#golodir

You know you’re dying when the wound doesn’t hurt. Golodir first heard that as a young Ranger, and since then has seen it endlessly. On friends, on enemies, in nightmares. As the pain leeches away from his legs, his arms, and then his chest, he feels it too.

You didn’t kill me, he thinks at— he’s not even sure who. Even my death is a blow against you. His hearing isn’t gone yet: there is a battle still raging on this field of red, roaring and clashing. There’s also someone shouting, about eight inches away from his ear.

“Golodir!... You— fool!” He gets only a few words. The relevant ones. It’s Corunir. His eyes still work. He cracks them open: Corunir looms over him, hands hovering somewhere over the bloody pulp of Golodir’s shoulder. The sky over the Pelennor is still dark, black smudges of clouds lit from beneath with red fire.

Black and red— how had he not thought of it before? It’s the Angmarim sky. He never left.

A stab of pain slips back into his chest, and a surge of adrenaline.

“Corunir.” Speaking is grinding shards of glass through his lungs: a bit like broken ribs, a bit like pneumonia. It’s bearable. “Corunir, that’s... the sky. The sky.” He’s out of breath.

Over to the right, just within the band of black tightening around his vision, Amathan’s stricken expression gets a flash of confusion in it. Corunir gets it immediately. “We’re in Gondor,” he says, “Gondor, not Angmar. We’re about as far from Angmar as it’s possible to get on this continent. We’ve gotten all this way and you just— just— did you have to find the only skull thicker than yours on this whole battlefield to fall under?”

Laughing is worse than speaking. The pain is fading again now, though. It’s all right. He isn't dying in Angmar.

“...S’all right.” He says it aloud too. As loud and as angry as he sounds, Corunir looks like he needs it.

The first sight of an oak tree— untainted, grey bark naturally mottled, winter-bare limbs lifted high— had nearly brought him low when they rode out of Angmar. No such trees existed in Himbar after ten years under the False-king’s rule, and the stark beauty of one under a clear blue sky planted new hope in him.

The door clangs shut behind her, leaving Lorniel sprawled on the floor.

Great. She’s always know this was coming eventually. Venture too close to Carn Dûm, run into an orc patrol, get dragged before the False-king himself— the only part confusing her is why she isn’t dead. That, and the icy cold of the stab wound the False-king himself was so kind as to leave her with. It’s probably poisoned, though with what she has no idea. The toxin they’ve usually run afoul of in Angmar burns like fire, but her shoulder is bleeding ice and lightning down her arm and across her chest, slowly spreading.

Lorniel sits up gingerly, taking stock. The cell is even smaller than her own room at Gath Forthnír, with three walls and a floor of solid black stone. The iron bars of the fourth wall leak a bit of torchlight from down the hall into the cell.

“Ad'thor?” Corunir mumbled, realizing at last that no, the force buffeting and manhandling him wasn't free fall but another human.

“No,” said a murky voice, exasperated.

Corunir squinted up at sharp eyes and felt hands briskly checking the integrity of his skull. He tried again, “Lorn’l?”

The hands stilled, clenched a little, then released at Corunir’s wince— what was wrong with his head, it felt almost pressurized, ow.

“No,” it said again, softer. Corunir could hear it clearer now past the ringing in his ears: masculine, older, and somehow both tired and angry.

“Golodir,” he said, with confidence. “What... happen?”