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Melkor returned with a dreadful light.
He wore them in three, jewels of fine craftsmanship that had captured the last light of the ruined trees of the West. Light created by the Valar without him, contained in receptacles that were not of Mairon’s making.
His Lord’s servants grappled to be bathed by the sacred light, and Mairon wasn’t blind how quite taken his own Master with them. That as much as Melkor loathed its creation, he worshiped its being, caring for naught else but that despicable light that Mairon had grown to resent.
“We make our own light here.” Mairon had agreed, once, during an age where the foundation of Angband remained young under their feet, a fortified citadel created as an extended stronghold in mind until it was given for Mairon to command. And command he did until His return, with faith and loyalty that did not wane.
Melkor’s eyes had been less clouded then, piercing blue of chipped frost meeting Mairon’s ember ones. Mairon remembered the both of them casting tall shadows against the walls, darker than the dimness of their lands where the light of the trees hardly reached.
That his Lord was yet to renounce the light in his speech should have been a hint—that Melkor refused to exist solely in the darkness of Arda for he had been the greatest of Eru’s children first and foremost. The brightest of the Ainur who could cast the greatest of shadows.
Melkor had ceaselessly sought the Eternal Flame, and in his search he found the Silmarils instead.
His Lord had wanted for an iron crown, and Mairon wrought him none for Melkor wanted his own marred hands to twist and bend the metal himself. He shaped a wretched thing, made all the more detestable by those three useless gems.
Mairon’s doubt planted its seed at the discovery of his Master’s worsening sensibilities; a slow descent to madness that a spiteful part of Mairon thought just.
But he adored him still, the Lord that he had chosen to serve and follow on his own free will. Mairon loved him still to turn a blind eye and to gently coax Melkor back toward reason, the right ones that he would have taken if the old him had remained. Mairon did not mourn the Master he had lost and instead tried to embody the might that had beckoned him.
With the arrival of the Silmarils was the arrival of the Incarnates who would wage wars and spend their blood and of their kind over such gems. The most logical approach was to give up the stones and let the infighting destroy them on their own; mayhaps that might awaken his Master from his present preoccupation.
Mairon would not, of course, not while he remained in servitude. Not while Mairon had to kneel in deference every single time in Melkor’s presence.
So Mairon knelt once more, this time with all the intention to capture Melkor’s gaze from his gems. Mairon took his foot, mustering a magic that was never his domain to mend the torn tendons. His face Mairon insolently cradled, mustering a kind of tenderness that he thought he never had, fingers tracing across the clawed cheek and nose.
Melkor looked at him. Truly looked. And when Mairon was allowed to take off his Master’s crown, he remembered once more what had led him here, what all these were for.
He counted it a victory, to capture Melkor’s attention albeit for a while. To have his gaze clear and bright when Mairon came to strip off his form and bear the light that had always been Melkor’s when Mairon had sworn himself to his service.
Melkor called him beautiful then, spoken true and dear with the voice that had shaped lands and crested seas. Mairon came to believe in something else that devotion failed to encompass, and he won , if only briefly.
Mairon loathed what Arien had brought, a dark cloud that shadowed Melkor’s face under the weight of his iron crown sitting atop his head once more. His Master was forever lost, Mairon realized, and with him all the warmth Mairon had left.
The fool that wore Melkor’s face was not his Master. Mairon turned away to this false and cowardly Lord and did not look back.
Not even when Mairon’s escape was bid, when he thought he recognized the Ainu that Eonwë dragged away with hewn feet.
But it was too late. Far too late.