Survivors of the Downfall by SurgicalSteel

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Chapter 1

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Nemir was glad that the damned waves seemed to have calmed themselves for the moment.

He didn’t like the sea. Nothing ever stayed still on a ship, and things should stay still, for pity’s sake – but he was attempting to save enough money for his son to go and study in Númenor as he had, and it was difficult for a surgeon to earn the sums needed quickly unless one took a berth on a merchant ship. His cousin Osdil had laughed and said they had no need of one at the moment and cousin Avareth had offered him a loan, but he preferred to not be in anyone’s debt – and so here he was, attempting to earn the fees for the Guild of Surgeons and the money his son would need to rent appropriate dwellings in Armenelos and simply to live there.

Nemir had known he had skill with the knife as a young man, and he’d apprenticed in Umbar for a time before deciding to make the journey to Númenor – and he’d had to change his name from a Sindarin one to Adûnaic, and teach himself to not even think in any language other than Adûnaic in order to remain unmolested by the King’s Men, but the knowledge gained had been worth it, and he’d met his wife in Armenelos and she’d been only too happy to come back with him to Belfalas, where no one really cared what language you spoke or what name you called yourself so long as you didn’t cheat them at trade.

He’d thought it was insanity of the highest order when Ar-Pharazôn landed at Umbar, was certain that there would be a long, bloody conflict in which his skills would be all too needed – and was stunned when Mordor simply surrendered. His wife’s family had helped build the memorial in Umbar, that tall white pillar with the crystal globe that could be seen in clear weather as far away as Belfalas – and he’d wondered to himself if that victory had been too easy.

Now, though – he had a son who wanted to study in Armenelos. Whether despite or because of the stories that filtered back of what happened to the so-called Faithful in the Temple was anyone’s guess. There were rumors that not all of the sacrificial victims were intact when they reached the Altar, that some had been used for anatomic study while still alive – and while it might sound repugnant to the victims or their families, the plain fact was that you never really learned anatomy unless it bled. Nemir hadn’t particularly enjoyed it when his masters had him practice certain techniques on still-living pigs, but it had been a valuable learning tool – how much more valuable would it be to learn on living people…

“Captain wants you up on deck,” the first officer announced from his doorway – and then the blasted man laughed at him as he made his slow tedious way up the narrow hallway and up the stairs to the ship’s deck.

Damned first officer had laughed at him when he’d puked over the railing during the worst of that whatever it was, too – there had been some odd sort of BOOM that shook the entire ship in the morning and seemed to him to come from everywhere and nowhere all at once. That had been followed by the crew complaining that it felt like the currents were pulling them fairly far off course to the West, and then the waves… the tallest of those waves had probably been the height of ten men and there had been the dizzying ascent up followed by the drop downward that had left Nemir’s stomach somewhere up in the rigging and the realization that if that wave continued all the way to the coast at its present height, most of the coast of Eriador would shortly be underwater.

Oddly, though, the captain hadn’t headed East to see what was happening on the coastline, she’d turned West, toward Númenor. Nemir thought it shouldn’t be too much longer, and perhaps he could put his feet down on solid ground, perhaps Tol Uinen or whatever the king wanted it called…

“Mother of mercy,” he swore, looking over the railing. Númenor should be there.

It wasn’t.

What was there was some sort of unholy steaming and water spouting up toward the sky and black ash clouds and chunks of stone floating in the water which steamed around them – and improbably, one of the ship’s smaller rowboats out in that roiling mess pulling someone out of the water.

“Amazing, isn’t it?” Captain Zamîn asked him.

He nodded at her, aware that his mouth was open and not quite able to make it close. “What happened?” he heard himself asking and then answered himself, “It must have been the Minul-Târik. All these years…”

Zamîn nodded at him. “I’m hoping whoever that is out in the water might know more – but I agree, I think it’s most likely that the Meneltarma finally exploded. Dangerous business living close to a fire mountain, even more so living on one.”

Nemir nodded. There were fire mountains in the Southern seas, it was rumored, and they’d stay quiet for generations only to suddenly spew fire and hot ash and noxious fumes. He was perfectly happy to have his homeland be a place where the worst danger was Ossë’s wrath.

“They pulled a few dead ones up already,” Zamîn said. “I don’t think we’ll find a live one, but if we do…”

Nemir nodded again and pointed out at the rowboat. “Looks like they’re heading back with that one – they haven’t been bringing the dead, have they?”

Zamîn shook her head. “No, I told them to leave the dead for the sea. We haven’t enough equipment or enough space in the hold to take them anywhere for burial,” she said. “Mother Ocean will take them to her bosom soon enough, and we’ve the hold full of salt cod. If any of those waves hit Umbar – for that matter, even if they didn’t, the fact that we’re carrying foodstuffs… we should make a tidy profit off of it somewhere.”

“Always thinking of profit,” Nemir said.

“Which is why I resigned from politics,” Zamîn said. “Far more profit in trade than in running Umbar. Your people in Belfalas have far more sense than we did. No need for official rulers, simply live and let live and don’t cheat anyone.”

“You have far more people in Umbar, and less forgiving land,” Nemir pointed out.

Zamîn shrugged again. “True enough, I suppose. It amuses me, you know – I promised my father and the father of my children I would never sail to Númenor. I go against that promise once, and look!”

“Effect, not cause,” Nemir said.

“Your family have always produced prodigious logicians and men of science,” Zamîn said with a laugh, and then they were helping to haul the survivor onto the deck of the ship.

“Your sickbay?” Zamîn said.

“The light’s better out here,” Nemir said, kneeling down to examine – well, it was a tall man, that much was apparent. He was breathing, and his pulse was only a bit rapid – not so rapid that Nemir worried about shock. “I need the colloidal silver, the aloe, bandages, splints, blankets,” he began calling as he started to examine his patient more fully. “I don’t know that he’ll survive, Captain,” he called to Zamîn.

“He’s our only chance of finding out what truly happened, for the moment,” Zamîn said.

Nemir shrugged and set to work – it wasn’t as if she was asking him to do something that wasn’t his job, after all. First would be to debride the burns – to remove the bits of what looked like some sort of ceremonial robes that were burnt into his skin, to remove the bits of skin that hung from him like shredded rags, and for that he needed clean water and clean rags and he worked on the limbs first, trying to pull fractured bones back into alignment even as he worked on the skin with a sort of scrubbing motion, removing as much dead skin as possible, removing the ash, pulling away bits of what must have been richly embroidered fabric.

His patient gasped, and opened his eyes for a moment, and called a name that Nemir didn’t recognize – but the eyes, oh, gracious, his eyes… “He’s an elf, I think,” Nemir called to Zamîn. “Poor bastard, wonder what they’d have done to him… do you think he was in the Temple?”

The man coughed, and spat out a clump of what looked like blood mixed with ash, and said, “Mercy, please…”

Poppy would be a mercy, and Nemir pulled the man up to half-seated long enough for him to choke down a bit of poppy tincture, and continued to work. The only part of his flesh that seemed intact was underneath a gold ring on the man’s left forefinger. He thought to remove it, the hand might swell, and swollen tissues underneath a ring could lead to gangrene, but the man got such a pained look on his face when Nemir touched that area that he decided to leave well enough alone. There would be time enough to cut it off, if need be – and so Nemir continued to work as the captain questioned this man.

“Was it the Meneltarma?” Zamîn asked.

“The queen went there,” the man gasped, coughing again, and Nemir stopped to press his ear to the man’s chest. No, he had equal and normal sounds in his chest, so lung-collapse was unlikely, but he’d almost certainly inhaled a great deal of ash and perhaps sea water as well, and there wasn’t much Nemir could do for that. “Sought to appease…”

“Appease who, the Valar? Why would she need – the Temple’s been there for years, why would the Valar make a fuss over it now if they didn’t when Nimloth was burned?” Zamîn asked.

The man shook his head. “The king sailed West,” he said. “To conquer.”

“What sort of idiotic…” Zamîn began. “Whose fool idea – were you in the Temple?”

The man nodded.

“And Sauron?” she asked.

The man winced – which was odd, Nemir didn’t think that particular burned patch should have hurt. It appeared to be full-thickness, which was generally painless. “Do not… say that name,” he coughed out.

“He was in the Temple as well?” Zamîn asked.

After a moment, the man nodded, and choked out, “Laughing. Laughing. Fire and thunder and ash. Mercy…”

Well, the silver ointment was the best hope of warding off the infections that seemed to inevitably accompany burns like these, and the aloe might help with healing – and the splints would keep the broken bones in place. And that was all that Nemir could do for this man who’d somehow survived…

How he’d survived, Nemir wondered about as they made their way back to Umbar. How he’d not only survived, but how he continued to survive, how he avoided infection, how his bones seemed to knit so quickly – Nemir knew elves healed more quickly than men, but this? This was nothing short of miraculous.

The man never gave an actual name, calling himself ‘Vorendor,’ or ‘Loyal to Middle Earth.’ He refused to explain what an elf had been doing on Númenor, given how unfriendly the people of Númenor had become toward the elves. He confirmed the details of the story he’d gasped out when they’d first pulled him onto the deck: Ar-Pharazôn had sailed off West to invade Valinor. Nearly six weeks later, the Meneltarma had exploded, sending fire and ash down onto the people. The queen had gone to the Meneltarma to try and appease the Valar, but whether she ever reached the Hallow there was anyone’s guess – the mountain had continued to explode with such force that the lands seemed to collapse in on themselves and finally to be swallowed up by the sea. He repeated the story so many times, and was so unwavering on the details, that they decided it must be the truth as he understood it.

It took time to return to Umbar, goodness knew, but it shouldn’t have been enough time for even an elf to heal enough from full-thickness burns and broken bones to somehow make his way in total silence past the sailors on deck and steal one of the damn rowboats. Zamîn had been furious about that, even after the boat was found in one of the secluded coves off of the North Cape – but there was shortly more than enough for her to deal with. Refugees from Númenor had arrived in Umbar, telling tales about the mountain smoking and Eagles flying over the island as if they were about to attack. And if the Lords of Andúnië were loading up their prized possessions onto ships as if getting ready to evacuate? It made sense to leave before the Meneltarma did worse than smoke and steam.

Zamîn will be pressed into taking up politics again if she’s not careful, Nemir thought, and it somehow seemed right to him that a descendant of Tar-Ancalimë’s granddaughter might assume rulership of what remained of Númenor, that she should again be elected one of the Judges of Umbar.

For himself, Nemir would be content to never set foot on a damned ship again. Exploding islands were something he preferred to read about, not to actually witness the effects. His son would have to study in Umbar, and Nemir would go back to being a simple surgeon in Belfalas – and to occasionally wonder what had become of the mysterious survivor of the Downfall.