Of Draugluin by Huinare

Utumno

Catching Sauron's notice could only be a good thing, right?

Read Utumno

I first saw Mairon take such a form as this and it seemed well to me, fearsome but not horrendous.  Too many of the Raucar thought it was clever of them to look fiery or spiky or decaying or some other nonsense.  Mairon always had better taste.  He was hardly a person I could hope to emulate in most things, mastering any task he set his mind to.  I was never much of anything, skulking at the very edge of Melkor’s inner circle.  But that form I did take to and I wore it a fair amount, letting blood Yavanna’s pitiful creatures in the woods of the north, or patrolling the corridors of Utumno with a small click of claws on the cold stone.

Eventually it got me noticed.  I would have thought that was what I wanted.

Lord Mairon was visiting from the new place they’d recently finished delving further west.  He had been out there overseeing the construction for years, but he returned often to stay in Utumno for some days.  Now that the thing was officially built, he was taking command of it, and there was to be a celebration to mark the occasion in Melkor’s hall.  Everyone looked forward to that.  Utumno’s parties were excellent.  There was always decent music, so different from the tempoless blather of Almaren and Valinor, and blood on the stones.

I was making my final rounds, checking that the sentries and guards were all still in place in the upper southwest quadrant and warning them again that parties didn’t mean we left our doors or dungeons unguarded.  I was in this form then, prowling along the corridors and enjoying growling at the guards who dared look sullen.  The last thing I expected was to round a corner into a deserted hallway and nearly run headlong into Mairon.  He was in lupine form also, a form larger and more fierce than mine though I myself made lesser Raucar cringe.  I was embarrassed and I hunched down with my ears and tail tucked. 

“Don’t do that, Draugluin.  I did not seek you out because I was displeased with you.  Here, walk with me.”

We paced down the empty corridor.  Mairon asked idle, polite questions concerning my health and goings-on about the fortress, glancing over sometimes with coppery gold eyes.  He got round to asking after Ancalagon, who had been my friend since before the Music. 

Ancalagon was never much for words, but the words that did leave his mouth were always smart and usually violent.  Last celebration, he had done something creative involving a lava basin and one of those pointy-eared Eru-whelps.  We’d laughed over it between ourselves and wondered what the fools would say in Valinor if they knew we already had hold of those pretty people and were making them less pretty.  I was also somewhat jealous of Ancalagon, and somewhat pitied him, because he had volunteered himself for an experiment of Melkor’s.  There was a lot of prestige involved with that, but discomfort and probably fear too.  Ancalagon’s humanlike form was gradually getting longer and leaner, its skin darker and more calloused.  He was now growing bigger, but when it first started it had seemed like he was growing smaller, starving down to ribs and a long knobby spine.  It had taken years for that look of weakness to become one of sinew and strength.  Lately his neck and jaw especially were getting longer, and his teeth were pointy.  He walked a little odd and sometimes skittered a short ways on all fours when he thought I wasn’t looking.

I wasn’t sure how to answer questions about Ancalagon.  “Sir, I think he is well.  Everyone respects his sacrifice in service to Lord Melkor.”

“Ah.  Why do you perceive it thus?  As a sacrifice?”

I stammered stupidly until I got a sentence out.  “It doesn’t look very pleasant, is all I mean.  I think he has been in some discomfort.  He would never say so though, he is long-suffering.”

“If he said so, it would change nothing,” Lord Mairon pointed out in a calm, friendly way.  “But we do not see yet the whole picture.  Your friend is nowhere near the end of his metamorphosis.  By the time it is complete, he shall be immensely powerful, more so than all the Valaraucar combined.  Some inconvenience now shall work to his benefit and honor in days to come.”

I never saw until much later that he was stoking my jealousy, the better to consume the fodder he laid out.

He came to a stop, and I could do nothing but stop also.  “Draugluin–”  He cut himself short there, as if he’d thought better of it.

I was afraid for some reason, but also intrigued.  I had to fight to keep the fur along my back smooth.  “My lord?”

“There’s been a particular notion in my mind for some time now, involving wolves.  You and I both know the wolf is almost ideal, as far as creatures fashioned by Aulë’s insipid wife go: It is strong, and cunning, and swift, and noble yet also fearful in its seeming.”  Lord Mairon paused to let it sink in that he was putting me and himself in the same category, that of people who had enough sense to truly appreciate the lupine animal.  He saw that I saw this, and he kept on, “I believe that, for our purposes, the only possible improvement we could make upon Yavanna’s model would be to instill it with a sentience.”

His words had outrun me.  I looked at him helplessly for a moment before he tried again, “I mean to say, wolves could be of much use to us if we could give them consciousness and self-awareness, such as the so-called Eruhíni have.”

“Certainly, sir, but–”

“But they say it’s impossible, yes.  I believe that is a lie, Draugluin, forged by Eru and propounded by Manwë and his thralls, in order to keep us from gaining in power and knowledge.  They are dull fools, yet who among them would willingly sit by and let us add intelligence and will to the efficiency and ferocity of a pack of wolves?”

Mairon’s eyes were alight with his pride and his grudge against Aman now.  He came a few steps closer to me, still speaking.  “I am devising a way.  This is why I wished to have conference with you, for of all the Raucar in Utumno you seem to appreciate the lupine guise most, and to become it best.  I would need the aid of one with these qualities, one of resolve who would not shrink from honor and duty.”

When he explained it to me I was uneasy and rather disgusted, even though I didn’t fully grasp the ideas and words he used.  I tried humbly to back away from him and his plots, saying something about how I didn’t think I was fit for such an important task.  I’d always thought that I would be pleased if Mairon paid me more than a passing word or glance, but now I felt more like a wounded prey in the sight of a seasoned hunter.  He leaned out and put his muzzle to my shoulder to stop me backing up and said, “No, you are suited fine to the task, you just don’t wish to do it.  I could not compel you to such an undertaking.”

By which he meant, he would not.  Or possibly, that he would not at that point in time.  He allowed me to excuse myself but I knew the issue wasn’t laid to rest.  I wished it was and tried to pretend it was.  But the next couple times Mairon was in Utumno, he found some place and excuse to bring it up again, each time speaking at more length and coming nearer to me until his breath was all but in my eyes. 

The fourth time, he took me out hunting.  Comings and goings from Utumno were strictly metered and I didn’t get out as often as I’d have liked, so I couldn’t help but be grateful.  The air was many-scented and the scrubby trees were rustling with things of marrow and blood.  Mairon had taken us out one of the north gates, at the very fringe of the scrub, and then we were out upon the plains of snow.  We cut a reindeer off from the rest of its herd, racing it to its death, no stones or trees standing in the path.  When I stuck my muzzle into the steaming body cavity I was practically giddy with bloody exhilaration.  I forgot that Mairon had his own reasons for granting me this freedom and was only glad to have the honor of sharing a kill with him alone.  The black of his pelt, which ran atop his form from nose to tail, seemed to defy the nosy stars of Varda that pierced all the other darkness round us, and the silver on his flanks and underside gleamed a bit as if it had stolen something from the stars.   

When I flopped down on the snow, gorged to clumsiness, Mairon sat next to me with more dignity.  As wolves will do, he started grooming me companionably.  That caught me off guard and I had no idea whether to be pleased or afraid.  “Draugluin, I never see you more at your ease or in your element than when you occupy this wolf’s guise, and never more than when you are doing as wolves do.  Are you not glad to run in the crisp air, and kill, and eat raw that which you kill?”

“Yes, I thank you, Lord Mairon,” I muttered.

“I ask no more of you than to be what you already joy most in being.”  He took the opportunity to pick at some bur or mat in my ruff, bringing his teeth much too near my throat in the process.

I flinched and brought my chin down, pretending it was all part of turning my head to look him full in the face.  “But–without cease, my lord?”

Mairon stopped and returned my stare.  “You called your colleague Ancalagon’s decision a sacrifice.  If you must think on it in those terms, yes, that would be the sacrifice exacted, but the benefit reaped would be much honor and power and freedom.  As I have told you, I’m reasonably confident in my devices and want only your assistance.  You shall have in Angband much more influence and ease than you are granted here, and with very good cause: you’d have earned it by your duty, which would entail certain inconveniences.  Yet you would be the fount of a completely new race, one that shall confound the Eruhíni and grieve the Ainur.”

“But–all mortal?”

“Indeed, even as wolves are now, though longer of life.  Would you have them be immortal, Draugluin?  Creatures which breed and multiply and eventually become too many for their prey?  If they knew no death, they would in time kill all the reindeer here, all the antelope and horses, and all else they could consume.  The prey would not have time to replenish itself.  What then?  Surely you would not wish mass starvation and misery for a creature you honor.”

I thought I still had an objection.  I felt it in my stomach.  But I could not figure out what it was, for Mairon’s words went quickly and deftly like small game running across its own snowtracks.  So I only shook my head, of course I would not wish the outcome he’d spoken of.

“I realize I ask much of you, Draugluin.  If I thought you a weakling or a dullard, I should not have taken the time to debate–yea, nearly to plead with you.  I should simply have demanded it of you.  Yet you are not one of the lesser Raucar, to be thus trifled with.  I ask much in accordance with the potential you possess.  I expect that one with such potential might be willing to experience some fear or discomfort for the sake of his own advancement, or am I mistaken?”

I thought first that I was being flattered, then that I was being sneered at.  I blinked at Mairon and tried to get a hold on my confusion.  “And if I did this, sir, there can be no undoing it?”

“I doubt it.  It’s safe to assume no.”  He casually started biting at the bur in my ruff again, not as aggressively this time. 

Maybe it was the promise of more influence and power in Angband.  After all, I knew I’d never advance any further than I already had at Utumno.  I had not the might nor wit to come close to those nearest in Melkor’s counsels.  Maybe it was fear of Mairon, though he’d never threatened me openly, or, more than that, a wish to please him.  Maybe it was a wish to prove that I was as resolved and bold as Ancalagon, who I would now be sundered from.  Whatever fills that ‘maybe’ is only hateful, now.

I was given a few days to wrap up my business in Utumno.  I changed one form for another often then, in a hurry, like someone trying to decide what to wear to a gala.  I liked them all.  But the game was pointless, for I knew the outcome already.  I think I was trying on the one side to gain memories of them to hold fast in my jaws, and on the other side I was trying to show myself that none of them were all that decent anyway.

I stood with my old friend in a human shape, for the last time.  “Just tell me once and I shan’t repeat it beyond my hearing, Ancalagon.  Does it hurt?”

Ancalagon looked down his long nose at me.  His slit pupils went narrow.  “Of course,” he said without any feeling, and never spoke of it again.

---

Chapter End Notes

Raucar: Probably a self-explanatory term to those familiar with the the word 'Valarauca.'  I prefer to use this term for Melkor's folk and envision them as using it for themselves (reclaiming it from disgruntled Valar who coined it as a slur), though I recently read Tolkien named them Umaiar.

I'm aware that this contains a hetergenous mix of Quenya and Sindarin names, which I don't have the werewithal to redemy at present.

 

Angband

Wherein Draugluin finds himself rather bound by an agreement.

Read Angband

Mairon brought me to a laboratory of some kind, well nigh at a level with the deepest pits.  I first saw stone tables and papers filed into narrow slots in the wall, and then metal tools and devices that I didn’t understand except to be worried by them.  Mairon insisted none were to harm me, “but we need to be sure you hold very still.”  We, he said, and I saw the dread shadow of Melkor waiting silently.  This thing Mairon had tried to explain to me must truly be difficult and terrible, if it needed both of them.  Everyone knew Lord Melkor was the most powerful being in Eä, though he didn’t really show it unless he was provoked to.  Usually he went around awing or terrifying by his mere presence, saying and doing little.  If he hadn’t been there I might have hesitated more before hopping up on the table, but I did not want to try his patience.

I settled down on the marble as directed, on my belly.  The iron that clamped over my legs, above the feet and elbows, made me bristle in spite of myself.  I uttered something between a growl and a whimper.  Mairon patted my head and neck and spoke gently, and I was too afraid to mind that he was treating me like a poor stupid animal in front of Melkor.

The “integration process,” I think that’s what Mairon called it, seemed like they did it mote by mote and that it would never cease.  It hurt physically, although they never touched me with anything more than their words and minds, but that was the least part of the hurt.  I’m sure Mairon could speak philosophy about it for a long time, what it means to bind an immortal spirit to a mortal form.  Yet he is not the one who knows what it means, and I who know have not the mind to give it words.  I can say I pleaded like a coward much of the time and even tried to take back the commitment I’d made midway through.  Mairon always kept a level tone and would say things like, “You speak only in a heightened emotional state, not in your own sound mind, thus I cannot heed what you ask of me now.” 

At the end of it, Melkor removed the irons, looked for a small time into my eyes with his own eyes like embers in shadow, commended me to Mairon’s care, and left.  I refused to move for a long time because I did not want to feel the weight of my doom.  Lord Mairon puttered around the laboratory rearranging papers and coaxing me patiently.  When I was convinced to stand up, the dreadful sense of permanence panicked me.  I tried like an idiot to flee from the wolf form.

“Mind my papers,” Mairon said with a bit of narrow-eyed, brow-raised annoyance.  I felt so helpless that this was enough to send me cowering into a corner.  He tidied a stack I’d set sliding off a counter and spoke mildly again.  “You’ll become accustomed to it.  We leave for Angband when you’re able to comport yourself.  We can hunt on the journey back.”

Hunting was indeed the only thing that saved me from despair in the early days at Angband.  Only then did this form seem a choice rather than a prison.  Mairon left me to come and go as I pleased for a time, installing special catches which responded to my will on the doors I used most.  He gave me honors and responsibilities and his folk treated me with regard, as he’d promised.  Sometimes he went out hunting with me.  Sometimes at meals he seated me at his right hand, on an armless chair with a brass platter on the long table under my nose.  Even so, it rankled my pride to dine in such a form with the rest roughly human-shaped.

Mairon gave me a year to settle in, which is not so long a time to the deathless.  Then he got the second phase of his experiment underway.  This is humiliating to recall, as it was to do.  I’d be lying if I said the form didn’t respond to female of its kind, but my mind was not in it.  The whole thing felt perverse and I was glad it didn’t last long.  Just ten litters, he said, enough to have variety in the stock.  The ten she-wolves he’d captured and half-tamed all were pregnant within the same year.

I knew it was useless but I dared ask, “My lord, now that the litters are in the growing, have I not done what was required?  Might there be some way to release me from this form?”

“I thought you loved no form better, Draugluin.”

Mairon’s speech ever laid traps.  I thought about it for a while and answered, “Of course, but that doesn’t mean I love no form else.  Would you be content to have your powers and experiences bound by one shape?”

“That’s a dreary outlook on it, my friend.  Think rather that this shape, being so near to your spirit, enhances the best of your abilities and offers the experiences that are best to you.”

I didn’t dare say he hadn’t answered my question.  Nor was I clever enough to debate him.  So I said, taken as I still was sometimes with horror and despair, and whining a little, “There is no way to undo it?”

Lord Mairon was not in wolf guise when we had this talk in his high-walled courtyard that looked upon only mountain stone and mist and cloud.  He was in that human form which appeared very lordly.  “No.  As I told you before you agreed to it, the only way to imbue a species of animal with self-awareness is to inject an individual with self-awareness into the stock.  Since self-awareness belongs not to the animals but to the Ainur, this could only be done via an Ainu.  Since an Ainu cannot breed with an animal, it was needful to effectively make an Ainu become an animal.  You are very much bound up with that form, irrevocably, as it had to be in order for the breeding to work.  Your spirit inhabits its very cells.  It’s no longer a mere raiment that might be cast aside.”

I stared at the flagstones passing under my paws as we walked.  Mairon saw my sorrow, stopped, and sat on a stone bench to look me in the face.  “I am most grateful, you know, for your sacrifice.  If I ever seem otherwise, it is because I am often absorbed in the demands of my work, which are many and heavy.  What you have undertaken requires a dedication and a courage that few possess.”

I wanted to say that having no choice was not being dedicated, and that courage and cowardice looked much the same when there was nothing but a prison.  But that would have been admitting too much weakness, and he would have found cleverer words to drown mine anyway.

The whelps distracted me from my despair when they came.  Mairon concocted a warm broth of meat stock, milk, and water, and he took the whelps from their mothers as soon as they could hold their heads up enough to lap this up from a saucer.  One of the lower courtyards had been left unpaved and treed, a little walled forest.  Here we raised up the new wolves, that Lord Mairon called nauri.  They made me glad when the words we taught them began to spill from them, because they were like me, they had words but they were bound in a form of four legs and bloodied fangs.  Mairon wanted them to have a violence in their purpose, and so from a very young age they were brought live animals to toy with before eating.  He especially liked to give them birds, which were beloved of both Manwë and Yavanna.  As the Nauri grew in stature and ferocity and might, and as they also grew in speech, they took down larger creatures.  At Mairon’s request, Lord Melkor sent one of the captured Eruhíni, which showed how deep in the Dark Lord’s counsel Mairon and his project were.  The Eruhíni were rarely taken from their quiet inlet, since Melkor wanted to leave most of them to breed and multiply in a place they preferred, the better to provide more slaves or victims later.

The half-grown whelps then asked me why the Eruhín had spoken before it died, for none of the others had.

It was hard to explain.  “Lord Mairon has told you that Eru is our foe, and thus so are those that the accursed Valar in the west name the children of Eru’s creation.  Eru or the Valar gave them speech, yet that means nothing to us, unless that we slay them with less pity and more pleasure.”

“But what happens to their words when they die?” insisted the cleverest among them, following me among the fir trunks with their questions.

“I don’t know.”

“Fie, Draugluin, you must know.  What happens to their words?”

I was uneasy and impatient, so I said the first thing that came into my mind.  “As their bodies go back into the earth and become other bodies, well then, so their words go into the air and become other words.”

“So perhaps that one’s words are mine now?” piped up one of the Nauri. 

“I wouldn’t think so.  They are from the light.  You are from the darkness.”

I never had ready answers.  Mairon was always better with such things, making up stories as easily as a spider constructing its web.  For him the Nauri had unquestioning respect, but along with that a distance.  With me they were affectionate when we weren’t training.  I supposed their ceaseless questions were a fair trade for their company.

When the whelps had come to full age, Lord Mairon brought in a new prey.  This was one of the Maiar, though a weaker one since he was easily able to hold it bound to its physical form.  He had just captured it on the western shores of Endórë, so it was probably one of Yavanna’s or maybe Vána’s.  Oromë’s Maiar would have been too alert and martial to be caught.  I remembered the old wars of Melkor upon the Valar, and how they had been horrified when they found that we could and would hurt their people, as I watched the Nauri run it down and slay it.  Mairon told them to take their time and let everyone, for there were nearly sixty of them, get a strike in.  The Maia tried to escape when its form finally gave out, a white-red globe of hazy light.  That was what usually happened if their form died in great pain.  It was rumored that, in their confusion or madness, they were drawn back to the halls of Mandos.  There Námo recalled them to themselves.  But Mairon stayed the Maia’s flight with a gesture and a small smile.  He would probably find a way to make it take a shape again, and put it to work on the ever-deeper delving of Angband. 

The Nauri had questions about that also, of course.  “What was that glow that came out of it after it died?  Was that its words?”

“No and yes.  That was an Ainu.  It does not really die, though it can be held in a form that dies.  Its spirit was trying to return to the far shining country in the west.”

“Draugluin, you are more like the Ainur than the Eruhíni.  You have no whiff of death, nor does anyone else in Angband who speaks with words.  Yet what of us?  We are like the Ainur, and like the Eruhíni, and yet even like the animals that speak nothing.”

The Nauri were uneasy when one of the eldest spoke this, and a deep unhappiness stole upon me.  “Ask Lord Mairon.  He is greater, he can explain these things better.”

Not long after, Mairon looked sidelong at me in the stone courtyard among the clouds.  He didn’t take a wolf form so often anymore, and his face was high above mine as we paced about.  “Why do you always refer them to me?  You are their sire, and you are best equipped to answer their concerns, Draugluin.”

“I have not your cleverness, sir,” I answered.

“Indeed.  Well, since you had not the heart or presence of mind to apprise them of their mortality, I made a tale for them.  When they die, their essence–their words, if you will–shall encounter a great wolf, Ancamanar, spiritual in nature.  This being, if they answer its judgments or demands with courage and integrity, shall usher them into the beyond-life, whatever that may be.”

“But, isn’t that–”

“A lie?”  Mairon smirked a little regretfully.  “Of course.  But call it, instead, a myth, for it was meant to lighten their hearts.  After all, their burden is great.  They perceive their own death lying in wait, and that awareness is heavy for such an exquisitely self-aware creature.  It would be cruel to tell them that there is nothing else.  In any case, we’ve no empirical knowledge of the ultimate fate of mortals.”

He was very intelligent and very wise.  If he did not know the fate of mortals, surely no one did.

---

Chapter End Notes

Cuiviénen

The werewolves are given a task, and Draugluin discovers that the old ultraviolence isn't always that funny.

Read Cuiviénen

Now the Nauri were fully grown and Mairon had begun sending them out far and wide on patrols, hunts, and errands.  In the days when the second generation of whelps were still blinking clouded eyes, a messenger came from Utumno. 

The messenger told us that the Dark Lord’s spies had seen Oromë find the Eruhíni and go down to dwell among them.  “It seems he left a small guard around the bay, but they are secretive, revealing themselves not even to their charges.  There are three Maiar there at most.  It is Lord Melkor’s wish that the mettle of Angband’s Nauri should be tested, and also that the Nauri might serve as a small reminder of our presence, by either slaying one of the Eruhíni or by harrying Oromë’s people as the situation might call for.”

Lord Mairon answered that Melkor’s will would be carried out at once.  When the messenger was gone, I said, “The Maiar of Oromë are fell.”

He raised his eyebrows at me.  “Likewise are the wolves of Angband.  Did you think they would be relegated indefinitely to the slaying of deer and the torment of prisoners?”

“No, but of all the foes they could face on their own, Oromë’s–”

“I do hope you’re able to conceal your demoralizing fear of Oromë from your wolves.  Choose six from among them.  Assuming there are indeed three Maiar to stand against them, that makes it two to one.  The Nauri are mortal, yet they have still the power of the Raucar distilled, thanks to you.  And they have as well the fierceness and the loyalty of their animal kindred.”

“Might I go with them, sir?”

Mairon narrowed his eyes at me and for just a second there was a terrible warning look in them.  Then his manner became easy and he shrugged me off.  “If you must.  You shall do well to remember what we spoke of before this project’s inception.  If you become too attached, it can only lead to your own injury.  Take that counsel upon the leagues.  It is heavy, but it is current.  Gather the six and leave at once.”

Of course he was right.  The Nauri had not been bred for me to dote over.  They were meant to hunt and slay, and, as I did, they enjoyed those things.  I tried to keep myself of that mind against the dread that went with me on the long journey to the eastern foothills.

The place was a long bay off the south end of the Helcar.  Hills closed it around.  If we could have crested the hills, we may have heard the singing that was said to often rise from the settlements of the Eruhíni. 

We never got that far.  One of the Maia guards sensed us before we had gotten halfway up the slope.  I was a small way ahead of the others and I went to confront him alone, ordering the Nauri to remain hidden.  This Maia was not in a physical form when we argued and I tried to force him to manifest, a method Mairon had been teaching us at Angband.  But the Maia only snickered in my face and tried the opposite thing, to make me leave my body.  It was like someone had tried to pull me through an iron grating.  When he realized that I was trapped in this body, he announced it arrogantly, in front of the Nauri, “How could I hope to compel you to a thing which you yourself cannot do?  You’re confined in that form, is it not so?”

I denied it, and my anger and desperation were so great that the Nauri leapt to aid me against my wishes.  Seeing that I wasn’t alone, the Maia called for his fellows, and two more were soon upon us.  A vigorous and bloody skirmish rose.  Of the three Maiar, only the second one on the scene seemed to be Oromë’s.  I took on this one, partly to keep him from dealing death to the Nauri and partly because it was truly a terrible joy to do battle with him.  He was of great physical strength and skill, unlike his two companions, who resorted to mid-range weapons or telekinetic tricks.  I was very absorbed in my fight with Oromë’s Maia, but I saw sidelong that the Nauri were falling one by one, necks snapped or severed completely.  I thought the decapitation was the worst outrage, but then they eviscerated one of my folk, leaving her for dead in a thorn bush which tangled around her guts each time she struggled to get free.  This all increased the fury with which I fought the only honorable one of them. 

In the end, the third Maia stopped me cold by speaking to me out of nowhere, in the way the house of Námo tended to do, in a tone of prophecy.  “Be not so keen to deal out death, for you shall find yourself subject to it in your own time.  Guard the life of your present guise well, Draugluin, for in the hour that it is slain you shall be unhoused and suffered no other form while the world lasts.”

This enemy knew my name by some dreadful art, and I felt against my will that it was also true, about my fate.  I never liked to think of my body dying, even though it might have seemed like a good thing to be free of it, for there had always been a nameless dread in the thought.  Staying my attack, I did something shameful.  I turned and fled, not wanting the Maiar to slay me as they had just done with the rest of them.

I had hardly run an hour on the road back to Angband before Mairon intercepted me.  Like all the Raucar could who weren’t fool enough to land themselves stuck in a body, he could travel formless at great speed.  He sat on a boulder and demanded a report.  Shaking with fatigue and something like anger, and still something more, not daring to look at him, I explained what had passed.

He gave me only silence for a long time, an untwitching shadow, then answered, “I’m not surprised you fled.  You could have done little else at that junction.  If I am disappointed, it is by your insistence upon attempting to coddle and protect the Nauri in the first place.  You see that your involvement changed nothing.”

Wrath crashed into me as though to knock the breath out of my lungs.  Lord Mairon had sent my Nauri off to die as easily as he’d condemned me to their form for their sake.  I barely kept myself from snarling, and the fur sprang up along my spine.   

He saw that I finally resented him, and his gold-tinged eyes flickered just a bit.  It came to me that he no longer had any need for me, since the Nauri could breed on their own.  I saw too late that my reward for this imprisonment was nothing more than the questionable honor of watching my own perish in service to Mairon. 

For a moment I wanted to call him to answer for all of it, even knowing he could inflict much torment on those who gave him a mind to, but then fear or reason returned to me.  I could not have changed my doom even if I had seen it coming.  I couldn’t have refused Mairon’s bidding half disguised as a request, and I couldn’t have kept aloof from the Nauri.  Since indeed nothing could be changed, it was useless to be angry.  My fur smoothed back down and I lowered my head.

Lord Mairon’s eyes still gleamed with warning, but no longer in my direction.  He was looking back toward the hills.  “Yet all of you put up an admirable fight against powerful Maiar who are not to be trifled with.  I’m unsure who Námo’s vassal was nor why such a one would be present there, but, from your description, the one you fought could be none other than Alatar.  Lord Melkor’s spies have said that he is Oromë’s right hand.  The one who first intercepted you sounds uncannily like my former colleague Curumo, who of all folk should be well aware what he dares in this.  It is preposterously arrogant of these three who would slay with one hand and with the other defend, to think they can hold back our shadow from the east.  I assure you, Draugluin, that their screams and lamentations shall provide what recompense they may for the loss of your pack.  Now, return to Angband, take some rest, and ready your mind for the conflict to come.  I doubt it can be long now before things begin to escalate.  The Valar may yet instigate war in defense of their vaunted Eruhíni.”

The thought of revenge was the only thing to give me any measure of comfort.  Yet it wasn’t only anger and sorrow that troubled me, but dread.  “Lord Mairon, what of the Maia’s prophecy to me?”

“What of it?”  Seeing that his manner was harsh and that I was wretched, he paused and spoke more softly.  “Let us speak of that after I return from Utumno.  I am in haste, and you are weary.”

I did as I was bid since there was little else to do, in fear now of death upon the road, and back at Angband I had to tell the rest of the Nauri that their brethren were dead.  I assembled them under the firs in the courtyard, and I let all sorrow flare into anger and rallied them until they were howling for the blood of the Maiar and the Eruhíni and the Valar themselves.  It was better to tell it in a rage than to give them a display of weak sorrow.  Once we’d all fumed and howled for a long time, I turned to go off by myself into the trees.  Some of the second generation of whelps trotted after me. 

“Go away.  I’ll bite your ears off.”

I must not have sounded very convincing.  They kept getting under my paws until I grumbled and flopped down on a mossy rock.  They piled on me and licked my face and recited singsong rhymes about the storm hunting the stars until we all slept.  My last waking thought was that even now none of them knew that I was actually trapped as a wolf, for I’d let them believe that I simply saw no reason to ever choose any other form around them.  It increased their pride, and made my shame less.

The six Nauri who had heard the truth uttered hadn’t lived to tell tales.  That was the best thing that came out of them dying.  Not that I was glad they were dead.

---

Chapter End Notes

The skirmish at Cuiviénen, seen from another character's viewpoint in a much more tedious project of mine, was what originally prompted this story.  Draugluin did his thing and left the page, and I thought, "What's up with that guy?  What's his story?"

Lossë

Justifications: Mairon has them.

Read Lossë

When Mairon returned and I had given my report of Angband’s business during his absence, I asked,  “Is it true then?”

We walked on narrow trails, in the mountains north of the fortress.  He turned the coppery eyes of his lupine form full upon me for a second, and he asked casually, “Is what true?”  His eyes said he knew what I meant, but he was going to insist I speak the ugly words.  His attention went back to the path.

I barely managed not to bristle or whimper.  “Is it true that, if I do become unhoused from this form, I cannot take any other shape while the world lasts?”

We walked some paces in silence.  The mountains were grey and the flimsy snowfall put a white dust on them.  It almost gave an illusion of light, but there was no shadow.  “Yes.  Probably,” Lord Mairon said.

My stomach dropped as though my belly had gaped open and tossed it on the path.  I sank to a crouch.  Mairon stopped and looked at me patiently as I panted.  My blood was going too fast, and perhaps my heart would give out and kill me then and there.  “Mairon, don’t let me die, please–”

He sat next to me and said in a kind, reasonable voice, “You are not dying, you’re in a fit of panic.  A psychophysiological response–unfortunate, but not unheard of.  And of course I will act to prevent your death in any way I can, you need not doubt that.”

I calmed enough to get a reasonable sentence out, though I felt the panic a hair’s breadth away waiting to seize me.  “Yet even you can’t guarantee to prevent it.”

“No.  There are few in Endórë as powerful as I though.  You are as secure as you can be in my protection.  I release you from all duties outside the walls of Angband.”

“I thank you, my lord.” 

Then I was too relieved to feel wounded in my pride, though I would feel it later.  But my relief didn’t last long, for I knew that I would ever live in fear of Angband’s strength failing.  And if it failed, and my physical prison died, there would be no real release.  There would be a more terrible prison with no solidness or texture or warmth.  Existing as an unclad spirit had been well and good before Arda was made, before I knew anything else.  But now the Ainur had long since become a part of the world, and there was only terror in the thought of never being able to touch any of its substance again.  I was already alone in being an Ainu who could not change or put aside the form, but I had some company in the Nauri at least.  If I lost my form and couldn’t get it back, there would be no one like me at all.

I thought about this for a minute and the frantic feeling fell back, but the dread lay cold on me like the snow on the stones.  “Why is it that I could not just reform a new body, like any of the Ainur?”

“When I say that a portion of your being was made to inhabit your body’s cells during the integration process, I mean not just that it is confined within those cells, but that its very nature was altered to become organic matter itself.  It lives in your own cells and in those of all your progeny, which is of course what gives them their sentience and their increased strength.  It is changed and dispersed, and can no longer be reassembled.”

Mairon said all this in a gentle but not regretful way, grooming me about the ruff and ears as he occasionally did when he wanted to be friendly.  I thought about it some more while the snow came down thicker.  “Are you quite sure?  Maybe I might make a smaller, weaker body at will with whatever was left?”

I was thinking something like a garter snake, or even a small spider.  Those things weren’t very powerful or noble, but even they would do as some link with the physical world.

“I really would not count on that, Draugluin.  There may be a slight chance of it, but it is best not to look for that outcome.  The remainder of your being is, of course, made somewhat weaker and more limited by the exclusion of that portion which has been dispersed.  You may not find yourself capable of reforming into anything physical, if, as we shall do our utmost to prevent, you should be unhoused.  As you know, this matter was experimental.”

I turned my head to stare at him.  Normally I wasn’t so bold as to look openly in his eyes, but something strangling trampled over that reluctance.  “You withheld that from me.  You never told me I would be a weakened shadow until the end of all things if this form is slain!”

Lord Mairon’s eyes narrowed a bit and one of his ears twitched.  “But did you not know that all along, at the bottom of your being?  Why else did you falter and dawdle over the decision?  If you had ever truly believed that such was not the fate associated with this project, you wouldn’t have hesitated to participate in it, and you would have bade me tear your throat out as soon as the whelps were conceived in order to reattain freedom of form.”

I kept staring, seeing only the eyes that spoke no more than the truth yet lied without shame.  “I knew, but I did not know what I knew,” I forced out at last.  “You might have told me clearly from the start.”

Mairon’s ears twitched again, both of them, almost laying back on his head for an instant.  “And had I done so, would there be any Nauri?”

I couldn’t say anything.

“The Nauri will become a numerous and terrible race,” he said as if I needed convincing of that.  I said nothing.  “Such could not have been, without your commitment.” 

“There would be no Nauri to die at your will,” I said at last.

Mairon regained the look of fell pride in his eyes, which til then I hadn’t noticed he’d lost.  “Have a care how you address me, Draugluin.  I will no death for your wolves.  I will them to hunt and fight and slay in service to the dark powers.  Death may result from that, but at no time was that my express intent.  Why would I bring them into being, why would I put you through torment, only for the sake of death?  You’d do well to reflect before you wrongly ascribe such base and pointless waste to me.  The Nauri know the world is bloody, and they do their duty and complain not.  You might take a lesson from them.“

Torn between resentment and fear now, I muttered, “Long I complained of nothing.”

He paused for a minute and looked at the snow, then answered quietly and very seriously.  “True.  I’ve spoken in haste.  Yet now no complaint shall avail you though I would heed it if I could.  It was never ideal that your suffering should attend this undertaking.  I considered that it was for the greater good.  You shall see how this is, if and when the Valar withdraw their hand and the Eruhíni, these first ones and those still to come, spread over the land.  Your folk shall give them grief tenacious and unending, in all habitations they should care to claim.  Wolves are adaptable.  They may be white and soft in the winters of the far north, dun-colored and sharp in the arid places of the south.  We have contrived a new sentience, in despite of Eru and his Vala toadies, and no corner of Endórë shall lack of it in due time.”

I felt pride for the Nauri when I pictured Mairon’s words coming to pass.  But that did nothing for my dread, and still I was angry somewhere.  “I would you had told me all this before, sir, what I was getting into.”

“Would you have done it then?” he said simply.

“No,” I admitted. 

“Perhaps I have wronged you.  But consider the benefits of what has befallen you to the greater whole.  And consider that, if I did not think you deserved to know the truth eventually, I wouldn’t have been open with you now.  I omitted the information before, but I didn’t think you merited the dishonor of a bald-faced lie, once you asked about it openly.”

“Maybe it would have been better if you’d lied now.”

“How then could you take due precautions?”

Lord Mairon had trapped me with his arguments again.  I didn’t wish to resent him since nothing would be changed by it.  It was far too late.  I’d ignored my own doubts and taken what I thought was the safer route of giving him what he wanted.  And if the greater cause of the darkness was served, maybe my problems didn’t matter so much.  Even if the experiment hadn’t been done with my wellbeing in mind, neither had it been done out of malice toward me, that I did believe. 

“You must have thought me very stupid,” I said at last.

“If I that were the case I could never have abided your presence.  You may not be the epitome of intellectualism, but neither are you a simpleton.  All I thought was that you were someone who met the criteria I had in mind, one of which was that I find the person to be decent company, being that I would need to work closely with them.”

I put my chin on my paws, feeling resigned to the doom that came over me as quiet and cold as the thickening snow.  I thought I understood Mairon, as well as one like myself can understand.  He had seen the use of a thing, he had seen that it could be done, and so he had done it.  If his aim had been my suffering, I would even now be in some dungeon or mine, or an echo of a spirit drifting about.  And now he was the best chance of safety I had.  I had no more protests.

“I could still attempt to extract you from your form in such a way that you could reconstitute,” Mairon volunteered, settling down in the snow, his chin beside mine, “but I doubt it would succeed.  More likely, it would only serve to cut short your time with the physical world.”

He didn’t want to be responsible for that, if he failed.  Perhaps that was concern, perhaps it was pride.  In some ways his motives didn’t matter, for I did not want the risk and refused it.

---

Chapter End Notes

This is about where I originally had in mind to end this, though on a more dire and foreboding note.  But I never lack for ideas, so Draugluin will have more to say after I hash out the chronology and logistics of subsequent events.

Nyárë

Lore is given to the werewolves.  A somewhat anomalous and stylized interlude in Draugluin's narrative, answering the Storyteller Challenge.

Additional authorial blathering: This was never where I anticipated this going, but one of the numinous inspirations that have been visiting me lately showed up last night.  Aside from the Storyteller challenge, this was a challenge to myself in various poetic meters which I thoroughly enjoyed.  I've looked these over a few times, but if errrors are found in my meter please feel free to give me a friendly nudge.

Thanks and happy holidays to those who have lent me encouragement in this tale!

Read Nyárë

It wasn’t long before I saw that the Nauri would start to question why I no longer left Angband.  How could I tell them I was afraid of my body’s death?  They risked that with every step they took beyond the walls. 

“They will begin to doubt me,” I said to Mairon.

“Not if you come to fill some other function in which it’s reasonable to preserve you from peril.  Instead of instructing the present generation of whelps in hunting or fighting–a job the first generation is already assuming–why not instruct them in the lore of their people, Draugluin?”

“Sir, there is no lore.”

He looked at me for a second as though I was a pitiable case, then grinned and corrected me, “These is as of yet no substantial lore.  You’ll need to provide that.”

“I’m no good with that sort of thing.”

“I daresay you’ve never tried.  Gather the youth in seven hours.  I will tell them the tale I made for their sires, you recall, the time they asked you about death and you had no answers.  They’ve probably heard it before, but I’ve considered some additional details since I first told it.  From there, you shall need to figure out where the mythos goes next.”

Under the dark firs, seated on a boulder while the whelps sprawled over each other and thumped their tails in the red needles, Mairon told this tale.

When the earth was young
And teemed with spirits wondrous
I met a great wolf.

Yet he was troubled
And he told me of his woes
In stately lament.

“Across the wide sea
In a high brazen country
Dwell the oppressors.

And of their number
One spoke a doom on my line
Envying my might.

Jealous Yavanna
Who seeks to rule all creatures
Has cursed my proud race

To a mortal death
By sickness or doting age
Yet all the wise know

No wolf ought to die
Except by valorous hunt
Or boldly fought fray.”

And I was much vexed
By this petty injustice
Against noble ones.

But this greatest wolf
He is named Ancamanar
And cunning he is.

And to me he said
“Yet I will fashion my realm
Beyond earth’s circles

And bring thence my kin
When death flings them from this world
That they may prosper.

Sky their hunting ground
And stars their shining quarry
They shall have their bliss.”

The whelps looked at what sky could be seen through the boughs.  One of the youngest leapt up and batted at the air.  “Don’t be simple,” advised one a bit older, “the stars are too high to reach for now.”

Mairon walked with me further into the trees.  “Tomorrow at this hour, you tell them another one.”

“I’m afraid I have no ideas.”

He looked up at the small patches of sky as he walked.  “If I must give you a hint, recall that rhyme one of the adults made up lately.  The whelps won’t stop singing it, or haven’t you noticed?”

So I went and asked one of them to show me how well she knew the song.  The small wolf tripped over her tail, sat up, sneezed, and began.

Stars on high
Pelts of white
Fell and fleet they run on the sky
Vain is flight
Storm is nigh
Dark clouds gorge on innards of light

I sat by myself in one of the high, narrow courtyards for a long time, with only the wind’s voice for company, until I thought of the story.  When I lay on the boulder, the listeners looked up and twitched their ears and chewed on each other’s fur.  I had never told a story and I was nervous.  Mairon had suggested that, if it helped, I might think of it as giving a report.

Now in the western lands beyond the seas
The enemy called Varda was distressed
To see the pack of Ancamanar hunt
The stars that she had hoarded in the airs.

And sometimes on her mountain tall she stands
And shouts a threat and challenge on the wind.
And then the sky-wolves gather all their might
And make a vast hunt all across the sky.

They go abroad in force and with great noise
Of thunderous howls and flashing of their teeth,
And then their quarry bleeds upon the earth
That enemies might take heed of their might.

Some of the whelps looked west, the direction of Aman, and howled in their piping way.  “Why is Varda so greedy?  There are plenty of stars.  These people across the sea are maggots!”

Lord Mairon was leaning against a tree and watching all this.  When the listeners had dispersed, he sauntered over and said, “You see?  You did just fine.  The story held their interest and got them excited.  This lore we are weaving is tactically useful as well.  Note how much they already dislike certain Valar.”

“Sir, if they’re going to dislike the Valar, there are plenty of reasons to without making things up.”

“Perhaps the Valar would themselves be interested to hear your opinion?  They began this business of making things up about one’s enemies, after all, when they failed to correct their thralls who started referring to me by a particular–epithet.  They even seemed to encourage the widespread usage of that epithet.”  Now Mairon was glaring at nothing in particular, and I knew better than to make any comment. 

The stories went well for a small time.  I found that new tales were easier to come up with when a foundation of related tales was already in place.  If I couldn’t think of anything, I would set the whelps singing instead, or ask them to retell the stories in their own way. 

Then one of the eldest of the Nauri died when he was ranging far abroad with some others.  He fell into a pit, and many bones were broken in the fall, and by the time his fellows had been able to bring help he was dead from dehydration.

They started asking me what happened to wolves who didn’t die in an honorable way.  Surely it brought dishonor to lie in a hole and die, even if it couldn’t be helped. 

I said to Mairon, behind the jagged battlements at the top of one of the three peaks while the clouds moved fast and thick above, “They’re convinced that they can’t become sky-wolves if they don’t die fighting or hunting.  What do you think I ought to tell them?”

The lord of Angband leaned on the battlement and scanned the high plateau to the south.  “I really hope you are able to stop asking me these questions soon, Draugluin.  The lore is now in your own hands, as it were, as well as your progeny’s.  I have many other matters on my mind.  There are more Maiar abroad of late–rangers, spies, something.  If you must know what I think, I think it would be inconsistent with the earlier tales to say that one can come to Ancamanar’s country by way of a dishonorable death.  There’s a very easy way to remedy that, however.” 

“Yes?”

“Give everyone an opportunity for an honorable death.  Something like, say,

Yet all must meet a second death
Who Ancamanar’s realm would find.

The great wolf himself
Shall beset them with bared fang
To slay them anew.

Will that do?”

“It might disturb them, sir.  Ancamanar always comes off in these stories as being concerned for them, not as killing them.”

Mairon glanced skyward as though patience might be found there.  “These actions are mutually exclusive?”

Somewhere off at a great distance, there came a howl.  It did not sound quite like a wolf.  My bones seemed to tingle oddly in their very marrow.

---

Chapter End Notes

__________________________Notes on the Verses__________________________
I don't actually picture this as being the way they would have told the stories.  I'm more of a prose person.  This idea was strangley irresistable to me though.

Mairon's story of Ancamanar (Q. ~ 'jaws of fate/fortune/doom'): Haiku in the general sense of a 5-7-5 rhythm.  I'm riffing on my own satirical piece, "Morning People."

The whelps' song: Alluded to in Ch 3--I didn't suspect I'd actually be writing it at the time.  I couldn't figure out a meter I wanted to use for this, so I ended up basing the beats of its rhythm on the song "Sakura Sakura."  Possibly because I had just heard the song played live a few hours before writing this. 

Draugluin's story of the sky-wolves' hunt: Blank verse, one of my favorite things in the world.

Mairon's post-script to the story of Ancamanar: Iambic tetrameter (I was thinking of Tolkien's Dwarven songs) & haiku.  Inconsistency perhaps indicates distraction or impatience.

Roimë

Of hounds and spies.

Read Roimë

The whelps of the second generation were approaching their adolescence.  The third generation would never know me as anything other than the old teacher, though of course my form could not age nor weaken.  I thought maybe I was acting old now, or like a cripple who is left only with eyes to watch and a voice to speak.  I wanted the older ones to forget me as I had been, and the newer ones never to know of it.  As far as beings of my sort went, I was crippled, chained to one body which might leave me ever houseless should it die. 

I would never have looked for or wanted a vocation as a keeper of lore, but I began to like it since the other options were to feel useless and guilty or to risk my life hunting and patrolling outside the walls of Angband.  And mine was an important task, especially since Mairon seemed to be losing interest in the Nauri.  As he said, the werewolf project had become self-sustaining, and he needed now to concern himself with the increasing number of enemy scouts who were combing the region.

There came an hour when the fog hung thick about the trunks of the firs in the broad forest-courtyard.  The younger Nauri had not seen such deep mists before and wanted to know about it.  I pretended to do as learned folk sometimes will, to take my time answering just because I could, but actually I was watching them to gauge how I ought to explain it.  Some of them seemed uneasy, but many were amused and interested, batting at the fog and trailing each other through it by scent.

I swished my tail and went to settle down on my rock, and a group of young wolves trailed after me.  They strewed themselves around in the pine needles, a barely-seen shadow in the mist at my feet.

“If ever you meet the Eru-whelps outside these walls,” I began, “you’ll find quickly that their sense of smell is pitiful.  They favor their sense of sight, which is keen, but a fog like this will leave them blind.  Are we blind, in the fog?”

“Yes,” said a few, and, “No,” said a few.  And then, “You ran right into a tree just now!” one of the first few said to one of the second few.

A tussling sound came out of the fog, and a yip, and then they fell quiet again and waited for me to take sides.

“Well?” I insisted.

They thought about it.  “Our eyes are blind in the fog,” a voice piped up, “but we aren’t really blind because we can still scent things out.”

“That is so.  Fog favors the Nauri.” 

I was taking a breath to say more when there was a stirring and a figure waded through the mist and through the whelps, causing them to shuffle aside.  The Nauri rarely saw Thuringwethil and she did not seem especially fond of them.  She didn’t seem especially fond of me for that matter, and I thought with annoyance and worry that it was odd for her to come here at this foggy hour.

Thuringwethil came quietly up to the rock.  She wore her favorite form, basically human but with the addition of sleek, featherless wings that folded around her shoulders like a cloak when she wasn’t using them.  “Lord Mairon requires your immediate presence in the council chamber.”

I told the whelps to practice scenting in the fog and followed Thuringwethil indoors where she immediately left me and went on her way.  I found the lord of Angband pacing around the council chamber with its crimson trimmings and mahogany furniture, talking coaxingly at two of the Nauri.  These two were half of a group recently sent out beyond the fortress to sharpen their hunting skills on wild game.  The wolves looked very unhappy.

Mairon did not look pleased either.  “Draugluin, it seems your folk have come into direct contact with the caniform creature.”

A few prior bands of Nauri had reported this creature running out at them suddenly as though it had been purposefully hunting them, but they’d had enough of a lead to evade it.  Mairon and I had heard its howling two or three times from the battlements.

I sat down between the two wolves and set to grooming the one who seemed more distressed, trying to ignore the familiar dread and anger that crouched in wait to jump me.  Mairon, who believed in a time and place for decorum, started to look disapproving, but he let it go.  “I would have them explain what occurred.”

“In good time, sir.”  I thought it was a little obvious what must have occurred, but after some time I got the Nauri to give the details.

“It was much like the hounds of Oromë in its looks, but larger by far.  It was taller than you, Draugluin, though very bony and sinewy.  But its sinews must have been made of iron chains, for it was very strong, more than we thought it should be even for its size.  And it was fast.  When it started coming at us, we ran, we couldn’t help it.  We paid for our cowardice with half our lives.  We had a long start, but it still came on and…”

“I see,” Lord Mairon said softly, not asking them to elaborate.  He would not be as much concerned about the details of the wolves’ deaths as about the exact nature of the strange hound.  “You’ve said that this creature was ‘much like’ Oromë’s mongrels.  I take it there is some difference, apart from its unusual size and physical prowess?”

“Yes, it wasn’t a normal, dull animal like the other hounds.  It had keen eyes like we do, and it had something about it like you have, Lord Mairon, and like Captain Draugluin and all the other folk in Angband and the Maiar have.”

“Did it speak in your hearing?”

“No.”

“Were there Maiar around?”

“No.”

Mairon nodded to the two Nauri, thanked them, and dismissed them.  I wished to go with them back to the trees, but he motioned to me to stay.

He half sat, half leaned on the edge of the table as he sometimes did he thought he might want easy access to pacing.  I myself paced in one tight circle, all but chasing my tail, then plunked down on my haunches facing him.

I began, “I had specifically requested that no Nauri be sent to hunt outside the fortress walls, after the groups that were chased–”

“I remember the conversation as well as you do.  I am aware that my insistence upon sending them out seemed cruel to you, but part of the purpose for which the Nauri were bred was to eventually range about all the wild lands of the earth.  We cannot forever cloister them all here because one monstrosity, of which there may or maybe not be more in the future, is roaming around out there.  They need to be tried against new threats, for threats they shall always face.  Now that it’s confirmed this uncanny hound is a rather terrible force, I will honor your request to keep them all within Angband for the time being, but only because the Nauri are not yet numerous enough to bear heavy losses.  It shan’t be all that many years before colonies of them are turned loose across the length and breadth of Endórë.”

My mind rolled over itself trying to follow Lord Mairon’s several lines of thought and recall what I was protesting.  At last I said, “Did two of my folk need to die for you to decide this hound is a threat?”

His eyes held the fell shadow of a glare and I considered being alarmed, but the look passed and he answered mildly.  “Maybe.  Since the prior witnesses beheld the hound only at a greater distance, we did not know what it was capable of, nor its nature.  Now we know that there is indeed intelligence in its demeanor and even some indication of Ainu being.  It sounds indeed to me like a hound-formed Maia rather than an exceptional animal.  But why such a form do you think?  Is it simply a preference, or perhaps he was asked, tactically, to assume this guise?”

Mairon was so interested in his hypothesizing that he had forgotten how he’d got started on it.  Again the spark of anger that sometimes glowed behind my lungs flared brighter with each breath I took.  When I made him no answer, he looked at me sharply and saw how quickly my breaths were coming, and his hands which sometimes gestured at imagined charts in the air fell still. 

“Draugluin, I am sorry you take it bitterly and I blame you not, but your folk shall always die and you have always known this.  Were you were to seal them in the deepest chambers of Angband, all shall die by infirm and doting age,” he said gently and immovably.

The anger was doused by resignation.  I remembered Gothmog in Utumno, actually and metaphorically seething with anger over just about everything, and how disgusting I’d found the fellow.  If that spark ever caught and surged along my spine and into my head, I might never be able to put it out.  It was better to be quiet about it all, and Lord Mairon was right anyway.

“I knew it, of course.  I knew not what it would mean though.  I have no insight into what anybody might intend with this hound business, and I should like to go be with my folk now, my lord.”

Mairon gave a faint shrug.  I crossed to the door, put my right forefoot on the small slate tile near the frame which had some art in it to recognize my pawprint, and left quickly when it swung open.

The Nauri, still shadows in the mist, were howling loss and indignation when I joined them.  They currently numbered forty-four adults and one hundred twenty-nine adolescents, and indeed they were becoming too many for the forest-courtyard to hold.  Thirteen of the first generation were already gone, six in the skirmish with the three Maiar, one from injury and lack in the wilds, four sent into the east some months back and never returned, and now two at the hound’s jaws.  It had already been murmured, before anyone had gotten a clear description of the canine creature, that it may have slain the four missing Nauri, and none doubted it now. 

They asked me later whether those who had been killed while fleeing dishonorably had any chance of a place among the sky-wolves.  I answered that Ancamanar would offer any wolf who had died the same chance for redemption, and I was getting uncomfortable with the story and how easily they believed it. 

I began to wonder without cease what did happen to the Nauri’s minds, to their words, when they perished.  The wonderings came into my dreams, where I followed strange paths, challenging or begging all manner of mortal and immortal creatures for knowledge and advice.

Mairon said that my folk would be a liability if we bid them out-of-doors now anyway.  “I suspect the Oromendili have perceived that the Nauri, since they cannot dematerialize, offer the best chance of locating Angband.  Doubtless the hound reached this region by stalking or chasing the missing group.  I dispatched Raucar to attempt his capture, but he is canny and he has drawn back some leagues as he’s become aware of the pursuit.  The enemy already suspects the general location of Angband in this section of the Angoronti, and I fear these recent incidents bring their focus ever closer to the vicinity of the three peaks.”

The three peaks were unusual in that they stuck out a bit from the rest of the mountain range and were very conical.  Mairon thought they had come into their volcanic being when Illuin fell in its earth-ripping cataclysm.  They smoked almost constantly, which was part of the reason the main portion of Angband had been delved in the quieter mountains right behind them.  Much of the smoke from the furnaces of the workshops was vented up through these seething peaks, so that it looked like a natural occurrence.  The fortress was very well-hidden, its few outdoor courtyards and platforms fashioned to blend in with angles and shadows in the rock face, and it was well-guarded by mostly immaterial Raucar.

After some days of the hound continuing to evade capture, Mairon proposed at council to send forth three wolves as decoys.  They would act as if they were on patrol, but they would be closely guarded by the formless Raucar and would be in no actual danger.  I reminded him of what he had said about not sending the Nauri without while the hound still roamed, and Thuringwethil shot me a look of annoyance over the mahogany table.  Though Mairon had left out parts of the truth many times, he had never gone back on his word to me, and he was unwilling to do so now although I saw the thought cross his eyes in a gold flicker.  He pointed out again that there would be no real danger involved, and persuaded me to sanction his coming among the Nauri to ask for volunteers to help capture the Hound of Valinor. 

There were quite a few volunteers. 

Three were selected and sent out, and I tried not to think about it. 

After a few days, Mairon came with news.  He bid me walk down the corridor to the council chamber with him, and his eyes gleamed as he sat down at the table.  I settled myself on my accustomed ebony stool.   

“Did you get the Hound?” I asked, even then doubting that the Hound would be unwary enough to fall into such a trap.

“No.  The decoys did lure in something else that might be of interest to you though.”  It seemed he could barely contain some mongrel sentiment of amusement and anger. 

I was clueless for a second, and then I put my forepaws on the table and leaned across it.  “Those three meddlers?”

“The same.  Our decoys drew them because they themselves were sneaking around Angband’s eastern neighborhood in wolf guise, of all things, evidently hoping some Nauri would show them to the entrance.”

I snarled and spluttered like a prey over which the jaws of outrage and delight quarreled.  “I should gut them just for that!  What happened?”

“They approached our decoys claiming to be of a sundered line of Nauri, whom I’d allegedly sent as suckling whelps to Utumno years ago as tribute, now bearing messages to Angband.  Is that not the most heinous, unmitigated arrogance?”

I growled agreement.

“Your wolves were wisely suspicious,” continued Mairon, “but Curumo was speaking and evidently he’s been working on his uncanny powers of persuasion since there’s little else he’s good for.  The obscure one from Mandos was also casting some kind of sorcery over them to dampen their Maia presence.  The Nauri played along until they came to the sentry rock, where their unseen guard and both sentinels fell on the spies.  They got hold of Námo’s person at once.  Unfortunately Alatar and Curumo managed to flee like honorless cowards, which I’m told their companion urged them to with most tragic nobility.”

He watched my reaction with interest as he spoke all this.  Alatar concerned me least.  I had admired his melee skill.  Curumo I hated most, but Námo’s Maia certainly did not have my love either.  If it weren’t for her and her dire words, I might have been able to remain ignorant of the full extent of my predicament.  I might not have that dread, always there like a faint whiff of rot in a pine wood.

Mairon finished, “I resolved to give you access to any of these three, should they fall into our care, as recompense for the heavy loss of life you witnessed at their hands.  I’m willing to largely leave you to your own devices, within certain parameters pertaining to interrogation and to an invention I’m testing on the captive.”

Mando

Draugluin gets a taste of revenge and Mairon tests a new invention.

Note: All the more intense story warnings apply to this chapter.  I had no idea this rather grotesque interlude was going to happen when I first started this story.  If anyone finds themselves not wanting to finish reading the chapter but wants a cleaned-up summary of its plot, feel free to message me.

Other note: Chapter title is not a typo of Mandos, though that too is relevant in a tangential way.

Other other note: I seem to have had a birthday of late.  I decided that it was fitting to mark that occasion by giving a final scrubbing to this long-waiting-for-posting chapter.  This is normal birthday fare, I mean, right?

Read Mando

Mairon hung the lantern from a hook in the ceiling.  In the far corner of the cell, the shackled form of a small Maia squinted slowly at the sudden light.  Even now her face was hard to read, but her skin, which I remembered as middling, had gone very pale.  Mairon moved a few steps closer, the lantern behind him throwing his shadow over her. 

His tone was cool and musing like frost underfoot.  “I suppose you still won’t entertain courtesy enough to name yourself?  Well, I’m hardly surprised you would prefer to retain your token obscurity.  They say that rarely do the servants of Námo or Vairë come forth from their halls, as theirs is not to shape the world, only to receive and record that which passes within it.  They say as well that many from the Halls possess foresight, and perhaps that is why it is better for them to remain in those Halls, beyond the access of interested parties such as myself and my captain.  I understand you and Draugluin have already met, and not on the best of terms.”

The Maia’s eyes slid from Mairon to me, but still she didn’t twitch a muscle.

He continued, “You’ll find the circumstances of this your second meeting rather altered. You are for all intents and purposes as a chained mortal here.”

Still no response, and then Mairon left me alone with the captive.  I paused, not sure what to do now that I finally had one of the meddlers at my mercy. 

I had been instructed to avoid damaging the area around the steel collar on the captive’s neck.  That would at least keep me from acting rashly and tearing her throat out.  The collar was Mairon’s new invention, to keep an Ainu who wore it stuck in one form.  He’d said something about a technological and biological method being superior to sorcery, which was a drain on his powers and attention.

I paced in closer to the Maia, back and forth slowly, in a way that had set other captives shivering.  She kept following me only with her eyes and the rest of her didn’t move.  Her calm began to anger me. 

“I remember you had more to say when you were in the free air swinging that bloody blade around,” I finally said.

“What would you have me say?  I can see you’ve not forgotten my words then.  Do they bear repeating?” 

I wanted to get angrier, but this wasn’t even spoken insolently.  Taking up a confidence I didn’t really feel, I said, “You’re eventually going to tell us what you know of the counsel of the Valar, and the slavering Hound running around on our doorstep, and the Oromendili’s base of operations.  Maybe you don’t believe it now, but time and hunger and darkness will do their work, and there shall be worse things than those.  If it’s too big a step to speak of those things now, you could start by explaining what the Void a Maia of Námo is doing skulking around in Endórë.”

I got only silence and eyes that didn’t seem even to reflect the light.  I was out of ideas, so I sprang and stopped with my forepaws on either side of the Maia and my jaws practically under her chin.  She finally flinched back a bit, but hardly.  Maybe she thought that if I killed her she would be able to leave her body and escape the fortress.  Or maybe she didn’t fear pain or death of form, considering who her Vala was.  Mairon had said this one was particularly aloof and it wouldn’t do to get frustrated about it.  Think of it as a game, he’d suggested, but I wasn’t amused.

The prisoner wouldn’t know that I was forbidden from tearing her throat out, so I acted as if I was thinking about doing that, nosing along under her jawline and occasionally taking a light hold with my teeth.  She still hardly reacted, but the pulse against my muzzle quickened, a physical instinct of fear if nothing else.  To keep my jaws from snapping together over an artery, I suggested, “It’s not so pleasant, being constrained in one form, is it?”

“No,” she agreed calmly.

“If you don’t feel like talking, there’s that other matter still between us, what you and your friends did to my folk.  I’m afraid you’ll need to answer for both of them, since they flew like cravens and left you to your fate.  What help is there for you now?”

The prisoner’s eyes narrowed and a spark of lamplight came off them for a second, but then there was no more reaction.

It was common knowledge that an Ainu trapped in a body could take a lot more damage than a mortal in a similar body.  That thought encouraged me.  I sat back for a second and listened to the pent anger in my breathing, then leapt forward to release it onto the Maia who had blood and doom on her hands.  I came away with half a head’s worth of hair that trailed a slippery rag of scalp.  There was no scream or cry, but the captive slumped against the wall and gasped there with clenched teeth.  Blood painted over the pale bone above her eye and ear.

I thought my violence had dwindled after the whelps came along.  It must only have been asleep and dreaming of thorn bushes and battlements in the fog and the polish of the mahogany table.  A pitiless joy gripped me, that wanted nothing more or less than to change the Maia into a sludge of bone and meat.  It hardly mattered that the creature still did not beg or curse.  There were only quiet, profound whimperings.  I calmed at last and backed away with meat, and watched the twitch of bared muscle and the white of ribs poking through.  The Maia breathed in a faint rasping, aloof eyes somewhere behind a slick film of gore.

Mairon came in, blinked at the remainder of the captive, then looked over at me and winced politely.  “I didn’t ask you to eat it.”

He didn’t understand.  “You didn’t ask me not to.”

He nodded slowly and looked off into the middle distance where he sometimes went for patience.  “Draugluin, do refrain from eating the prisoner hereafter.  And from bringing her this close to dying.  Preliminary experiments demonstrated that they can heal themselves with the collar on, but I don’t imagine it’s possible past a certain point. “

I quickly finished eating the last bit of prisoner I’d been holding between my paws.  “Yet what if she does die?  I’ve seen you keep them here and make them re-embody when that happens.”

“I could let her die and force her remanifestation good as new, and then put the collar back on her, yes.  But I don’t wish for her to die yet.  I have my reasons.”

I watched Mairon crouch down by the hardly-conscious captive and lay one hand on her skull.  Very slowly, a bit of undamaged skin on her brow started to spread along its edges and up over the bone.  Although I’d known it lay within his power, it was strange to see the Right Hand of Melkor healing someone.  Mairon had a rag with him, and he dabbed blood from the Maia’s face and spoke something quietly.  I was confused by his kindness until I realized he was contrasting himself with my violence, to seem like a decent and safe person.  He had positioned himself so that the captive wouldn’t be able to see me if her eyes opened.  Soon she stirred a little and hissed in pain. 

“I don’t imagine this is what you expected when you came to Endórë,” Lord Mairon said in a consoling voice, still working.  “Why would Námo have sent you hither?  It seems cruel.”

The Maia must have been disoriented, or shocked out of her distance.  There was a mumble, “No.  Lord Oromë.”

“Surely a Maia can’t serve both Oromë and Námo.  That should be a strange fealty.”

“I do.”

“I’ve heard of Maiar apportioning their service, but never between two of such disparate nature.  How do you manage that?”

The answer sounded helpless, and painful, maybe owing to the captive’s general lack of skin.  “I am.”

“And who are you precisely?”

“Pallandë.”

So it went with Pallandë.  Mairon stopped in regularly with his sympathetic yet faintly threatening air, and he tried all sorts of topics to start the Maia talking about something.  I would visit with my anger.  My anger didn’t cool with the days, but crawled up from my marrow and romped with that joy of revenge and power.  My techniques got slower and more precise.  People don’t get used to pain as it becomes familiar.  They only dread it more.  But although Pallandë’s composure began to waver a bit, she never answered either of us with more than a few well-placed words.

“It seems I was mistaken to think you may have grown soft,” remarked Mairon in one of the high paved courtyards, in the wolf form he didn’t often wear anymore.

“Whatever else happens, I will not be soft on my enemies,” I answered, watching the stars duck in and out of the jostling clouds.

“Good.  This one isn’t yet sufficiently frightened.  Kill the body, any way you please that avoids damage to the carotid artery.”

Apparently this was part of Mairon’s experiment, because he came down to the cell to see what would happen.  The fact that he was there and that I was expected to do this deliberately made my anger abandon me.  I looked at Pallandë sitting in the corner.  Again she glanced between us with unreadable eyes.  I thought of my own body being killed and I felt cold. 

To get some motivation back, I gloated as best I could, “You and your folk might think that my people are dispensable, but you who prance around in the light of Aman are no different than those of us who walk in shadow here, when you slay.  If death is hateful when we do it, what of you and yours?”

“No cruelty was intended.  It was a skirmish.  You attacked, we sought to defend.  There was no time for delicacy,” said Pallandë, which was the most she’d said.

Seizing this cue for the most indelicate of deeds I had done in that cell, I came forward and pinned her against the floor and tore in below where her ribs met.  She tolerated this with the usual tooth-clenched hisses until I poked in far enough to meet entrails.  Then she tried to squirm away, which was the most fearful response we’d had from her, but I was holding her down and the chains wouldn’t have let her get far anyway.  Smells and textures accosted me and I pulled them away from their owner, remembering with vengeance my wolf in the thorn bush.  I pulled them half my body length out onto the floor and went back for more, happy now that the Maia kept trying uselessly to flee from me.  And yet I was afraid, knowing that if it could be done to her it could be done to me.  I reeled out reek and blood, feeling strange and removed, until there was none left.  The hollow creature kept mewling painfully until no more breath was drawn in.

There was the reddish light, like a thin liquid mist, the usual result of Maiar who were forced through the painful death of a form.  They always tried to turn to the west.  I thought this one surely would, being from Mandos, but nothing like that happened.

The light quivered and settled about the head and neck of its dead form.  There it stayed, silent and seething.  A chill came unannounced and rifled through my innards.

Mairon walked into my line of vision.  He looked down at Pallandë, the light and the corpse, with gleaming interest.

“Is this what you intended?” I said.

“Theorized.  There is a system of needles and tubes in the collar which diverts the bloodstream through a part of it, then returns it to the circulatory system.  This is why they can’t shift or discard a form when wearing it, because a part of the form’s very lifeblood, and therefore a part of their own being, has been placed beyond their influence.  I thought it might necessarily continue to retain part of the being, should the form be slain.  This may be useful to us.”

“How so?”

“Consider how traumatizing, even humiliating, it must be for a Maia from the Halls of Mandos to be unable to overcome her own death.  She may be more tractable hereafter.”  Mairon didn’t take his eyes from the confused light of Pallandë, and his voice grew quieter and very intent.  “Trauma renders people more honest.  I daresay she hardly knows who or what she is, and little beyond this compulsion to stay by the body.  A terrible experience, doubtless.  It’s only a shame she is too far gone to communicate now.  If a being is stripped even of any subconscious vestige of pretense, its rawness must be unsullied, like when we first emerged from the Void, yet more than that because back then there was nothing behind us but Void.”

I felt the fur rise along my neck and back.  “And she’d recover if you take the collar off?” I asked, partly to get Lord Mairon to stop staring at the reddish glow like a cat watching a fire.

He blinked and looked at me with narrowed eyes.  “Yes, the body would dissolve and she could resume an undamaged form.  But understanding the full range of this collar’s effects may have far-reaching ramifications, and the prisoner’s present experience is more likely to secure her compliance than anything else I can conceive of.  Thus, I prefer that she aide my studies by clinging to this body until such time as its grip on her spirit loosens.  I imagine a certain stage of decay shall need to be reached.“

I drew back a bit and struggled to hold down a snarl.

Mairon lifted his brows at me.  “I’ve not been blind to your obsession with causing this creature suffering.  Surely your stomach is not weak, and I can’t imagine you are moved to pity now?”

“No, sir.”  Yet still my fur bristled.

Mairon set a watch on the cell to see what would happen and when.  It was a task that none of us in his inner circle should have got, but he didn’t trust lesser servants with it.  Thuringwethil and the rest were at least able to disembody, but I was stuck with my nose and its keen sense of smell.  The process was hastened by a fire under a steaming cauldron in the cell, which made the place warm and humid.  My fur did me about as much good as my nose.

Soon I managed to beg off the duty, because of the heat and the smell.  “I’m a wolf, Lord Mairon, not a vulture.”  But I didn’t mention how I also hated the spirit flickering around the throat and head of the corpse.  It went abroad a little as time wore on, darting up and down the length of the body.  A couple times I’d had to run out of the cell and sit panting in the corridor for a long time. 

I was settling back into my old routine in the forest-courtyard when Mairon came and said that the experiment was done.  The Maia’s spirit had finally broken away from the carrion, which dissipated at once with its stench following more slowly, but she’d immediately been constrained again and compelled into her usual form.  At first I was uneasy visiting the cell, but that passed soon enough.  The prisoner still didn’t say anything useful, yet she reacted to my questioning with more noticeable fear and pain. 

Mairon came in once when I was gnawing one of her arms down to the bone, and he said in a pleasant tone, “You’ve found that not even the death of your present form shall deliver you.  Your resistance is weakening already, and we can do that to you as many times as need be.  But perhaps you know already what we’re going to do?”

Lord Mairon was intrigued by Pallandë’s association with Námo.  I had told him that I thought prophecies could do more harm than good and that I ought to know.

Pallandë looked at him with those calm eyes now weirdly haunted with dread and said, “I’ve told you before, Mairon, I cannot know things by choice or design, not though you threat a thousand deaths.  That which I perceive of the future is unbidden.”

“Then it would seem you’ve no control over anything now.”  Mairon fiddled with the chains, drawing out all their slack by securing them to hooks in the wall, until the captive was stuck with arms outspread.  Pallandë and I both watched, not knowing what was coming, as he went to the far corner and brought out a brand from a pile of items.  He opened the lantern that hung from the ceiling and lit it. 

Returning, he held the flame calmly to one of Pallandë’s hands until it caught.  I took a couple steps back from the light and reek.  The Maia twitched and tugged uselessly at the chains, gasping.

“I could singe your limbs down to the bone, one by one,” Lord Mairon said, conversational.  “Maybe we can melt your tongue out, too, since you don’t use it overmuch for talking around here.  Then we could see what might be done about various internal organs.  Sometime during this process, you’ll find yourself back in that place of horror you endured, not a living thing and not a dead thing and not even an Ainu really, exiled between the tangible world and the profound halls of your master.  You shall have no name and no will, no consciousness outside that of fear.”

He’d hinted that he had gotten the Maia to talk a bit about this experience when she first returned to herself terrified and disoriented, so his description must have been passable.  Pallandë did look very unhappy at the reminder. 

“We can play this out a thousand times if you’re so inclined,” Mairon continued.  “If you care nothing for yourself, at least be aware that the more obdurate you are now, the more punishing things shall be on any future Maiar in Angband.  This goes doubly for Curumo and Alatar.”

“Yet neither of them shall suffer harm from you in Angband,” said Pallandë as the fire ate away at her arm.

“A typical vague prophecy.  Perhaps more harm shall befall them outside of Angband.  Or, more likely you speak only in the meaningless bravado of the helpless.”  He cinched a chain a little tighter.  It clacked against bone as charred material fell away.  Pallandë winced and hissed and made no other answer.

Mairon and his torch moved to the other hand.  The captive tried instinctively to pull away, but fire and reek rose up again.  He sat down on his heels in front of her and stared at her face.  “We would like to know about this singularly noisome Hound, Pallandë.  Is this creature not a Maia?”

Pallandë’s brows twitched in a small way that I would have taken for physical pain, but Mairon’s sight always was more nuanced.  Nodding to himself, he said, “A Maia of Oromë, most likely.”  He began to list all the Maiar of Oromë he could think of, which was quite a few.  He reached the name of Huan, stopped, and smirked.  “And why is Huan running about in this mongrel guise?”

Pallandë’s eyes shot wide open.

Mairon grinned.  “Even you cannot maintain a bland expression forever under duress.  Huan’s name may as well have been etched under your eyes.  Your form begins to betray you, and thence your allies.”

He pressed this question of Huan until the captive was again near the edge of death, limbs singed away.  “We will kill you again, Pallandë, happily.  How can Huan be defeated?”

The Maia looked like she was also near the edge of panic.  Her eyes flicked toward me for a moment.  A strange look of resignation or relief came over her.  “Only the greatest werewolf to walk the earth shall ever defeat Huan.  This I saw.”

“Thank you.  Next time speak sooner and maybe you can avoid another round of this.”  Mairon suddenly had blade from somewhere, which he drove up into the captive’s heart.

---

Chapter End Notes

Pallandë: Those with particular esoteric knowledge might be struck by the name.  Yes, it is intended as the selfsame character with one different letter.  One might aptly fancy I’m conducting a thought experiment of sorts, particularly if one has read any of my Third Age material involving the character.

My notion of this Maia serving both Oromë and Námo is hybridized canon and personal fanon.  Pallando was in fact associated with the latter Vala at some earlier point in Tolkien’s conceptions (Unfinished Tales, "The Istari").

Ohta

War comes to Endórë, and Draugluin meets someone he did not expect.

Read Ohta

“I’m not technically a werewolf.”

“So speaks the sire of the werewolves.”  Lord Mairon peered over the battlements toward the brush and gullies east of Angband.  “You’ve been glad enough to identify as one of them when it involves sleeping under the eaves of the firs and playing with the whelps.”

He had me there.  My ears went back for a second.  I tried again.  “The Maia herself said that she can’t pick prophecies out of the air.  They come to her unbidden.  What are the chances that she would have seen Huan defeated, right when you asked?  She’s probably lying.”

“Did you stop to think she might have seen this earlier, but refrained from saying anything about it until desperation wrenched it past her guard?  She is not lying.  It’s not in her nature.”  

“All right,” I agreed quickly, not wanting Mairon to go off on another of his speeches about the fascinating honesty of a being poised on the edge of death.  The wind came out of the west and sent his hair eastward, exposing black strands at his nape that usually only showed as a shadow under the lighter stuff.

He rummaged around for something to tie it back with, shrugged, and slid to a sitting position out of the wind with the stone at his back.  “Draugluin, I would deem that you qualify as a werewolf, despite some obvious differences between you and the Nauri, and certainly none of them are as powerful as you.  While the Hound presents a very real threat to those with significantly less power than you, he may not be so terrible when confronted with a more even match.  After all, he never stays to fight the Raucar but continually flees them.  While doing all this running and hiding, I daresay he’s doing quite a bit of spying and I like it not.  And he’s slain as many of the Nauri alone as Pallandë and her crew slew between the three of them.”

Huan’s deeds had not made me quite so angry because I hadn’t witnessed them myself, but Mairon had a point.  I felt anger stirring again, and it was for myself as well because I was afraid to go out and avenge my folk as I ought.

Mairon could all but see me thinking these things.  His sharp eyes blinked once at me.  “I’ll send an escort to follow you at a distance.  They shall intervene if you run into trouble you can’t handle.”  He laid both hands on my ruff just behind my ears.  “Know that you underestimate yourself though.  Your strength has never waned, only your confidence.”  

So it was that I left the safety of Angband at last, relieved to be taking action and doing the honorable thing despite my worries.  I’d got used to thinking of myself as a dotard and a cripple, and the land proved me wrong.  I tore over rock and stream, stopping to howl challenges and cast around for scent or sign of the Hound of Valinor.  After five days, I ran into a couple of rangers from Angband.  They told me that Huan hadn’t been sighted since three days before I’d come forth, and that the rangers were starting to think he’d left the region altogether.  

I kept searching, but as often as I thought of finding the Hound I thought of the sky field with its stars and clouds.  I ran just to be running, until I ran into the foothills northeast of Angband against the liking of the two escorting me.

“Captain Draugluin–where are you going?”

“Up.  These hills command a wide view.”

The other two both went formless, as the Raucar usually did when they were abroad in those days, but I heard the speaker’s frown.  “We’ve been up so high while accompanying you, sir, and there’s no Hound to be seen from above either.  He’s well and truly gone.  Might we not be thinking of heading back?”

It wasn’t the first time I had gotten a sense that the people who were supposedly under my authority didn’t respect me.  I couldn’t do many things that came easily to them.  “My orders are to seek Huan.  This I’ll do until I hear otherwise.  He may have come up here himself, for all we know.”

“Sir, I believe it is important that Lord Mairon know the Hound has possibly fallen back.”

“I have not reached that conclusion yet,” I answered as importantly as I could, and I climbed more quickly.

“Your pardon, sir, but it seems quite likely.  And if the Hound has left, it’s probably because he did whatever Oromë sent him to do.  Things might be moving apace now.  The Lord of Angband would surely wish to–”

“If your conclusion is so obvious as all that, the rangers have surely sent a message to the Lord of Angband already.”  I was trying not to bristle with anger and embarrassment.  My companions made a good point, one that hadn’t occurred to me.   “But if you wish to go tell him yourselves, don’t let me slow you down.  Go.”

“We were instructed not to leave you…”

“Well, I’m instructing you to go.  Tell him I said so, and that if he wants anyone to answer for it I will.”

The two guards paused reluctantly, but in the end they left, glad to turn their minds to other business than tagging along behind a wolf.  I jogged uphill, suddenly wishing I had somebody handy to maul, and finally stopped on the top of a narrow ridge.  

“Huan!” I howled.  My voice thundered around as several voices in the heights, and none answered.

I looked back toward Angband some ten miles distant.  The fortress was cunningly hidden, as one might expect from Mairon, mostly lurking below the three peaks and delved into the hills and scarps behind them.  The few windows and outdoor courtyards were situated in shadowed angles of the rock formations, and sorceries were laid on them to lessen their chance of being noticed.  I tried to figure out where the Nauri’s little forest might be, but from where I watched I did not have the faintest idea.  

Longing fell over me like heavy snow, but what for I couldn’t tell.  It was no use wishing for many things, so usually I didn’t.  I hadn’t slept much since starting out.  In spite of the danger, I crawled under a bush and curled up with my tail on my forepaws.

I woke to the earth trembling as it sometimes did in those parts, but more forcefully than I’d ever known it to.  A large roaring sounded from the far end of the plateau that lay at the feet of Angband.  Wriggling out of the bushes, I ran to the end of the ridge and saw a huge cloud of dust rising into the dark sky away west.  That had been the site of a pass between two steep cliffs, but the cliffs didn’t appear to exist anymore.  As I watched, a few dots of fire sprang up.  The war Mairon had anticipated must be upon us at last.  Probably he’d brought the cliffs down on the enemy host as it dared the passage to come up onto the plateau.  I laughed to think of that.

My next thought was for my Nauri, and I stopped laughing.

I bounded back down onto the plain, cursing the slowness of my form though it was faster than any other wolf upon the earth.  I gained the easternmost entry into Angband, a small gate that led to a long underground passage.  But it opened near the top of a sheer rock formation, and I had no way to get to it.  Fearing that the enemy might already be near, I padded around the foot of the rock, calling up quietly for the guards who should have been stationed there.  No answer or movement came.  They had probably been ordered to move inside the gate, to avoid drawing any attention to it, and seal it behind them.  It was indistinguishable from the rock around it when it was closed.

“Folk of Angband, open, it’s the captain of the Nauri,” I tried a last time, more loudly, in the language Mairon had made up for the Raucar.  Nothing happened.  

The only other side entrances I knew of were one on the plateau in an old hollowed-out oak, and one in a ravine to the west of the fortress.  At this rate I may as well run openly for the main gate, which was tucked into a small dell between two of the peaks.

I turned southwest and raced for the gate.  The ground shook again, violently, and I was nearly knocked off my feet.  This time the quake was much closer.  Chunks of rock tumbled down the slope on my right.  A broken branch balanced in a scraggly dead tree fell into the dry grass next to me.  I threw myself on the ground as another quake followed right on the heels of the first, then leapt back up and ran on.  Rounding a long rock outcropping that had blocked my view since I left the silent east gate, I stopped short.  The battle begun at the pass was seeping onto the field before Angband.  Many clashed with weapons or powers, and the airs above bristled with the struggles of those who preferred to fight incorporeally.

I used to take joy in fighting.  Now I couldn’t even think of it.  Even if I ran for the gate like the worst sort of coward, someone might decide to come after me with death.  The battle and its noise edged nearer across the wide field, while I stood watching for what seemed like a long time.  Telling myself that I must dash through to join my people and my lord was no use at all.  When my legs finally moved, they turned me around and hustled me away.  I hid myself in an uncomfortable thicket of brambles, wishing I’d returned to Angband along with my wiser escort the day before.  My innards felt like I was being swallowed up in some icy maw.

The earthquakes kept up intermittently for something like eight days.  I wandered aimlessly up and down the streambeds.  Some streams I’d known changed their courses or drained away somewhere below the ground.  A bit of smoke came out of the three peaks.  The time of Arda’s shaping by the Ainur was very long past, and it was impressive that some of them, Mairon and Aulë at least, were still able to command the earth to such deeds.  I tried to stay far enough away to avoid the worst effects of the quakes, but I couldn’t bring myself to go too far.

I barely slept.  I saw enemies in every shadow, and the Nauri in every flicker of a passing animal.  This was when I started to wish I were just an animal in truth, a creature who would die completely and leave no spirit.  I fancied I was walking through a fog of cattail down riddled with knives.  Each gust of wind shook the cattails and rattled the knives, and pointed out my failures in Mairon’s voice.  

Then at last a quieter kind of vibration, like many marching feet, ran through the earth.  I raised my head and saw that another host was coming along the foothills out of the east.  I capered liked a demented whelp and almost ran to meet them.  But then I thought about how Lord Melkor would take my failure to brave the field.  My actions were basically desertion.  So I fled from them, too, and hid cowering as Utumno’s army marched past in its terror and splendor, its fire and shadow.  

Soon the harsh light of Valarauca flame came up from the field, and war drums rolled.  I was heartened by all of this.  Utumno had twice the host of Angband, under the command of the Dark Lord himself.  

But something else happened then that I could never have imagined.  A quake greater than any of the others tore across the land, and I saw the three towering peaks of Angband slide apart as if they were made of nothing more intimidating than sand.  Then I was crashing down a slope along with dirt and boulders and plants.  My head smashed into something.  Terror and darkness moved in swiftly.

I came out of them more slowly, full of pain, relieved at least not to have died. Everything was quiet.  I heaved off a heavy coat of dirt, gravel, and a creeping vine.  The westward sky was choked with dust and smoke.  Staggering to the top of the hill of rubble, I could just make out the shadow of a host retreating into the east.

I approached Angband, clambering and leaping over mangled land, and found the field silent under the heavy debris clouds.  The toppled peaks sat like the backs of dark tortoises wallowing in their own guts.  I swallowed my dread back and trotted around the place.  All the gates were destroyed or blocked.  With a sickening sort of hope, the kind that does not expect to be fulfilled, I sniffed around for any trace of the Nauri.  They might be trapped down below, or dead on the field or in the wreckage.  There was no sign of anybody, mortal or no.

I was tempted to sit down and howl, but it would change nothing.  Before I could lose my nerve, I turned back east and ran desperately, until I could see from the many-colored banners that the army moving away in that direction was Valinor’s.  But before them went the host of Melkor, in what Mairon would probably have called a “strategic retreat.”  Still I didn’t try to join them.  For all I knew, Melkor might punish my cowardice by making me join the Valaraucar in the rearguard or something.  It was Mairon I sought.  He might know what had become of my wolves, he understood my problems enough to possibly be forgiving, and he was my commander anyway.  But I couldn’t tell if he was among the Dark Lord’s folk now.

I stopped and panted, exhausted and indecisive.  My head pounded.  Both armies were far ahead by the time I started moving again.  Not knowing what else to do, I tailed them at a great distance for days.  When I came finally within sight of the cold slate-colored mountains that hid Melkor’s stronghold, his folk had already vanished inside.  Valinor’s troops were arrayed at the feet of the sheer cliffs.  It seemed Utumno, a much older and deeper place than Angband, was prepared for a siege.  That land had always been chill and quiet, dark rock brindled with white snow, but now color and noise came into it.  I watched the flames and quakes and skirmishes from afar, repeating the helpless guilt that had been involved in standing by as Angband fell.

If I was going to be useless, I could go and do that far away in a safe place.  I could go back to Angband and dig around in the rubble til my paws bled.  Every choice seemed ill.  I’d fallen into a deep shadow years ago and it had only gotten longer.  Maybe it was the lack of sleep again, but even now I could almost see that shadow just beyond a few pine boles, matching step with me as I paced anxiously.

“Draugluin,” the shadow hissed.  I whirled and snarled at it, then stopped and gaped at the faint glint of familiar eyes.

“Ancalagon?”

---

Chapter End Notes

Ohta: Evidently Quenya for 'war.'  Yes, my creativity is unparalleled.

If anyone wants a closer look inside my mind and process, which no one sane does, this song is my soundtrack for the fall of Angband (well, actually for Angband and Mairon in general).  The tune/instrumentation is the thing.  The lyrics, as far as I can tell, are about David and Bathsheba and presumably entirely irrelevant to the subject at hand.

 

Aldar

Of refugees and trees.

Read Aldar

Relief overwhelmed me, to recognize an old friend in the dark figure facing me, and an actual happiness such as I hadn’t felt in years.  I bounded over and tackled the other Rauca without thinking.

Ancalagon had never been the friendliest of friends.  He swatted me away backhanded with one long hand, or paw, or something.  “What are you doing here?”

Even though that was the sort of reaction one might expect from him, I felt my ears and tail droop.  “I don’t know.  I got separated from Mairon’s folk, long story.  I suppose I’m looking for him.”

“I’ve not heard tidings of him.”

“And what are you doing here?”

Ancalagon stared at me for a long second.  He was well on his way to becoming whatever it was Melkor was making him into.  He was more elongated now, and a lot bigger, and definitely moved on four legs instead of two.  I saw that he’d been doing me a favor, after his fashion, in backhanding me, since that had kept his lethal-looking claws curved away from me.   

“I am running far away,” he answered.

I didn’t dare sound surprised.  “Why?”

“I was commanded by the lord to quit Utumno while there was still time, to remove far from danger.  I’m more useful if I preserve myself.  I’ll be much stronger in the future so long as I’m not damaged.  You know I can’t change or drop this form, like you.”

I blurted out, “And you can’t regain that shape if it perishes?”

“None can say.  Not quickly, no.  It would undo years of work.  But I need to leave now.  You might come with me.”

“But I can’t abandon–”

“You don’t even know where your Mairon is, do you?  Would he wish for you to try and assail an enemy which can kill or detain you easily?  Maybe, he would rather you do what you must to survive.  He needs you for his experiments, yes?”

“Not exactly.  The experimental phase is over and the results have become self-perpetuating,” I rattled off diligently.  

“I see.  Well, you already know you cannot hope to face this foe, else you wouldn’t be wandering around out here.  It was good to see you, Draugluin.”  Ancalagon’s tone betrayed no pleasure whatsoever at having seen me.  He turned to leave with a lash of a short, skinny tail.  He was almost lost in the shadows before I scurried after him.  We struck out south without any words, down into a grassy land.

The river on our left, which must have begun as a spring somewhere in the Angoronti, seemed high.  Blades of drowned grass stuck up out of it at the edges.  “The snow and glaciers,” growled Ancalagon, swiping at the grass, “gone down in flame.”

Even after the Angoronti were days behind us and lost to view, quiverings of the earth and flashes of light in the northern sky still reached us.  We were following the Hísoronti, a long and very high chain of mountains that ran north to south.  Ancalagon had been commanded by Melkor to keep them on his right until he reached their end, which was a long way from the warring lands, and to wait there until someone came to tell him that it was safe to return to Utumno.  We didn’t talk about what might happen if no one ever came.  

I missed the Nauri sorely.  It was little good talking about that to my traveling companion.  He said nothing the first few times I mentioned it, and then he said, “You have changed.”

“And you.”

“This?”  Ancalagon paused a beat to drum his talons against the earth.  “No, I’m the same.  I only look changed.  You’ve embraced mortal habits.  Raising young up, being concerned about them beyond their functional purpose–”

“You might also ‘embrace mortal habits’ if you had no better choice.  You’re going to keep growing more powerful, thanks to whatever it is the Dark Lord’s done with you.  What of me?  I’m stopped where I am.”

Ancalagon seemed to think about this.  He tilted his head.  His face had always been hard to read, and now it was just more so, like a snake’s.  “I suppose you’re right.  I am in no position to understand.”  He thought about it more and added with dignity, “And I should sooner castrate myself with my teeth than be in that position.”

“Lovely, thank you.”

“Now I can have nothing useful to say about your Nauri, I mean, nothing that’s good for you to hear, except maybe this.  If they are dead as you think, and as I think based on what you’ve said, then you are doing the best thing by removing from peril.  Lord Mairon may need to start his werewolf program afresh after this war is ended.”

I tilted my chin down to watch the ground passing under my paws, not sure if I would want more Nauri to come into the world or if that was the last thing I wanted.

Ancalagon was quite large, about twice my size, and very hungry.  He’d quickly gotten to like the horses that roamed there in the grasslands between the foothills and the river, but I never developed a taste for them.  In terms of large game, I preferred the deer and mountain sheep I’d been used to.  I liked reindeer best, but I hadn’t had fresh reindeer since moving from Utumno to Angamando.  First we’d been decided that we couldn’t hunt together, since my method was to give chase and his was to lie in ambush.  Then we realized that chasing prey into an ambush was a compromise that was actually better than either method alone.

But the soon the mountains turned slightly west, the river was far away, and the horse fields lost ground to great woods that loomed closer and looked denser every time we stopped for our rest.  Ancalagon wished to go further up onto the steep shins of the foothills, taking a longer and more dangerous route rather than go near the forest, but the cliffs in that region were impossible to climb up onto.

A great scarp forced us right up under the eaves of the trees and deep into shadow.  As we rounded it, the faint flashes of light from the north were finally lost to view.  My friend hadn’t been abroad in the forests in many long years, and he paused uneasily.  “I dislike these trees.”

“And here I was just thinking I’ll feel better not being so much out in the open.  Anyway–”  I stopped myself, having been about to say that, anyway, wolves liked forests.  As if I were an animal.

“Anyway, enemies can hide better in here.”

“They are all at Utumno.  These lands are empty.”

“Of known enemies, maybe.  Yet something in the forest has changed.  You don’t feel it?  I thought you had a certain affinity for the growing things.”  Ancalagon’s weirdly shining eyes darted left, up, right, down.  

I had always liked trees.  There had been times, long before the world, when I had sung with Yavanna’s people.  But then I’d never quite known where I fit in.  Nessa, and Oromë whose folk I disliked so much now, had also been interesting.  Melkor’s song, when that finally happened, had proved the most interesting.  But I still couldn’t understand Ancalagon’s dislike of the forest.  If anything, I found the place comforting, in a sad way that reminded me of hunts and songs to the stars.  It had that rich smell of both oldness and life.  I stopped and sat down beside an oak and put my nose against its bark.

“What?” he said, shuffling up beside me.

“Shh.  You’re right, there is something different.  The trees are more, more present somehow.”

“What does that mean?  They cannot be aware, like creatures, can they?”

Pleased for once to know more than Ancalagon, who was smarter, I said, “No, of course not, not like creatures.  They don’t have brains.  The awareness of creatures depends on the existence of their brains.”

“I see your lord’s preoccupation with natural philosophy isn’t lost on you.  But then explain why I feel like this tree is hostile.”

“Maybe because you feel hostile toward it?  I think it’s become more aware, in whatever way a tree is aware, so maybe it’s noticed.”

“I thought you said it can’t be aware.”

‘I said it can’t be aware like a creature, which is what you asked.”

Ancalagon swatted at the oak’s trunk in a brief flare of temper.  “You know what I–”  He stopped as the smallest mumble of rustling leaves floated on the windless air.  The hairs rose down my back.

“Ancalagon, let’s please not hit the tree anymore.”

“Agreed.”

The narrow space between the wood and the mountains lasted for many marches.  Usually there was a bit of starry sky to be seen above, but often the trees crowded so close to the feet of the Hísoronti that the thick branches shadowed everything.  Ancalagon was determined that trees, and flowering grasses, and plants in general, were at odds with Lord Melkor.  I didn’t see why they should be so, any more than, say, rocks.

“They’re Yavanna’s things,” Ancalagon said, drawing one side of his upper lip back in an expression that showed a few pointed tooth-tips.  We sat on a slope of dark, shiny stone that had managed to rise above the treetops.  He flicked the entrails of his meal out into the leaves.

“And the things of the earth are Aulë’s things.”

“Pssh.  Aulë concerns himself with shiny stones.  He knows little of fire, and this earth and all the other earths began in fire.  As you should remember, we were all there, and your Mairon was fairly instrumental in those matters.”  He paused to worry another bite of flesh from the fox’s flank and tilted his chin up to swallow.  His meal reminded me a bit of a very small and delicate wolf, and he hardly chewed at all these days.  “Aulë only knows Arda’s fire insofar as it interacts with the rock, which is but a thin covering like an eggshell.  There is unfathomable flame far below, flame enough to drown the world a thousand times and turn all water and life to vapors.  Who gave thought to this but Melkor?  Who else could bear it?”

His voice had gotten very intense and almost violent, although he spoke quietly.  Ancalagon was, as he said, the same as he had been.  Actually, he was more like himself than ever.  I glanced at him sidelong, then back out over the trees.  “All right, so Lord Melkor has a part in rocks through fire.  Not so with living things.  Is that why he hates them?”

“We weren’t talking about ‘living things’ collectively, we were talking of trees.”

“So trees are worse than creatures?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

Ancalagon huffed quietly and snuck his snout back into his food.  I’d given up thinking he would answer by the time he tossed the fox’s brushy tail away, and then he said, “Creatures are agents.  Some have instincts more than others, but many can knowingly act.  You’ve probably seen that with wolves, I mean, mundane type wolves, and some kinds of birds.  They can make choices.  They can also be influenced.  The plants don’t have those qualities.  They’re more irrevocably Yavanna’s.  This is why we hold them at little worth.”

Those things of Yavanna’s continued to hem us in between them and the cliffs.  Once in a while, the shade of the forest was gashed by a stream or river chattering to the stars.  Wind or rain, or both at once, sometimes came down from the north, but Utumno was far behind and we had no way of telling if the weather boded anything.  

I thought sometimes that this traveling might be pleasant, if Ancalagon was happy.  But he disliked the forest and also seemed to be in some physical pain.  And he was sore about leaving Utumno, even though he believed it was reasonable for Melkor to have bidden him to do so.  For my part, I felt guilty about avoiding the battle at Angamando, and guiltier about how much safer it seemed in these quiet and empty lands.

Finally it seemed we could see the last hazy peak off in the southwest.  Sliding down the steep rock face we’d climbed to survey the land, we nearly skidded into two weird tree trunks that met in a thicker trunk above our heads.  A very deep voice mumbled from out of the looming shape, “Hoo.”

Ancalagon lashed out at the thing with a set of foreclaws that would have torn any normal creature to ribbons.  A few scraps of bark or skin fell away, but the tree was barely scratched.  It hollered wordlessly, more surprised than hurt, and landed a heavy blow that caught Ancalagon across the chest and shoulder.  He went flying like a squirrel tossed by a whelp and hit the rock behind us with a crunch.  I leapt after him and leaned down to nudge him.  For an instant he lay still, then jerked his head up with a snarl.  He tried to rise and collapsed back on the stone.  The tree, grumbling ominously, moved a step toward us on long legs.  Besides legs, it had arms and a head with a gleam of eyes.  I could see that it was useless for me to attack it.  

I might have tried to run and save my own hide if it had been anyone else, but Ancalagon was as trapped in his body as I was.  There was nowhere to run anyway.  I didn’t stand over so much as cower over the other Rauca.  I could feel him trembling.  The tree was right above us now, still rumbling at us.  It had raised one hand a little, but that looked more like an angry reflex than a deliberate act.

A pleading whine escaped me.  Ancalagon, unimpressed with me even in his fear, exhaled between his teeth.

The tree stared right at me for what felt like a long time.  Then it glanced at its hand, looking confused, and lowered it with a long, deep sigh.  “Hrrrrm.”  Turning, it strode away into the woods.

Ancalagon stirred.  “Fool turned its back on us.  Strike now.”

I was only able to hold him down because he was injured.  “It just let you live.”

“Get off.  Since when did you care for honor?  That thing is dangerous.”

“Only because you struck it first.  It doesn’t even understand what it means to hurt someone, you can’t see that?  It wouldn’t turn its back if it did.”

“Then we should enlighten it,” Ancalagon hissed, but the walking tree had disappeared from sight.  “Or have you added pity to your repertoire too?”

“Bury pity, I just don’t want it killing either of us.  It’s extremely strong.  Just let it be, it is only a tree that has no interest in power or harm.”

He turned his exasperation on me.  “When was the last time you saw a tree move about?  I could almost swear it spoke, too.  So much for trees not being like creatures.”

“Fine, I was wrong.  That was not exactly a normal tree, though.  But you can’t even get up, how did you wager you were going to pursue it?”

“Silence.”  Ancalagon gathered his three good legs under him and got carefully to his feet and took a couple wobbling steps with his left foreleg dangling unpleasantly.  He didn’t flinch at all, but his eyes narrowed to slits.  “I am going to find a cave or overhang.”

I winced more than he did as he started back up the steep rock face.  “Just rest down here.”

“Not in that blasted greenery.”

“At least let me help.”  Rocks came loose above me and jumped down the slope.  I dodged them and watched Ancalagon scramble for a foothold.  When he’d found one, he suddenly reminded me of a bat clinging to a wall.  “Bleeding storms, Ancalagon, just stay still for a second.”  I scrambled up beside him and got my shoulder under his damaged leg.

He sighed dramatically and made a point of asking as we got on our awkward way, “How do storms bleed?”

“It’s a thing, that is, a metaphor, you know…”

---

Chapter End Notes

Hísoronti - I take delight in bad Quenya portmanteaux and took the liberty of making one for the Misty Mountains.

My conception of Arda places Utumno not far east of the sources of the river Anduin.

Angamando v. Angband.  I plan to go back later and attempt to standardize the names and places in this story to Quenya where applicable.  I began this story with Angband but have since decided that all of my pre-Sun writings will utilize Quenya as consistently as they can.