Month: February 2017

Wolf howls.
It’s been three days since he heard them last, three days since the patrols went up into the Mountains of Mithrim. It takes time for them to return to an area after being disturbed by soldiers and steeds. Maedhros listens to them from his bed, long, hollow notes coming in through the arrow-slit of a window, along with the frosted air of the northern forest. There’s a good moon tonight; he can count the fir trees on the mountain slopes. The river is a silver road reflecting the cold light of Tillion, its banks lost in shadow. Sometimes, if he is patient and sleepless enough, from his tower he can see the pack crossing through the shallows, far in the distance; just specks of grey and white and black, a glitter of splashing water.  

He lies awake in the midnight stillness not because of the unfamiliar bed, but because of the unfamiliar battlements, the unknown weaknesses of their defense. He is a visitor here; he has traveled far from his own fortress in the east of Beleriand to aid his cousin, the king; fortifying the intermediate castles between Hithlum and the fens, like the one he stays at now. It is usually his routines that keep him steady, and it is an exhausting struggle to maintain them on the road.  
Briefly, he’d dreamt; just enough to know that sleep would hold no comfort for him this night. His right shoulder aches in its socket. 

The howling is different tonight– or is it just that his nerves are piqued? The cold is knife-sharp and he is strung taught from the unwanted adrenaline of his dreaming; it would not the first time he has assigned himself to a watchful night because of paranoia. There is nothing wicked about the wild hill-wolves, he tells himself. 

But it chills him. Their cries shiver through his bones, through the echo of his lost hand. One voice in particular rises above the chorus, so strange the hairs on his neck rise and his heart pauses beating as if to hear it better; it is a low crescendo accompanied by harmonic overtones, dancing fey and flute-like around the tuneless howl. It is a wild, unearthly sound, like the twisting of the aurora.

After it stops, he is uncertain of what he heard. He would doubt that he heard it at all, but for the fact that his skin is prickling, and his guts are a frozen knot. And oh– oh, his shoulder feels like fire; the ripped ligaments that never fully healed despite the centuries ache the way they do before a thunderstorm, though the sky is clear as glass. 

The howling of the natural wolves ceased in the wake of that one call; a few scattered hoots and canine laughs trailing into silence. The pack was moving on, their message delivered. He knows they call to other wolves in the surrounding territories, announcing their presence and their number to those who have strayed into their lands. 

Maedhros’s breath is a white plume in the air as he leans out over the window. Just over the mountains, he knows there is one who might wish to announce himself. Someone who knows he is listening, sleepless in the frigid night.
Without thinking, he rips the prosthetic hook from off his nightstand and begins to dress himself, heart pounding with fury. He wants to fill his lungs and scream into the moonlight, strike his sword against the battlements and roar in answer. 
I am still here. I am stronger. I am coming.

But instead he leaves his cousin’s castle in silence, armed for hunting, and does not return until dawn. In the following nights, no wolves howl over the hills of Mithrim. 

@doegred