Findegil and Tulk sat vigil outside the room where the prince had been placed. The chaos of the previous night had calmed down into an eerie stillness. A healer had taken Eldarion into a private room with a bed and a cup of tea brewed from willow and poppy. They had been ordered to see that he was allowed to gain desperately needed rest. Findegil sat on the hardwood, his scholar's robes pooled around him. He pulled a small book of roughly bound parchment leaves from his breast pocket, adjusted his glasses, and scratched some notes with a stick of lead in a clever elvish holder. He noticed the dwarf watching him.
"You write poetry while your lord lies at the gates of death," Tulk observed.
"Someone has to," Findegil answered, sparing a glance at the door across the hallway, "Master Narbeth said always to keep notes." He bit back his sadness at his teacher's death, "Nobody will know it happened if nobody writes it down."
The dwarf laughed, leaning on his axe with both hands. "Indeed." He answered. The corridor grew quiet except for the scratching of Findegil's delicate Tengwar across the kidskin. "There has been no explosion," Tulk noted, looking up through the sculpted beams and bobbing red trumpet vines to the tower looming above them. The sun shone from behind it, and the sky was beginning to populate with small clouds.
"No." Findegil thought of all his beloved books, scattered like a deck of marked cards across the floor of the archive, his master dead amongst their blooming pages. "Pallando chose to target the two receptacles of history in the city. We will be transcribing the lost editions for decades, but they would never exist at all if they were never written in the first place." Findegil bowed his nose to his writing; Tulk observed the boy, this plump, intellectual child would be worthless on the battlefield, and yet, there it was, clear for anyone to see, that he was of nearly pure Numenorian stock. "I would like to hear about the attack in the market in your own words if you don't mind." Fin's fair curls fell around his face, and his dwarfish spectacles made his ocean-blue eyes look enormous as he looked up.
"Perhaps another time," Tulk was bowing his head in gentle deference to the young man when a sound made them both look up to where two guards flanked the King's sick room down the hall.
Allatar leaned heavily on his cane as he closed the door behind him. The wizard seemed drained of his former potency, as if every person he healed drew a bucket from his own celestial store. His back stooped lower, and his legs seemed to tremble. Tap, Tap, Tap, went his cane on the hardwood.
"How fares the king?" Findegil asked, tucking his journal inside his breast pocket.
Allatar regarded the two of them with a gentle smile. "I have done what I can for now." He answered simply. "I would like to see the boy if permitted." He looked between the prince's two guardians.
"We were told that he is not to be disturbed!" Findegil stood and went to flank the door beside the dwarf. Tulk placed one hand on his axe.
"I suspect that you will not find him resting." Allatar looked at the door and then back to the Archivist's apprentice.
Politely knocking on the door, Findegil pulled it open a few inches, peering inside. The small room was dark. The shutters had been pulled closed, only letting a few slanting lines of afternoon sunlight onto the rumpled bed where the prince lay curled up beneath a thin cotton sheet. His eyes seemed to shine in the darkness like shards of glowing amethyst.
"Prince Eldarion, are you awake?" Findegil asked. Eldarion squeezed his eyes shut and rolled onto his back. He was wearing the white silk garments the healers provided to their patients, and there were patches of moisture around his neck and armpits.
"The Wizard wants to see you," Findegil stepped into the room. Eldarion did not answer. He lay one arm across his face and rolled so that his back was to them. "I don't…" Findegil almost shut the door, but Allatar caught a glimpse of the boy through the opening, and he pushed past in a rush.
"Why did you not tell me you were injured?" The wizard demanded as he went to the far side of the bed and took a stool from the corner. He spoke to the prince of the Reunited Kingdoms with the familiarity of a grandfather scolding his kindred. He removed Eldarion's arm from his face and looked into his drug-softened eyes with pity.
"You needed to conserve your energy for my father," Eldarion answered honestly, to which Allatar shook his head in exaggerated dismay. The wizard laid one hand on the boy's forehead, finding it warm.
"I have done what I can for him, for now," Allatar's brow softened, "These processes can take time. May I see your leg, your highness."
"Why won't he wake up?" Eldarion asked, pushing himself onto his elbows and pulling aside the blankets. His injured leg had been re-wrapped, although the doctors had said that they would wait to repair the stitches, and rubbed with antiseptic ointment and aethelas oil. But the wound was still warm to the touch and swollen with a pink flush.
"Pallando's magic lingers."
"I don't know what happened." Eldarion insisted again, feeling cool metal against his leg as the bandage was cut away. He shrank into himself, not wanting to speak of the confusion and chaos of the last two days.
"If I understand your uncles correctly," Allatar said as he worked, mixing droplets of several oils in his palm, "when my mad brother's plan to bring down your family was executed, he did not foresee the presence of that misbegotten artifact that was, in ancient times called the Eye of Mandos."
Tulk straightened where he stood beside the door.
"The eighth Palantir, made in ancient times by the Smith himself, broken, recut, and traded between a thousand hands until its true provenance was utterly forgotten, and it was placed as a decoration in the haft of a war hammer," Allatar smirked at the dwarf. "In the first age, there were some amongst the Noldor who believed that these broken shards might be used to breach the very veil of death and communicate with those who wait. It was believed that one could see into the halls of the Doomlord, and even beyond, to the void beyond the worlds, to commune with the departed souls of men and Eru himself. But such a thing was of course, impossible, or so they thought." Findegil pulled out his notebook as silently as possible and began writing furiously.
A cool numbness spread through Eldarion's limb, and looking down in wonder, he saw only a tiny red mark where the cut had been.
"How do you do that?" He attempted to sit up all the way, trying not to tip over as a wave of nausea hit him. His head rang with cacophonous music, and he suspected that the drugs were suppressing a raging migraine.
"Shh," Allatar guided him back down to lie on his side. He studied the boy. It was obvious that Eldarion had been crying. His haunted eyes were raw with tears.
"It was like a window opened in the center of everything," Eldarion whispered after a moment, "and now… I think there's something wrong with me." He covered his ears and squeezed shut his eyes.
"You are hurt, in your soul and body, afraid and grieving, and you have wielded a magic that we do not fully understand," Allatar spoke patiently.
"Can you hear it?" Eldarion asked.
"Sometimes," Allatar said, "When I am very quiet, in the early hours of dawn, or deep in memory."
"There is screaming in the music." Eldarion whispered, as if it was some terrible secret, "inside of everything, it won't stop." He grabbed his ears tighter and rolled his face into the pillow. His breath came in terrified gasps.
"I know." Allatar put a hand on the young man's shoulder, letting his terror drain through him into the earth.
"How will I be king if I know the world is made of fear?" Eldarion asked, begging for reassurance.
"Because it is also made of love." Allatar beamed.
Eldarion groaned and raised his head to give the wizard a disgusted look, but Allatar's easy laughter cooled the acid on his tongue.
"Something went inside me when the jewel shattered," Eldarion confessed. He looked lost as his eyes went to Tulk and Findegil, watching him with pity from the door. "For a moment, it felt as if I could see everything, all my mortal ancestors preserved like notes on a page." His voice became distant, as if something much older and wiser was speaking through him. "It was like a great darkness lifted with the coming of the morning out of the East," he was silent for a long moment, "I remembered what the first men forgot when they fled from the wrath of the First Enemy in the First Age." Eldarion turned away from the doors, stripes of sunlight decorating his face and body, wishing that his heart would slow.
Allatar laughed, "And I have also come out of the East!" He stood in a swirl of robes and went to the window, throwing them open to blast the prince with the light of Arien's flaming fruit as it blazed in midsummer glory into the hospital room. "To prepare the champion of the Dream lord for his battle with the lord of fear!"
"I am fourteen years old!" Eldarion sat up, scowling tearfully at the light on his hands as if it made them unclean. "I just want my father back!"
"My dear boy," Allatar put his hands on his hips, "you are older than the sun. Together we will save your father." Eldarion looked up at him in horror. "I fear that the power of the stone has caused the calamity we have experienced here in Endor to be met with an even greater one. Pallando's target was you, and your father, but his victims may lie across the unbending sea. And you, you are the bridge between earth and eternity."
"What would happen, an Aman, if Mandos were to fall?" Eldarion asked.
"It would mean that the firstborn could die as mortals do. Those who wait will be sent to the void."
"But that didn't happen. He was taken back?" Eldarion asked, "Just pulled out of the world like a rabbit in a snare! I saw it!"
"Which means, Valar permitting, that has not happened." Allatar placed his hands on his cane.
"And what about my father?" He leaned forward.
"Help me find him."
.
Reality, or something like it, seemed to resolve in the damp stone under his body. The smell of moss and old, drippy tunnels filled his nose. Aragorn tried to move and winced, clawing for scraps of memory. Where was he? How far had he wandered in the darkness? He tried to organize his memory; jumbled images of his wife and children seemed to fade away from him, but they seemed to shift and crumble like sand. How did he get here?
Voices were speaking from some distance away. Smooth and lilting in the antiquated tones of Noldorin Quenya. He tried to move and was met with a searing pain in his head. A hand clutched at his shoulder, and the voices stilled.
"He's waking up." There was movement close to his head, "He's waking up! Estel?" A familiar voice said close at hand. He felt a palm on his cheek, turning his face towards the voice, "Estel, open your eyes!" Aragorn froze, one hand raised, attempting to blink eyes that felt sealed shut by a layer of grit.
"Ada?" Aragorn asked in his confusion. He was unable to orient himself before he felt his body lifted in a crushing embrace. His mind, still numb with shock, he pushed at Elrond's chest and blinked to bring his face into focus in the dim light. He gazed at his adoptive father with awe written clear across his expression. Elrond had tears in his eyes and otherwise looked like he had just stepped off a battlefield. He had a cut on his cheek and his hair was pulled back in hasty warrior's braids.
"Estel," his father scolded him with wonder mixed with sadness, "Far too soon," he insisted, "it is far too soon!" Elrond lifted him from the ground and clutched him desperately against his chest.
"I'm dreaming." Aragorn muttered, "Where are we?" he looked around, trying to orient himself. They were in what appeared to be a small cell, windowless except for a distant opening above them. A heavy door with a grate looked into a torchlit corridor. A tall figure looked out of it, leaning one arm above his head.
"You're in a coma." Elrond moved back, giving him room to sit up against the wall. "You were injured; you came to the very lintel of death, but it was not your time." He studied his son's face in the dim light. He should not be there. The wrongness of it was like a band around his heart. "There was… a great calamity. Magic unlike any of us have seen." Elrond's expression held a look of confusion, even fear.
"What happened, Ada?" he asked, "who have you been fighting?"
"My brother and the angry dead who follow him," the figure by the door said at last. His face was turned to the dim light coming from the window. It glowed in a whisp of orange hair at the edge of his silhouette, "while he lived in Endore, he would often speak of his interest in necromancy. Despite our warnings, he saw death as a personal insult, Mandos as his personal enemy." The Eldest Son of Feanor had been clothed in a body made of spirit and dream stuff, as subtle as the thought that comes before speech. He was beautiful as he had been in his youth, and his voice was deep and richly accented. "He spoke from a great love of those who had passed. Afterward, in the millennia of darkness, Curufinwe grew bitter in his waiting. His spirit burned with rage at our fortune. He drew other spirits to him, angry spirits, dark things. We were confined to long solitude and silence. Our father was condemned to the void. We believed all his experiments to have failed. I never thought he could attempt to usurp the will of the Doomlord himself. He tried, more times than I know, to use the dark jewels, the broken shards of my grandfather's seeing stone, but could never…" Maedros Fëanorian turned, and his eyes pierced through the other two. His foster child and the mortal king he had raised, "he needed one final ingredient."
"Me?" Aragorn looked between the two of them.
"No," Elrond sighed, "he needed your son."
"Eldarion?" Suddenly, memory came rushing back to him: the market, the explosion, the purple stone on the hilt of the great weapon, a horrible weight crushing the breath out of his body, his son screaming in terror for him to wake up, Arwen weeping beside his still body. "I have to get back!" He pushed his father away and scrambled to his feet. He was overcome with a wave of vertigo and immediately went back to his knees, his father's hand on his shoulder. "How do I get back, Ada?"
"You don't!" a mocking voice came from the corridor. Two figures stood outside: a dark-haired elf and a Maia in a hooded cloak.
"Atarincë!" Maedros shook the door fruitlessly, "coward!" he lunged out to grab at his brother.
The dark-haired elf clicked his tongue, stepping back with a chuckle, smoothing down elaborately embroidered robes with a disappointed sigh, "Brother. You may call me a coward, but you did not even have the courage to stop me." Then he looked at Aragorn curiously, "I see that my menagerie is growing!" He stepped forward, staying just inches from his brother's reach. "I was always fascinated by the potentials of hybridization," his sneer slid across the three of them, "they thought I disapproved of…" he studied Elrond with distaste, like an inbred dog, "miscegenation. But rather, I was personally fascinated by your… ancestral perversions. Peredhil. To play chess with a god and win a prize that never belonged to you," he clicked his tongue, "that's real power. You see, I believed that I had lost my chance at freedom with the Sindar bitch when I was locked away here," he shook his head in mock disappointment, "and all these millennia later, who should complete my experiments by her own errant offspring!" he laughed, "fascinating! Now the lord of death himself is trapped in the void he created for our torment, trapped, with his mad brother," He spread his hands triumphantly. "and the descendants of that unholy union are mine, to… dissect."
"He is not meant to be here!" Elrond snapped, one hand clutching Aragorn's shoulder, mounting horror and helplessness winning over his gentle nature, "His body is healing. You have no right to keep him!"
"What do you want?" Aragorn studied Curufin through the bars, seeking some strategy to disentangle his soul from his webs of treachery. He wore a mocking smile as he folded his hands behind his back and bobbed back and forth. The Maia at his elbow watched without reaction, he was sure that if he made any motion against the elf, he would be struck down without hesitation.
"It speaks!" A flash of childish wonder lit the elf's mad eyes. "Is that not obvious, Edan?"
"Atarincë..." Maedhros stepped protectively in front of the mortal. His voice was a growling warning.
Curufin smiled benignly, "I want… to die." He turned his gaze to Aragorn, "and you will show me how."