Talion had been prepared for a landing. A landing that involved the rocky and hard ground of Gorgoroth.
He had not been planning on snow. Or trees.
Or flocks of birds.
In the brief seconds of peace he had, Talion managed to partially clear the ringing in his ears and realized that the heat of Mount Doom had vanished. The air was far too cold for Mordor. He had just enough time to feel the glaring absence of Sauron in his being before Talion descended into a moving cloud of squawking and feathers.
That would be the birds.
It happened too quickly for Talion to manifest his wraith and simply pass through the avians. He was rattled by a series of thunks and cracks as downy feathers and rich red blood splattered against his armor. Talion's vision was obscured as grey feathers became caught in his jagged helm.
So he slipped his vision into the wraith world just in time to see a towering pine rushing to meet him -or was it the other way around? Talion used his wraith to dodge the top of the pine trees. The angle of his maneuver made it so that he couldn't get a grip on any of the green branches that blurred past him.
Then Talion "landed" in a snowdrift, something he hadn't seen since he ordered the destruction of Seregost. Oh and the bird feathers made it so that his landing was entirely horizontal rather than vertical.
As Talion clambered out of the snowdrift, he did not make groans or wheezes as any other man might. Talion had not truly needed to breathe since the days of hazy happiness in a different land. Lacking any nerves that might protest at movement so soon after such a fall, Talion could quickly take stock of himself and his location.
He had tumbled to the bottom of a gulley after bouncing away from the pines. He was surrounded by slate grey rock and falling snow. Talion looked upwards to see the overcast sky and the uniformity of its color. Surely, he thought, if he was in Mordor the sky would have some amount of red in it from the rage of Mount Doom. Where was he?
Talion did not know the answer to that question and it worried him.
With his location remaining unknown, Talion looked over his body. When he was freed of Sauron's domination, he had been too deadened and too focused on immediate survival to take stock of his arms and armor.
Now that the grayscale vision had dropped away and he could feel motivation again, he had that chance. And what a sublime pleasure it was to see color, even if it was just plain mud brown and rock grey, again instead of the muteness of the wraith world.
Strangely, he was adorned much like he had been in the early years of his defiance against Barad-Dûr as the Lord of Minas Morgul. Blackened steel cuirass, pauldrons, greaves, gauntlets, spiked vambraces, sabatons, and tasset. Talion could have sworn he had set this set of armor aside, stored in the depths of his Tower, when he had forged a more ornate set of glossy black and gold instead of this more matte affair. A spike of grim amusement registered in Talion's ravaged emotions. Despite his hatred of that traitorous elf and long years of punishment and servitude to the Flaming Eye, Celebrimbor's enhancement of his vocabulary remained with Talion.
That set Talion could dimly recall being...requested by someone? Or had he forged it as a form of snub towards the being he challenged for lordship of Mordor? Talion could not breach the fog that obscured those memories. But he knew it had been destroyed, melted to slag, as part of his punishment for defying his rightful mast-no, no, Talion had no masters, now or then. He had had captors and backstabbers, but not a master.
The terrible sight of a roaring river charging towards the Nine Brethren and pain of its fury flensing their material form into nothingness, compelling a hurried flight back to Mordor. The sight of two of the hated elf lords -both of whom had a kinship with Celebrimbor from the glimpse of their faces- with their false and hollow and lying light stamping itself into the Ninth Nazgul.
Talion started to walk along the bottom of the gulley, continuing to check his gear. Testing taps and knocks on his steel told him that it hadn't weakened in the years since he had last donned it. So it would do. Talion reached upwards and felt relief -as strong as he could feel, which wasn't much- at the familiar metallic grips and pommels of Urfael and then Acharn. Such was Talion's familiarity with his weapons that just by touching their hilts he knew that they had not been tampered with during his servitude to Sauron.
That was good. Talion knew that with his weapons at his side, he would not be waylaid as he ascertained his location.
Just as Talion reached the end of the gully and the rhythmic roars of waves reached his ears -surely he must be in Mordor still- something unnatural occurred: Talion shivered. He had felt...cold. The sudden bite of the frosty wind had reached into his flesh. Talion was stunned. The elements, be they deserts, forests, mountains, or lava plains, had not touched him for unremembered years.
Then he felt a flicker of pain and a thick, hot sludge trickle down from his throat. Talion brought a gauntleted hand up to touch at the space in between his jagged mask and cuirass. Bright red blood stained his fingers. His own blood.
Talion's gaze leapt to his ring, that perfect circle of gold with its finely set spessartite garnet, which he knew had not left his finger. So why had that happened?
Talion twisted his ring hand back and forth, examining his ring. What was wrong with his ring!? Physically, his wondrous possession was as perfect as it had always been -to think he had once called it a little thing- but when he glanced into the unseen world, Talion discovered a horrible thing.
His ring had been damaged. No, attacked. Nothing of nature would want to harm a thing as beautiful as this, so it had been attacked. Talion could see the power of the ring, it's very lifeforce, slowly dripping out into the unseen world to be scattered into nothingness. For a moment Talion felt nothing but the thunderous beat of a long silent heart in his ears.
Then he shrieked aloud, letting loose the hair-raising, courage-breaking, soul-frightening cry of the Nazgûl. It was a tangible and dread power, this cry. Capable of killing a particularly weak orc or man that faced its full fury.
How dare they! The shriek grew louder and louder as the fury Talion felt continued to grow. How dare they!
How dare they damage it! How dare they deface it! How dare they harm what was HIS!
The walls of the gully trembled and shock under the assault Talion unleashed upon them. Pieces of shale rock tumbled down its slopes, snow drifts and icicles broke apart under the torrential outburst.
His anger was so great that Talion felt like he could have raged at this offense for days but when his precious bleed again before his eyes, Talion silenced his shriek. Talion wanted to feel helpless in that very moment. He wanted to blame someone for this horror and foster responsibility off to them to fix it.
But that would be weak. That would be cowardness. And Talion had exicised such weaknesses from himself long ago. So up came the experience of the Gravewalker, and Talion planned what to do. In grim amusement, he acknowledged that any other ringbearer in his situation would not know what to do in order to save their ring of power. However Talion was a Ring-Smith learned in his craft and that was the only thing he would ever thank that feckless curr Celebrimbor for.
He was one of three beings who knew the intricacies of ring-craft as master of the craft and he was one of two beings that had forged a ring meant to be worn in war. Talion felt a calm, the calm of battle, settle upon him. He knew what to do.
He needed a forge, he needed a forging hammer attuned properly and he needed a fount of magic to forge in. He could carve the runes with Acharn and he did not need to prepare metals for the process of becoming a ring of power, he just needed to fix what was his.
Talion wrapped his essence around the wounded ring in the wraith world, helping to further bind the wound on its spirit but this was not a wound that would heal on its own. The further confirmation only hardening Talion's resolve.
Exiting the now battered gully onto a gravel beach, Talion took note of the color of the waves lapping at the beach. He could not remember the waters of the Sea of Nurnen having such a richness to them. Talion pushed the discrepancy out of his mind, having seen the tendrils of smoke further inland from where he was.
Finally something familiar. He thought. An orc encampment. Talion did not think it a slave encampment, he had not known Sauron to stable his mannish work force away from the fertile plains of southern Mordor. He broke into a run, heading towards
The orcs will fear me more than any slave might. And that fear will loosen their tongues but prevent any lie.
Talion was running instinctively while he continued to clutch at the leaking power of the ring in the wraith world, trusting in honed reflexes to know when to jump over obstacles or change direction to avoid a tree. But instincts are mostly good for avoiding things that didn't move around, not so much the other way. Caragors, graugs, wargs or orcs for example.
Or, Talion remembered as he collided with an armored warrior with horns on his helm, other men. Talion took his sight out of the unseen world to look at the warrior he had knocked over. Because it took the full weight of a caragor to knock him off his feet in Mordor and this man was no caragor.
This warrior was dressed far too...uniquely to be from Mordor. From the curly goat horns on his simple iron helm, to the reliance on padded gambesons and hardened leather as armor instead of iron, and the black animal skin slung over his shoulders.
The strange tongue the warrior was slinging at Talion's unmoving self was another giveaway.
"Cuach op arse, ghoul y badraigh mai an cuach…" The warrior stumbled to his feet, shaking his helmed head. Talion noticed the simple axe clutched tightly in one hand and the broken wooden round shield in the other.
Talion began to think that he was not moving towards an orc encampment but an orc raid. That changed matters greatly. Now that he was free, nothing in the world would make him help orcs do their orc-work again.
The warrior with goat horns on his helm finally turned towards Talion, probably with another curse on his tongue. Then he saw the masked form of a Ringwraith standing before him, as still as a corpse.
Talion had never seen a man go so pale and clammy so quickly.
"Aen modron Freya och Hemdalls geas." The warrior all but flew backwards, a great desperation obvious in the jerking movements made to get away from Talion. Like his very appearance caused the man pain.
"Der Jagd ys Mörhogg… aen modron Freya. Ai ai ai, skudda ys Ragh nar Roog." The panicked man collided with the large boulder he had been unknowingly backing up into. He paid no attention to the impediment, legs still trying to propel him backwards while the simple iron axe was brought up to ward Talion away. All the while he kept repeating the mantra 'aen modron Freya'.
The chilling winds and snowfall were stronger than they had been just minutes ago.
It was the strange tongue the warrior spoke in that forced Talion to consider that, in all likelihood, he was not in Mordor. Any escaped captive would have spoken in Westron on account of being Gondorian or employed by Gondor. It wasn't the tongue of Umbar, Near Harad, Khand, or the Black Speech either.
To even bring Sindarin into consideration was ridiculous. Not that Talion could have tried to address the warrior in that language. The speech of elves, spoken or thought, had only brought great pain to Talion since he had taken up Isildur's Ring.
Talion strode up to the trembling warrior, batting aside the axe with a backhand and with his ring hand Talion gripped the face of the warrior.
If he did not know the tongue of this warrior, he would just have to take the knowledge of it from him.
"Submit." He rasped.
Talion did not dominate the warrior, never that, but as he had discovered during the Shadow Wars, taking information from the minds of men was as easy as taking it from orcs. It was how he had defeated the first? Third? No no, definitely the first offensive that had the majority be non-uruk soldiers.
So Talion looted the mind of Erik Angsbornsson of all its treasure. Words, events, places and people whirled through his mind's eye as Talion absorbed the knowledge they held. The hulking figure of a great and terrible enemy of Erik's people. A place high atop the mountain of this island, Undvik, stood out to Talion. Then he pulled away from Erik's mind, the tongue of Skellige sliding into place in his mind and removed the vice grip on
Erik Angsbornsson, to his credit, did not collapse into unconsciousness. He did collapse to the snowy ground and began to vomit but Talion paid it no mind. He was busy mulling over new words and new facts. He was going to have changed his plan greatly, this Skellige was no land that Talion had ever heard of.
So he took this to mean that returning to Mordor was impossible at the moment. Now Talion had to focus on finding what he needed in the local area he found himself in. The sudden throbbing of his ring hand told him to hurry.
"Oh mother Freya…" moaned Erik as he finished vomiting. "What has Clan Tordarroch done to offend you so. First the giant awakens...now a herald of Ragh nar Roog stands before me. Even our clan's forge has fallen to the giant."
Talion continued to watch as the skelliger mastered his shaking limbs and haltingly rose back onto his two feet. For some reason, the warrior cast his gaze skywards instead of looking at Talion, the obvious source of his terror.
"I beseech thee, oh mighty Freya, all powerful Hemdall! What oath have we broken to anger you so? What curse have we created that has let the giant take the great forge and defile our ancestors' land?" He cried out, gesturing wildly with his broken shield.
Talion did not have the answers this man wanted, but the forge had caught his attention.
"Where is this great forge?" His demand came out as a harsh whisper that rattled past his mask as it was said. Producing the effect of many voices speaking instead of one. Talion hated this mask but he had no confidence in his face being a sight less horrible than the cruelly shaped iron mask.
The warrior gaped like a fish at his words. "And even the Hunters of Mörhogg have come to torment us further." A burst of life came to the young man. "Why do you want to know, spectre? Your giant friend has already taken possession of it from us and he will soon have possession of the rest of Undvik" -Talion noted the grief that came over Erik at saying those words- "so if you want to fight the giant in a holmgang over the island, leave Clan Tordarroch out of it!"
"I have need of a forge and I have decided that yours will do." He had wasted enough time already. "If it is no longer under your control, Erik Angsbornsson, then I will retake it for you and myself."
The warrior could do nothing but laugh at that statement. "Jarl Harald will most likely kill you before he treats with you, servant of Mörhogg, but I will take you to him, if only so that I can die in my home."
"He sounds like a man in a desperate situation. Good." Talion replied before grabbing the skelliger and pushing him forwards.
"I do not have the patience for fools today."
A/N: and Talion is in the brave new world. Which he doesn't know is the brave new world. Neat but not for Talion really, he still thinks this is Middle-Earth with Middle-Earth rules.