One: Awake


So much death…

Thranduil moved slowly through the corpses carpeting the grasslands. 'The Dagorlad,' they were calling it now, 'the battle plain;' unimaginative but fitting. The bodies of orcs and other fell beasts far outnumbered those of Men and Elves. Even so, they had lost far too many. His father lay among the dead; so did his mother and younger brother. So many of his friends were gone, too, fighting bravely and skillfully but finally overwhelmed by sheer numbers.

Movement drew the prince from his reverie, the scrape of metal over stone and the clinking of chains. He drew his sword and followed the sounds as quickly and quietly as he could.

Beyond the edge of the Dagorlad proper, Sauron's armies had excavated a deep pit. At the bottom was a stone structure still half-buried in the earth, a spire or bell tower of some kind, but not from any age he recognized. The scraping noises were coming from somewhere inside it.

Thranduil descended to the floor of the pit using the ramp the enemy forces had built, then sneaked over to the spire. There was no one else visible nearby, but under the surface, in the spire, the scraping stopped, replaced by Black Speech in guttural voices.

Orcs.

There was a stair inside the spire, old and worn and half-rotted, leading down into the dark. The elven prince descended slowly, carefully, mindful of every step. Yet as he walked, the scraping resumed, heavier this time, stone over stone. Right as he reached the bottom of the stairs, there was a heavy thud, then silence.

The elf paused, listening.

The sounds of battle split the silence without warning, the orcs struggling against some sort of snarling beast. Thranduil wasn't sure how many there were on either side, but one by one the orcs were falling silence. Their battle cries and shrieks of pain died away to gurgling breaths, then nothing. All that was left was the sound of something panting.

Thranduil was reluctant to face whatever it was that the orcs had unleashed, but at the same time if he could not, how could he ask his people to do so?

Every step down the hall seemed deafening, the slightest rustle of his clothing and armor incredibly loud in the silence. The prince was sure that whatever it was, knew he was there and was lying in wait for him, yet he could not bring himself to care.

The hall opened up into a wide chamber, half-excavated. What drew his attention was the stone coffin in the center of the chamber. It had once been bound shut, but the silver-plated chains now lay pooled around it. Its lid was also silver-plated on the inside, and marked with a cross not unlike the ones Sauron used to kill prisoners when he was feeling particularly cruel.

There were for orc corpses in the chamber, all seemingly uninjured but still dead just the same. At the center of them was a Man, pale and gaunt, wearing strange armor, black scales with a red dragon motif. He was lying on the ground where he had fallen, propped up on his elbows but head bowed, forehead resting against the stone floor. He was panting heavily, that much was clear from his heaving shoulders, but his thick, dark hair obscured his face.

Then the Man lifted his head.

He had a noble face, full lips, and an edging of facial hair along his jaw and also his upper lip. He would have been attractive, were it not for his glowing red eyes and the black blood dripping from his mouth.

Thranduil drew himself up, tightened his grip on his sword, and the Man growled at the threat, baring bloodstained fangs, and started pushing himself up. When one of his hands landed on the chains, the elf heard the sizzle of burning flesh, and the Man jerked his hand back with a hiss of pain. The Man's glowing eyes never left him, studying him intently, yet the more he looked at the elf prince, the more confused he seemed to become.

Then he hissed again, and lunged – and broke into a swarm of shrieking black bats. The elf prince leaped backwards, bringing up his blade, but the bats shot passed him down the hall. He sprinted after them, but by the time he reached the stair, they had already flown to the top of the spire and vanished out into the world.

Thranduil walked back down the hall to the main chamber, kicking aside the corpses as he approached the coffin. Aside from the cross on the lid, there were no carvings or reliefs or documents indicating what the creature was, though the elf prince could probably guess based on the way it had killed. His father had told him stories about Morgoth's vampires from the First Age, but they had been half-bat beasts, mindless creatures that existed only to serve the Shadow and prey on the living, not… this. He had to be old, very old indeed, not one made by the Enemy. He had been sealed away in a forgotten age of the world, and now Sauron's forces had unleashed him again.


The War of the Last Alliance eventually ended, yet Thranduil had seen only one sign of the vampire's continued existence – an entire battalion of orcs drained of blood and impaled on stakes, leading the elf prince to tell Elrond, Gil-Galad, and Galadriel about him, and show them the half-excavated tomb. But neither hide nor hair of the Man was seen during the seven-year Siege of Barad-dûr.

That had been for the best, at least for them. No doubt Sauron had been hoping to make an ally of him, but instead he killed a number of the Maia's men and vanished.

Yet as he rode back to the Greenwood with the survivors, Thranduil couldn't help but wonder what became of the vampire from the tomb. Who was he? Where had he come from, and where had he gone? How had Sauron known where to find his prison? (Such information had been destroyed with the collapse of the Dark Tower, and so would remain forever a mystery.) Perhaps most important of all, what would he do now that he was free at last?

When he had asked the questions of Elendil and the other Elf Lords, they had no answers to give.