The Rise and Fall of Empires
Chapter 8: Mastermind, Makers, Pirates, Spies…and Necromancer (Part 2)
Fuck the update schedule, we deserve an extra chapter this week. Flashbacks, part 2 of 2!
On balance, Annatar was enjoying himself. The loss of his jewel of a city still burned like a brand, and Celebrimbor and many of his lesser favorite elves were under constant threat, out of his reach, or both. And the obsequious manner he had to maintain with the lords of Númenor was wearing thin.
But it was so pleasant to not only flex skills he’d let lie dormant for most of an Age of the World, but to have a real project for which to do so. Celebrimbor’s method of perfecting Arda was so slow that it became seductive, a never-ending series of daily, yearly, centennial minutiae. Now, Annatar held ever-fluctuating thousands of variables in his hands, and with every step of the equation he reduced them—though to the layman they seemed at times to grow—down toward perfect nothingness.Â
Most of all, Annatar enjoyed practicing necromancy again. It was the one craft he’d never been able to convince Celebrimbor to appreciate, much less to practice. (To be fair, it required power and perception far beyond that of a mere elf.) The marvel of a captured fëa in his hands, thrashing in desperate frenzy with every last speck of life and will that Eru had gifted it! The moment of unmatched beauty when it finally submitted and fell still, like a lake returned to picture-perfect after a stone’s ripples finally ceased! And the picture it then reflected, of course, was Annatar’s own admirable will…
Not that he pursued such stillness now, of course. These were not the grand old days of hunting prey through a dark forest or sweeping a net through a bloody battlefield and mauling, warping, breaking to bloodlust and chaining to service... Just a bud of trust watered here, a nightmarish memory muffled there—nothing that stood out from the natural effects of time and acclimatization.
