Quenta Narquelion by bunn

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The Coming of the Winged Dragons

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The few remaining people of the House of Fëanor had passed along the March and into the blackened hills near the mountain-walls of Dorthonion as quiet and secretly as ghosts.  

But coming behind them, the great hosts of Valinor, moving North, had reached what had once been Maglor’s Gap: the widest and easiest route between Angband and Beleriand for armies, whether they were heading north or south.  They were having to fight for it.  

“You don’t want to try some kind of flank attack?” Maglor asked Maedhros, in the damp and gloom of the old storage-cellar, as they watched through the light of the seeing stone Finarfin’s golden banners move north beside the white banners of Ingwion against the black and red banners of Angband.

“I can’t see any way that we could strike a blow that would be felt, can you?” Maedhros said.   “Look at them.  Balrogs. Dragons.  Trolls. Tens of thousands of orcs.  How can he still have so many?  We must have fought some of those same beasts at Unnumbered Tears...”

“I think they’ve grown,” Maglor said. “The size of the scales on them, now!”

“There’s no point trying to tackle those with cavalry — not with what little we have left here,”  Maedhros said, and shook his head helplessly.  “We’ve done our best with with what little was left... afterwards. But you can’t fight a war with fewer than two hundred people.  They’d crush us like a moth, and not even notice us.  If we are to have any chance at the end, we must wait.”

“He could hardly say we haven’t tried. Fingon, I mean.” Maglor said, pulling his cloak closer around him. “You have done everything that could be done with cunning and artifice and strategy...”

“Yes, well. I doubt that he would think that makes up for what we did to his brother’s family,” Maedhros said.  Maglor was silent.  Maedhros leaned back against the rough stone wall, shutting his eyes, as before him in the darkness white and golden banners swayed against the darkness on a wind out of the West.

The fighting raged on into the night, fires and smokes blazing, and lightning cracking brilliantly across a sky half-filled with stars, as Eönwë and his people called up wind and storm to their aid.

When the Sun came up the next morning, she looked down upon a land blackened and bare and scarred anew by war until even the very rocks groaned in agony.  And still the battle raged.

Finarfin had been cautious, until now. Fëanor had seen little sign in him of either Fëanor’s  own passion, or of his brother Fingolfin’s determination.

He was not being cautious now, in the clear morning light.  He was pressing out into the legions of the enemy, his golden banners flying and his people close around him, a steel-edged wedge that cleft through orcs and Men alike, a force before which the few remaining Balrogs fell back in alarm.

Finarfin’s army was smaller than that of the Vanyar.  The Vanyar had their whole people to call on, while most of the Noldor had marched out with Fëanor or Fingolfin, and died upon the Ice or in battles before the sun had risen, in Dagor Bragollach, in Nirnaeth Arnoediad, and in a thousand other skirmishes and hard-fought battles. Now, presumably, they waited in the Halls of Mandos, yearning for their bodies, and receiving little pity for it.

Most of Finarfin’s force were women.  Many of them had followed the example of Nerdanel, Anairë and Fëanor’s sister Findis, and had stayed in Valinor, refusing the call to leave. But they had marched out to war at last for Finarfin, to come to the aid of Middle-earth. By now they were both skilled and deadly.  They had fought for their king across the long miles of Beleriand, and now they marched out onto the blackened plains of Lothlann, where long ago Maglor’s companies had burned and died.  

Fëanor hesitated, watching, caught in indecision.  He wanted to go out to join the battle, to bring what aid he could to Finarfin, who had come very late, it was true, and had been slow, careful and cautious, but had in the end brought all the strength that he could muster against their father’s murderer.

But there was Maedhros, and Maglor, and there was something that seemed terribly vulnerable about them now, the last two of his sons still living.  Fëanor had not stayed with Caranthir or Celegorm. He had not watched over Curufin, or Amrod or Amras.   

When last he had left Maedhros alone, Fëanor had encountered Morgoth’s necromancer servant.  He might still be nearby.  If he left his sons now to aid Finarfin, might some great evil not find them before he could return?  

He resolved to wait.

On Finarfin’s western flank, companies of armoured Vanyar spearmen, led by Ingwion in panoply of white and gold, drove into the great dragons.  They were paying a terrible toll in lives, but slowly but surely, one great monstrous armoured beast and then another began, day by day, month by month to fall.

And behind them, slow but inexorable, the greatest menace to the forces of the Enemy approached. On the heels of the hosts of Valinor, brown and savage and roaring hungrily, capped with foam, came the Sea.

In the foothills south and east of Himring,  Balrogs were trying to raise the land in fire and tumult.  But the Sea was stronger.   Where the rock ran red and white with flame, the Sea poured in, endless and unstoppable, making a vast white cloud of steam and mist that drifted north across the battle, hiding the hosts and their banners one from another.

The Sea was taking the land through which Morgoth had wound his power, rock by rock,  piece by piece, and it fell away into the waves and was lost. And with it, the power of the Enemy too was eaten away.

And now Eönwë and his Maiar came again, through the Gap and North, and soon they were hunting the remaining Balrogs across the field of Lothlann, moving with the swiftness of thought on wings of wind.  

Behind them, the Vanyar were hunting dragons lumbering down towards the approaching Sea and the hungry waves reached out and took them, writhing into steam and darkness.

 

* * * * * *

 

It was months before the battle for the Gap was won, and by then, the winter was setting in.  The host of Valinor did not march North and West for Angband.  They settled in the Gap, and under the shelter of the mountain-wall for the winter, a few leagues to the east of where Maedhros and Maglor were encamped in the mountains on the eastern borders of Dorthonion.  

That winter, when the bitter winds subsided and the snows that Melkor sent down from the North were not too deep to take the horses out to exercise, you could hear them singing in the distance.  Fair voices out of Valimar and Tirion carried faintly down the western winds, singing songs in praise of the stars of Varda in Noldorin and Vanyarin Quenya: not far, and yet, a world away.

Maglor and Maedhros rode out one day before the deep snows had come, with a small escort, and went east a little way until they were able to look north to the hill of Himring, and east to the great camp in the Gap, from which the smoke rose from many fires. There were no horses in the Vanyar camp and so there were few tracks in the snow around it, but inside the perimeter it was busy enough with people coming and going.  

There was no sign of any attack taking place.  Morgoth seemed to have pulled most of his people back to Angband for the winter.

“Better neighbours than the orcs, at any rate,” Maedhros observed.  “They may not care much for us, but still, if they throw the Enemy back, I don’t care what their opinions are...” he breathed a bitter laugh, breath steaming bright on the icy air.  “I wonder if that’s what Thingol thought of us?”

Maglor grinned at him, a flash of teeth from deep within his wolfskin hood.  “Probably!” he said.  “But they’re having more luck than we did.”  He hesitated and ran his hand across his horse’s shaggy neck.  “I was wondering for a good long while if Mother had come. But this close, there’s no question, if she were there, we would know, of course.”

Maedhros stared at him, appalled. “You wouldn’t want her to come here ?”

“I suppose not. I’d not be eager to explain... the Havens.  She might not forgive us that, even if she was prepared to listen to the rest.  But anyway, she hasn’t come. Anairë came ...”

“Anairë only stayed in Tirion because Eärwen talked her out of leaving with Fingolfin and her children as she had planned.  Our mother stayed in Tirion because she would not go even as far as Formenos with us,” Maedhros said flatly.

“Well, she had argued with Father, of course, and she put more weight on the advice of Aulë and the commands of the Valar than we did.  But so did most of Finarfin’s people, and they are here now.  She has Celebrimbor to think of, too, even if she prefers not to think of us. Perhaps the Valar required her to stay, as they did with Elwing.”

“By all means think that, if you prefer. It’s a more comfortable thought that she might be forbidden than that she chose not to come,” Maedhros said.  “For myself, I think she decided long ago that her work in us was flawed, and with an artist’s ruthlessness, decided to discard it.  That wouldn’t be unlike her.”

Fëanor would have liked to protest at that, but they were perilously close to Angband. For all that the Enemy’s grip running through the land was not the iron fist it had once been, he could not speak subtly mind to mind without opening himself to evil. If he spoke so that all could hear him, then even Maglor could hardly fail to notice, and he had promised Maedhros that he would not speak with Maglor.

And in any case, there was a certain unpleasant creeping likelihood to the idea that Nerdanel might simply have dismissed her children as a flawed creation, like a sculpture cracked in the carving.

Maglor did protest.  “Even if she thought that of us, why would she think it of her grandson? Surely that’s the darkness speaking...”  But his voice sounded unusually thin, and trailed away. There was no conviction in it.   They rode back to their refuge in silence, and around them the Oath coiled thick as dark oil upon water until the light seemed oddly dim.

 

* * * * *

When the snows began to melt and run away, when the sea-winds blew north carrying the clouds away and the Vanyar marched out once again towards the trenches defending the Anfauglith, thin tough grasses began to spring up again, offering grazing for the horses across the hills to the south of their refuge.  Those hills had once looked down across Himlad: now they looked out upon the sea.

Gil-galad’s starred blue banners had not been seen in the battle for the March, or in the fierce running battles that spread across the darkened plains of Lothlann.   

Gil-galad and his people were in the west now, in what was left of Hithlum, which now stood open to the west; open to the wild sea-winds. Nevrast was gone and the mountains of Ered Lómin had fallen.  The Enemy’s armies had pulled back onto the Anfauglith.

But Hithlum was far from deserted. The puzzle of what to do with the remnants of the Edain of Hithlum, and with those who had overrun their land, enslaved them and intermarried with them had been left to Gil-galad, Círdan, Elros and Elrond. It was a puzzle increasingly urgent as Morgoth’s dark powers withdrew from Hithlum, as the winter storms swept in and the land began to crumble into the sea.   

The work kept them busy enough for a long while. When Maedhros called the light into his last seeing-stone, it was rare that that the stone, searching for its lost companions, would find any of  the three in Hithlum in use by their owners.

The Edain had taken a fair revenge for their great losses in Beleriand, but in Hithlum there was less revenge to be taken, and more grief that could surely not be mended within the circles of the world.

When the Spring came, if you looked out south across the new sea that covered what had been Estolad and Himlad, you could see Círdan’s grey ships far out upon the waters, moving to and fro, ferrying survivors east to the new settlements in the south of Ossiriand.

Then, as spring brightened into a ghost of summer, and the Enemy’s beasts came ravening down from the North again, news came from the East.  

They were not the first to hear it.  When Maedhros used the seeing stone, it was trained on the hills nearby, looking for the orcs and trolls that still sometimes ventured near their refuge, or further afield to Lothlann or on the blackened plains of the Anfauglith, or on the gates of Angband, when the will of Morgoth would allow them to be seen, which was not often.

So it was only when the seeing stone, roving in search of its old companions, caught Elrond in Ossiriand at last, looking into  his own stone, that they heard.

“You didn’t know about the attack on the Ered Luin?” Elrond said, his face pale and unhappy in the light of the stone.  “It was a Balrog.” Maedhros stared at him, his  face stony and unspeaking, and after a moment, Elrond went on.  

“Gil-galad thinks it was fleeing the battles in the north, to be so far south and east. It must have crept around the host and southward through Thargelion.  

It was seen when it came to the River Ascar, before it could come to the pass.  There are a good number of our people there now.  So it called on its master, and struck at the land, then ran up into the pass in flames.  The Ascar is a great wide gulf of sea, now, and... and the old pass is gone - there’s a great trench right through the mountains.  Nogrod has vanished.  And Belegost...” he shook his head miserably.   “There were survivors.  Mount Dolmed still stands, and the tunnels that ran into the mountain... some of them held when the mountains shook.  But most of the city... the main halls and the gates...  they fell. Gil-galad and I went after the Balrog, but the land was torn apart. It fled and we could not find it.”

“I see,” Maedhros said, and there was something in his voice that made Maglor look sideways at him, worried.

“Is there any word of Audur, or any of the House of Azaghâl?” Maglor asked.

Elrond shrugged helplessly.  “No word of Audur that I’ve heard yet.  The Dwarves are still digging, those that got out.  Ivaldi has taken command of them: he was away from the city in Thargelion when it struck...  Some of Belegost is still habitable, and I am told they have sent for help from Khazâd Dum.  We sent them supplies. There’s not much more that Elros or I can...”

“Of course,” Maedhros said and bowed his head.  

“If you wanted to come back to Ossiriand, to help with the search...” Elrond began, but Maedhros shook his head.  

“Impossible,” he said.  There was a sick unhappy twist to the corner of his mouth.

“You could send Saeldir, and perhaps a few of the people who have skill with stone?” Elrond suggested tentatively.

“No.”

“It isn’t possible, Elrond,” Maglor said, more gently. “We cannot spare them.”

“Of course,” Elrond said, at once, and looked away, unhappily.  “I must go.  We are moving North again ourselves tomorrow.”

* * * * *

Maedhros went very quiet for a while after the news from Belegost, almost as he had done after the Nirnaeth Arnoediad. Maglor looked sideways at him, worried, and Fëanor was worried too.  

Then one evening, prompted by nothing that Fëanor could see, Maedhros said abruptly to Saeldir who was standing guard with him.

“I could not send you back to Belegost.”

“Of course,” Saeldir said, a little surprised.  “The Dwarves are quite able to handle rockfalls for themselves, and Khazad-dûm will aid them generously.  I think Elrond only suggested it because he felt guilty about going back to the war in the north himself.”

“I burned their friendship like a candle to keep me from the darkness,” Maedhros said, staring into the night.

“Darkness would not have left them alone if we had not come here,” Saeldir said steadily.  “We came here hunting the darkness, and found it here in plenty. But it’s not our darkness.”

Maedhros shook his head.  “You came to darkness following us. We led you here.”

“That is not how it seems to me,” Saeldir said.  “It came to us.  He was our king that the Enemy killed. It was our city to which the Enemy brought the Unlight. You are our prince to follow and your father was our king to choose. I thought your cause just.  That’s why I came here.”

“But it was not just.” Maedhros said bitterly. “And now you are a kinslayer too. It wasn’t enough to bring all my brothers into the dark with me, I had to drag my mother’s kin into it too.”

Saeldir looked around warily at the night, then turned to Maedhros, and made a helpless gesture with the hand that was not on his sword-hilt. “I don’t blame you. I take the blame for what I have done in Middle-earth upon myself.  I could have turned back.  I could have refused your command at any moment, gone to Celebrimbor, or to Gil-galad.  I did not.  Because it’s not your darkness, in the end, Maedhros. It belongs to the Enemy.”

“The darkness feels like it belongs to me,” Maedhros admitted, and Fëanor would have liked to speak, to gather the darkness to himself and take it from his eldest son, if only he had known how to do it.

Saeldir said,“That’s how it works.  It makes you think you have no right to light, but it’s only another of his lies.  You told me that.”

“So I did,” Maedhros said.  “Before Doriath.  But now it is so very dark. And do those who slay their kin and lead their own kinsmen to kill for gems deserve anything but darkness everlasting?”

“I think so,” Saeldir said.  He shook his head in bafflement. “Maedhros, perhaps you could go in and sit by the fire for a while?   Angruin and I can keep the watch. There’s nothing stirring out here, and we need you well and rested more than we need one more person on guard. ”

******

 

The battles upon the fields of Lothlann were over.  The Anfauglith itself had been retaken, and the enemy beaten back.

Once again, as it had been before the Dagor Bragollach, Angband lay under siege, though by now there was little south of the Anfauglith that had not been taken by the Sea. Círdan’s ships sailed from the new settlements of the Falmari in southern Ossiriand, up the coast of Thargelion and clear across to a makeshift harbour in the centre of what had been Maglor’s Gap, where now the waves washed coldly over the vast bare shapes of dragon-bones.  

Upon the Anfauglith, the Vanyar, the Noldor under Finarfin, the remnant of the Eldar of Middle-earth and the Edain under Gil-galad and Elros now were encamped, as once long ago the companies of Fingolfin and Maedhros had been encamped there.  

But now the plain that spread wide to the south of Angband was far from green and fair, as it had been then. It was barely a plain at all.

It had long been burned and blackened, but now it was scored with trenches, rents and tears so deep that the unwary could fall and be lost, and was in places piled high with the black and sulphur-stinking rocky debris that had run from the heights of Thangorodrim far out onto the plain at the Enemy’s command.

Around the Hill of the Slain, a legion of armoured orcs had fallen to the lightstorm of the oncoming Vanyar host.  The Hill itself had fallen as the ground itself had moved and writhed in agony beneath the combat.   It was hard to tell the bones of the Fallen of the Nirnaeth Arnoediad now from the many others that were strewn around them.

The war had moved to the very gates of Angband, and Maedhros and his people moved with it, moving like ghosts of the captains of the first Host of the Noldor through the broken land, warily lest the horses should slip on the rough terrain.  The torn land did at least mean that it was easy enough for their small force to lie hidden from those who were not allies, as well as those who were true enemies.

But the gates of Angband were closed.  Sometimes, if the wind blew the right way, you could hear the sound of Elven singing under the shadow of the mountain, close by the gates. Maglor shook his head at it, recognising a familiar sound.

“That won’t work. We tried that long ago!” he said to Carnil, who happened to be sitting on a rock nearby.

“I remember,” Carnil said. “You’d think they’d know that already.”  

They were watching over the horses while they grazed. The horses could not be left unattended, even in the places where the grass was starting to grow again now the days were mostly light again. Thangorodrim rarely gouted out such smokes and steams as it had done for years, but the ground was treacherous and orcs and goblins still crept through the shadows in the old trenches and the rocky clefts.

“There may be nobody left to tell them,” Maglor said. “The people who are with Gil-galad now must be from Gondolin and Nargothrond, mostly: I suppose they would not recall what we did on Ard-Galen in those days. But if they keep that up, they are going to... ah.”

A low menacing rumble announced that Thangorodrim had moved in its sleep, and the singing stopped abruptly. The horses’ heads went up as the ground shuddered, and Maglor and Carnil with the other watchers hurried to reassure their mounts.

“They’ll end up waking the mountain, you were going to say?” Carnil suggested, once her horse had stopped rolling his eyes warily.  

“Something like that,” Maglor said. “Now they know.  Let’s hope not too many were hurt.”   

The other horses had moved a little south away from the rumbling, but Carnil’s had found a little trail of fresh grass from a gap in the rocks, and Maglor’s horse had followed her, so they were a little away from the other elves now.

Maglor looked at Carnil across the long shaggy brown neck of his horse, and frowned.  “You haven’t thought of joining them?”

“It has occurred to me,” Carnil admitted, looking wary. “Particularly when eating pickled turnips. But there’s no point dwelling on it. They wouldn’t have me.”

“Elros might be able to arrange something,” Maglor said absently, looking away towards the three-horned peak of Thangorodrim. “You still have something left to lose, and your experience would surely be useful to them. If you wanted to...”

“I swore my allegiance to you, my lord , not your uncle Finarfin,” Carnil interrupted him.

“You, and all ten of the rest still free and living...  You hardly knew what you were getting yourself into at the time.”

“No more did you,” Carnil retorted.

“If I could find a way to get out of it, I would,” Maglor said. “I’ve thought of it... you all know I’ve thought of it, and not only when eating pickled turnips.  But I can’t. And if I could, I...  I don’t think I could leave Maedhros to it.  I hope I wouldn’t do that again, even if I had the choice.  But as I can’t, there’s no point fretting about it.”

“Well then,” Carnil said, as if that settled the discussion. “No more can I leave you to it.  I doubt any of Maedhros’s people would either, not even Mastiel, for all she’s not a kinslayer.”

“It’s my Oath, not yours.  It’s not the same. Elrond would help, you’d only have to go to him.”

“Your brother would not allow it,” Carnil said. “He said Saedir could not go to Belegost.  So did you.”

And that was true, though Fëanor himself could not see the point in it. The small band of Elves who still followed Maedhros and Maglor were hardly likely to help them win a Silmaril: they were far too few to be an effective fighting force, and Maedhros hardly needed all of them to help him with his horse and gear.  If the gems were to be won, they would have to be won by Fëanor and his sons in person, or not at all.

Maglor seemed to agree with that, though he did not quite say so.  He became very busy untangling a small knot in his horse’s mane and did not look at Carnil.

“I could mention you leaving to Maedhros once you had gone,” he suggested. “He isn’t at his best, just now.”  

“Nor are you,” she said unhappily. “Maglor, I don’t have so many friends left alive, either.”

“If I ordered you to go.” Maglor suggested, half-heartedly.

“If you ordered me to go, I’d go.  I’d have to, wouldn’t I? You’re the one with the power in your voice.  But if you want us gone, you will have to order it,” Carnil told him, her face unyielding. “I’ve followed you this far.  I’ve killed enough times for you.  If I turn away now and say, oh, please, Elros, help me hide the blood that’s on my hands, help me desert my lord — or even worse, if I ask you to ask him —  what does that make me? If I were going to turn my coat, I would have done it at the Havens. The House of Fëanor is all I have left.”

“And so we are all ensnared together,” Maglor said looking at the distant black peaks of Thangorodrim again.  “Here we are, back again outside the walls of Angband. Outside for now, anyway, for as long as the siege holds this time...  I wonder how many thralls are still alive inside there, of all the many who stood with us last time. I wonder if they wish they had fled when they had the chance.”

Carnil looked at him unspeaking for a long time, until he turned to look back at her, then she very deliberately set one hand upon her sword-hilt, and with the other tapped the small silver flask of miruvor upon her belt.

“Hm,” Maglor said and put his own hand on his sword-hilt, to call on the virtue within it against dark thought. “A fair point.” She poured him a measure of miruvor and he drank it in one gulp.

Carnil said “Here we are, with the grass growing green again — well more or less green, even if it is a bit yellow and straggly —  and the hosts of Valinor at last before the gates. Even if they did bring a rockslide down.  Maedhros promised us no more kinslaying, and we still have an Enemy. Why should I not fight Morgoth for you, rather than your uncle?”

“Because there are only eleven of you left,” Maglor said bleakly. “I can do very little to protect you.  A prince who can do nothing for his people seems somewhat pointless.  Maedhros would say so, if he could have a day or so without the darkness to think about it properly.”

Carnil ducked her head and gave him an uncomfortable grin.  “I don’t think any of us got into this so that you could protect us,” she said. “But I’d still rather have you than some new-minted lord of Valinor between me and a Balrog.”

Maglor made a faint huff of laughter.  “I’d rather have Maedhros,” he said. “But if he’s busy, I will do my best to fill in for him.”

“Anyway, you need us.  You’d be hopeless if you had to clean your own boots and repair your own gear,” Carnil told him.

“A foul calumny.  I’ll have you know I once made a pair of boots and walked all the way to Valimar from Tirion in them.  And back again.”  Which, Fëanor remembered, was true, although he had only done it for a bet.

“There is no limit to your talents!” Carnil said smiling.  “But I would still prefer to leave the Balrogs to you. I’ll stick to orcs, and looking after your horse-tack and your boots.”

“It’s a terrible waste of your skill,” Maglor said seriously.

“There is so little call for teapots, in war,” Carnil said reflectively. “It’s a waste of your skills and your brother’s, and a long time since Panonis has had an orchard, or Roquenon has made cheese. He’s wasted a good many skills, our Enemy.  Even Angruin is without a forge, now.” She shrugged. “At least there is Ecetion.”

“A blessing on Ecetion and his excellent socks,” Maglor said.  He looked over at the other horses some way away. “We had best join them,” he said to the horses.  “You’ve had the best of the grass here by now, and if we linger, the orcs I can see in the shadow up there on the ridge might finally get up their courage to attack us.”

 

* * * *

Something that was recognisably a faint shade of the autumn that had once swept golden across the long grass of Ard-Galen came, and after it the snow, and still  the walls of Angband stood strong and silent, as they had stood through all the Long Peace.  They retreated back past Ladros to the shelter of the Pass of Aglon for the winter.  There was little choice about that: the Hosts of Valinor were supplied to hold the field in winter, but Maedhros’s people were not, and there would be no Silmarils won by freezing to death in a ditch before the walls of Angband.

With spring they returned to a camp near the Gates of Angband, and to waiting.  This time the spring upon the Anfauglith was more like a real spring, with the sun shining and bright grass springing with almost the old green.

As the swift days lengthened into summer, red poppies sprang up everywhere across the great expanse of the Anfauglith.  

It must have been some new spell of the Maiar who had come with Eönwë that had brought them, for Ard-galen had never been a place of poppies before.  But now the delicate red silken flowers lifted up their heads from broken earth and trench and ash, and swayed, numberless, from the crumbling remains of Dorthonion-that-was clear across to the Gates of Angband in the faint warm wind that came blowing Northwards from the wide new Sea.

Maedhros and his people were not far from the Gates, when the end of the waiting came at last.

The day had been quiet, broken only by the sound of faint voices from the camps of Valinor.  They had seen nothing of the servants of the Enemy for some time, though Thangorodrim had lately begun to pour forth its vapours once more, and the sky above the dark peaks of the mountain was a deep and dirty grey, with sulphurous yellow edges where the winds of Manwë whirled against it and were thrown back.

There was a great grinding noise, more to be felt than heard. The ground shuddered beneath them, as Maedhros and his people came to their feet.

Then someone shouted, pointed, and there was something odd about the familiar three-peaked shape of Thangorodrim, something that moved, and extended, and finally, impossibly, took wing.

A dragon. A winged dragon. It was so vast its black wings almost blotted out the sky: a mountain in flight.

Maedhros was caught into immobility, staring up at it with eyes filled with horror.

Maglor was not.  “Retreat! Retreat!  Take cover!” he called, in a voice of power that took them all, horse and rider and Fëanor too, and flung them back, desperately fleeing across the poppy-filled plains as above them darkness arose in might and blocked the light of the sun.  The air was filled with the harsh stink of sulphur, and waves of terror beat, intangible, out of Angband.

From the Vanyar camp not far away behind them came the thin sound of screaming, but from the walls of Angband behind them as they fled, a darker note echoed. Great drums were beating, and a cry had gone up; both a name, and a battle cry.  Fëanor could pick out the words.

“Ancalagon! Ancalagon the Black!”

The great dragon beat its wings, once, twice, three times, and the thunderclap of them shook the air.  Then it opened its great mouth, and upon the red poppy-fields of the Anfauglith it poured forth terrible flame.

Beside it another flame blazed, and yet another: like the rivers of fire of Dagor Bragollach, but greater, a flaming terror against a darkened sky. The movement of wings in the darkness baffled the eye: it was impossible to say how many of them there were, but they were many: armoured, clawed, and at their head flew the greatest of them all, in scales of black steel.

The dragons stooped upon the hosts of Valinor like eagles, but vastly, impossibly greater. Where falcons would have extended talons, the dragons burned.

None could stand against them.

But the Anfauglith was not the empty plain of Dagor Bragollach. The trenches scored across it, the pits and hills piled from the spoil, the old black lava flows — all of them offered cover and broke the terror of the flames.

Maedhros was calling words to the sky for water as he rode, and Fëanor joined him.  Not far away, he could feel Maiar and Vanyar doing the same.

Maglor, holding on to his horse with his knees, had managed to pull his harp from its bag, and as they ran, he called music from it and began to sing. His strong golden voice rang out across the torn and broken land.  

Maglor had made this song after Dagor Bragollach, when his wife had been lost, and most of his great companies of riders had died in flame.  The song was a lament, but written to the rhythm of a running horse, and in answer to it, even the darkened sky began to weep.

Clean grey clouds and white sea-mist were sweeping north from the Sea, and under cover of the rains and mists, the proud hosts of Valinor fled, Sindar, Noldor and Vanyar mingled together, heedless of who was who, while beneath their feet the ground shook, and high above, the dragons roared.

 

* * * * *

 

The Fëanorian retreat went only as far as the pass of Aglon and Celegorm’s store-rooms there.   Almost all the small force survived: they had lost only two people and three horses in their headlong retreat. Under the circumstances, it was at least almost certain that Tautamion and Saeldir had been slain swiftly, and had not been taken into Angband. Tautamion with his wooden foot had, in the end, lived longer than anyone had expected.

They sang the lament for them, as they had done so very many times before.

The Hosts of Valinor in their headlong haste went further than Fëanor and his sons.   Ingwion and many of the Vanyar fled the dragonfire from the skies west into the Ered Wethrin, past the ruins of Barad Eithel.  Finarfin, Eönwë and the remainder of the Host of the West, Vanyar, Noldor, Sindar and Edain together, fled swiftly east and then south to the new borders of the Sea.  They encamped beside what was left of the River Gelion.  Elrond and Elros had been among the people furthest from the Gate, and they and the Edain had escaped with few losses.

The dragons did not follow.  They could be seen, sometimes you crept to the edge of the Anfauglith and looked North into the darkness, swooping low before the walls of Angband, now and again breaking the darkness with red flame.  But they did not, as Fëanor had at first feared, come swooping south beyond the Anfauglith.

“I wonder if they cannot fly so far?” Maedhros wondered, a month or so later, as they watched the dragons flying, looking North from the shelter of the mountain-borders of Ladros. “Surely there must be a limit to how far even those mighty wings can carry a beast of that size?”

“I hope they can’t,” Maglor said. “But even if they can’t go far from Angband, they have set us all a pretty puzzle.  How can we hope to attack a land that is defended from the sky like that?”

“Archers, perhaps?” Maedhros speculated, looking at the faint dark shapes that drifted through the gloomy sky. “Perhaps we should have trained with the bow rather than the spear and sword.”

“Too late now,” Maglor said. “We only have a few hunting bows, and who knows how far we’d have to go to find suitable wood for bows and arrows, now? And yet again, we are too few. Perhaps Círdan can do something with his bowmen.”

“Perhaps,” Maedhros said, and said nothing more, though in his mind you could see as bright and clear as day, the memory of the long ranks of the armoured horse-archers of Hithlum, and Fingon, their leader, who had driven back Glaurung, the father of fire-drakes, with his arrows. Hithlum had always been stronger in archery than Himring and the March.   

If the host of Valinor had come sooner, those archers might still have lived to ride out against the winged dragons, if Morgoth had had time to breed such monstrosities at all.

 

******

Eönwë found a different answer to the dragons.   He called upon the aid of Thorondor, King of Eagles, and his people, and among a strong company of his attendant Maiar, he marched out into the North, calling upon a storm-wind from the Sea, with lightning in his hand like a memory of Manwë himself.

The great eagles were more nimble than the  dragons, and they were brave.  They struck at the dragons, six or seven against each one, while the thunder rolled to shake the ground, and light speared up at the dragons from Eönwë’s bright hand.  

But the dragon-fire blazed hotter, and their mighty scales were hard as steel.  One dragon fell, shrieking, and crashed with a great sound into the Anfauglith, but there were many to avenge it.  Eönwë was beaten back, and the Eagles fled, screaming, back to the Sea and the safety of the Ered Luin.

The next attack, as the world was rolling over from what should have been summer into autumn again, was sleep.   The Vanyar, with their prince Ingwion at their head, marched east from the Ered Wethrin, and north and west from  from Lothlann, singing. Maedhros and Maglor, hearing the singing from afar, went out to aid them, going  cautiously, on foot in the dragon-armour of Belegost with an escort to guard them and help if they should exhaust their strength.

But the Enemy had learned, in the immensity of his malice, since Lúthien had cast him into slumber.  The dragons were armoured against song, as Fëanor had armoured his own spirit against the works of the Enemy, and they dived upon the Vanyar singers with a terrible ferocity.

Then one ship-sized beast caught sight of the sons of Fëanor with one vast blazing eye. It  turned, massively, in the air towards them, and began ponderously to dive.  Maedhros whirled, searching urgently for cover, but there was no hill or dell within reach that could hope to offer shelter against the full force of an oncoming dragon, nor was there time to raise the land.  The dragon’s mouth was opening, and Fëanor prepared to hurl himself up at it.

Next to him, Maglor screamed a single word, his eyes wide and white around the edges with fear.  All around him were gripped by it.

The word, though there was little art to it, only raw force and terror, caught the dragon too.  Like every listening thing within hearing it was held enspelled, bound into immobility.  

But the dragon was already moving. For what seemed a very long moment, it hurtled down towards them, faster, faster, and then, straight as an arrow, flew close above their heads and ploughed head-first into the ground behind them, flipped over, and crumpled into a massive heap of broken, burning wings and scales.

******

It was a good while, after that, before Maglor could speak again, and longer still before he could sing.  His last eleven people had to turn to Maedhros for their orders, as his brothers’ people all had done before them. But Maglor had time to rest, that autumn, for there was little that could be done from the ground, and by midwinter, his voice was golden again.

After the Vanyar singers had been driven back by dragonfire, the Eagles came again, in smaller numbers, but with grim persistence, week after week, raid after raid, striking with speed at the eyes and bellies of the dragons.  Three more they killed, and then the ice and snows returned again, and the dragons retreated from the skies to their mysterious roosts within Angband.  

But they were not gone.  Usually, one could be seen perched atop Thangorodrim like a vast black crow.  The Eagles mobbed them, but did not dare approach too close for fear of orc-arrows.   As the snows retreated, the dragons began to float out again across the Anfauglith, armoured and flaming.

*******

 

The siege held for another six months.  Then the Valar made their next move.

Maedhros and Maglor were encamped in the hills near Ladros.  That was the closest anyone could come to Angband now, without coming into the land that had fallen under the shadow of the wings of dragons.  They had left the horses and the few tall swift hounds that still ran with them with a few people to care for them in the Pass of Aglon, where there was grass, and where the horse would not be terror-stricken by the sound and scent of dragons passing.

To the south, above the Sea, the starlit night sky was paling to a golden dawn as the Sun began to approach the eastern mountains.  In the North, dark clouds hung as usual over Angband and the Anfauglith, with dragons sliding through them. Fëanor, Maedhros and the Elves on guard were watching them, though they had become almost used to the sight by now.

There was one star in the West that did not pale in the growing dawn.

One star, bright, that grew brighter yet.

A star that was coming closer, brilliant above the Sea with all the lost, beloved and familiar light of the fallen Trees of Valinor.

And beside it flew an army of the sky.  Not Eagles only, but an uncountable, impossible mass of birds of every kind, large and small,  and the light shone on the white wings of the seabirds along the shore as they sprang up to join them, and with them was the morning on a sunlit wind from the sea.  

They fell upon the dragons in fury; too many, too small and swift to be burned or crushed or bitten.  And from the small shining ship Vingilot, which swung so nimbly around them that the dragons could not turn fast enough to face it, fired forth barbed, glittering harpoons, like bolts of lighting gemmed with diamonds.

The harpoons struck, and a dragon screamed, a great shrill trumpeting that rang out terrifying across the plain, and then was cut short.

A dragon fell from the sky, encased in birds, and then another, and north from the hills, Elves and Men rushed eagerly to finish them.

In that hour the great dragon, Ancalagon the Black arose from Thangorodrim, and he flew flaming across the the plain, hunting Eärendil, for his fury was very great.

Vingilot, tiny, glittering, swung about his massive head, too swift to be caught, and as Thorondor and his Eagles battered about the great dragon’s eyes, Vingilot dived before the dragon’s face, dived between its front legs, and as the Dragon struck out in fury with its claws and the left foreleg was stretched fully ahead, it  fired a shining harpoon into the chink in the armour in the hollow behind the leg.

The dragon, as great as a mountain, choked in midflight, its wings suddenly stiff and contorted.  Then its long body twisted like molten metal fallen into water.  It crashed down upon Thangorodrim, upon the very Gate of Angband, and burst into a great fire that shook the ground for a moment and then burned away and died.  

And so the Gate was broken, and the Mountain fell.  The mountain walls of Angband that had stood strong through all those long years of pain and misery were breached at last, and the hosts of the West came flooding in, unstoppable as the Sea, and the Enemy’s servants turned and began to flee in terror and disorder.