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No matter where he spent the night - in caves, in valley groves where the pines crowded close enough for shelter, in temporary burrows carved out of the snow - he could hear them in the distance. Heavy feet marched, shaking the forest floor, and wolves howled to each other across the mountains. The enemy was everywhere now, and they never slept, so neither did Beren. He had always been a light sleeper, but he now woke at the slightest tremor of the ground, the softest rustle of the undergrowth.
Pursuit forced him to travel farther and faster than he once had, and the toll it took on his body led to more close calls; Orc raiding parties spotting him when he had not meant them to, wolves catching his scent and trailing him until he was near collapse. Each time he managed to slip away, but each time they came nearer to capturing him - and capture him they would, he knew. He had thwarted them too long, killed too many of their comrades for the Orcs to give him a quick death, and their masters surely wished to make an example of him. There was only one other path open to him now.
Coward, the icy winds shrieked, the bare trees whispered, but he gritted his teeth and forged on, not stopping until he reached the lake. The Orcs patrolled it regularly now, so it no longer made a safe long-term camp, but something about Aeluin still made them nervous, for they never remained on its shores overnight. Beren crept along the banks from a safe distance, making sure the nearby lands were deserted before he ventured closer.
The cairn lay in the shelter of several massive pines, which kept the ground around it largely free of snow. He knelt beside it, feeling the crunch of dried pine needles beneath him, and placed one hand upon the rough stones. The ring on his finger glinted at him; the finely-wrought gold and the green gems set within it were strangely bright even though he wore it always, as if some elvish magic protected it from dirt and blood and age. He clenched his fist and shut his eyes, no longer able to bear the jeweled gaze of the snakes staring up at him.
“Forgive me,” he whispered, briefly pressing his forehead to the stone. “I should not fear them, but I do. I do not have your strength. Forgive me.” Then he stood, and turned to the south, and did not look back.
~
Ered Gorgoroth was steeper than the hills around Ladros, the stones sharper. It didn’t take long for the rocks to slice through the worn soles of his boots. He wrapped strips of cloth cut from the hem of his cloak around his feet, which helped, but only so long as the coverings held. When he went too long without replacing them, the rocks tore into his skin. His feet had grown so numb by then that he didn’t notice the cuts until he tried to climb a steep surface and found his feet too slippery with blood to gain purchase.
There was little snow in this part of the mountains, but there wasn’t much of anything else, either. No plants, no animals, no soil, no water - just rocks, sharp and rough and cold. When the sun set and he could no longer see where he was going, he wrapped himself up in his cloak and lay down in the lee of an outcropping for the night. The stones were harder than the forest floor he’d grown accustomed to, but he could hear no wolves or hunting parties, and at last his weary mind let him sleep.
Wind roared across the peaks all hours of the day and night, sometimes forceful enough to make him stumble. The cold deepened with each passing day. With his hood pulled up and a scarf wrapped around his face he managed to protect his eyes and ears, and the mittens he had made with fur and leather scrounged from the corpses of Orcs served well enough for his hands, but nothing he tried could keep his toes covered for long. They grew numb, and some were certainly frostbitten. It didn’t matter - if he stopped moving, he would die.
He managed to reach the southern foothills before he ran out of food. The ground had turned from stone to rocky dirt, hard-packed and frozen under the withered grass. Clusters of pines dotted the slopes, their dark green boughs giving some color to the drab landscape, but he saw nothing that looked like it might be edible.
A dull roaring sound came from somewhere ahead of him. As he reached the top of the hill he saw a small river beyond it, a narrow grey ribbon that cut across the ground for some distance before disappearing into a ravine. Exhausted, he half-ran, half-slid down the slope and fell to his knees upon the stony bank, plunging his face into the water. It was icy cold and tasted strange, bitter and sweet at the same time, but he’d had worse in Dorthonion. Morgoth’s poison had fouled the water there; only Aeluin remained clean, and the lake had frozen months ago, leaving him to live off melted snow. He drank until his mouth went numb, then filled his waterskin before continuing on.
Quenching his thirst had helped, but hunger still gnawed at his stomach, and he began to feel weak and sluggish. His vision blurred slightly, and the sky above him seemed to darken. He needed to find food, and quickly. Reaching out with one hand, he found the steep side of the ravine and used it to guide himself forward, stepping carefully on the uneven ground.
He had thought to keep following the river, but before long it dwindled to a stream and vanished beneath the ground. Stone walls rose sharply on either side of him, seeming to close over his head. As his eyes began to adjust to the darkness, he realized that a thick, grey fog hung over the cliffs, blocking out the sky and completely obscuring the position of the sun.
The rock face he was using to guide himself stopped abruptly, and he stumbled sideways into what appeared to be a wide rift in the side of the ravine. Catching himself against the inner wall, he looked down and saw that he had stepped into a sort of web, which stretched from one side of the passage to the other at the height of his ankles.
The hair on his arms stood up, and he felt his heart beat faster, the blood pounding in his ears like the footsteps of an army. He tried to run, but his feet had tangled up in the thick, sticky strands, and he nearly fell. Pulling himself upright, he drew his sword instead and stood his ground. He could not see much in the darkness, but the unmistakable sound of shifting rocks meant that something was coming towards him. Assuming a defensive stance as best he could without moving his feet, he braced himself and listened.
The strange, scrabbling sounds grew faster and louder, and all Beren saw was a shifting mass of shadow and the dim glint of too many eyes before the thing was upon him. With a roar, he struck as hard as he could, not caring which part of the creature he hit as long as he kept his arms free of its webs. Slashing wildly, he severed one of the beast’s legs and it reeled back, pausing just long enough for him to make out the shape of it in the dim light. It was as he had feared - a spider the size of a bear advanced upon him, clicking and hissing, more cautious now that he had drawn first blood.
Muscles tensed like a wolf poised to spring at its prey, Beren held perfectly still, eyes fixed upon the spider. As it reared up over him, preparing to strike, he lunged with all his strength, tearing his feet free from the webs and plunging his sword deep into the creature’s exposed underbelly. Then he pulled the blade free and dropped to the ground, rolling out of the way of its collapsing body.
Scrambling to his feet, he kept a safe distance from the spider’s twitching corpse, waiting until it went still before approaching its head. Then he drew his dagger and used it to pry out one of the creature’s eyes, keeping it as intact as he could. It was a little smaller than his closed fist. He cut the thing in half and shoved a piece into his mouth, swallowing quickly with the help of a swig of bitter water. It tasted vile, but took the edge off his hunger. He downed the other half and ate two more before abandoning the carcass and pressing forward.
He walked. Nothing lay before him except a maze of narrow, crumbling ravines with walls too steep to scale, full of uneven paths of stone broken only by slimy moss and pools of stale water. Sometimes he came upon the entrances to caves, but most were adorned with sticky webs and little piles of bones, and he passed them by as silently as a ghost.
Day and night no longer marked the passage of time. The fog above never lifted, and sometimes it drifted down into the ravines, so thick that he could not see more than a few feet ahead. He never stopped to rest unless his legs threatened to give out, and even then he rarely slept, keeping his hand on his sword and his ears alert for sliding rocks or clicking fangs. It was warmer here than in the mountains. His extremities were no longer in much danger, but the smallest toe on his left foot had not healed; it simply withered and turned black. So he sharpened his knife and cut it off, covering the wound with spiderweb. After crossing the mountains with bleeding feet he scarcely noticed the pain.
Sometimes he encountered spiders in the darkness, and he killed them. He was growing used to the taste of their eyes. When the water he had taken from the river ran out, he drank sparingly from the vile pools - too much at once made him sick.
It was not enough. His throat grew dry again mere minute after each drink, and when his lips cracked and bled he sucked at them, trying desperately to wet his mouth. The fog seemed to press closer, thickening, choking him, forming ghostly shapes that he could only see out of the corner of his eye. His head spun.
“Beren.”
The whisper came from behind him, and he turned so fast he slipped and fell on the damp stones. Pressing his back to the wall, he looked around wildly, his heart pounding.
Gorlim stood before him, only slightly more substantial than the fog. He looked just as he had when Beren had last seen him: tired and ragged, with a wild light of despair in his eyes.
“I died a traitor’s death, as I deserved.” His voice sounded distant, as though it had been carried there on the wind. “When I came to warn you, I thought you were destined for a hero’s. And yet you live.”
Beren closed his eyes and held them shut, hoping that when he opened them the ghostly image would be gone. But they flew open at the sound of a new voice, a woman’s.
“They got us all.” Emeldir wore traveling clothes and light leather armor, with her hair bound up and a sword at her waist. No - her braids had unravelled into blood-matted curls, and the scabbard was empty. Beren gave a dry sob and reached out a hand to her, but she did not seem to notice.
“I tried to save them, but I could not.” She put a hand to her stomach, and it came away covered in blood. Her gaunt face was anguished. “I would have given my life for any one of them, but in the end it did no good. Sometimes sacrifice is meaningless…”
A dark-haired child lay curled up against the stone wall. He was about to move closer when Morwen turned and glared at up him, eyes hard in her too-thin face.
“They killed Rían,” she told him, her voice strangely harsh. “First she was a prisoner like me, but she cried too much and couldn’t keep up, so one of them broke her neck and left her body for the wolves. You weren’t there.” Suddenly she screamed and began to thrash, beating at some invisible attacker with her bound hands. Beren lunged forward with a roar, but the moment he touched her the image dissolved, leaving him clutching helplessly at nothing.
Fog swirled around him, pressing closer, forming and dissolving and reforming in a matter of seconds. Beleth sat at her spinning wheel, singing to herself as she worked. Bregolas was laughing, big shoulders heaving, a grin turning his scarred face kind and familiar. Then came the sound of crackling flames, and his uncle roared a battle cry that ended in a choked gasp as a troll’s spear plunged through his chest. Bregolas’ wife, Adaer, lay sprawled across the threshold of the hall in Ladros, her body hewn nearly in two.
Suddenly he was back at the old camp, the lake stretched out on the horizon. Bodies lay in the dirt, exactly as he remembered them - except that one was missing. He heard movement behind him and turned, reaching for his sword, then froze.
Barahir sat propped up against the gnarled trunk of an ancient tree, clutching the ruined stump of his arm to his chest. His eyes, open and glassy when Beren buried him, had been pecked to bloody pits by carrion birds. Streaks of dried blood marked his face like tears. But despite all this, despite the many other wounds that marred his body, Barahir’s chest rose and fell, each breath a gasp of pain.
“Where is my son?” he rasped, turning his head back and forth as though trying to see through the empty sockets. “He only went hunting. He should be back by now.”
Beren could not move, unable to decide whether to rush to his father’s side or flee. His own face was wet, real tears he could not remember shedding. He tried to wipe them away with the back of his filthy hand, and when he looked up, the ghastly vision of his father was gone. In its place stood a stooped old woman, white-haired and frail, and yet strangely more solid-looking than any of the others had been.
“Beren.” It was Andreth’s voice, but it did not match the thin, cracked voice of the old woman he had known. Instead, he heard her as he had long ago, when as a small child he had seen her sing at festivals and before the hearth in the great hall - solemn and clear, rich and smooth as honey. “Tell me, child, did I not teach you well? Have you forgotten what I told you of our people’s history so quickly?”
He tried to protest, but found he could not open his mouth.
“The lives of Men were not always so frail and fleeting as they are now. Long ago we fell under the shadow of Morgoth, who wished to master us. But even as he stole our lives, and our children, we defied him - we fought, fled, built ourselves new homes, and fought again. And still we lived.” She spread her hands before her in a wide, sweeping motion, a common storyteller’s gesture that meant Do you understand? “Every day we do not die is a victory against the Enemy.”
She faded slowly back into the fog, and Beren felt himself begin to sob, though he was so parched by now that no tears fell. His body shuddered with convulsions he could not control, until he collapsed from pure exhaustion.
Time passed, and at length he managed to move again. The ground seemed to be rising ever so slightly, though at first he could not be sure whether he was imagining it. Soon the incline was steep enough to be obvious, then it rose sharply in the span of just a few minutes. Lungs burning, every muscle aching, he trudged on until he slipped on a loose rock and fell forward onto his hands and knees, his raw throat spasming in a gasp of pain. He wasn’t sure he would be able to get back on his feet, so after a minute he began to crawl, scraping his hands and bruising his knees as he pulled himself up the ever-steepening path.
And then, without warning, the fog was gone. Light seared his eyes, and he cried out, throwing his arm across his face and curling up on the ground. For a several long, terrifying minutes he could see nothing. Then, just as his eyes had begun to adjust enough to make out pieces of his surroundings - mostly heavy clouds and dark stones and scrubby brown grass - he heard a growl, and something dark and solid slammed into his right side.
Almost before he hit the ground, Beren began to grapple with his attacker, desperation lending him a strength he would not have believed he still possessed. Claws raked across his arm, and he barely dodged the creature’s snapping jaw before rolling over and pinning it to the ground. With a hoarse yell, he drew his hunting knife and plunged it into the animal’s heart, then threw himself free of the body. The beast convulsed, howling, then went limp.
Beren sat on the rocky ground until he had recovered his breath, staring at his kill. The creature was a wolf with patchy dark fur, and appeared to be little more than a collection of bones held together by scarred skin and wiry muscle. He’d only brought the creature down because it was even weaker and scrawnier than he. The claw marks on his arm bled freely, but he scarcely noticed; he was already cutting the beast open. After some frantic scrambling he found what he wanted, and crammed as much of the liver into his mouth as would fit. Then he cut the creature’s throat and caught the blood as it pooled, drinking it by the handful, throwing back his head and laughing exultantly at the warmth and wetness of it.
When he had eaten and drunk his fill, he stood on legs that shook, placing a hand on a nearby boulder to steady himself. Before him to the south lay a stretch of plain, covered in dead grass and a few small, gnarled trees. Beyond it, a crumbling stone bridge spanned a massive river, and beyond that rose a wall of tall trees that stretched east and west and south as far as he could see. The trees had no leaves, but they stood strong and firm, bare not because of poison in the soil but because spring had not yet taken hold of the land.
A river meant water, and a forest meant food, and both meant life. Strength seemed to well up inside him, and he shouted wordlessly up at the grey sky, drawing in massive lungfuls of the clear, cold air. The voice of the ghost-Andreth echoed in his head once more: Every day we do not die is a victory against the Enemy.
Even now, starved and wounded and weary unto death, he would not die.