Service to the Dead by heget

| | |

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.

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!”

Table of Contents | Leave a Comment