I'm not totally sure where this is going. Right now it's just a Rohirric child, a victim of war, sees her first Elf and is changed forever by it.
She sawed off her curls with a knife, carefully aiming the sharp edge outwards and away from her neck. The hanks of hair fell to the earth. She buried them, then smudged her pale face with the grime on her hands. She plundered the bodies of the dead, peeling clothes from their lifeless, stinking bodies. Tears burned in her eyes, along with smoke. She felt leaden, numb. It caused her only the slightest twinge of disgust to pull off her own wool dress and disguise herself in the salvaged clothes of a little boy who lay dead and bleeding in the dust by the stables.
There were no horses left. She packed a spare set of clothes, a small dagger, a bow and a quiver full of arrows. Then she set off on foot across the plains with the five other survivors: all children. All blank faces, stunned and silenced. All tiny in the face of their horror. They did not know where they were going. They stumbled in a straight line towards the setting sun.
She was cold with terror. Her mind was crystalline, sharp as ice. Her numb lips formed the words, and her voice spoke them: wavering, clear. The brutish Orc heads turned, their bloody teeth bared in savage smiles. She pointed, spoke again. They seized her by the shoulders and forced her ahead of them, prodding her in the back to lead the way. And she did.
Footstep after footstep, one neatly after another in the swaying grass, she led them to the other children. To save her own life. To save her heart still beating, pounding a tattoo against her ribs, to save her lungs, sucking in the dusky air. To save her eyes, wide open and frantic but terribly dry. Footstep after footstep. She lead them to the camp. She pointed. Then she ducked and hid behind a large boulder, clutching her head and shaking violently as she tried to ignore the piercing screams splitting the night, and the sickening sound of metal sinking into flesh.
She lost her identity. She lost her name. She staggered on the edge of life and death, fending of her Orc captors by leading them to village after unarmed village. She kept herself alive for week after week, until the days turned into months, and she was skin on bone, hollow eyes in a carved haggard face. She stayed alive, by the blood of hundreds of others.
First she'd slip past the watch. It wasn't hard, when they saw only a starving peasant boy with short matted curls and a filthy face stumbling towards them, begging for charity. When they'd let her by, given her food, she'd do the worst, and find moment alone to set the thatched roofs aflame. Then run, because her job was done, run through the smoke to safety while the Orcs charged into the blaze, howling with bloodlust and hewing down every fleeing innocent that tried to escape the flames.
Month after month. It could not go on forever. It had to end. Either with her death or theirs.
She was so cold inside, so numb. She didn't know her own mind. No one to talk to but herself, and her thoughts chased each other in circles. Her nightmares – were they real? What was real? Reality was worse than a nightmare. Did that make it untrue? She was bone-achingly tired. But she was still sharp and still desperate, and still unwilling to die. She protected her life with every ounce of cunning that she had, because her still-beating heart was all she had left to guard.
Oh how she longed to hear human voices, kind gentle human voices, and how she longed to feel the friendly touch of human hands. It had been so long. Did she still remember how to speak? Did she remember how to smile, how to open her arms and embrace? She was so tired. She wondered whether sleeping was waking or waking was sleeping or if it was all one and the same, but none of it mattered, really, because she had no one to tell it to except herself.
At night behind her closed eyes, she saw the bloody faces of the children she had betrayed and imagined she heard them screaming.
The Wizard found her useful. So she would live for a while yet. He gave her a meal. One meal, and condescending, cruel instructions. Then he turned her out of his high black tower and left her on her own again, without even the Orcs whom she had become so used to. She stole a horse a few days later, from a village that had escaped plundering, and rode off to Edoras, towards human company. But she knew that she went to them to kill them, indirectly, the same way she had killed the others. This time, though, she had to weaken a fortress, an army, a king – and who knew what was in store for her when the last of them were dead.
She remembered how to smile, and how to laugh, and what her hands looked like when they were clean. She remembered human voices, gentle and warm with kindness. She remembered the dancing, flashing rhythm of facial expressions and the flying movement of hands during a conversation. She remembered the comfort of lying on blankets before a fire. She remembered the joy of a full stomach.
She felt a stabbing pain in her heart when she thought of betraying these people to the Wizard, and for the first time her fear of death was overshadowed so very slightly by another emotion. But not for long enough to make a difference. She still looked at their faces and knew they'd soon be cold and dead. She never questioned this, only felt sharp pangs of regret.
White-gold hair. A carved, angular face. Sharp, flashing blue-grey eyes. An inhuman voice, beautiful but terrifying. An Elf before her very eyes. An Elf that turned round and looked at her, saw the stunned look on her face, and smiled a smile so beautiful that she was frozen for several minutes after he rode away.
She was entranced, shaken to the core. She followed him at a distance, just watching, her eyes wide and bright as coals in her dirty face. Then one day he turned his hawk-like eyes on her once again, and called her near. She moved in a daze and sank to her knees at his feet. She felt his hand on her hair, heard his strange unearthly voice in her ears. And afterwards when she smiled at him, breath shaken from her lungs, he nodded in return or beckoned to her and she came and sat at his feet, listening to him talk to his companions and enjoying the lightness of his long fingers on the crown of her head.
Soon her fear of death was turned to mere vapor in her heart, replaced by a burning terror that her betrayal would kill him, this Elf who was so kind to her. There was a fire in her veins, a strength now rearing in her blood. She would not let him die.
They thrust a heavy axe into her untrained hands, pulled clinking chain-mail onto her thin quailing frame and strapped the weight of a helmet onto her head. Her heart leapt in terror. They told her not to be afraid. They slapped her on the back. They led her to the wall and told her to kill, or be killed.
She wanted to scream that she was a girl, that she did not want to fight, that she was scared and weak and tired and did not know how to wield a weapon. But far off in the distance, bright against the falling night and clinging wisps of fog, she saw the gleam of fire on his pale hair, and she held herself steady. She could not hide below in the caves while he risked his life up above, straining to hold back the tide of evil. So she clamped her chapped lips shut and tightened her rough, grimy fingers around her weapon, and when the Uruk-hai appeared in the distance, she did not flee.
She survived the battle. By luck or fate or her fortune of being small enough to pass unnoticed in the fray, she survived with only shallow wounds and lived to see another dawn, this time as a girl free from bondage. For now she could see that the Wizard was overthrown, and his honeyed words fell from her mind, leaving her at liberty.
But her Elf, her Elf -- he had gone, with only a brief smile and a word for her, the girl he now called a "brave esquire," and believed to be an orphaned peasant boy. She felt herself heavy, weighted with insignificance and deceit. She sat alone by the coolness of the stone walls of the Deep and spoke her name to the silence, wishing he could hear it. Yet she did not dare shed her disguise.
To Edoras, unnoticed in the crowd, then to Dunharrow, again by stealth. They paid no heed to a dirty-faced young boy riding in their midst, and if they noticed they dismissed him as someone else's squire. For that is the story she spun, to the few who questioned her joining them. To Dunharrow she made her road, because she did not know where to go or what to do, save that she wished for her Elf, and he was going to war. So to war she would go also, and if she died in the deed, then it was no tragedy. She could not think what to do with her life, except to throw it away or contrive to stay near the Elf who named her in jest his esquire.
What was in a life, anyways? It seemed to her they were made of memories and loved ones, for that is what she used to have in hers. But now her memories were bitter, and those she loved were gone. Better then that she should die and join them in pursuit of the last she held dear to her heart, than to go on without purpose.
When it occurred to her that she was now seeking death where once she had fought tooth and nail to avoid it, she laughed. But she couldn't seem to find that old tenderness for her beating heart that she used to cherish, and her body felt like extra weight clinging to the heels of her flying soul.
Pelennor Fields. To be there was quite different. To breath the stinking, smoky air and to feel in her veins the rush of adrenaline that came from seeing a mass of furious foes was very different. The air was hot and static, her breath came quick in her lungs. And suddenly she was aware of it, very aware of it: of the air passing easily in and out of her body, and of the skipping, light beat of her heart, and the feel of the helmet on her head. She was suddenly again aware of her life. And too late she felt a rush of wild, panicked emotion rise up her in her throat, for she realized that in her haste and sorrow at being left alone without guidance she had made a dire mistake. She did not want to die, not yet.
But too late for such grievances. The King blew his horn. Her horse surged forward. And with a throat dry in fear, she drew her long dagger. She had asked for death, and now she was sure she would receive it.