A Thousand Winds that Blow by StarSpray  

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Nineteen

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Lossenol found Kóri looking smug at the mountains. He also found a flurry of activity, as the outpost was being expanded and further fortified. Similar work was underway on the western side of the pass but on a larger scale, he was told. “It seems our wise ones were right,” Kóri said as they retreated inside away from the noise. “You’ve seen the new star?”

“I have. Has anything else changed?”

“Not yet, but it’s only a matter of time. Have you seen anything in the mountains or elsewhere in the north?”

“No, nothing. It’s probably only a matter of time for that, too.” 

Everyone else was still away by the time Lossenol returned home. He had expected to be the first back; in fact, he expected Eluréd and Elurín to part from Daeron and Nellas to do some wandering of their own before they came back, taking advantage of the relative safety of Eriador while they still could, taking time to come to terms with whatever had happened to their sister away from everyone but each other. It was very quiet in the empty village, though, and there was not much to do. He pulled some weeds in the garden, hunted, picked up his sword to practice, argued with the goats. His dreams were filled with the Silmaril’s light and with voices that he knew while still caught in the dream, voices he kept trying to reach, but which slipped away as soon as he woke. 

Finally, Daeron returned—alone. “The twins have gone to stay with Mithon for a little while, and Nellas remained with Goldberry,” he said. “How are things at the mountains?”

“Preparing for war,” said Lossenol, “but no one knows when or how or what it will look like. What did Goldberry say?”

“Very little more than we’ve guessed already,” sighed Daeron. “Iarwain says armies are mustering and war is coming, though he did not say whose armies or where. But they were both hopeful, and spoke of the Enemy’s downfall as all-but certain.”

“Do you think they’re right?”

“I’ve never known Iarwain to be wrong. If the Valar themselves march to war than anything is possible, I suppose. They have fought and defeated him before.”

“We need to think about what we’re going to do,” said Lossenol. “If that kind of war is coming to Beleriand, people are going to be fleeing east.”

“You still want to join with the Dwarves?”

“I’d be very surprised if those armies mustering that Iarwain spoke of didn’t include everyone in Eriador,” said Lossenol. “I don’t want to run away. The whole reason I left Valinor was to fight the Enemy.”

Daeron looked at him sharply. “Do you remember that, or…?”

“Not exactly, but why else would I have left?” 

“Do you think you’re able?” Daeron asked after a moment. “With your eye…”

“It makes it harder, but I can manage, especially if I have someone I trust on that side. It’s my shoulder that gives me more trouble.” He wasn’t sure if it had been crushed by a falling stone or a blow from a weapon, but he still didn’t have the same range of movement on his left as he did his right. It didn’t stop him from being able to draw a bow or wield a sword, especially since he was right handed, but it did limit him. The bones also ached sometimes when it got cold and damp. Until now it had been a minor annoyance, hardly ever thought of, but a weak and blind left side might cost him his life in a real battle. “The bulk of the fighting will surely happen farther west, and north. I don’t want to go that far. I can’t go that far. If we can defend the pass from behind walls or hidden in the hills, or use other tactics to keep the roads clear—that will be very different from charging into a pitched battle.”

“Have you spoken with any healers lately?” Daeron asked.

“There’s nothing they can really do about it.” He’d long known that he was as healed as he would get—Daeron felt far more badly about it than he did. “Don’t look at me like that, Daeron. I’m fine, and I know my limits.”

Daeron sighed. “I’m going to hate it whatever we do,” he said. “Whenever I think of retreating farther east—Hendaras and Elenel are already packing their things, along with many others, all the women and children and the old—whenever I think of joining them, I feel rather like I did when I tried to delay crossing the Ered Luin before.”

“We aren’t meant to go east, you mean.”

“I wish I was shown things the way others were, instead of these vague feelings and hints in the Music. We aren’t meant to go east, but I do not know what we are meant to do.”

“Kill a lot of orcs, probably,” said Lossenol. 

“Very funny.”

“If we’re lucky we might even get to take down a balrog.”

Daeron shuddered. “Oh, don’t say that. I have never seen a balrog, and I don’t want to. But it’s also—there won’t be any point in hiding, after a while. Myself, I mean, especially if I have to sing songs of great power. Or the twins, which is worse.”

“They can handle themselves,” said Lossenol. “I don’t think we could have done any more to prepare them than we have.”

“I know. But it doesn’t feel like enough. It feels—they’re still so young, Lossë, and I don’t—if something happens to them—”

“Don’t borrow trouble from the future. We’ve always known it was going to get bad—now we have reason to hope that after it gets worse it will get better.”

“I don’t know how to do that—to hope for that.”

“Then just take it one day at a time, same as we’ve been doing all along.”

It was a relief to have Daeron back, to have another person to talk to. His absence with the twins had been the longest Lossenol had ever been apart from any of them when he wasn’t away on errands of his own. It was very different to be alone in the woods with a purpose, to be doing something, than it was to just sit or wander idly. It had felt like too long. He wasn’t built for that kind of solitude. He didn’t know how Daeron had endured years of it.

Eluréd and Elurín did not stay away as long as Lossenol had expected. All of them were uneasy and no one wanted to be apart from the others for long. A few days after they returned, Elurín sought out Lossenol. Daeron and Eluréd were busy elsewhere, and Lossenol was fletching arrows. “Can I help?” Elurín asked.

“Always, birdie.”

Elurín sat down, crossing his legs, and picked up an arrow. “I’m sorry,” he said after a few minutes, not looking up from his work. “For shouting at you, I mean. It’s—none of it’s your fault. I know that.”

“I’d rather you take it out on me than your brother,” Lossenol said. “I can take it, and I know you didn’t really mean it. You’re still angry?”

“Yes,” Elurín said after a moment’s hesitation.

“Good,” Lossenol said. At this Elurín looked up, startled. “You can use that anger, Elurín—as long as you rule it, rather than letting it rule you. When it comes to fighting—and it will, far sooner than any of us would wish—you’ll need it.”

“You speak as though from experience—but I don’t think I have ever seen you get angry.”

“I haven’t been, really, not since we met. But before that—I think I was.” Sometimes he realized that he knew things about himself only as he said them out loud. But as he spoke he became certain that it was true. “I think I was so angry that I grew blind to nearly everything else. I think I might still be that angry, somewhere deep down. That’s most likely how I ended up in Doriath in the first place—and I don’t want that for you, Elurín.”

“Do you really not want to remember who you were? To know these things for certain rather than just guessing?”

“No, I don’t. Some doors that close shouldn’t be opened again.” Most days, at least before the Silmaril had appeared in the sky, he didn’t even think about the fact that he hadn’t always been Lossenol, hadn’t always known Daeron or the twins. He wished he could keep it that way—hoped his past would never come back to haunt him. He didn’t want to remember why he had been so angry—he didn’t want it to consume him again, and he was afraid that if he did remember—the anger and the reasons for it—it would.

“Just…I can’t imagine ever forgetting my parents. Or Elwing. Or Eluréd.”

“You know why it’s different for me, birdie,” Lossenol said quietly. “You know who I followed, why I was in Doriath.”

“That doesn’t mean there isn’t anyone out there who might be missing—”

“I don’t think there is. But it’s fine—I’m here with you, and that’s more than enough.”

Summer waned into autumn. Nellas did not return, having decided to stay with Goldberry for the foreseeable future, unwilling to venture again any closer to the Ered Luin; Lossenol missed her, but didn’t blame her. He watched Daeron carefully as the days grew shorter. He seemed fine at first—it had been a long time since his grief weighed on him enough that Lossenol felt seriously worried—but as the leaves fell and the bright autumn colors faded to the browns and greys of winter, he grew quiet, and slept more—and started having nightmares again. By day he just wanted to curl up by the fire, and the rest of them were careful never to leave him alone for long, and to fill the silences when they threatened to become oppressive. Winter wasn’t any better—it was the harshest since they had come over the mountains, with howling winds and driving snows. 

“It’s like that winter when we all first met,” Eluréd remarked one afternoon, after Lossenol and Elurín returned from bringing in more firewood and stood shaking clumps of snow out of their hair by the door. “You remember?”

“How could we forget?” Elurín replied. 

“Do you remember much from that winter?” Eluréd asked Lossenol.

“Most of it.”

“It feels cozier and happier in my memory than I know it really was,” said Elurín as he curled up beside Eluréd, who had a harp on his lap to replace some broken strings. 

“I’m glad of it,” Daeron murmured. He said nothing more, but it was easy to tell that he did not look back on it in quite the same way. 

For himself, Lossenol remembered the coziness—but also the tightness around Daeron’s eyes and the way his smile wasn’t really real through most of it, though it had been impossible to recognize that until much later when he had finally seen his real smile. He remembered pain and fear and discomfort as well as the warmth of the fire and the soft music and Eluréd and Elurín’s quiet giggling when Daeron told them silly stories to pass the time. The better parts outweighed the bad, especially when added to all that came afterward, but some of the fear lingered—especially when winter storms came howling through the trees, sounding a little like wolves in the distance. 

The next year passed very quietly. Orcs crept over the mountains; Lossenol killed two and heard of others from the Ents, who also spoke of rumblings in the earth, of armies mustering, of a bitter taste on the wind when it blew out of the north. At home they made preparations to leave. Eluréd and Elurín took the goats down to Nenuial; Lossenol was glad to see them go just on principle, but made a show of being even happier than he really was so Daeron had something to laugh at. He spent his time making arrows and making sure they had enough food that could be easily preserved and carried with them. Daeron did the same, and spent a lot of time by the river, listening to whatever it might tell him—hoping, he said, for a warning before something happened. 

While he listened he carved things, little toys to give away to the children at Nenuial, charms and beads and, eventually, five delicately carved wooden leaves he turned into pendants, one for each of them. “When we leave this place, it will be forever,” he said as he gave three of them to Lossenol and the twins. “So here is a way we can carry a piece of it with us, wherever we go afterward.” The fifth he took to Nellas, when he and the twins went to visit her and Goldberry. 

When the change came, late in the summer two years after the Silmaril first appeared in the sky, even Lossenol could tell—a great wind rushed up from the southwest, and the earth trembled under their feet. A murmur swept through the forest as though the trees were all waking up—as though they might become suddenly Entish and begin to move. By the river Daeron cried out, scrambling to his feet as the water swelled, its regular rushing rhythms changing suddenly. Lossenol did not have the same connection to the Music that Daeron did—or the twins—but he could tell that they heard something new. Birds erupted out of the wood in a cacophony of calls, and Lossenol could hear other animals racing through the trees somewhere behind him.

“The Valar have come,” Daeron breathed, turning to look at Lossenol with eyes gone very wide. “They shaped the world and it knows them and they are here.”

“So what do we do now?” asked Lossenol. 

“It’s time to prepare to leave,” said Elurín. 

They made their final preparations over the next week. Then the wind shifted again and Lossenol smelled smoke. At the same time Daeron went still beside him. “Someone’s coming,” he breathed. “From the west.”

“Men,” Elurín said a second later. “Men and Orcs.”

“It’s been a dry summer,” Lossenol said. He didn’t need to hear the distressed calls of all the birds to know that the flames would spread—burning hot and burning fast. “Unless one of you can sing up a rainstorm, we need to go. Now.”

“Should someone go to Nenuial—”

“The river will halt the fires,” said Daeron. “Our plan was to go to the dwarves, and it’s too late to change it now.” They scattered to grab their things; there was no time even to take one last look at the place they’d called home for almost all of the twins’ lives, and in minutes they were racing south through the trees, following a familiar trail. Lossenol let Eluréd take the lead, and dropped to the back just behind Daeron. After a while he heard crashing through the trees behind them; they were outside of Daeron’s Girdle now, and there was nothing besides their own woodcraft to hide their passage. Lossenol drew his bow and glanced over his shoulder. 

The attack came from the front. Eluréd cried out, and Elurín lunged forward, drawing his sword with a shout. Daeron stumbled, and Lossenol caught him, pulling him away from the orcs. “Now would be a good time to break some skulls, Daeron!”

Then another sound reached them, from north and west. A loud roar and a keening cry mixed together. The orcs jeered and laughed as they kept coming. Lossenol carved through them, trying to have Daeron’s back while also watching for Eluréd and Elurín—but they were fighting in tandem exactly as he’d taught them, blades flashing in the dappled sunlight. 

Then Daeron caught his breath and spoke a few words that shivered through the air almost like blades themselves, and the orcs broke and scattered. “Come on!” he said, grabbing Lossenol’s arm. “Songbirds, let’s go!”

“What was that noise?” Eluréd panted as he ducked under a low hanging branch. “The—the roar—?”

“I don’t know,” Daeron said.

“Dragon,” Lossenol said at the same time.

Eluréd and Elurín skidded to a halt. “We have to warn Nenuial!” Elurín cried. “A dragon will cross the river for sure—”

“We’ll never make it there ahead of it,” Daeron said. 

“I can! I’m fastest, I can make it!”

“You can’t make it there and then back to the mountains before the road is blocked!” Eluréd protested. 

“I can find a way—I’m going!”

“Elurín!” Daeron cried, but he was already gone. “Lossë—”

“He’s right about one thing,” Lossenol said. “He’s fastest—we won’t catch him, and we won’t change his mind.”

“But if the dragon is headed that way—”

“What if we delayed it somehow?” asked Eluréd. “What if we—distracted it, maybe?”

“No!” Daeron and Lossenol said at the same time. “You’ve heard the tales, Eluréd,” said Daeron. “We aren’t going anywhere near that thing—we won’t stand a chance.”

“We don’t have to get near it,” Eluréd said. “If there’s a song that would—”

“There isn’t,” Daeron said. “We can’t risk it.”

“I don’t think the dragon is in much of a hurry, anyway,” said Lossenol. “And we might end up being a distraction anyway—those orcs will be back before long. Come on, birdie.”

They ran, Eluréd stumbling a little before he hit his stride again. When the dragon roared again it sounded closer. As they went Daeron chanted, half-gasping the words out in between breaths—words of shielding, of hiding, of twisting shadows and confusion left in their wake. It wouldn’t deter a dragon, but it would make it harder for the orcs to follow.

The mountains were days away. By night they climbed trees and hardly dared to even doze. Lossenol held onto Eluréd, who had not spoken since the debate over the dragon. By day they ran, pausing briefly to rest as time dragged on and they got wearier and wearier. The orcs did not catch up again, but they were never far. 

Finally, they reached the road. That morning Lossenol had wrenched his bad shoulder climbing down out of a tree, but there wasn’t time to do anything about it, so he just had Eluréd keep his bow out, and gave thanks, again and again, that he was right-handed. They stopped to catch their breath. When Lossenol looked north he saw smoke rising from the woods; he could smell the burning when the wind shifted. It was far too easy to imagine the village gone up in flames—the home they’d built falling apart into ashes. The thought made something under his ribs hurt—the ache of yet another loss in a long line of them. In the distance they heard what sounded like horns, calling and answering. “The Ents are moving,” Daeron said. 

“Can they fight fire?” asked Eluréd.

“I don’t know, but they sound angry.”

“Come on,” Lossenol said. He rolled his shoulder and winced. “We need to keep going.” He glanced up as a few ravens passed overhead, dark shapes against the hazy sky. Eluréd hesitated, looking back east along the road. “Eluréd—”

“He’s all right,” Eluréd said without moving. “I’d know if he wasn’t.”

“Eluréd,” Daeron said, and took his hand. “Come. He’ll be expecting us to wait at the pass.”

“I’m going to strangle him when he gets there,” Eluréd said. 

Traveling on the road was easier for them, but it was also easier for others. The orcs caught up again a few days later—more of them. This time Eluréd met them with words that shivered through the air and made them stumble and stagger—though he was weary and frightened and unused to using his voice as a weapon, so it did little more than buy them a few seconds. 

It was just enough. A cry went up behind them and then dwarves charged past, some on ponies, many on foot. “Come!” Lossenol grabbed Eluréd and pulled him away from the fight. Eluréd grabbed Daeron, and they found one last burst of strength to put all the dwarves between them and the orcs.

“Lossenol!” Kóri came striding down the road. “There you are—I was worried for you. But where’s Pínamrent?”

“He went to warn Nenuial about the dragon,” said Eluréd. Daeron swayed, and Lossenol caught him. 

“The dragon?” Kóri repeated in alarm. 

“We don’t kn-know where it’s—headed,” said Lossenol. He was exhausted, and his tongue felt too thick, and his thoughts were slow to reach his mouth. That hadn’t happened in a long time. 

“We heard it, though not for some days now,” Daeron said, wrapping an arm around Lossenol as he looked away back down the road. The dwarves had chased the orcs back into the trees. “How much farther?” Daeron asked.

“Not far,” said Kóri. “It’s all uphill, but we have beds ready for you, and walls that will withstand whatever the orcs throw at them.”

“Thank you,” Daeron said, offering him a small smile. “You must be Kóri.”

“And you must be Torrandir.” Kóri bowed. “At your service.”

“At yours and your family’s.” 

The last few miles weren’t as hard as they might have been—not with the surety of safety at the end. The outpost had been fully transformed, and there were many rooms both large and small prepared to house Dwarves, Men, or Elves. The ravens they had seen had been carrying messages, some to the downs south of Nenuial where they were expecting a call to arms, and some even farther east, all the way to the Dwarves who lived beneath the Misty Mountains. “Durin the Deathless sent a promise of aid when the star first rose,” Kóri told them, “and now the time has come for him to keep it. Doubtless he knows already, and our raven will find him already mustering any and all who can wield a sword or an ax. They’ll bring arms and armor too—they have mithril aplenty in the mines of Khazad-dûm, and there is no steel that can compare.”

“Will you march to war in the west?” Daeron asked.

“Most likely, but for the time being we will continue to do what we have been doing—keeping the lands west of the pass clear for any who manage to pass over the Gelion. They have been few and far between, but I suspect we will see a flood of them before long.”

“I hope there will be enough to make a flood,” said Daeron. 

The room Kóri showed them was small, plain but cozy, with a hearth and four beds attached bunk-style to the walls. Daeron eyed them and then sank onto one of the lower ones. “I am not climbing up there.”

“Me neither,” said Lossenol, slumping down beside him and resting his head on his shoulder. “Gonna be a tight—tight fit.”

“You’re both ridiculous,” Eluréd said, fond but distracted. A basin and pitcher of water had been placed in a corner, and he washed his face before coming to sit on Daeron’s other side. 

“Are you all right?” Daeron asked him, reaching out to tuck a damp strand of hair behind his ear. 

“I don’t know.” Eluréd’s voice shook a little. 

There would be nightmares, Lossenol thought, now that they were safe and able to try to get some real sleep, and to consider that Eluréd had both fought his first battle and killed for the first time. “Forget the bunks,” he said, forcing the words clumsily out of his mouth. “Let’s—on the floor.”

“That’s a good idea,” said Daeron. They rose and pulled the mattresses off of the beds and onto the floor, along with the pillows and blankets. Then they all cleaned up more thoroughly, and Daeron insisted they all eat something. When they finally collapsed onto the cushions, Lossenol and Daeron tucked Eluréd between them. Eluréd curled up with his face hidden in Daeron’s shoulder, and Lossenol wrapped an arm around him from behind, feeling him shake a little. “It’s all right, Eluréd,” Daeron murmured. “We’re here.”

“I’m afraid,” Eluréd whispered. “If Elurín…”

“He’s among friends,” Daeron said. “He’ll be all right. He’s brave and he’s strong and clever—both of you are, and you’re both going to be all right.”

“We’re all going to be,” Lossenol said. But he remembered the sound of the dragon in the distance, and remembered the sight of Elurín vanishing alone into the trees. They could speak aloud their hopes, but they could make no promises, not in war. He looked at Daeron and saw the same fear reflected back at him. Miles and armies stood between them and Elurín, now—and he would not be content to hide behind walls in safety if he thought he could make a difference.