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The signals came at midday, bright flashes under an austere canopy of sky. The receiver signaled back their safe receipt of the message, and turned to Timbrethil, the runner assigned to this post, a blustery hilltop west of Himring. Laicamírë raised their eyebrows and offered an exaggerated sigh.
“Bad news?’’ ventured Timbrethil, matching their raised brows. She was newly dispatched from training to a full assignment, and in Laicamírë’s opinion, too excited about it.
“No,” they said. “Hardly. I’d look rather more alarmed, wouldn’t I?”
“Then?”
“An unexpected visit,” said Laicamírë. “Though not an unwelcome one – I’d bet an extra night shift on this miserable hill that the lord Maedhros will be both very irritated and very pleased.”
“Oh,” said Timbrethil, and fresh though she was, she’d become well enough versed in the sparse shreds of gossip that circulated in the remote northeast. “The prince Fingon is coming?”
“So says the signaler to our west.” Laicamírë raised their hands in surrender. “Improper protocols, improper advance notice, yet they assure me nothing is wrong.”
“So…”
Laicamírë gave her a light shove. “So you get on that horse and ride to the fortress, and deliver the message.”
*
She arrived at a trot, and the guards at the wall of the citadel heard her message, let her pass, and told her she’d best wait and repeat it to lord Maedhros himself. In the courtyard Timbrethil dismounted with what felt to her a terrible lack of grace, and suppressed the urge to pace while someone fetched the Lord of Himring.
He appeared at last, with one of his seneschals, cloaked in dark fur with his hair loose, burning red under the brittle sun. It was a peculiarity of the Noldor, Timbrethil had noted, that for all the unpleasant weather and bitter wind, under any light they still seemed to glow. No cold white glare would blanch them, nor smoky haze dull them. Against the drab stone and churned-up, frozen mud of the entry yard, Maedhros burned solid and bright.
“A message, Lord Maedhros,” she said, when he drew nearer. “From the glathralvas to our west. A small delegation from Hithlum is approaching, including the prince Fingon.”
Maedhros stared at her, silver eyes burning down like stars from his great height. “Why,” he said, half muttered, and shook his head. “What’s happened?”
“No further details, lord. Only they insist nothing is wrong.”
His stare did not soften at all; if anything, a new tension hardened his jaw. He dropped Timbrethil’s gaze, mercifully, and turned to his seneschal to begin issuing instructions. Timbrethil waited several more moments, hoping she was dismissed, or better yet forgotten, and when no one glanced her way again, she led her horse back toward the gate. Hesitating before it, she reasoned that it was unlikely her presence was urgently required back at the signal station just yet, and if Fingon really was arriving soon, rumor had it that was a sight not to be missed.
*
Maedhros watched their body language first as the small group of riders approached, for any sign of strain or injury, and as they cantered up the hill and the guards swept them through with a few shouts of greeting, he watched their faces. A few servants and soldiers of Fingolfin’s house, whom he generally recognized, and then Fingon in the forefront, braids flying free. Fingon raised a hand in greeting and gave a call, lost in the rumbling of hooves and the clang of the gate as it was drawn shut.
They seemed almost a mirage, laughing among themselves as they dismounted, handing their reins off to stable hands and embracing a few among the guards who they recognized. No sense of danger or alarm about them, but Maedhros couldn’t shake his own tension, the furious vigilance of muscles and flicking eyes.
Fingon waved his people on as Maedhros’s seneschal stepped forward to direct them toward the fortress, and halted before Maedhros rather than follow them. He seemed solid enough now, and more so when he clapped Maedhros on the arm, grinning.
“What is this about?” He wished the rasp of his voice was not so harsh.
“A good day’s greetings to you as well,” Fingon said, still a touch of laughter in his voice, though it faded as he regarded Maedhros’s stern look. He didn’t want to glare at Fingon, but surprises were rarely good.
“Has anything gone wrong?”
Fingon put on a wounded expression. “Must it have? Is there no other reason I can visit you?”
“I suppose not,” Maedhros allowed. “But it is a long way to go. And a long time to leave your post unattended.”
“It is attended,” said Fingon with a sniff. “I have many good people around me.”
“I have a few,” said Maedhros, “but I would be loath to entrust Himring to them.”
“You would barely entrust Himring to your own brothers,” Fingon said tartly, “which I do understand, but nonetheless you do it once in a long while. Might I not return the favor?”
“Have you news from the west?”
“Must I buy my appearance before you with information?”
Maedhros sought for some less shaky place to stake his argument, but before he’d found the words, Fingon flashed a smile. “If it helps, though, I have better than news. I have evidence.”
He reached for a pouch at his belt, slipping the ties off and withdrawing a shard of something glassy that flashed golden in the light. Maedhros eyed it with apprehension. “Evidence of what?”
“Take a guess.” Fingon passed the object up to him, and Maedhros pinched the edges, frowning. It was a bit smaller than the palm of his hand, slightly ovate and jagged along one flattened side. The substance was not one he recognized, hard and flinty with a surprising weight and an iridescent gleam. “It looks like an artichoke leaf,” he said, “but made in a forge the likes of which I’ve not seen.”
Fingon laughed again like a shower of crystal. His presence could not physically warm Himring’s chill, but it seemed even the ruthless wind balked at assailing him. “That is not a guess I expected,” he said, “so two points for that! But alas, this is neither vegetable nor trinket in imitation.” He paused a moment, as if struck by some memory, and said, half-dreamily, “An artichoke! I haven’t had an artichoke since…” He shook his head.
“I do not think they would grow here happily,” said Maedhros. “We have had luck with the root tubers, though, and some of the hardier greens if they are sheltered from the wind. I suppose you can grow far more in Hisilómë, with your rain and milder climes.”
“It is not so mild in the winter, let me tell you,” Fingon said, widening his eyes.
“I have been there in winter,” Maedhros replied, “and I say it is worse here.”
“Only because you refuse to spare the luxury of heating it adequately.”
Maedhros folded his arms. “I suspect you did not come all this way to discuss vegetables and temperatures.”
“No,” said Fingon, “but if ornamental artichoke is your best guess, I may just leave you in your ignorance.”
Maedhros returned his gaze to the object, turning it carefully. The underside was a dark slate color, and rough, with the convex side hard as steel and polished as a shining shield. That thought gave him an idea, and an uneasy feeling. The more he looked at it, the more it felt lonesome, a single fragment out of place in a phalanx, an interlocking pattern of leaves, of shields, of scales.
“Skin, or armor, I deem,” he said, “for some fell beast.”
Fingon whistled, and the smile he gave now was hollow. “There’s the wits you’re known for.”
“What kind of beast?” He traced back now over memories he liked better buried, and found them well-populated with gruesome creatures, orcs and wolves and other things with malevolent spirits burning inside them, displacing or devouring whatever had before dwelt in such bodies. He had seen many kinds of armor, and many metals wrought merciless and unyielding. But this design was unfamiliar.
“Imagine, maybe, a worm,” Fingon suggested. Maedhros frowned, doubtful, and was going to make a point about the form and substance of a worm, but Fingon hastened to say, “No, then, a snake! A snake or a lizard perhaps – something long and muscled, with terrible strength and girth.”
“I dislike the metaphor I think you’re drawing,” said Maedhros.
Fingon made a choking noise in his throat. “You thought it, I didn’t say it! And you wouldn’t be thinking such things, if you’d seen this – worm. Which we are calling an Urulókë.”
“Because…”
“Because it also breathes fire.”
Maedhros felt a dull pounding start to twinge in his temples. “Lovely. And you were how close to this thing?”
“Well,” said Fingon dryly, pinching the scale back from Maedhros, “close enough to touch. With an arrow, at least,” he added, when Maedhros drew a quick breath, some stormy reprimand hot on his tongue. “The arrows dislodged this, and we found it on the ground after the beast fled.”
“So it is not dead.”
“No, or I’d have brought you more than a token like this.” He grinned, but it quickly faded to a grimace. “No, not dead. And worse, we think it may not even be… complete. Still growing. It was not battle-tested, nor as strong as it might have been. At first we gave ground, but in the end we were able to overcome it, with my arrows and the darts of my comrades.”
“I wish you had killed it.” Maedhros stared unseeing at the small golden gleam until Fingon tucked it away again, and then blinked, shaking himself.
“I hope to, someday. So I’ll take that as a challenge.” Despite the glib tone he saw Fingon’s jaw tense, his lips thinning under the press of teeth. “Though it need not be by anything so honorable as face-to-face combat. I do not wish to look at its eyes. It had an evil feeling.”
“What else should you expect of Moringotho?” Maedhros shook his head. “I do wonder, too, how he would have created such a thing. It cannot be any creature wholly new, so... it was like a snake, you said? Or maybe a worm, though the liberties he’s taken are rather far from any concept of a worm I would recognize.”
“Are you criticizing the Enemy for a lack of scientific aesthetics?”
“No!” said Maedhros. “Well – neither am I complimenting him. I am only trying to reason out how this thing came to be, and whether other, uncorrupted versions exist somewhere in the cold north of this world, perhaps, or whether its ancestors would find it hideously unrecognizable.”
He caught Fingon’s doubtfully narrowing eyes. “Do not read into that statement,” he warned. “I am only thinking through the ramifications of your news. If these Urulóki are very large, and grow slowly, he cannot have too many of them, and if this was the first test and you repelled it easily—”
“It did take rather a lot of effort,” Fingon protested. “It was quite glorious.”
Maedhros rolled his eyes. “No doubt. But that cannot please the Enemy, so I suppose the next time we see such creatures, there will either be many more, or they will be far stronger.”
“Always the optimist.”
“Optimism is not an option.”
Now Fingon rolled his eyes. “You would not be here if I did not disagree.”
Maedhros was momentarily at a loss, but Fingon only sighed shortly and said, “Shall we go inside, or do you now treat with all your visitors exclusively out of doors?”
“Only the important ones,” said Maedhros. “And you were the one whose news couldn’t wait till I brought you in.”
“Only because you were implying I ought not to have come without something to show for it.”
Maedhros sighed. “I am glad you are here,” he said. “I always am.”
“I know, you fool. But it wouldn’t kill you to say so up front.”
He lifted his shoulder, dropped it. It twinged with its perpetual ache. “I said it now,” he answered, and laid an arm over Fingon’s shoulders. Perhaps a lapse in propriety, for the remote lord of this icy citadel, but Fingon leaned into him as they walked, and Maedhros cherished his presence and his bright flame more than any words could ever say.
*
He lay unsleeping now, staring at the dark ceiling, the whorls of wood turned to leering shadows in the faint flicker of a waning candle. He sighed, and tried to do it quietly.
“You are awake, I can tell,” said Fingon beside him. Despite Himring’s perpetual draft, he pushed away the blankets and sat up. His eyes gleamed brighter than all else in the room.
“I am thinking of the dragon,” Maedhros said.
Fingon made an exasperated noise. “We spent all the evening discussing the wretched beast with your advisors – I do hope there’s nothing harmful in the touch of its scales, for every one of you made sure to fondle the thing for all it’s worth.”
“Fondle gives rather the wrong impression—”
“Yes, yes, the mood was all business. I know. But nothing that we didn’t resolve then will be resolved now.”
Maedhros sat up, too. He tilted his chin up slightly, eyeing Fingon, and said, “Show me the beast.”
Fingon scowled slightly. “I have tried to make you a sketch already – several times, for my artistic skills were deemed deficient.”
“Which is why I don’t want another drawing. Send me the image of the thing.”
Fingon bit his lip, which was a good look on him, but his hesitation grated. “I thought you had declared that unwise.”
“If I, of all people, am willing to take the risk, what are you afraid of? It is not ósanwë at great distance, it is a sharing of indemmar in close proximity. I don’t ask for much, but I need to be better prepared than I am.” When Fingon still wavered, Maedhros sighed shortly. “I trust your mind more than any other,” he said, “and I trust you with mine.”
“Oh, you—” Fingon shook his head. “You go and say things like that. You know I’ll give you whatever you ask.” He shut his eyes tightly for a moment, and then held out his hands.
“You only need your mind,” said Maedhros, but he extended his hand in return, and Fingon clasped it in both of his. His skin was warm and his calluses rough, and his pulse was a familiar rhythm, a reassurance.
“I would not pass up the excuse to touch you,” said Fingon. His thumbs stroked idle circles on Maedhros’s wrist. “But all right – here’s your dragon.”
Maedhros eased the shields from his mind, slitting open a crack that he might accept Fingon’s sending. The rush of warmth he received always staggered him – filled him, steadied him, threw him off-kilter. Fingon in fëa was a leaping flame, the glitter of dew on a meadow turned crystalline under light now lost, an outstretched hand, a full and rolling laugh. Perhaps it was good Maedhros kept himself shielded all the time, barred the door to his open mind. Not only to keep Morgoth out, but to keep himself safe from this decadent warmth and love unfurling toward him.
He had little true sense of how his own fëa was perceived from without, or what scars it bore. In his heart there were curdling shadows, and the imprint of pain lived there like an extra lung, filtering every breath he took. Perhaps his not knowing was better.
Fingon only smiled softly at him, and held his hand, and sent to his mind's eye a terrible cacophony – discordant shouts, and the hissing cries of a beast. Leaping flame and the twang of arrows and grating steel. A swath of Ard-galen was blackened in his wake and smoking, and Maedhros felt his stomach clench.
In the indemma Maedhros watched the fire-drake slither forward, its coiling body lithe and powerful, its legs spindly in comparison, and he thought Fingon was right: it was not full-grown. It jolted back when arrows struck its hide, and shrieked in outrage eerily close to discernible words. Fingon gave a great roar and led the charge forward, and the creature cringed away, hissing, spitting sparks, and turned. They pursued it over the burned ground, shooting and shouting, and as the beast fled back toward Angband Fingon let the image fade.
He shuddered slightly, returning to himself in the dark room, the linens warm under him and cold beyond, and Fingon warmer still. His hand was still clasped between Fingon’s, and Fingon watched him from glittering eyes.
“So you’ve seen it,” he said. “What do you think?”
“Alarming,” said Maedhros. “Much more effective than your drawing.”
“Well, it’s your security protocols we’re breaching, for the record,” said Fingon. “I miss this. I am still inclined to consider it a significant tactical blindness, to deny ourselves ósanwë here. Like fighting with—”
“One hand tied behind your back?” Maedhros let his expression do his work for him. Fingon grimaced. “I know you understand why we must be cautious. And we will fight fiercely all the same.”
“I do know. But the enemy cannot be pressing at all of our minds all the time – a little openness cannot be so dangerous. Just with you, at least.”
“A little openness at the wrong time is exceptionally dangerous,” said Maedhros, “whether we speak of minds or leaguers. You do not want to find out just how hard he can push, or what he would do if you let him inside.”
“I know.” Defeat did not sit comfortably on Fingon’s face; his stubbornness tried to shake it off before it could settle. “I just – I worry.”
“No lack of cause for it,” said Maedhros.
“About you.”
“Oh.” He took a shallow breath. “Don’t do that.”
Fingon sighed. “I know we are changed, all of us, for what we’ve seen and lived. I don’t ask you for any of that, to put it to words if you cannot, and I will trust you when you say you’re all right. I do trust you. But most of the time I am so far away, and I think on it sometimes – for all our communications relays, our messengers and ñaltalmar, something could happen to you and I would never know.”
“Or to you,” said Maedhros, “rushing out against these Urulóki. And ósanwë may not help, over such a distance. The only cure perhaps is to visit more often.”
“But even close, when I see you now – there is distance still, that there was not before.”
Maedhros searched his expression but found no rancor, no tint of blame or anger. “Are there not reasons enough for that?” he said. “And not all of them have to do with me alone, or what I have become.” Fingon’s eyelids twitched at the last words, and Maedhros let out a weary breath, forced himself to imagine what Fingon saw, why Fingon wished still to breach the shields that Maedhros guarded with such vigilance, what possible warmth or redeeming memory he sought to recapture beyond. Their easy connection might be shakier now, but the warmth they drew from each other was true. Yet his mind, like his right hand, was no longer something he could readily extend.
“But I am here with you now,” he said, “and whatever you will have of me is yours. You need not the probe of my mind to know it.”
“I do not doubt you!” said Fingon. “I only worry.” He moved to close the distance between them, wrapped one arm around Maedhros’s back. “I know vigilance and dread is your domain, but I do indulge in it, too. For all our sakes.”
“Indeed – you bring me fresh worry,” said Maedhros. He reached out in the dark and fumbled at the side table beside the bed, closing his hand over the dragon’s scale once again. It was chilled to the touch now, almost clammy, as cold metal drawing moisture from over-swollen sky.
“I brought you a report of an incident and a report of intelligence, is that not what you ask? And a visit, too.”
“You do your duties well,” he said. “You know that.”
“Oh, is this a duty now?” He turned his face to Maedhros’s neck, pressed his lips to the bare skin above the tunic’s collar.
“No,” he said, unsteadied. “Though that you also do well.”
*
“I will talk to my brothers and our people,” he said, later, still maddeningly awake. Fingon had worked much of the tension from his body, but it clustered still in the corners of his mind. “If we are to face off against more beasts such as these, our tactics and formations will need adjustment. And our weapons, too.”
He turned the scale in his hand again. Its edges were dulled except for where the curved sides drew to a needled spike, and the jagged bottom where it had torn off from the body. He pressed his finger lightly to the point but not hard enough to break skin. “Would you leave the scale of the fire-drake with me?”
“As a present? If I’d known you were accepting gifts, I’d have brought something more suitable. Armor. A weapon. A gem.”
Maedhros could imagine any of his brothers bristling at that comment, but Fingon’s smile dulled any barb. “Those I would not turn down, unless the conditions of their receipt were too onerous. But no – not as a present. As evidence and for further plans.”
“I doubt you can reconstruct the beast out of just the scale.”
“Why would you suppose that’s what I’m after? I only want to study the material, or have Curufinwë study it – or better yet, send it on to our dwarven allies. They have a remarkable skill for metalwork.”
“I should like to meet dwarves,” said Fingon. “I have heard from reports – not yours, all you send me are the absolutely necessary facts – but I’ve heard their handicrafts are quite beautiful, and I should imagine their mansions are too, under the eastern mountains. I suspect we could learn something from them of building in these lands.” His voice had gone thoughtful, somnolent. “It is beautiful here, in its way – the sharp air and the jagged mountains, and the rolling prairies when the wildflowers bloom.”
Maedhros thought of the winds that shrieked on the northern marches, the land molded like heaps of grey clay beneath them, tufted grasses brittle and yellowed as the early winter bled out their color. The cold north kept him cold, kept his mind filed smooth and alert. When he looked out from his towers, it was the presence or absence of blight that he sought, not beauty. The reassurance of unsullied plains and the skies white above him, and always the fumes of Thangorodrim, a distant threat that did not slumber.
“But our fortress itself is not yet very beautiful,” Fingon was saying, “and much of the region’s settlement is all bent on subsistence, the growing of food in hard ground, and then of course hunting and endless patrols. I suppose my brother has gone and built something stunningly beautiful, not that any of us can see it. And he likely wouldn’t be interested in learning from the dwarves.”
“Neither were my brothers, at first,” said Maedhros, “but whether out of appreciation for craft or for the opportunities of leveraging trade networks, some of them have come around. Or maybe appreciation for allies, though that is not the priority for them that I would prefer it be.” He rolled his shoulders to relieve tension; the right one protested. “In any event, if the Urulóki resurface someday, I’d like to have better than just archers against such an eventuality.”
“Yes, we’ve thought the same in Hisilómë,” said Fingon. “Our defenses are mainly focused on spotting the approach of an army on foot – we don’t believe they have cavalry, nor flight. But more Urulóki could change the picture. I'll be adjusting the soldiers’ training accordingly – perhaps a small party designed just to corral and strike the creature, while the rest hold the line? But with many more of them, all bets are off, and the trouble is, we haven’t any beasts to practice with, so it’s all rote learning of untested drills.”
“I think you’d have far more trouble if there were beasts to practice with,” Maedhros observed. “Or do you wish I was trying to make my own? Raise an army to match Moringotho?”
“Hardly,” said Fingon. “I don’t think it could be done, and – with all the best intent – I think your family has had trouble enough with the forging of inanimate things, let alone beasts of war.”
“Inanimate is an uncertain line, at times,” Maedhros said. “Do you know my father considered that his silmarilli contained life, in form of light? He debated whether they ought to take the animate referents, in our mother tongue. He thought so.”
“I am not sure I like the implications of that,” said Fingon.
“No? Perhaps not.” For a bit he was quiet, and when he spoke again the words were hesitant, released in a hushed register, the dregs of his voice. He would have kept silent in daylight, or in any darkness save for one shared with Fingon. “In the language of our foes,” he said now, “there are animate formations, but only so that you may know that you are not addressed with them. He is, Moringotho. Perhaps his lieutenants, if they have his favor. But all else is material in his hand, a tool to be used.”
Fingon shuddered slightly, a tightening of his shoulders. He kept his eyes steady on Maedhros, as few did when his speech turned to Angband. His brothers might have shied away, or interrupted with something needlessly combative. Sometimes they let him speak, but rarely wanted to hear it; perhaps Fingon had earned the ability to listen to comments far darker than these, secure in the knowledge that he had freed Maedhros from that torment. His brothers, after all, could not say the same.
“This beast, to him, it is unliving. Not deathless as are called the Ainur, or we perhaps in the eyes of mortals, but lifeless. Not as a dead body but a deadened one, a thing without fëa and only fear, and loathing.”
“It may be without fëa regardless,” said Fingon, “as a beast is.”
“The violation of fëa may also render something beastlike,” said Maedhros. “But it may not have been always. Something can be made unliving without being dead.”
“You speak of the orcs,” Fingon surmised. “The idea that they were once like us.”
“Well, if it is true that Moringotho cannot create something from nothing, and only corrupt what is...” Maedhros shook his head. “I do not know what they are, rightly. Nor his other beasts - some sort of spirit they have, but whence it comes I do not know. From him? From others who serve him, willing or not?" The words were growing heavy, but they would fester worse inside him. He had to wonder at what point would his contemplation of the Enemy's designs have turned to comprehension, had it been his fate to wait and find out. Only orcs understood what it was to be an orc; only dragons knew dragons. "He considers his creations as tools molded to the hand, as I said. Unliving, and we too. I did not know his language, of course, in the beginning – but he spoke ours to me, and therein too are the living deadened.”
Fingon swallowed. “If the orcs are descended from the Quendi, with their fëar subdued or twisted, then do you suppose the Urulóki were once innocent, too?”
Maedhros took up the scale again and tossed it thoughtfully. “Not impossible. But if there are friendly dragons out here, I have not seen them.”
“Nor in Aman,” said Fingon.
“No. I will ask Tyelkormo, maybe - he would better know the range of creatures both there and here. But if there exists an uncorrupted form, we should have known it there.”
“Perhaps it is not corrupted, then. Perhaps it chooses to serve him, and needed no coercion. Though I dislike the thought of a creature whose inherent inclination leans toward the Dark Foe.”
“Some spirits have served him willingly since the world began. And the line between the willing and the not becomes uncertain too." He would not voice the question of how long it would have taken him to cross it. He would sooner have sought death, but such wishes were not always possible.
"Well," said Fingon bracingly, "I won't be holding out for sympathy from the fire-drakes, but I do prefer to think that few beings in this world would turn to evil wholly willing."
"I believe that even the orcs despise him,” said Maedhros. "But they do not only despise him, and they hate us as well. And they cannot undo what they are, even should they wish to. It is ironic, no? For all he warned us against prisons across the sea, to none that serve him does he truly grant freedom.”
“Do you pity them?”
Perhaps another question only the darkness would allow. Maedhros pressed a finger to the sharp point of the scale again, and considered. “I - at times,” he said at last. “Or, I pity what they were, and I think it is perhaps out of pity that we would kill them. To live as they do is the worse fate. If anything of what they were still endures, perhaps powers beyond ours can mend hröa and what is left of fëa.”
Fingon hummed in response. Lightly he tugged the scale from Maedhros’s grasp and laid it back on the side table. He said no more, but returned to Maedhros’s side and leaned against him. Fingon’s head rested heavy on his shoulder, the braids he wore for sleep brushing his neck and trailing down his back. Fingon laid one hand over Maedhros’s, the other circling his back to rest on his hip. It was that gift of sudden warmth that told Maedhros how cold he had gone, skin down to bone. His teeth did not chatter, but only by the clench of his jaw.
His thoughts slid back to the creature in Fingon’s indemma, the lash of its spiked tail, the armored scales drawing to a ridge down its back like the crags of toothed mountains. And Fingon before it, arrows readied between his fingers like talons, and his voice resounding across the field. But in his mind’s eye the fire-drake swelled and shifted shape. It laughed with a sound like rending metal, and fire engulfed Fingon, who gleamed in gold against the dark before he fell.
Maedhros shook the thought away. The dragon had fled, for now; Fingon was here before him, alive and well. For now.
*
Correspondence from Himring to the dwarven stronghold Belegost:
I write to inform you of an emerging threat from our enemy: he has developed or trained a new creature, something akin to an enormous snake or lizard, but it emits fire and leaves behind it degraded lands. Our forces in Hithlum to the west have encountered one such creature and repelled it with success, but suspect that it may have been only partially matured.
This has implications for our territorial defense, martial training, and weaponry - the last of which being the reason I write to you. I enclose as well a rendering of the creature as it was described to me, and a scale which formed part of the outer layer of its body, and was dislodged during the skirmish. It is a very unusual material, you will appreciate, and a sample of such may lend itself to the development of improved protections against it – or even imitations, should we discover how to match such a substance for the making of armor. I suggest we ought to consider fire as a more prominent weapon of assault in the future, and with your expertise in craftsmanship and weaponry, perhaps more durable armor could be devised, or some form of shield against heat and flames.
If you will send to me an exemplar of the work you devise, I would appreciate it greatly.
In solidarity,
Lord Maedhros Fëanorion, Commander of the Eastern Marches
*
A fair amount of time elapses
Timbrethil was no longer resigned to the tedium of watches at the glathralvas station; she’d been granted the assignment of courier, recently, ferrying messages and supplies from the eastern marches to the western front. It was far more interesting, for the lands she got to see and the people she could meet, and occasionally, the cargo she carried.
Orodir loaded the saddlebags on the horse Timbrethil would ride toward Himlad, and there switch steeds. One of the parcels almost lurched out of his arms as he staggered under the weight. “Heavy!” he exclaimed.
“What do you suppose it is?” Timbrethil was eager to be off, less so if the horse would be overburdened the whole way.
“Probably not our place to wonder,” said Orodir doubtfully. “But there just came in a delivery of dwarf-made crafts, some very fine metalwork samples – so I would guess an implement of war.”
“Judging by the lord’s face when he oversaw this shipment, I might have thought it was a joke. He was almost smiling. Imagine.”
“Well,” said Orodir, “it is going to Hithlum.”
Timbrethil nodded sagely, biting back a grin. “Then I suppose we can guess who’ll be smiling at the other end.”