Chapter Text
”And Elrond?” Durin asked briskly. He lives, I know it.
Narvi’s gaze swelled with compassion. Before he could even speak Durin wanted to shut him up and deny his pity. “Sire… Commander Elrond did not survive.”
The death of his father had laid Durin’s head on Disa’s shoulder. The weight of a kingdom dragged down his shoulders. Yet these simple words brought him down to his knees.
I failed him. He begged me for his life and I abandoned him!
Louder than this was the cacophony of Narvi’s voice repeating those words over and over until Durin wanted to scream and tear the still beating heart out of his chest.
Commander Elrond did not survive.
Elrond did not survive.
Aulë forgive him, he’d killed his best friend.
The cage which had held the Elven shieldmaiden was easily repurposed. For a while Galadriel’s light in the camp had brought with it a strange clarity; the threat of a song and the beauty of caged defiance. When Adar was informed that the High King had wrestled ten Uruks to reach for his courtier, his interest was rekindled.
They were to keep the Elf, but not to touch him. To gaze and not destroy. To wonder and scheme and imagine how their Lord Father would snuff the dying light in despairing eyes, and to wait patiently for his orders.
Never had the smell of blood so incensed their craving. To split open the veins filled with old magic and drink that fading glimmer which still clung to his spirit. To crack bone and burst that warm, beating heart and watch the light in murky eyes flash out in an instant. Adar could keep the pretty head, so long as he let them have their share.
“Adar says we do not touch him!” Mûglug gnashed, shoving away the urchin that crept in to grasp a trailing ankle. “Finish off the dead. He’s got something special planned for this one.”
“I want to see….” To see him, to say I’m sorry, to know for myself that he’s not coming back. “To pay my final respects,” Durin finished with fragile control.
“No, you don’t,” Narvi said gently. “The bodies were beyond count. They’re lighting pyres even now.”
Clenching his fists until the grind of nail into flesh matched the anguish inside, Durin nodded sharply. “Then we will join them in mourning.”
Two funerals in so many days. If not for Disa and the little ones he imagined his own heart would have given out. Even now he wondered — if he just held his breath a little longer — if the pain would ease along with his spirit.
Durin breathed in sharply, too stricken for tears, and hammered the loss into one more plate of impenetrable armor. Let his heart become like the hide of a dragon, indestructible and calloused, impervious to the lancing arrows of bereavement. He resolved that he would not weep, for such admission would bring the guilt of death upon his head and he could not imagine waking to that tomorrow.
A small part of him knew that Elrond — Elrond with his wounded smiles and willing heart and endless summers — would not want to be remembered as the foundation of an iron fortress for a ruthless sovereign. But Elrond was not here and Durin would live with that to his dying day.
He could hardly forgive the Elf for leaving him with this legacy if he could not even forgive himself.
When Adar returned with a star on his finger he frightened them. His face was that of a fair warrior and his eyes were softer than the day he pulled Glûg from sinking mud.
“My children,” he said with grief, touching their convoluted skin with compassion, with yearning to change that which they had learned to regard as its own form of beauty. “I failed you all. Your brothers and sisters, murdered. Our quest a vain aspiration. Now I fear I must lead you away in defeat, for I cannot bear to lose any more.”
Glûg stepped forth, his gaze locked with a strange detachment ever since the troll was unleashed. “Sauron is… dead?” he said uneasily.
When Adar shook his head a rattle of iron and gnashing teeth filled their camp. “No, my children. We are not strong enough to defeat him yet, even with Elvish rings. But now I see that in my ardency to protect you, I caused greater harm. Will you trust me one last time as we return to our homeland of ashes?”
He looked around at the circle of pensive faces and dropped his gaze. “Will you still regard me as a father, after I have failed you so cruelly?”
It was Glûg who shuffled forward, a keen rising in his throat when Adar opened his arms. They flocked him as one, cherishing the brush of his hand to the soot and stain on their cheeks, the touch ever kind despite the foreign face. Yes, they would follow him to the ends of Middle Earth and beyond the sea if he asked, so long as they knew his love endured.
“What of the Elf?” Vragdâ rasped, sneering at the cage where the Elf hung in his chains, his gaze as empty as the pilfered ribcage of the corpse ground into the mud before him.
Once more Adar surprised them, his eyes melting soft for the savage who had rended their brothers with pitiless eyes and gleaming blade. “Take him with us. They do not deserve his light.”
They sliced off a strip of the dark scalp, lapping the blood which sluiced down the Elf’s neck, and Adar laid the token at Gil-Galad’s feet along with a golden ring and the crushed heart of a nameless soldier.
The taste of his despair was almost as satisfying as blood.
When and how they knew not, but Sauron had spirited away from Celebrimbor’s forge, leaving a horrid stake and wails of despair in his wake. They burned the body of their beloved smith on a pyre from the shattered ruins of his work table and placed the remnants of the dearest and kindest at his side. Galadriel kept Elrond’s ring, a brand on her finger that screamed with his voice and his last clever distraction as he slipped a pin into her hand.
She was certain she would slap him after the battle for humiliating her so.
She would give anything to tousle his hair and scold him again.
“We must think to the rings.” Gil-Galad spoke softly and the reverie was shattered, cold finality settling in Galadriel’s chest. “Sauron must never find them.”
Nine rings for Men. Whispering, cruel devices of greed and malice, they twined empty promises even through the cloth pouch. Círdan would know how to dispose of them.
“He rests now with his people,” Gil-Galad comforted her, his words as hollow as the corpses of many Orcs. “He will be welcomed by his kin.”
“Yet I would have him here still,” Galadriel admitted without shame, “With the light of the Valar shining in his countenance.”
Gil-Galad did not offer her further condolences. His spirit entwined with hers in mourning and when he sang a farewell blessing she did not hold back her tears.
Elrond deserved every one of them.
They poured a draught down the Elf’s throat to keep his heart beating and smeared ashes and limestone into his wounds, discarding his armor in the rotting heap of bones and hooves. When he came alive and struggled against their ministrations they laughed, petting his hair and jabbing his wounds with gnarled fingers until he fought them with lightning teeth, wrenching against the shackles that restrained him. They teased him until he slumped in defeat and then redressed him in grey rags, covering the cage so that he could not feel the sun.
Adar said they would keep him. Their own wild thing to feed and tend and keep alive as long as the tormented light flickered. And flicker it would, so long as the ring was present to drag his spirit back to Middle Earth. Slowly his defiance would crumble, memories of golden leaves fading to ash, until he rested his aching head in Adar’s hand, as docile as a tamed wolf.
Not even an Elven king could fight off the creeping mist of shadow and time.
“I will not rest until Adar is dead,” Arondir vowed, pushing away Galadriel’s hand as she implored him to lead their few survivors. “My place is not here.”
He left her with an ache in her throat, grieving for one more vibrant youth who would fall prey to evil. With her lips she wished him peace and in her heart she said goodbye.
She did not fool herself to believe she would ever see him again.
The Elf deceived them only once, feigning docility until they released his hands. By the time he was pinned with knees in his back and a boot on his neck three Uruks were dead and Mâglog was gurgling through a crushed throat.
Adar cut the names of the slain into his back, crude strokes with a knife spilling blood for blood. They ground in a paste of earth and Uruk blood to bind the marks and then muzzled the teeth that had torn out Vragdâ’s throat. When they hauled him to his feet the Elf kicked back Drégarak’s skull, snapping his neck. Adar dug his fingers into old bruises, choking the fire from merciless steel, and tossed the Elf into their circle in a wheezing heap of sprawled limbs.
“Break his legs.”
Elrond’s tree pined, blackened leaves drooping despite the crystal light, and Durin felt his memory tarnish with it. In dreams he saw Elrond on his knees, sometimes begging, sometimes weeping, sometimes turning to him with eyes wrought with accusation. Always his last words echoing Vorohil’s cruel reccount.
“Durin will come. Durin will come.”
Even in the last, Durin had failed him. By the time he reached Eregion the final rites were over and all he had was a handful of ashes.
How could one possibly build a kingdom on such an oath?
With his arms shackled above him the Elf could not claw at their eyes. With his jaws clamped he could not bite. With his mangled legs folded to the side he could neither run nor sleep, trapped in a stupor of pain. Glûg smoothed the ash from his soft hair and smeared honey into raw flesh where they had torn his scalp and rubbed warmth into limbs that quivered in the morning mist. He murmured reassurances in his own tongue, much as he would for his own wee Gûlkon, and tutted when the Elf tried to lean away from his touch.
“Won’t be long before we rest for the day. If you behave they’ll let you eat on your own this time.”
He might as well have asked a fish to dance for the Elven kings.
Tracks of an Orc party mingled with the stench of shallow graves and old blood. Arondir stooped by the mangled earth, brushing his fingers against the stain on a severed branch. This was no Orc blood.
Allowing himself a hope he dared not entertain, he took to the trees with urgent stride.
When Elrond keened Adar removed his hand, having channeled just enough of the ring’s healing to tear away the shroud of a fading spirit. A tear slid down the muzzled cheek and he wiped it away, cupping the fair head and stroking until Elrond stopped struggling and leaned against him with hitching breaths.
Even the proudest horse eventually gave in to the lead.
There was hardly a full legion left after Eregion’s assault. From his vantage point Arondir counted the scouts, marking which ones slumped in boredom and how often they changed the guard. There was an empty cage on the outskirts, recently oiled and padded well with furs. He watched until one of the Orcs ladled two bowls and scooped up a roll of filthy bandages, taking them to the leader’s tent.
And then he settled in to wait.
“You only increase your own suffering,” Adar chastised, healing the thumb which Elrond had mangled the moment his jaw was released. Before he was struck hard and fast, stunning blows splitting skin and sending rivulets of blood dripping onto packed earth. “The next time you fight me I will pry out a tooth for every calloused word that escapes your lips.”
The Elf no longer tempted his threats. He did not fight when his jaw was gripped open, a full-body shudder reflecting his revulsion for the slop poured between his teeth.
“You have the same rations as my children,” Adar reassured him, tracing a thin trail of fresh blood. “Be grateful I do not feed you the marrow from your own soldiers. Though perhaps that would finally curb your defiance.”
The dark head bowed in silence and Adar ran his fingers through filthy curls. “There’s a good lad.”
Finally, at the height of the day’s heat, when the Orcs took shelter below trees and canvas, Adar left for the far end of the camp to consult with one of his commanders. Arondir moved in on silent feet, slashing the throats of the nearest scouts and lowering their bodies without a sound. He tore off a cloak and hauled it over skin he’d coated with ash and mud, dropping his shoulders to a lumbering hobble.
When he slipped into the leader’s tent he blinked in the sudden darkness, for the shadows seemed not only to shelter from the light — but to consume it. Weeks of despair permeated this small space and his heart hammered with the desire to flee and never turn back.
His eyes adjusted and he momentarily forgot his role, lighting to the commander’s side. “Commander Elrond!”
Grey eyes flashed open and slammed shut in the next instant, shivers racking translucent skin stretched over bone. Filthy rags were torn and stained, their original color lost, and the loose swathes provided little protection for the chill of the coming night. Arondir knew not which was the greater wound; the legs which crooked unnaturally or the muzzle that crippled the spirit.
“Av-’osto,” he whispered, resting a hand to the stricken face as fear rolled in crestfallen eyes. “Odulen an edraith angin.”
Terrible wonder gripped the dulled eyes with new tears, and when Arondir cut free the hateful device Elrond buried his face in his arms. “He has the ring,” he whispered without hope. “I cannot help you. You must leave before he returns.”
“Nay, I shall not leave you to suffer further,” Arondir whispered, picking the chains with scarcely the whisper of a sparrow. Chaffed skin bled as he tugged off the rusted clasps. “Come. I will carry you.”
So light was the commander after weeks of captivity that he weighed scarcely more than a child. Indeed, Theo might have proved a heavier burden. Elrond stuttered to breathe, blood dribbling down his chin as he bit through his lip, but he did not make a sound.
“The path to the horses is clear,” Arondir murmured, ducking through the slice he had rent in the back of the tent. “I cannot spare you the pain of riding.”
“Hurry,” Elrond whispered, the sweat on his brow mixing with dried blood.
In the distance Arondir heard his enemy plotting, knew he had lost his chance to end Adar’s ruin once and for all. The Orcs would slink back to Mordor with Nenya and not even the High King’s army could pry open their gates.
For this choice, however, he would not fault himself. The path ahead was never more clear.
He held the greater treasure.
“King Durin.”
Stoic, unflappable, ruthless. So he had presented himself to the people, and such would be his legacy. Even the joy of his bairns’ smiles was shadowed with a memory that he could never redeem.
“What is it, Narvi?”
“Sire….” Treacherous optimism scalded Durin’s ears before the next words punched the air out of his lungs. “Commander Elrond lives. He is tended even now by the Elven healers.”
Suddenly Durin remembered how to breathe.
And his heart exploded in grief.
“Get the boars saddled!” he shouted through tears of relief and lingering anguish. “What’re you waiting for? We’re riding for Lindon!”
Be he censured or disdained, should forgiveness never settle on his unworthy shoulders, he would not rest until he held that daft Elf’s hand and confirmed with his own two eyes that he still breathed.
And when Elrond smiled through tears of joy to see his friend, Durin would rewrite a kingdom.