The resinous smell of burning pitch filled the narrow passage way, reminding Aragorn that his torch was nearly spent. He needed to turn back, but the drift of cooler air wafting over his bare hands and face drew him onwards; there was an exit ahead.
He had decided, early in his explorations, this network of interconnecting underground caverns must honeycomb the entire ridge of Tol Morwen, but he had found no other entrance or exit beyond the hillside opening they used to come and go from their new home.
There were few comforts in his new life, but they were dry, they had food to sustain them, a place to retreat if it rained again, and room to stretch out, even if it was on the hard cold floor, to sleep.
No resentment tarnished his thankfulness for those small blessings, though Aragorn had thought often in the days following the discovery of the wreckage, that he would rather have perished with the rest than live with the guilt.
Now he moved forward cautiously, holding the torch aloft well in front of himself, testing each foot fall before stepping further along the passage way. He had twice come upon deceptive dead ends that might have ended him as well; interstices that had smelt of humus and tropical air, but had opened onto deep, though narrow, declivities. Narrow enough that had he found them at home, he might have jumped across to explore the other side. He had contemplated it briefly the first time, but on pondering had decided attempting to jump back and forth into man-sized holes might not be the wisest course of action.
It was the change in the quality of the darkness that alerted him to the fact that he was out of the cave, and the sense of soaring vastness that instantly replaced the slight oppression he experienced in the cavern tunnels. He was still inside something though; he sensed rather than saw, walls, or at least the semblance of walls.
Aragorn swung the torch first right then left, casting the light toward the ground as well. Crumbling stonework appeared briefly on either side, as though he stood in a doorway, while strewn about his feet, as far the smoking torch illuminated, huge stones lay tumbled as if cast like dice from a giant hand.
A smile flickered as Aragorn thought briefly of the fortunes in shells and pebbles that changed hands nightly before their fire. Harwan's first carvings had been a pair of dice.
Their days had fallen quickly into a semblance of routine. Mornings were spent learning to communicate. Aragorn, bringing to bear his unusual aptitude for languages, was surprised to find Harwan leaning Common as quickly as he was picking up the strange Haradrim patois.
Afternoons, Harwan sat on the beach with a fishing pole he had made from a willow branch, some stripped vines, and the little scuttling crabs Aragorn had seen on the beach. The hooks had been the second things carved; cunning little works of art, both lovely to behold, in their spiny sharpness, and useful.
Aragorn's afternoons were spent trailing game, setting snares, or skinning and dressing - when his labors bore fruit.
More often than not, they ate fish for dinner.
Aragorn glanced again at the torch. He had spent the first couple of nights in the cave huddled close to the fire – once the island wood had dried enough to make one – wandering the Númenórean map in the flickering light, while Harwan whittled.
The map, however, could hold his attention for only so long before restlessness got the better of him. Harwan's advice not to leave the cave after dark had proven good counsel when Aragorn, in one of his no one is going to tell me what to do anymore moods, had stomped out of the cavern and come face to face with a big cat nosing around the entrance. Fortunately, they had spooked each other and Aragorn had retreated unharmed, but with a healthy regard for the island night life.
The first night he had begun wandering the passageways branching off the back of their cave, his makeshift torch had burnt out rather quicker than he had expected, drenching him in a cold sweat in the sudden and complete darkness that had descended at the end of a drawn out sputter. He had learnt quite a lot about sensory deprivation feeling his way back to the main chamber in complete darkness. Had they not had a fire, he would have been hopelessly lost in the complicated maze. He had always had a keen sense of smell and that alone had guided him back along the path he had traversed with the light.
A little experimenting, a process he had learned at the knee of his foster father, had proven useful in making a longer-lasting torch and he had since been careful not to let excitement lead him further than he knew would allow his safe return.
Stupidly, he had let this one burn dangerously low, so his priority must be to find new material to augment his swiftly ebbing light. Harwan worried when he was gone too long and Aragorn was already past their agreed upon allotment of time.
He cast about, high and low, looking for anything that might burn and found only more tumbled rock and debris and towering walls that must once have been thick indeed, from the enormity of some of the boulders strewn amongst the rubble littering the floor. His feet tripped over a sudden up thrust in the uneven ground and he bent to swipe at the thick layer of accumulated scree shifting beneath his boots.
The find he unearthed rocked him back on his heels where he sat contemplating for several moments before bending forward to clear away a further patch of floor. For it was definitely floor, not ground, and made of marble if his senses were not totally bewildered. His mind juggled wildly chaotic conjecture, trying to order the fantastic thoughts with what he knew of Tol Morwen and its history.
Straightening, he rose and lifted the torch again, high over his head. Looking up he realized he could see stars, quite a lot of them in fact. Huge shadowy stones, piled up like children's blocks, rose well above his head, looming against the night sky, jagged edges showing like broken teeth between what once must have been graceful, arched columns. The encompassing walls, he discovered, were not so much broken as gashed and pitted and scarred. And had been hewn from solid rock.
Aragorn turned slowly, jaw gaping as his mind grappled with the idea taking shape. He stood in the ruins of the long hidden fortress of Nargothrond, home of Finrod Felagund, brother to the Lady Galadriel, grandmother of his unattainable beloved. The breath whooshed out of his lungs.
Centuries – no eons – more than two Ages of eons stretched backward from this moment in time, like an unbroken ribbon flowing along on the backs of the epic poems and stories and lore that in this moment suddenly became much more than dry, dull history.
How Borlath would have laughed to see him thus awestruck. For a pregnant moment, the poignancy of missing the sea captain and his crew threatened to overwhelm Aragorn. The flames of his forgotten torch wavered mistily before his eyes, then steadied, drawing his attention again.
He shook off the threatened lethargy and cast about for a way through the labyrinth of debris stretching out as far as his eye could pierce the darkness. Living history aside, he needed to find fuel and return to their abode before Harwan grew worried enough to go in search of him. Negotiating the passages often required two hands, as well as feet, and that broken arm would handicap the sailor, not to mention, despite the language barrier, the man had made his dislike of small, dark places very apparent early on.
Aragorn had difficulty, though, remembering that urgency as he moved further into the once underground fortress. That it stood open to the sky, now, must have been due to the cataclysm that had been visited upon Middle-earth with the drowning of Beleriand.
The slow march of time and nature had visited its own destruction and decay upon the legendary stronghold. Vines had crept down over once smooth walls, finding and filling cracks and crevices with strong green tendrils that eventually widened those cracks into fissures and faults. Water, whether in trickles or gushes, had worn away much of the interior walls, but sensitive fingers could still discern traceries of heraldries carven into the walls; heraldries Aragorn knew of only because they were preserved in Imladris by the current keeper of elven lore, Elrond Peredhil.
Clambering over colossal shards of marble, the edges whetted down by long years of exposure to the elements, Aragorn began forming a picture of a great hall in his mind. Of shimmering elven lights reflecting off polished wood, jewel-colored rugs glowing softly in the light as well, the glimmer of marble flecked with gold and the molten silver of mithril. Of graceful doorways carved in the shapes of great overarching trees, airy furniture arranged along walls hung with tapestries depicting Telperion and Laurelin. Of majestic soaring ceilings where flew the likeness of carven birds among the sky of stars over Cuiviénen.
His thoughts so occupied, he did at first assimilate the implication of the spectrally-glowing mountain impeding his progress. He noticed some dried up, hairy old vines still clinging to a cracked and fissured section of wall and moved to tug at one experimentally. A long length came down and he knelt to wedge the leaf-wrapped handle of his torch into a small gap between two stones, gingerly twining the new flammable around the old so as to not smother the current flame. When he was satisfied the torch would see him home again, he palmed the handle and rose again, thinking to backtrack now and return anon tomorrow.
The swift passage of torchlight again awoke a spectral gleam, though Aragorn dismissed it as a trick of the eye in the star washed gloom of the night. He had taken several steps in reverse of his forward path when he stopped abruptly and swung back just as he done on the beach. Only this time his eye beheld nothing he had imagined.
Treading closer, torch blazing now with new fuel, he found himself at the foot of a steadily sloping mountain of gold, mithril and jewels in every hue of the rainbow, all flashing and sparkling in the torchlight. It too rose above his head and spread out from his feet to fill what appeared to be half the chamber = at least from this side of the pile.
He could only stand, jaw flapping again, staring at the unexpected discovery. Clearly Borlath and company had never stumbled over this king's ransom, else they would all have been living in princely comfort in some far off Haradrim palace.
No, this hoard appeared to have been untouched in all the millennia that had passed since the razing of Nargothrond by Glaurung. The stories of the dragon's hoard were legion and legend. He wondered why - in the forty-some years between the slaying of Glaurung and the beginning of the War of Wrath - none had attempted to salvage anything? Perhaps it had been spelled? Perhaps it still was.
A tentative touch woke no overt evil, nor the tingling sensation he recognized as magic at work. Aragorn picked up a fist-sized emerald, turning its multi-faceted sides so it flashed green fire in the light of the torch. It was too large to adorn a lady's toilette and too flawless in its own right, to be cut into smaller stones, but he had learnt – also at his foster father's knee – how to discern stones of power and this one fairly blazed with energy. Though he could not wield the ancient power, his Maia heritage had marked him in subtle ways he was just beginning to grasp the importance of, now that he understood that heritage.
He yet remembered Elrond's astonishment when as a young boy, prompted by his brothers, he had scoured Rivendell's promontories and peninsulas to find a gift for their father's naming day. Unaware of either his own gift, or the power of the stone he had found, he had presented it with a flourish at the evening celebration, expecting, with all the perspicuity of a six-year-old, to be cosseted and celebrated for his ingenuity in finding such a perfect gift. He remembered being smugly pleased that his efforts had been rewarded beyond his wildest dreams, with absolutely no understanding that his achievement had just confirmed a future he would know nothing of for years to come.
The memory brought a smile now as he hefted the weight of the stone in his hand. If Elrond could not bend its properties to usefulness, it would make a pretty paperweight for his foster father's daughter. The smile faded into a sigh, but Aragorn pocketed the stone and bent to run his fingers through the trailing edge of the massive mountain of loot.
A fortune in pearls sifted through his fingers, along with diamonds and sapphires and lapis lazuli. Rubies three and four times the size of the jewel Borlath had affected on the middle finger of his right hand rolled down the shifting slope.
Bending a keener eye on the hoard he saw it contained many works of art; framed pictures, some of the canvases shredded, some unbelievably intact. Candlestick holders and candelabras, their bases sunk in heaps of jewels, shone with muted glow in the light of his torch. Pieces of those tables and chairs he had been imaging earlier, showing deep scratch and claw marks, as if the dragon had used them like a cat to sharpen his claws. Torn and shredded bits of moldering tapestries, recognizable still, even after all these eons, because elven artifacts were made to last forever. There were ornaments of brass, exquisitely wrought chests more fanciful even than those Aragorn had seen in Borlath's cabin, dwarven-smithed bowls of beaten copper and carved stone, caskets spilling gossamer jewelry so finely crafted it appeared made of spider silk.
It was far more than his mind could comprehend in the few minutes he allowed himself to stare in awe at the cache. Enough, though, he was sure, to finance an army should he ever decide to claim that throne his foster family insisted he was heir to.
Prince of Númenor indeed; why was it he had never felt less princely?
But, Aragorn thought with a grin as he began to fill his pockets, this was sure to up the ante during tomorrow night's dicing. He would wait to share his discovery until he could meet Harwan's pebble bet and raise it by a couple of chrysoberyl.
TBC