The night was gentle. Gwathrandir touched Laureanis for a long time, as if retracing an ancient memory. He touched the pale skin of her gently rounded belly and traced his fingers across her curved body as she lied on the bed next to him. Beyond the windows they could hear crickets chirping and a lone owl hooting, lamenting it’s loneliness.
Gwathrandir had emerged from Cugusaelon’s house into the gray light of a sullen afternoon of late Tuilë. He had walked across the Valley along the bank of the Bruinen before meeting Laureanis. During his long walk he had seen everything clearly. It was like a veil of clouds had shifted from his vision.
He would not betray Laureanis anymore. She would not used anymore. But he would have to find out what her secret was – if she had a secret – to help her in whatever she needed to do to be free. She would not agree to leave Imladris with him just because he asked her to, not if she had something that kept her here. Gwathrandir would have to find out exactly what it was so he could help her. And then he would take her out of Imladris and together they would find a place where they could live happily ever after in peace, just the two of them.
When they met he had very little to say to her. They had kissed and walked arm in arm into their secret meeting place down at the bank of Hidhuinen where they always sat and ate. When she spoke to him, he would respond in a quiet and slow manner, like a sleeper who does not want to be awakened from his dream. He had watched her with sad, distant eyes, the eyes of an elf casting the last glance at their home in the Middle-Earth before sailing away to Valinor, never to return.
In the darkness of her house by the bank of the Bruinen he had craved for her. He had touched her and kissed her to breathlessness. His lean body had pressed against her gentle curves and he had whispered her name over and over, hoping the night would never end.
It was the time of late watches and Imladris slept uneasily. Laureanis was sitting at a window. She was naked but it was not cold. It had been a warm afternoon and it had turned into a warm night. Gwathrandir watched her sitting there, her skin glowing with the light of the moon and the stars. He was lying on her bed, naked as well, one arm propping up his body.
”When you left me”, Laureanis suddenly said, slowly, almost like beginning a song.
”When I left you”, Gwathrandir said in a voice full of sadness and regrets.
”I could not be consoled. I wept and wept for weeks. You said you had an oath to fulfill, that you had to follow your brother to fulfill the oath you had taken in the name of Ilúvatar. But it was not your words that hurt me so, it was the way you would not touch me, would not even look at me. After everything I had suffered in Angband it was just too much to bear. I could only weep.”
”I am so sorry”, Gwathrandir said. He did not know what else to say.
She turned and looked at him. ”I know”, she said softly. Another silence lay between them.
”Angband, Maglor”, she said. ”Nirnaeth Arnoediad. I didn’t know what had happened to you or your brothers after the battle had stopped raging, but of those of us who were forced to surrender almost all were slain on the spot. There were orcs and trolls and wolf-riders, we were surrounded and most of us were killed. I remember the orc-captain, he was quite large. He pulled me by the hair and dragged me across the ground as I screamed. He pushed my head into the river until I thought I would drown. When he pulled me up by my hair I screamed and he laughed at me. He struck me once. In hindsight he was not so bad. They put us in the cart and we waited for a long time. They gathered all the slain elves and men and piled them in a huge mound. We looked at each other in the cart and we felt ashamed – ashamed to be still alive when so many had been killed. After a long time we were driven away, taken to Angband.”
Laureanis paused and her mouth turned down in bitterness.
”Laureanis”, Gwathrandir said, sitting up on the bed. ”Come here. Come to me.”
”I was kept in a dungeon inside the Iron Prison for three days”, Laureanis continued as if she had not heard Gwathrandir, as if she was not even aware of his presence in the room anymore. ”I was not fed. There was a hole on the floor of the dungeon to defecate into and a bucket of foul-smelling water to drink. I could not believe it was happening to me. Sometimes I would scream, but silence was my only answer. On the third day the Slave-master came. He was a large orc. I will never forget his name – Dragaur. Dragaur took me away into a dark room and told me to take my clothes off.”
”Laureanis…”
”But I have to tell you everything”, Laureanis said, looking at Gwathrandir sternly. ”Everything that happened to me. Everything that was done to me. I need someone to know. And you owe it to me to listen.”
She turned away from him and started to talk about all the things she had endured in Angband during the following weeks, months, years and decades of her captivity. The things she told Gwathrandir were too awful to repeat, too awful to listen, too awful to even comprehend. Gwathrandir’s mind could not fathom the malicious imagination of creatures who could have invented such cruelties, much less put them into practice. He could not understand how Laureanis could have endured all that and survived it with her body and mind intact. Tears streamed down Gwathrandir’s cheeks as he was forced to listen to Laureanis’ horrific story, narrated in her gently relentless but strangely dissociated voice, as if the things she told him had not happened to her at all but to someone else, maybe someone she had once known in the distant past.
”Laureanis”, Gwathrandir pleaded, unable to take it anymore. He felt like he had taken part in the tortures himself. ”Please don’t tell me these things.”
”Why not, Maglor?” Laureanis asked. ”Do you think I can pretend like those things never happened to me? Or is it you who wants to pretend? Six thousand years, Maglor. I am not the Laureanis you fell in love with and married anymore. That Laureanis died a long time ago in the Iron Prison of Angband.”
”How did you get out of Angband?”
”They broke me in the end”, she said. ”Of course they did. It got to the point where I had forgotten my name and everything I had ever done in my life. I was called Mud, and I did everything they told me to do. Life became easier when I stopped resisting, when I coudn’t remember my real name anymore. I worked in the mines, doing all kinds of menial work, but the tortures stopped at some point. It was like I had become invisible to them once they had broken me. In all honesty I don’t remember how I escaped, or why. All those years are a blur to me, I can’t remember much of it. Maybe they just kicked me out of there. I mean they must have. I did not have an ounce of free will left at that point, no desire to be free anymore. No desire for anything, not even death. I was just a thrall named Mud, that’s all I had ever been and that’s who I would remain for the rest of my short life. Maybe it was the final cruelty they wished to inflict upon me – their final joke. Because they must have known what would happen when I tried to return to my people. I went back there, did you know that, Maglor? After you had turned away from me, after everyone had turned away from me, I went back to Angband to serve there as the thrall called Mud. And there I remained until the day we were all freed by the Valar. I had no other place to go to, no other place to call home.”
”Laureanis.” But Gwathrandir realized he had nothing to say. He wanted to say her name again but he had nothing to say, no comfort he could give her.
”You had left me, Maglor. You had told me you would leave me. I had wept for you but you had left me and my tears had stopped.”
Gwathrandir went to her and held her. Her body was cold but she did not resist him. At last she let her arms come around him to feel his muscles and ribs. She kissed him and they pressed against each other.
He took her back to the bed and they lied on the wrinkled sheets. They slept entwined to each other, arm in arm, breath against breath. And when Gwathrandir woke up and felt her next to him he knew what he would do. He would have to talk to Cugusaelon. Cugusaelon could write to Parthadan about whatever he wanted, but Gwathrandir would take Laureanis away from Imladris. Now. Tomorrow. He would not let anything bad happen to her anymore.
He got up and started pulling on his clothes.
”Maglor?” she said in a soft voice, a voice full of dreams.
”Sleep, Laureanis. I will be back soon.”
”Don’t leave me.”
”I will never leave you again”, Gwathrandir said, slipping into his dark hooded cloak. ”I have things to tell you. But it can wait until tomorrow. I have some… things I need to get straightened out first.”
”Now?”
”Yes. It cannot wait until morning. I love you.”
She smiled at him, half asleep already. Gwathrandir slipped out of the door and into the shadows of nightly Imladris. His expression reflected grim determination.
Laureanis would not be used again.
