Release from Bondage by heget

"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.