Lothrandir has been walking for days.
There is hardly any light, there in the depths of Isengard Destroyed, so it is hard to tell the exact time, but from the scattered memories, the ache in his bones, and the gnawing at his stomach, it's quite a logical guess.
The waters slosh about his shins as he steps down again into a pool of it, freezing cold on his numbed skin. Five fore-shortened strides measure the distance to the next sopping pile of refuse he can climb, and then he steps free once more, though the cold doesn't leave. It seeps ever inward, inching like a slow poison toward his heart.
Oily, filthy water drips slowly from the rags they have made of his clothing, joining the echoey river that streams around him in ever-flowing whispers.
Early on after Isengard's flooding, the orcs and Uruk-hai had at last run to nothing their stored provisions, and turned instead for the cell blocks when their hunger called. The clank of the key in the lock had awoken him from fevered dreams. The light of the torch burning his eyes and the hungry snarl of the Uruk had been his only warning before the teeth sunk into his shoulder.
He'd looked dead, there in the far corner of his cell, childishly turned away from the door as if to hide the nightmares away. The Uruk had thought it'd get an easy meal.
His shoulder burns steadily to ashes in the back of his mind, and though he has not yet looked at it he knows its infection rages still. There's nothing he can do, for washing it in the waters that surround him would be worse than nothing, and what little clean water he has found he needed to slack his raging thirst.
His foot sinks into the next heap of junk with a sodden squelsh , and even now, after weeks in this pit of -, he winces and tries not to think of whatever he's stepping on. The chain clinks and drags as he lifts the foot once more, and then stretches taught as he steps, for his legs know well the length they're allowed.
Barely a day into his keeping, Fâsh had given him shackles fitted only for the shortest of the fallen Istar's prisoners. They chafed terribly even when padded, and reduced his normally long stride to a pitiful shuffle that had him tripping and falling every other step. The orcs had thought it hilarious, and had not bothered to remove them even after he was remanded to the cells.
He's tried picking the lock several times, but the mechanism is clogged with every piece of garbage under the sun, and besides, he's never really mastered the art of lock-picking.
(Culang and Brangil tried to teach him, long ago. It was a joke to them all, a party trick you sometimes got to show off if a lock in the Old City was being persnickety that particular Tuesday. He was ham at it even after several lessons, and eventually they gave up with a laugh. There aren't many locks of metal in Dunland or Forochel, and he's never again gotten a chance to try.)
He turns a corner in the endless corridor he's caught in, balancing himself carefully with his free hand along the dark stone wall. His other hand clutches the worn hilt of an orc-sword, wrested from his attacker in the cells.
Voices echo along the dank stone, snarled and loud amidst the dripping quiet. Should he turn away? Try to fight? He has been lucky thus far but Dúnedain are not known for their luck. The voice is getting louder— it is Fâsh, snarling over the screams from the prisons; it is Avair, lashing out in hatred and hurt; it is Lheu Brenin, luring them ever-deeper into his maze of dank tunnels so like to these.
It is getting closer.
He can't clear his mind enough to halt his numb feet, and instead suddenly emerges from the stone passage into one of dizzying openness. His rotting boots meet an iron grate, suspended by machinations he can't comprehend over what must have once been a great field of work under the earth. Instead, unsteady light from unseen fires flicker off the endless swirling of oily waters dozens of feet below.
The grated catwalk criss-crosses the entirety of the subterranean lake, but the immediate sight before him is that of an Uruk, bulky with starved muscle and slavering at the mouth. Its snarling cry is deafening at close range, its flashing bloody teeth bared in sickly hunger as it sights a new prey.
It goes for the shoulder, sensing weakness despite the stolen sword held at guard. Razor point meets dented pauldron and skids off with the meager strength behind it. A terrific force hurls him to the ground, and white-hot fire ignites and blazes in his shoulder.
He thinks he fights back, later, throwing himself against the crushing weight and searching teeth. Instincts trained by Gauredain three times the size of any Uruk turning his opponent's weight against itself. Perhaps he even could have won— desperate hope against starved despair— but the catwalk isn't wide and the guard-rails rusted, and one roll is all it takes. With a wretched grunt the Uruk falls, splashing far below into the sickly waters of the Isen.
Discombobulated from the throw, Lothrandir regains his feet only slowly, slipping and skidding on the damp ground and straining at the shackles. His shoulder spikes and blazes in fury, the only part of him that is warm. Whether the Uruk can muster the strength to swim, he doesn't stay to find out. He flees.
Avair has returned.
Saruman seems to have all but given up on his usefulness as an informant and turned him over to the slave-drivers, but Avair still comes every day like clockwork. She taunts, and snarls, and cajoles him in equal measures to submit to the traitor-wizard's will and to not submit so that she may kill him at last. She rarely leaves in the good mood she comes in, incensed at his resistance, and yet she comes.
"You have no hope, Ranger!" Avair's eyes, manically bright, pin him relentlessly to the cold stone of his cell. "The Old Man owns the middle-lands without question, and the horse-lords will fall this day. The armies have marched out. You speak so proudly of your name and home— do you even know what is happening to the North?"
"Saruman might own all the lands of Middle-earth, from lake to sea." Lothrandir's own voice, real amid all the shadows, steadies the flame of his resolve and strengthens it. "He does not own me, nor will he ever."
"The fool who denies the warg that kills him dies just the same."
"Even if it is a fool's hope I have, I shall die free, and slave to no one in heart." She roars at his words, and her dagger is aloft in a blink. The Nameless, he has learned through context, are functional slaves to all in Angmar, and such is the greatest insult he can offer her.
Their Uruk guard, there to ensure the temperamental slave-driver does not harm the wizard's pet project, intercepts her flying arm before she can gut him. It snarls in her face and socks him in the stomach for good measure. It steps back once more, leaving him gasping for breath beside the furious girl.
"This may be your last day alive, Ranger," She snarls, "and I pray that it is so! Your escape from life will be mine from shame, and the Old Man will give me a name as he has promised."
"Is that all you— you wish for?" The words burn on their way out of his tortured throat. "A name?"
"I wish for what you took from me!" For a moment, Lothrandir thinks she will spring for him again, but her leaping anger holds back.
"Just a name? Not a… home, or a family, or— or peace?"
"What does a Ranger know of peace?" She laughs, ringing harsh and grating through the caverns. "You have come all this way south to wage a fruitless war with those who bring only order!"
"I have come south to protect what I love, be it from pillagers or traitors' 'order.' I have a name, however much you decry it, but I walk in the steps of a thousand nameless brothers, and I would give it up easily for what is worth far more. Even with a name, Avair, what will you fight for? Saruman has not promised you your home back, has he?"
She leaves soon after, stamping out in the furious fit she has all but lived in this weeks of his imprisonment, having listened to none of it. She looks so young with the anger painting her face, a raging teenager whom the world had taught nothing but violence.
Left in the dark Lothrandir turns again to the dank wall beside him. The silence and solitude shiver once, echo, then seal, and the world is dead once more. He will try to sleep, to wake ready for another long day of fighting tomorrow and the next. Wouldn't do to be falling asleep in the middle of one of Morflak's monologues.
What does a Ranger know of peace, after all?
Whether it has been days or hours of wandering, the fire of wounds and icy numbness of everything else foretell an end soon in coming if he cannot rest soon. How long has it been since the last a slave bothered to deliver food to his cell, or since he found clean water?
The Uruk's attack has nearly managed to drain his last reserves, and he stumbles from the catwalk blearily. The next enemy he crosses will not find its meal so difficult, he thinks.
Still Lothrandir moves on, across a narrow intersection and up another two ramps— perhaps he is nearing the surface after all, presupposing there is one. He comes to a wide open space, walled in iron and floored in a maze of tracks indicating a loading area. The water is shallow there, eddying and flowing ever downward, and only a foot or so deep.
He's not the only thing in the room.
At first he thinks he's hallucinating, as he has several times in the darkest corners. Half-remembered nightmares and desperate hopes blending together in a depleted mind. The dark lump slumped against a pile of cast-aside scraps looks almost like a body.
Far above shine tiny chinks of light in the darkness. One burns brightly on a small silver star buried amid stained grey cloth.
He lunges forward before his mind can think; murky water splashing about his reckless feet and hated iron pulling tight against his ankles. As neat as any Ranger's tripwire it pulls him over. The water is even colder from within, drenching his hair and saturating what garments he has left. Freezing iron tracks scrape against his bare hands, but he drags himself upright and crawls toward that tiny, horrid light.
Lothrandir sees the glint off a rusted pauldron next, then the familiar folds of a well-made mantle and heavy wool cloak, and horror takes away the rest.
No! Do not let it be— how can it be? He's the only one—
Why do you insist on this charade? The voice echoes in his head without warning. What remains for you to defend? Your company is mine, and if you persist in your folly I shall be forced to seek wiser minds. The hill-men keep your kin in the mountains, but even they are far kinder hosts than I when I wish. Do you long for your friends to drown beside you, your captain to die in fire—
—there is a figure clad in Grey Company gear slumped against the mound. It is solid and real against his fingers, and it isn't breathing.
He hadn't even registered the words, too busy spitting at the shimmering cloth and laughing in the wizened face. Nevertheless they creep into troubled dreams, and thrive in distant mirages and double-takes.
The mask and hood so favored by the Dúnedain are pulled up, and drowning in a swirling storm he can't reach for them. The sullied silver star is proof enough, the rips and stains upon the tunic pain enough, and horrified denial doesn't leave room for grief yet.
There's a dent in the pauldron, the exact shape a dent might be if a reckless Ranger had tripped and fallen against solid stone. His eyes catch and hold on it. " You've got to be more careful, Loth, how am I to fix this?"
A fraying rip in the durable mantle. A series of tengwar letters stitched clumsily into the hem. "How is it you spell your name, again, southron? Why? No reason."
An idea far less horrible and far more strange hits him, and he reaches for the tunic pocket with numb fingers. Within he finds rotten slimy threads that had once been a mountain-flower picked on the slopes of Tâl Methedras.
This is his tunic, his pauldron, his mantle.
With a shudder of anticipate grief he slips the hood back. The face beneath, locked down with the dead's stiffness, is so caked with blood, mud, and worse things that almost nothing of the skin can be made out, but he does not recognize the features. What's more, an edge of dark red ink can be seen faintly across one cheek: a falcon's bloodied wing.
He, whoever he is, is one of the Hebog-lûth, and he is dressed in Lothrandir's gear as if he were a Dúnadan.
A voice speaks out of the darkest corner, rusty and dead in tone, before his theory of fever dream quite takes hold.
"It was supposed to be a last trick of the Old Man's." Avair steps out, haggard and bent, and Lothrandir decides he's absolutely done with being shocked for the day.
"One of the Dunlending prisoners, unable to work any more in the foundries. Ken-ned ." She sounds out the syllables, slow and sad, "He was near death, and the Old Man ordered me to dress him in the Ranger's gear." Her knives and cruel smile are gone, and Lothrandir doesn't think her eyes know him. "It was supposed to be a trick, for any rescuers. But the flood came, and no one else did."
He understands at last, all at once, " What rescuers?"
"The king of the horse-men came with many men to flood the grounds and imprison the Old Man. He thought that the Rangers were with them, and they would come to search for the prisoner. He did not wish for his prisoner to be found."
"Rangers? Has the Grey Company escaped , then?" Avair looks at him, dreadfully empty of the energetic hate she had filled with in the absence of self. The face that looks at him is nearly that of the young girl so scared and hurt he had glimpsed in Forochel for only a moment before she'd jumped at him. No answer comes.
But why else would such a trick be tried? The dank fog of Isengard clears only slowly from his thoughts, but no horse-lord of Rohan would even recognize a Ranger's gear. Only the Company would know the facade set up. Only a Company that had come to search for him.
"No one came, no one comes, no one ever will." She shuffles forward, once-proud stride nearly as pitiful as his, and kneels by Kenned's disguised corpse not even a meter away. "We fail, and left for dead we try again, and again, and never succeed. No room for failures, no care for the nameless."
Though she is bent with hunger, her eyes wild for want of sleep, for the first time in his entire imprisonment Avair looks straight at him, with no sneering hate shielding her eyes from view. "All I wanted was a name. You had one, but they still didn't come. No one ever does."
"Sometimes, they can't." The corpse dressed as a kinsman draws the eye like a magnet, but Lothrandir's gaze stays steady on the girl, despairing but still alive. "Something stronger than mortal strength stands between them." Blizzards and ice-storms, baring the door until days too late, leaving nothing but to find the corpses.
"Or a greater duty pulls them apart." His kin would have wanted to find him, as the wizard clearly knew, for they stand by their own. But their oaths and duty bind them to the war and their chieftain. They will fight for Aragorn, and to crown or death they will stand beside him. This is hardly the first time the Dúnedain sacrificed for their king, and there will never be a last.
He is so tired he would cry if the moisture could be wrenched from his aching head. Here they sit, a pathless Ranger, a despairing girl, and a dead hill-warrior. What hope have they, with the last chance of rescue passed before he had even known it was there?
This cruel deception of a body to find is a trap, and however much he is glad his kinsmen never suffered its cruelty it is a new grief to see it sit, unsprung. He knows even if his company is free, they should not chase after ghosts, and in their place he hopes he would be strong enough to choose the same. But all the same it hurts bone-deep to know himself a victim of tides of fate and war, and to know that no one is coming.
The girl that sits beside him is even more so a victim, no matter how willingly she had sought out the traitor-wizard and gleefully she had overseen his torture. She was driven from home and identity and resorted to the only thing anyone had bothered to teach her.
Maybe there is something can do, weak as he is.
With aching muscles and a creak of fire from his shoulder, he reaches out. He has learned that, even in the far reaches of Forochel and the pits of Isengard, there are few things warmer than an embrace, and that is something she can teach her. Avair doesn't flinch at his movement, but as one arm goes over hers and the other around her thin and shaking frame, she clings to him with surprising strength.
Days he has wandered, and Avair too if her state is any indication. She might know where the surface is, or she might not.
But still a small ember musters in his heart at her solid warmth now untainted by hate. His company is free , and their cause is not completely lost. And isn't this, dreadful as it is, far better a state to be in than before? There is no wizard grasping at his mind, no slavers driving innocent folk to their deaths in front of him, no purchase for the all-consuming fear of finally breaking. And he's got a friend now.
He shifts, and with a quiet burst of strength not his own he stands, wavering but balanced. Avair comes up with him, somewhat steadier. Kenned does not deserve to lie here forevermore in the dungeons that killed him, but neither of them have the strength to lift him and so Lothrandir only touches fingers to mouth and heart in a quiet prayer.
"Come on," He and Avair turn together toward yet another rampway, this one canted up and thus a bit more promising. "We're still alive, aren't we? I don't know the last time you saw the sun but it's been a few weeks for me. Have any good walking songs?"
Avair doesn't answer, but as they wobble their way up the ramp his good shoulder grows damp with something cleaner than river-water.
A bedraggled man and a slip of a girl emerge into the faint light of day just over an hour later, strength lasting them into the care of the Ents before fevered sleep at last takes hold. Though their part in the war is now long over, they will live to see its end.