DISCLAIMER: The events in this chapter are mine. Most of the rest isn't.

Mountains

As Maglor closed the gates behind him, sealing them for all eternity, he felt a strange weight lift from his shoulders. Whatever happened now, the last grey ship was built. He could go to his rest knowing that, someday, someone would find it, and sail it to Valinor at last.

No, he thought, frowning, I cannot be sure of that yet. There is more to do first. He still had to build his tomb, and carve the inscription that would guide his messengers to their vessel. And to do that, he had to return to his point of origin. Sighing, he turned to face the Misty Mountains, and began to walk.

He made fairly good time, and reached the highest point of the Pass of Caradhras sooner than he had expected. However, Caradhras had not forgotten its hatred of Elves and Dwarves. It would not let him escape so easily.

The snowstorm struck out of a clear sky, clouds boiling in from the north like a great black tide. At first, Maglor stopped, sitting down under an overhang to wait it out. By the time the snow had reached a foot deep, and with snowflakes up to two inches across falling, he had realised his mistake. Standing up, and thanking Ilúvatar that elves could walk on snow, he set off down the west face of the Redhorn.

Soon enough he discovered that walking on snow was only half the battle. The wind blew fiercely from the west, howling around the rocks like a pack of wargs that had caught a scent. At times it felt like an invisible hand, pushing him backwards, so that he had to fight for every step. Onwards he pressed, until he felt he could go no further, and then further, pushing himself to his limits and beyond. So this is what it was like, he thought in a moment of clarity, to cross the Helcaraxë.

He had never before understood how his cousins and uncle had managed it, how they could have walked over those miles of freezing ice, how they could have kept going with the knowledge that they could die any moment. He did now. There, on Caradhras, when death was so close he could practically taste it, he knew what it was like to lose all sense of self to the blistering cold, to exist in a state words could not describe. For, he thought before finally surrendering thought, when there are no words left to describe it, there is only the thing itself.

It could have been minutes or days later that he finally reached the bottom of the pass, blue with cold, frostbitten in most of his fingers and toes, and ready to collapse. As soon as he reached the nearest forest, and had left the snow behind him, collapse he did, taking the time only to pull his cloak tightly around himself before falling into the trance-like state adopted by elves near to death. He knew no more for several days.

The Helcaraxë is the Grinding Ice that the followers of Fingolfin had to walk over to reach Middle-earth.

I am very sorry that this chapter took so long to write, and that it's so short. I am trying to get back into writing these stories, and have three chapters of the sequel to Darkness Falling written, but a lot of my time has been taken up with writing a screenplay for a planned Silmarillion fan-film. The script, adapted into narrative form, will eventually be put up here as a new story. However, this will probably not be for a while.

For anyone hoping for more chapters of The Advancement Of Learning any time soon, I'm also sorry. I've gotten halfway through a chapter, but it's so convoluted that it needs a total rewrite. Preferably one that doesn't involve Parmiel explaining why she's never met a Vala. If I get bored enough, I might stick up the half-chapter as a separate story.

Cloaked Eagle