unfortunately I have begun to mentally write the Lotr/Silmarillion AU longfic that I would write if I was going to write a LotR/Silmarillion AU longfic. Which I’m not going to do. But if I was, I know roughly how the prologue would go.
i am TRYING to do work, but my brain won’t stop playing “Empty Chairs at Empty Tables” while thinking about a reincarnated Celebrimbor leading the Fellowship through Khazad-dum
the prologue would go like this:
“Celebrimbor, please. Calimafëa.” Annatar’s voice is soft again, his touch gentle. “End this, please let me end this. I have no desire to hurt you so.”
He is honest, at least. At last. It is impossible to hide one’s own emotions when boring like a drill through the mind of another, ransacking like an orc and consuming like a flame. Though if anyone could do it, it would be Sauron the Deceiver.
This is ABSOLUTELY written for everyone who shouted in the reblog tags for more. You bastards, I had to look up so many place names and he’s barely gone anywhere
Celebrimbor didn’t linger in Valmar, no longer than was necessary to acquire decent clothes and a tolerable sword. The Vanyar were curious, but too polite to ask delaying questions of someone on a time-sensitive mission from the Valar themselves. (More like on leniency from the Valar… Celebrimbor couldn’t say what he’d expected when he swore his Oath, because he hadn’t really expected anything, save more pain for his defiance. He still thought he would rather be cast into eternal Void than see the Three, and then all Middle Earth, in An– in Sauron’s hand.)
Time-sensitive though, yes. Mandos had said nothing more, but the new Oath gnawed at Celebrimbor’s gut, urging action, and he’d been in enough deadly battles and wars to sense when one was drawing to a breaking point, even from idyllic Aman. For war this was, though war begun, resumed, or unending he didn’t know - the Vanyar said that 4,762 years had passed while he was in the Halls of Mandos, but the only details they could give of Arda was some vague story about Numenor earning its own destruction. No word of Sauron, none of Laurelindórenan or Lindon, much less any of the other races…
GRATEFUL SHOUTOUT to @isi7140 for all translations!
It was less strange to ride through the empty hills of Lindon than it was to walk through diminished Mithlond, but it was still strange. Celebrimbor…had seen entire landscapes altered overnight, by both fire and flood. But never by time, which was supposed to be a gradual thing. The air was drier and cooler in a way he could tell wasn’t just random fluctuation; the dominant scrub-brushes had wider, darker leaves; and the hills themselves were flatter, worn by wind and rain.
There was barely any farmland, and the wolves that howled at night were more fell.