Under strange stars by Idrils Scribe

In the end their answer came from a luckless Arnorian sailor by the name of Ruhiren. Erestor thought it terrifying, that the final piece of this puzzle that was the long search for Elrond and Celebrían’s lost son should come from a man so sad and damaged.

Elrond’s chief counsellor met the Mortal at a run-down watering hole in one of the seedier parts of Fornost. They were far indeed from the polish and splendour of King Valandil’s court.

Ruhiren ordered a jug of sour ale, something he clearly had done far too often of late. Greasy wisps of dark hair framed a face that once possessed that near-Elvish handsomeness of the Dúnedain, now bloated and sallow with drink. 

Erestor kept his hood up as he sat down at a corner table, his back to the wall. He did not trust the tangled mess he had allowed his hair to turn into for this secretive errand to hide his leaf-shaped ears. There was no telling how much Mortal eyes would discern in the reddish half-light of smouldering grease lamps. 

Ruhiren returned with the beer and two leather tankards. As he set them down his ragged sleeves failed to cover rings of tell-tale scar tissue. Here was a man who had worn shackles. 

Unwilling to spend more time in these sordid surroundings than necessary, Erestor did away with pleasantries. “Did you see the child we seek in Umbar, at the slave market?”

A spark of cleverness remained in the Mortal’s sea-gray eyes. He knew the question for the trap it was. “No child did I see, but a man grown. He’s been there for many years, as you know well. And he wasn’t at the market either.”

Erestor remained silent, carefully opening his mind to the alien pitch and rhythm of the Mortal’s thoughts. He kept eyes trained on the man’s face in his effort to discern falsehood, but found none. Ruhiren’s story was the truth, or at least what the man believed to be true.

“I met him after I was freed.” Ruhiren said with no more than the slightest of slurs. “This was deep in the desert. He’s with the Haradrim, fighting the Black Númenóreans of Umbar. He told me he’s a freed Northern slave.”

“They must be thick on the ground in those parts. What makes you think he is the one I seek?” Erestor asked.

Ruhiren’s eyes flashed with indignation. “I’ve seen the King a few times, from afar. Our Valandil is your Elf-Lord’s kinsman. The man I saw has that same look. Bears the family resemblance, so to speak.”

Erestor’s senses were strained to breaking point, but still he could discern no lie behind the extraordinary claim. “How would I find him, if I were to go looking?”

Ruhiren laughed bitterly. “It’s as simple as travelling to the deep desert. Once there, the Haradrim will find you. They might lead you to your lost prince if you somehow convince them you aren’t a spy from Umbar. If not, your Immortal life will end then and there.” He paused for another swig from his tankard. “I wouldn’t bother asking the Umbarians. They’ll hang you just for speaking his name.”

“Which is?” Erestor tried his best to show neither emotion nor enthusiasm.

“They call him Thanak, of the House of the Four Winds”

Erestor pounced upon the inconsistency. “So he does have kin there?” 

Ruhiren shook his head. “Oh no. Harad is overrun with freed slaves without a home to return to. They’ve started a House of their own. Bearing that name is a statement that he has no kin.”

Erestor’s sense of foreboding grew with every glimpse of this disturbingly alien place. “Maybe the search would be easier with you as my guide?”

Once more Ruhiren laughed his mirthless laugh. “That desert is a place of terror, Master Elf! The Black Númenóreans are cruel as vipers, the locals are more than a little mad, and every last evil thing our good King Elendil flushed out of Mordor crawled down there to hide. I’ve had the good fortune to make it back home once, and I won’t tempt the Valar twice!” 

As if to make his point, Ruhiren gulped his remaining sour ale as if it were the finest Dorwinion.

“Not even for silver coin?” Erestor tried, knowing well enough that Elrond would willingly hand over a king’s ransom for his son’s safe return.

Ruhiren plopped down his tankard with an unsteady hand, wiping his mouth and wafting an eye-watering smell of stale alcohol towards Erestor, who bravely kept from flinching.

“Not even for the Royal Scepter. If you think my tale worth your reward, then pay me what you promised. If not, at least pay for the beer.”

----

Pacing the portico of the Last Homely House was beneath the dignity of its Lady. Nonetheless Celebrían did just that as she waited for Erestor to return from his inquiry in Fornost.

Elrond had sensed him fording the Bruinen an hour ago, and all that time Celebrían had prowled the house like a caged lioness, silk skirts rustling behind her as she strode under the elegantly vaulted arches. On the lower branches of the great beech tree shedding its leaves in the courtyard she could make out Elladan’s dark shape, waiting for possible news of his twin as anxiously as she was. Elrond was inside, mindlessly rearranging the clutter on his worktable and attempting to hide his agitation.

Over the past forty years there had been many tales like this one, and always they had come to bitter disappointment - Elrohir being kept prisoner by wild hillfolk, abducted into the East, buried under such-and-such oak tree. The stories had all been dead ends, no trace ever found of the youngest twin or his escort. As the years wore on the stream of fortune-seekers spinning fancy tales with their greedy eyes on the reward offered by the Lord of Imladris had worn down to a trickle, then stopped entirely.

Until a few weeks ago, when word reached Imladris from Elrond’s envoy at the court of King Valandil in Fornost. Nénuwen’s missive came with her usual amount of level-headed scepticism. The letter painted the strange tale of a missing sailor’s unhoped-for return from the Far South. Once home the poor fellow had taken to stumbling between ale-houses, entertaining any listener willing to buy him a cup with wild tales of being captured by corsairs, sold into Umbar as a slave, and making a miraculous escape by way of the deep desert. In that strange and wild place he claimed to have met the one mortals in Arnor now called the "Lost Elf-Prince". 

That very day Erestor travelled to Fornost for a discrete investigation, avoiding Elrond’s official channels at court. And so the Lady of Imladris paced as she awaited the return of Elrond’s chief counsellor and spymaster on this radiant autumn afternoon.

Erestor had barely dismounted when Celebrían spun him around to face her. She had much of her mother’s talent for seeing minds. Then and there, she knew. 

With a small sound between a sob and a sigh she embraced Erestor as he stood there in his travel-stained, ill-made mannish clothes. He awkwardly returned the embrace while looking  over her shoulder at Elrond, who came running from his study without regard for the dignified reserve expected from the Lord of Imladris.

Celebrían turned around to offer her husband a single memory, wafer-thin and fragile. This was what all of Erestor’s skill at ósanwe had managed to extract from a mortal mind neither equipped nor suitable for such sharing. An image, its periphery hazy and dreamlike but gaining sharpness towards the centre where the dark outline of a face took shape. It was covered in cloth, a turban perhaps. Only the eyes were sharp and bright: grey as a clear evening, and within them the remembrance of starlight. Both Elrond and Elladan gasped, as struck by the enormity of this moment as Celebrían herself.

----

They convened in Elrond’s council chamber as soon as Erestor returned from the baths, his sable hair drying in damp waves as it spilled down his customary immaculate robes. Celebrían looked around the bright, vaulted room with its round table, finely inlaid by one of the Noldorin craftsmen in Imladris. Elrond, Erestor and Glorfindel were seated around it in various states of agitation.

Someone had to travel to the Far South in all haste. Who, exactly, was the subject of heavy debate. Elrond insisted on making the journey to retrieve Elrohir himself, while Glorfindel and Erestor protested that he could not risk his own life, or – even more catastrophic –  risk Vilya falling into the hands of the Enemy. So very rarely they mentioned the very existence of Elrond’s ring aloud, even in this room. It was why Elladan had not been allowed to attend, despite his protests. Their son – sons! – had not yet come of age, and Elladan was kept in the dark about the true extent of his father’s responsibilities. Few Elves knew the whereabouts of the Three Rings. Two of those had passed into Mandos’ halls, and four of the ones remaining were now sitting at Elrond’s table.

The debate went around in circles until Elrond silenced Erestor mid-sentence with a frustrated gesture and turned to Celebrían. Despite his lordly composure, she could tell his control was fraying at the edges. He was much closer to tears than he would have Erestor and Glorfindel believe.

“My lady, what say you?” Elrond asked, voice hoarse with emotion. “You have heard us all out several times and you have doubtlessly seen much. Give us the benefit of your wisdom.”

Celebrían looked at her husband in the fading light of early evening. Decades of grief, concern and desperation had dulled his bright spirit and taken the gleam from his eyes. He reminded her of how he had been newly returned from Dagorlad, still deep in mourning over Gil-galad. Wise, he certainly was, but she acutely saw how his emotions in this matter had overpowered his judgement. No good would come from it if he travelled to Harad, and too much would be risked.

She took a moment to straighten out her words before speaking them aloud, and from the corner of her eye noticed Glorfindel leaning forward in anticipation. His hands were twiddling with the edges of a hastily procured map of the Far South, earning him a peeved look from Erestor. The ancient warrior had been Elrond’s strategic advisor and the commander of his guard since his miraculous return from Valinor. At first Celebrían had been awed by the momentous importance of Glorfindel’s return to Middle-earth, but she had found the Elf behind the historical reputation to be kind and good-natured despite his sometimes brazen and cocky manner. His loyalty to Elrond as the last descendant of the line of Turgon ran deep. 

The knowledge eased her sadness over having to tell Elrond that she sided with his counsellors. On hearing her words, he buried his face in his hands. Only she knew how hard he fought to keep the tears that burned behind his eyelids from falling.

When Elrond looked up, his ever practical nature had taken over. There was a campaign to organise.

----

When Glorfindel left Imladris mere days later, he had been disguised with all the considerable art at his and Elrond’s disposal. His golden majesty and the light of Valinor in his eyes were veiled beneath an unremarkable Mortal face. He had been outfitted in mannish clothes and mail, a serviceable but slightly dented sword at his side. His mount was a dun-coloured pack horse, a far cry from the white destriers he normally chose.

He rode for Lindon bearing letters from Elrond to Círdan requesting passage to Umbar. He made record time, reaching the Grey Havens before the first winter storms.

Glorfindel knew Círdan well. The first long-year of his second sojourn in Middle-earth he had spent in Lindon. In those days the legendary warrior, returned to walk Ennor once more as a symbol of defiance to the Enemy, brought hope and inspiration to the lingering remnant of the High Elves. 

On this occasion the Lord of the Havens received Glorfindel and his message with equal measures of relief and concern for the sheer distance and complexity of the task before him. Círdan did smile his irreverent Telerin smile upon realizing the irony of the resplendent Lord of the Golden Flower, who would not dress in silver embroidery if he could get gold, having to play the part of a rugged Mortal traveler.

Without delay a ship was outfitted and crewed with eager volunteers from Círdan’s folk. Elrond had been chief counselor to High King Gil-galad for almost an age, and the Peredhel was well-loved among his former folk. All other work in the shipyards ceased as many skilled hands readied victuals, rigging and sails in record time, allowing them to set sail just a week after Glorfindel rode through the gates. 

Círdan himself captained the grey ship, and sang its sails seaward. Their journey south was so blessed with favourable winds that it seemed that Ossë and Uinen themselves sought to bring home their beloved Eärendil’s lost grandson.

Once they reached southern reaches of the Bay of Belfalas, the time had come to make a difficult choice. 

No Elvish ship could openly approach Umbar, or any other southern harbour where Black Númenóreans ruled, their worship of Sauron still as ardent as before his defeat at the Last Alliance. Glorfindel had to land secretly, in the dead of night. Cirdan had voiced his misgivings about abandoning him alone in this desolate and hostile land with so few clues to Elrohir’s whereabouts, but the Balrog-slayer stood firm.  

Nowhere in the lands of the West existed a current map of Umbar. From an ancient sea-chart drawn when Númenor still stood, Círdan selected a deserted stretch of arid coastline to the south of Umbar, two days’ ride from the town of Pellardur. Seen from the sea, Umbar looked as unforgiving as Ruhiren’s tales. As far as Elvish eyes could see sage-speckled sand and bare red rock stretched to a horizon shimmering with heat.

And so Círdan rowed back to his grey ship moored in the shallows, leaving Glorfindel and his dun mare alone on a dark, windswept beach under strange stars.

Once more Glorfindel lifted his half-empty waterskin to drink the smallest possible sip. Around him arid plains of rough sage-brush stretched to the horizon. The ceaseless wind parching his throat seemed to blow straight from a furnace. A harsh copper sun beat down on the caravan of camels led by slaves on foot while their Black Númenórean masters rode high above the scorching sand. 

Glorfindel had paid most of the silver Elrond had generously supplied him with to join this caravan of traders on its way to Zimrenzil. That city was Umbar’s last stronghold, teetering on the edge of the wild, empty desert.

The Umbarian penchant for violence and savagery had made a lasting impression on Glorfindel. Pellardur had been a walled trading town, its dust-filled market square dwarfed by the cavernous slave market where chained men, women and children were paraded and auctioned off like cattle. The mere sight of such violence and degradation from one child of Ilúvatar to another made the ancient Elda feel contaminated by the uncleanliness, the wickedness of it all. It was a bitter irony, he felt, that if Orcs could not live in these sun-lands the feeble race of Men should obey Sauron’s will so eagerly that they’d turn to behave just like them.

Emperor Zimrathôn of Umbar retained a strong garrison there, and the steel-clad warriors patrolling the streets reminded Glorfindel that these slaves tended to rise up against their masters with equal violence. Various amputated body parts displayed on every gate and tower in the city sent a clear message about the consequences of rebellion.

The Umbarians brought that same attitude with them on the desert journey. Obedience was enforced with whips and the ever-present threat of the heavily armed imperial soldiers protecting the caravan. At the sight of the lash-marks on the emaciated men leading his camel, Glorfindel tried his best not to imagine the sweet, quicksilver child he had once known as Elrohir making his way to the desert in a similar manner.

Jagged mountains loomed ever closer on the southern horizon, and the Númenóreans became restless. They spoke in fearful tones of raids by Haradrim rebels in the area. As the caravan entered the foothills, Glorfindel sensed a change. All his ages of experience as a warrior screamed that hostile eyes were watching from the rocky hilltops, and whispers of their approach ran through the valleys. He felt a spark of fierce joy despite the oppressive dread of an inevitable attack. Whoever was lying in wait to ambush the caravan, they might know of a grey-eyed man by the name of Thanak.

The Haradrim came at night. Glorfindel had to admire their skill and strategy at setting traps. The Umbarians were cleverly brought to camp for the night on a valley floor that was nigh impossible to defend against attack from above. A rockslide, doubtlessly prepared days in advance, had closed off the way forward and it was too late in the day to turn the caravan around and return to higher ground. Glorfindel had known for days that they were being watched, even though the scouts neither saw nor heard any sign of Haradrim raiders. A leaden silence hung over the canyons, broken only by the stirring of small animals indifferent to the violence of Men.

Glorfindel decided not to warn his companions about the imminent attack. After witnessing their cruelty he felt no sympathy for them. Their defeat would make it more likely that Glorfindel could continue his journey in the company of someone who could lead him to Elrohir. 

In silence he put out his bedroll on the edge of camp and feigned sleep. When the encampment fell silent he slipped between the guards unseen, into the desert. He changed his Umbarian robes for a cloak of Grey Elven make brought from Imladris. To his great satisfaction it seamlessly blended with the moonlit ochre of the valley’s tumbled rocks.

Glorfindel made a detour through a small side canyon to reach the hillcrest above the sleeping camp. Nothing stirred below but guards moving between the tents and the small campfires, where he had lain not an hour ago. He would have laughed, had his life not depended on silence. Where the heavy-footed Umbarians had found nothing but empty desert and frustration, sharp Elvish senses and three ages of military experience had succeeded. Glorfindel had found the Haradrim.

About fifty of them, and probably a similar number on the valley’s opposite rim. All wore flowing robes, turbans and face-veils the color of the desert sand. They had no mail as far as Glorfindel could see, but were armed to the teeth with spears, scimitars and metal crossbows, likely looted from earlier raids on Umbar. Their clothing might be all alike, but Glorfindel had never seen so diverse a gathering, doubtlessly representing the Umbarian fondness of exotic slaves. What was visible of their faces ranged from almost coal-black to Edain-pale. Some had the slanted eyes of the Far East, others were light-eyed, probably captured Northerners like Ruhiren. Glorfindel watched their movements for a time, until he could identify their captain as a tall, dark-skinned man whose grey eyebrows betrayed his age.

Glorfindel silently crept along, hidden by his Wood-Elf cloak. To the captain’s credit he made no sound when Glorfindel seemingly materialized out of the sand at his feet. A quick gesture, and spear points surrounded the Elf from every side. He raised both his empty hands.

“Hold your spears, I come in peace!”

The Haradrim captain looked him over. The whites of his clever eyes sharply contrasted the burnt umber of his half-veiled face.

“You are a Northerner, but neither from Umbar, nor Gondor.” The Mortal said. “Something else entirely. Something I have not seen before.” 

The man spoke Númenórean with a strange, heavy accent, probably from the far south. “You are not a slave, and never were one, if I am to judge. I have seen you riding a camel with the Umbarians while our people walked the dust beside. You bore no whip though. For that, I will allow you to speak before I decide the manner of your death.”

Even though the Mortal was incapable of seeing his mind, Glorfindel knew that this man would see a lie for what it was. He simply told him the truth. He spoke of Elrond, Imladris, the North. Elrohir’s abduction and the long search for the child now grown to manhood. He even named Ruhiren as the one who had put him on Elrohir’s trail.

When Glorfindel’s tale was told the captain’s eyes showed doubt. He was not a cruel man by nature. Glorfindel sensed that he, too, had children somewhere, maybe lost to the chaos and destruction that had engulfed so much of Harad. But he was no fool. Their chances against the Númenóreans this night were already balanced on a knife’s edge. The Haradrim could afford no mistakes. To leave a potential traitor alive in their midst might be the last one they ever made.

Before the captain could voice the order that would end Glorfindel’s life in Middle-earth for a second time a fine-boned Easterling woman interrupted him. Despite his predicament Glorfindel noted that among these people a commander’s authority clearly did not have the same tyrannical quality as with their Númenórean counterparts.

“He tells us at least some truth, Amuk,” she said. “I once knew a Northerling by the name of Ruhiren. He was a captured sailor, and did return to the North two years ago.”

Another man interjected that the time for talk was running short, pointing at the stars to show that the appointed hour for the attack was near.

The captain, whose name was indeed Amuk, came to a decision. “Take his pack, his weapons, and search him well for any he has hidden. Then tie him and leave him here until we return. We will decide what to do with him in the morning.”

Glorfindel bit back his anger and disgust at the humiliating treatment. There was no way forward but to swallow his pride and allow two Mortal warriors, who he could easily have bested with his hands tied behind his back, to do their captain’s bidding. Glorfindel’s face remained impassive as they patted him down, even going as far as shaking out his boots. Inwardly he could have spat at their unmelodious chattering in what had to be Haradi, and the sickening smell of their long-unwashed clothes. Glorfindel was tied securely, his face towards a rock face so he could not observe the course of the fight.

They left him utterly defenseless and alone. Glorfindel’s life now depended on the fortune of the Haradrim in the coming battle. If they were defeated and killed by the Umbarians he would die of thirst where he lay, forgotten and without a chance of being found before the desert reduced him to a pile of sun-bleached bones. He only just managed to keep panic at bay, reciting a prayer to Elbereth over and over in his mind to keep it from racing. 

Soon, he heard the Haradi attack on the Umbarian camp begin. From the sounds of the battle he could not discern which turn it was taking. He heard no battle cries from either side, only the clatter of steel on steel, screams of anger, fear and pain, and the dull roars of panicking camels running amok.

By first light the fighting died down. As the sun rose many voices took up a single call, echoing over the mountains.

“Ak-ren ghab, Ak-ghab Eru!”

Glorfindel knew not a word of the Haradi tongue, but the mere fact that victory was announced in a language other than Númenórean was blessed relief. He waited for another terrifying hour. Amuk did not strike him as the kind of man who would leave a bound prisoner to die. The question was whether Amuk had survived the battle, and if not, what his successor would choose to do with the strange Northerner. 

At last Glorfindel’s dark musings were interrupted by approaching footsteps on the gravel behind him. The very same warriors who had tied him up had come to retrieve him, looking the worse for wear. Their robes and veils were blood-splattered and torn. One sported a black eye slowly swelling shut. Despite their injuries they seemed in high spirits, chattering among themselves in excited tones while untying Glorfindel’s bonds just enough to enable him to walk. Without speaking to Glorfindel they led him downhill towards the campsite on the valley floor.

When he caught sight of it in the harsh white light of the desert morning, Glorfindel could not help a pang of sorrow for such loss of life despite his earlier antipathy for the Umbarians. His former travel companions had been slaughtered to the last man. The only people left alive in the valley were the Haradrim warriors and the now freed slaves, who had set to plundering their former masters’ corpses of weapons, clothes and armour. The stench of dead bodies beginning to rot in the heat was overpowering. 

Even the creatures of the desert seemed to rejoice in the carnage. Glorfindel had never seen this many carrion-flies on any northern battlefield, and packs of wild dogs congregated at the camp’s edges with much snarling and growling. Overhead, large vultures slowly circled through the steel-blue sky, waiting for the Men to leave them to their feast.

To one side of the camp the pack-camels and their precious cargo of wheat, wine, olive oil and dried fish were being gathered by Haradrim warriors, loudly counting and rejoicing in their bounty. 

Amuk stood in the remains of the Númenórean caravan leader’s tent, tallying what gold and precious stones had been looted. On Glorfindel’s approach the Haradrim captain carefully finished his count and gathered his treasure in a leather purse, which disappeared beneath the flowing robes. Amuk looked Glorfindel in the eye, gauging his reaction to the massacre in search of grief for the Umbarians. He found none.

“Master Glorfindel, as you can see we were fortunate this night and therefore you are, too.” Amuk smiled as if they were old friends meeting at a feast. “Your tale has garnered some sympathy among my people. You may ride east with us. One among our folk might fit your description. He rides with a company like this one. I know not where they are now but we may meet them on the road, Eru willing.”

Glorfindel made sure to thank the man profusely before asking “Am I your prisoner?”

Amuk’s eyes settled on the ropes binding the Elf. “You have neither desert experience nor skill with camels,” he said pensively. “We will keep your weapons and waterskins. Walking away without them means certain death. That will be shackle enough for you, unless you are a fool.”

With that, he gestured for his warriors to untie Glorfindel.

“Now there is much work to be done, and we’d be glad for your help.”

Glorfindel’s guards were called Samak, a quiet Haradrim, and a woman named Metalan. She was a freed slave from the far Southlands, her skin so dark it had an almost bluish tinge. They set him to the grisly work of stripping the Umbarian corpses. 

Glorfindel almost refused out of sheer indignation. He was intimately familiar with the sight and smell of violent death, but as a commander had never been present for the inevitable disposal of bodies that took place after a battle’s end. On some level he was aware that even Elvish warriors would have to lower themselves to handling the bodies of their fallen enemies, be they Men or Orcs, but for him this was a disgusting first. The one small mercy was that no tale of this episode was likely to reach Imladris. He would never live it down if Erestor ever caught wind of it.

Most Black Númenóreans appeared to have fallen in battle, but others clearly had their throats cut afterwards. The corpses were left to rot where they fell, stark naked as a reminder for future caravans of who controlled this desert. 

When Glorfindel next looked up the Haradrim were saddling their own camels, brought in from a distant valley where they had been hidden during the raid. These were majestic animals, taller than those the Umbarians had used, with an aloof and defiant air reminiscent of their riders. The former slaves had been outfitted with their dead masters’ gear and were now in their saddles. Samak took Glorfindel behind him on his own camel.

Glorfindel soon grew acquainted with the rhythms of desert travel. The Haradrim kept a guard on him, but he was treated with kindness. As a people they were not unlike the Sindar in their love of the nighttime and the stars. The company slept under tarps during the glaring heat of day, their camels hobbled and left to roam near camp to graze on the sparse vegetation. When the sun dipped to the western horizon a meagre meal of dried dates and rock-hard waybread was handed out along with a carefully measured water ration. The camels received nothing at all. When Glorfindel remarked on that he was told that the strange animals could go without drink for a fortnight before thirst would limit their use. 

As the sun set the Haradrim lined up their camels in a single file and rode all night, navigating by the stars. The unusual mounts appeared to have surpassing night vision. Even Elvish horses would have broken their legs riding at speed over the dark, wayless county. In the long dark hours the Haradrim often raised their voices in song. Glorfindel had not yet learned enough Haradi to understand the words, but the haunting melodies awakened visions of boundless freedom in wild, unconquered lands under open skies.

Amuk proved an unexpectedly pleasant travel companion. He was not a talkative man by nature, but he was cheerful enough, inviting Glorfindel to share most morning meals with him. The Southron could not have been more than fifty years old if Glorfindel was any judge of Mortal faces, but he possessed that hard, calculating cleverness born of long experience leading warriors into battle. 

News from outside the desert was hard to come by for the Haradrim. Amuk cared little for Glorfindel’s tidings from Arnor, which he referred to as "the Snowlands". The world north of the Mouths of Anduin was no more than a distant and wondrous rumour to the inhabitants of the deep desert, utterly without relevance to their own lives. Amuk was keen to hear all Glorfindel could tell him about Pellardur and its garrison and the state of Gondor’s military. The Haradrim felt great kinship with Gondor’s ceaseless war against Umbar, considering the enemy of their enemy a friend. Glorfindel gladly let himself be questioned in exchange for being taught the language and the customs of the Haradrim.

Customs that were strange indeed. On the first night of their journey Glorfindel convivially asked Amuk’s father-name, only to be met with the stony silence of insult. After Glorfindel’s baffled apology Amuk softened, and explained. Most of the Haradrim were former Umbarian slaves, escaped or set free in raids. Parentage was a source of pain rather than pride, a subject unfit for public discussion. The sorrow of not knowing their begetters, inconceivable as it seemed to Glorfindel, was considered preferable to an Umbarian father’s hated name, a permanent reminder of the torment he must have inflicted on their enslaved mother. Those slaves imported from distant lands had even less cause to dwell on what half-remembered kinships lay behind them, far out of reach in both distance and time, given the shortness of their Mortal years.

 It was a strange curse, Glorfindel mused, this Mannish ability to breed like Orcs whether the resulting children were wanted or not; yet another unbridgeable gap between Mortals and the Firstborn. 

Amuk saw rather blessing than curse, it seemed. “I am only of myself, Master Glorfindel, and my place in this world I wrested from Umbar with my own two hands. What other source of pride does a man need?”

Glorfindel, descended from a house of princes, did not possess the cruelty to gainsay him.

Not that the Haradrim would care overmuch for princes. Now that Glorfindel had learned more of their language he understood the battle cry he had heard for the first time over the carnage of the Umbarian caravan. The Haradrim defiantly called it out each morning as every member of their company turned east to kneel before the rising sun, turning their backs on the West.

“No Lord but God. No God but Eru.”

As they travelled south the signs of war were all around them. Whenever the company came upon a well or watering hole they were greeted by charred remains of straw and clay huts, some with the burnt bones of their inhabitants still in them. Whether these were Black Númenóreans raided by the Haradrim or that situation reversed, Glorfindel could not tell. It did not seem to matter much. Whatever small fields were suitable for planting had clearly been untilled for some time, which explained why the Haradrim had been more excited about their plundered wheat than the gold. During their journey they did not meet a living soul.

That changed on a dark night with a shroud of wind-swept dust blotting out the stars. Amuk’s company had been making slow progress with their navigation so hindered. Glorfindel was the first to notice the distant sound of camels behind them, their steps out of synchrony with the caravan. He alerted Samak, who dashed up the line to warn Amuk. 

The caravan reassembled itself in battle order, every eye trained on the dusty horizon. Glorfindel’s Elvish eyes soon found their pursuers. Five camels were following their tracks, the veiled riders dressed in Haradrim fashion. When Glorfindel described this to Amuk the man relaxed slightly.

The instant their pursuers became visible to mortal eyes a wave of relief swept the company. Clearly these visitors were well-known. How the Haradrim managed to identify each other with their desert-coloured robes and face-veils all alike, Glorfindel could not tell. When they came within earshot welcoming calls went up. A smiling Amuk gave Glorfindel a pat on the back.

“Eru favours you, Glorfindel! The man we call Thanak is among our guests.”

“Which one?” Glorfindel asked, eyes fixed on the approaching riders.

“The one in front, their captain.” Amuk said. “They seem to ride in haste, most likely a message. I would hear Thanak’s news first. Then you have my leave to speak with him and learn if he is the one you seek. Even if he is not, he might still be of use in your search. He travels far and hears many things.”

As the first rider approached, Amuk rode a small ways to meet him with a water skin in his hands. Samak trailed behind, allowing Glorfindel to observe the proceedings. 

Amuk made a welcoming gesture. “Eru bless the camel that carried you here!” he proclaimed in Haradi, holding out the waterskin.

“And Eru bless the hands that pass me this water!” The stranger answered solemnly before accepting it to take a ceremonial sip. For that he had to lower his veil.

Glorfindel’s heart stopped for a torturous instant before blood came rushing back into his veins. 

The rider’s face was Elladan's.

Both the newcomers and Amuk’s company made their grumbling camels kneel and dismounted. They would make camp for the day in this place. Amuk and Elrohir --no, Thanak-- turned their backs on the lively chatter of folk raising tents and lighting fires. They walked off among the strewn boulders surrounding the encampment to discuss whatever message Thanak had brought.

Glorfindel waited at the camp’s edge, nerves strung to breaking point. He tried his utmost to drown out the bustling of people and animals around him as he paced, suddenly agitated beyond what meditation could suppress. He had to restrain himself from following the pair to grab hold of Thanak and bare his face, if only to satisfy himself that hope was not playing cruel tricks on him, that this was indeed Elrohir and not some unfortunate young man of Gondor with the look of the Elf-friends. 

Glorfindel strained his ears, but he failed to understand their hushed conversation in rapid Haradi. All it conveyed was concern, an urgency with a hint of despair. Whatever the Haradrim intended with this strange war without armies, if war it was, it seemed to go ill. An agonizing hour passed and the eastern sky had brightened before they returned.

Thanak had clearly been told already of how Amuk’s company acquired a strange Northerner on an even stranger quest. As he approached Glorfindel his eyes gave away nothing of his inner thoughts. He was on the tall side for a Mortal, but smaller and slighter of frame than Glorfindel. His bearing had the grace and purpose of a seasoned warrior and he bore the arms to match it. A scimitar hung sheathed from his hip, a crossbow and quiver on his back in a leather holster. The desert-tinted garb of the Haradrim showed only tanned hands and a small slit of face from which sea-grey eyes now scrutinized Glorfindel. The depth of his gaze eerily reminded him of Galadriel in her youth.

Thanak spoke Haradi. “Greetings, Northerling. I am told you are looking for me.”

The faintest trace of Elven fairness remained in Elrohir’s voice even in such an alien language -- enough to remove all doubt. Relief flooded Glorfindel, and he could not help but smile. Despite Ruhiren’s grim warnings about this desert’s tendency to turn all things to darkness, it seemed the Valar had smoothed Glorfindel’s path to fulfilling his mission.

Elrohir sat down on the sand beside Glorfindel. His manner seemed gruff and unwelcoming, and his right hand remained hidden in the wide drape of a sleeve, no doubt clutching some weapon. Glorfindel deliberately ignored the implied threat as he undid his own headdress, revealing his face. With great caution, his back turned to the others, he released the artful enchantment veiling his appearance, so Elrohir would see him as he had been in Imladris. 

Glorfindel could see little of Elrohir’s expression, but he heard the hitch in his breath, and for a moment the carefully maintained guard on face and mind slipped to reveal shock … and recognition … before his eyes grew inscrutable once more.

A long silence descended. Glorfindel left the initiative to Elrohir, feeling the momentousness of this occasion and the delicate balance between hope and doubt in the young Half-Elf’s mind.

When Elrohir finally spoke it was not the Sindarin Glorfindel had hoped for, but accentless Númenórean.

“So at least this part of what Amuk tells me is true. I somehow knew you, long ago.”

It was less of an acknowledgement than Glorfindel had hoped for, but something at least. 

“Your father sends me to bring you home.” He said, his manner careful and gentle. “We have searched for many years. At last we have found you.”

“I have no memory of him,” Thanak interrupted. “What little I know of my childhood before I was captured does not allow me to tell whether you speak the whole truth. I can see no falsehood in you, but your mind is different from any I have met before. It hides many things.”

“Only what safety requires.” This was the truth and Glorfindel made sure Elrohir could perceive it in him, but even that failed to bring reassurance.

 A flock of sandgrouse spread out against the lightening sky. They noisily flapped into the air in a cloud of swirling feathers, disturbed by a group of warriors hunting them with slingshots. For the briefest of instants Elrohir’s eyes flicked, not to the distressed birds but to a small grouping of tumbled rocks nearby. The hidden warrior with her crossbow had been clever and stealthy, but Glorfindel could hear her breathe. 

He kept his eyes fixed on Elrohir’s, all openness and pleading. To threaten or demand would mean his death. The boy had grown up among Mortals, who did not value one another’s lives, and he would make himself a kinslayer without hesitation.  

Elrohir laughed without mirth. “Whose safety would that be?”

Glorfindel remained impassive. "Yours first and foremost, but also mine and that of those who eagerly await our return at home.”

“Which is?” 

Ai child, have they robbed you of even the memory of home? The thought was unbearable, and Glorfindel struggled against the sorrow colouring his voice.

“Imladris, in Arnor. Where Elrond, your father rules the Hidden Valley with the Lady Celebrían, your mother.”

Elrohir appeared utterly unmoved. “None of those names hold meaning to me.” His tone grew clipped. “It must have been over forty years. I am surprised to hear my parents are still alive, let alone sending out search parties.”

Elrohir’s lack of recognition, the seeming absence of any emotion was a dagger to Glorfindel's heart. He once held this child in his arms and sang the stars to life for him, only to see these very eyes light up with joy. He wished he could show Elrohir his brother’s face, his parents, to make him remember whether he wanted or not. What kept him was the hidden archer, and the likelihood of Elrohir reacting unpredictably to the strangeness of another’s memory inside his own head.

Glorfindel played his final card with regret for the pain it would inflict.

“What about your brother? Have you completely forgotten Elladan?”

The words hit Elrohir like a fist to the face. He gasped for breath, choked by rushing memories. The wet gleam to his eyes was a relief of sorts. Whatever else Elrohir had lost, he remained capable of honest tears.

After a long silence he looked at Glorfindel once more, this time with a new and unhoped-for gentleness.

“We meet in interesting times, Glorfindel.” Elrohir’s voice was hoarse with sorrow. “The war against Umbar is at a turning point. We must defeat them now or be destroyed. And right at this very moment you appear as if by Eru’s own hand, with a tale that is simply too strange to be true in this mad world.”

Glorfindel stated fact when he answered, “Yet you believe me, or you would have had me shot by now.”

Now Glorfindel did allow his eyes to move to his would-be killer’s hiding place, and Elrohir knew that he knew. A flicker of shame flashed through the boy’s mind. 

“I believe you, Eru help me!” he exclaimed, “But I fail to see how it still matters. As you have your duty to uphold, so do I have mine, and my time is running out. Now that I have delivered my message to Amuk I am needed elsewhere, and with great haste. My companions and I will leave in an hour, for we do not have even the day to spare. Where we go, you can’t follow. Amuk and his folk will now turn to the Pass of Horns. You must go with them and wait for me there. Eru willing, I will find you again. Then we will see what can be done.”

Glorfindel smiled, and briefly let himself revel in having convinced Elrohir. Now that the Peredhel believed him, all that remained to be done was strategy. And strategy was what Glorfindel had excelled at many centuries before Elrohir’s grandfather had been a twinkle in his great-grandmother’s eye.

“Take me with you, wherever you are going.” Glorfindel pleaded. “No matter what awaits, you will be glad you brought me before the end.”

Elrohir shook his head. “You know nothing of the desert, Master Glorfindel. We cannot take you on this journey. Speed is of the essence. You have no camel, and even if you did you are unused to riding. Go with Amuk.”

“Camels can carry two people,” Glorfindel retorted.

“Not as far, as fast and with as little water as the journey we are about to attempt.” Elrohir caught Glorfindel’s eyes with a stubborn determination that could have moved mountains. Celebrían’s son indeed.

Two could play that particular game. “So you leave me no choice but to follow you on foot.” Glorfindel said, wholly calm and matter-of-fact. 

Elrohir was flabbergasted by the sheer folly of that. “You’d be dead before the third day broke.”

“Do not underestimate me. There is more than the eye can see.”

Elrohir’s eyebrows almost disappeared beneath his turban. “Whatever that is, I am quite sure it will not let you walk all the way through the Great Dunes with only the water you can carry on your back!”

He had clearly never met an Elf-warrior, and certainly not one like Glorfindel, born in the light of the Two Trees. Glorfindel knew that his endurance would be double or more of what even the strongest Mortal body could bear. He would suffer, but he would live to protect Elrohir to the very end. He would not fail.

“I have sworn to bring you home safely. Now that I have found you I will not let you go to war alone. If I cannot ride with you I will walk in your tracks wherever you are going, and I will find you at their end.”

Elrohir was visibly taken aback by that much persistence in the face of reason. “You are mad. The one thing you will find in my tracks is your death.”

“A chance I am willing to take.” Glorfindel said, slow and solemn. “Hear me Elrohir, the name I heard your father give you the day you were born. Whatever is on the other side of the dunes, you will be glad of my help. Take me, or I shall walk.”

The sound of his true name seemed to break some unseen barrier, because Elrohir gave an exasperated sigh. “Very well. I’ll take you in my saddle, but know this. If your presence threatens our mission, I will not hesitate to abandon you to your fate in the desert.”

With that he rose to his feet, clearly distressed, and all but fled. Glorfindel followed. Elrohir’s company were already saddling their camels and packing their gear. He set to the same tasks in the reddish light of sunrise. 

With as little as he knew of camels Glorfindel could tell that Elrohir’s was a fine one. The animal was tall, with intelligence in its eye, its coat a golden tan. Glorfindel noted the heavy-tipped spear strapped to the saddle in easy reach. The weapon’s shaft was long enough to battle an adversary on the ground. Hanging from a hook on the saddle was a second quiver with even more crossbow bolts, fletched with the feathers of desert fowl.

Before Elrohir could mount Amuk approached. He was carrying Glorfindel’s weapons and waterskin, taken from him at the raid. The skin had been filled to capacity, and there was a bundle of dried dates Glorfindel did not remember packing.

“May Eru protect you, Glorfindel. These times grow dark and we may not meet again in this life or the next. I am glad to see that honor and loyalty have not entirely forsaken this world.”

Glorfindel bowed to this brave captain of Men, who had taken a chance by sparing his life and leading him to Elrohir for no other reason than that he understood all about a father’s love.

“My thanks and blessings, Amuk. May your fortunes in this war and beyond be favorable, and may you return safely to those you care for."

Elrohir silently packed Glorfindel’s belongings with his own. Even if his movements were gruff and angry when he allowed Glorfindel to mount behind him, it mattered not. Glorfindel now had the time he needed to talk to Elrohir. He could wait. 

The journey with Elrohir’s company was punishing. Glorfindel’s Umbarian guides had travelled during the fiery daytime, but on smaller, even-footed camels and never at speed. This ride felt like receiving two beatings at once: one from the great war-camel beneath him and another from the southern sun burning directly overhead. 

Glorfindel now fully appreciated the Haradrim fashion of covering one’s entire body, including the face. As the sun rose the intense glare flickering off the sand underfoot stung even for an Elf. To Mortal eyes it had to be near unbearable. Elrohir and his companions handed around a small jar, its contents an inky black. Darkening the skin around their eyes with the mixture of ground charcoal and animal fat seemed to bring some relief. When Elrohir turned around and offered the pungent stuff to Glorfindel he gladly accepted it.

Out here in the deep desert water was precious as life itself. Elrohir soon told Glorfindel that they would not pass any wells or watering holes. They wholly depended on what their camels carried, and would find no more before reaching their destination, which he refused to name. Glorfindel observed Elrohir and made sure to drink less often and in smaller sips than the Peredhel did, which was hard enough. The constant gnawing thirst gave him a new respect for his mortal companions’ ability to suppress the longings of their feeble bodies.

At high noon they set up a tarp to rest in the shade. The camels were hobbled and released, but they stayed nearby. The vast sea of sand surrounding them held nothing for the animals to graze. 

Elrohir sat up to take first watch as the others lay down to sleep. He had removed his head-covering to reveal dark hair cropped heartbreakingly short, as seemed to be the custom among the Haradrim. Awash in equal amounts of pity and sorrow Glorfindel noted the uneven bristles in Elrohir’s neck where one of his fellow warriors must have cut it for him with a knife. The sight brought unpleasant thoughts of thralldom and torture: no Elf would undergo such humiliation of their own free will.

It would be a long work, to bridge this gulf of strangeness that gaped between what Elrohir had become and what he was born to be. Suddenly Glorfindel doubted the wisdom of his counsel to Elrond, that the Peredhel stay behind in Imladris. Glorfindel himself had little fondness of Mortals, with the esteem he had held for Tuor all but demolished by witnessing Isildur’s weakness. Elrond, with his ingrained understanding of Elrohir’s adopted people, would probably have had a far easier time building a rapport. A dear price the Peredhel had paid for safekeeping the burden that was Vilya. Glorfindel would see to it that it would run no higher.

Glorfindel sat down opposite Elrohir once he was completely sure that the others were asleep. He chose the spot both to scan the horizon at the boy’s back, and to see his face. Even with the strange black stripes around his eyes he was the spitting image of his brother.

“Will you not tell me where we are headed?” Glorfindel asked.

“We are on a hunt, Master Glorfindel.” Elrohir answered with a wry smile. “Our prey hides in the Sea of Dunes. I did not tell you in Amuk’s camp to keep from alarming those overhearing our conversation.”

Glorfindel read what little emotion slipped past Elrohir’s carefully maintained facade. To his dismay, it was pure and unadulterated fear.

“What is it you seek?” he demanded, urgency in his voice.

“I do not know. We have no name for such a creature. Some call it the Demon. It seems to be a man, and yet not. Fear is its weapon, and with that it causes a slow death without wounds. It sets itself against the Haradrim, aiding Umbar, and it will be our downfall if we do not defeat it soon.”

An icy fist closed around Glorfindel’s heart as he thought of Sauron, fled into the wilds after his downfall at the hands of the Last Alliance, when Isildur failed to deal him the killing blow.

He took Elrohir by the arm, his fingers gentle but firm. “Have you seen this creature with your own eyes?”

A hint of pain flickered across Elrohir’s face, but his voice remained steady. “I have.”

“Show me.” Glorfindel belatedly realized that he was issuing orders as if this were one of his warriors.  

Elrohir looked at him in confusion, thinking the demand an ill-timed jest. “I don’t have it in my pocket.”

Glorfindel did not even smile at the attempt at a light-hearted answer. His eyes bored into Elrohir’s. 

“You and I, we can open our thoughts to one another, and so share memories. You may not have experienced it among Men, but you are certainly capable of it. Allow me to see this being through your eyes so I may put a name to it, if I can.”

Elrohir recoiled, backing away from Glorfindel with loathing in his eyes. His right hand shot to the dagger in his sleeve.

“I have felt that before, too, and from the very thing we seek. It was not an experience I’d care to repeat. Are you one like him, perhaps given fair form to deceive us?”

Elrohir’s entire body tensed like a snake about to strike, and for an instant Glorfindel was terrified. Against a half-starved child he was sure to come out the winner, but Elrohir would never trust him again. 

Glorfindel raised both hands to where Elrohir could see them. “Look into my eyes. I speak the truth. I am nothing like him.”

Elrohir did look, and what he saw made him relax somewhat. “Take my hand,” Glorfindel said, voice carefully even as he threw caution to the winds and reached for Elrohir’s. “It will make it easier.”

Elrohir shook, but he let himself be touched. His palm bore a swordsman’s calluses, rough and clammy with sweat. Glorfindel reached into his mind as gently as he could to avoid spooking him again. That distinctive, almost-Elvish weave of it was instantly familiar from Elrond and Elladan. The contents were another matter. Glorfindel was met with a firm resistance born of terror. Clearly Elrohir wanted nothing more than to recoil at the unfamiliar sensation of another mind against his, but he wished to learn what Glorfindel could tell him even more. Panic rose, its discord jangling the weft and warp of Elrohir’s mind. Glorfindel could feel him suppress it with the skill of one used to their life depending on composure. It was only a moment before he regained his bearings and brought up the memory.

Elrohir stood guard over a sleeping encampment. It was a dark noontime, the air so saturated with the dust blown up by a hot southern wind that a permanent red dusk had descended. As people and camels slept, the billowing curtains of dust endlessly driven across the sky were the only movement, and yet there was nothing peaceful about the scene.

Even just watching the memory, Glorfindel felt unease and impending threat weigh heavily on his mind. Something wicked approached.

The camels could feel it too, and they bellowed in terror, trying to run despite their hobbles. All around him men and women awoke and reached for their weapons. Every eye was trained on the invisible horizon and the dancing veils of dust, but nothing else moved there. 

Suddenly, on the edge of vision, something disturbed the pattern of the dust storm. A man walked towards the camp. No, rather than a man it was the absence of one, a man-shaped emptiness in the red dust. The crushing press of fear intensified. Somewhere behind Elrohir camels screamed in blind panic. Some of the people, too. One of the archers drew his crossbow to shoot a bolt at the thing. It was well-aimed but passed straight through the shape unheeded as it continued its approach.

Elrohir became aware of being touched, not physically but in mind as if another were with him in the darkness behind his eyelids. It was vile, a disgusting violation. He struggled with all his might to remove the thing as it clung to him with a grip of iron.

“You are not like the others!” The paralysing cold of that hissing voice was torture in itself.“What are you?! Speak!”

The pain intensified as Elrohir’s defenseless mind was torn asunder by an iron claw. The creature used fear itself as torture, pouring it into him like a viscous poison until he was mired in it like an ant in amber. There, just before the breaking point where it would wholly bring him under its shadow, a memory resurfaced from a time long forgotten.

“A Elbereth, Gilthoniel! A tiro nin!”

Elrohir’s waking mind did not recall or understand the words, but they had left his mouth nonetheless. Not only did they break the creature’s hold on him, but they struck fear into its dark heart.

When Elrohir became aware of his surroundings once more he was on his bedroll, a handful of pale, concerned faces looking down on him. The creature had fled, hours ago as it turned out. Meanwhile the dust had settled and through a gap between the tarps he could see the stars.

Glorfindel let go of Elrohir’s mind and hand. They were once more in the sea of dunes under clear blue sky and harsh midday sun.

Elrohir rubbed his eyes, seeming dazed. Passing the memory had been hard work, Glorfindel realized, for one not used to it from childhood. He touched the Peredhel’s mind once more. Elrohir was surprised, but he allowed it. This time Glorfindel only gave of the strength he had aplenty, glad he could do at least this small thing for him. Elrohir’s mind was clear and strong when he withdrew.

At his expectant look, Glorfindel answered, “It is as I feared, I do know him. He is not the one I dreaded most but a deadly adversary nonetheless. He is a Ringwraith, one of Nine. In the North we believed him and those of his ilk vanquished with the defeat of their evil master. I see now that we have greatly underestimated them.”

“How did you do it?” demanded Elrohir eagerly.

“Do what?”

“How did you defeat them to begin with? If you succeeded once, it can be done twice!” A fierce hope lit Elrohir’s eyes. “There is only one now and not the worst among them, you said. Can they be killed?”

Glorfindel looked at the stilled waves of red sand-dunes stretching to the distant horizon and thought of Elrond, the White Council, and the many weeks of travel separating them. The sheer distance was daunting, and at the last he dismissed it as impossible. He was alone in this, with one far too young to be a threat to the likes of the Witch-King.

After a long silence, Glorfindel finally answered. “Not by mortal men. I believe that the time for this one to die will not come for many long years yet.”

At Elrohir’s look of desperation, he answered, “But he can be weakened, struck with terror, his own weapon, and driven far from here. Which is what we will attempt.”

Elrohir did not seem convinced. “How?”

“Not by the sword or any other physical weapon. Some weapons are only of the mind. You remembered a little of that art when you first encountered him, and it saved your life in more ways than you know.”

As he spoke the words a terrible understanding dawned on Glorfindel. A cold sliver of fear of what might have been had their fates been even a little different slid across his heart when he realised the full measure of Elrohir’s despair.

“Now I see why you and your companions have come on this hunt, of all the warriors in Harad. They have Númenórean blood, you the blood of Lúthien. With that comes a measure of skill in matters of the Unseen. You are the last stand of the Haradrim, and you came here to die. That is why you are not concerned about water for a return journey, and why you refused to take me.”

He searched Elrohir’s eyes, and knew his words to be truth. With or without Glorfindel’s presence, this hunt would have been the last mission Elrohir ever carried out for the Haradrim. The cruelty of the child dying alone, in terror and without even knowing his father’s name was beyond what Glorfindel could bear to contemplate.

“You see more than you are shown, Glorfindel.” Elrohir’s eyes seemed glued to where his fingers were twiddling with his bone-hilted dagger. “We have no desire to die. But knowing what we do, I can honestly say that I see no other possibility. We will stand against the Demon, and be defeated. Harad will fall.”

After Ruhiren’s tales Glorfindel had expected to encounter darkness and despair in the desert. It was nonetheless painful to see Elrohir ensnared by it.

“Why?” Glorfindel demanded. “Why throw your life away on a battle you have no hope of winning? Do you not care for the life you have been given?”

Elrohir looked at Glorfindel and spoke plainly, as if explaining a simple fact of life to a child.

“We will be the lucky ones, before the end. If the Black Númenóreans conquer these lands… I have no desire to survive that day. Only the dead will be beyond their reach.”

Glorfindel knew he was treading dangerous ground.

“You are not one of the Haradrim in sooth.” He remarked cautiously. “I am not telling you to leave now, or even asking you to, merely offering. If you want to go north, we will. I’ll lend you what help I can with the war, if that is your choice. But you only need to say the word and your part in all this shall end.”

Elrohir was less offended than he could have been.

“I am going to pretend that you did not just propose me to commit desertion.” He answered dryly. “It’ll spare us the misery that will come from me trying to behead you, which is what our laws require me to do in such cases. For both our sakes I have only heard the part where you said you would defeat the Ringwraith.”

Glorfindel looked at the bright young spirit before him. One fateful day he had kept darkness from consuming the child’s forefathers. He had brought down a Balrog then.

He would not cower before a mere Mortal now, Ringwraith or not.

Glorfindel laughed, fearless and full of joy as he cast off the despair that still clung to his young companion like a heavy cloak.

“Elrohir Elrondion, you bravest of fools,” Glorfindel said. “It was without a doubt divine intervention that brought us together, and despite the Valar’s best efforts you would have left me behind with the luggage.”

Elrohir did not even smile. “You should stop singing their praises if you want to make friends in these parts.” He sat back to look Glorfindel in the eye. “You are unlike anything I have ever seen before. Your death would be a great loss, and I would have no part in it.”

Glorfindel looked at Elrohir with nothing but joy in his open gaze. “The same can be said for you. I am rather hard to kill. I will not die, and neither will you.”

Elrohir ignored the implications of Glorfindel’s words. There probably was only so much he could wrap his mind around in one day.

“What do you propose?” 

“Send your companions back to Amuk.” Glorfindel ordered with a seasoned captain’s confidence. “They will be more burden than help. Then bring me to this Demon, and I’ll see what can be done.” 

Elrohir paled. Until now he had made an effort to mask his fear. At those words he dropped all pretenses, terror plain as day in his eyes.

“Alone? This is madness. Have you not seen what he is capable of? Once het sets his eye on you, you’ll be swept away by fear like a flood, to darkness and death. There is no escape from his gaze once it is upon you. Our only hope lies in numbers. Even he cannot subdue six attackers at a time.”

Glorfindel shook his head, doing his utmost to project an image of supreme confidence.

“I have seen him when he still wore his iron crown, in Mordor on what was to be the day of his triumph. He knows me well indeed! When your father and I faced all nine Ringwraiths in battle they could not stand against us in the end. This one has not forgotten! He is alone now, and much diminished. Once he was a Mortal Man, and despite the foul enchantments laid on him, he still knows fear. It will be his undoing.”

Elrohir seemed only half-convinced, caught between a wild new hope and the weight of long-carried despair. He was quiet for a time, and guarded while thinking. 

His next concern was of a far more personal nature. “How do I know you will not tie me in a sack once the others are out of earshot, and drag me north to your lord?”

At first Glorfindel was appalled at being thought a liar and a coward. Then he remembered the slave market in Pellardur. Elrohir may have a distinct lack of trust, but he had his reasons.

“I can only give you my word.”

Elrohir shook his head. “There is no promise you can make that I can trust.”

Glorfindel smiled once more. “You will have to take a chance, then. Know this: if I really wanted to take you north against your will I could already have done so. Your companions are no match for me.”

Elrohir considered this for a time, and Glorfindel smiled when he saw common sense win out.

“Very well. Master Glorfindel. I accept your proposal, Eru help me!”

Elrohir rose to wake his bleary-eyed company, who responded to his order to turn away with equal measures of concern and relief. 

His lieutenant, a dark-skinned Haradrim called Hamalan, would not be swayed by Elrohir’s assurances that he had agreed to the arrangement of his own free will. She was a fair woman in her prime, all soft roundedness and long dark braids, but her scarred hands and straightforward manner spoke of a life amid violence. Glorfindel could tell she greatly cared for Elrohir. They must have known each other for a long time, judging from the way their conversation required more looks than words.

Hamalan insisted on leaving the camp with Elrohir until they were out of earshot between the dune ridges. They spoke at length there before she could be convinced that her captain had not been bewitched or possessed by the strange Northerner. 

Elrohir would rejoin his company at a place called the Pass of Horns. He managed to say it as if he truly believed he would survive his journey with Glorfindel.

Once the departing riders had disappeared beyond the shimmering horizon, Elrohir saddled his own camel. He was quiet; whether from sadness at the parting or unease around him, Glorfindel could not tell.

There was much more packing than before. In addition to Glorfindel’s pack and Elrohir’s own belongings the others had left them as much food and water as they could spare. Elrohir expertly balanced the leather-wrapped bundles and tied them down in such a way that his weapons would still be in easy reach. The kneeling beast seemed to disagree, groaning loudly and snapping at Elrohir with every pack he added. Elrohir was clearly unimpressed. He simply kept pushing the large head with its yellow teeth aside, gently chiding the animal in Haradi.

“Can he carry all this without collapsing?” Glorfindel asked with concern.

Elrohir gave him a ghost of a smile. “Of course. Ot is just a little cantankerous at times.”

“Ot? Is that his name? I thought that word meant 'no good'?" Glorfindel was genuinely intrigued.

“It does. Ot has been with me for many years. He’s a fine camel but he gets grumpy. Mind his muzzle!” Elrohir’s hand shot out to push Ot’s head aside before the jutting teeth could snap shut on Glorfindel’s fingers.

Glorfindel smiled, glad that Elrohir’s years in Harad had not robbed him of all his laughter. He did make sure to keep well away from Ot’s front end as he mounted the kneeling beast. A click of Elrohir’s tongue and up they went.

They rode for what remained of the day, and much of the night. Glorfindel took advantage of the hours to talk to Elrohir, speaking of home. The arid landscape passed unheeded under pale moonlight, all dunes alike onto the horizon. A few times Elrohir brought Ot to a stop to stand up in the saddle and study the strange southern stars to determine their direction.

By morning Glorfindel could feel Elrohir’s muscles relax for a brief instant, his head lolling forwards before he could straighten himself out again. Gorfindel was deeply alarmed at first, thinking some strange illness had befallen the Peredhel. The next moment it dawned that he had no idea how long Elrohir had already been in the saddle when he met Amuk’s company the previous night. He certainly had not slept since.

“We should stop, and rest.”

Elrohir shook his head. His grip on the reins was white-knuckled. “Ot is fine. He could walk twice as far if we needed him to.”

“It is not Ot who concerns me. You are no help if you arrive there unconscious.” Glorfindel dared a comforting hand on Elrohir’s shoulder, but quickly retreated when the boy flinched as if struck.

‘I can sleep in the saddle,” Elrohir retorted.

“You are the one steering us! We could amble off in the wrong direction for hours and I would never know.” Glorfindel realized with mounting concern that between the two of them he was currently the only one making sense.

Elrohir shrugged. “It’s fine,” he murmured evasively.

With a jolt Glorfindel understood. Elrohir did not dare to sleep for fear of being at his mercy.

“If I meant you harm I could have done it days ago.” His voice was gentle, all kindness and reason. “Whether or not you are asleep makes no difference. Please stop, and rest. I will do nothing but guard you.”

Elrohir turned around to look Glorfindel in the eye. He clearly was miserable. His eyelids were red and swollen, his face pale underneath his tan.

More to himself than to Glorfindel he said, “You’re right. I’ll have to fall asleep at some point, and risk waking under a spell of white-fiend sorcery. I might as well be done with it.”

He brought Ot to a stop and bade the camel to kneel. It did so with a moan that, to Glorfindel clearly expressed relief. Elrohir did not even bother with the tarp. He simply unsaddled Ot with trembling hands, hobbled the camel, and lay down where he stood with the saddle blanket for pillow. A moment later his body relaxed into sleep.

In silence Glorfindel set the tarp over the still figure and sat down next to him to take watch, true to his word. He did not need sleep as Mortals did, and it would be many days before he would need to walk the paths of memory.

The sun rose over the dune sea in a radiant display of rust and orange. In the reddish light Elrohir’s face looked even younger than his forty-eight years. He slept like a Mortal, eyes closed and mind on the strange, fragmented paths the minds of Men take when exhaustion has become too great for dreams. He was still wearing his sword-belt and the leather harness that had held his crossbow, the weapons lying forgotten on the ground beside him. The whole scene was jarring. In these days of peace in the North no Elf of Elrohir’s age would need to touch a weapon.

Eärendil’s star was setting in the East. Glorfindel found himself annoyed with it, wishing he could somehow flag down the Mariner and make him carry his grandson to safety. He would not come, Glorfindel knew, just like he had not for his own twin sons as they grew up in army camps raised by kinslayers. Glorfindel had never sired children himself but he was keenly aware of how precious they were. He had never understood Eärendil’s heedlessness. He made a conscious effort to abandon his resentment for more constructive lines of reasoning. It was dishonest to accuse the Mariner of indifference to Elrohir’s fate. He was bound to the heavens, forbidden from interfering in the affairs of Middle-earth by the Valar themselves, and Glorfindel knew it.

Elrohir awoke at noon, bleary and disoriented at first. His evident relief upon finding himself unharmed would have amused Glorfindel if it had not been so harrowing. After a small meal of waybread and dates and an even smaller drink of water they rode again for what remained of the day.

Glorfindel felt an ominous change creep up in the desert around them. What small animals scurried here -- lizards, snakes, the tiny crawling creatures burrowing in the sand -- diminished in number, then disappeared entirely. Leaden silence descended on the frozen sea of dunes. With it came an oppressive dread, constricting the heart and mind. Ot became reluctant, and Elrohir had to apply all his skills to keep him going.

As the sun dipped towards the west with an absurd display of color reminiscent of spilled blood, a red rock formation appeared on the southern horizon.  It dominated the landscape despite seeming small at such a distance. The pervasive fear that saturated this place somehow radiated from it like heat from a brazier. Ot balked at the sight, and could not be persuaded to take another step. The camel’s sounds of protest echoed frighteningly loud in the tomb-like silence. They rode back a small ways, into a sheltered valley between the dunes. There Elrohir unsaddled Ot, and left him hobbled with their packs, continuing on foot in the falling dusk.

Elrohir had told Glorfindel that the rocks held a cave. Not long ago it had been a stopping place for Haradrim caravans. Now nameless terror had taken residence there, coming and going at will. Glorfindel took care to hide himself and Elrohir from the creature lurking in the rocks. Against its unsleeping eyes he sang songs of power, of cloaking, fleeting shadows and secrets kept. Thus they reached the cave mouth unhindered. 

To an ancient immortal a Ringwraith held little terror, but Elrohir’s youth and his Mortal blood made him far more sensitive. Until then he had walked beside Glorfindel without a word, but at the dark, gaping maw of the creature’s lair, the Elda could tell his young companion was at breaking point.

“Wait here,” Glorfindel whispered, and the sound of his fair voice seemed to break the bleak press of fear for a moment.

Elrohir did not protest as Glorfindel entered the lurid darkness by himself.

Glorfindel did not need to search. The Ringwraith had lain in wait only a little way into the cave. Elrohir could not discern a thing in that unnatural darkness so thick it was almost a physical presence but Glorfindel, who could see in both worlds, saw the creature as a tall and ancient Man, crowned with iron and lit only by the corpse-glow of his own flesh. The Wraith drew no weapon, but opened his semblance of a mouth and screamed.

Elrohir had tried to resist, regain his courage and enter the cave behind Glorfindel, but at that terrible sound his legs gave out. He sank to his knees, folding in on himself as if struck. 

Glorfindel released all disguises. Suddenly there was a light, clear and pure and as bright as if the midday sun had risen inside the cave. Glorfindel stood the center, a tall figure of white and gold, barely discernible in such great radiance.

His voice rang out, fell and clear. “A Elbereth! Lacho calad, drego morn!”

The Wraith screamed once more, but it was the sound of panic at the unexpected confrontation with an enemy he remembered well indeed. Sauron’s captain drew blade. This was not the mighty black sword he had once wielded and lost on the Dagorlad, but a smaller, dagger-like one of a strange, dull grey color. 

Glorfindel unsheathed the dented sword he had carried on his hip since leaving the gates of Imladris. With all concealment lifted it was sharp and well-made, glowing with a fierce blue light of its own. Hadhafang was its name, throng-cleaver, an heirloom of Elrond’s house nearly old as Glorfindel himself, and as sharp. Faced with the wrath of an Elf-Lord of Aman the Ringwraith fled shrieking towards the mouth of the cave.

There he found easier prey. With shock and horror Glorfindel felt the vile creature’s attention shift to Elrohir. From the dark inside the cave the Peredhel had heard the telltale sound of steel being drawn, and he had done the same with his own scimitar. He now held it up blindly in front of him, trying to deflect a lethal blow from an opponent he could not see. 

Glorfindel could feel echoes of a vicious attack on Elrohir’s mind, seen and recognised for what it was: smaller and weaker than his companion, a prize ripe for the taking. With a shriek that could have crumbled rocks the Ringwraith threw himself at Elrohir, Morgul-blade aimed at his heart. Elrohir deflected the first blow by instinct more than sight.

Glorfindel’s blood turned to ice -- he had failed to foresee this, and through that oversight the Enemy might win this battle yet. There was no time for panic or regret, only for the swift action instilled by yéni of training. Glorfindel leapt onto the Ringwraith’s back like a great cat pouncing, bringing him down to the ground with him.

Glorfindel touched Elrohir’s mind, roughly pushing all other thought aside. “Stand back!”

They grappled for Glorfindel knew not how long with Elrohir looking on in dismay from the cave mouth. The Wraith had once been mortal, but that weak body was melted away by Sauron’s dark arts long-years ago and replaced by bone and sinew that was more than physical flesh. Finally, after a small eternity of terror and an agonizing near-miss with the poisonous blade, Glorfindel wrested the weapon from the Wraith and tossed it far into the cave. He struck his enemy in the face with a resounding crack, deeply satisfied by the dry crack of bone beneath his fist.

It seemed the Wraith could not bear to look at the light in Glorfindel’s eyes, and at the sight of him so close he screamed again as if tortured.

Glorfindel raised his voice in song. The song’s raw power brought Elrohir to his knees once more, shivering under its onslaught. It was mighty, like an unstoppable flood or the roaring of thunder leaving destruction in its wake, yet carried in itself a wild, untamed joy that lifted the heart and sent it soaring. 

The white light in the Elf-Lord’s face became too bright even for Elrohir to look into. The Ringwraith, trapped in Glorfindel’s hold, screeched in pain-filled madness. 

At the song's end Glorfindel spoke in a fair, ringing language. Elrohir had no recollection of Quenya, but he understood nonetheless.

“It is not your doom to die by my hand this night, but you tried to take one of mine for your own and for that I will have my vengeance,” Glorfindel spoke, well aware that he looked more like a wrathful Spirit of Light than a man. “As blinded as you are by this light, you will remain to all things with your waking eyes. The Unseen shall be the only sight left to you. Glorfindel of Gondolin is my name. Remember it!”

With that, Glorfindel stood and released the Ringwraith. He fled instantly, gibbering madly as he crossed the desert floor below the rocks towards the East.

When Glorfindel turned back to Elrohir the Peredhel scrambled away from him, sword in hand and eyes wide with terror.

“Ai Eru! what are you?!”

Glorfindel crouched to look him in the eye.

“I am no wraith, Elrohir, nor any other creature of evil. Merely an Elf who has lived long and travelled far, in unusual ways. I have fought this long battle against the Enemy and his servants for three ages of the world.”

“For a creature of the Light you seem awfully dangerous,” Elrohir retorted.

Glorfindel smiled. “That is one way of putting it. You could call me dangerous, but so are you,” and in a sudden burst of generosity “and all Haradrim, in your own manner.”

Elrohir seemed only half convinced, but stood up nonetheless. He bowed to Glorfindel with formal grace and said, “Whatever you may be, you saved my life this night, and many others with me. I am in your debt.”

Glorfindel replied with equal formality. “Then this I would ask of you as repayment: that you come home to Imladris, and end your family’s long wait.”

Elrohir's face fell. “Do not ask me the one thing I cannot do. I will not desert on the eve of battle. I cannot go anywhere but the Pass of Horns.”

Glorfindel managed not to show his frustration at the Peredhel’s stubbornness, his insistence on getting himself killed or worse in this senseless battle between Mortals that should never have concerned him. It was frightening, how all it had taken for a descendant of the High King of the Noldor to identify with a ragtag band of Secondborn suffering disturbing religious delusions was a mere forty years of proximity. Despite his annoyance, Glorfindel found he could not force Elrohir to abandon the Haradrim. An oath was an oath, a duty a duty, even towards the Followers.

“I did not ask you to do it straight away.” Glorfindel answered. “Duty and oaths taken are the same here as they are in the North. Let us ride to the Pass together. But remember that you are no Haradrim. They are Mortal Men and you are something else entirely, more so than you now realize. You may have sojourned with them, but it must come to an end so you can return to your own kin and be one of us.”

Elrohir did not answer at first, but stood staring at the pale expanse of the empty desert under a crown of blazing stars. He was silent as they walked back to the valley where they left Ot. Glorfindel could practically hear the turning of his mind. When he finally spoke, it was with a sharp honesty reminding him of Elrond.

“I know. I have suspected it for a few years now, and had my thoughts confirmed when the wraith singled me out.” He spun to face Glorfindel, suddenly frantic. 

“Look at me! I must be over forty years old by my own count and there is no way of telling I am a day over twenty. My friends, the people who were young with me have begun to age; some have died already. Someone is bound to notice. Maybe not yet, but in ten years they certainly will.”

Glorfindel nodded in agreement.

Elrohir continued with an air of desperation. “I know noble households, Glorfindel. I grew up serving in one. How many half-brothers do I have, beside my twin? What position does our mother hold? Wife, concubine, or slave? How many of my father’s wives will gnash their teeth in the harem at my arrival, plotting to poison me and secure their sons’ place in the line of succession? I’d be easy prey, a friendless foreigner. I’d prefer to die in the desert.”

Faced with such colossal misinformation, Glorfindel hardly knew where to begin. He made no effort to hide his disgust when he spoke.

“You should not mistake the perversities of the Black Númenóreans for the norm in more civilized places. Your father’s house has no harem, and your mother is the only woman for him. You have just one brother. Elladan nearly died of grief for your absence … the very idea of him plotting your downfall is madness!”

Elrohir did not answer, and saddled Ot in silence. With the Ringwraith’s departure the leaden weight of fear had lifted from the landscape, but neither of them had any desire to linger in the area.

Soon they were in the saddle again, their direction carefully determined by Elrohir’s stargazing. Glorfindel left him to his thoughts. When he spoke next, it was about something else entirely.

“Why did you tell the Ringwraith your name?” Elrohir asked. “He will seek revenge, and so will his eight brothers. You have conveniently provided them with your identity.” Elrohir did not turn around, awaiting Glorfindel’s answer while adjusting Ot’s direction.

“A good question.” Glorfindel said, slow and thoughtful. “I will not shield you from the answer. You are no longer a child by any stretch of the imagination.” 

Glorfindel could not help but feel a certain grim satisfaction in delivering this most decisive of his arguments. “The first time you encountered The Ringwraith he recognized you for what you are: a son of Elrond, neither Mortal nor fully of the Elves. There are no others like you and Elladan in Middle-earth. Tonight he was lying in wait with a Morgul-blade, hoping to bring his master an invaluable prize: one of Elrond’s sons, trapped in the spirit world as a slave-wraith.”

A shudder ran down Elrohir’s back, but he was not nearly frightened enough. Glorfindel drove the bitter reality of it home. “It would be a fate worse than death. A loss beyond weeping, and a devastating blow to all your House. If your kin should wither with grief they cast the free lands of the West into Sauron’s lap. I have just sent the Enemy a clear message that Elrond’s children are well protected. 

Glorfindel placed a comforting hand on the rigid line of Elrohir’s shoulder, grieving that he could not afford to be merciful. “While you remain in Harad the Ringwraiths will come for you again, Elrohir, and if they fail their master will collect his prize himself. I alone have no chance of standing against Sauron. We need to get you home before news of your identity can travel into the East.”

At this, Elrohir did turn around in the saddle. Glorfindel could tell from the way he had paled, concern written large in his eyes, that he understood.

“So I must go north whether I want it or not.” 

Elrohir sank into pensive silence, and looked wistfully at tumbled ochre rocks under the blazing dome of southern stars. A herd of gazelles elegantly leapt away at Ot’s approach. They were descending from an escarpment down a small canyon, coming out into a vast plain of crusted salt without end in sight, white as bleached bones. The eastern horizon had begun to brighten to pale pearl.

“Let us rest here for the day,” Elrohir said. “The shadow beneath the cliffs will be cooler than the plain. Crossing the salt will take three nights. On the other side we reach the Desert Mountains, and from there the Pass of Horns.”

“Three nights is a long time, with the water we have left,” Glorfindel said matter-of-factly.

Elrohir shrugged. “I have crossed the this salt-plain before. Ot will not fail us. We will be thirsty for a while, but there is water at the other end.”

Glorfindel struggled with the Haradi name of the place. “Kes Ubil, that means…”

Elrohir interrupted him. “It means ‘go in, and you won’t come out’. The name is meant to scare off foreigners. The Haradrim pass unharmed, most of the time.”

“I am glad to hear it,” Glorfindel said wryly.

Sitting under an overhanging part of the escarpment, their backs against the cool stone, they shared the inevitable dates and waybread while Ot grazed the dusty shrubs nearby.

Elrohir was quiet, his eyes guarded as always. Glorfindel could tell his inner agitation from the way he was fidgeting with a loose thread on the sleeve of his robe. 

“Will you not tell me what bothers you?”

Elrohir sighed. “The Wraith used me as a pawn in a much larger scheme, and if not for you he would have succeeded. Somehow I failed to see it. I wonder what else has escaped my notice. We have plans at the Pass of Horns but those are risky, and I am one of those who stood for them in the council. There is no way back now. I can only hope my folly did not seal all our fates.”

With that he fell silent, clearly unwilling to reveal more.

“You knew too little of who and what you are, and what the Ringwraith is.” Glorfindel soothed. “He will never again have that advantage over you. Fighting the Umbarians holds no secrets to the Haradrim. From what I have seen of their skills, the plan is like to be sound.”

Elrohir smiled, though it did not reach his eyes. “May Eru prove you right! Instead of brooding, we should sleep while we still can. Would you prefer first or second watch?”

“You may sleep all day,” Glorfindel replied as he turned towards the fiery spectacle that was sunrise in a sky saturated with dust. “I need no more rest than to sit here and watch the desert.”

Elrohir looked at him with new doubt. “You are an alien creature. You have gone five days without a wink of sleep. I know not if I am more concerned that you’ll fall over at some point, or that I might wake up alone, and you long fled with Ot and our packs.”

Glorfindel looked his charge in the eye once more. In the reddish light he saw how washed-out Elrohir looked, skin wan despite his tan, the deep-lying eyes and the way his hands trembled once more after restless days and nights in the saddle. The Peredhel might need less sleep than a Mortal, but certainly more than an Elf. Even among Elves young ones had more need of rest than those full-grown. 

“Please, Elrohir. I am an Elf, a very old one. Sleep as Mortals know it is alien to me. It is no hardship to sit here for the day. As for your other fear… I am no Kinslayer. I could no more abandon you to die of thirst than I could cut off my own hand. Let not even the thought of such horrors darken your heart. It will not happen. Please, go to sleep.”

Glorfindel reached out in mind and touched Elrohir, the way he would do with Elladan at times. Elrohir allowed it, and Glorfindel let his own feelings be perceived: concern for Elrohir’s safety, joy at having found him, love. He knew them seen and understood when he next read Elrohir’s eyes.

Elrohir woke as the sun touched the western horizon. He looked refreshed, free from the shadows of fear he had carried since the encounter with the Ringwraith. 

When it dawned on him that he had slept an entire day away he leapt to his feet, swearing under his breath. Glorfindel could not help but grin as he watched the realisation sink in that Ot was already saddled, their small camp packed away and loaded onto the camel’s back. Glorfindel had even managed to pull the saddle-blanket from under Elrohir without waking him, and now sat waiting beside a small ration of food with an amused expression he hoped would not veer into smugness. His newfound skills with Ot came with an edge of danger: Haradrim war camels were trained to bite strangers. 

Elrohir did not begrudge him his victory. “Well, good evening! Hold up your hands so I may see which fingers my camel had for breakfast!”

Glorfindel smiled. “There is nothing to it once one has seen it done a few times.”

“You’re lucky he hasn’t gone in for your hair!” Elrohir quipped, having already noticed Glorfindel’s one vanity.

As he sat down and started on his handful of dates, he became serious once more. “Why didn’t you wake me?”

“You needed sleep. I gave it to you.“

Elrohir shook his head in disapproval. “No more please! We can’t afford such long days or we’ll run out of water before we reach the mountains.”

With that he stood up, still chewing his last mouthful, to inspect Ot. He found saddle and packing like he would have done himself.  

So began their crossing of the vast salt flats, white and empty beneath the stars. Neither spoke much, with the desert wind’s ever-present whistling and Ot’s hasty steps the only sounds breaking the uncanny silence.

Later, Glorfindel found that he could not remember those three days and nights they spent on the plains of the Kes Ubil separately. They merged into a conglomerate of excruciating thirst, heat and sun-glare. Glorfindel and Elrohir both gave up speech, simply because their throats were too parched. Rationing water became an obsession and a torment. When they allowed themselves a sip they could hardly feel it in their dry, cracked mouths. To conserve water and spare Ot they rested briefly under tarps at high noon. They rode all night, willing themselves to think of anything other than the deflating water-skins in their packs and finding no diversion in the flat monotony of the starlit landscape. Elrohir slept fitfully. Glorfindel was baffled to find his dreams filled with the sea, the surf cool and refreshing against an impossibly blue expanse. He sat beside his sleeping charge and watched Arien’s white-hot glare span its high arc over the great emptiness of the desert.

Towards the end Glorfindel almost lost hope that the vast, featureless wasteland of salt and forlorn tumbleweeds stretching as far as the eye could see would ever end. Large carrion-birds circled overhead, waiting for the travelers to accept the inevitable and lay themselves down for it. The one thing keeping up Glorfindel’s spirits was Elrohir’s firm conviction, read in his eyes clear as day, that he knew exactly where they were and where they were going. Sure enough, before sunrise on the fourth day a dark line could be seen on the horizon. When Glorfindel strained his eyes it broke apart into jagged peaks and valleys between. They had found the mountains.

As they entered the foothills in the early morning Elrohir spurred Ot on. He steered the camel into a deep canyon where a few green leaves on otherwise skeletal acacia trees made a promise of water. When they caught sight of a small, brownish water hole, all that was left of mighty floods that had passed here after a long-past downpour, Ot made a strangled noise Glorfindel had never heard before, and broke into a gallop. 

Elrohir let go of the rein. The camel lowered its head and slurped noisily. Elrohir jumped off Ot’s back into the water without even bothering to make him kneel, clothes and all. Glorfindel followed suit. The puddle was brackish, laden with sand and surrounded with the dung of animals that had drunk there, but none of them cared. No crystal mountain spring of Imladris could have been more precious. 

Elrohir stopped drinking just long enough to whip up Ot, who was trying to roll in the mud with the saddle and packs still on him. He unsaddled the camel, then let him do as he pleased. Ot covered himself in mud with noisy abandon.

The rosy light of dawn began to filter into the canyon, painting its towering russet walls with fire. The water-sculpted rock of layered colours seemed otherworldly, unlike anything Glorfindel had seen in either Middle-earth or Valinor. Elrohir sat on a boulder beside the water. He had taken off his soaked overclothes and turban and spread them out to dry beside him. He closed his eyes to simply enjoy not being thirsty, relishing the victory of having survived another crossing.

Glorfindel sat down beside him. “Where to from here?” he asked, his voice surprisingly melodious after the long thirst.

When Elrohir answered he did sound hoarse from the days of silence. “The mountains are a maze of canyons like this one. We will be riding in the shade from here to the Pass of Horns. And we’ll have company long before that. Our people heavily patrol these mountains, water sources especially.”

Glorfindel’s curiosity had been piqued. “What lies beyond them, then, to require such guarding?”

He received a piercing look while Elrohir considered keeping him in the dark, before deciding that they had come far enough together to warrant some trust.

“Khibil, the capital of the Haradrim. A large oasis, a stone fort and a city. It’s fertile land, providing most of our food. Remoteness is its only protection. One cannot travel to Khibil the way the Umbarians do, without knowledge of the desert.”

Glorfindel could guess what was coming. “But now they are going to try it regardless?”

“Emperor Zimrathôn has mounted a campaign against the Haradrim unlike any we have seen before. Our spies in Umbar send word that most of the Imperial army is moving into the deep desert. Their measures to supply the troops with food and water are beyond anything we’ve ever seen. Umbar means to raze Khibil to the ground and occupy the the oasis. That would end our ability to feed ourselves, and thereby the war.”

“What does Harad mean to do about it?” Glorfindel inquired, dreading the answer.

“Scorched earth,” Elrohir answered matter-of-factly. “We mean to cut their supply lines, starve them by poisoning every last well and waterhole, then finish them off in an ambush at the Pass of Horns. An army that size cannot pass these mountains any other way.”

A wild hope shone in Elrohir’s eyes. “If we destroy them, Umbar loses an entire army. They cannot send another without leaving their northern borders undefended against Gondor. This campaign could end Umbar’s grip on the desert once and for all.”

Glorfindel breathed deeply. This was talk he knew well indeed. Desert navigation might have him puzzled, but he had been Elrond’s chief strategist for nearly an age of the world. 

“How many troops?”

“About ten-thousand, twenty among them mounted. On elephants, that is. They also bring some three thousand camels.”

Glorfindel whistled softly between his teeth. Like no other he understood the logistical challenge of bringing an army that size to such a remote location, and the breathtaking arrogance required to even try.

“Where is Zimrathôn getting all that water?”

“Much of it is being carried by the animals, but he also leaves behind fortifications at regular intervals to keep supply lines up.”

“An ambitious plan,” Glorfindel remarked, anxious to hear more about Elrohir’s role in all this.

“It has already begun to come apart,” Elrohir answered. “They did not expect us to poison our own wells. You have seen the burned fields. The Umbarians will find neither food nor water for weeks. We keep their supply convoys under heavy attack. And when they come here, to the heart of the desert, we will be ready for them.”

A fire had appeared in Elrohir’s eyes as he spoke.

Glorfindel felt the bleak press of concern. He had expected fighting at the Pass of Horns, something like Amuk's raid on the Umbarian caravan or slightly larger, and had planned to somehow keep Elrohir out of the thick of it. Now that the full scale of the operation was revealed he felt only shock at the sheer hopelessness of it. He looked the young Half-Elf up and down as he sat there in his drying undertunic, unpleasantly reminded of mulish King Oropher’s Silvan warriors at Dagorlad, mowed down by the hundreds by mail-clad orcs while dressed in boiled leather, with wooden arrows for their longbows.

He needed to at least try to inject some reason into the conversation. “Allow me to summarize this: a couple of thousand Haradrim with stolen weapons and no armour, against three legions of Imperial soldiers armed to the teeth and not only a large camel cavalry, but also elephants? You are all insane.”

Elrohir smiled wryly. “Probably. But you forget our greatest ally. Not the Haradrim will defeat Umbar. The desert itself will. By the time they reach the Pass of Horns we hope to have them half-mad with thirst, their mounts already slaughtered or abandoned. Once we have them caught in the Pass we’ll be spearing fish in a barrel.”

Glorfindel, with ages of tactical experience, was thinking fast. He considered distances, supply lines, provisions, calculated the needs of water and food for man and beast each day in this climate. But most of all he thought of the maddening torture that was thirst and the despair that had threatened even him on their long crossing. He was greatly vexed by the lack of information on the current position and state of the Umbarian army. Elrohir could not tell him: he had not received any news in the days the two of them had travelled the empty desert. In the end, Glorfindel had to concede this: the Haradrim were ruthless bastards and their plan, while risky, had potential to succeed.

“You will suffer heavy losses, against such an enemy,” Glorfindel brought up.

Elrohir answered with surprising equanimity. “We all prefer death to slavery.”

The words shed a new and disconcerting light on Elrohir’s state of mind. By his own admission he had been an ardent supporter of this risky strategy. When the Haradrim council agreed to it, Elrohir had willingly embarked on what amounted to a suicide mission to eliminate the Ringwraith before it could turn the tides of war in Umbar’s favor.

Glorfindel was once more at a loss to understand how a descendant of Finwë could wish to die over a cause of so little consequence in the grand scheme of things. The stiff-necked Peredhel had clearly inherited his family’s penchant for the dramatic. At least his grandmother’s rash decision to throw herself off a cliff had been over a Silmaril instead of a random patch of desert and some vague illusions of liberty. Glorfindel surmised that Harad’s victory would attract far less rejoicing, or even understanding in Valinor than Elwings’s offerings had, should Elrohir find himself dispatched West by the swiftest road.

The thought that followed was most unwelcome. Unlike Glorfindel’s own experience, for Elrohir Mandos’ Halls would hold not just an accounting but a Choice. He had not, could not be told of that yet. In his current state of mind there was no doubt that he’d rashly choose death if his adopted cause required it, and the Fate of Men thereafter. Glorfindel tried not to imagine the conversations he would be having with Elrohir’s parents and grandparents if that came to pass.

Glorfindel spoke carefully. “Do not throw your life away rashly or in bitterness. You are needed back home, for things other than war. Your family loves you, Elrohir, and you will remember it ere the end.”

Elrohir nodded, his manner detached. “Let us not worry about tomorrow. Today has its own merits.”

With that he rose to don his half-dried clothes and began to light a small fire from dead shrubs he gathered around the waterhole. Once it burned brightly he commenced a curious ritual of boiling water, grinding strange black beans from his pack, which he treated like the most precious of gems, then combining the two. He poured the resulting black liquid in two small cups into which he then dropped a lump of sugar. 

“Come Glorfindel. Even if life as we know it shall end soon, I do believe we have earned ourselves a cup of coffee. It’s nice and sweet, though I can’t offer you cardamom with it.” 

Glorfindel accepted the strange, steaming concoction and sniffed it before taking a tentative sip. Its bitterness accosted him despite the sugar, and he could barely keep himself from grimacing. Elrohir seemed to be enjoying his like a treat. An acquired taste of the Haradrim, then. After a few sips he could feel the stimulating effect of the drink.

“What is this?”

“Roasted beans of a bush that grows in these mountains. I’ve used them sparingly until now, but I have hopes of refilling my pack soon.”

“Is it a medicine?”

Elrohir gave him a strange look. “No, just something people have with breakfast, or in the afternoon. Don’t you drink coffee in the North?”

“We have small beer with breakfast, or watered wine.”

Elrohir shot him an incredulous look. “Wine for breakfast? It’s a wonder Northerlings get anything done at all.”

Glorfindel emptied his cup more out of politeness than enjoyment, but he laughed merrily as he did so.

With his spirits raised by rest and water Elrohir was eager to rejoin his company. They decided to forgo a day’s rest and instead weaved their way through a maze of spectacularly coloured canyons, dry riverbeds and rock formations, the dusty green of the surrounding shrubbery a fascinating contrast against the deep red rock. Ot’s steps loudly echoed in a silence broken only by the whistling wind.

After a few hours of slow, winding progress that unmistakable sensation of being watched crept up on Glorfindel. Not daring to risk even the sound of a whisper, he tapped Elrohir’s shoulder and pointedly raised his eyes to the canyon rim above them when the Half-Elf turned around.

A lesser Elf would have startled when Elrohir burst into song at the top of his lungs. As far as Glorfindel could make out it was Haradi with a heavy desert accent; a silly ditty about a girl, a camel and what had to be a lot of double entendre. Elrohir’s unmistakably Elvish voice singing so foreign a scale and rhythm was eerie. He stopped abruptly halfway through the second stanza and leant forward in the saddle as he strained to hear the song taken up by a hoarse man’s voice somewhere on the plateau above. The unseen singer dropped the song halfway through a line, only for Elrohir to continue without a moment’s hesitation. 

This was some kind of test, and their observers were now apparently satisfied that Elrohir was indeed one of their own. Once his strange performance wound to a close several veiled Haradrim began to climb down from the canyon rim. Elrohir made Ot kneel and dismounted, meeting their leader as she approached, waterskin in hand.

“Eru bless the camel that carried you here.” Her voice was familiar.

“And Eru bless the hands that reach me this water,” Elrohir’s voice sounded perfectly formal, but his smile as he took a sip from her waterskin could have melted glaciers. 

This was Hamalan, Elrohir’s lieutenant whom they had sent away as they rode to confront the Ringwraith. Strange that it had been only ten days ago. Glorfindel was surprised by the depth of his own relief at reaching the end of the loneliness and desperate peril of their journey. It seemed as if Elrohir and he had been roaming empty desert for an eternity. Elrohir seemed to be taking it all in stride; the Haradrim were as hard as their land. 

Hamalan, too was beaming at Elrohir’s return. “You’re still alive, and you seem very much yourself. Dare I believe that you have done it?” she asked, carefully examining Elrohir’s face.

His expression grew serious. “The Demon is not dead. Glorfindel managed to frighten and maim it. It has fled from us screaming, and we have not felt its presence since. So yes, we may have done it, depending on your definition of ‘it’.”

Hamalan smiled and turned to Glorfindel with a bow. “This is more than we dared hope for. I have gravely misjudged you, Master Glorfindel. Please accept my apologies. We are in your debt.”

Glorfindel returned her bow, glad for the mistrust and wariness to abate.

“Mistress, you were only sensible not to trust a stranger too lightly. No apology is needed.”

Elrohir interrupted the pleasantries. “Tell me, Hamalan. The Umbarians…?”

Hamalan launched into a breathless diatribe. “As bad as we could have hoped, praise Eru!” she rattled, “They are already slaughtering their animals. The occasional supply caravan slips through our fingers, but nowhere near as many as the army needs. There is talk of rebellion among the troops! General Arnuzîr has orders from the Emperor to keep moving, but he had to subdue a mutiny by the legion from Pellardur.”

Elrohir smiled with the fierce joy of bloodlust. “Good news indeed.”

The dark mood passed like clouds blown over as Hamalan recalled a more cheerful tiding. “Meanwhile we can offer you some fine hospitality! You two look famished. With all these raided caravans we shall soon grow fat on Arnuzîr’s food. Climb up with us, a feast awaits like you haven’t seen since before this infernal campaign began. Master Glorfindel, let me offer you this small compensation for your troubles!”

Ot was left hobbled in the valley to graze what green shrubbery there was, and Hamalan led them clambering up a side canyon. The Haradrim camped in cool shadow under an overhang where a nameless river had once worn away the red rocks, uncounted years before this land became a desert.

Elrohir was happily reunited with friends there. If some of the Haradrim thought the strange Northerner’s presence an intrusion they were too polite to stare, at least while they believed Glorfindel would notice. They were a peculiar people, Glorfindel thought. At once brutally savage in war and utterly restrained in their demeanour, veiling their very faces to all but their closest companions. It seemed that defeating the Ringwraith had gained him access to that inner circle, and the meal was pleasant enough for it. 

Elrohir excitedly recounted the Ringwraith’s defeat, and suddenly the burden of dread and oppressive strangeness he had carried like a heavy cloak seemed lifted. Glorfindel was glad to finally hear his laugh, a merry sound that sharply reminded him of Elladan.

Under the circumstances they were served a feast indeed, with fresh bread, dried meat, dates and even a small piece of honeycomb, with watered wine and coffee to drink. As the meal wound to a close, the conversation centered on the advancing Umbarian army. From the accounts of the Haradrim scouts, the Black Númenóreans were in dire straits indeed. 

Horror returned once more as Hamalan spoke of desperate men so mad with thirst that they slaughtered their precious camels to drink their blood. When he heard Elrohir and his companions whoop and cheer over the gruesome tales, Glorfindel could only feel shock and disgust at their rejoicing in such savagery. In his many years as an officer Glorfindel had dealt more death than he cared to remember, but never meted out prolonged suffering or allowed such a thing under his command. He would have deemed the strategy of the Haradrim Orc-work, if he had not fully understood their desperation.

From there they went on to list their own losses. Among the dead were a few names that saddened Elrohir. Glorfindel, too was grieved to learn that his friend Samak had not survived a raid on an Umbarian supply caravan.

After the meal most of the company took to their bedrolls. Glorfindel sat in meditation beside Elrohir’s sleeping form. All the world had stilled. Heat shimmered in the sun-baked canyon outside, the silent shadows of the sentries guarding them the only movement. 

Glorfindel recalled Imladris, where snow had to be thick on the ground by now. He thought of Elrond, wondering how his old friend was holding himself under this hope turned to torment that was the long wait for his son.

---

At dusk Elrohir and Glorfindel took their leave of Hamalan and her warriors. They went to the main host of the Haradrim at the Pass of Horns to bring word of the Ringwraith’s defeat. The ride under the stars became a pleasant experience now that they were well-fed and safe in friendly territory. Elrohir, too, seemed in a softer mood, humming the watchword song from that morning under his breath as he steered Ot through a maze of rocky valleys whose walls became ever steeper and higher towards the heart of the mountains.

At sunrise they entered a wide, sagebrush-speckled valley surrounded by craggy hills, their rocky flanks a dream-like display of bands of red, russet and pale ochre. To the west the valley floor, strewn with sage and cacti, stretched out until it was lost in hazy blue distance. In the east the land sloped up towards a narrow pass among vertical rock-faces towering like the painted walls of some mad giant’s keep. The endless whistling of the ever-present desert wind was the only sound in the desolate expanse.

Glorfindel knew they were being watched, from hilltops and hidden caves.

“These hills have eyes,” he remarked.

“Aye, but to us they are friendly,” said Elrohir. “We have reached the Pass of Horns. This is where the future of all of Harad will be decided.”

Glorfindel peered into the distance to the west. Even his sharpest of eyes could not yet discern any sign of an approaching army.

“The Umbarians are far away still.”

“They will come,” Elrohir answered dryly as he turned Ot towards the narrow pass in the east. “There is no other way. Come, let’s go see how the preparations are going.”

At their approach a welcoming call went up. Seen up close the rock faces were riddled with cave-mouths. A vast system of cool, dark underground caverns sheltered the army of the Haradrim. Water must once have created these passages, and though they seemed bone-dry now there was at the very edge of smell the promise of moisture in the air, blowing up from deeper places. These caves held a priceless treasure: the only untainted well in hundreds of leagues of empty desert. The water they were greeted with was crystal-clear and cold.

The keep swarmed with people and camels. Elrohir was clearly familiar with the place. He led Glorfindel by torchlight up many winding passageways. In aeons past some underground river must have sculpted them from the cliff side's living rock of many colours. As they climbed up through vast chambers and narrow hallways the torch lit fantastical growths of stone, shaped like creatures from a fever-dream. 

In one of the larger caverns Elrohir stopped, and lifted his torch. Glorfindel could not suppress a gasp. The flickering light revealed a fleeing herd of aurochs. Every single animal seemed about to leap from the wall and thunder through the cave, eyes rolling and horns aloft, yet all were painted in red desert pigment by unknown hands.

“Who made them?” Glorfindel asked.

Elrohir shook his head. “We don’t know. It must have been very long ago, and the world changed since, for these animals are strange to us who live here now. Some say they were painted by the first Men Eru woke. This is a holy place.”

On some level Glorfindel had always understood that loss of history was the unavoidable fate of Men, for whom lore could be kept only until the sheer number of transferrals from one generation to the next garbled it beyond all recognition. It was sad to see it with his own eyes, this ancient work of captivating beauty now shorn of its meaning and the name of its creator. He copied Elrohir’s respectful bow, and followed him to what lay beyond, letting the painting fall back into darkness.

----

After a steep climb they emerged into blinding sunlight at the very top of the plateau. A settlement of mud-brick dwellings had been erected at that dizzying height. The view from a thousand feet above the valley floor was breathtaking despite the howling, sand-laden wind. 

From this high vantage point Glorfindel could discern the plumes of red dust thrown up by the ten thousand marching feet of the approaching Umbarian army. He tried to point them out to Elrohir, who could not yet see. Silhouetted against the steel-blue desert sky in his wind-blown robes and face-veil, the Perdehel had a wild and dangerous beauty, like a drawing from a storybook about the mysteries of Far Harad.

“You have sharp eyes, Glorfindel.” He said, turning away from the wide vista. “I will go give an account of these past weeks to the council.”

After a brief hesitation, in which he seemed to weigh yet again whether Glorfindel warranted such trust, he said, “Come, if you will. Hear what will be said, if they permit it, so we can benefit from your advice.”

Glorfindel felt a stab of hope at yet another crack in Elrohir’s guard.

The council, most hastily raised from their daytime beds by news of Elrohir’s unhoped-for return, convened under a sun shelter on the roof of one of the mud-brick houses, with a sweeping view of the valley below. As Glorfindel had come to expect of the Haradrim there was little pomp or splendour to their council chamber. They seemed to prefer the timeless beauty of the landscapes surrounding them over man-made objects. 

Glorfindel thought of the Silvan folk once more, and recalled the last time he had attended a similar gathering on the eve of battle. That pain remained sharp and fresh after just a long-year. A council of war in High King Gil-galad’s tent, richly draped with cloth of gold despite the hardships of Mordor. As slender as a willow-tree, and as out of place King Oropher of Eryn Galen had looked there in his simple uniform of brown and forest-green, sitting beside the hulking shapes of Ereinion and Elrond in their gold-inlaid full armour. Little love had been lost between the High King of the Noldor and his Silvan counterpart. Had Glorfindel known how bitter a fruit would grow from the seeds of discord sown by Ereinion’s lack of forbearance during that session, he may have looked beyond Oropher’s rustic ways and unsuitable gear to see the Silvan King’s shoulders straining under the same weight of responsibility for his people as Ereinion’s. Much sorrow would have been prevented, and Glorfindel would be able to look back to that particular day with something other than shame at his own disdainful attitude.

He retreated from memory back to the present. Of today’s battle, at least he could still change the outcome.

The leaders of the Haradrim were hard and serious men and women. Leanness and suffering were etched into their faces. Elrohir shared that toughness, Glorfindel mused, a hard-learned acceptance of anything and everything necessary to survive. 

Amuk was among them, and the man gave Glorfindel a friendly smile. The council listened in stunned silence as Elrohir told the story of his victory over the Ringwraith, its maiming and subsequent flight. 

After the first heady joy at their enemy’s downfall came gnawing doubt. “What if it returns with a vengeance!? What if it brings others like it?”

Glorfindel spoke at length. He was glad of having mastered the Haradi language: these people would not have listened to one speaking Númenórean, the tongue of their enemy. He told them of the nature of the Ringwraiths, their creation and defeat, and their fear of Light and clean fire of any kind. That knowledge alone might be little protection, but it was at least something to diminish the fear. 

He caught himself praying to Eru and all the Valar that the advice he now dispensed would never need to be heeded. The Haradrim were a proud and free people, who abhorred Sauron’s machinations as deeply as did the Eldar and Edain. The Valar had raised no star to guide them, no Land of Gift had been prepared, no mighty Kings would ever muster an army in their defense. Still they made their brave and desperate stand to gain either freedom or death. Secretive, irreverent and cruel as they were, Glorfindel had to grudgingly admit that Elrohir could have wound up in far worse company.

Now that Glorfindel had been accepted as an ally, talk moved to the battle at hand. From the constant stream of dispatches from their scouts the council knew the Umbarians’ exact position, and the degree of their desperation. In the day that passed since Elrohir and Glorfindel had last received news from Hamalan another mutiny had broken out among Arnuzîr’s troops. 

The deserters were hundreds of fishermen and farmhands from the coastal provinces, drafted for this campaign with promises of riches and glory. They had had no concept of the vastness and desolation of the eastern deserts. Now that the full measure of their Emperor’s ambition was revealed they refused to die of thirst for Zimrathôn’s foolish pride, turning back in droves. General Arnuzîr’s countermeasures had been as desperate as they were efficient in keeping his unwilling army marching east: his personal elite troops had left behind hundreds of decapitated bodies, littering the desert like oddly shaped rocks.

The pressure the Haradrim had to exert on Arnuzîr’s supply trains to keep his army thirsty was intense and costly. The council heard reports of yet another Haradrim patrol decimated by the heavily guarded water caravan they were meant to intercept.

The Haradrim strategy for the upcoming battle was simple, but sound: the Umbarian army would be lured into the seemingly deserted valley by rumours about the presence of water, spread among the troops by spies. The keep was to be defended by a deceptively small contingent of Haradrim. Once both the Umbarian commander’s attention and his personal guard were captured by engaging them, the main force of camel-riders would attack by surprise from the hills on both sides, crushing the thirst-weakened Umbarians between hammer and anvil. There would be no prisoners, no quarter. The plan was like the Haradrim themselves: efficient, daring and ruthless.

Inwardly Glorfindel winced at so much loss of life. Large-scale bloodshed he was intimately familiar with, a string of pain that ran back to the depths of time: Mordor besieged, Eregion fallen, Gondolin sacked, tears unnumbered before Thangorodrim. The thousands who would die here at the Pass were no Orcs, but Children of Ilúvatar. Haradrim warriors felled by Umbarian steel. Umbarians killed as much by thirst as by their elusive enemy. In this orgy of death it would fall to Glorfindel to somehow keep Elrohir alive and unscathed, regardless of the battle’s outcome.

 Both Glorfindel’s dark musings and the council were interrupted by the call of a lookout on the adjoining rooftop. She was a young woman of Númenórean descent, her voice both familiar and deeply alien in the Haradi tongue.

“Behold! Umbar is coming!”

The plumes of dust on the western horizon had come within reach of Mortal eyes.

Like a nest of fire-ants disturbed, the keep swarmed with people running to and fro. Suddenly the plateau was full of men and women peering into the distance to catch a glimpse of the approaching enemy. Order returned mere moments later as captains began to muster their companies. Banners were raised and the air rang with calls. Elrohir decisively turned towards a green banner with a four-pointed star.

Glorfindel quickly pulled him back by the billowing sleeve of his robe. "Where are we going?”

“To join my company.” came the exasperated answer. “We are to move into our attack position on the northern flank.”

Glorfindel looked him in the eye in search of even a trace of reluctance, and found none. It was a hard realisation, that there was nothing he could say to keep Elrohir from riding to his probable death in a foreign war that should never have concerned him if the world were a just place.

“Come!” Holding on to Elrohir’s sleeve Glorfindel pulled him towards the nearest house.

Elrohir was half-dragged along, still protesting. "What in Eru’s name is the matter!?”

They ducked into a doorway to the darkness beyond. It was a granary, motes of chaff dancing in the beams of sunlight falling between the planks of the rickety door. Glorfindel closed it behind them. Without a word he began to undress, pulling his robes over his head. Instantly the mud walls were speckled with flecks of light as his mail hauberk was revealed. Elrohir stared, perplexed, while Glorfindel bent at the waist to take it off, then thrust it at him, along with the soft leather gambeson he wore underneath.

“Quick, put this on!”

Elrohir did not reach for it.

“Take it!” urged Glorfindel.

Elrohir shook his head. “You are mad. I cannot accept such a rich gift from you. Keep it, you will be glad for it before the day is through.”

“This is no gift, it is a rescue!” Glorfindel barked. “I may not be able to keep you from engaging in this madness, but I shall drag you out alive or die in the attempt. Now stop contradicting me and put it on!”

Glorfindel knew he must have looked ferocious, because one look into his eyes made Elrohir abandon his protests. He pulled off his own robes. His body underneath was lean with hunger. The Haradi sense of modesty clearly did not allow for changing in the presence of others. His face pointedly averted, Elrohir quickly snagged the gambeson from Glorfindel’s hands and turned to face the wall. Bemused by an innocuous everyday occurrence in the barracks of Imladris causing offence here, Glorfindel quickly dressed and turned his face away until Elrohir had donned the gambeson. 

From the way he needed Glorfindel’s help to pull the mail over his head it seemed Elrohir had never worn armour before. The hauberk became invisible under his wide overclothes. Even under these desperate circumstances Glorfindel marvelled at the lightness of the Noldorin smithcraft. He could only hope it would suffice to keep his charge from harm.

Elrohir was at a loss for words, and pressed for time. Before bursting through the door he turned back towards Glorfindel.

“I cannot claim to understand what you just did. But know that I will remember it for as long as I live.” Before adding dryly, “Which may be until tomorrow, if Arnuzîr has his way. Come!”

A long line of armed camel riders snaked into the hills in a silence heavy as stone. The least noise could now give the Haradrim ambush away to the approaching Umbarians and doom them all. Elrohir directed his company into position using hand signs, steering Ot up and down the column. Not once did he turn around to look at Glorfindel, but that strange, rigid set of his shoulders spoke clearly enough.

As they lay in ambush overlooking what was to become the battlefield the long, silent wait began to grind. Hours passed, and now that there was nothing left for Elrohir to do, Glorfindel could tell he was suffering. He did try to rest, but the unfamiliar weight of Glorfindel’s mail made him toss and turn in the sand-hollow they shared.

Glorfindel gently brushed his mind, pleasantly surprised when Elrohir allowed it. What he encountered was a well of agitated confusion. The young Peredhel was afraid, but it was more than simple fear of the upcoming battle. Just weeks ago the idea of being slain had not held the terror it did now. Ever since Glorfindel reawakened the deeply buried memory of Elladan it had consumed him like a fever. Elrohir could not, would not accept the end of his life without having seen Elladan one more time. He now remembered brief snaps of his brother, small moments of what little time they had had together. All that remained of their bond was an emptiness, harrowing not because of what it was but what should have been there, like an amputated limb.

Night came and went as the sounds of the approaching army grew louder. It was enough to make even the bravest among the Haradrim doubt their sanity. Thousands of feet marching to drum beats, stirring clouds of red dust high enough to blot out the fading stars. The grumbling of discontented camels beaten forward by their shouting riders. The greatest terror of all were the elephants, living mountains of flesh with battle turrets strapped to their backs, trumpeting dejectedly as they were slowly driven across the valley floor below.

The Haradrim were not entirely without hope, be it a cruel one. Even from this high vantage point the Umbarians’ desperate suffering was clear to see. Their marching  rhythm was disjointed. Some companies lacked half their number, and more than a few soldiers dressed as cavalerists were on foot, their camels lost to thirst or perhaps slaughtered for their meat. Elrohir turned his head towards Glorfindel who lay next to him, flat on his front in the sand to spy over a hillcrest, and smiled despite the leaden weight of his dread.

Just after sunrise, a relief like water to a thirsting man, Hamalan and the rest of their company arrived. They had been drawn back from guard duty to join the main force. Glorfindel could tell that her familiar presence and calm efficiency were a balm to the agitation Elrohir tried his utmost to hide from his companions.

Their long wait mercifully reached its end. Horns and battle cries from the keep could be heard over the din made by the marching army below. The camel-riders formed a phalanx.

War in Harad held little poetry. There were no grand declarations or rallying cries, not even a last chance for Glorfindel to say something to Elrohir along the lines of "take care" before they poured themselves over the hill crest and into the valley below, silent like a rising flood.

Elrohir and Ot moved as a single being executing the steps of some deadly, arrhythmical dance. Glorfindel could not register what was happening beyond their section of the battlefield, so were all his mind and will set to protecting his charge. The damned Peredhel took too many risks in his eagerness to do as much damage as possible to the Umbarian camel-cavalry before the element of surprise wore off. The Umbarians were fearsome fighters, clad in well-forged steel. The battle would have been hopeless but for the agony of thirst that had weakened man and beast, making them far slower than the Haradrim.

Whether green field or desert, camel or horse, Man or Orc ultimately made no difference, Glorfindel realised as he deflected what would have been a deadly blow to Elrohir’s back, and ran the offending Umbarian through. Not to the screams, the blood, the way gore clung to one’s sleeves to the shoulder after the first few disembowelments.

There came a lull in the fighting, a chance to look around. It turned out that they had run out of opponents. Elrohir turned to Hamalan on her own camel beside him, and together they laughed, fearless and fierce. They were both unscathed, and their company had just brought down an entire Umbarian camel-cavalry division. 

The celebration was not to last. As Glorfindel watched them rejoice, the reckoning arrived. 

The ground itself shook under the enormous feet of the mûmakil. So alien, so mighty were these beasts that the only comparison Glorfindel could think of were the ancient slime-drakes of Morgoth. They seemed more like moving mountains than living animals, crowned by cruel metal spikes on teeth, trunks and feet. High above the ground in turrets strapped to their backs rode their masters, driving them on with iron-tipped whips. 

Atop the tallest Mûmak stood a turret draped in gold-embroidered red silk. A multitude of signalling flags hung from it on many flagpoles, being constantly rearranged as the battle progressed. A tall figure in gold-plated armour stood among many attendants swarming about him like bejewelled beetles. From this elevated lookout General Arnuzîr commanded his army.

Elrohir and Hamalan moved as one. Instead of turning around and fleeing for the safety of the hills, they charged. Their war camels had been raised in the presence of mûmakil and could be brought to approach them. The company thundered towards the monsters, kept alive only by their speed as arrows and javelins launched from the dizzying heights of the creature’s backs bounced off the ground around Ot’s legs. 

Glorfindel grabbed Elrohir’s shoulder and spun him around in the saddle. “Stop, you fool! This is madness. Draw back!”

The brute force with which Elrohir thrust his intentions into Glorfindel’s mind would have sufficed to command an entire company of Elven warriors. Even mûmakil had their weakness, it turned out. The eyes first, and then the tendons moving their enormous legs. Haradrim archers were already launching volleys of arrows at the beasts’ heads. Glorfindel could feel, more than hear Elrohir’s cry of triumph as Arnuzîr’s mount was struck blind by many ochre-fletched arrows sticking from its bloodied eye-sockets like a bouquet of bizarre flowers.

There was no time for pity or shock at the sight of such cruelty inflicted on a living creature. 

A call went up from many voices, Elrohir’s among them: “Cut it down! The legs! Take it down!”

Ot brought them ever closer to the maddened, thrashing Mûmak. Both Elrohir and Glorfindel drew their cutting spears, and beside them Hamalan did the same. Suddenly there was a rush of wind, like the wings of Manwë’s eagles landing. The enormous head descended, dripping blood and foam from its metal-tipped tusks. Someone screamed, Glorfindel could not tell whether it was man or mount, and then both Hamalan and her camel were gone, sent flying into the air like a handful of dry grass. The mere sight of the sickening crunch when camel and rider met the hard ground was enough to know that neither would rise again.

Elrohir’s anger and desperation hit Glorfindel like a stormwind. For an instant the Peredhel sat frozen, Ot wildly galloping without his rider’s direction. At the full, unguarded extent of Elrohir’s sorrow Glorfindel briefly wondered what, exactly Hamalan had been to him. The alarming line of thought was cut short when Elrohir emerged from his shock with a wave of bitter hate. A single thought bloomed in his mind, another way beside the unreachable, flailing legs to bring down the General of Umbar. As they thundered past the Mûmak’s flank, he suddenly stood in the saddle and jumped.

Of course. The cinch. It held the whole battle turret fast to the animal’s back. Several Haradrim had come to the same conclusion and were hauling themselves up to carve at the knotted cable of leather reinforced with iron. It did come apart, but far too slowly. As Glorfindel watched volleys of Umbarian arrows picked off the cutters one by one. Elrohir alone remained, saved by Glorfindel’s mail and hanging on for dear life with his legs as both hands sawed frantically, dulling one blade after another on the cable’s metal threads.

Glorfindel reached out in mind to the structure of the iron itself, already screaming and stretching, and sang.

Glorfindel knew that this very moment would haunt his nightmares until Arda’s end.

The great Mûmak’s cinch broke, and the release of its tension made it snap the air like a gigantic whip as the battle turret slid off the oliphaunt’s back. There was nothing left for Elrohir to hold on to. As Glorfindel looked on in horror he was pulled down by the falling debris and disappeared from sight in the cloud of red dust thrown up by its crash.

Then at last battle-rage possessed Glorfindel, the red-hot wrath of close combat. Whoever dared to stand between him and Elrohir, it would be their last deed in life. Despite their fall, hard fighting remained against the survivors of Arnuzîr’s retinue. 

Glorfindel pulled Hadhafang from the last Umbarian’s throat with a gurgling gush of blood. He did not spare a glance for the richly adorned corpse that had to be Arnuzîr himself lying at his feet. The general’s great battle turret had been light, made of silk and bamboo. Elrohir had to lie beneath its wrecked remains, and he was not dead yet. The smallest of flames still burned within the Peredhel at the very edge of Glorfindel’s perception.

As he dug frantically among the wreckage hope bloomed hot within him when he felt Elrohir’s mind stir. There! A piece of Haradi desert-coloured cotton just visible underneath a heap of bamboo beams. With the strength of the desperate Glorfindel lifted the whole tangle, throwing it aside like a handful of twigs. He fell to his knees beside the still figure he uncovered. Elrohir moaned when the harsh afternoon light hit his sore eyes. One side of his face was an unrecognizable mass of swelling and congealed blood where a beam had struck him.

Giddy with relief Glorfindel made a note to lecture him extensively on the necessity of wearing helmets in battle, much later on some quieter and more mundane occasion. Glorfindel drew his hands across Elrohir’s body, immensely grateful to find nothing more sinister than a few broken ribs. The young fool had been knocked out cold, but he would live.

Glorfindel cradled the child in his arms and began searching for a camel. He no longer needed to concern himself with the Umbarians, it seemed. 

The Haradrim had paid their victory in blood, but they had won.

 ----

Utter chaos ruled the keep when Glorfindel rode in, cradling Elrohir before him in the saddle. What few healers the Haradrim had set up a meager field hospital in one of the lower passages, only to find themselves overrun with wounded fighters staggering in or being carried by their agitated comrades. The caves echoed with screams, moans and barked orders. 

The pandemonium bore no resemblance to the strict organisation of a well-supplied Noldorin healers’ ward, but the stench of battlefield medicine assaulting Glorfindel’s nostrils was familiar nonetheless. He inhaled the metallic tang of blood, cauterized flesh and that unmistakable putrid smell of gut wounds, and revolted against the very idea of Elrohir being treated amidst this dangerous, destitute mess.

Glorfindel carried Elrohir past the harrowing scene to find their packs in one of the upper galleries. It was strange to see their belongings just as they left them behind less than a day ago. The sight of Elrohir’s saddlebags made Glorfindel wonder what had become of Ot, who had served his master so bravely before being abandoned to whatever fate had befallen him amidst the raging battle.

Glorfindel laid Elrohir down beside his own pack. Thanks to Elrond’s foresight it contained everything he would need to take care of him. First he washed the matted blood and sand off Elrohir’s face with clean water. Its cool touch briefly brought him around. The one eye that was not covered in a dark blue mass of swollen tissue opened, clouded with pain and confusion, his hands weakly pushing Glorfindel’s away.

Glorfindel’s voice was a gentle whisper, all kindness. “Peace my friend. All is well now. I will make this better, but you need not be aware of it. Sleep.”

Elrohir sighed, turning his face into the hand that cupped it as he gave in to the beckoning darkness of spell-induced sleep. Only then did Glorfindel realize that he had spoken Sindarin.

What remained to be done now was delicate work. Glorfindel was glad for the opportunity to busy his hands and gather his thoughts. First he removed the blood-soaked ruin of Elrohir’s clothes and the mail hauberk, and dressed him in a reasonably clean change of clothes from his pack. Then he set to work on the head wound. With endless care he pried apart the grotesquely swollen eyelids, cleaning and briefly examining the eye underneath to find it mercifully unscathed. Most of the blood came from a long cut in Elrohir’s scalp, which he sutured with fine silk thread.

The delicate bones of his skull were fractured in several places. Glorfindel laid his hands on the broken face, feeling the warm, pulsating course of arteries and veins, the small, lightning-bright twinkle of each tiny nerve beneath his fingers. The breaks were a jangling dissonant in the song that was Elrohir, but Glorfindel found a far more concerning matter. The brain itself had been bruised and was swelling within the tight confines of the skull. It seemed Elrohir’s death had not been averted yet. Glorfindel’s voice did not waver as he wove his response. He sang of wholeness, calm and healing, and even as he chanted he could feel the damaged tissues beginning to knit together. 

When his song had run its course Glorfindel rose. He briefly felt light-headed, so much of himself had he poured into the singing. He needed a few moments to recover, but soon Elrohir was resting comfortably, covered in a camel-hair blanket with his head elevated on a makeshift cushion of saddlebags. All he needed now was the stillness of sleep.

The night that followed was long and harrowing. From the lower levels sounded cries of pain, grief and despair. Glorfindel was torn asunder by the suffering of the Haradrim. He could barely restrain himself from going down to the field hospital to lend what aid he might. Then his eyes came to rest on Elrohir’s still form. His injuries required constant watching. Leaving Elrond’s wounded son alone to go to the aid of others, only to return to Elrohir having a seizure or choking on his own vomit was unconscionable. This was a hard and bitter choice, just as it had been in wars long past. He could not help all those in need, at least not without abandoning the task he had sworn to fulfill. Once more the choosing left Glorfindel feeling stained and diminished.

After sunset the remnant of the Haradrim took up a rhythmic chant, probably in honour of their dead, that was kept up throughout the night. A few times people carrying torches wandered into the pitch-dark gallery where Elrohir slept and Glorfindel sat motionless like a sentinel carved from the cave’s red stone. Most were in search of belongings, some after missing friends. Once, a visitor came in the dark. It was a boy not much older than fifteen, simply lost and wandering blindly in a daze of grief. For him, Glorfindel sang to lift what he could of the fog of horror and desperation shrouding his mind. He descended back to the main host with a purpose, at least.

Elrohir was asleep through it all, undisturbed by dreams or pain. Glorfindel released his hold on the boy’s mind when a pale, grey light filtering down from the plateau enabled him to see his hands in front of his face once more. It took another hour for Elrohir to come to, the onslaught of pain drawing him awake despite his exhaustion. Glorfindel listened as his breathing became fast and irregular before his one good eye opened. 

In the cave’s reddish twilight Elrohir tried to make sense of the world once more. He brusquely sat up, seeming panicked and unsure of where he was and with who. Glorfindel sensed echoes of a wave of blinding pain and nausea brought on by the movement as Elrohir retched. Glorfindel fetched a pail, then helped him lie back down with as little jostling as possible, whispering what he hoped were reassuring words in Haradi.

At least Elrohir was properly awake now. His one good eye stared intently at Glorfindel with fear in his gaze. 

“Are we under siege?” His voice sounded so hoarse and raspy he had to repeat himself twice and switch to Númenórean before Glorfindel understood.

Glorfindel shook his head, quick to allay that particular fear. “As far as I know not a single Umbarian was left alive out there.”

“Then why am I hearing the chant of despair? How many have we lost?!”

There was no comfortable way to say such things. Glorfindel was unsure whether it would be crueler for Elrohir to remember so many gruesome deaths, or for the memories to be lost to his injury and the realisation endured a second time.

“I have no numbers. I don’t believe anyone does at this point in time. But many.” Glorfindel said at last.

Pain flitted across Elrohir’s face. It seemed he did remember the battle, or parts of it at least. Glorfindel did not have the heart to mention Hamalan.

Elrohir tried to sit up once more. “Where is Amuk?” 

Glorfindel quickly laid a hand on his shoulder to keep him down, lest they need the pail again. “I do not know. If you promise me to stay here and rest I will go down and find out for you.”

Elrohir nodded, then winced from the stab of pain upon moving his head.

Glorfindel rose to find a waterskin, unstoppered it and pressed the spout into Elrohir’s hand. “Here, you must be thirsty. Take small sips. Do not even think about getting up!” 

He turned to leave in search of news.

“Glorfindel?” Elrohir’s voice sounded shaken, and afraid. “Did I lose my eye?”

Glorfindel knelt beside him once more and smiled. “Fear not. It’s under there somewhere, and bound to turn up again one of these days.”

Even if Elrohir’s smile was a brave facade, at least it did something to lift Glorfindel’s spirits.

Glorfindel’s arrival in the crowded lower passages caused a sensation, a ray of light amidst sorrow so heavy it weighed down even the good-natured Elf.

The Haradrim army had been decimated. What few warriors remained had combed through the battlefield by torchlight during the night in search of wounded survivors. Haradrim were carried to the keep, Umbarians executed where they lay. 

Given the sheer numbers the Haradrim had no hope of bringing their dead off the battlefield for burial. It was decided to simply round up any roaming camels and leave everything else. 

Glorfindel thought to suggest a pyre, but held his tongue when he realized the desert held nothing for them to burn.

For once Glorfindel was grateful for the incessant whistling wind that blew over the Pass. If not for the constant stream of fresh air they would have had to abandon the keep to escape the eye-watering stench of rotting flesh and the legions of carrion-flies. 

Even with no one left alive there was still a din on the battlefield. Swarms of vultures were squawking over their prizes, and in the distance entire packs of hyenas had set to feasting on friend and foe alike. Already the wounded Haradrim were being moved to the top of the plateau to distance them from so much death.

To Glorfindel’s surprise and delight Amuk had indeed survived and was firmly in charge of the proceedings. When the chieftain of the Haradrim laid eyes on the Elf he, too, received a pleasant shock. It turned out that in the confusion of battle, Glorfindel and Elrohir had been presumed dead along with most of their company. There were a few survivors whose faces Glorfindel did recognize from the meal they had shared in Hamalan’s camp, two days and an eternity ago.

Their joy at Elrohir’s unhoped-for survival was great, as was their concern for him. They would not be appeased until Glorfindel took them to see Elrohir and his injuries with their own eyes. Glorfindel kept the visit brief; Elrohir was in too much pain to be glad to see them.

Afterwards he lay still with his eye closed, not sleeping but suspended in a private bubble of misery. He did look up when Glorfindel’s voice resounded through the cave, deep and melodious. Glorfindel improvised the lines of the Lay of Leithian in Númenórean despite the jarring way the Mortal language broke the meter of the ann-tennath, so Elrohir would understand the words and be uplifted by them.

“The leaves were long, the grass was green,

The hemlock-umbels tall and fair

And in the glade a light was seen

Of stars in shadow shimmering.

Tinúviel was dancing there

To music of a pipe unseen,

And light of stars was in her hair,

And in her raiment glimmering ...“

Elrohir could not possibly have understood all of the northern lay, but when the song came to a close the weight of his pain and sorrow seemed to have lifted somewhat. In his unguarded mind was Elladan’s face, and a sweet kind of longing for half-forgotten things, the memories barely beyond his grasp. 

Once more Glorfindel sent him sleep, and Elrohir allowed tiredness, heavy beyond resisting, to pull him down into the dark.

----

 By the third day Glorfindel’s arts of healing and Elrohir’s innate stubbornness had him well on the mend. The dark blue of his bruises had begun to lighten into greenish yellow, and his eye slowly reappeared as the swelling went down. 

As his body grew stronger, his restlessness increased. He seemed given to brooding, the long hours of forced immobility setting his mind spinning in circles like a water-wheel. Despite Glorfindel’s attempts at drawing him into conversation he remained quiet, standoffish even. Once he was able to stand up and take a few steps without vertigo bringing him down, he insisted they move to the top of the plateau.

Glorfindel carefully walked beside Elrohir after the arm he had offered for support was summarily refused. Elrohir was clutching it before they had even left the cave, his breaths coming in small, halting gasps. When they emerged into the white-hot midday sunlight above Glorfindel was half-dragging, half-carrying him, both his good eye and the swollen one tightly shut.

Despite his physical pain the sight of the desert and the the open sky seemed to lift Elrohir’s spirits. Once seated comfortably, shielded from the whipping wind with his back against one of the mud-brick walls of the storerooms, he opened his eyes and deeply breathed the crisp air with the first ghost of a smile Glorfindel had seen on him since the battle.

The company of Elrohir’s comrades was a decidedly mixed blessing. While he did seem glad for their companionship they were also a constant reminder of the ones that were lost. That even now Elrohir had not once spoken Hamalan’s name was concerning, to say the least. The sweeping views the plateau offered of the horrors in the valley below did not help either, in Glorfindel’s opinion.

A small ray of light appeared in so much grief when they learned that Ot was among the camels that had been rounded up from the battlefield. Elrohir insisted on a visit, and Glorfindel allowed him to walk all the way down to the camel pens despite needing to hold himself up against the wall every few steps, only to set his mind on happier tracks. His plan succeeded, but the lifting of Elrohir’s gloom was only as brief as their short visit to his loyal mount. 

Faced with the problem of climbing back up, to which he clearly had not given a thought beforehand, Elrohir had to admit defeat. In one of the lower passages his knees buckled and he sank down with his back against the rough wall. After expanding Glorfindel’s knowledge of the many interesting profanities endemic to the Haradi language, he rested his head on his knees and sat stock-still, his eyes closed as he battled his crippling dizziness.

Glorfindel gave him a few moments, then tried to take his arm so he might help him up.

“Leave me be!” Elrohir’s voice trembled with far more than mere annoyance at his own helplessness. He buried his face in his hands.

Glorfindel knelt down in front of him.

“Elrohir, I am sorry. For the very fact that you are in this situation, for the loss of your friends, for the way my news has burdened you even more. I am truly sorry.”

There was no response except the sound of swallowing and deep breaths drawn for composure. When Elrohir looked up his eyes were shiny and his voice hoarse.

“As am I. You have traveled so far, and let yourself be drawn into this disaster on my behalf. If not for you I would have been dead twice over.”

Glorfindel had not planned to have this particular conversation seated on the floor of a public walkway, but it was as good an opportunity as he was likely to get.

“Let me take you home,” he pleaded. “You have more than fulfilled your obligations towards the Haradrim. Further delay will only bring more pain, both to you and those at home who count the days awaiting your return.”

Elrohir gasped as he fought to hold back tears. In all the time Glorfindel had known him he had never looked this vulnerable, suddenly devoid of the sturdy, warrior-like appearance afforded by his Mannish heritage, leaving only a lost, forty-year old elfling. Glorfindel’s heart ached for so much senseless pain. Had this been Elladan, he would have pulled the child into his arms to let him cry his fill. He knew Elrohir well enough by now to predict that attempts at closeness would only upset him further. For long moments they sat side by side on the sand-covered cave floor, a foot of empty air and an abyss between them.

“I don’t know.” Elrohir finally whispered, looking Glorfindel in the eye with a searching gaze. “What do you want with me, in your cold land where the stars are strange?”

“I promised your family that I would bring you home. There is no ulterior motive. You may not remember Imladris, but you will find your welcome there anything but cold and strange.”

During their long nights in the saddle, Glorfindel had tried to explain to Elrohir where Imladris might be found. It had been a difficult exercise given the Peredhel’s complete ignorance of the world north of the river Poros. Gondor he considered a nebulous and almost mythical realm. The question of what might lie to the north of it seemed never to have occurred to him. 

Here be dragons, Glorfindel thought wryly, recalling the whimsical writing on Erestor’s nearly blank maps of Far Harad. The very notion of travelling to such alien places, never to return to the desert he knew, was terrifying Elrohir. Glorfindel now regretted the tales he had spun in their hours of starlit riding. He had spoken of ice and snow, long winter nights, the soft grey light of northern days and the wonder of bare branches and fallen leaves renewed in spring. Intended to entice and entertain, they only served to further distress Elrohir in his current state of darkness.

For a moment Glorfindel was convinced that Elrohir would refuse, that even his given word and the Ringwraith’s threat would not suffice to lure him back to a home he could not remember. He reached out to Elrohir’s mind and found his answer, burning like a signal-fire in the night. 

Elladan. The agony of missing his brother had become unbearable. Elrohir would give in to that pain, rather than to Glorfindel. It was not a comfortable thought, or a proud one, but Harad’s harshness allowed no such luxuries as kindness or honour.

Elrohir silently nodded his assent, to Glorfindel’s immense relief. “What do we do now?”

Glorfindel could not help but smile. “I will help you get back up to begin with. Take your time to say your goodbyes, at least until you feel well enough to ride. Then we go west, to the coast. I have friends there who will take us to the North.”

That had been a mistake. At the mention of travelling to the coast, into Umbar, the blood drained from Elrohir’s face. His former openness disappeared like spring turning to sudden winter.

“I am a wanted man in Umbar. Now even more so than when I was there last. For me to go there is suicide.”

Glorfindel tried to reassure him. “I will keep you safely disguised.”

Elrohir sat up straight now, buoyed by sheer terror. “I do not have a forgettable face, Glorfindel!” he exclaimed.“If I stick as much as the tip of my nose over the border with Umbar I will end up nailed to three different city gates! Eventually, that is, once they’re done torturing me.”

He looked at Glorfindel with eyes so guarded there was hardly any light left in them, back rigid as steel. “Unless that is what you are after. As you doubtlessly know I am worth my weight in silver, for the one who brings me in alive. A pretty sum, even if the Umbarians should swindle you by lopping off some of my heavier parts before they pay up.”

For the first time in many long-years Glorfindel was struck dumb. Not once in either of his lives had he been accused of treason. His loyalty and the strength of his word were all his honour, and never had the slightest shadow of doubt been cast upon them. He had every right to a display of righteous outrage, but the absurdity of it all kept him from feeling even a shred of anger. He was relieved by how measured his voice came out when he finally managed an answer.

“I admit that the Elves have harboured the darkest of traitors, cruel enough to deliver their people and their King into the hands of the Enemy. Two ages of the world have passed and still we sing of them, bitter songs that will never let us forget.” 

He drew a deep, shuddering breath and turned his thoughts from Gondolin to the present. “Even so, not once have I heard of an Elf who sank so low for as mean a thing as silver.”

He looked Elrohir in the eyes. “Sorrow weighs heavily on your mind. Dark are its counsels and the specters it casts, and they are far from the truth. In your heart you know it is not so.”

Elrohir remained silent as he hauled himself up against the gritty red stone of the cave wall.

Even without their quarrel the climb to the plateau would have been an ordeal. Judging from Elrohir’s cold aloofness he would rather have spent the night alone in the camel pens had Glorfindel not insisted they go back up together. He had no choice but to lean on Glorfindel as he slowly stumbled his way through the cool dark of the winding passageways. Glorfindel nearly carried him like a dead weight for the last part, awkwardly holding their torch aloft with his other hand, driving leaping shadows before them as they passed.

In the days that followed they had several conversations about the way North, and they all began and ended with Elrohir’s dogged refusal to even consider going anywhere near the coast. With the benefit of hindsight Glorfindel often told himself that he should have foreseen what the Peredhel was going to do. Maybe it was naivety that deceived him, maybe wishful thinking. Glorfindel liked to believe that betrayal was so alien to his very nature that even in his second life he seemed unable to fully grasp its winding ways.

Meanwhile the keep’s population dwindled. Many wounded were beyond help despite Glorfindel’s best efforts. As soon as the injured warriors they attended to were either healed or laid to rest most Haradrim chose to leave that place of death behind and revert to the hard-won freedom of their nomadic ways.

Elrohir watched each company depart with a sorrow that nearly made Glorfindel falter in his mission. The knowledge that every goodbye he now said would be utterly permanent was yet another wound. His longing for the open desert, away from the constant reminders of the horrors of war was obvious even without reading his mind. Between that and his yearning for Elladan, Elrohir was torn in two like a hare between two snarling wolves.

He grew ever more silent and withdrawn, his sea-grey eyes over-large in the pale oval of his face. Glorfindel began to worry in earnest, afraid that the weight of all this misery combined might be enough to sever his spirit from his body. He gently tried to touch Elrohir’s mind, but was turned away every time.

From the moment Elrohir could be safely left alone Glorfindel had spent many hours in the the open tents of the waning field hospital, assisting the Haradrim healers. There came a day when he was asked to attend to a dying woman. She had suffered for nearly two weeks after being speared through the gut.

At first she held up well, kindling a false hope in both healers and her kin. The past days her fever had risen as her pale face wasted away, and the cloying smell of rot emanating from her soiled bandages left no trace of doubt that she would inevitably succumb to her injuries. Her grieved husband begged the Elf to if not heal her, then at least ease the torture that was her passing. Glorfindel possessed the skill to painlessly snuff out the very spark he had so often kindled back to brightness, but the gravity of such an act made him loathe to perform it save in utmost need. To be sure, he subjected the deliriant woman to yet another painful examination before giving in to her relatives’ begging. When the deed was done he felt he could not in good conscience turn away from her burial rites.

As was their wont in joy and grief, the Haradrim sang to the alien rhythm of their drums as they laid her to rest under a simple mound of stones, her face towards the sunrise. The words of the funeral song struck Glorfindel to his core. It was a defiant celebration of the Gift of Men, their joyful hope of freedom beyond the circles of Arda Marred, where neither Vala nor Morgoth held sway. After the crowd had dispersed Glorfindel lingered long beside her grave, wondering in awe and melancholy where the strange fate of her people might have taken her.

When Glorfindel returned to the tent he shared with Elrohir his hair stood on end the instant he opened the tent flap. Inside he found only his own belongings. 

He ran down to the camel pens, already knowing he would be too late. 

Ot was gone. 

Swearing like an Orc, Glorfindel dashed into the blinding sunlight outside to find no trace of the camel or his rider. As Glorfindel stood before the keep straining his eyes, distress and anger battling for precedence, Amuk came out after him with Elrohir’s message. The man did not even seem to fully grasp why Glorfindel was so agitated over the Peredhel’s stealthy departure. In times of peace the Haradrim went as they pleased within their vast, trackless desert, choosing their way and their companions freely. 

Elrohir sought solitude to gather his thoughts, Amuk said. Surely Glorfindel did not begrudge him that, after all that had come to pass? He would turn up again when he was good and ready. 

At Glorfindel’s protests that Elrohir might get himself killed or worse, Amuk was even more bemused. A Haradrim lived and breathed the desert like a fish did water. These lands had never been safer with both the Ringwraith and Umbar defeated. Elrohir had wanted Glorfindel to know that he would travel due north, as promised.

Glorfindel stormed up to the plateau once more to look out on the vastness and desolation that was Harad. Elrohir had vanished into the mountains’ web of canyons and gullies. There was no trace of him or Ot, and nothing moved among the decaying bodies on the plain.

With a sinking feeling Glorfindel stared across miles upon miles of unfathomably empty wilderness, recalling the vast distance Elrohir and he had covered on their way to the Pass. As much as he wanted to ride out and search the wastelands, without a Haradrim to guide him it would amount to taking his own life. 

That accursed Peredhel had clearly known it as well. Glorfindel had no choice but to carefully retrace the steps of Arnuzîr’s army due west and meet with Círdan.

Glorfindel did not doubt for a moment that Elrohir would indeed head North. His preoccupation with seeing Elladan had bordered on the obsessive. His journey would inevitably lead out of the desert, and into Gondor. 

The Elves would be waiting.

Chapter End Notes

Thank you all for bearing with me! I hope you enjoyed reading this tale as much as I did writing it! Authors thrive on feedback, so please let me know what you think.

Unfortunately neither our favourite Balrog-slayer nor Elrohir are anywhere near home yet. Watch for the sequel, coming soon... 

Under Strange Stars was the very first story I ever wrote, and on reading it again while I worked on 'The Art of Ending' I couldn't help but notice that it showed. The contrast with 'Northern Skies', the trilogy's final installment, was stylistic whiplash.

This realization (and the inherent cringe factor of seeing your own earliest work!) inspired a major rewrite in order to unify the series and smooth out some minor inconsistencies. What you see now is not a new story but I do think it's a better one, and its style and language fit the rest of the series. The themes and plotlines now tie together all the way through to 'Northern Skies'.

I did keep 'Under Strange Stars' exclusively in Glorfindel's point of view, but 'Sun and Shadow' and 'The Art of Ending' have been added to the series to show Elrohir's side of the story. I might do more stories like these in the future, and I'm very open to reader suggestions about which scenes you'd like to see retold in Elrohir's POV!

What do you think of the new and improved Under Strange Stars? Whether you're reading the story for the very first time or have known it from the very beginning, I'd love to hear your thoughts on it. Please consider leaving me a comment, some kudos or a bookmark.

Idrils Scribe