The trails of Nan Elmoth by Chiara Cadrich

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Eöl the dark elf

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The trails of Nan Elmoth

Part 2 -  Eöl the dark elf

.oOo.

When Aredhel came to her senses, the light was rapidly declining under an opaque vault of anthracite clouds. From the depths of the dreamless sleep the megalith’s strange emanations had plunged her into, rang a distant call. A sense of urgency overwhelmed her - a shrill voice insisted she should leave these lands. The vacillating consciousness of the princess reared itself to the imperious accents of these injunctions. Yet Aredhel stood up, her head heavy, and approached the gulf.

The spiders were roaming the bottom of the ravine, clashing and attacking one another in their panic or blindness. But some of them lingered at the foot of the scree and seemed to glare at the palpitating reflections of their white prey. At last the Princess listened to the inner voice, and moved away from the megalith.

Aredhel turned south and climbed a ramp, encumbered with blocks of broken slate and invaded by lichens. On the crest, she scratched her ankles on sharp edges which crumbled beneath her feet. The princess now overlooked a deep valley, which seemed to enclose the next ridge, bristled with rocky fangs.

In the center of these concentric arches rose a dark mountain, the surface of which shone with fugitive reflections. An extinct star seemed to have fallen in the midst of this lost forest, freezing in irregular crests, the formidable wave of its fall. A dark block with steep facets, the fallen star culminated like a dungeon, fortified with many tormented crenellations. A lace of thorns and thickets had invaded the dales, barred with jagged edges. Some power seemed to be lurking beneath the mountain, hounding its spells to keep the intruders away from its domain.

The dull and threatening imprecations of the mountain forbade any passage. Hesitating, Aredhel glanced backward to the north. In the last rays of the setting sun, large stones raised at the edge of the plateau, silent and attentive guardians, scrutinized the teeming darkness assailing the plateau. Shivering at the memory of the hairy legs and the rumor of the mandibles, the Lady of the Noldor plunged into the maze of pines and brambles.

.oOo.

A darkness hovered beneath the trees, a damp torpor which enveloped the dale with a protective warmth. The peak of the black pines sharpened on the distant grey clouds. Searching with her two hands for a path between the interlocking branches, Aredhel slowly progressed under the foliage haloed with vapors. The needles carpet stifled the sounds of her feet. She felt her temples beating and her blood flowing in jerky rhythms towards her febrile limbs. A shuddering diffused from wallows, vivacious and restless growth, which shoots pointed to hatch into clematis that clung to the elf's ankles. It seemed to her she had penetrated into a sanctuary, a souvenir of the original forests which reigned in middle-earth before the advent of the lamps.[1]

But this secret asylum mistrusted both the Noldor and the creatures of the Dark Lord. Each step required the full will of the inflexible princess. Aredhel restlessly rejected the mountain’s mute injunctions addressed her. In the ferns, the low branches hindered her march and lacerated her arms, but the elf held the course. Then the ground became very uneven, cluttered with sharp slate plates between the roots. In the course of her painful progression, intoxicating scents of resin and spores rose to her head. Further on, a giant spider corpse, impaled on a high rocky spine, rotted under green mosses. The White Lady of the Noldor had to mobilize all her strength of character against the will which thwarted her efforts, to go forward through this rockery.

Sometimes inquisitive eyes lit among tall ferns. Some serpents slipped towards her, whistling. Deaf crackings and fugitive crumplings shoot from the trees as her slender silhouette ran between their gnarled trunks. She felt the roar of the primal forest rising around her, and struggled against the growing entanglement of roots and branches, when an enormous stretch of dry pine crashed before her.

The imprecations which grew beneath her skull became violent. The princess, powerful among the men of the Noldor, appealed to the regenerating power of her people, to the proud independence of her tribe, and drove from her mind these imperious intrusions. In a last effort, she crossed a ridge of rocks congested with brambles and was able to descend into a clear valley.

.oOo.

Dark rocks paved the ground, gleeming under the stars, that shimmered now as if Varda had just sown them in the firmament. Aredhel followed this path, which gently wound on a pale lawn, at the end of the valley, lined with dark coppices.

The White Lady of the Noldor approached the mountain, which glistened with dull reflections, like a dark power concealed beneath a veil of secrecy. Its great black mass soon dominated the princess who had reached the end of the road, barred by a wall of slate.

Two rows of carved megaliths stood, like spears, on either sides of a large door in the middle of the wall.

The imposing lintel projected a disturbing shadow on the steps. The vast wings sealed the entrance of the mysterious Lord of the Fallen Star. Powerful fittings covered the heavy wooden pieces, assembled with an art unknown to the Noldor. Runes of distrust and secrecy, engraved on the uprights, consecrated the threshold’s inviolability.

Aredhel felt the wrinkled eyes of the iron masks wrought on the locks. She nevertheless approached, defying her premonitions and the mischief hidden behind the high door.

Each forged nail head evoked the memory of the imprudent that fate had brought to this place. Some of them, furious bearded faces, grimaced with dreary threats. Others, languid, slender faces, uttered silent warnings. Still others nailed to the oak, hideous spiders twisting in pain.

By appealing to the artifices of her people, the White Lady of the Noldor kept her mind from those threats, denying the evils that radiated from the gate to drive her away, and slid over the steel of her soul.

.oOo.

The oaken wings opened in utmost silence. Eyes shone, piercing the darkness like those of a predator before the sun and the moon came. The master of the fallen star, rising from his lair, unveiled his hidden power, repressed throughout the centuries of reclusion. Aredhel felt herself searched by an anxious curiosity. A bruised, bitter and inflexible soul probed the edge of her conscience, seeking duplicity or greed.

Finding nothing there but the proud candor of a Noldo virgin, the inquiring look lingered on the features of the fugitive. Desire sprang forward, to face the pride of this fierce beauty.

Remaining hidden beneath the awning of the deep lintel, the silhouette advanced under the light of the stars, setting ablaze the silver hair of a twilight elf.

His face combined the nonchalant grace of the Eldar and the attentive vivacity of the felines. The blaze of dying stars shone in his gray eyes, revealing fiery memories and wilted hopes. The elf's long face, noble and handsome like the first King under the stars before the wound of the world, showed obstinacy and sagacity. But bitterness could be read at the corners of his lips, which betrayed the lassitude of disillusioned centuries and flouted sovereignty.

"Who comes to my door without being announced?"

Aredhel defied the shining eyes - unfolding her silver brow, she faced him. But she could not escape the spell, when the ardent gaze plunged into hers.

The stature of the elf, however modest, revealed an unusual inner strength, forged through reverses and betrayals. Subjugated by the authority of the king in his homestead, the princess felt young again, departed from her years of tears in Middle Earth. The words of power and distrust of the Noldor had dried up on her lips. She replied without hiding anything of herself, not even sketching the beginning of a curtsy.

"I am Ar-Feiniel, daughter of Fingolfin, High-King of the Noldor."

The twilight elf's eyes glowed with a dark flame, from the burning rancor that was smoldering in his soul.  So his door should open and his spine should bend, as soon as this usurping lineage name is uttered? Such are the ways of the Noldor, arrogant even in the debacle! His savage gaze contrasted with his haughty wearing of head.

- Why should I welcome you? Did not your fellows bring the Black Enemy back into Middle Earth? Is not your people responsible for our marred forests, our stained springs, the tarnished firmament? Nightmares haunt the valley of terror by the Noldor's fault, cursed be their race!

Aredhel, troubled by the acrimony of this dispossessed soul, exclaimed:

- I have rejected the suzerainty of my brother the High King. I cannot, therefore, avail myself of his gratitude to beg for your help, nor can you charge my people with all evils. But the terrors of Morgoth have been pursuing me from Nan Dungortheb. Evil has not changed since the beginning of the world, and it is up to all elves to fight it wherever they find it. Gentle Sire, in the name of the most sacred uses of the elves, I ask for asylum in your home!

The defeat of this princess altered neither her grace nor her courage. In her frank and limpid gaze, the twilight elf read the amazed flame that had inhabited his own heart as he had roamed the hills under the stars before the Black Enemy’s arrival. He appreciated with a fresh eye the slim silhouette, haloed with the courage for revolt. The master of Nan Elmoth saw in her an alterity to be subdued, a revenge to be taken on the Noldor. Yet he felt a strange solicitude in him :

- Without wishing it, you have led the horde of my enemies on my land! Had I known who you were, perhaps I would have denied you entry. But your exploits compel respect and deserve asylum. Yet what help can a Noldo virgin bring, even the most valiant of princesses? You know nothing about these disgusting predators. Your proud bravery would be vain, without the secrets of Nan Elmoth.

The fair face of the elf hardened, as some atrocious memory seemed to pass in his look:

- Their innumerable bands inexorably enclose their enemies. The offspring of Ungoliant seize their prey and sting the victim with paralyzing gall. Soon the limbs and body stiffen in hideous spasms and unspeakable pain. But the old scoundrels do not kill. They envelop you with a warm cocoon of silk, and lay a few eggs in your welcoming entrails. So your throbbing body serves as a nursery and pantry to their cursed offspring!

Feeling sick, Aredhel curled up on herself, subdued by the horror of these revelations. Her pride abdicated to the memory of her desperate flight, her own vanity, and the hours of hopeless struggle against the atrocious arachnid tide.

The lord of the fallen star contemplated for a moment that woman, subject to his good will. Only then did the grace and beauty of the princess reach his heart. His solemn posture of a king granting mercy had hitherto ben spoiled with the ambiguous sensation of the conqueror, to hold in his power a forever adversary. The elf now dominated Aredhel kneeling before him. To possess this princely beauty, touching in her candid pride, surpassed his grudges and his dreams of revenge, and disturbed his tormented soul. A fleeting expression of admiration and pity passing over his face, Eöl gallantly raised the White Lady of the Noldor:

- Be welcome, you who seek refuge and bend to my law! You, who place your life under my protection, receive the blessing of Eöl, first child of the twilight and sovereign of Nan Elmoth!

Aredhel, struck dumb by this arrest as by a spell, accepted the arm of the Lord of the fallen star. Eöl's aura embodied the immaculate glory before the wound of the world.

The door closed on the couple, in the eternal silence of Nan Elmoth.

.oOo.

NOTES

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[1] Illuin and Ormal were two gigantic lamps, the Valar hoisted to illuminate Middle-earth, long before the sun and the moon appeared. But Morgoth shattered them, causing a cataclysm.