Faster.
Andromeda clenched her teeth when, in her hurry to follow the trees's nervous whisperers, she lost the grip on the cutting edge of the rock she was trying to climb over, so to put a whole river between her and the monster she could hear panting behind her back.
A foolish attempt of a foolish child to escape death's grip once again with nothing more than a broken gaze and a shaking body, but Andromeda did not seem to know when to give up, not even when the chances to come out alive were so little, not even even if she knew, deep down, that the Warg would have reached her, in the end.
That Sauron would have had her at his mercy once again.
But even if the black man would have had her again in his clutches, it did not mean that she could not try to make it harder for the beast to bring her back.
So she ignored the bleeding of her hand and the stinging of her eyes, releasing a huff of frustration and a hiss of pain as she used her other hand to climb over the rock once again, crawling on the slippery surface with her hair attached to her sweaty face, a labored breath to leave her chapped lips every time she forced her body to move.
To go beyond.
And beyond she went, only, not in the way she had hoped.
If, at the time, she had had a voice to release, her scream would have silenced the quiet chirping of the birds above her head, but what Andromeda did was only gasping like a fish while the freezing water she had drunk in the fall filled her lungs and her whole body shivered for both the low temperature of the river and the 'splash she heard soon after her crash.
But if her crash had only produced a small flow of water, when the river welcomed a second, bigger shape, Andromeda risked to drown a second time when the Warg landed a few steps from her, so close that she could feel the heavy breathing of the beast tickling her forehead covered by soaking white hair.
She heard him growl and shaking off the water that had drenched his fur, a penetrating smell of wet dog to make her nose wrinkle and her eyes squeeze, but, other than that, she did nothing else.
She did not try to stand up.
She did not try to run away.
She simply sat in the water with her arms sunk in the freezing water with her chilled body motionless and her hair dripping wet, quietly, as if a beast wasn't gazing at her with hunger clear in his yellow eyes, as if she wasn't on the verge of being torn apart by the fangs she saw glinting on the river's surface, but Andromeda didn't seem to care about that, at the moment.
She seemed more concerned on her reflex in the water rather than the beast she could hear growling threateningly in front of her, and when she saw her own reflex smiling back at her, Andromeda knew to have finally lost it, in the end, to have finally gone mad.
Because, the more the beast growled, the more the trembling smile on her face widened while the crystalline water took a sickening shade for the bleeding of the hand that Andromeda pulled out of the water to see the trail of her blood following the serpentine line of the Silmarillion around her wrist before dripping in the water.
It was odd.
Going mad.
It wasn't theatrical as she had read or had thought at first.
She did not try to tear her own hair out in the grip of delirium.
She wasn't biting off her own arm to focus her attention on physical pain rather than on the spiritual one.
She was feeling surprisingly lucid, at the moment. Rational.
Cold.
- You have to kill them before they kill you, my love.
When the familiar voice echoed in her mind, Andromeda left the state of trans in which she had lost herself, noticing what, at first, she had considered negligible, of little importance, for her.
The nearness of the Warg who, now, was painting straight in her face, his jaws parted in the act to bite her head off while some trail of his saliva dropped on her head.
The odd color the water had taken, as something filthy was trickling in it.
And how, despite his proximity, the beast wasn't chewing her limbs or sinking his teeth in her exposed neck.
- Kai?
A flash of emotion shook the glassy surface of her eyes while her lips lost the smile, the voice of her mind now desperate as Andromeda tried to call him back, to beg him not to leave while her fingers sunk in the damp earth and her breathing came out disconnected for both the fear and the crying that was crushing her chest.
- Please, come back, I am scared – she whimpered as a tiny, whining child, waiting for words of comfort, of kindness that did not come as she was hoping, or at least, what she was praying to have, what she thought she needed from him.
- Scared, my love? - Kai's voice inquired curiously, and, for a moment, Andromeda could even imagine him tilting his head to the side like a curious animal – why?
Baffled by the question and his strange tone, Andromeda parted her lips without uttering a sound, the dripping of her hair the only sound she could hear along with the rushing of the river around her form, her eyes wide for the confusion that was shaking both her soul and her internal voice.
- I am alone – she breathed in a tiny whisper, as if that could explain the reason behind her turmoil, her distress, but Kai's voice kept on sounding skeptical, as if he could not understand the disarray of her emotion.
Her need for comfort. For help.
- You are never alone, dearest one. I am with you, I am always with you – he retorted simply, as he was explaing something obvious to a silly child, like if he was telling her something she should have already known, but Andromeda was struggling to recognize him, his voice, and maybe, if she had not been so blinded by the pain and the despair that was tearing her apart, if she had not been so desperate for someone to talk with her, to stay with her, she would have noticed how his voice was too low and dark to be familiar.
How her surrounding had become blurred, foggy, somber.
Because she was letting darkness engulf her form without even knowing it, the pale light that encircled her trembling form now thick and harsher as Kai's voice kept on asking questions she did not understand but that she kept on listening to, anything, to have him with her, to have someone to talk to her.
To acknoledge her existense.
- Look in the water, love.
Despite her unconditional trust in him and her need to let him talk to her as long as possible to fight the madness that was taking over her, Andromeda did not follow his request as blindly as she had done before.
Something prevented her to do what he was asking her, a hesitation born from the fear to know what she would have found.
The defeated eyes of a surrendered child with a haunted heart who was waiting for a monster to eat her alive without even blinking, or fighting back, that one would have been what she would have seen, what she didn't want to see, to find, to acknowledge, but Kai's deserved at least that, from her, he was helping her to remain sane, not to fall prey of madness, he was the only thing that remained her.
Blinking away the tears that were still rolling down her cheek, her eyes searched in the murky water the disoriented girl she expected to see, but when her eyes focused on her reflex, what she found, what she saw made her breath hitch.
When she felt the soft touch on her freezing cheek, Andromeda did not flinch, she did not try to get away from it, instead, she allowed herself to lean her face against it as the evanescent hand she could see through the water captured between his fingers a wet, pale lock of her hair, smothering it with kind moves between his fingertips.
- Fear, my love, is not something you should feel, but something you should inspire in men's heart.
Despite the cruel words and the dark meaning in them, she did not recoil as she should have done, too tired to act, too broken to see the wrongness in the touch, in his voice, in his dark feelings while her eyelids, heavy with tears and tiredeness slowed in their move, leaving only a hatch from which she could see the shadow behind her back embrancing her like a heavy curtain that wanted to cut her off from the harsh world that wanted to hurt her, or so she was seeing it at the moment.
Andromeda had alwas been a romantic soul, after all, and she could not see the lie behind that act, the danger.
The evil.
The deception.
She was tired to think, to move, to be afraid and to cry.
To feel weak.
- There is more power in your fingertips than in the sun's burning touch, my love.
Power.
Andromeda had never craved for it. She had not felt the need to wish for it, but power was what she needed to survive in that world, the power to fight her demons, her enemies, something she already had, as Kai whispered in her ears, reminding her of the hand drowned in the water where her eyes landed, staring at the bracelet dirtied with blood on her wrist.
No one had ever known what the power of the Silmarill was.
No one had ever had the time and the chance to test it, to see what it could do, not even Andromeda had thought about it.
She had simply stopped to the painful burning, too scared to discover that wearing it could bring more pain, more heartbreak, but, maybe, maybe it was time to give back what she had received from that world even when she had asked for mercy, even when she had begged for it between tears and voiceless scream.
The same, annihilating misery she had felt when, chained to the ground, she had been tortured for something she didn't want.
The pain, that, in the end, had finally broken her.
A faint and icy breath escaped her lips while the shadow around her form became thicker and the water turned a sickingly red, a tint gained by the blood that Andromeda, lost as she was in her delirium had not noticed of losing by a small gash under her wrist.
A small, almost invisible crack in the tender skin that was tearing her foream apart like the chipped skin of a porcelain doll that someone was breaking under the pressure of his hard and cruel grip, a hold Andromeda felt closing under her elbow when Kai's evanescent hand guided her fingers towards the pietrified Warg.
A flash of horror darted into her eyes when she saw the fur burning under her touch, but, as Kai whispered in her ears in a comforting and reasonable voice, the Warg was trying to kill her, and as he had said before, kill them before they kill you.
And, as far as harsh and unforgiving it could seem, that one was nature's law, where only the strongest ones could survive, and, as she took a deep breath, closing her fingers in claws while the Warg began to whimper, Andromeda decided, for once, to be the stronger one between the two, and, for the fist time in her life, to be the one to kill first.
Thorin Oakenshield knew far too well the splitting feeling of being about to grab something he held dear before losing the grip, seeing it falling, dying, in front of his eyes.
He could still feel the scorcing touch of the flames against his face as he got up from the ground, the dryness of the dust in his lungs as he gulped ashes and blood through his nose, the painful shelling of his eyes as the image of the Misty Mountain burned to ashes was branded in focus in his mind and soul.
His fingertips still carried the burns of when he had tried to save his people from the hunger of the flame as trees fell to the ground and rocks rolled on the side, crushing in their path friends and foes, but for every life he had saved, another one had been taken, leaving him with no more than a handful of dwarfs with haunted eyes and broken spirits to rule and no home to return to.
His home.
His crown.
His people.
And then, his father.
Thorin Oakenshield had lost more than a man could bear without going mad, a madness that ran deep in his blood line, an insanity he had shunned like a plague, hiding in the darkness of his soul what, one day, would have been his doom, a madness that, now, was making his steps harsh, his breath heavy and his gaze wild.
Insane.
Because he was running like only a mad man would have done, without knowing where he was going, what he was doing, ignoring the voices that were calling his name while his hand grazed the dirty hair that the wind brought back on the skeletal shoulders he saw shivering while Thràin, despite coughing blood, did not slow his steps, he did not let him reach him.
- Father!
The hoarse calling thundered in the night like the inlking of a violent storm, and just as a storm Thorin fell on the ground when a sudden flash of light blindinded his sigh, tearing him a growl of pain as his hands tried to cling to roots of the trees he failed to grasp as his body kept on rolling down the flatland, bringing him at the edge of a river in which he sank when his bruised fingers did not reach the branch he would have used stop to his fall.
When the icy waters welcomed his body, Thorin wasn't fast enough to shut his mouth, filling his lungs of the water he spat in resurfacing from the depth of the river where his father must have fallen too, but even before he could hold his breath to search for him in the dark water, something moved in the corner of his eyes, awakening his warrior's instict while his blade shimmered in the night and a pair of glowing eyes flowed on his feauture with the same violence of the river's waves that smashed against his body with the clear attempt to bring him down.
Thorin could barely notice or care about the dripping of his own blood in the water as his eyes, as cutting as glass splinters, surveyed the young woman in front him who, as an answer to his intense staring and the unsheathed blade pointed at her tightened her grip around the shaky shoulder of the man he was searching for.
- Let him go.
Strained for the fall and the bruises he must have reported with the fall, Thorin let his dark voice rumbling in the night like the growl of a wild animal, his hands firm and his stance hard as he kept on watching her, but the more he watched the strange creature, the more his gaze noticed what he had not seen before, blinded as he had been by his hatred and pain, small details that confused his mind and weakened the grip on his sword.
- You are hurt.
When the gentle, strained voice reached her tense soul, Andromeda looked away from the stormy eyes of the man who was threatening her with his glowing sword to meet a gentler blue skyes that warmed her shivering heart while Thràin's trembling hand reached her elbow, a look of confusion to distort her features as her eyes followed his concerned gaze where she found a terrible wound she did not recall.
A wound so deep and awaful that would have exposed her bones, if only the pale light that filled the deep gash wasn't flowing like blood in her skin, obscuring the view of her raw flesh, a strange occurence that would have kept her mind busy if she had not heard the bustling noise and the hearfealt calling of the two young dwarfs who emerged from the thick bush with a shout.
- Uncle! What-
- Quiet.
In a difference place and a different time, Kili would have felt affronted by his uncle's harsh tone and cold voice, but they were in the woods, alone, with the howling of the wind to brush their freezing form and to make them gnashing their teeth, but even if the cold wind would not have been a reasobable reason to freeze on the spot and keepig quiet as their uncle had so gently required, the glowing woman with the deepest and stangest eyes he had ever seen in front of him would have been a reasonable reason to stand still on the spot and not to say a word, or releasing a breath, but when he caught in the corner of his eyes the parting of his brother's lips, it became clear to him that Fili wasn't so intimidated by their uncle's rage as he was.
- She is bleeding.
When Andromeda heard the quiet voice and the rustling of robes, her eyes darted like daggers on the fair-haired dwarf who was watching her with a light hint of concern in his clear eyes, his hands raised in front of his pale face while her breath began to slow down and the light that was still hugging her form faded into a more gentle pale halo that encircled Thràin shaking form when her hands closed protectively on his skeletal shoulder when she caught Thorin moving towards her.
Hands covered with cuts up to her elbows that, as Thorin kept on watching the glowing maiden while advacing, weren't restraining his father from running away as he had feared at first, but hands that, instead, were holding him tight to prevent Thràin to fall and drown in the water.
A loud 'plop followed the fall of his sword in the water while his hands mimicked Fili's surrender pose as he kept on advacing, his eyes still hard and cold as the winter's wind, but his voice less menacing and more welcoming.
- I mean no harm.
And he was speaking the truth, but, despite his change of heart and the sincerity in his words, the more he advanced, the more the light began to grow stronger, blinding, while the fair maiden clutched his father in her hold as she was trying to protect him from the threat he could represent for them both, but when his voice rumbled in the night a second time with the intent to soothe her turmoil, the confusion in her glowing eyes made him aware of something he had not noticed among the many things that relaxed the stiffness of his limbs and lightened up the darkness in his gaze while a new awareness made its way inside his heart.
- You do not understand my language.
More than a question, what left Thorin's thin lips was a security that grew stronger and firmer as Andromeda took a step back and her whole body stiffened when the imposing form of the dwarf obscured her own shadow in reaching her, his eyes no more dark, no more cold as he began to look at her like he was seeing her for the first time.
When Kili and Fili saw their uncle raising his arm, both of them could not prevent themselves to stiffen with the fear that Thorin would have stricken the bleeding woman, but it was with astonishment that they followed the billowing of the heavy fur cloak that their uncle had just removed from his own body to wrap it around the glowing woman and the smelly man with what they knew by their uncle's stiff move to be concern and restlessness.
- You are just a child.
Andromeda did not know what made her act like that.
If the dismayed and horrified voice she heard in her mind that made her realize how battered and broken she had to be in his eyes.
Or the kind gesture that caught her by surprise and shook her so much to make her tremble and cry at the same time, not used as she was to receive kindness from someone else after so long.
Or the ocean blue eyes that were watching her like if the man in front of her glossy eyes, the bitter king she had feared to meet, to anger with her presence, cared about her untidy appearance, her ripped dress, the imprint of male hands around her frail neck or the sign of handcuffs around her frail wrists.
Like he cared about what had happened to her, and even if she could not explain why he should have cared about that, about her, when she felt the warm cloak closing around her throat and the rough fabric grazing her scratched cheek, her lips began to tremble while fresh tears filled her broken gaze and Andromeda let herself crumbling on her knees with a voiceless scream no one would have been able to hear except herself.
A scream she muffled against Thràin's shoulder when the dwarf hugged her form with his skeletal limbs, confused and disoriented by her hopeless crying, her shaking back, her frail figure that, for a moment, seemed smaller than his own.
A figure Thorin Oakenshield tried to reach with a hesitant gesture before leaving his hand in midair, nervous and uneasy on what to do with the crying maiden he had assaulted with his hatred and harsh words and a father who did not recognize him, but who was looking at him like he was the enemy, the guilty one, while holding the young woman who now seemed so small and harmless with his huge cloak to cover her battered form.
His sister would have asked for his head if she had known of his unforgivable behaviour towards a female, witch or not witch.
Dwarfs were known for their reverence towards the female gender, given the lack of it between their kin.
It was one of their unbreakable rule, a sign of their honor.
Woman, whatever the race, should have been protected, shielded, not threathened with a sword, and yet, he could not betray his warrior's instinct neither.
Because despite her battered state, Thorin could still recognize in the burned carcass to the woman's side the Warg that had tried to attack them.
She had killed it.
He was sure of that, and he was concerned about it, because if she could kill a Warg without being torn apart trying, the strange woman could kill him or one of his nephews without even blinking.
Such a terryfing power could be a gift and a curse for the one who owned it and for who decided to get close to it, a power Thorin did not dare to unleash or to hide neither, not if hiding her could bring harm to his people, but the eyes full of tears that Andromeda focused on him in sensing his uneasiness made his heart freeze and his jaw go stiff.
Undescribable horror. Unpronunciable pain. Endless loss.
The woman who had brought back his father from the dead was watching him as he had watched his home burning to ashes.
With a hopeless gaze.
A wounded spirit.
A heartbroken soul.
A gaze he still was trying to fix, to mend, but a gaze that, despite the bitterness and the hardness, could still recognize the wickness and the treachery, and despite what he had seen, despite the sign of danger that surrounded the young human, there was nothing evil in her.
When Andromeda saw the dark dwarf kneeling in front of her, her arms strengthened her grip around Thàrin's shaking form while tears kept on rolling down her cheeks and her eyes hardened instictively for what was coming, what she feared to receive from who could have strangled her with his bare hands as Sauron had done before him.
But the hand Andromeda saw moving towards her did not try to reach her neck or the sword in the water, it did not try to grab her hair or to shut her mouth, it simply stayed in midair in front of her eyes, waiting for her to grab it or to shun it, to make a choice, something Andromeda had already done, bringing to ruin her whole existence.
A choice.
A chance to make a mistake again whispered her internal voice, shaking her gaze and soul, but even if the fear to be mistaken again, to be betrayed again was strong, Andromeda knew that she had to do something and that, at least, she had to feel relieved that he had not tried to stab her like she had feared at first.
- Let's go with him.
A shiver tickled the tender skin of his foream when the dwarf king heard the gentle and soft voice in his mind, a feeble murmur that the young woman who had just taken his hand to stand up whispered inside his mind while her eyes searched in his father worried face an approval that Thràin seemed loath to give him, his hands clutched protectively around Andromeda injured arm.
- We…we are not safe with them.
When Andromeda felt the rough hand that she was still holding tightening around her frail fingers in response to Thràin's troubled thought, she did not hide the grimace that distorted her face or the concern for the dark frown that had hardened Thorin's face, but when the wind brought to her the thundering of countless footsteps and the danger they would have brought with them, she knew what she had to do.
Where she should have gone next.
- He can be trusted – she whispered gently to the concerned dwarf, squeezing his hand while her eyes found the hard gaze that Thorin did not avert, not even when Andromeda tried to search in his eyes a refusal that, on his honor, he would not have given her – He will keep you safe.
- Let's go home.
When Thorin's raging shout exploded around them like the uproar of a thunder, Fili and Kili were still too dumbfounded to follow his order right away, but when Thorin began to walk with the glowing woman and the smelly man to his side after recovering the sword in the water, both the dwarfs could only do as he had told them without asking for other explanations, something they woud have required once back home.
And, judging by the obsessive way their uncle was keeping an eye on the strange woman and her companion, they knew that they would not have been the only one to demand questions or explanations, and, unfortunately for them, they were not only talking about their uncle and themselves.
Thanks for reading! Until the next chapter ! ^.^