“Witch, please!” Miflin said.

The bald woman looked up at him, her eyes blazing for the briefest of moments. She waved her hand in front of her face, between the two of them, setting a gentle trail of sparks in the air, like lit motes of dust. Miflin stepped back, alarm roiling over his features.

“Don’t even think about...”

“Silence!” the bald woman said, stretching the word out like the sound of a waterfall. Her skin was tinged a shade of blue darker than any woman’s skin should be, as though she had painted herself with the blood of some deep dwelling shelled creature. But her eyes were the color of hardened honey, and they blazed whenever the light caught them. Miflin could only gaze at her for quick glance before her intensity was too much. This reticence did not dim Miflin’s particular brand of courage, however.

“I serve the Master! I don’t take kindly to your old magic, bi...” Miflin started to say, but without making eye contact.

The bald woman snapped two blue-tinged fingers and Milfin’s voice became like drops of water in a puddle at the bottom of a very deep well. Miflin clutched at his throat and glared at her, still not making eye contact. His eyes bulged as he tried to speak and was unable. When he realized he could not breathe nor speak he fell to his knees and did the only thing he could imagine would save him. He bowed in obeisance to the bald, bluish woman. She stared down at him as the firelight from her huge hearth glimmered in her stone honey eyes. Just before he died his eyes met hers and pleaded where his voice could not. Miflin’s heavy, lifeless body crashed to the dusty woven rushes which covered the floor. A twinkling shower of particles leapt up and refracted in the firelight, but none of the particles touched the bald woman.

“I know you are there, Eldar.” she said, calm.

Neldoreth crept out of the shade of the evening into the doorway of the ramshackle house. His drawn, thin face was aghast as it took in the bald, blue woman. That he knew her was not in question. However, she did not seem to know him.

“I cannot see into your mind, it twists so.” the bald woman said. “But in time all waters run to the source. You led the Man here, you helped him breach my defenses. Why?” She did not sound at all afraid.

Neldoreth moved. Hesitant and slow, towards her, with careful toe-first steps. His feet were so light on the rug they raised no motes. His hand reached out towards her, fingers splayed wide with hope. The bald woman made a slashing gesture and Neldoreth’s hand fell sharply away. He screeched in pain as a long, thin gash cut open across his body from shoulder to hip. The gash started to bleed in slow, gentle lines down the ragged clothes covering Neldoreth’s body. The bald woman grinned at him, showing teeth covered in moss.

“I came for you River Woman.” Neldoreth said. “Long have I heard songs of your beauty, but they are pale glimmers of the Moon on dark waters against what you truly are.”

The bald woman growled a shriek of undisguised rage. “How do you know...”

Neldoreth cackled. “I am Eldar! You should know better than to ask such questions. To my kind were given the gifts of the Earth. I...”

Again the bald woman slashed a hand at Neldoreth, this time with a full twist of her body. A concussive smack sliced the air, though the sound bothered neither the woman, nor Neldoreth, though it did stir up more shining motes of dust from the woven rushes on the floor. Neldoreth flew backwards and slammed into the wooden wall, drawing another hard slap of sound from the humid, musty air. When he landed, Neldoreth crumpled into a ball against the wall and floor. And he laughed.

The bald woman heard the madness in his laugh and considered fleeing, but she heard something else in his laugh as well. A familiar sound, an echo of something lost for years and years, a tinkling of deep waters on a still pool.

Tom. She mouthed the name.

Neldoreth looked up, his eyes meeting the woman’s, pleading and angry at once. She ran towards him and knelt at his crumpled body, tears already washing down from her eyes.

“Tom?” she said, almost a wail, the short, quick word broken into wet stutters. Tom-tom-tom-tom. Rain battering against a ceiling.

Neldoreth’s eyes blazed in time with hers, and for a moment they shared a timelessness which stretched between them, as old as Time itself, as wide as the known world, as old as old could be. When the moment had to end, as it must, such Powers could not be sustained for long, not since the Closing of the Earth, not without Power Neldoreth did not yet possess, the bald woman broke into sobs of pathetic misery. Neldoreth pushed her away. She did not resist. Instead she cowered against her knees, clutching herself like the image of the frightened girl she had never been.

Neldoreth sang under his breath and bits of dirt lifted up from the rushes to coalesce into his skin, healing him. The bald woman caught his tune and hummed along with him, as the rain sang with the wind through the trees of an old forest. The song lasted only moments and when it was done a cough shattered the ensuing quiet.

Miflin, alive again, was wracked with coughs as he heaved the dust and wet from his lungs, his face almost pressed against the rushes, his palms and knees all that held him from collapsing again. After his coughs subsided he looked over at Neldoreth and the bald woman, his brown eyes cast with terror.

“How...?” Miflin said.

“The Gift was not yours.” Neldoreth said, voice harsh, but sure. The bald woman stared at Miflin, as shocked by his drawing of breath as the man himself.

“It is not within our power to defy the Gift...” she said, at Neldoreth.

“Not yet. But it can be, Daughter of the River.” Neldoreth said. “It can be.” Within his deepest roots, Neldoreth knew this to be true. He was slowly becoming something different. A long dormant Power was rising through him, and it had spent many, many ages in the formless Void, preparing its thoughts.

She cast a questioning look at Miflin then back at Neldoreth before she said, while shaking her head, “It is....wrong. We must not.” But there was no fight in her voice and both she and Neldoreth knew it.

“Wrong?” Neldoreth cackled. “Wrong? There is no wrong! Once this land could exist within the lines drawn between the Dark and the Light, inside the Light was life, outside was Void. It was all so... clear.” Neldoreth drew back within himself for a moment, considering before he continued, as though he were engaged in a conversation only he could hear. When he glanced back at the bald woman his eyes shone again. She wilted in his direction.

“This cannot be, Tom.” she murmured, her voice too weak to carry, but carrying a pained emotion, a wet need. Still, Neldoreth heard her, though Miflin did not. The man had gotten to his feet. Seeing he was not watched by the witch nor the pointed-eared demon, Miflin ran. His muffled footsteps carried him to the door before the bald woman croaked a command and a sheet of midnight blue water cascaded over the doorway, solidified an instant later to ice. Miflin slammed hard into it, knocking himself unconscious, crystals of ice forming on his nose, lips, and fingertips.

Neldoreth drew close to the bald woman, put his hands firmly on her shoulders. She held his gaze and covered his hands with her own. Eyes locked, they again lost themselves in one another for a long, carefree moment. “It must be, Gold...”

“Say not that name, Eldar!” the woman said, thrusting Neldoreth away with a strength not apparent in her size or thin bodied structure. “That name is as dead as the bottom of the mud in a river of ash beneath the Mountains of Shadow.”

Neldoreth considered her, and her words, before he nodded. “A new name then, for the coming days. Maral, I name you, River of Woe!”

The word had no meaning in any of the tongues the bald woman knew, but it held power nonetheless, a power which should not have been Neldoreth’s to grant, but which, nevertheless, was. It did not surprise her however. In this place, in this house, on this land, he was Master. Energy suffused her body. Ropes of shadow leapt out from the corners of the room and licked her body like flames against a piece of wet wood. Forceful, the ropes wrapped themselves around her arms, her chest, her legs, until only the bluish skin of her face remained uncovered. Neldoreth’s lips curled backwards, a smile of joy in pain. The shadows stopped coming and Maral screamed, a primal sound, as terrible to hear as the thunder, rain, and storm descending all at once. Her eyes closed and she teetered against the wall of the house, her shadow-roped arm coming up to cover her face, as though a blinding light spiked at her eyes, despite the dimness of the room, lit as it was only by the roaring fire in the hearth.

“Do you feel it, Maral? The power of the Empty Dark? Long has it waited, forgotten. Fools they were, to leave it untapped, seeking instead to corrupt the Light. The Empty Dark was always the stronger, it surrounds all.” Neldoreth said, but the voice was both his and not. It was multiple voices at once, all of them sounding brass with madness, tortured.

Maral’s face came out from under her arm, her eyelids flickering open. Where golden, frozen-honey colored eyes had been, were now black orbs, so dark they seemed to take in light with the utter promise of refusing to allow it to escape. Neldoreth approached her, stroked her face, lovingly.

“We are not evil, Maral.” he said. Drip-by-drip sanity had been returning to him, after thousands of years of wandering down the moonlit paths. “All is connected. We are what remains of the old ways. It has not grown soft with age. It has not left this Middle Earth completely.”

Maral held eye contact with him, while the black of her eyes wavered. Blue and honey tried to reassert itself. Neldoreth pushed back, allowing all the force he could muster to flow into her. Never had such power been his. Even when he had eaten the Brown, trapped and fed off the Master, when he had learned what it meant to see Time stretch in more than two directions. It was only now he truly understood what either the Master or the Brown had been. It hardly mattered now, what they had been. The Master was gone, save for the parts which lived within Neldoreth. As was the Brown.

“Once long ago,” Neldoreth said, as he twisted cold darkness into Maral, “The Master was First. Oldest. As the Great Music ended, he came first and touched the first foot upon what became the Earth. Once long ago, the Master said he would also be the Last. I will see it so. I have returned. I am the Master.”

Maral’s chest rose and fell with heavy movements, like great furious waves lapping against an unyielding dam, as heavy winds came to push them over. Sounds escaped her throat: needy, croaking sounds; an old boat heading towards the rapids, unable to stop itself. Neldoreth’s hand clasped her chin, closed around it and pulled her up, to her feet. She was taller than him. Whatever he was, Elf or Angel, Wizard or Wight, Man or Beast, Master or Servant, or some unholy mixture of all, she was still what she had always been, River Daughter, Spirit of the Waters, Bringer of the Rains, Washing Woman. Only darkened by time and sadness, like rain washed with soot. Still she was powerful, when she wished.

A stalemate held between them. Neldoreth exerted all his power, but it was not enough. Though he had consumed the Master, and in this place was now the Master, could exert all the powers and privilege once granted to that holy being, it was not enough. Maral, the River Daughter, could resist him, because she had always been his Master. She was the mightier, because her love had the power to wash over his. Neldoreth knew this. Maral knew it. She had to choose, nothing else would suffice.

Neldoreth pulled her chin towards him. He used the gifts of this place, the powers of the Master, to change his form, to fatten his slack-faced skin, to expand the shape of his body. He now appeared to be a bandy-legged fat Man, balding but hale. His beard was fluffy and long, gay even without the presence of her flowers. His blue eyes twinkled as though refracting fresh sunlight from the breaking of the May showers. Maral was entranced. Her love undid her. Time ceased between the two of them. She was pulled onto the moonlit paths and became Lost.

“Master....” Maral said, more an exhalation than an actual word.

Their lips met and the warring of her eyes ceased. The black hardened. Spreading outward in fine lines, like cracks in river rocks, black streaks crept out from her eyes, covering her skin in a fine tracery. The lines sprouted other finer lines, as though some artist of renown too great to maintain had made her body a final work of its dark Art. The tracery dripped down to her fingers, each of which now ended in a pointed, dripping fingernail, as brown-black as river mud in an unmoving stream beneath a dark mountain.

“River Daughter?” Neldoreth asked. She smiled cruel, and shook her head in the negative.

“Maral.” Neldoreth murmured, his voice a caress. “Together we will scourge this land. Our washing will burn the cancer out. Long has the Age of Man ruled this Earth, this once named Arda. Shall we rain Wrath down upon it?”

Maral smiled. Her pain and loneliness had millennia behind it. Memories of what had come before: of the joy of life, love, rain, and sun; all that was dark now, seen through the lens of her years without the Master. Some part of her knew a deeper Truth now: had she never known Love, had old Tom never seduced her wanderings, and dammed her travels, she would never have become Maral. It was Love lost which allowed her to cease being the River Daughter, servant of He Who Rules The Deeps. A small, tinkling voice she had been in the Great Music, one of unimaginable multitudes, but still the voice had been hers, and rivers had flowed because of her singing. Love had taken that from her, had made her something more, and by the same power had now made her something else. Neldoreth smiled as he pulled away from her, the taste of mildew on his lips.

“Come now, Maral! Come now, once River Daughter!” Neldoreth said, “We are not as we were. We must feed.”

A question lingered in Maral’s blackened eyes. Neldoreth turned away from her, though it hurt him to do so. Part of him relished the pain. Deep within, part of who the Master had been was horrified at what Neldoreth had become, at what the Elf had used the powers of His land to do. Yet that part of the Master was no longer strong enough, even here. It was no longer Master. Neldoreth was.

“Miflin!” Neldoreth called out.

The Man returned, face alight with the Empty Dark radiating from Neldoreth and Maral. His gaze upon them was pure worship. It buoyed Neldoreth, to be worshipped, gave him Power. He watched as Maral also found pleasure in the emotion.

“Yes, Master?” Miflin said, obeisant, but confused. “Mistress?”

“We are hungry.”

Miflin paled and started to step away. “Please, Master. I do not want to go there again. It was so bright...I...Please?”

His pleadings were swept away. Neldoreth commanded him to come forward. Maral stroked the Man’s face, loving, as he stood, tall and wide between the two dark, ethereal beings. A susurration escaped his lips, part joy, part terror, equaled. As it should be, thought Neldoreth. Equals. We are the Master of this world.

Neldoreth pulled Miflin’s head down towards a broad shoulder, exposing the pale-skinned Man’s neck, corded with muscle. With gentle force building to ravaged tearing he clamped his mouth down upon the neck, pierced the skin, and drank the blood. Power surged into him. He pulled up, to show the ragged opening, spilling Miflin’s life down the man’s shoulder. Miflin’s eyes had rolled into the back of his head. His kind were not meant to experience Rites of this sort, their spirits were too weak. He would not survive. It did not matter. Neldoreth, in this place, could bring the Man back from the Void, if he chose. Here, if nowhere else, he was the One. He was the Master. He could deny the Gift.

Maral smiled, vulpine, before she lowered her mouth over the wound and sucked at Miflin’s cooling blood. It flowed down her lips, covering for a moment the delicate tracery of black lines which had decorated her chin. She clearly found the taste exciting, it was after all, the first time she had ever eaten the body of another animal. Ecstasy rose within her and she drew more of the Man’s blood into her, drew his essence, sucked at the Gift itself, the piece of the One which lived within every Man, and which shortened their lives as it sought to find its way back to Him.

The name, even in her thoughts was like hard fire. It burned. But the burn was not enough. Mere words, mere images could not stop her. Not now, not here, if ever such could. Neldoreth had found this power on the moonlit paths after the others of his kind abandoned him during their flight to the West. Now he shared the power with Maral. Their spirits had always been in kindred, now it was a kindred of darkness, as before it had been light. Maral fed until Miflin sank, all the life taken from him, into her. The Gift was truly gone from the Man’s body.

It coursed through her. She knew she could return it, if she wished, but she did not. She savored the power and strength it imparted. As if she were again amid the Choir of Angels, singing the Great Music, the First Shaping, when power had not existed, it had simply been a song, and the One had made it real. More, she knew she could sing again. Her songs would have power, as they had not had in three thousand years. Not since old Tom had left her to seek out the rumor of the Last Elf, the Damned One. Her new songs would dwarf all the power she once had.

Neldoreth. Maral mouthed the name. Neldoreth saw the recognition in her eyes. She knew the story now. How old Tom had wandered over the Mountains and into the Forest. How the shadows had fled before him. The farther he traveled from his land, however, the weaker he became. By the time he reached the Thousand Caves, the Darkness which had been woven there was too strong. But old Tom had sung against it. Sung with might as he had of old, as though this darkness were the shades of Men. It was not. His songs had only weakened Tom, until Neldoreth had captured the being, once known as old Bombadil. Neldoreth had already fed upon the Brown by then, had already assumed some of the powers of the dead Wizard. It was hundreds of years before he fully consumed all of old Tom. But he had. Now, all that remained of Tom was complete: what lived within Neldoreth and the Love of the River Daughter.

Together again.

Next Chapter: Chapter 12 - Khrashnak