Chapter 3 – Neldoreth

“It used to mean something else.” Neldoreth said, in the language of birds. The chirps and tweets were mocking as they left his lips. He meant them to be so. Around him the gloom of the forest was unmoved by the sound of his voice. He could vaguely remember it had not always been so.

Once the Forest was jewel-green, the color of Anna glittering off dewy leaves. Once we left the caves and danced under the stars, once we dreamed in song. But Anna is gone now. Once...

“It is not too late...” a croaking man’s voice shattered the sing-song chirping sounds Neldoreth had been making as he whispered his thoughts in birdsong, aloud. The man’s voice was hoarse, as though water had not touched it for half an age. The sound echoed off the walls of the cave, like a plunk of a first raindrop on a still lake. Ripples vibrated the air. There was power within the man’s voice, but it was not a fey power. It had been rendered impotent by the shadows around it, shadows imbued into the very walls of the cave.

Neldoreth’s head whipped towards the voice. He moved, wraith-like, towards the man, hands clenching and unclenching, feet gliding over the stone as though he skated. A wispy effervescence hung around Neldoreth’s body, an aura of dark, deep blue incandescence. The man, huddled into a crook of stone, pressed himself against the damp rockwall, slick with humidity and slime. But his eyes did not leave Neldoreth, whose head tilted sharply, like a bird considering a worm it intended to pluck from the ground. Neldoreth’s eyes blazed with white fury. They had long since faded into a monochrome of filmy white, though his vision was unaffected. Nearly four millennia living in the remains of the Last Palace of the Forest Elves, a grand name for the cavernous hole it had become after its shepherds abandoned it, had rendered Neldoreth a pale imitation of what he had once been.

The man, Neldoreth’s prisoner and companion for nearly two of those millennia, could still almost recall the majesty which had still existed in Neldoreth’s form, when they first met. He remembered many things, but much of it felt like daydreams, whispers from a fugue state of being. Not real, but not false either. Some nebulous intermediary. A twilight of reality. Neldoreth absorbed these thoughts from the man, processed them, but as a normal human might hear birdsong.

“They used to love the twilight...” the man murmured, eyes still frozen to Neldoreth. Neldoreth’s slender face remained impassive “You used to remember who you are, what you are....you used...”

Neldoreth chirped at the man in birdsong. A elbereth gilthoniel o menel palan-diriel le nallon sí di’nguruthos.. a tiro nin, fanuilos. But the words in the birdsong held no meaning for Neldorth, it was mimicry of his own memory. Bereft of all power and majesty those words once held, power they once possessed to banish the darkness. The light of that star was gone, here. The man cried dry tears and looked away, clearly unwilling to stare into the face of his captor as it was lit with the memory of the stars Neldoreth no longer recalled.

“He has not taken all of you. Fight him!” the man croaked.

Neldoreth leaned closer to the man and sucked in a deep breath. A small, twisting puff of something exited the man and floated into Neldoreth’s mouth, like a puff of warm breath traveling in reverse. Neldoreth sighed with joy at the pleasurable feeling of the essence settling into his body. For a brief, clarified moment the color blue peeked through the white film in Neldoreth’s hooded eyes, like moonlight through a sheet of thin paper. Neldoreth let out a moan of satisfaction. His eyes closed languid, only to snap back open, entirely white again.

The man’s breath caught in his throat and he convulsed on the dank, slippery floor, his naked, skeletal body all sharp, bony protuberances and wasted pale skin, covered by some fuzzy coating. But something had changed. After he ceased convulsing, the man looked up at Neldoreth, and they both understood the change. Both their mouths moved as one, spoke with the same tongue and voice.

“a elbereth gilthoniel.”

Neldoreth reached down and closed the man’s dead eyes. “Be at peace, Brown.” As quickly as the moment of sanity had returned it fled and Neldoreth swooped over the body like a bird of prey, bit at the fleshless bones and sucked at the blood-dry carcass. What little flesh remained was soon consumed. Neldoreth, when he finished, collapsed against the wall of the cave, satiated for the first time in so long he had forgotten the feeling. It was terrifying. The wide cavern around him suddenly no longer felt expansive and deeply huge. The dark pressed against Neldoreth, as though the night itself had pressed its cold hands atop him and pressed down with all its weight.

Flee.

Flee.

FLEE!

Neldoreth ran. He collided with moss and slime slickened walls, scraped his skin against rocks but paid it all no mind. His flight was animalistic, pure and terror-driven. He ran and ran, up withered stone steps that were the barest shadow of the majesty they had once been. Under arches which still gleamed with the matte shine of darkened metal, only slightly pitted in places, waiting patiently for the return of the light. He ran and ran. Past broken underground palaces and homes of the people he, in his madness, had forgotten. Away from memories which had driven him to madness from loneliness, away from the empty dark of the place which had once been so full of life.

Flashes of sanity struck Neldoreth, bells clanging against his covered well of insanity, creating echoes down the deep, dark length to the black pool at the bottom. Around him bits of the cave’s ceiling fell, in chunks, to crash on the stone floor, as the power which had held the place aloft began to fail. Four thousand years and more Neldoreth had sat in the cavernous remains the force of his being the only reason the place had not been retaken by the Earth. He remembered.

The captured star lights. The torches of alder wood. The songs of the elf maids. The gold and silver glints of our works. The beauty of our words and dances. The joy in our wines. The sweet taste of our fruits.

Pain.

Death.

Farewell.

Anna.

Alone.

All alone.

Neldoreth shrieked in the tongues of Men, Elves, Dwarves, Orcs, and other beings. His shrieks ran through all the closely held memories of his life, Age after Age, under the eaves of the starlight soaked trees, before the coming of the Sun and Moon. Before the Leaving. Before the White Dark. Horror assaulted him from within.

He was surrounded by spiders in webs, their impotent jaws biting at him, poisons affecting his mind alone, his body was immune. Shades of Men danced around him in a macabre performance of some rite to their lost Sorcerer King. Darkness-infested forest creatures attacked him with cruel claws and beaks, unable to rend his flesh, for it was beyond them, but more than capable of shattering the soul beneath.

All lost.

All lost.

All is alone and dark.

O elbere...

Neldoreth broke from the shattered mouth of a once mighty cavern entrance. A whispered voice in the darkness called to Neldoreth and he froze. Do not go. Stay with me. Hangings of moss and vines covered it so effectively it could not be seen anymore as anything but deep, darkened gaps in the hunter green of the forest canopy’s shadow. Overhead monstrous trees had grown to maddening heights, their boles so wide Neldoreth’s slender frame was a thin line of nothing against them, the striated cracks of those trunks were wider than his shoulders. The boughs above had woven themselves into an impenetrable shield against the light of Sun, Moon, and Stars. It was a darkness so complete it almost had a name and presence, a tickle of sinister purpose up the back of the neck.

In another flash of sanity Neldoreth recalled the songs he had sung in the pits of his despair and loneliness, when the insanity had first taken hold. Songs which to human ears would have sounded like a massive, mournful raptor’s cawing croon. Songs which had the power of not just Neldoreth’s heritage as one of the First Children, but of the Brown’s mightier heritage. Songs which could rend the very earth and tear the spirits of things which grew from the dirt, stitch them back together into a foul mockery of the One’s intent. A cacophony of sound directly sung in opposition to the choir of voices which had so long ago sung the songs of Creation.

It was the Song of Darkness, the First Disharmony, repeated and reworked, almost as potent now as it was in the Beginning.

Neldoreth ran away from the darkness-shrouded spot of the cavern mouth. From the memory of what he had done. From the centuries of the White Dark, from the four thousand years of slow torturous feeding on the spirits of powerful beings trapped by his shadows.

As he ran, the forest behind him rocked and rumbled. Trees withered from within. They had grown too large to support their weight. Too full of empty regret and heavy shadow. Burdened by webs of darkness. The very Earth beneath rejected them and they fell. For the first time in nearly four thousand years starlight struck the ground where the Thousand Caves had once been home to the People of the Forest. As Neldoreth ran, what remained of the Dark power within him settled back into his skin, the White Dark battling with the smaller, unstained part of him which remembered the feeling of wind in his once streaming locks of dark hair. His power had been the only thing which kept the last part of this forest intact, which had made it impossible for the Second Children, for the Men, to harvest it as they had the rest of the formerly thousand-league-long stretch of woodland. To the Men the place had been a haunted place and they were afraid of it. So it was left alone, left to gnaw on its malice, to grow dark and mime twists towards the sky, but never to expand.

And now it contracted, in crashed inwards, rotten from within. The last bit of the once green wood, the murky depths of the old home of Long Lived, died its last, shadowy breath. And it was forgotten. Even by Neldoreth.

The White Dark settled again over his eyes, both Outer and Inner. Once again Neldoreth was lost to history, a creature of the slow, languid past, a calcified tongue of rock dripping from century to century towards becoming something new, something terrible. And still he ran.

And still the Dark voice whispered to him.

Stay with me. Together we will rule them all.

Next Chapter: Chapter 4 - Khrashnak