The Mirror Crack'd by AdmirableMonster  

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Fear Behind Him

Summary: Fingon rescues an ex-thrall with a strange artifact embedded in his spine, brings him to Himring, and gives him a name.

A/N: HOLY SHIT y'all, I was NOT expecting the response to my itty-bitty prologue? I am BEYOND flattered, and also JAIMSJAM did an amazing piece of fanart which *really* captured the atmosphere, it's like a little animated storyboard, and it's SUPER COOL! Check it out here!

Chapter warnings: eye trauma, a little bit of body horror, and very muddled mental processes from someone who still thinks they're a slave.

Chapter title from Tolkien's poem about Théoden's riding forth, "From Dark Dunharrow in the Dim Morning"

The moon was hanging low at the horizon.  Maedhros paced again, back and forth, unable to keep himself still, unable to keep from looking up at it every few moments.  

I’ll be at Himring before moonset, the note from Fingon had read.  So where was he?  Maedhros was aware of the thousands of perfectly normal things that could have delayed him, and he told himself that his husband was more than capable of taking care of himself, but the increasing knot of panic at the base of his chest refused to listen to reason.  He wanted to ride out and search.

You cannot, he told himself sternly.  It is not even moonset yet.

Back he went across the wall, another two laps.  Taking a deep breath, he shut his eyes and focused on his other senses, trying to center himself.  He smelled wet leaves on the air, felt the strength of Himring’s walls beneath his feet.  And then, poised like that, trying to settle the restlessness boiling inside him, he heard the sound of Fingon’s horn, faint, on the wind.  Not a call for help: a declaration of arrival.

The fear dissipated like smoke, leaving faint embarrassment and frustration.  He opened his eyes—Tilion had barely brushed the horizon with the base of his curve.  Late, but not that late.  And Fingon was not exactly known for his punctuality at the best of times.  Maedhros ran his hand through his hair and started deliberately for the stairs leading down from the top of the wall.

By the time he heard the hoofbeats of Fingon and his company, Maedhros had commanded himself and hoped he no longer looked like a lovelorn child.  Fingon would probably know how he had been acting anyway, but at least he would not undercut the faith of those who depended on either of them.

He had the doors opened with a wave of his hand, and Fingon rode in, breathless and grinning as he always was after a hard ride.  To Maedhros’s surprise, he was not riding by himself; on the front of the horse, he had a limp, vaguely Elf-shaped bundle.  

“Were you waylaid, Finno?” he called, though Fingon himself looked uninjured.

“No, indeed,” Fingon returned, with a cheerful wave, pulling the horse gently to a stop.  “Say rather we did some waylaying ourselves!  This poor soul was running from one of Angband’s creatures, and if we hadn’t arrived when we did, I shudder to think what would have happened to him.  Can you take him so I can get down?”

“Of course.”  Maedhros held his arms out and Fingon swung his burden down.  

The Elf was wrapped in Fingon’s cloak.  He was unconscious, but the murmur of pain when he was transferred to Maedhros suggested he had wounds beside the most obvious one—one eye had been put out, and not cleanly.  Though he no longer had the connection to the Song he would have needed to perform a true healing, Maedhros had made it a point to be able to perform more mundane medicine.  He checked Fingon’s newest rescue victim over quickly, searching for further injuries and any clues to the stranger’s identity.

The wrists were red and swollen where he had been manacled, perhaps too tightly.  His throat was bruised and a little torn, but that injury was older, scabbing over.  There was something wrong with his back.  Maedhros peeled his shirt away, trying to get a better look, though he was not going to deposit the stranger on the ground just to see his back better.

He didn’t need to—although it was dim, the eerie blue-white radiance was obvious as soon as he pulled away the cloth.  There was something sunk into his spine—Maedhros would have to take a closer look later, but he recognized the handiwork.

“An escaped thrall,” he grunted.

Fingon’s eyebrows rose.  “He traveled far, then, on severe injuries.  Well, I am glad I was able to bring him to you.”

There were few places in Beleriand that would take in thralls; Himring was one of them.  It was the least Maedhros felt that he could do.

“Come in,” Maedhros told him.  “Himring is glad to host the High King.”

He got a cheeky grin in return.  “Please don’t stand on ceremony,” Fingon said.  “Everyone is tired.”

“Hemmoril will see to your horses.  You’re welcome to your usual chambers.”  He looked down at the still body slumped in his arms.  “I’ll get him to the healers.”

As Fingon passed him, he trailed his fingers subtly across Maedhros’s inner arm and leaned in to murmur, “I will most certainly be in my usual chambers, O Lord of Himring.  Try not to spend too long with the healers.  I am quite impatient to be attended to myself.”

* * *

The slave had not expected to wake again, yet here he was.  Nor was he houseless; there was far too much pain anchored in his back and face for him to have been left without a body.  It was important, he knew (though he did not know how he knew it), to ascertain where he was and with whom, so that he might understand his responsibilities, but his mind was clouded.  Thoughts slipped away before he could grasp them like leaves carried on the wind, leaving behind only the memory of gentle hands and a gravel-coarse voice.

He had been in a place of dark halls, where inchoate darkness met lines of rigid light.  Some part of him realized he was no longer there: whatever this place was, it was not so extreme.  The air was cold, but the slave was not—he was bundled into blankets, and something hot was poured into his mouth and down his throat.  Cold was a torment for him, and he was pathetically grateful for this strange kindness.

Then, one day, he awoke to striped sunlight and knew the world without knowing himself.  He sat up and looked around, as if he might be able to anchor himself that way and find an answer to a question he should not have had: who am I? 

He was in a small bed in a small room.  It was covered in a plain but well-made quilt.  The walls of the room were hidden by thick, unornamented green tapestries, and there was a square window through which sunlight was very determinedly streaming.  There was something wrong with his vision—he was almost certain he ought to have had a greater field of view than he did—and there was clearly something else wrong as well.  Who was he?  Where had all his memories gone?

Don’t panic, he told himself.  That would be inappropriate and might lead to punishment from—an authority figure.  Stay calm.  He clenched his fists and tried to catalogue what information he did still possess.  There was too much, and he didn’t know where to start.  Increasing the heat of the forge when tempering steel would lead to greater toughness, but the strength and the hardness would decrease.  The sound of Yavanna’s name in the great Song was like a waterfall of wren calls.  The appropriate punishment for stealing food was six to twelve lashes, depending on the strength of the culprit.

How could he even begin to find himself in this flood of disconnected knowledge?

The door began to open, and he felt instinctively for a weapon before realizing it was not necessarily safe to have one.  He sat back anxiously.  (Who am I supposed to be?)

“Ah.  You’re awake.”

An Elf.  Red-haired, craggy-faced, and one-handed, moving with a graceful strength.  The missing hand was an old injury, and the muscles in his wrist showed that he compensated well.  Something about him was faintly familiar, and the slave tried to grab at the memory, but it slipped away and was lost in the myriad of others, a single grain of sand muddied into the rest of a yellow shore.  

“It’s still going to be some time before you’re back on your feet.  I’m sorry.”  The Elf’s gravelly voice did not vary from its monotone.  “Your injuries were extensive.  Not everything could be healed.  But you’ll do better day by day.”

“What injuries?” asked the slave.  It seemed like the safest question, and he had intended to stop there, but there were still too many pieces of information floating around in no particular order, and he found himself asking before he could keep the words from his lips, “Where am I?”  He managed to bite down, Who am I? He knew he could not risk revealing his inadequacy, though he did not know how he knew.

The red-haired Elf did not look at him directly, which confused him.  There was a sense of predatory ease about this Elf, all the knowledge of power settled on his shoulders, but his body language was—not submissive, not exactly—non-threatening.  Maybe even deliberately non-threatening.  And the slave could not think of any reason for someone to treat him that way.  “You’re in Himring, a stronghold of the Noldor.  I am Maedhros Left-Handed.”

Although the name was meaningful in the abstract, the slave wondered at the physical reaction he had to it—his chest tightening, heat rising to his cheeks.  His body was preparing to fight, or to flee.

“No one here will hurt you,” Maedhros Left-Handed continued, which the slave knew was absurd.  “We have many ex-thralls among our ranks, myself included.”

Was he an ex-thrall, the slave wondered?  Had he been a thrall?  He could recall many disjointed facts about Angband, but none of them seemed to hold the immediacy that he assumed should be associated with the direct memory of an experience.  “You are no thrall,” he found himself saying in a low voice.  Knowing he should not have spoken, he shivered slightly, awaiting his punishment.

Maedhros Left-Handed made a low growling noise, but when he spoke it was in the same matter-of-fact monotone.  “I was.”  Slowly, he levered himself up from the wall, and the slave tensed, fists clenching again.  “I was coming in to take a look at your wounds.  Will you let me, now that you’re awake?”

So this was the punishment.  It would be worse, the slave knew, if he took the proffered choice as a real one.  He dipped his head submissively.  “Of course, my lord.”

“If you want to show me respect, I’d prefer ‘Lord of Himring.’”

“Of course, Lord of Himring.”

The slave was exquisitely aware of each motion—it took two steps to reach the side of the bed.  “Can you look at me?  I want to check your eye.”

Sternly, he quelled the instinctive desire to recoil and patiently turned his face upward.  It was only now that he realized he could feel the rough tightness of cloth tied about his head.  The Lord of Himring touched his head gently as he unwound it.  The slave understood now why there had been something wrong with his vision—something was covering his eye.

But the freeing of the eye from the confines of cloth did nothing to improve the field of his vision.  The Lord of Himring made a humming noise and clicked his tongue.  “It’s healing well.”

“What is?” the slave asked, then bit the inside of his cheek.  He was certain that he knew how to control himself better than this.

“That’s right, I didn’t describe the injuries.  Sorry.”  The Lord of Himring released him.  “You’ve lost an eye.”

The room narrowed, sudden and terrible.  “What?” someone said, in the slave’s ear.  “No—”

“It was a clean loss, but it will take getting used to.”

It fit the available evidence, but it couldn’t be, because if he had lost an eye, then he was—imperfect—useless.  It had to be a lie.  Why would the Lord of Himring keep alive a one-eyed, useless, half-dead—

“Hush.”  The Lord of Himring did not touch him, but the rough voice cut right through him. Once again, it seemed strangely familiar, but once again, the memory slid away into the vast hourglass of his mind.  “You will not be killed.  And this wound is almost healed.  That may not help, but I will not lie to you about this.”

Everyone lies!  There was an awful pain in his throat, and now a terrible pain in the one eye that he apparently still had.  He reached for it, wanting to make it stop, and he was halted, a heavy hand pinning his wrists down.

“I won’t let you hurt yourself more,” said the Lord of Himring.  “Although you may leave here if you wish when you can walk away.  That is my—promise—to any ex-thrall brought to me.”  That hand—crushingly strong—held the slave’s with enough strength to keep him from raising his, yet without causing pain.  The slave rifled desperately through the mess of useless, distant memories, trying to understand, trying to at least make a guess as to why, but he could find nothing.

“Your other major—wound—is that you have an artifact embedded in your spine.”

The slave did not know what he had been expecting, but it was not that.  He tried to sift through possibilities and came up with nothing.  Eventually, letting his hands drop, he said, blankly, “What kind of artifact?”

“I don’t know,” the Lord of Himring said grimly.  “I have seen such things before, but only in dead things, and you are not dead.”

Dead things.  Yes, the slave knew the kind of artifact he referred to: a rune-carved chain stitched into the flesh to bind the soul.  He could not come up with any use for such a chain in a living form, either.  Unless he had escaped prior to an execution—but what kind of prisoner would warrant such treatment?  It was not so hard to stitch up a soul after the body’s death.  And he had never heard of sinking the chain into the spine.  He was a little surprised that he was capable of moving—and in fear, he tried to move both legs.  To his relief, they responded willingly to his commands.

“No, you’re not paralyzed,” the Lord of Himring told him.  “It’s doing very little.  We had to turn you onto your side because you didn’t lie well on your back.  And it glows, at times, or grows cold.  But that’s all.”

Get it off, the slave wanted to say, but if it was embedded into the spine, there would be no way to remove it if he wanted to keep not being paralyzed. Something in the room whimpered softly.

“I wish I could tell you more.”  Maedhros Left-Handed, the Lord of Himring, sat gingerly on the side of the bed and just as gingerly set the slave’s hands back into his lap.  “Once I’ve finished examining you, I’ll leave you alone.  It’s good that you’re awake.”

Still confused, the slave permitted this.  There were many things he did not understand now, and they only seemed to be getting more curious, but the one that he found drew his attention the most strongly right now was this: how had such a great warrior learned so much about the art of medicine?

* * *

The next day, the Lord of Himring returned, but he did not come alone.  With him was another Elf, much shorter, with a musical voice and gold ribbons braided into his black hair.  The voice was familiar, but the slave did not know why.

“Will you introduce us?” this Elf asked, with twinkling eyes and a flashing smile.  It was hard not to like him—though he was clearly as accomplished a warrior as the other.  When he took a step forward and said, frankly, “I’m glad you’re doing better now,” the slave realized he actually did have a memory of his own of this Elf—face set and ferocious, wielding a great bow that sang as it loosed.  The arrow had sunk deeply into the back of the creature that had been a moment away from tearing the slave’s throat out.

“My lord,” the slave choked out, hurriedly trying to get out of the bed.  “I owe you my life.”

“Many do,” the Lord of Himring rumbled out wryly.

“I do not keep count,” said the Elf, waving a hand lightly.  “It is enough for the life to be saved.”

The slave sank back into the bed in some confusion.

“Yes, I find him infuriating as well,” said the Lord of Himring in the same tempered monotone, his grey eyes resting on the new Elf.  Then he paused, looking back to the slave.  “…I never asked your name.”

Sudden panic rose in the slave’s throat.  He must know the answer.  It was absurd not to know the answer.  It was a clear failure not to know the answer, and he could not fail—

But he hesitated too long, or the consternation was writ on his face, because the other Elf was speaking again, to the Lord of Himring.

“You didn’t ask his name?” he said, sounding scandalized.

The Lord of Himring shifted on his feet and cleared his throat.  “It slipped my mind.  I was focused on other things.”

The other Elf made a scoffing noise, then turned back to the slave.  “Please forgive Maedhros, he’s unaccountably rude sometimes.”

“Finno,” the Lord of Himring said softly.  He put his hand on the crook of the Elf’s elbow. “Finno, he’s—”

A quick glance that the slave could not read went back and forth.  “Well, it is no matter—do you object to me giving you a name we can use for you?” asked Finno.  “You need not share anything you do not want to, but I find it distasteful when I have no name to associate with a person.”

This was not a way out that the slave had foreseen.  Where had the offer come from?  He felt as if he stood at the very brink of a terrible precipice, and the only thing keeping him from falling was that cheerful, matter-of-fact voice.  

“I do not object, my lords,” he said, after a moment of struggle to assemble the words.  “Indeed, it would be most—most kind.”  How can you not know! screamed his mind, but no matter how he sifted through the information, he could still find none that referred to himself.

“Well, then, what about ‘Anniavas’?” suggested Finno.

The slave automatically broke the Sindarin word apart and put it back together in the language he was most familiar with.  Not a language he should use here.  He stared at his hands.  This name—this was not a reference, it was—

(A trap?  A recognition?  Why?  Why have you suggested this when I am—)

A queer kindness.

“If you don’t like it—”

“I like it very much,” Anniavas said, his words ringing with a sincerity he had not expected.  

Anniavas.  Gift of autumn.

Chapter End Notes

The name "Anniavas" is from the wonderful chestnut_pod's inimitable name list.

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