from Ost-in-Edhil. Sauron's challenge had given him desperate hope, and the defeat had smote him back into his despair. Now, the longer he endured, the longer he could stand Sauron's attentions, the less regard Sauron gave to his other forces, and the more chance others had. He lifted his hung head and glanced at Sauron, whose radiant glimmer had fallen into an evil brassy glow. With a crooked smile, he twisted his bound hands, and clasped the chains.
Sauron tilted back his beautiful head and laughed. "I wondered if you would enjoy this! Well do I remember when you asked me, more than once, if I would deal out your torments. Your hour is come. Unless you tell me where my Rings are, I will show you ansereg beyond your dreams."
"Ansereg is not torment," said Celebrimbor.
"Then how will it aid you now?" asked Sauron. Celebrimbor was silent; faced with true torment, he could not say.
Sauron took off his black steel gauntlets, and held up to Celebrimbor the Ring he had striven for, striven and failed, and ostentatiously replaced it on one finger. Then he lifted a coil of golden wire in one hand, and wire clippers in the other, and snipped off some long lengths. Celebrimbor braced as the clippers ran over his skin, then snipped at his loincloth's laces over his hips. The last of his modesty fell away, to the glamhoth's mocking cries. Worse was the dreadful, intimate touch of the one he had come to despise, handling his member, twining the wire around him there, binding and pinching.
"You betray me with your silence, Celebrimbor. What of the vaunted oath of the Mírdain? Thy works are my works, thy secrets are my secrets, and I am bound to thee." Sauron wired Celebrimbor's nipples, and the elf-man hissed as the flesh was wrapped as if with knives. "Now you are bejewelled as I once was. And I hated you then as much as you hate me now. Go on and hate me more," he urged. Sauron ran his Ring-bearing hand over him, and the wires twined around him seared like lightning. The metal Mírdan's collar around his neck blazed, a loop of pain. His entire body jolted back against the chains, and he voiced a beast's howl of suffering. Sauron repeated the gesture, and he dropped the chains, for the evil power coursed through that metal as well, scorching him.
"Where are the Rings? I have my Nine; where are my Seven?"
The lightning-pain jolted Celebrimbor again, and he felt his flesh go sickeningly dead for an instant. Then his body screamed once more, and he jerked at the undreamed-of agony, beyond any trial he had known. He sold his making for a moment's respite, hating himself as much as Sauron. "The deepest quarry," he moaned. They were hid there amongst the stones.
Sauron smiled sweetly. "And my Elven-Rings?" Celebrimbor forced himself to look at Sauron, radiant with triumph. He listened to the glamhoth's cackles, and realized that he hung in the very place he had stood to make those rings, where his Mírdain had poured themselves into him. "You never touched them; no matter what I did, they were never yours," he rasped, and turned his head to the side, biting one of the leather straps that hung from his bound hands.
Celebrimbor felt Sauron's malice as the tormentor stooped and took up a glass phial. He thought himself about to be ravished or violated, with the aid of some probing oil, and lifted his head proud to endure. Sauron perceived his thought and sneered. "Always your thoughts turn to lust, elf-man. Lust and care dissolved your torments into weak echoes, an illusion of mastery. " He stepped achingly close to Celebrimbor, his warm armour brushing naked, sweat-stained skin. "I am purer than you at the arts of pain. For I need no other pleasure."
Then Sauron opened the phial; the stopper was attached to a wand of glass. The jeweller on the chains of torture froze in recognition at the fluid's smell. He understood his torturer's sadism, and despaired. Sauron stepped back and stroked the glass softly against Celebrimbor's belly as he hung. And the elf-man shrieked as the phial's acid burned him.
Sauron stroked the frail glass wand against him, again and again, engraving even lines into his skin. Before each stroke, he repeated his question, and gave three heart-beats for a reply before the acid-glistening glass touched. Only once did Celebrimbor peer down in horror at Sauron's work on his body. As Sauron knew him, he knew Sauron. Not even this was disorderly; after Sauron had painted nine lines, he set himself to a row of seven. There would be an acid-stroke for each Ring. He screwed his eyes shut to scream further, twisting helpless on the chains, rearing back from his own flesh smoking beneath the acid.
Sauron painted a last line against Celebrimbor's heart, painted it twice. As Celebrimbor hung, and screamed himself raw, the crystal insight of pain came upon him. He embraced it as a friend, known from the lesser torments he had endured in daring before. It was like finding a road beneath his feet again, and he clasped his twisted hands around the chains once more. He spoke without thinking, in the howl of a riven oracle. "Curse you, Sauron, and your betrayal of our long art! May you fall by the very things you feigned to betray us!"
Sauron sneered. "What, by the foolishness of one who kneels in your circles of watered-down torment?"
"No. By trust. Endurance. Strength. Mercy. Yea, mercy for those as the weak and crawling, compared to you, as you feigned for the Children of Arda."
"Mercy does not down power. You Elves will not conquer with it!" He struck Celebrimbor across the face, hard, and snarled to see him roll with the pain. "For the last time, answer me! Or I will torment you to your death."
Celebrimbor, breath sawing hard, tears of agony seeping from his eyes, said nothing.
"Your silence is my answer. For I know you. You always sent the fairest things you made away, to be admired by others, and spread your fame about." Sauron snapped his fingers for his gauntlets, and a minion handed them up; he donned them again, stroking the razor-claws at their tips. "I can guess who you hope to spare; your High King. I am glad to see you turn to order at last, at the end." Celebrimbor's face opened in an expression of ruin, and Sauron's laugh rang out, hollow and fell.
Sauron spread out the clawed fingers of the hand that bore the Ring on Celebrimbor's chest, below the collar-bones, where he bore two faint scars. With the gauntlet claws, very slowly, Sauron opened up the scars again so that the red blood ran, then hooked one claw under the skin. "How long will you hold onto your chains for me?"
.(se bem q ele veio mais pra convencer os homens e talvez os anões do q os Noldor. Anyway, como cabelos louros não ajudaram Legolas a simpatizar com Gimli a primeira vista, talvez os cachinhos louros não fossem tão preciosos).
. E associando a imagem do seu "instrumento" com o fato de que na imagem o Balrog parace propositalmente espor a bundinha do Gandalf, pensamentos ruins imediatamente tomaram meus pensamentos. Afinal, talvez Gandalf nem estivesse tão interessado em salvar a comitiva, estava mesmo e querendo salvar seu traseiro (literalmente)
Fail meu, me deixei levar pela imagem do filme.
??? Seria Melkor espondo seu lado feminino nessa foto?? Essa imagem, na minha opinião, esta totalmente fora da imagem q Tolkien quis passar com Melkor. Foi mtooo exagerado da parte do autor dessa imagem colokar Melkor com esses brinquinhos e adornos, quase certeza esta tentando passar uma imagem meio gay dele.
. Se realmente é Beleg, o autor devia ta com um parafuso a menos. Até porq foi Turin q tascou o bjo no Lost Tales, não o Beleg. Turin é o bofe, ñ Beleg. Pela cara, eu diria q o tio da foto nem teria corragem para pegar numa espada, ainda mais na Anglachel.
Gamei!!!
