Save Gwindor Only by Secondborn  

…all were slain save Gwindor only…

—the Silmarillion, Of the Fifth Battle: Nirnaeth Arnoediad

I saw Gelmir first from a distance. 

He was standing uncertainly at the far end of a long, narrow tunnel, his back mostly turned, but even just that brief glimpse flooded my heart with feelings long grown unfamiliar. Relief, of course. Gladness. One might even say joy, if that was a thing that could exist in the mines of Morgoth. 

It was only a few days before that the guards had come to take Gelmir away, searching him out specifically from amidst the numberless throngs and marching him off to serve some grim, unstated purpose in the battle that we all knew was brewing out in the open air above. Few thought he’d survive that battle, though even fewer allowed themselves the luxury to grieve the loss. Instead, the other elves of Nargothrond scrambled to divide up the meager possessions he’d left behind, even if most were worn near to uselessness. The Sinda who led his work crew fretted over how to meet quotas with one fewer pickaxe at the rock face, and the old Hadorian who ran wagers against ration cards even offered odds on Gelmir’s fate, trading off the prospect of violent death for a few extra mouthfuls of rancid meat. Such is the way of things in the mines, where emotions only consume badly needed energy and sentimentality can get you killed. 

Still, there were tears shed for Gelmir down in the depths of Angband once he was gone. I know, because many of them were my own, heartsick and desolate. So to see him hauled back in by the guards, not just alive and seemingly unharmed but looking somehow stronger and haler than I’d remembered, was both a shock and a delight. 

“You’re alright!” I called over the distance and the din of clattering hammers, and I made my way toward him as quickly as a hobbled leg on uneven ground would allow. He seemed not to hear me, so I called again as I drew near and put a hand, easy and familiar, on his shoulder. At that, he turned his head at last. But when the pale torchlight caught the lines of his face in its sallow glow, it was not my friend whose haunted gaze met mine. 

What I saw instead was startling. This elf had Gelmir’s own strong jaw and cleft chin, his cool blue eyes and dark, thick brows. Indeed, he looked eerily like Gelmir in every way, or rather, eerily like how Gelmir must have looked before I came to know him. Before his raven colored hair was streaked in gray, his cheeks and forehead lined with hardship and suffering. 

“You are not Gelmir,” I gasped in confusion, feeling suddenly foolish with my arms spread wide to embrace a stranger. But the stranger drew suddenly back at the sound of that name, flinching as though I had struck him across his unmarred face, and that is when the realization hit me with the same force. 

The younger brother. 

My arms sank to my sides. How often had I heard Gelmir speak lovingly of Gwindor and his kind heart, his dogged loyalty, his sense of adventure, his musical laugh? How many times had I listened to stories of their cherished scouting trips together, months at a time spent out in the wilderness with only each other for company and yet never feeling the absence of others? They were brothers, yes, but far more than shared blood bound them together. They were the best of friends, and no matter how dark Gelmir’s life had become, he’d always found grateful satisfaction in the thought that Gwindor still dwelt on the peaceful banks of the Narog, far from the rot and reek of this cursed place. It was a thought he returned to again and again in times of need: freedom for the one he loved most in the world. Or so he had believed. Face to face now with the evidence to the contrary, I gave quiet thanks that Gelmir was gone, that he had not lived to discover that his beloved brother had somehow followed him into this worst of all fates. I don’t know if he could have borne it. 

The path from my mind to my lips was often muddled those days by the ever present strains of hunger and exhaustion, and so I did not manage to speak any more words before the guards had already shoved this newcomer off in the direction of a broad seam of ore. I might have cursed my softened brain for failing me in the moment, but really what could I have said to him that would have made any sense or brought him any comfort? There are no words of welcome in the pits of shadow.

Instead, I watched him from a distance for the rest of that day and into the night. The first few hours as a thrall were always the most dangerous. Desperation and defiance clashed unpredictably with rules that were poorly understood but brutally enforced, and so I kept a careful eye on him. He worked many hours that shift, the overseer being keen to get the most out of muscles that had yet to be stripped of their vigor, and I secreted myself nearby in case his pride or his spirit proved unready or unable to do as he was ordered. I don’t know how I might have helped if that had been the case — sought to calm him? Pled for mercy on his behalf? Raised a distraction? Any such intervention would surely have earned a beating for me alongside him. But I was willing to risk it. Eager, even. It was the least I could do for Gelmir, the most steadfast of friends in a friendless place. 

**********

It is hard to find others to trust while in the enemy’s grasp, but I began my life as a thrall doing as well as anyone else. I had those who would share stories, tend to sickness, give comfort or warmth when called for. There were plenty of captives still to be cautious of — elves who took up the work of the guards in order to gain whatever stingy advantage was on offer, or men who lied and hurt simply because the ordinary rules of decency seemed to have lost all meaning — but if life in the mines was punishing, at least I was not alone. Until one day I was. 

It all happened so quickly, and even now I cannot explain how I found myself all on my own at the mouth of a tunnel that opened to the outside world. It is easy to become lost in Angband’s twisting labyrinth of passages and shafts, and somehow I had wandered unnoticed to the one place where a path to escape lay stretched out before me, clear and inexplicably unguarded. All I had to do was run.

I made it only a dozen or so paces before something in me failed. My feet, my heart, my gut. Perhaps all three. Every ounce of my soul cried out for home, for release at last from the constant fear and hurt, the mind-numbing tedium, the hunger that gnawed with its own sharp little teeth, the wretched filth that felt like it had become part of my very skin. But after so many years trapped below, the flight to freedom was every bit as terrifying as the torments of bondage. 

The night sky overwhelmed me with its enormity, pressing down on my slight shoulders as though I was pinned at the bottom of a great dark sea. The sudden brightness of the stars seared my eyes that were so used to dimness, leaving painful white bursts that pierced my vision long after my gaze had turned away. A menace hung in the air, a sense of nameless things that lurked in the surrounding shadows of those fire-scorched hills and offered horrors of the most terrifying sort: those you don’t already know. 

A panic rose in my chest, more frantic and desperate than any I’d felt before or since, and began to claw its way up my throat. I lurched backward, frightened and disoriented, but my foot caught on a twisted root and I heard the sharp crack of splintering bone as I fell. The pain was intense, big rolling swells of it that brought what little there was in my stomach out onto the dusty ground. But even after I’d coughed my airway free I still couldn’t breathe, as though an invisible iron hand was about my neck and squeezing all the tighter as every additional second ticked by. My sight began to grow blurry at the edges, and I heard the screech of a carrion bird summoning others to a feast in the making. I knew if I didn’t muster the will to move, I would find my end as just another strip of bloodied flesh hanging from a vulture’s jaws, and so I dragged myself in the one direction that felt possible. Only after I was back in the mouth of the tunnel, with its stone walls close around me, fixed and familiar, could I take in air once more and seek to slow my thrumming heart.

I sat at the edge of that tunnel for a long time, staring at the shadowy wasteland beyond and trying to summon the courage to limp out once more and disappear into its formless maw. I failed, again and again, and each time I only hated myself all the more. Pathetic, my mind hissed. Disgraceful. Unworthy of even the diminished life you still cling to. I cried and I cursed and I beat at my own face with my fists, knocking loose some teeth in the process. But even as I spit those broken teeth into my palm and flung them out into the gloom, I already knew. No other part of me would ever willingly exit that tunnel again. No amount of abuse, no share of humiliated self-loathing, could be enough to induce me into that terrifying open, filled with both nothing and everything all at once. So I turned wretchedly instead to the rocky path that would lead me back to the others.

Word of what happened spread ahead of me as I made my way slowly through more familiar passages and caverns. It raced through the mines like a frigid winter gale and whipped up resentment with the very same fierceness. Nothing stirred other thralls to contempt more easily than a Returner, and by the time I had struggled my painful, frightened way back to the sleeping quarters I already wore the title like a brand burned deep into my flesh for all to see and all to scorn.

“I wanted to run,” I sobbed as person after person turned away in disgust. “I tried. I tried. I tried…” 

Gelmir alone met these pleas with sympathy. He didn’t laugh or sneer. He wasn’t furious that I had given up a chance that so many others only dreamed of having. He simply helped me to splint my mangled leg and to pull the razor sharp fragments of root from the soft, aching hollows where my teeth had once been. He let me rest beside him, mopping the sweat of pain from my brow and keeping one hand in mine so that even when my eyes were closed I would know that I wasn’t somehow still out there, alone and adrift in the raw wilds. Gelmir was my friend that night, and the next and the next. He was my friend in all the years to come, when other thralls looked through me as though I no longer existed. When the guards took to shoving me out beyond the gates every so often, just for the amusement of watching me crawl back again, hysterical with fear and laid low with shame. Gelmir alone seemed to understand that just because I could no longer live outside of this place did not mean I was no longer one of us.

And yet, he would not have wanted his brother to turn out as I did. No one could wish that for someone they love. He would want hope for Gwindor, and since he wasn’t there to kindle or to guard it, I would take up the task in his place. Whatever else befell Gwindor in the depths of Angband, mine would not be his fate. I owed Gelmir that much.

**********

It was easy enough for me to watch over Gwindor without drawing undue attention. 

With my poorly healed leg, I had long since ceased to be useful at the hard labor of breaking and hauling stone. Many who failed to produce in the mines were killed for simple expediency, and it was rumored that others were brought to the fortress above and handed over, still alive, to be fed to the cruel beasts that were bred and raised there. But I had been lucky, or so I termed it, and was assigned instead to work in the mine’s death ward. That job allowed me to move freely through the many pits and chambers to collect the bodies that piled up like firewood until I arrived to tote them away. “Fetch the cart,” a guard would snarl in my direction, and I would push my little corpse trolley from disaster to disaster, leaning on the cart like a crutch. After Gwindor’s arrival, I made certain to always choose the routes that took me closest to where he happened to be. 

In time he seemed to recognize my face, a consistent but unremarkable presence in the margins of his days, though we never did speak. In fact, he rarely spoke to anyone unless directly addressed. He talked mostly to himself, murmuring in quiet tones as he swung his hammer or waited in line to draw water or rested at night in the caves where we slept. 

A young woodsman from Brethil who lay near him each evening told others that these faint murmurings were all nonsense, just long strings of names or the counting of water drops as they slipped one at a time from the ceiling of the caves into the fouled puddles that dotted the floor. The woodsman saw this mumbling as a sign of madness, but I never believed that to be so. The mind has many ways of coping with the unimaginable, and this was one I had seen before. Distraction. Disconnection. These little measures protected Gwindor, just like the oysters in the bay of my homeland — a soft, vulnerable creature hiding inside a plain, impenetrable shell. 

Gwindor’s shell did much work here in the mines of torment. What he ever truly felt or thought was anyone’s guess, and I cannot say that any of us who lived and labored alongside him fully knew the heart and mind that he laboriously protected. The Gwindor we saw was a carefully maintained facade, all reserved stoicism and controlled feeling, though that did not also make him unkind. I’d seen him carry a sick companion on his weakened back rather than let her reap the punishment of being absent at count time, and many days he added pounds of his own arduously dug ore to the basket of another who risked failing to meet their daily quotas. In moments like those I heard again Gelmir’s frequent words of praise for his brother’s generous spirit, and it was moments like those when I committed myself again to that brother’s welfare.

That is not to say that I could protect Gwindor from all, or even most, ills. No one knew better than I the many ways that death came to call in Angband. The guards brought more than their fair share, from starvation rations and beatings gone too far to simple sport for a warden who had grown bored and restless. There is little a fellow thrall can do in the face of such wanton cruelty. But the mines themselves took many more lives all on their own. There were cave-ins and flash floods, days of boiling heat and nights of bone chilling cold. I was once called to clean up a mining chamber where a pickaxe had disturbed a pocket of noxious gases, leaving only two retching, gasping survivors still chained at the ankle to four dozen dead crewmates who had slowly choked on the fumes. These acts of nature I was also helpless to stop, and, in truth, there were times I believed that to try to stop them would have been the less merciful choice. Maybe sometimes the falling rocks or the surging floodwaters were the heralds of Eru himself, come to call home a spirit who simply had no more to give. Maybe I would follow that same call, greet it with hopeful relief, if it ever saw fit to come for me. But until that day, I would hold on to life as best I could. And I would help Gwindor do the same. 

I looked for every opportunity to ease his burdens, and I found some as I made my daily rounds. There are advantages, after all, to being beneath the concern and notice of others. No one looks too closely at what you do or what you have, and things occasionally came into my possession that proved their value. When Gwindor began to grow dangerously gaunt, his spine a jagged ridge of protruding bone between hollow valleys, I pocketed extra ration cards from the corpses I collected and hid them for him to find among his sleep things. Later I found him gloves for his hands that were blistered raw and seeping, or a needle that could mend his increasingly threadbare clothes. When he stumbled, bloodied and limping, out of some dark corner where he had been dragged and used, I left him my store of precious yarrow powder, painstakingly ground from a few scraggly plants I tended in the pale light of a smoke shaft where dead bodies were sometimes burned. 

I never gave these things to him directly, for I feared that he would turn them down. Not every hungry elf will accept help from another who looks just as deprived, and it was certainly true that I had need of an extra mouthful or occasion to staunch the bleeding of my own wounds. But those needs felt small against the satisfaction I got from watching discreetly as he discovered my humble offerings. He would look around in doubtful confusion each time they appeared among his things, unexpected and unexplained, but necessity inevitably overcame caution and he always put them to urgent use. Where he thought these finds came from, I had no way of knowing. I hoped he saw the hand of his brother in them.  

In this way I looked after him over the years. One became two, and then five and then ten. Slowly he took on more and more of Gelmir’s visage as I had known him, adding scars and creases and the purplish-green bloom of bruising that never had time to fade before another blow renewed its depth. His hair went white in thick streaks, and his eyes gleamed with the eerie light of those who live in perpetual darkness. The resemblance between the brothers had always been striking, but it became undeniable as the burden of life in Angband inevitably carved itself into the younger one’s body just as it had done to the elder.

I worried much about him, of course, and not just for the threat of more scars or fractured bones. There were more than a few among the thralls whose minds had broken entirely from the strain of it all. Some raved deliriously, unmoored from their senses, or intentionally courted death. Others simply gave up, unable to muster even the barest interest in a life that seemed robbed of all hope. This last seemed the most perilous to me, for there are many outward signs that a mind is losing its master but a surrender of the spirit can be much harder to detect. I was ever vigilant for hints that he had reached the end of what he could endure and ever grateful not to find them yet. Still, the worry clung to me, as impossible to shake as my own shadow, and brought greater urgency to my aim to see him freed of this place forever.

I knew he thought sometimes of escape. That much I discerned from my years of studying him, which gave meaning and intention to small acts and choices that looked purposeless to others. He used dusty thumb prints to make small marks each day on the board that listed his quotas, and it was long before I realized that these were the crescents and quarters of the moon as he tracked its growth each month to the fullness that could light a fleeing thrall’s path. Later he took to keeping little piles of pebbles next to him as he worked, shifting them back and forth throughout the day by what looked like random chance until close observation revealed him to be using them to note the movements of various guards, cleverly picking out patterns and gaps in their daily routines. 

That cleverness would serve him well when it came time to devise a plan, just as the bravery that had first brought him to Morgoth’s door would help him to carry out the plan of his making. But cleverness and bravery could only get him so far. Luck was also needed, and if such luck would not present itself to him at the right time and place then I was determined to create it myself.

My first attempt was a dagger that some nimble hands had painstakingly fashioned from an old spoon handle. I happened upon it in a little used passage not long after a flood swept clean the large cave where many of the Iathrim slept, and the receding waters left debris strewn in unlikely places. To have a weapon of any kind was an unforgivable offense, but no one ever thought to check my cart for such things. I kept any number of useful items buried in it, and the dagger joined these, at least until I could place it in Gwindor’s path.

I was well used to leaving things for him wrapped up in the tattered blanket he shared with another elf each night, though not every such gift made its way into his possession or stayed there. I lost a few to the sleepmate when he was first to arrive at their resting place in the evening or when Gwindor gave over his unexpected boons to that frightened young carpenter. More disappeared into the furtive hands that sometimes rifled through unattended possessions during work shifts, stealing away anything of value. Sadly, the little dagger met that fate before Gwindor could discover it waiting for him. I wondered often in the days that followed where it had gone, who could be hiding it, what their intentions were. I prayed that it would find its way into the gut of someone who deserved it.

Years sometimes passed between such opportunities, but if I had anything in abundance, it was the time to wait, to try, to fail, and then to wait again. So it was that I was ready when a fiery Haladin woman brought a truly promising opening at last. Newly imprisoned and roiling with desperate fury, she turned her work axe on the guards around her, bringing down three before taking a fatal blow of her own. In the chaotic clean-up that followed, no one missed the short sword that found its way from a dead guard’s baldric to the bottom of my cart.

I was much more careful that time. A sword to a thrall is a treasure unimaginable, far better than the little dagger or its successors had ever been, and I would not see it go astray. After much thought, I began leaving it nestled carefully in the shadows of the forge where Gwindor delivered his crew’s daily loads of ore, placing it there right before he arrived each evening. I’d position it just so, with only a glimpse of the handle visible in the dim torchlight, and then hide a distance away to keep watch and recollect it promptly again each time he failed to take it. Several days passed this way before I was certain that he’d seen it and several more before I marked him beginning to look for it in its now usual place. 

On the tenth day he took it at last, sliding it into a pant leg that had more than enough room alongside his bony limbs, and I smiled for the first time in many unhappy years. But no sooner had he walked away than the reality of what I’d done struck me full force, and the smile gave way to an anxious heaving of my stomach.

The next hours were troubled ones for me, filled with blossoming hopes and withering doubts. Once he had the sword, I knew he would use it soon, for something like that cannot lay hidden long in the mines. But whether I had equipped him for redemption or suffering, freedom or death, I could not foresee. The uncertainty plagued my nerves, kept an ache in my head and in my heart. I thought much of Gelmir, far beyond my reach now in the mysterious west, and prayed that he would judge my actions sound. That he could forgive me if it all miscarried somehow. That he would know I had done my best. 

I tried. I tried. I tried…

The pounding in my chest calmed only enough to allow for short snatches of sleep that night, and even then my dreams were fitful and anxious. But I had not long to wait. It was still early the next morning, shortly after the first stone-gangs had begun their shifts and I was still kindling the fire in the death ward, when an iron-shod foot prodded into my bent side.

“There’s been an incident,” growled a guard. “Fetch the cart.”

He said no more and strode off in the direction of a haulage ramp, leaving me to limp along behind him, terrified, as best I could. I cannot tell you what horrors I imagined as we walked, each one leading my mind inexorably to the discovery of Gwindor, broken and lifeless and cold. I’d seen many dark things in my years of thralldom, but the brain can somehow always dream up even worse. The imagination is a relentless torturer, and I lived several lifetimes of men in the minutes it took to arrive at the ramp and learn at last whether all my good intentions had led instead to needless tragedy. I hoped only that if I found Gwindor’s body, that I might find the sword alongside it and so join him in a failure that rightly belonged to me.

What I found instead was blood. So much blood. Big pools of it, dark as wine, were quickly losing their sheen as their surfaces set into a sticky skin. Across the walls were flung thick streaks, each sprouting dozens of long, beaded tendrils that stretched down toward the ground like deathly roots. Several guards lay soaked in the carnage, or propped up awkwardly beside it, but I saw with unimaginable relief that Gwindor’s body was not among them. Of him I found only one hand, severed cleanly through most of the wrist but with jagged skin and ribboned tendons where the sharp blade had lost its momentum and blunt force had torn the last inch free of his arm. The lone hand lay below an empty peg that once held a lamp, and a smeared trail of blood led from there up the ramp and off into the distance. 

It was not the place to indulge my feverish thoughts about what this all might mean, surrounded as I was by enraged minders whose tempers were now even shorter than usual, and so I did my work as quickly as possible. The living guards helped to load the dead ones, tossing their comrades carelessly into the cart like so much useless waste, but I kept Gwindor’s hand aside. I carefully wrapped it in the scarf that normally covered my head and carried it with me rather than adding it in with the bodies of those who had only ever tormented him. Later, some of those bodies would be burned while others were tossed out into the open air to be picked at by the creatures who prowled the hills above. I buried the hand instead in a secluded corner of the mines where it might at least avoid further defilement. I thought to sing a song of my youth as I did so, a soft, plaintive tune the mariners had written to wish one another safe tidings before a perilous journey. But I could not recall the words anymore, and so I only hummed the melody as I raised a cairn of small rocks and scraped his name into the surrounding dirt. It was the best that I could offer.

**********

It is difficult to describe how I felt in the days and weeks that followed. Any joy I might have expected for his escape was quickly tempered by the circumstances of it. I missed him sharply, I soon realized. Though I told myself over the years that I acted as I did for love of Gelmir, it was undeniable that I had grown to love Gwindor as well, even as the form of that love eluded me. Did I love him as my own brother, joined by life to a shared path? As my son, carrying my hopes for the future and in need of protection and nurturing? 

I had neither brother nor child back home in the Falas, much as I had always longed for both, and so I cannot know for sure what it is to love another in that way. It is different, I would guess, as a brother or son would really know me, understand me, and return my love, while Gwindor remained a stranger in many ways. Certainly I was all but unknown to him. In the end, though, I decided it didn’t really matter why or how I loved him. I simply did. Caring for him had become the light in the dark of my days, an obligation and a privilege, a reason to live when few others existed. And while I would never wish him back in the mines again, the loss of that light left all else even duller and more gray. 

Worse still, I could not say that he had truly succeeded in his escape. All my thoughts became consumed by what had happened at the other end of that trail of blood. Did he manage to find a way to salvation or, at least, somewhere better than this? Or had I all but pushed him out into the unfathomable open, alone, weakened, and now grievously injured, just for the novelty of suffering differently for a while before death or madness took him anyway? These questions haunted my waking hours and even stalked my dreams, where armless hands, crimsoned at their shredded wrists, beckoned me along paths lined by dark droplets that seemed to lead only to dread and despair. I always woke with a start before finding the end of the path. 

His fate weighed heavily on me, and if I thought time would dull the knifelike edges of my worry, I was wrong. They only grew sharper as time passed, cutting deeper and deeper until I began to fear that they might sever the fragile bonds that held together my sanity. The unknowing became simply intolerable, and I was certain I could bear it no longer. 

And so I reached for him. 

It was a moment of selfish weakness, I admit, for I had no right to any knowledge of him nor any right to bring even a hint of this awful place back into his life by seeking such knowledge. But I sent out a timid thought nonetheless, a wisp of a call, tentative and humble, to wander off beyond the gates in search of the answering mind that could prove his survival. I suppose that I justified it to myself with the notion that it was a fool’s errand, the thought unlikely to ever find its mark, and so it would never come to disturb him. There seemed little harm in trying a hopeless plan. But that small thought carried like a feather in the wind, over plains and rivers, mountains and forests, always catching a new draft to push it further forward. It carried until, miraculously, it found the mind I sought. 

I felt him receive it like the softest of touches. More miraculous still, a returning thought brushed immediately against my own mind, hesitant and questioning. 

Who seeks me?

I had not the words to answer him, overwhelmed as I was with my surprise and joy and utter relief, but he received these things as I felt them and then his thoughts began to come faster, more curious and insistent.

Where are you? Do we know each other? How is it that I feel you in my heart to be both a stranger and a friend? 

I had no answers to these questions either, or none that I could form into coherence. I was no one. A nameless thrall. Even worse, a Returner. There was no need for him to concern himself with me. My part in his life was already over, and to him it had never even existed. He couldn’t be expected to know what I had kept hidden from him all those years.  

But in the silence that followed he must have found the answer in my mind, or guessed it. Perhaps he recalled my face, one that had somehow always been at the edges of his vision, just near enough to keep watch, to mark his needs, to make small comforts happen. Perhaps he cast his memory back to his very first day in the thrall pits, when that same face had unexpectedly spoken the name of his beloved brother. Whatever the cause, I felt the change in his mind. I felt the light of understanding dawn, the murky confusion beginning to resolve itself.

It was you all along.

Though it had a tone of amazement, it was not a question, and while the statement still hung there in the air his mind began to race. Ideas flooded out in rapid succession, colliding with one another or stopping and starting, midstream, as new realizations suddenly steered his questions in a different direction. I struggled to isolate a single thought amidst the coursing, chaotic torrent, and long moments passed until he gathered himself enough to put forward a clear, urgent ask. 

How can I ever repay your kindness?

I might have laughed for the unexpectedness of the idea. I had not done all that I did for any reward, at least none other than the knowledge that he was saved. That was all the reward I required, and all that could practically be given. My world had grown small, my existence bare, and I could scarcely remember the beauty of the outside world or the small pleasures I once had before I became a creature of this place, bound here by shackles much stronger than the iron ones that still circled my wrists and ankles. I wouldn’t have known what to wish for even if I’d had a notion to ask. It was enough for me to take comfort in the fact that he was back once more on the quiet banks of the Narog, where he belonged, and to know that my private oath to Gelmir was fulfilled at last. That was all I had ever sought. 

These things I thought in full view of his mind, though I was not certain that the disordered jumble of them would make sense outside the cramped confines of my own head. It had been untold years since I’d bared my thoughts to anyone else, and I felt both clumsy and shy as I fumbled through the attempt now. Perhaps after so much time spent beneath the view of others, I no longer knew how to be truly looked at. I could feel him trying, but the lengthy silence that followed did little to assure me that I’d made myself understood. 

And then it happened. 

He placed a thought carefully in my mind, gentle and reassuring, like one approaching a skittish animal in the woods. It was the sound of bright birdsong in the spring, a trill that rose above the gentle splash of a river’s waters flowing swiftly over rock and pebble. I didn’t recognize the sounds at first, foreign as they had become, but they stirred something in my chest nonetheless, a quiet awakening of feelings from a different place and time, a different life. Contentment. Ease. Wonder. They were feelings that I thought had gone forever, but now they flowed back in from some unknown source to slowly refill the empty hollows they had left behind.

He clearly felt my awe, because then he opened his mind fully, pouring out detail after detail of the overwhelming beauty that surrounded him. The pleasure of the warm, soft grass beneath his feet, and the comforting weight of his father’s loving hand at rest on his shoulder. A perfume of damp, fertile earth in a breeze free of smoke and soot. The gentle chirrup of living things that swelled and faded like great breaths in and out, in and out. It wasn’t my home, far away at the salt-crusted edges of the sea, but it was his, the greatest gift he had to give. 

I sank back against a stone wall and let it all wash over me in glorious lapping waves. Long into that night he held my mind, filling it with colors and scents and delights both large and small, until it fairly overspilled with things I’d never dared to dream of again. Not least of these delights was my growing sense that he had regained his strength, not of body but of spirit. There was still sadness in him yet — I could see it shimmering in the further corners of his thoughts, where loss, disappointment, and rejection still pulsed with deep hurt — but he had the mastery of it. He need not fear it anymore. The shell in which he’d hidden all those long years was gone, left behind with his discarded chains, and he was living once more as someone who felt and dreamed and cared and loved. Someone that Gelmir would have recognized. 

Gwindor was finally free, and for those magical hours, happily adrift in the soothing tide of his thoughts, so was I. Even when I started to grow tired from the strain of holding my end of the thin thread between us, he sat with me in consoling silence, a calm, steady presence in my mind as that thread gradually frayed and then broke when I drifted into exhausted, grateful sleep. 

My dreams that night were sweet, full of golden light and dappled waters, the cooling touch of a breeze swirling through loosened hair and the warmth of the sun on an upturned face. A quiet peacefulness settled on me, broken only by the occasional sound of a voice in the far distance. It was muffled, too faint to discern any actual words, but it was insistent, calling again and again. I strained forward to hear it, reaching with outstretched hands as though I could decipher its message if only I could grasp the words first, pluck them from the air and examine them in front of me. 

The call still came, still indecipherable, but it began to carry a harsh dissonance now as it reached my ear, jarring like a sour note that taints an otherwise pleasing melody. The sourness spread with each echo of the call, and so too did a strange familiarity. A vague sense crept into my mind that I had heard this voice somewhere before. That it was calling to me. That I should fear it. 

Suddenly I didn’t need to hear the words to know what they said. I recognized them by the sinking of my heart and the cold that flooded my veins and marrow. The soft grass and bright birdsong of my dreams vanished like wisps of smoke, replaced by hard stone and the clank of metal on metal. I opened my eyes, dragging myself the rest of the way across the veiled threshold to wakefulness, and a scowling face loomed into my view, his iron-gloved hand prodding roughly at my shoulder as he spat those words yet again.

“Fetch the cart.”

And with a wearied sigh, I did.
 

Chapter End Notes

This is a companion piece to my 2025 Horror Week submission, which told the story of Gwindor’s imprisonment from his perspective. You don’t need to have read it to appreciate this, but those who have may recognize some story beats that are echoed here and somewhat recontextualized. 

The narrator here is one of Círdan’s people who was snatched up while working as a messenger between Círdan and other elven communities. Their capture pre-dates Gelmir’s and the length of their captivity is a big part of why they can no longer find imagine themselves successfully navigating the free world that they can barely even remember. 

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