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The Dead Marshes by DiegoGisbertLlorens
“They lie in all the pools, pale faces, deep deep under the dark water.
I saw them: grim faces and evil, noble faces and sad.
Many faces proud and fair, with weeds in their silver hair.
But all foul, all rotting, all dead.”— “The Passage of the Marshes”, The Two Towers
“We should not have come this way.”
Thranduil gave no response, did not feel beholden to supply one, though Haldir was right: they should not have come this way. Yet he pressed on.
The smell of the fens assailed them long before they came in sight, a fetid miasma of standing water and rot. Leaden mist hovered in warning, a shroud veiling its mysteries from the living. The sun that had peaked in the sky a scant few leagues before fought to pierce the brume with rays which didn’t illuminate the land so much as attenuate its shadows.
Well-worn trails gave way to dead peat, and then to sucking mud. The horses blew and shied, heads tossing in consternation as the footing collapsed beneath unhappy and uncertain steps. He heard Haldir behind him cursing under his breath and slapping at the relentless biting midges that swarmed and whined in their ears before summoning the last reserves of his patience to speak.
“Evil lingers here, and we must not.” The tone was low and sharp, an iron blade reflecting the gloom. “Let us go another way, my lord.”
Thranduil laughed a bitter laugh. Haldir resorted to honorifics only when thoroughly desperate or thoroughly annoyed. ““Evil? Was that not what my people— and yours, and the doughty Men of Gondor— died to vanquish?” His gelding stumbled in the gnarling roots, grunted, recovered his balance. “But evil is never truly vanquished, is it? It merely sleeps.”
“Then let it sleep!” Haldir’s urgency pressed him like a phantom hand between his shoulder blades. “No good will come of this. None. The best we can hope is that we pass with our horses intact.”
“Fine.” Thranduil dismounted, the swift grace of his movement made ponderous as his boots sank into sludge up to the ankle. Not even Elven feet trod lightly in this forsaken place; he had not forgotten that, not ever. He didn’t look back to see if Haldir followed or took up his mount's abandoned reins. He had not asked for an escort; if Haldir misliked this path, he was free to choose his own. He always had before.
No, Thranduil amended on the exhalation of his breath. That was neither entirely true nor entirely fair: they had perforce walked the paths allowed them.
He trudged ahead, glancing between the stagnant meres and the narrow pathways where the ground was firm enough to hold his weight. The sullen air didn’t move, not even enough to stir the fallow husks of marsh grass. But in his mind he heard the call of a war-horn, the roar of response, felt the surge of men forward, and forward again. He closed his eyes, as if that alone could silence the echo of memory.
There, beyond him, a sicky light flickered, a brief, pale flame extinguished as if by unseen breath. Against all good judgment, he followed it, lurched toward the twisting haze disappearing and reappearing in a covert of reeds. Dead shafts surrounded a noisome pool, and the light cast a dancing prism against the oily sheen of its surface. His face, drawn and grim with the weight of all his years, reflected back at him from the slough.
Yet when the fey light danced again, another face swam before him— a face akin to his own, yet not, silver hair fanning out in the clearing pool, bound to a stern brow by a circlet untarnished by tide or time. One arm lay crossed against his chest, as if to grip a grievous wound, and a signet glittered on a bone-pale finger. Mud and debris drew the outline of a stag in stark relief against the gold. He gasped in recognition, and the closed eyes opened to gaze up at him, unblinking, from below the surface.
“What is it?” Haldir’s voice sounded distant, and Thranduil did not answer. Could not— not when his father’s form rose from the murk, to stand before him in a ring of blue flame. Water sluiced from his body, from his hair, from his clothing. Yet aside from this, his face was young once more, and alive, and his body bore no sign of violence. A whimper wrested free of Thranduil’s throat.
The voice, when it came, was one he had not heard in three thousand years.
“You have come.”
His body jerked in the direction of the sound, yearned toward it as if bound by a tether: familiar, beloved and feared. “Yes. I have.”
“To whom do you speak, Thranduil?”
Again, Thranduil held tongue; Haldir did not belong here, not to this place nor to this moment. Haldir, damn him, had marched under Amdir’s banner, on the outermost flank, saved by his proximity to the high ground when Amdir’s forces, cut off from the protection of the larger host, had been driven into the marshes. He had not seen what Thranduil had seen, had not endured what Thranduil had endured: when Hathalador had fallen, he had not fallen in the fen but on the parched tongue of earth along its edges, and Haldir and his brothers had retrieved their father's body and borne it to Lothlórien. Thranduil imagined them casting locks of their hair into his grave, dutiful sons that they were, and marking it with a cairn of stones long worn to dust.
“At last, my victorious son.” Oropher smiled. His teeth were straight and white as pearls. “You have brought Sauron to his knees... and the last of the Noldor flee to the West!” He threw back his head when he laughed. Thranduil had not seen his father laugh in so long...could not quite remember if that was how it had looked, how it had sounded. It must have been thus, mustn’t it?
“They hungered for our lands and tried to claim dominion over our people,” Oropher eyed him avidly, and this— this fervid rejection of the Noldor— was all too familiar. “And in the end? Ah, they scurry whence they came! They sit at the feet of the Valar and lean their heads against their masters’ knees like the obedient dogs they are.” The grin grew sharper, and Thranduil fought the urge to shudder. “Their conquests here are done, my son! Even the White Bitch turns tail to abandon her conquests. The line of Oropher alone prevails!”
Oh, and what a glorious dynasty we have wrought, Thranduil thought. One king fallen, another failing, and the lone scion of my rueful union gone south to build his own land among Men!
“I would bring the Wood back to its glory,” Oropher answered, as if Thranduil had spoken his choler aloud. “Return me to my land, Thranduil, to my kingdom.” He canted his brow as if in question. “Is that not why you have returned? I have been so long away...”
Gooseflesh prickled up Thranduil’s spine. How long had he despaired to hear this voice, to behold again this beloved face? And yet a coldness marked those features now, a cruelty working behind the skin despite the lips turning in the vague shape of a smile.
“Why did you come here, blood of my blood,” Oropher asked again, gentle and insistent, “if not to bring me home?”
“I wished to visit the place where you had fallen. I wished to… to see you once more.”
Oropher appraised him slowly...oh, so slowly. “The crown is beautiful. But it sits heavily on your brow.”
“Thranduil?”
Haldir’s call came both as a sound behind him and as a flash of memory— the brush of fingertips against his jaw, the warmth of breath against his throat—he pushed both sound and memory aside.
“I understand, my child,” Oropher continued, the words coming from everywhere and nowhere. “Though I wore it only for a short while. Such a short while.” He turned his gaze over his shoulder, looking to the north, toward the Woodland Realm so far away that even Elvish sight could not bring it into focus. The gesture made Thranduil’s gut roil; his father’s head had continued to revolve, twisting on his neck until the silver sheen of his hair hung down his chest. Thranduil stepped instinctively away while Oropher, head facing forward once more, moved toward him, their bodies linked in a ghastly dance. “Such grand designs I had for Eryn Galen, and have I still! I would take your burden, my son, and make it my own...but you must bring me home.”
Thranduil faltered, lifted an appeasing palm. “Sire—”
“—You gave me no honors, no rites!” The dampened thunder sounded less like Oropher and more like a drowned ruin of the voice Thranduil remembered. “You left me here to rot!”
Visions of chaos took form in the dull blue flames, of the dark and seething mass of Sauron’s armies, of his father’s ill-timed charge, and of scores of men falling, falling. There had been neither time nor place to give funeral honors for a man who had poorly judged his assault, who had led with his pride rather than with his wits; Blood and carnage had been Oropher’s sole requiem.
“Yet at the last you have come for me. I shall make Eryn Galen my home once more, if my son will take me there.”
Eryn Galen is no more ! Thranduil thought in despair. In the end, I alone could not save it. I surrendered half my birthright to the one you called the White Bitch; she brought down the dark tower, not I. If you saw what became of your glorious forest, you would slay me yourself.
“Thranduil. My son.” The timbre, soothing once more, halted his grim ruminations. “The time is nigh. Return me to my forest. Bring me home.”
This is not right. This cannot be . But when faced with his father’s form standing before him in singular appeal, his endurance foundered. “What must I do?” His own voice was reedy in his ears. Insubstantial. Like water.
“Take my hand. That is all.” Oropher extended an arm. The golden signet proclaiming his kingship glittered on his attenuated finger in the false light. “Take my hand.”
Thranduil’s arm felt leaden, disconnected from his body and his mind. It rose of it’s own volition, reached toward his father. The weight of his being yearning forward, yearning toward the promise of reconciliation. All his faults forgiven, all his guilt assuaged. Yes…
... No .
He tried to step away, but a shriek pierced the gloom and froze him where he stood. The corpse lights flared. Oropher’s mouth opened, wider and wider, until his jaw unhinged, a great gaping maw opening to fill the dismal air with a scream too violent and too vast for any living body to contain. Keen eyes filmed over before sinking into empty black sockets. Livid flesh turned to grey meat, sloughing off the bone in splattering counterpoint to the ceaseless screech. The hair that had gleamed mithril-bright took on the the muted shades of rotted vegetation and gave off the same fecal stench. Lips receded until only the pearl white teeth remained, framing the obscene hole that had once been his father’s mouth. Yet still he reached for Thranduil, reached, the tendons of his forearm taut and fibrous as rope. The fabric of his father's sleeve fell away, leaving wet threads clinging to dead sinew. The hand bearing the royal signet was nothing but naked bone cast green with algal bloom. Dimly, he heard his name, a futile cry, the shriek of a gull taken by the wind.
A fist knotted in his cloak and his feet left the ground as he was hauled backward. Haldir’s shout penetrated his ears, silencing at last the horrible keening at last. They reeled together and tumbled to the squelching earth. Haldir was on him in a trice, knees pinioning his arms to the sodden ground, one hand grasping his hair by the roots, the other pressing the glinting blade of his hunting knife to Thranduil’s throat.
“Answer me, damn you! What is your name and who do you serve?” Above him, grey eyes keen as lances pinned him in anguished suspicion.
“I am Thranduil. I serve no master.” Still the blade stood sentry against his pulse. “Why do you threaten me?”
“You are not yourself.” Haldir’s guarded tone came with a slight shift of his weight. “What did you see? To whom were you speaking?”
Thranduil’s blood ran to ice in his veins. He turned his head, despite the stinging kiss of metal as he did so. Nothing but sluggish pools and bracken and unremitting gloom. There was nothing there. No face trapped beneath the water, only murk and mire.
“You did not see him?”
“See who?” Haldir asked cautiously.
“My father.”
“I saw no one.” Haldir drew back, sheathing his knife but not yet removing his weight. He cast a mistrustful eye around the bog before taking a short, sharp breath that reverberated in the quietus. “But if you tell me you saw him, I will believe you.” He stood and brushing the mud from his knees before offering Thranduil his arm and pulling him to standing. “Come, we’re losing light, and we cannot camp here.”
Reluctantly, Thranduil let himself be pulled away, Haldir’s fingers an unbreakable tether at his elbow, drawing him forward. Yet as he moved away, something gleamed for just one moment in the fey flicker of the blue flames. His eyes, clear now, and true, caught the flicker and focused.
Haldir sensed him balk and turned. “What is it?”
Thranduil shook his head, as if dispelling the remnants of a dream. “Nothing. Lead on. Please; I do not wish to stay.”
Little good it would serve to tell Haldir what had appeared in the tenebrous deeps, what he had seen with the unmistakeable clarity of a man graced with sudden illumination, that there in the festering fen, half-buried in the silt of three thousand years, the signet ring of the house of Oropher still shined gold, beckoning to its heir.