She is brought to me, not as a captive dragged and screaming, but as something delivered.

That alone interests me.

The bindings are old work—clever, layered, humming with will that is not my own. Sauron’s hand is all over them .. crude iron. Bindings meant to hold even when the held thing no longer believes it should exist. I recognize that craftsmanship. It is the kind that assumes endurance.

She does not struggle.

That is the first mistake they make about her.

She stands where she is placed, pale and thin as a famine memory, head bowed not in subjugation but in calculation. Her hair is white—wrongly white—and hangs loose around a face carved hollow by need. Red body fluid dries at her mouth, her hands. Not fresh. Never fresh with her. I note that, too.

I have been told what she is.

A thing remade. A failure that persists. A tool that refuses to be properly used.

I circle her once, slow. She does not track me. She keeps her gaze lowered, not in fear, but in restraint so tight it hums like a blade drawn almost free of its sheath.

Most creatures shake when they are given to me.

Most bare their teeth

Most beg.

She does nothing.

“You were made to hunt,” I say at last, testing the sound of my voice against her stillness. “And yet you starve.”

No answer.

I stop in front of her, close enough to smell the sharp, thin edge of her hunger. It is not the wild reek of indulgence.

It is careful.

Measured.

Chosen.

That irritates me.

Weakness should spill.

Yours does not.

Sauron’s voice lingers in my memory—cool, precise, disappointed. He had called her unfinished. A mistake of mercy. Said she fed on beasts when commanded to take people. Said she warned prey when she was meant to break it. Said she endured when she should have burned out quickly and been replaced.

I understand now why he gave her to me.

She is not broken enough for him.

I reach out—not to touch, not yet—but to test the edge of the bindings. They tighten in response, answering a will older and colder than mine. She flinches then, just barely, a tremor that runs through her like a fault line shifting.

So. There it is.

Pain, but not panic.

“You know what I am,” I say quietly. “And still you do not look at me.”

She lifts her head.

Her eyes meet mine at last, and something in my chest twists—not desire, not pity, but recognition sharpened to a point. There is no plea there. No hope. Only endurance. A vast, terrible patience.

That is when it settles.

She is not weak.

She is worse.

She is unyielding.

I straighten, a slow smile cutting across my face. “They say you refuse,” I tell her. “Refuse to feed as you are meant to. Refuse to become what you were shaped to be.”

Still silence.

I like that less than screaming.

“You belong to the darkness now,” I continue, voice low. “But you do not love it.”

Her hands curl slightly at her sides. The bindings tighten again, correcting the motion before it becomes rebellion.

Ah.

That is the tragedy of her.

She is bound not because She is dangerous—but because she chooses not to be.

Sauron thinks this makes she useless. He is wrong.

I step closer, close enough now that she must feel the heat of me, the weight of my presence.

She does not retreat.

She does not advance.

She simply endures.

“You will stay,” I say. Not as a threat. As a statement of fact. “You will be watched. You will be useful when it suits me. Withheld when it does not.”

Her gaze never leaves mine.

And for the first time in a very long while, I feel something like fascination root itself deep in my gut.

Because whatever they did to you—whatever they bound into your bones—you are still choosing.

And I have always enjoyed breaking things that think they can endure forever.