Release from Bondage by heget

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"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]

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