"Your brother would not listen," Legolas hissed, urgency in his face as he pointed vaguely towards the mountain, "your son is in danger." Arwen adjusted Celiriel on her hip and looked at her elder brother to see if he knew his twin's mind, but Elladan's face was inscrutable.
They were in his office in the palace infirmary. The afternoon light streamed through the windows. He was leaning against the desk with his arms folded.
"You know this wizard?" he asked.
"Ai!" Legolas dragged his hands through his hair and took a deep breath, "You call him Wizard, but we call him Necromancer. There are tales of him in the Greenwood. He came from the East in days of old, promising enlightenment. The Avari follow him, those who would refuse the call of the sea he promises a new path but…"
"But?" Elladan asked.
"Those he claims to help... die. He will come to isolated villages that have not met an outsider since the days of Cuivennen and many of the most wise and ancient of their number will fade and die under the false belief that he is guiding them on a shortcut across the sea.
He is a slayer of the firstborn, and all in my realm know him as such!"
"He has Eldarion?" Arwen stroked Celiriel's dark curls. They had been tied into a meager sprout atop her head with a piece of pink ribbon. Arwen looked fearfully at her brother, "What does Elrohir think he is doing?!"
"It may be too late…" Legolas admitted.
"So what are you doing?" she looked from the Prince of the Greenwood to her brother in betrayal, "save him! Are you not warriors!? Save my son!" Her raised voice upset the baby, and she started to fuss, "Not you too." She rocked the crying infant in her arms, bouncing her fruitlessly.
"Lord Elrohir stopped me, sent me away, and would not heed my warning." Legolas said, "he seemed to think that any intervention would put the child in more danger."
Arwen looked at Elladan as if he was responsible for the younger twin's decisions, "What is wrong with him?" she hissed, a childish desire to strangle her brother flooding through her.
"He would not needlessly put Eldarion in danger," Elladan stood up and lifted the child from her mother's arms, "if Elrohir is not here, he is at his side." Celiriel calmed instantly in her uncle's embrace as she put her chubby arms around his neck.
"He means to call upon the power of Illuvatar within the spirits of the mortal dead to try and send your son into the West," Legolas explained grimly.
"The Valar will not permit it," Arwen said certainly, watching Elladan soothe her daughter with practiced bounces, which he had learned millennia ago while holding his baby sister. Fear for her son flooded her, and she sat on the edge of the desk feeling nauseous. "He will be destroyed!"
"The Valar condemn such practices because it would usurp their powers. They would have no say in the matter." Legolas continued, "This being who calls himself Allatar, but we call him Gwanubango – the Death Merchant, he has been banished from my father's realm for many long yeni."
"Usurp the powers of the Valar?" Arwen looked to Elladan. Elladan, who always had a plan and an explanation and a cure, who could speak a dozen languages and do complicated arithmetic in his head, looked back at her and shrugged.
"How can a single player overwhelm an orchestra?" he looked down at the child in his arms, "if not with disharmony?"
"Then he is a servant of Morgoth, and he has my son? And you left him down there?" Arwen's wrath made Legolas flinch.
"He thinks that he can save his father," Legolas explained.
"He healed me skillfully. He has healed Estel's wounds better than any surgical intervention I am capable of," Elladan said, "and he still has not regained consciousness. Arwen, this may be his only hope."
"Or we have just allowed a servant of the enemy to rip apart our family?"
…
Tulk and Findegil had been firmly dragged to the palace holding cell where a terrified- looking Brekke and a defiant Elanor were already being kept. Holleg had grumbled something about the King's distaste for building prisons as he secured the bolt in the five-part Numenorian lock that would imprison the young conspirators in the only available cell. He spared only a moment to look disappointed at his young cousin.
"Where's Anja?" Brekke asked sheepishly. She held her bandaged arm; they had been changed that morning, but the sweaty heat of the day made the wrappings slick with sweat, and her arm began to throb. She did not dare ask permission to go to the infirmary.
"Your sister is repaying her debt to the realm in accordance with the Steward's justice." He told her, slamming the door with a sigh, "This better not be as bad as it looks, Brekke." He sighed, and Brekke sniffed, earning a disdainful look from the Hobbit girl.
Holleg left the four of them for what felt like a yen. Tulk was still sulking over having his axe confiscated and ruminating over how his plan to recoup his losses through service to the crown had gone so terribly wrong. When he had suggested that the legendary sword might have magical properties that could aid the Wizard's ritual, he had not meant for them to actually take the damn thing, and then Eldarion's silver eyes had gone round with high hope.
He had sworn to all of them that they would be protected and hailed as heroes if they only swore to him their aid and secrecy. The boy had been so charismatic and genuine in his plea, looking for a moment like every brave king from every old story, that Findegil had immediately agreed to whatever he wished, and the others had felt compelled to follow.
There were boots in the outside corridor; Holleg opened the door again and beckoned Findegil to follow him. He pushed up his spectacles on his nose and followed with his head held high. They placed shackles on his wrists, but he refused to be dragged along like a market sow. He walked as proudly as a lord out of the west amidst the sable-clad guards.
Findegil was led down the once-familiar corridors of the palace to the Commander's office. It was a cramped space lined with filing cabinets and lit by a single safety lantern and shuttered windows that cast a striped pattern on the checkered marble floor. Fin was placed on a chair across the desk from the commander, where he produced a piece of vellum and a stick of lead in a holder. Fin heard the door open and shut behind him. He glanced over his shoulder and shrank away from the sight of Lord Faramir sliding the bolt on the door closed.
"Findegil." Holleg began patiently, pulling his attention back around as he wrote something at the top of the parchment. "why did you take Anduril?" Faramir sat on the side of the desk and fixed him with a grim look.
Fin snapped his teeth closed and braced as if he was about to be hit by a tidal wave. "I have sworn an Oath of silence to my lord prince." He said it with a sense of finality, which meant it was not negotiable. He folded his hands defiantly and stared into the middle distance, his ocean-blue eyes like saucers behind his glasses.
"Fin," Faramir explained, pinching his nose, "As an intelligent and educated young man, you will know well that, as the Steward of this city, in a state of emergency, I bear the authority of the crown."
Findegil said nothing.
"Which means that by refusing to share information with me, you are betraying King Elessar,"
Fin shrank into himself but did not speak.
"Findegil, do you understand that this is treason?" Faramir's face fell into a look somewhere between respect and disappointment. he did not want to punish the child's loyalty and desperately wished that the king was here to properly chastise his fool of a son who had drawn his friends into this mad plot.
Fin blinked back the cowardly tears welling his eyes. He nodded but refused to speak, "do you understand the punishment for treason?"
Fin nodded again.
"Enter into the record that the suspect is refusing to cooperate." He glanced back at the Commander.
"Brekke has informed us that it was your idea to take the king's sword," Holleg said after a moment of silence. Fin only raised his chin, "that it was required for some ill-advised ritual which you believe to be capable of saving Lord Aragorn's life?" he waited for a moment and sighed when Fin remained silent.
"Very well," Faramir raised his eyebrows, stood, and, stepping close to the Archivist's apprentice, prodded at the breast of his robes until he felt the rectangle of stiff leather. He lifted Findegil's collar and drew out the little notebook. Fin's mouth fell open in horror as he watched the Steward unwind the leather thong and open the stiff pages thoughtfully.
"The Wizard Allatar has gone into the Prince's sickroom." he read out loud, "They chant and talk together. I have taken counsel with our new dwarven ally. He believes that the key to such magic is the song of Mahal which echoes through the great works of Dwarrowcraft." Faramir handed the book to Holleg, "Fascinating!"
...
Riele and Eldarion galloped together through the enchanted night until the pale light of dawn had grown rosy in the rising mists. A flickering incandescence of fairy lights spreading behind them like the wake of a ship in the high grasses as the mallorn became smaller and mingled with trees of lesser height and majesty. Riele climbed a rocky hill. She seemed to have some idea of where she was going. She deliberately navigated the stones with a goatlike nimbleness up to a rocky rise where the ground suddenly fell away from them into a vast valley. She stopped and smelled the air suspiciously. A black bird cawed and flapped its oily wings out into the morning.
Eldarion's legs had grown stiff, and he gratefully let himself slide from her back, leaving a sweaty mark in her pearly coat. He stretched and rubbed the newly mended place on his thigh and wondered that his body seemed to be made of such mundane stuff in this fey dreamland. Riele looked at him with concern and huffed, tossing her head out towards the valley.
Eldarion stepped around her, and for the first time, a mortal looked out upon the gleaming landscape of Vanyamar in the glory of the rising sun, and he beheld only ruin.
The sun was a blood-red eye in the stripe of soot painted across the distant saw teeth of the Pelori. A broad and mist-shrouded valley spread below them. In the dark shadows of the mountains, he could see farmsteads and the burned corpses of buildings bleeding foul smoke into the rippling pink sky. In the center of the mists, two crooked and ancient shapes like broken tree stumps a hundred feet tall loomed over the landscape, ancient reminders of entropy standing as signposts to those who spent their undying lives in the shadows of Ungoliant's hunger. Dark clouds swirled to the West.
Looking around for prying eyes in the silent wilderness, Eldarion untied his breeches and urinated onto a lichen pink rock, feeling guilty and relieved as he watched his mortal waste stain the Valar-blessed boulders. Tucking his clothing back in place and adjusting the hilt of the sword in its awkward position on his belt, he wished that he had brought a sword belt. He stood there for a long time, watching as the stars faded behind him, smelling the lingering smoke on the air. It had a sickly flavor like a fire built to cook rancid meat. The birds had gone silent. A chill of apprehension ran across his shoulders. He turned to look back into the menacing halls of the receding trees. The fairies had all gone dark.
"You're right, let's get out of here," Eldarion suggested as Riele pranced and whickered impatiently.
There was a hiss and a thud as a dark arrow slammed into a tree a few feet above Eldarion's head. He looked up at it and dove around the other side of his mount, pulling her down the rocks, thanking the Valar that she seemed to be more agile than a mundane horse. The sound of rattling bones came from the shadows under the tree, and the wind bore the stench of rotting flesh. Riele whinnied and stepped close to Eldarion, urging him to remount as two more arrows buzzed past them, and a third buried itself into the ground between her hooves. Eldarion pulled himself onto her back, barely gaining his seat before she leaped to one side. The sweat on her fur was cold on his legs, and it was all he could do to cling to her as he looked backward to behold their pursuers as they came crashing through the forest.
He had seen drawings of orcs before, some academically realistic and carefully rendered, some as cartoonish horrors designed to frighten small children. The half-rotten thing that came shambling out of the shadows behind them with a mass of gore where its jaw should be and eyes that burned with a violet fire, was worse than his uncle Elrohir's most grisly stories. It locked its terrible gaze onto the unicorn and her boy and, with a wail that seemed to fill the morning, through its ruined mouth it burst into an unnaturally fast sprint. At least a dozen other monstrosities rambled out of the forest behind it, bearing crude bows and armor that bore the hacks and blackening of ancient battles. Another arrow whizzed out of the darkness, catching on his outer arm.
"Run!" Eldarion shouted as two more arrows buzzed past them. Riele charged forward along the top of the cliff face where the forest ended. Looking back and forth, Eldarion saw it slowly grew level with the rolling grasslands below them. Ahead, he saw two axe-wielding goblins shamble with unnatural speed out of the forest, snapping their yellow teeth around maggot-filled mouths and howling.
Riele made a twisting motion as she came up between them, impaling one upon her horn at the same time that she kicked out with her back legs, caving in the creature's face with one hoof. She threw the impaled goblin down, but her face was stained with rancid blood, and the smell of it seemed to drive her into a protective frenzy. Eldarion yelped as the sudden motion nearly unseated him, but he seized another lock of mane and managed to stay on, his legs cramping from the constant tension required to ride bareback.
His heart hammered in fear, and he felt Riele brace against the stones and launch herself off the cliffs. Eldarion held his breath and closed his eyes for the moment that they were airborne, unsure of how far the drop would be and whether his new horse could see any hazards that might turn her legs in the high grass.
He gasped as they hit the ground, and the impact took his breath away, crouching low to her neck, he looked back to see skeletal wraiths climbing like spiders over the stone. He grabbed for Anduril's Hilt, taking comfort in the fit of the worn leather in his hand but unwilling to draw it and risk dropping the precious blade in the sea of grass. Somehow, impossibly, in his terror, he could hear the sound of a thousand tiny golden bells.
One of the horrors screamed as a gold-fletched arrow struck it in the neck and tumbled over the edge of the rocks into the long grass. Eldarion desperately looked along the path of the
mistle. The grasses parted ahead of him in the wind, and silhouetted by the rising sun; a rider appeared over the next hill.
The plume of his helm shone golden in the sunrise, and his great white destrier reared up to paw at the air with its hooves. He fitted another arrow to the recurve bow and let it fly with perfect control. The horse wore an armored saddle with clever stirrups and had jingling bells in its mane. The rider was immediately flanked by a whole company coming up over the hill in a line on either side of him. They wore gilded armor and the device of a golden flower shone from their shields and flowing green cloaks as they raised their bows in unison with their leader. The undead that pursued him fell with shining shafts in their throats and their mouths open.
"Help!" Eldarion cried out, sounding more afraid than he would admit and feeling Riele gallop headlong towards the newcomers.
The riders parted to let him through without question. Eldarion turned to look as he passed them and saw the warriors trade their bows for spears, stabbing and slashing down at the ravenous dead with the sickening sound of metal parting rotten flesh. He tugged on Riel's mane, curiosity overwhelming his fear as he urged her to turn around so that he could see the warriors fight. They were a flowing wave of golden violence that met the undead enemies with the calm efficiency of a butcher. The fighting was done in a few minutes as the last of the shambling horrors were put down to lie in the long grass.
Eldarion clutched the sweat-matted lock of hair at Riele's withers, squeezing his eyes shut, ready to urge her into another sprint as he fought to regain control of his breathing. He sensed the golden knights surrounding him. He heard the clink of mail as their leader dismounted nearby.
They exchanged some words in a beautiful tongue that he did not understand, clearly discussing their unexpected new charge. He felt a hand touch his elbow, speaking to him in that same strange language, gently coaxing him to raise his head and look at his rescuer. Riele turned her head and snuffed at the stranger's face in curiosity.
Eldarion raised his head to look at the strange elf. He had removed his helm and carried it under one arm. He was tall, even for an elf, with noble features softened by kindly blue eyes. His golden blonde hair was elaborately braided close to his head. His look of concerned curiosity melted into one of numb shock and his mouth fell open as he looked on the boy's face.
After so many long yeni of so many strange and impossible things in his life, Glorfindel was very, very difficult to surprise.
"Impossible," he switched to the once familiar tones of Sindarin, which he had not spoken since he returned to his mother's land. The boy with Earendil's nose and Arwen's round eyes looked at him in terror.
"My Name is Eldarion Telcontar," he said to the strange elf who was staring at him like he had seen a ghost, "I came here to rescue my father's spirit from the Necromancer called Atarincë Curufinwe Feanorion. I seek the halls of the dead."
Glorfindel's shock melted into a bewildered smile, "Ai, my boy, my Flower Knights might have run you down had I not known your mount as an old friend." He laughed, his eyes suddenly bright as he moved his hand to Eldarion's shoulder. There was a warmth inside the child's body. This was no errant mortal specter; a foreign and sophisticated magic had guided him here, and the determination in the boy's eyes shone out behind shutters of fear. A strange and volatile magic kept him suspended in two realities at once, a magic locked away within the secret gift of mortality. "But I would not send a dehydrated mortal youth into danger unaided. You are wounded and hungry, I sense." Eldarion touched his arm where the wickedly sharp goblin arrow had sliced across his bicep; the fear was ebbing away, and the cut throbbed. "Come to our camp. We may be able to help. I believe that there is someone there who would like to meet you."