via
http://ift.tt/2hX0jso:
imindhowwelayinjune:
@snartha appeared on our skype call tonight wearing a wooly grey hood thing and within 3 minutes we’d invented a new OC.
She had been an early prototype.
An unnecessary one, Sauron admitted to himself later, but he’d always been a stickler for perfection and couldn’t bear to set his Great Plan into motion without having done a dry run first. Experimentation was important, he was a scientist, he was an artist, he was a performer –
It made sense to have a dress rehearsal.
She had been no one of importance – a woman of mean birth from the nameless hills, with little power and less an ambition. Her anonymity had been an important control, he had thought at first, though he did realize this made her hardly representative of what was to come. Still, the important factors manifest despite this in the years after Old Nan had curiously slid that ring onto her bony finger.
The long life, for one.
The magnification of her most potent personality traits for another.
(The fact that these were good-naturedness, an almost pathological worry about others catching cold, and a zeal for crochet had made Sauron frown a little at this perversion of his gifts, but still. One couldn’t be choosy with a prototype.)
When she had died at last, or hadn’t, her spirit was fully under his thrall, and he rejoiced, for it meant his plan was to work, and the Nine – gleaming in their leaden honeycomb deep within his forge – would do what he had dreamed of:
Provide him with an army of wraiths; potent slaves; undying, biddable, powerful beings.
The fact that Old Nan hung around was annoying, but unavoidable. She drifted around in her old cowl with the herringbone pattern, embarrassing Khamul by draping a muffler around his neck and chiding the Witch King for going out to pillage the Shire with ‘nary a mitten, for shame!’
The Nine, to Sauron’s surprise, not only tolerated but venerated her, which gave him some pause, even jealousy. Surely he should be the only one his Ringwraiths venerated - but then, respect for one’s forebears was ground deep into the bones of these Wraiths Who Had Been Men, and as such he did not forbid their deference to the Wraith Who Had Been A Grandmother.
Besides, he didn’t know what he’d do without her tri-color, heel stitch, fingerless gloves.
@greenekangaroo @urloth
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