Service to the Dead by heget

Chapter 1

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But why are you here, M’lord? And not in thine Halls or reborn o’er the seas?” Gorlim asked.

“There is no peace for me there,” answered the armored phantom. “I vowed never to be reborn, and spoke this oath before the Doomsman. He accepted, loathe though he was at my resolve. I am not my cousins, to ever rest from this war against the Great Foe. So he sends me thither, to fight Morgoth once more, in the manner of the servants of Mandos.”

---

 

The lightless woods of Dorthonion played host to a ghost beneath its black boughs. Dead trees rattled in the wind, but this was true only for their uppermost branches, and in the lower canopy and at the forest floor where the ghost lingered, all was silent. Dry brown pine needles fell straight through the ghost as if the man had naught but the empty heft of a shadow, the passage of the objects through his massless body making no impact on his thoughts.

Beren had heard his confession. Beren had avenged them. Beren gave him absolution when he felt he did not deserve it, deceived as he had been by Sauron.  

Such were the thoughts of this ghost undisturbed by the pine needles that bisected him.

Gorlim watched Beren bury his father and their mutual companions of two years in a high secret cairn as an unseen and respectful sentinel, then watched as Beren went searching for Gorlim’s corpse to give him an honorable burial. He was still watching Beren search- and was growing tired of it. When Gorlim confessed to Beren in the living man’s dream of how he had been captured by Sauron and taken to their camp to be tortured until the promise of Eilinel’s rescue had broken him, he did not recall giving Beren the location of his death. Nor had he given thought to his corpse. Still, Barahir’s son searched for his final companion and kinsman, and Gorlim was touched by the consideration of this gesture. Bemused, Gorlim’s wraith observed how Beren asked the birds in frustration if they smelled the lingering aftermath of an orc camp, or if some fox or other scavenger might lead him to Gorlim’s bones. Gorlim, unseen and weightless, waited for Beren to fall asleep once more so that as a ghost he might once more enter Beren’s dreams. Then he would speak to his best friend one last time and tell Beren to forget this task. Honored though Gorlim was by this attempt at kindness, he needed not the gesture, and Beren had more pressing concerns. Sauron’s orcs were in disarray, but they were not defeated. The odds for Beren’s survival had dwindled beyond the threshold of hope. While orcs and wolves stalked the woods and abandoned crofts and farmhouses, there were naught but a small handful of mortal men still friendly to Barahir’s outlaws still alive in Dorthonion. Most had fled, or should have. Beren’s eyes had dark shadows beneath them, outward sign of how little sleep he had allowed himself in days. The strain that Gorlim’s friend was burdening himself with pained the ghost. Gorlim wanted to shout at Beren - “Eat something! Get some sleep! Leave these woods! Go to your mother and cousins in Dor-lómin and Brethil! They are dead, our loved ones. When I dared hope otherwise and did not accept our parting, it doomed me to torment and everyone else to death.” Anything he said would be in vain; no needle stirred whenever he spoke or moved, and no living creature could hear him outside of dreams. 

The surroundings for a houseless wraith were strange and colorless, where sound was somehow more solid than touch, and odd outlines lingered after every movement, like the afterimages of a twanging bowstring vibrating after being plucked. Gorlim trained his eye to ignore these illusionary vibrations, yet nothing could dilute the strangeness of how even in the dark Beren and the trees and stones around him were as flat and colorless as a drawing made in charcoal. All except the ring which Beren now wore on his hand, the band of gold and emeralds that the elven king, Finrod Felagund, had bequeathed to Barahir.

An owl landed on the branch near where Gorlim floated. The mortal wraith turned to the bird. “Mayhap you can speak sense into my friend.” The yellow-eyed owl stared through him. “No? Ah, you are right. T’wis a futile task. So was this war, our fight to free Dorthonion from the Shadow. No, we were not foolish enough to think to free it, twelve mortal men alone, but we could not abandon our homes to the enemy.” Gorlim wondered if that was why his spirit still lingered. The dead were supposed to move on, though to where the Wise Woman Andreth could not explain. Or if she had, he had not paid her lessons the careful attention that they were due while he had been a child.

“Thou shalt go to Eilinel, and be set free of my service.” Sauron had said such, mocking him right before he killed Gorlim with an almost casual backhanded swing of a mace. The blow had been to the skull, his death almost instantaneous, and after the prolonged torture and the torment of betraying his kinsmen, the suddenness had been relief. The sound that the mace had made through the air, and the sensation of his body crumpling as his face was pulverized, however, would not leave his memories. Dead he was, but no closer to Eilinel’s side.

If that was another one of Sauron’s lies, Gorlim knew not.

His childhood home was naught but ashes and a young bramble overgrowing the foundation lines of the house with its sharp thorns. There had been nothing there to salvage, but no people there to bury. No reason to make his ghost linger there. 

He feared returning to the house that he once shared with Eilinel before the Dagor Bragollach. Another foolish fear - her ghost was not here or back at the homestead he had built for them before their wedding day.

Gorlim tired of watching Beren search for his bones. Sighing, the shade looked up through the black boughs of the pines, ignoring the pale outlines of their swaying movement in the wind, searching for starlight. The branches were too tightly interlocked to allow light to escape through them to reach the forest floor. Abandoning his folly, Gorlim waved farewell to his living friend. He had a slow trudge to undertake, searching for where he was supposed to go now that he was dead. His sole intuition was west. “Free to go,” he muttered. “Black-hearted knave. I hope Beren finds thee and shoots an arrow through thy heart. Not that thou hath one. Nay, an empty cavity, like a rotted out shell, like an acorn seed that the squirrels have already feasted upon.” Gorlim could see such seed casings littering the forest floor, mixed in among the fallen pine needles. Sight was strange now that he was dead, that he could know what every object was in his surroundings and yet lack most details. Nothing hidden, but nothing as rich as it was in life. Amusing himself with more imagined curses for Morgoth’s chief lieutenant, the ghost wandered through the woods of Dorthonion, unaware of the meeting awaiting him.

---

Shepherd chords. That was the term that Gorlim finally remembered, taken from the elves, themselves describing a quality of songs used by their blonde cousins, to sing notes in a loop that made the sense of rising or falling notes immortal. Like a treadle dog running for hours and getting nowhere, that was he. Snow fell around and through him. Winter it was now, deep into the cold months, and he had not noticed the seasons run. Gorlim lifted his foot, for the first time perturbed that no snow had soaked through the leather of his boots, and sighed at the lack of footprint in the snow. No forest animal spooked at his presence, uncaring that a dead man walked among them, and this deep into winter few animals were active. Still Gorlim could see their tracks and that he left none. Waving his hand in front of his face left no afterimages of white vibration lines like which followed the fat falling snowflakes, but his movement seemed no different in speed to that of his surroundings. Gorlim knew he had trudged unceasingly, had never slept or stopped, but it felt not like weeks or months had passed him by. He worried that his memory was barred from him now that he no longer had a physical body. Or that he was truly moving at a slower speed than the rest of Arda as an undead wraith, though he could not see his surroundings progressing faster and never would. Lost in time as well as place. Without footprints, he could not tell if he had been walking unknowingly in circles. Gorlim found that prospect more frightening than blackouts in his memory. 

He was still no closer to the borders of Dorthonion.

Bitter was the sigh he made, defeated the cast of his shoulders, and with deep unhappiness did Gorlim turn north and begin walking once more.

His choice of north instead of west had purpose, for Beren was somewhere in that direction. Gorlim remembered that he would often espy his friend fleeting through the trees, no more lasting than if a ghost himself, dodging between shadows to hide from the orcs that hunted him. Beren’s beard grew long and his clothing worn, had replaced a cloak with a new wolf skin. That and the snow clued Gorlim of the passage of time that his memory could no longer contextualize with accuracy. He wondered how ragged his friend would look now and if the extreme cold -which he could not feel, being naught but a dead man’s shade- would convince Beren to leave.

Am I an aimless wraith because I cling to concern over my still-living friend above any thoughts of myself? Gorlim started to ask this question of himself but shied from completing the thought.

 A pull north and slightly east. The direction was back towards Lake Aeluin. Beren has not abandoned Dorthonion yet. Gorlim sighed, deeper than before. “Fool you are, my friend, and more stubborn than the grave.” 

At his last comment, Gorlim wanted to laugh, but in truth he was too tired. Worn he was, and yet could not bear to stop. Black ice beneath the fresh layer of snow would have made his footing treacherous, had Gorlim still any concern with balancing a physical body as he moved. No weight to carry and yet he felt burdened.

Climbing the incline of the gorse-covered rill, once again marvelling that neither fire nor ice had killed the plants, Gorlim pondered the inconsistencies of his existence after death. Sometimes weightless, able to pass through tree trunks, moving like a floating soap bubble, other times struggling to climb the slope of a hill. A ghost grumbling about having to exert effort and climb what was not a steep incline - there was an inherent absurdity to the universe. And in this humor, Morgoth’s claim as Master of Death was revealed for the falsity that it was. Inefficiency and cruelty was his aplenty, but this aimlessness felt of benign forgetfulness, not malice. 

Gorlim crested the hill, floating straight through the final gorse bush trying to claim the peak of the hill against the wind, and thus did a higher power find his ghost, one that certainly was not in allegiance to Morgoth. The appearance of another being was so sudden to Gorlim that the mortal wraith paused and nearly slid back down the rill. So close they were, Gorlim would have collided with the newcomer had the physical possibility remained. The new person was not Beren nor was he a servant of Sauron. Most unexpected, though, was that this new person clearly perceived Gorlim’s presence. 

The newcomer was mounted, clad in armor, and stared down from his tall horse directly at the mortal wraith. That he saw Gorlim when no other creature in the twisted and tainted land that was once Dorthonion could was fact undeniable.

Like a mouse caught in a serpent’s attention did Gorlim freeze. Shock held him- but also wondrous relief.

The mounted figure shone from the silver cladding of strange armor encasing both horse and rider. The armor whorled and flowed into protrusions and small spikes, spirals where a row of chain mail linked would be, shoulder pauldrons uneven and oddly shaped, a face-plated helmet in the guise of some beast that was dragon, wolf, and smiling youth all at once and none of those, and the horse likewise horned and skeletal grinning. Had Gorlim known the forms taken by seashells in all their varieties - conch and nautilus and the myriad corals - he would not have found the armor’s geometries quite as alien. And had Gorlim beheld the dwarves’ most prized metal, mithril, he would have mistaken the material as such.

The rider lifted the faceplate to reveal a face of flesh and blood - and yet something in the shallowness of color showed that he was no more a living man than Gorlim. Eyes too bright, not the reflectiveness of wolf or cat in the dark but a true light stronger than last harvest bonfires, glowed at Gorlim, blocking the color and pupil in their radiance. Slowly either the light dimmed or Gorlim adjusted, and the rider’s eyes became but elf-bright and pale blue. The face was that of a young man, a beardless youth, but the thickness of jaw and weary determined experience in those eyes spoke of a mature man. His eyelashes and brow were pale and yellowish. 

An elf-lord, then, and in those features Gorlim found a resemblance to the one elf-lord of his brief acquaintance, King Finrod Felagund. A kinsman, unless all elves looked alike.

“Who are you, my lord?” he shouted at the elven phantom, a half-formed suspicion and prayer of what his answer might be.

“A man of Dorthonion,” the armored and mounted figure said, then after a pause, “Well-met, Bëorian.” Then a second, lengthier pause. “Aegnor, son of Finarfin, I am. The lord of these lands when I was alive.” Shifting in the saddle, regathering the reins into his gauntleted hand to free his dominant hand to reach down for a handshake, pale blue eyes staring at Gorlim’s ghost with firm expectancy - all this he did with a strange jerkiness where the movements and words themselves retained grace but each action was out of sync, like a singer pausing too long between notes because they had forgotten the lyrics or melody. Gorlim wondered if his own movements were disjointed in the same manner with the pace of the world around him. No pale clouds of breath exuded from the horse’s nostrils and no white lines of afterimages -dead like him and not living material flesh - but Gorlim thought the High Elves went to the Doomsman’s Halls to await rebirth, not linger as ghosts.

“Gorlim, I was in life,” he answered. “A man of the People of Bëor, aye, my lord. Now...a lost shade.”

“Then you are my charge,” said Lord Aegnor atop his ghostly steed. “Gorlim of Dorthonion. Son of Angrim?”

Gorlim nodded slowly. The uncomfortable pauses between the elf’s sentences had smoothed away, and the colors of his flesh and hair seemed to grow brighter. The horse smelled like a horse, even if it did not radiate the warmth of a living creature, and Gorlim realized that he had missed the scent of things, that the sense had disappeared from him when he died and was now returned.

“I knew thy father, Angrim. And his father, Rovlim, was one of my best soldiers.” Lord Aegnor paused, smiled for the pleasure of his private memories, then spoke again in an attempt, Gorlim deduced, that was an effort to reassure and comfort him. “Your face is known to me, and it is that of a noble and loyal warrior and good friend.”

“No loyal and noble friend am I,” Gorlim spoke, and bitterly and in full detail did he explain his deeds, how he had been captured and deceived by Sauron, how though he had first valiantly and stubbornly refused to betray his kinsmen, that the false promise of Eilinel’s freedom had prompted him to divulge every secret of Barahir’s men. That after Sauron had killed him, Gorlim lingered as a ghost and revealed his treachery to Beren so that at least his surviving friend was forewarned. Throughout Gorlim’s speech Aegnor did not reply or make sounds to show his reaction, and his ageless face did not show scorn or dismay at Grim's tale. Had he shown his opinion, Gorlim might have faltered in recounting his recent personal history. Still, he waited for Aegnor’s judgement with an almost nervous longing for censure. 

As if reading his thoughts -and perhaps the elf lord could- Aegnor finally spoke. “A noble fighter. A good and loyal friend. I did not mis-speak nor misjudge you, Gorlim, son of Angrim, man of Dorthonion. Proud am I to have once been your liege.”

Gorlim stammered and tried to deny Aegnor’s words, but a raised hand stopped him. “You were captured. You tried to hold out, but love was used against you, and you were cruelly deceived. Then, against death itself, you tried to mend your error. If you so strongly desire that I find fault,” the elf lord sighed and dropped his tone to informal as if addressing close kin or a child, “that thee went alone to thy former abode was foolish. But thy pain was personal and private, and I cannot cast judgement on that.”

Gorlim wept freely and unabashedly in front of his former elven liege lord. Afterwards, his eyes felt the familiar heat of expunged tears and his head ached, and if he were not already a ghost he would have worried that he looked a dreadful fright. Aegnor sat patiently through his tears, like an honor guard for his grief.

Gorlim collected himself, noticing that he sat on the ground, his legs below the layer of snow - how strange his ghostly existence was. From this eyelevel, he could see the legs of the horse that Aegnor rode, and how the silver hooves hovered slightly above the crust of snow. It raised the question of just what was the horse that Aegnor rode- and why his ghost was standing before Gorlim.

“But why are you here, M’lord? And not in thine Halls or reborn o’er the seas?” Gorlim asked.

“There is no peace for me there,” answered the armored phantom. “I vowed never to be reborn, and spoke this oath before the Doomsman. He accepted, loathe though he was at my resolve. I am not my cousins, to ever rest from this war against the Great Foe. So he sends me thither, to fight Morgoth once more, in the manner of the servants of Mandos.”

“Mandos, M’lord?” 

“The Doomsman, Lord of the Halls for those that have died, like you and I. His province is of souls, master of shades and Houseless spirits. I have been sent like a beater chivvying game to drive the lingering dead to the Halls so that they may be healed and rebodied, and I have been sent as warden hunting for poachers to find the culprits who would thwart the Doomsman’s rightful charge. And the waylaying of the dead has ever been a foul act of the Enemy. He and his servants capture ghosts as his orcs capture the living. And thus as I once did battle against his orcs, now I battle those servants. Their songs I thwart; their prey I save. And chief among those foes is one that you know well.”

Gorlim remembered the sound of a swinging mace. “Sauron.”

“Aye. And though I thought otherwise when I first beheld thee- that he was the cause of thy lingering- but I see not his bonds upon thy wraith.”

“So,” Gorlim pleaded, “my lingering here, it is not as I should be?”

Grave and kind was Aegnor’s reply, “No, Gorlim, son of Angrim, loyal man of the House of Bëor. Thy lingering is an aberration. To thy people’s final rest, to beyond the bonds of this Arda, free of its shackles, should thou long have been. No curse upon thee has thou recounted to me in thy tale, yet that must be cause, or some oath unfulfilled.”

“I did betray-” Gorlim started to say, but Aegnor angrily rebuffed him.

“Hold thy tongue! Speak never that self-flagellation before mine ears, for I tire of it, and we have had not but one conversation. Bemoan the cruel fate that thou hast been dealt, expound on thy piteous state if thou must, but call thyself traitor not within my hearing, and rebuke me not when I state that is not thy rightful title. An act of betrayal, under most grave duress, and one which you have atoned for,” Aegnor proclaimed. “I am no rude apprentice untempered in my calling to mistake why a wraith lingers. Barahir bound thee all not with oaths beyond that of any other man of Bëor, Sauron made sport of thee but bound thee not as his thrall after death, and while thine act might account for why thou did linger as a wraith to tell Beren of thy deeds and the danger that he faced, thy lingering beyond that act cannot be the cause.” Aegnor began to muse aloud. “Another reason holds you here. It is not the freeing of Dorthonion itself, or else Barahir and the other men would also linger as ghosts, and yours is the only one still here. Of your betrayal you absolved when you forewarned Beren, and he placed no curse upon thee…” Aegnor trailed off and stared at Gorlim, the last words of his sentences switching from Sindarin to a colloquial Taliska. The elven lord had been addressing Gorlim in a bewildering mix of the two languages, flipping between formal and informal. His wool-gathering aloud was either for Gorlim’s benefit or an unconscious act. One extreme or the other, and Gorlim did not have familiarity with this elf to know which was his character, for the bright eyes seemed not to truly focus on Gorlim’s face although the elf faced him.

Aegnor smacked a fist into an opened palm.

“It is Beren,” Aegnor proclaimed. “You linger for your final companion, awaiting his death so that you may pass on together. Self-inflicted somehow.”

Gorlim tried to deny the statement, but the ghost of an oath sat on that small space between tongue and teeth. The memory was lost where all his other dead memories dwelt, in the gaps of his ghostly wandering. The stench of long decaying mold and fresh blood bloomed out of the darkness, and with it came remembrance of his final instance before his spirit detached from his flesh. “I cursed myself,” he admitted, voice soft and small and defeated.

Aegnor’s unnaturally bright eyes were focused on Gorlim without ambiguity. “Until Barahir’s son joins you in death, you will not leave him alone on these shores. I can see the shape of this vow, and well beyond my power is to break it. Fain not am I to try.” Aegnor sighed, but did so with a light smile. “We wait then. Accompany me on my duties to attend to the other houseless shades that haunt this land, and when Beren dies, as soon he shall for an outlaw alone will stand not against Morgoth, then you both shall I escort to my Lord Mandos.”

Aegnor reached a hand down to pull Gorlim up to side behind him astride his horse, and the wraith, at a loss for any alternative, starved for companionship, and heartened by the confidence and sympathy of a man who had until five years ago been his liege lord, clasped the outstretched hand. The leather was warm. Strange, that he could once more feel that.

---

Chapter End Notes

Line 240 of the Third Canto of "The Lay of Leithian" does say that Gorlim cursed himself.

This is the alternative I mentioned in replies for Tears where Aegnor makes a similar deal as Míriel 

Chapter 2

The following chapter contains linked footnotes for dialogue. A pet peeve of mine is long strings of untranslated dialogue in a different language than the one that the fic is written in, as sacrilegious as it is for a Tolkien fan to admit. My exceptions are the odd vocabulary term and sometimes poetry or as a bonus in footnotes. However late in this chapter, two characters speak several sentences of what the pov character cannot in-universe translate, so I've included the dialogue in the footnotes.

Read Chapter 2

A dead man should not suffer from saddle sores. The universe was absurd and targeted its cruelty upon Gorlim. This was fact undeniable. His lower calves ached from the rubbing against the sides of the horse, his inner thighs and buttocks hurt, he kept accidentally banging his forehead against the back cuirass of Aegnor’s armor, and he knew the second that he dismounted he would not be able to stand straight. “I would beg thee to kill me to save me this misery, even if we both knew it would not work,” Gorlim whispered to his fogged reflection. The shape and patterns of Aegnor’s strange armor did not move as Gorlim watched, but the contours were different each time that Gorlim tried to map them, the surface broken by new swirls or scales that distorted the reflections, new spikes and horns on the pauldrons that he could not track. He could not comprehend how that worked, or how the horse’s steady two-beat trot switched time signatures without changing pace. He was counting the beats by old songs that he had memorized, and found it aligned best to the irregular complex rhythms of Haladim songs that Dairuin’s father had taught to him long ago. But the horse moved at a brisk trot, never a canter to explain the three-beats. Gorlim had no stomach in which to grow nauseous or else he thought the eldritch dilemmas upon which he rode could make it possible.

Aegnor noticed that he had spoken, turning in the saddle to glance back at Gorlim, the faceplate of his helmet raised to expose his face. “Are thee well?”

“Aye, M’lord,” Gorlim muttered, trying to hold back wincing from the pain of being astride a horse for several hours after years without. 

The mortal wraith did not meet Aegnor’s eyes, or else he would have seen the doubt in those elven eyes that accurately judged that Gorlim lied of his discomfort. Aegnor took his reply unopposed but still challenged him on a new stride. “Speak informal to me, or in Taliska or Sindarin as is most comfortable to thee. I am no longer thy lord.”

“I think it would be uncomfortable for me to address you informally, M’lord.”

“Thy father did.”

Gorlim, mindful of his shame, retorted, “And I am not him.”

“Nay,” said Aegnor, “Thou are taller.” The elven lord made an all too human sigh. “But if it sets you at ease... Fain, as long as you speak to me, my heart shall be gladdened by the company. The other Houseless rarely converse with me long, and I bandy words not with my enemies.”

Gorlim wondered if Aegnor in his loneliness held long conversations with the horse. In his isolation the wraith had attempted communications with random wildlife, so he did not think of the possibility as outside the realm of probability nor would he have disparaged Aegnor for it. And for all he knew, whatever the strange horse that Aegnor rode upon, if horse it was, was capable of speech. “What ...what would you wish for me to say?”

Aegnor did not immediately reply, and awkwardness grew the longer that the pause stretched. As Gorlim waited, Aegnor nudged the horse to weave around a solitary oak, the claw marks of a bear maring the bark in several clear pale lines. The sign worried Gorlim, for deep into winter all bears should be hibernating. The pale lines were an ill omen of possible danger towards Beren. Too preoccupied fretting for his friend, Gorlim almost missed Aegnor’s next words. “Dismount.”

“What?”

“Dismount, Gorlim. Quickly and silently,” Aegnor said brusquely, already sliding down from the saddle.

Gorlim half-fell, his legs and bottom sore and somehow more so for impacting the earth that he could no longer feel. Air that no longer existed in his lungs still punched out of his chest from the sudden fall against the ground, for fall it was instead of coordinated dismount. It had been the urgent fear in Aegnor’s voice that had prompted Gorlim to throw himself off the horse, inelegant and unsilent though the results were, and the mortal ghost stared up at the elven one. Aegnor stood behind the shielding bulk of his steed, sword unsheathed, his taut pose that of a hunting hound catching the scent of a wolf. Gorlim knew that pose. Four and three-quarter years an outlaw hunting orcs and other minions of Morgoth, hiding from their patrols and reprisals, ambushing them whenever possible, had taught Gorlim that pose and that tension’s taste. It was easy to imagine Aegnor with the twitching ears of Eilinel’s cat, the slightest quiver of tiny triangles, as it had looked when it heard a noise of either mouse or unfriendly dog. That was the question, whether it was prey or foe that Aegnor listened for. 

Gorlim, unarmed, hated the sensation of helplessness. Could he fight as a wraith? What enemies did the dead have? Aegnor had spoken of them. Sauron was one; Gorlim remembered that. No, let me not be helpless again before him.

Aegnor sighed; tension flooded out of him like water through a frozen river once spring’s full might hit. “Forgive me. I thought the shade was closer than it is. The trail is cold once more.” He sheathed his sword and slumped to the ground, losing some of that elven grace in the process. 

Gorlim pulled himself up into a seated position to mirror Aegnor. No snow or leaf debris crunched under him as he moved, which was more disconcerting than it should have been, for when he had been alive Gorlim would have begged for such silence in his movements as to hide himself from prey and foe. Even seated, the elven shade was larger than Gorlim, but it was hard to feel distant from a man when he sat across from one with legs stretched out and elbows plopped on bent knees. Aegnor looked tired. Long years as outlaws with barely any support to fight an overwhelming army - Gorlim understood that weariness and marveled at Aegnor’s loneliness.

Even the horse had changed. It emitted a radiance felt more than seen, and when Aegnor had dismounted, that inner light felt like sharp rays of sunlight at its harshest point of day piercing through the brittle shell of a horse-like shape, but when Aegnor relaxed the internal light turned soft and heavy and sank to the bottom of that horse outline like motes made of fuzzy cattail down. The light in Aegnor’s eyes was like that, too, brighter than even the way the elves’ brightness was, strange and holy in the same way as the white lines of afterimages of living things. The vision of the dead, Gorlim was starting to label all this. It made him queasy and fearful of what he would become if he remained a wraith.

“Describe for me your Eilinel.”

“M’lord?”

“A man delights most in talking of his wife and family. Thou need not sing her praises. Tell me a small story of her, a habit that she had or a feature of her appearance. Something that she did that brought you small grief, or the tale of how you met.” Aegnor’s face showed an earnest eagerness but not an uncomfortable hunger; he wanted conversation to relieve their boredom but would accept Gorlim’s refusal, and Gorlim did not doubt for an instant that Aegnor would be anything less than an appreciative audience. Beren had been a good listener too, one of the first traits that drew Gorlim to his friend. And to speak of Eilinel would bring Gorlim joy, to share the woman that he loved instead of tragedy that befell from her absence.

He fumbled for what feature to start with, which memory would work best for an introduction, then spouted the first image that came to mind. “She embroidered. I remember the last- no, it wasn’t the last project she worked on- this shirt. It was a deep green, and Eilinel was stitching this row of yellow flowers all around the front. Our designs, those flowers, not the fancy elven work that looks like the real thing, nothing so marvelous. I remember the thread though, the exact shade of yellow. And Eilinel,” Gorlim laughed, “she was near-sighted. She could make stitches the width of the leg of an ant, so fine, but anything further than the length of her arm began to blur for her. So she would hold her needlework and letters up to her face, so close that her nose almost touched. Would nearly singe her eyebrows off cooking, My Eilinel, staring at the cauldron a breath away so that she could tell if the consistency was right. Needed me to describe objects or people in the distance for her. And she would squint. It made her face charming, the tiny furrow between her brows.”

Aegnor nodded and smiled. “I see the expression.”

Gorlim realized he had been mimicking his wife’s face and laughed at himself. “Yes, well, it also meant she would always lean in close to me so she could see. I ...liked that,” Gorlim trailed off. “On her, it was attractive.”

“Gap between her front teeth,” Aegnor said suddenly, “she hated it.”

“Hmm?”

Aegnor shook his head. “You were telling me of your Eilinel.”

Gap teeth. Gorlim stopped and stared hard at the elf. If his company were a fellow man of the Bëorians, one of his companions sworn to Barahir or even Lord Barahir himself, Gorlim would dare the question that sat against his teeth. “Speak informal to me, or in Taliska or Sindarin as is most comfortable to thee. I am no longer thy lord.” Aegnor had said to him, and denouncing caution, Gorlim decided to test this.

“Tell me of the woman thou spoke of, this Gap Teeth, and I shall speak more of mine.”

Aegnor tightened the muscles of his face and body, drawing in upon himself to liken more to a cold and immobile statute of a man, his ageless face proud and stern and unwelcoming. His legs retreated and his back stiffened, no longer the comfortable companionship of two men sitting together on the ground. His eyes lost their warmth, and his voice, when he finally spoke, was steel bite. “No. Thou shalt never ask again.”

Once more Gorlim felt that hint of fear for the armored elven spirit. The mystery compelled him, however. For Aegnor’s mien and mood to turn so swiftly - to shield himself, aye, pain that was. Horrible, familiar pain. Gorlim’s fear melted into empathy. “We’ll drop it,” Gorlim said, the same way that his mother had stated that phrase when she meant that the subject would be returned to when it was most inconvenient for her son. Bright eyes glared at Gorlim. Ah, another soul familiar with that unspoken ‘for now’. Fishing for a new conversation topic, Gorlim cast his bait upon the horse standing next to them. “What is its name?”

Aegnor’s blink was the cracking of ice, and the cold mask fell away once more.

“The horse’s name is He Carries Consequences. It sounds sharper in the Valarin language, but the connotations of its meaning are... less dire and more metaphysical.”

“Your last word bestired not a single dram of understanding.”

“Philosophy. You needs be either a Vala, my brother, or very drunk to understand it.”

The laugh that escaped Gorlim’s throat was like a fox wiggling free of a chicken coop, and Aegnor’s laughter soon joined. 

“Dost thou sing?” Aegnor asked, once their laughter was sated.

“Aye,” Gorlim answered. “Was once my joy, and to learn songs. Taught my best friend, Beren, how to sing. We have no accompanying instruments, however, and I cannot pluck a reed to carve a pipe or string to craft one. Unless you brought one, M’lord?”

“No,” Aegnor said, “though I preferred the flute and pipe or the various lutes if called to play, as my eldest brother likes the harp. Angrod was best at the pipes; he loved your mortal ones involving sewn bladders and multiple reeds. Pretty instrument, though an acquired taste, and ill suited for the interior of castle halls. Horrified Cousin Fingon with it once.”

Gorlim imagined the scene and winced. “Shall I sing anyways?”

“If thou wish. It would please me, but you face no obligation. I ask not as your lord.” 

Gorlim cleared his throat and dropped his voice into the low sonorous chant of Eilinel’s favorite songs. She had liked best the contemplative songs and the old ones where half the words had no meaning anymore. The tones were low and dark, and yet Gorlim could feel his voice soaring out, able to resonate to the tarns and high valleys. Ragnar complained that Gorlim only sang dirges -false accusations with a seed of truth. At first he hummed, searching for the notes. Surrounded by snow, the dead man found his thoughts springing to a melancholic old Bëorian song whose overwhelming apropos had him hesitant to sing it. But Aegnor’s eagerness beckoned, so Gorlim sang, attempting to ignore lyrics that stung deeper. “Winter wakes all my care, for now these leaves grow bare. Often I sigh and mourn this with pressing keen,” Gorlim licked his lips, fumbling for the tune, “when this world’s joy I have thought, and how all its bounty goes to naught. Now it is, now it is not - as though it hath never been.” Gorlim repeated those short three lines, nervously checking Aegnor’s face for reactions. This was the section of the song that was the same in all dialects of Taliska, the part that Gorlim remembered singing as a skipping song and counting rhymes as a young child. Is and not and hath never been, which hand held the pebble, which straw to draw to pick patrols. “Many men say this, and it is so, say this and is so: we shall all die, though we like it ill. All that which grows green, now it fades to be seen. For I don’t know where I shall go when saying my farewell, nor how long among the green earth I shall dwell.”

Aegnor laughed at the last lines, but it was a rueful, gentle sound of compassion instead of raucous amusement. “Thou, my most peculiar case, are more uncertain than most, and shall linger until thy boon friend Beren says his farewell. And aye, that cruel uncertainty of your mortal spirits. To the Halls I shall ferry thee both - but thou both shall abandon me. My brother’s philosophy and my Lord Námo’s hope is that there is a chance for reunion once more.” Aegnor’s face dipped into a miserable snarl, his eyes shadowed by lash and tilt of jaw. “I have no hope for it, no faith. Mandos has certainty within the bonds of Arda, the ability to far-see and proclaim fates. But beyond the bonds?” Aegnor growled, “‘tis naught.”

Present before this anger, Gorlim almost regretted the choice of song. Strange he found it, though, for an immortal to loathe mortality and all that it entailed as his people did. Gorlim was the one facing it, and yet his fears focused not on the nebulous fate awaiting him but on how an existence trapped as a wraith would change him, a fear that he could lose all memory or sense of self or begin to see the world only through the bright vibrating lines of the movement of living things.

But the elf had been born in a land of endless summer, where the green of grass never faded. That old song must be as incomprehensible to grasp as the shapes of Aegnor’s armor were for Gorlim to outline.

They needed a new song.

Gorlim began to sing the first line of a frivolous song about linden trees, but the horse interrupted him by violently stepping back with ears pinned to its skull, tail lashing back and forth. Gorlim yelped and dove out of its path, unwilling to experiment with the sensation of being both dead and trampled by a war steed. Aegnor cursed and leapt up, unsheathing his sword. “Lured him,” he proclaimed, reaching for the horse’s headstall to steady the animal and lift into the saddle once the stirrups stopped swinging. “Stay, Gorlim! And stay quiet.” Before Aegnor vaulted into the saddle, his quarry appeared, and Aegnor released the horse, deciding to face it on foot. The horse with the Valarin name of He Carries Consequences -and Gorlim was itching to learn if the original Valarin version of that name had more or less syllables than the translation- snorted and sidestepped until it stood between Aegnor and Gorlim. Gorlim did not immediately realize that the horse was attempting to shield Gorlim from sight. Hunched on the ground, he could peer between the animal’s legs to see whom Aegnor now faced with an unbarred steel sword.

Gorlim had adjusted to discerning movement of objects by the bright lines left in its wake, an adjustment that made the dim figure moving towards them difficult for him to catch until his mind reevaluated what he saw.

Another ghost ran towards them -though flew was perhaps a more apt description- and the  body outline grew more bright and solid as it approached, drifting down from the leafless trees until the new ghost stood upon the mix of old snow and forest debris. The movement had been swift but jerky, like that of a spider, then it paused as if finally beholding Aegnor’s shape and armor and the bright line of a sword held ready. At first the figure had been a dim amorphous shadow among the branches, a man-shaped outline of mists and diluted colors. Now the ghost stood on the earth before them, almost solid and fully-colored for a denizen of this strange death reflection of the world. For months Gorlim encountered no other ghosts or wraiths, and in a short time he had intercepted the paths of two. The newcomer’s eyes were glowing lanterns, marsh light green. Gorlim wondered if that was where the warning stories originated. It lurched towards Aegnor and the horse after its pause, shouting something that Gorlim thought might be a question or request. Linda, Gorlim thought the word was, or something approximating that sound. Another word almost discernible was Adan, which Gorlim knew was one of the elven terms for mortal men. The voice croaked as it repeated its question or demand, sounding like the mimicry voice of crows or ravens instead of that from the throat of man or elf. Shrill it became, like a badly tuned lute. The wrongness repulsed Gorlim, and he pressed his prone body snugly against the earth, tilting just his head to peer up and through the horse’s fetlocks to see the figures across from him. The terrible angle was slightly nostalgic; many times he and the other men of Barahir’s group had lain undetected in the underground to observe passing orcs. Without being told, Gorlim knew that he did not wish this new ghost to notice him.

“Houseless Spirit, Heed me!” Aegnor commanded, and Gorlim felt a change in air pressure and for a bright half-second tasted acid on his tongue. The effect of Aegnor’s shout was even stronger upon the spirit that Aegnor identified as one of the Houseless, a dead elven soul that lingered when it should not. It flinched and moved as if it wished to flee but was trapped in some invisible spider’s web. The newcomer shouted back at Aegnor, and Aegnor repeated his command in words that felt as sharp as razors and tasted like bottled lightning. The last film of mist fell away from the figure, revealing an elven man in soot-darkened armor. From Gorlim’s supine angle, the oddity of the ghost’s missing boots was clearly visible. The stockings were coal black. An empty quiver hung from his belt but no bow or sword.

Aegnor shouted a name too quickly for Gorlim to catch. The Houseless phantom wore familiar armor, the mix of dwarven chainmail and small metal plates that the Noldor preferred, with an unadorned helmet, which meant he had been a lowly foot soldier. Someone who served under Aegnor and had died during the Dagor Bragollach, no doubt. Or maybe another victim of that battle, one of the riders under High King Fingolfin and his son Prince Fingon, who having died up in the flower fields of the far north had drifted down to Dorthonion. The phantom had no discerning feature upon his armor, and without cavalry footwear Gorlim would not know, for he could not distinguish the minute details of Noldor soldiery the way that he could recognize from which valley a warrior of the Bëorians hailed by what accouterments they brought. Aegnor recognized who he was, and he was the one that needed to.

“Please don’t step on me,” Gorlim whispered to Horse of Consequences as he wiggled forward to see what was going on and if the Houseless would bolt forward once more or try to flee.

Gorlim knew the elvish language, and aside from some syllables and almost-words, what Aegnor said to the other wraith and what that elven ghost replied with -all that orderly sound-  was naught but gibberish to him. The jackdaw of birds held no more sense than their words. Gorlim floundered in his role as audience to their scene. Had it been a physical fight, at least, he could understand the back and forth of parry and strikes, perhaps even participate, though he had no weapon. But though Aegnor held his sword in a plow guard, the former lord of Dorthonion made no move to lunge at the other elven ghost. 

The other elven phantom shouted at Aegnor, his words emphatic and loud, almost feverish in how he pleaded and screamed.  Gorlim’s ears deceived him into thinking he could derive meaning and he could parse that at least one statement was a negative declarative if little else^[1], but the strength of emotion sang clear as a finely tuned reed pipe. The Houseless cried, tears dripping from those green marsh-light eyes, slowly dimming to a more natural brightness.  

Aegnor snapped several long sentences in return, each growing louder and longer until he shouted three short syllables that almost sounded like the first part of the word for a ghost but tasted of acid and lightning, another command.^[2} Upon those final words the Houseless phantom fell to his knees in a fearful cringe, covering his ears.

The phantom wept, and Aegnor lowered his sword. Slowly he approached, as if to soothe a spooked horse, and laid a hand upon the other ghost’s helm. “Go,” Aegnor said in clear Sindarin. “Go to the Doomsman and find restoration.”

Though Gorlim could not feel it, nor did any vibration lines acknowledge its force upon the surroundings, a strong wind blew, the noise whistling by Gorlim’s ears. The westbound wind targeted the kneeling ghost; Gorlim was incidental. Like the words of what Gorlim deduced was Valarin, the wind temporarily restored a sense, scent instead of taste. Myrtle, Gorlim thought, and some other unrecognizable flower, and he stood up and dashed around the horse, reaching for the kneeling phantom. The wind picked up the once more dim and translucent ghost, floating away like mist or dandelion tuffs. Gorlim gasped, but Aegnor shook his head and called back, “Fear not. He has gone to the Halls of Awaiting as his spirit should have when first he died. Already before Mandos doth he now stand, and the Valië Nienna shall in kindness deal with his tears.” Aegnor sighed and trudged back to his two companions, shoulders no longer stiffened by the demands of command. “Forgive me, Loyal Gorlim; my intention was not to use thee as bait, but thy mortal song drew the Houseless spirit, a lonely ghost craving not only companionship but the sensations of the living. That is the danger, when those yearnings turn to envy. That envy will draw the Houseless to attack the living, a most evil deed, that which I am here to thwart.”

Gorlim deduced as much about both Houseless in general and their recently departed encounter. “I thought I was bait.”

Contrite, Aegnor sheathed his sword. “Fie. Your song was, though my first and strongest motive in requesting that you sing -and your voice is pleasant and pure- was but for the beauty and enjoyment of it. But yes, I calculated that the song might draw our quarry out, but not that he would approach so near or so swiftly. The plan was to have you hide a good distance back. I misliked how close he came. The Houseless should be little danger to thee, as thou art already dead, but I was loathe to chance it. And thank thee for staying back and not revealing thyself. I feared that thee might attempt something foolish.”

Just how reckless did Aegnor think him to be? “Please, I’m not Beren,” he scoffed.

Aegnor laughed, this time a sound halfway between the two that Gorlim was now familiar. “Thank the stars that we intercepted Vóryestaro before your living friend. I do not think that Vóryestaro would have attacked Beren, but the son of the last Lord of Ladros has enough enemies to face with Sauron at his heels. Thou do know that thy individual deaths are worth to Morgoth the same as killing High King Fingon himself, that the Black Foe counted each of thee outlaws of Barahir as an equally dangerous foe?” Aegnor’s expression could not hold any more possible pride, and he fondly patted nonexistent dirt and snow off of Gorlim’s shoulders. “My brave-hearted Men of Bëor. My fate was worth the knowledge of you and your fealty.” 

Gorlim blushed. Even if he no longer felt worthy of the praise, to know how earnestly beloved his people had been by one of their former feudal lords, it was like a bellyful of rich soup and Eilinel’s arms across his shoulders. To move the conversation away and to sate his curiosity, he asked, “What was that tongue which you spoke?”

“Quenya. Our mother-tongue - his. If I am to be precise, my mother-tongue was a variant of Quenya spoken by my mother’s people - but it is the language of the elves spoken on the other side of the sea. The banned one, for the act of betrayal and kin-slaying.”

“I remember,” Gorlim said softly. “That was one of the few words that I caught, amarto, that you both kept repeating. It means the same as amarth, yes? Fate, doom.”

“Yes,” Aegnor replied, his single syllable of answer more an exhale than speech.

“We called ourselves outlaws, you know, when we stayed behind to patrol Dorthonion. And it was true because Morgoth now ruled our homeland. But we didn’t think him king of it, not in our hearts. The true ruler of Dorthonion was Barahir, Lord of the Bëorians, and King Finrod above him. But we also had outlaws, true outlaws to the Bëor. Those were men that committed acts of theft or murder against their neighbors, who accepted guest right and then did harm to their hosts. Then such men were counted outlaws, banned and hunted, and never accepted back into any community, at least not in any story I remember. Thieves and murderers and traitors were to be denied burial.” Gorlim thought of Beren’s desperate search for his body to bury him with the others, of his friend’s incredible kindness. “That definition of outlaw was the Kinslayers, though, and why that ghost was so afraid. You elves were so much more forgiving and noble than us, I thought, when I heard the stories of what happened before Bëor met King Finrod.”

Aegnor said no reply.

“Your Valar are kind, too. To parole Morgoth as they did, even if the repentance was false. And to take back the ghosts and send you to fetch them, even those that broke their laws.”

“They are your Valar, too,” Aegnor grumbled. “And aye, I will send whichever spirit I can convince to go, even those of orcs if I could, to the Halls of Mandos so that they may be healed and reborn.”

“Have thou? Ghosts of orcs? Have any been freed?”

“Not yet,” Aegnor admitted in a soft sad tone. “I have tried, but none can listen.” He paused. “You addressed me informally just now.”

“I did no such thing, M’lord.”

---

Chapter End Notes

The poem that Gorlim paraphrased is one of the oldest surviving poetry of Middle English, "Wynter wakeneth al my care".

Bagpipes are a widespread and ancient form of instrument.

For those curious, Tool is my primary playlist inspiration for this fic, so Maynard James Keenan is a rough approximation for Gorlim's singing voice, if the Edain of the First Age had prog metal.

Valarin sounds harsh to elven ears, and Taliska is the collective name for the language of the Bëorians and a closely related but distinct dialect spoken by the People of Hador. This chapter is where the gratuitous tomfoolery with second-person singular pronouns kicks into high gear.

 

The Quenya dialogue that Gorlim naturally would not know:

 

¹ "I cannot return. The Doom keeps me. How can I face my neighbors, having partaken in the Kinslaying, having followed Findecáno, with hands still stained with their life-blood? I am Doomed; I do not deserve to return. Send me not to the Doomsman, I beg! The song, the mortal song, where is it? Send me not from the Hithershore! Aie, the Doom!" ^{[return to text]}

² “You must go to the Halls of Awaiting. The Doom does not disbar you. You must go. The Hithershore is not yours to linger. It is your shame and cowardice that keeps you here, as was also foretold. You fear the consequences of your choice; you fear the censure and to admit self-truth - but there will be no healing otherwise for you or any others. No shrift awaits unless you go. Your neighbors and your victims gain no more by your lingering on these shores than they would by your entrance to those Halls to which is your proper fate. If your regret is not false vanity, you will not stay. If you stay, you shall become something crueler, something worse than the Kinslayer who followed out of loyalty to misguided leadership. I have seen what Houseless become, when envy of the living sinks in. Or even lesser you might become, a frail dim thing that has no ears in which to hear the loveliness of song, and that fate I shall not allow you either. Hie thee away!” 

Chapter 3

Apologies for the long delay; real life family stress.
This chapter we get a few more ghosts, I try as best I can to answer a conundrum of the Lay of Leithian and the published Silmarillion - the lack of detail of who remained in Dorthonion after the ambush of Barahir to witness Beren's next deeds of bravery and resistance against Morgoth as to immortalize him in song and rumor. The Nightshade is on full display.

Read Chapter 3

The tableau below the branches was a fight scene, a desperate battle to live between a single mortal man and several orcs. Gorlim and Aegnor, sitting on one of the barren oak branches above this fight, legs dangling as if on a swing, had already remarked to each other the bizarre quality. Independently they found the experience akin to watching performances as a child, though for Gorlim the memory was hand puppets and for Aegnor a troupe of dancers recreating a story in a plaza at Alqualondë or a speaker in Tirion. Gorlim found the fact that a primary form of entertainment in the Noldor elf capital city had been men shouting their opinionated rants at passing crowds to be both worrying and illuminating. The figures below their feet were not play-fighting, but neither Gorlim nor Aegnor could join the combat, locked into their roles as observers, and this enforced helplessness of phantoms meant that they could do nothing but observe and comment on the performance as children did watching entertainers- or in Aegnor’s case, as dancing instructor with a promising yet erring student. Thrice Aegnor had pointed out where Beren lapsed in his defenses, overextending a sword strike or choosing an inferior parry. Overtasked and exhausted was Aegnor’s verdict, not a deficiency in talent. And that Beren fought alone against too many opponents without time to rest. The swordsmanship of the orcs compared to the mortal man was inferior still, so Beren had yet to pay dearly for his mistakes. Aegnor gestured to one of the orcs, explaining how if it lunged just so, Beren would lose his leg beneath the knee, or at least receive a debilitating wound. However, the orc just now disemboweled by Beren’s vicious swift sword thrust fell backwards onto the other orc, ruining the opportunity for that stratagem. The scene had to yet dissolved into farce - too much blood, mortal peril, and desperation. But very short on grace and excellence. Beren’s grappling move shifted into an eye gouge maneuver, and Aegnor actually clapped. Gorlim turned to look at his former liege-lord until he caught the corners of Aegnor’s eyes between the spikes of his strange shoulder pauldron. Aegnor shrugged with false contriteness, clapping stilled.

“If Beren does not leave this place anon, the second patrol shall soon be upon him and then his death swift after,” Aegnor said with far less levity after a lengthy pause.

Gorlim kicked his dangling heels rather than reply.

Thankfully the rain had fallen two days prior, and the forest floor soaked in the lingering water, leaving only a few damp patches of spongy earth, none near enough to the location of Beren’s fight as to factor into these battles. Yet the rain had been pleasant for Gorlim to watch, especially the after-effects of the raindrop movement, doubling the volume of the fall and transforming the rain into a gauzy curtain of white lines, like a veil of light. It was how Gorlim imagined the home of the gods must really appear, the true form of the Tree Light, the face of the One and the Flame in the Void. He did not share this imagining with Aegnor so that he would not be told how wrong he was. For fleeting moments during that storm Gorlim smelled the rain, but whenever he had stretched out a hand, he never felt the raindrops hit him nor did the water soak his ghostly garments or skin.

Another rainstorm would arrive in a few days, Aegnor predicted. Whether Beren, last survivor of the outlaws of Dorthonion, would be alive to see it was uncertain.

Beren shook the eye viscera off his fingers and made a rude gesture towards the two surviving orcs of this patrol group. Predictable results ensued. 

A small cloud of dark smoke rose and swiftly dissipated when some of the orcs died. Gorlim watched closely, trying to catch if this phenomenon happened with every death and if he could discern a shape or detail about the black cloud. His suspicion was that he was seeing their ghosts. If truth sat behind the mask of his suspicion, then these orcish ghosts left the stage too swiftly for Aegnor to apprehend. Sobering though the thought could be, Gorlim did not feel the loss of opportunity to confront an orcish ghost keenly, for if Aegnor fretted fiercely over the danger of an elven shade, then the ghost of an orc was no less terrible a foe than a living one.

A final strike, Beren slew his last opponent. He knelt, one hand on the ground, panting from desperate need to fill his lungs, miraculously alive. And still ignorant of the second patrol that would finish him off. Frustration fermented in Gorlim’s gut like sour beer, watching how Beren squandered his chance to escape.

A boar’s shrill distinctive squeal of rage broke through the soft sounds of Beren’s wheezing, and the exhausted man straightened and turned towards the trees. From Gorlim’s vantage point, he could see the spooked expression of Beren’s eyes. That wide ring of white transferred its primal emotion to Gorlim, his own heart reacting with shared panic even as his mind told him that a wraith had no danger to fear. Beren sheathed his sword and gathered various articles strewn across the ground: arrows, fallen waterskins, an unbroken knife, even tugged the cloaks and furs off the orc corpses. His search was a quick scramble for anything that suggested usefulness, and he shoved his bounty into a rucksack and fled the battlefield, all while the enraged cries of the wild boar called from a distance. 

“Fine stroke of luck,” Gorlim said, watching Beren run to safety, but Aegnor clucked his tongue.

“Someone is being clever,” Aegnor said cryptically. He pushed off the branch and floated down to the forest floor, then began to jog towards the porcine squeals. Gorlim huffed and copied him, trusting that Beren would escape and that Gorlim and Aegnor would be able to find the mortal man before Sauron’s soldiers did.

Gorlim jogged through the pine forest, dodging and leaping over fallen branches by habit and wondering why that effortless gliding of ghosts never manifested when he desired that more rapid mode of transportation. His frustration would be lessened if he did not know such rapid flying was possible for the dead. Or if he could call upon it by cue. At least he had no breath to be in short supply of, forced to pant and wheeze - death’s small mercy.

Aegnor’s bright pale yellow hair, unbound by a helmet, served as a torchlight for Gorlim to follow through the monochromatic forest. The former lord of Dorthonion promised that the living orcs posed no danger to the dead, and that if any patrol of the enemy could possibly contain a danger to the mortal wraith, Gorlim would be forewarned. Aegnor had yet to clarify what danger that might be, and Gorlim was beginning to suspect that Aegnor did not know. 

Or that Aegnor knew and it was too terrible to speak of. Gorlim’s cynicism wavered between which option was more likely.

Well, as long as Sauron himself is not leading this second patrol, we are safe, Gorlim thought to himself. 

“Here!” Aegnor called, waving to Gorlim. The wraith sprinted the final distance to reach the other ghost’s side, bracing against Aegnor to halt his momentum and -Gorlim was brave enough to admit to himself if not brave enough to speak it aloud- for the tactile reassurance of the other man’s presence. Aegnor snorted and rested a hand for a fleeting second on Gorlim’s head, an intimate gesture of family or close friends, but pulled the hand away so swiftly that the touch could be denied, a breach of formality too great to be acknowledged. Butterfly-like, the touch had been. That ephemeral moment spoke eloquently of a long loneliness - yet also of how tall the elven lord was in comparison to Gorlim. Gorlim straightened and stepped away from Aegnor, frowning in awkwardness, then looked up and finally saw the clearing.

The second orc patrol would trouble no one, least of all Beren. The boar that had spooked Beren into fleeing had found that patrol- or the orcs had found it. Since the two ghosts arrived at the drama’s conclusion, they could only speculate on its beginning. 

The wild boar stood over the gored bodies of orcs and one warg, bristles and broken arrows protruding from its high-shouldered back, tusks curved and red. It lowered its large triangular head, fresh gashes creating a new pattern of marks to outline the tiny eyes, and sniffed at its kills, the arrows and line of dark hair along its back waving like wheat in the wind. Fresh blood dripping from the few arrowheads that pierced that hide overlapped old white scars crossing like spider webs across its haunches and shoulders, almost like red weft over white warp threads. The only living thing in this scene, a monster of the forest, but familiar, for it was just an animal. “Some of Yavanna’s creations have been driven mad in the Nightshade,” Aegnor said, “as you told me of them, the animals growing unnaturally aggressive.”

“Aye,” Gorlim answered, watching the scarred boar begin to feast on the orc corpses, grunting as it pulled flesh away from armor like the deshelling of nuts. “I do not think this one needed assistance.”

Aegnor grimaced at the feeding animal. “Unclean things.”

Gorlim shrugged. “The Haladim eat them.”

“And mushrooms.”

“So speaks eater of snails,” Gorlim retorted.

Aegnor sighed. “One of our great regrets is that you Edain have never tasted the joy that is abalone. And that thou disdain the meat of freshwater clams.”

Gorlim folded his arms like a sulky child. “Some mushrooms are tasty. Thou hast to know which ones, and cook them right. Eilinel added them to meat pastries and stews.” 

“I doubt not that you relished your wife’s cooking, and that to a mortal man’s tongue the food was good. Of things that have been my nourishment I would expect no mortal to eat - rotting whale meat was better that starving when we froze upon the ice of the Helecaraxë - but please, gladly I ate the same meals as my Bëorians, but nothing with mushrooms.”

Gorlim smiled at Aegnor’s gracious acquiesce. His fond claim for the Bëorians, speaking as he had the entire conversation in Gorlim’s native language, filled the wraith’s chest with pride. “Then no offense shall be taken, M’lord. So thou art a fussy eater. So was Dagmir. Refused to eat anything with birch sap. Or walnuts. And our boy, Sícrum, had a strange and vicious hatred for endive as opposed to any other salad greens.”

“Thy boy?”

“Ah,” Gorlim awkwardly laughed. “Not a son. A fosterling, an orphan that my wife’s brother, Urthel, adopted. A fine lad, beloved, my other good-brother. Heart-nephew, thou couldst say.”

“Did he-”

“Died,” Gorlim answered, interrupting, “not during the fires, no. Afterwards, it was a,” Gorlim paused, for the boy’s death was tied deeply to Eilinel’s disappearance. “Dead.”

“Well,” Aegnor turned to face outward, beyond the guzzling boar to the branches and the gray sky behind them, “Beren has fled, and until by some doubtful mischance his foot finds a malicious badger hole and he stumbles and breaks his neck, I foresee that death is not his fate today. Let us to another mortal, to see if that fate holds true for him as well.”

“Old Duras?” Gorlim replied. “Aye, we have not seen to his death yet, and that he lives is the strangest fate thus far.” 

“I would chide thee for cruelty if not for the accuracy of thy words,” Aegnor said, planting his hands on his hips. “Bah, of all days for He who Carries Consequences to be off. Time to hoof in on foot, Gorlim.”

“Was that as terrible a pun in Sindarin?” Gorlim groaned.

---

“The orcs must know that this cabin is still inhabited,” Aegnor said, climbing the hillock along narrow crevasses in the moss-slick stone that would give a goat pause. Gorlim took the more sensible hidden tunnel route, the one that the old mortal man used on the rare occasions that Duras ventured outside his well-stocked den to check his traps or refill his water. 

As Gorlim climbed, he mused on the situation that would leave an old man to cling to a homestead when hope and common sense suggested elsewise. No living thing would be able to hear their conversation, so Gorlim ignored the instinct to speak quietly, instead pitching his voice to carry to the other side of the hill. As their conversation continued, their individual paths converged, swiftly in Aegnor’s case. Though the side on which Aegnor climbed was sheer, the hillock was not large. The elf attributed his acquisition of skill to Orodreth, offhandedly mentioning his kinsman’s love of mountain climbing, neither which stopped Gorlim from grumbling softly, “Showoff,” as Aegnor reached him, popping through the walls of the tunnel before it opened up to the ledge near the top of the hill whose sides but for one were too steep to be called a knoll despite the size and isolation.

“Some stayed because the journey would be too difficult for their bodies to make. Emeldir and the others would try to help the elderly, the infirmed, and the young to handle a march that would tax even the healthy youths; it was why we prepared that winter, to stock up supplies that could be salvaged, to craft litters to carry those that would not be able to walk the entire journey, to plan how the children would be watched over. Not perfect, the planning, not enough time or supplies, but we tried. And not everyone could be convinced to go. Stubbornness, fear, mistrust, weariness…some that believed they would be too much a burden. Lord Barahir and Lady Emeldir argued themselves hoarse trying to convince all our people to flee. As you know, not all would listen. Their reasons were many.” Gorlim shied his thoughts away from the abandoned cabin that he had once called home, along with a wife and a beloved nephew. “Old Duras did not stay as a form of noble self-sacrifice; he was just an ornery bastard and refused to ever abandon his territory.”

“His cabin is remarkably well-fortified. And isolated from the other Bëorian settlements.”

“Duras feuded with several families. And suspicious of the rest. I don’t remember if the clan chief outlawed him or not; if he did it would have to have happened back in Bregor’s day, or old Chief Boromir,” Gorlim explained. “Barahir brought him food, afterwards. And we tried to keep the orc patrols away from his stretch of the woods when they were chasing us. I do not think Chief Barahir would have cared to shield him had Duras been a true outlaw under clan law, denied that consideration of a thief or murderer who had not paid the retribution.”

Gorlim and Aegnor recently came across the body of one of those true outlaws, a murderer exiled several years prior, a man that Gorlim never met even during the two years as outlaw fighting against Morgoth’s forces. Until Gorlim saw the body, he had assumed that particular man had died in the fires of the Dagor Bragollach, if not long before. Back when Barahir was still alive, the chief had tried to bargain with some of those outlaws, the thieves and bandits that had not heard of the evacuation, to convince them to join his band of twelve. The other outlaws had either decided to flee south - or in one horrible case, attempted to kill Barahir, and Belegund had shot the man through the chest. The corpse that Aegnor and Gorlim found, however, Gorlim could not name, only remember the notoriety of the murder and the community’s outrage. The dead man’s beard had been long and matted, streaked with enough gray to speak either of old age or the stress of his years with only the touch of red to trigger Gorlim’s memory of the rumors, and his leathers stained with blood. The orcs had caught and tortured the dead man, then dumped the body. From the bloody face, sawed off limbs, and other signs of torture, it was clear that the orcs mistook him for Beren or one of his remaining compatriots. Whatever his past crimes, the prolonged death earned the murderer Gorlim’s sympathy. The duo found his corpse over on the Echoriad, the slopes of the valley leading down towards the river of Tol Sirion. Perhaps the outlaw had been trying to cross to Dor-lómin or go down into the Forest of Brethil. The ghost had lingered long enough for Aegnor to point towards the West and the Halls of Awaiting, though Gorlim had only caught a glimpse of him, enough to know that the man’s tunic had once been blue. The outlaw’s ghost had not lingered to speak, not even to acknowledge Gorlim’s presence. Like a bird in a distant leafy tree, flying quickly into the canopy, so swift had the ghost disappeared. 

He had not been the first mortal ghost, an outlaw whom death had finally captured, that Aegnor had encountered, but he had been the first that Gorlim had met, and the lack of interaction had been disappointing. Those outlaws, and the holdouts like Old Duras, were almost the only humans aside from Beren alive in the land of Dorthonion.

Aegnor grunted. “Those were awkward to deal with,” he said, speaking of crimes that could incur outlawry, “glad such matters were left to your chieftains to manage. Except that cattle raid business.”

“Which one?”

“The one that almost became a full-blown war. Angrod nearly called in Finrod to come play Manwë to stop it after the first barn caught fire. The letter was penned. That raid. The one that lost Belegor his left eye.”

“Did he really have that bright red eyepatch?”

“That is what thou wished to ask?” Aegnor exclaimed, deeply offended. Gorlim shrugged, even though he knew the other ghost could not see him. 

“I never knew if the missing eye was just, oh, coloration for a song, a detail to make an old story more exciting.”

“Exciting,” Aegnor hissed.

The door to Duras’s cabin was still locked, no signs of forced entry. Said cabin was a clever construct well-camouflaged into the hill, covered by sod, small and windowless, more like the food cache of a hibernating animal than a human’s house. Together Aegnor and Gorlim floated through the front wall into the gloom of Duras’s cabin, checking to see if the old man lived. No candle was lit. In the darkness only the brightness of Aegnor’s blue eyes shone. Marshlights, Gorlim thought, remembered the Fen. Lack of illumination bothered him not, dead as he was. The silence did. Old Duras was not home. Neither in his bed nor sitting at the lone stool at the small table upon which a snuffed candle and a half-repaired snare for catching hare and other small game sat. The bed was neatly made, no food sat unattended and rotting, and no animal had broken into the cabin to steal a meal. No sign of a fight. No sign of Duras.

Flies buzzed about the empty cabin, their white line afterimages of movement the only such vibrations of living presence. Gorlim was struck once more with how sad and colorless his vision was as a dead man.

Aegnor spoke a short word in Quenya that Gorlim would bet before Mandos himself was an expletive, and a foul one at that.

At a loss, the two shuffled awkwardly in the dark, then Aegnor picked up the threads on their conversion. “Did you ever meet Mornaeu? Craban, I believe an ancestor of yours named him, for his pet crow. One of my best men.”

“No. Why?”

“He lost the usage of his lower body after a fall on the ice. We had reached Beleriand, but the glaciers at the end of the Grinding Ice where it meets the Lammoth were as treacherous as the rest of the ice desert. He fell from the final glacier. At first his siblings thought him dead. This happened right before the Battle for the Lammoth, as I recall. Mornaeu was in a coma for a time, waking only when the moon rose. Afterwards, as we befriended the Sindar of Nevrast and Hithlum, we were able to craft a wheeled chair for Morneau and a special saddle so that he could fight. Still the trip to Dorthonion had been difficult for him, and he cursed the stairs of Barathonion daily.” Aegnor closed his eyes. “He had been friends with Argon, despite their age difference. That death wounded him deeply, as much as the loss of his legs.”

Gorlim hesitated. The idea of an elf crippled sat wrong to him, but this was a harm caused by physical injury, which he knew could affect them, not illness or something malformed at birth. Those he did not know were possible for an elf. “Sícrum, my heart-nephew, his right arm was withered since birth, malformed and did not grow as his left did. Not like the famous Prince Maedhros, removed by blade and learned to fight with his other hand, but to learn how to do tasks singular from the start and knew no other. Bothered not by the ghost of what was missing but the frustration of pity from his peers and the hassle of only the left hand for tasks and balance. But too proud to admit when his frustrations overtook him unless the tears welled, and even not then.” Gorlim smiled. “A proud, capable lad. But never to be a warrior, even had his temperament led him to desire that path.

“We were gathering funds to have a proper arm aid made for Sícrum, something clever to allow him to grab fine tools, once he grew to his full height, something dwarven-crafted and perfectly fitted. Beren and his parents wanted to help sponsor him so Sícrum could go study in Nargothrond - he wasn’t the cleverest student but he loved to learn, and he idolized the Wise-women. Thoughtful. He would have made a fine councilor for the chief. Had Sícrum been a few years older and born a maid, he would have been placed as Wise-woman Andreth’s apprentice.”

Aegnor grunted.

Gorlim waited for a question about Sícrum or more information about Morneau, even debated if to turn their talk to Eilinel’s injury, but after that short grunt, Aegnor said nothing else. He had turned his face from Gorlim, no longer the attentive audience that he had been. Gorlim was starting to become accustomed to the strange and sullen moods that overtook the elven lord at odd moments. Without a frame of reference he could not decree if such fits of emotionlessness were unique to the dead, elves, or Aegnor alone.

Patiently Gorlim waited for his companion, but Aegnor made no move to speak, instead seemingly engrossed in the pattern of buzzing flies. The silence stretched. Duras did not return to his cabin, nor did Aegnor rejoin their conversation. Finally, exhausted with his boredom, Gorlim crawled out of the windowless cabin, down the tunnel, and back into the sunlight of late evening, that time period when orange disappeared and purple reigned. Or would have, had his world retained its colors.

He felt the depression return, those black moods that drew him away from Barahir and the other companions when he had been alive. When he had brooded over the circumstance of Eilinel’s death, clinging to a hope that she had survived. The hope that Sauron had snared and strangled him with.

Aegnor walked up to stand once more beside him. Dead, his armor made no noise to announce his presence, but Gorlim could feel temperature once more when Aegnor was close, and the monochrome world had more depth and hint of rich color.

“Is that Beren?” Gorlim exclaimed, noticing movement in the distance. Old Duras’s hillock gave an excellent vantage point for the surrounding hills and forests. Deer bounded through another clearing, and Gorlim could also see the shifting forms of a large flock of blackbirds moving above the trees like a small dark fog cloud, but the singular upright figure running could only be Beren.

“Aye, thou seest clear,” Aegnor said. “Fie, let us chase him. I know how a hound feels with a brace of too-clever foxes. Let a chase today end without defeat. Sour will it be to track thy friend before he goes to ground again. I thought for sure he had left the Encircling Mountains when the snow melted until we found him all the way by Rivil’s Well hunting that wolf pack. If he slips from us again, who knows how long relocating him shall take? And I shan't have thee safely dealt with until you both are dead.”

Harsh but true, Gorlim admitted in his thoughts’ privacy.

---

As fast as Beren was running, Gorlim keenly missed the absence of the horse.

“Orc chases him,” Aegnor panted. “Single. Small. He’s turning left; come, Gorlim.”

The patch of trees into which Beren ran were mostly burnt out husks, the bark black and branches leafless, and something about the quality of their shadows made the forest darker than normal. Flat silhouettes, those trees, creaking in a missing wind. That patch of forest had always been an area that Bëorian children were not allowed to play near, and during their two years of resistance Barahir had never led his men to enter. Many spots in the wilderness they had been taught to avoid, parts of the streams that would drown, gullies and caves to never go down, haunts of bears or wicked things. Some were mothers’ warnings for children too young to know dangers, but some locations kept their warnings. That thicket, easy to recognize by the oak with a giant burr, suffered no trespassers, even after the fires that swept through Dorthonion. Squirrels and foxes avoided those trees, and even now no birds used them as a perch, not even the flocks of crows. What madness made Beren duck into those trees? The oak stood, but the twisted trunk no longer stood out among the other diseased or broken shapes, for many of the trees were only stumps or had fallen over with roots exposed. How similar to spiders, one learned, trees would look if seen from a new angle. After the fires, this area of the forest had not regrown as other regions had, no fresh green thicket to re-blanket the undergrowth. Crowns of the trees that were not felled did sway in the wind, but in their swaying the branches left none of the white lines of where they had been seconds before. Quickly, Gorlim translated what that signified, realizing that at least some of those trees were ghosts.

Trees have ghosts?

Aegnor grabbed the back of Gorlim's tunic and violently pulled the mortal wraith back, yanking him off his feet. Unfairly, this made Gorlim stumble into the much taller man, crumpling against the uneven surface of Aegnor’s bizarre platemail. Gorlim cursed, but Aegnor’s gauntleted arm wrapped around his torso, holding him tightly. “Go no further,” Aegnor commanded, a pointless directive with that viselike hug. “Those trees are Huorns, the awakened ones. Better to state that those trees were once Huorns, while they lived, and having died in the fires of the Bragollach, their ghosts linger. And they are still in pain. Angry. So angry that I do not know if one of the Tree Shepherds could parley with them. The same twistedness that makes the Houseless dangerous. What ill fate! The Onodrim might know how to soothe them, but I would trust no other living thing to safely traverse that graveyard, yet there thy brash friend flees, thinking that all trees will hide his shadow. And look, there follows the orc - a third patrol? Sauron is getting desperate or he has many troops to waste. And there-”

Gorlim watched a black branch sneak out like a snake and begin to straggle the small orc, tightening like a noose around its neck. Gorlim yelped. Aegnor’s arm pulled him further back, farther from the roots of the dying trees. The black trees began to creak and rattle their branches as if in the middle of a fierce thunderstorm, the groaning wood creating sounds that could almost be language. No mother’s tale had prepared Gorlim for how strangely terrible this was to watch.

“So we must wait for Beren to leave that grove?”

Aegnor sighed as a teacher deeply put upon by unruly students. “I will not endanger thee by venturing forth. So, yes, dear Gorlim, we wait. I know not how to speak to the ghosts of trees to convince them to go to My Lord’s halls, if Mandos is even the Ainu to which they go. Mayhaps Yavanna has a Hall for them as her spouse, Aulë, supposedly has one for his dwarves. Before thou asketh, my charge was neither dwarves nor any but the first two Children of Eru and to harry their enemies. Knight errant am I, not administrator of the dead.”

“But Beren!”

“Is -yet again, and again I suspect some hand has blessed him, or perhaps it is as simple as the trees of Dorthonion remembering their rightful lord, the final survivor of the living ones who once cherished them and is willing to avenge them- safe. The Huorns and their ghosts made no move when Beren entered their lichyard.” Aegnor relaxed his grip as he soothed Gorlim. “Admonish me if I prove wrong, but I doubt that Beren will come to harm, but I will not chance our fates. The minds of trees are strange to me.”

The snake-like branch finished curling as a creeping vine did around a lattice pole, yet at a speed unnatural for a plant. The dead orc’s head popped off its body like a plucked fruit, rolling across the fallen pine litter, mulch, and old ash of the forest floor while the body, oozing a torrent of black blood, slipped out of the branch’s grasp and fell to the earth with the soft thud of a fallen branch. Gorlim heard no screams. He wondered if this was the first time that Beren had used this trick to shake pursuit and how long said trick would work.

The two returned across the clearing to a copse of normal pine trees, once more floating up to sit atop branches like a swing, watching and waiting. Once more they resorted to idle talk. Before them, the Huorns and their ghosts stilled, seemingly as dead and still as any wood two years killed by fire.

“Teach me that linden tree song,” Aegnor said.

“Ah, M’lord, truly? It is a silly song about a failed courting, how the singer is told that his object of affection wants him to leave, sends her greetings and is rebuffed, and then he remembers her eyes.”

Aegnor hummed in response, but his face was drawn in, eyes dark and downcast.

Gorlim probed once more. “Has that ever happened to thee? To try to court a maid and be rejected? We heard no tale of thou leaving behind a wife in Valinor, as so many elves did.”

“No,” Aegnor answered, though his face spoke of his wish to remain silent. “I had no wife. And no rejection by a pretty maid with prettier eyes.”

Gorlim would wager that Aegnor had not intended to stress the word that he did. Another clue fell into place, that Aegnor had rejected someone’s courtship and bitterly regretted it.

To forestall another of Aegnor’s black moods, Gorlim suggested that they go check on the other mortals aside from Beren that they knew were alive: a father and son pair, herdsmen of a tribe that Gorlim did not recognize as that of the Three Houses of the Edain. Easterlings, people called them, from the tribes still on the far side of the Blue Mountains, who spoke a completely unfamiliar tongue and while not any swarthier than some of the Bëorians or Haladim had smooth black hair and unfamiliar garments. Some, stray herdsmen or entrepreneurial traders, had crossed into Estolad, but this lost pair had wandered into Dorthonion without their animals a few weeks prior. Trying to escape orcs had been Aegnor’s best guess. He too had trouble deciphering their language the few times that the father spoke to his son.

“If the lost ones are wise, they will have returned to the northern plains. We can both tell that dense forests make them nervous, and this twisted wood is growing progressively unsafe for any man, woodwise or not.”

Beren darted out of a holly bramble at the edge of the cursed trees, his bundle of pilfered cloaks and waterskins bouncing against his back as he leapt over a fallen branch and scurried to the lusher foliage of a birch thicket, seemingly oblivious to the nature of the danger that he had escaped. 

“Are there other god-servants out here?” Gorlim asked. “One belonging to the Lord of Hunt or the Queen of the Harvest?”

“None making themselves known to me,” Aegnor said with that same undercurrent when he remarked on a clever hand leading the boar. The tacit implication that the possibility existed of something benevolent actively shielding his last living friend soothed Gorlim.

“The old man, not the father and son,” Aegnor stated. “We check his cabin once more, then the paths that he frequented, the traplines and spring. Duras knows the Bëorian settlements, who Beren is and the areas that you frequent. The displaced herdsmen have not that knowledge to be coerced to share if captured.”

---

Gorlim yelped as a five-legged hare jumped across his path, its fellows pausing to rear onto their hind legs and scan for predators. More than a dozen red eyes in the twilight confronted him with their coincidental ignorance of his presence coupled with timing of an owl's hoot, and at least one of the animals was eyeless, unmarked skin covering empty sockets. Gorlim lied to himself that it was the brief return of color - how strangely arbitrary the phenomenon was, how one sickly yellow-green leaf would shine amongst a forest of gray and white - that startled him. The drove of hares disappeared into the undergrowth. Hares were not the only animals born odd in the years following the Bragollach as his homeland became the Nightshade; wasps and spiders were twisting and combining, deer with tumorous antlers crowning their skulls like mold-infected shrubs, even foxes and bears gone rabid- but that screeching centipede had been the worst. Yavanna’s creations played on an out-of-tune lute with at least one string snapped and the others fraying, the soundbox warping like termite-infested wood. The song could be heard, the lyrics followed, but no longer could it please the ear.

This section of the forest once grew thick moss, but now only patches remained, dotting the ground in a way that tugged as Gorlim’s memory. The Fens of Serech, he decided, was the image trying to break through his thoughts, the higher patches above the sinkholes and marsh grass. The heather moor recalled the fenland as well, but this forest was starting to feel like scabby flesh. Healing after a bad burn, Gorlim told himself, trying to twist his thoughts towards hopefulness. Life grows back; this was thick ash two years ago.

Not all lived.

Gorlim found Old Duras. Dead, as he had feared.

The old man died hours if not days before, and from the supine pose and lack of counter-evidence around the body, the most reasonable assumption for cause of death was a sudden heart attack or stroke. He had collapsed near to one of his hidden traps used to catch small animals, the snare undisturbed. Fallen leaves lightly sprinkled over the body, the fabric stiff as if it had been soaked and then left to dry, a sign that Old Duras might have died before the rain had ceased. Decomposition and the blackening of limbs had begun but not progressed to distend the body. Gorlim as a ghost had no sense of smell as to detect that stench or he could have found Old Duras far sooner.

“A swift death,” Aegnor said gently. “I sense no sign of his spirit. He has already departed. A good sign, Gorlim, that he did not need me. This is just the remains of his hroa.”

Old Duras’s corpse was missing his eyes, devoured by some animal, crow or fox the most likely culprit. Such was common and no longer disgusted Gorlim. Sad it was, however, to see an old man’s body treated so uncaringly.

Gorlim thoughtlessly reached out to the body of the old man to cover it, to make a symbolic gesture of burial and respect, and watched as his hand passed through the flesh, passing weightlessly through fabric and shriveled corpse alike. “Aye, we can give him nothing,” Aegnor remarked. “His soul is beyond us and his body we cannot touch. More animals shall come to scavenge, or the weather will blast and bury him, or mayhap even Beren shall find what remains and give his bones some dignity. But there is no deed that we may do for the old man. Leave it, Gorlim. Speak thy prayers, if it shall comfort thee. I mind not to wait.”

Furious with his inability to raise a cairn over the old man, Gorlim could not force himself to linger after reciting the words given at any funeral, unable to compose a song to honor the old man. He should have had more words than those given to an unknown, but Gorlim could not sing. I am tired of this puppet play; make me watch no more.

Gorlim returned to Aegnor where they stood side by side in silence like two sentries watching a camp, though they guarded nothing and were not scanning the surrounding woodland for foes. A cloudy night, Gorlim could see no stars above the trees. Long the silence stretched before Aegnor filled it.

“That old man stayed, even though the land could no longer support him, nor any life if I am to speak true, though plants- crawling to their deaths with each thwarted spring of this blighted Nightshade- still spread their shriveling roots down through its soil. The land will not recover. Something may still live on in, as life grows on the ash-heaps around Angband, but it will not nurture man as fair Dorthonion, harsh as these pine-covered highlands were, once did.” Aegnor sighed in remembrance of the beautiful if unforgiving land that he once ruled. Gorlim heard the love as clearly as the old song praising the highland fog and the tiny purple primroses. “I want to fault him for this, for this act that is not hope but helplessness, that he stayed in this desolation. By how can I, Gorlim, when we are not different, he and I? A shade I am, but do I rest and recover in Mandos’s Halls? Nay, I do not. Fighting ghosts in a life-less land.” Aegnor swung his sword at the empty air. Each new utterance was a swipe at an absent foe, angry and impotent and weary. His voice was breaking in the quiet manner of a fence post rotting, not the sharp shatter of stone or iron. “Clinging with cowardice mislabeled courage to the comfort of the lived-in grave. A corpse pacing the perimeter of the pit his fellows dug for his bones, like a bug trapped beneath an overturned bowl. Too weak to crawl out of it, trapped inside this barrow, waiting for death.”

“But you are dead,” Gorlim corrected, the informal address of friends coming thoughtlessly now to his lips, “we are both dead, and yet living.” He struggled to find the words to express himself and to convey the hope that he now saw that Aegnor lacked, feeling that there was a disconnect in the translation of the word death, for Aegnor meant not the word with how Gorlim thought of the meaning of it, giving it a weight that Gorlim could not feel, their misunderstanding greater still than the confusion of such a concept between mortal and immortal.

“No,” Aegnor said, “until Arda itself, this house and barrow and cage, dies, then I do not. I do not escape it; I do not cease. But you, Second-born of Ilúvatar, blessed or cursed I still cannot answer that for you and nor can my brother’s philosophy, you die. You leave this blighted land. Like a bird flying away.”  Aegnor barked; the harsh noise deserved not the name of laughter. Gorlim flinched from the sound. “She died before me, still, went on before me, and I wait, landbound, until this world dies and frees me with it.”

---

Chapter End Notes

Relevant sections of this chapter were written before the Bardcore trend exploded in popularity, but if you wish, here is the appropriate track.

Onodrim is the Sindarin term for Ents. Mornaeu 'Craban' is as readers of the Band of the Red Hand series know a character based loosely off of Bran Stark from ASoIaF, and astute readers might have picked up from the final chapter of Release from Bondage that Mornaeu was also disabled. Sícrum, Urthel, and Eilinel are very loosely inspired by characters from 1635: The Devil's Opera. Sador is another disabled character from canon. And in general, when an evacuation order is issued, for an incoming natural disaster for example, not everyone can or is willing to leave. Old Duras was partly inspired by Harry R. Truman of Mount St. Helens. The elven refusal to eat mushrooms is canon. As is the real world ferocity and dietary habits of wild boar.

As for ending where I did, oh fans of the Athrabeth, as a promise, here is a preview of what may or may not be the start of the next chapter:

Take pity on Gorlim, the helpless wraith, that the implications of Aegnor’s unmeant confession did not unfold to the dead man until long after this conversation, like a flower that blooms slowly, needing time to unfurl its petals. Gorlim’s chance to comprehend Aegnor’s words as the answer to his question hibernated until a longer measure of calm returned. After their upcoming encounters and fights would this screeching rant break across the dead pinelands of the Nightshade:
“Wait. What the fuck? She? what she was- mortal, wait, mortal, she was one of us, wait what, how, wait, what what is that something that happens what what-Aegnor! Aegnor, come here! Explain!”