A Traitor's Issue by herenortherenearnorfar

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On Evil Men

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Angband looms. All Gúlnar’s life it’s been the stuff of nightmares. Even Lúthien fled from it when Morgoth woke, troubadours say. Now they are going there freely to plead their case before the king of monsters.

Husbands get you into the worst trouble.

If she knew hers was going to pull such a stunt— double crossing their benefactor! turning to the side of the orcs and beasties!—only to die and leave her in this muddle…. well, she can’t say she would have married him. There wasn’t much of a choice for an orphan girl alone. But she certainly would have given him a talking to before he went off to die in that Vale of Tears!

Whose tears? The only people left to cry are the Feanorians (fair few of them), the folk of the secret city (which Gúlnar personally thinks doesn’t exist), and the widows and children left behind. Senara, her sister-in-law, hasn’t cried once since she first heard the news. All her energy has gone into plotting, trying to figure out a way for Olfan’s folk to survive. Angband’s growing shadow doesn’t phase her, nor does the child growing steadily inside her, one last gift from Olgor.

Little Magiwen didn’t believe her father’s death at first. Then she screamed for hours, threw her toys, and finally settled into a sullen silence when her mother reminded her that she had to set an example. Most of her tears have been the wrathful sort. Gúlnar didn’t know a three year old knew the word “revenge”.

Angband’s great gate, sung about in stories of Fingolfin’s fall and Beren and Lúthien’s flight, is flung open. Why shouldn’t it be? The siege is lifted, the lord of shadows has won. Gúlnar’s husband helped him win. A thin but steady stream of orcs and men come in and out. The orcs carry oddly dainty parasols or shield themselves from the sun with jackets over their heads. Troops carry big visors, meant to cover ten orcs at a time.

As for herself, Gúlnar is inclined to agree with her niece. Not in vengeance-hunger, just anger. She’s furious at Olhast for keeping her in the dark even as he rode off to battle. She’s furious with herself for never asking who the strange figures in the hall were, for never questioning why he had money that didn’t show up on the household accounts, or why he smiled secretly when she spoke of war.

The humans are later eastern men, those who have arrive in the last few years and never swore allegiance to any elf lord. They look similar to their kinsmen. Freckly, like all of Olfan’s sons, with the same full beards. Their hair is darker and they’re stouter about the middle— taller as well. They wear their hair wrapped away from their face like dwarves and their trousers tight like the Haladin, like they are accustomed to horse riding; aside from that their clothing is similar to that worn by Olfan and Brog’s people.

Gúlnar feels a sting of jealousy looking at them. These are the people reaping the rewards of her husband’s death. Rewards that she’s not sure she wants, but which don’t belong to them! These unaligned, lordless, unvassals, who risked nothing and gained all, now earn all the accolades of their wicked overlord. They have already taken Hithlum and Dor-lómin.

They trot through the gate unhindered. Once inside the giant-sized courtyard beyond, Senara slows their party.

“I was told we would be met here,” she informs Gúlnar, who is just thankful to be kept in the loop this time.

Minutes pass. More people stream by. Magiwen starts to get fidgety, whining and pulling at her mother’s braid.

Keeping the horses calm becomes more of a challenge. They’re old, steady, the only two nags in the stables too worn out to have been excluded from the war. They’re not among Gúlnar’s favorites; the horses she doted on, sweet Glissori, bright Glawîn, all went to battle with her husband and died at his side. The fondness she’s developed for these tired farm creatures is a thin thing; love is hard to nurture in such terrible times. They are anxious around so many orcs and she can’t blame them-- it’s quite possible that they’ll be eaten, horses and humans alike. The pats she gives them as she unloads their saddle bags may be the last kindness they’ll receive.

The sun is quite high in the sky now; at least when it can be seen, a pale circle behind the noxious dark clouds.

Just when Gúlnar herself is on the verge of finding the most human passerby and beginning a complaint, the most studious orc she has ever seen comes up to them. Admittedly she hasn’t seen many orcs, their recent trip through the conquered lands of Morgoth’s demesne excluded, and even a very tidy orc is still a bit blood stained. Still, he(she? as with elves it’s hard to tell) is wearing a shirt that might be red on purpose and a necklace of dwarfish make. In one ear is a glinting pearl earring.

“Come in, come in,” the orc gestures, motions small. The sky is still overcast, dark clouds blotting out any hint of the sun, and in addition to that they’re holding a stiff hide over their head. Still, they keep glancing upward, frightened. “You are… guests? Guests.”

“Thank you for your hospitality, we are honored to be here,” Senara says gravely, as if she’s speaking to a great lord and not a little goblin frightened of the sun. There’s a real threat that she’ll launch into one of her diplomat speeches so Gúlnar helpfully pushes some luggage into her arms. Even this doesn’t dissuade her from adding. “May we know how soon we can expect an audience with our lord? We wouldn’t want to be unprepared for his majesty.”

Only one of them ever expected to be the wife of a ruler and it wasn’t Gúlnar. For a while after Olfan died Senara was the acting lady, sharing the role with their mother-in-law. Now they’re both husbandless and adrift.

“Mummy, I’m hungry,” Magiwen whispers, as loud as she can. “Please ask the monster man if he has food.”

“Ah. Food. There is food. And the king. He is… his mightiness resides here.”

Gúlnar’s pretty sure he’s never left, not for hundreds of years.

“Please, come in,” the orc repeats. Their insistence might feel threatening if they weren’t sweating buckets, as it is they just look like a sad damp little boy.

Senara is cleverer than she is (Senara’s husband probably told her about the plan to upend all their lives and forever change the balance of power on the continent) and she’s walking forward unafraid. Following her lead, Gúlnar picks up the last of the baggage, kisses their horses goodbye, catches Magiwen’s little hand, and jogs after.

As they walk the orc’s too-big red shirt slips down the nape of his neck, revealing a few inches of back layered in whip weals. Gúlnar shivers. She dislikes this place. It’s too casual about its wrongness. The monsters walk, chatting, among people, and no one comments. Everyone steps over the strange stains on the floor. It’s too big as well, the ceiling towers hundreds of feet above them, tall as the trees that hold up the sky, and yet there’s not a cobweb in sight. Great vaulted grey halls like this should be full of dust, yet they taste pristine, chemical. Inside all voices fade into the empty space without echoing, as if the building is waiting for another to speak.

“What impressive architecture,” Senara smiles, unshakeable. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Their guide has no response for that bit of weasel-worded ladying. They are ushered quickly out of the enormous halls into smaller ones, only a few horses wide and an oak tree tall, though just as ammonia scented and frighteningly well kept. Instead of candles or sunlight the place is lit by a dim green glow from unhealthy moss on the ceiling. There are no people here, they walk alone.

From those halls they are led through a large iron door, across a very strange and untidy kitchen, full of small stoves and little glasses and tubes of bright fluid, then into a room of bones held together without wire or pins.

Most of the bones come from animals, mostly unnaturally large cats and wolves. A few seem to come from snakes and lizards. And a handful are human, or close to human. Stripped down to just bones it’s hard to distinguish at a glance if you’re looking at a stout child or a dwarf, a tall warrior or an elf, a sickly old man or an orc.

Magiwen is delighted until she sees the skeleton of a dog the size of her puppy at home, at which point she’s so distraught she must be carried. This leaves Gúlnar toting all of their bags.

Fortunately, they only have one more room to traipse through. Unfortunately, it’s gallery, longer than four of the other rooms combined. Lining the walls are pictures and they are… strange. They don’t show anything, at least not in a way Gúlnar can understand. They’re just smears of color and sharp shapes. There’s an eye popping pink that she’s never seen before, the red of songbirds and elf banners, blue like a sky come evening, inchworm green that makes her teeth hurt, a glittering white, black without edges. And the shapes— spiraling edges and spikes, long perfectly flat lines. The pictures are meaningless but they do have appeal, more than once she has to pull herself away to keep up with the orc.

Between paintings are closed doors. A little over halfway through the gallery the orcs turns sharply, goes to the nearest door, and unlocks it.

Inside is a cold little bedroom with a wide, low bed and an empty hearth. Sparse, no weavings or rugs, but functional. Gúlnar worries Senara will ask for another room, in an attempt to flex their limited power, and she desperately doesn’t want to sleep alone, here of all places.

“How nice,” she says quickly, before Senara can find her cleverer words, “Mag-hên, let’s start unpacking.”

As she and Magiwen go through the few saddle bags they brought, Senara assaults their guide with questions. Where can they get fire wood for the fire? (It will be provided, she’s nervously assured.) And, not to push, can they avail themselves of the great hospitality of Angband’s kitchen? (Food will also be provided.)

When can they see Morgoth? Senara asks again, though framed with flowery platitudes. The orc flounders.

“I… will speak with my lord,” they fidget with the hem of their shirt as they speak. “In the meantime, feel free to explore as you please, as long as you do not go past any iron door.”

Ominous! Gúlnar is about to ask what will happen if they do cross a ferrous threshold when the orc bobs his head and, without another word, flees.

“What a strange little creature,” Gúlnar comments to her sister-in-law as she hangs their extra dresses over the mantle to air. After their journey everything is hopelessly wrinkled.

“He is what he is meant to be, I think,” Senara replies, unhelpful as always. Her hand rests on her stomach in that proprietary way pregnant women have. “Gúlnar, if I poke around this place will you watch Maggy?”

Maggy has found her little toy horses and is lining them up in order from biggest to smallest. Though she can be rambunctious she seems calm at the moment so Gúlnar agrees.

When Senara slips out the door she closes it behind her.

Then she doesn’t come back.

It’s impossible to judge the time in this windowless place but at least an hour passes. Gúlnar unpacks their bags completely then rearranged their belongings several times. Magiwen grows bored with her toys and begins to whine for food; Gúlnar gives her the last crumbling bar of acorn cake which quiets her. After eating half she lays down on the bed and says she’s “going to nap now”. With no sign of Senara, Gúlnar joins her, curling loosely around her little body. The child is a furnace. They needn’t bother with fires as long as they keep her close.

Though Gúlnar drifts off aware of Magiwen’s close warmth she jolts awake in a cold and empty bed. Her first, panicked glance around the room confirms her niece’s absence, hastily rubbing the sleep from her eyes only adds a handful of details. The toys are still on the floor, nothing else is out of place. Under the bed? No, it’s on a stone platform. The door is open.

It’s amazing how quickly a person can move when motivated by fear. Gúlnar rockets out of bed and is through the door almost as fast as she realizes her predicament. Back in the long gallery she spies something on the glassy floor— a little beige crumb, then a few feet away, another.

The acorn cake! At least now she knows which way to go. Sprinting so fast she slides across the stone she follows the trail, out of the long gallery and into a series of rooms more dizzying than the next.

“Magiwen!” she calls. “Mag-hên!”

There’s a closet-like room with jars on all the walls, every one full of briny green fluid with suspiciously pale, fleshy masses floating within. There’s a room of white rats in cages, beady eyed and chattering— there are a lot of crumbs in there, indicating that Magiwen entertained herself feeding the last of their food to rodents. Then through one of the doors off of that chamber there’s a room of weapons and other, stranger devices whose purposes she doesn’t want to guess at.

It’s there that she sees the iron door, identical to the one they were first brought through. It’s open about a foot and through the crack she can see a large, dim space, and the titian gleam of Magiwen’s curls.

Before Gúlnar can run in to scoop her up she remembers the orc’s demand. Some leniency can surely be given to a child but she’s old enough to follow orders.

“Magiwen!” she says, free with relief. “Come back to me! You’re not supposed to be here.”

Magiwen turns to her, revealing a face red and snotty with tears. Her ignorant confidence, which Gúlnar and Senara sheltered through the battlefield, has collapsed into insensate fear. “I want my daddy!” she wails.

That’s not possible, he’s been dead for weeks. Magiwen knows it too because she scrunches up her face and amends her demand. “Mummy! I want— I want—“

“Come back to me and I’ll take you to your mama,” Gúlnar tries ineffectively. Magiwen keeps looking at something in the room, something that has her rooted in place, sobbing and frozen. The longer they talk the more upset she becomes.

Ah, well. Senara is the diplomat. If this gets Gúlnar struck down by Morgoth then at least she’ll have shielded the useful member of their party. She braces herself and steps through the iron door.

No lightning hits her on the spot. The air does not choke her, orcs don’t spring from the wall to bind her and drag her before Gorthaur.

There are consequences of her choice. With her head through the door it is easier to see what has Magiwen transfixed.

Chained to the brick walls of this low dim room are human-like figures, slumped to the ground like broken dolls. Macabre breathing corpses, filleted and still bleeding, with their broken bones showing through their skin like stones through a sack, their intestines slipping out. The closest one’s throat has been expertly sliced open, dissecting the windpipe without slicing the nearby veins, and as the creature wheezes the flesh of its throat flutters like a grisly butterfly.

It is that hypnotic movement that draws Gúlnar’s gaze and lets her notice the slight point to the chained figure’s ears (she was trying to avoid looking at their faces). A quick check verifies that every other victim is also elvish, even the ones who don’t have ears anymore have wolffish bone structure and long-limbs.

Poor things. Not much can be done for them though.

The Gúlnar of some months ago, protected for all that she grew up in a world past saving, would be too upset to move. But she has been a hundred women since then; they had to cross the still stinking battlefields to make it here in a timely manner, after all. Even Magiwen, whose mother covered her eyes when they came too close to the bodies (orcs, elves, men, dwarves, on one notable occasion a monstrous ferret big as a wyrm) has seen too much. When Gúlnar tries to grab her arm, to pull her away, she screams again, wordless and concise in meaning.

“Please,” Gúlnar pleads, aware that she’s not a parent, she’s just an adult of close acquaintance, one who always preferred cooking and horses— busy, dangerous work— to the quick conversation of the weaving room or the steady tedium of the kitchen garden. They’ve dwelt in the same house but she is not her mother.

After another, very long sob, Magiwen whispers something so quiet it’s impossible to hear. When she’s asked to repeat it, her motives become clearer. “They asked for water,” she says, fraught. “They were singing for it.”

A chorus of caged birds respond to her whispered words. Moans and groans and choking rasps. “Water,” croaks the most audible of them. He crooks a knobbly finger to a bucket with a dipper, tucked against the wall between two of the prisoner.

An easy enough request to fulfill.

“ No !” shrieks Magiwen before she can take her first step towards the bucket. Gúlnar freezes, one foot in the air, and turns to her niece.

“Magiwen! We don’t shout!” The reproval is doubly ineffective. It’s ridiculous to tell a child to be quiet in a raised voice and it feels cruel to try for discipline in such an abattoir. They’re all distressed, why compound the suffering? Even horses shouldn’t be trained when they’re injured and children are more sensitive than foals. “Mag-hên, you said you wanted to give them water.”

“They’re elves!” Anyone can observe that. Gúlnar isn’t sure why it has her in such a tizzy until Magiwen, face now buried in her skirts so she doesn’t have to look at the tormented prisoners, adds, “They killed my dad! They cut him up and no one found him!”

Oh, poor girl.

It is not only the elves who killed Olfan’s sons. Their old ally Brog, Maedhros’s vassal, (he came to Gúlnar’s wedding) is said to have cut down Olhast. Olreth, her brother-in-law, just seventeen, engaged by his parents, and a deft hand with a spear, cut down Broglas and Broglach, two men twice his age, before falling at the hand of their youngest brother.

It’s amazing how many stories can come out of a battle where so few survived. She wonders how many are true. There are not enough living eyewitnesses to vouch for half the tall tales she’s heard.

One such story is that Lord Maglor killed Olgor himself, turned on him in a rage, cut off his head and tied it to his saddle. Other, gorier, more unlikely versions also abound. There are fitting fates for betrayal and then there is cruelty. She would not have thought Maglor cruel.

When Magiwen was barely one and Gúlnar was newly married he came down to their house. A hunt in his younger brothers’ lands, he said. Believable enough for hunters often came through their hall, the last homely refuge before Himring, a shelter from the northern wilds where Morgoth’s creatures reigned. They were always hosting Celegorm’s folk, who came with bucks and wolves slung over their shoulders, skinned them in front of the hearth, and ate their juicy livers raw. Maglor was more personable than those wilding guests. He laughed and sang and when he heard Magiwen’s name—the syllable they shared— he puffed up in delight, sat her on his lap, and let her play with his gleaming aureal harp.

(They told him Magiwen was named for the house sparrows that nested all about the village, which had turned to killing and eating other birds after too much time dwelling in Morgoth’s shadow. The part about the sparrows was true— but not the whole truth. In truth, Senara had thought mag- meant song until well after Magiwen was named. After all, the elves who gathered under the oath-star called Maglor golden-voiced, and in their devotion called songbirds maglew more often than linde . The elf language was not easily learned, especially when you were learning it from a people with their own habits, their own idiosyncrasies.)

He’d been kinder than Celegorm the hunter, who stalked about like a vengeful ghost, shirt stained in blood, frightening all the dogs and horses but his own. He was kinder than Lord Maedhros, who only paid them mind when he needed something from them. He was certainly kinder than their Lord Caranthir, sharp as a nettles without the medicinal use. His acerbity bit without benefit, he lashed out at times simply to say something, not minding how his words were received only that someone had received them.

Gúlnar has dwelt with elves for most of her life. She was only nine when Olfan’s people crossed the mountains. That’s ten years of listening, learning. She speaks their language almost fluently, dreams in it half the time, knows their stories and demands, and yet she cannot say she understands them. Not enough to say for sure that the gentle bard they feted would not gut the young father he once congratulated before the man could draw his sword.

Maybe these elves here, chained to the walls, helped. But she cannot help but pity them, the way you pity caged wolves.

“Maggy,” she says softly, coaxingly, to the distraught little passerine in the circle of her arms. “ They’re all cut up now. We can at least give them water.”

Water and nothing else. She does not thirst for vengeance but she’s frightened of this place and the consequences of stepping out of bounds.

Magiwen shakes her head again, curls hitting Gúlnar in the face. She looks like a wet dog, still shaking and shaking.

A different tack. “If I was stuck there hurt and there were a little elf girl here who could help me but didn’t want to because her daddy got hurt in the big battle— would you ask her to help?”

That just makes Magiwen clutch at her as if she may disappear at any moment. “You’re my auntie,” she reasons with the last of her composure.

Gúlnar cuddles her, though it pitches her dangerously forward, keeps her arms full and her back vulnerable. This sort of comfort never came easily to her. (She’s glad, in her honest moments, that she and Olhast didn’t have a baby before he died— she wouldn’t know what to do with it now.) “They all might be someone’s auntie. Can I give them water?”

Even when Magiwen relents she doesn’t let go of Gúlnar’s skirt. Instead she clings, stubbornly, as she fetches the water bucket and ladles out the water to the half dozen elves. A few are too addled to drink, Gúlnar wets her sleeve and drips the water into their mouths if they’re asleep and dumps a cup onto their hair from a safe distance if they’re raving.

There isn’t much in the bucket and Gúlnar doesn’t know where to get more. Instead when the water runs out she puts it back and leaves. There are no goodbyes, no thank yous either. It is not a kindness to help someone in a situation your clan helped put them in, ignorance does not absolve you of duty.

These elves wouldn’t know her by name but they must suspect what humans would be walking free round Morgoth’s stronghold. The one who pointed to the water looks away from her after he drinks.

She wants to get Magiwen out of here.

The air is cleaner in the room of torture devices, blood less heavy on the air, and by the time they make it back to the gallery some of the tension has gone out of both of them. “Let’s find your mummy,” Gúlnar suggests.

Easier said than done. Senara still isn’t in their room. She isn’t in the room of bones either. They finally find her in the alchemist’s kitchen. She isn’t alone; a large man with thick brown hair, a furred hat, and pointy mustache has her backed against a table as he talks animatedly.

The relief and renewed fear on Senara’s face when she catches sight of them sets all of Gúlnar’s mental watch fires blazing, alarm ringing out across her whole being.

“And you are?”

The man smiles unctuously, “I am Brodda, little lady. I believe I am staying next to you. I was just telling your sister about this place, for it’s queer indeed.”

Senara takes advantage of this chance to slip past him, back to Gúlnar’s side. She fusses over Magiwen, who has once more grown bashful with a stranger so closer, and as she frets about dirtied clothing and tangled hair she orients their trio so their back is to the door.

Brodda watches and Gúlnar watches him. There’s desire in his eyes, and she refuses to give him any credit for open mindedness. Not many men would be interested in a pregnant widow with a toddler but right now, mere months after she’s been widowed, few men should be. Grief needs space.

Besides, she doesn’t like how he leans. It’s like he’s unaware of the threat he poses, or aware and just taking advantage of the unspeakable fact of it.

“Have they fed you?” Gúlnar asks, to try to get his eyes off Senara. His focused attention, the way he glances so briefly at the long line of her neck and the corner of her hairline left exposed by a slipping fillet, feels itchy. At least she can glare at him for it, Senara’s politeness gives her free reign to be rude.

“They have not, though it has been almost two days. Luckily I packed extra food— I would happily share it with you.”

“We will manage, but we thank you for your generosity,” Senara says very stiffly.

Water and heat are more pressing than food. They can go without bread but at night the north will freeze them and their tears will quickly wring them dry. The solution, Gúlnar realizes, is right in front of their faces. She steps in and to her surprise and glee Brodda actually steps back in alarm at her sudden advance. He has no reason to worry, she’s not coming for him.

There is wood set along the wall in a stack to fuel a great fire beneath the biggest cooking pots. For the small beakers there are candles and bottles of strange smelling clear oil. There’s no telling what keeps Angband’s lamp fires burning but wood is wood and wood and wax is wax. Gúlnar takes an armful of the pine splints, stacking them until the resin scent fills her nose.

“You can’t do that!” Brodda protests.

“They said wood would be provided. This is providing.” Senara takes the armful of firewood off of her, which allows her to start looking for a striker, to complement their own unreliable tinderbox. She finds a fire steel but no flint. Surely someone who could light a fire with magic wouldn’t have just the steel—

Inspiration strikes. Dragging the steel over a rough bit of wall Gúlnar sees small, white sparks. They’re inside a giant striking-stone, with walls of chert and floors of flint. Satisfied, she pinches a few extra candles as well.

Brodda’s face is a rictus of concern.

“Little lady, this evil place belongs to a witch. I would not have you injured.”

He’s awful and, since Senara is so clearly done with him, Gúlnar lets herself snap a little.

“Maybe I’m the witch and this is a test to see how you treat your betters,” Peeling back her lips she bares her teeth at him. The violence of his flinch startles both of them, he’s halfway across the room in one panicked moment.

While he’s deciding whether to piss himself or slap her for insolence, they make their escape. Back into the portrait gallery and down to their open bedroom door.

Senara tries to pin her there, begs her not to leave, but they need water too. Quick and quiet, she promises, before having them bar the door behind her.

Gúlnar goes to the room of rats for clean water. Above their cages are low troughs connected to pipes and small pools. It seems to run clear and tastes only faintly of sulfur, in the absence of better options it will have to do. The container for it requires a bit more exploration. Past a room of wolf pelts (she rolls a few under her arm) and one of cracked stones there’s an abandoned workshop of gears and smoke. The bucket next to the dead forge works carries water and she runs back to their room without seeing hide or hair of Brodda.

A fire is crackling now and her family is sitting on the bed.

“Maggy, Maggy,” Senara is murmuring in her own language to the top of her unimpressed daughter’s but she smiles like the brittle winter sun when she sees Gúlnar, before returning to incoherent affections. “ Swith liudan karo-bain… ”

It might as well be High Elvish, the proscribed tongue, as far as Gúlnar is concerned. Senara hails from the Bëorians of Estolad and she still speaks their language, Taliska, better than she speaks Wood Elvish; frightening as that is to imagine.

Her origins usually aren’t an issue. She’d picked up their language as soon as Olgor had begun courting her (she had that sort of skill with words), and she acclimated to their village easily. But sometimes Gúlnar wonders if she’s homesick.

There will be no going home, the Fëanorians have established their new front north of Estolad. Perhaps Senara could flee to them for shelter, take Magiwen with her. She has relatives there and she does have the Bëorian look, proud from all angles, proud in height, proud around the nose and chin, downright haughty in the sunken disdain of her eyes, and very dark of hair. She could blend in there, among the tall and terrible.

Such an escape would probably require swearing that Senara to swear she knew nothing of her husband’s planned betrayal, swearing it in front of an elf with their clever way of worming inside your head. Gúlnar knows she can’t do it. She hasn’t come out and admitted she was in on the secret but her behavior gives her away. Besides, Olgor actually trusted his wife.

When she finishes the song Senara pats the bed. “Thank you for bringing us water. And— is that fur?"

“There are a lot of rooms here.” (“Lots of sad, cut-up people,” Magiwen adds, helpfully.) And more branching paths yet to be explored.

She expected a scolding, for her rashness, but Senara just nods. “Be careful.”

“I won’t endanger our purpose here.” Gúlnar promises.

“I’m worried about it endangering you ,” Senara sighs heavily then pats the bed again. “Come sit, little sister.”

Their situation does feel a bit more secure with Senara’s knee pressed against hers. With a fire and a fire in the bed the room is cozy. They have water and time.

The next song Senara starts is in elvish. It isn’t any of the old ones exhorting the listener to be quiet for fear of the monsters by the lakeside/in the woods/below the mountain. There is a time and place for dark songs. Instead it’s a light, silly rhyme of recent origin, put to older music by Daeron.

Rest your head ‘midst flowers

Dip your feet in stars

Weave a watery bower

Sleep withi' for hours

Here the night is lonely

Here the night is still

Trees a’ stretching softly

Wind is gettin’ chill

A blanket of pine needles

A pillow of the moon

Let your eyelids tremble

Sleep is coming soon

You can repeat it indefinitely, it has that kind of tune; Senara does so until she has them lulled to sleep.

 

 

 

Gúlnar dreams of her wedding. Specifically, the dancing. It’s tradition among their clan that a newly wed woman has to dance with every other married man at the festivities before she can dance with her husband, and then finally take a seat. (The groom must dance with every married lady too, which softens the blow.) It’s not nearly as embarrassing as some of the other wedding traditions she’s witnessed; the ritualized kidnapping of Brog’s folk, the semi-witnessed consummation of Hador’s, which they seem to think is a good compromise between elven and human social mores.

The main drawback is that it’s exhausting, especially if you’re marrying a chief’s son on the eve of war and will have hundreds of guests.

She dreams of dancing with lord Caranthir first, true enough to life, except in the dream he is tall as a pine tree, moving awkwardly around her. After one spin he hands her off to the next dancer, and instead of her ailing father-in-law, or young Huor who had to leave early, the next pair of hands to catch her are Brog’s steady ones.

He’s wrong too. At first glance he looks how she remembers him: only a little taller than she is, blacker haired than Olfan’s children but with the same dark, ruddy face. He’s graying and there’s streaks of orange red dye in his beard, a warmer offset to the purpling rosacea of his cheeks. Red-on-red, the sort of looks that caused Celegorm the Brutally Fair to laugh and send one group of them to his brother Maedhros and another group to his brother Caranthir. Dogs should resemble their masters, he’d joked on more than one occasion.

Then Brog is not himself anymore. Or— he is himself but with a different shape, because now she’s dancing with a bear in his clothes. A slight bear, admittedly, with a wide friendly face of black fur and a tan muzzle. The very animal he named himself after, for elvish appellations don’t assign themselves. The name was meant to be self-effacing, now it makes Gúlnar shiver. In the old stories bears are closest to men, so close that sometimes humen who offend great powers are turned into bears, to be hunted by their own kin for food and fur.

Brog doesn’t seem to care. He smiles, a strange expression on a bear, and with padded paws hands her off to the eldest of his sons.

Broglach is already in bear form but as she watches he shifts back into man-shape, a round bellied laughing young father of two with an upturned nose and calloused hands. Then he’s a bear again, his laughter fading into a roar. It’s a dream so Gúlnar isn’t afraid. Even when his claws catch at the sleeves of her best dress, she only unlatches them and flounces over to his brother. Broglas is much more careful, for he fancies himself something of a poet.

Even with the face and hands of a bear he’s still exquisitely polite, quiet as a mouse. She can’t imagine how he does it, with his bossy wife and five babies, but the times she’s seen him with his family he’s been blissfully happy to be clambered over. When she tries to ask him about his histories he can’t answer with more than a chuff of hot air so she excuses herself to the youngest brother.

Bronthand is close to Olgor’s age but that’s not the only reason they’re fast friends. They share a verve, a weakness for romantic notions, a habit of pursuing what they want in the face of criticism. It was Bronthand who helped Olgor woo Senara, though she was two years his elder and from a poor, isolated hamlet far to the south. They barely spoke a shared language the first time they met, for Senara’s parents knew little elvish outside of what was needed for market, yet with Bronthand’s avid support the whole courtship took less than six months. Of all Brog’s sons, he’s the one Gúlnar knows best. Besides, recently wed as well and Gúlnar wants to thank him for taking some of the diplomatic pressure off her nuptials.

Before she can speak she notices the change in ambiance. The scenery has not been entirely faithful to her wedding— the guests milling about are suspiciously faceless, the music is just an old children’s ditty by Daeron on repeat, she’s standing in snow even though she married in midsummer, but now even those oddities have shifted. They’re inside, in a cavernous version of the Olfan’s great house, as if someone expanded that log and thatch round home to the proportions of Angband. The music has gone quiet, the dancers have melted away.

Gúlnar looks around for the other guests and to her horror she sees them, their bloodied bodies piled high behind her. Brog and his sons are busily mauling the corpses of men and horses, tearing out entrails, stuffing their bear faces with viscera. As she tries to run, limbs honey-heavy with dreamtime inertia, Bronthand catches her arms. His hot breath snuffles at her neck and then—

She wakes up.

Magiwen’s face is pressed into her shoulder, breathing down her collar. Half her sleeping limbs are sprawled out over Gúlnar’s torso. Senara banked the fire with ashes before she went to sleep so there’s once more a nip of cold in the air but the blankets and their shared body heat have kept the bed a decent temperature.

Her heart is beating very fast.

It’s impossible to say what time it is without windows or natural light. The pale green glowing lichen that creeps down from the ceiling of all the rooms in this suite gives off the same sickly glimmer at all hours. The witch light, which makes everyone look half-dead, does not ease Gúlnar’s nightmare induced anxieties.

Nor does her best dress, her wedding dress, hanging above the fire. It’s the only one she owns that’s nice enough to meet an evil god in. It’s what she wants to be buried in, and her dreams know it.

Rather than keep looking at the dress, or Magiwen and Senara’s terribly sleep smoothed faces, Gúlnar closes her eyes and works on unpacking the interpersonal aspect of her dream, before the memory of it can slip away from her.

She doesn’t resent Brog, surely? He kept an oath. He killed her husband, or one of his sons did, but that was a tragic, man thing. Men were always making competing oaths and killing each other over them and then crying. Elves too, now that she thought of it.

Perhaps she’s a bit miffed that after all that time socializing with each other, laughing and dancing at weddings, they go and stick swords in one another’s backs at the first opportunity. But there’s no time for hatred now. They’re dead. Her husband is dead. This is the time to look out for the living; she’s mostly worried about the survivors they left behind.

When the sons of Fëanor and their sparse remaining forces fled to Ossiriand they did not detour to evacuate Himring. Not that they could have— that many civilians, Maedhros and Maglor’s distant retinues plus a host of humans, would not move in a timely manner. Within a week of news of the great defeat came word that the fortress had fallen to orcs.

Egba with her butter soft hands and children trailing after her like ducklings. Delin and Jolin the whispery sisters who loved their horses and their secrets. Veene the old storyteller who could make you frightened of your own teeth. All the people she’s come to know after years of festivals, feasts, and enthusiastic trade. She doesn’t know if any of them still live.

Maybe Bronthand’s wife and infant who ventured south to recover from illness in a more forgiving clime? The handful of tradesmen still on the roads, or some of the quicker runners? Brog may have acted out of loyalty, he may have even acted right, but his people have not reaped any rewards for it.

Gúlnar throws an arm over her eyes, gently so as not to jostle the sleepers next to her. It hurts to think of all those dark probabilities. That’s the problem with dreams, they take such a toll on the dreamer. Olfan, whose dreams guided them unerringly to this accursed land, is a testament to that. He died not even sixty years of age, face lined by phantasmal troubles. If he’d lived another eight months he might have been able to counsel his sons away from their battlefront betrayal.

Prophetic dreams feel especially dangerous given her background. Her parents were not of Olfan’s tribe, before her birth they lived among another people, a sea-faring people, who listened to the whispers of the ocean and built fair boats. Then one day they sailed too far, the ocean they had loved and dreamt of turned on them, and their ships were shaken apart by great waves. The survivors split up and a few ended up with Olfan’s clan, two of them living long enough to have Gúlnar before dying one winter from the leftover fluid in their lungs. They passed on few lessons; never put all your valuables in one boat, don’t grow overconfident in success, and be wary of mysterious messages from powerful natural forces, especially when they come through a medium as fickle as dreaming.

It would be better to ignore it, but she doesn’t want to have the dream again.

If she does not have a grudge with Brog’s folk perhaps they have a grudge with her. When she remembers the growing pile of bodies on the barren plain… that hill of flesh will never leave her fully. Sadly there is no one to appease their doubtless restless spirits. Olgor took over as their priest when his father died and now he’s dead too. The older women of the families will probably pick up his responsibilities, if the sacrificial trees aren’t burned down by orcs by the next festival. As a younger wife, Gúlnar is the least qualified to make porridge or build fires.

“I want to see the mice again,” Magiwen whispers. Her shift from fast-asleep to wakeful, doleful eyes staring at the door, is so silent Gúlnar nearly screams.

Once she’s gotten past her shock a plan begins to form. There are some ways a layperson can help banish spirits, methods that rely on enthusiasm over expertise. Even if it doesn’t work on the exact spirits she wants to quiet, at least a corner of this terrible place will be a bit less haunted.

“I have much more fun things we can do, Mag-hên,”she counteroffers.

Senara lifts her head a few minutes after Magiwen starts banging sticks together, singing the song Gúlnar taught her mostly in mumbles. Her hair is falling in her eyes and the expression on her face is one of pure betrayal. Gúlnar keeps feeding the fire and singing along. They’ll have plenty of time to sleep.

Someone has hurt you/ Oh what to do!/ Drink from a little cup/Lie beneath a tall tree/Now you are all new/Drink! Drink! Drink!/Go! Go! Go! (It flows better in Olfan’s people’s language than it does in Sindarin, but Magiwen is far more confident in the elf tongue than that of the old country).

Before Senara can wake up enough to stop her, Gúlnar cuts deep along the back of her forearm and drips the sizzling blood onto the fire.

I’m sorry, she tells the ghosts, but if I were you I’d leave this world now. Grudges aren’t worth staying around for when it’s all going downhill.

 

 

 

They play a plethora of games to keep Magiwen from escaping. Over her hyperactive head, Senara chews Gúlnar out thoroughly. What can she say? “I convinced myself I was followed by ghosts after one bad dream?” This place has a way of unravelling people down to raw impulse and superstition.

Eventually the hunger pangs make Magiwen slow and grouchy so they return to the bed to spend the next indistinguishable period of time in a torpor. Sleep, a sip of water, then back to the warmth of their nest. All her dreams are forgotten by the time she wakes so Gúlnar counts her bandaged injury worthwhile.

Eventually the need for food overrules the danger outside.

“I’ll go alone,” Gúlnar offers. She’s unsurprised when Senara shakes her head.

“No, we’re not splitting up again. I feel more comfortable when we’re together, knowing what lurks here.”

“You shouldn’t have to face what’s out there.” That fellow Brodda was far too interested for comfort, there are literal torture chambers in these halls, and Senara is vulnerable.

There are reasons she had to come here, their mother-in-law is too indispensable, their sisters-by-marriage are in confinement or injured. Even bringing Magiwen made a certain sense, she was still nursing from time to time, she’d never been away from her mother, she was living proof of what had been sacrificed. Here is a fatherless child, fatherless for your sake, tenebrous king! That doesn’t mean Gúlnar’s eager to further endanger them.

“No one should,” Senara taps a finger on Gúlnar’s nose like she’s a child and finishes sweeping her hair back into its woven net. “But needs must.”

Despite her aspirations of protection, she’s ultimately outranked. Senara has age and familial seniority on her side. So she just watches, hawkish, as Senara rouses her daughter, slides on her woven straw shoes, and chivvies her out of bed. Once they’re set, Gúlnar unbarricades the door and peers cautiously out.

There’s no sign of life aside from them. The floors shine like lake-water, the air is still.

Senara leans over her shoulder, “Brodda is two rooms down on the right.” The instruction is, in truth, unneeded. He’s left his door open.

Moving as a pack they creep to his threshold. From the doorway Gúlnar can see an empty hearth, a neatly made bed, a travelling pack spread out across the floor with military precision. There is no sign of the man.

“He is gone,” the voice of the little orc hisses past Gúlnar like a weapon slicing the air. Too close! When she turns he’s at Senara’s elbow, without a single sign of his arrival. His pinched face twists even further closed, features furled into the centre of his face, until Senara pushes down Gúlnar’s raised fists.

“Friend!” Senara says jovially. “Well met again. Might I ask where he has gone?”

Orc smiles are unpleasant. It’s not the length or pointiness, how their mouths are full of tiger fangs or tusks. It’s not the poor quality of their teeth, Gúlnar doesn’t judge there, teeth are tools and the best ones wear with time (though black sludge isn’t standard decay). It’s the insincerity, the self-direction— nothing in their joy seems to be for the sake of others, nothing they smile for is true or fair.

“The king called upon him yesterday, took his measure, and hound him worthy. He’s been sent to rule over Hithlum.”

“He’s left his particulars,” Senara observes. She and the lady of Dor-lómin, at Hithlum’s knee, traded letters during that plague when Magiwen was a newborn. Looking at her face you would not suspect anything of the sort. “Will he come to retrieve them?”

“What use are paltry goods when you have the favor of the rightful king of all of Arda?” asks their host, which tells Gúlnar that things either went very well or terribly poorly for old Brodda.

Magiwen is collapsed almost completely into her mother’s shadow and sucking her thumb like it can replace sustenance. Her hungry noises remind Gúlnar of their quest. “You said food would be provided,” she prompts, “I do not mean to be an ungracious guest but the hours have been long and our bodies are not as strong as our spirits.”

“Yeees. Food can brought.” Their face is even more unappealing beneath a veil of false friendliness. At least the malice is honest. With that unhelpful reply they scurry away.

With the orc gone Senara and Gúlnar raid Brodda’s abandoned luggage. There’s a decent amount of hard tack, a leather bag of bulgar (running low), and a finger length of hard cheese. There’s some evidence there was salted meat in the bag as well, once, but those days have long passed.

They feed Magiwen the cheese and few bits of hard tack to tide her over; a proper meal will require soaking the bread soft. Altogether the supplies could last the three of them a few more days, if they stretch themselves, before they start to falter from starvation.

Gúlnar feels a terrible relief when the jaunty, bejewelled little orc scurries back, a covered tray in their arms.

“Food,” they say, revealing meat, grey, indistinguishable. It is cooked, but it is unclear what it was cooked in, or for how long, or even what animal it came from. The smell is appetizing, accompanied by a wave of heat, yet something makes Gúlnar hang back.

She does not remember seeing many animals as they travelled through the lands around Angband. Only people, dead and alive.

“Thank y—“ Senara begins to say.

“We can’t eat that,” Gúlnar interrupts her.

The orc looks at her. Their eyes are very keen, bloodshot sclerae adding an extra intensity to their stare.

“I do not mean to insult your lord.”

“Our lord,” the orc corrects her softly.

“Right. But my sister is pregnant. We’re a superstitious people, I cannot let her eat meat that I haven’t seen butchered myself, I need to know that the spirits of the animals are at rest, that they’ve been pacified correctly. If they aren't, they could chill her womb.” Technically true, though even the busiest grandmother would prioritize feeding a woman over protecting her fertility; when people are starving some taboos fall away.

“There are no uncollared ghosts in this hall,” the orc protests. They sound a bit impatient.

Gúlnar can see Senara biting her tongue, she wonders what sort of upbraiding she’s going to get when they’re alone. Nevertheless, she continues, “Of course. We do not mean to offend. This is simply an important human tradition.”

It seems this suffices apparently humans are still new enough to this country that their ways are met with confusion. “Fine. You will come with me and see the animal die.” For a moment the whiny nervousness disappears, the orc is demanding, sharp-voiced. Gúlnar remembers feeling dismissive of them on first arrival and wonders how she ever made such a mistake.

“Thank you for your aid,” Gúlnar feels like a diplomat until Senara cuts in.

“I do not want you to have to go alone,” she insists, reminding Gúlnar with a sharp hand squeeze of their earlier discussions about splitting up.

“I’ll be fine, I promise.”

“That is not a promise you have the authority to make it the capacity to keep,” Senara says darkly but with her arms full of Magiwen (still chewing on her hard tack) she can’t stop Gúlnar from following the orc to the door.

They make it through the bone room and the alchemist’s kitchen and to the iron door before Gúlnar remembers the warning given to them. “Am I allowed to go through this with you here?” she asks.

“What do you think?” snaps the orc, who is apparently irritated enough to have stopped playing the fool.

Gúlnar strains her mind, trying to look at the situation as Senara would. That’s too confusing, too many variables, too much balancing other people’s motives, so she backtracks even further and tries to imagine why she would give guests a vague but threatening instruction if she was a being of unimaginably great power and greater evil.

“I think it’s a sort of test and the only thing allowed is what best pleases him—kings can get away with that sort of thing.”

She has never met any of the elven kings, they hide away in their cities or simply don’t deign to come to small human enclaves. There are no human kings that she knows of. Azaghâl visited once though and he was strange, laughing one moment and flint-eyed somber the next, always watching everyone. He’d noticed the thinness of their sheep and turned it into a trading advantage, bargaining them down until they were thin themselves. He’d noticed Olfan’s prescient warnings about next week’s storms—warnings that were borne out before his party left— and sought advice with mild humility. Yet when Olgor, young then, barely old enough to hold a sword, had grown teasing, his frozen fury had been a sight to behold.

“Kings and others,” the orc agrees, nastily unhelpful, before they start walking again. Gúlnar has to jog to keep up even though their legs are shorter than hers.

The halls expand to the height of oak trees again, then contact until she can reach out and touch both walls. Their path is dizzying, turn after turn, crossroads at strange angles. She couldn’t retrace her steps if she tried. Her guide doesn’t let up their pace.

When she first hears the noise she mistakes it for a waterfall in a windy place, a low steady hum, like a millstone or clothes against a washboard, overlaid with intermittent lowing and whistling. Then, as the sound resolves and she remembers their quest, she recognizes it as animals, dozens, hundreds of them. The mechanical grinding she still can’t place, though it reminds her of the sounds of flour making or butter churning.

When they turn the next corner the smell comes, heavy, fetid, the smell of rot, of manure, of animals compressed into a small space.

Shortly they emerge through the door. After the first wave of nausea— it smells latrine, like a battlefield two weeks after everyone has gone home— her vision clears. They’re standing on a ledge above a roomful of round-backed grey and red creatures, packed together in pens. It takes a moment to identify them, they don’t have the tusks and bristles of boars, or the shape of cows. They are smooth and saggy and, even from a distance, threateningly large. After a moment of inspection Gúlnar decides that they’re pigs (their village doesn’t keep them, only sheep and geese and horses, so the identification is tentative).

The pigs are pressed together with barely enough room to turn around, lying back to back, in a filth even the worst stable master wouldn’t accept, with little pigs everywhere like flies on a carcass. They don’t seem to mind, because they have access to steadily refilling troughs of pink sludge; a network of connected basins zigzagging back to the center of the room, where three great metal silos are vibrating slightly, making the grinding noise Gúlnar noticed. Thin, unsteady catwalks above the pens allow a flow of orcs and taller, emancipated figures to bring sacks and bundles and full carts and stretchers to the silos. They dump their cargo in at the top and at the bottom the contents of the three containers combine, flowing out in all directions to feed the pigs.

Some of the pigs have open wounds. One close to Gúlnar is nursing and eating with half its flank removed, as if someone tried to eat it alive. It looks unconcerned, docile.

She tries to remember if pigs eat meat. She’s seen boars and sow do it; a Shadow-maddened male gored one of their horses a few years back and had to be chased off, bloody muzzled and wild eyed. If darkness could bring about such ends from a distance what could it do up close?

“We can’t eat any of this,” she says and hopes that confidence will make up for a lack of real power. It doesn’t help that her voice is stuffy, she can’t breath through her nose in here.

The orc is unimpressed. “Can’t?”

Gúlnar tries a different tack. “I am trying to protect my family. It’s only natural.”

“It is not always so, I’ve ne’er had a family.” The orc glances down at the surging activity of the floor below, animal bodies wriggling and shoving. “If I did I wouldn’t deny them meat.”

Meat fairly hunted or justly bargained for is a different matter than this, the corrupt filth, the close lightless air. When they passed through the battlefield and saw the growing mound of bodies, Gúlnar wondered what it would be like to be alive and injured, frozen in place as corpses piled around you until you finally suffocated beneath a ton of stinking flesh. This claustrophobic place brings that fear back up like a rush of bile.

“We come from different places, from people with different needs,” she says, every word carefully placed. “Yet we have come together in the interest of serving the elder king. My sister-in-law is our representative to him, and I am not wont to see her ill before she can present our submission to him.”

There are more arguments on the tip of her tongue but her guide grunts and then jumps, with shocking agility given their size and fine habiliments, and swings themselves up onto one of the catwalks. Without any instruction, Gúlnar stays put by the door. She watches the orc, distinguishable from all the others by the smooth fabric of their shirt, amble over to the tall depots and have a short conversation with an orc in filthy rags. The talk ends with Gúlnar’s orc yanking a half peck sack out of the other orc’s arms.

“Here.” The sack, full of pale brown powder that leaks through the loosely sewn seams, is passed to Gúlnar. She tucks it under one arm and sneaks a taste. It’s sweet even with the stench overwhelming her senses; sweeter than honey, sweet in a flavourless, undifferentiated way that reminds her of pale spun sugar candies made for mid-autumn. The only hint of character is an overtone of nuttiness and a hint of pine-green, an aged bark depth and a resinous smack that she can barely distinguish.

“Is this… syrup?” As a veteran of many hours spent boiling birch and walnut sap down into its thicker, preservable, form, she’s alarmed by the idea of fully dehydrating it— a person could die standing at the stove that way. But she can think of no other foodstuff she could be be holding.

They start walking back “It’s trees. We cut them down and my lord puts a magic on them so we can feed everyone.”

That explains nothing. It doesn’t need to be explained. Food is food and they’re finally out of that stinking place.

The walk back to the guest quarters (which Gúlnar isn’t sure are meant to be guest quarters at all) is spent in mutually uncomfortable silence. Gúlnar’s shoulders don’t relax until she sees the knit of Senara’s hair net and the dark wisps of hair framing her long face.

“The king will likely see you tomorrow,” the orc seneschal warns before leaving. They seem ill at ease, though perhaps it’s merely another trick. “I— prepare yourselves as you will.”

“You have our gratitude,” Senara might be holding Gúlnar like herdsman holds a wild horse, one arm looped across her chest, the other at her waist, but she keeps her voice friendly and light.

There is no response, just an exit.

“Tomorrow” is unquantifiable in this place without day or night. Not wanting to be caught off guard, Senara makes them change into their nicer clothes after they eat (the polenta is thick and the strange brown powder rehydrates into a pulpy, sticky soup and though its no bread and salt and neither of them truly believe Morgoth is bound by the laws of hosting, eating it settles their hearts— because planning for a trip home keeps their hopes up they save the rest of the sack). That means fussing and combing hair and lots of straightening ornaments.

To cut down on weight and demonstrate need as well as self sufficiency, Senara purposely packed a fraction of their usual festival jewellery. They still end up covered in metal and semiprecious jewels. The older elvish fashion of sewing small disks of metal, silver and gold for preference, bronze and even tin if needed, onto blouses and skirts till every movement jingled and sung, caught on with them a few short years ago. Gúlnar’s wedding dress sounds like the bells on elven horses as she slides into it. She fastens it shut with a heavy copper brooch, shaped like two goats sparring and a blue and red belt. Then there are the necklaces— amber for Magiwen, dark jasper for Senara, pale chlorite for Gúlnar. Just one each, a picture of restraint compared to the layered wealth she remembers on Lord Caranthir. Still, she worries it’s too much.

“Don’t tug so much, you’ll tear the string apart and we’ll be picking beads off the floor,” Senara advises as she expertly secures Gúlnar’s veil with tiny silver pins. She could be talking to Gúlnar or Magiwen, they’re both getting restless. Unlike Magiwen, who goes back to admiring her pretty pale blue skirt, tugging the fabric this way and that and muttering about the sky as she walks until she trips over the too long hem, Gúlnar has no means of corralling her wandering mind, nor any better path to set it on than the road to ruin.

The tension building inside her mind and the incessant tugging at her scalp eventually become too much. “Aren’t you worried?” she asks.

“Less worried than I was when you went off with an orc, with no assurance you would return,” Senara’s verbal jab is accompanied by the pointy end of a pin. Right, Gúlnar is still due for a dressing down, to go with their dressing up.

“I wanted to make sure we got food!”

Her hairstyle must be acceptable because Senara slides her fillet over her veil and smooths over the top of her head before whirling her around by the shoulders so they’re face to face. “He brought us food, it was sufficient, you didn’t have to leave—“

“It could have been anything, it could have been horseflesh or manflesh or poisoned,” Gúlnar protests.

“And that would have been fine.” Senara looks… weary. She looks as tired as a woman of seventy. It’s enough to make Gúlnar pause for a moment and stare. “It would have been fine, we would have lived or died together. I just don’t want to lose anyone else, I am through with outliving, and unready to let you go so recklessly. We’re not going outside, Maggy, dear! Get away from the door!”

“They feed their animals corpses,” Gúlnar feels compelled to point out. She recognized those long, unwieldy shapes, the lopped off limbs and pallid bodies being heaved out of carts and churned into pig meal. Even distance and tactical tarps couldn’t disguise such brazen action.

Senara shakes her head. “And what do you think the apple trees eat, little sister, when they wind their roots into the dirt?”

Glancing at Magiwen (she’s gone back to playing with her horses) and lowering her voice, Gúlnar asks, “You’re comfortable with cannibalism?” An evil castle can unveil whole new dimensions to a person. It reminds her of those old stories, the impossible tasks or secret tests of character.

“I’m comfortable with survival, for our sake and the sake of those we left behind.” Then, Senara leans forward —Gúlnar flinches shamefully— and cups her cheek. “I’m glad you have a stouter heart.”

“I don’t,” Gúlnar feels quite strongly about that. She knows few people of better quality than her sister-in-law; her recent wobblings have shaken that conviction but not entirely broken it. If Senara says that cannibalism is right and proper— Gúlnar can’t agree but she can’t fully contradict it either.

“You do,” Senara stays firm. “I have plucked my heart out of my breast and distributed it to a hundred-some people. Motherhood diminishes, as does leadership, as does love. Your heart remains firmly behind your ribs and you are stronger for it. No one shapes you away from your own true self.”

“I have loved,” Gúlnar whispers, feeling suddenly very small.

It’s true that her marriage was Olhast’s idea. They had played together as children in Olfan’s house, and spent hours talking in the stables as teenagers. Olhast used to come up with clever excuses to get her out of chores and Gúlnar, who was normally frightened of being seen as useless, an extra mouth to feed, would actually indulge in laziness with his prompting. He was her best friend and when he came to her with the idea that they wed she thought it was silly. A joke. Yet he kept suggesting it, kept pushing, and finally Imaka, his mother, sat her down for a talk.

It wasn’t the best match for Olfan’s house, she was an orphan or no note with no especial skills. Being increasingly pretty (at least pretty enough to make Olhast, who used to be sensible, go stupid and adoring) was not enough of a political benefit to make up for her lack of connections or schooling.

It would be very good for Gúlnar though. She would never have to worry about her place in the household again. She could stay with them for the rest of her life. And since she knew the family already there would be little adjustment. How terrible would it be to marry your best friend, she reasoned? Love would come in time.

Then he’d died and there was no more time left.

She did care for him, dearly, painfully. It was love. It just wasn’t the same as the love she’d seen between Olgor and Senara, or the taciturn affection of old married couples, and she aches for what she never knew she’d have.

Senara’s embarrassed flush and warm hands almost make up for the resurgence of grief ramming against her diaphragm. “Oh. I know. I know,” she soothes. “I know. No one could ever doubt that.”

“I know, I know,” Magiwen echoes her mother, a mimic bird, clumsily patting at Gúlnar’s knee.

After her sorrow peters out, smoothed flat by gentle stroking and soft words, Senara suggests, “Why don’t you get some sleep? I can wait up for a few hours and I’ll wake you to trade when I get tired.”

Crying spells are named thus because they use as much energy as any other form of magic. After even a short bout of tears Gúlnar is drained enough to agree.

 

 

When she wakes up it’s to Senara, shaking her. “We need to go, now.”

Angband is not a place for deep sleep, restful sleep. The chill, the muttering on the edge of perception, the uneasy sense that you’re walking through a graveyard, it keeps a person on guard. Gúlnar rockets awake and sees their proxy-host, this time accompanied by tall soldiers in spiked armour. Orcs with height and breadth to their shoulders, instead of the sinewy starvling frames she’s come to think of as standard. 

“Carry these,” Senara instructs, passing Gúlnar a pair of saddle bags easily slung over her shoulders. A quick glance at the floor reveals that she’s been going through their luggage, sorting and paring everything down to a bare margin of survival. Food, blankets, cloaks, weapons, firestarters, the only extra weight is Magiwen’s horses. 

“You don’t need-” the orc says primly. 

“Travelling with a child is cumbersome,” Senara nods to Magiwen, still asleep in her arms. “I can only hope your illustrious lords will make certain allowances for a widow come to plead her case.”

A human would be sympathetic. Here the response is bafflement but it accomplishes the same ends. 

“If you are ready, then follow,” comes the instruction.

Once again they walk the halls. This time Senara is aflutter. As they move she straightens Gúlnar’s hair and dress. She gently shakes Magiwen awake and lets her walk, frowning and torpid and clinging to her skirts. She whispers instructions, reminders, pleas, most of them for silence and compliance. Gúlnar is too busy keeping track of their path through the labyrinth of claustrophobic corridors and arching caverns to pay attention to most of it. Two lefts, she counts, a right. 

She loses track quickly, too many of the doors are identical and too many of the turns only make sense if you assume all the floors are at an incline, levels changing without anyone being aware. When they pass a window her thought process stalls. The view outside is of a mountain range from five hundred some feet in the air and it is bleak. Even the lowest slopes of the mountains are empty– not empty, she corrects, seeing the shapes of distant tree stumps, stripped bare. When the creator god sent his children to dredge up earth from the bottom of the sea, this is the bit the devil hid away. She’s never seen mountain peaks so knifelike or a sky so iron-grey. 

“We have to go,” Senara says, taking her hand and dragging them all closer to the devil himself. 

Their orc (Gúlnar has developed an odd fondness for the monster, which she has no doubt it does not reciprocate) stops them in front of a door. It has the same shape as the iron doors, the metal rim all around, the sill at the bottom, the odd handle on the front as if it can be cranked open and shut. This one, however, is made of shining silver. 

“You’ll see the lord lieutenant,” the orc advises, once more not bothering with hissing or scraping, “treat him with as much respect as you would treat the king, then, if you should see the king, treat him with twice as much reverence.” 

“Who’s the lieutenant?” Senara asks futilely, but the door is already being opened and their usher has retreated. 

Inside looks warm . 

There’s a fire crackling in a wide hearth and a rug of stitched together animal furs on the floor. Sitting on a low stool in front of the flames is a figure that glows faintly, like hot metal or a mirror in a dark room.

Fearless, Senara approaches and kneels, making obeisance look friendly as she settles Magiwen next to her. Gúlnar can only follow and echo the posture, sitting on her knees and feet, touching her forehead to the soft carpet once and then keeping her head bowed. 

“My lord.”

“Am I your lord?” 

“We chose,” it’s impossible to place the emotions in Senara’s voice, resentment or pride or resignation, “the whole world knows now.”

Through her lashes Gúlnar strains to look at the figure talking to them. He has long, sharp nails on hands folded neatly in his lap. His peacock bright clothing… does not look like clothing, it blends into skin at the wrists and neck, he wears it like a bird wears feathers. Even the wolf pelt over his shoulders moves too smoothly with the roll of his muscles as he laughs. 

“Yes, I’ve heard stories. They speak of Ulfang the traitor now, and his vile sons. Renamed by those who you once called allies, consigned to the bins of history. They’d fete your death as they feted his.” For the first time, Gúlnar notices a second power in the room, a shadowy giant sitting in a corner next to the door. She can’t see them as anything more than a dark wisp, not from this angle, but she can hear the telltale noise of a blade being sharpened behind her.

Senara grows more strident, “Then you know what we sacrificed, lord lieutenant. For your cause.” 

“For the king of the world,” comes the quick correction. There’s a long pause. “Look at me.”

The direction is clearly aimed at Senara but Gúlnar obeys it as well. She looks the lieutenant full in the face and she is afraid.

He has viper’s eyes and vampire fangs and a dreadful smooth beauty that makes her think of varnished wood or burnished pottery. Elves were never human but they had lumps and bumps and scars, stray hairs falling in their faces, laugh lines at the corners of their eyes. They liked to hunt and sing and dandle babies and it showed, in their callouses, their voices, the light in their eyes. Sometimes those moments of sameness could make up for the gaps between them, the way they’d talk about events a hundred years ago or a hundred years in the future like other people talked about last season’s weather, the confusion at every funeral, the fey savagery in battle, the idle insults bandied like they forgot other people could hear them. 

She doesn’t think this thing has ever sung a springtime song or stirred a pot of porridge or hunted in the summer woods. Well, maybe the last one, she allows, for he has the look of a hunter gone wrong, a wolf instead of a hound. 

A wolf– suddenly she knows which monster they’re facing. 

It doesn’t help at all. Gorthaur is no more approachable than a nameless terror. Either way, he’s not a thing of mortal means or mortal compassion, and every part of Senara’s ploy is predicated on using those sympathies. The toddler clinging to her waist, the obvious swell of her belly in her modest-fine dress, the subtle disarray of her hair contrasted with her ladylike graciousness; all of it would play very well with a human or an elf or a dwarf. Gorthaur doesn’t seem to be paying attention to one bit of it. Instead he’s looking in her eyes and she’s looking in his, as if hypnotized, unable to draw her gaze away. 

Gorthaur drops his gaze and sighs. “Well, your husband was a disappointment but they did help win the battle, even if all they were good for in the end was dying.” Senara rests a hand on her shoulder as if she needs to hold Gúlnar back, as if Gúlnar could think of doing anything other than cowering. It’s almost flattering. “And you seem organised, bold, clever for a human. The little mouse who keeps my rooms had some good things to say about your tenacity– along with sentimentality and disobedience– and a fair report from him is rare. It would be better if a few of your menfolk were able to survive, you prefer men, but I suppose you have some use.”

The figure in the back of the room says something in a rough, rocks crashing language. Enabled by Gorthaur’s (loosely interpreted) orders to look up, Gúlnar swings her head to examine them and finds that the shadow is… a shadow. A pulsing mass of smoke and black dust, shaped like a man about nine feet tall. There are some liberties taken with regards to horns and claws and teeth, which spark brightly with every shift, and their eyes are bright as coals.

The weapon they’re sharpening is an axe, made of stormclouds, black as thunder. Despite looking insubstantial, it makes a metallic hssh as they run a normal grindstone over it. 

It is a strange time when Gorthaur is the less threatening force in the room. 

The Tormentor laughs, lightly, and responds in the same language. 

“My associate says everything has a use, even if it’s only as kindling for a fire,” he says as he returns his attention to them. “Still, I think we can do better than that, don’t you? I can give you… Himring. The orcs have probably made a mess out of it and if we’re to hold it permanently it needs administering.”

Himring, Himring of friends, of kin, of festival days and weddings. Himring, abandoned still full of the people they spent years shoulder-to-shoulder with. Egba, Delin, Jolin, Veene, a dozen others and a nameless hundred more. Gúlnar’s heart has been beating like a bird’s this whole time, now the frantic rate doubles. 

“Are we not to see the king, my lord?” Senara asks, placidly. She’s stroking Magiwen’s hair very slowly. “I would hate to think my preparations were for naught.”

Gorthaur tilts his head. “We neednt trouble the master of fates with matters of lesser importance.”

There is a complicated arithmetic going on in Senara’s mind, Gúlnar can see the numbers stacking as she creases her forehead. “And if I asked to see him, my lord?”

“Then I would have you brought before him,” Gorthaur agrees easily, “But I warn you, his decision may be less charitable than mine.”

Ask for somewhere other than Himring, Gúlnar thinks, beg for aid, do something! Contradict him, demand what we came for!

She is not a diplomat for a reason. 

“I promised my mother-in-law that I would go to see the great king, who we sacrificed so much for,” Senara lowers her eyes, a picture of filial duty wasted on an unappreciative audience. “I cannot leave without pleading our case before him. I do appreciate your help, lord lieutenant, and the fineness of our lodgings.” As if this is a castle and not a thousand hauntings stacked together, a fairytale undone. “Please, convey my compliments to your staff.”

“I’ll give the slaves your regards,” Gorthaur says, smiling faintly. “You insist on seeing our master then?”

“I’m afraid I must.”

Only Gúlnar goes to help her as she awkwardly climbs to her feet, weighed down by fifty pounds of terrified three year old (Magiwen has been very good and quiet but she’s also tried her best to climb inside her mother’s dress) and weak-kneed. When the three of them are standing, clinging to each other, Gorthaur gestures shortly at the door. 

“They’ll take you where you need to go.”

“My thanks again,” Senara curtsies, wobbling. 

As they leave they hear the shadow speaking once more and another peal of Gorthaur’s laughter. 

Their orc has disappeared, leaving only the too-tall guards. It makes for a more unfriendly walk. The halls are growing bigger once more, Gúlnar notes, even as they descend down stairs into deeper darkness. In places the corridors are wreathed in darkness, without even a torchlight, and they must feel their way slowly, at othertimes the way is wide and lit by sulphurous flames. She pauses to take a thrashing Magiwen from Senara at an intersection where she swears she can hear screaming from down one passage. 

“We have to be very quiet and still for your mama,” she tells her new burden. 

Magiwen stares at her very seriously. In such moments she looks like the picture of her father, of her uncles, a resemblance so sharp Gúlnar has to suppress the mental image of the little girl on the battlefield, run through by an elven blade, freckles dusted by bloodspatter.

“They’ll cut us up,” she agrees, before she tucks her face into Gúlnar’s neck. 

There’s no arguing with that. 

The final door isn’t iron or silver. It gleams brighter than the coins on Gúlnar’s skirt, a soft moonlight glow, and despite their enormous size– wide enough for a cart to travel through and tall as a pine– there isn’t a hint of tarnish on them. They’re polished to a mirror finish, till Gúlnar can see her own image as if in water, tired and weary, draped in gaudy festival gear and luggage. Studded here and there are jewels, and those too glow, bright as lamps.

When King Azaghâl visited he brought a sample of such metal, only a fingerlength’s worth, which he hammered into a little looking glass, then a loop of chains, then a pretty ring. Mithril, the elves called it, and they were, according to Azaghâl, jealous for only dwarves had access to its mines. Even that finger of it, he claimed, would cost more than Gúlnar’s village. 

These doors are quite a lot of fingers. 

The stories always speak of the horror, the fire, the death, but they never admit to the beauty, however stolen and out of place it may seem. They never speak of the unique terror of finding something fine and lovely thrown amidst the torment, a testament to some evil untold. 

The doors open at the faintest touch and the guards nod Senara and Gúlnar in. Here they are, at Morgoth’s nethermost hall, with no choice but to enter. 

It feels as if a whole mountain has been hollowed out to make his audience chamber. Though there are fires, a dull orange glow to the left and right, and high above there is the green glow of more unearthly lichen, Gúlnar cannot make out the ceiling. Ghostly figures are silhouetted against those lights, far above and to the sides. Their noises can be heard, chittering, clanking, cackling like foxes. 

But the brightest light is the silmaril light– for a moment Gúlnar understands why all those elves have killed each other for it. It does not gleam or glow, it shines, bright as stars or the sun itself. As they advance across the floor it resolves into two lights, and beneath them, a glowering face. 

Not as grumpy as Caranthir, Gúlnar thinks before terror overtakes her, though somewhat less fair. Then her heart catches up with her brain and she sinks to the floor, knees giving out before they can go any further.

Senara, either similarly afflicted or just rolling with the punches, bows as well, low to the ground. “Great king, you have had a victory. Your might shakes the earth and your servants can only stare in wonder.” 

Though his face is something dreadful, Morgoth has a wonderful voice, a low deep bass that would be well suited for singing. “Ulfang’s daughter.” 

Daughter- in-law , the daughters couldn’t make it. Olgwest has four little ones and Olmith broke her leg two months past. It’s remarkable where a mind will go when cornered by fear; right now Gúlnar finds herself reflexively running through family trees. 

Even Senara is frazzled, when she speaks it comes out too breathy, too high, as if she can just barely get the words out. “Yes, my king. With your wisdom I doubt I need to tell you why we came.”

“It seems begging is all humans know how to do,” says the king dismissively. This prompts more cackling from his distant court.

“We’re all supplicants in the face of your glory,” Senara agrees. Magiwen shifts suddenly and Gúlnar curls a little tighter around her. “I ask only what was promised to us. My king, your message made grand offers.” The floor of this hall is mundane paving stone, granite grey blocks only remarkable for their enormous size. Why lay down a stone floor inside a mountain? No matter, Gúlnar focuses instead on the flecks in the rock, the pattern of light and dark, keeping her breathing even until it steadies Magiwen’s drowned fish gasping. 

“In return for loyalty, of which I’ve found little. Thine co-conspirators abandoned thee, the plot was ruined. I have no reason to give rewards for a task half done.” 

Senara sounds steadier now, as if she’s finding her confidence despite the circumstances, “We were betrayed, as you were. We paid the price for it. Deaths uncounted with no survivors. All out of loyalty to you. Now the survivors only beg for enough to raise their children, the orphans of your cause, so that they can be suitably loyal to you in the future.” Her mercenary tack seems to work. The dark lord pauses and so does the very air, no one breathing, no one moving.

“Thou cannot be faulted for zeal but there is too little strength left in thee. My servant, Lorgan. I will give thy people into his care, to serve him as he serves me.”

It is, as Gorthaur promised, a worse deal than the one he offered. This Lorgan is a stranger but his character matters little, the arrangement constrains them by default. They’ll be defenseless in his house, without even the formality of fealty to protect them. How easy to slide into thralldom under those conditions. 

Refusal is not an option, though. And in this room Gúlnar’s pride is shrinking by the second. 

“You are so generous, my king,” Senara simpers. Then she goes further, sweetens her tone even more, and adds, “But we would hate to be a burden— might I suggest…”

“I need no whispering from mortals or treachery from women.” Morgoth says it without ire, were he angry Gúlnar thinks she might cry. But it slams the discussion shut, closes the door, puts an end to any negotiating. 

Or so it would seem. 

In spite of Morgoth’s words, in spite of the egg-yolk eyed creatures creeping closer, in spite of good sense and Magiwen’s audible whimpering (she’s asking for her father again), Senara preserveres. 

“Of course. I-I am quite young, and in a fragile state, I have little knowledge to offer you who knows so much. But I do not want our master to have to take care of all of us in a new land, so soon after a great battle. Please, mighty one might we stay on our land and heed his direction and seek his aid from there?” The animal chittering stops once more. It’s hard to see anything but the corners of the room and the floor while bowed so low so Gúlnar lifts her head a few inches, turns, looks. 

Senara, who hasn’t wept since she heard the news of the great defeat, has tear tracks running down her face. With her arms wrapped around her chest her shoulders look thin as sticks. There’s a sudden age to her, unbefitting of her years. She is by no means broken, there is not any army in the world that could conquer her, but in front of Morgoth she seems unassuming. Frail.

“Do what thou’rt will,” Morgoth says dismissively. “I will have Lorgan mark thee among his creatures.”

Senara claps her hands giddily. “Not for nothing are you called the king of kings! I will write to him at once, Maggy, sweetness—” she holds out her arms for her daughter. Mag-hên is reluctant to move, reluctant to do anything now that the eyes of the room are upon her. Trusting Senara’s stage instincts, even if they do involve turning infants into props, Gúlnar peels her clinging fingers away and pushes her across the floor. 

“We can go home now, brave bird,” coos Senara, still uncharacteristically cloying. Stress can do odd things to a person. “Can you thank the nice king?”

Magiwen, for her part, seems reluctant to even look in Morgoth’s direction. Offering words to him seems like an impossible ask. Morgoth is just as unwilling to interact with a three year old as the three year old is to interact with him. 

“Return to thine place,” the dark king demands. 

Even with that straightforward order, Senara still takes her time getting up— in the end Gúlnar has yank her arm. They bow, twice to be safe, and before they begin to back away, Senara chirps, “I shall write to Lord Lorgan and speak to your stewards about the goods we were promised immediately! With luck we could leave within the day!”

“Have it done!”

Then they are walking backwards very fast and the great mithril doors are shutting with a clang in their faces, and Senara is once more in tears, clutching her stomach and doubled over. 

Gúlnar holds her up by the waist and examines her face, terrified that the Iron Hells have broken another mind. Worryingly, she finds Senara’s lips twitching with a smile, her eyes turned up in crescent glee. 

“We did it, we made it. Gúlnar, we’ll live.”

That remains to be determined. In times like these nothing is guaranteed. 

 

There is a short period of negotiations with Gorthaur, which Gúlnar manages to skip since Magiwen now refuses to enter a room with unholy powers and will voice her opinion loudly, wordlessly, and at a pitch that could cleave gold. 

(“Witchling,” Gúlnar would have been content if Gorthaur never knew she existed, could have died happy without him ever smiling his twisty cyclone smile at her. “A disappointment of sorcerer, I’ll admit.” A terrible untranslation through elvish of a name from another language entirely. It is not her fault what the elf tongue twists the name her parents gave her into. When Magiwen looked them both up and down and started wailing it came as a relief to spirit her away.)

Apparently cruel gods do not abide by agreements they make and have even less respect for agreements they were shoved into by young women talking very fast. Senara must make some counterpoints; probably about the honor of kings, because they do leave with two carts of the sticky brown tree powder and a very small coffer of gold.

“A fraction of what was first promised to us,” Senara reveals as they load their new horses (Gúlnar asked about the old ones and received no satisfactory answers). She speaks in an undertone because they are also accompanied by a strange man; one of this Lorgan’s underlings. 

More are promised to follow. An unsurprising development, their land is rich, borders territory the Feanorians still hold, and has a sudden wealth of marriageable girls. Lorgan himself has apparently set up in the North Lands, along with Brodda, but he has himself a pretty outpost now if he can rule it. 

And he will no doubt be encouraged to rule it, for Gorthaur seems to have suspicions about Senara’s capabilities. Morgoth must still be blind, if he weren’t Gúlnar suspects they’d all be dead. His servants can still make plenty of trouble on his behalf.

The time for ignorance is over. Gúlnar tightens a girth strap around their new liver chestnut. “What was promised,for what service in return? What happened? How did we end up here?”

Senara turns away. At first it seems out of guilt— then she calls Lorgan’s minion to her. 

“Dear friend, could you do us a favor and try to find the orc who helped us? I wanted to make him a gift, for his trouble.” With a flourish she shows him the handkerchief stowed in her sleeve. “It would go nicely with his tunic.”

Disbelief, that he’s being asked to fetch an orc, that an orc is being made a gift of haberdashery, that he’s being bossed around by a woman, all pour off the young man. Before he can contradict her, Senara steps a little closer into his personal space. 

Outside of the realm of monsters and warlords she once more towers over people, the poor soldier is a few inches shorter than her. Cowed by her reinvigorated aura of command, their guard mutters something about asking around, before walking hastily for the door. 

“That ought to buy us a few minutes,” Senara sighs. 

Gúlnar refuses to be dissuaded. “Will it be long enough to explain the deal you made with Mo—with the northern power? Who knew about it? How long—?”

“People will hear you.”

At this point Gúlnar couldn’t give a damn about all the orcs in Angband, but Magiwen is sitting in the cart behind them, explaining to her horses how they visited a very bright hot room and a very shadow cold room and neither of them were very nice. Such temporary peace shouldn’t be disturbed. 

When she lowers her hands, Senara leans in, rests her head on her shoulder.

“According to the Dark King, the deal was struck before the Eastern men crossed the mountains. He says he was the one who beckoned them here, and Father,” she is so often familiar with Olfan, who Gúlnar has known since birth but can still only refer to by name, “did not wholly reject the idea. You know of the westerning dreams?”

The dreams that promised untold riches in the lands of the far west, which came in a different manner to each dreamer of power a few months after Gúlnar’s birth. Brog and Olfan, who were both already moving for want of food, and who both boasted keen eyed prophesiers, had responded the quickest but not they were not the last to come. The dreams even gave Olfan his elvish name; his visions were of a great mountain topped with a black cloud of smoke and beneath it a bounty of food and jewels and gold, and when they walked her could sometimes see the mountain on the horizon, leading them where they needed to go. 

“The Darkness did that?” Gúlnar’s stomach gives a curdled heave.

Senara rolls her shoulder, too blase with Gúlnar’s childhood. “That is what the letter said. You cannot trust the lord of lies but it did trouble father.”

“The letter?” Gúlnar redirects.

“Angband sent a messenger. One to Lord Brog and one, apparently, to us. Ours was waylaid, however, so Brog ended up sharing his letter with us. It made the claim about the dreams, for one, said that we were already sworn to his power, an oath predating any others, and called on our secret aid. Then it made the offers. A cart of gold, of silver. Himring and the March for Brog, Estolad and Helevorn for us. Peace. A chance to rule ourselves. Olfan and Lord Brog,” it is reassuring to hear her calling him by his name, not the last-minute epithet it seems he will be remembered by, “conferred and decided to take counsel with their kin. If they both agreed to the deal it would be done.”

“And they both swore by that?” Such a precarious covenant.

“They did,” Senara laughs bitterly. “I think Lord Brog wanted us to temper his sons’ changeable minds, to veto the plan so he wouldn’t have to. Instead we all agreed, until all of a sudden they didn’t.” She has a normal, widow’s vitriol, mixed with the grief of knowing that those she resents are already dead. 

“‘Why?” The question feels wrenched out of Gúlnar’s chest, it turns her whisper into a fraught, nearly soundless scream. “Why did you choose this?” The deaths, Angband and its peaks, Magiwen explaining Morgoth to her toy ponies. The question she’s never been able to voice spills out of her, “And why didn’t anyone ask me ?”

Presumptuous. She’s just an orphan, a love match who didn’t have the decency to fall in love back, a silly girl from the barnyard. A little sister in all things. But she thinks her husband cared for her, even if it meant he treated her like she was twice as breakable as she actually is. She knows her mother-in-law does, with her scolding and suggestions, suspects Olfan did in his dreamy distant way. None of them even gave her a warning before their troops marched away. Not once chance to shout or scream or say an informed goodbye. 

“It was some time ago.” The clipped explanation, Gúlnar’s sense that the walls are spinning, Magiwen mumbling about cave monsters, it all blends together. “You weren’t quite married yet, Magiwen was a babe in arms. We didn’t even include Olreth, given his age. It was just mother, father, mine husband, yours, and Olgwest. As for our decision—“

Senara trails off, her face, still laying on Gúlnar’s shoulder, forehead to her nape, growing warm.

“I had a child,” she says after a long pause. “And I did not want her to grow up ruled by those who did not understand her.”

“So instead she’ll grow ruled by Angband, and fatherless as well!” Gúlnar regrets her words in a heartbeat. Senara does not seem to regret hearing them.

She lifts her head and looks at Gúlnar, holding her by the shoulders as if she might wriggle away. Her eyes are scarlet-rimmed and her cheeks are fever flushed. The set of her mouth is all conviction. “There are times when you’re in a house with a wolf,” she speaks like she’s tiptoeing, each syllable deliberate. “Even if there is howling outside the door, you still must go out. Perhaps it will be worse out there, perhaps it will be better. At least in the cold you have a chance. There, alone with the wolf, you have nothing. We were stuck with a wolf. We did not realize it but we were being eaten alive and one day there would be nothing left, of the house of Bëor or the house of Olfan. I don’t regret that we chose escape, however brief and futile.”

Gúlnar tries to match that stubbornness. “Humans are not so easily killed.”

“We’d survive,” Senara admits. “But as half elves, as little shadows forever seated below the salt. We’d live, darling, but would not be ourselves.”

And what are they now? The conciliation Gorthaur offered might buy them a few years, if they can defend it from pillaging. But without a quarter of their workforce they will find the winters lean and the harvests poor. If they’re lucky, Lorgan’s folk came without women—some of the later eastern travelers, especially those who gravitate to Angband, are more war party than village—and some will be happy to settle on their land and live in peace. Even that makes them vulnerable, for those men will want to throw their weight around. Worst case scenario, Lorgan realizes he has a free pool of barely guarded women and children in his demesne and starts making raids, stealing maidens and strong youths, further thinning their population until they’re a a scrap of a people, surviving on subsistence rations. 

“Lord Olfan must have seen the folly in this.” In truth Gúlnar is desperate for any sort of reassurance that the cloud voiced man she remembers, with his long wooden cane and his thick shock of black hair that slowly went white from the roots until he looked like a summer rain, who was so gentle until he stepped into the sacred grove and started railing at the gods and spirits on his people’s behalf. 

“He left the choice up to us, for he said the decision was clouded to him,” Senara admits. In the years before his death, as his illness grew, he left more important tasks to his children, a slow creep of responsibilities only noticeable in hindsight. “He told us that he did not think we would see benefits if we betrayed the elves, but that our children would never again bow to them, and of our children’s children’s children would come kings.”

Standing in Angband, in the wreckage of that choice, Gúlnar can imagine how easily it was decided. Senara and Olgor, who wanted the world for their children and would take it, Olhast who trusted his older brother implicitly, Olgwest who was even more ambitious on her children’s behalf than Senara since she did not have a lordship to give them, Imaka the most cautious who would finally reluctantly be won over by her children's enthusiasm ( she probably regretted the choice, for her sons would not come home). All that faith and hope and fear, and nothing to show for it but a mountain of bodies, cruel new names, an uncertain future being held aloft by a few determined women as the rest of the world drowned. 

 Their escort returns through the far door with one sharply dressed orc in tow, a sign that they can stall no longer. They’re finally leaving Angband. 

The orc in red takes the handkerchief, still in Senara’s hand, without ceremony. “I think your people call this a lady’s favor?” they say, with the requisite degree of scorn. Still, they fold it carefully, tuck it into their pocket. On their face is a new constellation of bruises, in their eyes the hungry intelligence of a bear, a person trapped in animal skin. 

If they could ever talk frankly in this fortress of ghosts, the time is over. There are living ears listening and judgemental servants of Morgoth in the room. Still, Gúlnar can’t resist a parting shot. 

“I can say this, I do not think we will ever be ruled by elves again.”

---

Chapter End Notes

So I did, as I said, reference a lot of proto-Finno-Ugric stuff for the cultural inspirations. Specifically the Volga Finns and the Udmurts, but also some Mansi and Evenki and Sami, and Brodda is pretty Hungarian. The bear culture and the ghosts and the dresses are all from that cultural pool and the red hair is Udmurt, I liked the parallels with Maedhros and Caranthir. Gúlnar is comparitively, I think, Tatar and a little greek for the boats and hubris.

I waffled a bit about the ending; were they getting away with too much? It is Angband and Morgoth... but on the other hand he has a history of getting pushed around by tenacious women because he underestimates them. His pride WILL be his undoing. Sauron, on the other hand, has his eyes on them, he knows ambition however curtailed it is.

I do have some thoughts about how this long term plays out! Lorgan, as Gúlnar guesses, does a number on them despite Senara's best efforts, and after a sufficient period of all their young people being stolen away as slaves they straight up melt into the woods and rebel. Which doesn't go great for them either but you know, wolf in the house. In the end the much reduced fragment left joins up with Elros' human collective and one of Senara's descendants is his queen. She would probably count Numenor as win condition. Gúlnar... would not.