Release from Bondage by heget

"The eyes of the bride were brown, big and brown and full of fear."

Read "The eyes of the bride were brown, big and brown and full of fear."

The princess’s eyes were light and bright as the source of the River Narog, the fair pools of Ivrin for which Lord Gwindor had named her, the green-blue of leaves reflected in clear water. But the eyes of this maiden were brown, dark and deep with fear.

”Is this her?" the orc overseer snarled in the foul language Faron had learned to understand, jabbing at the emaciated elf’s scarred back with the butt of a iron spear. The blow crumpled the last strength in Faron’s knees, and the thrall went from prostrated bow to lying flat on the wet stones of the cavern. Had Angband any poetry, the broken elf would have described himself as a squashed spider. More coal dust flew into his nose and mouth, and after a long pause because he had no energy to breathe or cough out the dirt from his mouth, Faron spat and slid his hands back under his body to push himself from the ground. It was a slow process. The open sores from the missing fingers had started to bleed again, but the pain from his back, from his stomach, from the despair in his heart, overpowered the sensation. He needed to answer the overseer before the orc struck again, before the next finger was taken. The elven thrall, one of the unfortunate thousands in the bowels of Angband, glanced up at the newest arrival.

Faron was not so broken as to misunderstand why he had been dragged forth. Perhaps it would have been kinder if he did not, but kindness was as foreign to Angband as poetry.

Nargothrond had fallen to dragon-fire and the armies of the King of Angband. Its people were either dead or dragged here to the pits beneath Thangorodrim’s triple peaks. The beautiful hidden city that had so impressed and enchanted a much younger and innocent elf was no more but ruins. The enemy had overthrown its gates, desecrated its halls, murdered its inhabitants, and harried its survivors. King Orodreth, gracious and noble, was dead. Faron had loved and sworn loyalty to Orodreth, as he had to King Finrod before him, and now failed them both. If it was true that Lord Gwindor had escaped this dungeon, he was dead now. Hope was forsaken in the pits of Angband, but a detached part of Faron had hoped, like a tiny star shining unseen above the clouds that blocked all light, that the Hidden Kingdom once offering itself as home to a young and half-frightened elf would remain safe and pure. Faron remembered how his fear, that of a young boy away from home, had turned to wonder upon seeing the doors of Nargothrond for the first time. He had no memories of his body dragged from the battlefield through the iron doors of Angband, only waking in terror as the orcs shackled him and brought out the knives and the whip. Faron could no more recognize the proud boy he had once been than he figured that smiling youth would recognize the wretch cowering before the feet of Angband’s orcs. Angband demanded all from its slaves, all memory of songs and poetry, of clear water and stars, of hope and joy, even their names.

But for all his misery and loss the elven thrall clung to the knowledge that the enemy did not have the Hidden Kingdom, could not despoil the cliff-face courtyard with delicate stone latticework and pillars in shape of birch-trees where he had once practiced, the cool kitchen storeroom above the underground river where he had hidden from chores, the bedroom in the rangers’ barracks with the reed-patterned rug woven by his mother and older sister where he had slept, all the places of worn memory that made him weep to recall. Now he would weep for their loss, if he survived to be thrown back into the kennels. Faron never had hope that he would escape and walk through doors of the Hidden Kingdom again, but the destruction hurt all the same. Everyone was dead now, the king and his daughter, the cooks and courtiers, the warriors that had not joined with Lord Gwindor, the other survivors from Tol Sirion. All except the newest slaves, like the girl before him, shivering in fear as two orcs held her upright by the arms.

"Is this the golug princess?” the overseer pressed again, glaring between the broken thrall and the company of orcs that had dragged the new prisoners here. “I thought the ones that sat atop those slag heaps had yellow hair, like the one Gorthaur and his pet wolves killed. Rumors say you swine disobeyed orders, killed the prisoners you were supposed to bring.”

"Rashnuf’s company did that, before getting stupid killed by the cowards in trees. We returned with our spoils. We are not cowards or traitors too fearful to fight," snarled one of the new orcs, unsheathing a blade to lunge at the overseer. The pale elven thrall squealed like a rat and covered his head with his arms, praying that the brawl would end swiftly and his pitiful person overlooked during yet another of these unending orcish duels that brawled through the caverns of Angband. It was not a relief when the orcs turned on each other, though Faron wished he could be grateful they were so willing to murder each other, for the monsters of Morgoth did not limit their violence once weapons were drawn. The orcs were always fighting with each other and the overseers, during which the slaves and foul creatures like wargs and werewolves were unwillingly drawn into their slaughter. And when the duels ended for every dead orc there was usually two dead slaves. But the tall overseer bellowed, and the orcs all cringed and froze, except of course the one that had raised a mutinous blade, for his body had crumpled to the ground as a natural consequence of having a skull bashed in. The captive elven maiden was screaming, fresh tears from her brown eyes.

"She is the princess," a new orc said, one of the two holding her aloft. "Look at her fine clothes. She was holding a crown when we dragged the golug from their stinking dens.” His tone, from what little the elf could discern, was a blend of confidence and groveling to cover himself, the fear of being wrong subdued by the fear of showing subservience.

The elf maiden was of the same age as the princess; the torn remains of her gown had fine gold embroidery, and her necklace had empty fastenings that probably once held emeralds or other fine gems. The orcs had plundered the gems from the casings, for Faron learned in his long years in the pits that while the orcs could not fashion gemstones, nor anything of beauty, they coveted treasures and even wore them in their own crude fashion, at least the highest among them. The overseer had a single ruby hanging from one ear, which he would fondly tug as he whipped prisoners. He was tugging at the ruby now.

"Slave," he barked, kicking the elf at his feet. "You were once from that stinking rat’s nest. Tell me if this is the princess."

The thrall glanced up at the maiden’s face, pale as bone with dark brown eyes full of fear, dark hair in limp greasy strands around her face, a yellowing bruise above her brow. Faron knew the face behind the fear and injuries, knew who the girl was. Faelindis, those brown eyes were of a girl named Faelindis. The face belonged not in Angband but to the life of the proud elven youth who lived in Nargothrond. A boy named Faron knew that face, a boy name Faron who practiced archery with the ranger company of King Finrod, who hid from the steward in the kitchens along with the other lads and laughed when Edrahil could not find them, who practiced his letters with a friend who died in the werewolf pits of Tol-in-Gaurhoth. The girl’s face belonged to the daughter of the seneschal of Tol Sirion, a young Sindarin girl who was often at the princess’s side as her closest constant companion. That face had often smiled and only cried when teased. Faron remembered when Lord Orodreth brought his family to Nargothrond, first on visits and then permanently after Tol Sirion had been overrun, the seneschal’s daughter following as always in Princess Finduilas’s wake. Her father had died when Tol Sirion was lost, and the girl had smiled less, as everyone smiled less. Still, Faron knew her. Faelindis sat with the princess as they embroidered or gossiped, giggling behind each other’s hands as they watched the rangers and Lord Gwindor practice in the training courtyards. The young women of Nargothrond liked to watch the soldiers practicing swordsmanship and archery, and the young men, a far more carefree Faron among them, had liked the attention, especially from the beautiful and noble. Faelindis had been a slight and dark shadow framing the brilliance of King Finrod’s niece, one of the small smooth rocks that lined the pools to make the waters of Ivrin seem all the brighter and clearer. In a distant sense she was kin, for they were both of the Sindar, though Faron’s family had from the beginning been followers of Lord Círdan, rich and high-ranking mariners who plied the shores of Beleriand, and none of her kin had ever stepped a foot in the ocean. But she was someone from home, someone who recognized his face through the wretched mask Angband had made of it, and he could see the shape of his old name falling from her lips.

"Fael-" he stuttered, stopped, considered. If the orcs and their dark masters thought the girl a Noldor princess, thought she was Finduilas Faelivrin, then she would be a prize kept to taunt the other elven lords, what few were still alive. The enemy enjoyed the use of hostage kin, to drag them out before another and mock their helplessness. There were only a few of Princess Finduilas’s family alive still, an aunt, some distant cousins. But there was no family left for the seneschal’s daughter, and a Sinda of no noble title held no value to the orcs. They wanted slaves that could mine for iron, who could fashion stone for fortresses, or work in the pits tending the beasts. Those they decided were not useful were killed, their bodies fed to the dragons and wargs, or sent to the dungeon bowels where it was rumored more orcs were made. A maid such as her would be sent to the dark spirits that created the orcs, that bred new soldiers for Morgoth in manners the elf thrall shied to think on. It was a foul fate that death would not save her from, for the spirits of elves who died in Thangorodrim would not find release. The Great Enemy had sunk his power into the earth of the Iron Prison, ensnared the souls of all under its shadow, warded it from the freedom of Mandos’s call. Faron would weep if his soul could but find the path to the safety of the Halls, but that was an escape as impossible to reach as one for his physical body.

"Faelivrin," he whispered, staring into those brown eyes, willing her to understand this deception was as close to mercy as he could offer. "She is Princess Faelivrin."

 

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Chapter End Notes

golug - known orcish term for the Noldor

"Where was I? I should have died with him."

Read "Where was I? I should have died with him."

He should have died with Aglar in the dungeons.

Faron had trained himself not to think of his regrets as he curled in the cells of Angband, useless an endeavour as it could hope to be. Angband was coal and iron and regrets. Thoughts that were not centered on present pain and misery only spiraled back to regretting the path that led to it. In Angband sleep came without rest or relief. It rarely came anyway. His bed was stone and his companions wargs, so what little sleep the elven thrall could snatch was huddled against the flanks of the oldest beast, the jaws of the warg resting atop his ankles as its red eyes watched him under heavy lids. The wargs barely tolerated him in their pen; if he thrashed in his sleep or cried too loud the beasts would savage him. Their sleep was no more placid than his.

The memories came when Faron slept, flooding his thoughts with more variety than the day-to-day banality of physical pain and fear allotted to thralls of Angband. Futilely his mind chased after the void as poisons of anxiety, pain, and self-recrimination accumulated in the marrow of his bones. An arrogant boy he had been, desperate to avenge his friends and prove his prowess to anyone that knew his name, desperate for glory to make his name widely known so that his accomplishments would earn something besides scorn from his father, to overshadow his martyred brothers and balance the guilt of betraying those friends he had loved more than any brother. That arrogant boy had laughed when he rode into battle. Faron tried to recall his old laughter, and could only hear the examples of orcs. He almost wanted to hate that boy, that fool that believed in victory and glory. Faron had been a boy that thought himself a man, who thought his duty was to avenge the companions he had not died beside. Eager for death he had been, in the manner of young warriors who thought death was something they bequeathed and never received, whose thoughts lingered on loved ones that had gone to the Halls of Mandos and not of what their own passage would cost.  He feared not a life underground because he knew only the caves of Nargothrond, coddled by the freedom to seek the sun if the echoes began to overpower him. As a thrall of Angband, he has not seen the sun since the disastrous battle. No day ever came again. Eager to ride north and challenge the darkness he had been, that boy named Faron wanted nothing as strongly as to see Angband and win glory before its iron gates. He had known nothing of true darkness. Angband was the cruel fossilization of soul, entombing a body in the miserable all-encompassing darkness of its iron mines, slowly eating away flesh and bone, and filling the cavity with a broken slinking creature that cowered in desperation.

He should have died beside Aglar, together as prisoners in a different dungeon.

Aglar had been his first and dearest friend in Nargothrond. Removed from the familiarity of family and the sea, Faron arrived to the underground city fearing the rest of his years would be lonely and silent, a seagull lost in the trees, roosting awkwardly with bats. With innocent apprehension and loneliness the boy from the shores of Brithombar greeted the unfamiliar hills where the great river Narog flowed. That apprehension was almost laughable in comparison to this true fear he later learned. He remembered his first glimpse of Nargothrond itself, a young boy alone in the company of strangers disembarking on the western shore of a river, the climb up an escarpment draped in autumn-bright trees, the small cave that suddenly and dramatically expanded into a great hall covered in delicate stone-work and brightened by many star-like lamps. How quickly he had fallen in love with the hidden fortress of King Finrod Felagund, its vaulted domes and wondrous carved stone only surpassed by Menegroth itself, the second-fairest dwelling of the elves east of the Undying Lands unless that tale of Gondolin’s beauty was true. The steward of Nargothrond assigned Faron quarters adjoining those of his nephew, rightly guessing that Aglar’s gregarious nature would buoy the newly arrived Falathrim boy. That evening Faron shoved his sailor’s knapsack under the stone shelf piled high with bright blue and green quilts that would be his new bed and introduced himself to the occupant of the cell next to his. The steward’s cousin, Aglar, though by age and position treated as a nephew and thus addressed so, had been forewarned of the new neighbor, and thus greeted Faron warmly. Aglar’s accent was hard to follow, strange vowels and antiquated vocabulary, and Faron knew his own tongue was westshore rustic. Still, Faron found a ready audience for his first nervous joke, and the moment Aglar’s vivid blue eyes shone with laughter Faron forgot fear. Aglar pulled him through the maze of underground passages as confident in his navigation as any nightflier to the newly completed kitchen storerooms. That evening as they ate their way through cheese and dried fruit, Faron resolved he would learn how to flourish in his new home as long as Aglar was with him. Soon the steward despaired of how close the two young men had become, thick as thieves and a hazard to Nargothrond's hallways. Faron remembered a dare involving a pair of shields and tobogganing down one of Nargothrond’s tunnels, but after many years of Angband’s oppression, he could not remember how it ended or what the dare was for. He remembered Aglar’s laughing face. He remembered that same face pale from fever-sickness after the fens. He had no memory of Aglar’s face after weeks of imprisonment in the Isle of Werewolves, for he had not been chained by his friend’s side, as he should have been.

The thrall knew he looked no longer like a brave and proud elven youth, like the ranger he had been, but one of the sickly old mortals, with rags covering a scarred and skeletal body, perpetually hunched over and missing several fingers and toes. Worse than a mortal affected by age, for Faron remembered old Bëor who spent his last years in Nargothrond beside the king, how the mortal wrinkled and faded like a piece of old fruit but did not become disfigured or diminished in soul underneath. There were no seeing glasses or clear pools of water, or much water to begin with, in which the thrall could see his face. Yet in the other slaves of Angband, from those imprisoned for weeks to those here before the rise of Sun and Moon, gave Faron the blueprint to imagine reflections of his own face. He knew it must be gastly. Never though was he able to imagine what King Felagund or Aglar must had appeared after months of Tol-in-Gaurhoth’s cells. But they had been brave, and the king defeated one of cruel Gorthuar’s wolves at cost of his own life. Faron could not do so, be strong enough to wrestle wolf with naught but teeth. Not with his own teeth so broken, he admitted as he rubbed a tongue tentatively over broken stubs, nor with all courage or strength leached away. Once he had been handsome. Faron had been tall and slender and dark compared to the shorter and stockier Aglar, his features refined while Aglar had a face that stayed freckled and boyish long past the age of maturity, so they were mistaken for age-mates. Everyone forgot Aglar was older than Faron, and that they shared no childhood. It did not help that they treated each other as if they had been lifelong companions. How much older was hard to say, for calculating the years between Aman’s Treelight and Beleriand's star-dark and then these new years of the Sun was a frightful headache. Still, at heart, Aglar was his new brother, a fairer replacement for the elder two Faron lost to war, though he knew better than to ever admit so in his letters home.

Like King Felagund, the young Noldor lord was the eldest of many siblings who had braved the frozen wastes of the Helcaraxë to enter Beleriand to fight against Morgoth, struggling to fulfill the role of family head after a father’s death. Of that death Faron’s friend rarely spoke of, only admitting that it happened in Aman, which Faron deduced meant the Rape of Alqualondë, and that the fatal wound had been from a sword, which Faron understood not until Aglar’s wary, angry treatment of his distant cousins.

Yet Aglar loved his father and loved to speak of his family, of the mother and sister and infant brother left behind in Valinor, of his father, and of the family that came with him, a brother, sister, and myriad cousins related on both sides. None aside from the steward, Lord Edrahil, only son of Aglar's mother's only brother, lived in the Hidden City of Nargothrond. Most were stationed north in the Leaguer, and King Finrod Felagund was constantly travelling to conference with his fellow lords, allowing Aglar’s family the opportunity to visit. A brother Faron became to them as well, or perhaps a cousin, even if no kinship but that of all Eldar tied them. Of Aglar's younger brother, the one everyone called by the epessë Craban, Faron often joined Aglar to visit up to Dorthonion, and developed some of the same protective fondness. Faron had been the one to teach Craban to use the short arrow and to carve a bow from black yew. Still, Craban was Aglar’s kin, not his. Faron suppressed his jealousy, for while his father still lived, letters home were brief, and his uncles were cold strangers or long separated by leaving with Prince Olwë to the Undying Lands. That uncle who left was dead, so proclaimed his youngest uncle, the one everyone called Nînlaws because he spoke to Lords Ossë and Ulmo in their own tongues. Faron's father hated the Noldor for that reason, for the Kinslaying and the theft and burning of his brother's ships, for a dead uncle Faron had never met.

Faron had loved Aglar like a brother, but when most sorely needed, Faron had chosen his family.

In the living entombment of Angband he had more time to regret that choice, though in hindsight both options led to a fate imprisoned. Had he stayed with Aglar, they would have died together in a different dungeon than Angband. As far as soothing thoughts went, it wasn’t much.

But Faron had chosen blood-kin, and thus the dungeon of the farthest north.

Foremost of his regrets was that decision to go home, to leave Nargothrond and Aglar and his king, unaware that their hour of need was approaching. If he had not left, he could have been there with Aglar. He would have been by his friend’s side, by his king’s side, by Steward Edrahil and Captain Heledir and the others in that dungeon.

In the Fens of Serech, sloughing through that mire in the desperate bid to reinforce Dorthonion, in that horrible retreat from orcs, rescued by the broad, brave backs of Barahir’s men, Faron had been surrounded by his fellow rangers, by Captain Heledir and Ethir and Tacholdir. He had carried an injured Aglar back to the Hidden City and had seen the moment King Finrod realized with that gifted foresight that the Lords of Dorthonion, Angrod and Aegnor, and all their warriors, including Craban, had died. Afterward, Faron had mourned Craban's death during the Bragollach with the same quiet intensity as Aglar, as King Felagund and Orodreth mourned their brothers and Lord Gwindor his. In those solemn months Nargothrond felt like Faron's old home, like the tense months during the siege when Faron’s mother wept over her dead sons and his father watched the orcs on the other side of the walls. Aglar had begged Faron for guidance to weather the grief of a brother’s death as one who had traveled such a path before. Faron could not explain to his friend that his brothers had been men grown before he was born, hard men with more love for the sea than a new babe in his mother’s arms. His brothers humored him but left him to play on the shore with his sister as they sailed the coast with their uncles, jested of their adventures and how a toddler had no part, dumped sea wrack and crabs in his bed and laughed when he hid from storms, and promised to set him adrift to float to Uncle Tolon across the sea when they were cross with him. Cófon and Duinethor had been his brothers, but Faron did not mourn them. He barely knew them before they were slain in the first unnamed battle of Beleriand and the long siege of Brithomber. His sister Iessel could, and she spoke fondly of them in her letters as if to draw similarities among all her brothers in her net, fish for ways in which Faron could be family as she knew. Duinethor’s skill with the ax would cover one letter, and how she was learning to wield one with greater skill, and Faron would reply that he never used the weapon, only the bow and sometimes a sword, though he could send her an ax from one of the Haladim. It was easier to picture Iessel as one of the Haladim’s warrior women, and Faron reflected on how strange that was to not know his sister and have to use mortals as reference. At least for his sister his imagination could pull together a mirage. His older brothers were empty shadows. Craban with his love of stories, quick to laugh and eager to show kindness, dreamy and wise, was someone Faron knew, someone he could mourn as his mother mourned Cófon and Duinethor. For all his strange moments Craban had been someone Faron wished he could have lorded over as an elder brother in truth. Faron told himself he would have been kinder, more loved and fondly remembered than his own older brothers long lost. A disservice to Cófon and Duinethor, Faron thought, but one he could not stop.

The unspoken guilt drove Faron to lobby his commanding officer, petitioning for the assignment to guard Prince Orodreth’s wife as she escorted her nephew to Círdan for safe fostering. Nargothrond had been the last stop of the journey by the young son of the new Noldor High King from his father and grandfather’s fortress of Eithel Sirion to the holdings of the Falathrim. In the growing danger of Beleriand after the Bragollach, with the fall of Minas Tirith and Dorthonion and the Marches to the east, with Angband’s armies coming closer each season to the borders of Nargothrond and Doriath, it was imperative that Fingon’s heir be sent to the safest location, which meant Lord Círdan and the sea. Long-since scouted contingency plans of the Isle of Balar were bandied around in council meetings, according to ranger scuttlebut, and after Captain Heledir appraised the number of guards available to escort the prince and Lady Eregiel he allowed Faron to join. Privately surprised, Faron attributed this permissiveness to how tense the Hidden City had become, straining under submerged currents of fear and the burden of refugees. Nargothrond was not built to hold the people of Himlad and Tol Sirion as well as its own, and suspicion lurked under some accommodating smiles. Lord Orodreth’s survivors from Tol Sirion were a known quality, those of Himlad less so - or in some cases perhaps too well-known and privately disliked. Aglar, his grief diminished by his new wife and distracted by the ancient grudge against his royal cousins revived by close proximity, hurried to wish Faron a safe journey and laugh at his boastful farewells. “Tell me everything when you return,” he called as Faron navigated the slow incline of the side tunnel that led to the stable. The blue lamplight had marked strange shadows on Aglar’s face that last time Faron saw him, but he did not linger, eager to escape the gloom of Nargothrond and appease his heart’s whispers of disloyalty.

He should have stayed beside Aglar, so they died together in Tol-in-Gaurhoth.

 

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Chapter End Notes

A majority of the mentioned original characters are expies from ASoIaF or other series, Aglar the most obvious. Name meanings are hints. 

Craban = (large) crow

Nînlaws = damp-hair

 

On Gil-galad: Personally I combine a few tidbits from other versions, but the published Silmarillion's paternity for Ereinion Gil-galad as the young son of Fingon works well for my tastes (whereas making him a younger sibling of Finduilas does not). As a nod to the alternative version as Orodreth's son, I've made his mother, Meril (a name on the family trees back when he was briefly Finrod's son), a first cousin of Orodreth's wife.  Having his aunt, Orodreth's wife, take Gil-galad to the Havens and help raise him is a bit of an in-joke.

 

Haleth had a bodyguard of female warriors, and the Haladim, like the Sindar, used axes as their primary weapons.

"Half my life I have waited to come home, and for what? Mockery and disregard."

Read "Half my life I have waited to come home, and for what? Mockery and disregard."

The chance to travel home and see a father, mother, sister, and uncles he had not in three and a half centuries had blinded Faron. His hopes had been so strong and foolish, but the reunion disheartening, blood-kin dismissive and angry, and the cost higher than Faron could have ever imagined.

The trip to Brithombar was the last time Faron felt something that approximated freedom. The wooded highlands of High Faroth had made for pleasant travel. Faron remembered that as they travelled he sang a song by Loremaster Daeron that described that region in summer with such beauty as to gild the leaves. In Angband, he no longer knew the words of the song or could recall why the highlands inspired beauty. Nor could he remember most of his companions on that journey. Little Ereinion had been younger than Faron had been when separated from his own father. A dark-haired princeling bundled in furs, jewels, and fine silk clinging to his aunt, the boy spent the journey leaning over his saddle to ask Faron in an excited voice if he had been nervous when he left home and would he enjoy living by sea. Faron could not answer from both bitterness and ignorance.

Never in the right place, Faron knew, surrounded by the wrong companions, by the wrong wolves.

Like a snake biting its tail Faron returned home in this strange echo of why he had left. The young Noldor prince sent away from the frontlines of the war depended on the alliances which King Finrod had helped to brace, which Faron had been made into one of its bricks. Círdan had sent the last son of his most powerful vassal inland to the new Noldor allies to offset the growing dissention that came with wild rumors of Kin-slayings and dark exile, crafting a boy somewhere between symbol and hostage and ward. Faron’s father had been the most vocally opposed, most unwilling to work with Noldor and allow King Thingol’s ruling that for the Kinslaying most Noldor had bitterly atoned. Thus Faron was sent to the most acceptable of the newcomers, Prince Olwë’s grandson, to the new city that had their king’s blessing. In hindsight Faron wondered if his return-welcome would have fared better had he be sent to Menegroth, for even then he would have been just as much an outsider, divided from the sea, his words grown strange and footsteps balanced for stone and branches. Ten years after the Dagor Bragollach, Faron finally returned to the walled seaside city of his birth and found himself adrift on unknown currents. Longing did not stop Faron’s mother from being a face that did not match the one he remembered, or make his sister’s laugh less familiar than Lady Finduilas’s smiles. His uncles grim and joyless were not the men that played and sang in his memories. Everyone smelled too strongly of salt and fish. They grimaced at the cut of his clothes and the weapons he bore and doubted aloud if he knew what it was to hear the music of running water under the stars. Infrequent letters and name-day gifts had not undone centuries of separation. When Faron and Iessel stood before one another once more, they found it hard to embrace as kin. At that uneasiness Faron knew his father was right, that his long years in the Hidden City had turned into one of the Noldor, who distanced from any former ties of family instead of following the example of the Edhil.

And then the messenger had come from Nargothrond with a tale of the coup by Lords Celegorm and Curufin, of King Finrod’s abdication over the outlaw Beren, choosing to aid the last Lord of Ladros, son of the man who had saved the king and Aglar and himself in the Fens of Serech.  His king had joined the mortal Beren on a dangerous quest with only a few companions who the messenger could not name. Faron knew who they were, knew long before he rode back through the hidden door on the west bank of the Narog River in a furious panic. If King Finrod had appointed Lord Orodreth as steward -and yet it was not his men from Minas Tirith that greeted Faron at the gate, but men who with scornful glares and unsheathed Tirion-forged steel wishing to turn Faron away if not for Lord Gwindor’s timely intervention- then Edrahil had gone, and Captain Heledir with him. Ten men had gone with King Finrod and the mortal Beren, ten out of the thousands of the Hidden City, and Faron had not been present to be one. Loyal guardsmen and rangers with whom Faron slept beside in the barracks wing and patrolled with for years had gone: young Ethir from the willow region of the south, Tacholdir who taught him to read tengwar, Bân and Fân with their oversized swords and incomprehensible inside jokes, pig-headed young Gadwar who secretly pined after Gwindor’s niece, old Arodreth who knew the tasks of turning men into rangers, newcomer Consael whose gentle sister had the skilled hands of a healer, and of course Aglar. Faron’s companions had gone, his fellow rangers, his direct superiors, his friends, his king. Faron had abandoned them, or they him. His mind could not decide, but his body knew he needed action. High summer was now the turned leaves of autumn, and no word had yet come of their fates. Nor was anyone, it seemed, willing to investigate. Gadwar’s brother, handsome white-clad Galuven, stopped Faron before the armory, dragged him back to Lord Gwindor’s chambers while lecturing the entire time about duty, foolishness, hopeless causes, and civil responsibilities, and Faron had called them both cowards. He almost called them traitors, especially Galuven who had been with his brother Gadwar in the Fens of Serech and owed the Lord of Ladros his life as well. In Angband, cringing fearfully before the orcs, afraid of defiance’s repercussions, Faron forgave Galuven for staying, rescinded too late his taunts of coward and traitor.

Gwindor bolted the door, glancing down the tunnels to see if anyone had followed, before nodding to Galuven to release him. “Prince Orodreth needs us,” said Lord Gwindor, and Galuven in his pompous voice echoed him with more words on the needs of the city, of the lawful charge set by the King to protect his city and rally behind Prince Orodreth as steward, to win back control of Nargothrond from the former lords of Himlad.

Faron cared not.

He should have gone with the king, and died with Aglar in the dungeons.

Gwindor understood, had seen Faron’s self-loathing for what it was long before he did, and knew Faron’s ties to Nargothrond were bound through a singular friendship. Galuven believed in institutions of rule and the protection of the majority. Gwindor’s personal loyalties were still in the Hidden City. Faron’s were languishing in the dungeon that Sauron had made of Tol Sirion, though no confirmation had yet come of King Finrod’s capture. Only Celegorm and Curufin with those personally loyal to them were permitted to scout the plains outside Nargothrond. “We are watched,” hissed Gwindor. “And any actions we might take would be stopped and labelled treason by the ones that think themselves rulers now. The former lords of Himlad are looking for an excuse to imprison us, or strip the few of us loyal to Prince Orodreth from all positions of authority and replace with their own lackeys. We two are the senior-most officers of the rangers left, and you, now that Captain Heledir and Arodreth have left. Faicandil is their man, and the new stable-master. You are watched, Faron, and will be stopped. They know who you are, who your closest companion was, who your father is. The people have grown heartsick of loss thanks to the Bragollach, and that fear was played upon. Now they are mistrustful of the strength of our secrecy and our arms, our courage and our cause. No one wants the soldiers away from the city where their swords are not visibly between them and the threat of orcs, the rangers away from our borders where they might draw the attention of Angband, and the former lords of Himlad do not trust those swords or rangers out of their sight, fearing some counter-treason. They are suspicious, as ever they were before, and will tear Nargothrond apart in civil war between those with any loyalty to the House of Finarfin and themselves, and use this fear of violence against us.” Gwindor spoke with the voice of an older man, as Captain Heledir or Steward Edrahil might have. The fear he spoke of that paralyzed the people of Nargothrond infected him as well, though it burrowed into the heart with a different guise, and settled into Faron as well. It tasted of well-meaning caution, the unsteadiness of green troops, of petrifying guilt that lashed outward so the thorns did not dig so deeply into host flesh, and under all the lingering echoes of Thu’s fear-inducing cloud on the survivors from Tol Sirion, tendrils of what would be perfected as the Black Breath.

The acceptance of Gwindor’s words dropped cold and heavy in Faron’s soul. He could not leave the city to go after King Finrod, could mount no rescue. He was no High King to ride out alone in courageous fruitless challenge. He had no desire to waste his life, to die unmourned in a hopeless war, and Faron was enough his father’s son to scoff at any value placed on a Noldor jewel.

Arodreth died, and Captain Heledir of the kingfisher-quick smiles. Werewolves fed on the bones of Ethir and Tacholdir. Loyal Edrahil, steward of Nargothrond, would never see the Hidden City again, nor his nephew. No more letters came to Bân’s sweetheart in Doriath or ever would. Only three knew when Fân died, watching helplessly as Draugluin’s spawn did what a fever could not. Sweet Faelineth in the healers’ wing of Nargothrond whispered futile prayers to the Valar for her brother and her newly-wed husband, and Faron avoided the caverns that led to the healers or their storerooms. He could not face her questions about Aglar. His stalling tactics were no more sustainable than the teetering tensions that truly ruled Nargothrond, but the outside break came the day that Galuven dumped all his jewelry into the underground pool beneath the kitchens. Faron watched the older man pull rings from his fingers and chunk his arm bands and bracelets into the pool, his handsome face bloodlessly pale, whispering of nightmares and his brother’s name. Even once his wrists were bare of metal, Galuven rubbed at the flesh as if expecting blood. Spooked, Faron fled to the upper levels in time to hear that the lords Curufin and Celegorm had found Princess Lúthien, captured her, and brought her to the city. The former lords of Himlad and rulers of Nargothrond in all but name kept anyone from helping the princess. Faron never spoke to her or heard her pleas to rescue Beren, Finrod, and their companions, though he questioned Gwindor and even had the courage once to speak to Finduilas to learn if the lady was allowed to visit her cousin in confinement. A sad shake of blonde curls and a stony glare across the vaulted hall to where Celegorm nursed a bruised jaw and complained of his besotted dog answered that. Then came the morning when it was discovered that Princess Lúthien had escaped Nargothrond, slipping pass any pursuit with the assistance of the very hound they had used to guard her. Galuven had laughed, the first time Faron heard Gadwar’s pompous and serious brother laugh, the sound bordering on the hysterical as he rubbed his wrists in his strange new tic. Such mockery was kept away from the knowledge of Lords Curufin and Celegorm, but the simmering resentment and mistrust that Prince Orodreth and those loyal to his house cultivated from the seeds that Luthien's unexpected arrival, unjust treatment, and unconventional departure had planted were starting to root. It was the careful campaign of Faron's obnoxious smirks, whispers from Lady Finduilas's solar, the pointed way in which Prince Orodreth dictated romantic letters to his wife still in Brithombar, and Gwindor's airy compliments to the empty-handed patrols that returned soon after they would set out.

Silence of a sort ruled Nargothrond until the freed prisoners from Tol-in-Gaurhoth hobbled back to the Hidden City with their reverent tale of how Princess Lúthien and the hound Huan defeated Sauron and pulled down his tower. Less palpable was the history of endured horrors written across their bodies and every flinch and dead-eyed stare, the former prisoners telling of what had happened to the twelve taken alive by Sauron and how only one living body was pulled from the pit, of the tall cairn they helped to build for Finrod’s body, placing the bones that could be found of his ten companions around him. The former prisoners were sequestered quickly when they reached Nargothrond’s borders, and only their desperately desired and despaired of stories rebuffed the standing policy to refuse contact or reentry for any ex-slave of Morgoth. But Gwindor and Prince Orodreth saw the opportunity of their arrival and all the tales they carried, and ordered the rumors spread immediately against the wishes of Celegorm and Curufin. Like the muddy runoff mounting behind the dam, the anger was dark, opaque, and red. “Gather everyone in the city and bring them to the throne room. There are proclamations I must make,” Prince Orodreth ordered. Lord Gwindor, dressed in full armor whose floral engraving could not hide the steel, politely suggested all troops whose loyalty was trusted to do the same - and rouse the former lords of Himlad to attend this meeting without allowing them the opportunity to arrive equally so garbed if possible. Discretely, though, as to not unduly alarm, and Faron hooked his bowstring and tucked two arrows into his finest belt. Finally Galuven’s hands went perfectly, horribly still.

When everyone in Nargothrond was in the throne room, and the former lords of Himlad questioned the purpose, did Prince Orodreth speak.

When Prince Orodreth’s speech was over, he was King and not merely lord or acting steward, and the former lords of Himlad had no guest-right or power in Nargothrond.

 

Faron volunteered as one of the rangers watching the pair ride away humiliated and furious, fingers on the arrows at his belt, half-hoping the day of mercy would end before the riders escaped the borders of the Hidden City. He could call it vengeance and maybe find a modicum of satisfaction. It would not unmake Faelineth a widow or bring back Galuven his brother. Faron wondered if it would even please his father and the shade of Uncle Tolon long dead on a distant shore. But King Orodreth demanded honor and clemency, to act in a manner that would not shame King Finrod’s memory or curse his people further. Faron’s guilt over Aglar and his former king could not overwhelm his loyalty to that honor. But his fingers brushed against fletching.

Commands forbade any ranger of Nargothrond as aggressor in open conflict. No one warned Faron of watchers and treason, and yet he was once more forbidden to leave, once more the hostage never named such. Now he no longer had even the sole comfort of a dear friend to chase the darkness from the caves or the hope of a warm reception at the sea. An arrogant boy desperate for glory and vengeance and escape, he latched onto the news of the Union of Maedhros.

King Orodreth, after much bargaining, allowed Gwindor to lead a company to join the alliance in what would be the fifth great battle of Beleriand, though only under the banner of High King Fingon. Not that it mattered to Gwindor or Faron among his men. The banner they brought in their hearts to the thirsty plain outside Angband’s black gates was green with a silver harp and a burning torch. The king they pledged to fight for had a name given in honor by the dwarves, a king they had abandoned, a king they had loved. The knights of Nargothrond wanted vengeance for their dead and enough orcish blood to rinse away the shame of standing back.

He should have died in Tol-in-Gaurhoth, with Aglar and his king. He was in the wrong dungeons, surrounded by the wrong wolves.

Faron knew it would be best not to think of the start of the battle, of the moment Gelmir was led from the gates, of the taunting lies shouted before commencing that display of torture and execution. In many ways the words haunted Faron most, the false hope they had given him. Gelmir who everyone thought lost in the Bragollach had survived long enough to be captured, and if Angband had many more prisoners whom everyone thought dead, then Gwindor and Faron and the soldiers of Nargothrond had to rescue them. It would have been their redemption for failing to save their king and friends. Faron remembered the wild, ridiculous hope for other survivors, that maybe someone else had not burned in the fires of the Bragollach, that while it was undeniable that Aglar was dead perhaps his brother, Craban, was not. Maybe even one of Faron’s brothers, all these long years mourned by his mother, needed not. Such a terrible fool’s hope was the spur that dug into his war-horse’s flanks as Faron charged the iron gates of Angband.

Faron remembered Gwindor screaming his brother’s name, and the name of Galuven’s brother, and their dead. Faron was also screaming that morning. He screamed until the blow came that should have killed him.

One of the wargs kicked in its sleep, jarring Faron from his memories. He woke, no names upon his lips, no chains around his wrists. The memories of home were fading away, the faces gone.

Still the thought that he should not be here, that if his curse was to face torment then this was not the right one, followed him whether he slept or was awake. Wargs were not Sauron’s wolves, and no stone of Angband had ever been part of an elven fortress. He should have died beside Aglar and his king in the dungeons of Tol-in-Gaurhoth under the teeth of its werewolves, not in Angband surrounded by the wargs and eaten by fear without death.

---

Chapter End Notes

This two-part section was heavily inspired by The Leithian Script, especially the idea of Edrahil as a relative of Nerdanel. Again, most OCs mentioned are expies from ASoIaF or other series, Aglar the most obvious. Arodreth should also be familiar.

Edhil = Sindarin term for 'Elves'. HoMe XI clears up that while there was ill-feeling enhanced by arrogance and resentment between the Noldor and Tatyar Avari, the Sindar had strong kinship feelings with the Lindar Avari and Nandor as one people.

"There are ghosts in Winterfell, he thought, and I am one of them."

Read "There are ghosts in Winterfell, he thought, and I am one of them."

The orc overseer with the ruby earring culled Faron from a pen of elven thralls, choosing him to tend the wargs after the beasts devoured the last slave who had watched over them. At least that was what the orc told Faron, laughing about the double meaning to ‘feed’ wargs and shoving the thrall into the pit where the wolf-like creatures were penned.

The warg kennel was as large as a dancing hall, fenced in with iron grating and recessed down from the main level as to be slightly deeper than hip-height. Each time Faron climbed in or out from the warg tender’s sidegate was awkward and slow. A thin channel along the wall filled with water pumped up from below, which Faron learned never to approach after one of the wargs nearly crushed his left arm, nor was it safe to be too close to the feed trough. His duties were simple: to ensure each beast was on their feed and to alert the overseer if one did not eat or fell injured or ill, to clean away their filth as best he could, separate the quarrelsome ones before any serious fight broke out, and collar and leash them so their handlers, smaller orcs covered in familiar tooth scars, could ride them out on patrols. There was no set schedule to the warg patrols that Faron could discern, but when the riders came, the beasts would set to howling and scrambling against the walls of their pen, even awkwardly climb the iron fence that separated them from the rest of the cavern. All of Angband would echo with the wargs’ excited high-pitched screams.

Attending well to his tasks gave not what he would label pride, for a slave of Angband had no such luxury or retention of dignity, but there was some satisfaction in knowing that as long as the beasts were healthy, the overseer was less interested in teaching Faron a lesson in what pain an immortal body could endure. Faron could not prevent all cruel beatings, and his missing fingers and toes reminded him if he forgot.

Osp was the name the overseer gave him, though there was another name in the guttural snarls of the orcs’ rudimentary language, a black speech built of curses and echoes from the dungeons, that meant the same and which Faron learned to also scrape and bow to. If he did not answer to the new name, another finger or toe would go. Renamed by the orcs could be a blessing and curse, for that meant being singled out, being remembered by the whips of Angband. But the unnamed, the captured slaves that stayed in the holding pens, they disappeared soon. Faron only had dark guesses of their fates. So the reeking one that tended the warg pens he was, for in its own way it was safer than the mines.

He dreamed of Nargothrond and his life before Angband less often now. Soon the thrall wondered if he would forget he ever had a life beyond that of warg tender. Better than miner, he thought.

Angband’s original purpose had been as an advanced watch-post and armory for Utumno before re-purposed as the Dark Lord’s seat of power. The mines remained the most important of its secondary purposes, for the army of Morgoth was made of thousands of orcs, and each needed armor and several weapons all of black wrought iron. It was not orcs that dug the majority of that iron or who smelted the ore in all of Angband’s uncountable furnaces.

Those with the light of the Two Trees in their eyes were forced to work the bellows of the furnaces, judged as the prisoners most likely to have knowledge of metallurgy from Aulë. The rest were sent to dig out the iron ore, to turn the giant treadwheels that pumped out the groundwater of the lowest levels, or to any other task in the vast dark fortress that benefited the armies of Morgoth. All the while, the feeling of Morgoth’s attention and power pierced each slave’s mind, like bone shards from a debilitating blow to the back of the head digging into soft tissue. The ones that oversaw the partition and management of Angband’s elven slaves were corrupted Maiar and a few high-ranking and trusted orcs. The fortress levels that held the living and training quarters for the orcs was mostly separate from the mines in which the slaves toiled, though some orc companies were in charge of the iron furnaces, and there was a fresh rotation of orcs as guards and torturers. Some stayed in permanent positions. Those were the ones that barked the orders for shift changes and oversaw the pens that held new captives. These overseers would linger outside the torturers’ rooms, waiting to gather their charges after any information was wrung out of the new arrivals with heated irons and sharp knives, and tutted and complained if the prisoners died in questioning before being put to work.

It was whispered with cold acceptance that if an elven prisoner died in the cells it did not matter, for the power of the Black Foe, which one could feel sunk into the very grains of the earth and each mote of air that comprised Angband, would trap and gather the soul to be recycled back into another of Morgoth’s dark projects.

Mortals taken to Angband rarely survived the first phase, and few were sent to work the mines. The elven prisoners were envious of the humans’ easy deaths.

Faron lost his first finger to the thin knives of the torturers, along with strips of skin from his chest and back and thighs. He was questioned repeatedly about Nargothrond, its exact location and defenses. Still disoriented from the battle and then crazed from the pain, his replies had been garbled and near useless. Gwindor, chained nearby until the orcs took him away to a more secured cell for prisoners deemed important, assured Faron that he had not betrayed the Hidden City. Faron remembered the dull red of heated irons, the feel of the flaying knives, the stench of rotting flesh and the burning pain of his throat from screaming, but the memories were erratic shards and mercifully short.

When they tired of torment, the torturers handed over their prisoners, Faron among them, to the holding pens. Gwindor was held elsewhere, and no one else of their company from Nargothrond had survived the Nirnaeth Arnoediad. It would be twenty-three years until he heard his name spoken again by someone who recognized him from the life before Angband.

One could easily forget what it was to be an elf in Angband.

The mines of Angband, for the most part, lacked the sound of voices, only the ring of rock and panting of the ore bearers carrying the material out of the tunnels to be refined. One could feel the weight of Morgoth’s overpowering essence in the back of the skull, a heavy supernatural pressure that muted tongues.

The closest thing to trees that anyone in Angband saw were the logs stolen from the forests of Taur-nu-Fuin brought in for charcoal for the furnaces that roasted the iron ore for the slag and wrought iron that army of the Iron Prison depended on.

Sometimes fire-setting was used to crack the rocks, when the overseers grew impatient with the progress. The fiery whips of the Balrogs lashed against stone instead of flesh, but the fumes were unpleasantly dangerous in the narrow tunnels of the prison. Water would be brought in to douse the splintered rock face so the enslaved miners could continue to work, and this is when the slaves would dip their rags and crude containers into the heavy vats of water, thirsty and overheated and desperate. The water was silent. If any song echoed, it belonged to Morgoth alone.

Rations were scant, comprised chiefly of the white earthy flesh of some mushroom that grew in the depleted tunnels. Though unappetizing, the meal could be trusted whereas the thin meat stew could not. One of the slaves had planted some of the white cave root that the dwarves called earth-bread and shared pieces of it with everyone in the work-gangs. It was hard to chew and astringent without boiling. The orcs allotted each slave a cup of the same dark brew which they drank. The foul drink cleaned wounds, even seemed to speed the healing process, though it did nothing for scarring. Healthier to dress wounds than trying to drink it, at least, was the consensus of the slaves. Faron, with his trusted position as warg tender, had a cup regularly, though food was harder for him to come by because he was not in one of the work gangs rotated from the mines to the holding pens each shift, nor could he sneak over to the abandoned shaft where the earth-bread was hidden. He resorted to infrequently caught rats eaten raw and hurriedly before the wargs noticed. Faron would not eat the meat the wargs were fed, fearful of what, or whom, it had once been.

Arms full of offal and meat for the wargs’ daily meal, Faron would pass by the work crews coming up from the mines at the end of their shifts. They would be covered in black dust, their hands raw, re-shackled in a line to be led back to holding cells for the sleep shift. Their eyes would meet his with mostly a mix of pity or envy, depending on if they were close enough to smell the stench from the wargs. One of the miners had eyes that were unsettlingly vacant, and the overseer noticed it. The orc laughed at the blank opacity of that elven thrall’s face. “That one is soon ready for transfer,” it jested. Faron tried not to dissect the meaning.

Better than the mines, he told himself, and anything was better than when the eyes went blank.

While the tunnels of the mines themselves were rough stone, scoured by fire and crude pickaxes, the main galleries of each subterranean level of Angband was dressed stone. Faron knew not how many levels there were to Angband or how many of these large caverns were to each level, for he was confined to one and had only seen two others. The one he lived in, with a corner devoted to the sunken warg pen, was built of glassy-smooth bricks, or at least the walls carved to appear so. There was no mortar, and the lines were perfectly straight and so snug that a fingernail could not fit between. Not all angles in the gallery were clinically straight, as Faron noticed that if he looked up that the walls bowed outward to the high and smooth ceiling. The effect was disorienting, feeding into the feeling that he was naught but a scurrying insect. Another gallery a level up had walls that sloped inward. To look up in that gallery was to feel the ceiling crashing down, so Faron stopped glancing up. It was not as if he would ever see the sky again, so the habit had been folly. Passageways between the main galleries looped around in narrow tunnels indistinguishable from the mine shafts, but some would be wide and relatively straight, with broad smooth stairs well-lit by torches and the same sharp brick. These were the main thoroughfares through which the Balrogs would use, and thus the paths that slaves like Faron avoided. The roofs of these wide corridors were black with soot off those flame and shadow monsters, and Faron could feel heat lingering in stone each time the Balrogs passed through. The elven thrall mentally mapped the sections of Angband he had explored to know which tunnels were best as to avoid the most orcs and Balrogs. None matched the corridor he remembered from his first memories of this place, the one that led from the first interrogators’ cells.  

The cells to hold important prisoners, those Morgoth liked to use as bait for their connections to the leaders and kings among the Noldor princes, were kept in the gallery with inward sloping walls, in tiny cells too narrow for a body to lie down, each door along a featureless row with but two vents for air, one at the bottom of the door and one too high for a hand to reach up and touch. There were only a few of these doors, and the coffin-like cells were for the most part empty.

Faelindis was kept in one of those cells, thanks to Faron’s lie that she was Finduilas Faelivrin. The orcs did not torture her for any information, for the Hidden City was secret no longer, and her value would be as bait for remaining Noldor princes, and for the son of Húrin if but the forces of Angband knew where the mortal hero had fled. Dor-lómin was the last estimate, and the overseer had smiled as he told the elven maid that Túrin chose his mortal family over the desire to rescue her. Perhaps the news would have tortured the real Faelivrin, but Faelindis was nobody and expected no rescue attempt. The mortal hero would never have recognized her name, and Faron knew the maid only because she had been a companion both to the princess and the young maiden who Gadwar and Galuven both aspired to court. Without the lie, she was not worth the special treatment.

Faron thought of what madness such cells would bring, trapped in a dark and tight space. Faelindis was a small maid, as short and slender as a sapling, so she might have room to curl on the floor and press against the vent at the floor that allowed air and light to enter. He wondered how much from outside the cell could she hear, or if it would only be the sounds of her heart beating, her breaths taken in the stuffy heat, and her persistent sobs. He knew which cell along the smooth wall held Faelindis because it was the only one from which sounds emerged.

A mercy it was that the overlords of Angband did not confine the elven maid to the cell indefinitely. Running errands to the upper gallery, Faron would lurk until he could watch her be dragged out. The fear of being discovered made him shake to the point of barely standing, and it was dangerous if the orcs thought him too interested in one of their special prisoners, but concern and guilt drove him to wait until she appeared. Escorted by one of the few orcs that Faron could believe was female, Faelindis was led in circles around the cavern to exercise her legs and checked over for sores and signs of illness. Her wide brown eyes would blink and tear up in the light of the cavern, and the rotund orc would scrub away the worst of the dirt and force a cup of the vile orc brew and a piece of white root down her throat. For one of the monsters of Angband, the possibly female orc that tended to Faelindis was almost caring, in the only way that Morgoth’s creations could be. It, or she, worked intently to ensure the elven maid was not starving or confined too long to the tiny cell. Motivated by fear of the other overseers or that feeling a farmer had tending to an animal it meant to slaughter, it did not go out of its way to harm her as other orcs might. Faron knew how such strange affection could grow towards those that did not kill when they had the power to, how that act of restraint was recast into a sign of kindness, and he wondered if Faelindis felt the same relief he did when it was the large soft-bodied orc that pulled Faelindis from the cell and not one of the torturers. Yet outside the cell still meant the watchful presence of the overseers, the leering one with the ruby earring worst of all, and to see the evidence of cruel imprisonment in Angband. Maybe the elven maid preferred the dark confines of her cell, trapped with her sobs and nothing else.

After a while, during these inspections and exercises, Faelindis was given a chore as to be more useful. Idle hands were discouraged in the iron mines of Morgoth, no matter who they belonged to. To be useless was the orcs’ greatest fear, though what the denizens of Angband considered productive and worthy was narrow and tailored almost exclusively to the war efforts of their Dark Lord. The orc that tended to her led Faelindis to Faron’s gallery, the one where goods were stockpiled and the wargs housed. Faron supposed the layout arrangement was mostly for the benefit of the butchers, not that it mattered, for now he could observe the elven maid with ease.

Faelindis’s task was to braid leather cords used for leashes, whips, and rope. Sometimes the rotund orc that chaperoned her time outside the tiny holding cell set her to sewing pieces of the boiled leather armor for the more disposable troops, the vaguely matronly and befanged creature watching the elven maid closely to ensure she did not pocket the needle or anything else that could be improvised as a weapon. Faron found it dryly humorous, for Faelindis placidly accepted the tasks, the tremor of her hands barely noticeable. The real princess, Finduilas Faelivrin, was infamous for her lack of skill with the needle. Orodreth's daughter had been beautiful and well-tempered, exuded the dignity and wise bearing of a queen, and had been quite skilled with the harp and glaze-painting, but she could not sew a straight line and broke more bobbins and tangled her skeins than the most maliciously minded cat. Faron watched as Faelindis offered the orc matron the completed cuirasses with trembling hands. Momentarily his terror for the overlords of Angband submerged under a well of misplaced mirth, a foolhardy courage to shout and mock them. Her eyes are brown and her hair is not gold and she does not scowl at needle and thread. Your princess is counterfeit, can't you tell? It was fortunate that no other survivors of Nargothrond worked as slaves in this gallery, and if any were among the mining parties, none undid Faron’s deception.

Faron wondered if the maid thought of him as she huddled in her cell, or if she noticed how he watched her from behind the bars of the warg pen as she worked. Did she hate him for passing her off as Finduilas, or thank him? Faron wondered why it mattered what she thought.

 

---

Chapter End Notes

Ancient Roman silver mines in Britain were one of many inspirations used to flesh out the daily life and appearance of Angband. Mîm's earth-bread was probably not unique to the Petty Dwarves, and the orc brew comes from The Two Towers.

My theory for the creation of orcs is a little more Frankenstein and zombi than straight Lamarckian torture.

"He had to remember that. Serve and obey and remember who you are, and no more harm will come to you."

Read "He had to remember that. Serve and obey and remember who you are, and no more harm will come to you."

A captain of Morgoth was the one to bring Faelindis news of Túrin's death. Faron watched it happen. The elven thrall was alert to the presence of Morgoth’s captains, wary of those dark spirits who walked in bodies of orc and cruel men but held the twisted aura of commanding majesty that no mere orc, however mighty and cruel, could exude. Even though the shapes they wandered about in Angband were less burning tall, they were far more dangerous than the Balrogs. Those captains were the ones who taught the orcs their cruelty by example. Despite their inherent danger, Faron watched them for the rare updates they dropped in bragging taunts. News of the world outside Angband came from the carefree mouths of its leaders, deciphered through the distortions natural to those creatures. Silence and deflection masked defeat while victory was boasted beyond proportion. Such was the manner in which the tale of the last day of Húrin’s children retold, in short mocking sentences gloating of Doom unescaped and self-destruction and anguish. The captain of Morgoth desired the princess’s pain, so he had the elven maiden dragged from her holding cell to hear his tale. Faron slunked behind the crowd of gathering orcs, watching as the captain recounted all the rumors of how Túrin Turambar met his end. Faelindis was too afraid to reply. Only when the captain of Morgoth hit her face, the iron glove drawing blood, did she begin to weep. Finduilas’s companion until the fall, the seneschal’s daughter could have gaged the depth of Princess Finduilas’s feelings for the mortal better than any in Nargothrond. Yet her loyal heart respected the hidden pain of her princess and still aspired to hide the depth of the princess’s unrequited love. “I greatly esteemed the Adanedhel,” Faelindis whispered, speaking of her own feelings.

 

The orcs wished for the princess’s anguish, and Faron wished he could tell the maid to give them what they wanted if she was to have any hope of surviving this place. If their toy did not cry as often and loudly as they wished, it would be made to. You are Finduilas Faelivrin, he wanted to scream at her. I told them you were Faelivrin; you must be Faelivrin. Faelindis is nothing but a body to breed more orcs or feed the wargs. Faron knew the relief he felt when the brown-eyed elven maid began to fold in on herself and sob, her small body shaking in loud grief, was a twisted creation of Morgoth, as ugly a perversion on the soul as the creation of orcs.

 

“Has Húrin Thalion been told of his children’s death?” Faelindis asked, after some tears. She did not look the captain in the eye, only held her fingers against the bleeding of her face and tilted so it flowed away from her mouth and eyes. As deflection the choice was inspired. That Húrin Thalion was enthroned in a stone chair high in Angband, silent prisoner to be taunted by Morgoth, was an open secret. Too cold and stubborn for any display of grief, her open display when compared to his had provided more satisfactory sport.

 

The orcs gathered around to watch her tears as if she was some fine statute or a performing minstrel, a jeering crowd that shouted foul taunts of Túrin’s death and the fate of his sister-wife. Faelindis wept, but there was an odd current that Faron could not place to the stillness of her mouth. A strange gratefulness it was, the thrall decided, that loyal Faelindis was relieved that she could take her friend’s place and that Princess Finduilas did not learn of what happened to brave Adanedhel, at least not in this cruel manner.

 

Faron thought it also curious that the captain of Morgoth did not state how injured the dragon Glaurung was. As a former ranger of Nargothrond, he nursed a keen hatred of the golden beast that befouled his beautiful home. The mortal had perished after hunting the beast, but the tale was unclear if it was only by his own grief-stricken hand or dragon-inflicted wound. In the disjointed threads of the story, ignoring the barbs against Húrin Thalion and his kin, it sounded as if Glaurung the Golden had been seriously injured. Faron hoped. It would be fortunate indeed if the Father of Dragons sulked off to some far region of despoiled Beleriand and hid there to lick its wounds and trouble not the greater war, as Sauron pouted up in Taur-nu-Fuin. Better than to have the monster slithering through Angband’s halls, and best of all it seemed Glaurung had abandoned the ruins of fair Nargothrond.

 

Eventually Faelindis was escorted back to the holding cell. Faron returned to the kennels, carrying his own strange gratefulness that the girl was still alive, that the ruse he gave her to be the Princess Finduilas to save her from harsher tortures was intact, and that all the minions of Morgoth wanted from her today was to listen to a sad tale and pay with tears and only a little anguish and blood.

 

---

 

After the death of Türin Turambar, the orcs began to let Faelindis wander between the galleries like other thralls of Angband, ignoring her if she slept in the pens of the slaves that counted and repaired the stockpiles of armor and camp bedding. Now and then the overseers remembered she was a valuable prisoner and sent her back to the coffin-like cells at the end of the shifts, but the pressing attention of the matronly orc disappeared and her chaperones cared less what the elven maid did as long as she never wandered beyond the main tunnels. Faron feared the deception of Faelindis’s true identity had been discovered, until he realised it was because the orcs no longer expected Túrin to come to Angband and thus needed Finduilas Faelivrin to display before him.

 

Rumors had reached Angband of Finduilas's death in the Forest of Brethil, but Angband was loathe to admit if it errored, and until another captured noble of the Noldor disputed the claim, Faelindis was Faelivrin. If not Túrin, then eventually another might need the princess as bait. Not only useful, to believe the deception gratified the egos in Angband, as Faron had hoped.

 

The overseer with the ruby earring was the only one to stalk the elven maid with leering and anticipatory eyes, to grab her arms and pull at her face so she faced him as he questioned where she had been, smiling as he ran claws through her hair and demanding she be cleaned and her rags replaced. The elven maid was still counted a valuable prisoner, but it was clear what the overseer intended once the rulers of Angband no longer had any need for the princess.

 

As the orcs doled out the daily cup of their thick dark brew, syrupy and bitter, Faron shouldered his way through the line until he stood near the maid, close enough to see the sharp lines of her clavicle and a small and faded bruise at the juncture of her neck. Under the cover of the noise of the press for nourishment and emboldened by proximity, Faron mumbled, “Are you well, m’lady?”

 

Faelindis jolted a little, turning around to face him, but Faron ducked his head and repeated his question, afraid of the scene she might create and the attention they would draw.

 

“Faron?” she whispered.

 

“Osp, just Osp,” he hastily corrected. “M’lady Finduilas. Faelivrin,” he added, hoping she understood the reminder. He was only the reeking warg keeper now, as she must be the captive princess, and he lambasted his foolishness in daring to speak to her.

 

Cup in hand he scurried back to the warg kennel, cursing how his missing toes made his gait lurch. The cocky ranger Faron may have spoken to Lady Finduilas’s friend Faelindis during a banquet in Nargothrond, which he did not remember but likely happened numerous times, and it would have been inconsequential. There were always dining rooms set with food and drink in Nargothrond, and one needed only to know the chefs’ schedule to know which wings of the underground city served food. Faron and the other rangers would make a circuit of the city, following the cycle of banquets and viewing parties, listening in on recitals and performances to grab the free fruit and wine. Aglar’s cousin, the steward of Nargothrond under King Finrod, reprimanded them for the behavior, demanding that they should at least offer themselves as dancing partners or provide entertainment if they were to continue crashing parties. Faron’s singing voice, even before the torment of Angband broke his voice, had been middling poor, Aglar could only sing flat notes, and of the rest, only Galuven, his brother Gadwar, and the young ranger Ethir had truly pleasant voices. But Faron remembered dancing during a banquet party hosted by Princess Finduilas, and one of his partners might have been Faelindis. Handsome Galuven or noble Aglar with his red hair, even the other rangers like the energetically friendly Bân, were the targets of maidens’ affection and desire, but Faron had flirted with most of the unattached female population of Nargothrond and won his own admirers. None of the courting had been serious, unlike Gwindor and the princess or Bân and his handmaiden back in Menegroth. Also, Faron had the sense to do nothing more than smile to Lady Finduilas’s ladies-in-waiting, and he only ever treated the niece of King Finrod and daughter of King Orodreth with the courtesy. Whether this had been enough as to make him memorable to Faelindis he knew not.

 

Faron swallowed the last of the orc drink and went to count the wargs, checking the more docile ones for ticks and sores, petting the animals that let him touch them behind the ears as he would a well-behaved dog. When the beasts were resting, he could ignore the red eyes and misshaped muzzles and pretend they were but ugly hunting hounds. Some were nearly as large as Huan, without his intelligence or grace. His back to the rest of the cavern, he meant to be intent only on his job, but the temptation overpowered him. Turning around, Faron saw Faelindis standing on the other side of the iron grate separating the warg kennel from the rest of the large cavern.

 

“Are you well?” she asked in a soft voice. Her dark eyes flashed to his as she spoke, and once more Faron could see recognition of his old face in how the maid from Nargothrond stared at him. How she knew was a mystery, for his dark hair had gone white and brittle as a mortal’s, his once strong and tall body now skeletal and hunched, and the orcs never addressed him by his old name.

 

“Best go before they notice,” Faron hissed. The orcs were still busy watching the rest of the slave crews get their daily cup, but disaster needed only one overseer to notice Faelindis talking to him. The elven maid nodded and walked away from the pen, but for the rest of the shift she glanced to his end of the cavern, and Faron realised as often as he had been watching her work on sewing armor or wander the gallery, she had observed him.

 

With little fanfare old Húrin Thalion was released from Angband, sent to create mischief or because Morgoth had tired of the old mortal man. Faelindis was the one to tell Faron, whispering the news to him as she walked pass the warg pen once more. “We won’t be released like that,” she murmured, “but my heart is glad for him.”

 

Faron did not turn as she spoke. Mortals were to be envied, too frail for Angband, their suffering so short and swiftly ended. But the father of Túrin had suffered more than most, so he was not surprised, nor would he begrudge Faelindis’s sympathy. He thought her very kind and wondered how soon it would be when that heart withered away in grief, when would the elven maid lose all light to her eyes. If the captains of Angband continued to ignore her, she might survive.

 

Later, when Faelindis was confined to her cell for the shift, Faron debated going over and pressing his hand through the vent at the bottom of the cell, perhaps giving her a piece of cave root to eat, but he decided against it as too risky. As he fell asleep in the farthest corner of the warg pen, he curled his remaining fingers against his palm and imagined another hand holding his. In his dreams, once more wishing he was shackled in the pits of Tol-in-Gaurhoth alongside the friends he desired to have died beside, the manacled hand that reached for his before the teeth descended was pale and small. When he woke, he forgot why.

---

Chapter End Notes

Osp = Reek

"In songs, the hero always saved the maiden from the monster's castle, but life was not a song."

Read "In songs, the hero always saved the maiden from the monster's castle, but life was not a song."

Faelindis grabbed his arm in the narrow tunnels outside the depleted iron mine that led to the gallery with the warg pens, the nails of her dry fingers for a second the bite of a warg’s mouth. Faron suppressed the wish to scream. They were not sharp, and the only wetness was a damp tear which quickly dried in the grime of his naked shoulder blades. Her nose pressed against the ridge of vertebrae between his shoulders, making sniffling noises against the scar tissue of his back, and she coiled her other hand around one of his remaining fingers like a small child. “Please,” she whispered, “can you stay with me for a little while? Not for long, just some company. Someone else. Someone else that remembers, please.”

She knelt under one of the hollows where slave-miners had removed a layer of stone in search of iron, the overhang of rock above her like the jaws of a wolf. Faron slowly knelt in front of her, the loss of several toes making the balancing of the movement uncertain, afraid he might fall into her. Faelindis steadied him, supporting him from the elbows, and Faron felt shameful at how much stronger this small maid was than he whom once been a mighty ranger and captain of men. He bowed before her, hiding her in the concave of the tunnel wall, a few moments of precious privacy.

On his knees, mindful of the pain, Faron waited for Faelindis. Her hands had not left; their warmth on his body awaking the simplest of memories, that another’s touch could be gentle instead of harsh.

 

Faelindis asked him for details of memories of simple things, of the world that existed before the dungeons, before the orcs and the wargs and iron mines. In hope she petitioned him, that surely he knew how to hold onto memories and preserve them from present misery.

Hope belonged in Angband no more than poetry or song.

“I forgot what it looks like,” Faron admitted. “I remember the caves of Nargothrond. Doors that opened, there were images carved on them. I cannot tell you of what they were. I remember there was music, but I cannot tell you any of the songs. I remember the trees, that their colors changed in the seasons, but not the feel of leaves. There was the sea, where I was born, before Nargothrond. It used to be important to me. I cannot tell you any of its features. I forgot the sea in Nargothrond, long before here, and now I cannot remember any of its colors or what sounds it truly made.”

“Your eyes,” Faelindis whispered. “They have the sea in them. Everyone said so, and they’re true. They are dark and green.” She placed both small hands on his sharp cheekbones and lifted his face until their eyes met, trapping him in her intensity. “Please don’t look away from me,” she whispered, and Faron stared at the bright red of the cut on her bottom lip, the bright white of her teeth. “That is the color, the only green I have, to remind me,” she said as she tilted his face back up. “Please.”

Faron wanted to be angry at her. It helped him not, for he could not see his own face. Her eyes were only brown, her hair the color of slag rock, her skin a greyish pale, every color of the girl faded and ghostlike or dark as Angband’s mines. The only brightness was her red blood where it burst from the paper thinness of her skin, and he needed no reminder of blood’s color or taste. She smelt of blood, of iron and copper.

In the thin vise of her fingers he watched as she searched his face for some memory of the outside world. She held him as if he was a source of comfort for her, as if she drank the sea. Other survivors of Nargothrond were enslaved in the pits, others who had clearer memories of home, who did not flinch from her noises and her tears. In her face he drank misery.

The maid wept constantly, filling the slave pens with echoes, unsettling the wargs from sleep, and each time Faron silently begged for someone to cease her sobbing before the overseers came during these rest shifts when Faelindis wept and Faron listened instead of slept. He knew the Valar could not hear his prayers. The shadows of Thangorodrim blocked their holy light, and Morgoth’s jealous hold denied his prisoners the safe release of Mandos’s call. The thrall doubted the distant Powers could stop the elven maid’s tears or would be inclined to. One of them was a weeping maid as well, if he remembered his tales right, a gray lady whose tears started long before anything was born and would stop only after all were long dead. He wondered if the Weeper sounded like Faelindis, this keening and constant cry, looked like her, these swollen red eyes and cracked lips in a translucent grey shell folding in on itself like the cave shrimp and snails he used to gather in Nargothrond’s hidden pools. Perhaps the Lady of Sorrow could hear the maiden who wept as She did. If any of the Valar could be found in Angband, it would only be the Weeper.

There's salt in tears and salt in the ocean. Faron remembered his mother saying that, but he could not remember her voice or the context of this memory long buried. Perhaps it was after his brothers had died, somewhere between their funerals and the day he was sent away from her to Nargothrond. Her hair had been the color of salt, pinned in braids, and her face had been as sad as Faelindis. He had forgotten his mother, yet Faelindis's cries had restored a memory.

Faelindis stared at him with eyes of gentle pity, the sea falling with each tear. You are the sea, bringing my driftwood memories. He wanted to say this to her.

His tongue was calcified stone.

The broken thrall that had once been a brave elf named Faron, last-born son of a sea lord, had the courage only to meet the eyes of the elven maiden, to not cringe away as she used his to remember what green and the sea was.

---

Sometimes his heart whispered of escape, to chance it as Gwindor had. The slaves taken from Nargothrond’s fall had confirmed that Gwindor had escaped from Angband. Only Gwindor was meant to, only he was supposed to survive that reckless charge, to break to freedom and be tangled in Túrin’s fate. Faron knew this as if he had seen it written on the Weaver’s loom. Gwindor had been as the King had been, a noble fate entwined with that of another great hero, an awaiting Doom worthy of song. Faron had no songs, had not died with Aglar to earn them. He remembered Dyril, clever and bold, who had screamed and screamed until all of Angband heard her. There would be no escape for him.

---

“She was beautiful, wasn’t she? The princess,” Faelindis said, and Faron feared her wistfulness had damned them until he realized anyone overhearing them would think her sadness was for Princess Lúthien and not Finduilas.

“Yes,” answered Faron, for he had seen the Fairest of Elvenkind once during her captivity in Nargothrond. Lord Celegorm had been escorting Princess Lúthien through one of the lower hallways of Nargothrond, flanked by his personal guards. Faron remembered her as a patch of beauty glimpsed between bars of walking steel and leather, cold and angry and still more lovely than anyone he knew before or since, a feeling that if the entirety of her form was seen unhindered that her beauty and fury would flood the great cavern hall of Nargothrond like an exploding star. He watched as the princess was dragged like a statute to rooms more easily guarded, the tight grip of Lord Celegorm’s fingers on her bare arm as he boasted of how soon he would wed her, the angry red marring pale flesh. Faelindis carried similar bruises on her arms from the touch of the overseer with the ruby earring, a reminder that the attention of the orcs Faron could not shield her from.

Lúthien had escaped, and even for a brief moment had brought Angband itself down low.

Faelindis could not escape.

“I was not as beautiful,” Faelindis whispered, rubbing at the welts on her arms. “Or strong. Everyone called her beautiful, though. Even the mortal admired how strong and beautiful she was.”

“Aye,” Faron whispered back. He had never met Beren, on patrol when the mortal arrived and everything overturned, and he had been enslaved in Angband since the Fifth Battle, never meeting the Mormegil, the doomed mortal Túrin who Finduilas loved as she had once loved Lord Gwindor. Faelindis had met both. She had seen the outlaw Beren declare the impossible for a love that defied the foundations of the world, then seen the second mortal outlaw to come to Nargothrond and win the heart of an elven princess. Faelindis was a close observer of two high romances, audience to the composition of their lines of tragedy. Unnoticed by high doom had been the daughter of the former seneschal of Tol Sirion, Lady Finduilas’s shadow, the girl who mended the princess’s gowns and applauded when the lady played the high harp, who sat in silence in the corner of the bower as the noble and beautiful princess weeped over her twice breaking heart, and who was pulled from her lady’s side when the dragon overran Nargothrond, only able to clutch the crown.

Now Faelindis had a princess’s name, but her tragedy was no special doom that song could defeat.

---

Faron dreamt of escape. He dreamt of Gwindor running through the woods, of Dyril screaming as the orcs recaptured her. He dreamt of the songs he used to sing with Gwindor and Galuven before they rode off to the Fifth Battle, of how Lúthien and her mortal hero came to Angband and brought low its king, escaping with the aid of the Great Eagles. He dreamt of Faelindis holding his face, the feel of her fingers, and her loud cries. In his dreams he apologized for not being a hero, for not being in a song.

"She should not look to me for rescue."

Read "She should not look to me for rescue."

News of Menegroth’s fall came via the boasts of the King of Angband to his captains, Balrogs, and orcs. “My enemies do my work for me,” he was said to have crowed, his laughter echoing to the lightning-scarred rafters of his throne room. The orcs toasted to the Kinslayers’ names, laughing and praising them, and their mocking joy of what had happened drove Faron to the far corner of the warg kennels to puke out the dredges of his stomach.

After that, Faron no longer listened intently for the captains of Morgoth to grace the lower levels of Angband with their stories of the outside world.

 

---

 

Gondolin was all that was left now, Gondolin and Lord Círdan’s island across the Bay of Balar. The Dark Lord had overthrown all other elven strongholds or lands of men who opposed him. He had breached the walls of Himring and topped the towers of Eithel Sirion, turned the forests of Dorthonion into a land of nightmares and the flowers of Ard-galen and Lothlann to ash, ran packs of wargs unhindered through the Pass of Aglon into the fertile plains below and through the Forest of Brethil, placed Dor-lómin under the hand of his cruel mortal allies and stretched his oppressive rule to the sea.

Doriath with its impenetrable girdle and city of a thousand caves had been the first to stand against the might of Angband and had never been breached by Morgoth in all the centuries of war, but it had been destroyed nonetheless. Nargothrond had been found and conquered. Of the three hidden cities only Gondolin remained untouched.

It was Faelindis who first told him of the newest captive to fill the tiny holding cells for those deemed Angband’s greatest prizes.

The Lord of Angband desired the location of Gondolin and its subsequent destruction with a consuming fever that infected all his fortress. Rumors of Gondolin’s location spread through the orc population, especially after the wandering of old Húrin Thalion confirmed that the Hidden City lay east of Anach somewhere in the Encircling Mountains between Taur-nu-Fuin and the River Sirion. Patrols were sent to scour the wilderness below those peaks, though between the spider-get of Ungoliant that crept from the dreadful valley and the Great Eagles that roosted in the mountains, few returned. Faron was kept busy with new wargs brought in to replace those sent on those scouting parties. The younger beasts were unaccustomed to his scent or touch, and the remaining wargs were unsettled by the loss of familiar packmates and riders. His time was spent dodging fresh teeth and interfering with fights between the pups and the older beasts. Calls for Osp to fetch the wargs and saddle them broke into what little sleep he could grab, and he began to lose track of which animals were out on patrol and which needed to be fed or healed. At last a patrol returned with what had been so desperately sought, setting all of Angband abuzz. Faelindis crawled over to the warg pen and whispered between the iron bars as the yammering wolf-like creatures hid their talk.

“They brought in a man today, a tall elven lord, one of the Noldor with pale skin and long black hair,” she whispered. “They found him high in the mountains, all alone. Fine jewels and dark clothing. A lord of Gondolin, its prince, the nephew of the king. Had the king a nephew?”

Faron tried to recall the host of Gondolin as it appeared unlooked for on that morning of the Fifth Battle. He remembered the horns coming out of the mist from the south, from the direction of the Fens of Serech, that place where the men of Barahir had rescued him in the Fourth Battle. The unfamiliar horns brightened the spirits of the High King and filled the army with overconfident joy. The Noldor serving under King Fingon recognized the banner of his younger brother. Turgon was his name, the king of Gondolin, the one Galuven swore had been the closest friend to King Finrod. Galuven had recognized the banners emerging in the distant mist, chief among them the blue, silver, red, and gold of the king. Other banners there had been: a golden flower on a field of green, blue with a multi-hued gem, silver and crystal, green, more purples and blues and white, and several that were black, half of which had a silver harp. It was the silver harp that Faron remembered most, for he had wanted to weep when he saw it approach. The shape had been wrong, and it had not the burning torch nor the field of muted green, but it had come from the direction of the Pass of Sirion, and for a second he had believed the ghosts had returned.

“A nephew rode with the king of Gondolin, yes,” Faron said. “He had solid black armor and a matching sword, and his soldiers had plain sable armor and great two-handed axes.”

“A black sword?” Faelindis asked.

Coincidence, Faron wanted to tell her. Faelindis described the Mormegil and the reason for his name to Faron, the mortal man as lofty, beautiful, and valiant as any prince of the Noldor with a reserved bearing and cultured accent at odds with his initial wild and worn appearance. She told of how Túrin led the rangers of Nargothrond into battle with a full suit of armor and face hidden by a fierce dwarven mask, and how he wielded not the ax or bow one would expect but a sword reforged a dull black that still gleamed white at the edge. That he had pitied and befriended Gwindor after the elf’s successful escape from Angband, and he had been Gwindor’s dear companion in place of Faron and Galuven and all the rest of Nargothrond’s dead soldiers. This alone would have endeared the mortal in Faron’s heart forever.

But however unwittingly, the mortal with his black sword had carried the downfall of Nargothrond with him, and now it seemed another hidden city would fall.

If the nephew of King Turgon held out during the torture, or was overcome by the pain and rendered insensible as Faron was, then Gondolin could survive. The elven thrall knew not how likely or unlikely the possibility was, for the Dark Lord’s desire for the secret of Gondolin’s exact location and its defenses equaled the lust he had for the Silmarils. To withstand torture was not impossible, but it was not something withstood by will alone, and the dark Vala himself would bring his maddening gaze to bear. The eyes of Morgoth could break the minds of Maiar. Faron pitied the nephew of Turgon.

From the number of shifts that passed, Faron would say it had been at most a month when Faelindis updated him on the prisoner. She was being escorted by a pair of smaller orcs and had time only to say one hurried sentence as their paths crossed in the tunnels that led between the two galleries. “He has been released,” the elven maid whispered. Faron made no outward sign that he had heard her, praying the orcs had not noticed. Why, he wanted to ask her, but knew the answer.

From then on the frenetic activity of Angband did not lessen, but it did become more orderly, more scheduled and assured in its focus. Fewer scouting patrols were sent, so the burden of his workload as warg keeper lightened. The elven thralls that worked the mines and those in the smithies, however, were driven harder by the overseers as quotas expanded. Angband prepared once more for an outside undertaking, as the Balrogs blithely called it. The need for iron increased as a great campaign demanded not just more orcish soldiers but more weapons and armor to outfit them. Faron could see the faint illumination of the miners’ blue lanterns as they worked every shift, pressed beyond their usual grueling pace, the whip-cracks of the overseers echoing up through the tunnels and galleries. The hammers of the bloomeries echoed like drums from several galleries over, the pounding of fresh steel like the excited heart of Angband. Overworked furnaces could not handle the demanding load, and more accidents occurred, the hammers stopping as the slaves frantically fixed the machinery. No disasters would be enough to stop Angband’s great undertaking. New weapons were commissioned and crafted, giant siege vehicles to overcome the many walls of Gondolin and its seven gates. New crews to man these siege weapons were needed, and there was fierce infighting among the orcs for the honor to be part of these new machines. Those not chosen to man the siege engines lobbied for the divisions under the Balrog captains, none more illustrious and desired than that under the command of Gothmog. The orcs were concerned with rumors of which company would be the vanguard, and their gossiping was almost painfully familiar to Faron. Back when he had been a ranger of Nargothrond instead of the warg keeper thrall, such concerns had been his world as well. Among most elven slaves the focus instead was on how hopeless it would be to send a warning to Gondolin yet praying that during these long years someone recognized the unwilling treachery the city faced. This powerlessness of the thralls of Angband was an old sorrow. They braced for the news of the city’s fall and for the inevitable influx of new slaves. Among the miners were those would could recall the aftermath of the Nirnaeth Arnoediad with the influx of slaves from Himring and Eithel Sirion and how it had been the same after all the great named battles. The survivors of the sack of Nargothrond knew best what Gondolin could expect. Faelindis no longer wandered the tunnels and galleries but sat hunched in a corner when not confined to her tiny cell. She did not sob, but her hands sometimes reached up to feel the base of her throat or back of her neck. Though he wished for the courage to, Faron did not leave his pen to speak to her.

Finally preparations were deemed complete. It seemed if half of all Angband was to be sent to destroy the Hidden City, not just orcs and Balrogs but dragons. Glaurung’s slithering offspring had matured and were ready to overthrow Gondolin as their draconic sire once overthrew Nargothrond. The orcs of Angband cheered them off in parade-like crowds as the beasts marched through the wide corridor, the dim torches glittering off their gold and vermillion scales. After the dragons came the smoking war machines, the covered siege weapons designed to look like the scaly monsters complete with fanged mouths to hold the battering rams. Then more orcs followed, chanting and singing their vile songs, yellow eyes bright and excited.

The overseer with the ruby earring, the one who gave Faron a new name along with the job to tend the wargs, who leered possessively at Faelindis and left bruises across her neck and shoulders and arms, was staying in Angband. No trained fighter, his talents laid in terrorizing helpless slaves, so despite Faron’s dearest wishes, the overseer did not join any of the crews with the terrifying new metal siege constructs or fighting hoards under the command of Balrogs.

After the armies left, Angband possessed a terrible quiet. Such thick and dreaded anticipation was not the uneasing waiting that had gripped Nargothrond all those years ago, for there had been uncertaining and hope in that waiting tension.

Faron had no desire to join the whispered speculations of the attack on Gondolin. Distant kin on his mother’s side had joined the following of King Turgon back when he lived in Vinyamar, before Faron was sent to Nargothrond, back when the rumors of the truth had not reached them to show the rotten wood under the newly arrived Noldor’s gilt. The people of Vinyamar decamped to the mysterious Gondolin only after Faron left, but he would recognize no one from that city. The strangers who slaved to work the forge bellows or toiled hundreds of feet below him to bring iron ore to those forges compelled only a cursory sympathy. He would waste nothing on far-off doomed Gondolin. He could not afford to.

A month perhaps, maybe more, and the victorious divisions of orcs and the preening dragons returned, glutted on blood and destruction and fat with glory. Some were leaner than others, for the most interest concerning their return was for the whispered story of Gothmog’s death in one of the plaza’s fountains. This was a terrible embarrassment for the greatest of Morgoth’s captains, though not as shameful as Sauron’s defeat.  At least two other Balrogs met an unfortunate end, judging by who returned to Angband. One of the companies sent to guard the escape routes in the surrounding mountains could not capture the fleeing refugees, and had perished to the last, even their leader. That Balrog had to return to the iron fortress as a disembodied shadow, cringing in shame. This failure infuriated the ruler of Angband, for it was eventually established that the king’s daughter and young grandson had been among the successfully escaped. Had she been captured, Angband would finally have a true golden-haired princess of the Noldor. Faron’s gratefulness for Idril’s safety had nothing to do with compassion for the daughter of Turgon and everything with ensuring that the counterfeit Faelivrin remained the most valuable prize of noble blood.

The fire-breathing serpents with their poisonous reek returned with barely a scratch to their scales. One had been wounded by a mortal man in Gondolin, a cousin of Túrin who had fought Glaurung if rumors were to be trusted. As with Eithel Sirion, the dragons had a delightful time toppling over the stone towers of the Noldor, chortling at the crash of masonry as a child would knocking over sand castles at a beach. They were displeased that no elven fortress or city remained in Beleriand for them to wreck.

Descriptions of the city the orcs destroyed were for the most part limited to the seven gates, which orcs had hacked pieces off to carry back home as souvenirs, or of the falling towers. Of the white stone they complained, and how the rubble made maneuvering the war machines difficult. Some treasure they hid away instead of bringing back to Angband where the greedy and jealous overseers would have made acquisitions of the spoils. Sprawling brawls erupted for several weeks over treasure that had been ported to Angband, especially helmets. The orcs tore wings off some of the purloined helmets and fought fiercest for those with tall spikes, using them to headbutt and gore one another. Oddly they found this hilarious, though the watton violence only frightened Faron, for the brawls agitated the wargs and were hard to avoid.

Slaves aplenty the army dragged back to Angband, hundreds with the bright Tree-lit eyes that meant Noldor and thus some skill with metal or stone. New workers had not been the primary goal of the invasion of Gondolin, but the elven war captives were brought anyway. The prisoners were those that had tried to flee by the normal route. None knew how Princess Idril and her family had escaped. The torturers were busy. Sounds of the prisoners’ cries and the overseers reopening the holding pens brought too many memories of Nargothrond’s destruction and aftermath. In the warg’s holding pen hid the beasts’ keeper, disfigured hands covering his ears in futile effort to block the screams.

With the fall of Gondolin, the king that sat many levels above in the throne room of Angband laughed once more, for now he saw his victory as complete. He needed only to wait for the remaining stragglers clinging to the southmost shores and forests of Beleriand, those few elves and men he had not yet enslaved or killed, to wash out to sea or be slain by his free-roaming armies. Not even the Silmaril missing from his iron crown troubled him. Morgoth’s triumphant elation sank into the stones of Angband and leached away the last of hope.

 

---

 

The settlement at the mouth of the River Sirion, last mainland holdout of men and elves against the dominion of Morgoth, was destroyed and most of its people slain. No orcs had done the terrible deed, but now the forces of Angband could claim all of Beleriand. The thrall that cleaned the warg pen barely noticed.

 

---

 

Once Faelindis stopped him on the way to cleaning the pens and said, “I have lived more of my life a slave in this place than outside.” Faron wondered how she retained the ability to count the years, and wished he would have told her that here in Angband none of the elven thralls were living, and even in death their spirits would not escape it.

The orcs dragged her away, and Faron stared down as she was pulled into a new cell lest he be linked to the princess in their attentions any more than he was already. He had wargs to feed and their teeth to dodge, and he could not save her. His lie when she first arrived in Angband had not saved her.

 

---

 

Faron stopped dreaming of escape.

---

Chapter End Notes

Descriptions of Gondolin's banners and armament come from the Unfinished Tales.

 

From "Of Tuor and the Fall of Gondolin":

“But Morgoth thought that his triumph was fulfilled, recking little of the sons of Fëanor, and of their oath, which had harmed him never and turned always to his mightiest aid; and in his black thought he laughed, regretting not the one Silmaril that he had lost, for by it as he deemed the last shred of the people of the Eldar should vanish from Middle-earth and trouble it no more.” [Silm 293]

"A sword, that's all I ask. Let me die as Theon, not as Reek."

Read "A sword, that's all I ask. Let me die as Theon, not as Reek."

The armies were drawing close to Angband now. The captains of Morgoth could not deny it.  

Almost fifty years it was since word first trickled down from those closest to the Lord of Angband that the worst fear of its master had come to pass. The Valar across the sea had departed from their thrones to land upon the shores of Middle-earth and once more meant to drag Morgoth from his iron throne. The tunnels of Angband shook in perpetual tremors, like a living being facing the cold, the entire fortress feeling the small vibrations from his fear. The Dark Lord cursed the half-elven children of the lines of Turgon and Lúthien who had escaped with his stolen Silmaril to beg succor from the only force that could defeat him. The Army of the Valar had arrived, arrayed in gleaming battalions led by Eönwë, the mightiest of arms in all of Arda, the one whom no Balrog dared to face. The orcs that roamed the wasteland of Beleriand now fled back to Angband fearfully screaming of new elves with burning eyes, ones clad in white with spears that reached out and stabbed like sunlight made steel, swift and light as air who sang and laughed in glee as they outran the swiftest wargs and plucked the vampire bats from the skies. The White Elves, the orcs called them, the ones who came with skills and songs given by the Valar, who could sing the earth and air to turn against Morgoth’s forces. With them came the followers of Aulë, the remaining Noldor under their golden-haired king, and their weapons were sharper than steel and spat fire and light. Great hounds arrived with the Army of the Valar, packs of giant dogs each the equal of the mighty and feared Huan, and they howled as they chased the wargs back to their dens. Even the spider-get of Ungoliant, once firmly entrenched in the Nan Dungortheb, were ousted from their lair. No orc would willingly face what even the spiders feared.

From their southern island base the Army of the Valar marched north. Their advance was not the lightning-quick of when the Noldor first arrived or the short-term victories of the Union of Maedhros. The Army of the Valar came like a glacier, slow and methodological. Like a glacier their progress could not be halted or slowed, and once each inch of territory was firmly taken to scour it clean of Morgoth's touch, the forces of Angband could not steal it back. The irony was not appreciated by the King of Angband. Nor could his usual tactics of sowing division by treachery or playing upon fissures in the command structure of his enemies work. The servants of the Valar knew his tricks, and the Vanyar looked down upon him in disdain. The dead Sindar and Noldor like King Finrod restored and healed in Mandos and the Gardens of Lórien had shared their knowledge before the army departed. The troops landing in Beleriand for the first time knew what to expect from Morgoth, or deduced all but his last ploy, and had little fear of him. The laughter of Tulkas came with the vibrations of their marching feet, that laughter Morgoth vainly blocked from his memories of the first time he had been pulled from his throne. Vengeance and a glacier's fury propelled the sunlight lances of the White Elves, the swords of their allies among the Noldor and Second-born, and the battle songs of the Hounds of Oromë.

In the struggle between the efforts to cleanse the earth of Morgoth’s taint and free the people and land of his corrosive evil against his desperation to retain his control over land and inhabitants, it was the earth itself that lost. The sea was swallowing Beleriand. As a son of Brithombar and a high lord of the Falathrim, Faron could take pride in how the ocean had never been truly befouled by Morgoth, and it was that ocean which swept in after Morgoth’s efforts to destabilize the earth beneath his enemies’ feet. A countermove leaching away the Dark Vala’s power, the sea ate away the essence Morgoth had poured into the very stone of conquered Beleriand. Over the Ered Lómin and lapping at the foothills of the Ered Wethrin, crashing in waves against the Ered Gorgoroth and flooding through the Pass of Aglon came the sea, and soon the Gasping Dust would be thirsty no more. Before the ocean advanced the spears and swords and songs of power of the Valar and their elven and mortal allies. Angband was besieged by a far mightier army than before, one that offered him no hope of escape.

It was unspoken in the bowels of Angband what would happen when the fortress was finally breached, but the orcs and their thralls knew exactly what the other had planned. The orcs walked armed and armored through the tunnels and high galleries of Angband, ready to slaughter the slaves the second that all hope of holding off the Army of the Valar was lost, for the Dark Lord wished to make a pyrrhic victory out of any triumph and deny his enemies the captives.

Only the workforce needed to supply iron and other essentials to outfit his failing armies prolonged Morgoth’s final plan.

The elven thralls, especially those in the mines and forges with access to tools, vowed that they would not die defenseless. Against the orcs they had not even the outnumbering press of bodies as advantage, but victory in a fight was not the intent. Their souls would not be withheld from the safety and healing of Mandos no matter how or where they died now, though the thralls wished to enter as themselves. A blade in hand fighting against orcs seemed to them the most attractive and definite statement.

For his own defiance, Faron did not feel as courageous. The missing fingers stole the dexterity his hands would need to wield any makeshift weapon with confidence. The elapsed time of more than a century enslaved in Angband had stolen his confidence to fight. But finding a way to stop the orcs from murdering him when the iron prison was finally breached enticed his stray moments of quiet thought. He toyed with the idea of setting the wargs loose in the tunnels. It was possible to fling open the large iron gate that divided the wargs from the rest of the gallery, enough to chivy out the entire pack. Then between his own efforts to over-excite the beasts and the maddening effects of the high tension and panic that the gallery, and indeed all of Angband, would be under during that final breach of the stronghold, the wargs would in their frenzy gladly savage every orc that their teeth could reach. That in such an event the maddened wargs would also attack any slaves, including Faron, was the flaw which forestalled his plans. Such action would kill more elves than orcs, and he refused to be a Kin-slayer, to sink even lower than the prideless wretch Angband had molded him into. In all likelihood the wargs would force through the iron fencing of their kennels to run rampant through the tunnels of Angband whether the thrall released them or not. Already the high tensions and fears that quivered Angband prompted the beasts to quarreling amongst themselves, each fresh tremor upsetting the most ill-tempered and sensitive among them to pouncing on one another or cringing with the high-pitched keening of a frightened dog, which then invited the other wargs to snap and fight. The only way to ensure the wargs did not run mad would be to kill the beasts, and Faron had no manner in which to do so, no sharp blade or strength of arm or even poison to eliminate the wolf-like monsters. He did not love the beasts, but the wargs had been under his care for so long that a chain of strange affection bound them to his heart. He feared them as only one who knew intimately the sharpness of their teeth and foulness of their breath, but with that fear was the comfort and pity of such close familiarity. The wargs were as doomed as the orcs and elven thralls. Osp will miss his wargs, he thought in a moment of whimsy and self-loathing. When the Army of the Valar finally breached the dungeons of Angband, they would find his body beside the fallen forms of the wargs. Faron did not mind, for that was how Princess Lúthien and Huan had discovered King Finrod and the others, Aglar and Gadwar and all of Faron’s dear and deceased companions. That would be fitting.

During the final assault that was coming, the only guarantee would be chaos and bloodshed, ending in death.

Faron hoped not for escape.

Dyril has almost escaped. Clever and bold, she had taken keys off a sleeping guard, had made for the access tunnels that opened high on Thangorodrim’s cliffs, had almost escaped. She had fought when the orcs cornered her, had thrown rocks and clawed at them and had screamed and screamed when the Balrogs lashed her with burning whips. Dyril had almost escaped, and then died horribly for it.

Faron hoped for no escape for himself, except that which Mandos would offer and the promised reunions found there, but still he feared death and the pain before it. Foolish after the torture he had survived in Angband, both the everyday torment and the fractured memories of the questioners’ whips and knives from his first days, but Faron could not deny to himself that death was still something he shied from welcoming. Under those sharp thin flaying knives he had longed for it, but years had dulled that desire. No other path to Mandos and the safety of the Westernmost Shore was there. Hope of escape he would not wish for. And if he continued to tell himself that, eventually the thrall would believe.

As a distraction, he watched the flow of water through the narrow chute that supplied the wargs. The channel was an arm-span in width, but of unknown depth, as the noxious smelling drinking water was not clear. Pure water would not be found in Angband. But the flowing water intrigued Faron, for in all his long years he had not discovered from where the underground wellspring came and through what pipings was the water carried to emerge in the trough for the wargs before disappearing through the wall onto another section of the prison. If the warg keeper had to carry buckets of drinking water to and from the kennels, the task have been more onerous and frankly impossible for Faron with his maimed hands and feet. The clever piece of architectural engineering assisted his duties, but as the elf stared at the water lapping against the cutaway at the bottom of the wall where the water disappeared, he wondered at its destination.

He wondered if he dove into the water and let its flow carry him away not only where the water courses might lead him but if the pipes through the walls of Angband would be too narrow or if there was another section that uncovered soon enough to prevent him from drowning. The only possible answer to any of these would be drowning and a further entrapment in the bowels of Angband, but Faron thought of the underground pools of Nargothrond. One ran along the floor of that cave chamber before sinking into a natural well that resurfaced in the hills behind Nargothrond as a spring feeding one of the River Narog's many small tributaries. Ethir paddled a dugout canoe up and down the long chamber, dodging stalactites, during his free hours and gave boating lessons to Tacoldir, whose family had been pin makers in Tirion and thus had no experience with watercraft. Ethir likened the cave spring to the Falls of Sirion south of the Aelin-uial, the Meres of Twilight of southern Doriath which battled the Fens of Serech for the top position of Beleriand’s mistiest marshland that one would not transverse without a guide and weatherproof supplies. Nine leagues the River Sirion traveled beneath the hills before resurfacing, and Ethir loved to describe the specially-crafted barrels the march-wardens used to send trade goods through the subterranean tunnel to the settlements in the willow forest of Nan Tathern rather than porting them over the Andram. Ethir, whose family came from Nan Tathern, knew well the system, for it had been how the young ranger came to Nargothrond, escorting his family’s barges up the River Narog to trade with King Finrod’s new city before completing the last leg of this widened trade route overland to Menegroth in the east. The young ranger had unfinished plans to see if he could send a small weighed barrel through Nargothrond’s sinkhole to where the stream reappeared, but never did before the Doom demanded precedence. Faron would guess that if anything was sent through this channel in the warg pen, it would emerge in the sluice for the iron forge waterwheels rather than any secret river.

Gwindor had escaped, at cost of a hand, through some side tunnel in the mines that was long since discovered and blocked off, and Faron was no miner. Dyril had stolen keys to escape the holding pens and fled through the orc tunnels, only to be recaptured as she reached the surface, and Faron had his doubts. The cruel character of the hands that ruled Angband would find more use out of an unsuccessful escape attempt by which they could display the penalty and futility of trying to resist or flee. Clever Dyril, bold and bait, was deceived by a mind more clever and vicious than hers. Escape was a trap. Faron would wait for death, and when his spirit found Mandos, he would search its halls for Ethir and ask if there were streams that flowed besides the Weaver’s looms. He would embrace Aglar and his kings, noble Finrod and Orodreth, if they had not already been released, and speak to Gwindor, who would finally have a companion that understood all the torment they had endured. There he would learn the indisputable fate of Princess Finduilas, and Faelindis would be free to claim her true name.

Eyes panic-wide, Faron turned from his study of the water to the view through the iron grating into the gallery beyond. Faelindis, the thought hit like a short arrow bolt embedding in his chest, what would happen to the elven maid when Angband fell? Indecision and need trapped his movements, and he stood half-turned and ill-balanced on his maimed feet, staring at the gate that separated the warg pen from the rest of the cavern. This place would be dangerous when Angband fell, but was there any place that would not? Was there any place for the maid to wait and hide, or at least a choice of quick and relatively painless death? And of the overseer with the ruby earring, nothing restrained the orc now, with the war near its end and the Army of the Valar amassed under Thangorodrim’s shadow, their siege weapons and Maiar on Angband’s front gate.

As if his panicked realization had been a premonition, though the gifts of foresight had belonged to Craban and King Finrod and while rumored among the family of Faron’s mother had never manifested for him, a terrible screech echoed down the main hallway to the gallery. A warning cry from one of the shadow creatures, Faron thought, and the temperature of air backflow from the tunnels rose as the sounds of sizzling and popping flames echoed in reply. Heavy pounding thuds in concert with those firestorm sounds meant the remaining Balrogs had awoken and were on the move. More screeching cries as if from the throat of some malignant bird ricocheted off the walls, and the orcs interrogated each other about orders and procedures, uncertain of what had spurred the Balrogs to hurry. It was not a full call to arms and stations, or the long awaited panic to prelude the end. That, everyone knew, would begin once Morgoth stood -or was forcibly pulled- from his iron throne, and the tremors that shook throughout Angband had not stilled to signal that event. The wargs stirred, those sleeping springing awake, those eating or drinking from the trough stopped, and those that had been barking and howling paused with pricked ears. The pack awaited some signal, their fur bristling, tails stiff. It was not the excitement of knowing a chance to chase was here, for the beasts were too quiet, too uncertain. Prudently Faron moved to the kennel side gate, slow enough to not add to their attention.

And then Faron finally heard that faint noise that had stirred the captains of Angband. Trumpets and horns he had never heard before, their sound though blocked and distorted by several tons of stone was not too dissimilar to the horns that had voiced when the Noldor first arrived to relieve the siege of Brithombar or that morning of the Nirnaeth Arnoediad. A richer and more eerie sound to be able to reach through the solid and polluted earth of Thangorodrim, these were the terrible horns that disregarded the ears of the material world.

The oldest warg stood behind Faron, panting through its stained yellow teeth, ears pinned back as if wishing it could block the divine sounds. It made no move to stop Faron from unlatching the tender's gate and crawling out of the pen, but it panted and watched. The younger wargs were beginning to howl, mournful calls that irritated and unnerved the orcs. If the pack continued to howl for more than a few minutes the overseer would come to castigate the warg tender for not keeping the beasts quiet, so Faron had a short grace period before he could expect the whip. The howls were not yet piercing, nor had the entire pack joined. The red eyes of the oldest warg implored him, a softening fear in those blood-colored eyes.  Pity’s poison squeezed Faron’s chest.

“Maybe I’ll see you in Mandos,” he whispered to the warg, wondering what had prompted him. “Yavanna shall find your spirit and heal it, and the Hunter. One day those horns won’t frighten you; you’ll run proper and free like you were supposed to.”

On that parting, Faron re-latched the gate and began to hobble in search of Faelindis.

"We flew."

Read "We flew."

Faron found Faelindis at the mouth of the leftmost tunnel that entered the lower gallery. She was burdened by a load of thin gorgets, half of which she had looped around her arms so the frail maiden could carry all the pieces of armor. For the last few work shifts her task had been to bring finished armor pieces from the forges to the stockpiles. Sometimes Faelindis would hide next to the stack of metal curiasses and wait for Faron so they could share a meal of the white cave root, comparing what they knew of the advancing army. That pile had been the first place Faron had checked. Back in the gallery, one of the overseers was barking to the orcs milling around to start suiting up for battle, and Faron knew the last place Faelindis needed to be was surrounded by orcs keying themselves up for a desperate fight. “Leave those,” he hissed. He tugged at her arm, spilling the metal gorgets to the ground, and pulled her back into the tunnel. The ricochet of metal on stone was lost in the high din of orcs demanding orders and the locations of their troops.

“Faron, what are you doing?” Faelindis asked, her steps unsteady as she twisted back to stare at the discarded pile of metal rings. “Please, let go. We’ll be in trouble. The overseer will hurt us. I have to return those to their rightful spot or the overseer will whip me. He promised to. And you will get in trouble for talking to me. Faron, don’t. Stop, please, before they hurt you.” Her second hand drifted over to the hand that was tugging at her wrist, gently feeling the empty spaces where the flaying knives had removed his fingers.

 

“Quiet before they notice us,” Faron said, and Faelindis started to cry. Her sobs were not loud; the howling wargs and shouting orcs masked the sound, but Faron wanted to scream in frustration. “No longer safe back there,” he hissed. He had already dragged her halfway up the tunnel to the higher gallery, and the echoes of marshalling orcs dogged behind their feet. The hammers of Angband’s forges were beginning to peter out, and the new hammerfall sounds of orcs bellowing the start of their fighting chants replaced it. The drumbeats of Doom, Faron thought, and noticed how rapid was his heartbeat in comparison. Faelindis wept, but her hands griped his tight, and she followed him through the tunnel without further compliant.

Their passage through the tunnels was not completely unnoticed by other slaves and orcs, though the orcs were mostly preoccupied by disjointed summons and the screeching call. None made moves to halt or question Faron or found Faelindis’s tears remarkable enough to warrant notice. Yet. “Taking the princess back to her cell,” Faron shouted. He hoped no one heard the panic in his voice and realized this was a buff to ward off questions or intervention.

The upper gallery teemed over with confused bodies, aimless orcs entering and exiting the wide cavern searching for their cohorts and leaders, needing that reassurance of comrades-in-arms and instructions to follow. They were not the only ones who would have appreciated such comfort.

For a second Faron considered the coffin-like cells for valuable prisoners, how seamlessly they blended into the wall of the gallery. After the battle, when the orcs rushed around to murder the last prisoners of Angband, would those cells be overlooked? Two bodies could not fit inside such small cells, and the prospect of separation from Faelindis now that he had found her was unthinkable.

He looked elsewhere.

“Where does that side-exit lead? Has it been blocked off?”

Faron’s pull was rougher than it should have been, and the ghost of guilt heightened the awareness of her skin, how he could feel its blood vessels and tendons and bird-brittle bones. A maiden pulled up from river mud, made of skin soft so that every touch imprinted bruises dark, and Faron, afraid she would wash away, had found her to be the dirt beneath his fingernails. He did not apologize for the force of his grip. Under his remaining fingers he could feel her fast-racing pulse.

Faelindis stuttered and hummed. “The Kinslayer. Maedhros One-handed, that’s the route that led to where he was displayed, hung up high on the side of the mountain.” Focusing on explaining what she remembered of overheard gossip helped Faelindis settle her nerves. Her voice steadied. “The orcs complained about that, how hard it was to carry food and check to see he was still there. There is a network of tunnels that led up to the spot, then some span of a narrow ledge. But it’s no good, the tunnels go through one of the orcs’ main halls first. The guards said so, that some of the time they were sent to check on the prisoner they would only go halfway and visit their companions or bed. Later they would lie to the overseers that they went outside. I think that’s why Prince Fingon was able to save him, because the orcs were lazy.”

Euphoric hope cooled. Faron mentally plotted the course lain by Faelindis’s explanation. If they used that route as an escape, and successfully sneaked past the living quarters of the orcs, there was no space at the final destination, only a ledge with some rusted chain and maybe a severed hand, like all they found of Gwindor when he escaped. Faron knew that path would not work. But the darkness of the small doorway beckoned. The small side tunnels of Angband, the ones that were not dressed stone widened and polished for the Balrogs and dragons to parade through, branched and twined like tree roots. And the side passage was no longer in use, not for centuries. Perhaps there was a fork in the tunnels before it looped over to where the orcs were kept.

“There,” Faron said, and was surprised at the surety of his voice.

On the far side of the large cavern with inward sloping walls, an elderly orc, perhaps not an orc at all but one of Morgoth’s captains, a lesser Maia, was shouting for the orcs to line up. He was attempting to inject some order into the milling crowd, snarling for them to forget their usual companies as the various divisions of the horde were scattered due to the panic and disorder flooding Angband. Fierce rivalries between the orc divisions had fueled many of the brawls, and to share a work crew or fighting company was more important that what passed for blood ties among the creatures. To create an ad hoc troop from random bystanders invalidated the only important ties among the orcs that was not fear of their masters or enemies. As the gathered orcs strenuously quarreled with the captain, affronted that someone not their leader was trying to force them to follow orders -and that the captain was no towering Balrog with fiery whip so no fear overpowered this orcish inclination for insubordination- Faron nearly laughed. The hateful nature that Morgoth had imbued in all his creations was aid instead of hindrance. No orc noticed Faron or Faelindis on this side of gallery. Slowly Faron tugged her over to the partially-blocked entrance to the unused access tunnel, staring at her darker eyes until a silent understanding filled them, and as the orcs shouted such charming retorts as “Who are you to order me around?” and “The White Elves take you if you try to force me to work with those shits from Cavern Thirteen!” and “I’ll gut you if you dare look at me again!” Faron climbed into the tunnel with Faelindis quick behind.

Ducking behind the pile of refuse that half-blocked the entrance, hands cupped over Faelindis’s mouth, though the gesture was pointless for the maid was as silent as him and understood the need why, Faron listened. With no change in the squabble outside, he assumed their actions continued to be unnoticed, and rising from his crouch he pulled them both deeper into the forgotten passageway.

All they needed was for this narrow side-tunnel to branch off before reaching that cavern for the orcish living quarters, and Angband was riddled with cracks in its walls, as hollow as bone or igneous stone. Fool hope or true hope, the elven thrall could not say. There were no torches or light in the tunnel once they had walked beyond the first two turns, and Faron knew Faelindis followed him only by the sound of her bare feet scuffing against the stone louder than his unbalanced steps and by the faint pressure and heat of her hands hooked around his wrist. The tunnel began to slope up, so Faelindis shifted her grip from his wrist to the frayed cord Faron used as a belt so his hands were free to brace against the walls and to pull his body up and over the rock shelf. Then he used his hand to help pull her up. The shelf wobbled under their weight, and Faron wondered if it was not some unintentional obstruction caused by the tremors and small quakes that shook Angband. Then again the orcs had a greater aptitude for navigating the dark tunnels, so perhaps such a steep step would have not hindered their tasks. The tunnel quickly narrowed after this point. There was a fine layer of dust, and coupled with the silence and darkness, it promised that this side passage had been abandoned and forgotten.

The longer the two elves climbed the fainter grew Faron’s hope that an exit before the rumor-promised hall of orc living quarters would appear, and he almost halted their climb, willing to chance hiding in the tunnel until the tremors of Angband ceased to signal its final fall. But that which was longed for did appear.

Faron could feel where the narrow tunnel branched off, a gap in the wall. No air moved through, but when he stretched out his arm he felt no resistance. “Here,” he whispered, breathing through a smile no one could see. There was no illumination in the tunnel, nor would he have chanced it, but he pulled Faelindis after him. “We’ll find our way out but yet,” he promised.

Faron would not fault Faelindis’s unspoken skepticism of that optimistic assertion, not that she voiced any doubts, for his true feelings would concur. But she patted his shoulder and did not turn back. Together they squeezed through ever narrowing passages, lost in the cracks behind Angband’s walls. Never had Faron felt more rat-like.

Sound was muffled in the dark creavses, without even the echo of the Valar’s horns, that divine sound that discarded the boundaries of the natural world to pierce through layers of corrupted stone. The rocks were oily to the touch, the floors and ceilings as uneven as the walls. On some unknown instinct Faron crawled through these fissures, hands groping to find openings to new passageways halfway up the walls or on odd corners. Some sections of the tunnel narrowed so that even as skeletal thin as they were to proceed involved a tight squeeze. Only the drive to continue climbing and the omnipresent quiet propelled him forward, even when he was positive they were circling back around. Faron was unsure if they were descending or ascending, or how long they had travelled. Often the necessity of their malnourished bodies and the long journey through uneven passages imposed a period of resting. How long these rests were until fearful urgency bade them crawl onward was as impossible to determine as the distance or spatial orientation.

A few hours or a few days, Faron could not say, yet their spelunking was nearly at an end.

For a while now Faron had felt the pull of gravity that suggested upward movement, and the rocks felt slightly chill, as if they were moving away from the great furnaces that built Thangorodrim. He had erred each time the tunnels had branched to choose the colder air. Now Faron knew on the part of faith he remembered the king labeling estel instead of amdir that they were almost free of Angband. Maybe it was the lessening pressure of Morgoth’s presence in the deep recesses of his mind, as if pond scum was being scooped out of a spring by small hands.

Behind him Faron heard Faelindis take a deep inhale of air, and when he copied her the taste of fresher air, sharp with the cold but lighter of coal dust, filled his lungs.

The tunnel opened up in a narrow crevice in the earth. Faron and Faelindis had to shuffle sidewise, scraping chests and backs against the uneven rock face, worried they might become stuck if the gully squeezed any tighter. Weak sunlight stroked the tops of their heads for the first time in decades, and they could see the sides of the crevice and how their shadows inched across the stone. Hot tears poured from the corners of Faron’s eyes, and he knew not if they were a product of stress from their escape or just relief due to daylight.

Eventually the canyon splayed out into a small mouth, hidden by the jagged stones around it. Faron wished for the freedom to scream in relief, yet knowing a battle was around him and that, while judging from the quick glance up and around them that the pair of escaped elves had emerged outside Angband in the rocky foothills to the north, they were still in Morgoth’s territory. Most siege lines were to the south, and as the rock face around them seemed deserted, nor could they see any causeways and deep craters from Fingolfin’s duel, north and its foothills was Faron’s best estimate of where they were. Awkwardly hoisting his body onto one of the taller rock spires and turning around, he saw the triple prong of Thangorodrim looming behind him, close enough that he could not see the tops of the peaks. But they were not on the slopes of the smoking mountain itself, having found by chance the underground path that led away from the fortress. Not far enough, but they had not emerged in the middle of some orc battalion. Faron and Faelindis had reached the surface after all, a feat he had privately despaired of. All they needed now was to continue walking and crawling away from Angband, and praying that their luck continued to hold and they that avoid any patrols of orcs, werewolves, or flying spies. Faron looked down at his mangled feet, at the gaps where the torturers had taken his toes. Faelindis obstructed his view by placing her hands on either side of his head and lifting it up to meet her eyes. There were fresh tears in those dark brown eyes, but for once they came from relief. The tips of her white teeth covered her cracked bottom lip, restraining a tremble. “Almost free,” Faron whispered. “Let us continue on, before any foul thing finds us. The Army of the Valar has come. Soon the Iron Crown shall fall. We need but survive ‘til then.”

The soft hands that cupped his head trembled, but the lips around those white teeth were curving into a smile.

 

---

 

Any steps carved into the path had the appearance of natural rock fissures, their scaling proportions irregular and oddly spaced. In all likelihood the path itself was more the intention of an escape route than a premade feature. Faron wished an escape trail, so his eyes were painting one for them. It was but another folly in a long chain of them, but the elf accepted it. His decisions had always been delusions and folly, and this last gasp to save the maid and himself from death was no different. Perhaps this was a path, and freedom at the end. Faelindis followed behind him, scrambling up and over the uneven steps. She trusted him. For that trust Faron climbed.

The air held no water and was cold enough that had it moisture a rind of ice would have settled like a thick shellac over their lips, crystalline and mummified. The wind blew against their backs, sooty with black dust off the bulk of Thangorodrim, oddly warm like cinders off a dying furnace. Faron did not turn back to look at the peaks. They were still trembling, sending the mountains around them to shake. For fifty years the peaks above Angband had smoked and belched ash and fire, but there were no eruptions at the moment, only the tremors, and any lava Thangorodrim might spew would be directed south towards the armies. So did Faron hope. The landscape north of the Iron Prison was mountainous without signs of growing things, no dead trees or animal tracks, only a fine layer of ash that covered their feet as they climbed. The only landmarks to gauge the path were near-indistinguishable stone outcroppings. Some were light gray, but most of the stone was iron-black and glossy as polished glass.

Faron could still hear the battle waged on the other side of Angband. As long as the path was taking them further from those sounds, they had hope.

The shaking of the earth was growing stronger. Faron wondered how fierce the tremors were inside Angband now, to be this violent so far away.

The foothills around Angband through which they fled were not towering high but felt greater thanks to the half-finished feeling of the cracked stones. Without a topsoil or growing plants to soften the stone, the hills looked nothing like those around Nargothrond. Objectively the hills were closer in height and shape to those around Nargothrond than what ringed Dor-lómin or would have been found amongst the tarns of highland Dorthonion. As a ranger Faron had transversed the hills of the Andram and High Faroth south of the Guarded Plain with comfort and skill. Back then he still had all his toes and boots to shelter them. He could had patrolled through those hills as any ranger of Nargothrond did, swift and surefooted and invisible. In this terrain, bleak as it was, he could still hide Faelindis and himself, and all that mattered was that they travelled in a direction away from Thangorodim. Their slow speed still worried him. Uphill, malnourished, injured, and in unfamiliar terrain, slow was the only speed Faron and Faelindis possessed.

Slow transformed into a sudden halt.

The prayed-into-being path violently dropped off at a wide chasm, the edges raw from the recent upheavals, the black stone flaking off the cliff with each seismic tremor. Clattering stone clips bounced down the steps and then fell silent as they careened down the abyss. Faron lurched back, Faelindis colliding against him. The unsteady earth beneath their feet tried to slide them towards the gaping fall. The far slide of the chasm was several feet lower, but the ravine itself was too wide to safely jump.

They needed wings to cross it.

Faron laughed, and was surprised that he could still laugh. If only one of the Great Eagles would come; an Eagle could have plucked Faron and Faelindis up in its talons and carried them away to safety. But Faron was no prince with golden harp or braided hair, and his fingers could not strum a sweet melody even if he wished. The girl in his arms was no princess either, so he knew better than to ask for Eagles to come rescue them.

Faelindis glanced behind them, her skittish eyes darting from rock to rock, waiting for the iron helms of pursuing orcs to arrive. She moaned, alternating between low groans and shrill whistles, her nails digging red rivulets into his arms. Faron looked across the chasm. Either they would stand at the edge of the ravine, waiting for the orcs to find them or the stones of Angband to crush them, or they could attempt to jump it. Faron pulled one arm away, peered down the ravine, then chose.

Objectively Faron knew he looked like a skeleton covered in skin, so thin he had become and his muscles wasted, but Faelindis was barely heavier or wider than him. He hoisted her in his arms against her last groan of startled protest. On reflex her arms tightened around his neck. Warmed by the self-satisfaction that his strength was enough to lift her body, he carried her the few steps in a blind rush towards the ledge, constricted the hold of his arms in desperate need, continued his run, and leapt.

A gust of wind flew under them as they jumped, like a giant hand holding them aloft, and their fall was almost slow and soft, almost like flying, and then they hit the black stones on the other side of the wide crevasse with a crunch. Smears of bright blood shone red against the rocks. Though he had tried to twist in the air, Faron landed with Faelindis underneath him, and he heard the snap of what was probably at least one of her ribs against him. If there had been a chance of any air in his lungs, he would have whispered apologies to her. He had not meant to land on top of her. Slowly Faron tried to turn around, to roll off the maid. His arm around her torso might have snapped as well, for it ached as if it was broken, the sharp pain instead of the fire of his other arm and legs. Faelindis had screamed twice, once as he leapt, again when they hit the far side. She was whimpering now, soft keening noises, and her fingernails were digging into his neck and back. She smelled of sweat and coal dust and blood.

"Safe," Faron finally choked out, and before he fainted away from pain he heard the first discernable words from Faelindis since he had pulled her through the access tunnel.

Her voice was soft, gentle. “Why don’t you ev-” He could not hear the rest of her question. Another apology he owed her, and though the unconscious void was for once empty of all worry or pain, he awoke to the need to learn what her question had been. He opened his eyes to find his face level with the ground, watching tiny chips of black stone dance up and down to the tremors. His body still hurt. His back was warm, though, from another body lying tight against it, and he could hear the soft exhales of lungs and feel the moth-like lightness against his ear.

“Faelindis?” he asked. “Are you awake?”

The breathing hitched. “Yes,” the maid whispered. “Yes, my name,” she cried, a wrenching sob of happiness. “Yes. Yes, I am awake.”

“What was it you were trying to say?” Faron asked. Neither of their voices rose above a whisper.

“Oh.” Faelindis giggled.

Under the Thangorodrim’s three-pronged shadow lay in exhaustion these two starved and bleeding elves, two pale streaks against the darkness of the broken wasteland, and with a giggle Faelindis brought a small piece of joy back into a place that had been bereft of such loveliness for time long beyond counting.

“You never give me a warning of what you are going to do when you try to save me. Why you named me the princess and why I needed pretend to be her. Or just now with the ledge. I am thankful. I am, Faron. But warn me. Explain.”

“Oh.”

Now Faron laughed, brief and weak and defiant towards the soul-crush of Angband. "I shall attempt to resolve that flaw of mine, and tell you all my plans," he said. His teasing made Faelindis laugh again, and Faron resolved that such a light and sweet sound should replace all her weeping. "My next plan is that we rest here for a little while. I have no strength or energy to move, I must admit." Faelindis's arms moved to embrace him from behind, her body pressing against his back. Face pressed tightly to his body for warmth, she muttered that this was a fine plan to which she had no objection.

In the gray and black bleakness of the land north of Angband, the passage of time was hard to judge, with the whistling of wind and the sounds of the battle on the other side of Thangorodim the only noise. Faron and Faelindis lay where they had landed, exhausted and dozing.

A new coldness came upon the two suddenly. The echoes of battle that were not yet distant and muffled enough to assure Faron of safety now changed in pitch and clarity. Discordant screams and clanging metal had crescendoed into a single sharp note, the portend of some dire event. Yet nothing came to disturb the two, aside from how suddenly vanished the dim sunlight. As dark as night come again was the world once more, and Faron wondered how many hours he had lain with Faelindis on the ledge unable to move to make this day so fleeting. There was a great and terrible sound, then a long period of silence in which he could hear nothing, be it his breath or hers as Faelindis pressed against his back, one leg draped over his hip and her arms encircling his shoulders.

 

Only later would Faron learn that darkness had been Ancalagon the Black arising from Angband in his awesome bulk, dark and monstrous with wings so wide as to block the horizon’s light. That the monster led the great unforeseen host of winged dragons, and the armies of the Valar had quaked in shock until Eärendil cast down the greatest of dragons, that Ancalagon the Black was vanquished as sunrise repels the night. That the tumult and destruction, the explosions and avalanches, had been Ancalagon’s impact across the three peaks of Thangorodrim. When the dragon fell, its body brought down all of Angband’s smoking crown.

By some mercy, none of the descending stone fell towards the two escaped elven prisoners.

Faron and Faelindis had been sheltered, as if by a giant and yet gentle hand of air.

---

Chapter End Notes

Nuance between the two terms for hope, amdir and estel, is explained in the Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth, but can be summed as logic-based hope versus faith.

 

Invisible Manwë cameo.

"The ghosts," he blurted. "They whisper to me. They...they know my name."

Read "The ghosts," he blurted. "They whisper to me. They...they know my name."

It was a wolf that found Faron and Faelindis, a monstrously large beast with coal-black fur and eyes that glowed green. The two elves had not stumbled far from their resting place, and with the light but a dim overcast allowing no clear shadows, any passage of time was difficult to judge. Faron’s memories of daylight had been damaged by centuries in Angband. Distance and direction were concepts as muddled above ground as they had been in the crevices and tunnels of the Iron Pit, leaving him to feel hopelessly adrift. Still he judged the surroundings too bright for twilight, nor did he think they had travelled in circles. Faelindis had not questioned Faron on their plans or destination yet, less from habit and more from her recognition that they had nothing upon which to build a plan. Though the winds had died, the air was still thick with dust and ash. Some ash had settled like snow across the black rocks that surrounded Thangorodrim, dulling the stones that had shone like polished black glass to a matte gray. A muted world, numb with silence, and until the wolf crested the ridge in front of them, Faron and Faelindis had been equally quiet. The fear to draw attention to themselves was too ingrained even in this new world where the three peaks of Thangorodrim had been smashed to fine rubble and the earth had ceased its violent tremors. The King of Angband had been defeated, but Faron was afraid if he voiced that belief aloud it would be disproven. Hope was a dangerous skill to regain, as the giant wolf on the hill before them proved.

An elf dismounted from the beast, and that the rider was clearly one of the Eldar instead of the bandy-legged orcs shocked Faron out of his terror. They had not been discovered by a warg rider. Those green eyes belonged not to a wolf, not one of the Enemy’s scouts come to recapture them. Those were the green eyes of a hunter of wargs, the noble counterpart to the Enemy’s corrupted werewolves and wargs that Faron knew too well, a being of whom Faron had only a singular acquaintance. “A Hound of Oromë,” he told Faelindis, who gripped his unbroken arm and hid behind his back, “like Huan.” The large black hound lowered its muzzle and whined, the plaintive sound an apology for frightening them, then lifted both head and tail at Faron’s words, wagging the tail and barking like a pup. A giggle escaped Faelindis’s lips, and she moved out from behind Faron, smiling up at the great hound. Her hand still clung to his wrist.

“He sounds like Huan,” she whispered to Faron.

The hound barked in happiness, paws dancing in place, nails clicking against the stone, and his tail wagging in a furious blur. The sounds of his barks were more musical than that of regular hounds. This made Faelindis laugh again. The dismounted elf rested a hand behind the hound’s ears, a caress to calm, then the hand descended to scratch at the fur behind a thick collar lined with sharp spikes and plates to protect the neck. His other hand pulled down the headscarf that covered his face and neck, revealing a pale face and blue eyes that shone with uncanny light as all eyes of the Exiles did. This was no Exile, though, Faron knew, but a soldier of the Army of the Valar, and one with a Hound of Oromë as companion.

A hand signal to tell the hound to stay in place, the strange elf half slid, half skipped down the ridge to approach Faron and Faelindis. His arms were empty, raised in welcome, and the only visible weapon was the hilt of a small blade belted perpendicular to his back. The elf wore strange pale leathers coated in gray ash and dust, and a copper gorget reflected off the pale daylight, the lightness of his armour a sign that he expected minimal danger. From how he approached Faron and Faelindis, he clearly expected it more likely for them to bolt in fear instead of attack him. Or his confidence in his giant canine companion to protect him from any danger was stronger than the need for weapons or heavy armor. From what Faron remembered of Huan, and Aglar’s stories of the hounds that he and his siblings had raised in Aman, this was not unwarranted.

The elven scout was close now as to reveal fine details of his face. Red-tinted brown hair and eyes as blue as a river surrounded by freckles that reminded Faron of the flanks of river salmon - he knew who this elf was. The Hound of Oromë had been his first hint, and that face shaped like part of a matched set with the two that haunted Faron’s memories confirmed it. A sharp tug on Faron’s wrist from Faelindis was sign that she recognized those familiar features as well. There was no doubt that this stranger was related by blood to Aglar and his younger brother, Craban, or to their cousin, wry Edrahil who had been the steward of Nargothrond when King Finrod still ruled. Family they left in Aman, though Faron had not entertained the possibility that their kin would be among the soldiers of the Valar.

The elf, kin by ties unknown to Aglar, babbled a string of words. At their incomprehension, the strange scout with the familiar face shifted to another language, one whose cadence and stresses sounded near to the mortal tongue Faron had picked up from the people of Bëor. He recognized the first two syllables as the start to a question. As the scout began his questions in yet another new and unknown language, Faron interrupted. “Can you speak Sindarin?”

“Yes. You can? Some escaped thralls know only mortal tongues. Unversed I am in Easterling speech.” His Sindarin was serviceable but peppered with abrupt and awkward pauses, like a novice rider riding a horse unsure of its footing. Such an accent belonged to Faron’s late childhood, to his first years in Nargothrond surrounded by Noldor still learning his people’s language. The face was Aglar; the voice could have been Craban.

Am I in another dream, another memory? The small hand on Faron’s wrist pulled him out of his rambling thoughts.

“We are not mortals but elves,” Faelindis said, and Faron desired to smile at the stranger’s mistake. The feel of broken and missing teeth against his tongue stopped him. His wretched and worn appearance, with hair turned brittle and white, was such that to be mistaken for one of the mortal elders was no far leap, so he did not begrudge the erroneous assumption. Faelindis, coated in blood and ash and dressed in the meanest of rags, had still the ethereal beauty of an elven maid. She should ever only be mistaken for the noble flower of Noldorin royalty and not a mere mortal thrall.

The vehemence of that thought and the desire it trailed in its wake choked Faron’s mind, bringing his wandering contemplation to a stumbling collapse as he wondered what metaphorical stray arrow had felled him. With his attention on the maid beside him, bewildered by the longing to proclaim her beautiful, he missed the stranger’s approach until the scout stood not but two feet away, arm stretched out.

“I am known as Sarno Herenvarnion. Eh, Sarnor? Father name would be ...Gwaltha-barnon? I do not know what mouth sound my siblings chose.” The scout looked young and lost.

“Sarnor,” Faron breathed out. “Aglar spoke of you, of his last brother, babe in his mother’s arms too young to come. I knew him.” Faron could not be embarrassed by the anguish in his voice as he clasped the proffered arm nor judge if his words were discernible beneath that strain. “Your brothers, Aglar and Mornaeu, and your cousin born in snow, I knew them. They were my friends, dearest friends. I was… I am Faron of Nargothrond, sworn to the House of Finarfin, son of a lord of Brithombar. I was a soldier in the company of Lord Gwindor.” Why were his knees devoid of strength? His face felt hot and wet, tears it must have been, and he cared not how greatly he wept. It was difficult to look the younger elf in the eyes, hard to remember to tilt his face up instead of cringing down in fear. “The maiden beside me, she is also a lady of Nargothrond. Her name is Fael,” again Faron’s tongue grew thick, “Fael indis .”

“Faelindis of Nargothrond,” she said in that high bright voice, almost a giggle. “I was a lady-in-waiting to Princess Finduilas. My name is Faelindis.” The relief of proclaiming that secret broke Faelindis into peals of near-hysterical joy, and she collapsed to her knees, covering her mouth as she laughed. Faron could not remember kneeling beside her, but somehow he was staring up at a bewildered Sarnor, leaning into a giggling Faelindis and smiling through tears. At a loss, the young scout and his green-eyed hound watched the pair cry with laughter and kneel in the dust of Thangorodrim.

 

---

 

Sarnor led them back to the fortifications held by the Army of the Valar after a silent argument with his hound to allow Faelindis to ride upon the dog as if he was a horse. Faron held onto the stirrup for support, having stubbornly refused to join Faelindis astride the hound. Though Sarnor vouched for his companion, assuring Faron that the hound could carry the weight of two so emaciated, the reminder of warg riders and Faron’s resurgent pride halted that. Thus the journey was slow. The ex-thrall tried to repress the envy he felt watching the younger elf walk without pain or hesitation.

Eventually Sarnor’s path intersected with other friendly scouts, though it soon became obvious that his use of a canine mount was unique among the soldiers of the Army of the Valar. Some were mounted on horses, a group of five afoot waved to Sarnor from the distance, and one scout with a strange narrow eyepiece covering the top of his face rode upon an animal Faron had never seen before but looked like a gangly cross between sheep and horse. When Sarnor greeted his fellow soldiers and patrol parties, he shouted the first word of Quenya that Faron clearly understood and learned, that for survivors. Only later would Faron learn the word had originated in the Telerin dialect. The other scouts, intent on their missions, spared a moment to exchange and update the maps they pulled from small oilskin folders. They would look over Faelindis and Faron, but did not press Sarnor for details. The scout riding the unfamiliar creature gifted a pair of warm blankets for Faron and Faelindis to wrap themselves in. The group of five did not stop to meet with Sarnor. Likely, their task was too pressing.

They saw no orcs, not even the corpses. Faron guessed Sarnor was deliberately avoiding the battle sites as he led them back. Still, evidence of the enemy’s malice on their path remained. The air reeked of onion and garlic in a manner than turned Faron’s stomach instead of inducing any pangs of hunger. He could see plumes of brown smoke in the distance, which Sarnor was swift to turn them from. “Dragon’s flumes, more noxious than their blood,” the young elf explained.

They circled wide around the ruins of Thangorodrim and the battlefields that had freshly despoiled its desolated doorstop to eventually reach the foremost fortification lines of the Army of the Valar. Here were the corpses of orcs, wargs, and other unidentifiable monsters being pulled away by work crews, and the walls and trenches of proper battlelines worn down by evidence of fighting. Still Sarnor’s path skirted the edges of the carnage to fortification lines mostly untouched by yesterday’s violence. Towers protecting huge siege weapons loomed above them. Looking upon them, Faron thought of the gathered forces of the Union of Maedhros of which he had been briefly a part of and shared its ill fate. Seeing these breastworks and artillery manned by the troops of the Army of the Valar, he cursed once more the hubris of princes. Elves with long pikes and small buckler shields leaned against the vast network of trenches and raised earthwork fortifications that delineated the main camp of the army. Their white tabards and standards were stained and coated in black ash. Water turned murky and poisonous filled the bottoms of some of these trenches. It was easy to read exhaustion and a long and difficult battle on the postures and faces of the soldiers. Yet despite the grimy coating, the defenses felt akin to the stories of Gondolin rather than dismal Angband. The faces that turned up to watch Sarnor and his survivors pass by were those of elves, faces bright with joy and relief, who hailed them with blessings and well-wishes. Sarnor led Faron and Faelindis along a raised pathway that spared them the muck of the trenches and through brightly-lit tunnels in the fortifications guarded by heavily armed soldiers and doors of solid steel. Again only the Telerin word was necessary for unhindered passage, although the silent but emphatic vouching of a Hound of Oromë played equal role. Beyond the redans and trenches the ground sloped down into one of the camps of the Army of the Valar, perhaps even the main one for the sheer size and number of tents and hanging banners. Here were more soldiers, their commanders and logistics officers, the noncombatant servants, squires, runners, healers, and hanger-ons. Easily this multitude outnumbered the army that had gathered on the morning of the Nirnaeth Arnoediad, even if by proportions this was a much smaller portion of a full army than King Fingon’s half of the Union of Maedhros of which Faron had joined. And this was an army on the morning of their final victory, a sensation Faron had never beheld.

The armor of the soldiers, not the lightly equipped scouts like Sarnor, looked strange to Faron’s eyes, for the pieces were solid metal instead of suits of chainmail or the scale-like segmented pieces he grew used to in Nargothrond. Nor were they the quilted silk and padded linen and leather lined with steel common to the Sindar and mortal warriors.

At the center of a crowd of men in full armor was a tall figure in gold-washed plate with a sunburst on a blue cape, his helmet removed and chainmail caul pulled down to allow a long golden braid to fall down the cape. He was addressing the armored soldiers, high-ranking generals if the quality of the strange solid plate armor was any judge, as their commander, and he stood next to a banner that had the same straight-armed sunburst as the sigil on his cape, a device Faron recognized from the official seals of Nargothrond. When the war leader turned, his profile could be seen even from a distance. The man looked remarkably like Finrod Felagund, enough that Faron forgot himself. He called out, weeping, “My King!”

The man in golden armor heard Faron, for he was now facing the ex-thrall. The face was more akin to King Finrod than Sarnor had been to Aglar, yet just as obvious was the reason for resemblance. This was not Faron’s king returned to him. Joy extinguished as a flame swiftly smothered. The horror of his mistake, and to behold how confusion sunk into sadness on the man’s face, quelled Faron’s tongue. In shame and pity Faron turned away, only to meet Faelindis’s face, who was staring at the Noldor High King with the same bitter longing.

“We are surrounded by strangers wearing our loved ones’ faces,” Faelindis said. “What a strange torment.”

 

---

 

The structure that the scout led Faron and Faelindis to was too grand and solidly built to be labeled merely a tent, with double layers of canvas over wooden frames painted as to appear solid and wood panels hinged for wall partitions and doors. Unmortared brick fashioned the floor. It harkened to reports brought back by Mablung and Daeron of the accoutrements at the Mereth Athardad, especially since the height and breadth of the building overtook the dimensions of the grandest mortal drinking halls. The building was hung with bright blue gems for illumination and imbued with the over-sweet smell of healing herbs. A healer’s place, then, and Faron with his broken arm and Faelindis’s cracked ribs were thankful for it. They were led into two small rooms hung with white curtains and separated on either side by tall wooden screens carved with flowers that Faron could not recognize, each given a pallet to rest on, and told a healer would come to inspect them shortly. The interior of the healer’s tent was too loud for Faron to hear Faelindis on the other side of the wooden screen, and before he could call out to her, the healer pulled aside the white drape and entered. A second woman, taller and heavily muscled with black leathers and red gloves, stood behind the healer and did not enter the partitioned space, lingering like the bodyguard she obviously was. The healer turned to wave away the other woman. “I need no assistance with this one, Dondwen.” Faron ignored the impulse to cringe away from the healer and her guard. This was not Angband and the healer had only the calm self-certainty of authority in common with the orcish overseers. She was slim and short, with bright green eyes that had not the glowing light of the Two Trees. An elf of Beleriand then, one of the Grey Elves. Her companion was Noldor, brown eyes bright with the unnatural light, and by the simple cut of the leathers and white sash was one of the soldiers that came with the Army of the Valar. Many of King Finarfin’s troops were women.

“I can stay,” the woman in black leathers said in a surprisingly timid and gentle voice. “His arm is broken; you may need my assistance.” The brown eyes that stared at him had pity, not revulsion. Her words were slow, heavily accented; it was obvious she spoke Sindarin for Faron’s benefit.

The healer addressed her companion in a mix of languages, of which Faron only understood the parts spoken in Sindarin and the Mannish tongues. “Then stay outside the door and see if you can hail one of the nurses for more bandages, oil of the aid-leaf, and-” The healer rattled off more items, none of which Faron recognized, then grumbled, “In truth those storerooms would find a guard most useful; even the servants of Îdh are vexed to combat the shortage.”

The woman laughed at the healer’s words and backed out of the partitioned room, closing the white curtain, though her shadow silhouette disclosed how she lingered in reach from the doorway. Satisfied, the healer turned once more to Faron, her green eyes inspecting him like a captain inspecting green troops. She softened her face at the signs of Faron’s distress. Faron tried to relax his body in response, crafting a silent mantra to remind himself that he was safe and free forever of Angband and the orcs.

The healer ran a cool hand over Faron’s brow and shifted his head from side to side, checking for abrasions and cracks in his skull. Then she held a glowing stone in front of his eyes to watch how they dilated in the cold light. Her voice was soft as carded and washed wool. “The scouts say you claim to be from Nargothrond. We have had few survivors from that city, none rescued from the Iron Fortress.”

“Have-” Faron croaked, “have they many survivors from Angband?”

“No,” the healer said, moving her examination down to Faron’s neck and upper back, fingers running along the lines of corded scars from the overseers’ whips. “They have not found many living survivors.”

Faron placed the accent, hard at first to determine by the softness of her voice, as the clipped and old-fashioned dialect spoken inside the Girdle. A refugee from Menegroth then, one of the few who had survived the kingdom’s destruction and the second attack on the refugee settlement at the mouth of the River Sirion.

The healer moved around to his arm, cleaning as carefully as she could to not aggravate the broken bone. Finding skin unpierced, she began to rub an ointment that numbed the pain and began to wrap the arm in white cloth, then a second set of thicker bandages soaked in an unfamiliar concoction. The smell was not unpleasant.

Her hands moved down to Faron’s hands, and he needed more willpower than he could hope to possess to not flinch away, mindful of his missing fingers. He knew what the small flaying knives of the torturers had taken was among the first injuries the healer would have noticed, but he could not bear her touch. Patiently she waited until the tension slackened, no longer pulling away as she daubed more ointment between the remaining digits. Faron studied the floral designs on the screen partition. As she worked, the healer addressed him in a tone affectedly causal. “The healer who trains me was from Nargothrond. I am a novice, dealing most with the herbs and tinctures, yet with this last battle there were many needed. She is off with those most gravely injured. My apologies that you must endure with me.” The healer gave another apologetic smile to Faron.

“Perhaps I know her, the senior healer?”

“She is called Faelineth. The scout who brought you in is her brother by marriage, though they never met before this last month, when all battalions and support were called to the front lines.”

“I know her then,” said Faron. “Her husband was a dear friend of mine, before he died. Faelineth had a brother as well; both were companions of King Finrod who chose to help fulfill his life-debt to Beren. They died in Tol-in-Gaurhoth.”

“I know,” said that soft voice.

The suspicion overwhelmed him. “Your sadness as we speak of that quest - you knew of the twelve. This is not just sadness for your princess or her cousin.” Faron swallowed. “One of the soldiers who left, we called him Bân. He spoke often of a woman in Menegroth with whom he shared letters, wishing to court. Aereth?”

“They call me Airanis,” she said. “I try not to mind it.” Her smile was regretful.

Quietly Faron spoke, “Bân treasured his letters from you. All who knew him knew the depth and sincerity of his feelings. He strove to be worthy to receive your affections, to be true and honorable. They who followed the king and Beren,” Faron licked his lower lips, tongue pulling over the broken and missing teeth, and left his sentence unfinished, overcome with shame.

“The princess and her mortal husband gave me accounts of their last moments,” Aereth said, “I knew long before of his death, and his reasons. I am proud of him. I cannot begrudge.”

“You can mourn.”

“And I have. As have you. But please, speak no more of those fallen.” Her head nodded to the door, where the Noldo woman stood guard. At Faron’s incomprehension, the healer sighed. Lowering her voice, she explained. “Dondwen seeks a childhood friend who joined the Exile. She knows not what he renamed himself in Beleriand, or which prince he followed, or if he ever reached this shore. But he promised to become a great and acclaimed hero, and his hair was golden. Few of the Noldor have light hair who were not kin of Felagund. There was a lord of Gondolin, who saved them on the pass from a Balrog. Glorfindel he was called; the refugees from Gondolin loved to sing about him. That might have been her friend.”

“Or Bân’s quiet friend. He didn’t speak much about his past, except that he and Bân joked about how small their home villages were.” Faron pressed his tongue against the stubs of his teeth. “The one she seeks may be Fân.”

“If so, he is dead,” said Aereth. “I wish not to smother her hope, yet even she doubts he lives. Still, Dondwen searches the survivors for him.”

“Survivors.” Faron could not stifled a bitter laugh. “The few of us.”

“The few there are,” said Aereth in her soft and firm voice, “is thanks to my lady Elwing and her husband Eärendil, who brought us the grace and might of the Powers from the West.”

Faron flinched. “I meant no disrespect, Lady Aereth.”

Cool hands smelling of strange herbs touched his brow. “You have endured what no one should have endured. You have not fallen into despair or madness. If any are allowed their grief and bitter feelings, it is you. And I, and the mortals,” the survivor of Doriath and Sirion added. “Survivors, if they could be saved, most were beyond words, beyond thought. Beyond kindness, whether to show it or accept it. Or walking dead, souls sundered from body. You would have remembered them, the freed prisoners from Tol-in-Gaurhoth, and how long many of them lasted before asking for the Judge’s Mercy. Others, they were hollowed out inside, filled with darkness. Weapons to use against compassion and hope. Such was never uncommon, and more so as the war has gone on. And you need not convince me of the horror of Angband.”

Faron pulled his damaged hands from her grasp and curled away from her eyes. Aereth sighed, apologized, and shoved a cup of clear liquid in his face. “Drink this. Regain your strength, and accept that we marvel that you had such a strong will to survive a terrible place, you and your companion. Drink this, and it will help to lessen the memories of it. Angband shall be no more. The Powers are stripping it bare to the foundations of the earth this time. The Enemy is in chains, and this time he shall never be released. Drink.”

---

Chapter End Notes

Bân is the sixth companion of Finrod and Beren to have died in Tol-in-Gaurhoth, Fân the ninth, and Faelineth's brother the fourth. Several crossover counterparts in this chapter, from Rickon and Shaggydog to Aerith/Aeris and Tifa.

Tolkien used World War I as inspiration for the War of the Jewels- the Fall of Gondolin being the most obvious, so the War of Wrath also needed some nods to WWI. Saruman's gunpowder allows for the possibility of gunpowder artillery used by the Army of the Valar, but I'll leave that ambiguous. The mustard gas less so, and as for trench warfare, that was not an invention of the nineteenth century.

Îdh is the Sindarin name for Estë.

He raised his eyes. "Sister. See. This time I knew you."

Read He raised his eyes. "Sister. See. This time I knew you."

Docks had been constructed where the sea had not yet claimed the land, those small patches of Ossiriand saved from the waves, for the Valar were attempting to divert the incoming ocean to the north. They would readily drown the lava flows and ash heaps that remained of Morgoth’s fortress in cold salt water, but not even Uinen could pull back the sea from pouring over the Long Wall and drowning the forests of Beleriand. A few places fought to stay above the waves or like Tol Morwen had been hallowed and uplifted. Most of Dorthonion, land of the pines where King Finrod’s brothers and those brave mortals led by Barahir had once lived, the Valar had saved. Long before the War of Wrath the land of Dorthonion had gone mad, broken before these current upheavals by the terrible might of Morgoth, and it became a forest of nightmares until the Army of the Valar reclaimed the land once and for all. Beren himself had spoken of the terrible Nightshade once his home, though Faron had not been present in Nargothrond to hear the reports. Now the Valar had done their best to quell the land’s madness, but like Morgoth’s grip on the soil of Beleriand, Dorthonion could not be scoured clean. No trees remained on the island, according to gossip, only rock, though some Maiar of Yavanna and Oromë were trying to reseed the land.

A futile task, it seemed, to save so little of Beleriand, and yet the rest of the world was preserved now that Morgoth was defeated.

Waiting off the coast of this drowning land, unseen except on clearest days, was that fleet of the Falmari, the long-separated kin. The barren island, Dorthonion that was, was ringed by great ships. The sheer cliffs of the Ereb Gorgoroth were now deep fjords where hopeful salmon and many masted ships sailed in to find shelter. This was where the majority of the Valinorean fleet lay in anchor, for the eastern coastline was still unsteady and the tides untrustworthy. Círdan eagerly awaited the day that the ocean returned to a modicum of regularity. Only a small fraction of the Valinorean fleet sailed into the newly named Grey Harbor, close enough that their anchors dragged along the bay’s basin.

Beholding the unnatural beauty of the Falmari ships, one had a tantalizing glimpse of the unparalleled beauty and efficiency of the lost Swan-ships, like the echo of the fabled light of the Two Trees if one stared hard enough at the new star that graced the morning and evening skies. Faron had been eager for stories of the Swan-ships when he first arrived to Nargothrond, as was natural for a son of a lord of Círdan, and he had been bitterly disappointed at Finrod’s reticence to speak of them and lack of any pictorial representation. These Falmari ships were not the Swan-ships, no more than the Sun and Moon were the Two Trees, but like the celestial lights, they carried a legacy. Joining this fleet were the smaller vessels of Lord Círdan, all barnacle-heavy and patched-sails, like storm-battered ducks intermingling in a pond with a flock of pristine, beautiful geese. The ships did not segregate, and pinnaces would ferry between the integrated fleets continuously, yet only the smaller darker ships would have sailors disembarking onto the stony beaches. The image of seals bobbing their heads in the bay and climbing onto the shore of his childhood home of Brithombar came to Faron, a fragment of once-forgotten memory. He stared out at the mass of masts and sails, listening to the creak of water against hulls, and wept.

These battered yet proud ships of the Falathrim were why Faron and Faelindis had journeyed to this new coastline.  

Ships were sailing the pardoned and those that wished it back to Valinor. The full extent of grace the Valar were still debating, yet the decision to send those broken by enslavement in Angband to Aman itself and to the healing gardens of the Valier Estë had been swiftly proclaimed and agreed unanimously.

Among that select few were Faron, hair shaved and arm in a cast, and Faelindis, ribs bound and set under a padded stay and borrowed gown in the high-waisted Sindarin style. The dress had been a gift from Aereth, and even with tight lacing on the bodice jacket and attached sleeves, the garment hung loosely. Thankfully the full skirt hanging from beneath the bodice line hid how thin her stomach and legs were, and only the hem needed shortening to fit, as Aereth was taller and far wider in the hips. On the journey to the new shore Faelindis diverted herself by hemming her dress and then sewing sleeve panels to add to Faron’s new vest. He could not wear the sleeves with his arm in a sling, but Faelindis was determined. “You shan't greet the Princes and Powers in your undershirt.”

I already met the High King of the Noldor half naked in rags that did little to grant any modesty, caked in blood and dirt, and I called him by the name of his dead son. Faron did not say this aloud to Faelindis as to not injure her feelings.

He envied her needle. His thoughts had no distraction.

Caravans of the injured, survivors, and pardoned traveled in slow continuous loops to and from the Grey Harbor, collecting all that would be sent from the remnants of Beleriand. The drivers were Vanyar, but the guards were stone-faced Noldor women carrying the banners of High King Finarfin or the Maiar of Eonwë. The Maiar were the ones to clear roads for the carriages and wagons, but the trail paths were often swept away by water or landslides, prompting long detours and waits. In this time Faron’s hair grew back long enough to start to curl around his ears, some patches no longer a dead limp white. No one could guess how long the refugee caravans would run. When the sea stopped swallowing land like a greedy whale was everyone’s guess. Healers rode with the carriages. One came every other day to switch out Faron and Faelindis’s bandages for new ones. Sometimes this healer was Aereth. Her companion, Dondwen, was the one to procure a needle for Faelindis and some fur to line two new cloaks so they stayed warm as they stretched their legs. Faelindis planned to sew a gift in return for Dondwen, something red to match the woman’s metal-studded gloves.

Faelineth, Aglar’s widow, visited Faron and Faelindis once. The visit was short and awkward, and the healer spent her attention on Faelindis’s cracked ribs and Faron’s arm. “We thought you dead,” she whispered, and Faron knew not why she intoned it as an apology. Better had we, he did not say. Nor did he joke, we were, and have returned to life like Princess Lúthien and Beren. The jest would not have upset Faelindis, but Faelineth with her golden shell necklace and listless eyes seemed somehow more brittle than the younger maiden, for all that she had escaped the downfall of Nargothrond and having settled on the Isle of Balar thus escaped the Third Kinslaying.

“We met Sarnor,” Faelindis said, trying to draw out a conversation.

“Yes,” Faelineth whispered. “I suppose I have a brother again. He has been kind to me. He has written to his mother and sister. They await me and have promised me lodgings. You can could with us, once you are released from the Gardens. There they shall fix your teeth, Faron.” With a smile that did not reach her eyes, Faelineth excused herself from their company.

The next healer to visit them was a brusque Vanya man who chided Faron to prioritize stretching exercises in the cramped confinement of their carriage and demanded that Faelindis eat more. The field rations from the Amanyar tasted over-seasoned, and the bread was soft but oddly sour. Yet compared to the meager and foul scraps of food that Faron and Faelindis had survived upon in the bowels of Angband, each meal on their journey to the new shore was a feast.

Mortals who had not already been evacuated to the shoreline also joined the refugee train, and they were the only ones to sing and make noise, eager and excited for their new lives. The elves were more silent in their solace. As the cry of seagulls grew louder, the mortal men and women grew more animated, speculating wildly about the sea that they would finally see. The trees thinned, allowing them to see the long grey firth and a string of new buildings and small ships moored along the beach. Here was when Faron saw the forest of masts and sailcloth out on the bay and began to weep.

The carriage that transported them from the front lines to this rudimentary dock that would ferry passengers onto a Falmari vessel to voyage back to Aman halted without warning. Faron gripped the cushioned seat of the bench that he was sitting on with his hands to brace himself from tipping forward, marveling at the poultices and healing tonics that Aereth had given them. Even now he barely registered the pain of his missing fingers. He straightened his back and sighed in relief. The curtain for the carriage window fell loose in the jostling, and the oiled cloth blocked the view of the harbor. As he reached for the curtain to let light back into the carriage, Faelindis turned and grabbed his shoulders in excitement. “Put on your new jacket, Faron, and brush your hair back.” Her tone was commanding, but her brown eyes were alight with joy, and her wide smile was as if the Faelindis of Tol Sirion had travelled centuries into the future to replace the survivor of Angband. The return of her smile was like the fleet of Valinor, the heralding of hope restored.

Dismounting from the carriage was a tender process. Faelindis gripped her freshly hemmed skirts in her arms, desperately attempting to keep the fabric clean of the mud. She hobbled onto pathway of wooden planks and grimly and silently debated if to knot her skirt to keep it from the ground and if she could do so without limiting her mobility. Faron only remembered how Faelindis behaved when they were both confined to Nargothrond after the Dagor Bragollach, when living in an underground city meant there was few opportunities to be plagued by mud. He wondered if she had been this fastidious as a girl-child in Minas Tirith, or if this concern for the state of her clothing was a result of having the luxury of real clothing again instead of squalid rags.

Around Faelindis pressed the crowd of people, healers leading the injured to the waiting ships, Amanyar in white looking for their loved ones, mortals searching for the sounds of familiar accents, and veterans weary but happily waiting for the call home. No one jostled her. Wooden planks crisscrossed the muddy ground, and Faron suspected that many were recycled from planks of lost ships. To his left he could hear the distinct sounds of active saw pits, the steady rasp of long sawblades halving lumber for new ships and houses. On the crest of the hill were foundations for what looked to become a stately hall, and tall blue tents with white and gold banners were pitched north of those stones. Rain had dampened the banners, but now the wind was lifting them into the sea breeze. Somewhere in one of those tents was Eönwë, herald of the Valar. A strange notion that was, for Faron had become skilled in detecting the presence of Morgoth’s Maiar, not just the balrogs but those that disguised themselves as orcish captains, and his inability to sense the nearness of any Maia unsettled him. He knew this was irrational, born of years of Angband’s enslavement, and such reflexes could not be instantly unlearned. Resolving to ignore the distant tents, Faron climbed down from the carriage, thankful that the horses had been unhitched. The whip scars on his back ached.

Faron’s boot-clad feet squelched in the mud, and he breathed in the distinctive soothing smell of earth after heavy rain mixed with the odor of the sea. The smell comforted him, for he realized that he still remembered it. He had not known this smell since before the Nirnaeth Arnoediad. He tilted his head to feel the sea breeze and felt a cold sting. Tears, he belatedly realized. He was crying again, and he could only presume that the tears came from relief.

“Faron, this way,” Faelindis coaxed, holding out her hand. “They said this path leads to where our ship is moored.”

With a wry twist of lips for the reversal of their positions, Faron wordlessly reached for Faelindis’s outstretched hand and followed her down to the shore.

A kind-faced old mortal man pointed them to the ship that would ferry them to the staging point at the bare rock island of former Dorthonion and onto a Falmari ocean-going ship. Faron laughed then, for he recognized the vessel that he would board.

The single square sail was black wool twill, and obviously a fresh sailcloth with the lack of patches or mends, and the prow curved up and over like an octopus tentacle, complete with rings painted along both sides and down the length of the hull. Faron always thought that the pattern looked more like the feathers of a hawk owl than the row of suckers that it was supposed to emulate. On either side a row of oars hung above the water like a seabird drying its wings. Priming for a soon departure, thus did Faron read into those oar positions. Again he laughed with himself over this private joke that the universe was sharing with him, for the ship was a small coastal galley of Brithombar. Specifically it was a ship captained by a member of his family. His grandfather’s first boat had been a great hollowed log from a giant oak tree, rigged with a sail when Ossë taught the elves how to use sails to catch a wind to propel their canoes and rafts, and he had named the boat Mithmeren. All subsequent watercraft, be they small coracles or forty-oared trading vessels, were the Grey Daughters of Mithmeren, manned by Faron’s father, uncles, brothers, cousins, and sister, and each Lunt Mithiel carried a variation on those adornments. This ship meant one thing - a member of Faron’s family had survived the war.

And befittingly, they were taking him to his new home.

A plank stretched from the hull of the ship down to the beach, a concession for the injured that were to be loaded onto the ship. It was not a steep climb, but some of those that waited around the line of wooden planks and mooring ropes that one could generously label a dock sported severe leg injuries, such that Faron in his new padded and stuffed boots winced in sympathy. A healer directed crewmembers to load chests of medicinal supplies onto the ship, placing them where the sailors’ chests would normally sit to become rowing benches when the ship was not under sail. Another elf pointed towards one of the taller and larger Falmari ships waiting at anchor in the bay, holding a navigation instrument in his other hand. At least Faron assumed that was what the object was. Standing here, close enough to feel the sand in the wind and hear the cawing of seagulls and the small waves lapping against the beach rock in that constant tidal rhythm, more lost childhood memories returned. He remembered his uncle Aearon, the one everyone called Nînlaws because he dove into the bay to chat with Ossë and Uinen, teaching Faron how to judge his location along the shore with a piece of string and stick using the position of the stars. But as Faron searched the faces of the sailors, he did not find his uncle. Instead, and to his delight, Iessel was the family he found.

His sister, tall and dark, stood on the docks, shouting orders to her sailors. No sign of injuries were apparent, and her stance was confident and commanding. The only sign of change was the scarf looped around her neck, a black and white pinecone pattern of Haladim design, and an additional hand-ax on her belt-loop. The gray-robbed healer pointed to the last provision chests, then pulled out parchment from an oilskin folder to begin reading names. The healer attempted to confer with Iessel, but Faron’s sister waved them away, down to where the refugees had gathered on the beach. Iessel’s eyes focused on her crew and the loading of her ship, glancing quickly over her passengers with disinterest and a detached pity well-mixed with revulsion. Faron knew by the way her eyes darted away that she did not recognize him, seeing only yet another too-thin and too-broken ex-thrall of Angband.

“Sister! Iessel!” Faron cried. “This time I am the one to recognize you first! Over here!” He laughed at the shock upon her face and the tears that came forth. “I live!”  With a great shout, Faron repeated his words, and felt as if song could once more find lodging in his breast. “We live!”

Iessel, once she embraced her younger brother and gingerly inspected his face, still bewildered at the dire transformation of his features, led Faron and Faelindis to a log cabin close to the hastily constructed dock. “Storm is coming. A spat of rain, but they wish us wait til the morning to sail. You can stay here, sleep the night. Better than the tents. Father is dead,” his sister said curtly, “and Mother sailed already. Uncle Duinenir stays with Lord Círdan. I know not what happened to Uncle Aearon. Mayhaps Uncle Tolon is alive, over in Alqualondë, restored to life. King Orodreth sent us a letter, after the Nirnaeth Arnoediad. Mother mourned for you.” Iessel sighed. “Father mourned the first time you were sent away. I am glad you live, Little Brother. Try not to drown between here and the Far Shore.” For all her brusque words, Iessel touched her brother softly and her green eyes were bright with pity. “Rest here. A bed you’ll find in the back; it’s not large but at least it doesn’t sway, and there are plenty of furs to keep you warm. Water for you and the lady to freshen up. Pickled fish in the red jar; eat up. I’ll bring you safe, my crew and our Hatholros. Oh, you are alive, Faron,” Iessel exhaled, cupping his cheek, her fingers tentatively feeling the scars and the deep concave of his cheeks. She pulled away. “I need to see that my men store the oars properly and seal the oar holes. Last voyage some of them lost the disks. Had to bail water. Sent them to teach the Edain how to paddle. Think I might replace my crew.”

Faelindis laughed at this proclamation. Faron refrained from explaining that his sister was not making a jest.

---

Screaming woke them, nearby cries of fear, pain, and outrage. The screeching of metal on metal -of swords against shield and plate armor- could not be mistaken for that of peacetime tools. In the darkness, these over-familiar sounds of violence overwhelmed Faron and Faelindis. Faelindis screamed in that soundless way that she had learned to make in the coffin-like cells of Angband, curling her body tight and small against the corner of the room, her bare feet scrambling against the floor as she kicked in panic. One foot lashed out and hit Faron in the stomach and then his jaw, but the pain was familiar. As his disfigured hands gripped the fur blanket that he had pulled off the bed as he also slid to the floor in an instinctive drive to hide from the screams, his mind said that he was no longer in the Grey Harbor but back inside the warg pen. The lightless cabin was the deep levels of Angband, and the sounds were of orcs in yet another senseless brawl, and soon the violence would come for them.

His sister’s voice shocked Faron free of the horrific illusion. “Stay inside, Faron! I’ll investigate!”

Faelindis stopped thrashing. Faron curled against her, unwilling to climb back into the bed. In Angband they had only small moments in the tunnels in which to touch one another, and to hold Faelindis through their mutual nightmare allowed them to banish some of the memories. He murmured meaningless sounds to Faelindis, reminding her that she was no longer alone. Behind him the door slammed shut, and he could no longer hear the sounds of men fighting, though there was still the shrill alarm calls of trumpets and elven voices raised in command and fear. The shouts drifted away from the town, and distantly Faron could hear the baying of hunting hounds. That made him shudder and pull back, and this time Faelindis was the one to reach out in the stifling darkness and pull Faron back to rest against her chest, tucking his head under her chin and soothing him like an infant.

The night never returned to its initial quiet, but the bedlam was quelled, and it became clear that the harbor was no longer under attack.

Iessel re-entered the room, placing the weapon outside the doorway. She locked the door behind her, but her movements as she walked over to where Faron and Faelindis huddled on the bed were slow and gentle. She aimed to be soothing. "They were after the Noldor Gems and are now gone, weren't any of the fighting near our camps and never would be. It was only two intruders, the -"

"Fëanorians, we know," Faron interrupted. "Always them, whenever news came to Angband of elves killed and cities destroyed when Morgoth wasn't to blame. Made him happy, the Dark Lord and his Balrogs. Laughed about it."

Faelindis shivered. "Why couldn't they be banished to the Void too? Why didn't they stop?"

"Those cursed Noldor gems," Iessel shrugged. "But the things are gone now, stolen and good riddance. From your stories and everyone else, they never seemed to do much good, aside from letting Eärendil reach Valinor. I liked Eärendil - had a beautiful ship. Wish Círdan would have helped to build me as ship half as lovely as Vingilot. Now there was something beautiful beyond compare, only fitting that the Valar turned it into a star. Imagine sailing the Upper Airs, what an adventure!"

As his sister waxed poetically on the beauty and merits of the blessed mariner and his ship, Faron tried to calm Faelindis. He held her hand and listened to Iessel's incomprehensible but enthusiastic nautical drivel as a soothing distraction. His sister’s voice was ocean waves encroaching on the shore, eating away at panic.

---

Dondwen found them the morning before they embarked, her burgundy Tree-bright eyes rimmed in red, her leather-clad hands hanging like listless leaves. Without bothering with introductions and polite greetings, she began speaking in her stilted Sindarin.  “Airanis was there. Wanted to see the light again, in memory of old life at Sirion. Was thanking the Valar when the two attacked. Tried to stop them. Tried to heal one of the guards they had murdered. Was stabbed on their way out.” The Noldor woman switched from her clipped Sindarin into a far more passionate and anguished stream of Quenya, her voice rising and slurring into an incomprehensible rant, fresh tears welling as she raised her arms to hide her face. Her foreign words ceased, and in a diminished falsely calm voice Dondwen apologized as she uncovered her face. “Please inform Healer Faelineth for me. I will stay for next convoy. Herald General Eönwë says we cannot go after the Kinslayers. He forbids. There are those petitioning him to reconsider. I wait.

“Go to Valinor, freed ones. Go be healed, reunited. They are all there, in the Halls or Gardens. Everyone I love. Everyone for you, too, am I right?”

Horrified, Faron could not reply.

Dondwen forced a smile. “When we reach the Western Shore, then we can put down all our burdens. Been dragging them for so long. Grief heavy, but the hope has been worse.”

Faron knew not a word or gesture he could offer Dondwen as comfort or that would lessen their mutual outrage. She did not linger long enough for any attempt from him, but waved Faron a farewell. “Do not become seasick. Do not be afraid of Valinor. Cry only tears of happiness to be reunited with loved ones. Costawë was your friend, too? I can see in your eyes. He will not know the name Dondwen -but Indolen. If you see him in the Gardens before I come, tell him I searched for him. Tell him Indolen came for him. And I am proud he became a hero.”

---

Chapter End Notes

Deep pull here: the original Japanese dialogue for Advent Children used the onomatopoeia "zuru zuru" to refer to dragging a heavy burden (survivor's guilt) where the English dub used "dilly dally shilly sally".

Sparing everyone the nautical minutia, but for those interested, Iessel's ship is a small karve, a type of longship, whereas the Falmari vessels might look more like a brig in size and sail plan.

"...can never die, but rises again harder and stronger."

Read "...can never die, but rises again harder and stronger."

Faron’s sleep was dreamless. When he woke in the Gardens of Lorien, he felt as if bathed in light, as if his body had soaked in a vat of morning sunlight and that gentle warmth had refilled all the hollows beneath his skin, replacing the poison of Angband that had fossilized in the shell of his flesh and organs. His joints and muscles, lax and supple, no longer screamed at him, and that absence of pain bewildered him. Restoration was too simple a term for what Faron felt upon awakening. His body no longer imprisoned him, and that alone would have been cause enough for his joy. He wondered how sunlight did not escape through his parted lips, since he felt so full of its warmth.

Mist clung in a thin flim across his skin, beading on his eyelashes as he blinked. At first Faron could not see, but then a gentle hand pressed against his shoulder and another hand wiped his brow. “Peace,” a voice commanded. Faron stilled. His eyes adjusted to the soft bright gray of his surroundings, breathing in air that was pure and heavily scented of myrtle and mint. The combination of smells irritated his nose as he sat up, causing him to sneeze. The voice laughed, and Faron turned his head to see the man that held his shoulder and braced his back to offer him support as he rose to a seated position.

Aglar’s brother, dead since the Dagor Bragollach, knelt beside Faron. Soft cotton gray robes wrapped around his body, and a thin wire crown of silver leaves and tiny flowers made of crystals no larger than grains of rice sat across his brow. His blue eyes were exactly as Faron remembered. His hair, once the same russet red-brown of Aglar and Sarnor, was not. Dark brown hair, almost black, feathered the contours of his cheeks, cupping his face like smooth wings. The elf laughed, shaking his head with all its changed locks. “I know. A strange side-effect of my re-embodiment, when I was restored. We are not changed, unless it is to decide to keep or lose some scars, or ask for a different body to more closely reflect our fëar or for a younger age at which to be reborn- though that delays a return of some memories. Most do not change, aside from wishing to remove all scars, but we cannot alter our hröar to the whims of our fëar as easily as the Ainur. And yet here I am, dark-haired as to finally match my mother-name. The color does not bother me, though I do miss the texture of my curls. Tease me if you wish on this strange but fortunious mishap, Faron.”

“Craban,” Faron exclaimed in the softest of exhales, the name hanging like mist in the air between them. Wetness gathered around his eyes. The other elf pulled off the gray mantle around his head and shoulders and wiped at Faron’s face, then gave the length of cloth for Faron to wrap around his own shoulders, assisting him as he stood. Faron’s balance was wobbly, but no longer was this balance issue caused by the dismemberment of his toes. A newborn fawn was Faron’s unsteadiness, not the scrambling of a spider without a full set of limbs. Craban kept his hand against Faron’s lower back to steady him, chuckling softly. The sound was kind.

“Aye, it’s good to stand again. Worry not. The grass is gentle.” Craban made no remark on Faron’s weeping, and he allowed Faron to set the pace, patient as together they tottered away from the soft bed upon which Faron had awaken, a bed that the elf now saw had been placed within the exposed roots of an impossibly large willow. This tree, with bark whiter than any living willow, formed a tent with its hanging branches to shelter him. The trunk had been his headboard while he slept, the mattress upon which the white sheets spread was netting filled with dark moss, and the groundcover was a spongy plant that Craban called grass but felt like velvet against his toes and provided the aroma of mint that had so aggravated his nose. It was a bower that any Laegrim would envy, one that felt as if designed by the Tree Shepherds. Strange that Craban felt natural in this place. The Noldo had ever been one for the cold pines and stark stone towers of the north.

“I trust you,” Faron said.

“The possibility remains that you may fall. You trained yourself to walk on crippled feet and must relearn to walk on ones restored. I faced difficulties in my remastery, and wish you not feel disheartened even if I cannot keep you upright, dear friend.”

Faron fumbled for words for his question. “Was - who was with you, when you came to the Gardens?”

“The Gray Lady of Healing and Rest, Estë,” Craban said. “As she is present with us now,” he added and pointed with a toe towards the edge of a shallow pool, no more than a wagon wheel across and no deeper than an apple basket. Resting half-submerged at the water’s edge was a small salamander with a frizzled comb of gills sticking out like honeysuckle on either side of its head. The animal was pale and iridescent like a pearl carving, and its eyes were smokey quartz. Those eyes blinked at Faron slow and deliberate as cats would when surrounded by people that they trusted. Faron, used to the toxic stench of Balrogs and Morgoth’s dark Maiar, felt nothing from this tiny axolotl. Perhaps a faint scent of some sweet-smelling herb that was not mint, overpowered by the more aggressive herb.

“For one of the fifteen greatest powers, she seems a bit small to be Îdh,” Faron said.

“A token of herself,” Craban explained, guiding Faron’s steps away from the shallow pool and the tiny creature observing them. He led them towards the canopy of willow branches that curtained the soft bed upon which Faron had awoken, lifting an arm to push aside the willow leaves and expose the rest of the Gardens of Lorien to Faron’s sight. “A small aspect of Herself monitors all patients and stays at their side when they awake, though never Her alone. You are not the first healing that I have attended, and there were other elves beside me when I woke and when I left the Gardens. When I was steady on my feet and prepared for the emotions, my mother came for me. And Amanië, my eldest sister. Angell sat with me through the healing, and Lady Elenwë. Angell still works with the recently re-embodied, serving the Valië Nienna, as I do. But I prefer the Gardens of Lorien and Valië Estë. I will be present for my brother, and Lord Angrod and Lady Edhellos. Lord Aegnor will not leave Mandos. Some chose thus.” Craban parted the willow curtain and guided Faron through. “You may stay here as long as you need and desire to.”

Faron thought that the Gardens would be gray. Even with the touch of cool mist against his skin, nothing was gray except the thin robes of his companion and the shawl draped around his shoulders. The grass of the Gardens of Lórien glowed green, so pure was the color, but without overwhelming the senses in garishness of hue. It was the green of a shaft of sunlight on the floor having passed through one of the colored windows of Nargothrond, a light that one could hold. The blue of the lake was equally rich, as bright and luscious as the lapis stones that artists ground to make blue paint. Faron knew of the blue painter’s stone because Fân complained of the cost, as lapis lazuli were rare in Beleriand. Dark purplish-blue lupine carpeted islands and the opposite shore, and large lotus flowers dotted the lake. Other flowers that Faron could not name mixed in among the tall blue lupine and encircled other willow trees with their full blankets of pale green. Faron wondered how many had healing beds in the shade of their canopies, those living tents, and if even now Faelindis was emerging from behind the screen of her own boughs to behold this beautiful vista. Smaller ponds, no doubt with a tiny white amphibian residing in each, reflected light like gemstones scattered across a carpet. Moss thick and soft disguised any stone. There was a wall around the garden and lake covered in solid ivy, but tall and wide arcs showed that the walls were but divisors for the Garden to partition it into multiple sections. Faron could not see from the angle at which he stood to know if the other areas of the Garden of Lorien had lakes, but he could see the crowns of flowering trees over the wall of ivy. No spot in the garden was untouched by either water or growing plants.

“I am pleased that you find my efforts pleasing,” a piping voice said. Faron turned back to see that the axolotl had transformed to a snake with the same pearlescent scales and gray eyes. “A challenge it is, to receive long injured instead of fresh from my brother’s keeping, but more welcome to me. To mend flesh instead of recreate it. I kept the scars from your time as a Ranger of Nargothrond - any that were cosmetic and did not adversely affect muscle or joint. Mornaew Craban assured me that you would share that inclination with your fellows.”

“My?” Faron trailed off, for the smiling Craban answered his question.

“Veterans of Beleriand. Your companions. They have been restored to life, most of them. If you come sit by that moss-covered stone, I shall point to you those that remain in the Gardens to complete their recovery and tell you all whom have left the Gardens of Healing and await you outside.”

Faron stumbled through his reply. “I would be pleased.”

---

Estë and Craban said that any difference he felt from his new-grown fingers was in his head. The skin did not feel softer or look even under closest inspection to be discernibly different from his original fingers. Only because he remembered the thin knives of the orcs taking his fingers did he know some had been restored. He counted them in the childhood song: little father, little mother, little brother, little sister, little baby. Both families reunited.

As he marveled at his hands, Aglar’s brother pointed to people in light robes resting or playing in the Garden. Most wore white or pale blue, but a few were garbed in gray with heavier mantles and hoods. Faron’s shift, beneath his borrowed gray cape, was pale blue, of a soft thin textile unfamiliar to him. Craban called it cotton. The style was archaic, sleeveless and untailored, but the Garden was warm. Far warmer than Beleriand, and Faron remembered how often his Noldor companions spoke of missing balmy weather.

“I came in the company of a maiden named Faelindis,” Faron said. “The only child of Rimdir, steward of Minas Tirith when the island of Tol Sirion was held by Orodreth. She had been a prisoner of Angband, come for healing. Where is she?” Faron strove to keep worry from his voice, but it colored his tone like black ink.

What Craban read into Faron’s face and words amused him to peaks of great laughter. Such amusement only drove Faron’s ire.

When his peals of laughter ceased, Craban spoke, “Your Princess has recovered, all whip scars removed; the light of her spirit reassured.”

“It was but a ploy, my subterfuge by aiding in her misidentification as the Princess Finduilas.” Faron’s anxious words were spoken in a rush. “I recognized Faelindis from the moment I saw her. Only the Enemy was fooled, and how great of fools they were! Faelindis is dark of eye and hair - did never word reach Morgoth that the youngest scion of the House of Finarfin shared in that famous golden hair?”

Craban pursed his lips. “Faelindis Rimdriel is here, and you will know her by the blue gown. Gelril, sister of Gadwar and Galuven, attends her. Lady Gelril has apprenticed to the Aulendil, eager to enrich her studies of invention, but as her brothers are still both within the keeping of the Valar, she volunteers hours in the Gardens. Your presence and verity of your rescue from Angband shall greatly assist in cheering the spirits of Galuven. His guilt over your fate has long plagued him. And what befell Gwindor as well.”

“Has Gwindor been restored?”

“No,” Craban answered. “How long a spirit needs the quiet and peace of the Halls of Mandos is to the decision of each spirit. But of your many companions of Nargothrond, the ten that oath-sworn went with Beren, son of Barahir, and died in the dungeons of Tol-in-Gaurhoth, they have almost all been restored to life, and many are in this area of the Garden. We chose this location for that reason. I will try to find them for you. Of their number, I know for certain that Fân you shall not meet today. His memories were most disoriented by his captivity, and even in Mandos they have not recovered. My Ladies Vairë and Estë have hope that re-embodiment and companionship shall restore him to himself, but the process is delicate.”

“I have a message for him, from a woman named Indolen.”

Craban smiled and bowed his head. “It shall be done.”

---

 While Craban delivered news of Dondwen’s words for her childhood friend -and with the certainty of foresight did Craban proclaim that it would only be when the woman herself came to the Garden’s gate to seek out the blond-haired boy of her cherished memories that Costawë Fân would be fully restored to himself- Faron took to wandering the shoreline of the lake, searching for those he knew. Before he left, Craban gave Faron some fruit. Faron knotted the pieces of dried apricot in his borrowed gray cape, more interested in finding friends than eating.

Most of the Gardens’ patients were injured veterans from the Army of the Valar, the newly re-embodied from the Halls of Mandos lounging in another lawn of the Gardens. Among the various tall blondes stretching their newly regrown arms and legs or soothing nerves damaged by war, Faron found Tacholdir’s dark hair. The former soldier of Nargothrond sat beside a blond man, holding the stranger’s hands in his lap. Faron refrained from the temptation of interrupting the pair to greet Tacholdir as he wished. Reunions would come, and Tacholdir looked uncharacteristically happy. Faron has never seen the older man intimate with anyone. With a fond smirk, Faron searched for more familiar faces.

The next one that he found was by quite literally tripping over them.

A man lay prone, hands folded behind his head, feet stretched out and ankles crossed, taking a nap on the ground in the very exemplar of repose. Only the steady rise and fall of his chest, and the faint sonorous sound of his snoring, distinguished him from a log of driftwood half-submerged on the shore of the lake. Faron did not espy him until his feet fumbled against the man’s torso, causing Faron to trip and fall onto the sleeping man. He rather violently woke the man from his nap by slamming on top of the man’s center, expelling air from his chest and punching his elbows into the man’s gut, his left knee hiking up into an extremely painful bodily location in which to have solid bone ram into. The pair both recoiled and curled in reflex, cursing in pain and surprise. Faron was the first to unfurl from his fetal position, unfurling his head and limbs like a turtle relaxing from its shell. The expletives and the voice in which they were addressed struck Faron as familiar. “Captain?”

“May Vairë make bobbins of your nuts! Stars above, Spiders!-spiders’ eggs in your testicles, curse thee, stars! - oh, it’s you. Faron. Of course it’s you. Edrahil would have just kicked me, and Finrod would have tapped my shoulder. Or splashed me with water. Ethir is the only kind and considerate soul among you lot. What do you want, Ranger, to so vigorously wake me?”

Faron stuttered, and Heledir huffed and sat up, his shoulders still hunched together in pain, but his face open and bright with mirth. “I know it was an accident, Faron. I tease you. And, aie, it is good to see you! I heard you were taken in the Nirnaeth; have they finally released you? But no- your robes are blue.”

“I was prisoner in Angband, for one hundred and eighteen years. I escaped in the chaos of the final assault.”

That confession gave their conversation an awkward long pause, before Heledir with his natural charm and aplomb pretended the subject of captivities never occurred. As a topic it was too large to gracefully maneuver around, since Heledir himself had died a prisoner in Tol-in-Gaurhoth, and their shared yet separate experiences loomed as shadow above them like the peaks of Thangorodrim. But Heledir’s willingness to ignore that dark pain was the metaphoric corpse of Ancalagon to smash the discomfort into rubble. “So, who have you re-acquainted yourself with, Faron?”

“Craban. And I saw Tacholdir sitting with another man -a Vanyar veteran of the Army of the Valar. I did not know that he had a Vanyar companion back in the West.”

“He didn’t,” Heledir said with a familiar gleam in his eyes, and Faron belatedly remembered that his former captain was a glutton for gossip and loved nothing more than to keep running tabs on the romantic entanglements of all his subordinates and superiors. “And don’t say ‘back West’. You are in Valinor now. Now it is ‘back East’. Fret not, we still haven’t adjusted. It pained the King to hear the King call Beleriand ‘back home’. Aie, too many kings. That will be another habit hard to break.”

Heledir straightened his back, the pain having dissipated, and gave Faron a tooth-filled smile. “Finrod is with his mother, Queen Eärwen, in Alqualondë. Edrahil is with them - his family is still based there. Odd for an Aulendil family, but there is a long-standing business relation between Lord Enedir and Alqualondë, only strengthened after the calamities that occurred after the Darkening. Edrahil has gone to see his family, and gain permission to court his Teleri maid. Oh, the situation is more complicated than that, and the reunion and hashing out of issues and past history and assumptions and hurt feelings and surviving affections created a veritable tempest in the Halls of Mandos, one I found myself subject to as a skiff tossed about in the middle of one of Ossë’s great storms. But Edrahil is my oldest friend, and I had to stand beside him as he tossed his heart once more to the seagull and tried to convince her that he would no longer pluck all her feathers. However, I draw the line at family visits and dowry negotiations. And, ah, no shame in telling you, the first time outside of the Gardens’ gates, I was overwhelmed. So I have retreated to regroup in its calmness, as is sensible.”

Faron scooted until he sat side by side next to Heledir, leaning shoulder to shoulder to the older elf, and pressed his head against the other elf’s shoulder in an armless side hug, a gesture he fuzzily remembered doing with his older siblings, back when he was too young to understand the great siege that was about to take his older brothers away from him. Faron still felt no remorse over his absence of sorrow for the loss of Duinethor or Cófon, but Heledir was closest to an eldest brother of his heart. His captain had been the one to mold the boy that arrived in Nargothrond as unwilling ward into a young man whom the city proudly claimed and who could claim the city as his home, a ranger whose skills Heledir could extol and knew his commands would be obeyed, but also a man Faron could sit beside as equals and receive and return comfort.

Faron spoke. “This place seems best to find calmness. You have always been wise, Captain.” Heledir accepted the proffered absolution. The defensiveness that tensed his back relaxed, and Faron could feel this shift beneath his head resting on Heledir’s shoulder.

Encouraged, Faron made his own confession. “I broke. In Angband, during the torture, they took my fingers, toes, skin. I lost my senses, became insensate.”

“As did I,” Heledir whispered. “The dungeon broke me, Faron. I was not your captain, not anyone’s. Edrahil has to bespell my mind to stop my madness, and I begged for death because I could not face the losses.”

“I gave into despair. I ceased to hope. It was only the last day, when the Army of the Valar sang their trumpets and were about to breach the walls of Angband, that I regained my heart, and only because I sought to free Faelindis.”

“Then you did not lose, Ranger,” Heledir said, pitching his statement as if they were foundation stones upon which to build a fortress. His hand rested atop Faron’s head, the comforting warmth soaking through Faron’s freshly shorn hair. Faron closed his eyes and rested against his former commander, soothed and relieved.

The two leaned against one another, content to remain motionless and listen to their surroundings. Lorien’s lake did not sound like the Narog or its tributaries that flowed through Nargothrond or Lake Aeliun, no gentle sloshing of wavelets or echoes through the canyon. The water’s song was muted so that the presence was noticeable only by the scent, which was not exactly the same. A good scent, though, comforting, as all clean water was. The ground beneath Faron was muddy, especially where his feet were stretched out to where the moss thinned, and Faron once again marvelled at Captain Heledir’s ease at lounging in mud wallows along the banks of any available water source. He should have been named for a swan or beaver, Faron thought with a spat of mirth, and remembered how Heledir’s prefered napping hobby earned him the permanent displeasure of Nargothrond’s laundresses. That line of thought pulled another name to the forefront. “Has Arodreth been released from Mandos? And has Lady Alphen hunted him down yet?”

Heledir laughed. “The Old Bull was released a little before Eärendil arrived, and immediately pursued the new residence of Old Mother Swan. He has hired himself out as her man, from what I hear, claiming his expertise is needed to build gardens in her new manor. Ardoreth was enamoured of the new flowers to be found in these Gardens, and all the flowers of Aman that are free for him to discover shall likely occupy and delight him for the coming Age.”

Splashing startled them, and they opened their eyes and looked out at the lake, over in the shallowest area around one of the central islands where a pair of figures played, a man with black hair that fell to his shoulders and a woman with brown hair and a pink sheath dress that clung to her body. With the fabric waterlogged and made nigh transparent, the color was difficult to discern. But when Faron recognized the shades of brown and pink, he realized who the woman was, and thus also knew the man.

“Is that Bân? And the woman in pink, I know her. A healer named Aereth, of Menegroth, the one whom he sent all those love missives. She was our healer, the one to tend to us when they first took us to the army camp.”

Heledir snorted. “Aye, the puppy and his flower girl. And while romance rekindled or starting new is not uncommon to either the Halls of Mandos or these Gardens, those two behave as if within the stanzas of the High King’s poetry.”

Faron was interrupted before he could interrogate Heledir on the contents of the High King’s erotic poetry.

“The shortest stint in the Halls of Mandos was she.” Heledir and Faron turned at the sound of a new speaker behind them, the words spoken by a grave female voice. Though the voice was low and throaty, an imperceptible quality recalled to mind the high-pitched tiny voice of Estë’s salamander form. A column of shimmering air stood behind them. Had Faron experience with desert climes, he would have compared it to heat shimmers. The air folded in and out between two translucent forms, like mirages called forth by a singer’s highest art. One was a small gray songbird, but the second form was of an elven woman, tall and exceptionally buxom, clad in numerous heavy fine silver jewelry and a few lengths of black fabric that matched her long black hair. The woman’s face revealed a sorrow so heart-wrenching and profound as to make the joyously bright atmosphere of the Garden as bleak and colorless as the northern foothills of Thangorodrim, and Faron could taste once more that biting cold. “Little Aereth would not assent to a separation from her beloved, nor heal without the physical earth beneath her,” the sorrowful voice said. “Long has she waited for this joy; begrudge her not this enthusiasm in finally attaining it.” The distortion of air disappeared, taking with it the scent of sweet roses and crushed pine needles.

Overwhelmed with awe, Faron asked, “Was that an aspect of the Lady of Mourning, a partial manifestation or Maia of Nienna?”

“You did not recognize- ah, of course you would not, having never met her. She was once a servant of Estë and Yavanna, very long ago. She taught the nightingales here to sing, long before any elves came her for healing.”

The answered dawned on Faron. “That was the Queen?”

Chuckling as he pulled away and stood up, Heldir answered, “Yes, I believe that was Queen Melian. And ‘tis rare for she to show herself, deep in her grief doth she be. The honor of her presence must be for her former handmaiden’s sake, not to lowly rangers such as we two. Now, you have your not-blonde princess to find, and I have a pair of amorous victims to tease. Thankfully, they make it easy.

“Most of the lake is shallow,” Heledir said, knotting the ends of his white robe above his knees. “The fountains in Tirion are deeper, and have a greater risk of accidental drowning. Don’t mention that fact around some of the Gondolindrim. They will perceive it as a joke in poor taste.”

Confused and uncomfortably reminded of some orcish jests made after the sack of Gondolin, Faron watched as his former captain pulled away. Heledir waded out into the lake, lifting his mud-encaked feet like a heron in and out of the water. He flapped his arms in a wave back towards Faron and the shore, then waded away towards where Bân held aloft a giggling Aereth above the water. Her arms encircled his head, blocking Bân from noticing the mischievous captain Heledir approaching and whistling off-key.

---

 “Faron!”

The call came in Faelindis’s voice, brighter and louder than he ever remembered her, and in joy he turned around to find her. Perched on a moss-covered rock like a sunbathing siren, Faelindis waved down at him, then scrambled off her perch, the thin blue of her gown riding up to her knees as she slid down the moss and her dark hair tangling in her limbs because she needed to awkwardly half-turn to place her feet steady on the grass. Faelindis straightened and reordered her hair and garment by the time Faron ran up to her - he was laughing as he ran at the ease of his feet, how he no longer stumbled and shuffled on missing toes. He stopped before embracing her, suddenly self conscious. Faelindis restored to full health and happiness was an unfamiliar but beautiful sight. Colors infused the undertones of her skin, transforming the darkness of her eyes and hair into the richness of wood and earth instead of the dullness in Angband. Her eyes still lacked the strange light of Elves who grew up in the radiance of the Two Trees, but star-like was the only appropriate description for how they shone. The blue fabric of her sleeveless gown was semi transparent, making the outline of her waist and thighs visible. Folds in the fabric as it draped blurred and made opaque the contours of her chest, but Faron was more aware of their existence. The tips of her hair curled around the tops of her thighs and cupping her buttocks, longer than the tresses had ever been in captivity, and she had tucked it behind her ears, no longer hiding her face. Her neck was unadorned by either a broken necklace pilfered of gems or the ring of bruises and cuts that had so long marred her.

Love poetry spoke of necks like a white swan, and Faron finally understood why attention was lavished on that feature.

This time the blow to his chest could not be ignored. Faelindis stood before him, and to his sight she was the comeliest of maidens. The overwhelming pressure of Morgoth’s vile essence must be to blame to have hidden this fact from his senses, that he dared ever not think her beautiful, that he had ever not desired her. Faron attributed this flood of arousal as an effect of encountering almost all of his friends entangled in romantic pursuits. He was especially thankful for Heledir’s absence. Also earning his thanksgiving was the looseness of his robes. He ran his tongue across his restored teeth. His mouth was unpleasantly dry.

Faron breathed in and wished for the coldness of the lake to calm the heat that broke out across his flesh. Warring thoughts battled like the maddened wargs in the pens of his mind, whether or not to reach out for Faelindis and what he dared say to her. What action he dared might make, and if she would reciprocate.

“Are you well?” Faelindis asked.

In answer Faron held up his hands, fingers splayed to display all ten digits.

Faelindis squealed. “Delightful! And your hair is growing back dark as it once was!” There was a dimple on her cheek. She had not dimples before, not even in Minas Tirith or Nargothrond. She thought herself merely pretty , he remembered her words. Gentle, brave, compassionate, gorgeous - any of those words but merely pretty, once. He gathered his rambling thoughts and refocused on her latest words.

Faron laughed. “Have you seen Craban - Aglar’s brother? His hair is now a near-black instead of the red curls like his brother.” A nervous lick of his teeth. “Do you like it? It is far too short, and I cannot tell if all the white patches are gone.”

“You are no piebald horse, fear not, Faron. And it is good to see your smile once more!”

His smile. His prayers overflowed with gratitude to all the Powers than none of his companions could observe his giddiness.

Faelindis’s smile was as sweet as candied fruit. Faron’s memory of sweet and lovely things had returned during his dreamless sleep. Clearly now could he recall the intricate stonework of Nargothrond, the lotus flowers along its cornices, the carved owls and squirrels in the branches of its tree-imitation columns, the designs and scenes in the stained glass windows. The colors of the rugs that his mother and Iessel gifted for his room, the taste of fresh bread and good food. The songs that Princess Finduilas played on her harp and Faelindis accompanying her with a voice that was not talented but not unpleasant. He forgot that Faelindis sang. He wondered if she remembered herself, if anyone had yet asked her to sing.

“Are you well, Faelindis?”

“Now that I’ve found you,” she said, her breathless honesty stunning Faron. Hope rose in his throat, hope for what he could not yet name. His desires, freshly aroused, spoke of something he had not contemplated for more than a century. Faron settled on companionship. That thought was safest, staring at Faelindis and the thin blue robe that only highlighted the lines of her body.

“Faron?” Worry furrowed her brow, adding a quaver to her voice, and Faron reached a hand out to cup Faelindis’s cheek. Warmth undampened by the lake mist beneath his palm, Faelindis’s fingers covering his arms soft as a songbird landing on the folds of a petal, memories of standing face to face like this in the caverns of Angband now remade with new gentleness and the sense that nothing could rip this peace from them, all this prompted Faron’s answer.

“You are with me once more, and we have freedom. I am well, Faelindis. We are well.”

---

Chapter End Notes

More than most, this chapter heavily references the rest of the Band of the Red Hand series.

As Aglar's story established, Craban is very loosely based on Bran Stark, so the hair change is a joke about the difference between the book description and the actor's hair in the show.

Sindarin vocabulary exists for "Elvish play-names" for each finger of the hand: atheg, emig, honeg, nethig, gwinig

 

Edrahil's Teleri beloved, Maiwë, is another direct import from "The Leithian Script".

"I could be your wife. ...You could be my man."

And here's the final scene, the short epilogue that pushes the rating, but not enough I judge to change it.

I like to keep to the spirit of LaCE, if not the letter.

As promised - this is a romance.

Read "I could be your wife. ...You could be my man."

Faelindis’s skin was soft and smooth, the muscle under her pale flesh yielding to his touch. When he reached hip bones Faron found hardness to press against, but the rest of her was soft. Skin and flesh both. His thumbs could find the edge where her ribcage started if he slid them upwards, if he pressed. Further and his fingers could feel the outward swell of her breasts. He dared not. His new fingers could not feel a difference compared to his old - Faelindis was no softer under the third finger of his right hand than his left. But the knowledge that his hands had been restored, that both his scars and those that had marred Faelindis had been removed and their flesh returned to peak pristine health, heightened the sensation of touch. He could not stop marveling over the smoothness. He forgot that he had touched her body before this moment. Perhaps the lack of clothing, even those threadbare rags that they had worn in Angband, and that their bodies were clean of its grime and terror, made the difference. That he could touch her like this. The knowledge that they were safe and would not be interrupted by anyone, especially not any orcish master, added to the sensuousness of this moment. No fear, no rushing. The ability to just linger at her waist, to stay there until she alone moved him, intensified the intimacy. 
The scent and flavor of apricot on his tongue overwhelmed Faron, even as he strained against that fruity taste to detect the unique scent of the woman in his arms. The songs that Faron had listened to as a young man stressed that lovers could recognize the perfume of their lovers. He worried that he was failing at that requirement. The singers demanded that he should, but he could not conjure any poetic language to describe Faelindis in this moment. She was warm and soft and allowing him to touch her. She was encouraging him to touch her. 
Until she stopped him, Faron would hold and caress her.

Her own fingers were slender and bony, pressing quite firmly against his arms and digging into his biceps and shoulders. Then Faelindis’s hands moved further up to his neck, reaching into the still short hair at the nape of his neck, curling against his scalp and pulling down. It was not as hard as it could be, but the persistence eventually convinced Faron to lift his chin up and open his eyes. Faelindis’s eyes, darker than normal, met his, and from this distance of only finger-breadths he could see that she had been biting down on her lower lip. There were lines of poetry about the long lashes of a lover’s eyes, something about roses and red lips, and Faron could not even give her that. She deserved beautiful words. She should rip every perfect line of song to describe herself from his willing lips, drink them from his parched mouth.

His hands were drifting down again, seeking those divots at the bottom of her backside right before the soft muscle began to curve out again. He could not allow his hands to roam further than that point, but the curling and downward tugging of fingers against his hair was attacking that restraint. 
“Say my name again,” Faelindis said, and Faron obliged. Under his hands he could feel her flesh shiver as he said her name aloud. 
“Faelindis,” Faron said, watching her close her eyes. He repeated her name and closed his eyes as she leaned forward and began to kiss his lips. He expected them to be soft, and her lips were for a moment, but she was pressing hard, and he could feel her teeth behind her lips. All of her was pressing against him. Heat low in his body was becoming uncomfortable, his head felt thrice as big as it should, and his mind drifting lost inside it. Hardness instead of softness. Unbearable hardness.

She wanted to hear her name. Faron -barely- focused on that. Her name, with each stroke of his hands against her soft flesh, against the tip of a tongue that parted his lips and silenced him. “Faelindis. Faelindis.” Hands running down his neck, short fingernails digging along the wings of his shoulder blades, tickling his sides as she moved her hands down to his waist, reaching down to cup his ass, her stomach pressed flat against his, her thighs touching his, leaning against him and shifting her weight to straddle his lap. “-indis,” he murmured as Faelindis stilled above his lap, her knees squeezing his thighs, her hands pressing hard against his body to hold herself up.

Faron’s nakedness hid nothing about his body’s reaction.

Dark brown eyes looked at Faron’s restored body. Flushed red lips parted as she pulled back, a gasp and then a smile. Faelindis evaluated him and the reaction she caused, the soft and mindless look to his sea-green eyes, his slack jaw and panting, the slight shake as he struggled to hold his legs and hips still. Smug, she arched her back, reveling in the pull of Faron’s hands as he was unwilling to allow her to move away. Her dark hair fell like a queen’s cape down her back. Emboldened by his evident desire and the mantra that he had made of her name, Faelindis offered, “Your bride.”

Faron forgave himself the delayed and muzzy-headed reaction to her words, but he hated the spike of fear that shot at an angle from his lower back into his stomach and through his diaphragm, stuttering his breath. He ached for her, for the feeling of Faelindis, for confident smiles on her face, the sound of her voice lightened with laughter and joy. That she knew him when he was Osp and never recoiled in disgust. That her brown eyes saw her savior when she beheld him. But the wise part of Faron’s soul, not the foolish young man that died at the gates of Angband or the terrified creature grasping for preservation that survived Angband but the man who could look back upon them with pity, warned him. Faelindis thought herself in love with him, and he knew that he was in love with her - but how much of that was the centuries in Angband? His was the only kind face that she had known in a long period of  torment. Soft, incredible Faelindis could choose another than him, now that she had freedom. And Faron knew the boy that he had been in Nargothrond. Unlike his companions, his affections faded swiftly, his courtships like candles, bright but consumed in a matter of days or weeks. He feared that his traitorous heart, free to return to old ways, would tire of her. His body screamed that was an impossibility, one region in particular. But could he promise her a forever?

“Faron?” Faelindis quivered.

Without thought, Faron pressed his thumbs firmly into her flesh, gripping her tight. He could not allow her to pull away from him. There was fear in her dark eyes, and he could not allow that. Could not be the reason for that. “Your man,” he whispered, feeling the shape of that promise on his tongue. It tasted of apricots and salt. It tasted right and true. “Yours. To Eru I swear.”

Faelindis smiled. “I would have my family present to hear our vows. Yours as well. Your sister, at least, and parents, and any uncles you wish. You spoke fondly of some of them. And our friends!” she added, animated excitement overpowering her shyness. “I would have Lady Finduilas see me on my wedding day, and Gwenniel, and Lady Aereth, Dondwen, Gelril. Oh, and you must have them, Aglar and Craban and Galuven and Captain Heledir. Even - no, I cannot ask for the king, for either of them. But you could.” Her voice grew soft again. “Son of the Mithmeren lord, you are a prince among the Falathrim, and I am but a seneschal's daughter. Only a counterfeit princess.”

“Noble, M’lady,” Faron countered, daring to run his fingers across her collarbones and dip down to the small swells of her breasts, wondering if there was any part of her as soft as what he now felt. “You are noble.”

Faelindis shivered, and Faron felt the difference in its violent intensity. She whisper-pleaded, “No. My name. Your Faelindis. Just her.”

Faron leaned forward to give into the impulse to kiss the part of her that he craved to yet had refrained from, outlining the small circle of her nipple with his tongue. Once he satisfied himself with the taste of her breast, slowly licking the sweat that had gathered down her sternum and mouthing more gentle kisses at the divot of her collarbones, he spoke into the hollow of her neck, his eyelashes fluttering against her neck. “My Faelindis.” He repeated her name, tangling fingers into her dark hair.

Her small hands shifted around to touch him, shy at first, gauging his reaction, then guiding his hands to where she wanted his fingers. Tentative touches, promises for a day they would not yet claim.

“We flew,” Faron murmured, thinking back to another time that he held Faelindis in his arms. “We are free now, can go wherever we wish.”

“And where do you wish?” Faelindis asked, cupping his face with her slender hands, drinking the sea once more from his eyes, the tips of her fingers as wet as the shine across her bitten lips.

“Here is most pleasant,” Faron teased, drawing her body closer with his arms, pressing so there was no emptiness between them from knees to chin, close enough that their breaths passed from lip to lip. Close enough that he saw only the maiden’s eyes, dark and deep and full of love.

---

Chapter End Notes

And also as long promised, the notes on character fusions. Readers of the rest of the series should already know these, and all of this is nothing more than Easter Eggs for people familiar with A Song of Ice and Fire.

Faron is obviously Theon Greyjoy, with the Falathrim as a whole substituting for the Ironborn. Iessel is Asha, as are his two older dead brothers Rodrik and Marion as Duinethor and Cófon, his parents Ringon and Hithaereth for Balon and Alannys (no driftwood crown for Balon), and while Aearon “Ninlaws” is the Damphair, you can decide which remaining nuncle is the one who left to Aman and died in the Kin-slaying. (Tentatively Urrigon fits Tolon best for parallels.) Rodrick the Reader is an elf, Duinenir, living with Círdan and very happy with his books, I’ll have you know. Nargothrond becomes Winterfell, except for when Angband is covering for it under the Boltons (and for Faelindis’s backstory, Tol Sirion as well). Therefore Finrod is roughly analogous to Ned Stark for some plot points. Faelindis with her brown eyes and position of steward's daughter forced to pretend to be higher-born is Jeyne Poole (Finduilas Faelivrin takes the place plot-wise for both Arya and Sansa Stark - and not in the way that the tv show did). The orc overseer with the ruby earring is Ramsay Snow, and never a more fitting assignment. Fat Walda also sneaks in a cameo. Aglar was another easy choice; here the irony is that Robb Stark is killed by a werewolf. Bran Stark is the younger brother, Craban. (Mornaew is black bird, Craban crow, Bran the Three-Eyed Crow has a name that literally means Raven.) While not named in this fic, there is the paternal cousin of Aglar raised side-by-side more like a brother who patrols in the far north with a name that means snow, and Aglar has two sisters and a baby brother who cameos towards the end. His father died trying to stop the First Kinslaying instead of being beheaded at King’s Landing, and his mother’s red hair means Catelyn Tully is now a niece of Nerdanel. The direwolves are now Hounds of Oromë and thus had to stay with the older sister and other family in Aman. Faelineth the healer is the other Jeyne, and her brother Raynald Westerling becomes one of the other ten to die in the dungeons of Tol-in-Gaurhoth. The rough characterization and backstories for Edrahil and the Captain of the Guard, Heledir, are shamelessly stolen from The Leithian Script, though on the family trees Edrahil’s father corresponds to Edmure Tully. As for some of the other soldiers of Nargothrond, their inspirations come from some very different places. Bân and Fân have more than a passing resemblance to the protagonists of one Final Fantasy series and its spin-off, and the brothers Gadwar and Galuven were loosely inspired by Gawyn Trakand and Galahad Demandred, making Arodreth Gareth Bryne and Finduilas’s other lady-in-waiting Egwene al’Vere. Gelril is Elayne Trakand.

And thus this entire fic was an excuse to give Theon and Jeyne the happy ending that I knew GRRM wouldn’t, complete with restorative magics. And dead dragons.