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Next morning Gandalf felt much better. Being here, in their chosen home usually did that. Even the concept of towers could only cause slight amusement instead of wrath - until Gandalf, completely carefree, stepped on the hem of his robe. To catch his fall he gripped the handrail and dropped the candles he'd been carrying upstairs from the storage that was - of course - placed in the basement of the monolith.
"By Manwe! I am certain if this tower could be destroyed, somebody would have done so a long time ago. I should convince all races to abandon this concept. Aye, once I have finished my task, I will make the war against towers my personal crusade." he mumbled while he picked up the candles from the stairs.
One had fallen into a particularly deep crack at the inner side of the staircase and Gandalf was not completely able to reach into the crack with his gnarled fingers. It was then that he noticed the crack continued upwards in an almost perfect right angle. "This is most strange..." his gaze followed the crack but soon lost it in the maze of natural veins that crossed/intersected/ran through(durchziehen) the stone. He stood and using both a finger and his eyes to trace the crack, he soon learned why he had lost it before: it seemed that the structure bore a flaw. The rift followed the zig-zagging lines of intersecting veins. Yet it always kept an almost vertical direction instead of continuing along one specific line as would have seemed logical for a stone to do.
Thanks to Gandalf's close scrutiny he noticed another oddity: At shoulder-height there seemed to be some kind of encrusted object. Now, Gandalf had always been fascinated with the enormity of the monolith the tower had been carved out of and during their first years he had spent significant time searching for seams in the structure that would betray the tower's segmentation. But he never had. They had both come to the conclusion that it indeed was a monolith, probably a remnant of the ancient pillars that had once carried the first lamps to light Arda. Nobody had ever bothered to investigate the fate of the shards when the pillars had been broken.
As a side-effect of these intensive observations, Gandalf was sure he had never before in any place discovered any encrustation whatsoever. Ever the curious, he lightly touched this with his hand and a soft 'click' was to be heard and the crack widened slightly. Gandalf ducked instinctively but when nothing else happened, he relaxed and approached the crack again. "A door! All these years and we never noticed..." he gently pushed the stone and it swung back effortlessly. Knowledge to do such had been lost ages ago, that much Gandalf did know! It never came to his mind that maybe Saruman had discovered the door already and kept that fact hidden.
Inside it was pitch-black. The air that wafted out of the room was stale and dusty, virtually smelling of ages past. Luckily he had been carrying candles and it was a small feat to set a wick alight with a small spell. The walls seemed to swallow the light and so Gandalf lit another candle. The walls were too smooth to put down the waxen taper anywhere, so he held them in his hands. As far as he could tell his footprints were the first to be set into a thick layer of dust and he was certain that this room had remained undiscovered for at least this Age, maybe much longer. Only the tiny tracks of mice and insects had left intricate patterns in the dust that had been there for Eru knew how long.
Despite the room seeming so completely untouched and abandoned, Gandalf could not shake off a sense of evil foreboding - something he first blamed on the absolute darkness of the windowless room.
"By Eru!" he exclaimed softly when his eyes had adapted to the darkness. In the center of the not too big room was a pedestal and on top of it seemed to rest a tome of enormous size. Like the floor it was covered in dust. Gandalf could now sense that this appeared to be the source of the dark vibes inside the room. He carefully blew across the surface and once the cover was cleared off dust, he gasped and shuddered.
The cover was completely black, only a relief of an 'M' rune apppeared in the flickering light of the candles. The surface was soft with a structure to it; like woven silk over a panel of wood. Gandalf shivered but he was too curious to abandon his find right now. Slowly, carefully he turned the cover.
The pages were spattered with some brown substance; some were torn, others scarred at the edges. Yet Gandalf was able to read it. It was the language of the Valar! For lack of appropriate scripture - the Valar had a perfect memory and needed not to write down anything - it was written in a very ancient form of Tengwar. The elves would not understand enough of the Valian language to write a book, Gandalf knew. Could it be that this was indeed written by the Fallen One? That he had discovered a book written by Melko himself? It would certainly explain the feeling of utter evil that was almost palpable in the close proximity of this book.
The beginning was just filled with sheer hate and self-praise and Gandalf skimmed it rather quickly. The parchment used was of exquisite quality like the wizard had never seen before and sometimes he thought he could discern some pattern that seemed to be interwoven with the material of the parchment. The script, written with an ink that had turned brown over the passage of time had in places almost faded completely, making it hard to follow the flow of words. Oft the wizard had to guess great parts, being mislead for a good while.
But it slowly dawned on him that this book held the story of the elves enslaved under the Dark Lord during the First Age, before the Valar had come to Arda for the last time and had overthrown Melko in the War of Wrath.
"I took away their voices for their singing hurts the ears of my creatures and comforts the Eldar greatly. Taking away their means of mourning locks up their negative emotions and helps with my plans..." Gandalf read on "... it is unbearable to their minds to find themselves locked up underground, especially when there is no light. I must only be more accurate determining the proper moment before they turn completely insane, to have them at my will and do my bidding..."
"...the insemination is not always successful and the bearer of the child - be it a male or a female - must undergo the most intense tortures during the time of pregnancy. Unfortunately they willingly abandon their bodies too often before the time of delivery has come... the results are not quite satisfying but the offspring is far more willing to interbreed with whoever is brought before them. To have them rape a pure elf, especially their own bearer seems to produce the most perfect creatures, made for my purposes..."
Gandalf was weeping as he read how his beloved Eldar were tortured by Melko to create those wretched creatures called Orcs. And only then he recognized one of the patterns on the parchment: The Eldar of the First Age had oft worn large tattoos to enhance the shape of their bodies and to mark their belonging to a certain clan. What he saw on the page, faded in the process of making the parchment was such a pattern! "No!" he cried out, realizing that the whole book was in fact written on parchment made of elven skins. It was only a logical conclusion that the ink, that brown, fading ink was... oh, dear Eru! it had to be blood. Elvish blood.
Gandalf tried to back away with horror but found that he could not. Something seemed to hold him in place, forcing him to turn the pages despite the utter sickness he felt upon each time he touched that cursed tome.
TBC...
