After the battle, the Red Snake commanded his men to put Aramir into the dungeon somewhere in the deep of Galenlond. Aramir was standing there alone, with no hope of escaping, in almost complete darkness. There was just one small window in his dungeon through which light could pass, but that was enough for him to know how long he was in this dungeon. For four days and three nights. That is how long he was in there. The gaolers would bring him water and breed just enough that he needed. They didn't bring him anything more. Not even bread was very good. Aramir was now sitting on beside the damp stony wall. Since no one talked with him, he started to think.

He first thought about his daughter Arrana. He could have wept because of her safety, but he didn't. Weeping wouldn't save Arrana. He was terrified. Did anyone touch her? Did anyone hurt her? The Red Snake said they didn't, but Aramir wouldn't trust him if he told him that the sky is blue.

The rest of his family were safe, Isaiah and his brother Ondoher were on the border with Arendelle, while Yelena and their other sons were in Minas Hír, together with Ondoher's children. But Arrana wasn't safe. Aramir didn't knew what to do to save her. He couldn't even get his head through the grids of his cell, let alone walk out of the cell and save Arrana.

Aramir was not sorry for himself. He was sorry for Arrana, Adonijah, Eradan, Gad and Ethil and all others who got into these cells. He was sorry for all Israel. He didn't save the people of Israel as he thought he will. The Red Snake was still free, thunder strike him, Aramir was his prisoner, and not the other way around. Nothing went according to Aramir's plan, everything was turned on it's head, everything went the wrong way. Everything. And he could only do the thing he said to Adonijah that he will do.

"Lord, why?" he asked in the complete silence he was in, not getting an answer. He didn't expect it, at least not in a human voice, but he was still sad. Aramir could now understand his forefather David and his singer Asaph, and even righteous Job in part. Asaph and David both asked the Lord in their Psalms why do the righteous suffer but the wicked like Aron win the battle.

"Why did you allowed him to win, Lord?" Aramir knew Lord wouldn't control Aron's will or the will of his soldiers to kill or not to kill (Actually, when he was young, some priest and teachers even told Aramir that they believe God made the free will so strong, that even He cannot control it.) But He could have helped in some way. One of those problems that foreign philosophers called the problem of evil, when God doesn't interfere. This is one of the things that made people, and even the prophets of the past, to doubt God's goodness.

But in the past, when something evil happened and it was dangerous for all Israel, it would be a part of God's plan. Aramir remembered the Babylonian captivity, when the entire cities were destroyed, thousands of men, women and children slaughtered, but almost a hundred years later, everything was fixed and the Temple was rebuilt. Aramir grew tired of the priestly phrase "God works in mysterious ways", but he couldn't deny it as false.

"But if this is the part of Your plan," Aramir started speaking to God. "then what does this bring? What does this do? What is the rest of the plan? How will You turn this defeat on it's head? Will You save us again, like You saved us from Egypt?" Aramir's voice could be heard clearly in his cell. "Will You save us like You feed our fathers and mothers in the desert with the bread from heaven and with the water from stones, Lord? Will You? Like You saved Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego from the furnace of Nebuchadnezzar? Or like You saved us from Holofernes and his army? You cut off his head, using the hands of your servant Judith. Who will be a Judith this time, Lord?"

Aramir then started to speak the words his father David sang:

"I lift my eyes toward the mountains.

Where will my help come from?

My help comes from the Lord, the Creator of heaven and earth.

He will not..."

"You are praying. Just as I expected, my old friend." the voice said, awfully familiar. The voice Aramir hated. He could hear his footsteps, and then he saw that he was carrying a torch in his hand. The fire was strong enough for Aramir to see his face. His face with that scar that no one knows how he got. He was smiling, just as usual. He placed the torch in the nearby sconce.

"And since He won't, I will answer your question: no, lord Aramir, I don't think the Creator will save Israel like He saved our forefathers and foremothers in the desert."

"My forefathers and foremothers." Aramir said, angry. "You are not their son. You don't deserve to call yourself their son." Aramir frowned, but Aron smiled.

"But I am their son, old friend, aren't I? I am their son just as much as you are. I have as many drops of their blood as you have." then the Red Snake offered him bread and water in a canteen. Aramir just glanced at them, not wanting to take either of those things from that criminal.

"So?" Aron asked.

"I would rather take bread and water from the hands of devil himself than from you. Though there is not much difference between you and him."

"I know, but I don't like when my guests starve to death. Will you take it or not?" Aramir still stared at him.

"No?" the Red Snake said, quasi-disappointed. He then threw the bread and the canteen into Aramir's cell. "Pity. I wanted to be polite, but you wouldn't take it." Aramir was just looking at him, not moving the inch of his face, not wanting to show neither fear (which he didn't had, at least for himself) nor hatred and anger (which he definitely had).

"You might be their son by blood," Aramir started "but by your deeds and spirit you embarrass them. And that is even a small word."

"I embarrass them?" Aron said, still smiling. "I am the ruler of their land, how do I embarrass them?" Aramir shook his head at that.

"You are really mad, aren't you? You are not the king of anyone or anything. The Israel is still free of your flag, Red Snake. You are either a blind man or a fool for not seeing that."

"A fool?" Aron then crouched. "Do you have a memory loss, old friend? Did you already forgot what happened at Londis? Your army of ten thousand men was destroyed utterly. They are either all dead or sitting in cells like the one you are sitting in. The only difference of course, is they don't know what you know."

Aramir looked at him with burning eyes, the memories coming to him. And the Red Snake asked him does he have a faulty memory. Aramir remembered very well what happened. He remembered his encounter with the Red Snake at Jol Port. He remembered what he saw there and now, he remembered who was the man sitting next to him.

"I do. I remember. I never forgot it." Aramir said slowly. "I never told anyone. Only to God in my prayers." Aron was still smiling. But this smile was not the same like the previous ones. It was the smile of a man who is mocking someone's ignorance of something important. Aron was hiding something. A plan that he had. Aramir grabbed the grids of his cell violently.

"What do you want to do?" he asked quickly. "Thunder strike you, you fool, what is your plan?!"

"You think I am a fool, my lord, do you?" Aron and Aramir were now eye to eye level. "No, I am not. I am not a fool enough to tell you the plan."

Aramir chuckled at that and got back to sitting beside the wall. The Red Snake finally lost the smile from his face, surprised look replacing it. Aramir then started laughing and couldn't stop. He was almost losing his breath and he wanted to stop, but couldn't.

"What are you laughing at? What is so funny, lord Gondor?" the Red Snake said. Aramir stopped himself from laughing, so to answer him.

"I am laughing at you." Aramir said. "For your naivety. Do you think you are going get something if you do something for them? Do you really think that? If you do so, then I tell you now. Only a mad-man would think that they would give someone a reward."

Then Aron also started laughing, but for a short time. "Oh no, no lord Aramir, you are a fool, not me. You know them only from once that you saw them and from the stories that you heard when you were little." His eyes then filled with knowledge. "I know them because I saw their power. I witnessed their power. I saw what they were all capable of. I also learned another thing about them, lord Aramir. I learned that they cannot lie! It is their curse. They cannot lie. I will get exactly what I want."

"And what do you even want?" Aramir asked him. "What do you want? To kill your entire family? To rule Israel? To rule only Arendelle? Or did you came back from just because you wanted to kill me? Now really: what do you even want?!"

Aron opened his mouth but then closed them and then stood up. "I will not tell you, my old friend. As I said, I would be a fool to do so." Aramir chuckled at that and then looked into him again.

"You are a criminal and a kinslayer. A murderer who wants nothing else but everyone to worship you as if you were a god. You want to have power over everyone else and you are without mercy to anyone. That is what you want, I tell you. You are a fool who is so full of himself that he thinks that they are going to help you. Agnarr should have beheaded when he had the chance." Aron was chuckling the whole time while Aramir was saying these things.

"He was too weak." Aron said. "Weak and dumb to do what was right. To kill me. And his daughters and son are no better than him."

"That's what you are wrong." Aramir said and touched the grids again. "I met the queen Elsa, Aron. She is far more wiser than you think she is. She is not a child. She will do what is needed and she will lead her kingdom against you, Aron. You are laughing now, yes, you are laughing. Laugh. Did you not heard what happened Aron? She froze the entire kingdom by accident a year ago. By then she must have learned how to control her powers and she can destroy all your tricks by a move of her hands. They might have given you some powers Aron, but not enough powerful to challenge her."

"You are a fool to think that I got all that I have from them. You remember that small earthquake that I caused. I didn't learn it from them. I learned it from before. I already knew them. What I know now is simply more things that they taught me to do and improve on, but I had many of these powers from before, lord Aramir." then he glanced at Aramir strangely. "Really strange. You really haven't told anyone. Keeping something a secret for ten years. I must admit to you, Aramir, that is a rare quality. To keep a secret for so long. My plan includes them. They are a very important part of my plan. The most important one actually, and they are the ones who gave this mission. It would be really bad if the fact that I am allied with them gets out of this cell."

"If that is so, then why don't you kill me and I will carry your secret to my grave. Quite literally." Aramir was sick of Aron's games and riddles. He couldn't bear to hear more of them.

"Kill you?" Aron raised his eyebrow. Aramir noticed that the thought didn't cross his mind before, but couldn't think about it any longer."

"Yes, kill me." Aramir said angry. "Bury me alive, throw me off a cliff, hang me, tie me to the horses to tear me apart, throw me into the sea, stab me to death, put me to fight foes I cannot possibly win or behead me in front of all of your subjects, anything! I am sure your mind would not be short of ideas to do something like that." Aron then chuckled.

"Oh, my dear old friend. I will admit to you, I want to kill you, but that would be the last thing I need right now. You would become a martyr and martyrs are always avenged in the end. I would only make more enemies." the Red Snake tilted his head. "I would defeat them, I mean. But it would take a longer time that needed. What are you laughing at now? Yes, I would defeat them. There is no one I am afraid of right now. And no one who can really hurt me." Aramir was chuckling again. His lips were now dry, but he resisted to drink the water from the canteen.

"Oh, victorious Aron the Red Snake, not afraid of anyone or anything, able to defeat any enemy of his own. Nothing can hurt him. Will you then free me from this cell?" Aron looked up, pretending that he was considering the thought.

"No." he said bluntly and Aramir chuckled. "That no one can hurt me was of course the figure of speech. I don't know what you would do, lord Aramir." Aramir laid his head back against the wall and closed his eyes.

"Only thing I know is that your plan, whatever it is, will fail in the end." Aramir opened his eyes and looked into the Red Snake's eyes again. "You will not win, Aron. In the end, your body will be left to the wild beasts to feast on it." Aron was still smiling.

"You are wrong. The wild beasts will feast on the bodies of only nine people I need. On the children of my king brother...and your children as well."

At that, Aramir burned with fury. He stood up as fast he could and tried to jump at the Red Snake but the grids stopped him in doing so. The Red Snake was just chuckling, not showing a hint of fear at Aramir's anger, which just made him even angrier.

"Do not touch my children!" Aramir roared with his voice, sending echoes throughout the dungeon. "Do not even think about it! If you touch them, I will..."

"You will do what, lord Aramir?" Aron laughed and punched the grids. He was taller than Aramir three or four inches "You can barely get your hands through these grids. How will you get the rest of your body out of that cell of yours? Do you have some powers I never heard of, old friend? How will you exactly protect your children from me?"

He then raised his eyebrow again. "Oh, yes." he smiled again like a devil. "You reminded me of another reason I am keeping you alive. You will be a good bait for your son and heir. He will march into battle to save you."

"Isaiah?" Aramir said aghast.

"You don't know? Well, what a coincidence, my friend. I have spies in every corner of Israel and all of Canaan itself, and the word has come to me that your eldest son is right now, with an army of two thousand men, in the city of Arendelle, preparing to fight me together with my niece. How lucky for them. My other niece and my nephew are also going there right now, and so is your second youngest son." Minardil! How?! "So when I attack Arendelle, I will catch five fishes with one net. And I already have your daughter in my grasp. I will take other three of your sons later and then everything will be prepared."

"You are a fool! You just told me you will not tell me your plan."

"And I didn't." Aron's smile was gone and his snake's eye was now shinning. "I told you what people I want to take. I haven't even told you everyone I want to take. I didn't tell you what I plan to do with them, nor how to catch them, did I?"

"My daughter?" Aramir repeated the words. "What do you want to do with her? With all of them? Tell me!"

"You are my prisoner, lord Aramir, and not the other way around." Aron put his left hand behind his back. "I will not kill you any time soon, but I would advise you to be quiet that I don't change my mind." he placed his right hand on that scar on his neck. "I always had a reminder of you, lord Gondor, and I cannot forget what you did at Jol Port."

"And I wonder what you did after that! What did you do? You think I am terrified of common folk's tales of your travels in the west do you, Aron? I can bet on what you did on those travels. You came to the western shore of Nilliad and then you stayed there for all those ten years, and found some fools to follow you there! After that you bought those bear-wolves from some animal trader over there and that is how you ended up here! I can bet, no, I know that what you said on the docks was a lie. Killed unseen creatures? I bet that in all that time you haven't killed a rat bothering you in your house! If you even had one."

"This is the reason I like you, lord Aramir." Aron said, smile returning to his face. "Everyone else before you that I captured would start screaming and weeping like a little baby, and would tell me everything they know. They would betray their own mothers just for me to get out of their sight, but you? Here you are, talking to me like I am a local lord, insulting me and even threatening me, while in my own stronghold." Aron laughed. "Truly, lord Aramir, not even my own family ever had that kind of bravery to talk with me that way, except of one of them, and he is dead. But, I regret that I haven't made you drunk and sleepy because I also love insults just as much as any man alive, my friend. You think I haven't killed a rat? No. I killed something far worse."

Then Aron showed Aramir the head of a certain creature. It's head looked like a mix between a snake and a bird, and it caused Aramir to flinch. What is that?"

"This is a basilisk, lord Aramir." Aron answered. "The creature with head, legs and wings of a bird and tongue, tail and body of a snake. The so called king of snakes. Everyone thought they didn't exist on the whole world, ever in history. And yet here I am, holding the head of an 'non-existing' creature. Look at it yourself, lord Aramir. Does it look like a fake?"

Aramir didn't want to confirm with words and thus bring pleasure to Aron, but he couldn't lie himself-this was a real head.

"You see very well, I see." the Aron threw the head into the other side of the room, as if it were a rag for cleaning a room.

"Not gone further than the land of Nilliad? You sure? Do you recognize this, lord Aramir?" them Aramir took out a sword that was red as blood. It was a sword made from the rarest kind of iron in the world-the red iron. When Aramir was still a young man, barely entered his twenties, thirty years ago, a lord adventurer came back from the Red Lands in the far west with an axe made of this iron and he didn't know how to make more of it. He payed that axe. The only place where this kind of iron could be found were precisely the Red Lands, named that way exactly because of this type of iron.

"You see this to, yes you do." Aron said and put his sword into the sheath that Aramir thought appeared out of nowhere. "I am not the easy man to defeat, Aramir, I thought you knew that better than anyone else did. I know more things than you think I do, I plan greater schemes than anyone is able to make with their minds. I make webs Aramir, like a spider."

"So what are you then?" Aramir stilled his voice. "How should I call you? The snake? The spider? The demon? How?"

"Ah, yes names and titles." Aron said, his voice on the level of Aramir's. "If every name or a title ever given to me was a coin with worth of one shekel, I would be the richest man alive, maybe even richer than Solomon was. Call me whatever you want, Aramir. Look, I called you by five names in this talk of ours, you see. And you called me by more than ten. Names are names, they don't matter. All those names signify one and the same thing. They describe that thing, but they don't matter in and of itself. But if a name is remembered, what it signifies will also be remembered."

"I know your name will be forgotten after all this is over, Aron, be certain of that." Aron smiled at that again. The smile seemed to never abandon his face.

"My name forgotten? Oh no, lord Aramir. In the future, when new children will be born, all children will hear my name before they even hear their own names. I will be the only one that remains. As for you and your family and my extended family, I would not be so sure for them."

Aron then took the torch from the sconce. "Enjoy your solitude for now, my old friend. This is the first, but it will not be the last time you and I will talk here. Farewell." when Aron finished, he walked into the darkness and the light of his torch disappeared, but not as if it was extinguished, but rather like it was never there.

Aramir fell back to sit against the wall and hit his leg in anger with his fist. He then felt something, or rather nothing in his mouth. That was it. His mouth and his lips were dry. Really dry, like the desert. He was thirsty. He grabbed the canteen and drank the water.