After the champagne bubbles and the jazz melodies fade to blackness, she sees him drowning in her dreams. Swirling in a cocktail of silvery heights and the darkest nightmares, he appears too fragile. Her heart aches to hold him and kiss the scars on his ageless face.

In every transfiguration, the same golden eyes burn with the pure, holy fire that sparked his existence. When he was first called Mairon the Admirable at the beginning of all things.

But there is nothing pure in him anymore, certainly nothing admirable.

Through the smoke and mirrors of every facade, he is a perfumed poison, a destructive beauty that both frightens and thrills her. He is her opium, her morphine, in the long tunnels of those fever dreams.

She flies from that warped seduction. Through bodies, through time. As the setting changes, he makes chase, like a hunter tracking his prey. He will never accept that it is finished between them. That glorious love is now hollow, a shell rusting with all his sins and all her shame.

She has been born anew in the heat and throb of a gilded decade in a world far from the shores of Arda. She gives no credence to those dreams as the shadows fade at waking. Though they have followed her from the cradle, they are nothing to fear.

The dreams become more frantic in the summer of that last year. Before she hears his name again for the first time in centuries, he who has been called by so many other names.

He has always called himself Tar-Mairon, King Excellent, but in the Third Age of Middle Earth, he is known as something else.

Sauron.

He comes for her in that strange land to take her home. And it will be the final time.