Spring of the year 509 of the First Age, the northern part of the Echoriad:
"Maeglin! Wait on us, princess!"
The female rider ahead of the two Lords of Gondolin did not seem to have heard Salgant, for she encouraged her horse to continue. Maeglin, the second Princess of Gondolin and niece to its King Turgon, had wanted to explore more of the mountains in the hope of possible finding new seams of iron and her uncle had requested that two of the Lords of Gondolin followed her, since he seemed to think that she could be hiding a plan to escape, and she had responded by choosing Rog and Salgant, who she trusted the best of the Lords.
"This is far north of Anghabar, I have to say," Rog commented, referring to the iron mine in which the House of the Mole under Maeglin extracted iron for the Hidden City far behind them. The princess, black of hair and eye color, looked over her shoulder for a moment.
"I wanted to get away from Gondolin and Tumladen for a few days at least, and why not claiming a search for a new possible mine as a good reason? It is not like I have left Tumladen since I first arrived here!"
Maeglin did not mean to snap at them, but she was deeply annoyed by how overprotective her uncle was towards her, rarely allowing his niece to leave the valley where Gondolin was placed.
"And you have a perfectly legal reason to be cross with the King, young miss, you are not your late mother reborn and have a very different personality than her. Yes, it was wrong of your father to kill her like that, or aiming to try to slay his own daughter, but the King really should not have executed him and made you a orphan within a day of that event. And that is something which makes it difficult for you to trust him."
Rog was among the oldest Elves living in Gondolin, someone who had been alive at the Great Journey of the Elves, and had enough bitter life experience to be able to guess the motive between Eöl's unbelieve actions towards his own family, despite never meeting the Avari Elf before Aredhel had shown up in Gondolin with her daughter 109 years earlier.
"Oh yes, a very great impression, killing your own brother-in-law in front of your niece whose father he is," Salgant muttered for himself while standing up in the the stirrups so his horse could step upwards to follow the small mountain road a little easier.
Suddenly, Rog stopped. There was a strange sound in the distance, if his ears did not betray his old fighting instincts.
"Orcs!" he warned, and all three Elves drew their weapons. Rog and Salgant may not be wearing armour, but Rog's warhammer beside the glavie and the chain whip used by Salgant could still be deadly. Maeglin herself had a smaller sword in her hands, made to suit her feminine built and weight by Rog himself as a secret gift after overhearing Maeglin complaining about getting out of shape with her weapon training. While they had their crashes as a married couple, Eöl and Aredhel had been in agreement that their only child should at least know self-defense.
"This way!"
If it was just a small group of orcs which had started a fight between themselves for any random reason, they could hopefully kill all of them and ensure that Gondolin was still hidden away from the eyes of the Dark Lord.
~X~X~X~X~X~X
At arriving there, it seemed indeed like the orcs had been in a fight not even half a hour ago, and it was pretty easy for the three friends to kill off the remaining ones.
"Well, that was a nice way of getting rid of my anger against uncle. I should be able to greet him next time without sounding like I want to murder someone," Maeglin smiled as she used a semi-clean cloak from a orc to clean off the blood from her sword. Behind her, Salgant checked on the still bodies by beheading the orcs with his glaive, just in cause someone tried to fake their death and trying to escape once they had left.
"Hmmmm?" Rog wondered for himself, taking a closer look at some of the now headless bodies, "Odd, that is marks from the claws and teeth of a warg. A really big one, I must say."
"Maybe it was suffering from rabies and ended up attacking the orcs it was obeying otherwise?"
Maeglin had been taught about that horrible illness among animals from the shamans living in Nan Elmoth, and recalled how her own first kill had been done in self-defense against a such sick animal while screaming for her parents to help her. The Elves was fortunate to avoid the illness, but being bitten was always taken seriously and never treated as a joke.
"Perhaps. It did give us less work to do, so perhaps we can return home in peace."
It was in that moment as Maeglin noticed something strange in the thin grass at her feet. Kneeling, she picked up what seemed to be a throwing dagger, still with reasonable fresh blood on it. And there was something else at the dagger hint as well. Holding it up, against the setting afternoon sun to reveal hair strands, she saw a much unexpected colour:
"Dark reddish hair….?"
Then she looked around again, for a closer look. There had been a fight here before she, Rog and Salagant had arrived, but what had really happened? And the blood spots on the rocks seemed to almost form a trail of some kind…
She followed the trail, towards a set of rocks that led down to a small ravine where a river should be running, if she mentally remembered her maps of this area right. Looking over the edge, Maeglin saw something which alarmed her greatly: A male elf, if she saw right, dressed in ill-matching pieces of armour, the owner of the dark red hair, which covered the face from being seen.
"Rog, get me the climbing rope you took along in the saddle bag this morning, right now! And Salgant, start making our cloaks into something to pull up a injured person with!"
There was a fear in her voice that revealed the seriousness of the situation, even without the two Lords seeing what she had seen.
"Right away, miss Maeglin!"
Maeglin herself managed to climb down quickly, and ran over to the immobile Elf who had fallen facedown just outside the very edge of the river. Any closer with the bleeding head, and it would have been a death by drowning because the injured Elf was unconscious from the fall. The dead body of a warg was in the river not far away.
"So much blood….!"
Against her own wishes, Maeglin once again had that mental image of how her father's dead body must looked like after the fall, broken against the cliffs.
"Dead or alive?" Salgant's question brought her back to the present, thankfully, and she carefully turned the head just a little to feel on the pulse on the neck, which was next to impossible with the iron collar around the neck.
She could feel the pulse just narrowly, The healers in the mine was going to have a full night of work if they wanted to save this unknown Elf. A weak groan between the pale lips, and Maeglin saw a very short glimpse of a black-coloured eye before it was closed again.
"I need help to move him, I do not want to aggravate any internal damage."
Even if this Elf was not someone from Gondolin, Maeglin refused to leave him here to die, alone and in a great pain. Her uncle might forbid contact with the world outside his Hidden City, but this was not a normal situation. This was about life or death.