Middle-Earth, Rhûn; F.O.10
It's an empty place, this strange land I have found myself in. No matter where you cast your eye there is an absence of life. Men of course, and their smaller kin along with them – they were gone quite quickly, once the Blue cloaked men turned their fancy to slaughter instead of conquering. Whether they are dead, their bodies confiscated and misused by persons who no longer belong in this world, or just buried beneath the sandy dunes of this land really matters very little. Either way they are gone, with the only remnants of these two peoples being the occasional desperate traveller, along my road. But never fear, for such creatures do not survive me for very long.
Men, Hobbits, Dwarves – all so mortal, all so very skittish. It is no wonder then to me that they are gone now. No, what is though is the disappearance of the birds, the beasts and even the small insects of the ground. They are not quite as vanished as the men are, but they are still rarer to be found than my stomach can take.
Perhaps that is my own fault, so far as anything can be – for after the men in blue cloaks came into this small town, and drove or murdered all its men away I had my fill you see. They left their animals behind. Dogs, cats, camels, horses, chickens and other edible birds. Didn't even bother to unlock their pens, or their cages.
And so, I went about at my leisure and feasted – I ate the dogs, I ate the cats, I was even kicked in the face by one of the more uncooperative beasts of burden. Eventually by the fourth turn of the year, I had eaten all the creatures of the town. An action, that even I can admit was not well planned – for now there are no more fat chickens, or salty ducks, or succulent dogs to quench my ever-gnawing hunger.
A peculiarity of my condition, while I dwell in this middle-earth, is that I must feed continuously. While I still lived in civilised, that is to say populated lands, I feasted on the blood of men, and hobbits and dwarves. I never touched an elf in that way, for I would not know what would have become of me had I done so. After all, elves as a people are often so watched by those higher creatures named the Valar. Those creatures, I do not wish to find me. And so, I have stayed away, and all for the better – still it would have been nice to have some more thinking meat in my belly before I was reduced to how I am now. Hunting amongst the flats of the deserts for small rodents, and even smaller bugs. They are mostly gone, for the living do not care for the dead, and there is no creature that understands this more than the beasts.
High thinking creatures, like the one in whom I still possess – yes, despite my best efforts he's still quite alive – will dampen their instincts of hate and distrust for my rotten flesh. They are taught to be polite, in one form or other, by a hundred mothers only thinking to raise their children right. And so, they pretend they cannot smell me, they cannot truly see what I am. But of course, creatures of primal intelligence have no such qualms and politeness. They run when they hear me coming, but not nearly fast enough now.
Sometimes it seems like I have eaten them all and yet I am still hungry. Look out onto this land, this land that once a blue wizard – or at least something that resembled such a creature – once ruled. In fact, look out onto all the lands that once this beast lay claim to, look at them and see how empty they are now. Empty of sound, empty of smell, empty of all forms of life. Khand is dead, the cities and the rolling caravans of Rhûn's people were not far to follow. Not in the bird's eye view of things. Now these lands are not places in which the living rule anymore, they are the kingdoms of the dead. You did not see them fall, because you were not meant to. Like the sleight of hand in a shoddy magic act, the writer drew you away, distracted you by the siege of a golden city. But in the long run that siege meant little, it didn't even last an hour – and the city was already mostly destroyed by the fire anyway. The only thing it could have brought was the destruction of the blue wizard, and we all know that will never happen.
Even the desolation of the blue army is no great feat, there were only nine hundred men that followed that blue fiend to his great cause. The rest were dead, or vanished into the sands of this terrible desert. Now the blue army is gone, and all that's left are the shambling corpses they left behind, and I cannot eat those.
But you might ask, who am I – who seems to know so much about incidents and parties that I was not there to witness. Do not question the mad, my dear, for in this world they will always know more than is strictly sane. And I have gone insane, insane from the hunger, the loneliness, the dwarf's voice in my head.
But I see now, that I am just avoiding the question you have already asked in your own head. Who am I? And why do I care so much about the desolation of this land? I don't care, things like me have no ability to do so. As for who I am, I would ask you to look at the empty streets of this town. To follow them down, down into the cold part of this little settlement. In the shadows there sits a figure, he is small and ragged. Old and bent, more than any mortal ever should be. His beard, as white as the mountain over his old kingdom, is gnarled and knotted with detritus from the road and stained with blood.
He is not a man.
He is a dwarf.
In body at least.
Yes, I think you know who I speak of now.
This dwarf, this Balin, was once a great creature – but his mind is so tired after years of battle with, well, me, that he so often slumbers now. And while he does, well I have free reign to do as I so please.
Now what of my name you still ask?
You know it already, my dear.
I am the son of Fëanor.
I am the once lord of Moria.
I am Caranthir.
In one of the deserted cities of Khand; F.O.12
Hello there, we've met before, haven't we? You know me the lover, the liar, the father of the monster.
Yes, you remember me now – Finwë, the fool that started this whole mess. Oh, not by leaving Mandos – I was forced into that – no by fathering Fëanor. I was not a particularly affectionate father to most of my children, and these past – I don't know can you really count time of horror as time at all – has only made me more certain that either I was not meant to be a father, or merely a very distant one. Because you know what child I was never distant with… Fëanor – I was loving and kind and supportive and look what became of him.
No, let's go one step beyond that and look at what became of this world, of my people, of yours, of everybody's. Let's for a second step back and have a look at this scene, I currently see before me.
We're in the remains of a city, I think – it's so hard to tell now, with the buildings crumbling so rabidly. There are no living people in this place now – we have either eaten them, the gnawing hunger in my belly never satisfied. A curse that my child has inflicted upon me, I was quite happy being a houseless spirit, but no we all have to have bodies in this place. Anyway, back to the scene.
We're in the ruins of a city, the living are gone and now all that remains are the dead. We are dead twice over, for we are the dead of the first born and yet we wear the skins of later people. The second born most of all, but I have also seen the bodies of dwarves and smaller people shambling around this city in which my body makes its home now. The whole city is covered with these corpses, standing around, walking around, but always hunting for the next moment when we can quench our hunger.
It's a terrible thing to admit, but I think I hate my son for what he has made of us. I hate my son for the hunger that is now all I can think of. I hate my son for the crumbling cities of Rhûn, and Khand, and whatever other man or great cities once existed in this world. I hate my son for the land of the dead he has created, and most of all I hate my son because he is no longer here. He has left us. All these spirits that now wear an ill-fitting meat suit because of him, now have no one to lead them. And thus, all they can do is make their way across this land, eating and eating, and eating.
It's all we can do anymore.
I know what you must be thinking, that surely, I am no such monster – I have my thoughts, I have my reason, I have my hate. But I'm so sorry to say that you are wrong little one, I am as much of a monster as the creatures that just ate your family.
But I want to thank you as I thanked the others in your tribe, in your family. Thank you for staying in this land. If you hadn't, if you had fled, run to some far-off kingdom in the sea where we could never find you, then our hunger would have gone unsatisfied for one more day. And that, child, would have been a terrible thing indeed – for us at least.
Now please, do no not try to run from me again, for I am so very hungry, and this hunger does not breed patience in its hosts.
Somewhere deep within the barren wastes of Rhûn, in one of the last thriving human settlements, F.O 13.
I should never have taken Akunosh's hand that day. I should never have let him into my room that day, or my tent the first night we made love. Yes, there's many things that I, former Blue General Böri should not have done in my life. Starting with going out my front door that day many years ago, when I was not but a stupid six-year-old and forgetting to lock it behind me. Too focused on running off to play with the big boys and their big boy games.
For every decision, every even minor choice in my life has all led me here, has all led me to now – sitting in front of my tiny fire, looking down into the stewing, chard mess that was supposed to be my dinner. No, that was supposed to be everyone's dinner for tonight.
Soon the others will smell the burnt mess, and they shall shamble over – frantic and yet still careful in their movements as every living thing is in this land of the dead. They will stare into my burnt cooking pot and maybe they'll frown, maybe they'll even try to kick me, but that won't stop them from eating it. With food as scarce as it is now, and getting it from the abandoned villages a few miles back twice as dangerous in the dark – the rule of the camp is that you eat what's put on your plate, and you like it. Regardless of the actual edibility of the food.
I was not made to be a cook.
Clearly.
But then it would seem lately I am not made for very much at all.
I am not made to be a bearer of ill news.
When we left the blue temple, Akunosh and I had tried to run – tried to tell anyone of what was happening there. Not because it was the right thing to do, but simply – at least for me – because it was the only thing that I could do. Couldn't go back to the Blue Army, not now that I had deserted, taken my lover's hand and run off into the heat of the dessert before us.
And I couldn't stay to fight the creature that had besieged us, that foul smelling rotting carcass that now lay claim to the mantle of the blue wizard.
In the end I was just too weak for that.
Too weak in body.
Too weak in spirit.
Too weak of a man, in everything I did.
We tried to warn the others. I don't know who they were. Whether they were enemies of the blue army specifically, or just enemies of the Blue Creature. The fiend known as Fëanor. Either way it doesn't really matter, the dead had already arrived in the East, and the kingdoms of men, of hobbits and of all the creatures high and low and in between, had already begun to fall.
We didn't know that of course, not back then. We were alone, camping out here in the desert, with no way to contact either of our people anymore. We tried, we really did to find someone, anyone else to tell – agents of either side would have done us, but nothing was to be found. For although Akunosh assured me, that as an agent of the Golden city of the Turtle-Fish, he knew the secrets of this land – and the paths it hid better than most, it seemed like the desert had wiped all those paths clean. We walked for maybe weeks, or months, possibly even years before we found anything even close to a settlement.
And what we found, when we found anything at all – confirmed to me that there must be some higher power guiding my life after all. Though whether it was the guiding light of the Silmaril – hardly mattered anymore. For the settlement we stumbled into at last – if one could call a haphazard collection of rudimentary tents a settlement at all – was led by someone very familiar, to me at least.
It was her.
My once wife.
Akallabêth.
She was not pleased to see me – but welcomed Akunosh as if he were her long lost brother. I think it was only his clear love for me, that stopped the noble woman from ordering her men to lop my head from my shoulders.
I could go into greater detail on that account, but I see no need for it. All that you need to know is that Akallabêth had found shelter with one of the enemies of the blue army, and when the dead arrived in our lands, and those enemies fell, Akallabêth and several other lower ranked attendants in noble courts fled their homes. They too were lost in this wide, vast desert of Rhûn – but it was the kind of lost that was done with deliberate intention.
Akallabêth and her people had left civilisation behind, and they had no intention of ever going back to it.
Of course, it wasn't as if there was anything to go back to – the only things left in this land now are the desert and the dead.
Still, if rumour was to be believed, that was still better than what was happening in the West.
But enough of that now, I've got some burnt stew to dish up.
Somewhere along the old broken roads that once covered and connected the different kingdoms of Rhûn; F.O. 14
Xiang Bingwen's stomach ached, but then it had been aching since Ai and him had fled from their father's village seven years ago – so really, where was the change there? His feet were blistered, but that was nothing new either; and his heart was trapped in the continuous motion of fear and panic it had been locked into ever since he saw his first dead body get up and walk from its grave. But that had also been years ago now.
Before he left the village Bingwen would have thought a life, forever on the road, forever walking would be somewhat less monotonous in its terrors – but then what had he really known of anything back then? Nothing, he had been a stupid boy, part of him would always feel a little like that stupid boy that had pulled up his father's crop when it refused to grow fast enough for him. Although he had long since aged into his maturity – and he knew now the true terror of this world.
Which was not the dead themselves, although those were fearsome indeed.
Nor was it the robbers, and the feral bands of men or dwarves one would occasionally encounter on the road. So long as your party was currently large enough, the odds of your death coming from that were very small indeed. These days men, who were still on the road were thin, thread-worn things – something that could not put up much of a fight against a good hobbit throwing axe.
Nor was it the hunger or the thirst that often dodged the footsteps of the Xiang siblings, and the other hobbits they currently travelled with.
No, it was none of these things – the true terror in this new dead world of theirs, was that you could become used to everything else. Used to the terror of seeing the dead rise, bored of the sight of men driven half mad on the road, unsurprised by the thirst or the hunger. Everything had grown so boring for Bingwen, even the hot feel of the broken sandstone road beneath his two furry feet, made him feel nothing anymore.
He stopped then, and realised that once again, his musing on his own boredom had caused him to fall to the back of the group. Ai, who had probably been too young to form a proper memory of what life had been like before…before the road…walked now close to the front. He could hear her laugh from all the way back here. When they had been younger, and still travelling by themselves, he could remember scolding her for that exact laugh. But that had been years ago, and that was no longer his place anymore. If the leader of their travelling band thought it prudent to silence her, then he would do so. After all, he stood beside her now, holding her hand and looking down at her with such a love in his eyes it almost made Bingwen sad to look at it.
A tall hobbit from the south, was their leader. With skin as dark as his eyes – eyes filled with a love that seemed to have only belonged to Ai since the first moment that the Xiang siblings had joined this little band of survivors.
Survivors.
Yes, that's what they were – nothing more than that. Not a people, or a society. It would be another generation, if not several, before any one group in this land were plentiful enough to aspire to that level of civilisation.
For now, their only goal was to keep on living from day, to terrible day. Live, and perhaps multiply so that those future generations could exist at all.
Up ahead the laughter had ceased and Bingwen raised his eyes again to stare at the back of their leader's head. The other hobbit had frozen; his fist raised as a sign for the others to follow his example. Go still, it said to them, and make no noise or they will find you. Who exactly 'they' were depended on the situation – sometimes it was marauders, bands of starving men or sometimes, most terrifying of all it was the dead.
All terrifying, all life threatening, all quite boring by now.
And that, dear readers, is when that band of hobbits, that band of survivors heard the most terrifying, the most daunting, the most surprisingly thing of all.
Laughter.
The laughter of other hobbits.
The dead do not laugh.
Of this fact Xiang Bingwen was sure above all things in this world.
The dead do not laugh.
They do not find joy, or hope, or even satisfaction in this land of the physical.
This is something reserved for the living; reserved for those who still yet belong to this plain of existence.
So, in that moment, when he heard the bubble of laughter, deep and world-worn; a weight lifted from his soul. There were no dead to ambush them this day, and from the sound of the laughter he could tell that there were no men to do so either. We will not bother to explain to the reader the differences between the laughter of the race of Men and the children of Hobbick. For if the reader be of the former there would be no way for them to tell, even if they should listen to the laughter of hobbits for a hundred years; and if the reader be a hobbit, then there would be no reason to tell them at all for they would already know.
This is the truth, and all the hobbits of Bingwen's party knew it well. It was why they stumbled out of the darkness they had been travelling in and into the light, that the fire provided. The first thing that Xiang Bingwen observed of the four hobbits that sat around the fire was that they did not seem to belong in this land of the east. They were far too pale, as only a creature of the West was, and their clothes were strange. Perhaps they had once been finally crafted things of beauty, but the jackets and trousers that had once proclaimed their owner's position in life so thoroughly, now hang in rags from their too thin bodies.
And despite their laughter three of the hobbits looked severely gaunt and troubled. They were not as pleased to see the travellers, to see the survivors as their fake smiles might have fooled a less wise hobbit into believing. Of this Bingwen was sure the leader, who seemed often to be the wisest of them all, would have discerned almost instantly. But of course, by then, they themselves were running low on vital supplies. And the smell of cooking meat was strong in the air that night – so perhaps even a wise hobbit could be persuaded to lay aside his better instincts, if his belly was so empty.
And besides the fourth hobbit, seemed genuinely happy to behold them. Unlike his companions, this creature was not thin and rake like at all, he was in fact quite plump and rosy cheeked. With bright red hair streaked with just a touch of silver. His clothes were fine as well – no rags for this hobbit. And just the barest glint of a gold chain coming out from one of his finely deep pockets. He was dressed all in green – making him seem, to weary and dehydrated travellers, almost like some kind of spirit of nature come to bless their way.
This fine hobbit rose from his place among his fellows, and approached their leader with hand outstretched in welcome.
'My friends, we welcome you to our little feast tonight. Please sit down, and rest. But first allow me to introduce myself – my name is Faldo Proudfoot, and I'm so happy to see you tonight.'
The West was a terrible place.
Or at least so claimed the four fine hobbits lounged round the fire.
'Don't ever go near Gondor,' warned one fey looking fellow, his hair white and bedraggled around his ears. 'A terrible place to find yourself in, and even worse to get out of.' It seemed for a moment like an honest warning to Bingwen, but then the plump hobbit with the fine clothes, and the red hair had laughed. And the bedraggled hobbit smiled too, although this did not seem half so genuine as the warning had.
'Yes,' cried the plump hobbit his hands clapping once in delight. 'They were terrible hosts, why I became starved while travelling through those lands. There was nothing good to eat at all, a greedy folk the men of Gondor; they had eaten it all before we arrived.'
It was said as if it were a joke; and everyone certainly laughed like it was a joke – but Bingwen doubted that any of his own party found it particularly funny. There was something that stripped the joy of a 'starvation' joke from you, after you had actually experienced the phenomenon. Perhaps it was the pain in your belly, or the feeling of saliva filling your mouth the next time you smelled even the small morsel of food. Whatever the case, the sound of these fine hobbits laughter on the subject soured something in Bingwen's stomach. Or maybe that was just his full bladder.
Yes, must be it. He just needed to get up, find somewhere quiet and dark, and relieve himself.
So that is what he did, leaving his sister smiling as she nodded in interest to the strange tales of the West her hosts continued to spout.
The first thing he thought when he was finally free of the fire's light, was that he really wished to be back in it. The company, might have been difficult, but there was something about the night sky tonight that left him chilled in a way he hadn't been since his boyhood. The night before his father had sent him and Ai away from their village and into the relative safety of the desert. There was something unsettlingly about the lack of any light, there was no moon, nor even the faint glimmer of starlight to light his way through the undergrowth this night. He was sure the stars were there, they were just hidden by some ominous cloud blanketing the sky from those on the ground.
Still maybe it was for the best, the young hobbit thought as he finished emptying his bladder, pulled up his breeches again and readjusted his tunic. He wouldn't have wanted to be spied on in the moonlight while doing this; it was bad enough when you were caught by members of your own travelling party, but to be found like this by a stranger, that would have been too much. Still, he concluded finally as he turned to make his way back to the small glimmer that was the fire now – it wouldn't have hurt either moon or stars to come out now. Shine their light down over his path so he didn't end up standing on…and that was when his foot collided with something.
Something…strange feeling. It was both hard and yet…and yet squishy at the same time. And sharp, like it had portions that were long like knitting needles, ready and willing to slice into a poor hobbit's shin. And that was the moment when he realised that his eyes were beginning to adjust to the lack of the fire's light. He could make shapes out in the dark, just shadows of things at first but then, as he looked down at this strange squishy, hard thing he realised that he, with horror in his gut, suddenly knew what it was.
We won't bother describing in detail what poor Xiang Bingwen saw then – he left no written accounts of it regardless. The only way we know he saw anything at all, is his account in the Ganyman archives, and even that is short and brief on the subject of what he saw that cold and terrible night so many millions of years ago now. Besides you don't need to know exactly what kind of horror show, Bingwen had let his foot step into to understand the true source of the terror that gripped the young hobbit then.
Because in the end, Bingwen had not stood on a what at all, but a who.
Or to be more specific, it was the scout they had sent along the road ahead of them a couple of days back. He was dead, of that much Bingwen was almost grateful for because – and again we won't go into too much detail on this account – but it almost seemed like he'd been eaten by something. And not a beast, because Bingwen was certain that a beast of any kind would never have left such precise knife marks behind after leaving their dinner to rot and decay overnight. In fact, a beast of this land, the kind of place it was now would not have left anything at all, and it was an amazement that any creatures – thinking or otherwise – would be so wasteful. It was almost as if they had stopped themselves from gorging because they did not want to be too stuffed to eat for…for…oh Ancestors…the main course.
And that dear reader is the precise moment, when Xiang Bingwen heard the screams from the direction of the fire.
Desperate to stop this, somehow, Bingwen started to stumble half mad with his own terror back to the fire. He even managed to grab a stick, although how that would help against these undead monstrosities, not even Bingwen really knew. But it's better to have some weapon, even a ridiculous one, than no weapon at all in times, in days like these ones. He was almost to the light again, in fact he was so close that he could see it's sparks flickering and dancing around the violent shadows of the screaming travellers and their pursuers. He was almost there, almost ready to save his sister from this fate when someone, and he didn't know who, but someone kicked sand not only in his face but all over the now much smaller fire, putting it out for good. The darkness was total now, and desperately Bingwen swung his stick in a mad attempt to hit something, anything at all – but it was no good, for all Bingwen hit was air before he himself was felled by a sharp biting pain to the soft flesh just under his knee. He fell and screamed and he thought, ah so this is how I die.
But reader, this is not how Xiang Bingwen dies. He will not die tonight, with the teeth of Faldo Proudfoot sinking into his leg. In fact, Xiang Bingwen won't die for many years to come, he will die as an old hobbit surrounded by his close kin. But of course, Xiang Bingwen didn't know that when he heard the sound of a horn in the darkness – and suddenly it wasn't the travellers who were screaming anymore
Suddenly around the dead and the living both, torches blazed to life - illuminating both the living's salvation and the dead's comeuppance.
It was the Sons of the Blarney.
Dressed in rags perhaps, but glorious none the less.
And all Bingwen could think as he slowly lost consciousness was thank Hobbick, the Blarney sons have come at last.
Middle-Earth, somewhere in the deserts of Rhûn; F.0. 15
They had left Moria – Caranthir and the Dwarf– the night they had given the Fellowship of the Fools to the Balrog. The son of Fëanor tried to convince himself that this was his decision, after all he had always hated dark, underground, smelly places that tried to pass themselves off as proper kingdoms. But no matter how he spun it he couldn't deny that it had not been him, or thoughts of his father that had made the decision that night. But he didn't want to think it was the dwarf because the dwarf had no power over him and he never would, so he did not think about that night.
No instead he focused on the sun and the sand beneath his clomping Dwarven feet. And he focused on how little water they had packed for the journey, and he focused on how empty his stomach was at that particular moment. He ignored diligently the sound of the voices in his head – one was the old 'wise' croak of Balin son of Fundin – the dwarf that just refused to give up and die. The second voice though, wasn't that, no this voice should never have been there at all. This voice was older than them, older than even the Silmarils themselves.
It had been the voice that forced him out of bed that night, it had been the voice that had made them leave he was sure of it. He tried not to turn his head anymore, because he could always feel now the presence – the small dark, wrapped in rags presence – of the voice that made him leave. He didn't want to think about it, so he didn't.
Anyway, how could he? What was one small shadowy figured wrapped in rags compared to the hundreds of them that surrounded him now. He didn't want speak to them, didn't' want to acknowledge their existence either, but that is something that is very hard to do to the person who's pointing a spear in your face.
'You are not a dwarf.'
Said the leader of the band of rag covered hobbits.
'Says who?'
Caranthir sneered at the strange hobbit's face. Hobbits, what kind of name was that for a species anyway, which Valar had gotten drunk and sung them into life? Even dwarves had the dignity of ages past. They had kings and kingdoms, what did hobbits have? A small green collection of fields in the west and clearly a desert full of skeletons in the east. Undoubtedly fearsome with a stick in their hand, but noble, something not to be laughed at? No, no Caranthir didn't think so.
The dwarf did, but he didn't matter now. Of course, as much as the elf fëa wished he could, and dearly wanted to, he couldn't laugh at the small bundles of rags that were brandishing sticks at him, because he wasn't actually suicidal.
'You mock us in your thoughts son of Fëanor. But you know nothing of our kind, even our gentle cousins to the West may yet surprise you, but you know nothing of us. You know nothing of the sons of the Blarney, our voices are the air, our hearts are the sun, and our eyes are the sky above your head. You may never escape us, you may never run from us, you might try but you will fail as you will fail most things. You are the dead and no one speaks to the dead like the children of Hobbick.'
The shadow behind him, laughed and applauded and Caranthir began to scream. Or at least he tried to, but like most things in his life lately, he failed miserably.
Maybe in another life Caranthir would have fought them, maybe in another life he would have even bested them, but this was the life he lived now, and he would be winning no battles today. His new body was old and stiff, and only just begun to stink with mouldy flesh. That was how things went if you didn't wait till your host was properly dead. Most bodies didn't want the second fëa in it, so they tried to chase them out by literally decaying around the thing.
This terrified the dwarf, but he still refused to leave. Over the several years they'd travelled together Caranthir had become used to Balin's cries of terror, when their fingers turned black and began to crumble away. The elf had been afraid too…once, but he was so old now, and he had seen so many things in his lifetime; his body rotting away around him was strangely enough not the most bizarre thing he had ever experienced.
The hobbits in rags threw him to the floor, he only noticed now how they kept their noses and mouths covered when they were around him. Figures, his stench was foul even to his own nose.
'I know you.'
Says a voice from behind him.
The voice is young, child-like even, and it holds the dreamy not-quite-there quality that you hear in most people who spend too long in the presence of the Valar. Caranthir does not look up, because whoever's standing above him, wriggling their tiny toes on the crown of his head, is no friend of his.
'I know you, you're the Dwarf King from Moria.'
He doesn't speak, because he knows, just somehow, he knows, what's going to happen next.
'You tried to throw my da to a Balrog.'
The Elf looks up then, into the young round face of the hobbit lad. The hair is black, lacking the curls that should have come along with it, and the nose is long and straight – like the house of Finwë's nose – and the eyes, dark green with just the fleck of silver. Those eyes would forever haunt the fate of his house. For they are not the eyes of a hobbit father or mother, they are not the eyes of a hobbit at all. They are not the eyes of a mortal, they are the eyes of fire, of madness, they, are the eyes of his father.
The Elf tries to scream, but it's already too late – for his spirit is already being ripped away from the dwarf. Don't ask how, for a Silmaril can never be questioned like that.
Caranthir had no body, this was not as strange an occurrence as it should have been, since Caranthir had had no body for many a millennium. But it was still different, for then he had had no body in Mandos and that was not quite the same as having no body in Arda.
In Mandos you still felt whole, even if you were nothing more than a shade, but here, here you were the wind, you were the air, and you were nothing all at once. He did not care to have no body here, for he had done that once before. Around him the night was black and cold; his captors had housed his fëa in a cage when they had ripped it from his host body. He did not know what had become of the dwarf after that, but he told himself that he did not care, because dwarves were ugly stupid creatures, and it would be madness itself to have grown fond of one.
The voice that had followed him and the dwarf…Balin, that had followed him and Balin all this way, began to laugh again. It was a sharp kind of sound, not a proper laugh at all, it was the sound of rocks scraping over flesh and steel slicing into bone. It was the laugh that would follow you even into your waking dreams, not that Caranthir dreamed anymore. The laugh was still there when the light appeared. This light was brilliant, this light was home, this light was…family. He'd seen that light locked in his father's study, or work-room, or from far away in the clutches of some undeserving fool. But now he saw it up close, without even the glass of the jewel to separate him from it.
The light was larger than it really should have been, and it had a form of its own; legs, arms, head and everything. They weren't defined exactly; it was as if the lines and the facial features that might have once been there had been blurred and smudged until there was nothing there at all. Nothing but the eyes, his father's eyes.
And a child's voice that said…
Hello Uncle Caranthir, do you want to come play with me?