9. Palantír: The Númenorean

“My father and mother should have stayed in Númenor where they met and married and where I was born,” the man was saying to the local lord with a dark sneer, “but they did not. Now I am here, and I rule this part of land. You can either accept it and be my vassal, or refuse it and die…”

They decided to leave Númenor to find power and wealth in Middle-earth. Their ships landed, and they embarked - tall and bright-eyed, in grey cloaks that glistened like silver in the sun. The people saw them, and were amazed…  just to be forced to give up their land for the new lords from the West.

Sauron smiled. He was a true Númenorean, dark-haired and of piercing eyes. Sauron watched him from afar, and he liked what he saw… he wanted to have him, to make him his captain and leader of his armies.

“My lord,” he came to him with a fair face and sweet voice. “Will you accept this ring?”

And he did. There was something triumphant in Sauron’s thought at that, as if he would defeat Aragorn’s refusal, at least in his own mind, but his thought continue on its own, and he wasn’t sure he liked the direction where it was going:

Was it a coincidence that the Stoors fled from the shadow of the Witch-king’s realm in Angmar to settle in the Gladden fields, where the orcs ambushed and killed Isildur? Was it a coincidence that one of them found something at the bottom of a river, something sparkly, precious… 

There are no coincidences.