Earth by Aerlinn

hunger games

Read hunger games

He is walking through a garden. He is walking right over someone's carefully tended crops and carrots. There is some blood on his boots, and it makes a mess. Right now, he is still too proud to look down, too caught up in the fading heat of battle, the slight, stinging pit in his stomach, the sure knowledge of loss.

They took the children. Some think it was an act of mercy. Others will say it was foolish, because will the children not try to avenge their parents? Now they are small, easily kept and subdued. Later, they will be stronger, search for poisonous herbs, a knife for his back. It was not mercy, or at least that is what he consoles himself with. It was, Maglor thinks, scraping the thick cake of mud, blood and squashed cabbages off his polished leather boots, it was revenge. Or maybe not revenge. It was...it was collecting a debt. He considers dying their hair red, clothing them in the colours of his house. Would they learn to respond to those names? 
Probably not, he thinks. Probably, they were too late, they are too old already. Probably, they should have come earlier. Earlier? But there was no Silmaril here earlier, nor the small, dark haired boys currently huddled up in a tent, somewhere in his camp. The Ambarussa yet lived. Would they have died in an earlier attack on the same place too? Was that not how fate worked, how Vairë pulled and knotted the threads from all sides at once? He feels as if he should know, but his childhood is far, far away, in a different world, when he was a different person, and he can reach neither the land or that boy again, ever. There is a haze over his thoughts, but that could just be the aftermath of battle.

The Noldor are a proud people. They are not, have never been, a tribe of farmers. Before they came to Valinor, maybe, some of them have tended crops. But only the very oldest. Those who remembered the ache of hunger in their bellies, the constant vigilance of the hunted, of being prey. But few of those have come. Very few of those who have seen these lands before were eager to return. Maybe that should have warned them, but it didn't. They were young and fierce and righteous in their anger. They would conquer the world. They would avenge their kin. They would...come to know the ache of hunger.

The Nandor and Avari do not know they hold such power, and the Noldor are sure to keep it that way. Every time official exchanges are held there is an abundance on their tables the likes of which those simple peoples have never seen. Delicacies perfected in the languid abundance of Valinor, works of centuries, melting on the tongue. They see the carelessness with which they treat precious, valuable objects - shining, iridescent jewels large enough to secure a comfortable life for many Long Years, strewn out on the floor in a glittering disarray, the shine of golden goblets winking at them in the glow of the fire. For now, they do not know they are needed. Their impressive trading partners just don't seem to like getting their hands dirty, but that is only in part the truth.

It is not that there is no food. But meat alone is not enough to keep anyone completely healthy, not even the Eldar, and in their current circumstances they needto be healthy. They know, too, what wild herbs and roots they can eat, and they do eat them, though they are sure never to let that show in those vital trading exchanges. It is simply that they are with too many, too often attacked, too often driven to barren places, positions of defense. Only coarse grass grows in abundance around Himring, and only their horses become fat with it. The many hunting trips the Lords take are not, as the Sindar think, just because they find it entertaining. They are hunting because they are also the hunted, because the land is not kind to them. Nothing but an abundance of mushrooms grows in Nargothrond's caves. They are places chosen for their strategic positions, not for the soft rich dark earth beneath them. Often, there is nothing but sand and rock.

Maglor wipes the sweat of his brow, gazing at the dark, tangled edges of Taur-im-Duinath, listening to the soft breeze rustling the high reeds surrounding the Sirion. This is a place of abundance. There is water, and soft, dark ground, rich with the leaves of many years. If only they could stay here, but no, they need somewhere strategic, somewhere barren, as the very blood on his hands proves, as the blood on his on his boots does, as it does on the ground. This is no place of defense. This they knew. In the end, this victory will appear not be of much use to them. But the men, the hungry men, tired of dried meat, roasted meat, cooked meat, of all imaginable things done with meat after yet another diplomatic Nandor-Noldor fall out, the men will appreciate this sacking. They will dirty their slim, long crafters' fingers, artists' fingers, their well kept nails. They will dig out the carrots and wash away the mud and blood, they will drown the slight, shrinking guilt in vegetable soups and oven warm dishes. They will not question the timing of this fall out, the well-scheduled mention of a Noldorin claim on some previously uninteresting patch of forest, the sudden insistence that the Nandor remove their small, unobtrusive tree houses from the area. They will not. And when the order to attack Sirion comes, to take back the Silmaril, it seems right. They will think about the rustling reeds and sun drenched, fertile ground, the anger on their leaders' behalf burning as hot as the ache in their bellies. 

When they take them away, they look back. The children sitting almost backwards on a horse before Maedhros' large form, craning their small necks. There is still some smoke rising up in the distance, its colour a dirty dark grey against the blue of the sky. Around them, the smell of blood, of dirt. the guards behind them exchanging recipes. The smell of flowers and soft, sun warmed earth starts to fade. Then, hiccuping, one of them begins to cry. Then the other. 

It is an unjust exile. But so was theirs.