The Mirror Crack'd by AdmirableMonster  

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The Ominous Blade

LAST TIME on The Mirror Crack'd: Anniavas grapped with philosophies of hierarchy, and interpersonal relations, and was not able to swear his fealty to the Lord of Himring.

THIS TIME on The Mirror Crack'd: Domestic matters become unimportant when Maedhros's company is attacked by dark creatures. The kennel-master and Anniavas ride to his rescue.

Chapter warnings: Canon-typical horror themes and violence

For those of you who have been curious to get a peek inside of Maedhros's head, this chapter features the first instance of his point of view.

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By the end of the day, Anniavas was feeling less profoundly disconnected from everything, but he was still undecided as to whether he would seek out the lord of Himring on the following day or not.  Maybe Maedhros’ suggestion of a good night’s sleep did have some merit.  Besides, Echeleb told him firmly to leave well before sundown.  “You need to eat and sleep, you barely ate anything at lunch,” they told him.

Still grateful to them from earlier, and discovering that he was indeed very tired and hungry, Anniavas was disinclined to argue.  He managed to consume some bread and soup in the mess hall, then headed back to the dormitory, where he proceeded to pass out, with barely even time to be surprised at how quickly an incarnate body could go from waking to unconsciousness.

He went from unconsciousness to waking just as rapidly some hours later.  It was late, not early—some indefinable quality of the light or the soft noises of the other sleepers told him that.  Then the room was flooded with sudden stark white light, just for an instant, followed by a heavy peal of thunder, and he realized he had been woken by an earlier lightning strike.  Maybe that was why his palms were sweating and his breathing was so rapid. At the next flash, he rolled upright, pulling his knees into his chest.  His heart was pounding in time with his breathing.  Damn.  He wouldn’t be able to sleep again until the storm had moved on.  The sensible thing to do was try to at least lie back and get some rest, but he suddenly found that all he could think about was Limral and how scared she must be.

It would be utterly foolish to go out in this weather.  It had been snowing this morning, but the temperature must have risen over the course of the day, because he could also hear the steady rushing noise of torrential rain.  Even taking his warm, sturdy cloak, he would be soaked, and it might not be cold enough for snow, but it would certainly be cold enough to make him miserable.  It would be much better to stay here and curl up in the warm bed, even if he couldn’t sleep.

* * *

The cloak had helped, quite a lot.  It was dripping onto the stable floor, and his feet were soaked, but he wasn’t frozen, and he was warming up much quicker than he would have otherwise.  Although that might be the dogs.  Once he had arrived and had hung the cloak on one of the empty hooks that were usually used for riding gear, he had gone to check on Limral, who was indeed awake and crying.  Several of the other puppies were crying also, trying to hide under the mother, who seemed almost as nervous.  And then, well—what else was he supposed to do?

“Shhhh,” he said softly to Limral, whose little body in his arms had just undergone another spasm of shivering.  The mother put her head in his lap and nosed at his upper thigh, whining uneasily.  “It’s all right,” Anniavas told them.  “It’s just a storm.”

Then the mother’s ears pricked up.  At first, Anniavas thought she had noticed a more distant thunderclap, but then he heard Hemmoril’s voice and realized it must have been the sound of the stable door opening.

“—be taking with you?”

“Whoever can be ready on short notice,” said the kennel-master shortly, and both of them strode in past the dogs.  The kennel-master was already arrayed in a set of scaled armor, and he had a longbow slung across his back, a knife belted at his waist.  

“What’s happening?” Anniavas asked, standing up with Limral still held in the crook of one arm.  He dislodged the mother, who huffed with displeasure, then got up and padded over to the side of the pen, wagging cautiously.

The kennel-master’s face was hard, his jaw set.  “Maedhros is in trouble,” he said.  “We’re going out to get him back.”

“Back?” Anniavas’s chest tightened.  He kissed Limral gently on the top of her head and then set her down.  “Never mind, I’m sure there’s no time for questions.  Take me with you.”

“You’re not a warrior,” Hemmoril objected.

The kennel-master’s eyes went to Anniavas’s face, then back to the dogs swarming around his knees.  Anniavas was conscious of not cutting a particularly impressive figure—he had not really dried off from his soaking and now he was also covered in dog fur—but the kennel-master nodded.  “Come on,” he said.  “Hemmoril can find you a weapon and armor.”

“I am not yours to command, Lord Celegorm,” Hemmoril said icily.  Anniavas made a split-second decision not to think too hard about this revelation of the kennel-master’s identity.

“You’re going to tell Anniavas he has to stay behind?” 

Hemmoril’s lips thinned.  “No,” she said, with a short sigh.  “Come on, Anniavas, there isn’t much time.”

Anniavas followed her, past the horses and over to a part of the stable where some of the spare light armaments were kept.  Hemmoril rapidly found him a set of light leather armor—“you’re not used to it, so I’m not putting you in anything heavy”—and then paused in front of the weapons.  “Do you know if you have any experience with weapons?” she asked.

His mind helpfully supplied the ways various weapons could be used; he had no idea if he could execute on any of them.  “No.”

She sighed again.  “All right.  No bow, then, I don’t need you shooting any of us in the back by accident.”  After another moment of deliberation, she gave him a light short sword that she belted around his waist, and then paused.  “You’re sure you want to do this?”

“If Maedhros is in trouble, I want to help.”

“All right.”  Rather than going through any more of the weapons here, she reached to her own calf and unbuckled a small, rather worn-looking blade with an inlaid mother-of-pearl handle.  It was singed black in several places, but the damage looked to be primarily cosmetic.  “Take this.  It was my wife’s.”

Anniavas stared at her, and she pressed it into his hands.  “Thank you,” he said, awkwardly.

“Don’t do anything stupid,” Hemmoril told him.

* * *

During the rest of the chaotic preparation—which was not efficient enough for Anniavas’s taste, and he took several mental notes for ways the procedures could be improved—he managed to piece together what had happened.  A few hours after their conversation in the garden, word had reached Himring about a group of escaped thralls who were fighting off a band trying to take them back to Angband.  Maedhros had taken the primary cohort who were usually on call for such skirmishes and ridden out to offer assistance, but he hadn’t come back.  It was the middle of the night before a single warrior returned, and then the news she brought was dire.  It had been a trap—they had been ambushed at sundown by misshapen monsters that they could barely see.  Angband had, of late, been using such creatures more sparingly, and, clearly, Maedhros and his warriors had grown too complacent.  Anniavas recalled his first blurred memories of the thing that stalked him before Finno had rescued him and had to hide a violent shudder.

They rode out into the tail end of the storm.  The rain was falling less violently now, but the wind was still up, howling sharp and painful.  The horse Anniavas had been given was experienced and unafraid, a mature gelding that moved smoothly from a trot into an easy, loping canter.  Anniavas’s body had no memories of riding, but his mind helpfully supplied some of the general physical rules behind it, and while he was sure he was clumsy, and it was rather an exhausting thing to do, he at least did not feel in danger of falling off.

If anything, he wanted them to move faster, but they had to keep pausing to check for signs of Maedhros’s passage, which had been partially obscured by the heavy rain.  With the clouds still thick overhead, it was very dark, and Anniavas was uneasy at how clearly the steady bright shine of the jewel-inset lanterns marked their location, but they could not ride without light.

They had been doing this for perhaps half an hour, though it felt much longer, when Celegorm called a sudden halt.  “Quiet,” he said tersely.  “Turn out the lights.”

The lanterns were snuffed, and their faint hum cut off; the sound of hoofbeats died, leaving only the shrieking of the wind—lessened by the cessation of their movement.  And something else—the sound of steel on steel, of snarls and shouts.  When Anniavas turned in the direction he thought it was coming from, he caught sight of an eerie blue flicker.

“Follow me!” Celegorm shouted, and the lights went on, and the whole cavalcade took off again—trot to canter to full-on gallop.  Anniavas, chilled and exhausted muscles aching, clung hard to his horse and wished he had someone to pray to.  Melweril and Echeleb worshipped Yavanna, and he had heard Hemmoril whispering rhymes invoking Manwë, but Anniavas, like Dernodhos, shied away from the thought of the Valar.  He had no faith that anyone but this pitifully small rescue group from Himring cared enough to try and save its lord.  He set his teeth.  They were enough.  They would be enough.  Failure was not an option.

The messenger who had arrived at Himring had been cut off from Maedhros and the others, but she said she had seen them taking shelter in a crack in a weathered hillside, which might be an old Mannish barrow.  Clearly, from the sounds of battle, either the forces of Angband had breached it or Maedhros was leading a final desperate sortie.

They arrived on the scene as a single flash of lightning spidered across the stormclouds above them.  For an instant, the murky scene was starkly lit and clear, and Anniavas saw Maedhros.  His mouth was open, perhaps in a battle cry, and his red hair had escaped from its customary topknot, whipping around his face and shoulders in the howling wind.  His sword was arrested in mid-slice, and all around him Anniavas caught a glimpse of not-quite-Elf-shaped things, raising white and twisted limbs.  As the brilliance of the lightning faded, he could still see them quite clearly, the eerie blue glow of the chains sunk into their limbs outlining them with a series of gnarled lines, but Maedhros’s form above his shoulders fell into shadow.

Awkwardly, Anniavas urged his horse forward; for the first time it seemed to hesitate, but as Celegorm rode forward with a shout, it let Anniavas convince it to follow.  Then they were in the thick of it, and Anniavas didn’t know what to do, how to even reach the twisted tide of battling creatures below.  It was as if the horse was swimming, head and shoulders above an eerie current.  He hesitated too long drawing out his sword; the horse cried out beneath him and reared up, and Anniavas was sliding backwards.

There was a horrible instant of vertigo—then, an impact.  He gasped for breath, and someone kicked him in the ribs.  Rolling to the side, he made it onto his knees, but there was nothing in his hand.  He had dropped his sword somewhere in the freezing mud that now coated his back and hands.  He crawled forward, searching.  It couldn’t have gone far—a hoof slammed down near his head, and he jerked back.  No, no, no.  He could find it.  He could.

Something grabbed his hair and yanked him back.  He went up flailing, and then he was being flung sideways.  He landed with a yelp half-upright against the hillside, with something bending over him.  A red maw gaping too wide for its white face panted at him; a hand with too many joints in the fingers pressed down against his throat, cutting off his air.  It stared at him, blue eyes unblinking.  Anniavas thrashed, trying to jerk away, and a jolt of searing cold skittered down his back.

Hands, holding a needle and thread—

Hands, stitching a chain into dead flesh; cold, cold—

Dead eyes opening.

Cold—Anniavas was aching with it, but his mind was unscrolling a helpful list of suggestions.  One hand went to the knife strapped to his calf (“Don’t do anything stupid,” Hemmoril said, in his memory) and brought it up, slashing across a line of invisible thread down the creature’s back.  It squealed and staggered backward, falling as it did so, the light flickering across its form as parts of it collapsed, quiescent.

Air rushed into Anniavas’s lungs, and he gulped for it desperately.  His hand tightened on the handle of Hemmoril’s wife’s little knife.  His mind remarked that he was fortunate it was well-sharpened.  Anniavas told it to shut up and looked around wildly for Maedhros.  His limited vision meant he had to crane his neck around farther than he had expected—working in the tea garden had not really prepared him for how his single eye would behave under conditions like this.

There he was—not an inch moved from where he had been when Anniavas had spotted him before.  Lightning flashed again, and Anniavas clutched the knife and ran towards him just as he went down beneath a wave of the stitched-together revenants.  The knife wouldn’t be enough; it couldn’t be enough.  This did not seem to matter, when weighed against Maedhros’s gentle voice saying, Breathe in, breathe out.

He plowed awkwardly into the back of one of the revenants, and as it started to turn he got his knife up along the thin line of sorcerous thread binding the animating force into the corpse.  It tumbled down into a heap of flesh, and there was an opening—there was Maedhros, on the ground.  

“Maedhros!” Anniavas shouted, and Maedhros’s face turned towards him, eyes widening.  The world almost seemed to jerk, going white-then-black for an instant, and Anniavas was standing beside him, hand out.  Maedhros took his hand, and they braced against one another.  Anniavas stumbled forward at the sudden weight, but Maedhros was up.

“Do you have a weapon?” he asked tersely, and Anniavas realized he had had to drop his sword to rise.  Either he did not have an appropriate prosthetic, or it had been lost during the tumult.  

“Just this.” He pushed Hemmoril’s wife’s knife into Maedhros’s hand.  “I’ll look for your sword,” he said, going down onto his knees in the mud again.  It was hard to search with only one eye; he had to keep rotating his head.  And he kept expecting one of the revenants to grab him, but despite what felt like aeons splashing around clumsily in the churned up mud and grass, nothing happened.  At least this time he was able to find the sword.  His fingers closed on the hilt, and he stood up in time to see—

Celegorm, riding hard towards them, drawing his bow, while—

Maedhros tried to fend off a sword-wielding revenant with nothing but the tiny knife clutched in his hand—

(Anniavas yelled a useless warning)

—and the sword drove through Maedhros’s guard and bit deep into his shoulder.

Celegorm’s bow twanged; an arrow appeared in the revenant’s neck, and it reeled backwards, but that wouldn’t be enough to stop it.  You know what to do, Anniavas’s mind told him, and, almost to his surprise, his body was already moving before it had finished.  Knife—caught as Maedhros dropped it, going to the left so he could see it with his uninjured right eye—around to the revenant’s back, and again, that same line, swift and sure.

It dropped.

“Nelyo!” Celegorm’s voice cried, raw and hoarse.  “Shit!”

Maedhros was already rising, twisting his arm around to pull the sword blade out of his shoulder joint.  It came free with a gush of blood, and he let it drop, but in that one moment before Celegorm was getting him up into the saddle, Anniavas saw that the tip of the blade was missing.  He wasn’t sure why that worried him, but he dove for the blade anyway, and as soon as his fingers closed around that ice-cold metal, he knew.

* * *

Maedhros was accustomed to injury at this point, and he barely registered the pain in his shoulder.  This whole damn thing had been a mess.  He ought to have taken a larger force to begin with, he ought to have broken away far earlier when they realized how many revenants there were, he should have led them to a different, more defensible cavern—

He ground his teeth, trying to banish the whirling recriminations so that he could pay attention to the actual situation.  He and Celegorm were a heavy burden for a single horse, but Morleweg could handle them for a little while, at least.  He wasn’t the most reliable of the horses, but he was very strong. Cúrodhroch and the other horses the first sortie had brought—Maedhros had sent them off when it became obvious that their only chance was to hole up inside a hillside cave.  He hoped they would reach Himring unharmed; if not, their deaths would be on his conscience, too.

Again, he shook his head.  This retreat wasn’t over yet.  “Turko,” he said.  “Have we lost anyone?”

“I don’t know,” Celegorm growled out in reply.  “I was focused on getting you out.  Hemmoril will tell the others where we’re to meet.”

Not for the first time, Maedhros missed both Fingon and Maglor, but Fingon was half the continent away, and Maglor could not be spared when Maedhros himself had been in jeopardy.  Celegorm was a fine fighter, but he did not always have the leadership qualities Maedhros would have preferred.  Hemmoril, though—she was steady.  She could be trusted, especially in such a dangerous situation, to find a way out, if there was one.  At least Celegorm had shown the sense to bring her.

Morleweg kept a steady pace, a freezing, rain-laden wind at his back.  “Was that Anniavas?” Maedhros asked, half-wondering if he had dreamt the sight of that one-eyed countenance, oddly lovely beneath the ravaging scars.  “I didn’t think he was a warrior.”

And we left him behind.  

There was a longer pause than Maedhros expected.  Maybe he had been wrong, but Celegorm was not usually hesitant to tell him so.  If Celegorm wasn’t rushing to speak, there was something more going on.  Maedhros set his jaw and waited.  His little brother could never resist answering a direct question.  Admittedly, he realized after a moment, he wasn’t certain if Celegorm even knew who Anniavas was, but any clarification would only give Celegorm an opportunity not to answer.

“You mean the one-eyed thrall,” Celegorm said as Morleweg swerved expertly to avoid a large boulder.

Ex-thrall.  “I do.”

It shouldn’t have been hard to maintain his focus on this one line of questioning, but his thoughts kept slipping.  It was cold, colder than he had realized—it seemed colder than it had been—was it only last night? that he had met Anniavas in the garden, when it had been snowing.  He hadn’t slept well, but that was not unusual, and he could go for reasonable stretches without sleeping.

“Yes, he begged to come, so I let him, all right?”

That was Celegorm’s guilty voice.  Maedhros winced, an old familiar ugly pain tightening at the base of his sternum and running along his collar-bone to his injured shoulder.  “Is he dead?”

Another long pause.  “I don’t think so,” Celegorm said, and paused again.  There was something else in his voice, Maedhros could tell that much.  Over the storm, he heard pounding hoofbeats—with luck, the others had made it out as well.

In Valinor, he would have told Celegorm to just spit it out, and Celegorm probably would have.  Here, everything was different, all bonds broken, all hopes dashed, all patterns unraveled.  He waited and wondered at the way his thoughts kept spinning off.  He was very cold—not feverish, though.  The Men said Elves never sickened, which was not true, but it was true that Men sickened more easily and had less recourse.  They were so delicate.

“Those things,” Celegorm said tightly.  “They avoided him.  Like rats trying to dodge around a terrier.”

He was unnerved, Maedhros could hear it in his voice.  But was he right, and if he was right, what did it mean?  Celegorm’s lantern swayed, its too-stark light playing across the wild fields around them.  Its reach did not remain consistent, and Maedhros saw, in quick succession, the gnarled limb or root of a tree, a fast-moving brook that looked black in the darkness, and a sudden pair of gleaming eyes, quickly extinguished.  What could you see and understand in a battle like that?  And Celegorm was unstable, had been since he had returned from Nargothrond.

But one could not deny the possibility of truth merely because the messenger was unreliable, Maedhros thought wearily.  His head was aching.  

“Sanctity,” he offered, the silence stretching too long.

“Power,” Celegorm countered.

There was another ugly pause. The lights of Himring appeared in the distance, a yellow steady beacon. “Don’t hurt him,” Maedhros said tightly.

“I wasn’t going to hurt him, Nelyo,” Celegorm said roughly.  “But you can’t deny it bears watching.”

“Many return from Angband with strange powers, Turko.  Should they not return at all?”

“You’re not—”

“I am not having this argument again.”

He had spoken forcefully enough.  Celegorm went silent.  As Morleweg’s strong legs consumed the distance between them and the yellow glow of home, other riders began finally to appear out of the darkness, flashing in and out of the light of their lantern.  Some still had their own lights; others were using makeshift torches, managing to keep them lit despite the fickle wind that still rose and fell.  Maedhros’s head thrummed; he tried to count the others, but he could not keep track of them.  Names and numbers filled his mind and emptied out again, leaving only a hollow ache.

The gates of Himring opened for them.  Maglor stood in the courtyard, pacing back and forth, with the healers gathered behind him.  His hair was gathered into a loose and sloppy bun on the top of his head, and he had thrown one of Maedhros’s old cloaks around him.  It was too large for him; he was half-drowning in it.  He looked up, eyes wide and fearful, as the riders clattered in.

Celegorm reined in Morleweg, coming to a halt in the center of the courtyard.  “Got him,” he said unnecessarily.  Other riders trickled in, hoofs striking loudly against the old stones.  Maedhros closed his eyes for an instant, trying to gather himself against the tidal wave of weariness that threatened to drag him under.

He opened his eyes to find that he was half off the horse.  Celegorm’s shout of “Nelyo!” hung in the air.  Maglor was there, shoulder beneath his, the worry wiped cleanly off his face.

“Careful, Nelyo,” he said, lightly.  “Don’t crush me, please.”

Maedhros snorted; Maglor had supported his full weight before.  “I’m all right,” he said.  “Just tired.”

“He’s injured!” Celegorm snapped, sounding insulted.

“Barely a scratch,” Maedhros countered.

“Maybe you’d better let the healers decide that,” Maglor told him breezily.

Something small and hurting and afraid inside Maedhros recoiled from the thought, wanting to skulk away and lick its wounds alone, but he mastered it.  “Of course.” The sound of the gates closing was arrested, another rapid spate of hoofbeats announcing a straggler.  Maedhros turned as someone shouted his name to see Anniavas and Hemmoril enter sharing a mount.

“Let me down!” Anniavas demanded; before anyone else could react, he slid clumsily off the horse and staggered forward but righted himself.  “Maedhros—lord of Himring—”

He was breathing hard but was not moving as if seriously injured.  There was a bruise across one cheek and an ugly set of dark stripes across his windpipe, as if someone had tried to throttle him.  In one hand, he clutched a blood-stained blade.

“Hold him back!” Celegorm cried, and Anniavas halted, as if he hadn’t seen any of the others in the courtyard, as several of the other watchers hurriedly stepped to intercept him.  He looked down at the sword in his hand as if he had forgotten it was there.

“My lo—lord of Himring,” he said tightly.  “There is a black enchantment on this sword, and I am certain part of the metal is lodged in your wound.  Please—you must let me remove it.”

Pain, hidden beneath an unnoticed numbness, flared in Maedhros’s injured shoulder.  He heard Celegorm’s voice begin to form an answer—Maglor’s voice interrupting—but somehow he could not understand the words.  Blue-white light stitched up the line of Anniavas’s spine, coiling around his throat like a collar made of flame, and Maedhros fell backwards into darkness.

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Chapter End Notes

horse names from Chestnut_pod's name list