The doors do not open so much as break.

They groan beneath my hand and the weight of my will, torn inward into a hall made for dread and spectacle. Steam rolls through it in heavy waves. Iron. Smoke. Stone darkened by ages of ruin. The very air feels heavy, as though something unnatural has settled into it. Morgoth would make a theater of darkness if given the chance, and here—beneath vaults that swallow light and return only shadow—he has done precisely that.

I come for the Silmarils.

That purpose is in me with the same clear and merciless drive that carried me across ice, across loss, across every ruin that followed in my wake. I feel them before I see them. Their light is wrong here in ugliness, forged to crown what should never have been permitted to touch them. My sons walk in behind me, steel drawn, breath hard with the labor of ascent and fury. But I hear little of them. Hear little of anything beyond the roaring pull in my chest that says mine mine mine.

Then I see what lies below the throne.

At first I take her for some creature shaped from the refuse of shadow—a pale thing folded low at the foot of black iron, too still to be wholly living. White hair. Hands too thin. A frame reduced by hunger to angles and absence. She does not crouch down further. She does not lunge. She simply remains, half veiled by the long spill of darkness cast by Morgoth’s throne, as if she has sat there so long the shadow has begun to name her shape as its own.

My gaze passes over her. Then returns. Something in me stumbles. Not in body. In certainty.

The hall remains hot, the iron crown remains set with stolen light, the dark remains what it is—but for one impossible instant all of it thins around that single figure beneath the throne. I know that stillness. I know the shape of those hands, though they have been made down to almost nothing. I know the line of that face even through the hunger and the wrongness of what has been done to it.

No.

The word does not reach my mouth. It strikes inside me and goes no further.

Lírissë.

The name tears through the years between one breath and the next. Salt wind against white harbor stone. The sound of gulls. The glint of sea-light in dark water. Her turning toward me with that patience she wore when she thought me too heated to hear myself. Her hands upon a rail, fingertips tapping once against weathered wood as she listened, always listened, before she spoke.

And then—Alqualondë.

Dark water in the harbor. White ships made in flame. The screaming... My own fury bright enough to blind me to everything but the theft of the ships, the theft of time, the theft of what I had already decided the world owed me.

I did not see her fall.

The realization lands heavier than anything I have yet endured in this fight. I did not see her because I was not looking. I had eyes only for the ships, for the Silmarils, for the oath already hot around my throat like iron. I remember the chaos. I remember the sea turning strange. I remember victory so bitter even then I would not name it. But I did not look for her.

And Morgoth did.

By the time I understand this, I am no longer looking at the Silmarils.

I am looking at her.

At what remains.

Morgoth says something from above me, something like mockery made into amusement, but I do not hear the words. My ears are full of the surf that must once have lived in her scent, though here the hall stinks only of smoke and iron.

She lifts her head.

Slowly.

Toward me.

There is no accusation in her face. No plea. No welcome. Only the unbearable stillness of one who has endured too long to waste herself upon visible reaction. The hunger has hollowed her almost beyond recognition, and yet Morgoth has failed in the one way that matters most: he has not erased her.

Valar forgive me, I know her.

She kneels in the shadow of my enemy as proof of a loss I never counted among my burdens because I never understood I had already lost her.

I move forward instinctively

"My Lírissë what have I done."