[Year 1155 of the Trees. Late Spring. Western bank of the Anduin]
[Selas POV]
The Anduin was behind us now.
Ahead rose the Hithaeglir, the Misty Mountains. A wall of stone and snow stretching north and south beyond sight, its peaks lost in clouds that never seemed to move.
{ image: The Hithaeglir }
We made camp in the foothills and waited.
Not by choice. The very young needed time to grow stronger before the crossing. The scouts needed time to find passable routes through terrain that had turned back an entire kindred of our people. And all of us, every last one of us, needed time to absorb what the Nandor had given us.
The smiths were the worst.
—•——•——•——•——•——•—
[Foothills camp. Same period]
[Eol POV]
The blade was garbage.
Eol turned it over in his hands, feeling the balance, testing the edge with his thumb. Better than anything they'd made before the Nandor encounter. Still garbage. Just prettier garbage.
"The tang's too short," he muttered, more to himself than to Tavor, who was hovering again. Always hovering. Like a moth around a forge-flame, except less useful, because at least a moth didn't ask questions. "Shifts the weight forward. Fine for a cleaver. Useless for a sword."
"What if we extended it through the grip?" Tavor reached for his own sketches, shuffling through them with the careful excitement of someone who thought he'd found an answer and was bracing for the inevitable explanation of why he hadn't. "Like the diagram they showed us. Full tang, riveted through a wooden handle."
"With what rivets? Our bronze is still too brittle for that gauge." Eol set the blade down on the anvil stone and rubbed his face with soot-blackened hands. "Actually, that's not a terrible thought."
Tavor looked up, visibly startled. Eol giving a compliment was roughly as common as rain underground.
"Don't let it go to your head. I said 'not terrible.' That's three full steps below 'good.'"
"I'll take it," Tavor said. "Last week I was at 'did you even look at this before drawing it,' so I'm making progress."
"You are. At this rate you'll reach 'adequate' in about forty years."
"Something to look forward to."
The Nandor metalwork had been a revelation and an insult in equal measure. They'd learned from Oromë himself during the Journey. Proper forging techniques. Alloy ratios that Eol had been groping toward blindly for decades. Sword designs that actually distributed weight along the blade instead of dumping it all at the tip.
Everything the Avari had invented through bloody trial and error, the Eldar had simply been handed by a god.
It burned. But Eol was not the kind of smith who let resentment stand between him and better steel. He'd swallowed his pride, asked his questions, and committed every answer to memory. He could resent the unfairness later. Preferably while holding a finished blade good enough to make the point for him.
Now he spent his days hunched over sketches and ore samples, muttering about smelting temperatures and carbon content, trying to translate divine knowledge into practice with inadequate materials and a portable forge that couldn't hold consistent heat.
"Real swords," he said for the hundredth time. "Not these oversized knives we've been making. Proper blades. Give me the right iron and I'll forge something that'll make every Tatyar smith in Aman weep."
"That might be setting the bar a little high," Tavor said carefully.
"The bar is where I put it."
"And if it's unreachable?"
Eol gave him a flat look. "Then I'll forge a ladder first."
Tavor snorted. He'd been Eol's assistant long enough to know when a conversation was over. He went back to his sketches, hiding a grin behind the charcoal-smudged parchment.
—•——•——•——•——•——•—
[Same period. Archivists' wagon]
[Selas POV]
The archivists were nearly as bad.
Dirmal had latched onto a Nandor trick: plant fibers and wood pulp beaten into crude sheets. Primitive paper, lighter than our treated leather and smoother than bark tablets. It could take soot-ink without bleeding into a smear.
He'd already ruined three batches trying to replicate the process. The fourth was drying on a rack near his wagon, curling at the edges but intact. Mostly.
"The Nandor use bird feathers for writing," he told me, eyeing the falcon perched on Celestia's shoulder with unsettling intensity. "A proper quill. Not these chewed reeds we've been pretending are pens."
He paused, still staring at the falcon.
"Do you think she'd notice if one went missing?"
"She'd notice," I said. "And you'd lose something very precious."
He went back to experimenting with reed pens.
For the first time, copies didn't have to weigh as much as a shield. If Dirmal could make the process reliable, our archives could grow without breaking the wagons. Twenty years of accumulated knowledge, field maps, medical notes, metallurgical records, all of it currently crammed onto treated hides and bark tablets that took up three full wagons.
Paper could change that.
Meanwhile, Gelasiël led teams into the mountains before we'd even decided to cross them. He came back every evening with new ore samples and notes, adding to the growing collection of markers on our maps.
We'd been building those maps since Cuiviénen. Twenty years of routes and resources, dangers and discoveries. The Nandor had filled in vast sections we'd never seen. Now we were layering in more, not just geography but potential. Sites for future settlements. Defensible positions. Places where ore might be found or crops might grow.
—•——•——•——•——•——•—
[Same period. Evening]
Something had shifted in the camp. I felt it that evening, a strange energy buzzing through the foothills that hadn't been there before.
Meeting the Nandor had changed something in my people. For the first time, they'd seen other Quendi and found them lacking. Not in character. Not in worth. But in everything we'd built.
Our clothing was different. Our language had evolved beyond recognition. Our weapons, our formations, our way of moving through the world, all of it marked us as something new.
I watched young Avari compare themselves to Nandor visitors and stand a little straighter. Watched elders discuss the differences in hushed, wondering tones.
We weren't just refugees anymore. We were becoming something else entirely.
A civilization.
The thought should have pleased me. Instead, it kept me awake at night, turning over everything that could still go wrong.
We weren't there yet. Not even close.
But the seeds were planted. The first awkward steps had been taken.
—•——•——•——•——•——•—
Idleness has never suited me.
When there's nothing urgent to do, my mind fills the space with everything else. Philosophy, logistics, memories I'd rather not examine, plans that might be genius or might be madness. Sometimes all of it at once, tangled together until I can't tell which thread leads where.
The only cure I'd found was work.
So I ran drills. Organized exercises. Gathered my commanders around rough-drawn maps and talked through scenarios we might never face. Most of them grumbled about it. All of them showed up.
"Flanking maneuvers against a fortified position." I sketched lines in the dirt with a stick. "The enemy holds high ground. What do you do?"
Vertalas studied the diagram, head tilted, already running three plans behind his eyes. That was the thing about Vertalas. He never answered fast. He answered right.
"Pin them with archers. Send light infantry around the flank. Force them to split their attention." He traced an arc in the air. "But only if the terrain allows concealed movement on the approach. Otherwise you're feeding them targets."
"And if they don't split? If they hold position and wait you out?"
"Then we're not attacking a fortified position," Yalinim said, cutting in with the bluntness of someone who had no patience for hypotheticals that danced around the obvious. "We're laying siege. Different problem. Different tools."
"Exactly." I erased the lines and drew new ones. "Now, same scenario, but you're the defender. An enemy force twice your size is approaching from the east. What do you do?"
Thinking silence. The good kind.
Vertalas spoke first, slowly, the way he always did when he was building something in his head and didn't want to lay a crooked stone. "Depends on the terrain behind us. If we have room to fall back, we hold until the cost of staying outweighs the cost of retreating. Make them pay for every step forward, then withdraw in good order. If we're pinned…"
"Then you don't let yourself get pinned in the first place," Celestia said from behind us.
She'd appeared without sound, as usual. I'd stopped being startled by it somewhere around the third time.
"If you're the defender and you let them choose the ground, you've already lost half the battle." She dropped into a crouch beside the map, uninvited, entirely unbothered by the looks from the commanders. "The fight starts the moment you pick your position. Everything after that is just consequences."
Yalinim gave her a sideways look. "Some of us were working through the problem step by step."
"Some of us got to the answer faster."
I hid a smile. Celestia had a talent for being right in ways that made people want to argue with her anyway. But she wasn't wrong, and Yalinim, to his credit, just grunted and moved on.
The discussions went on for days. Tactics borrowed from military minds I'd studied in another life, translated into terms that made sense here. Concepts that had never existed in this world, seeded into minds sharp enough to improve on them.
What surprised me was how quickly they moved beyond repetition into innovation. Vertalas began combining ideas I'd presented separately, finding connections I hadn't explicitly drawn.
Yalinim stripped every plan down to its bones, discarding anything he considered overcomplicated, which was most things. Celestia challenged every assumption, not out of disrespect but because she genuinely couldn't help herself.
By the time the scouts returned, I'd run out of scenarios to discuss. They hadn't run out of arguments about the old ones.
"Three viable passes," Celestia reported, "The northern route is shortest but steepest. The southern route is gentler but adds weeks to the journey. The middle path…" She hesitated. "It's passable. Barely. But it's the most direct line to where we need to go."
"Risks?"
"Narrow stretches. Exposed ridgelines. A few sections where we'd be single-file for hours." She met my eyes. "I wouldn't take the children through there without ropes and anchors."
"Recommendations?"
"The middle path. If we're careful. And if Yalinim stops looking at me like I'm suggesting we march everyone off a cliff."
"I'm considering the possibility," Yalinim said flatly.
"It's the right call," Vertalas said, quiet and certain. "The northern route risks injury. The southern route risks morale. Weeks of extra marching when people can see the mountains right there…" He shook his head. "That's harder on a group than a difficult climb."
The Council agreed. We broke camp within the week.
—•——•——•——•——•——•—
[The middle pass. Second day]
[The Hithaeglir.]
"How can it be so cold…"
"Pull carefully! Carefully!"
"…surrounded by mountains full of ore and instead of prospecting we're dragging wagons…"
"…easy now, easy, once we're through the pass I'll find you sweet grass and brush your mane, just walk steady and calm…"
"Look how huge these peaks are!"
"Get back from the edge! Eru forbid you fall!"
"…children are fed and wrapped warm in the wagons…"
"Why didn't we stay in Rhovanion? The Nandor would be helping us settle right now, but instead we're crawling through these frozen mountains!"
"The Chief wills it and the Council decided! Better to be master in your own house than guest in another's…"
"…firewood's running low, we need to ration…"
"…another night sleeping under the wagon…"
—•——•——•——•——•——•—
[The middle pass. Day four]
[Amalaë Witness POV]
Amalaë counted heads for the seventh time that morning.
One hundred and twelve little ones in the main column, children too young to be trusted with anything sharper than a wooden spoon. Another sixty older ones, the awkward in-between age, tall enough to walk on their own but still young enough to do something catastrophically stupid if left unsupervised near a cliff edge.
All accounted for. Again.
She'd developed the system during the first day of the ascent, when a small child had wandered within arm's reach of a drop that would have killed a Vala. Counting at dawn. Counting at every rest stop. Counting when they moved. Counting before sleep.
"Seventeen, eighteen, nineteen…" Elemmirë, her best teacher, was doing the same thing three wagons back. Their counts would meet in the middle. If the numbers didn't match, everything stopped until they did.
"Amalaë!" A young mother pushed through the press of bodies, panic whitening her face. "Tiriel isn't in the wagon. She was right there and now she's gone."
Amalaë's stomach dropped. Then training took over.
"Which wagon?"
"Third from the back. She was sleeping between the grain sacks, but when I checked—"
"Elemmirë! Hold the count!" Amalaë was already moving, threading through the column with the efficiency of someone who'd done this before. More times than she wanted to admit.
She found Tiriel wedged between two supply crates at the rear of the next wagon forward. The girl had crawled there in her sleep, following the warmth of a horse blanket someone had tossed over the cargo.
Sleeping peacefully. Completely oblivious to the terror she'd caused.
Amalaë exhaled. Picked up the girl, who murmured and burrowed into her shoulder without waking.
"Found her," she called back.
The mother ran to them, eyes streaming. Amalaë handed over the child and patted the woman's arm.
"She's fine. Just a wanderer."
She returned to her count. Seventeen, eighteen, nineteen…
The mountains didn't care about children. Didn't care about anyone. The wind screamed through the passes like something alive and hungry, and the cold seeped through every layer of fur and leather they possessed.
Mireth's Warmth Circles kept the worst of it at bay. Amalaë organized them for the children every evening, arranging the youngest at the center of each group, Light flowing in loops that carved small pockets of heat from the frozen air.
The technique was crude and exhausting, every adult in the circle drained by morning, but it kept tiny fingers from going numb and tiny hearts from stopping in the night.
Not a single child was lost on that crossing.
Looking back, she still couldn't quite believe it.
—•——•——•——•——•——•—
[The middle pass. Day nine]
[Selas POV]
No amount of preparation could have made that crossing easy.
We'd planned for steppes and forests and river crossings. Mountains were something else entirely.
Livestock panicked on narrow ledges. Some slipped and fell, their screams echoing off stone walls before cutting short. We lost cattle we couldn't afford to lose.
The wagons were worse. On the steepest sections, we had to unhitch the horses and oxen, then haul the wagons up by hand. Dozens of Avari straining against ropes while others braced the wheels with stones to keep them from rolling backward.
One rope snapped on the third day, and a wagon loaded with grain slid fifteen feet before a team of warriors threw themselves against it and held it with their bodies.
Three cracked ribs and a dislocated shoulder. Cheap, considering.
Firewood ran out faster than we'd calculated. Warm clothing proved inadequate against winds that cut through fur and leather like they weren't there. If the North Pole existed in this world, I was fairly sure we'd taken a wrong turn and found it.
We slept in shifts, huddled together for warmth, taking turns keeping fires alive through nights that seemed to last forever. Privacy became a foreign concept. Dignity followed shortly after. Nobody cared. Freezing to death has a wonderful way of curing self-consciousness.
We leaned hard on what the steppes had taught us. The Warmth Circles Mireth had invented during that first brutal winter years ago.
On the twelfth day, we came through.
—•——•——•——•——•——•—
[Western foothills. Eriador]
We emerged from the mountains battered but intact.
The camp we made in the western foothills was less a planned rest stop than a collective collapse. People dropped where they stood, too exhausted to do more than wrap themselves in blankets and sleep.
I let them.
Three days passed before I called anyone to duty. Even then, I kept the demands light. Basic camp maintenance. Hunting parties. Nothing that required real effort.
Gelasiël, predictably, ignored my orders completely. He had his teams back in the mountains within a day, mapping deposits and marking locations for future reference.
"The ore here is different," he reported, eyes bright with that particular madness that afflicted all our prospectors. "Richer. More varied. Give me a year and proper tools, and I could—"
"We're not staying a year. Mark what you find. We'll come back."
He grumbled but complied.
I was fairly sure Gelasiël was the only Avari who'd come through twelve days of frozen hell and been genuinely disappointed when it ended.
—•——•——•——•——•——•—
[End of Chapter 9.1]