Release from Bondage by heget

"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.