Something Un-Feanorian by Himring

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Chapter 2

Eregion: Another dreamscape and more imaginary corpses--but considerably more conversation and a complete change of mood.

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I had visited Ost-in-Edhil many times, travelling from Lindon either on Gil-Galad’s business or on my own. But never had I had the slightest suspicion, not even a hint of a sense of familiarity that might have warned me; I had never recognized it as the ruined city I had stumbled into a long time ago, soul-in-soul with Maedhros in one of his nightmares, until now—now when it was too late to do much good.

Of course, when I had previously visited Ost-in Edhil, it had been flourishing, growing by leaps and bounds from its humble beginnings as a village on the doorstep of Khazad-dum to a city in its own right, twin to its older sibling below the mountain. Now, horribly changed since I had last seen it two years ago, it was visibly already in the process of becoming the place of ruins that I had seen in Maedhros’s dream. The city walls, a late addition of Celebrimbor’s, but as strong as Noldorin craftsmen who had Dwarven help could make them, had been reduced to rubble in many places. Fire had ravaged workshops and residential quarters; black smoke was still curling up here and there.

At the city’s core, the vaulted roof of the great Hall of the Gwaith-i-Mirdain sagged pitifully. No doubt at its foot, near the left-hand corner, there lurked an ominous shallow pit. I had never noticed one there, but I would hardly have bothered to look. For now, the intervening distance mercifully concealed any details: I could not see the extent of the carnage in the streets. That was left to my imagination. Ost-in-Edhil had gone the way of Gondolin and Nargothrond.

Perhaps it was not so surprising that I had not recognized the place before. We had imagined that we had left the wholesale destruction of the First Age behind us. Now it had caught up with us with a vengeance.

From my current position on a ridge some way away to the northwest of the city, I could see Gorthaur’s troops encamped around its walls. Substantial numbers surely occupied the city itself. Orcs and wargs compelled from the anarchy of their scattered strongholds to form the serried ranks of an army, as the grip of the Dark on their minds tightened once more; cave trolls dragged from their isolated existences into close proximity with others and forced to obey commands, Men gathered from points far East, far enough away from home that distance broke down customary restraints and allowed cruelty free rein—everything that we had hoped and expected not to see again.

I had come, supposedly, for the purpose of reinforcing the city’s defence, not to attack Gorthaur’s army on my own. Moreover, I had had no idea of the size of his army. Initial rumours had not exaggerated but understated the numbers. As I advanced east and began to have an inkling of what I was facing, I had sent a number of increasingly urgent messages to Gil-Galad, the last one almost as panicky as the reports of the refugees it was based on. I was not sure at all whether that last messenger would get through and, if so, whether Gil-Galad would manage to step up his efforts to mobilize troops in time enough to defend Lindon, let alone Eregion.

Maybe I should have turned back. Probably, I should have turned back. But until late on yesterday, I had not definitely known that I was already too late.

The stray scout of Celeborn’s we had picked up had been separated from his comrades and had been out of contact with them for days. Where Celeborn was now—or whether he still lived—was anybody’s guess. But the scout had at least known enough to confirm that Celeborn had withdrawn from the city when it had become evident that further defence was hopeless and that Celebrimbor was dead. They had seen his dead and mutilated body carried as a banner against them, when pursuing enemy troops caught up with their retreat.

Standing on that ridge and desperately trying to plan my next move, I still spent a moment mourning Ost-in-Edhil—not yet its inhabitants, for until I had established more clearly how many had already died and how many yet lived and might be in reach of aid, those still very much formed a part of my on-going concerns—but the city itself.

I had heard it said that the people of Ost-in-Edhil were over-nostalgic and over-ambitious, that they secretly regretted having refused the call to Valinor and now were trying to recreate Valinorean conditions in Middle-Earth. There might well be some truth in this, but I could not help but notice that it was the die-hard conservatives of Lindon who were most prone to saying this, the kind of people who, as Elros had once sarcastically remarked, spent most of their time sitting on the beach, one eye permanently scanning the depths of the ocean for the faded glories of Beleriand, the other trained firmly on the western horizon.  They would be quick to detect nostalgia in others; it formed such a significant part of their own outlook.

I had never been to Valinor, of course. But it seemed to me that to the extent that Ost-in-Edhil resembled any of the Eldarin cities I had heard described, it reminded me of Nargothrond, not Tirion—despite its situation above rather than underneath the ground. And that was perhaps hardly surprising, considering the history of Celebrimbor and those of his company.

‘Nargothrond’, Maedhros had told us once, ‘was like Menegroth and yet unlike. Menegroth was entirely Thingol’s vision: a forest turned into stone, stone turned into forest. For the Khazad, it was a commission, paid work. They were proud enough to have met his exact specifications, but that was all.  But at Nargothrond, Noldor and Khazad worked together, both hearing the song in the stone; Nargothrond was the result of collaboration. That was why the Khazad named my cousin Hewer of Caves, Felagund.’

He gave us a sharp look, as we listened raptly, deep in the wilds of Ossiriand, to tales of past, unseen glories.  ‘You realize’, he admonished us, ‘that some of this is hypothesis, not fact? I was shown Nargothrond shortly after its hewing, and I heard Finrod and the Khazad of Belegost and the northern Sindar speak about these things.  But’—and his expression grew remote, shuttered—‘the only time I saw Menegroth, I had not much attention to spare for matters of architecture.’

Ost-in-Edhil, even more than Nargothrond, could never have been like a city in Valinor. The influence of the people of Khazad-dum on its shaping, ever since its inception, had been too strong. And to me, at least, Ost-in-Edhil had signified something else: the determination to let bygones be bygones and make an entirely fresh start.

It seemed, at times, paradoxical. Here was I, Elrond, who had never seen Valinor, who had not even been born until the First Age was almost over—and yet I seemed to be weighed down with all the burdens of the past:  to the Sindar I was the descendant of Luthien, to the Edain the descendant of Beren and Tuor, to the Noldor the descendant of Idril and the foster-son of Maglor. But it was Celebrimbor, who had taken part in events of the First Age from the Flight of the Noldor onwards, who had been there all along, it was he who had refused to keep on looking back and had been determined to start from scratch… Valinor could have held little attraction for a Feanorian who no longer wished to be counted among the Feanorians, who wanted a clean break with the past.

Sometimes, when the tensions at Gil-galad’s court began to grate, when I grew very tired of people whose memories of their ills seemed to stay always fresh and green, when I fervently wished that I could tell them in the rudest of terms just what they could do with their long-cherished grudges as far as I was concerned—I had toyed with the idea of throwing it all in and running away to Ost-in-Edhil. It had been a daydream, no more, and consciously so. I had already made my choice. If I had wished to make a break with the past, I would have gone with Elros.

‘It’s all too much’, Elros had told me and, indeed, he sounded worn-out. ‘My father is a star, my mother is a bird, and my foster-father is a ghost wandering along the seashore. And all of that seems set to go on forever and ever. I do not have the proper Eldarin patience, Elrond. I want things to have a beginning, a middle and an end. I want them to be over and done with, somehow, sometime…’

 ‘I understand’, I told him. ‘But I cannot come with you.’

He looked at me unhappily and said: ‘Well, then, at least, if he comes wandering back one day along the shore, clutching his burnt fingers, one of us will be there to meet him.’

‘You do think he should be met?’, I asked him. He had said some very bitter and scathing things about Maglor and, after all, most people would have agreed with almost everything he said.

‘Elrond, if I thought he might come through the door now, or even within a year or two, I would want to be there, I would want to weep all over him and then try and hit him repeatedly over the head with a blunt instrument—or maybe the other way around. But he is a Feanorion and, if there is one thing we know about Feanorians, it is that they are unable to let go of things; they are unable to let go of anything at all. And I just don’t have the time for that.’

And so Elros had gone to Numenor, Celebrimbor had gone to Ost-in-Edhil—and I had stayed in Lindon. And the past had refused to stay the past and had caught up with us in the shape of Gorthaur, whom they called Sauron.  Celebrimbor, bent on his fresh start, had failed to see it coming and, despite my suspicions of Annatar, so had I. So much for a beginning, a middle and an end—except that it had indeed been the end for Celebrimbor and Ost-in-Edhil, and it was now looking as if it might well be the end of me, also.

I now needed to make up my mind. Should I try to beat a belated retreat to Lindon? If so, I should really have started doing so at least two days ago, but it would be better to correct my mistake late than never. Should I try and find Celeborn? But I only knew where Celeborn had been four days earlier and not even where exactly he had been heading then, assuming he had known himself. Searching blindly for him would leave me terribly exposed to attack and might even make matters more dangerous for him, if he had managed to outdistance pursuit and I led the enemy back to him. What other courses were open to me? Was there nothing further to be done for the inhabitants of Eregion?

I felt my lack of experience keenly. We had not been involved in the War of Wrath except on the very fringes. Since then, I had taken part in other minor skirmishes but this confrontation beggared the scale of all of them. Maglor and Maedhros, and after them others, had attempted to educate me in military strategy and tactics, but just now it was as if I could remember only a single one of their lessons: how even the best-laid plans could go horribly wrong in war. My present situation seemed to be clinching evidence for the truth of that maxim.

I decided to withdraw slightly northwards and wondered whether I was just dithering or whether this was really part of a plan. I must have managed to convince my captains of the latter for, astonishingly, none of them raised a protest. That night I lay down where we camped long after midnight, convinced that I would never be able to rest, let alone sleep, and intending to get up in a moment and check on my troops again. Instead I quickly drifted into a dream.

I found myself back further south, in the plain before the gates of Ost-in-Edhil. And whereas before I had been so far away that all the gruesome details were veiled by distance, now I found myself in the midst of a battlefield—what is more of a battlefield that had ended, if it had not begun, in complete and indiscriminate slaughter. Blood pooled to the right and to the left. I was surrounded by corpses, and a pile of corpses—slain men and women of Ost-in-Edhil, but now so much dead meat—lay across my thighs and abdomen, weighing me down. They were so very heavy I realized I couldn’t move out from underneath even if I tried.

I seemed to have expected all that. I gave up the brief struggle to free myself and lay back down on the ground, looking up into a lurid, bloodstained sky. When a moment after that I heard Maedhros’s voice calling, I seemed to have expected that, too.

‘Elrond! Elrond!’

We might both be in the middle of a nightmare, but his voice sounded  un-panicked, even unworried, as if he was calling me on some morning long ago in southern Beleriand. Wake up, Elrond. Come on. Time to go.

I tried to answer but discovered my mouth was bone-dry and I could not utter anything except a little retching sound that I could hardly hear myself. But maybe he heard me anyway, for he called me again and this time he was closer. I still could not speak, but I flailed around a little among the heaped-up dead and by that movement I guess he found me, for there suddenly he was, clad in the browns and greens of our fugitives’ life in Beleriand. The only weapon he was bearing was the dagger at his waist. I looked into his face and saw that this was indeed day-time Maedhros, quiet, calm, sometimes-almost-too-rational Maedhros, and although as a healer and a professional, I had since come to the conclusion that the calmness of day-time Maedhros was in some ways less healthy than the distraught fear of the Maedhros of his dreams, I found that the Elrond in me who had been a child cared not a whit about that: at once I felt much better.

‘He makes you feel safe?’, Elros had asked me once, in a tone of voice that said that I was only a little less insane than Maedhros himself.

Yes. It was, of course, something that could under no circumstances ever be mentioned to Celeborn—or to any other of my relatives on my mother’s side, but to me Maedhros’s presence had come to mean safety, despite the dreams. And as I looked up into those calm grey eyes, I found that, somehow, it still did. Possibly, I had always been afraid of the wrong things?

He studied me for a moment and then asked me, in his characteristic Feanorian Sindarin—no trace of a Quenya accent as such, but every word articulated just a little too precisely: ‘Elrond, do you want a handkerchief?’

I raised my eyebrows at him.

‘I am lying on a battlefield, almost squashed under a pile of corpses, and you are offering me a handkerchief?’, I asked him.

He studied me some more.

‘Do you want me to try and pull you out?’, he offered then.

‘Yes, please’, I said with exaggerated patience.

He knelt down behind me. I propped myself up on my elbows. He passed his arms under my shoulders and around my ribcage, clasped the stump of his wrist firmly with his single remaining hand and heaved with all his might. I saw the muscles in his forearms bunch before my chest. I felt a faint warmth and a gentle pressure; otherwise nothing happened.

‘I was afraid of that’, he said behind my left ear. ‘It must have to do with being dead.’

He let go. I lay down again. He came and knelt at my side, seemingly oblivious to the fact that he was kneeling in a puddle of blood. Of course, there would be some who would argue that, as a Son of Feanor, he was well used to such things and they were all in a day’s work for him.

‘I am going to die here, aren’t I?’, I asked him. ‘The way you prophesied it in your dream?’

‘As I prophesied it? As far as I recall, I dreamt I found Elros and you with your throats cut in a pit next to the Hall of the Gwaith-i-Mirdain. Elros may have died since, but he didn’t die anywhere near Eregion and he didn’t even die a violent death. And you are not in a pit next to the Hall and I rather doubt whether you are going to be. Some prophet I am! Elrond, you would get a more precise and reliable prophecy out of the leaves in a tea cup.’

I frowned, puzzled.

‘Is there any other reason you think you are about to die, apart from a brief glimpse of a few picturesque ruins in a very muddled dream of mine?’

‘I failed’, I confessed. ‘I failed you.’

Saying it aloud and even more saying it aloud to him was a relief.

But it seemed he was having none of it. ‘Surely not? How could you possibly have failed me, Earendilion?’

‘I disliked Celebrimbor.’

He appeared to consider this.

‘Well, I guess you did not have a great deal in common, so perhaps that is not all that surprising.’

‘We had you in common!’, I insisted.

‘Did you? Were you not rather divided by us? Tyelperinquar did not find it easy to repudiate us. He would have feared the bad things you might tell him about us, but he would have equally wished to avoid hearing anything good.’

‘If I had managed to talk to him about you… If I could have made him see… Maybe he would have listened to me when I warned him about Annatar.’

‘Maybe. Those are a lot of ifs and maybes, Elrond. And Tyelpo’s need to believe in Annatar was very strong.’

‘Still, I failed. I failed in warning Celebrimbor, I failed to arrive in time to defend him—and another city of your people perished in fire and smoke.’

‘Of my people? I rather doubt whether the citizens of Ost-in-Edhil would have been very happy to hear themselves described as mine.’

‘Maybe not. But that would never have stopped you from regarding them as yours.’

‘It wouldn’t have stopped me…? Elrond, you haven’t been taking me as a model of political leadership, have you?’

‘Of course I have.’

‘Aren’t you overlooking something, Elrond? I killed my own people. I went insane. I committed suicide. None of that is exactly recommended procedure, I do assure you.’

‘Nevertheless, how could I help it? As we were growing up, it was you we had before our eyes, you and Maglor, every day, trying to ensure the survival of everyone who was left as best you could. And besides…’

‘And besides?’

‘And besides, we loved you and you loved us.’

So very much taboo had that subject been while he was still alive that I tensed as I spoke and almost expected him to emit a wailing shriek and vanish like a ghost at cockcrow. He did nothing of the sort. He bent forward, suddenly no longer calm, but furiously intent, his gaze boring into mine.

‘Yes. You did and I did. But, tell me, Elrond, is that not a much worse thing, a far greater injury, than anything I did to you at Sirion or anything that rumour has it that I did afterwards? That you should have been made to love a murderer, a madman, a suicide?’

‘No!’, I shouted in outrage and sat up. I stopped for a second in confusion, as it occurred to me that I ought not to have been able to do that, but went on regardless, furiously: ‘No, you did not make me do anything and…’

I struggled to find words for how it had been, those years spent under the care of the two surviving sons of Feanor, sheltered and secure and yet not, as if wrapped tight in a very large, very warm cloak but one that had huge rents and holes through which the cold of fell winter seeped. Unlike Elros, I had had little choice but to remain aware how crippled by their losses both of them were all along. But to do even without the memory of that warmth…!

‘Elros, did you realize that, twice, Maglor was on the verge of giving us up and sending us to Gil-galad?’

‘No.’

‘Do you wish he had?’

And I watched him try very hard to say ‘yes’, but in the end he said ‘no’.

It finally registered fully with me that the heavy pile of corpses that had weighed me down had vanished into thin air and so had the rest of the battlefield around us. Maedhros was regarding with me a glint of satisfaction in his eyes. I decided that for a figment of my memory and imagination he was really quite uncommonly sneaky.

‘Prove it’, said Maedhros.

‘Prove what?!’

‘Prove that I did not inflict any lasting damage on you: do what you have to do and and do it well. Elrond, you do not need my help. You do not need my advice either, for I can see you already have a plan. And you certainly do not need my permission to survive poor Tyelpo. I challenge you: do something un-Feanorian and live!’

He smiled at me. I never had seen him smile like that during all the time I had known him in life. Maybe he had smiled like that when he still had hopes of victory, before the Nirnaeth, before his crushing defeat when he lost almost everything. Utulie n’aure! No, it was Fingon who had said that…

Maedhros’s face kept getting brighter and brighter until light seemed to pour over and out of it. At last, I realized I was awake and looking at the sun as it rose out of the cleft in the Misty Mountains beyond Caradhras. I arose and stood for a moment, gathering my thoughts.

Then I summoned my captains and outlined our plan of action. We would sweep through Eregion, gathering as many of its threatened and fleeing inhabitants into our protection as we could. When we came under too much pressure to continue, we would retreat northwards.

I went on to found Imladris and I survived. And at the time of the Last Alliance, when Gil-galad died, and Elendil and Oropher and Amdir, I went on fighting and survived. And when Celebrian left me, and Arwen, I survived that, too.

I would not, of course, agree at all that any of that was an un-Feanorian thing to do.

 

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Chapter End Notes

This version of Celeborn's and Elrond's relative movements is probably uncanonical in that, at least according to the account in the Unfinished Tales, they seem to have met up earlier, before Celebrimbor's death, and further west. But there seem to be  conflicting accounts of the Fall of Eregion in any case.

Besides, this piece is hardly very canonical in spirit.