False Dawn by Idrils Scribe

---

Chapter 6

---

Not so long ago, travelling from Imladris to Fornost Erain would have been as simple as riding down the King’s Road. As things stood, Elladan’s company crossed ravaged hill-lands in what was once eastern Arthedain, now a desolation occupied by Angmar.     

Elladan lowered his hood to study their surroundings. A cold drizzle ran down his neck and under the high collar of his mail hauberk. Before him Canissë did the same. Elladan was neither vain nor foolish enough to let himself be singled out by over-rich garb. He and every member of his considerable security detail wore identical grey wax-cloth cloaks over their mail. 

Steady rain had beaten down for days without end in sight, soaking rider and horse alike. It set everyone on edge even more than usual. He let his mind brush the fine, ever-shifting web of awareness spun by their scouts and found their minds taut as bowstrings. 

Roaming bands of Orcs plagued the Weather Hills, and with such heavy cloud cover the foul creatures could move even in the daytime. Sunset was hours away and yet deep grey shadows already lay pooled in the valleys. 

Dark pine forests loomed above the column of Elf-warriors and their Mortal companions as they followed a winding vale beneath steep, boulder-strewn slopes running down to their path. This little-used track proved treacherous, for even Elvish horses slipped on the wet soil or worked themselves into a lather of exhaustion as they sank into loamy mud up to the fetlocks. 

As Elladan looked on, Brannor’s mount startled at a hare sprinting from the undergrowth. In white-eyed panic the bay gelding slipped on a patch of decaying leaves to land against a tree-trunk with the sickening crunch of bone. 

Elladan leapt down from Rochíril’s saddle and ran to where Brannor had deftly dismounted and rolled to his feet. His face was wan with misery between hood and dark beard as he watched his gelding twitch and grapple in the agony of a broken leg. Elladan froze with indecision beside the man until Canissë appeared at his shoulder. She did not even look at Brannor’s grief as she drew a blade and put the animal out of its misery with a single bone-deep cut to the throat.  

Brannor sank to his knees, heedless of the churned slurry of mud and horseblood soaking his breeches, to cradle the horse’s head in his lap as it died. The proud captain of Arnor wept as if the beast were his most beloved kin. 

Canissë seemed equally distressed, but her trouble was far less sentimental in nature. 

“Udûn’s pits! The smell of horse-meat will soon have every Orc from here to Carn Dûm swarming this valley!” She whipped around to face Elladan. “We must get away fast, my lord!”

Elladan nodded. “Aye. Brannor, put your saddle on one of our spare horses. You will have no need of that bridle.” 

Brannor rose, pale as a corpse and with an absent, alien look on his face. His eyes darted to  the slopes towering above their heads as if he expected to see the Witch-king himself swoop down upon them.

“Morgoth’s balls! Get a hold of yourself, man!” Canissë was beyond compassion. 

She descended on the cadaver and made short work of the cinch to drag Brannor’s saddle off the dead horse’s back, driving rain clattering from her cloak as she worked. So absorbed was she in getting Brannor to move that she missed the first shiver of alarm that passed in  her warriors’ collective awareness.

Elladan had been almost painfully attentive, and with a jolt of pure terror he sensed the minds of the Silvan scouts guarding their flanks light up in alarm. He saw his doom through their eyes before the warning calls went up.

“Yrch!”

Suddenly they heard the beasts’ shrill cries, and saw them stream from the forest, running down the slopes like a moving tide of pitch beneath the black banners of Angmar. 

The howls and snarls of Wargs rent the air, and for the first time Elladan’s waking eyes saw those sleek and dreadful shapes that still haunted Elrohir’s dreams some nights. These monsters were near-sentient, half-animal, half-spirit, bred in mutilated mockery of Oromë’s Hounds. Their eyes shone with a fell, malicious fire; their stunted minds filled with bestial rage and devouring.

For a moment Elldan froze in terror as the world spun around him, a reality too horrid to accept. Canissë called his name once, twice, then simply elbowed him in the ribs and drew his sword for him to press the hilt into his hand. 

“Elladan! You know how to wield this. I taught you myself, and you always were a clever one. I will take charge but you must stand, son of Elrond, and show your warriors a captain’s courage!” 

A fleeting touch of warmth upon his mind and she was gone, turning away to call out her orders. Warriors peeled away from the main host, archers went up the surrounding trees, cavalry and spearmen formed a protective shieldwall with Elladan at its centre. 

Only Brannor’s men broke the orderly pattern. With a cresting wave of horror Elladan watched as they spun their horses around, Brannor leaping behind his lieutenant’s saddle, and sped up the slopes to disappear in the many-pillared shadows of the forest. At first Elladan believed that the Dúnedain were taking their vengeance in a suicidal stroke of blind rage. In the next heartbeat he noticed their sheathed weapons, the Orcs standing aside to let the Men pass unmolested.

They were betrayed. 

The stab of insight, bright and painful as a lightning strike, thrummed along the Elves’ collective minds. Without need for spoken orders their arrows rained down in vengeance. It was too little, too late but at least some of the foul traitors never reached the shelter of the treeline. Elladan could only stare in horror as Dúnedain fell beneath white-fletched Elvish arrows. A tall, dark-haired man loudly breathed his last, twitching in the slurry of bloodied mud as he gurgled and clawed ineffectively at his skewered windpipe. A snarling Orc trod the Mortal’s corpse into the mud. He had been wearing a borrowed grey cloak.

“The Void take the treacherous Secondborn!” Canissë cursed, drawing her sword with a sound like some tender thing tearing. “And curse us for blind fools, led like pigs to slaughter!”

Elladan saw beneath her rage into a vast depth of self-loathing. Canissë still bore the ancient Doom of Fëanor’s followers, haunted by treason from kin unto kin. Today that very curse had reached across three ages of the world to entangle Elladan.   

A shadow of foreboding fell on Elladan’s heart when he turned to her. “We have no hope of help: Imladris is far behind, and Fornost four days’ march ahead, if it still stands.”

As if to prove his words, the first wave of Orcs battered their ring of shields, but the noose was not yet fully drawn. 

Elladan quickly turned to Borndis, who stood at his elbow directing her scouts. “Here, I give this into your keeping!”

He scrabbled beneath his undershirt, and Elrohir’s ruby flashed in the dying day’s half-light. Borndis’ eyes widened at the sight of the jewel.

“Carry this to Imladris by any means,” Elladan ordered her, “at all costs; even at the cost of being held a coward who deserted me. Flee! Go! I command you!” 

Borndis’ face was wet with more than rain. She kissed Elladan’s cheek like she had not in the many long-years since he was her toddling shadow bearing a tiny bow of green willow, but she did obey. The ruby disappeared beneath her mail. She drew the hood of her grey cape, and even Elladan’s keen eyes could not track the shimmering shape of her once it was swallowed by the dark pines. 

A pair of Wargs bounded after her, hulking grey shapes leaping through the undergrowth, their open mouths slavering with bloodlust. Elladan cried out in warning, but a ring of Orcs had closed around the Elvish host and Borndis was now gone beyond all help. She would  escape the fell wolves by her own skills, or be torn limb from limb in their jaws. 

Step by iron-booted step the Orcs closed in, the fetid reek of them overpowering in the nose. Elladan breathed shallowly through his mouth lest he vomit and shame himself in sight of all.

The Orcish captain was a hulking, ironclad brute from Gundabad with yellow eyes and corpse-pale skin. It called out a challenge in the Black Speech, bloodshot eyes bright with malice as it whipped its Warg until the beast reared. Elladan had never felt such hatred for any living being as he did when he spotted someone’s torn-off arm dangling from its jaws. 

He leapt into Rochiril’s saddle and raised up his sword. The Noldorin blade glittered with a sharp blue light, and suddenly Elladan felt fell and fearless, his heart aflame with a thundering, defiant hope. He turned to face the great Orc and called out the battle-cry of Imladris with all the Power he could muster thrumming behind his voice.

 

“Aiya Eärendil elenion ancalima!”

 

At once every last eye in the valley was on him, both friend and foe. Elladan laughed. To be a son of Elrond was to embody an idea, be a living symbol of hope and defiance as tangible as Eärendil was remote. If this would be his death, he would make it worthy of Song. At the sight his warriors took heart, and many voices took up that call in all the tongues of Elvenkind.

Canissë spun her own destrider alongside, pride and dismay at war in her mind. “You are brave indeed! After that, they will deal you something worse than death. Fight hard, Elladan!”

A blast of horns startled his horse, but Rochiril was too well-trained to jump in fear like Brannor’s mare. Elladan had a brief moment to think of Elrohir with longing and gratitude. 

And then they charged—an unheard signal—and Elladan saw only the next foe and the next, trusting Canissë to defend his back even as he wreaked bloody havoc in the ranks of their enemies. The sounds of rending flesh and agony were new to him, as was the fetid smell of black blood.

Orcs fell like wheat before the scythe to the Elvish blades, and for a brief, utterly glorious moment it seemed they would somehow win. 

Then the wind turned into the north, and a fell shadow swooped down. 

“Fuinur!” called the Orcs. 

Elladan was a loremaster and he knew that name, even if his mind refused to contain its horror. Horses shrieked and bolted and Elves cried out in terror when the bitter reality of it struck. 

The Orcs kept chanting that terrible name like a spell. “Fuinur! Fuinur!”

The Ringwraith laughed, and drew its jagged sword while his thralls drew strength from the miasma of despair that went before him. 

Elladan saw Glingaer fall, torn from his horse by a pair of snarling Orcs leaping onto the animal, their weight bearing horse and rider to the ground with an anguished scream suddenly silenced. He leapt from his mount when they tried the same with him, and Rochiril’s screams echoed in his pain-fogged mind.

Canissë’s battle cry resounded in his ears – strong, at first, burning with the light of her ancient spirit – but dimming with fatigue which each utterance until she grew too hoarse and short of breath to shout. 

“ Aiya Eärendil elenion ancalima !” he cried, joining her voice with his own, ignoring those points of the web that were extinguished in his mind, one by one. 

Canissë and Elladan were the last now, standing back to back, spattered with blood and gore. Grim understanding resonated between them: they would not be taken alive. No one would ever sing of their last stand in the Hall of Fire. 

Canissë threw away her shield, splintered and torn, gripping her sword with both hands. Elladan smiled grimly and raised his own blade with a vicious snarl at the oncoming foe. He lifted his voice, hoarse and tired as he was, and Sang a western wind in their faces. For a single heartbeat the dying day’s blue twilight seemed to brighten. It was but a mockery of hope.

The Ringwraith was strong in this darkening hour. He sang a foul cantrip of artful necromancy, laughing at the Elves’ despair. Elladan caught but half the words in the Black Speech, and terror gripped him as their meaning sank in.

Another Orc leapt at him, but this one was unarmed. Elladan ran the beast through and it belched out its life’s blood in a gush of black slick. As it died its clawed hand closed around Elladan’s wrist, vicelike. In blind panic he hewed off the corpse’s arm. That should have been the end of it, but the hand clenched like a band of iron and it would not move even in bloodless death. There was no time to pry loose the fingers, because another empty-handed Orc leapt at him, and another. 

Elladan hacked and kicked and screamed but he could not keep the myriad hands from grabbing him like pale crabs from the deep come at a floating corpse, and once attached neither sword nor Song would move them. Orcish hands scrabbled for his arms, his legs, even his hair until he was covered in them as in a second layer of armour, their splintered ulnar bones sticking from him at odd angles.

And then Canissë was torn away, fear and panic enveloping the connection between them as hands, not weapons, stole her from his side, burying her strength beneath their bulk until he saw no more movement. 

The next Elladan knew was blind terror. The Ringwraith leaned over him as he writhed in the mud and gore of the battlefield, pinned down by clutching corpses. This was a mere lieutenant, not the Witch-king himself, but Fuinur’s proximity nonetheless gutted the mind, carved it to raw, shapeless pieces like the body of hapless King Arveleg. 

Elladan’s bloodstained appearance seemed to excite Fuinur. The bony mask that once was a mortal face came close to Elladan’s as if they were lovers leaning in for a kiss. His breath stank like an open grave.

Elladan’s hands were pulled behind his back with iron manacles, and the last he saw before a black hood covered his eyes was Canissë’s struggling form dragged from a pile of the dead.

 

 

Last of all Húrin stood alone. [...] but they took him at last alive, by the command of Morgoth, for the Orcs grappled him with their hands, which clung to him still though he hewed off their arms; and ever their numbers were renewed, until at last he fell buried beneath them. 

The Silmarillion, Chapter 20: “Of the Fifth Battle: Nirnaeth Arnoediad”