Blood Ties by AdmirableMonster

There was a hunt on.  Lómion sat at the high window of his small bedroom, peering out into the forest, one hand splayed across the glass.  He would have preferred to be out there with the hunting party, but his father would not hear of it, and even Ammë seemed perturbed by the thought.  “Yonya, for once, I would prefer it if you kept inside.”

“I feel safer in the forest,” Lómion complained, when he was certain his father was not in earshot.

“I know you do, and most of the time you are,” Ammë agreed.  “And you are nearly a man now, Lómion.  But three of our people have died in as many days, including one of our doughtiest warriors.  The thing that lurks in those shadows would make short work of you, if Angrenel could not keep it from tearing out her throat.”

Lómion knew his father liked to keep both him and his mother close to the house, but he had to concede with a sigh that if Ammë wanted him inside, she probably had reason for it.  His mother was fearless in all things that did not involve disobeying his father, and he saw the beginnings of fear-wrinkles in the corners of her eyes.  He really ought to stay inside.

But he had been kept inside now for nearly a week, since Ronel had first vanished when she was fetching water.  Lómion stared out at the moving dark branches of the forest.  He liked Ronel; she was a fine playmate and a clever one, one of the few of the servants’ children who were not afraid to spend time with the abnormally silent child of the house’s master.  Surely, surely she was not dead.

But three of the other folk of Nan Elmoth were—their throats clawed open, and drained of their blood.  (So Tawardil had whispered to Gladlin when she thought they were alone.  Lómion was very good at staying silent and keeping hidden in the shadows.) There was some dark creature out there, and now his father was leading the hunt for it.  Lómion thought he ought to be worried about Eöl—he had read enough to be quite sure that a child ought to be most concerned about the return of his father—but he was really more upset when he thought of Ronel.  Would they bring back her body?  Would it have its throat torn out too?

He rose from the window seat and paced back and forth like a caged animal.  He was supposed to stay in here, safe, while his friend might be dead or dying.  Even Ammë had told him to.  He was only a child, after all; what could a child do against such a terrible monster?

Something tapped on the glass of the window he had been looking out, the one that opened to the east.  Lómion looked over but saw nothing. He frowned.  An instant later, there came another tapping, this time from the wall of his tower room to the south. Another tap—to the west.  Another—to the north.  A brief pause and then the one from the east came again, as if some creature were pacing around the outside of his chamber as he paced around the inside.

Lómion chewed on the inside of his lip.  As the tapping went round the outside again, he moved to the North window.  Then, before he could stop himself, he reached out, undid the latch, and leaned out, looking from side to side.  It was not as if opening the window would do anything to the fierce warding magic laid around the central house, after all.

Leaning head and shoulders out, he saw it: a ripple in the branches of the trees moving like a concerted wave, as if in a heavy wind—but the air was still.  Lómion put his hand out and caught the bough that reached for his window, and it shied backward, almost pulling him out as he struggled to hold onto it.  The trees rustled, and above him, the grey clouds parted for a moment, letting a spear or two of sunlight between them to lance down and shimmer silver on the rims of the rustling leaves.

In those moving leaves, he saw Ronel’s face, blood smeared across her mouth, her eyes shut.  She lay still in darkness, her head pillowed on one arm, and her chest rose and fell very slightly.  She was alive.

Lómion leaped backward, slamming the window shut, his heart thudding in his ears.  She was alive, and the hunting party had already gone out, which meant he could not tell them to search for her.  Besides, hadn’t the forest shown the vision to him?  All the pent-up nervous energy battered at his chest, and he thought if he just sat here and waited longer he might burst into flames with it.

It might be the wrong decision, but it was almost fearfully easy to make.  No one had locked Lómion into his room today; he had been well-behaved now for some time and was no longer treated like the troublesome child of his younger years.  He went out and stood on the landing, looking back and forth.

He could not wear his white travel tunic and leggings; they would be too easy to see in the shadows of the forest, and that might get him killed.  He would also need a weapon of some sort.  His swordplay was not bad, after all.

There would be weapons and armor in the guardhouse, and most of the guards would be out on the hunt.  Lómion went down the back staircase, that only the servants were supposed to use, taking care to keep to the shadows and avoid stepping on the seventeenth and fourth steps, which creaked.  Gladlin would be in the kitchen at this hour of the afternoon, so their little room would be empty.  Lómion had long ago learned how to jigger open the badly-locked rooms of the servants, and it was quite easy to slip in, steal an old tunic and leggings, and shrug them on in a tiny closet.  These would be better than his fine indoor linens for an adventure.

He took a quick detour to the kitchens to procure some bread and cheese and then made his way to the side door, where he halted for a few minutes, trembling and breathing hard.  The guard-house was outside and some way down the main avenue—usually a journey made quite safe by the forest and the enchantments laid across it, but at least one of the victims had been inside the central compound when they were taken.  Lómion would have to go the entire way down with no protection other than that of the trees’ shadows.

He told himself it was not that far and brought to mind the image of Ronel’s bloody face and trembling lips.  Besides, it was not likely anything would even so much as see him.  He was being silly.  Determination sparked in his chest again, and he slipped out, shutting the door behind him.

The Sun had vanished, to his relief.  Lómion did not like bright light at the best of time, and he wanted even more than usual to fade into the shadows at the edge of the path.  He slipped sideways off the road proper, just to ensure he didn’t run into anyone who might still be out and about.  Then he set off.

It was only about a quarter-mile to the guardhouse, but he realized something was wrong before he had gone more than a third of that distance.  The woods were still terribly still, that stillness of the heavy conditions before a severe storm, with the trees only occasionally making little wavelike eddies of motion against the boiling grey-black clouds, but he could hear the sound of leaves rustling.  He took a soft step and another, paused, cocking his head to one side to hear better.

Something was moving through the brush to his right, on the other side of the main path.

Lómion swallowed.  He had often felt as if the forest was friendly, but he had rarely had the chance to spend much time in it.  There were usually servants to watch him if he went further than a stone’s throw from the house, and even if he was allowed to range farther afield, it had always previously been in the funerary white that he and his Ammë wore for visibility, so that someone could come to their aid if they ran into trouble.  Now, suddenly, he felt very small and foolish.  The forest was ancient, and he was only a child: how could he have thought that it would protect him from the terrible monster folks were whispering about?

He turned to go back and saw a little red fox slip out of the bushes on the other side of the road, pause in the center of the path to lift its nose to the wind, and then gallop off in the direction of the guardhouse.  Lómion’s racing heartbeat slowed, and he laughed softly.  A fox!  Of course, Nan Elmoth was full of animals.  What else had he expected?

With a cheerful little whistle at his own idiocy, he started off again.  He had not gone more than three paces when his foot slipped and he went down hard on one knee with a strange little crackling noise.  Lómion stared in perplexity at his hands, now resting on the fallen autumn leaves, on which had somehow formed a slippery crust of rime.

When it appeared, the creature did not make a noise of any sort.  It simply rose like a white swan from Lómion’s left, opening a pair of lopsided black eyes like pools of ink and stretching out a coil of substance as if to reach for Lómion’s throat.

All thought fled.  He screamed and ran—not down the path, which was slicked with white ice as far as he could see, but across it and into the woods on the opposite side.

Branches whipped past on either side of his head.  He could hear nothing but the pounding of his own heart in his ears and the rushing of his own breath in his lungs.  Cold crept down the back of his neck and along his cheeks, and he realized that ice was forming on his tightly-braided hair.  Lómion sobbed desperately.  He could not hear the thing behind him.  He had no idea how close it was, though the temperature around him was still dropping, from the heavy, laden air of late summer to something like the first snowfall of winter and beyond.

As the first wave of mindless terror receded slightly, he tried frantically to think of something he could do.  There was no way he would reach the guardhouse and without that, he was weaponless and defenseless.  His father could call the wood’s powers to him and was presumably intending to do so when the hunting party found the creature, but it seemed to have slipped past them, and Lómion might have read of the rituals to raise the forest, but he had never been allowed to try.  Eöl would not have the only living child Aredhel had borne him threatened in any way. so Lómion had always been kept like a pretty bird.  Useless and powerless, he thought bitterly, and it was all going to mean his death now, flowing towards him on billows of white.

What did he have to lose?  Couldn’t he at least try one of the rituals?  If he was to die anyway, wouldn’t it be better to die fighting?  He thought if he ran much longer his lungs might burst anyway.

The only ritual he could seem to remember was a simple one to choose a good path.  He had even seen his father do it several times.  Of course, it required blood, and he had no blade.  But there were many thorns in the wood—Lómion raised his nose and sniffed, hoping against hope—and almost immediately he caught the peculiar wax-wood smell he’d been hoping for.

He had a bad feeling the creature was toying with him at this point, unless he’d really run hard enough to leave it behind.  But he could still feel ice on the back of his neck and didn’t think he had long.  Turning to the left in his headlong dash, he followed the smell, and as he did so wet his lips in the desperate hope of getting enough breath to be able to whistle the little tune the ritual required.

He sighted the thorns and somehow pushed himself faster, though he knew this would be the last dash he could make, doing his best to whistle while his lungs worked like pistons to get air through his lungs.  The song that came out was a shivering little series of notes like birdsong, if the bird had had a particularly bad night’s sleep.  He had no idea if it was close enough to what it was supposed to be.

As he reached out for the thorns, that awful stillness fell on the forest around him again, and something twisted around his ankle, so cold or hot that it burned a line of pain right around it.  Lómion screamed and fell forward into the thorns, pain stabbing through his hands and limbs.  “No!” he shrieked.  “Help!  Ammë!”

But he had run so hard that those feeble cries were the last he could manage before he had no breath left, and all he could do was lie limp and panting, with the blood thundering in his ears, waiting for the thing to turn him over and pluck out his throat.

Nothing happened.  Multi-colored sparkles swirled in front of Lómion’s vision and cleared slowly.  Wood creaked softly around him, as if the wind had started up again.  His hands and legs prickled with pain where they had been scratched.

He was sniffling, he realized, which his father would probably have scolded him for, and there was moisture leaking down his cheeks and the back of his neck.  A gentle brush of something over his head made him shriek and cower underneath his hands.  He knew he ought to face his death like a warrior, but he was scratched and bleeding all over and his limbs felt like water.

When nothing else happened for a good ten heartbeats, he rolled himself over to see what had touched him.  It was a branch.  It was now hanging uncertainly above him, hard to see in the strange dimness that seemed to have overtaken him.  It took him another long moment to realize that this was because the thorns seemed to have knit themselves up into a solid wall behind him and over his head, apparently sealing him off from the monster.

Shivering, Lómion sat up slowly, drawing his knees into his chest.  “I’m s-s-sorry,” he stammered, his mouth and hands shaking violently.  “Fuh, for making things wuh, worse.”

The branch moved in; he flinched, expecting a blow.  It halted before touching him, bobbing up and down uncertainly.  Then it appeared to change its mind.  A bud swelled on the end of it, rapidly blossoming into a flower, which bloomed and opened, then lost its petals and swelled more until there was a slightly lumpy green fruit hanging there, which it held out as if in offering.

“I, I can take this?” Lómion asked.  The branch made a wiggling motion as if it were nodding, and the thorns rustled companionably around him.  “Thank you.”

He plucked it gently and took a tentative bite.  It might, he supposed, be poisonous, but it didn’t seem likely under the circumstances.  Indeed, the juice of the fruit was sweet, with a soft tang, not unlike an orange, though the texture of the flesh was more like a pear.  The juice flowed down his throat, leaving behind a mild and pleasant burning, almost but not quite like the wine he was only allowed on special occasions.  

Lómion managed to eat three quarters of it before exhaustion overwhelmed him, and he fell into a healing sleep on the carpet of dead leaves beneath him, with the thorns keeping a vigilant watch.

* * *

When he woke, the thorns had parted slightly above him, though not behind, and he could see the a faint silver glimmer between them.  He had been covered in soft dry leaves, so he was quite warm.  The bitter cold had vanished, but somehow so had the heavy waiting feeling of an approaching storm.

Lómion yawned and rubbed some drool from his chin with the back of his hand.  He couldn’t sit up the whole way, with the thorns above his head, but he pushed himself up to his hands and knees.  He was just wondering what to do next when the branch reappeared, sliding down from the top of the knitted thorns, and made a very beckoning sort of gesture.  

“You want me to follow you?” Lómion asked.  Again that wobbly nod.  Well, what else was he going to do?  And it did seem as if somehow the ritual had worked—showing him a surprisingly good path, even.  “All right.  Lead the way.”

The branch moved on forward down the tunnel of thorns, which rippled in its wake, and Lómion crawled after it.  The thorns went on for some time, but eventually the began to widen and unknit more, and he was able to go up into a kind of crouching crabwalk and then, a little further along, stand.

He emerged from within the tight mess of thorns to find himself in a small clearing.  He must have lost his sense of time entirely, for it was night—or rather, late twilight, the sky above him a deepening turquoise already adorned with several glittering stars.  At one end of the clearing was a small pond, over which a thousand little fireflies were shimmering gold, and an ancient willow drooped, its fronds brushing and disturbing the silvery surface of the water.

“It’s…very pretty,” Lómion said doubtfully.  There was no real response.  Even the gesturing branch seemed to have disappeared.  With no other indication of what to do, he pursed his lips to the side, shrugged, and began to make his way down to the water.  

The clearing up to the lip of the pond was covered in soft grey ankle-high grass, with clumps of little white star-shaped flowers scattered throughout.  They almost seemed to shine with their own light in the soft dim radiance of the stars and the fireflies, and Lómion paused for a moment to look closer and to breathe in a faint sweet scent, unfamiliar but strangely soothing.

When he reached the edge of the pond, he saw that something was glimmering at the bottom.  It did not seem to be deep, and everything about the little glade seemed to frame it, as if the whole place were a store-room of a rather unusual kind.  Lómion knelt at the side of the pond and reached out hesitantly, thinking to at least see what the thing was that gleamed like a little star in the shallow dark water.  He had to submerge himself right to the shoulder, but his fingers touched something cool, smooth, and solid, and when he closed his hand, it closed around a handle of some sort.

The wind rustled through the willow, and the fronds of it fluttered up with its passing, brushing gently across Lómion’s cheek.  “May I take it?” he asked hesitantly.  Somehow, he could feel the attention of the whole forest upon him, waiting.  Acceptance—encouragement even—flowed through him, buoying him up strangely.  He had never felt this way before, unless it were in his mother’s arms, rocking him to sleep.

It made him brave, the gentle regard of this old and terrible forest.  Firming his chin, Lómion pulled on the handle of whatever lay hidden beneath the water, and it came to him in a burst of cloudy silt.  Fireflies scattered nearby and reformed, and he had to blink at their sudden brightness.

When his vision cleared, he found that he was holding an old, finely-made sword with a queer patterned blade that looked like rippling water.  Hooked around the crossguard was a fine net of silver mesh with something inside it.  Lómion tugged it open and pulled out a small mail shirt, shimmering and light as cloth in his hands.  He stared at it, awed.  The wind whistled through the trees, high and far away.

“Will it fit me?” he asked.  There was no answer, but he did get the sense that there was still that attention focused heavily upon him.  Well, he supposed he might as well try.  He had been looking for a sword, if nothing else, and a mail shirt would certainly be better than nothing, particularly one as whisper-light as silk, that might actually allow him to move as silent and unseen as he did normally.

He pulled the coat of mail over his head; it slithered down across him and settled easily over his shoulders.  It was perhaps a shade too large, and Lómion thought of Gladlin telling him that he ought to eat more often.  He laughed suddenly and took up the sword, testing the blade with his thumb.  It was still honed to sharpness somehow, and he winced at the pain.  Blood welled up from his riven flesh and trickled down the blade.

Ahhhh. The forest seemed to sigh, and Lómion’s awareness exploded outward.

His mind grew roots, his soul leaves, and suddenly all about him was the forest, dark and reaching.  It was bound, he found, this wild thing, bound to serve the dark king—but it loved the white lady and her small, shadowed son, with a violent, fierce, terrible love such as Lómion had never experienced before in all of his short life.  It felt that he would not bind it, and he agreed—why bind such a vast, squirming, fearful, beautiful entity?

He had seen his mother ride a horse once—his father had taken the two of them to a summer festival near the gates of Nan Elmoth, with a full retinue of men at arms to watch over them, and there had been horses there, perhaps brought by a few of the visitors.  Aredhel had seen one—neither saddled nor bridled, snorting patiently by a tree—and something in her had kindled.  She had leapt upon its back and ridden it the length of the clearing, thrice, before laughing and returning to her husband and child.

For one lap, in the middle, she seemed utterly free and unfettered, her black hair streaming behind her in the golden sunlight, the white of her gown stained dappled grey with the shadows of the trees.  Lómion had wanted to see her ride on and on, as far as the mount would take her, off into the shadowed places between the trees and out of sight, so that she could keep riding forever, as free as the wind.  Of course she had come back swiftly.  But he had always wanted to see her like that again, and it was that sense of freedom and unfettered wildness that he could feel thrumming beneath the pulse of the forest, if only he could unbind it.

If only.  He was just a child, and he was bound as much as it was, and he could not free it.  It knew this, and it thanked him all the same, for his care.  It told him, then, two things: where to find the lair of the creature he was seeking and how to get there, and that he ought, once he had finished, to hide the sword.  In years to come, that sword might unbind the ancient binding.  When he had grown and reached the fullness of his youth, perhaps.

Would he agree?  Would he agree to this covenant sealed in blood?

Of course, Lómion responded, with all his being, and he whistled a high clear song that he had found in another one of the books, a charm to unbind the wind and whistle up a storm.

The glade shimmered.  Twilight deepened in its shadows, and then with a sound like a thousand birds taking flight, it vanished into the dimness, leaving Lómion standing on the dark winding pathway that he knew would take him to the monster’s lair.

His terror of earlier had quite vanished, now that he was outfitted with sword and mail, and he had the strength of Nan Elmoth at his back.  But he was still cautious.  He had been cautious all his life, and it had usually turned out for the best.  So he slipped quietly from shadow to shadow, keeping one hand on the pommel of the sword.

He became gradually aware that the cold steel of the sword itself was vibrating faintly, and, if he focused on it, a soft and sibilant voice became audible, as thin as a layer of crackling frost, but audible.  I am Anguirel, the sword of your father.  Carry me well, young Elf, and strike true.

It seemed stern and a little distant but not exactly disinterested.  Lómion nodded and moved on forward.

After some time, he came to a rocky scree he recognized.  It led down into an old, dried-up riverbed a mile or two behind the main complex.  Lómion had never been allowed to play there, for fear that he would slip and take injury, but he had sometimes walked along the side and looked down at the ancient blocks of white stone that littered the side and bottom.  Near the lip, he had once found a beautiful impression of a strange insect.  When he had taken it to show Tawardil, she had laughed and told him it was a dead fairy, from long ago, before the rising of the Sun.  When he asked if she had ever seen a living one, she just grinned and wouldn’t answer.

Now he went past the lip and over the edge, walking slantwise to the slope and keeping to the shadows of the stones.  He began to find the marks of some other creature’s passage, which heartened him a little.  If the creature had left physical scratches on the stone, as it seemed to have done, it could not be wholly a phantom, and he could be assured that Anguirel would be of use.

Less reassuring was the trail of fresh wet blood it appeared to have left.  Droplets that had barely dried spattered the ground and the stones over other, older stains.  Lómion’s stomach looped over itself as he considered whether this might not have been his blood if Nan Elmoth had not interfered. 

Well—it had.  He continued his careful motion down the side, following the trail but not directly on top of it, sticking to the shadows cast by the many rocks.  He could feel the wind of Nan Elmoth on his neck, and it gave him the courage to whistle again, softly, a song he wasn’t certain if he remembered from his reading or not, but in the next moment, all the ground seemed to glow.  Lómion had good night vision to begin with, but now even in the deepening gloaming it was as if he walked under the Sun at midday.

After a little longer, he reached an opening in the ground—almost a dead drop, but with just enough of a slope that it was probably possible to move onwards if one dug one’s fingers deep into the well-packed soil of its sides.  And there were already marks there, made by too-large hands with ugly claws.  The creature had climbed down here.

Lómion sat at the side and held onto the lip of it, leaning all the way down to try and see if he could get a glimpse of what lay within.  His arm ached with the effort.  From inside the hole, he heard the sound of scrabbling and then a soft little moan, but he could see nothing from this angle.  Gritting his teeth, he slowly lowered himself down, wriggling carefully downward.

He came to another lip above a rather long drop and this time, when he cautiously ducked his head, he was able to make out the scene.  This opening led into the high side of an underground cavern that had probably been hollowed out long ago, when the river still ran.  One one side, neatly piled, was a series of bones, forming what appeared to be a kind of cairn.  On the other side was something that looked rather like a nest—a pile of soft-looking feathers, leaves, and scraps of what appeared to be ancient, ragged cloth.  Curled up on this strange construction was Ronel, eyes shut tight.  Because of the sight spell, Lómion could see what appeared to be ugly bruising across her forehead, and smeared rust-brown stains at the corner of her mouth.

As he watched, trying to think what to do or how to fetch her out, he felt the temperature begin to grow colder again.  Ice formed in his hair, and Anguirel became almost painful to hold.  Fog boiled in from what appeared to be another entrance, and the creature entered.  It no longer seemed formless, whether because it had changed or Lómion’s perceptions had.  He could see wreathed in its cloak of white mist a tall form, like an Elf’s but too thin and too stretched, with eyes burning like black coals in a gaunt, skeletal face.  A soft rattling noise as it moved drew his attention to the chains looped about one leg and arm.  There was a power in them, he recognized, not unlike the spell binding Nan Elmoth—roots of white fire anchoring the chains squarely in the form of this terrible being.

At first, he thought that it did not move like a person, dragging itself along the chamber floor with a terrible scraping sound.  Then he realized he was not entirely right.  It was dragging itself because it could move only the chained arm and chained leg; the other arm and leg hung like dead weight at its side, and its head swayed slowly from side to side.  As it approached Ronel, Lómion reached for Anguirel, not sure what to do, but desperate to protect his friend.

It did not attack her, though.  It loomed over the nest and then, canted awfully to one side, it used the one mobile hand to gently stroke her hair out of her eyes and tug one of the scraps of cloth up to cover her better, like an awful parody of a parent tucking a child into bed.  That same hand then gently pushed apart her lips.  Stooping over her, its body seemed to convulse, and it vomited a horrible cascade of crimson blood right onto her mouth.  She moaned, and it rubbed her throat in a way Lómion had sometimes seen the farmhands do to coax a young lamb to drink.  Blood spattered across both their forms and the stone.

Lómion’s own gorge rose, and he clutched Anguirel tightly.  Before he could think, he had released his hold on the side of the steep passage and let himself drop.  He landed heavily, jarring his bones, but without significant injury.  “Let my friend go!” he called out, raising Anguirel, which made an eager hissing noise, like a disturbed serpent ready to strike.

The creature went still, then slowly its head turned towards Lómion.  His teeth chattered as he saw that the head this time moved almost independently of the rest of the body, the neck elongating in an impossible fashion as it did so.  Blood still trickled from its jaws, and the head twisted round.  It made a dry, rough sound like something choking.  Then it drew itself up so that its head nearly touched the ceiling, the unchained side still drooping downwards, and took a step towards him.

Lómion’s hand trembled on Anguirel.  He felt very small and alone.  “What do I do now?” he asked the air urgently.

To his surprise, the sword answered, its thin voice clearer now than it had been before.  “You might have thought of that before you drew its attention, young lord.”

“Well, I didn’t!” Lómion took a step backward as the creature advanced on him.  “Besides, it might have hurt Ronel.”

“I don’t think it has hurt her at all,” Anguirel said calmly.  “That bruise on her head is probably from a cracked skull.  I imagine she fell through the roof.”

“Well, it’s hurt a lot of other people!”

“Oh, yes, it’s a terrifying monster,” Anguirel agreed.  “As a terrifying monster myself, I recognize another one.  All the more reason to have studied it before attacking.”

“Anguirel!”

The sword laughed, shrill and high.  The monster moved, terribly swiftly, scrabbling across the floor on its chained leg and arm.  Lómion screamed but stood his ground, both hands wrapped around the sword’s hilt.  Somehow, he caught the first blow on the flat of his sword with a ringing clang, but the next snaked easily past his guard and streaked unerringly for his heart.  There was a terrible pain, and he was flying through the air.  His back struck the stone side of the cavern, and Anguirel dropped from his nerveless fingers as he collapsed against the wall, his lungs spasming and heaving for breath.

The creature gave a long, harsh cry.  Half-fainting, head spinning, Lómion clutched for Anguirel.  It was no good.  He wasn’t a good enough sword-fighter, and the monster was too fast for him.  What could he do?  He couldn’t die here!  He couldn’t abandon Ronel!

“Blood,” whispered Anguirel.  “Thy blood can still raise the forest, can it not?”

“Oh,” Lómion gasped.  He’d been so stupid.  As the monster turned its burning gaze towards him again, Lómion closed his hand around Anguirel’s blade.  Slamming the flat of his now-bleeding palm onto the earth beneath him, he whistled a tune he hadn’t even realized he had known, the cheerful little series of chirping notes that started woke him at dawn every morning.

Nothing happened.  The bottom dropped out of Lómion’s stomach.  “Anguirel?” he whispered.  “Am I going to die?”

“Take me up,” the sword urged.

“But I’ve hurt my hand.”  Lómion’s chest bubbled with terror.  Still, he reached for the sword with his other hand, listening to the soft shuffling noises the monster was making as it came closer.  Groaning, he pulled his knees in so that he could use the wall to brace himself as he stood.  He might as well die standing up, he supposed.

Then he realized that the sound of rustling was too loud and too spread-out to just be the noise that the creature was making.  It cocked its head to one side in confusion as Lómion regained his feet.  The earth rumbled warningly beneath his feet.  The monster, reaching him, stood clumsily as well, and Lómion raised Anguirel in his shaking hand.  Puffs of white fog coiled around them, and Lómion felt sweat and blood freezing on his face, frost collecting on his eyelashes.

The monster reared back, raising its too-large, twisted hand for another blow.  This time, Lómion was certain, it would aim for his throat, and the mail shirt would not protect him.  Then black roots, wet with earth, exploded from the sides and ceiling of the cavern, coiling around the monster’s upraised arm.  It roared, struggling against them.

“Now!  Strike!” cried Anguirel.

Lómion roared his own cry in answer, though it was high and small and swallowed by the space around them, and leaped forward to perform a clumsy stab, putting the bulk of the strength from his unmarred hand behind it and guiding it with the stinging, bleeding palm.  

This time the point of the sword sank into the monster’s body, hewing through sinew, bone, and flesh as one.  The momentum of Lómion’s wild charge carried him forward so hard that stumbled and went down on one knee, the monster going over underneath his weight or the weight of thousands of squirming roots.  Anguirel’s point clanged against stone, the ringing noise echoing out into the chamber and fading quickly into a queer and terrible silence.

The only sound for a long moment was Lómion’s ragged breaths in his own ears.  The monster, bound by root and impaled by the dark sword, did not seem capable of rising.  Lómion got slowly to his feet, using Anguirel’s hilt to help him.  The sword scraped against the floor, and the monster groaned softly as the blade wobbled from side to side in its chest, but though it struggled feebly, it could not free itself.

Lómion’s breath steamed in the air.  Moisture trickled down his forehead and the back of his neck, and his armpits and the place between his shoulderblades were sticky and damp with sweat.

“Finish it,” Anguirel instructed him.  “And next time, have a care with my point.  It is all dulled and will have to be sharpened.”

“How?” gasped Lómion.

“A whetstone—”

“How do I finish it?”

It seemed almost pathetic now, lying there and making tiny motions like a dying beetle.  With the fog bleeding away, Lómion could see that it had a shape not quite like an Elf’s, with one whole ear still visible and whole, rounded on the top.  Bits of hair clung to the skull and chest.  The chains bit deeply into its side, all the way up and even over to the tongue remaining in its decayed mouth.  They seemed to emanate from a tarnished silver torc about its neck, oddly difficult to see even now.  Lómion could tell that it was of very fine workmanship, though.

“Break the chains binding its soul,” Anguirel said.  “You will need me and the roots, and a song of unbinding.”

“I don’t know a song of unbinding,” Lómion protested.

The revenant made a groaning, terrible noise in its throat.

“Admittedly a difficulty,” Anguirel agreed.  “Perhaps he does.  Break the chains upon his mouth.”

Lómion made a disgusted noise, but he reached out clumsily with the sword.  The mouth gaped wide and awful, the teeth lining it sharpened into fang-like points and stained darkly.  The tongue in contrast looked almost alive, squirming but constrained by net of fine silver chains across it and sinking deeply into it.  Cautiously, Lómion brought Anguirel across them.  Thin as silk cords, they parted as easily beneath the sword’s bite.  The revenant gasped and gurgled, then spoke in a slurred and hollow voice.  It was no language Lómion knew, but somehow he nonetheless understood the words.

“Thank…you…”

It hummed, deep in its throat, a handspan of notes against one another.

Lómion whistled the song, questioningly, in answer, and more of the chains about the creature’s mouth sloughed away into a fine silver ash.  It writhed, darkness pooling beneath it by blood, but its words came more strongly, more quickly.

“Woken…by the girl.  Could not approach.  Kept her alive…with the blood.  A monster, mad.”  The eyes flickered and dimmed.  Lómion whistled the little tune again, gaining in strength.  “In life—wanted power.  Immortality.  For my ambition, I sacrificed all else I held dear.”  A heavy hand—the unchained one—twitched and fell upon Lómion’s.  “Nowhere for me to go, now.  The Necromancer holds body and soul.”

“His powers within Nan Elmoth are dimmed,” Anguirel answered, the tones of the sword far off.  “And my wielder is born of two lineages that have long defied him.”

“Ah.”

Lómion whistled again, then, swallowing, as the chains continued to unknit, he whistled the lullaby his mother always sang to lull him to sleep.  The roots quivered; the chains sloughed away.  A warm autumn breeze blew down from the hole above, carrying the scent of rain and wet leaves.  The fog boiled away and the creature dissolved into earth.

After he had stayed crouched over it for what felt like hours, Lómion gradually and wearily straightened up.  “It, it’s dead, right?” he asked Anguirel.

“The soul has either passed onto Mandos or it has been taken into the forest,” Anguirel replied.  “I do not know which, but either way, it will not trouble you in this form again.” Its own voice sounded as though it was becoming fainter and weaker.  “I must sleep now, child of dusk.  Hide me here to slumber and find me again in your hour of need.”

Dumbly, Lómion nodded.  He was already shrugging off the mail shirt.  It was the work of a few moments to clean the sword and wrap it in the soft silver.  Crossing softly to Ronel, he decided that he would be able to lift her, so he tucked Anguirel beneath the nest where its glimmer would remain obscured, and took her into his arms.

She woke when he took her outside, stirring and mewing like a kitten.  She seemed weak and confused but was capable of walking if Lómion let her lean on him, and this was significantly faster than if he had had to carry her the whole way.  Halfway up the scree, the promised thunderstorm broke above them, and the heavy wet rain seemed to restore more of Ronel’s senses, enough that she was able to confirm that she had indeed slipped and fallen into the hole and hurt her head.

“I had the strangest dream,” she whispered to Lómion.  “A tall Man, all in white, who fed me soup and sang to me.  He told me I would be all right, and the soup did seem to help the pain in my head.  Did you see him?”

Lómion shook his head.  “Not a sign.”

By the time they had reached the main compound, he had his lie ready.  He had heard Ronel calling for help in her delirium and had gone out swiftly, found her, and brought her back.  By the time the hunting party returned, the two of them had been ensconced in the kitchens and being tended to by Ammë and several of the cooks and healers.

His father strode in, told him sternly he was on no account to do such a foolish thing again, and hugged him tightly.  As this barely counted as a scolding, Lómion let himself relax and drift.  He listened with one ear as Eöl told the guards that they had found no sign of the creature, but the forest told him that it had fled early in the morning, just after the hunting party had set out.  They would continue to be on their guard, but the danger seemed to have passed out of Nan Elmoth.

Lómion thought of bones in the deep and the gurgling, twisted voice of the revenant.  He thought of the way it had stroked Ronel’s hair out of her eyes.

After Eöl had left, his ammë came over to him and looked deep into his eyes.  “My brave son,” Aredhel murmured.  “One day, I hope you will trust me with the truth of this day.”

Then she took his empty bowl of soup, kissed him on the forehead, and stood as if to go over and put it in the sink.  He grabbed her wrist. 

“Ammë,” he whispered.  “When I am grown, we will leave here.”

She smiled at him, sharp and pointed, and whistled, low and clear, a repeated line of little notes that he recognized instantly as the song of unbinding.  Then she nodded, patted his head, and passed on.

Lómion thought of Anguirel beneath the earth and smiled to himself as well.