[Year 1155. End of Winter]
[Council Meeting. Evening]
[Selas POV]
"The mountains are closer than we thought."
I stood in front of the assembled council, maps spread across the table. Twenty years of exploration marked on treated hides and bark-sheets in soot-ink and boiled plant dyes. Black for rivers and ridgelines. Red for orc signs and blood-debt places. Green for forage and safe water, when the ink hadn't bled into brown after rain.
The edges were already fading. We'd need to recopy the oldest ones soon, or lose a decade of hard-won knowledge to damp and time.
"Scouts estimate a few months to the foothills," I continued. "Beyond that, forests. Real forests, like we had at Cuiviénen. Rivers. Defensible ground."
The murmurs that rippled through the gathering sounded different than they had in years past. Hopeful, yes, but also wary. They'd learned not to trust good news.
"Orcs?" Opheon asked.
"Signs of them." Celestia shifted her weight. "Old camps. We haven't found their main strength yet, but they're out there."
She glanced at me.
I took over. No point softening it.
"There's something else. We found signs of settlement. Stone stacked with intent. Timber cut straight. Paths that don't wander. Paths that go somewhere and stay there."
I paused, letting the image form in their minds.
"Orcs don't make things like that."
The room went quiet.
"We believe there are other elves ahead."
Thoron leaned forward. "Eldar?"
"Possibly." I spread my hands. "The Great Journey passed through these lands. That much is certain. And not everyone who starts a road finishes it. Some turn back. Some stop walking and decide where they are is good enough."
"Quitters," Eol said flatly.
"People who made a choice," I corrected, keeping my voice level. "We refused to leave. They refused to keep going. Different decisions, same result. Elves who never reached the West."
Thoron's jaw tightened. "If they're real, what will they think of us?"
"Less important than what they'll do about us." I met his gaze. "Which is why we don't stumble into their territory with blades already drawn."
"Meaning what, exactly?"
"Meaning we find them before they find us. We talk first. We share only what we can afford to share." I looked around the table, meeting eyes one by one. "They don't have to become allies. But if there are elves out there who chose to remain in Middle-earth as we did, starting a war before we've even said hello would be stupid."
The argument ran long. A few argued for marching in armed and letting strength speak for itself.
It wasn't really about tactics. For some, the memory of being left behind, of watching others abandon our cradle, was still too raw to let go.
In the end, they agreed to proceed carefully. With scouts ahead and warriors ready for trouble.
But the possibility hung in the air now. Unanswered, and impossible to ignore.
—•——•——•——•——•——•—
[Year 1155. Twentieth Year of the March. Late Winter]
We heard it before we saw it.
Not wind through grass. We'd had enough of that to last several lifetimes.
Water. Moving water. A river.
The column crested the rise, and there it was.
Wide. Fast-flowing. Bordered by actual trees, tall and green and alive in a way nothing had been for twenty years of scrub and dust.
Nobody gave an order to stop. The column just halted. Three thousand Avari standing in silence, staring at water.
Then someone laughed.
And the dam broke.
A group of young warriors sprinted toward the bank, shedding clothes as they ran, and hurled themselves into the water with shrieks that probably scared every fish for miles.
I let it happen. We'd earned this.
—•——•——•——•——•——•—
[Riverbank. Afternoon]
After the scouts returned, I spread their sketches beside our accumulated maps, twenty years of routes and dead ends and hard-won knowledge, and finally understood where we were.
The Carnen — The Redwater. It flowed from the Iron Hills and merged with the Celduin further south. Both rivers eventually emptied into the Sea of Rhûn.
The Iron Hills. Real iron deposits, if the name meant anything. Not tiny scavenged scraps or bog ore. Actual mining potential.
Eol would want to hear about this. Gelasiël had probably already told him. I pictured the two of them hunched over rock samples, speaking in the particular shorthand of craftsmen who'd been working together for decades, and felt something close to satisfaction.
Right now, people needed rest.
Families spread along the riverbank. Children splashed in the shallows while parents watched, and then joined them.
The march-born had never learned to swim. There'd been no safe water deep enough to practice. Now Celestia, together with Amalaë, organized swimming lessons. Patient, methodical, teaching youngsters who'd grown up knowing only dust and grass how to float.
{ image: Swimming Lessons on the Carnen }
I watched a girl, maybe eight years old, born somewhere on the steppes, take her first real strokes without someone holding her up. Her face when she realized she was actually swimming…
I found myself grinning like an idiot. Didn't care.
—•——•——•——•——•——•—
[Same evening. Council tent]
The scouts brought other news too.
"Orcs." Celestia's voice was flat, controlled. The way it got when she was delivering information she'd already processed and filed under 'threat.'
"North of here, maybe two days. A large warband. Four hundred fifty, maybe five hundred."
Murmurs around the table. Not fear. We'd moved past fear of orcs years ago. More like anticipation.
"Settled or moving?" Vertalas asked.
"Camped. Looks semi-permanent. They've been raiding something. Lots of stolen goods in their camp."
"Other settlements nearby?"
"None we've found."
I looked at the map. The orc camp sat in a clearing north of the river, forest at their backs, open ground in front.
We'd fought orcs dozens of times during the march. Skirmishes, mostly. Quick, brutal encounters where our scouts found them first and our warriors hit them before they could react.
Five hundred orcs was larger than anything we'd faced before.
But we had the numbers. We had the training. And we had ground that favored our tactics.
"We hit them," I said.
Vertalas nodded, already thinking through deployments. "Strike force of seven hundred? Archers and heavy infantry, standard ratio?"
"Make it eight. I want reserves in case they have friends we haven't spotted." I looked around the table.
"This isn't desperation. We control the engagement. We pick the ground. We execute what we've drilled. Questions?"
None.
"Council also needs to decide on the crossing," I continued. "Northern fords are shallower but run through heavy forest. And we'd have to cross the Celduin eventually anyway.
But before continuing on our way, we had orcs to kill.
{ image: war council }
—•——•——•——•——•——•—
[Two days later. Northern clearing. Dawn]
[Vertalas Witness POV]
The strike force moved out in the last darkness before dawn. Eight hundred warriors in tight column. Two companies of archers, two blocks of heavy infantry, scouts ranging ahead and the Chief's personal guard.
Vertalas commanded.
Four and a half hundred orcs. Possibly more. In a semi-permanent camp, which meant organized. Which meant someone was giving orders, and someone was being obeyed.
Organized orcs were a different problem than scattered raiders.
He pushed the thought down. Worry was for the night before. Now was for execution.
The column moved through the forest in near-silence. Twenty years of practice had turned these warriors into ghosts when they needed to be. Armor padded, weapons secured, every step deliberate.
Celestia's scouts materialized from the treeline as the forest opened into a wide meadow. Orc tents scattered across the far end. Cookfires still smoking. Figures moving between shelters.
She appeared at his elbow. Wordless. Held up five fingers, then made a fist.
Five hundred confirmed. Concentrated.
He nodded.
The orcs saw them immediately. Shouts went up. Figures scrambled for weapons, forming into a rough mass at the camp's edge.
"Deploy," Vertalas said calmly.
The column split and reformed like a river dividing around a stone and joining again. Archers forward, infantry behind. Drilled a thousand times until it happened without thought.
—•——•——•——•——•——•—
[Same moment]
[Selas POV]
I looked at our enemies. Armed with axes and a few spears. No formation. No discipline. Just a mob working itself into a killing frenzy.
Good.
Mobs were what we'd trained for.
"Archers ready!" Celestia's voice carried across the line.
The front rank drew and held. Two hundred bows, tips angled skyward, arms steady.
The orc mob started forward. A tide of snarling bodies picking up speed.
"Loose!"
Two hundred arrows flew as one. The sound was like fabric tearing.
Orcs screamed and fell. Others stumbled over bodies. The charge wavered.
"Nock! Draw! Loose!"
Another volley. Then another.
The mathematical cruelty of massed archery against an unshielded charge. Each volley dropped thirty, forty orcs. By the fourth, they'd lost a quarter of their number before closing half the distance.
But orcs didn't break easily. The survivors kept coming, shields raised now, hunched behind whatever cover they could find.
Fifty paces. Forty.
"Spears to front!" Vertalas commanded. "Archers through and reform!"
The infantry line opened. Archers poured through the gaps like water, reforming behind the spearmen. The gaps closed. Shields locked with a sound like a single massive door slamming shut.
"Best shots to the trees!" Vertalas continued. "Flanking groups, prepare to envelop!"
Twenty archers sprinted for the treeline, scrambling up into branches that gave them clear shots down into the orc mass. The remaining archers split left and right, ready to close the trap.
"If lere Avari!" Yalinim roared from the infantry line.
"AVARI!"
—•——•——•——•——•——•—
[The shield wall]
[Yalinim Witness POV]
The orcs hit the wall.
Yalinim felt the impact travel through his shield, through his arm, into the earth beneath his planted feet. A solid jolt, but nothing like what he'd braced for.
The arrows had done their work. What slammed into the shield line wasn't a charge. It was the ragged remnants of one. Maybe a three hundred and fifty orcs, already winded, already bleeding, slamming into five hundred disciplined infantry who'd been standing fresh and ready.
The line didn't bend.
It absorbed.
"Steady!" Yalinim called, the wall was solid. You could feel it in the way the shields interlocked, each warrior braced against the next, a continuous surface of wood and bronze.
The second rank thrust over his head. Short, economical stabs. Spearpoints finding throats and eyes and gaps in crude armor. The orcs pressed forward with the mindless fury of creatures that didn't know how to stop, but every heartbeat cost them another body.
An orc face appeared over the rim of his shield. Yellow eyes, broken teeth, a scream that sprayed spit. Yalinim punched his shield boss forward. Bone crunched. The face vanished.
Then Vertalas's voice, clear and unhurried.
"Wings forward. Envelop."
This was the part they'd drilled for years.
The ends of the shield line began to move. Not charging, not rushing. Stepping forward in cadence, pivoting inward like a pair of doors slowly closing. The center held firm while the flanks advanced, curving around the orc mass the way a hand closes around a stone.
Yalinim felt the geometry shift. The orc front, already too narrow to overlap the Avari line, began to shrink as the wings pressed inward. Orcs at the edges found themselves facing shields where a moment ago there'd been open air. They turned to meet the new threat and exposed their backs to the center.
From the trees overhead, Celestia's best shots kept firing into the compression. Every arrow that fell into that tightening knot found flesh.
The orcs realized what was happening. Some tried to push harder through the center, a surge of desperate strength that Yalinim absorbed with his legs and shoulders. Others tried to break out through the closing wings.
They met locked shields and steady spearwork, the flanking warriors stepping over bodies without breaking formation.
The pocket shrank. Ten paces across. Then eight.
The front rank switched to hand axes. Close work now. Mechanical and grim.
Orcs crushed together couldn't swing their weapons properly.
The Avari could, and did, methodically, the outer ring contracting one step at a time while the inner ranks did the killing.
It was over in minutes.
—•——•——•——•——•——•—
[After the battle]
[Selas POV]
"Victory!" someone screamed.
"If lere Avari!"
"URA!"
Warriors beat weapons against shields, the rhythm thunderous. Vertalas caught my eye and allowed himself a tight smile.
We'd fought orcs before. But this was what a real army could do. Hundreds of enemies in open terrain, and we'd taken them apart with the kind of precision that turned a battle into an execution.
The envelopment had worked exactly as we'd drilled it. The wall absorbed. The wings closed. The pocket collapsed.
I let them celebrate for a few minutes before the commanders restored order.
Then I walked the field.
What concerned me were the losses: fifteen wounded and two dead. That was two more than it should have been. Two families I'd have to visit tonight.
I knelt beside each body. Said their names. Committed their faces to memory, the way they looked now, not the way they'd looked alive.
Lirien. A Lindar archer, barely twenty. Her first real battle. An orc spear through the chest while she was repositioning with the flanking group. She'd been running, exposed, between the treeline and the wing formation. A gap in coverage that should never have existed.
Taurion. One of Yalinim's heavy infantry. An orc with more sense than most had gone low, under the shield rim, and found his knee. He'd gone down and been trampled before the second rank could cover him.
Two names. Two mistakes I'd study later, so they'd never happen again.
We burned the dead orcs and the camp, carefully controlled, no risk of spreading to the forest. Our own dead we carried back.
The column reformed and marched south. Scouts continued sweeping the area.
Every orc we killed now was one less problem later. Every Avari we lost was a wound that never fully closed.
—•——•——•——•——•——•—
[One week later. The southern ford]
The crossing was exactly as miserable as expected.
Deep water and strong current. A riverbed that grabbed at wheels like it wanted to keep them. We spent a full day just preparing. Unloading wagons, building rafts, stringing guide ropes across the deepest channels.
The actual crossing took two more days.
—•——•——•——•——•——•—
[Far bank of the Carnen. Evening]
The rest lasted longer than I'd planned.
The victory celebration merged with relief at surviving the crossing, and I didn't have the heart to cut it short. Fires burned high every night.
Music played, instruments that Opheon's craftsmen had been refining for years. People danced and sang and remembered what joy felt like.
Young couples decided this was the moment they'd been waiting for. Weddings happened on the riverbank, following the old Cuiviénen tradition, the pair standing knee-deep in water while parents and a First-born Elder spoke the binding words.
I officiated seven of them. Smiled until my face ached. Meant every blessing.
And then I let myself rest.
I found a quiet stretch of bank away from the celebrations, stripped off my boots, and let cold water wash over feet that had walked for twenty years. Lay back on grass, actual grass, soft and green, and stared up at the sky.
No sun, I thought. Can't get a proper tan.
The absurdity of it made me snort.
Can elves even sunburn? Would we turn into drow? Smoked elves?
I laughed out loud. Startled myself with the sound.
Twenty years of marching and I'm finally losing my mind.
Good. About time.
I lay there for a while, watching the stars. The acorn was warm against my chest. Gold and silver light, barely visible, pulsing in time with something I couldn't hear.
Soon, I told it. Not yet. But soon.
—•——•——•——•——•——•—
[Several days later. Moving south]
Rest ended. The road called.
The column reformed and moved south along the river, then west toward lands none of us had seen. The terrain changed as we traveled. More trees, more water, more green.
The great forest appeared on the horizon six weeks after we'd crossed the Carnen.
Eryn Galen. The Greenwood.
Someday this would become Mirkwood, dark and corrupted. But that was far in the future. Now it was simply vast. Ancient in a way that made even elves feel young.
Beyond it, lay the Anduin. The Great River.
That crossing, I thought, is going to make the Carnen look easy.
But there was something else to consider. Someone else.
The Nandor.
Teleri who had turned back during the Great Journey, refusing to cross the mountains into the West. Our kin, in a way. Elves who had made a choice not so different from ours.
"Time to meet the relatives," I murmured.
—•——•——•——•——•——•—
[End of Chapter 7]