Release from Bondage by heget

"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.

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.