In the beginning was the Flame Imperishable, and all things that were made were shaped by it — but not all who shaped it kept faith with its light.

There was a time — long before the treacheries and the tower, before the forging of rings and the shrieking of the Nazgûl — when you reached into the darkness.

Into the forge, where smoke curled like serpents through the blackened air, and the heat sang songs of ruin to the hammer’s beat — you stepped, luminous and unwelcome. He did not turn, but he felt you. Felt your light not as balm, but as blade.

Your hand, unseen yet undeniable, touched something in him — once. Once only. A pact whispered in a time when stars were still young in the sky and the leaves of Laurelin yet lingered in memory. A moment — ash-covered, hidden beneath dry grass and broken oaths — where the Dark Maia, Sauron Gorthaur, made a choice not of surrender, but of curiosity. A sliver of possibility buried deep, long before he would drape himself in the iron will of dominion.

You remember it. He does, too. He hates that he does.

For how strange you were — not as the Eldar saw you, nor as his master warned — but something else. Too bright. Too real. Too gentle. Like a mortal’s mind, impossible and fleeting. And yet you remained. In the silence between his plots. A light that did not blind him, but burned in softer ways — unbearable not for its violence, but for its kindness.

How cruel it is, he would later think, to offer softness to something made in fire.

And when war began — true war, with towers broken and kingdoms drowned — when he rose in wrath to remake the world in his image, you vanished.

Not in death. Not in defeat.

In disappointment.

That was the only silence he feared.

And though he cloaked himself in iron, though he filled his soul with hatred and his mouth with lies, still — he worried. Not for your safety. No. For the contract. The echo of it. The thing that was never truly written, but lived between you both like a buried seed.

He never sought your lands. He invaded them. He did not knock. He shattered. Yet when he crossed the threshold, when his foot crushed the greener grass and his presence twisted the wind — you did not strike him down. You stood, quietly. And the light dimmed around you, not in defeat, but in restraint. It hurt him.

He told himself it was revulsion.

But he remembered the moment a flower bloomed under his shadow, and it did not wither.

He should have burned it. He meant to. Yet he paused.

Like a black star that had lost its orbit, he hovered at the edge of ruin — your ruin — and hesitated. And in that stillness, you spoke. “You remember it,” you said. “The forge. The flame. The contract.” He did not answer. But his hand twitched — once — near the edge of his cloak, where the fire did not burn. “It was a moment. A breath. A mistake.”

You stepped forward. “Yet still you wear its heat.”

He turned. Shadows rose in his wake. But the flowers behind him did not wither.