Fractures by Elleth  

Chapter Five: All

Rescue?

Once again, a warning for dark themes - notably, torture of a prisoner, mostly physical but with psychological undercurrents. Obsessive behaviour, one brief hint at (intended, not actual) sexual violence.

When Alphangil forced her eyes to open, a rattish-looking Orc was glaring down at her, far too close for comfort. Her scraped-up cheek stung where it had struck her to rouse her out of what she thought must have already been the edge of wakefulness, although with the mosaic of different pains that her body was, this hardly mattered.

Alphangil breathed down the terror at the cat-green eyes boring into her own, tried not to smell the creature's stench of corruption, the odour of decaying meat and rotten teeth from its mouth. She lay near to a fire, and the Orc's breath mingling with the putrid smoke of whatever refuse were burning took her breath away entirely. Had her stomach not been utterly empty, she would have retched.

The Orc grinned at her, showing all its teeth, and in strange Sindarin said "Hairyours, so soft…" Its hands ran through her mussed hair with something like appreciation, if Orcs could show that. Its own strands were greasy and unkempt, black like her own, but patchy, ragged and flecked with flakes of dead skin.

Alphangil said nothing, remembering her mother's advice.

The Orc drew a knife and pulled up a fistful of hers, half-lifting her off the rocky ground she lay on. It hacked away at her hair and nicked her scalp, and Alphangil bore it stoically. She gritted her teeth and curled her numb fingers into her palms but didn't give it the satisfaction of another reaction. Hair would regrow.

The rest of the hair came loose, some ripping out by the root and some tearing under the knife. She bit back a whimper. The Orc dropped her unceremoniously and marched away with its prize, and through another explosion of pain in her already-hurting head, another sting through the broken bones of her nose, she saw it present her hair to the other Orcs who lounged around the cave, who laughed like bones grinding when the thing began to braid her hair into its own, preening. Another came, regarding her with perhaps similar intent, pulling up another fistful of her hair, but it didn't seem to find her hair as appealing and simply levelled an iron-shod boot into her ribs with something like boredom.

She wheezed for breath and pressed her face into the sharply-stinking ground, littered with bat guano, trying to find whether the orc had broken her bones - only bruised, she determined after a while. She had been lucky.

When the shocks of pain had abated back into thrums that at least allowed her to breathe more calmly, she cast around for Cýronil. The thrall was silhouetted against the sky at the mouth of the cave, and Alphangil wished herself back to the tree where she had been captive before. At least Cýronil had left her alone - for the most part. Now she seemed preoccupied with something: she looked up at the sky, turned this way and that, clearly seeking, called something to the Orcs, and disappeared from Alphangil's view.

Startled, Alphangil realized that the world outside the cave was growing dark. It couldn't be long before they'd take her and move on, but something had seemed strange: Had it been her imagination, or had Cýronil sounded nervous and annoyed, even though Alphangil did not speak the language and could discern nothing of the meaning?

She sucked in a painful breath and then another, and tested her bonds, now that she had a chance to. After being cut free of the tree, she'd been tied again. This time she lay on her side on the ground with her hands and feet in terribly tight ropes connected behind her back in a way that forced her body into a precarious, obscene arch. She didn't know how long she'd been lying unconscious like that before startling back awake, but the fact that dark was falling and the way her muscles ached made her think it must have been longer than just a little while.

She lay still and concentrated on breathing, ignored how parched her mouth was, and kept her eyes trained on the cave entrance until exhaustion had her lose focus. Cýronil reappeared eventually, melting out of the swift winter darkness that had now fallen for good. Cýronil's path led her straight to the fire, warming her hands - her right wrapped in rags torn from her cloak and splinted with sticks, Alphangil was gratified to see, even if she still remembered the horrible sound of cracking bones in her mouth and the bitter taste of Cýronil's blood.

Cýronil noticed her staring and drew the knife she bore, the one she had held to Alphangil's throat the night before, the one she'd broken her nose with. It was long and curved in the style of Himring's smiths, with the Fëanorian star etched into the pommel, beautifully wrought but deadly. She balanced it on the fingertip of her left hand, flicked her wrist, caught it from the air, and tossed.

Alphangil's shoulders screamed as she wrenched herself away with enough force to roll onto her back. The knife stuck, quivering, in the ground where her stomach had been a moment ago. Cýronil laughed and came toward her. She pulled the knife out, polished off the grains of sand from it sensuously with her cloak.

Alphangil glared at her.

Cýronil tossed the knife again, and this time, lying supine with her arms and legs under her, Alphangil was left open and undefended. The attack the night before had not taken place - intentionally so, she thought - until Alphangil had divested herself of her chainmail to sleep easier, when she'd still trusted that there was safety to be found.

The knife pierced through her clothes and into her skin, springing off the bone of her hip. The throw had very little force behind this time and did not penetrate deeply - a wound, certainly, but not a serious one. But with her insides turning to water, Alphangil saw, as the slow torture went on - the knife sticking in the ground by her ear and cutting it, the knife just barely passing her face - that the Orcs were beginning to pay attention to Cýronil's game. There were grunts and cheers when she drew blood, and some had begun toying with their weapons, some whips but mostly their own knives - some of them of Elvish make, but all of them ill-tended and rusted, notched and mean-looking.

"Tell them not to!" Alphangil pleaded. By now her fight was going out of her; she was tense like a bowstring with agony and desperate fear, all her noble convictions of silence gone. At least Cýronil was not an Orc. She at least might still be reasoned with and convinced away from her cruelty.

Cýronil bared her teeth at her. "You should have thought about the consequences of your actions before. I'm only passing time until the rest of the host arrives, and the boys like to play, too. Gets their blood moving for the last leg of the journey. But Angband ordered to bring you in alive, and if I don't, that's on my hide, so don't you worry your pretty head, I won't let them kill you. Only a little fun."

She took up the knife again and this time, instead of tossing it, cut through the tunic, which parted like butter under the blade, and carved, not too deeply, but deep enough to hurt, a large C-tengwa into her skin, half-round bow and downward stem, then reaching for a handful of black ash from the edge of the fire and rubbing it in. "So you don't forget me, if they don't let me have you," Cýronil said, suddenly sounding perversely tender.

She bent to kiss the wound, similar to Alphangil 'kissing better' any little scratch that Gil-galad might incur playing. The thought of her son, so sudden amid the torture, helped Alphangil to keep from shuddering under Cýronil's lips.

She resolved that she would scour this tattoo from her body herself if she had to, she was not going to bear any mark this woman had left on her.

Her captor halted, cocked her head. "One more thing that won't kill you that I won't miss out on. One hand for another."

Cýronil bent down and grasped Alphangil by the shoulders, turning her so she lay prone and her head was pressed once again into the stinking bat guano littering the floor. She could only feel what happened next - Cýronil's heavy war boot ground down onto the palm of her right hand, against the fragile bones there, from fingers down toward the wrist, and shifted her weight onto it. The crushing pressure mounted until it was unbearable.

Bones crushed, snapped and twisted. Alphangil's back screamed to have the weight of another elf concentrated in a single spot, and the cords, already cruelly tight, sliced even deeper into her skin.

She lay wheezing, biting her lips bloody not to scream, and still could not wholly suppress it. And then the pressure crested, vanishing only as Cýronil leapt over Alphangil's head and landed by her face, nearly kicking her boots into her ruined nose. Alphangil's view was a hazy blur of tears with the new pain. Somehow it seemed to re-ignite all the other agonies that she'd already suffered and she could not help weeping openly now.

Cýronil bent down to her, and Alphangil found that over the blood rushing in her ears she sounded far away. "Little princess, this was not even the beginning of what Angband will do to you - I know because they did it to me, and I look forward to seeing you enjoy the same."

Then she sheathed her knife, and straightened up, calling something in Orcish that roused protests in the crowd, and repeated the same thing in a harsher voice.

Knives were sheathed. Through her tears she could see one Orc forcing an erect penis back into its breeches, and snarling at another that made a grab for it. Cýronil had been bluffing: she was not going to let the Orcs torture her. Alphangil felt a new surge of weeping come on, this time of twisted gratitude.

The Orcs began to rouse themselves. The fires were trampled out, cinders kicked into her face that sizzled against her tears, provisions stuffed into bags.

"We're moving on, nevermind the fucking slugs that should have been here by now," Cýronil said to her, her tone now carrying even more of the annoyance Alphangil had marked before. "I don't want to waste any more time."

*

Along the edge of Dorthonion and Anfauglith, running from East to West, lay an ancient Elf-road. It had been beautiful once, during the Long Peace, with flower-studded margins of heather, wild thyme, rattleweed, arnica and waving grasses. Now all was burned and since then, thorny shrubs had come there and reached out for the riders passing in a gallop.

Fingon on Pilin was at the head of the host, and Maedhros let him take the lead. The white stones of the road, covered by dust though they were, sparked against Pilin's hooves every now and then.

Secrecy be damned, speed was of the issue now.

Abandoned, desolate waystations and rest points, sometimes entire towns, loomed out of the dust to the left and right and flew by just as quickly, though not quick enough to keep Maedhros' memories at bay. Elves had lived there once, overrun by the Sudden Flame in a winter not unlike this. He himself had ridden along this road on visits to Eithel Sirion. During the Long Peace, these had not only been military installations so much as fortified civilian towns far enough from the frontlines that he had met the few children living there when he'd passed with a company, staring up bright-eyed and awed at his mail-clad warriors, while people sang at work, fountains splashed in village squares and horses ran along the far pastures.

He tried not to think of what had happened to them all. It became harder as dusk crept in with its ghosts, and they still had not reached their destination. Piercing-bright stars came out, and the Sickle hung high above Angband in the North.

With the stars of the Valacirca bright, Maedhros prayed, in the privacy of his mind, to Varda and all the Valar, one of the few times since the beginnings of his captivity, that they would find Alphangil - more than that, that they would find Alphangil alive.

Once or twice Maedhros spotted how the Fëanorian lamps they carried caught in the eyes of some creature out in the dust - once, a wolf or wild dog that an archer dispatched of without falling back, lest it was a beast out of Angband that would fetch its companions and come in pursuit, and not a stray without a pack.

The elven horses, trained for both speed and endurance, made good time, but even they had their limitations, and they had to slow from gallop to canter, finally into a trot and at last to a walk. He saw Fingon leaning forward whispering in Pilin's ear, and knew he was asking him for more speed, but Pilin snorted and tossed his head, though he quickened his walk a little.

They stopped only once to water the horses when they had worked up a lather of sweat.

"I feel like I have lost both of you," Fingon said with difficulty, stowing Pilin's ration of water away in his packs once the horse was done drinking. "What you did to those Orcs - I cannot forget it."

"I have carried that darkness in me since Angband," Maedhros replied, passing a cloth over Nimlach's sweat-soaked sides. She pushed against him. "And you loved me all the same."

"I had not seen it so closely then."

"I would do more, and worse - for you, for her, and if my Oath compelled me. I pray that it remains asleep."

"I will do much for you, but - at least do not make me complicit in it again," Fingon replied and afterward said nothing else, only giving him a long, wordless look that Maedhros could not read, his mind shut tight. They mounted again soon after and went back on their way. The horses, trusting their riders, went as fast as they still could.

Even though the landscape had changed in the burning, Maedhros thought that it couldn't be long after nightfall that they were approaching their destination - he remembered the outlines of the hills against the sky, the lay of the land, the particular ruined town that they passed. He rode up to Fingon and quietly informed him, and saw his eyes shimmering with exhaustion and worry, though the hard ride had dried his tears.

Still, perhaps with the dark words from before forgiven or overruled by his need for comfort, Fingon leaned in to Maedhros in full sight of the host, and Maedhros gave him a half-embrace on horseback in full sight of them all, whispering, "Soon. Not long now, I promise."

"I will go mad if it is not soon. My sword wants blood and I want my wife. If they harmed even one hair on her head, I shall -" Fingon's voice faltered.

Maedhros could not, in his heart of hearts, find the strength to lie to Fingon. "You shall comfort her - we shall. She will be scared and exhausted, at the very least - they will not have treated her kindly, you know that as well as I do. How much they hurt her I cannot say."

Fingon made a dry, rasping noise in his throat. Maedhros could guess where his mind went - to Thangorodrim, to the state Maedhros himself had been in. He remembered little from that time, passing most of his days and nights in the shackle in a daze near unconsciousness, a brief brightness of Fingon's song and his answer, the pain of losing his hand, and then a long, dark time of nothing, until he woke in a bed in Mithrim with Fingon asleep in a chair beside him.

He squeezed Fingon's hand and was about to tell him once again that they would find Alphangil, when another rider pushed forward next to them. "My Lord, High King," they said urgently and pointed ahead, where a spot of flickering light was moving across the road, from the opening between two hills and into Anfauglith, where it disappeared from view in between the remnants of yet another cluster of buildings. Another followed, and then furtively, more.

Maedhros dared not hope that finally, finally - "Ghost lights?"

"Torches, I think," Nellómin answered, and they nodded in answer to the question Maedhros had not asked. "We found them."

There was no holding Fingon after that. He spurred Pilin onward with a shout that rang in the ruins and the emptiness, and the entire host sprang after him.

*

At the command of Cýronil, Alphangil found herself lifted and slung over the shoulders of a large, strong orc. She whimpered; every movement jolted not just her head and made her dizzy and nauseous, but also sent new spasms of pain into her mangled hand. It was swelling around the broken bones, she could feel that, and the ropes cut into her flesh now, so much that she wondered how she still had all her limbs.

The thought made her snort in despair.

Her and Maedhros would only have two left hands between them if she survived to lose her now-mangled right, and that would not be enough to keep Fingon satisfied. They'd have to get even more inventive with their mouths and other limbs, she thought and laughed out loud in a strange mixture of despair and elation, wondering if she was in the process of losing her mind entirely, and then groaned, because her laughter sent shocks through her body and even those hurt.

They left the cave with lit torches and began their northward march, their boots hitting paving stones. Alphangil remembered that a road ran there, connecting Eithel Sirion, Himring and Dorthonion, ensuring swift travel and communications between the Noldorin realms of the leaguer, but the Orcs swiftly crossed over into the dust and ruins of Anfauglith instead of marching along it, and made their way north instead. Even in the darkness, Angband loomed black in the distance. It was as if the starlight from the clear, cold sky glanced off of it without a touch to lighten Thangorodrim.

In the distance, a wordless shout, a familiar, beloved voice. Alphangil struggled to look back along the road.

Cold lightstone lanterns, a horn blast, a storm of hoofbeats, veering off the road and closing in on the Orcs swiftly. The Orc carrying her passed behind a low, crumbling wall and her rescuers were hidden from view, cutting off her chance of being found. Alphangil found herself dropped to the ground; the Orc drew its blade and sprang out toward the coming fray. She pressed herself down into a corner, and then Cýronil was there with a drawn knife - not the one she had received from Maedhros, the one she had used for her torture games, nor an orcish one.

This one was small and evil-looking. A cold, dark sheen lay on the edges of the blade in the starlight.

A weapon of the Enemy.

Alphangil had heard of them before - rumored to be carriers of the Enemy's living will, or at the very least some dark, poisonous magic that corrupted those afflicted by it - before inevitably dragging them into death.

Cýronil showed it to Alphangil with relish, and her smile brightened into cruelty.

Cýronil explained, her gloating made urgent by the desire to get away, skittish looks over her shoulder, "You're lucky - it won't be Angband for you after all. You'll wish you were dead before you are, but you'll last a while before darkness takes you."

Hoofbeats. Quieter in the dust than they had been on the road, but closer now.

First shrieks of the Orcs. A trample of running feet, the ringing of swords and music of bowstrings, thuds of bodies falling, quick and merciless.

Fingon screamed her name like a battlecry, and she had never heard a more beautiful sound from his lips and - a shadow with blazing eyes flying over the ruined wall - a black horse and a rider, Fingon shining with white fire, here.

They had found her.

Cýronil slammed the knife home into Alphangil's shoulder to the hilt; then she was gone.

Alphangil screamed. The pain blazed, incandescent, through her entire body. She lay sobbing in her bonds, knowing that Cýronil had spoken true:

Whatever evil was in that blade, it would kill her.

Closing her eyes, she reached her mind out to Fingon, a final farewell. There was a snarled tangle of thought when she brushed against him, tightly wound with worry and flickering with disgust, fear, anxiety.

I will await you in the Blessed Realm, she thought out into it, and felt a blaze in return, a sudden burst of light and focus on her like a desperate sunrise.

No no no no no. Don't you dare! Alphangil!