30. Palantír: Stripping

Now Sauron was showing him everything, the moment of his greatest fear and shame even… His head spun when he heard in his mind a scream, distant and muted, but terrible. It was Morgoth's scream when Ungoliant assaulted him, but he did not hurry to his lord's aid, despite the pang of joy at his return from the captivity in Aman. He was afraid… Just like he was afraid before, when Tulkas Astaldo dragged Melkor out of Utumno, and that careless Vala was laughing – laughing all the time. That scared Sauron more than anything else, and made him despise the Vala even more – but he didn't dare to do anything, just hide in the deepest dungeons with the Balrogs and cower in fear as the Powers above sounded their voices like the horns of victory, like battering rams pounding into the darkest and deepest doors of Utumno.

He never admitted it to any of his servants, but he was afraid of Shelob, dwelling on the borders of his land. She reminded him on her ancestress Ungoliant too much, and every time his thoughts led to her, he remembered Morgoth's scream in Lammoth, and the pure horror in that sound, and he shivered. She still lives, his thought sounded in warning to Aragorn, and she is a real danger. Beware!

Barad-dûr was crumbling. Fire and water. Present and memory. Loss of body in the water that flooded Númenor like a crushing fist of the Valar... Loss of soul in the fire, the same fire that was his ally in forging the Rings. Like he felt his body drowning, suffocating under the heavy mass of dark waves, now he felt the piece of his soul bound to the Ring melt in the fire. The wrath of the waves left him naked and terrified. Hating the water, he took a form of fire. Now that fire was his undoing. Agony. Indescribable agony. And then... freedom.