The Mirror Crack'd by AdmirableMonster  

Prologue

“You know nothing,” Maedhros says bleakly, “of what I was in Beleriand.”

…

“You know that isn’t true,” Annatar says. 

—Chthonion, The Harrowing, Ch. 50

Something howls in the distance. Dark earth closes in around him.  His companion’s luminous eyes stare at him from the depths.  Guilt and fear and anger knot tightly in his chest, though he does not know why.  “I will draw them off,” someone says.  The voice is far away, and something about it is terribly, terribly wrong.

“You can’t,” growls the eyes in the darkness, warns the eyes in the darkness, howls the eyes in the darkness.  “They will kill you.”

“Perhaps they will not kill us both.  I would deny them that, at least.”  Which is he—the monster hidden in the darkness, or the monster crouched at the round entrance to the burrow?

“Please—”

“You told me once you had sacrificed yourself for another.  Maybe it’s your turn to be saved.”  (One of them did tell the other that, didn’t he?  Everything is so cold.  Thinking does not quite seem to work.)

Something howls wordlessly behind him.  The burrow falls away, and as soon as the suffocating earth is gone, he regrets it.  Those earthen walls were tight but safe; they hid him like a fox in its den (but hounds can dig a fox out of its den.  Better one than both, surely.)

He runs.  The high white moon overhead is watching him, like an open eye.  The stars blink, fearful and relentless.  He needs to be hidden, but his face and head and back feel as if they are on fire.  Some terrible emotion behind him drives him onward—fear, perhaps, or shame, or misery.  Twigs crack beneath his bare feet—too tender.  Why does he only have two feet when he is running this way, through moon-silvered fields and rivers, with the thing behind him following?  Why is it so hard to see or to scent?  Where is he going?

It is not only a feeling behind him, is it?  It is not only his own clumsy footsteps on the earth that he hears.  There is something else, pacing him.  The fugitive knows what it is to be a hunter, and he knows now, with a sudden and shocking realization, that he is the prey.  He has lost his protection and his power, and now there is only fear, the blood pounding through injured veins, the final terrified flight that can end only one way.  The injured prey does not escape.

(This is what you deserve.)

A knee gives out.  He is on the ground.  Pain roars in his ears with his breath.  This is the end, and it is only his own failure that has made it so.

As his lungs seize up, burning, as he waits for the teeth that will inevitably sink into his throat, he hears, distantly, the sweet silver sound of a horn.