[snip ]
When the Noldo’s knife carves a precise triangle into his chest, his attention is bent entirely in frantic anticipation of an answer that never comes. Maedhros is toying with him. The chilling light catches the elf’s eyes like poison… He will not reveal the secret of this prison yet, there is too much satisfaction to be had in making his captive wait. Sauron knows this– this is his game, though he has never played this side of the board before.
But as the circuit is completed, white fire sears him where flesh makes contact with iron, and his mind goes blank.
Metal has never betrayed him this way before.
The shock of it draws a belated howl from him; it is as if his body is refusing to acknowledge the bite of a loyal hound until its fangs were bloodied thrice over. His delayed screams surprise even him.Once, long ago, the maia had felt the gaze of Namo pass over his spirit. It had been cold and hollow, its pull unforgiving. Just beyond the agony of this strange electric fire, he could feel that same chill tug beneath the heat– it feels like dissolution. It feels like the nearest he can come to death.
The interior of his fana twists and pulls violently in opposing directions, his very atoms seem to wish to fly apart, and it is all he can do to hold the repelling forces together with brute strength of will. It is a small blessing that his jaw locks, for otherwise he would find himself begging through the roar of pain.
When he has fought in the past it was to maintain advantage; now, all thought is consumed by the urgent need to survive, to hang on, to regain control.His eyes and flesh glow with the magnitude of this singular effort, unable to maintain the semblance of humanity any longer. Flakes of black oxide and ash peel off his molten skin. The harder he pulls himself in, the hotter the fire within him grows, and the whiter the heat of his frame…
When the core of him burns yellow-white as a furnace, he can feel the terrible power of Maedhros’s machine begin to slip. It gives him enough leverage to wrench himself off the wall, and with a drunken lurch, he takes a threatening step towards his gaoler.
“Pers… perseverance.” He hisses, smoke rising from his mouth and body. Waves of heat distort his vision, but he can see well enough to lunge.
Even through the haze of drunken hate, this curtain of rotten joy that, rather than being parted by the bone-white blade, is made thicker and thicker with every thread of skin that snaps under its caress, even as his gaze is clouded by the sweetish smell of the Maia’s blood rising in arches of bubble though the air Maedhros should see the signs. After all this possibility is hardly an unexpected one, and yet the Noldo notices barely in time to react. Suddenly the droplets of blood until now floating, start falling around Sauron’s body as his eyes glow and the machine looses some of its grip of him under the heat radiating from the Maia’s body. Behind his shoulders Dimhelesin gasps sharply and his distress hits the Noldo like a wave, sobering through their link, in the same instant in which the metallic smell of burning conductors and ozone reaches him, even stronger than the corruption from the Maia to his newly awakened senses. There is almost no time for rage, fear of loosing his prisoner, or satisfaction at seeing his enemy’s desperate effort.
“DIN! FULL!”
His voice is a roar and yet there is an odd elation in his words even as the Fëanorion grits his teeth, strong enough for his jaw to hurt, and his whole body coils backward. His eyes shine, never leaving his enemy’s and, in the same instant that the Maia takes his first step ahead, Maedhros springs into action.
Behind the Fëanorion’s shoulders his herald barely blinks before moving fast, with military precision, and sharply lowering the lever that control’s the energy flow to the apparatus, any sign of doubt or emotions in his face erased by the danger.
In one swift movement Maedhros’ body launches forward, his hand brandishing the knife in a spasmodic grip.
Around them the hum of machinery rises to a frenzied buzz, the inscriptions surrounding the machine glow livid and suddenly the air is cold enough to make the Fëanorion’s breath rise in a wisp of vapour as he slams his left foot on the tiles, using the force of his movement to bury his knife in Sauron’s shoulder and its momentum to immediately drag it across the expanse of his chest, deep enough to scrape over bone with a screeching chirrup.
With a deep, harmonic, drone the lines of power flare back to life, invisible and yet unyielding, encasing the Maia once again as the temperature lowers and the corona of blood droplets surrounding Sauron rises once again, stretching in elliptical wings around the fuse of the field, and if he were lucid enough Maedhros would know that barely a whisper of space stands between him and unconsciousness. Yet right now all he can feel is the drunken satisfaction of flesh opening for him as a scream of agony tears through the air and the inscriptions on his blade shine like a park of fire in and out his enemy’s flesh.
Just enough to take him out for a while, just that. That much is all he needs.
Maedhros’ very thoughts are tinged with a desperate elation as he opens his mouth, humming the few words of power that he knows and now uncoil on his tongue: not the power of the West, or the power of convictions.. Not only, at least, but the deeper power, the one that links together matter and makes crystal shine, the one that burns without heat in the heart of his people’s gems and makes light flow effortlessly, as it is doing now, though certain ceramics and refined carbon.
It is with a savage last thrust that Maedhros drags the blade to touch the previous cut, closing a broader circuit in Sauron’s body. His lips almost form the words echoing in his mind.
Just enough power for now..
The Fëanorion’s voice is a savage hiss as he buries the knife in the flesh and the ceramic blade chips on the Maia’s ribs with a clear tinkle.
“Yes.. Perseverance..”
This is not happening! This is not happening to me, this cannot happen to me! He’d been in control, the solution to the problem found: heated iron fell immune from the grasp of lodestones, that should have returned the upper hand to him! Had he miscalculated? No… his breath fogs, ice crystals branch across metal and glass, his core of heat faltering in the unnatural cold.
The invisible power reaches out to him again, halting his momentum as surely as if he were walking into Manwë’s windstorms. Clawing the ground uselessly for purchase, he loses his grip in the vertigo, and rises contorted into the air with a scream of helpless anger.
Every movement of the Noldo and his subordinate are precise and desperate, part of a plan, gaining on some precarious goal. They are a soldier’s motions, and yet, beneath all, he recognizes the drunken passion of a more personal motive.
It was not so long ago when their positions had been reversed.
Fear makes the great Maia’s heart thunder in his chest, drowning out the horrible drone of the mechanism with its pounding. The Noldo’s knife plunges again and again, thudding into him and parting him with gushing lines. A hard, intimate vibration through his bones as the knife rattles across his ribcage promises a future of unbearable pain– if indeed there is a future.
Maedhros’s face is the only unclouded image he can see; star-bright eyes wide and terribly focused, lips parted and damp as if the elf were panting with lust, his rune-etched blade sizzling with the Maia’s blood.
His eyes shut as another shriek is torn out of him by the opposing fields of the machine, hot lightning crackling through the fresh outlets carved in his flesh. He feels himself losing this body– the one he has no replacement for, the one Aulë made him so long ago. He cannot bear it. He cannot afford this.
“I beg you, stop! Please! I surrender!” Darkness floods his vision and he can no longer tell if he is housed in flesh, or dead, or dreaming.
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