Scent of Reality by Himring

Chapter 1

The lake was big and green. The shore was gravelly and hard. Maedhros, who had no flesh on his bones to cushion his backside, was most acutely aware of that gravel and its hardness. However, it was only one more pain beside others that seemed to have no intention of stopping, so he ignored it together with the rest. He should have been used to the cold of this land; he had been. Now he shivered in the three layers of cloaks that Maglor had insisted on draping around him before agreeing to accompany him outside.

He had sent Maglor away. He knew that, in fact, his brother was hovering only a little way behind him and keeping an eye on him, but that did not matter. What mattered was that, in his throat, orc words were boiling like bile, hot and acid. If Maglor had remained with him, he might have been in danger of spitting them out and he did not want Maglor to hear them. He swallowed them down once again and stared at the lake. It was big and, in current weather conditions, it looked green.

Always the same fear, even if it took many different shapes: the fear that Angband was the only truth and everything else, everything that had come before and that came after, was illusion and lies—the lake of Mithrim only a coat of green varnish shoddily smeared across the blackness that was Angband and Angband all that he had ever deserved or was fit for. The fear took many shapes, but today it was simply itself: stark terror constricting his chest and making it difficult to breathe. He hugged his knees closer and waited for panic to ease its grip. It probably would; eventually, so far, it always had.

An animal movement, just in the corner of his eye—for a moment, he knew it was a wolf. Then he corrected himself, exasperated: there would be no wolf in the Feanorian camp. This, of course, was Huan. Huan came up beside him and sat next to him, crouching down on his hind legs. Maedhros sensed coarse, springy fur and strong body heat all the way along his left arm and down to his hip, warming that side of him. Sitting, Huan was as tall as he—no, taller. He glanced at Huan, sideways.

‘I suppose I am lucky, Huan, that you are not permitted to speak. Otherwise, I would be in for a lecture—would I not?—on my lack of true repentance and of proper gratitude?’

Huan opened his snout and yawned, showing an abundance of magnificent teeth and about a foot-length of narrow pink tongue. Then he leaned harder against Maedhros, almost causing him to topple over.

‘That has cut me down to size, hasn’t it? I’m simply not all that interesting.’

Maedhros gave Huan a slight push with his shoulder in order to right himself again. It felt like pushing against a furry rock. He thought: I am truly in a sorry state—I take it personally when a dog yawns at me! Huan may be a Hound of Orome, but he is still a dog. Dogs yawn.

Huan got up in a leisurely sort of way, stretched himself thoroughly, and lay down right next to Maedhros again, looking across the lake. His nose twitched—and went on twitching, hard at work on the analysis of the smells and scents of Mithrim. Maedhros watched that twitching nose, wondered what kind of smells Huan was detecting and discovered that he himself smelled nothing at all. It was not that he could not smell anything in particular; his sense of smell was simply not functioning. Maybe this was, in part, the explanation for his difficulty in believing in the reality of the lake of Mithrim? Perhaps some of his senses had turned themselves off in self-defence in Angband, and his perception of his current surroundings was limited by this?

Maedhros shut his eyes and searched inside himself. Pain in his wrist, pain in his shoulder, pain in his back, pain in his side… Yes, yes, but that was not what he was looking for. He groped further, seemed to find something at the back of his head, focussed on it, inhaled, held his breath for a moment, exhaled and then inhaled again.

The first thing that hit his nose was a strong wave of honest-to-goodness dog smell. Stink, his mother would have said, in her forthright way. Beyond that came a whole potpourri of smells, of water and damp and green growing things, of drying fishing nets and of wood fires and… He felt overwhelmed and dizzy, trying to sort it all out.

‘It does not smell like Angband’, he said to Huan.

***

A short while later, Celegorm, puzzled, came looking for his dog. Catching a glimpse of Huan by the lake, he automatically pursed his lips to whistle for him, but Maglor quickly grabbed his shoulder and stopped him. Together they watched the pair on the gravelly beach, the huge wolf-hound and, huddled beside him in three thick woollen cloaks, their brother, his long limbs thin like the twigs of a birch broom, his scalp gleaming through red stubble. Almost as one, the dog and the elf lifted their heads and cautiously sniffed the air.

***

He was beginning to see different shades of green.

Chapter End Notes

The description of the lake as "big and green" takes off from Maglor's description in Oshun's story for the same challenge, "Fearless and Full of Himself".