Hold Fast Ere Night Comes by heget

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Chapter 1

“Darkness fell in the room. He took her hand in the light of the fire. 'Whither go you?' she said.

'North away,' he said: 'to the swords, and the siege, and the walls of defence - that yet for a while in Beleriand rivers may run clean, leaves spring, and birds build their nests, ere Night comes.'

'Will he be there, bright and tall, and the wind in his hair? Tell him. Tell him not to be reckless. Not to seek danger beyond need!'

'I will tell him,' said Finrod. 'But I might as well tell thee not to weep. He is a warrior, Andreth, and a spirit of wrath. In every stroke that he deals he sees the Enemy who long ago did thee this hurt.”

‘Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth’ History of Middle-earth X : Morgoth’s Ring

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Iron-grip he must be, for Angrod must hold his baby brother tightly.  Keep him grounded as Aegnor’s rages and new-found fatalism turn the Fell-Fire as dangerous to himself as his enemies.  Grief and impotence against the unchangeable realities of the world make Angrod’s brother bitter.  Faced with a gulf that love cannot ever bridge, the anger curdles inward, the despair lashes out.  Aegnor becomes almost mortal in his ways - changes that frighten Angrod.

Angband looms before them, the iron and sulfur reek on the wind, that stinging wind that blows eternally from the north. Up here on the slopes of Dorthonion its lords cannot forget or ignore the enemy. There is no northern peace, but only the long truce of the sentry ever-watchful for the next foray.

The tension binds them, but none more so than Aegnor who no longer sees what to live for beside death.  Death for the enemy, death for himself.  Angrod thinks this must be how the Firiath, the mortals, feel.  This certainty of their death with every breath, the inescapability of it.

Angrod knows he and his brother will die on a battlefield against the forces of Morgoth, that he will return to his father and mother through the embrace of Mandos.  He will join the people he could not protect from the enemy, the ones who fell on the Grinding Ice, his uncles and cousins from Alqualondë.  His sorrow is strong, but stronger the shame for failure, rage for murders, the guilt that he allows for crimes to rest unanswered.

But reckless Aegnor courts his inevitable death in lieu of the mortal maid he cannot.

Angrod knows he must not blame the adaneth, this Andreth.  Angrod has lived with the Edain, the people of Bëor, for four generations, befriending them, fighting at their side, watching them wilt and die.  Their greatness, their strange fascination with the world around them, like they are hearing pieces of the Song in notes too high or too low for his ears, how they surprise him with what they can say or do.  Finrod is right, such odd and intriguing sources of new knowledge.  How the mortals are so frightfully fragile in hröa and fëa, and yet bear under stresses Angrod knows he could never take.  It must be a special flame from Ilúvatar, and how can he fault his brother, Aegnor, for being so badly burnt?

But oh, how Aegnor gives no heed to his duties or safety anymore.  Angrod must restrain his brother, hold him back from this assisted suicide by Morgoth.  “Iron-grip” he must be, with the strength of Tulkas himself, to hold Aegnor from his doom.  To pretend to those he has sworn that nothing is amiss.  To inform his oldest brother, both liege lord and family head, that their dear baby brother has tasted the sweetness of love, but it was bitter before it left the tongue.  A mortal poison.  Finrod tried to soothe the pain with philosophy, explain away the cruelness of the divide, the unfairness of knowing such mortal beings.  That Aegnor’s grief would scar over, would become a gentle grief and wisdom.  Nienna’s song.  Any true healing and erosion of pain could only come in Mandos, they all knew.  Or at least Angrod thinks in this he sees clearer than his older brother.  Only Mandos, maybe.  But Angrod lies to Finrod and says Aegnor’s grief did not affect his duties as Lord of Dorthonion.  Lies to Aegnor by never mentioning a woman in Ladros who sits in honor next to the lord’s place, the mind who drafted the yearly tithes that supplied Barathonion, hands that wove the cloak Aegnor wore.  Lies to himself.

In desperation, any battle with such foes as orcs and balrogs would be welcome, for as strongly as he grasps, Iron-grip can not hold.

 

---

 

When the messenger brings word of the orc raid, Angrod fears today will be when Aegnor dies.

Orc raids are uncommon in these years of Watchful Peace, more than 300 years after the Dagor Aglareb.  Still the Black Foe would send parties of orc to harry the elves along the siege lines and raiders to attack the human settlements.  Usually they are not so bold, but the lords of Dorthonion have noticed a restlessness, more by intuition than observation, on the part of the enemy behind Ard-galen’s plains.

The moment Aegnor hears of the attack he grabs his great-sword and runs for his horse, intent on chasing them down.  Angrod calls for Aegnor to wait, to gather his troops, prepare a plan, for Valar’s sake put his armor on first, but it falls on uncaring ears.  Rashness makes Aegnor deaf.

Angrod sighs, for this behavior is not wholly unexpected, and goes to round up a company of their warriors.  Correcting the straps of his sword-belt and rolling his shoulders to adjust to the weight of the chain mail, he thinks the armor should not be uncomfortable anymore.  After the way he has slept in it for decades, he has worn it into a second skin.  Still, there is the mandatory twitch of muscle as his body remembers.

Edhellos greets him in the stable, a grave look on her face.  She and a pair of stable-hands hold out the reins of several saddled and ready war mounts.  His wife wears leathers and a patched doublet over an embroidered wool shirt, a black row of prancing horses in fine stitches along the cuffs.  Bregor’s wife gifted it to Edhellos- or maybe it was one of his daughters.  Was the girl old enough for stitch-work?  Some of the Edain ran together to Angrod, especially the families who looked and behaved so alike.  And that human practice of reusing names every other generation or so Angrod takes as a practical joke on the Bëorians’ part to confuse the elves.

Edhellos’s delight is in horses and livestock, their care and breeding and training.  Angrod wonders if he shouldn’t have convinced her years ago to transfer to Hithlum or Himring where the great breeding farms of the Exilic Noldor are.  The heights of Dorthonion and Ladros are not good country for horses, and most of its stock are shaggy semi-feral ponies.  Nothing like the fine high-strung racehorses Eldalótë raised in Valinor.

But Edhellos as she is now left Valinor with him, infected with his eagerness for adventure and vengeance.  He cannot make her admit that she regrets leaving those green pastures, the orderly stables and more orderly studbooks, regrets that she must train horses to not flinch under the sound and stench of the glamhoth, that her days are spent minding the various maladies of the Firiath's shaggy cattle.

"I’ll bring them back in one piece," Angrod tells her, a jest older than the sun, from the halcyon days of their courtship.

"Worry about bringing your brother back in one piece," his wife says tartly.  She hands him the reins to the big-boned chestnut with the white face and waits for the rest of his troops to filter into the stable yard.  As she hands each warrior a mount and directs her small army of stable hands to double-check loose girths and assist them to mount into saddles, her eyes bore mulishly into Angrod.  "He blew through here first, taking Suldal. Didn’t warm him up first."  There’s a deep frown furrow between her brows.  "What has happened?"

"Orc raid," Angrod grunts, "near Rivil’s Well."  He pauses to heave himself into the saddle, leathers creaking and steel rings playing a glissando.  "Not all the crofters were killed.  We think some may have been taken as captives for Angband."

Edhellos draws her narrow face inward and down.  “Your brother has the bit in his teeth,” she mutters.

Angrod thinks it is a serviceable metaphor for the heedlessness of his younger brother.  Protecting Aegnor from his folly is starting to wear on the middle son of Finarfin.

"Give us a day or two," he tells her.

The mounted company Angrod has gathered leaves Barathonion at a brisk trot, following Aegnor’s trail.  It takes more than an hour for them to catch up to Aegnor.  Angrod finds it difficult not to scream at his reckless baby brother, drag him off his horse and shake him until some sense takes root in his head.  The wild look in Aegnor’s eyes stops him.  Panicked horse in a thunderstorm, Angrod thinks, and vows to describe it thus to his wife.  Long married to Edhellos, her metaphors are becoming his own.

Angrod holds out a spare helmet, the one with a white horsehair plume that usually rests on a wooden stand in Aegnor’s chambers.  Aegnor at least has the sense to look abashed.  Angrod almost quips about hasty rising to action, but that would dredge up other memories and a festering anger that has nothing to do with what is at hand.  There is rage enough today to not add to it.

They see the burning farm by the tail of black smoke from two valleys over.  Aegnor nearly spurs his horse into a canter before he stops himself.  The deep valleys and broken ground of Dorthonion, shaped by the ice of Morgoth eons before the Awakening of the Elves, makes terrain both treacherous and long to travel.

The climb through the valley before reaching the one that holds the burnt-out remains of the Bëorian farm is a stone in the gut.  Time crawls by in these hours of the sun, and yet each passes more urgently than any before the Darkening.  Too late, too late, a refrain of Angrod’s life, to watch the horrid aftermath of everything that has slipped through his grasp.

To see the carcass of what the orcs have made of a prosperous settlement is difficult.  Angrod waves the flies from his face and watches Aegnor study tracks.

"The yrch took three of the Edain survivors with them- one of them smaller, but none as small as a child.”

Angrod could see the evidence for that.

"On foot," Aegnor continues.  "If we hurry, we can overtake them.  The orcs will be slow, even if they decide to carry their prizes."

The orcs would be faster if they abandoned their prizes.  Or the other thing.  The captives were as good as dead, with little chance of surviving to face the torment as slaves in Angband.

But his duty as lord and protector of Dorthonion, and the slim hope of saving them, compels Angrod.  He nods to his brother, then motions to his men.  They ride north, trailing the spore of the orc raiding party, swords loose in the baldrics, bows strung, and quiver cases open.

 

When the elven warriors finally engage the enemy, during the long hours of dusk as the sun sinks into the bed of the horizon, Angrod almost falls from his horse in fear.  Not for himself.  He is only a furlong in front of the archers that hang back and loosen steelhead bolts into the orcs.  Angrod holds his shield strong and observes how the orcs forget their prisoners in a rush to answer weapons of their hated foes with iron forged in the pits of Thangorodrim.  It is Aegnor, red from the setting sun flashing along the edge of his raised sword, that nearly stops Angrod’s heart and drains the strength from his knees.  Aegnor with only the padded gambeson as protection.  Reckless Aegnor galloping his gelding alone to challenge the lead orc without backup.  Wild, open, unprotected, valiant, stupid Aegnor.

Angrod cannot marshal his troops to focus on securing the human hostages, to save them from any stray blade or purposeful malice, because all his world has narrowed to Aegnor.  Racing to his brother’s side, shielding him before this heedlessness kills him.  Angrod’s scowl nearly matches the vicious one on Aegnor’s face as he wedges his shield between a swinging orc mace and the unarmored flank of his little brother.  Pain flows down his arm, but he holds.  Sounds of wordless rage boil from the elves’ throats.  They shove back with shield and sword, parry and riposte strikes, sink steel into flesh. Their growls sound indistinguishable from the noises of the glamhoth.

Finally the last orc dies, death rattles silenced by a firm sword through the soft flesh of the neck.  Flecks of black blood are painted carelessly across Angrod’s body.  He watches Aegnor approach the three Edain - two girls and a boy.  None look enough alike to be siblings, Angrod thinks, but then it took him about fifty years to learn to see the differences in face between men, and many more years to adjust to how drastically the Firiath faces would change, the rapid metamorphosis of their aging.

The poor former captives have been driven out of their senses by fear, all still screeching quietly.  One of the girls, heedless of a long gash down the side of her face, howls loud enough to make the warhorses twitch.  Only now, with the battle over, are the stirrings of gratitude and relief gentling the horror in their eyes.  Aegnor makes the soft calming motions with hand and voice one would use on injured beasts.  Slowly the noises begin to lighten.

Angrod sighs, a weariness settling into his body that he did not know the Eldar could have.  This drained exhaustion of spirit as well as flesh he does not think would be possible to feel in Valinor.  It is something of Middle-earth, of war.  As Aegnor attempts unsuccessfully to calm the Bëorian youths, Angrod comprehends Aegnor’s actions.  More than just the duties as overlord to Dorthonion, as allies against the mutual foe, did Aegnor risk his life to rescue and avenge the children of Bëor.  These human settlers from Rivil’s Well could have been Ladros.  The captured girls could have been his Andreth.  Perhaps in his mind they are.  For the sick horror and unthinking rage that propelled Aegnor, the heartbroken pity as he wipes the blood off the older girl’s face, his inner thoughts rest elsewhere.

"We’ll send them to Bregor.  They need to be around the comfort of their people, now that they have lost their kin.  The Lord of Ladros will know how to help them."

Aegnor nods in assent to his brother, watching the three.  Carefully the Edain are placed behind the riders on the saddles.  Elven warriors hum soft songs to try and soothe the rattled orphans.  Aegnor does not take any second passenger.  Instead he mounts up and leads the group, the sweat-soaked flanks of his horse shivering with exhaustion.  It is a slow ride south from the foothills of the Ard-galen, eyes focused on the distant shining peak of Foen.

Aegnor’s eyes are stone.

 

---

 

"Look, Brother!  Morgoth has finally made something big enough to kill us!"

Aegnor has been laughing, a fey hysterical peal of joyless glee, from the moment the ruddy lights appeared in the north like the banking of low red coals from a false sun.  The air comes in thick and black with smoke.  Now it is so dark that no light, not even the fires of Angband, pierces it.  But Angrod can feel its heat.  Stinging ash pops and sizzles against his armor, and bloodshot eyes water from the burning soot.  Aegnor’s pale face and stiff golden locks of hair are as bright as a star under his own coat of grime.  Always on his brother the elf lord Angrod focuses.  It is his lodestone as he hacks through a tide of orcs, plunged around and battered as if he was some sea wrack in the dangerous riptides off Araman.  Grandfather Olwë warned him about riptides.  Grandfather Olwë tried to warn them all away from this madness.

He’s gone mad, Angrod thinks.  He went mad a long time ago, when he flung his heart on something not destined for the confines of this world.

Aegnor’s laughter is all but screams now.  The twisted smile on his face spreads his mouth so the red cavern of his throat is glimpsed pass the white gates of his teeth.  Madness of the Spirit of Fire, Angrod thinks unkindly, but the eyes.  Aegnor’s eyes are the eyes of those that died on the Grinding Ice, those that stopped walking and waited for the cold.

His eyes have been like that for fifty years of the sun.  Don’t be shocked, Iron-grip.  You were the only one to stand at your brother’s side every day, to see all the changes at the banquet table, the new way he gripped a sword, no longer laughed at songs or jests, when he would stand atop the battlements at night.  Always north Aegnor looked, as if his eyes could pierce the miasma around Thangorodrim all the way to the dark god seated upon his twisted iron throne, iron crown with three bright jewels upon his brow.  Aegnor avoided the southwestern walls.  Fearing if he looked south, his feet would take him to Ladros before he could restrain himself, Angrod supposes.  Or that the pain and self-loathing were too great to face.

He was looking for the release of death, for the pale imitation of his heart’s fate.  Only courage and skill kept Aegnor from death before.  Only Angrod watching his brother’s back, gripping him and trying to drag him back from the edge with an iron grip turned brittle.  He has kept Aegnor alive until now.

But not this, this is too much.  These are the fell flames that shall slay them.

 

Angrod leans against the inner curtain wall of the fortress, gripping the makeshift tourniquet to staunch the bleeding of his missing arm.  An orc blade has severed it above the elbow, and it is the most grievous of his injuries.  Not that he believes he would be walking away.  Not since the first red stains on the sky.

A young Edain leans against his other side, a Bëorian warrior in a mailshirt and the tatters of a green scarf around his neck.  Angrod peers closely at the scarf with the focus born of anything to avoid thinking of the pain.  He studies the patterns in the weave as if it is the knowledge most worthy of contemplation, the most wondrous note in the Song.  Angrod can distinguish the colored threads under the gore and dirt.  The green, blue, red, and gray.  This simple Hildor scarf is the most glorious creation in all of Arda, equal to the Silmarils.

"Brother.

"Brother, look at me."

Aegnor looms over him, filling his vision, a hand gently shaking his body.

"Stay with me, Brother.  Another sally is coming.  We need to move you into the keep.  Can you walk?"

Aegnor’s tone is concerned, gentle, and firm.  Angrod pulls at the corners of his lips to make a small smile.  He is using my voice, the one I tried to restrain and console him with.  I taught him that voice.

Angrod tilts his head to the Edain, leans his weight over.  He is so tired, too tired to speak or use his remaining hand to gesture.  He hopes his question is understood.

"The boy is dead," Aegnor says softly.

Oh, Angrod thinks, he must be right.  I can’t hear the rattling half-drowned noises of his chest anymore.  So young, the boy was, even for a human who were all so terribly young, so swiftly grown and gone.  Angrod had saved the boy from the orcs, had dragged the tiny Edain warrior inside the gate before it shut.  I’m sorry, Children, for our failure.  For getting you involved in this war, for failing in our duty to protect you.

"Angrod."

The motivation to care, to feel, ebbs low, but Angrod struggles to his feet.  He knows there is still one more task.  As lords of Dorthonion they have a duty to protect their people, to be the shieldwall against the forces of Morgoth, the bulwark that shelters the rest of Beleriand.  The orcs, the dragon flame, the fiery torrents of the enemy’s power, shall wash over Dorthonion like a ruptured dike, but they must fight.  To take as many of the orcs with them into death as to lessen the number the innocents to the west and south shall face.  To dull the edge of the sword swinging at Finrod’s throat, even if the rust on the blade comes from their blood.

"The keystone song," Angrod croaks out.  His throat is so dry.  Must be the heat. "Need to sing the walls down, deny the glamhoth the fortress.”

Angrod understands his duty.

"I will stack all the yrch bodies as burial offering to our dead, turn this infernal fire into the funeral pyre of us all,” Bregolas states from Aegnor’s side.

Bregolas and his house-carls held the ramparts when Aegnor and Angrod had sallied forth to investigate the new threat from Thangorodrim.  When they first regrouped, Bregolas attached himself to Aegnor’s side like a short dark shadow.  He rode out with Aegnor when they tried to drag back the company of advanced scouts who had been overtaken by the oncoming orcs.  To shelter the soldiers behind the walls of Barathonion, northern-most stronghold of Taur-en-Foen.  Bregolas, steadfast and dependable and honorable, calm as a stone.  Whose eyes burned fierce.  Whose words for all their evenness of tone were tar-thick with bloodlust.

"It is perhaps good thing I send my sons to patrol the southern borders with my brother.  We could have used more men, but… they are not here and I cannot deny I am relieved."  Bregolas’s Sindarin is a little stilled, pain perhaps or stress to make the second language heavier on the tongue.  His accent is the backcountry twang of North Beleriand, which even Angrod has picked up, to his dismay.   The accent of the Bëorian’s brother, Barahir, is worse, and Belegor was atrocious.  Beril happened to be very fluent.  Angrod’s mind wanders, thinking of more Edain long dead.

Still, the sentiment is clear, and the elf lord does not fault the Lord of Ladros for it.  Angrod is comforted by the thought that Finrod and Orodreth and little Nerwen-call-me-Galadriel-now are safe.

Edhellos, his heart tries to screech, but he blocks the pain, shunts his emotions ways like if he was back on the Ice.  Soon, soon I will follow.  Not long now, forgive me the few lonely minutes in Mandos.  I will return to your side soon.

No, it must be like the ice desert.  Pain means nothing now, only duty.

Iron will.  Iron-grip.

Bregolas and Aegnor hold each side of his body as they help him cross the inner ward, stagger indoors, and up the narrow stairs.

"Why," Angrod huffs out, "did we build," a stumble as his foot catches on an uneven step, "such shoddy stairs?"

"To make it harder for an invading army," Aegnor answers, half-laughing.  The mad glee lingers, a tad sobered, but Angrod no longer has the will to concern over it.

Like the Engwar we have become, assured in the inevitability of our deaths.  How strangely liberating despite the fear; this must be why they are so strong, burn with such intensity.  Now Angrod laughs.

I do not blame you, my big brother, for sending us here.  For finding the Edain and taking them under our protection.  Do not blame yourself for this, for our fates.  We chose to fight, to stand at the forefront of the Black Foe’s enmity.  To fall in love with these mortals, Boromir and Boron and Bregor and Bregolas.  Andreth.

 

Their last stand is bitter and cruel.  The heat is terrible, the air so thick with smoke it feels like all the keep is the interior of a chimney.

Angrod’s body doubles over the hilt of his sword, the point jammed firmly between the stones of the floor while his remaining hand slips with sweat on the bond leather of the hilt.  The torrent from the gash at his hip has slowed to a sluggish pace.  He can’t feel his left leg.  Angrod needs every reservoir of strength to not collapse to the floor.  There is little left of him now.

Aegnor holds the doorway, steel sword flashing ribbons of dark blood.  Bregolas died in the final retreat to the fortress heart, throat torn out by an orc’s claws.  Few are alive, except the ever-coming orcs.

"I think it time," Aegnor hisses, liquid both bright and dark dripping from his limbs like had he stood in a rainstorm.  The beauty of the elves, we gore-covered fiends.  Our family would recoil in horror to behold us.

Angrod breathes in one last time, the acrid stench of Morgoth’s flames and Morgoth’s creations burning down his throat and lungs.  There is a song, short and powerful, to crumble the white walls of the fortress of Barathonion, one grafted onto every stone as they were laid.  All its warriors knew of its purpose, to deny the enemy a stronghold if the central northern heights were taken.  Angrod alone holds the key.  His strong hands placed each block, his voice -not as gifted as his brother or sister- had crooned power to each stone, inciting them to stand firm.  Or now, to fall.

It is a sweet lullaby, Angrod’s song, the melody he would hum as he cradled Aegnor as his brother wept from the bitterness of unattainable love.

A gift, Angrod thinks, to dead Bregolas, to all the generations of Edain he had befriended.  A gift to save your people, using the wisdom you have taught me.

We love you.

Aegnor laughs as the blackened walls of Barathonion collapse inward and out, crushing the hordes of orc and smothering the flames of the Dagor Bragollach.

 

---

Chapter End Notes

• yrch : orc
• adaneth : mortal woman
• glamhoth: 'din-horde' orcs
• hröa and fëa : body and spirit
• Suldal : Windfoot
• Edain, Hildor, Engwar, and Firiath are all various names given by elves for the mortals.

Angrod translates to "Iron Champion", and his epessë was Angamaitë "Iron-handed". Aegnor comes from his mother-name meaning "Fell Fire".

HoMe gives the name of Angrod's wife as Eldalótë "Elf-flower", with the note for the Sindarin version as Edhellos, implying she came with him to Beleriand.

 

Note on the geography of Dorthonion: 
Dorthoion is highlands covered in pine, tarns, and bare tors rising from the Ard-galen, very reminiscent of descriptions of Scotland. Foen is the central white mountain peak, and Dorthonion was also called Taur-na-Foen, "Forest of the Foen". Rivil is the name of one of the rivers that started in the uplands. I make some natural assumptions that not all Bëorian settlers would have moved to Ladros, and that the elven lords would have a central fortress in Dorthonion itself (hence Barathonion from Barad + thonion "Fortress of Pine trees").

The colors of the young human's scarf are based off the Bëor heraldic sigil designed by Tolkien.

The inspiration for the mechanics of the final scene come from the "Lay of Leithian" when Lúthien demands the key from Sauron and sings down the tower of the Wizard's Isle.

Inspiration of all of the story comes from those final lines of the Athrabêth of how reckless and almost death-seeking Aegnor has become, and the idea of his manic fatalism when faced with Glaurung the Golden.

 

The tonally inappropriate working title of this story has been "The Adventures of Irongrip and Rage-Bunny"