Heget's Blatherings

After the first battle of Beleriand, more unexpected tragedy strikes in the heart of Menegroth, and a Girdle must be raised.

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It is the scream that draws Elu’s attention, a scream that sounds like it should come from the throat of an injured animal rather than that of an elf. The sound has echoed down from the serpentine corridors of the subterranean palace system, warped and uncanny. Elu Thingol grabs the heaviest of the rolled map scrolls from the desk in front of him, privately lamenting that he left his sword and armor back in his private chambers. The scroll will make a poor weapon, but the uncanny scream triggers a fear and a reflexive impulsive to defend his home.

After months of wearing the heavy steel of sword and armor, Thingol had relished the absence of the weight, the respite from the fighting. Only a week and a half after returning to Menegroth from the killing fields in the East, Elu is tired of war and death. His muscles are exhausted from the strain of desperate marches across the rough terrain of his realm, back and forth from the stronghold, of heaping the corpses of orcs in stinking hills trying to expend the rage of helplessness from Amon Ereb. The guilt of coming too late save his friend and fellow king Denethor, of being unable to save any of the Laegrim, has destroyed his sleep, and at first Thingol thinks the scream is just a walking dream, another hallucination. Images paint across the back of his eyelids: finding the cooling bodies of Denethor and his two sons that played with Lúthien as children, bright and dear lads who Thingol had taught to use a sword, nephews in all but direct blood, their bronze swords bent and broken by Angband’s steel. Denethor’s wife, as dead as he, found on the hill, who constantly teased Thingol for being too tall and ugly, and who he had retaliated by insulting her cooking. Elu thirsts for at least one sip of her awful bitter beet stew, an irrational craving ever since he returned from the battlefield, and knows the only reason he feels nostalgic for that nasty stew is that he will never have it again. Galathon, last child of his brother Elmo, the only one of Thingol’s nephews and nieces left to him on these shores, is last no more. Thingol hates how he found the dead body, a grisly wound on Galadhon’s head that made all features of that smiling face unrecognizable, only knowing it was his nephew by the dark silver of the hair and the familiar leaf embroidery on the padded silk jerkin. Denethor’s kinswoman and Galathon’s wife, Danaril, stretched out at his side almost as if she was sleeping peacefully, the illusion broke at the ragged bite marks on her arms and the gaping wound that nearly severed her torso in two.

Elu’s first task upon returning the Menegroth and reassuring his wife and daughter of his personal safety had been to approach Galadhon’s two young sons. They had been under the care of their grandmother, Elmo’s wife Linkwînen. That painful walk to their wing of the palace made Elu feel like he was wearing a pair of those ridiculously ugly Naugrim boots, steps weighed down by heavy cast iron. A long walk, in the end unavoidable, for Linkwînen knew. His sister-in-law grew up on the shores of Cuiviénen, had lost friends and relatives to the dark riders. She has comforted Elmo when he and Elu’s parents had been taken by the hunters, stood strong during the long years Elu had been missing, separated by choice from her oldest child when the tribe was split, and lost her second child to the evil spirits during that long and dangerous period when the Eglath wandered the wild of Beleriand. Strong unbroken Linkwînen. Then came the year Thingol had to approach her when the fell false wolves hunted and tell her that Elmo, her beloved husband and Thingol’s precious brother, was among the missing and presumed dead. Tell that the reed girl who grew up with the youngest of the silver-haired boys that she would no longer have her companion, no longer tease a man curious as a squirrel and have his voice answer back, that her walks through forest and wading in the shallows of the rivers and lakes would be lonesome where it once was always with treasured company. That grief had bent Linkwînen harder than the day the Lindar tribe split, or the day young Eöl returned unexpectedly to them with dark eyes haunted by unspeakable events and told a sinister tale to sicken the joy of reuniting with the knowledge this reunion came only to her grandson, that her daughter and son-in-law would never return as well. Thingol had feared the grief would break his sister that day only her grandson returned, but she was well-named, for like a reed bowed by the wind Linkwînen had rebounded. She had poured her energy into helping her people, into building friendship and knowledge with the dwarves that had returned her only grandchild, and then when the Laegrim came to befriend and assist them. She had encouraged her last child, Galadhon, to find happiness with Denethor’s sister, to start a family.

And once more, because of Elu’s failings to protect his friends and kin, he had to approach Linkwînen in the aftermath of Amon Ereb. He had to inform her of more family that would no longer walk at her side.

She had known, for news of the grievous price victory had cost them flew ahead of Thingol’s returning army like bands of crows, and the tales of the Laegrim refugees deciding to shelter in the many halls of Menegroth instead of retreating home spoke loudly. The young boys, Galadhon’s two sons, were old enough to understand what had happened, though the elder, Galathil, had put on a brave face and did not cry, nor did he say that he wished he had been allowed to fight at his parents’ sides, and die with them. Not that he needed to; Thingol read it in the grief and guilt across his face. The younger, Celeborn, had been the one to place his hands around his grandmother’s shoulders. Taller than his bare fifty years would seem, the youngest scion of Elu’s kin had only asked if his parents had been in much pain before they died. Celeborn was wise; he knew his great-uncle had lied when Thingol answered it had been swift.

In the echoes of the unnatural scream, as Thingol kicks the maps outlining the armies of orcs that have overrun his kingdom, the lists of refugees that have poured in from all over Beleriand to crowd the halls of Menegroth, Elu connects the straying thoughts. The scream is coming from Linkwînen’s chambers, deep in the heart of palace. And it is not a wail of heartbreak.

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