Fingolfin's richly decorated armor gleamed with a pale light on the walls of the corridors as he walked before them beside the veiled elleth.
"Is it her in truth?" Elrond asked Maedhros in a whisper of Ossanwe. To the others, it appeared that they walked in silence.
"The lady is no friend of these abominations, that is certain," he responded in the same way, rubbing his wrist, still unaccustomed to the restoration of his limb. "she is alike unto my father in spirit, but she is deeply veiled, in more than just her dress. She knows more than she says if she be the lady Þherindë in truth."
They had gone very far through the maze of black tunnels, moving along steadily behind the statuesque form of the Dead Queen. Occasionally, they had heard the sound of stumbling feet or caught a breath of foul air, but now the fortress felt still as if preparing for a great storm to crash against its cloven walls.
"It was she who freed us from the torments of the necromancer," Damrod told his king as they followed behind their new allies.
Noticing his limp, Damrod had wordlessly supported his lord by one elbow and was quickly permitted to pull Aragorn's arm across his shoulders. He would not mention the king's weakness and continued to do his best to fill him in on all available intelligence. "He is making a great collection of all mortal souls who appear before his fractured throne expecting the mercy of the Doomlord and liberation beyond the world. By delaying our passing in his cruel torments, he thinks of unlocking his coveted Gift of Men." Damrod pronounced the last words with disdain. "A Gift would be to see my family again."
"There are others?" Aragorn asked. Gripping his chancellor's shoulder tighter.
"Ai, my lord, those citizens who fell in Pallando's attacks, and many more, who seek for your coming," Damrod spoke as if he was delivering a status report to his commander. Aragorn realized, far too late, that he had never truly known the man, and the Eru-facing shade who walked beside him now in the mournful halls of doom would never welcome him home with a polite bow and a bundle of correspondence again. Damrod had lived a life that no great history was obliged to record; he had fought bravely for his king and his captains, loved with humble diligence in the days of peace, and the music of his soul had been cut off too soon in its waxing elegies, "There are very many, you will see." Damrod said and Aragorn looked up to find that they had stopped.
"We are here," the veiled elleth touched a few dark stones on the glistening wall with one lace-gloved hand. The stones slid inward with a groan and, with the rattle of some hidden machinery, were pulled away and divided to reveal an aperture. "Long have I dwelt in these halls, and in this place, I have found refuge and made the circles of the world my spinning wheels, and the bars of the music writ upon the cosmos into the weft and shuttle of my loom," she said, and her voice was dark with the bitter gift of prophecy.
They stepped down a stair that went a little way before opening into a firelit chamber. On the walls of the stairs and every side of the chamber were woven tapestries, the art and poetry of which were like none in Arda. They were woven of silken fibers in ten thousand shades, as rich in color as the flowers of the Shire in spring. The story of the whole history of Arda was drawn in knots and threads of gold and mithril, twenty feet high on the cold walls.
Immediately in front of them, hung a portrait of a dark-haired Numenorian king who Aragorn did not recognize. His eyes shone with clear violet light and his smile was kind and curious. He held the scepter of Anuminas in one hand and wore the crown of Isildur lightly.
A shout of welcoming voices went up when Fingolfin stepped into the chamber, and a few seconds later, an even louder shout was heard as Aragorn stepped into the room, which he realized was full of what appeared to be Gondorian citizens.
"King Ellessar!" a Girl's voice called, and she ran into his arms as all those assembled rose to try and touch him. Aragorn found himself on his knees. She had been standing beside him in the market. He had smiled and waved at her from her perch on her father's shoulders.
…
"I would be an ill guardian if I let the boy seek out danger without stopping his recklessness, and I cannot afford to lose either of you, Ingoldo." Galadriel looked at her brother seriously, turning to Glorfindel for help. "Elrond's foolish attempt at infiltration has already deprived me of one of my generals."
"Why not wait until the fighting is complete before sending him into danger?" Fingon suggested, studying Eldarion with an impressed smirk. The boy was staring at his iconic gold-laced braids and looked to be holding his breath for fear that he might actually talk to him.
"Exactly," Galadriel agreed with her cousin enthusiastically, "There is no point in sending him anywhere near the fighting. In fact, I would send him back to Eressëa with the hobbits if I had my way. I need you here, Ingoldo, not running off on some errand."
"Errand? Artanis!" Finrod parried, "This is no mere errand," he pointed to Eldarion, "He may carry with him our only hope of victory." They had been going back and forth for some time. She had failed to protect the innocent too many times in her life and was determined that she would not be culpable for the Boy's further suffering. Still, she did not have an opportunity to object, for there was a commotion at the door as the tent flap was tossed open.
"Naneth!" Celebrian ducked into the tent. Her aspect was changed from before. She seemed like one who wakes in delirium from a vivid dream. She was barefoot and wore only a silk chemise, and her hair fell to her knees unbraided. She stopped in the midst of them, looking around until her eyes landed on Eldarion. "Elrond has reached me through ossanwë." She announced, a look of triumph on her face as she turned to her mother, "It worked, Naneth!"
"The mad Peredhel did it!" Fingon said, in apparent shock. Galadriel seemed to sag in relief. She stepped around the table to embrace her teary-eyed daughter.
"It was just a glimpse," she said, hanging in her mother's arms, "they were in the dark; there were others." She looked at Fingon seriously, and his mouth fell open at her meaning, "Those who have yet to be reimbodied, they are banding together in the depths of Mandos to try and escape, but," she shook her head, still out of breath, "they are pursued! They will be captured if we do not send aid."
"What worked?" Eldarion asked, feeling lost.
"Your grandfather took a terrible risk to infiltrate the fallen fortress." Eldarion looked up at Galadriel. "The half elven have…" she looked at him for a moment, and he felt as if he was being weighed like corn on a scale, "a unique relationship with death."
"Eldarion, he's with your father." Glorfindel clarified before he could ask about the specifics of the terrible thing his grandfather had been forced to do.
Eldarion softened and sat forward in his chair, "where are they?"
"They were in a dark room with many of our kindred, the noble dead of Vanyamar, those whom the Necromancer knew that he could not control," she shook her head, "A great evil hunts them!"
"We have to do something," Fingon said matter-of-factly, and Galadriel nodded.
"Do not send me away!" Eldarion stood, facing her stubbornly, "I can save them. I know how we figured it out. He showed me." He pointed at Finrod, who had the grace to look guilty.
"He bears a sword of Dwarrowmake," Finrod shrugged, "which may rouse the hosts of Mahal from their secret chambers."
Galadriel looked at her brother, dumbfounded for only a moment, "And you would accompany the boy as his protector?"
"Until the stars go dark and death takes my soul forever," he laid one hand firmly on Eldarion's shoulder.
"I will go with him as well," Glorfindel placed a large hand on the other shoulder. They heard a wicker from somewhere outside the tent as an eavesdropping Riele approved.
"Not you!" Galadriel pointed to Fingon, who put up his hands with a look of baffled innocence.
"You may be distracted by personal pursuits," He rolled his eyes, "and I need your help upon the field of battle, oh valiant one." He nodded in reluctant agreement. "Do not neglect the mortal need for rest." She gave Glorfindel a look of deep trust, hands clenching around the table's edge. "Come," she said, "you should be armed with more than weapons."
...
Arwen looked from her eldest brother to the prince of Eryn Galen with an expression of deep disappointment verging on disgust. She brushed them aside as she walked between them and
out of Elladan's office.
"My lady?" Gimli looked up as she passed him in the hall, "Is something amiss?" he asked Legolas, who followed Elladan at a run behind her. She had a fey light on her face, and her steps were confident and intentional as she rushed outside into the brilliant afternoon light.
Arwen's white garments snapped in the wind as she crossed the citadel.
"Arwen!" Elladan called after her, "What do you mean by this? You cannot confront him, Arwen!" he caught up with her and grabbed her elbow to turn her towards him.
"Do not presume to give me orders!" she hissed, twisting away from him and continuing heedless.
"Please, you cannot confront this being!" Elladan begged, drawing the attention of the guards and officials who stood close at hand.
"And would you have me do nothing?" she turned to him and Legolas, and her eyes were wet with rage, "oh brave warrior and noble healer, would you do nothing while my son is slaughtered like a thrall on the altars of Morgoth?" she huffed and spun away.
Arwen led them straight to the catacombs entrance, where a concerned-looking guard was waiting by the mangled door, and without another word, she continued into the darkness below the mountain. A clear light seemed to radiate from her body as she stepped into the pressing silence of the dead.
The stairs went downward until they opened into the necropolis of dead kings and nobles entombed in their richly adorned mausoleums standing amongst beams of filtered sunlight. In the center of the city of the dead stood the temple of Mandos, a vast octagonal dome with an arching door at both sides. But the doors had been sealed, and all around the structure, a cloud of gleaming lights, neither brightly colored nor red with anger but glowing white and radiant, had wrapped themselves in gleaming threads like mithril gossamer around the building.
A guard ran up to them in apparent distress. "He's locked us out, ma'am!" he said, looking from Arwen to Elladan, "your brother's inside with the prince, sir."
"Where are the other guards?" Arwen asked, looking over his shoulder at the temple in grim resolve.
"They were all inside. I was the only one to get out in time. It was like a sleeping spell took them, my lady."
Arwen stepped past him, looking up at the temple, her mind working to find a way to save her son. Elladan had his eyes closed and one finger on his temple, trying to force his awareness through the barrier to contact his twin. Arwen turned to him and saw his hand drop, eyes searching the shadows with uncertainty as if he had lost some comforting tether.
"Elrohir is unconscious," he told her, "as if he is caught in some fey trance beyond my skill to break." He did not say that he could not sense Eldarion's presence in the room at all. Some dark magic had set the spirit free from the body to wander beyond the veil, but the look on her face let him know that he did not need to.
"The stone was a Palantir stained by death." She stated after a moment, looking to her brother for his usual expertise, she had seen its power herself, gazed into it and seen the dead beyond.
"Arwen?" Elladan asked, sounding nervous.
"We have another, do we not?" She looked away up the main road with a fey light in her eyes, "another seeing stone that has witnessed death, I mean."
Most of the buildings were well-maintained and clean, with offerings and fading flowers on the stoop. But at the end of the road, there was a single derelict tomb that no one had dared to go near in over a decade. The Steward's crypt had been burned black with the fires of Denethor's terrible unmaking, the broken windows, which once shone with colored glass, had been covered with boards, and the beam of light that illuminated the broken spires revealed only the decay of abandonment.
"No." Elladan tried, but he knew that Arwen could not be swayed once she had made up her mind.
"Assist me." She ordered, making for the haunted tomb. Without waiting for them to follow, she climbed the stairs, reached the front entrance, and seized one of the planks covering the door. It shifted only slightly under her hands. She sensed that the guard had stopped several paces from the foot of the stairs, looking terrified.
"Let me try," Elladan stepped up beside her. He unsheathed a knife from his belt and used it as a prybar to loosen one of the planks, "if you mean to take this path, then let me attempt it first." He grunted, applied more force, and the board came loose, "since it seems there is no deterring you." Legolas had stepped beside them and loosened another plank so that there was enough room for one person to climb through.
"No," she peered through the opening and saw the burned and broken door behind. Steadying her balance with one hand, she crouched, pushed on the blackened wood, and found that it crumbled under her touch. A cool wind blew from within.
"Think of the baby! Arwen!" Elladan tried, but he knew that there was no deterring his sister once she made up her mind, and he did not want to know the consequences of physically restraining the queen.
"Let me go first. There may be hazards," Legolas offered, kneeling beside her. Arwen acquiesced, and after Legolas had crawled through the opening, he reached to help her follow.
The three of them stood in a chamber blackened by a great burning. The once ornate stone sculptures were covered with a dense layer of soot. From the broken roof came a single beam of pale sunlight. It fell upon a dais in the center of the chamber, and there, amidst the ashes of
the body of the former steward who had self-immolated in this place fifteen years ago, sat a perfect black sphere staring at her with a terrible regard.
Before Elladan could stand from his crouch and stop her, Arwen went to the stone and laid her two hands upon it. The last firey touches of Lord Denethor's charred hands reached out from the darkness and laid themselves upon hers from within the mirror-smooth surface.
Arwen suppressed a cry of pain, falling to her knees, the soot staining her white garments and curls of smoke rising from her palms where they clutched the stone as if it was fresh out of a forge.
"Arwen!" she vaguely felt Elladan reaching around her and attempting to pull her hands away, but she resisted and clung to the scorching surface as tears of agony streamed down her cheeks. She kept her eyes shut tight as she focused her mind, ignoring the smell of burnt flesh. She felt an overwhelming sense of despair, fear, darkness, and everlasting grief threatened to drown her as she gazed unblinking into the last echoes of a brutally painful death. Still, in her heart she knew that these were only the fragile shades of a madman's final torment, and wresting control over the gem, she bent it to her will by sheer force of mind.
The Palantir stubbornly revealed its secret geometries of sight, attempting in vain to link up to the shattered network of its brethren and finding an answer far across the sea.
Arwen beheld a vision then, a purple stone set in a scepter in the hands of a necromancer upon the stolen throne of Doom. A shattered fortress built upon a cliff face on the far edge of the undying lands, endless labyrinthine halls of locked and open cells, crawling with all manner of dark creatures, and there, huddled in the darkness together with some others, she saw the lights of her husband and father.
A vast horde of the angry undead flowed from the broken walls of the fortress. Servants of Morgoth from all the long torments of history resurrected from their cells in the depths of Mandos to run rampant across the green hills of Vanyamar. Against them was arrayed a vast host of elven armies, maintaining a battlefront of hastily deployed fortifications. There, just at the edge of the fighting, she saw her son, arrayed as an elven prince out of legend. He rode a unicorn, and there was starlight in his eyes.
"Arwen!" Elladan's panicked voice came to her, and she realized that he had forced her hands away from the stone and pulled her against his chest. Gazing down, her stomach lurched as she saw that her palms had been charred black as orc skin.
…
"Again!" Glorfindel ordered, knocking the boy onto his back for the twelfth time. Eldarion picked up Anduril and staggered to his feet, clearly winded and sore but uninjured and bearing a look of determination common to most angry cats. He adjusted his hold on his father's blade, its hilt in both hands.
He was wearing a helm given as a gift from the Lady Galadriel, which matched his mail in style and sat lightly on his head without obscuring his vision. A fine curtain of chain links fell around his shoulders and clasped in a familiar motif of a serpent and a flower. That had been the night before, but they had left camp, Eldarion riding upon Riele, who had been preened
and saddled by the elvish grooms who were very eager at the chance to commune with such a creature. Glorfindel sat astride a large white destrier stallion whom he called Lothwindor, and Finrod rode a nervous mare of Vanyarin stock who seemed to need a lot of verbal reassurance that she was in fact, a very brave horse after she had escaped the destruction of her home with Finrod's caravan of refugees. They Traveled West for a day until they came close to the battlefront and instead followed a low-lying ridge parallel to the fighting.
Resting under the stars in a scrubby landscape of short oak trees, having pursued the light of the sword for a day of swift travel, Glorfindel convinced Eldarion to show him how well Elrohir had done with his fencing lessons. Eldarion had not complained when neither elf had suggested building a fire; they seemed to revel in the starlight, and it was warm enough that Eldarion felt no need for heat. He was soon sweating and gasping regardless as Glorfindel made him demonstrate the set of one hundred and forty-four left-handed fighting stances taught by Maedhros Feanorian to his grandfather.
The golden warrior twirled a long, heavy spear in the style favored by the Gondolindrim, and Finrod sat on a boulder, watching critically as he took large bites off a crunchy apple. Riele sniffed the air and peered around suspiciously as if someone was watching, but she saw no one.
Eldarion had at first been reticent about fencing with anything other than the blunted practice foils that his uncle Elrohir favored, but Glorfindel seemed entirely confident that the boy would not be hurt and shook his head dismissively at Eldarion's voiced concern that he might be able to draw blood from the golden warrior.
"You cannot truly fight with a longsword until you can beat an opponent armed with a spear," Glorfindel repeated, easily parrying two more swipes.
"But I can't get close enough!" Eldarion complained petulantly as if Glorfindel was cheating.
"Is that so?" he observed dryly, smacking the side of Eldarion's helmet with the flat of his weapon. They traded parries and swipes back and forth a few times, Eldarion's face scrunched up in focus as he crouched, trying to get past a spearhead that seemed everywhere at once.
"He fights like a maid cutting flowers," Finrod goaded as Glorfindel forced Eldarion to dance backward, whacking the haft of his spear away three more times, "orcs won't give a fuck about your honor, GRAB IT!" Eldarion was shocked for a moment to hear his hero swear.
Before Glorfindel could take advantage of his distraction to knock him onto his backside again, something came whizzing out of the darkness, and Finrod's apple core smacked the side of Glorfindel's helm with a sound like a ringing bell.
With a shout of triumph, Eldarion grabbed the spear's haft and yanked forward. A thrill went through him as he felt the side of his blade slide off the mail at Glorfindel's shoulder, but a second later, the shaft of the spear swung around, catching his knees and sending him sprawling in the dust. He lay there for a moment, feeling sore and grinning. Somewhere above him, Glorfindel was laughing.
Finrod stood over him, studying the boy fondly, but there was darkness in the backs of his eyes. "You got a hit!" he looked pleased as he helped him stand.
"You fight without honor!" Glorfindel scolded, removing his helm and eyeing the smudge of saliva-soaked apple juice on the otherwise well-maintained metal with distaste.
Finrod looked like he would meet his jab with some sarcastic riposte, but Riele whinnied loudly in alarm, grabbing both of their attention. The mirth instantly evaporated from his countenance, and he leaped down to stand beside Eldarion, drawing a compact battle harp from a holster on his back.
"Something is coming," Glorfindel whispered, pointing his spear into the darkness. A chittering sound came from the high grasses, the sound of a thousand little legs scuttling over the rocks.