Perils of Being Seen
Kharsi was taken from all sides.
Crude goblin blades rang against him in a chaos of iron and shrieks. His chestplate proved its worth again and again—turning some blows outright, dulling others to bruising thuds that shuddered through his ribs. He stayed standing longer than anyone had the right to.
But even good steel has its limit.
The strikes found the same place, again and again, until the metal screamed and split. The plate cracked straight down the center with a sound like frozen wood breaking. One more blow followed.
Then another.
Kharsi went to his knees.
By the time Narali reached him, blood had already darkened the seam of his armor. When the metal was pried away, the damage lay bare: a deep gash over his breastbone, torn wide and uneven, the flesh beneath already swelling hard and hot. Bruising spread outward in dark, spreading blooms—rib contusions at least, possibly fractures beneath them. Smaller wounds ringed the larger one: shallow slices and punctures from chipped blades, skin ground raw with grit and rust.
Kharsi’s breathing came short and rapid, fluttering high in his chest. Each rise of his ribs made his jaw tighten. When he tried to speak, only a wet rasp came out, flecked with red.
Narali worked where he lay. She pressed cloth and her hands to the wound, feeling the frightening warmth and slip of blood soaking through layer after layer. She counted his breaths without meaning to, then forced them slower with her voice—low, steady, relentless. She told him to stay. She told him to breathe. She told him nothing else mattered.
They carried him back to camp on shields and cloaks, moving too fast, stumbling over stone.
Thrarfi walked beside them like a storm given legs. In his fury he had taken a goblin alive, dragged it from the skirmish by the throat, meaning to tear answers from it later. His voice shook with rage that had nowhere to go.
At the Mirror they laid Kharsi down, carefully, as though the ground itself might finish what the blades had started. Others crowded close until Narali snapped for space and they gave it at once.
His breathing remained shallow and uneven. One side of his chest lifted less than the other. His skin had gone pale beneath the blood and dirt, lips faintly gray at the edges. His pulse skittered under Narali’s fingers—fast, thin, uncertain. His eyes fluttered open and shut, failing to fix on anything for long.
Narali reached for the armor.
The chestplate came away in her hands in two jagged halves, split clean down the middle, warped inward where the final blows had landed. She set the pieces aside, hands shaking.
She cleaned the wound as quickly and gently as she could, washing grit and metal flecks from torn flesh. Blood welled stubbornly with each breath. She packed cloth to it, pressed until her wrists ached, then pressed harder, holding until the flow slowed to a dark seep.
It did—unevenly, grudgingly.
When it would not fully stop, she reached for Atgar’s honey and poured it carefully into the gash. Dark and thick, it filled the torn channel of flesh, clinging to the edges, sealing them together where stitches were impossible. She layered salves over it and bound his chest tight with clean cloth, firm enough to limit the movement of broken ribs, loose enough that he could still draw breath.
Kharsi groaned once, low and broken, his fingers twitching as if searching for something to hold.
Narali did not stop.
Hours blurred. He drifted in and out of waking, shivering despite the heat of his skin, muttering once, then falling silent again. Someone kept water at his lips in careful drops. Someone else counted his breaths when Narali’s hands were busy. Thrarfi paced until his boots wore pale lines into the stone.
The others spoke of going back. Of fire and tunnels and payment in blood.
Narali heard none of it.
When Kharsi finally steadied—when his breaths deepened, when the faint rattle in his chest softened, when the bleeding stayed quiet beneath the bindings—she allowed herself to sit.
She drew his head gently into her lap. His weight there was solid. Warm. Real.
She began to sing.
It was not a song meant for company. It had no bright beginning, no proud ending—only a thin, old melody worn smooth by fear and repetition. A mother’s song, meant to be quiet enough to hide inside stone, meant to keep the listener breathing when the world had decided to forget them.
She had sung it in darkness once.
She sang it now.
Kharsi slept.
When he woke again—weak, glass‑eyed, breathing shallow but steady—the fury in the camp had dimmed to embers. The prisoner was bound elsewhere. Talk of revenge had sunk into grim silence.
They sat together by the Mirror—Narali, Kharsi, and Thrarfi—close enough to touch, close enough to share breath.
Only then did anyone notice what else had been lost.
Kharsi’s cloak was gone.
What remained hung from his shoulders in torn, uneven ruin, the rest left behind on the rocks where he had been carried through narrow stone and blood‑slick ground. Half a life of travel cloth, claimed by the mountain.
He did not seem to care.
For now, he would wear light things. Bandages. Borrowed wool. Soft layers where armor had once been.
Later, there would be steel again.
Heavier. Smarter. Built not only to turn blades, but to remember this day.
But not yet.
Narali stayed with them a little longer, listening to Kharsi’s breathing, watching the slow rise and fall of his bound chest. When she was certain the rhythm would hold, she rose
Kharsi was breathing again. That was the miracle. That his heart still answered when her hands pressed against his chest, slick with blood that would not stop being warm. His breastplate lay in two ruined halves nearby, metal peeled open like bark after lightning. Narali tied and retied the bandages until her fingers shook too badly to pull another knot. Only when others took over—hands steadier than hers, voices lower, calmer—did she step back.
The wall found her.
She leaned into the stone with her shoulder, just long enough to keep the world upright. Her head rang. Her mouth tasted of iron. The cavern swam.
And then it came.
Not the old pressure. Not memory. Not the deep, patient truth of stone.
This voice slid.
Durin’s blood spilled the bearer. They took the circle from living dark. They call theft a craft.
Narali stiffened. The words did not fade. They gathered, pressed closer.
You know how it feels to be taken and renamed.
She pulled back from the wall, but the voice followed—not from the stone this time, but from just behind her thoughts, as if it had learned the shape of her name.
You learned to answer to another sound. You learned to live without the first one.
Her breath thinned. Her vision narrowed. The whisper thickened, impatient now.
They wear stolen circles and call themselves heirs. You wear a stolen name and call it survival.
Narali tore herself away from the wall as if it had burned her. The sound cut off mid-thought, like a door slammed shut. Silence rushed in too quickly, too cleanly. She stood too straight, arms folded around herself, eyes fixed on nothing.
Her lips moved. No sound came at first.
Then, barely a thread of breath: “Taken…”
A swallow.
“…and renamed.”
The words felt wrong in her mouth, like stones that did not belong to this tunnel, to this life, to her. She did not repeat them. She did not explain. She did not look at anyone.
Thrarfi had already turned back to Kharsi, voice low and urgent, hands steady as he gave orders. Kharsi was barely conscious, grey with pain, eyes unfocused. Others lingered nearby—bloodied, shaken, pretending at strength. The new elf stood a little apart, watching.
Narali felt it then. Not the voice. The exposure. Something in the dark had looked directly at her.
For a heartbeat she was not in Moria at all, but newly escaped from Barad-dûr again—half-starved, unnamed, shaking in open air with no walls left to hide inside.
How did it know?
Her hands curled at her sides. Once, she had believed the stone spoke only with the voices of the dead—echoes worn smooth by time, asking nothing, meaning no harm. Memory, not hunger. Grief, not design. A sorrow that could be borne because it did not want.
She had trusted that.
Now that story lay in pieces at her feet.
This had not been memory. It had known her. Worse—it had chosen her.
If the voices were not only the dead, then they were something else. Something listening. Something learning. Something that might already be learning the others.
Kharsi’s blood was still on her hands. Thrarfi’s voice cut through the dark with quiet command. The company stood open in the cavern—tired, wounded, brave in ways that broke her heart.
If she spoke, if she named it, if she gave the thing shape in the air between them, it might listen more closely. It might follow her voice. It might begin to notice the rest.
Fear twisted into something sharper: protection.
So she said nothing.
She returned to Kharsi and knelt again, careful now, back straight, turned facing the wall without stone behind her. Her weight balanced on her heels, as little of herself touching the stone as possible—the way her mother had once shown her. Upright. Distant. Leaving no more of herself behind than breath and shadow.
The voice did not return, but the ground beneath her certainty was gone.
For the first time in many years, the old instinct stirred: to vanish, to become narrow, to survive by being unseen. It frightened her how easily that shape still fit.
At last she rose. “I need air,” she said, already turning away.
No one followed.
She walked blindly at first, vision swimming, feet finding stone without her asking them to. The light thinned. The noise of the camp dulled. The vast dark opened around her.
She stopped near the crystal growths, their cold glow distant and fragile as stars seen through deep water.
There, finally, she folded.
Narali sank down beside them and drew her knees to her chest, curling inward until her armor creaked softly. She pressed her face against her arms and let the tears come, silent and shaking.
For Kharsi. For the others. For the terrible hope of belonging.
And for herself.
For the lie she had lived inside. For the truth she no longer understood. For having been seen.
