Of Draugluin by Huinare

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Aldar

Of refugees and trees.

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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…”

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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.