Service to the Dead by heget

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Chapter 1

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 

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